Opinion ID: 852801
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: What Does the Railroad Own?

Text: The litigants have joined in extensive debate over whether the Railroad’s interest in the land at issue is fee simple or merely an easement, and the rulings in the trial court and the Court of Appeals reflect this emphasis. The nature of the Railroad’s ownership, the parties say, drives several of the issues presented. For example, does one owe rent to the owner of a mere right-ofway? Or, does application of the Joint Use Statute vary depending on the nature of the Railroad’s interest? This debate presents interesting questions of legal history. The Railroad’s operation predates by several decades the adoption of general statutes on railroads and corporations. Its corporate form and powers flow from legislative charters originally granted to “the Ohio and Indianapolis Rail Road Company” in 1832 and from later legislative acts affecting the operation of that company and its successors. 1 The legislature wrote statutes about the Railroad three times before expressly authorizing “fee simple” ownership of property. The deeds at issue in this case were acquired during the interval. Counsel thus contest whether references in those deeds to the powers of the charter should be read as giving only an easement and whether the third statute was “remedial” as we understand that doctrine today. It is difficult to imagine the creation of such a substantial enterprise as a railroad without buying land in fee, but knowing with confidence whether this was so would require considerable effort. The meaning of these intertwined Nineteenth Century documents turns as much on custom and practice as it does on Twenty-First Century rules of construction. While information on such matters is knowable, it is not surprising that the scale of the present litigation has made it diseconomic for the parties to pursue such an investigation. 1 These individual legislative charters were the ordinary method by which railroads took form under the Indiana Constitution of 1816. See, e.g., 1851 Local Laws of Indiana, ch. 62, 96 (authorizing James Emison, Chauncey Rose, Horace Shepard, and others to build a railroad from Vincennes to Terre Haute and northward). 3 These intriguing matters would certainly be central to resolving, say, a dispute between grantee and grantor, but that is not the nature of the litigation before us. In the end, we conclude that the statutory regimes applicable to this dispute lead to the same outcome regardless of the nature of the Railroad’s ownership interest.