How it started
Foundation and diversification
The Kalamazoo Railroad Velocipede and Car Company was founded in Kalamazoo in 1883 by George Miller and Horace Haines, with a capital stock of $45,000. The factory at Pitcher Street in downtown Kalamazoo was next to the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad (GR&I). By 1901, the company had changed its name to Kalamazoo Railway Supply Company. It manufactured hand and push cars, railroad speeders (motorised inspection cars), velocipedes, jacks, tanks, stand pipes and other products needed for railroad work. The company moved to a larger factory on Reed Street, also next to the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad, that still stands today.
In the early 1940s, the company diversified into the materials handling field with a "Speed Truck" line, early ancestors of today's personnel and material vehicles used as intra-plant transportation in many corporations. Many of the Speed Trucks used the same Wisconsin 16 brake horsepower (12 kilowatt) air-cooled engine in Kalamazoo railroad speeder (inspection) cars. Eventually, that product line grew to include a platform model, a dump model, and a runabout - a one-person, no-cargo version. A final name change in the early 1950s, to the Kalamazoo Manufacturing Company, reflected the growing non-railroad business.
From Wikipedia’s article on Kalamazoo Manufacturing Company, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2