If this question has been answered before I apologize. When a railroad officially asks permission to abandon tracks, who gets the land and the tracks right of way? Does it go back to the abutting land owners, the county/state,…? Do the abutting land owners give any money to the railroad?
If often ends up in the courts to decide.
Here in Iowa when a line from Cedar Rapids to Waterloo was abandoned many people wanted to turn it into a biking trail. Several farmers came up with the original deeds and contracts that stated that when the RR no longer was using the land it reverted to the original deed… and they won in the courts. The old ROW did become a biking trail but if you look at it on Google Earth you can see a couple of right angle detours around the perimeter of a parcel of land that is now farm field.
The devil is in the details of the original aquisition agreements…and anything is possible.
This has been mostly decided by State Statutes and subsequent case law and it varies from State to State. Basically if the acquiaition deed, and there are many deeds, stipulate that a particular parcel reverts to the land from which it was originally taken then that is what happens.
If the RR acquired the parcel with no such stipulation then is “ususlly” can sell it to whomever it wishes.
Say in a five mile segment the RR had eighteen separate acquisition documents there could be several, maybe even all eighteen, different outcomes.
Yes this question has been raised and answered many times. There is no set answer as each right of way was done in a different manner. Sometimes the track is abandoned but not the right of way with it being sold inact to a utility or a rail trail group or held by the railroad company and leased out. Some deeds give the land back to the original owner others don’t; some have to be sold back to the original owner others just given. Some land came from governments and agencies. Because of such deeds, contracts, easements, etc, it is believed railroads are also responsible for the huge success of the American Bar Association and its memebers.
I don’t disagree with anything stated in the prior posts. But there’s one additional wrinkle - the National Trails Systems Act (NTSA). Regardless of what the original acquistion documents may say, if a railroad transfers a right of way to a trail sponsor (by sale lease or otherwise) under the NTSA, the effect is to prevent any reversionary interests from taking effect. This is due to what is quaintly referred to as a “legal fiction”. Under the NTSA, a transfer of a ROW for trail use is not considered an “abandonment” of the ROW for purposes of “any law or rule of law”.
In these cases, if there are reversionary intersts which are “trumped” by the NTSA, the holders of those interests may be entitled to compensation from the US for a “taking” of their property (under something called the “Tucker Act”).
Clear as mud?
I’ll have my lawyer contact your lawyer and they will contact the railroad’s lawyers and the government’s lawyers and they all will become filthy rich. But no train will ever turn a wheel. And it will be quite a while before there is a usable public trail, too.
Well, I just wrote a nice explanatory post on this, and it was lost when I opened up a new window or tab or some damn dumb thing like that . . . [sigh] I’m too mad to re-create it, so I’ll just observe this:
The very specific words of the original document by which the RR obtained the ROW are the starting point for figuring out what should happen - there are many different possibilities that could be involved (including no documents at all !). That can be affected by court cases and state legislative statutes which interpret and/ or modify what those terms really mean, and how they should be applied.* Then, did this happen before or after the Trails Act ? If after, then as falcon48 said there may be a claim for the ‘reversionary value’ of the strip of land against the Feds and/ or the current trail owner/ operator - see the late 1980’s case from Vermont that was decided by the US Supreme Court as Presault vs. ICC.
*See Emrick vs. Bethlehem Twp., Penna. Commonwealth Ct., mid-1980’s.
- Paul North.
Thank you all for your input. I see there is no easy answer. Kind of what I expected. Lawyers & politicians involved…yep…fubar
Paul, it just happened to me. I wrote a response suggesting that after writing a post, you block it, click on the bloc, and tell the systeme to copy it. Had I followed my on advice, I would not have had to rewrite it after doing something foolish.[:)]
Back in the 1980’s I dated a girl in college who was from Urbana, IA. One of her issues was the fact her family had friends who’s farm had the abandoned WCF&N ROW running through it. They were upset over not being able to use the land for farming because of the new bike trail. I pointed out that the WCF&N was likely built on an easement, and as such it would be conceivable that the land would revert back over to the landowner. She mentioned it to their friends, who upon actually finding the original agreement were able to keep and use the land that was rightfully theirs. As a result, the trail was re-routed around their farm. Presumably more people didn’t fight it because they simply didn’t know their rights.
Here in MO, the Katy Trail was illegally built on private property after the Katy was abandoned. This wound up costing the state a lot of money, as the land had to then be purchased from the landowners.