I don't have access to Trains Newswire and the STB website is quite confusing. I did to try and find the story but the people on that website seem to speak in a different language than I do. Can anyone find a link that ALL of us can look at? I sure would love to hear what railbanked lines are being rebuilt.
Modeling the "Fargo Area Rapid Transit" in O scale 3 rail.
Do you have a specific line, or date (or time frame in mind) ?
The STB does not have a 'master list' of 'railbanked' lines that have been appproved for rebuilding, as far as I know. Instead, the STB's 'cases' or 'dockets' are indexed mainly by the names of the applicant or other party(ies), docket number, and dates. So you'd need to know some of that data to start any seach there.
There have been several - like maybe a half-dozen to 10 - such applications and rebuildings, most often in the context of a power plant seeking another (2nd) rail connection to get out from under what the utility considers to be an excessively high 'bottleneck', 'last mile', or 'monopoly' rail rate.
I believe the subject has been discussed here before, but not recently. Somewhere, someplace, there must be such a compilation - perhaps with the "Rails-to-Trails" folks who started the whole idea of railbanking ?
If not, then we could try to create such a list here. Any nominations ?
- Paul North.
Here is a very recent approval. The applicant is RJ Corman, the project is in Pennsylvania. The link is to the Executive Summary, which also includes a map.
[www.stb.dot.gov]
R.J. Corman/Pennsylvania Lines now is authorized to construct a 10.8-mile line over a segment of abandoned rail right of way between Wallaceton and Winburne, Pa., and reactivate a connecting 9.3-mile line between Winburne and Gorton, Pa. The combined 20-mile line will be used to provide rail transportation services to a proposed waste-to-ethanol facility, quarry and industrial park near Gorton, as well as other shippers along the route.The STB’s authorization is subject to environmental mitigation conditions and the stipulation that R.J. Corman build the line on the environmentally-preferable route, board officials said. R.J. Corman also is authorized to acquire the adjoining right of way currently being used as a trail in order to provide service on the combined route.
Note that there is a trail on a portion of this to-be-rebuilt line.
More info regarding the trail question is available here:
Centre Daily TimesMonday’s decision by the federal Surface Transportation Board granted R.J. Corman Railroad Company the right to reclaim about 20 miles of track abandoned by Conrail in 1990, 10 miles of which have been converted into the Snow Shoe Rails to Trails. The decision means the 20-mile trail network will be halved if the rail line is built.“We’re not happy about it,” said Snow Shoe Rails to Trails vice president Jim Verost.....The Surface Transportation Board decision encourages R.J. Corman to “attempt to negotiate a mutually acceptable agreement” with the Headwaters Charitable Trust, which controls the Rails to Trails, but only requires R.J. Corman to construct a new trailhead facility, consisting of a gravel parking area and covered sign structure, at the new Gorton Road trail terminus.The decision is certain to meet with public consternation, Centre County Commissioner Chris Exarchos said.
Full article:
http://www.centredaily.com/2012/05/22/3203995/railroad-company-gets-ok-to-reclaim.html
[Sorry for the poor formatting on the earlier version of this note - I had a computer problem. Here's a more readable copy]
Here is a link to the actual STB decision:
http://www.stb.dot.gov/decisions/readingroom.nsf/fc695db5bc7ebe2c852572b80040c45f/b49c2df22d487a6485257a050047fd2b?OpenDocument
This decision is not at all surprising as to the trail reactivation. The Federal statute that covers rail-trail conversions (the National Trails System Act) has both a carrot and a stick. The carrot is that structuring a trail deal under the act defeats any "reversions" which might otherwise destroy the continuity of the corridor. This is pretty important as many rail rights-of-way consist, in whole or part, of property with reversionary title (in other words, the property goes back to the original grantor or its successors if the property is no longer used for rail service). The Federal statute makes it possible for a trail sponsor to acquire this property for trail use without paying anythign to the owners of the reversionary interests. In fact, in a Trails Act deal the U.S. governement, not the trail sponsor, is often the one that has to pay the reversionary owners for "taking" their interests.
The "stick" (or the quid pro qup) is that a rail corridor acquired for train use under the Trails Act MUST be available for rail restoration. That has always been a statutory requirement under the Trails Act. The reason this hasn't come up very much before is that it's pretty rare for there to be a legitimate proposal to reactivate rail service over a trail corridor (after all, why would the railroad have abandoned it if there were prospects of significant future traffic?). But the law is the law, If you want the benefits of the Trails Act, you have to accept the burdens. There's nothing that would prevent a trail user from acquiring an abandoned rail corridor outside the Trails Act, and dealing with the reversionary property be condemning it or buying out the reversionary owners. But that's more expensive than using the Trails Act.
(1) 16 USC 1247 Badly written law (constantly in the courts for interpretation)
(2) NARPO doesn't get it ( recent STB hearings bear this out) and neither do many trails groups.
(3) The bigger part of the PA case was that some of the line being built had abandoned pre-1976 without a trails component in essence creating "new construction" under the tenets of the 1920 ICC Transportation Act which requires STB approval.
There are more than a few cases of trails going back into rail service for various reasons. You have a case in Poseyville, IN where a line is about to become a trail for the second time, except several towns want to keep the rail line.
Paul_D_North_Jr Do you have a specific line, or date (or time frame in mind) ? The STB does not have a 'master list' of 'railbanked' lines that have been appproved for rebuilding, as far as I know. Instead, the STB's 'cases' or 'dockets' are indexed mainly by the names of the applicant or other party(ies), docket number, and dates. So you'd need to know some of that data to start any seach there. There have been several - like maybe a half-dozen to 10 - such applications and rebuildings, most often in the context of a power plant seeking another (2nd) rail connection to get out from under what the utility considers to be an excessively high 'bottleneck', 'last mile', or 'monopoly' rail rate. I believe the subject has been discussed here before, but not recently. Somewhere, someplace, there must be such a compilation - perhaps with the "Rails-to-Trails" folks who started the whole idea of railbanking ? If not, then we could try to create such a list here. Any nominations ? - Paul North.
The Rails to Trails Conservancy has listings of rail trails on their website (I don't have the web address immeidately at hand, but it will pop upf if you Google the name). However, the list isn't necessarily limited to trails under the National Trails Systems Act (and, in some cases the listed trails aren't really rail trails).
Still, the RTC listing is probably the best there is. The STB doesn't have a master list, and doesn't even know what ROW's were turned into trails. You can find from their website, on a line by line basis, the lines for which they issued a "Notice of interim Trail Use" or "Certificate of Interim Trail Use" (if you have access to a legal research website like Westlaw, you can do a very focused search for these documents). Trouble is that these forms of decisions are essentially just authorizations to negotiate a trail deal. There historically hasn't been a requirement that the parties advise the Board whether a deal has actually been made. Sometimes the parties notified the Board, sometimes they didn't - it was hit and miss.
STB recently revised its trail rules to require that the parties notify it of trail deals that are actually made (among othe rthings). So, going forward, they wil have this information. But that doesn't help for the many deals made the past 25 or so years.
I misread Paul's note when I sent my latest response (thus proving, once again, the importance of engaging the brain before hitting the "post" key). He was talking about listings of trail-rail reactivations, not rail-trail conversions.
A proposal to reactivate rail service on a trail corridor is something that requires an STB filing (the exact type of filing depends on whether the reactivating entity is the railroad which abandoned the line or someone else). It should be possible to find the decisions resulting from these filings through a legal research program (like Westlaw) without too much ado. Once again, however, the STB decisions won't tell you if the reactivation was actually accomplished. It will only tell you whether the STB authorized it.
A very common scenario with power plant "build-ins" or "build-outs" (which is the scenario Paul is describing), is that the power plant gets STB authority for the project, and the incumbent railroad responds by agreeing to give another railroad trackage rights to the plant over its existing trackage (the reason the incumbent road will do this is to preserve at least some financial contribution from traffic that may shift to the new competition rather than losing it altogether ) . That gives the pwer plant the two railroad service it was seeking, so it doesn't construct the new line. This is one reason why the STB "authorizations" don't necessarily indicate that the project was ever done.
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