[Talk-us] bike rail trail as built vs as proposed and imported

[Alex Mauer]

On 08/11/2009 06:10 AM, Greg Troxel wrote:

> But, is "abandoned" really in use in other countries to mean what in the
> US we call "old railroad grade"?  (Here I am taking USGS norms to be
> established practice in the US.)  

Probably not; however, it is accepted practice in OSM.  As you say,
someone with more familiarity with railroad procedures and how they
differ between the US and elsewhere might be able to answer that.

> The Surface Transportation Board of the ICC makes abandonment decisions,
> and they are published by the federal government.  An example:
> 
> http://regulations.vlex.com/vid/railroad-abandonment-lamoille-valley-22682301
> 
> I'm not saying this is trivial to find,

I think that's a big understatement. I would go so far as to say that
it's nearly impossible to take an arbitrary piece of railroad track and
determine whether it's abandoned or out of service (in the US legal
sense) -- or indeed, whether it's in fact still in service.

If my understanding is correct:
* This several page document describes just one section of track.  So
there are many, many of these documents.
* This document just lists an intent to abandon a section of railroad.
It may or may not have been accepted by the relevant authority (although
it probably was)

Can you provide an example of the steps one would have to go through to
actually find this out for a specific piece of track?  As far as I can
tell it would involve trawling through
http://www.stb.dot.gov/decisions/readingroom.nsf/DailyReleases?OpenView
or http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/advanced.html (the latter of which only
goes back to 1995, and the former of which goes back to 1996)

So you might be able to find out if it *is* abandoned (If you're really
lucky it's on your other link at http://www.trainweather.com/aban.html)
but even that's extremely difficult, and it's even less possible to
determine that it's not abandoned.  It seems that the only way to do so
is to go through every single abandonment notice, and if it's not on any
of them, then it's probably not abandoned after 1995 -- though it would
be easy to miss it among the huge number of documents.  And if it is on
one of those abandonment notices, then you have to somehow figure out if
the abandonment was approved.

Do I have it right?

-Alex Mauer "hawke

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 261 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20090811/624a88c7/attachment.pgp>