[fotbr]

They did a lot of the "rails to trails" stuff around here as well, but the underlying deal is that it's all technically land-banked and the railroads can claim it back at basically any time as long as it gets put to active use.

[kjs3]

You still have to rebuild the infrastructure from scratch. So yes, we can piss off all the new users by reclaiming the right of ways (technically). But there's still a huge cost in recreating what was torn up to make it useful for a different purpose. My own opinion is that between the "piss off new users" and "cost of rebuilding", these right of ways will stay "rails to trails" forever. Which, again, isn't a bad thing.