Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit

It's been awhile since I've made a state level map of any of the US States, but I got a recent request to map the State of New Mexico, and figured it was time to put another feather in my cap! New Mexico's railroad history extends far beyond the busy mainlines that still cross the state today. From mining railroads in the mountains to agricultural branch lines on the plains, hundreds of miles of railroad corridors once connected communities that have long since lost train service. The map below highlights many of these abandoned and out-of-service railroad lines across New Mexico, revealing a hidden transportation network that helped shape the state's development. The map shows former rail corridors stretching from the mining districts near Silver City and Dawson to agricultural branches around Clovis, Tucumcari, and Roswell. Many of these routes served coal mines, timber operations, ranching communities, and small towns that depended on rail transportation during the l...

The Frying Pan Line was a spur line built by the Milwaukee Road to serve downtown Beaver Dam, WI. As it was a loop line that served the downtown area of Beaver Dam, it was given the "Frying Pan" nickname.  It was less than two miles in length from Beaver Dam Jct. on the mainline to the loop downtown, and thus is an interesting little spur line perfect for discussion from us. Beaver Dam on the 1914 Sanborn Map , with the majority of the Frying Pan line visible. (Library of Congress) It was built late in 1882, and used some of the right of way of the never built Beaver Dam & Baraboo Railroad, which was an early ancestor of the Milwaukee Road. The Milwaukee constructed a line northwest of Beaver Dam as opposed to heading south and west towards Baraboo, and thus the "Frying Pan" served the Beaver Dam manufacturing concerns, while the mainline bypassed the majority of the town. Fact on the "Frying Pan" line from  Beaver Dam's 175th Anniversary Brochure...

For the better part of the last year, I've been stuck trying to figure out what appeared to be the trace of an abandoned rail line immediately west of Pinckney, MI, which is easily visible in the satellite imagery below. Google Maps image of the line west of Pinckney via our Abandoned & Out-of-Service Railroad Lines map . The line in question diverges from the right of way of the former Grand Trunk Railway line that is now part of the Lakelands Trail . The grading is fairly consistent for the first 10 miles of line, and then just stops around the Joslin Lake area, which led me to believe that it was either a long-forgotten ice house spur, just like the California Ice and Coal Company Line in Antioch, IL, or a logging railroad of some kind, of which numerous operated in the State of Michigan, albeit usually in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula. However, after being unable to find any information corroborating those theories, I finally came across what appears to be the R...

As we've done for the States of Illinois , Rhode Island and Florida , we've completed a static map of Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines based on the abandonments, railbanked corridors, and out-of-service lines in the State of Washington. Abandoned/Out-of-Service Railroad Corridors in Washington State, 2021. FRRandP creation in QGIS using Mapbox Streets v10 as a background and state/county lines from US Census data. Clicking on this image will bring up the map in its original size. This data was gathered by us over the last five years and is available on our Abandoned & Out of Service Railroad Lines Map , and where we had missing/incomplete data, we pulled data from the WSDOT GIS Data Catalog , who maintains a shapefile of railroads active and abandoned in the State. Neither ours nor WSDOT's data is completely encompassing however, as there are numerous logging railroads that have not been mapped, many of which have little/no traces left, similar to our map in...