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...