ROCHELLE — At Tuesday’s meeting of the Rochelle Rotary Club, Burlington Junction Railway General Manager AJ Martin and Director of Marketing Kevin Mershon made a presentation on the Rochelle Transload Center (RTC).

The city owns its own short-line railroad and has a contract with Burlington Junction Railway to run the day-to-day operations of it. The city council recently approved a 10-year extension to the contract. The city’s rail system includes the RTC. 

“They've been great to work with,” City Manager Jeff Fiegenschuh said. “They've done a fantastic job and we have a lot of great projects in the works that will benefit the community long-term.”

Mershon said transloading is the process of transloading a shipment from one mode of transportation to another and it is most commonly used when one transportation method can’t be used for the entirety of a trip. 

“All types of businesses can transload,” Mershon said. “It's moving things from truck to train or train to truck. Its benefits are speed and efficiency once it gets up and running and it's normally near a highway. It's for transportation of goods going longer distances over more time. It can provide temporary storage. We've transloaded things like lumber, organics like wheat or soybeans, rebar and angle iron.” 

Martin said the RTC at 1851 Steward Road is currently halfway full and Burlington Junction is currently in contact with a customer to fill it the rest of the way. It opened in 2020 and caters to companies that don’t want to ship through Chicago, which Martin said can be a “burden and time waster.”

The RTC has good partnerships with local truck companies, Martin said. It does not currently store products on-site because companies that use it have not yet asked for it. Most of what RTC is transloading today is plastic pellets, grains, steel and a paper compound. 

“They bring it to Rochelle and it's a lot quicker and generates revenue for the city,” Martin said. “That's what we're trying to build here. It sells itself and there's nothing we can't do there. Rochelle has space and there's nothing we can't do there.”

The RTC is just one component of the city railroad. Burlington Junction Railway also takes care of putting refrigerated cars into the city’s frozen food plants. The city railroad has enough track (10,000 feet) to service longer trains. Transloading is where the city’s railroad has seen the most growth recently. 

After the closure of the Global III Intermodal in 2019, Martin said Burlington Junction Railway has been trying to start up an intermodal transload in Rochelle. 

“The biggest problem we're running into is the equipment of containers and the railcars to move the equipment,” Martin said. “They're in such a tight form right now. We're one of the biggest ones outside of Chicago trying to do it. So far it's not been very prevalent, but I think there's some headway here and in the near future and it could happen.”