54 Business View Magazine - May 2016
The Kankakee, Beaverville
& Southern Railroad
Serving the corn farmers of the midwest
“There’s always going to be farmers and there’s always
going to be corn,” says Tyler Stroo, President of the
Kankakee, Beaverville & Southern Railroad (KBSR),
a small, family-owned, short line that traverses the
cornfields between Interstate 57 in Illinois, and I65 in
Indiana. Stroo’s great-uncle, Fey Orr, who had a lum-
ber business and an agricultural products industry in
Beaverville, started the railway in 1977, when Conrail
planned to abandon 25 miles of their ex-New York
Central Railroad trackage between Kankakee and
Sheldon, Illinois.
“He was not in the railroad business,” says Stroo. “He
was in the grain business. He owned an elevator that
