Iowa's Rail Network
Iowa has a robust and thriving rail transportation system that has 17 operating railroads and 3,801 miles of mainline track. Stretched end to end, that length is equivalent to the distance from Iowa to Ireland. This system is a critical component of Iowa’s agriculture and manufacturing economies and allows Iowa businesses to send or receive shipments around the world through connections with the multimodal transportation system.
Iowa has an extensive rail system shown on the 2025 Freight Rail Service Map (2.8 MB) .pdf for the safe and eco-friendly transport of large volumes of freight. The information on the Freight Railroad Profiles (1.73 MB) .pdf shows the overview of each operating railroad in Iowa, including total miles of freight railroad owned and operated by each railroad, lines owned/leased and operated under contract, trackage, and/or haulage rights, transloading/intermodal locations, and interchanges.
Although rail accounts for about three percent of the freight network’s mileage, it carries roughly nine percent of Iowa’s freight tonnage. The rail network performs an important role in moving bulk commodities produced and consumed in the state to and from local, regional, and national processors, livestock feeders, and river terminals, as well as ports for international export. The rail network’s ability to haul large volumes over long distances at low costs will continue to be a major factor in moving freight and improving the economy of Iowa.
Benefits of Using Rail
For rail freight improvements, the benefits involve increased transportation competition resulting in lower cost to shippers, less highway congestion and damage, and reduced environmental and energy impacts. By their nature, grade crossing improvement projects and other rail-related improvements also increase transportation safety.
The transport of hazardous materials is regulated by the FRA and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). Class I railroads have additional resources and personnel that can be dispatched quickly to supplement local response to hazardous materials rail incidents outside of public emergency response.
Positive Train Control (PTC)
PTC is a set of technologies that prevent the most serious human error incidents. It is designed to prevent train-to-train collisions or derailments caused by excessive speed, unauthorized train movement onto sections of track where maintenance activities are taking place, and movement of a train through a track switch left in the wrong position. These technologies are designed to automatically stop a train before certain accidents.
Remote Control Locomotives (RCL)
For more than 20 years, freight railroads have successfully used RCL technology — also known as Remote Control Operations (RCO) — to enhance the safety and efficiency of locomotive operations within railyards. Widely accepted throughout the industry, RCL has proven to be as safe or safer than conventional methods in facilitating yard operations. All RCO employees are FRA-certified and receive specialized training in remote operations.
Based on existing technologies and transportation modes, rail is considered the most fuel-efficient approach to transport goods over land. According to the American Association of Railroads (AAR), not only can one train move nearly 500 tons on a gallon of fuel, one train can carry the freight of hundreds of trucks. Additionally, AAR indicates freight railroads are, on average, three to four times more fuel efficient than trucks and moving freight by rail instead of trucks is expected to translate to a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 75%. The efficiency is reflected in the 2020 national data, where freight rail only represented 6.0% of the GHG emissions related to freight transportation, while transporting almost 29.0% of the total freight.
The efficiency of rail relative to truck is not new. A 2022 study from Texas A&M Transportation Institute comparing domestic freight transportation modes highlighted that while freight trucks have been improving in terms of metric tons of GHG emissions produced per ton-mile transported from 2005 (171.9 metric tons GHG per ton-mile) to 2019 (140.7 metric tons GHG per ton-mile), it is still significantly more environmentally damaging than rail, which only produced 21.6 metric tons of GHG per ton-mile transported in 2019.
- Efficiency of Freight Rail can be seen on the Transportation Mode Comparison Chart.
Rail has particular cost advantages when shipping sizable quantities or commodities in bulk where the large capacity of a rail car (or multiple cars) offers economies of scale. Shippers moving oversize or overweight truckloads may be able to use rail to avoid or reduce issues with highway clearances and permitting. Rail is often a very effective way to move large equipment, pipe, and other dimensional cargo. The serving railroad can provide details and the process to ship over-dimensional loads by rail.
According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Freight Analysis Framework (FAF), freight tonnage moving in the U.S. will increase by nearly 27% between 2022 and 2050. This will prove to be a sizable challenge for the overall freight transportation system. This growth will be reflected in Iowa and will not uniform across modes. Iowa’s transportation system facilitated the movement of over 624 million tons of freight with an estimated value of $377 billion in 2022. These figures are expected to grow to over 1 billion tons with a value of over $745 billion in 2050. Additionally, Iowa is a net exporting state, meaning the state produces and exports more goods than it imports. This is true both in terms of tonnage and value. The gap between Iowa’s imports and exports is projected to grow wider from 42 million tons in 2022 to 120 million tons in 2050.
Commodities
Iowa rail movements in 2022 totaled 273.6 million tons and carried over 6.0 million carload units. Rail movements through Iowa account for 66% of the weight and 84% of the carloads of all rail movements in the state. The five commodity categories included on the chart below show – coal, food or kindred products, chemicals or allied products, farm products, and misc. mixed shipments account for 80% of the total commodity movements by weight and 69% by carloads.
Alternative Access to Railroads
Transloading refers to the transfer of freight shipments, typically bulk, from the vehicle/container of one mode to that of another at a terminal interchange point. Types of transload facilities include the following. Iowa Transloading Facilities (Map) Figure 3.6 from Iowa State Rail Plan. For a complete list of Rail-Served Freight Facilities, refer to the Resource section of the rail toolkit
Types of Transloading
- Team track: A simple siding or spur track where rail cars are placed and available for use to load and unload freight. Once the cars are loaded, the railroad is notified to pick them up. Team tracks can be owned by a railroad or rail customer.
- Cross-dock: Locations where cargo is unloaded from an incoming truck or rail car and is reloaded directly into outbound trucks, trailers, containers, or rail cars. A cross-dock typically allows level loading between modes.
- Barge terminals: Locations where commodities are transferred from barges to trucks and/or rail cars. These terminals are a staple of industries moving bulk products by inland waterways.
- Biorefineries: Production facilities for renewable fuels made with corn and the byproducts of corn production. These locations typically receive raw materials by truck and ship finished biodiesel/ethanol by truck and/or rail. The opportunity to shift from one mode to another qualifies these locations as transloads.
- Coal-burning facility: Power plants that burn coal to generate energy. These facilities typically receive large amounts of coal via railroad or waterway.
- Grain elevators: Facilities that collect grain from farmers by tractor and trailer or truck. The grain is then stored and shipped to market via truck and/or rail. Iowa has a vast network of grain elevators to handle the large production of corn and soybeans each year before being transported elsewhere. As is the case with biorefineries, the multiple transportation options qualify these locations as transloads.
Intermodal refers to the transfer of freight using an intermodal container or trailer through multiple modes of transportation (rail, barge, and/or truck) without the handling of the freight itself when changing modes. This method improves security and transportation speed while reducing the damage and loss of goods. Container transfer facilities handle rail-to-truck and truck-to-rail transfers in sealed units such as trailer-on-flatcar (TOFC) or container-on-flatcar (COFC).
A warehouse is a commercial building for storing goods, including raw materials, packing materials, spare parts, components, and finished goods associated with agriculture, manufacturing, and production. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, and transport businesses, and some warehouses include transloading capabilities to offer short- and long-term storage and handling of goods.