JACKSONVILLE, Ill. — With officials from both KCS and Canadian Pacific reportedly aboard, Kansas City Southern’s Southern Belle business train visited the Bartlett Grain facility in Jacksonville on Wednesday, Oct. 26.
KCS No. 1 led the A-B-A set of FP9 from Kansas City, Mo., to Roodhouse, Ill., then north to the Bartlett facility’s loop on the south side of Jacksonville.
Jeff Hymas, communications director for Bartlett Grain/a Savage Company, said the company was hosting the business train as part of a customer appreciation trip. Bartlett’s Jacksonville, Illinois grain facility opened in 2013. It includes a 100-railcar loop track and can store up to 8 million bushels of corn. The company, KCS’s largest grain customer, is one of the leading exporters of U.S. grain to Mexico.
The train rolled through the loading shed but stopped short because the dome car in the 12-car consist does not clear loading equipment. The locomotives cut off, ran light around the loop, and coupled to the rear observation car for a return run to Roodhouse, where the power was wyed to put the KCS 1 back on the point for the train’s return trip to Kansas City.
CP and KCS have been conducting joint inspection trips recently, with both railroads’ business trains recently in Kansas City.
Jacksonville had a major Fertilizer plant on the Burlington branch that went through it back in the 1960’s when I was there for a year. It had enough volume to have its own daily turn from Beardstown. Does anyone know if the Fertilizer plant is still operating there?
The only major industry I know of that CB&Q served at Jacksonville in the 1960s was the Anderson, Clayton & Co. (food oils) plant on the east side.
The ACH plant opened in 1953 as Mrs. Tucker’s Foods. The plant has gone by several names over the decades: Anderson, Clayton & Co., then Kraft Food Ingredients, AC Humko and, finally, in 2000, ACH Food Cos.
Formerly used as a food manufacturing, warehousing and cold storage facility, the plant was a major employer in Jacksonville and the payroll of the plant’s employees was a significant contribution to the city’s economy.
In 2007, ACH restructured its Jacksonville operations into primarily a packaging facility, dropping much of its food processing and production operations.
A year later, ACH closed its Jacksonville and Champaign plants and formed a joint venture called Stratas Foods with Archer Daniels Midland Co. Stratas Foods operated its distributing center at the facility, but the plant closed months before it was put to auction.
Kristin Jamison, vice president of Marketing and Communications at Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corp., said the property was sold to Florida-based Steel Recovery Solutions — the current owners — in August 2011.
After the purchase, Steel Recovery Solutions had the property cleaned up. In 2015, the property was leased to Ameren Corp., which used it as a laydown yard for about three years as it developed a transmission line. Jamison said the building may not be available for food processing, but the area still is zoned for heavy industrial manufacturing.
As of 2020, it is still used by Ameren to store their metal power line poles and components. The industrial lead into the property was removed some years ago, but the crossing is still signalled and called “Anderson Clayton Street” even though the track touches neither the plant property or the BNSF mainline. The siding to store the tank cars for the former plant is still there and now stores coal hoppers.
Hey. At least they didn’t run the dome car through the loading facility!!! Someone was paying attention.
F-units <3
This is, of course, on the KCS’ Springfield line, the very property CN thinks it wants.