> Hmmm, I had been thinking along the lines of upgrading the existing
> tracks, I had basically written off the idea of new construction due
> to right of way or eminent domain issues, but your idea of using the
> highways is intriguing; I hadn't considered that. There might also be
> room in many places to build new track alongside existing lines.
> Being in real estate, I see a lot of tax maps, and in this area
> anyway, the railroad right of ways seem to be rather generous. I
> don't know if it is a safety issue to keep things away from the track
> or if it was done with an eye towards future expansion, but the
> railways seem to control a lot more real estate than their tracks are
> actually using.
The county I grew up in is 70% federally owned, that's pretty common
in the Northwest, Idaho as a whole is in that ball park as well. The
funny thing is that about half of downtown Grants Pass, OR is owned by
Union Pacific. Much of this land, aside from what was never settled in
the homestead days was from railroad land grants that were seized when
the rail lines of the 1880s and 1890s failed to build all the lines
they were promising.
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