I was going through some land records in Niagara County and was surprised that Penn Central still owns the land under the Amtrak Station out there under Niagara and Auburn RR holding company or something like that. Auburn & Syracuse I think it was as a matter of fact.
The mudchicken has frequently pointed out that county land records are often questionable when it comes to railroad holdings. It’s quite possible that the county records were never updated after the establishment of Conrail in 1976.
Penn Central’s real estate and railroad operations were separate. The real estate division was not part of the bankruptcy and was separately owned by the Penn central Holding Company, as was the railroad. The Penn Central Holding Company was not insolvent and survives to this day.
I could be mistaken, but, I have heard that PC still owns the lad on which Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom sits…
I would opine that this is just another example of corporate looting - buy the whole company, then shed the parts that aren’t paying as well as you’d like (or aren’t paying at all). Apparently the real estate portion of PC is still profitable. Most of us know the story on the railroad side…
RR property? Could it be a title problem that has not been cleared? Is this property providing enough income to cover insurance and taxes ?
This is news? The Penn Central estate got all the cast-offs that did not go into Conrail, Amtrak or spun off into shortlines. Carl Lindner in Cincy owns them currently and has them headquartered in Cincy with the other family businesses (started with a dairy & milk stores in the 1930’s) . The skeletons in their closet are every bit as ugly as the ones created by CR. Compound that with PC/CR/USRA’s poor recordkeeping and the legacy mess is too big to sweep under the rug - a headache for all us mudchickens,Amtrak, CSX and NS.
I may be mistaken, but I think we had some similar conversations around the arena of the use of Railroad ROW’s when they were being used to lay down any number of Fiber Optic Cable lines ( SPRINT ( of Southern Pacific Lineage, and then, The QUEST Corp., come to mind).
Mud Chicken, Diningcar and some others weighed in with some interesting facts referencing the kinds of deed held by the railroads, vs. the adjacent land owners and how those deeds in some cases dictated the specific uses and limitations on the railroads and how they could use those ROWs and what uses could and could not be made of them .
A link to that discussion is @ http://cs.trains.com/trn/f/111/p/215753/2370511.aspx#2370511
Because a railroad may cease to exist as a Corporate entity. It may have property, p[ossible, as an intellectual or maybe even physical in nature that will have on going value to others. The SPRINT system of former Southern Pacific ownership is a case in point.
Some of the discussions on the posted-linked Thread so how property as well can become under some circumstances, a legal football as well. So the Case for Penn Central still existing, in-part, as an entity owning Real Estate, could be a case in point.
Before or during the bankruptcy agreement, Penn Central was required to divest itself of all those lucrative air rights in New York City over Grand Central Terminal, over Penn Station, and over their respective train yards.
Even selling all of that real estate didn’t save the company. It was that bad.
Oh, and don’t forget that Jackie Onassis and her supporters permanently ensured that the planned skyscraper that was always part of the original 1913 building plans for Grand Central Terminal will never be built.
Huh? If you bought the whole package, would you want to hang on to the parts that were confirmed money-losers, especially when somebody offers to buy them from you? Should Ford have kept on building Edsels?
I believe that they owned Grand Central and some related property until the past five years or so.
Because the corporate entity is no longer a railroad, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’ve read that some of the other railroads that went into Conrail, after selling their railroad assets and being released from bankruptcy continued as corporate entities. They no longer were operating railroads and may have changed their names. Some still had real estate holdings that wasn’t conveyed to Conrail, plus at the time there were tax credits from past years where they had lost money that they could use to offset any future earnings.
The Rock Island’s corporate structure continued after the railroad quit operating. In 1984 it came out of bankruptcy as the Chicago Pacific Corporation. After paying off their creditors there was cash and assets (including the tax credits from the years of losses) and they became a holding company. Eventually being merged into Maytag, who wanted the home appliance companies C-P Corp had acquired.
Jeff
From Wikipedia-( In short Reading is a movie theater company)
Post-railroad: 1976-present
On April 1, 1976, the Reading Company sold its current railroad interests to the newly formed Consolidated Railroad Corporation (Conrail), leaving it with 650 real estate assets, some coal properties, and 52 abandoned rights-of-way. As of 1999, most former Reading lines are now part of Norfolk Southern Railway (NS), as a result of the Conrail split between NS and CSX Transportation. It had sold 350 of the real estate tracts by the time it left bankruptcy in 1980.
In the late 1980s a Los Angeles lawyer named James Cotter gained control of the corporation through his holding company, the Craig Corporation, and liquidated the rest of its assets to finance his cinema chains in Puerto Rico, Australia and New Zealand. The company sold one of its last railroad-related asset, the Reading Terminal He
There are still some dramatically wide rights-of-way in Pennsylvania, some two and three tracks wide, that sit abandoned.
Central Railroad of New Jersey has vast, abandoned four- and six-track rights-of-way you can see from the New Jersey Turnpike Extension that leads to the Holland Tunnel, too.
Abandoned RoW’s like that could be the routes for dedicated passenger rail services from NYC to the west, including HSR, especially since they might well be available for little or no cost.
[(-D][(-D][(-D] (what clueless transportation planner told you that wives tail?)
If you don’t have the foresight to acquire the line at abandonment, it’s long gone and almost impossible to re-establish)
For example, the former CNJ R-o-W on the northern bank of the Lehigh River from Easton, PA to the west as far as the Rt. 33 overhead bridge is now owned variously - in 1 to 2 mile segments - by the Hugh Moore Parkway (City of Easton ?), Palmer Twp. & Bethlehem Twp. Bike Trail, Delaware & Lehigh Canal Commission (?), and the PA Fish & Boat Commission (actually going to the latter later this afternoon !). Tantalizingly, though, the next several miles (about 70 acres) from the Rt. 33 bridge to the west through Freemansburg are now unquestionably owned by Norfolk Southern, which has paid taxes on them ever since acquisition from ConRail circa 1999.
- Paul North.
And there’s that segment of I-80 that used to be the Erie Lackawanna, the LIRR Rockaway Branch, and on that CNJ line, the Prudential Center is in the way.
Biked on the Lehigh Canal from downtown Bethelham to Easton…ROW was very visable 7 years ago from canal trail now is fast disapearing …WE NEED THAT RIGHT OF WAY FOR COMMUTER RAIL AND WE NEED IT NOW!
Hope “WE” has plenty of $$$ and can deal with the political gerrymandering that drives up the cost of building anything.