Peoria Station

CAPTION: Toledo, Peoria & Western road freight M-EFEP (Manifest, Effner IL to E. Peoria IL) is shown at locations at or near Weston, Chenoa, Gridley, El Paso, Eureka and Washington, Illinois Saturday afternoon, November 11, 2023. The entire train is shown at each. TPW 2070, IORY 5007, TPW 5010, and IORY 5014 have 121 cars from on-line industries and CSX and CN interchanges.   A nice sunny late-morning and early-afternoon in November is a good time to get a westbound TP&W freight!  A lot of typical TP&W freight business is represented on today's train. - The first 15 cars are loaded with limestone shipped from The Rogers Group/Newton County Stone in Perkins, Indiana and consigned to East Peoria Materials, located on the east end of the TP&W yard (and to celebrate 20 years in January 2024!). - Fourteen TPW-marked cyclindrical covered hoppers might have been pulled from the Ludlow Co-Operative Elevator Company at La Hogue. (Crescent City is possible, but newer, 2...

Thanks to an agreement between Republic Steel and ERP Iron Ore LLC, unit ore pellet trains like this one (CSX K502 on 6/26/16) will resume running in about a year.  This news has a Peoria connection, so bear with me!  First, Lorain County, Ohio's The Morning Journal announced July 25 that Republic Steel's Lorain, Ohio steel mill, idled since early 2016 when markets declined, will be producing up to 1 million tons of pig iron annually beginning in July 2018.  The news was good for another shuttered plant - the former Magnetation LLC ore pellet facility in Reynolds, Indiana. According to linked article,  ERP Iron Ore will send iron ore pellets to Lorain via rail from its plant in Reynolds, Ind. ERP Iron Ore LLC purchased some of Magnetation's assets, including the Reynolds plant, in February 2017. Before Magnetation ended operations in October 2016, CSX delivered unit trains of hematite ore (loaded on BNSF in Minnesota) and received unit ore pe...