KINGSBURY, Ind. — Eight years of extensive work to have an intermodal facility at Kingsbury has finally paid off. Work has started on a rail yard, but whether fresh produce and other farm products will be part of the operation as originally envisioned remains to be seen.

For about a month, JBC Rail Restoration and C&D Rail Services, both out of Illinois, have been refurbishing long-abandoned railroad tracks from the 1940s north of Hupp Road at the Kingsbury Industrial Park. The tracks will be used by those firms and other companies, expected to follow.

“I’m here to tell you, we have movement,” announced Dave Christian, the economic development coordinator for LaPorte County.

Replacing all of the old railroad ties and ballasts for holding down the existing track has already been finished on 25,000 lineal feet on land owned by Midwest Warehousing.

JBC Rail Restoration provides a variety of services in the railroad industry that include recruiting customers to bring various goods into rail yards by train for storage, then shipment to the consumer on trucks. Christian said the company is presently trying to recruit several Houston-based firms for railcar storage and loading at the Kingsbury site.

He would not say if the companies in those talks are involved with agriculture, but farm products certainly could be among the goods coming in and out of the area where the rail line is now being refurbished. That’s because JBC Rail Restoration is involved with storing and shipping a wide variety of products, including farm goods. Recently, Christian spoke to people about using the site to move fresh food.

“There is significant interest. Whether it materializes or not, I don’t know,” he said.

Hopes are high that JBC Rail Restoration, being a major player in the rail industry, will generate a good supply of customers for the rail yard and businesses in areas such as warehousing that desire freight service. The company is also involved in railcar maintenance, with Houston and St. Louis among its other nationwide locations.

C&D Rail Services is relocating its headquarters from Joliet to Kingsbury, bringing more than a dozen employees who are dispatched to various locations to refurbish, maintain and install new track, said Christian.

Most exciting, perhaps, is the $2.5 million investment by JBC Rail Restoration that enhances the message about the viability of Kingsbury already designated by CSX as one of its “select sites.”

“With the recent announcements, it’s a good sign of some of the momentum that’s picking up at the Kingsbury Industrial Park,” said LaPorte County Attorney Shaw Friedman.

CSX put in a rail spur at the industrial park over a year ago in hopes of landing a deal to bring in refrigerated railcars of fresh produce and other farm products to and from Florida. That spur will serve another 600 acres targeted for development on the south side of Hupp Road.

Friedman said talks that began over a year ago are continuing with officials at the Port of Tampa for access to ships that would have the farm products they’re carrying loaded onto railcars heading to Kingsbury. The cars would then return to Florida with farm products for placement on ships to deliver to other countries.

In addition to CSX, the South Shore Freight Railroad and Canadian National Railroad have a presence at the park and everyone involved in the development has signed agreements providing access to all of the separately owned tracks. Such connectivity adds to the appeal of Kingsbury and should help efforts to bring fresh produce and other products in and out of the rail yard, said Friedman.

“It’s just further indication that KIP is the place to be in the logistics industry,” said Friedman.

Originally, efforts were focused on an intermodal facility that would store fresh produce brought in on refrigerated railcars until loaded onto semi trucks. Those efforts failed because of a split in a partnership between Green Express and The Halfwassen Group, LLC, which now is the sole owner of the area targeted for development south of Hupp Road.

Christian said four other companies are close to making commitments to Kingsbury and as many as 100 new jobs could be there by next year. He said railcar storage and use of some of the existing buildings at the site could start happening by the middle of August or early September.

He explained the rail yard development happened after he introduced the concept at a railroad summit in Chicago two months ago and things started moving fast. “That’s where it all started.”