How it started
History
The line, which ran between Crest Hill and Rockdale, Illinois, was a former branch line of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern (EJ&E) Railway, which had been out of service since 1991, after a fire severely damaged a wooden trestle.
In 1994, Minooka, Illinois, businessman Donald L. "Don" Bachman, who owned a locomotive-rebuilding company called Relco, founded the Joliet Junction Railroad, acquiring its trackage from the EJ&E, which had sought to abandon it after the fire. Bachman learned that it would cost $90,000 to replace the bridge, plus significantly more for other expenses to bring the line up to code. As a result, he applied for and received a $390,000 loan from the Illinois Department of Transportation to fund additional improvements.
From Wikipedia’s article on Joliet Junction Railroad, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2