Peoria Station

Five railcars are shown being unloaded at the Keen Transport Rail Yard/Team Track in Creve Coeur on December 2, 2008.

Just in time for winter, more road salt arrived Peoria on Saturday, November 29. Today, it was being unloaded from railcars (seen above) to trucks waiting to take it to storage facilities. The cars were routed to Peoria on the BNSF Railway, so the salt probably came from from a Kansas supplier. It’s interesting that rail delivery is being used so early in the season, but road salt shortages have caused price increases, and munipalities go where and when they can get it.

This isn’t the first time rail has been used for delivery of road salt to the area - last March, Peoria and Tazewell Counties received eleven carloads of it at Carri Scharf’s East Peoria Materials transfer facility. Normally, road salt arrived the area by barge, then is trucked to city and county facilities for storage until needed, but frequent snow showers last winter depleted local supplies and an emergency purchase had to be made from a supplier in Canada. Had the salt been trucked, it would have required 44 truckloads (and 44 drivers) to transport it over a considerable distance (at least several hundred miles).

Rail saved the taxpayers money.

Salt generally arrived the Peoria area by railcar until 1958 when a Central Illinois Dock Company began receiving it by barge at its Wesley Road facility, from where it was trucked to local buyers. Heavy use of road salt since then (particularly during those three harsh winters between 1976 and 1979) probably forced the purchase of salt from alternate suppliers, and thus use of rail transportation, but the barge-truck combination has been the general rule the past five decades.

- David P. Jordan