When a line sits unused for a year or more, what is it to a railroad? Is their insurance costs the same if a line sits dormant for a time or what. What about property tax on an unused line? I think it was Barron county Wisconsin where a line had not been used in 10 years and just got used again this summer. With the population and consumption of goods always growing, I wonder sometimes why we abandon “any” lines that might be needed 10 or 20 years down the road or in case a disaster takes a line out of service. How long before someday the “Cowboy Line” gets put back together to help carry more low sulfur coal to the eastern US.
It’s interesting that you mentioned the Cowboy Line. It was originally planned that this line was going to be C&NW’s route into the Powder River Basin. Unfortunately, it had deteriorated so badly that the cost of rebuilding it became prohibitive and C&NW changed its plans to the routing over UP that’s now in use.
The fact that the line remains in physical existence helps the telecom companies, who have bought access rights to the right of way to lay fiber optic cables, resist claims of trespass against the landowners abutting the railroad tracks . . . .
In Georgia, railroads do not pay property tax. They are taxed by the number of revenue cars using the track - so a Seaboard Coastline official told me back in her 1970s. If no revenue cars go over it, it does not cost the railroad anything in taxes.
Wow, she was old.