Rail Trail - Railbanking

Railbanking is preserving railroad rights-of-way for possible future use. Railbanking leaves the tracks, bridges, and other infrastructure intact, relieving the railroad operating company from responsibility of maintenance and taxation. Often the tracks are put in custody of a state transportation agency, who then seeks a new operator for possible rehab or reactivation. This helps ensure the possibility of future restored rail service when new economic conditions may warrant resuming operation.

In places with many environmental laws and other governmental regulations as the United States, it is very difficult to restore an abandoned line, but it is easier with a railbanked line than one that has undergone a "total abandonment", as the Federal government guarantees the railroad the full rights to reactivate it. A railbanked line can be reopened within a year's time while an abandoned corridor could take years to be reactivated, if it was even possible. In railbanking, the government helps fund the line's rebuild. 14,184 route miles (22,694 route km) of railroad have been abandoned in the 25-year period from 1983 to 2008. Of that, 8056.5 miles (12,890 km), representing 56.8% of the lines abandoned in the past 25 years, were originally negotiated for railbanking agreements.

21% of those railbanking agreements failed; that is, they were ultimately abandoned. 5,079 miles (8,174 km) of those originally negotiated 8,056.5 miles (12,965.7 km) actually reached a railbanking agreement, representing 35.8% of the lines abandoned during the 25-year period. The remaining 43.2% of the lines, representing 6,127.5 miles (9,861.3 km), were lines that railroads never considered trying to have railbanked, and were abandoned in their entirety. In total, 9,105 miles (14,653 km) of the 14,184 miles (22,827 km) abandoned during the 25-year period were not railbanked (64.2%). Some railroads refuse to railbank lines, and instead sell the land in parcels to the surrounding landowners.

Since railbanking began in 1983, nine railbanked corridors have been approved for reactivation by the STB. Some of these reactivated corridors had only short sections reactivated, while others had the entire corridor reactivated. Two of these approved have not yet been reopened, though both are in the process (as of March 2010). Railbanked corridors are usually utilized as multi-use recreational trails for cyclists, walkers, joggers, snowmobiling, cross country skiing, and horseback riding.

The land over which railways pass may have many owners—private, rail operator or governmental—and, depending on the terms under which it was originally acquired, the type of operating rights may also vary. Without rail banking, on closure, some parts of a railway's route might otherwise revert to the former owner. The owner could reuse them for whatever purpose he chose or modify the ground conditions, potentially prejudicing the line's future reuse if required. However, the landowner must agree to keep the infrastructure such as bridges and tunnels intact.

Approximately 85% of the railroad rights-of-way in the United States were acquired by easement from the then-abutting property owners. Normally, when the use for an easement is abandoned, the easement is extinguished and the land is not burdened by this adverse use. In 1983, Congress passed what is now known as the federal Rails-To-Trails law codified as 16 U.S.C. 1247(d). The federal law took the property rights of property owners throughout the United States for rail trails. Several property owners sued the government as the law took property without compensation. In 1990, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the property owners were entitled to compensation for the land taken for these rail trails. In 1996, Mr. Preseault was awarded $1.5 million as compensation for the land taken for a trail through his property (see Preseault v. US, 100 F3d 1525, Fed. Cir. ).

In some cases, the infrastructure is removed regardless. Laws have been passed to remove infrastructure, in some case. For example, in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a law was made to remove all unused railroad overpasses. Another example is a natural disaster. If a flood washes away a railbanked railroad bridge, that is beyond the owner's control. The local, state, and Federal governments could give some financial help for the railroad to rebuild any infrastructure that may have been damaged or destroyed during the time that it was unused.

A single section of a route changed in this way could have serious consequences for the viability of a restoration of a service, with the costs of repurchasing the land or right-of-way or of restoring the site to its former condition outweighing the economic benefit. Over the full length of a railway's route with many different owners, the reopening costs could be considerable.

By designating the route as railbanked, these complications are avoided and the costs of maintaining a right-of-way are removed from the railway operator. In the United States, land transferred to rail banks is held by the state or federal governments and many rail banks have been reused as rail trails.

In the United Kingdom, thousands of miles of railway were closed under the Beeching Axe cuts in the 1960s and while several of these routes have subsequently been reopened, none were formally treated as land banks in the US manner. The Beeching closures were driven by the government's desire to reduce expenditure on railways, and so most lines were offered for sale to the highest bidder, a process which frequently led to great fragmentation in the ownership of former UK railway lines.