ewh wrote:The rails have been removed from just south of the Leominster station into Fitchburg, but the right of way is supposedly being railbanked. The area between Leominster and Fitchburg has been malled in the last 15 years and all the accesses run across the right of way.
CSX still owns it and carries full operating rights on it, so the mothballed part of the Fitchburg Secondary officially goes in the books in Massachusetts as "out-of-service". The federal laws on landbanking get further layered by degrees-of-difference in line "activity" or lackthereof at the state level, and each New England state uses different designations in its state rail inventory. In MA, OOS = "railbanked"; short-term embargoes are still counted as active, and only the ones in long-term deep freeze but which still have an extant operator get slapped with the OOS tag. In other states--CT, for instance--they parse in more nuanced fashion as "Not In Service", "Railbanked", and "Landbanked".
The Fitchburg Sec. thus gets grouped in with other lines like Grafton & Upton. The line owner never abandoned their rights to serve freight, so it can be subject to reactivation on due notice to the communities no matter how long it's been gone or if the rails have been removed. The restored line just has to get brought up to code with current environmental regs. Like with G&U the NIMBY's can make life a living hell for customers and facilities along the lines and nitpick the environmental compliance, but they are powerless to actually stop the tracks from getting re-laid no matter how many nuisance filings get lodged.
Now, CSX itself is never going to have a reason to reactivate this track. There's no customers and the duplicate PAS interchange route doesn't matter when the PAR Worcester Main is the one that'll eventually be getting the public funds for state-of-repair upgrades. But unlike PAR and other area railroads CSX tends to keep its leverage tight by picking railbanks over landbanks. Company policy to drive up the price on line sales to the state and local municipalities when the inevitable rail trail proposals come through. Or...in this case...they're just content to sit on it forever because if they do sell the Fitchburg Sec. it'll fetch a higher price as a contiguous line. Been a bone of contention with the trail folks...Leominster and Fitchburg abandoned their trail proposal on this line because they didn't like how vague CSX kept the lease terms, and felt that they priced the value of an outright buy of that part of the line way too high. But that's how Jacksonville rolls; they'll sit on it forever until somebody pays their full asking price and not a penny less.
