Who answers for the track inside our fence?
Seven questions for anyone with railroad track inside his own fence.
The question this Read asksWhat does the track inside our fence cost us a year while looking after it is nobody’s job?
Exposure Read 2 · The Industrial Track
If rail cars come through your gate, you almost certainly own the track they come in on. Not the railroad — you. The plant, the elevator, the mill, the terminal, the transload, the warehouse park, the mine. The switch may belong to the railroad; past a defined point, the ties, the rail, the ballast, the drainage and everything standing beside them belong to the company whose name is on the building.
That surprises people, and it keeps surprising them, because industrial track sits in a seam.
So the track gets maintained to whatever standard the facility chooses. Usually that is no written standard at all, applied by people whose trade is the process, not the plant. The liability does not sit in the seam with it. It lands on the facility — through the indemnity in an agreement signed decades ago, through car damage billed by the car’s owner, through the shipments that stop moving, and through whoever is standing on the ground when it fails.
The Federal Railroad Administration writes the track safety standards for the general railroad system. Track the serving railroad operates over is inside it even behind your gate, and you answer for that track as owner (49 CFR 213.3(b)(1) and 213.5(a); 49 CFR Part 209, App. A). Where the standards do not reach, as on track inside a plant railroad that no general system railroad operates over, they set no inspection schedule for that track. Whether that exclusion applies turns on the facts of your installation.
Each rule cited here was read in its current published text on 13 NOV 2026, at the eCFR (current to 10 NOV 2026). The law changes after that date; read the current text before relying on any of it.
Run them yourself.
None of the seven questions below requires a railroad background to answer. They take an afternoon, a copy of your agreement with the serving railroad, and a walk down your own track. Run them yourself. That is why they are yours to run.
Where exactly does the railroad’s responsibility end and yours begin?
Your agreement with the serving railroad — a sidetrack, industry track or private track agreement — names a point. Find it in the document, then go and find it on the ground. Most facilities cannot point at it. Everything on your side of that point is yours: rail, ties, switches, derails, drainage, clearances, crossings and signage — whether or not anyone at your company has ever been told so.
Who inspects it, to what standard, how often — and where is that written?
If the answer is the crew would say something, that is not an inspection. If you cannot produce a written standard and a dated record, you are maintaining to no standard — and those records are the first thing asked for after anything happens.
Which way does your indemnity run, and how far does it reach?
These agreements commonly indemnify the serving railroad for occurrences on your track, and some do so without regard to fault. Read yours. It can mean that an injury to the railroad’s own employee, on your property, comes back to you. Then read your insurance and find out whether anyone who bought it knew that clause was there.
Are your clearances legal today — and were they legal when somebody built that platform?
Every canopy, pipe rack, conveyor, light pole, pallet stack, snow bank and parked trailer added since the track went in changes the answer. Nobody re-measures after the build. Measure it, write the figures down, and date them.
Do you weigh what you load, against what the car is stenciled to carry?
Overloading is not a paperwork problem. Check your scale calibration while you are at it.
What happens to your operation the day that track goes out of service?
Count it in dollars: what you cannot ship, what you cannot receive, what accrues while cars stand on someone else’s property, and what it costs to put it on trucks instead. Most facilities have never priced a single week without rail, which is precisely why the track work never reaches the capital plan.
When did someone whose actual trade is track last walk yours?
Not the switch crew. Not the plant engineer whose remit is the process and who inherited the track because it was on the site plan. Somebody whose trade is track. If the answer is never, or when it was built, then you now have a figure for how many years you have carried a risk nobody has measured.
A question you cannot answer from your own documents and your own records is already an answer. It means nobody owns the problem, which means you do.
The annual carrying cost of track that sits outside everyone’s remit.
Set it beside the cost of having it walked, written up and put on a plan.
What arrives.
The property, walked and written up
Every defect located by station, classed by what it will do rather than by how it looks, and ranked against consequence. Soft track under a loading spot outranks spectacular-looking rail wear on a track nobody uses. The ranking is the value — anyone can make a list.
Your agreement read against your ground
The clause numbers set beside what is actually out there, and the places where the document and the property disagree — a boundary drawn in the agreement that nobody has maintained to, a clearance obligation that a later building violated, an inspection duty assigned to a party that stopped existing. That disagreement is where the money and the liability both sit.
A sequence, with what each step costs now and later
Drainage first, then the work that drainage protects, then the work that can wait — each line priced to do this year and priced again to do in three, so the cost of deferring it is a number on the page rather than a feeling. A plan that does not price the deferral is not a plan, it is a quotation.
Something you can hand to someone who was not there
Written to be read by your board, your insurer, your counsel or the railroad, with the findings traceable to what was seen and where. A finding that cannot survive being read by a stranger is not yet a finding.
And what it is not
It is not an inspection under anybody’s regulation, and it does not make you compliant with anything. It is not written by a party who sells material, which is the reason it can recommend doing nothing. The finding stands on its own whether or not you engage anyone to perform the work — including us, and including after you have read it.
The seven questions above are the test of the firm that wrote them. Run them, and judge the firm by what they find.
Most facilities can run these seven questions without help, and they are yours to run. If you run them and find nothing, that is an afternoon well spent and you owe nobody anything.
If you find something you cannot resolve in-house — or would rather have the property walked and the agreement read by somebody who has done both from the railroad’s side of the fence — write and say what you found.
Our bench of career railroaders brings better than 160 years of combined field experience. Nobody we send learns railroading on your property. That is a standard, not a résumé.
Write and say what you found.
Write and say what you found, or call 928.605.7984 and say it. Not an impression — what the seven returned on your own property: your score, and which one you could not answer. The one you could not answer is the finding, and on most properties it is the whole matter.
You will have a reply within one business day, from the principal and not from a form. Writing puts you on no list. If what comes back says you have no problem, you will be told so. What comes back sets the next stage, or the work stops there. The full Exposure Read, with its worksheet, comes from the same address.
This page is general information about railroad practice and the rules it cites, as they read on the date shown. It is not legal, engineering or financial advice, it does not replace counsel or an inspection of your property, and reading it does not engage SteelWheels.Co.
solutions@steelwheels.co · 928.605.7984 · What happens when you write back