The ICC Abandonment Filings are starting to show up on Abandoned Rails. I am going through the AT&SF’s filings right now, and so far the earliest one is from 1920. I have a little over 50 of them added so far, which is evident on the AT&SF’s page:

http://www.abandonedrails.com/gallery.asp?t=2&id=524

I’ve divided the filings from the regular content, so scroll down to the new "Other Abandoned Routes" section, and you’ll see a nice long list of ICC filings. (Look for the icon that looks like a scroll, they’re hard to miss!) Click on one, and that will take you to the information about the filing, along with an appeal to supply further information about the route either via email or by leaving a comment. The filings are also available on the State pages, such as Kansas:

http://www.abandonedrails.com/gallery.asp?t=1&id=16

As I’m working through the AT&SF filings right now, the only states that will have filings will be those in which the AT&SF ran, of course. I have about 150 filings to go (I think), so once I finish with those, I will move on to a railroad in the eastern part of the US, perhaps the B&O.

Anyway, introducing these filing records onto Abandoned Rails has given me a chance to address the other "unknown" abandoned routes (about 20 of them). If you don’t recall, the site also listed a couple of routes that were "unknown", mainly in South Carolina, that were known abandoned routes, but for which I had no information to present on the website. I now present these in the same manner as the filings (sans the filing information), to allow visitors to add comments about the line. Hopefully if enough people leave comments on a particular line, I can actually create an article from them, but we’ll see.

Back to the filings, a concern of mine which arises by adding these filings is that, with probably close to a thousand filings to add, I’m afraid that I will be presenting too much information at once. I haven’t added these filings to the Atlas yet, but when I do, you can expect that there will be a large number of blue markers all over the map, probably to the point of slowing down the responsiveness of the Atlas so as to make it virtually unusable. My thinking is that I will add different atlases, one that shows only abandoned rails articles (as it does today), and another that will show only filings. (By the way, for those of you using Internet Explorer, the Atlas has been fixed. As I use Firefox almost exclusively, sometimes I forget to check the "other" browser to ensure that my site works in it also. Which is important, considering that almost 70% of my visitors use IE, but I digress.)

If you're still awake, be on the lookout for more filings to be added for AT&SF in the coming days (or weeks). Adding a single filing takes only a couple of minutes, so hopefully getting through all those filings won’t take long. And of course, I will still keep updating the site with articles, maps, and such, it is just a matter of balancing the workload. And quite a workload it is!