This Week in Abandoned Railroads: Norfolk Southern's Front Royal to Broadway Line Frozen

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

The line runs about 48.5 miles from milepost B 51.0 near Riverton Junction in Front Royal to milepost B 99.5 at Broadway, through Warren, Shenandoah and Rockingham counties. 

Image: Edward O Pollock III on Facebook, "Broadway, VA. Ex-Southern, currently OOS Norfolk Southern. These two signs mark the beginning of the inactive line from Boardway, VA to Strasburg, VA. Hard to tell from the picture but the rails are both cut. There are plans in motion to turn this section into a rail trail, or a trail with rails in the near future. Due to the funding involved and the lack of interest of a rail operator using the rail part of the trail, it seems more probably at it will just be converted to a trail without rails. I have been trying to get out and take pictures of the line before it possibly changes."

Norfolk Southern filed a notice of exemption to abandon it on October 5. On October 22 the Board issued what it called a "housekeeping stay." It postponed the date the abandonment could take effect and paused every deadline, including the environmental review and any offer to buy the line to keep it running, until further order.

Between November 6 and November 10, nine parties filed. Eight asked the Board to keep the pause in place:

• Wholesome Companies, a fats and oils processor in Edinburg

• The Virginia Cattlemen's Association

• Joseph A. Bosco, a former special assistant to Transportation Secretary John Volpe, who writes about the Nixon-era decision to preserve deactivated passenger corridors

• Valley Railroad Company, a track contractor based in Shenandoah County

• The Shenandoah County Farm Bureau, with 1,600 members

• Frank W. Nolen, a former state senator from Grottoes, who saw the Shenandoah Valley Railroad bought out of an abandonment thirty years ago. That railroad now carries about 2,000 carloads a year.

• The York County Board of Commissioners in Pennsylvania (population 470,000), one of whose commissioners runs a rails-with-trails partnership there

• The Virginia Poultry Federation, which puts the state's poultry and egg industry at $17.8 billion in economic activity

The letters ask for the same thing in nearly the same words: hold the abandonment notice and the request for trail use in abeyance, so the case for keeping freight service gets a full hearing.

The ninth filing went the other way. On November 9, the Town of Strasburg, which sits on the line, filed a letter dated November 6 from Mayor Brandy Hawkins Boies. Earlier this year the town council told Norfolk Southern it would not oppose the abandonment, as long as the whole corridor was kept intact through federal railbanking. The mayor cites the town's 2018 Comprehensive Plan and its Town Run Greenway, and asks the Board to deny the motion to pause and lift the October 22 stay. "The Town's support for railbanking is independent of who ultimately serves as trail sponsor," she writes.

Read side by side, the letters are not a fight between rail and trail. Nearly everyone in the docket says "rails with trails." The Farm Bureau's 2023 endorsement is headed "Rails With Trails," and the York County commissioner writes "Rails-WITH-Trails," citing 36 businesses and a 37.7 percent rise in patronage along his county's rail trail, which runs beside a working railroad. The real disagreement is over who holds the corridor while the pause lasts, and what the pause is for. 

The pause traces back to a different case. On September 9, the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation and its subsidiary, Manassas Gap Railroad LLC, told the Board they intend to ask for this same 48.5-mile line to be split off and sold to them. They plan to do it inside the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger case, and that application is due November 18.

On October 14 the Foundation also filed notice that it intends to offer to buy the line to keep it running, and asked the Board to pause the abandonment until the divestiture request is decided.

Norfolk Southern replied on November 3 that the Foundation's reasoning is "theoretical in nature," since the divestiture application has not been filed. The Foundation's reply the same day argues that Norfolk Southern filed to abandon on October 5, twenty-six days after the divestiture notice, to get ahead of it. It adds that evidence gathered in the merger case shows the railroad turned away requests for service on the line as recently as 2025 and 2026. Those are the parties' claims, not findings by the Board, which has not ruled on the request to pause.

As of Friday morning, November 13, no one had filed since the Poultry Federation's letter on November 10, and the Board's latest decision was still the October 22 stay. Nine filings in one week came in on this one corridor, and none in any other abandonment docket that week.

Two dates matter now: November 18, when the divestiture application is due in the merger case, and whenever the Board rules on the motion to pause, which ends the freeze one way or the other.

Elsewhere this week

Ohio: a trail deal for the whole line. On November 5, Norfolk Southern and the Scioto County Board of Commissioners told the Board they had reached a trail use agreement covering the full 24.43 miles of the Scioto County line, from milepost CT 80.57 to CT 105.0. The county takes on the right-of-way, the liability and the taxes. Not a mile of the line was left out.

Idaho: a railroad asks to hold its own corridor. In Clearwater County, BG & CM Railroad asked the Board to allow interim trail use over 27.5 miles from milepost 3.5 at Orofino to milepost 31.0 near Jaype. BG & CM succeeded the Great Northwest Railroad, which bought the line from Camas Prairie RailNet in 2004 and noted at the time that no traffic had moved over it in more than two years.

Here's what those terms mean in plane English:

• Notice of exemption: a shortcut to abandonment for a line with no local traffic for at least two years (49 CFR 1152.50).

• Railbanking and a NITU: a Notice of Interim Trail Use lets a railroad and a trail sponsor negotiate to turn a corridor into a trail while keeping it available for rail in the future. A sponsor signals interest with a statement of willingness (Rails to Trails Conservancy).

• Offer of financial assistance (OFA): an offer to buy or subsidize a line so rail service can continue. A qualifying offer postpones the abandonment (49 U.S.C. 10904).

• Abeyance: putting a case on hold until something else is settled.

Sources

All filings and decisions are from STB dockets AB-290 (Sub-No. 425X), AB-290 (Sub-No. 422X) and AB-872X, retrieved from the Board's public record on November 13, 2026. 

• Decision 53298, served October 22, 2026 (stay; response due November 3)

• Norfolk Southern verified notice of exemption, filed October 5, 2026

• SVBF/MGR notice of intent to file an OFA (Doc. 312699) and motion for abeyance (Doc. 312700), October 14, 2026

• VDOT statement of willingness, October 28, 2026 (Doc. 312752)

• Norfolk Southern reply to the abeyance motion, November 3, 2026 (Doc. 312796)

• SVBF/MGR reply, November 3, 2026 (Doc. 312799)

• Wholesome Companies (312813), Virginia Cattlemen's Association (312814), Joseph A. Bosco (312816), Valley Railroad Company (312817), Shenandoah County Farm Bureau (312819), Frank W. Nolen (312821), all November 6, 2026

• Town of Strasburg (312824) and York County Board of Commissioners (312827), November 9, 2026

• Virginia Poultry Federation (312829), November 10, 2026

• Joint trail use agreement notice, Norfolk Southern and Scioto County, November 5, 2026 (Doc. 312801)

• BG & CM Railroad request for a NITU, November 5, 2026 (Doc. 312803)

Location: Front Royal, VA 22630, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Famine Roads of Ireland: Pathways to Nowhere

Image
Across the rolling hills and rugged landscapes of western Ireland, one can find peculiar relics of a dark chapter in the island’s history. These are the Famine Roads - routes that climb into the hills, twist through valleys, and often end abruptly, leading nowhere. Their haunting presence is a testament to the desperation and suffering endured by countless Irish peasants during the Great Famine of 1845–1852. "One of the many roads to nowhere built during the Famine" (Image via sboins on Reddit ) The Great Famine , or Án Gorta Mór, was a catastrophic period in Ireland’s history, marked by mass starvation, disease, and emigration. Over one million people perished, and another two million fled the country, profoundly altering Ireland’s demographic and cultural landscape. In an era dominated by the rigid doctrines of laissez-faire economics, relief efforts were minimal, and assistance often came with cruel conditions. Under the Poor Law and its amendments, relief programs were es...
Read more

The Illinois & Michigan Canal

Image
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...
Read more

Old Chicago Amusement Park: An Idea Ahead of its Time

Image
In addition to the abandoned railroad , Route 66, and its two interstate highways, my hometown of Bolingbrook has (had) another gem that piqued my interest as a kid, one that I never got to see, Old Chicago Amusement Park. Today's blog represents the culmination of the most research and work I've done on anything on this website, mostly because I was attempting to make a book out of this, but I eventually found that I could not discuss much beyond what has already been said about this place. That being said, I believe that a blog is more than sufficient for what has been done toward this project already, so with that in mind, I hope you enjoy today's foray into the nostalgia of Old Chicago! Image of the Chicago Loop roller coaster. (Image via Bolingbrook Historical Society.) Like many kids growing up, I was fascinated with amusement parks. One of my favorite places in the entire world was  Six Flags Great America , located in Gurnee, Illinois. You can imagine my excitement,...
Read more