Des Moines officials are re-evaluating the future of a planned rail freight transload facility on the city’s east side after the project was recently passed over for a federal transportation grant — at the same time a larger rail dock project in Cedar Rapids did receive federal funding.  

The Des Moines Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and the city of Des Moines have been working for the past three years to develop a privately owned and operated transload facility east of downtown near East 15th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.

The proposed facility would serve businesses within a 150- to 200-square-mile region by transferring loads of commodities and goods from trucks to train cars.

The city had applied for a $5 million FASTLANE grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation, but the project was not among the 18 projects nationally that received a total of $759 million in funding last month.

A rail project larger in scope than Des Moines’ is moving forward in Eastern Iowa, however. Last month, Cedar Rapids received a $25.7 million FASTLANE grant for the Eastern Iowa Logistics Park. The proposed $46.5 million project would create a 75-acre rail dock facility that would combine three types of freight transfer capabilities — transload, intermodal and cross-dock — in one facility.

An intermodal facility is used to transfer standard shipping containers from rail to truck, or vice versa, whereas at a transload facility the materials in the containers are transferred between trucks and rail cars. A cross-dock facility provides a staging area where goods may be offloaded and briefly stored before being transferred for shipment.

The Eastern Iowa Logistics Park — which now requires $21 million in private matching funds to move forward — would be the eastern hub of a three-hub system of rail freight facilities to serve the eastern, central and western regions of the state, said Craig Markley, director of the Iowa DOT’s Office of Systems Planning.

According to a new state freight plan recently released by the Iowa DOT, there is a business case for building additional freight transfer facilities in Central Iowa as well as Eastern Iowa. There is already an intermodal facility operating in Council Bluffs that serves the western region of the state.

“The study we’ve done shows that there is a need in Eastern and Central Iowa,” Markley said. “It is a high-level model, but it does show there is a propensity for those types of facilities in each area of the state with varying levels of demand.”

According to a feasibility study conducted in 2014, the proposed transload site in Des Moines would provide access to three major Class I railroads — BNSF Railway Co., Norfolk Southern Railway and Union Pacific Railroad — as well as to Iowa Interstate Railroad Ltd., a smaller Class II railroad. The facility would provide a lower-cost option for companies that now must load their products onto trucks to ship to rail transload facilities in Chicago, Omaha or Kansas City.

Des Moines Area MPO Director Todd Ashby reiterated his organization’s support for the transload facility.  

“I know our study showed there was a market for a transload facility in Des Moines that would be very competitive,” Ashby said. “We’re satisfied that it can meet the market (demand) here locally.”

Although there will always be an imaginary dividing line when shippers are deciding whether to move freight through Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, that line is fluid and could be influenced by a lot of factors pertinent to the shipper other than just finding the closest facility, Markley said.

According to the Iowa State Freight Plan, a quantitative analysis of rail carload transportation shows a potential annual transportation cost savings of approximately $20 million to $32 million per region, across the three regions of the state.

Sanders said city officials haven’t received any official explanation from federal officials why the Des Moines project didn’t receive funding. The process was obviously highly competitive, however, as 212 projects seeking more than $10 billion were vying for the latest round of FASTLANE funds.

From Sanders’ perspective, the next step will be to talk to both state and federal DOT offices and make some decisions about how to integrate the two projects.