R.J. Corman Railroad Group, LLC is a railroad holding company owned by Richard J. "Rick" Corman. Corman first established the company in 1973. It owns short-line railroad lines in seven states (Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and West Virginia).
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R.J. Corman operates the following subsidiaries:[1]
Richard Corman also owns R.J. Corman Railroad Property and a controlling interest in the Clearfield and Mahoning Railway, both non-operating subsidiaries.
In addition to operating rail lines, R.J. Corman has offered services to the rail industry including construction and maintenance, derailment services & cleanup across the United States, distribution centers, and train loading facilities, as well as aviation services including aircraft maintenance, including its own private airport, Lucas Field, at its headquarters in Nicholasville, Kentucky. R.J. Corman also operates The My Old Kentucky Dinner Train which includes a monthly murder mystery train, as well as special holiday trains such as the North Pole Express, a Christmas themed train and the Wizard express, a Halloween themed train, which are geared more towards young kids. This passenger train operate on the Bardstown Line in Kentucky.
R.J. Corman's passenger train depot was built in 1860, and is located in Bardstown, Kentucky. By 1953, the depot shut down due to the end of the passenger train era. In 1992, the depot was refurnished for the R.J. Corman dinner trains and reopened, and once again serves many passenger trains each year. Some of R.J. Corman's lines have undergone major rehabilitation with the help of local and state governments. R.J. Corman began its operations on the original lines in Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania in 1987, and acquired/rehabilitated many lines in the 1990s. They've reopened many Railbanked lines, and in Pennsylvania, they began an attempt in 2008 to reopen a fully abandoned non-railbanked corridor, though no decision has yet been made. It is to serve a new industrial park, landfill, and quarry.[2][3] R.J. Corman Railroad Group announced on June 18, 2009 that it had acquired the assets of Railpower Technologies Corp, and its U.S. subsidiary, Railpower Hybrid Technologies.[4]