Ag Rail LLC's terminal at a Union Pacific rail yard in Bloomington, IL.
Bloomington, IL — With a rail terminal elevator having a little more than 3.5 million bushels in storage capacity and a landlocked location in the middle of a relatively large city, Bloomington, IL, upgrades at AgRail LLC (309-828-8600) can be tricky.
“We were wanting to be a little more flexible with our grain handling, moving two commodities at once,” says General Manager Todd Sage, who has been with AgRail for 15 years after working for Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). “The trick was getting all of the equipment we wanted into the space we had.”
AgRail loads railcars on the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. The company provides grain drying and storage services, as well as purchasing grain for rail shipment from commercial grain elevators and farmers in central Illinois. These include its seven owners:
With all the grain coming in from around the central Illinois region during harvest, more flexibility was a must. If that could be accomplished and also boost rail-loading capacity, that was an extra benefit.
AgRail solicited several bids on the 2018-19 project, but in the end, selected a proposal from Grain Flo Inc., Heyworth, IL (309-473-2512), which has done most of the work on the facility since it opened in 1999.
“Grain Flo knows our facility and came up with the best solution for our needs,” Sage says.
Work on the $1.7 million project began in June 2018 and was completed in April 2019.
In addition to Grain Flo, AgRail received the services of the engineering firm SKS Engineers LLC, Decatur, IL (217-877-2100), and the electrical systems contractor KDJ Sales & Service Inc., Mackinaw, IL (309-359-3611).
The project started with workers adding a third mechanical receiving pit adjacent to existing storage near the south end of the facility. The pit is emptied by a 25,000-bph Schlagel drag conveyor that ends with a 60-degree upward curve to emerge above ground.
Grain, in turn, is deposited onto an existing 40,000-bph AGI Hi Roller enclosed belt conveyor that runs to a new 25,000-bph GSI leg, enclosed along with an older leg in an existing 123-foot-tall AGI Brownie tower. The new 210-foot-tall leg is outfitted with a single row of Maxi-Lift 20x10 heavy-duty low-profile buckets mounted on a 22-inch Continental belt.
The leg raises grain up to a Schlagel four-hole rotary distributor with 24-inch spouting. Three of the four spouts drop grain via gravity into two older storage tanks or an existing bulk weigh loadout scale for rail loading. The fourth deposits grain into an overhead 25,000-bph GSI belt conveyor with 36-inch belt running out to newer storage tanks.
Rather than building a new catwalk supported by new towers for the new conveyor, GSI fabricated a new truss and catwalk 7 feet wide by 10 feet tall and 123 feet long. The new belt conveyor is placed directly over an existing GSI belt conveyor, and the bridge holds up both of them. The bridge, in turn, is supported by a tower fabricated by Grain Flo at its shop in Heyworth.
Sage notes that the new equipment allows the terminal to receive grain at up to 85,000 bph simultaneously through all three of its pits. In addition, rail loadout capacity has gone from about 40,000 bph to about 50,000 bph.
New overhead Grain Flo truss bridge and catwalk hold both a new GSI enclosed belt conveyor at top and existing conveyor at bottom in almost the same amount of space.
- Ed Zdrojewski, editor
Reprinted from July/August 2019 GRAIN JOURNAL
New Pit and Leg for More Flexible Grain Handling
