You can see this in SF Mission and the old Southern Pacific lines, and why some blocks are so oddly shaped, and why there are parks that have the strangest configurations. Out of place diagonal lots, parks, roads. Very hard to erase those legacy shapes.
Similarly, seeing long stretches of green or empty space and realizing that there's a giant water pipe underneath stretching from the Sierras, and that's why there will never be a house built on that <xyz> lot.
(Funny, and I never seem to find among my friends anyone else who takes interest in it.)
I find this fascinating, too. I'm in western Ohio near an abandoned line that connected Indianapolis, IN to Springfield, OH. The line is still very apparent in satellite photos nearly 50 years after the last bits were retired. Likewise, in the property records, the "scar" the line left on the land is clearly visible.
In a few places landowners purchased the parcels on both sides of the line and "reconnected" them, but mostly the line's legacy is a bunch of oddly-shaped property lines cutting across a grid of 80 or 160 acre fields. In those "reconnected" places it's interesting to see how the crops and soil have a slightly different appearance (or not-so-slight, in some cases).
Many of the little towns along the line have a "Railroad Street", too. The town I grew up in did, but I'm old enough to remember when the abandoned rails were still there.
Similar to the railroads leaving their mark, a few years ago I got a bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. I spent a few evenings laying in bed "flying" the line with Google Earth, seeing where the pipes diverge and following their separate paths, and seeing where they meet up again. Seeing how San Jose and Palo Alto are situated on top of the line is interesting. I'm resolved to visit the Pulgas Water Temple and any public spaces I can walk on top of Hetch Hetchy next time I'm in the Bay area.
I always get a little sad when I go looking for things like this. Today it costs a billion dollars per mile to build rapid transit, and yet there are cities where they just tore up their rapid transit system. My favorite is probably a branch off the Green Line in Chicago. You can start here: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8220133,-87.6169737,3a,60y,2... and zoom out and follow the entire route. A transit desert with lots of space for development, that way because the rapid transit route got torn up. (Info about this particular line: https://www.chicago-l.org/operations/lines/kenwood.html There are a lot of them in Chicago.)
There's a stretch of disused railway near here which is still clearly visible in aerial photos over 170 years after it was closed... (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newmarket_and_Chesterford_Ra... -- the line from Six Mile Bottom to Chesterford closed in 1851. This is about where it diverged from the still-existent Cambridge-Newmarket line:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/qXRZ84sd97A5gK4Q8 -- if you turn on the satellite-image view it's easy to see curving off to the south.)
I've always enjoyed the weird odd lots and the parks that fit in some of them in the Mission. Still hoping that eventually something gets done with the one by the Atlas Stair building [1]. I've also always wondered why Treat doesn't seem to line up with the rest of the line farther south, and this site says that it's because a small rail yard was there [2], which makes it look like Treat was a siding and the main line ran down Harrison.
Fun fact: this was also the line that used to take bodies to the cemeteries in Colma, which is why there are still a couple mortuaries around, e.g. the one right off 17th and Valencia amidst all the fancy restaurants, and apparently a working crematorium at 17th and Folsom?
When I was in New York for a week 15 years ago, I bought this book https://forgotten-ny.com/book/ and had real fun walking around to spot all the places in the book. Not sure how many survive still…
I used to visit Utsubo Park in Osaka. Walking the long corridor with the dividing hedge, it was easy to envision the airstrip it once was. But it isn't so obvious to me from aerial photos.
Seattle has abandoned railways that could be re-used for light rail at minimal cost (they actually sit there with rusting tracks on them). Instead, every effort has been made to destroy those corridors, so that tens of billions of dollars can be blown by blasting new corridors for light rail.
funny example, bellevue is the atherton of seattle. they caused such a stink during planning of the line 2 extension microsoft, boeing and t-mobile sent the city council a letter telling them to shut the hell up
Most of the old railways on the Eastside aren't suitable for new development because they're surrounded by low density suburbs. Any stations built along a new line would have very little traffic, making the whole system kind of pointless, unless it was designed as a high speed system. But doing that wouldn't be able to use the existing lines anyhow because they have too many curves.
I've really started to enjoy biking "rail to trail" lines in Kansas. The Flint Hills Trail is 115 miles of biking, relatively no elevation change... but the best part is absolutely 0 motorized vehicle traffic, making it quite enjoyable.
If you ever get a chance to bike it I would, and consider making a donation to the foundation that builds these out.
If you’re relatively close and interested in a long rail trails, I’d recommend checking out the Katy Trail next door in Missouri. It’s the longest rail trail in the US.
One of the rails to trails routes here in Virginia that I've ridden my bike on features a pretty large and relatively high bridge that spans acroases a river and much of the woods surrounding it. The more narrow bridge makes it easier to see over both sides like a typical pedestrian bridge but having that experience in the middle of the woods and above the trees was rather magical.
Very interesting site, although not all the rail routes listed are actually abandoned per se. For example, I live next to a popular and well-maintained trail that used to be a railway, and the site still lists it as an abandoned rail line.
Abandoned for rail use though. If you are hiking somewhere like the allegeny national forest, these abandoned rail routes are a boon since they are generally raised up out of mucky ground, flat, and easy to navigate along if you know which one you are on. Hunters frequently just walk along the abandoned railways when searching for game. Why not call it a trail at that point? IMO because this isn't built like a trail (which can have complicated terrain or scrambles up or down some steep terrain), its built like a railway, and should be marked as such on a map since that will tell you a lot about the conditions on that route (raised, flat, generally free of obstructions short of fallen trees since abandonment)
Rail trails weren't created just by being left to rot, they had to be legally abandoned by the railroad before they could be converted into trails (in the US, anyway).
I noticed the same for my local area. The site listed an abandoned rail that has long since been turned into a popular paved bike path. The pictures for the rail even show the bike path instead of rail.
The large Vermont line this site returns was a causeway across lake champlain which is an active enough bike path that there is a seasonal ferry service for the portion of the line that used to be a bridge. Whether there are tracks there or not these still leave visible scars across neighborhoods.
I remember I used to go to this old railroad bridge and hang out and fish, there were signs of life there, bb gun marks on the metal, graffiti, beer bottles. I wasn't the only one spending time in this space.
It made me think about how we think of infrastructure as animals. When we think of a road, we think of it in much the same way we think of a forest or a river. It's just there, a permanent part of the landscape. But these things must be maintained, and all of it will be ruins one day. Every single thing we have built will lose it's purpose, and eventually it's form. And in much the same way you see things like wasps and pigeons moving into unused structures, humans will do the same in our own human way.
Saw the posting and wondered if the site listed any of the many abandoned lines I see here in Montana. Turns out it does: https://www.abandonedrails.com/montana
I'm particularly fascinated with the Homestake Pass line, which is easily visible from the adjacent I-90 freeway -- you can see the rails are still in place. Apparently it was never actually closed, they just never ran another train after some date in the 1980s. Subsequently there have been some tunnel collapses that make the line unusable.
I sometimes question how such items come to be posted on HN as many of the non-tech posts here I share great interest in and this topic is no exception.
I live next to one of these abandoned railroads, one of the earliest in the country actually, which Daniel Boone wrote about riding along with many U.S. Presidents as well as Kings and Queens of foreign countries. The items I have recovered from surface hunting and metal detecting this area have been eye opening from many aspects. The U.S. National Archives has the blueprints of the design for this railroad I live next to digitized and available online and many years ago I studied it out of curiosity for the value of understanding the history of my area. What I could not have known at that time of studying was that a few weeks later I would discover pieces from the construction that matched the U.S. National Archive designs to a T - I was stunned. I have also since come to learn these pieces are in great demand from avid railroad collectors but I just do it for the lulz and not the money. Through my 10 years of researching and exploring historical information in my area I would share with everyone that if you live near a historical location and have interest in the past do your research first.
As a serial entrepreneur my point for the HN community is that opportunity is everywhere and in studying history one can discover exactly where to look for such opportunity. This logic applies to nearly everything.
we do a terrible job of corridor preservation in the states. lots of converting old rail right of ways to trails or redeveloping them. the utility of simply leaving them empty, especially in urban areas, is hard to overstate.
probably the example in the bay is the dumbarton line, which has been preserved and in a world where CAHSR wasn't politically compromised would be the route off of the caltrain towards the altamont pass. the altamont alignment is technically superior to the chosen pacheco alignment on all metrics (cost, speed, operational constraints), but pacheco was chosen due to lobbying by san jose politicians, who, suffering from a massive inferiority complex, demanded that podunk san jose's diridon intergalactic was on the main line and not served by a branch. that decision, btw, pretty much single-handedly compromises the utility of CAHSR. it severely constraints the tph into SF, makes the SF-sacramento trip uncompetitive, and adds billions in unnecessary infrastructure costs
another example is the vasona branch, which branches off the caltrain right of way around cal ave, and slated to be used for a BART line to los gatos during the early days of BARTs development.
>lots of converting old rail right of ways to trails or redeveloping them
Once you make a decision that you don't want something any longer you can't just keep it in stasis forever just in case. As others have mentioned, in many cases, rails converted to trails do maintain railroad right of ways against a future change of heart. Of course, in practice, converting a well-used rail trail back to rail of some sort would be deservedly unpopular in most cases.
There is some great potential for the land these old rails occupied if they are still owned by the rail company but no longer have tracks. Some of the spaces in urban/city areas are probably not the most desirable places, but others can (and have been) transformed into interesting spaces.
A great California Bay Area example is the REAP Center in Alameda. It's on a half mile of old rail line easement that's now what you might call an Urban Farm Makerspace, though those that make it happen would describe it much more eloquently.
I've stayed there a number of times when visiting, and it's this wonderfully peaceful place where you feel like you're away from the city, but are close to the estuary with Jack London Square basically in sight.
If you're ever wanting to see what an old rail line space can turn into, go check it out. It's anything but an "abandoned rail line".
My favourite part about https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ is that it shows abandoned and razed tracks, although you have to zoom in somewhat. I wonder if there is a way to make it highlight those tracks at a higher zoom level.
Here's one in Austin - it's pretty cool to see how other infrastructure has used it's Right of Way, including the Southern Walnut Creek Trail, electrical transmission lines, and other roads - https://www.abandonedrails.com/georgetown-to-pershing
Note: this is next to another rail line that is still in use. I think the commentors on the site discuss that, but I don't quite understand what they are saying.
Edit: looking at this further - the Right of Way is nearly intact for most of it's original length. It would be so cool to have a bike trail for this entire thing.
Some routes were taken from rancher via eminent domain or similar. Basically forced easement onto private property. Some of those easements no long exist with the rail routes being abandoned.
Can confirm. My family used to own a chunk of land that had part of an abandoned rail line on it (the rail and ties themselves were gone, but the path was very obvious) and the map shows some near it, but not that one.
It engendered lots of 'ghost train' campfire stories. And they installed a lot of infrastructure to support it, including highway overpasses and crossings - there are still a couple now-purposeless overpasses on Highway 69 that once crossed it.
There are plenty of abandoned railways in Canada, none of which seem to be available on this site. The claim of "in North America" is BS. The creator would be better off just saying "in the United States" considering that North America includes Canada, Mexico, and Greenland.
They have Felton to the Boardwalk run in Santa Cruz county as abandoned but Roaring camp bought it and runs tourist trains on that route. Weekends all year and everyday during the summer...
Edit: Searched the site and found it. Looks like the Felton to Campbell is the abandoned part. Not that you would know it from their main map...
There was an abandoned railway near my house when I was growing up. I used to go for nature walks there and see wildflowers, hummingbirds, butterflies, etc.
[+] [-] supernova87a|3 years ago|reply
You can see this in SF Mission and the old Southern Pacific lines, and why some blocks are so oddly shaped, and why there are parks that have the strangest configurations. Out of place diagonal lots, parks, roads. Very hard to erase those legacy shapes.
Similarly, seeing long stretches of green or empty space and realizing that there's a giant water pipe underneath stretching from the Sierras, and that's why there will never be a house built on that <xyz> lot.
(Funny, and I never seem to find among my friends anyone else who takes interest in it.)
[+] [-] nedrylandJP|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvanAnderson|3 years ago|reply
In a few places landowners purchased the parcels on both sides of the line and "reconnected" them, but mostly the line's legacy is a bunch of oddly-shaped property lines cutting across a grid of 80 or 160 acre fields. In those "reconnected" places it's interesting to see how the crops and soil have a slightly different appearance (or not-so-slight, in some cases).
Many of the little towns along the line have a "Railroad Street", too. The town I grew up in did, but I'm old enough to remember when the abandoned rails were still there.
Similar to the railroads leaving their mark, a few years ago I got a bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. I spent a few evenings laying in bed "flying" the line with Google Earth, seeing where the pipes diverge and following their separate paths, and seeing where they meet up again. Seeing how San Jose and Palo Alto are situated on top of the line is interesting. I'm resolved to visit the Pulgas Water Temple and any public spaces I can walk on top of Hetch Hetchy next time I'm in the Bay area.
[+] [-] jrockway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm215|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farnsworth|3 years ago|reply
It's sad to me that we lost so much to turn cities into a grid of highways.
[+] [-] splonk|3 years ago|reply
Fun fact: this was also the line that used to take bodies to the cemeteries in Colma, which is why there are still a couple mortuaries around, e.g. the one right off 17th and Valencia amidst all the fancy restaurants, and apparently a working crematorium at 17th and Folsom?
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7558183,-122.412433,3a,75y,1...
[2] https://www.abandonedrails.com/colma-branch
Edit: much better article about what's going on with the abandoned lot on 22nd: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Forgotten_Railroad_R...
[+] [-] cgio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeopinion|3 years ago|reply
(Thanks for bringing back good memories.)
[+] [-] Scoundreller|3 years ago|reply
Here's one example where buildings have been built in the way: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Petite+Ceinture+du+12%C3%A8...
[+] [-] asveikau|3 years ago|reply
Near San Bruno Ave near division you can still see railroad tracks on some of the streets, partially covered by street asphalt.
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6122286,-122.1837204,121m/da...
[+] [-] andbberger|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hashmash|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
If you ever get a chance to bike it I would, and consider making a donation to the foundation that builds these out.
[+] [-] colincooke|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.abandonedrails.com/durham-to-duncan
[+] [-] tshaddox|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katy_Trail_State_Park
[+] [-] gehwartzen|3 years ago|reply
Here is a picture of in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bridge_(Appomattox_River)...
[+] [-] codyb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beckler|3 years ago|reply
https://www.pathfoundation.org/our-trails
[+] [-] Melatonic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarf21|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarynate|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
Eh? What do you think an ‘abandoned rail line’ is? It’s exactly this.
[+] [-] saltminer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moenzuel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munk-a|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] betwixthewires|3 years ago|reply
It made me think about how we think of infrastructure as animals. When we think of a road, we think of it in much the same way we think of a forest or a river. It's just there, a permanent part of the landscape. But these things must be maintained, and all of it will be ruins one day. Every single thing we have built will lose it's purpose, and eventually it's form. And in much the same way you see things like wasps and pigeons moving into unused structures, humans will do the same in our own human way.
[+] [-] dboreham|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bokohut|3 years ago|reply
I live next to one of these abandoned railroads, one of the earliest in the country actually, which Daniel Boone wrote about riding along with many U.S. Presidents as well as Kings and Queens of foreign countries. The items I have recovered from surface hunting and metal detecting this area have been eye opening from many aspects. The U.S. National Archives has the blueprints of the design for this railroad I live next to digitized and available online and many years ago I studied it out of curiosity for the value of understanding the history of my area. What I could not have known at that time of studying was that a few weeks later I would discover pieces from the construction that matched the U.S. National Archive designs to a T - I was stunned. I have also since come to learn these pieces are in great demand from avid railroad collectors but I just do it for the lulz and not the money. Through my 10 years of researching and exploring historical information in my area I would share with everyone that if you live near a historical location and have interest in the past do your research first.
As a serial entrepreneur my point for the HN community is that opportunity is everywhere and in studying history one can discover exactly where to look for such opportunity. This logic applies to nearly everything.
[+] [-] andbberger|3 years ago|reply
probably the example in the bay is the dumbarton line, which has been preserved and in a world where CAHSR wasn't politically compromised would be the route off of the caltrain towards the altamont pass. the altamont alignment is technically superior to the chosen pacheco alignment on all metrics (cost, speed, operational constraints), but pacheco was chosen due to lobbying by san jose politicians, who, suffering from a massive inferiority complex, demanded that podunk san jose's diridon intergalactic was on the main line and not served by a branch. that decision, btw, pretty much single-handedly compromises the utility of CAHSR. it severely constraints the tph into SF, makes the SF-sacramento trip uncompetitive, and adds billions in unnecessary infrastructure costs
another example is the vasona branch, which branches off the caltrain right of way around cal ave, and slated to be used for a BART line to los gatos during the early days of BARTs development.
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
Once you make a decision that you don't want something any longer you can't just keep it in stasis forever just in case. As others have mentioned, in many cases, rails converted to trails do maintain railroad right of ways against a future change of heart. Of course, in practice, converting a well-used rail trail back to rail of some sort would be deservedly unpopular in most cases.
[+] [-] pugworthy|3 years ago|reply
A great California Bay Area example is the REAP Center in Alameda. It's on a half mile of old rail line easement that's now what you might call an Urban Farm Makerspace, though those that make it happen would describe it much more eloquently.
I've stayed there a number of times when visiting, and it's this wonderfully peaceful place where you feel like you're away from the city, but are close to the estuary with Jack London Square basically in sight.
If you're ever wanting to see what an old rail line space can turn into, go check it out. It's anything but an "abandoned rail line".
https://www.reapcenter.org
[+] [-] Svip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|3 years ago|reply
Note: this is next to another rail line that is still in use. I think the commentors on the site discuss that, but I don't quite understand what they are saying.
Edit: looking at this further - the Right of Way is nearly intact for most of it's original length. It would be so cool to have a bike trail for this entire thing.
[+] [-] honksillet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bachmeier|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|3 years ago|reply
https://www.abandonedrails.com/faq.html
[+] [-] brimble|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sillyquiet|3 years ago|reply
It engendered lots of 'ghost train' campfire stories. And they installed a lot of infrastructure to support it, including highway overpasses and crossings - there are still a couple now-purposeless overpasses on Highway 69 that once crossed it.
[+] [-] coldacid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qiskit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BashiBazouk|3 years ago|reply
Edit: Searched the site and found it. Looks like the Felton to Campbell is the abandoned part. Not that you would know it from their main map...
[+] [-] nradov|3 years ago|reply
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/popular-roaring-camp-r...
[+] [-] mjg59|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitwize|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rrsmtz|3 years ago|reply