Business View Magazine - May 2016 49
We closed in November, 1994, and set out to turn the
company around.”
Sabin continues: “At that time, there were only 325
loads per month generated on the line – a little bit of
overload traffic from the Chicago/Northwestern. The
rates were higher than the truck rates; the service was
very bad. They only had 63 hopper cars and they had
five locomotives, but only one was generally running
on any given day. So, I convinced my brother, Mark,
who was, at the time, Director of Commuter Operations
for the Chicago/Northwestern in Chicago, to come out
and join me, along with my partner, Pete Collins, as we
set out on a turnaround process and started growing
the business.
“There was roughly a four million dollar mortgage owed
to the state of Iowa’s Railway Authority, and we found
