Scott Fadness is not a popular person these days among railroad advocates in Indiana.
The mayor of Fishers, Indiana, favors ripping out a former Nickel Plate Road branch line that runs through his city to Indianapolis that until 2015 hosted excursions operated by the Indiana Transportation Museum, including its popular Fairtrain to the Indiana State Fair.
In place of the now dormant rail line, which is owned by a public entity, would be a hiking and biking trail.
ITM and other rail supporters have proposed building the trail alongside the rail line.
But Fadness has rejected that due to safety concerns, saying he didn’t think it would be wise for trail users to be within several feet of a locomotive.
It is easy for railroad advocates to dismiss Fadness as ignorant or to proclaim his position as ludicrous as an ITM spokesman did.
Indeed, those accusations probably are true. But overcoming the beliefs of officials such as Mayor Fadness will not be easy.
He may not be a friend of rail preservation, but it could be a mistake to consider him an adversary. He is someone who needs to be won over.
If anything, railroad advocates need to listen carefully to public officials such as Mayor Fadness. You can’t overcome opposition if you don’t understand it.
Rails and trails can and do co-exist. The Rails to Trails Conservancy says there are 1,600 trails in 41 states that are located next to a railroad line.
Yet the Conservancy said there are 10 times more trails that have been built on a former railroad right of way.
As a result more people think trail without rails than they do trail with rails because the former is most likely to be what they have seen and experienced.
One of those trails without rails is a couple miles west of the ex-NKP line on the right of way of the former Monon Railroad line to Indianapolis.
Fadness wants to emulate that trail and has adopted the type of “more beneficial uses of the property” worldview that worries Jim Porterfield, the director of the Center for Railway Tourism at Davis & Elkins College in West Virginia.
Porterfield was quoted in the May 2017 issue of Trains magazine as warning that heritage railroads are at risk when a community views them as entertainment rather than historical venues.
Porterfield told Trains that the typical arguments for displacing heritage rail lines include, “year round versus seasonal use, a greater distribution of income to local businesses, more people present, and higher property values along a trail versus a rail line.”
By one estimate, the ex-NKP line in Indianapolis needs $9 million in repairs to bring rail service back. A trail can be built for much less than that.
Mayor Fadness sees the situation as a simple cost-benefit analysis that weights heavily in favor of a trail.
Every rails to trail dispute has its own circumstances. In the case of the ex-NKP rail line, there has been internal turmoil within the past year at ITM that has harmed its credibility.
The location of the line in an affluent area of suburban Indianapolis also works against it. Such areas are a fertile ground for NIMBY opponents who know how to work the political system.
Some at ITM have also spoken about extending the ex-NKP to downtown Indianapolis and offering passenger trains there.
There may be some merit to that vision, but it would cost millions if not billions, to replace track that was removed years ago.
People who do not “love” railroads will laugh off such proposals as unrealistic given the existing available resources.
Mayor Fadness may have his mind made up and time is not working in favor of those who want to keep the ex-NKP branch intact.
If you are going to persuade public officials such as Mayor Fadness, you need to show him that rails and trails can co-exist. And you need to convince him on his terms, not those of a railfan who tends to believe that every foot of rail should be preserved.
The question is whether the railroad advocates have the skills and willingness needed to make the case for rail and trail.
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