Railroad "Right of Ways" can be easy, hard, really hard, or nearly impossible, but like many survey problems, they require extensive research and vary a great deal depending on where you are, and what "kind" of right, entitlement, and/or under what authority was in play in the first place.
Without monuments, sometimes there are whistle stops, fences, stone culverts, road crossings, etc, that are stationed on the Val maps.?ÿ So, locating those, along with the rails, will get me close enough that I'm pretty comfortable with the location.?ÿ And also that someone else probably isn't going to come up with a better location and prove me wrong.
@jph?ÿ
They aren't quite unicorn difficult but they sure are elusive. We found two on the last rural RR job and they fit the tract so well it made it easy. The other one we recovered in that area was a section corner monumented by the RR with a rail, it was there too. The problem with that area is I have two sets of VAL maps and a set of deeds, issued 40 years after the RR was built. The deeds, the Val maps are all different. The older Val map which probably predates the deeds fits the railroad and all the fencing. The deeds are a mess and even include variable widths depending on the time of year, wider in the winter, narrower in the summer.
The BLM surveys of the active lines make things easy. What is hard is the abandoned narrow gage railways acquired by the Alaska Railroad. Some are so abandoned houses have been built on them.?ÿ
@aliquot Very true.?ÿ The original survey of the Palmer-Sutton segment, was difficult as tracks had been removed, and very little evidence of the railbed, and some had eroded into the Matanuska River.?ÿ ?ÿ
Speaking of the Alaska Railroad, they are being tested in court over the extent of their interest in the land they were granted.?ÿ
This should be interesting. They more or less claim fee simple including subsurface rights and charge everyone accordingly.
Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.