Railroads are governed by the Interstate Commerce Act which prohibits local governments from regulating railroads. This has come up time after time before the ICC, and still comes up before the STB.

Recent arguments have centered on whether a contractor providing services on behalf of a common carrier railroad have the same exemption (referring to transfer facilities), or if a long out of service railroad offering tourist service with little expectation of common carrier service still has common carrier rights (both lost their argument).

I think the issues with NCRA are:

1. They generally are not aware of railroad specific rules and proceedures.
2. They are a political body, and political considerations prevent them from rocking the boat.
3. Any time you have more than one government agency involved, they rarely will refuse to do what the other agency tells them.

In my OPINION:

The need for an EIR should have been waived, because there was no evidence that the previous rail operations or expected resumption of service would cause a significant enviromental impact. (There were some pre-exisitng spills that the cleanup was addressed.) Imagine the expense if every road project had to have an EIR and mitigate the potential impact from more traffic?

NCRA should have hauled the city of Novato into federal court and obtained an order against them for illegaly attempting to regulate and restrict interstate commerce.