A rendering of the proposed car barn as viewed from Benning Road NE.

A federal judge this week dismissed a community group’s request to get a restraining order against continued work on the planned streetcar track along H Street NE. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued the ruling Monday against the Kingman Park Civic Association’s request to block the installation of overhead lines and building of a streetcar depot on the campus of Spingarn Senior High School, Washington Business Journal reported.

The civic association filed its suit on June 28, after months of bickering with D.C. officials about the plan to construct a streetcar barn on the high school grounds. The school received historic landmark designation last November, but that did not do much to impede plans for the facility. The District Department of Transportation released proposed designs for the car barn in February.

Spingarn lies at the end of the H Street-Benning Road NE streetcar line, which is currently in a testing phase and might finally start running by the end of 2013.

But in her opinion, Kollar-Kotelly wrote that she could only see minimal impact to Kingman Park residents as a result of the streetcar project. “The only ‘irreparable’ injury the Plaintiff is likely to suffer is some obstruction of the view of Spingarn High School,” she wrote. “By contrast, the District of Columbia would be forced to expend hundreds of thousands of tax dollars if installation of the overhead wires on the H Street line and construction on the Spingarn campus is delayed for even just a few months.”

District officials argued in their response to the suit that it would cost taxpayers $16,500 a day to push back streetcar construction.

Memorandum Opinion in Kingman Park Civic Association v. Vincent C. Gray