Like many people, I am sad that the extension of the Greenway Trail through Concord will kill the Scenic Railriders business with its quirky pedaled train cars.
On the other hand, I can’t wait to see what sort of machinery CSX brings here to pull up and haul off six miles of steel rail that by my estimate weigh at least 500 tons.
CSX, the railroad giant that owns the abandoned line, hasn’t confirmed what they’re going to do, but it’s a safe bet they’ll remove the rails, said Eric Oberg, senior director of programs for the national Rails-to-Trails Conservancy.
“The scrap steel value in those rails is pretty high,’” he said. Each mile of track is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. “They are an asset, not a liability.”
I’m guessing that the line uses 115RE rails, which has long been the North American standard for long-distance train tracks. These weigh 115 pounds per yard and are generally almost 40 feet long.
It’s no easy task handling a 1,500-pound piece of steel almost as long as my living and dining rooms combined. You can find lots of videos online of equipment being used to do just that, usually involving big mechanical arms with cool-looking claws and bored-looking operators sitting in the cab.
One thing that simplifies the process is that CSX won’t have to build access roads. They can just ride their giant machine to the end of the line and yank up the rails as they go backwards.
It’s not impossible that some rail could be left, as the Cotton Valley Rail Trail in Wolfeboro demonstrates. It is one of three abandoned rail corridors taken over by the state that still have some rails intact. On Cotton Valley, people hike or bike on paved trails alongside and sometimes across rails, which are used occasionally by local fans to run small motorized rail cars.
But that’s an anomaly. “It sounds cool but in 20 years of doing this, I can say it’s extremely rare,” said Oberg.
Here’s a confession: I have never used a rail trail. I belong the school of New Hampshire thought that says hiking only counts if you’re stumbling over rocks and roots while going uphill, uncertain when you’re enjoying it and when you aren’t. But I’m in the minority.
There are well over 2,000 designated rail trails in the U.S. The system is an outgrowth of the National Trails System Act, signed in 1968 back when the federal government did big things that helped society even if nobody could profit from them. The rail-banking law of 1983 also helped create a legal framework for preserving all those long, skinny tracks of land where trains used to run.
Some railroad fans hate the trails, arguing that they encourage companies to remove rails, making it virtually impossible for trains to ever return. Oberg argues that it’s the opposite.
He said rail trails make use of the corridors and give people a reason to keep them intact rather than letting them be chopped up for development.
“It’s often the only viable way to preserve a corridor. Without the corridor, nothing is going to go there. Whether it’s a train, whether it’s a trail, whether it’s a rail-bike, whether it’s a freaking tube that sends you 10 million miles an hour in the future — without the actual linear land, nothing is possible,” he said.
“There’s a reason current rail traffic is no longer there. You can’t just say ‘leave it a railroad’ because that’s not happening.”
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