So you can abandon and railbank as a trail, or run a railroad, but not both. Interesting. Not unexpected, considering that trails in the backyard are just about as popular as railroads. If the lawyer has as many cases as claimed around the country, there must be some record of how successful they are.

The cities and counties and the state should be parties too, since they're the ones who forced the trail to be in the rr r/w. Funny thing is that if payments must be made, they won't always be to the current adjacent landowner, if somebody else is the more direct successor to the original landowner.

If the trail has to go away, that should make more room for double-tracking SMART. In the photo that leads the article, it sure looks like the trail is where a second track would go.