The City of Galesburg has received a $25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to install rail track infrastructure into the Galesburg Business Park property. The funds come from the “Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity” (RAISE) Program, which will be used to install a rail track and switch on the Business Park site. Ken Springer, Knox County Area Partnership President says the first project tied to the funding is building a large agricultural intermodal export facility.
“Is going to be run by a company called DeLong, based in Wisconsin, and this facility is going to be pretty important in the region. It’s going to be a place where regional ag producers can bring their commodities, and those commodities will be loaded into containers and then shipped west on the BNSF rail all the way to the West Coast ports and then on to export to Asia. So it’s a new export pathway for regionally produced crops.”
The grant is part of a $54 million investment into the Galesburg Business Park. The project will reduce cargo transit by approximately 4,000 miles when compared to using the Mississippi River and Port of New Orleans to ship commodities westward.
