And this is the attitude that makes rail preservation so toxic.

Someone asks a question.

“Sit down and shut up”

1. Railway Preservation News does NOT exist to provide you with a forum to flog your frustrations, your anger or your philosophical differences with any entity, real or imaginary.

2. I suggest you read the RyPN Guidelines and the Post entitled Rant at the top of this forum.

3. To be simple about it: be civil, or begone.

What sometimes looks like stonewalling is simply the fact that nobody - not the railroad, or even the Authority, knows the timeline on ANYTHING that involves getting environmental permitting done. In this case, Trout Run was involved with some kind of endangered species, which means that the joint permitting (West Virginia and US Army Corps) is fully involved, that the bids have to be approved, agreements finalized, etc. And you get the Forest Service involved as an adjacent property owner here...I think.

In any kind of bid situation it takes a sometimes absurd length of time to review the bids, verify the contractor, make sure they haven't messed up, and get a contract signed, and until they get a notice to proceed, nobody knows when it will be done. Until you have a signed contract and everybody is happy with the permit situations, there's not an approved schedule. While an active railroad can often do things under an emergency work permit (which is how CSX or a class 1 can do it) an inactive corridor like this is treated entirely differently.

One thing you can be sure of is that if you are working in a stream, your work window is often confined to low-water periods, and that can really muck a contractor's timeline up. In 20+ years of tangling with this stuff, there are lots of scar tissue built up on my tongue. Of particular concern has become that the staffing cutbacks and turnover at the state and federal level can result in delay after delay resulting from starting cold with new people, and that's sure not unique to this project or this state. That doesn't make it evil, just incredibly frustrating to the outside observers.