Planners Library

By Harold Henderson

Tied to the tracks. "Abandonment," writes Joseph Schwieterman, "is often the culmination of a process of divestiture spanning a half century or more." He elaborates on this theme in When the Railroad Leaves Town: American Communities in the Age of Rail Line Abandonment (2001; Truman State University; 350 pp.; $39.95 cloth, $24.95 paper). This is the first of two volumes, and it deals mainly with towns and railroads east of the Mississippi.

The book is a labor of love. Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University in Chicago, compiled a database on 3,000 main line communities that are now inaccessible by rail. From this database, he has plucked 64 towns and cities from Tuskegee, Alabama, to Salem, West Virginia, and written minutely observed, systematically organized, and beautifully illustrated profiles of their railroad history.

These case studies, averaging four or five pages each, bring together local history, railroad history, and planning history, and confirm that there are many ways of losing a once-dominant transportation provider. They tend to be more descriptive than analytical, which means that the reader seeking to glean useful planning information will have to dig for it.

Most pertinent is the section in each profile titled "Abandonment’s Legacy". That’s where we learn, for instance, of the abortive efforts to reestablish an excursion train on old tracks around Oberlin, Ohio (thwarted by Ohio Turnpike expansion), and the abrupt demolition of a historic depot in Crown Point, Indiana.

While Schwieterman finds much to lament in the loss of railroad service, he recognizes that change was in many cases inevitable. "It appears unwarranted," he writes in his final chapter, "to conclude that the abandonment of rail lines, at least in the long term, has had substantially negative effects on communities."