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  • Newton Lower Falls Branch (Mass.)

  • Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New England
Pertaining to all railroading subjects, past and present, in New England

Moderators: MEC407, NHN503

 #1395704  by dbperry
 
Court rules an abandoned rail line isn't really abandoned until the feds say it is - even if the railroad removed all the rails

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 #1395712  by BandA
 
Can a railroad remove the rails from track that is not abandoned? Did the homeowners pay taxes on the land anytime between 1972 and 1982? So, they could and probably should have filed for adverse abandonment between 1972 and 1982.

The segment of track between Riverside Station (Boston and Albany) and Riverside Station (MTA) was also in limbo, with track in place and Penn Central owning it but not paying taxes and the city not foreclosing on the property, probably because they didn't want to deal with hazardous waste such as an embankment built from railroad ties. Not sure how that was resolved.
 #1395729  by Rbts Stn
 
I drive past there every day and it's obviously an old ROW. I wondered what was up with it since it hasn't changed a lick in 5+ years, except for a slow accumulation of trash.
 #1395761  by F-line to Dudley via Park
 
BandA wrote:Can a railroad remove the rails from track that is not abandoned? Did the homeowners pay taxes on the land anytime between 1972 and 1982? So, they could and probably should have filed for adverse abandonment between 1972 and 1982.

The segment of track between Riverside Station (Boston and Albany) and Riverside Station (MTA) was also in limbo, with track in place and Penn Central owning it but not paying taxes and the city not foreclosing on the property, probably because they didn't want to deal with hazardous waste such as an embankment built from railroad ties. Not sure how that was resolved.
The B&A/Riverside track connection is MBTA-owned. That might've been embroiled in a legal brain-teaser for a little while, but it's long since been resolved. The Mass Turnpike Authority used to own the B&A all points inbound of the Wellesley golf course, until that agency was abolished by Gov. Romney and the title deed conferred to the T. Any Penn Central-era paperwork gaps re: the Riverside Jct. spur would've been uncovered and dutifully plugged when they were doing that inter-agency title transfer.


In the modern/post-1986 era removing the rail hardware is usually fine and dandy if the STB filing claims a discontinuance of service exemption and not a full-on abandonment. It would take Googling some dry legalese to sort it out, but there's more than one (three?) categories of functional abandonment filings, and only the severest type involves the full and complete extinguishing of property lines. For example, RR's will routinely do the discontinuance of service filing to get out of serving customers and maintaining as active, but keep the ROW and the toehold on reactivation rights so they can collect rent on whatever power lines or pipelines run along the property. That's how CSX keeps the part of the Fitchburg Secondary from end-of-track in Downtown Leominster to the former junction with the Fitchburg Line as "out-of-service" on the state rail map even though Conrail lifted the rails almost 25 years ago; they're still getting a few pennies of pocket change from the utility poles on that segment and want their overpay from the state before they give it up.

Lower Falls being a pre-'86 abandonment, it's anyone's guess what happened. The laws were less precise, record-keeping quality control was virtually nonexistent in the chaos of the 70's PC-->Conrail transition, and this was I believe the last Boston & Albany branch to be abandoned rather than sold intact to another railroad so the oldest of property records at NY Central/B&A could've also been full of holes. Conrail didn't get its records seriously in-order until they were prepping for their big 1987 IPO, so the ICC routinely got amended filings from them a decade or more after an original filing to reopen abandonment dockets with more information, dump property they didn't know they still had, and so on. I know the New Britain Secondary in Connecticut (a.k.a. the billion-dollar busway ROW) was one such line that fell into a memory hole. It went out-of-service a couple years before Conrail sold off its Central CT holdings to B&M, but it took until a decade later when CDOT was doing road construction over the ROW to uncover that it still belonged to Conrail and arrange quick-and-dirty state purchase. And that one in CT was a secondary-grade connector, not some little one-customer industrial track like Lower Falls. This stuff was unfortunately very common due to the hasty circumstances in which Conrail was put together. Most of these little paper outliers have been stamped out over 4 decades, but I guess it's not too surprising given how rampant this used to be that there'd still be one or two little surprises left to uncover.
 #1395963  by BandA
 
Yeah, the ICC filings don't seem to be online like the STB ones are. [OT] I was trying to look up info about the North Brookfield branch. You can find out about the first 10 year lease, the next 50 year lease, but only that the next lease (?jan 1 1936) was for one year, renewable, without passenger service and was signed on the last day of the prior lease. [OT] MTA bought the Highland Branch (and freight yard?) in 1958, but not the RR retained the track beyond the RR station I believe. The Taxxachu$ett$ Turnpike comes in just east of the junction, where the former Riverside Station was located, so I assume the Turnpike ownership started by the bridge.

Reminder, Lower Falls Branch track was relocated from off the mainline to the Highland Branch when that was extended from Cook St to Riverside.