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Railroad fever swept much of the country in the 1800's and your area probably didn't escape the epidemic. Towns and villages saw the kiss of death, real or imagined, if the railroads passed them by. A common method used by the town fathers to raise money for construction was through the sale of bonds. Many of the backers of these lines, (most if you read some railroad historians,) were little more than common crooks. 'Jasper P. Coots', who owned the feed store and a partnership in the new line would put the pressure on every poor dirt farmer that walked through his door to put his life savings into the railroad with dire predictions that if they didn't build the line to his door, every farmer in town would go belly up along with him. As it turned out, many a poor farmer did go belly-up but old Jasper, an early version of Ken Lay, somehow managed to thrive as the partially built RR bit the dirt. <br /> <br />A less cynical reason why rails to nowhere are still found in the deep woods: In the Adirondacks, logging and mining required the building of rail lines to carry logs & ore. As the wilderness was clearcut with scarcely a toothpick to be gleaned (and fires burning hundreds of thousands of acres every so often,) rails were pulled up from the played-out rights-of-way and relaid in other areas. These were short-shelf-life roads with rough cut ties laid on grade and ballasted with dirt if they were lucky. When the rails were pulled up and a few years passed, little remained to tell a railroad ever ran through there except a meandering little path to nowhere. <br /> <br />Wayne
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