Level 3, the biggest Internet backbone transit provide, was spun off from the Peter Kiewit construction firm, and had as its original asset a coal mine in Wyoming.
It would have been interesting to see what happened if it hadn't spun off, suddenly you'd have a huge Fortune 500 telecom where its side business was running a railroad.
Would that have kept them afloat as an operation? I've spent the last few decades here watching as their red-and-grey engines disappeared in a sea of yellow.
(If you're wondering how you get from rubber to phones, they had rubber-coated cables and wired telephone switches along the way.)