When rails are better than trails

As with just about every other subject these days, there are two diametrically opposed schools of thought on what is popularly known as Rails to Trails. Both sides think they are right, and both sides tend to use whatever ammunition available, including, but not limited to, lies, innuendo, outright name-calling, and, when all else fails, and sometimes as first resort, courts of law.

People have fought over railroad rights of way since the early nineteenth century, some wanting them, some wanting them to go away, and some even wishing they had thought of the idea themselves. State governments granted charters for railroad building, requiring the railroad to become what is known in law as a common carrier, and establishing end points and likely routes. In those cases where land had to be acquired, the railroads had to negotiate with the property owners for the easement, and those easements came in many, many forms.

In some cases, the property owner would just sell the land to the railroad and a deed or equivalent title document would be created. In cases of dispute, compromises might include all kinds of conditions and covenants. In some cases, the railroad had to remain solvent, and in others, the land had to revert to the original property owner in case of abandonment. Others involved true easements, where the railroad could use the land for a specified period of time, often ninety-nine years, before the original land owner could evict it. (Eviction of a railroad is easier said than done.)

As long as railroad mileage grew or remained roughly constant, the question of what happens to land no longer used by the railroad wasn’t often asked. So what happened when the railroad quit the property?

The process of “rationalizing” railroad mileage in America actually started during the Great Depression and reached its peak after the late 1970s with the failure of the Northeastern freight carriers and the establishment of Conrail. Rationalizing meant abandonment of those lines that were redundant, places where two or more of the railroads that were dumped into Conrail had parallel lines. To be fair, many of the Northeastern carriers had attempted something like this before bankruptcy, but without Congressional intervention, the process of abandonment was too cumbersome.

The question of what to do with the land after this happened was complex and involved looking at literally tens of thousands of land contracts encompassing multiple states and municipalities. One of the most popular ways to forestall claims from prior land owners was for a government entity to take over a segment of railroad under the guise of preserving service. If, after a significant period of time, there are no customers to serve, or there are none because the government entity has failed to provide a level of service that is economical for the customers, the idea of converting the railroad into a walking/hiking/biking trail always comes up.

In my opinion, service preservation is a worthy goal of government. If, on the one hand, a railroad is converted to a walking/biking trail to bank it for future return to service as the economy of the area grows, I think that’s also a good thing. On the other hand, when a group demands that a viable railroad providing service be transformed into a trail, for the sole reason that they don’t like railroads, or commerce, or industry, or roads or much else that doesn’t sprout leaves and provide wildlife habitat, I think that’s a very bad thing. More on that next time.

The earliest version of a trail made from a right of way, of which I am aware, is the Illinois Prairie Path, once the Chicago Aurora & Elgin railroad. The latter, an electric interurban line with freight customers, went out of business in 1959 and soon tore out its tracks and third rail. By 1963, naturalist groups advocated the preservation of the right of way as a nature trail, rather than allowing real estate development, and the federal Department of the Interior designated the path a National Trail. All well and good, the railroad wasn’t using it anyway, and, if not preserved, the right of way would have become so many condos and parking lots. (Some of it went that way during the intervening four years.)

In retrospect, considering the enormous sixty-year growth and prosperity of the western suburbs of Chicago, the area could be making good use of an environmentally-friendly, all-electric, additional commuter rail line from downtown Chicago to its fastest-growing and most affluent suburbs. Hindsight is…well…you know.

But nobody ousted the railroad to build the trail. (Holy hell would be yelled if anyone tried to oust the trail to rebuild the railroad, however.) And back then, Interstates were just getting popular and everyone thought the private passenger car would kill off just about all passenger rail by the time the Interstate system was complete. (It took another ten years, and they almost did.)

Well, getting a little long here. We’ve seen when trails may be better than rails. Next time, I’ll look at when rails are better than trails, and trails are just a pain in the …

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)