Oh, yes, RI has every single OOS line under railbanking or landbanking. And they get on P&W's case with a few of the unused odds and sods they own (most notably the old B&P alignment in Woonsocket angled in the Boston direction) to not let anything get encroached on and to negotiate with the state first if they want to dump anything. They're very tight about preservation, and tend to be a lot more hands-on about temporary rail trail usage to enforce its reactivation rights and keep the NIMBY earth-salting ploys in check. I wish Massachusetts had their attention to detail; they get punked depressingly often by trojan horse trail lobbies.
They did a mass inventory study back in the mid-90's ('94?) of all rail ROW's in the state to rank them as deep long-term passenger rail prospects. All of the East Providence trackage that fed the old tunnel were covered in that. Favored mode is a light rail extension of their proposed trolley network, because reactivation of the tunnel is easier that way with the old downtown viaduct to the NEC torn down and not easy to re-create. But they did duly note the commuter rail dilemma because de-railbanking the Bristol branch for commuter rail proved to be one of the highest-upside corridors in the study. Whole thing's archived pretty prominently on RIDOT's rail transit page. Interesting read because they were pretty thorough in the inventory.
For what it's worth the top 3 ranked lines from the study were. . .
1) South County commuter rail to Westerly
2) Woonsocket commuter rail via the P&W
3) Bristol commuter rail via East Providence
3a) Rail shuttle Fall River-Newport or MBTA commuter rail limited Boston-Newport joined to the T's Fall River extension. Different animal, but they studied that too.
#1 planning's going full-speed ahead. #2 made a stir recently when some state legislators surprisingly lobbied the feds and made a public "let's do this thing now!" bluster (jumping the gun just a bit much, but they're pretty bullish about that one's potential). And they seem to think Newport's an easy-ish "why not?" if the T gets to Fall River since the Sakonnet River Bridge is the only missing piece of infrastructure and they're already studying modest short-term upgrades on-island to let the dinner train run more general-purpose in-season commuter service. So I'd say with their aggressiveness about developing a rail transit system all of these lines are in the not-total-fantasy 25-year realm of possibility--plus the Providence light rail. They're definitely of a mind to protect the E. Providence ROW's from any harmful encroachment.
