I have on a my desk a map that shows lots available in a new home lots. One section is marked ‘finished’. One section is marked ‘Currently building’. and one section is marked ‘Fall 2015’. It also shows existing streets, gas line easements, lot sizes and quite a bit of other pertinant information. In short, it looks like something drawn up by a surveyor.
Along the west side of the subdivision, beyond the proporty boundy it says ‘Chicago, Minneapolis, & St. Paul Rialroad right-of-way’. This line had been Milwaukee Road. Then the state bought it. A few years back, the state sold it to BNSF. Does the railroad name applied originally stay with official government maps forever? When a graveled county road gets paved and becomes part of a town, the new maps will show the new name given to it, like Sycamore Drive.
That right of way never changed ownership, although the name of the owner changed over the years, so I don’t think there would be any need to reregister it. I notice the name apparently even predates the Pacific extension.
Government maps often contain railroad anachronisms. Geology maps in particular often retain long gone railroad lines and names, simply because they are irrelevant to the map’s purpose and so are never revised during any updates.
I found a wonderful example on an Ontario (Canada) county road map. A branch line was abandoned in two stages, the northern half in the 1930s and the remainder in the 1960s. The more recent abandonment had been recorded by the provincial cartographers and removed from the map, but the portion that had disappeared 40 years earlier was still shown. Different levels of government rarely communicate!
If it says exactly what you wrote, I bet when the modern map was made they just wrote the railroad name from an earlier map. I would bet the earlier map probably just had initials, CM&StP instead of it spelled out. Why? Because if it was former Milwaukee Road trackage, it should read “Chicago Milwaukee and St Paul.” (Back then it was informally known as “The St.Paul Road.”)
I bet the person read CM&StP and, substituted Minneapolis for Milwaukee. Minneapolis probably being more recognizable than Milwaukee to the general public.
The railroad has indeed changed ownership, it may just have not gotten down to the county level. Common blunder that we see nationwide.
As a surveyor, in most states, adjoiners are supposed to be identified by current ownership. Cerro Gordo County in Iowa just recently discovered how dangerous not getting it right can be. Having taught railroad surveying basics in SD and IA, it’s interesting to see what some of these folks have never been aware of. IF (BIG IF) you had a county surveyor checking plats at submittal, he should be rejecting the plats or at least questioning the data.
Would love to know if there was an ALTA survey tied to that subdivision plat and the blunder can be chased back to a Title Agent. (Surveyors do not determine title, however they do collect evidence and show apparent ownership.)
BN, MILW, Omaha Road et al are dead as primary operating companies and land interests long ago were transferred over. The railroad industry is hardly a dying enterprise anymore, but people don’t change with the times. (Esp. GIS and tax mapping people) Long and loud discussions over the finer points of this continue to happen, the surveyor may not be as much lazy as stuck with a broken concept of accepted practice that needs to change. (PDN and I have stories about what’s “good enough”)
Surveyors will usually check in the county Recorder of Deeds / Land Records office, which will have at least the name of the railroad when the R-O-W was first acquired. After that, subsequent name changes being recorded and updated is ‘iffy’ at best. One common reason is that mergers are often recorded in the state’s Department of State corporation records, but that change doesn’t always promptly (or ever) work its way down to the local level. And when it does, it’s often a massive Deed containing all the R-O-W properties in that county, those that straddle the county line, and anything else that the preparer of the Deed thinks ought to or might be the railroad’s in that county, including portions of lines that were sold off long ago . . . (this was ConRail’s method). For an uninformed title clerk, a USRA Line Code reference and greatly shrunken R-O-W map may as well be in Greek. In some other instances, the Deed is never recorded, on the basis that: 1) any competent ( [:-^] ) title searcher will check the Dept. of State’s corporation records; 2) by the presence of the tracks and general knowledge, everyone in the local public is on notice that there is or was a railroad there, so they ought to check it out; 3) if all else fails, no one can acquire good title as against a railroad to a piece of land by adverse possession, etc.; and 4) the acquiring railroad can’t afford to do all (or any) of this anyway. Failure to follow any of these ‘good practice’ principles is what keeps mudchicken and some other knowledgeable folks at work and with a paycheck (and some humorous and/ or scary “war stories”), and brings grief in various forms to others.
I often specify or request that the title company - not the surveyor, because surveyors ar
Probably not applicable to your specific situation, but one other possibility no one seems to have mentioned yet, sometimes the “familiar name” that everyone associates with a line, might have been just a lessee.
Suppose the “Oakee Doke investment trust calling itself a railway” buys the land and hires itself a labor force to build a rail line from A to B, and then leases the asset to an operator, who later assigns it’s interest to some other entity that it is merged into, it might look confusing as to why the name on the maps do not match the names that the line has been historically associated with. (fwiw)
Consider this, let’s say that the land on the other side of the subdivision had been owned by Homer Nelson. It had been in his family since the late 1800’s. Since ol’ Homer died way back in 1980, the property has been through a bankruptsy, and a couple of ownership changes. How would it look if the map of the subdivision showed Homer Nelson as the adjoining landowner?
No, not “and others”. Better would be “Now or Formerly Homer Nelson”, usually abbreviated as “N/F Homer Nelson” in case the ownership does change, or you’re not certain who actually owns it now - at least that’s a point of reference.
As to Murphy’s point: The Tax Office usually knows who the current owner is, or at least who’s paying the taxes on behalf of the owner; if that isn’t happening, then it won’t be his property for much longer ! So that’s where you usually start to find out who the current owner is. Not official or guaranteed to be the owner, “but that’s the way to bet”(as the saying goes).
If the plat doesn’t reference one or the other, then someone should be asking questions about what’s going on. Usually there’s a local who knows the family or history of the land well enough to be the one to point that out. Most planning boards and land offices are reluctant to allow something to be approved and recorded - with their signatures and official seals on it - if there’s something clearly amiss or badly out of date (not that it doesn’t happen, but the ones I’ve worked with are pretty scrupulous about that). Then again, with 2,500+ municipalities here in “Penn’s Woods”, they’re small enough that there’s likely someone around who knows everybody and everything that’s happened and is happening, and is only too happy to share that inside knowledge . . . [:-^]
Apropos maps showing railroads that have changed owners, or aren’t there any more, Mapquest shows a rail line from Edgemont, SD, to Deadwood, SD - that’s been a hiking and biking trail since the early 90s.
Of course, Mapquest still has USS Iowa in the Siusun Bay ship graveyard. She’s been a museum in San Pedro for two years plus…
Homer Nelson, heirs and assigns… (hairs and butte signs) (we had a project at the crossing of the Nickel Plate and the CB&Q in ILL that had RatJohn H______ as a grantor. Dear old RatJohn, turns out, only thought he owned the property. Wound up as donated property to an orphanage… County Assessor started the confusion in the 1930’s) PDN : CSX now owns a 6000 square foot luxury shack in Western IL that was built on the R/W of three separate railroads (owned in “fee”), the owner and the title bubbas were too cheap to do a proper survey that would have raised multiple fluorescent red flags. Makes the Judge’s house pale in comparison.
MC, was it the land under the crossing that RatJohn (was that his real name, or a nickname?) thought he had the authority to grant? Does the orphanage own it and allow the railroads to use it or has the orphanage granted the land to the railroads?
(2) Parcel in question was close to, but not under crossing, part of the grounds of a former vertical coal mine that interchanged with both railroads. Poorly written ambiguous legals and bad title work contributed to the corned-fusion, lost parcel was landlocked by parcels acquired over time around the ambiguous lost parcel by RatJohn’s predecessors in title.
USGS has been at flat or zero funding for years. Most maps have not been updated since the 1970s. Universitys are not replacing there USGS collection as they lose them. So many times I see Penn Central on railroad maps