April 2014
| Business World Magazine | 51
a rebound – to make it a another reclama-
tion project.
“I had a small operation in Pennsylvania
at that time and I was looking for something
small that was in a turnaround situation,” he
said. “I’d heard Genesee & Wyoming was
getting ready to file for an abandonment pe-
tition, so I went down on my own and talked
to some of the customers along the line and
said ‘I think there’s a chance of doing some-
thing here.’ So I approached them about ac-
quiring it.”
The deal was made official in July 2003,
and in the subsequent several months Gold-
en veered between continuing to lay ground-
work with the line’s former and potential
customers, and – especially when the line
moved just nine cars in the first six months –
pondering exactly what he’d gotten himself
into.
“I was wondering if we’d made the right
decision. I was beginning to wonder,” he
said. “But we had lived up to what we told
the customers we would do, and the custom-
ers started coming around and traffic started
to move after about six months. In that part
of the world, it’s a very seasonal business.
Business usually moves fall, winter and early
