One of the most torturous aspects of building a new road or rail line, especially in urbanized areas, is acquiring the right of way. Urban land is expensive, and the acquisition process can be lengthy when landowners resist selling. It is difficult to imagine a replay of the 1950s-era acquisition of rights of way for interstate highways, which were routed through neighborhoods of the poor and politically powerless.
That’s why it’s so urgent, when we have rights of way for potential transportation corridors, that we protect them. But it seems that rights of way for old, abandoned railroad lines around Virginia are being allowed to lapse. Indeed, it doesn’t appear that anyone in Virginia even maintains a master list of abandoned railroad lines.
That’s what I found out in an interview with Kevin Page, Virginia’s director of rail transportation, during the course of researching my recent column, “Midlothian Leviathan.” I didn’t use any material from the interview in that column, but Page made a number of observations that are worth recounting in the blog.
One of the questions I asked: Has anyone conducted a survey of deactivated or under-utilized rail lines in Virginia? Such lines, it seemed to me, could serve as potential routes for local passenger rail service. No one conducts a statewide survey, said Page, although local Metropolitan Planning Organization officials may undertake local studies of their own.
The subject is more complicated than it might seem. “Sometimes abandoned rail lines can be difficult to resurrect,” Page says. It depends on the terms of the abandonment. Sometimes the land can revert to the owner of the land before the railroad acquired it.
During a period of downsizing and restructuring a quarter century ago, freight railroad companies abandoned a lot of unprofitable routes. A handful have been converted to jogging/bicycle lanes. Many lie fallow. It would seem to be a horrendous waste to allow them to revert to former owners — or, more likely, the descendents of former owners — who can’t do anything economically useful with their fragments. Even if passenger rail doesn’t look profitable today, you never know when circumstances might change. We could well be kicking ourselves ten or twenty years from now for having let the rights of way lapse.