Track ownership is irrelevant. As I and others have repeatedly noted in the forum -- including yourself -- CEQA is attached to the State money. Public money, whether state or federal, comes with strings. Among those strings are CEQA or NEPA, as the case may be. The point I was addressing above was in response to an earlier assertion that environmental regulations always apply. They don’t! If a federally certificated private common carrier wants to use private money to work on tracks over which it operates with federal authority, then there are no enforceable statutes or regulations that can be applied to require an environmental review. Rarely, exceptions to this rule have arisen where the carrier has "voluntarily" surrendered its preemptive rights in exchange for some consideration. For a variety of reasons, NCRA cannot use this preemption. And NWP Co. doesn't want to use this preemption because it wants the NCRA to pay for the work.