How do railroads dispose of abandonded rights of way, once a track is pulled up? Several companies in my town, including the one I work for, had old,abandonded ROW’s through their property. My old boss spent literally years, trying to buy a 100’X400’ strip of ROW from BN. The line was a Great Northern line, pulled up in the 60’s, that would never come back to life. The company owned the property on both sides of the ROW. It took several years, just to get the BN to respond to requests to buy, and several more years to set a price. Why? Wouldn’t a railroad want to sell unuseable, and near worthless real estate? Seems that money would go right to the bottom line. Our company is not the only one to have this problem, with BN(SF), and others. There is an old IC ROW that is causing problems as well. What give?
Around here when some track was abandoned people started to turn it into a “trail”, but a couple of farmers produced documentation that said the land reverted to them automatically when the RR left. I don’t know the final result of it, but I know one of the farmers bulldozed the right of way level and built fences to keep the trail walkers off “his property”. I remember comments about the trail group purchasing other (the farmer would not sell, period!) property to tie the two ends of the trail back together to make it continous again.
I wonder if the RR doesn’t want the land to be questioned and so ignores the inquiries in the hope they will just go away.
Hey, Brian (IA) , do you remember these farmers claiming the land was their’s? I think it was the Cedar Valley Nature Trail being built back in the 1970’s or 80’s that was to connect Cedar Rapids to Waterloo (maybe it does now, I don’t use them so I know little about them).
Yeah, I remember that- I think they’re located up in the corner of Benton County somewhere near Urbana. I haven’t used the trail much myself, though (I’ve only been on the portion from Hiawatha up through Center Point), so I couldn’t tell you if the trail still has a couple of jogs in it up there.
EDIT: It would seem, according to the trail map, that those jogs have been eliminated.
Murphy:
(1) The previous poster is partially correct. The issue is called “color of title” which basically boils down to how did the railroad acquire and hold title the ground it used for R/W in the first place. They would love to sell it to you if they held the property “fee simple”. If there is a reversion clause/ restrictive covenant in the document then that may govern. (lots of fun in the courts these days determining what was actually meant and agreed to 100-150 years ago - the text may not mean the same thing it means today.) Was it fee simple -absolute?, fee simple?, fee simple with covenant restrictions/riders?, Quit claimed ?, a R/W Deed (means something different in railroad parlence vs. most other places, like highways)?, an easement?, a contract?, a grant? (if so, which one? - different ones have different rules), a charter?, a license/permit?, an ordinance?, a court decree?, held by adverse possession? or ??? I think you get the idea now. Railroads know where they got title to a piece of ground and/or where it was disposed of. There may or may not be copies of documents on file at the courthouse. Just don’t ask the county to tell you how a railroad got that certain parcel. The county assessor people and GIS people are generally clueless in that department. ( I have fielded calls regarding the mess downtown near you. I am aware of that mess and the local political issues raised. I may get to advise/coach somebody up there yet.)
(2) Your boss was dealing with BN which could be cause for alarm. The Glacier Park land arm of the company [BN] was an unmitigated disaster that almost sunk BN. The Santa Fe side of BNSF was SFLC and the internal real estate arm of the railroad were run totally different manner from BN. (diningcar could post on this ad-infinitum; it had issues, but nothing like the scale of BN’s troubles)…In a nutshell, If the railroad did not carefully watch what was going on, the real estate arm or contractor could get it into deep tro
I know in some cases like a street crossing the tracks have to stay in place and are paved over until the lease runs out. The other side of the coin is if you were BNSF would a 100’ x 400’ section of real estate really be high on your list of things to deal with with everything else that is happening? It would probably cost them more to complete the sale than they would get from it. Now if he offered to buy twenty miles of right of way and then he could resell it as agent to the various property owners they might move it higher on their list.
100 feet by 100 miles? That would make a heckuva golf course…
…and if the average hole is 350 yards long, you’d get 503 holes to play…
And a lot of lost balls![(-D]
…and most likely a dead golfer…[xx(]
If you played a golf match on those 503 holes of former ROW, I’ll bet it would end with a tie. [:-^]
I am NOT a lawyer, so what I am about to say shoulkd not be taken for legal or land advice. I am a retired board member of a large transit agency that held over 250 miles of under utilized rail line for future conversion to light rail or commuter rail service. Basically there are two broad categories of ownership that railroads used for right of way. The first is a direct purchase which is fairly straight forward. The second is an easement such as the electric company uses for their power lines. Generally under an easement the railroad (or poweer company, water company, gas company, etc) has perpetual use of the easement for reasons specified in the easement document. Upon abandonment of the easement the property usally will revert to the prior owner or adjacent land owner. This can vary by state. In this case the farmer was within his rights to fence off the trail. A right of way can be preserved by banking it under the rails to trails program. There may be exceptions to this in various situations. The ROW owner has the right to reclaim the ROW should business conditions dictate reactivating the rail line. The problem here is just try to get the Greens to give up their hike and bike trail. Talk about getting your house rocked at night. Usually when a rail line is abandoned it reverts from imporved to unimproved land which has a very low tax basis as a narrow ROW is almost useless for development. The railroads will hang on to the unimproved ROW as its holding cost is minimal. Another problem that can crop up is adverse possession of land. In this case if a non owner uses the property for a set period of time, which varies by state (10+/- years) they own it subject to property taxes being paid, etc. If this happens and the railroad wants the land back they will have to deal with the adverse posessor and usally pay a high price for the land. It behooves the railroad to frequently inspect their ROW f
Nah.
(I have heard a few similar stories and the Mudchicken has probably been involved in dozens of every kind.)
[#ditto] - Although this year I saw a couple of lawyers on the other side that might be charged with that.[:-^]
mudchicken: I presume the downtown track you’re speaking of, is the Milwaukee/State of S.D.? That ROW forms one side of the property at work. I forsee that still being a mess when I’m old and gray. Speaking of mess, adverse possession was mentioned by another poster. I was thinking about that, in relation to the Rock Island line through here. In a messy bankruptcy situation like that, I picture a lot of people trying to claim their own little piece of the Rock-and no one to really stop them.
MC suggests that I may participate here, however I think his comments and those of ccltrains offer a variety of scenearios that give a reasonable understanding so I shall leave it there. If I dissapoint you MC it is to keep this one on track because we do seem to get carried away here at times and the 100’s of cases I might cite would only lead to more confusion.
Not disappointed, just checkin’ on the ol’ Mimbreno in da car.[;)]
Murphy: Only a small piece of what I was asked about involved the Milwaukee. Most of it had to do with how clueless the Minnehaha County fathers had gotten and a growing downtown basin controversy/scandal not of the railroad’s making, but involving multiple R/W’s. Really bad soap opera.
[xx(] I think you hit the nail on the head! The Milwaukee Road, Great Northern,CNW,Rock Island, and Illinois Central all had line basically on top of each other, through a narrow, downtown bottleneck. Local officials have been trying to obtain a grant of $50 million of free government money([}:)]) to relocate the BNSF yard outside of town! It doesn’t sound like a month of Sundays would be enough time to track down all those ownership issues.
Thanks for the encouagement that I will not be going to jail for practicing law without a license. I also know several lawyers that I would like to see in jail.
The name box shows me with only 5 or 6 postings. I do not know what happened but I have made about 250-300 postings. I guess they were lost in the great ether of the internet when TRAINS revamped their forum.
Cheers,
Dick