RJ Corman Railroad HO Scale Models

R. J. Corman Railroad Group, LLC traces its origins to 1973, when Richard J. Corman founded R. J. Corman Railroad Construction in Nicholasville, Kentucky, where the company has remained headquartered ever since. The enterprise grew steadily through the following decade, adding derailment and emergency response services in 1983 with the opening of a division in Columbus, Ohio. Over the course of the late 1980s and 1990s, additional derailment services divisions spread across the northeastern and midwestern United States, establishing the company as a significant provider of railroad emergency response work. Richard Corman's headquarters campus, known as Jay Station, was named in honor of his father, Jay Corman, reflecting the personal and family-oriented character that distinguished the privately held enterprise throughout its early decades. The company entered short line railroad operations in 1987 with the acquisition of two lines, the Bardstown Line in Kentucky and the Memphis Line spanning Kentucky and Tennessee. These initial acquisitions set the template for what would become a pattern of purchasing, rehabilitating, and reactivating underutilized or dormant rail corridors across the eastern half of the United States. The Bardstown Line gained a degree of public recognition beyond freight service when it became home to My Old Kentucky Dinner Train, an excursion passenger operation that made its inaugural run in 1989 and continued to draw tourists to the Kentucky countryside. Through the 1990s the company broadened its reach into track material distribution, agreeing in 1994 to serve as Conrail's full-service distributor of track and rail materials, a relationship that underscored the firm's growing standing among major railroad operators. The twenty-first century brought further diversification and geographic expansion. R. J. Corman launched a railroad switching subsidiary in 2001 and added signal design and construction services in April 2013. The company made a notable acquisition in 2009 when it purchased the assets of Railpower Technologies Corp and its American subsidiary, Railpower Hybrid Technologies, extending its capabilities into locomotive technology. In January 2019 the company acquired the Nashville and Eastern Railroad along with associated operations, and in 2020 announced an agreement to take on several additional short line properties in Pennsylvania and New York, including the Owego and Harford Railway and related carriers. Richard J. Corman died on August 23, 2013, after a prolonged illness, but the company he built continued operating under family ownership. By the time of its founder's death and in the years that followed, R. J. Corman Railroad Group had grown into one of the more substantial short line holding companies in the eastern United States, operating approximately nineteen subsidiary railroads across states including Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. The group interchanges with all six Class I railroads and serves a broad range of industrial customers, making it a meaningful connector between large-scale rail networks and the local industries and communities that depend on rail access. Its combination of construction, emergency response, switching, material distribution, and operating subsidiaries under a single privately held structure represents a relatively uncommon model in contemporary North American railroading.