As both a surveyor and railfan, I usually have a pretty good handle on the railroad geography in my area of Ohio, but here’s one connection that I just discovered that really caught me by surprise[:0]:
RJCorman operates southwest of Lima on the old Lake Erie & Western/NKP line and also operates on the old Erie/Erie-Lackawanna line west of Lima. However, to get from one property to the other, they must run their trains through one mile of the local refinery property (fka Standard Oil and BP, now Premcor). The old Erie diamonds (xing both B&O and NKP) in South Lima are now laying in the tall grass and awaiting removal.
I would appreciate hearing of similar scenarios where two railroad properties are connected by industrial track on non-railroad property. This has to be unusual. The floor is yours…
I think this happens in a lot of places. In Stockertown PA there’s a plastics plant and a lumber distributor that are located along the former Bangor and Portland (both towns in PA) branch of the DL&W. The branch is severed both from the north and from the south except for a spur that served the Hercules Cement plant. The cement plant was also served from the opposite direction by a spur from the Lehigh & New England’s Martin’s Creek branch much of which is still in use by Norfolk Southern as the Norfolk Southern Cement secondary. So to get to the plastics plant and lumber yard on the former DL&W, NS trains must pass through the cement plant property. Whether or not the plant owns the track, I don’t know.
In fact the former L&NE line runs through the property of several cement plants between Bath PA and Stockertown PA.