The Abandoned Railroad Map of Washington State

As we've done for the States of Illinois, Rhode Island and Florida, we've completed a static map of Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines based on the abandonments, railbanked corridors, and out-of-service lines in the State of Washington.

Abandoned/Out-of-Service Railroad Corridors in Washington State, 2021. FRRandP creation in QGIS using Mapbox Streets v10 as a background and state/county lines from US Census data.

Clicking on this image will bring up the map in its original size. This data was gathered by us over the last five years and is available on our Abandoned & Out of Service Railroad Lines Map, and where we had missing/incomplete data, we pulled data from the WSDOT GIS Data Catalog, who maintains a shapefile of railroads active and abandoned in the State. Neither ours nor WSDOT's data is completely encompassing however, as there are numerous logging railroads that have not been mapped, many of which have little/no traces left, similar to our map in Florida.

Most prominent in the central part of the State is the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension, which large swaths remain abandoned from just east of Seattle all the way to beyond the State line in Montana.

Thanks as always for reading!

Location: Washington, USA

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