City of Rochelle Railroad

Rochelle owns a railroad. Not a museum line or a preserved branch, but a working freight short line, built by the city in the mid 1980s with state money to serve industry on the east side of town and connect it to the two main lines crossing on the west side. It runs twelve miles of track along the Caron Road corridor with three interchange yards and two transload yards, moving lumber, steel, canned and frozen food, ethanol and grain products, and it is operated under contract by the Burlington Junction Railway rather than by city staff. Municipal ownership of a working freight railroad is unusual in the United States, where the network is almost entirely private, and this one was a deliberate piece of economic development rather than an accident of history. The logic is straightforward once the diamond is understood. Two Class I railroads pass through Rochelle but neither has much interest in switching individual factories, which is slow work at low margins. A city owned line does that switching, which means a manufacturer can put a plant on the edge of town and still reach both networks. The railroad serves more than a dozen customers and handles well over ten thousand cars a year, and the city credits it with drawing over fifteen industries and more than two thousand jobs. It sits alongside the municipal electric, water and telecommunications utilities as part of an unusual habit in this town of owning its own infrastructure.