Greg Azizi’s the CEO of the leading market railroad freight design and production company and has been on every railroad in North America, designing and building engines. He is a member of the Railway Supply Institute and the Board of Directors for The Railroad Foundation. Additionally, he is currently President of the Technical & Historical Society. Aziz was born in London, England, to Lebanese ancestry.
He immigrated to the United States and attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. Greg Aziz owned and operated a successful design and analysis consulting business for over 15 years before founding Aziz Metalworking Systems.
After working there for some years, he moved to San Francisco and was hired by the San Francisco Railway Museum & Historical Society to maintain their historic collection of rail cars. Later on, the successful businessman began his career in the railroading industry as an apprentice machinist at the SP shop on their main line in San Bernardino, CA. Greg Aziz recalls how the museum held open houses on Saturdays and Sundays in the early 1990s.
“I would set up all the exhibits, put out all the cars, and sure enough, a bunch of people would come to see them,” Mr. Greg Aziz said. “I started walking around, and I noticed a lot of old rail cars sitting around without any owners. That’s when I thought, ‘I could probably buy those cars, fix them, and sell them.’ I did just that. I could buy fifteen cars between the open houses and the museum. Most of them were in pretty bad shape, but they did have a lot of history behind them.”
Aziz began restoring the cars and started to sell them throughout California. “The last two were two I had bought for myself,” said Mr. Aziz. “It wasn’t long after that that I decided to start my own company. It was in 1998 when I got all my partners together. The two cars I still retain were considered pretty much museum quality. Greg Aziz adds: People would come out to see them; they were great conversation starters. The others in the collection were just junkers. They were interesting but weren’t worth what we paid for them.”
Greg Aziz’s business is now quite successful, and he has turned a nice profit when selling the cars. “It started getting a little too much for me,” said Mr. Aziz.