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SJC ruling stirs trails dispute Property owners given claim to land By John Ellement, Globe Staff, 3/13/2003 In a ruling that could generate lawsuits and drive up acquisition costs for new rail-to-trail bike paths, the state's high court ruled yesterday that some property owners abutting abandoned railroad beds may have a legal claim to the land. The Supreme Judicial Court decision, the result of a lawsuit by property owners in Western Massachusetts, means that thousands of people who live next to unused railroad rights-of-way own the land to the ''centerpoint'' of the rail bed, attorneys said yesterday. But lawyers also stressed that the unanimous ruling is limited only to those cases in which a railroad had an easement to run tracks over the property - not when it had bought the land outright. ''All over the state are abandoned strips of land that used to have trains running on them,'' said Wendy Sibbison, the attorney for Williamsburg property owners fighting a rail-to-trail conversion project. ''This decision will affect all those abandoned strips of land - and that is a lot of land.'' While calling the SJC victory ''sweeping,'' Sibbison, as well as attorneys for the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, said the high court ignored a key legal question: Once the trains stopped running, did the easements expire? Some easements date back to the mid-19th century and Sibbison and her clients argued the easements ended once trains stopped running. In the Williamsburg case, train service ended some 40 years ago. Rail-to-trail planners, she said, ''simply need to do what every other public project needs to do in order to acquire land - they need to pay for it.'' But Alexander A. Bernhard, a lawyer for the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, said the easements survive under state and federal law because the restrictions on property were created to support transportation, regardless of the mode. Hikers, walkers, and bicyclists are - legally speaking - modern-day versions of steam and diesel engines, he said. Still, one attorney working on behalf of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy will travel to the University of Connecticut's archives, which house the corporate papers of the New York and New Haven Railroad, the last company to run trains on the long-disappeared Williamsburg tracks. Brennan F. Wall said he is looking for documentary evidence that the extinct company never intended to give up its easements. If he fails, he said, ''Then it's very bad news for the creation of a trail to run between Northampton and Williamsburg.'' Craig Della Penna, the New England representative of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, said only about 15 of the 60 rail trails now in planning, acquisition, or construction in Massachusetts will be affected by the SJC's decision. He, as well as a spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, said the SJC ruling will have no impact on rail trails being built over MBTA-controlled land. Della Penna also said only a few hundred yards of the 2.5-mile Williamsburg trail are impacted by the SJC decision. He said rail-to-trail projects in Milford, Stockbridge, Andover, and Newburyport are among those that could be halted because of property rights disputes. A spokesman for Massachusetts Electric, which purchased the Williamsburg rail corridor in 1971, said the company was studying the decision and declined comment. But the ruling was greeted with shouts of joy by Linda Sarafin Rowley, the Williamsburg resident who has spent the past eight years fighting rail-to-trail advocates and Mass. Electric over control of portions of her property. ''We won! Oh, my God, we won,'' she said in a telephone interview. Her enthusiasm quickly cooled, however, when she realized the limits of her victory. ''We won the right to go to court,'' she said. ''But, you know, if we hadn't won, I can't imagine what this would have done to property owners in this state.'' Rowley - and others in Williamsburg and around the state - see the rail trails as an intrusion and the easements as an illegal restraint on land they purchased years after the trains stopped running. ''If we had lost this case, it would have been devastating,'' she said. This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 3/13/2003. � Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. ____________________________________________________________ The following story appeared in The Globe Online: Headline: SJC ruling stirs trails dispute Date: 3/13/2003 Byline: " In a ruling that could generate lawsuits and drive up acquisition costs for new rail-to-trail bike paths, the state's high court ruled yesterday that some property owners abutting abandoned railroad beds may have a legal claim to the land." ____________________________________________________________ To read the entire story, click on the link below or cut and paste it into a Web browser: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/072/metro/SJC_ruling_stirs_trails_dispute+.shtml ____________________________________________________________ This message was sent by via Bob [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] through Boston.com's email recommendation service. 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