Northern Central Right of Way, York to Baltimore

Trainlawyer wrote:Can anyone on this board give some local insight to what is going on?

I too was curious about all of this.

Judging by the STB posting today, he took a hit in his plans to re-establish the rail line that has been abandoned for years.

Any chance you can use your "rail-lawyer" skills to help me stop the Bethlehem Branch from being abandoned?

How could this guy think that aquireing a railroad would let him avoid clean indoor air laws in an office building? I can kind of see it in a locomotive shop, which I dought he has, but an office building?

joshuahouse wrote:How could this guy think that aquireing a railroad would let him avoid clean indoor air laws in an office building? I can kind of see it in a locomotive shop, which I dought he has, but an office building?

It's worse than that, as I see that trainlawyer has discussed over on rypn: http://www.rypn.net/cgi-bin/interchange.pl?read=48844

If I understand what trainlawer said, this guy was using the excuse of owning a railroad, to avoid regulation in purchasing the property to start the railroad, which he didn't yet own....

I'm not a lawyer, but that still didn't sound right to me.

Trainlawyer wrote: Where Mr. Riffin may have made his biggest mistake is that he violated a doctrine called Estoppel. In normal English that means he tried to have it both ways. He told the state court that they could not touch the property because he was a railroad and when the State of Maryland called his bluff, he told the STB that they could not act because the properties were not part of the railroad.

My feeling is that he either really does not understand the law or it was an attempt to dodge around state regulation.

GME

It's called "we ain't letting you do this no matter WHAT argument you try to make"!

Here is a new STB document

If he gets those 19 miles, then he'll at least be a real railroad....

Checked the STB filings today and some more documents showed up:

First PDF file

Second PDF file

These are from the State of Maryland.


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And this one showed up in the STB "reading room"

JAMES RIFFIN D/B/A THE NORTHERN CENTRAL RAILROAD--ACQUISITION AND OPERATION EXEMPTION--IN YORK COUNTY, PA

More James Riffin action over at the STB site:

http://www.stb.dot.gov/filings/all.nsf/ ... enDocument

I wonder if he'll pull this off.