Global III

In 2003 Union Pacific opened a hundred and eighty one million dollar intermodal terminal southwest of Rochelle and called it Global III. The point of it was to get containers out of Chicago. Freight arriving from the west coast had to thread the most congested rail terminal district in North America, and a yard seventy five miles short of it, at the junction of Interstate 39 and Interstate 88 and beside the main line, could lift containers off trains and onto trucks before any of that began. The terminal covered about seven hundred acres of a twelve hundred acre holding and was designed for seven hundred and twenty thousand container lifts a year. A great many of the containers leaving it were carrying grain. It reshaped the town around it. Distribution centres followed for Sara Lee, ConAgra and Rayovac on ground that had been farmland, and Rochelle acquired a second economy alongside its canneries and its railroads. Then in July 2019 Union Pacific closed it, folding six Chicago area intermodal facilities together under the restructuring it called the Unified Plan; by then the terminal was handling around two hundred thousand containers a year against a capacity more than three times that. The warehouses stayed. Rochelle went on to build a container yard of its own on the municipal railroad instead.