You can't just rip up railroad tracks even if you own it as per STB. (At risk tourist lines)

Trains Magazine General Discussion
1

http://www.stb.dot.gov/home.nsf/case?openform&caseID=31285&caseDocket=NOR_42140_0 (seeking an injunction to stop a railroad from removing its line)
http://www.stb.dot.gov/home.nsf/case?openform&caseID=29086&caseDocket=FD_34869_0 (addressing the question of whether a rail line had been abandoned pursuant to STB authority, much like the question in your situation.)
http://www.stb.dot.gov/home.nsf/case?openform&caseID=31388&caseDocket=FD_35918_0 (an ongoing matter, in which the STB has been asked to determine if a rail line segment is subject to its jurisdiction)

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Gabriel S. Meyer
Surface Transportation Board | Attorney-Advisor
Office of Public Assistance, Governmental Affairs & Compliance
Rail Customer & Public Assistance program
1-866-254-1792
(202) 245-0245 (Board Mainline)
(202) 245-0150 (direct)

2

And?

3

Whether a tourist line is at risk or not, seems to depend on its status with STB. In the middle case reference you cited regarding the Honey Creek RR, STB final decision cited an earlier case in Leelanau County, MI (a line with which I am somewhat familiar). After the CSX line was officially abandoned by ICC/STB, the tourist line that followed was determined not to be subject to STB, and was eventually abandoned without fanfare.

4

Let me say, first of all, that I know Mr. Meyer very well (he can probably guess from this note who I am). He has extensive experience, not only at STB but at two Class I railroads and personally handled many rail abandonments prior to his association with STB . You can (and should) take anything he says on this subject as absolutely authoritative.

The big STB question with the “tourist railroads at risk” issue is what tourist lines are actually subject to STB abandonment jurisdiction. Many tourist railroads are not. For example, some of the most publicized “at risk” tourist roads operate over lines which were part of the mass abandonments of rail lines not included in the northeastern railroads’ final system plan when Con Rail was created in the late 1970’s, or which were abandoned by Con Rail after its creation. Following abandonment, these lines were acquired by public entities. The tourist roads then contracted with the public entities to use the lines for tourist service. These lines, if operated only for tourist service, aren’t subject to STB abandonment requirements. That means that, for a line owned by someone other than the tourist road using it, the owner can oust the tourist road without any STB authority. Of course, the owner has to have authority under its agreement with the tourist road to oust it, but that’s a state law contract issue, not an STB issue.

5

Most of the challenged tourist lines have the same problem as Lacey Township in Ocean County, NJ. They wanted to build a road, contending that the old Central Railroad of New Jersey, nee Toms River & Tuckerton RR, would cut the costs of the road would benefit the town and the people. The CRRNJ was a bad business proposition from the 1860 forward, declaring bankruptcy numerous times and seeking Chapter 11 protection at least seven times before its final bankruptcy in 1967 a year before Penn-Central (inc. NY, NH, & H), a stillborn disaster was formed.
When the CRRNJ went under the NJ DOT, named trustee continued its operation under the auspices of the courts, and began abandonment proceedings against almost all of the lines’ intrastate feeder lines, south of Toms River, and Lakewood, west of Clinton and many other branches. Unfortunately, this was not legal, the CRRNJ was, at its height, in the 1930’s a listed Interstate Railroad and NJ never tendered any Federal Applications for Abandonment before the Interstate Commerce Commission. When the Township contested the issue, the STB said the lines were not abandoned, and they also faced the big gun lawyers of NS & CSX who were then contesting the dissection of Conrail.
In the case of the Ulster County Issue, the Catskill Mountain Railroad, the solution lies in finding the original actual owner, likely the D&H and discovering the status of any abandonment proceeding. Because of the confusion developed from disillusion of the Northeast Railroads under the 3R’s/4R’s Acts and the NPSR 70 Act amid the confusion created by Staggers, many of these supposed abandonments were never properly filed or litigated.
Still, many of these lines have limited or no functional use and reality dictates that they should be abandoned. However no public money should be expended to create a trail from a railroa

6

Well, finding out the STB status of these lines may not be as difficult as you think. Lines of the bankrupt northeastern railroads not included in the final system plan (FSP) that created Conrail could be abandoned without any further action by ICC (the predecessor of STB). The final system plan should be available, although I haven’t had any reason to try to find it. Post Con Rail, any abandonments should have been processed through ICC or (post 1995) STB. There was an ICC process for expedited Con Rail abandonments, but it still required going through the agency, so there should be regulatory dockets for each post FSP abandonment.

7

I may be able to make it a little less difficult if what you say is so.

The excellent Multimodalways site has .pdf copies of the Final System Plan documents and material.

8

Finding the actual ICC/STB documents is a lot harder than you think (and a lot more expensive). You won’t find documents quickly (if at all) and you are at the mercy of what somebody thought was important at the time and also you are now dealing with the strange defensive habits of National Archives after a certain political figure’s attempt to rewrite history and spirit documents out of Archives by stuffing papers down his pants and boots and walk out of Archives 2.

Among other things:

(1) Thankfully there are a few copies of USRA’s FSP and PSP out there. The agency files were largely, but not all, reduced to computer language and placed on computer tape that is now unreadable at National Archives. (nobody thought to put the now lost computer software used at the time with the tapes). Trying to figure out what was going on in the FSP is tough (there are gaps in the coverage of the lines involved - I am aware of at least 5 of those “blips”…Surveyors got stuck with trying to discerne which line segments really went where when lawyers and others put them in legal property descriptions for which the USRA data was never intended to portray actual boundary lines)

(2) The ICC/STB considered many of those non-Conrail FSP segments as “minor cases” and poorly kept track of what happened. The abandonment cases that did happen (The AB-167-(?)'s that were considered “minor” at the time won’t be found in the bound volumes of the ICC/STB or at the STB Library, but rather buried at National Archives since they were dumped over ther in 1996. Anything that falls in the 1976-1996 “donut hole” is a crap shoot in where and if you will even find it as a trained professional (the general public is out of luck)…The little sidebar on page 7 with Deb Miller of STB in the current July 2016 trains glosses over some of the shortcomings of the agency’s legacy (Hey Steve Sweeney, get ready to duck the next time we cross paths! Miller completely gl

9

I read Gerald Best’s Ulster and Delaware last year, and as I recall it was independent until NYC acquired it. If the abandonment documents can’t be found, does that mean that STB must now rule on it? Ulster County supported the tourist RR, until about the time that a couple of $million became available from FEMA for a RR bridge repair. I have seen cases where other towns have been able to redirect FEMA funds from rail to other projects.

10

IF references can’t be found, somebody will be filing for a declaratory order or adverse abandonment. (or the locals will blunder along until somebody turns the local blunder to their advantage … Don’t have to search the current STB open cases very far until you find examples of this.)

First step will be going through the ICC card index with the STB librarian (or public assistance staff)and the PSP/FSP searching for the applicable USRA line code for the line.

You can almost bank on the fact that the local county clerk & recorder/ county assessor/ county GIS office are clueless (and arrogantly stupid) to what’s going on, even though most were copied on the abandonment procedings if they happened. (same applies to local city/town/borrough/village government)

*** For those who think CR is so wonderful, this is one of the places where CR’s really poor habits stunk up the place on a repeated basis. (Harsimus Stem case is the current CR case du-jour screw-up. You get to see, yet again, that CR was all about the $$$ and compliance with well vetted regulation be damned)

For those with spare grey matter for the brain damage required, Start with STB/ICC Docket AB-5_10(x) 5-3-72 and USRA Linecodes 0137 & 0137a which can be found at pages 270,498 in the Final System Plan and page 626 of the PSP. also look at USRA Docket 75-11 if it exists in print anywhere for the 304(f) rehab / 3R Dicontinuance-Abandonment application.

11

The “National Network System” of what goes into Conrail and what does not was made in the 1970s just before the oil crises and at a time that Gov planners thought we needed a smaller rail system. Short Line empires like Rail-Tex, Genesee and Wyoming and Wheeling and Lake Erie did not exist yet. Now we have capasity crunches and Mile long Oil Trains.

12

Is that STB docket number supposed to have an underline in it?

Some of us actually DO go to look for these references when you post them, and it’s hard enough to find what the government and the other players do with them when we have precise titles…

Do you have linkable cites for any of the indicated Conrail follies? (Sorry if this makes you reach for the aspirin just having to think about the topic!)

13

Mod: Straight out of the ICC card index. Using STB’s search engine, the underline separates the Docket prefix from the extension. (the docket prefixes identify the railroad in the AB’s (5=PC, 167=USRA, etc.) - You won’t find the AB-5_10(x) …(or AB_5_10_x) on the web, it’s just too old (1982)…STB might have something on film, but more likely it’s at Archives or lost all together (courtesy the careless bozoes at the Intermodal Institute at DU who stupidly allowed 8 truckloads of ICC documents to be destroyed by mold and water…should have been allowed to go to NARA instead of the wreckless academics who “had to have it”…)

Other examples of CR’s screw-ups:

Former CR/PC/PRR PRR main Clark Jcn/Buffington - Whiting, IN bought by the State of Indiana for a boondoggle highway never built. (Some guy did try to fly his car off the uncompleted bridge though)

Former NYC-PC-CR portion of the Dune Park Branch east of Ivanhoe, IN …(IHB was only a tennant, they have a valid docket number AB-317_5(x))

Former NYC-PC-CR at Pekin IL (3 mile “gap” plus Whiskey Lead)

Former PC/PRR, Norwood, OH piece of the Little Miami

Ex RDG at Reading PA and another I’m working on that has LV and two other CR predecessors involved, but getting nowhere fast.

(all of the above do not have ICC/STB citations because they never reported the abandonments and sold stuff off, just like Harsimus Stem. Take the money and run. One of the Indiana cases is a crying shame. A certain Class I would love to have that piece of railroad intact through the swamp, the work-around is butt ugly.) Before I retire, I expect I’ll find others.

ICC/STB has no investigators and it shows.

If you had not found Harsimus Stem, try AB-167_1189(x) … It dragged NS into the fray, but they had zero to do with the issue. They just happened to unfortunately be holding CR’s post break-up bag when the outhouse blew up.

The button pu

14

[quote user=“mudchicken”]

Finding the actual ICC/STB documents is a lot harder than you think (and a lot more expensive). You won’t find documents quickly (if at all) and you are at the mercy of what somebody thought was important at the time and also you are now dealing with the strange defensive habits of National Archives after a certain political figure’s attempt to rewrite history and spirit documents out of Archives by stuffing papers down his pants and boots and walk out of Archives 2.

Among other things:

(1) Thankfully there are a few copies of USRA’s FSP and PSP out there. The agency files were largely, but not all, reduced to computer language and placed on computer tape that is now unreadable at National Archives. (nobody thought to put the now lost computer software used at the time with the tapes). Trying to figure out what was going on in the FSP is tough (there are gaps in the coverage of the lines involved - I am aware of at least 5 of those “blips”…Surveyors got stuck with trying to discerne which line segments really went where when lawyers and others put them in legal property descriptions for which the USRA data was never intended to portray actual boundary lines)

(2) The ICC/STB considered many of those non-Conrail FSP segments as “minor cases” and poorly kept track of what happened. The abandonment cases that did happen (The AB-167-(?)'s that were considered “minor” at the time won’t be found in the bound volumes of the ICC/STB or at the STB Library, but rather buried at National Archives since they were dumped over ther in 1996. Anything that falls in the 1976-1996 “donut hole” is a crap shoot in where and if you will even find it as a trained professional (the general public is out of luck)…The little sidebar on page 7 with Deb Miller of STB in the current July 2016 trains glosses over some of the shortcomings of the agency’s legacy (Hey Steve Sweeney, get ready to duck the ne

15

Falcon…Internet problems here. It’s dropped my resonse to you twice. Needless to say, the real world does not reflect your answers, esp about local sources. That anwer is only about 50% true. later.

16

“Specific “boundary” information is typically not contained in ICC/STB abandonment cases. However, if you know the end points and general route of a rail line, the boundary information can usually be obtained from local government bodies that keep track of real estate titles”.

Please quit unwittingly promoting a hoax that will not go away. At best, boundary and title information found at the courthouse or local level will apply to 40%-60% of the R/W unless that R/W is very recent. County level government records around railroads runs from good to poor (usually the latter). City/town/village/borrough/parish level records are even worse with things like ordinances, grants and charters (frightening). If you were to espouse the quoted comment above to a room full of professional surveyors, you had better be ready for a brawl. Surveyor groups are getting much more agressive with STB and government agencies because of some of the stupidly dismissive language coming out of lawyers filings regarding surveyor concerns and fuels the surveyors attempts at breaking-up the good-ol-boy behaviour of people that don’t get it. A&K’s lawyers got a good dose of that recently in the V&S/KVCN case. (Not sure if they were being cheap or stupid or both).

“They can also be determined from railroad valuation maps. Many railroads keep valuation maps of their abandoned lines. The National Archives has a pretty complete set of them from the original valuation in the teens of the last century, which are often used by researchers”.

(1) In the case of the USRA/CR line codes, how you create a boundary out of a node that is not even well defined by USRA is beyond me. Is that node a switch, a milepost, a clearance point - exactly what? Surveyors in ConRail territory are regularly encountering property descriptions (do not call them legal descriptions, far to man

17

Well, since I’ve used ICC decisions (from Westlaw) and valuation maps pretty extensively, let me make a few comments.

(1) If you have a subscription to Westlaw, and know how to use the system, you will be able to find any post-FSP abandonments of Con Rail lines, as well as lines of other railroads… I’ve done it many times. You can query the database for particulary communities or counties, either on the STB database or the Federal Register database. It’s very easy to use (but you have to pay for a subscription).

(2) You don’t have to go to a railroad to get a valuation map. The National Archives has a complete set. But, even if a railroad won’t voluntarily release a map (and many will, for an administrative fee), if there is litigation , the maps can be obtained from a railroad through normal discovery processes.

(3) I don’t understand your reference to “spirals”. Valuation maps are a very accurate record of what was on the ground on the date of the valuation (around 1917). Even if the track was subsequently realigned, the propery boundaries of the ROW shown on a valuation map should be accurate. The issue with the surveying communty involves the very common practice of surveyors of yore using the centerline of a track as a monument for adjacent property boundary descriptions in real estate transactions. This often manifests itself in demands that an abandoning railroad monument the current location of its track. The practice of using track as a surveying monument for a property description is inexcusable, because track isn’t a permanent monument. Its location can change over the years as a result of intentional track realignments (like realigning a curve into a spiral), or even normal maintenance, which can shift track locations way beyond acceptable surveying tolerances. In other words, using the location of a track abandoned in, say, 1989 as a surveying monument&nbs

18

[quote user=“Falcon48”]

Well, since I’ve used ICC decisions (from Westlaw) and valuation maps pretty extensively, let me make a few comments.

(1) If you have a subscription to Westlaw, and know how to use the system, you will be able to find any post-FSP abandonments of Con Rail lines, as well as lines of other railroads… I’ve done it many times. You can query the database for particulary communities or counties, either on the STB database or the Federal Register database. It’s very easy to use (but you have to pay for a subscription).

Buttonpusher mentality at play.It isn’t all on the web or in West’s. With West’s, the further you go back, the spottier the coverage. (How some of that got scanned-in my be part of the issue with the pre-digital FR)… This poster is lucky enough to be able to get in two local law libraries one public, one private)for a fee and get access to West’s. Good tool, but only to a point.Still does nothing with Conrail’s problem with abandoning without a docket at all (which is the crux of the Harsimus Stem issue, CR had already been admonished early on for that, but that does not solve the problem still ongoing there)

(2) You don’t have to go to a railroad to get a valuation map. The National Archives has a complete set. But, even if a railroad won’t voluntarily release a map (and many will, for an administrative fee), if there is litigation , the maps can be obtained from a railroad through normal discovery processes.

National Archives does NOT have a complete set. Sometimes they have 4-5 progressive iterations of the same map, other times they have nothing (or it’s shrink wrapped out in the main warehouse and has not been assessioned…ie NARA does not even know it exists.) If the rail line abandoned pre-1920, pretty good chance it does not exist at NARA. U

19

I love it when Sir C is in teaching mode - I can (almost) understand most of the lesson.

20

Mookie: Pay Attention…[:-^].

You could not buy the information, or the personal experiences flowing in this Thread! [bow]

Pretty cool stuff! [tup][tup]