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Comment by binarynate | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting site, although not all the rail routes listed are actually abandoned per se. For example, I live next to a popular and well-maintained trail that used to be a railway, and the site still lists it as an abandoned rail line.

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Abandoned for rail use though. If you are hiking somewhere like the allegeny national forest, these abandoned rail routes are a boon since they are generally raised up out of mucky ground, flat, and easy to navigate along if you know which one you are on. Hunters frequently just walk along the abandoned railways when searching for game. Why not call it a trail at that point? IMO because this isn't built like a trail (which can have complicated terrain or scrambles up or down some steep terrain), its built like a railway, and should be marked as such on a map since that will tell you a lot about the conditions on that route (raised, flat, generally free of obstructions short of fallen trees since abandonment)

We call them "rail trails"

For more info, see https://www.railstotrails.org/.

Notable examples in Seattle include the Burke-Gilman trail, the Sammamish River trail, and close by the Snoqualmie River trail, etc.

The Virginia Capital trail is a good one at 52mi long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Capital_Trail

That site badly needs a map of all the trails they support. If there is one, I can't find it...

Usually rail trails are deliberately constructed and maintained however. Although the degree to which this is done varies. And it's also not uncommon for some section of a rail trail to have been worked on and other sections are in the plans for someday--whether because of money or local opposition.

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.

> For example, I live next to a popular and well-maintained trail that used to be a railway, and the site still lists it as an abandoned rail line.

Eh? What do you think an ‘abandoned rail line’ is? It’s exactly this.

Rail trails weren't created just by being left to rot, they had to be legally abandoned by the railroad before they could be converted into trails (in the US, anyway).

One of the reasons rail trails are fairly popular is because it preserves the railroad right-of-way for potential future use. Even if the rails are removed and pavement put down, it's far cheaper to pull the pavement up and re-lay rails if you need the line in future (like for light-rail or commuter service) rather than to have to re-acquire the right of way again or build an entirely new line. The term is "railbanking." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbanking

This actually can become a problem in the future. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland there was an old rail line converted to a bike path but always with the intention of adding light rail to a portion of it.

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.

I noticed the same for my local area. The site listed an abandoned rail that has long since been turned into a popular paved bike path. The pictures for the rail even show the bike path instead of rail.

The large Vermont line this site returns was a causeway across lake champlain which is an active enough bike path that there is a seasonal ferry service for the portion of the line that used to be a bridge. Whether there are tracks there or not these still leave visible scars across neighborhoods.

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