Start building $1 billion TriEx in late May? Maybe.

Things are looking good, so far, for the N.C. Turnpike Authority's effort to sell Wall Street on its new plan to finance the state's first modern toll road, the 18.8-mile Triangle Expressway in Research Triangle Park and western Wake County.

The TriEx would be the biggest single road-building project in state history, employing a few thousand workers.

The turnpike agency wants to borrow about $1 billion so it can buy up the real estate it needs and award about $584 million in construction contracts to get going.

So far, the authority is staying on its timetable to negotiate a series of approvals needed from a string of bond rating and insurance agencies, state regulators, a federal lender, and Wall Street bond traders.

If everything stays on schedule, the financing deals and construction contracts could be signed by the last week of May, Grady Rankin, the turnpike authority's chief financial officer, told the turnpike board today.

The final right-of-way purchases would move ahead quickly, and bulldozers would start rolling, said Steve DeWitt, the turnpike authority's chief engineer.

"You're going to see equipment showing up there" after the contracts are signed, DeWitt said. "You'll see clearing happening very, very rapidly. It won't take six months. It will be happening almost immediately."

"We are prepared to go to work just as soon as the bonds are funded," said Jonathan Bivens, a vice president of Wilson-based S.T. Wooten Corp. Wooten was the low bidder on a $137 million job to build the first section of the expressway, the 3.4-mile Triangle Parkway from Interstate 40 south through Research Triangle Park to the 540 Outer Loop.

The bonds were supposed to be sold and construction was supposed to start last October. But the nation's bond market got very chilly last fall. It's warming up now but still not ready, as it would have been last summer, to buy the turnpike authority's BBB-rated bonds.

So the bond package has been refashioned, and preliminary ratings are promising, Rankin said.

The primary bond, to be repaid from toll collections over the next four decades, still is expected to be rated only BBB (the low end of investment grade material). But it is for a smaller sum now, easier to insure and easier to sell. The Turnpike Authority could not earn a higher rating because it is a new agency, with no assets and no track record.

A new separate bond package would be repaid with $25 million per year pledged by the General Assembly to cover an expected gap between toll collections and project costs. This bond is expected to win an AA or AAA rating that would make it very attractive to bond buyers.

In addition to land purchases and construction contracts, the rest of the borrowed $1 billion wold be spent to operate the TriEx, collect tolls electronically, mow the grass and repave the road when it needs it, for the next 40 years or so.