Peoria Station

The above photo shows a British Columbia Railway boxcar spotted for unloading at the Tazewell & Peoria Railroad’s Creve Coeur freight house this afternoon. BC Rail is now part of Canadian National, the railroad which handles the majority of lumber bound for Peoria area consignees, including Carver Lumber. This car’s presence at the Creve Coeur facility suggests Carver has returned to using this facility. 

You may ask how I know the pictured boxcar is consigned to Carver Lumber? Let’s use the process of elimination. Besides Carver Lumber, three other firms in the Peoria area receive lumber by railcar directly or via rail-to-truck transload: Amerhart, LS Lumber and Morton Buildings. Amerhart has its own warehouse in Pekin, and is served directly by CN; LS Lumber owns an unloading platform off S. Darst St. in Peoria and is served by TZPR, and finally, Morton Buildings has a rail-served facility in Morton (and doesn’t get boxcars) located on the TP&W. None of these firms have any reason to use the facility shown in the above photo.

Another firm, MBS Building Supplies, occasionally receives boxcars at TZPR’s freight house. I happened to come across a company boom truck departing TZPR property one summer day in 2006, and it was loaded with Malarkey-brand roofing shingles. A BNSF boxcar was spotted in the same location as the car pictured above, and Malarkey’s plant is in Portland, Oregon, a city not served by CN, thus none of that railroad’s railcar fleet would be used for shipments from that city to Peoria or anywhere else. Those details preclude that the BC Rail boxcar at the TZPR freight house today is a load of roofing shingles for MBS.

The so-called “western spur” was proven to be a spectacular failure back in 2006 when forced inclusion of Union Pacific in the routing of Pioneer Park-bound rail freight added some $1,000 to 1,500 per carload in transportation costs and unpredictable transit times.  Now that the Kellar Branch will soon be severed, Carver Lumber has probably returned to the second most cost-effective method of getting lumber to its Pioneer Park facility.

- David P. Jordan