AB — Abandonment

What it is

“Rail line abandonments and discontinuances of services. This would also include proceedings in which there is trail use (i.e., rail banking).”^[B] The series began in 1972 when the ICC separated abandonments from Finance Dockets.^[N] The registry holds 6,646 AB dockets, 5,542 of them sub-numbers — one per line a carrier abandons.^[C]

What is being asked for

Permission to stop: to abandon a line (remove it from the rail network) or to discontinue service over it (stop operating, leaving the line and the obligation intact — often a lessee’s or trackage-rights operator’s request). Three routes:

• Application for a certificate under 49 U.S.C. §10903 — the full case, with a showing that the public convenience and necessity permit abandonment.^[N][R]
• Petition for exemption — an individual request to skip the full case. (49 CFR §1152.50 notes the difference)^[R]
• Notice of exemption under the class exemption for out-of-service lines, 49 CFR §1152.50 — the carrier certifies “no local traffic has moved over the line for at least 2 years” and overhead traffic can be rerouted; the notice is filed at least 50 days before the planned abandonment and is “effective 30 days after publication, unless stayed.”^[R] This is the route most AB sub-dockets take — the X suffix, on 3,370 of them.^[C]

What the Board can and cannot do

Grant, deny, or grant subject to conditions; and hold the door open for someone else to keep the line alive. An offer of financial assistance (OFA) lets a party offer to buy or subsidise the line (49 U.S.C. §10904); a public use condition (§10905) and a trail use / rail banking request under 16 U.S.C. §1247(d) can stay an abandonment so the corridor is preserved as a trail with the possibility of future rail use.^[R] The Board does not decide who owns the land afterwards, or what a state or town may do with a crossing; those are matters of property law and of other agencies.

What happens next, typically

Notice or application → environmental and historic review (an Environmental Assessment is required for “line abandonment, service discontinuance”^[B]) → decision or effective date → OFA, public-use or trail-use requests if any → the carrier’s consummation notice, or its lapse. In the record: 6,089 decisions, 1,407 environmental reviews, 674 notices of exemption; the commonest filings are reply (3,281), request for extension of time (2,255), notice of exemption (945), consummation notice (862), environmental materials (680).^[C]

Examples in the record

AB 55 (CSX Transportation’s abandonment docket, with more than a thousand sub-numbers), AB 167 (Conrail’s).^[C]