Lower Macungie Commissioners revisited the ongoing saga of the Church Lane Bridge at the Feb. 21 meeting.

Commissioners approved plans to fix the wooden bridge that spans the Norfolk Southern tracks near the township's border with Upper Macungie.

But the fix has its "good news/bad news" aspects.

The good news is that the bridge will be fixed and will take only a few days of work. A beam that is currently damaged will be replaced, and beams that are expected to go bad in the next few years also will be replaced now. The hope is that the anticipation of problems will prevent a future closing for repairs.

All work will be done with cranes, according to Alan Fornwalt who was sitting in for Township Engineer William Erdman at the Feb. 21 meeting.

There will be no equipment on the tracks, Fornwalt said.

And the materials should arrive in the next two weeks, Commissioner Ryan Conrad said in a recent Facebook post.

The bad news is that though the plans have been approved by the BOC, they still have to be approved by Norfolk Southern.

The company has been known to take its time with this process, Fornwalt said, and nothing can be done until the company approves the plan.

Furthermore, there will eventually—and nobody has a timetable on this—be the need for much more extensive work on the wooden bridge which, according to the state data was built in 1930.

In previous discussions about the Church Lane Bridge, Erdman has said that it cannot be replaced—as was the Spring Creek Road Bridge—because the land next to it is a cemetery and cannot be purchased to accommodate current requirements for a new bridge.