I thought i had read that the typical railroad ROW is 50' on each side of the center line of the track. There's an area in town where a bike trail seems really close to the tracks. I figured out the edge of the asphalt is 21' from the edge of the rail. Is it common to be that close in a city setting?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Murphy Siding I thought i had read that the typical railroad ROW is 50' on each side of the center line of the track. There's an area in town where a bike trail seems really close to the tracks. I figured out the edge of the asphalt is 40' from the edge of the rail. Is it common to be that close in a city setting?
I thought i had read that the typical railroad ROW is 50' on each side of the center line of the track. There's an area in town where a bike trail seems really close to the tracks. I figured out the edge of the asphalt is 40' from the edge of the rail. Is it common to be that close in a city setting?
There is no "standard" width for ROW. "A 100 foot strip consisting of 50 feet on either side of the railroad as currently staked" is common in the deeds (and not terribly helpful is there is a survey dispute!), at least on BNSF, but far from universal. Congressional land grants usually included either a 400' or a 200' ROW through public lands. Wider ROW's were also purchased, either during the original construction or later on, to accommodate cut fills and slopes.
But probably the biggest wrinkle is that, if a town already existed before the railroad arrived, then the railroad wound up going in, next to, or across one or more platted streets. If the tracks were going in or across a public ROW, it was usually (but not always) with the City's written permission in the form of a City ordinance. But if the railroad just happened to be located parallel to a public ROW, then they would just buy whatever lots the railroad was on, and whatever the setback was from the tracks to the street, that's the width of the railroad ROW.
Without knowing what specific location you're talking about, that would be one guess, is that the trail location is actually in a platted street that predates the railroad's existence.
Sometimes railroads will actually either sell a portion of the ROW for trail use, or license a trail on part of the ROW. BNSF currently has a blanket policy against parallel trails on the ROW, but back when they were selling off land to pay their operating expenses, it was a little different.
Finally, prior to 1995 states generally had fairly broad power to condemn railroad ROW for public use (unless the railroad ROW had been granted by the US government), so they may have just condemned railroad land for a trail, or for a road that eventually became a trail. States still have that power today, but it is more circumscribed thanks to the Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act (ICCTA), which prohibits the states from "unreasonably" interfering with railroad operations. (Taking away land within an active rail corridor that the railroad is holding for current or future use is typically considered to be unreasonable interference.)
Dan
Norris, check out pictures of the CP line through Bellevue, IA sometime...
Brian (IA) http://blhanel.rrpicturearchives.net.
When the SP was winding down its ownership of the SDA&E, it was making an effort to sell off land outside of a 33' wide strip centered on the track.
Why 33'? Well, 33' is one hallf of a chain (66'), or two rods (16.5'). Note that a statute mile is 80 chains long and an acre is 10 square chains, usually 2 chains by 5 chains.
A lot probably depended on the involved landowners and the philosophy of the railroad. Lines running through open country would likely see that 100'. In towns and villages, probably less.
Recall that the Erie was originally built to six foot guage. As such, everything was just a little wider. An ambitious railroad might plan on double track someday, so acquired land accordingly.
Check tax maps, Sanborn maps, and the like for a better idea.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
R/W widths can be just about anything. I just depends on how the original railroad acquired the railroad corridor in the the first place and what the color of title is. The railroad reported all their R/W information to the feds just after WW1 including the documentation on how they acquired it - The Class 1 roads still have to keep those records accurate and current (some do better than others and some are stupidly converting that data to GIS with unqualified people making a mess of things - frequently guessing) Regardless, the railroad records are still better than most county road records. Some counties are clueless on how they get from A to B (scary) and have never kept track of how their road systems evolved or what they own or have rights to.
Using tax maps is dangerous - they are frequently wrong (bad guesses by poorly trained county employees, and then the gizzers get hold of it)
With what Norris is talking about, a fair guess is we are not talking federal grant right of way (FGROW), it's too narrow.
Second fair assumption is that if it was broad gage or narrow gage, the track is no longer exactly in the center of the R/W.
Wasn't that uncommon for roads to follow the highways. There are plenty of highways on railroad R/W's covered by license agreements/ contracts. (very few by easement, contrary to popular thought). In the case of federal grant R/W (FGROW), if the railroad abandons it, the local road agency had the right to claim it under federal statute, but that has pretty well ceased since 1996 (ICC Termination Act , also what Peltier is talking about.).
Where railroads run in a street do they own their right of way or just use it by permission of some sort? I'm sure there are variations.
mvlandsw Where railroads run in a street do they own their right of way or just use it by permission of some sort? I'm sure there are variations.
Generally by ordinance or charter. There are other "unique" arrangements, usually because the railroad arrived before the subdivision or commercial tracts and a populated area grew up around it with the railroad encouraging the growth. The interurbans frequently tried to exist solely in public R-O-Ws for financial reasons.
mvlandswWhere railroads run in a street do they own their right of way or just use it by permission of some sort? I'm sure there are variations.
mudchickenUsing tax maps is dangerous - they are frequently wrong (bad guesses by poorly trained county employees, and then the gizzers get hold of it)
I was kind of thinking of general character, not specifics, although there could clearly be a problem with that as well. Some areas wide, some narrow.
The problems MC has described in the past, especially buildings actually being built on ROWs due to unsuspecting tax mappers, etc, are a case in point.
The maps of our line describe a wide spot/lot alongside a river. To my knowledge, nothing was ever built there, but it shows on the maps nonetheless. My guess is that perhaps the original planners considered a watering station there.
And there lies the rub.
Overmod There is the somewhat fascinating case of Broadway, in Memphis, TN, which appears in older city maps as a platted street, and may still so appear, but which has been come to be used entirely as an active ROW with multiple ballasted tracks for many years.
There is the somewhat fascinating case of Broadway, in Memphis, TN, which appears in older city maps as a platted street, and may still so appear, but which has been come to be used entirely as an active ROW with multiple ballasted tracks for many years.
Not uncommon. For instance, both the Soo Line and the Northern Pacific accessed the Minneapolis Great Northern station on a route along N 1st St. which included several roadway underpasses. The Burlington Route along the Mississippi River occupies non-existent city streets in several towns.
It's also interesting just generally how many streets were platted and dedicated but never physically constructed. In Saint Paul some platted streets literally go straight over the edge of a cliff. In those previously mentioned Wisconsin towns, the grids sometimes extend several blocks into the river.
blhanel Norris, check out pictures of the CP line through Bellevue, IA sometime...
mudchicken With what Norris is talking about, a fair guess is we are not talking federal grant right of way (FGROW), it's too narrow. Second fair assumption is that if it was broad gage or narrow gage, the track is no longer exactly in the center of the R/W. Wasn't that uncommon for roads to follow the highways. There are plenty of highways on railroad R/W's covered by license agreements/ contracts. (very few by easement, contrary to popular thought). In the case of federal grant R/W (FGROW), if the railroad abandons it, the local road agency had the right to claim it under federal statute, but that has pretty well ceased since 1996 (ICC Termination Act , also what Peltier is talking about.).
Murphy Siding mudchicken With what Norris is talking about, a fair guess is we are not talking federal grant right of way (FGROW), it's too narrow. Second fair assumption is that if it was broad gage or narrow gage, the track is no longer exactly in the center of the R/W. Wasn't that uncommon for roads to follow the highways. There are plenty of highways on railroad R/W's covered by license agreements/ contracts. (very few by easement, contrary to popular thought). In the case of federal grant R/W (FGROW), if the railroad abandons it, the local road agency had the right to claim it under federal statute, but that has pretty well ceased since 1996 (ICC Termination Act , also what Peltier is talking about.). This particular track was Milwaukee Road, built around 1880. The adjacent 4-lane street and bike path were possible because the city took over the parallel Rock Island ROW. The two tracks would have been close together at one point because of the lay of the land, but not at this particular spot. Way back when tracks like this were laid out, was there a rule of thumb about how far competing railroads had to be away from each other?
mudchicken With what Norris is talking about, a fair guess is we are not talking federal grant right of way (FGROW), it's too narrow. Second fair assumption is that if it was broad gage or narrow gage, the track is no longer exactly in the center of the R/W. Wasn't that uncommon for roads to follow the highways. There are plenty of highways on railroad R/W's covered by license agreements/ contracts. (very few by easement, contrary to popular thought). In the case of federal grant R/W (FGROW), if the railroad abandons it, the local road agency had the right to claim it under federal statute, but that has pretty well ceased since 1996 (ICC Termination Act , also what Peltier is talking about.). This particular track was Milwaukee Road, built around 1880. The adjacent 4-lane street and bike path were possible because the city took over the parallel Rock Island ROW. The two tracks would have been close together at one point because of the lay of the land, but not at this particular spot.
Wasn't that uncommon for roads to follow the highways. There are plenty of highways on railroad R/W's covered by license agreements/ contracts. (very few by easement, contrary to popular thought). In the case of federal grant R/W (FGROW), if the railroad abandons it, the local road agency had the right to claim it under federal statute, but that has pretty well ceased since 1996 (ICC Termination Act , also what Peltier is talking about.). This particular track was Milwaukee Road, built around 1880. The adjacent 4-lane street and bike path were possible because the city took over the parallel Rock Island ROW. The two tracks would have been close together at one point because of the lay of the land, but not at this particular spot.
Way back when tracks like this were laid out, was there a rule of thumb about how far competing railroads had to be away from each other?
Surveying parallel R/W's gets "fun" in curves where you encounter gaps and overlaps where you have to determine who got there first. Lots of studying land schedules and tract books to figure out how land lines evolved. Were the land lines a common line or not? Were there agreements between the roads when things overlapped?
Other brain damage happens with federal grant right of way where railroads were allowed up to a maximum width and chose to claim something less (Missouri Pacific was weird about this, usually claiming only 100' of their 200' grant width per the federal grant of 3-3-1875). So far, nobody knows what the old MP thinking was - even old MP Engineering staff. The further east you go, the weirder things get.
When the R/W line gets to be less than 25 feet out from the centerline of the track, the pucker factor increases. I know of two cases here in Denver where the center of Union Pacific's track is only 6+ feet from the property line after the city and a highway (non-railroad muggles) re-arranged things ...railcars can hang over the line and you could not place a fence on the line. Uncle Pete now has an adverse possession/ unwritten prescriptive right over city property that is now high dollar housing in the city center all thanks to lack of survey and lack of brains on the part of some urban transportation planners (rubber tire'd) part. The scary part is that they are doing it again with plans to move the joint line and purchase of a piece of UP's (D&RG) original 1870-71 main line corridor.
(you can't tell the city they have an issue, they won't listen and UP let's sleeping dogs lie for the time being (They have other more serious issues with the political knotheads to deal with first - guaranteed future attorney work))
Another interesting aspect: The original main tracks were established with simple curves. Later as operating speed increased railroads introduced spirals at each end of the simple curve to minimize the transition from tangent track to the simple curve. This created the situation with the track not being situated equally distant between the property lines. This is especially observed with new construction (Williams-Crookton, AZ for example) where one degree curves had a 570 spiral that resulted in the track not being equidistant between the property lines by 2.35 feet within the simple curve.
Further elaboration may be helpful. Usually, the 100-200 foot ROW's were defined by the distance from the main track centerline. When the main tracks centerlines were altered by spirals and by other means it became difficult to properly identify property lines. I have been retired for many years and as a surveyor I would have difficulty defining today's ROW lines unless they were tied to established and legally recognized reference criteria.
diningcar Another interesting aspect: The original main tracks were established with simple curves. Later as operating speed increased railroads introduced spirals at each end of the simple curve to minimize the transition from tangent track to the simple curve. This created the situation with the track not being situated equally distant between the property lines. This is especially observed with new construction (Williams-Crookton, AZ for example) where one degree curves had a 570 spiral that resulted in the track not being equidistant between the property lines by 2.35 feet within the simple curve.
The BNSF Glasgow Subdivision between Minot, ND and Glasgow, MT has a large number of curves - many, many small hills and depressions that were just large enough to be worth bypassing in the push to reach Montana. From 2013 - 2015 we set to work double-tracking the ~150 miles or so from Minot to Sydney, MT in response to the Bakken oil frenzy. (The grading was finished almost the whole way. Track was only installed east of Williston, ND before the need disappeared.)
One thing that we encountered over and over again was the effects of a 20th century improvement program that reduced all mainline curves to 2 degrees or less. In a few places this resulted in thousands of feet of new alignment on new ROW, but most curves were just eased somewhat within the existing ROW.
In 2013 our maps showed the track centerline and the ROW boundaries. You could easily see that the ROW on the low side of the curve was much skimpier than on the high side, but there were no dimensions between track and boundary lines in the curves. It was rather difficult to identify where we needed new ROW for the new track.
We tried overlaying the maps with our plansets in CAD. That usually did not produce good results - the accuracy just wasn't there to make them match over even short distances. We tried referencing the deeds, and found that most of them said nothing more than "n feet on either side of the railroad as it is now located" - in other words, from the original track centerline, which was not shown on the maps. In the end, we relied a lot on fence lines.
In places where we had to acquire land, a land surveyor did eventually have to draw up a plat of the acquisition parcel. I have no idea what records they relied on, but fortunately the new boundaries were described in terms of metes and bounds from section corners - so the old boundary was used only for calculating the acreage (cost) and is no longer relevant in those particular places.
In at least one case, we didn't realize that the backslopes of our cut extended outside the ROW until construction actually reached that spot and the landowner objected. The short term solution was that the contractor signed a "borrow pit" agreement to remove the soil from the landowner's property.
mudchicken Other brain damage happens with federal grant right of way where railroads were allowed up to a maximum width and chose to claim something less (Missouri Pacific was weird about this, usually claiming only 100' of their 200' grant width per the federal grant of 3-3-1875). So far, nobody knows what the old MP thinking was - even old MP Engineering staff. The further east you go, the weirder things get.
One of several plausible explanations .... Before the ICC Act of 1913*, the states & locals assessed the taxes and set the rates. (and abused the tax system to the point nothing was fair or made sense)
Another was mis-reading the law and its interpretation by GLO (now BLM)...no two individual state offices of the GLO did things completely the same way.
(*) ICC Valuation Act of 1913
The establishment of taxable RR properties is now done by special State agencies, none of which are the same. This resulted after too many early and localized attempts resulting in litigation.
I have edited my reply above to further inform you of the difficulty for surveyors to locate ROW lines.
Another problem is when a road is built next to the RR ROW. This could be 50+/- feet from the track. This presented problems when a road crossed rage RR. A vehicle could be trapped on the tracks due to traffic. This could be a disaster for a speeding train. I can think of one case where the track was elevated above any road crossings or the highway was reconstructed to be over or under the RR.
ccltrains I can think of one case where the track was elevated above any road...
There are many examples of this, and we've seen some of them reported here as the result of semi's being high centered on such crossings, and getting hit.
I would suspect at least part of the problem is that railroads tend to simply add more ballast over time, raising the track just that much each time. It's entirely possible that a given crossing of this sort was once at the same level as the adjacent, parallel road.
Since the road is usually the relative newcomer, I'm sure the railroads have generally adopted a "too bad, so sad" approach. Fixing the issue by lowering the track would likely be an expensive proposition.
You can see the same sort of thing at underpasses, where the highway gets repaved numerous times, cutting down the clearance each time. Any more, they've gotten smart and mill the old road surface before putting down new pavement.
I saw this in the village where I grew up.Eventually they recognized the problem and took out many layers of pavement, gaining quite a bit of clearance in the process.
Removing old pavement can only go so far. I gets interesting when you get down to the layer where the streetcar rails are embedded. This isn't too uncommon in Chicago with underpasses beneath railroad embankments.
CSSHEGEWISCHRemoving old pavement can only go so far.
I wasn't there when they did it, but I'm thinking they took out something over a foot. No streetcar tracks to worry about.
I remember seeing a photo of the PRR that had added ballest over the years somewhere in Pennsylvania. The ballasted track was about 2 feet above the adjacent unballasted line.
Not unlike the past situation in Chicago on the Union Station approaches at 18th Street. Double stacks could clear on one track but not the other.
As long as we are straying off the OP:
(1) Ballast degrades (Esp. steel mill slag and limestone, both turn to dust.)
(2) Undercutters
(3) Ballast consolidation
(4) When they started replacing improved dirt with pavement (asphalt/concrete), they scraped-off the existing surface and re-graded. Rarely did they ever import roadbase or the dirt they removed.
(5) Rarely do counties or towns care about approach grades, especially where curved track has existed. No attempt made to match cross level / superelevation. (spilling over from the other thread, railroads are responsible for paving between the tracks and to two feet beyond the field side rails, the road agency is responsible for the rest)
(6) Darts and daggers to the civil engineers designing vertical curves with road crossings in the middle of them. (They should be fired, lose their license and then be shot)
I've witnessed highway department officials getting dressed-down by railroad commission engineers and inspectors. (it happens)
mudchicken (6) Darts and daggers to the civil engineers designing vertical curves with road crossings in the middle of them. (They should be fired, lose their license and then be shot)
Would this be before or after they were sent to the Russian Front???
On a more serious note, are the CE's you are referring the RR's CE's or are they Highway Bubba CE's? I can see how a crossing would be excruciating to deal with on a vertical curve.
Highway bubba local consultant CE's - Just had another case of this in the last week on a project in Illinois. Really annoying when you see "safety upgrade" in the title block. Bled red all over that rascal.
mudchicken As long as we are straying off the OP: (1) Ballast degrades (Esp. steel mill slag and limestone, both turn to dust.)
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