When tracks are abandoned, do they forever stay the property of the railroad unless sold.?
The Milwaukee Road for example. Were large parts of that sold or given back to the state(s) they were in; or after some years can a state claim some sort of eminent domain and just appropriate the land, assuming the tracks… which might not physically exist any longer… will never be used.?
There must be abandoned track-age all ove the USA at this point. Is it, really, all accounted for.?
Thank You
The Real Estate Lawyers and Title Clerks FULL EMPLOYMENT actions if rights of way are desired to be used by railroads again.
The rights of way were obtained by any and every form of land transactions known to man, and probably a few that have been fully forgotten by 21st Century inhabitents. With as many different types of acquisition as there were, they probably even more types of reversion clauses in effect.
Falls under “Adverse Possesion” in some cases if it is abandoned and your adjacent to it unless someone else challenges your claim before the Adverse Possession time period lapses…
https://lonestarlandlaw.com/adverse-possession-in-texas/
One of our next door neighbors in Wisconsin tried this crap by repeatedly mowing a silver of our residential lawn, problem was his only argument was maintenence and because it was pre-emptive maintenence before we cut our lawn and because he didn’t really lay claim to it via other means. His case failed.
So you cannot presume it is not someone elses private property because it was left abandoned. The process of abandonment means you abandon all rights to the land. I guess if nobody is adjacent then it remains unowned until claimed.
Balt nailed it, but I’ll add my own take on it as well.
It is possible for more than one person (or company, or government) to own an interest in a piece of land. The most fundamental form of ownership is usually referred to as a fee interest. If you own the fee interest in a piece of land, then it is “yours”. And unless you sell it to someone else (or someone else seizes it by adverse possession) it will remain yours.
However, even if you own the fee interest, other people may still own a more limited interest in the same property. For instance, you can sell off the mineral rights to an oil company, and then they would have the right to come in an extract the oil underneath your land at any time. Or, someone can buy (or take by eminent domain) an easement, which is a right to use a specified parcel for a specific purpose. An easement is normally “reversionary”, which means that if the owner of the easement is no longer using the property for the specified purpose, then his interest in the property disappears and automatically is returned (reverts) to the fee owner.
So, when a railroad is abandoned, then the parcels in which the railroad only had an easement revert to the fee owner, but any parcels where the railroad owned the fee interest still belong to the railroad.
So the answer to your question is, “It depends.” But as Balt said, the nuances have resulted in many, many court cases and a few pieces of legislation to clarify exactly who gets what when a railroad is no longer used.
There is one very important special case which doesn’t fall neatly into either the “simple fee” or “easement” category. When Congress gave a railroad public land to use for its ROW (as happened with many western railroads), the US courts have determined that the railroad gain
Thanks for all yhe replies.
I sort of figured it was complex
The Tennessee Pass remains a topic of interest. I cannot imagine that the majoriity of that mainline will ever be used again, but i am not any kind od railroad expert.
As indicated above, RR ROW titles can be very diverse. My experience shows a variance by State and within each State a variance by decided court cases.
The Tennessee Pass line has never been “abandoned”. UP/SP originally filed for abandonment in the UP/SP merger, but the STB only granted authority to “discontinue” train service (which UP exercised on the line segment from Canon City to Gypsum). After UP’s post merger service meltdown, UP voluntarily removed the line from its abandonment “hit list” (technically Category 1 of its “system diagram map”, an STB mandated listing of lines that a carrier expects to abandon). This prevents any reversionary interests from taking effect and allows the railroad to restore service (if it chooses to do so) without any STB regulatory approval. That remains the line’s status today.
For what it’s worth this reminds me of something I read in “Field and Stream” magazine 50 years ago:
“Every square foot of ground in the country is owned by someone.”
The point being made was don’t assume because a piece of ground is unoccupied it’s OK to go hunting or fishing on it. Check first.
My small town used an abandoned BNSF line for part of a trail system. However, that extended only to the city limits.
South of there, the track right of way stayed as it was for several years until a farmer with adjacent land leveled it out and began farming on it. Within a short time, every other farmer along the way for a distance of about eight miles did the same, and it’s nearly impossible today to even see where the tracks were.
I’m not sure how legal all this was, but so far, no one has raised any issues.
If you look at satellite images, taken in the spring after plowing, of areas where that occurred, you can often pick out the different color. I’ve seen it from lines taken out many years ago.
The proper term for what’s going on is “Discontinuance of Service”. There are multiple reasons that lines wind up in this kind of limbo, usually in a game of keep-away with some other railroad.
Mr. Peltier and us former birds of a certain feather (retired or otherwise) could probably write a book on some of the weird things that happen. Would be nice to cross paths with him at an AREMA function some day.)
First rule of thumb:
IF the the STB (or ICC before it) says it’s abandoned, then it is. (since 1996 that extends to back tracks and industrial leads as well)…
Second rule: The railroads have a very good index of how their rights of way were acquired. (Called a DV-107 Land schedule). To this day, the big railroads (Cls 1) still have to keep current records
Very well-presented MC. You have been there, done that.
It should be understood that each State has its own laws and decided court cases.
I have also been there, done that.
It seems from a casual perusal of MC’s and Dan Peltier’s informative posts that there are conflicting views on whether or not railroads use easements.
I have never seen, or heard about, an easement for a main or branch line main track.
There may, occasionally, be an easement on the outside of a railroad yard for some specific service but I know of none.
An example of the “keep away” is here in Alexandria, Virginia. The last NS customers in town went out around 2012-2013. The City prevailed upon NS to not file for abandonment and instead simply discontinue service. At the time, Arlington and Alexandria were working on a plan for joint streetcar service. The city saw the NS ROW as a useful corridor for a branch of the system. The whole thing fell apart when Arlington discontinued their part of the project. But it still serves as an example of why someone would prefer not to abandon a rail line, even if the railroad that operated it is long done with it. It was going to be much easier to convert it to streetcars than start from scratch with ROW acquistion.
The other remark is a peculiar one. Railroads are such massive land owners that it seems odd to me that people would even claim such. I remember in my youth, I went to the county court house on a field trip. We had a fun time in the room full of enormous maps and found out that the Bessemer & Lake Erie seemed to own much of the land where we lived. Some people were surprised to find out that their families were actually leasing the land they were farming.
Off the top of my head, since I have second hand experience with it, the PRR/PC/CR’s Butler ¶ Branch was easements the whole way from Freeport to Butler. There was a considerable local legal uproar when it was trailified.
The use of easements in railroad corridors is extremely limited and usually involves a federal highway or state road crossing over a railroad senior in right . Some are promoting a lie out of ignorance, but others have an agenda and hope no one notices the flaw in their agenda.
On the BN’s predecessors, industrial tracks were commonly built by the railroad on easements that the industry would provide (on the industry’s land). Kind of the opposite of how it is today, where the industry builds the track and the railroad leases any part of its land needed for the track to the industry.
The railroad also obtains easements for access roads, drainage, and so forth outside the railroad corridor proper.
By contrast, I have seen very few deeds for mainline ROW that say “Easement” anywhere on them. But, I have seen many that contain language that is ambiguous - and the tendency in most states is to lean towards treating ambiguous language as easements. This encompasses most land that the railroads took using eminent domain, as well as a number of other deeds like the ones I mentioned in my previous post (land conveyed “for Right-of-Way”).
Fortunately, it usually makes no difference whatsoever to railroad operations whether the railroad owns the fee interest or not. Either way the railroad typically has the same degree of control over the land while it’s in use. (That’s not necessarily true for every possible kind of deed, but it’s pretty true for any deed that is ambiguous about fee vs easement interest.) The only difference comes in what happens once the railroad is legally abandoned.
And even then it doesn’t always make much difference. For instance, if you’re trying to redevelop an old industrial site and there are railroad easements recorded in it, your insurance company may not let you proceed until you get those easements cleared. Which you can do either by paying the railroad to give you a deed releasing them, or by going to
That’s a pretty serious accusation.
Alas, it’s true. People with an agenda (and money) are dangerous.
After 40+ years in the profession, you see and hear some things to the point of beating a dead horse. The need to push back is apparent and probably needs to be done more forcefully until the stupidity stops.
Repeating the lies on abandonment and easements in relation to railways doesn’t somehow magically legitimize those claims.