Our Decatur Terminal in central Illinois is the largest flat yard in North America. The 3.6-mile-long facility serves major agricultural customers such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and is key to the world’s food supply chain. To serve our customers better, we paused train traffic over a busy switching ladder for a 40-hour period on August 23-24 to complete a series of major repairs.

Work was performed over 1,800 track-feet stretch of the yard, located adjacent to ADM. Track in this busy area showed signs of wear after years of heavy tonnage across it. During the first six hours of the outage, Maintenance of Way and Structures crews surfaced the entire North Lead track, taking advantage of the down-time deeper in the yard.

The outage consisted of installing 12 panel turnouts and around 800 track feet of panels. The old track was removed, and the ground was excavated deep below the bottom of the ties to remove all grain-spills from years of traffic out of the roadbed. A geogrid fabric was placed at the sub-ballast layer and a ballast pad was installed and compacted on grade to support the track and switches. These new turnouts are expected to last over 30 years.

Around 90 Engineering craft employees and 16 supervisors worked shifts to complete the work on time.

“We are making strategic investments throughout our railroad and the Decatur Terminal improvements are a significant part of this effort,” said Ed Boyle, VP Engineering. “We worked together for over a year as ONE TEAM to plan for this project. As a result, we minimized disruptions to our customers, and we will be able to grow with them over the long term.”

The project is part of a five-year comprehensive improvement strategy to modernize the Decatur Terminal track infrastructure. Future work will also be bundled to minimize the frequency of service outages and will be performed primarily during the summer months when construction conditions are optimal.

The Decatur Terminal improvements are part of Norfolk Southern’s $1 billion annual investment in infrastructure throughout our 22-state network. These strategic investments in our railroad ensure that we can continue to deliver safe, reliable, and resilient service to our customers.