Abandoned railroad routes in North America
abandonedrails.com
abandonedrails.com
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.)
Near San Bruno Ave near division you can still see railroad tracks on some of the streets, partially covered by street asphalt.
It's sad to me that we lost so much to turn cities into a grid of highways.
Sometimes you can find a gigantic tree stump here and there.
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.
That was the sticking point for this particular branch. It needed money in an era where trains were boring and the glorious automobile was our savior, so wasn't going to get any money. It turned out that was not the best long term solution, and that's the sad part. People were onto something with this whole "streetcar suburb" and dense ubran rapid transit system. But, it hit some rough patches, and here we are today. (Overrun by cars and their pollution, but without a transit system that would let people get rid of their car.)
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...
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9714622,-83.004088,3a,75y,18...
Here's one example where buildings have been built in the way: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Petite+Ceinture+du+12%C3%A8...
(Thanks for bringing back good memories.)
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6122286,-122.1837204,121m/da...
Though I have gotten hate mail calling me an uninformed idiot to imagine that railroad tracks paralleling the most congested freeway in the state could be used for light rail. No, it must be destroyed.
This isn't the only track the county has destroyed. There's the line from Renton to Black Diamond that was used to stuff a mattress, and one paralleling Bothell Way that was used as a beehive.
why a developer would be against something that increases real-estate prices is beyond me
Really, what could be more useful? I'd use it all the time. Sure, it wouldn't go by my house, but I'd drive to the station and take it for the major part of my trip.
It doesn't have to be high speed. It just has to be faster than the gridlocked I405 with a predictable schedule. I always have to leave an extra hour early to drive to the airport because I might get stuck on I405 for an hour.
The Kirkland section of the trail actually gets a fair amount of use as a bike and walking route and connects sections of Kirkland that weren't easy to connect before. With the South Kirkland park and ride to at the south border I know a few people who used it to bike to the bus system.
Kemper Freeman I think has a lot to do with why the train line wasn't used for light rail.
That's the problem with turning it into a bike path. Sure, it's nice to have a bike path. But a bike path moves maybe 1% of the commuters that light rail would.
A bike path minimizes utility, rather than maximizes it.
The one section through Bellevue as shown does run along I-405, but on the wrong side with respect to downtown. So any trip along I-90 to downtown and beyond would take longer. There's a small stretch of the old line which did get repurposed at NE 8th street, but the old rail couldn't be kept anyhow because it wasn't elevated.
There's also the problem that the old rail is just one set of tracks, and so another set would be needed anyhow. Of source the original set would need to be replaced due to age. And there's the Wilburton trestle, which would have to be ditched and replaced for pretty much the same reasons.
The nice thing about the system that we're getting is that it connects to the new regions of the city which have higher urban density, like the Spring District. Keeping a few sections of the old line would result in slower travel times, and I don't see much savings in terms of cost.
Yes, it's on the "wrong" side of 405 from the downtown area. About a 10 minute walk (I've done it). Oh, the agony :-) But it's on the "right" side if you want to go to the hospital, or Whole Foods, or any of the other businesses there.
> There's also the problem that the old rail is just one set of tracks, and so another set would be needed anyhow.
Not necessarily. With modern technology, one set can service both directions safely. I'm also sure adding a track will cost <<< less than adding a new right of way and a new road bed and two tracks.
> Of source the original set would need to be replaced due to age.
I'm sure that replacing a set of tracks is far less costly than blasting a new right of way, making a road bed, and putting new tracks on it.
> And there's the Wilburton trestle, which would have to be ditched and replaced for pretty much the same reasons.
Or it could be - maintained.
Another person said it couldn't be done because a station would have to be added here and there at incredible cost. Of course, the only thing a station actually needs is a slab of raised concrete. I tend to be amazed at the monumental structures Seattle Transit likes to build as stations.
That would require rezoning low density residential areas, which is practically impossible.
> About a 10 minute walk (I've done it). Oh, the agony :-)
I've done it too. For a pedestrian, 8th street is a complete hellscape. How many people working/living in downtown would enjoy adding 10*2 minutes of hell each day to their commute?
> With modern technology, one set can service both directions safely.
How often is this done? If this would save costs, then all the new lines should be doing this, but I don't see it happening anywhere.
> Or it could be - maintained.
Bridges have a finite lifespan, and the trestle is almost 120 years old. It won't last forever, even if maintained.
If they can blast new right of way through it, they can rezone it.
> For a pedestrian, 8th street is a complete hellscape
I agree. I recommend 10th instead.
> How often is this done?
Beats me. With modern tech, how hard can it be? It'll work up to a certain level of traffic, then a second track will be needed, and it'll be obvious and the funds will be easier to get.
> Bridges
It only has to last long enough to prove the need. And light rail, being light, is not going to stress it. The thing was built for heavy freight traffic.
>> How often is this done?
> Beats me. With modern tech, how hard can it be?
All that's need is a handful of passing loops and modern signalling. It's how we in Scotland got the railway from Edinburgh to Tweedbank re-opened (part of the old Waverley route from Edinburgh to Carlisle that was closed during the Beeching cuts).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverley_Route
If you ever get a chance to bike it I would, and consider making a donation to the foundation that builds these out.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Erie canal trail (Buffalo to Albany), which is composed of a much higher proportion of bike trails?
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/11/05/nyregion/ny-e...
A mountain bike would certainly work but is overkill. The upright riding position of a mountain bike catches a lot of wind and you'll expend a lot of calories/water inefficiently, and they're not made for low rolling resistance.
Here is a picture of in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bridge_(Appomattox_River)...
https://www.texasmonthly.com/travel/traveling-130-miles-alon...
Notable examples in Seattle include the Burke-Gilman trail, the Sammamish River trail, and close by the Snoqualmie River trail, etc.
ADDED: And as noted elsewhere the railroad or its successors in ownership often still own the right-of-way--however unlikely it would be to revert a popular rail trail to rail use.
20 years later, they started the project and the local cycling groups are upset because their path has to be split and rerouted in places to support the new line. Delayed the thing many years as a result.
Eh? What do you think an ‘abandoned rail line’ is? It’s exactly this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/popular-roaring-camp-r...
The half dozen I know about in each CA and NY aren't listed at all.
Each morning, during my bike commute, I see thousands of car-drivers stuck inside their cages, stopped in traffic, and I feel sad for these poor people; and at the same time annoyed for the enormous space they take, the noise they make, the pollution, and how ugly their absurd machines are.
Less than 2.5 M trips per day, so let's say 1M passengers per day.
You don't have airplanes to replace land transit and your answer is irrelevant.
Alright, what's the relevant answer then?
Even in the best case of NYC where much of its rail infrastructure stayed active, and the area population soared, subway ridership hasn’t bounced back to 1946.
Foothill Expressway was originally a train line. If you know where the old Fry's Electronics was in Palo Alto, the line branched off from the main Southern Pacific line near there, went by the loading docks behind the buildings where Fry's was - it was a major cannery at the time - went through what is now Bol Park, and turned onto Foothill where the VA hospital is now.
Foothill makes a bend to the right at Homestead, but the train line continued straight through at that point, going through what is now the Trader Joe's parking lot. If you notice a diagonal NW-SE path through the parking lot that continues onto Homestead Ct and Peninsular Ave, that was the railroad alignment.
Highway 280 wasn't there at the time, of course, so the line continued straight through to the still-existing Union Pacific line that serves the Kaiser Permanente quarry, and then down to the line that parallels Winchester Blvd in Campbell. This right-of-way currently has three tracks on it: northbound and southbound light rail lines, and the Union Pacific line.
I used to live in an apartment that overlooked this railway, and it was great fun to hear and see the Union Pacific freight train that comes through twice a week. Just like at Fry's, you can see several of the loading docks in the buildings in downtown Campbell.
On the east side of that line, there was a branch that went south to serve the New Almaden mines. If you ever wondered where Camden Ave in San Jose got its name, it wasn't from the city in New Jersey. This line was called the Campbell-Almaden line, so CAMpbell-almaDEN is where the street name came from.
If you drive Camden Ave from Campbell, you may notice an oddly gentle right turn at the junction with Hillsdale Ave. This turn was gentle for the trains. Farther south, Camden takes a slight right at Clovis, just before Blossom Hill, and there is a powerline right of way that continues in a straight line where the railroad was. The tracks then crossed Guadalupe Creek and followed what is now Redmond Avenue, then turned south toward New Almaden.
Back to Palo Alto, if you know of Hawthorne Avenue, three blocks northwest of University, that was a train line too! Lytton and Emerson were streets at the time, but Hawthorne was a spur line that served the Catholic University in Menlo Park (now St. Patrick's Seminary). It branched off the main Southern Pacific line by the water tower, followed Hawthorne and then made a bend to the left onto what is now Middlefield, then a gentle right into the University. It split into two tracks on each side of the main building.
If you are interested in this stuff, I highly recommend the USGS topographic maps. They have the complete historical maps all online!
https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
For example, here is the 1899 Palo Alto topo where you can see that Hawthorne train line:
https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=8db99b827f55d7...
Ruby would have been a bit too hot a submission for me.
Many rail trails are still owned by the railroad with an option to make them rail lines again if they want.