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Richard Robey
Biographical Info
Richard Robey, a native of Cranford, New Jersey, began his railroading career in 1964 with a college summer job at the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad.
Robey joined the C&O’s Railroad Management Training Program in 1966 after graduating from Columbia University with an M.B.A. and later managed sales for the Illinois Central Railroad in Chicago. In 1976, four years before the Staggers Rail Act would bolster the development of the short line freight rail industry, Robey and three partners started their own small railroad. The group bought the Octoraro Railway for $50,000, a deal that included two 30-year-old diesel locomotives and a dilapidated depot.
In 1979 Robey joined the Southern Pacific Railroad and assisted in setting up its marketing department in San Francisco. In 1980 he joined US Rail, a car leasing company based in San Francisco. The following year he returned to Pennsylvania, joining the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad (P&LE) and was involved, among many other things, in selling a fleet of P&LE coal hoppers to China Rail.
When companies like Conrail were looking to divest some of their smaller lines in the early 1980s, the SEDA-COG Joint Rail Authority (JRA), an eight-county joint municipal authority, formed to preserve Pennsylvania lines and the area’s freight service. In 1984, following a competitive bidding process, Robey and his wife Miriam founded the North Shore (NSHR) and Nittany & Bald Eagle Railroads (NBER) in Northumberland, Pennsylvania to operate the local branch lines saved from abandonment by the JRA. The result was a public-private partnership between JRA and NSHR that exists to this day.
Under Robey’s leadership, rail traffic grew from just a handful of cars that first year to 20,000 to 30,000 carloads annually today. Robey retired in 2010 after selling the railroad to the North Shore Railroad management team.
Robey served two terms on ASLRRA’s Board of Directors. He was also one of the founders of the Keystone State Railroad Association and served on the AASHTO Standing Committee on Rail Transportation (SCORT). As of March 2023, he served on the Northumberland County (PA) Industrial Development Authority.