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Railroad - Related Real Estate
One of the goals of OATS is to promote new business and industrial growth in the southern Chester County, PA and northern Cecil County, MD regions, while preserving the agricultural and bucolic nature of the area.
One method by which this type of goal will be accomplished is to utilize the concepts of Smart Land Use and Smart Transportation during the planning and development of any infrastructure improvement project. These principles address not only the concerns of economic equitability, growth, and future expansion by identifying the needs and desires of the region, first at a local level, then progressing through the municipal, multi-municipal, county, regional, and state levels, but also combining these needs and desires with ecologically-friendly, intelligent planning and design.
Smart Land Use is a concept that, among others, promotes and provides for the re-use of currently existing "Brown-Field" properties. A "Brown Field" is a property that is currently under- or undeveloped, but had, at some point in the past, been the site of a fully developed business or industry, and is the antithesis of what is commonly referred to as a "Green-Field" site, whose definition is that of an undeveloped, "natural" state, without experiencing previous development.
(For the purposes of our discussion, we will consider current agricultural-use land [i.e., farmland] to fall within the definition of "Green-Fields".)
Below is a a link to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT) Bureau Freight Railway, Ports and Waterways web site, as well as a list of sites along the Octoraro Railroad Line we have identified as suitable for development due to their proximity to the rail line and their classification as an existing "BrownField".
For the PennDOT website, click on the "Properties" navigation button, select the "Search" button at the top center of the page, and select a county (in this instance select "Chester" county):
Contact info:
C. John Stevenson, Chairperson <c.john.stevenson@oatrains.org>; M. Walter Saranetz, Vice-Chair <m.walter.saranetz@oatrains.org>
Oxford Area Transit Services, 5 Mt. Vernon Street, Oxford Pennsylvania 19363 (610) 932-9670