Business View Magazine - May 2016 57
myself and my brother, Neil. I’m President and he’s
Vice President, but we do everything together. We ride
together to work every day; we start our jobs at seven
o’clock in the morning at our shed at Iroquois Junction,
Illinois and talk about what needs to be done.”
Essentially, the KBSR’s business model is very
straightforward. “We ship corn,” says Stroo. “We lease
284 grain hoppers and we pick them up at interchang-
es from the bigger railroads.” KBSR connects to the
CSXT, the Canadian National (CN), the Norfolk South-
ern (NS), the Union Pacific
(UP), and the Toledo, Peoria &
Western Railway (TPW), a re-
gional carrier. “We’ll drop off
cars at the private elevators
that receive the corn from
farmers. We have nine eleva-
tors on our line that are capa-
ble of loading cars. The eleva-
tor will load them, we’ll get
a bill of lading of where they
need to be shipped out to,
and then we’ll pick them up
and deliver them back to the
bigger railroads. They’ll bring
the loaded cars to wherever
they need to go and they’ll be
offloaded. Then they’ll bring
the cars back and we’ll do it
all over again.”
Stroo says that other than
maintaining the railway’s
tracks and machinery - jobs
which they outsource - there
are no further plans for expan-
sion. “There’s not too much
farther that we can go,” he ex-
plains. “We interchange with
your basic Class 1 railroads and that’s pretty much as
far as we can go. We plan, every year, to spend about
a million dollars to keep the track up to snuff. We try
to do ten miles every year. Once we get around to get-
ting everything done, then we start all over again. It’s a
never-ending battle.”
Regardless of the difficulties of keeping a short line
railroad running, Stroo seems at ease with the KBSR’s
relaxed work environment. “We work from about seven
till about . . . it depends on how much you have to do
