Peoria Station

The “Miscellaneous” category is needed to profile two local rail users which do not fit into the previous categories. Here they are:

CARGILL INC.
(unknown)
www.cargill.com

Cargill is listed on the Tazewell & Peoria Railroad’s current public tariff, effective July 1, 2008. But very little is known about this customer’s current use of rail in the Peoria area. Among the possibilities are (1) Cargill shipped soybean oil to Koch Nitrogen’s North Pekin ammonia storage facility before it closed in 2007, (2) Cargill is a supplier of road salt to area municipalities – five carloads of road salt were received last December. Finally (3), as owner of Mosaic’s Pekin warehouse and barge dock, Cargill can consign railcars of road salt, grain and fertilizer to that facility under its own name.

PEORIA BARGE TERMINAL INC.
Ft. of Sanger Street
Peoria, IL
www.peoriabarge.com

It’s difficult to categorize Peoria Barge Terminal since it handles many different commodities that would come under many of the groups profiled in this series. In recent years, examples of their use of rail were: scrap steel and melted steel bars received from barges, then shipped by rail to Sterling, Illinois on the Union Pacific, and boxcar loads of zinc ingots from Canadian origin, delivered by Union Pacific. The final destination for these “zingots” is unknown, but an educated guess says they’re stored then shipped by truck when required to Keystone Steel & Wire and/or Aztec Galvanizing, both of which require large quantities of zinc in their processes. The Tazewell & Peoria Railroad and Toledo Peoria & Western also have access to this facility.

UPDATE: Not listed in the introductory post is an unknown rail customer which occasionally receives tank cars on the Grainland Co-Op elevator siding at Cruger, located about two miles west of Eureka on the Toledo Peoria & Western. The tank cars come loaded with what may be herbicide. Early Bird Feed & Fertilizer in nearby Goodfield may be the customer, but this is unconfirmed.

- David P. Jordan