The series of rail spur lines combined with slabs of asphalt the City of Prineville Railway finished building last week isn’t much to look at, admitted Dale Keller, head of sales and business development for the railroad.

The “bulk transload facility” will allow bulk materials like gravel, grain and fertilizer, as well as bulk liquids like fuel and de-icing agent, to be transferred from truck to train or from train to truck. Located just north of Redmond where the Prineville Railway’s tracks tie in to the main north-south line, it is, Keller said, the first facility of its kind in Central Oregon.

“It’s not very glamorous,” Keller said. “But the people that are gonna use it are gonna get it; the rail users who deal in those kinds of commodities are gonna look at that and say, ‘That’s a good one.’”

Built using $2.1 million from Connect Oregon III, a $97 million state initiative to fund nonhighway transportation improvements using bonds backed by the Oregon Lottery, the new facility has the capacity to load or unload up to 100 tons of bulk material per hour and is built to contain any hazardous liquid materials that might be spilled at the site.

Though there are locations in Bend where rail customers can load and offload similar materials, they’re privately operated, Keller said. The new depot is envisioned as a regional facility that will seek to attract business from companies that aren’t necessarily large enough to require a loading facility of their own.

The unavailability of bulk rail loading facilities has likely made Central Oregon unattractive for industries that require such infrastructure, Keller said, and diverted goods that might be more easily shipped by rail to trucks.

With the bulk goods facility, the railway is hoping to capture a segment of the local diesel fuel market, Keller said, all of which is now brought to Central Oregon by truck.

Keller said over the longer term, the railway expects rail freight to continue chipping away at truck-based shipping. Right now, the tipping point comes at around 300 to 400 miles, he said — beyond that distance, rail is generally cheaper than trucks, Keller said, even when accounting for the trucks needed to move products from factory or field to the depot, and from the depot to their final destination.

Getting companies that have grown up relying on trucking to consider rail as an alternative is potentially challenging, Keller said.

“It’s been a long, long time since Central Oregon shipped heavily by rail,” he said.

The bulk transload facility is the second phase in the Prineville Railway’s effort to reinvent itself as a major player in the regional freight business. In 2005, the railway opened a freight depot just west of Prineville that included 144,000 square feet of warehouse space — slightly smaller than the remodeled Bend Walmart — designed for the loading, unloading and storage of lumber, tires and other nonbulk goods. The railway is shopping for a secondhand locomotive to serve both depots and ferry goods along the 19-mile line, and will begin examining bids from interested sellers this week.

Russ Deboodt, Crook County manager for Economic Development for Central Oregon, said the rail facilities could improve prospects for recruiting industries that would have been uninterested in locating in the region. Manufacturers have often been difficult to bring to Central Oregon, he said, due to the area’s perceived distance from sources of supplies and markets.

The freight railroads that operate on the line between the Columbia Gorge and Northern California, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway and Union Pacific, connect the bulk transload facility with every major West Coast port and nearly every mile of track west of Chicago.

Gus Melonas, spokesman with BNSF Railway, said the railroad should be able to accommodate as many train cars as the Prineville Railway can bring in or ship out.

“We look forward to the growth at this central location and the possibility to provide future train service,” he said.

Deboodt said the rail connections could help Central Oregon capitalize on advantages it has over the Portland area and the Willamette Valley — an abundance of ready-to-build industrial land, water and power. As industrial sites close to the Port of Portland and Interstates 5 and 84 become increasingly difficult to find, Deboodt said Central Oregon can make the case to companies interested in locating in the state that it’s not nearly as remote as it may appear.

“From an access standpoint, from a shipping standpoint, we’re actually positioned quite well,” he said. “We may not have the flair of I-5 running through here, but I think a lot of companies would actually prefer that.”