(The following story by Dan Piller appeared on the Des Moines Register website on June 19.)
DES MOINES, Iowa — Union Pacific Railroad said Thursday that its main lines through Iowa have been reopened, although lingering effects of the flooding will cause trains to move slower than usual.
BNSF Railway said that its main east-west line across Iowa is closed between Burlington and Ottumwa in the area where flooding has concentrated this week. The line is open from Ottumwa through Creston and Osceola to the Missouri River, spokesman Steve Forsberg said.
The Iowa Interstate Railroad has resumed operations west of Des Moines but is still shut down on the eastern half of its line across through Cedar Rapids and onto Illinois, the railroad’s transportation director Mick Burkhardt said Thursday.
Railroads serving Iowa were hit hard by the floods. Iowa Northern Railroad, which extends north from Cedar Rapids through Waterloo into the north central part of the state was cut in half when its bridge over the Cedar River in Waterloo was destroyed by the flood last week.
The Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railroad bridge over the Cedar River at Cedar Rapids suffered the same fate.
“We’ve had a heck of a challenge, the whole rail industry,” Union Pacific chief executive officer John Young told a transportation conference in New York on Thursday. “Every railroad that operates in Iowa was shut down or is shut down.”
Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis said UP’s main east-west line from Omaha through Iowa to Chicago, which had been blocked earlier this week in several points, was opened by Thursday but still was slow-ordered over much of the track because of maintenance issues. The north-south line extending to Kansas City also was reopened.
Davis said some traffic on the east-west line, which normally carries 60 trains per day and is one of the heaviest volume sections of the UP system, would be embargoed so the system did not become congested.
“”There’s always a danger when you reopen a line that all traffic gets on it at once and you risk congestion, and we want to avoid that,” Davis said.