With some surprise I notice that, in the L.A. area at least, Google Earth still marks numerous old local rail lines which have long since been abandoned and paved over, and in many cases built over as well. In most cases, they were formerly used for freight deliveries originating from downtown depots, but most of that business has been long since taken over by trucks. There are several places I recall seeing tracks in decades past, but they are now long gone, even if the shape of adjacent buildings, property boundaries, and streets betrays their former presence.
My questions are these: How does this information get into Google Earth? And do the original RR companies, or their successors, generally prefer to retain title over abandoned routes, and lease out the vacant rail-beds, instead of selling them off outright? In one case, the old Southern Pacific Expo Line is now owned by the local transit authority, which is building a light rail line over most of its route, but that’s a case of a railway being sold to an entity who, in all likelihood, will end up using it for trains once again.
Another odd aspect of this that piques my curiosity is this: Apparently when a route is abandoned and rendered useless by the removal or paving over of a segment of track, the RR often doesn’t bother to rescue all its rolling stock before the line is cut off–leading to stranded railcars. According to the Wikipedia article on the Exposition line, there is a very old stranded boxcar in the Palms area. Perhaps it will be rescued when the mass transit line re-establishes the rail connection. IIRC there are also some stranded passenger coaches in the Mojave Desert, on what used to be part of a route connecting the Owens Valley towns.
I have no expertise or knowledge in this area at all, so this post is a total WAG, but I’m going to hazard a guess that in the case of the abandoned cars, a spur that’s been unused for many years may not be in good enough condition (or can’t be *certified *to be in good enough condition) to support an engine that would be sent to collect the car. So why risk a possible derailment of a good engine for a lousy old freight car?
The cars themselves may not be in good enough shape to be worth saving, or it may not be a simple matter to determine (after a series of acquisitions, mergers, bankruptcies, etc.) who owns them.
So it may be simpler and cheaper to leave them where they are, and if they **have **to be removed, send out a crane and wide bed trailer truck to haul them away.
I live in Palms, but I haven’t seen the boxcar yet. I would be interested to know how old is “very old”, as the Wikipedia article says it is. That might be the answer right there; the older ones were mostly wood, which probably has long since dry rotted to the extent that it wasn’t worth saving. Still, you’d think the hardware would have been worth the trouble.
This road is the oldest railway route in Southern California, going back to the 1870s and long before L.A. was connected to San Francisco and the routes to the East Coast.
The information your looking for the called a cadastral map, if you want to previous owner of your land or the owner before that I can you assure a government department has maps going all the way back to the original land grant and those lines are never erased.
I don’t know for sure, but my son lives not far from the Burke-Gillman trail in the Seattle area. It is an abandoned rail line. But he claims that there is still an easement or something that would allow the line to be rebuilt at some point in the future were there demand. I have walked over parts of the trail and there are places that it crosses a highway, so rebuilding it would be non-trivial, but I don’t recall seeing any actual construction on it.
Sometimes the railroad line was built on land granted to it (usually by the state). In other cases, it’s on a private land on which the RR was granted an easement. It’s been a continuing source of controversy in Missouri. When the state announced plans to turn the abandoned MKT line along the Missouri River into a biking/hiking trail, a lot of the property owners sued, claiming that the easements for trackage specifically stated the land was to be used for a railroad, or the easement would revert to the land owner. The courts held that as long as the land could still be converted back to rail use, the easment stood.
In many cases, the freight car isn’t owned by the railroad, but by the shipper, or even a third party who simply pays the railroad to haul the car from here to there. When the railroad is ready to abandon a piece of track, they’ll tell the car owner that they have X days to hire the railroad to haul the car away, or the owner is responsible for it. (And a lot of times, the abandoned car is on a privately owned spur or siding, not the actual RR line.)
Probably not applicable in the OP’s particular case, but railroads (or car owners) may sell to a active business worn-out but still servicable freight cars to use as storage - this was usually boxcars in the past, but over the last few decades worn/surplus covered hoppers seem to have become common in this usage, as they are cheaper substitutes for fixed-installation silos (indeed active covered hoppers often server as ‘rolling’ silos - the UP has a big yard near Spring, Texas, called their Storage in Transit yard, which holds thousands of Covered Hoppers loaded w/ Plastic pellets, which are held in the yard until needed by local industries).
However, sound like the freight car mentioned in the OP is just not worth salvaging (price of scrap vs bringing a crew up to scrap/plasma-cut the car up and haul the pieces away).
Railroads have a lot of power people don’t know about. For example you can’t build a new road across a track without their permission. We have a local case where the railroad is asking that an existing crossing be closed in order to have a new road crossing built. The town can’t take the land like they can for other roads- no eminent domain for railroad land.
We have one abandoned track that is run by a local group as a hobby, once a month they take people on rides for $8 or so, kids really like it.
Well, for one example of tracks still showing up on Google Earth/Maps despite being completely removed can be seen in Oshkosh, WI, south of the Fox River. To answer the question of whether or not the railroad company that abandoned the track still owns the right of way, the answer appears to be no. Looking at that county’s GIS map, you can “see” the route of the old rail line marked by the property lines, but the old right-of-way appears to have been absorbed by the neighboring properties.
I always chalked that up to the fact that old railroads take awhile to disappear from online maps is that whoever is in charge of mapping the railroads updates their databases a lot less frequently than people in charge of mappings roads. And Google/et. al. just “reads” their databases, they don’t go out and map railroads themselves.