Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit

Hello all! We will be running a weekly post about what happened with regards to abandoned railroads in the STB dockets in the past week, as the railroad network is not a static map, and lines can and do go from in service to out-of-service, and sometimes even back again ! This will be a weekly post with items from the STB; and in the future, we intend to have a monthly foreign counterpart, although that is still a work in progress as work continues on finding appropriate sources for foreign railroad abandonments. This is the first of such posts, please let us know if there's anything else you'd like to add to these in the future. Thanks as always for reading! In one week, nine letters arrived at the Surface Transportation Board about a single 48.5-mile railroad in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Eight asked the Board to keep waiting before letting Norfolk Southern abandon the line. One, from the Town of Strasburg, asked it to stop waiting. A Shenandoah Valley line, on hold Th...

Despite being one of hundreds of failed short-lined railroads throughout the United States, the Farmers Union Railroad is notable for a number of reasons. In 1875, the company was incorporated in the State of Iowa to build a road from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River in the central part of the state, a distance of about 300 miles. Farmers Union Railroad Stock Certificate - Mike Martin Photo What wound up being built was a wooden-railed, narrow-gauge railway between Liscomb, IA and Beaman, IA, roughly between 10-12 miles in length. One engine and 10 cars was all the company could afford to run the route. As a result of poor construction, rolling stock, and lack of financing, the railroad lasted only months into 1876. I simply can't imagine a wooden railway operating anywhere near the length that the original charter for the road was considering. From Liscomb east to Beaman, IA, almost no trace of this railroad exists today, and as far as we can tell, no photographs ...

The Cincinnati Bluffton and Chicago ran between Huntington & Portland, IN between 1903-1917. ( Right of Way ). It was to run between its namesake cities, but it was never successful, like many short lines it suffered from a lack of investment and financing. Outside of a couple small spur tracks serving gravel pits, it could not create any freight traffic for itself to survive. CINCINNATI BLUFFTON AND CHICAGO RAILROAD – STEAM ENGINE 30 0-6-0 switcher, 1921 ( Val Trotter via Pinterest ) The original route was to run south of Portland, IN to Union City, IN on the Ohio Border. Had this connection been established, it would have been able to connect to Cincinnati, OH via the Cincinnati Hamilton & Dayton Railroad. At Huntington, IN, it did connect to Chicago through the now-abandoned Erie Railroad. The line opened in segments: Bluffton to Pennville was opened in 1903, from Pennville to Portland in 1904, and from Bluffton to Huntington in 1908. The never-completed extension between Un...

The Illinois & Michigan Canal connected the Illinois River at LaSalle, IL with the Chicago River at Bridgeport, Chicago, IL, creating a waterway between the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. This canal created a navigable route between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and helped solidify the fledgling City of Chicago as an early transportation hub, something that greatly helped the westward expansion of the United States in the early part of the 19th century. The canal's history is also tied to the United States' expansion into Indigenous lands. In 1816, the Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi nations signed a treaty with the United States that included the cession of lands in the region. Federal legislation in 1822 subsequently authorized a survey and provided land for the proposed canal. The route would eventually cross a landscape that had long served as a transportation corridor for Indigenous peoples and traders, transforming it into a major arte...

As I've discussed before, the City of Chicago has been most radically transformed in the recent past near the Chicago River. The area east of the river (and south of Roosevelt), once home to large railyards and industry, has been transformed into parks, condos and shopping centers. But what about the area west of the river? This is where things get a little more confusing, as East Pilsen is still quite industrious, but at the same time, is also undergoing some of the change that has been seen on the other side of the river. West Pilsen is now home mostly to shops, businesses and homes.  With the occasional tracks to nowhere. The history of Pilsen is interesting in its own right, and I highly suggest reading up on it, but my focus is on the gradual decline of railroads, especially in the last decade. If you're interested on the history of neighborhood, I recommend this page from  WTTW .  But from the photographer's perspective, it's quite easy to witness...

Centralia, Pennsylvania is one of those places where the popular story can easily become more interesting than the history itself, as evidenced by its plight being the basis for the first Silent Hill  movie, in an attempt to explain the area fog, more famously a motif of the video game series. Image of Locust Av in Centralia, PA, c. 1960. Unknown photographer, local archives. A town catches fire beneath the ground, a highway buckles and cracks, most of the residents leave, and a handful of people remain. The result is usually described as a ghost town. While Centralia is the most famous example, underground coal fires are not uncommon across the world. The Jharia Coal Field in India, for example, has been burning for over 100 years . Centralia, PA on the Ashland USGS 1947 Topo Map  with various Lehigh Valley Railroad lines. PA 61 is labeled as US 122 , which was an intrastate US Highway until 1963.  But Centralia was not simply abandoned overnight, and the fire was not a...

With how much Area 51 has been in the news recently, I figured it would be a good time to talk about one of the facility's more interesting (to me) pieces of infrastructure, at least that the US Government acknowledges exists, its railroad . An L.A Times article from 2014 notes the railroad as well. It states, "[Thornton "T.D"] Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51’s backyard. “Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground." This implies that this is the extent of visible railroad operations at the facility, but more might exist underground for testing purposes. First, let's talk about what we know. In the middle of the Nevada desert, or the "NERVA Test Site" on topo maps, exists a small railroad operation less than 7 miles in combined length. It is west of Groom Lake, otherwise known as Area 51, in an area known as...