(Radio Iowa) – The state Transportation Commission has approved funding for rail improvements for a business in northeast Iowa and two in western Iowa. D-O-T spokesman Jim Glaspie says International Paper received a nearly one-point-five million dollar grant for its project near the Waterloo airport. “So they’re going to build a new facility in that area so they can expand what they’re going to do. They have 129 jobs currently, the move to the new facility will keep those 129 jobs in Iowa, in Waterloo and the local area. And they had the capacity to create 72 new jobs,” he says.

Glaspie says the building is under construction and the rail line will follow. “The dual rail line that’ll come off the main, and then it’ll go down to one track and then when it gets right up by their property, it’ll split again into two tracks and actually go inside the building so they can unload inside,” he says. The grant is a 50-50 split with the company on the cost. Floyd Valley Transload won loans for improvements at two locations in Sioux City.

The first loan is for 830-thousand dollars for rail improvements at the Lewis Boulevard facility. “They were going over to local meat processor, and they were taking byproducts from the meat processing business and they were trucking that out of state,” he says. “What this allows them to do is to truck this to their facility, put it on rail cars and send it out on rail cars, instead of having truckers doing that.” The company got a 256-thousand dollar loan for its nearby location where they handle grain.

“They’ve purchased some grain storage facility…. it wasn’t used to its capacity, so he’s the people from Floyd Valley have purchased that and they have a lease with the B-N-S-F, which owns some property adjacent to it. And that’s to remove some track and upgrade some tracks so that it can hold heavier rail cars,” Glaspie says. He says the track will be brought back up to standards. “It kind of fell out of use and the switches are not in good condition ,and they’re going to add some additional track to get some better use out of that,” he says. “Like I said, they’re coupled with B-N-S-F so that this is kind of a joint project with them, but they’ll own the they’ll own the property that the track is on.”

The BJRY Transload company won a loan of 792-thousand dollars for rail improvements in an area of the Le Mars industrial park. The company has a load transfer yard where they handle lumber brought in on rail cars.  “This is a new property that the city has acquired. The city owns the main spur through the industrial Park, and BJRY will own and operate the transload that’s going to come out there to switch in for them. And there’s going to be a another lay down area, what we call that so they can unload the load, the train cars and then use it to put also put it back on semi,” Glaspie says.

Glaspie says the loans are for 80 percent of the projects, and the businesses put up the other 20 percent.