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Good old days of railroad? They're here, Hoback says
By ERIC BERNSEE
Editor
At age 66, Thomas G. Hoback is the product of an era in which virtually every red-blooded American boy cherished receiving one particular Christmas present more than any other.
Sorry, but this Christmas story doesn't include a Red Ryder BB gun. We're talking model trains. Lionel. Western Flyer. HO scale. Whatever. If one of those train sets encircled your tree on Christmas morning, you were one happy camper.
Unfortunately, most of us outgrew our fascination with model trains and traded our old engineer's cap for a tie and briefcase or a hard hat and a lunch pail.
But not Thomas Hoback. He's still playing with trains, only now his have become his life's work. And as president and CEO of the Indiana Rail Road Co. (INRD), Hoback has seen his trains become the model of regional railroad consistency.
But then again, he's been a "railroad guy" all his life. His father worked for the railroad, and he wanted to as well.
Addressing an audience at the Greencastle campus of Ivy Tech as part of the school's Business & Entrepreneurial Services (BES) Center 2013 Speaker Series, Hoback recalled a school guidance counselor's reaction to his pronouncement that he wanted to "work in the railroad industry."
The railroad comment stopped the counselor in his tracks. Apparently, Hoback said, the counselor had never had anyone else ever profess a desire to be working on the railroad all the livelong day.
"If you really want to go into the transportation business," Hoback recalled the counselor suggesting, "you really ought to get into airlines, that's where the future is."
Musing about that long-ago remark Thursday, Hoback ticked off the names of some of the major airlines he's seen disappear during his lifetime.
"Let's see, there's TWA and Braniff and Eastern Airlines and Pan-Am ..." And that's not even mentioning Ozark or Allegheny or ValuJet or dozens of other defunct U.S. airlines.
"The future of railroads has never been brighter," Hoback said.
And he should know. His Indiana Rail Road Co. -- founded in 1986 when Hoback and a group of investors acquired a line between Indianapolis and Sullivan from the Illinois Central Railroad -- has grown at an average of 13 percent a year over the past 27 years.
The rail executive says he has a ready response the next time he hears someone pining for the "good, old days of the railroad."
"These are the good, old days," Hoback stressed. "Railroads have never moved more freight and are more reliable than they have ever been."
He went on to share a number of facts and figures reinforcing his opinion about the rail industry's future.
For instance, railroads expect to hire 11,000 new employees this year alone, Hoback told an Ivy Tech audience that included local railroad enthusiasts Victor and Linda Hunter of Greencastle (who helped sponsor the event) and three DePauw University students interested in the possibility of internships with Hoback's company.
And, from the can-you-believe-this file, he added, "the largest user of railroad services in the U.S. is a little company called UPS."
"A lot of people don't equate entrepreneurship and railroads," Hoback said. "But if you've eaten a Hershey's chocolate bar recently, we've moved the sugar and sweetener that went into that product."
His trains also move the grain Jim Beam converts to its liquor products, the packaging for Tide detergent, and cases of Ice Mountain water and Coors and Bud Light beer. Even General Electric side-by-side refrigerators are being shipped via rail out of Bloomington these days.
Contrary to popular belief, Hoback said, trains are moving "more things in ways that affect lives."
Indiana Rail Road Co. will move the equivalent of 800,000 truckloads of products this year.
Hoback stressed that we're seeing "a huge global shift from truck to rail for long-haul service."
"And we're right in the middle of it," he said of INRD, which has invested more than $160 million in additional capacity and state-of-the-art locomotives to ensure better and more reliable service to good reviews.
"Our reputation for quality has helped leapfrog us into new markets," Hoback said.
One of those is the coal industry as INRD has invested $25 million in an eight-mile rail spur opened recently to access the Bear Run Mine owned by Peabody Coal near Dugger and Linton.
Hoback's railroad, which was named 2012 Regional Railroad of the Year at the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association's national convention in Indianapolis, will move 8 million tons of coal from that mine this year. He envisions as much as 12 million tons being moved next year.
Many of his railroad lessons were learned from his father, Hoback told the Ivy Tech audience.
"One thing I remember my dad telling me, probably 40 years ago, was this: If you could just learn to run a railroad like a business, you'd do well."
His father said the idea was to start "with a clean sheet of paper" and forget about all the negative things linked to railroads in the "dark days" of the 1970s and early 1980s.
Hoback obviously listened well.
When he learned the Illinois Central line from Central Illinois into Indianapolis, the 12th largest city in the country, was about to be abandoned, he acted quickly and formed a venture capital group with investors in Chicago and Indy.
In 2006, he struck again, acquiring a Chicago-Louisville line through Terre Haute that the Canadian Pacific Railroad was getting rid of. That gave his company access to the rail hub in the Windy City and the port of Jeffersonville along the Ohio River.
"For me personally," Hoback allowed, "it's a turn-on to find new things to move by rail."
Yep, like a kid at Christmas.