» continues on page 14 » 13 Professional Land Surveyors of Oregon | www.plso.org “property” the presence or absence of title was inescapably implicated, presenting a classic example of the fact that every word used in a contract must be very thoughtfully chosen. To all appearances, the reality of the situation is that the word “property” was improperly used by the parties, in a poorly considered and shorthand manner, when documenting their agreement, they really meant that SF was agreeing to pay UP rent for any SF line or lines that were situated under the RR R/W, which in the misguided view of both parties were thus protectively blanketed by the RR R/W. Such an agree ment could of course be characterized as a very foolish one on the part of SF on one hand, at least at rst glance, since it would arguably appear that SF thereby voluntarily and unnecessarily subjugated itself to UP. On the other hand however, the agreement had the practical eect of shielding SF from the need to deal with any other parties, specically the fee owners of the land in which the SF lines were installed, as long as those parties remained ignorant of their land rights, so in that respect it was a distinctly benecial arrangement for SF as well as UP. In addition, the implicit deception regarding the title status of the land occupied by the RR R/W, which was manifest in the agreement, could have been attacked at any point in time on the grounds that it amounted to a conspiracy between UP and SF, to defraud the owners of the lands underlying the RR R/W, or at least to leverage their ignorance of their land rights, as a way of unjustly excluding them from any nancial benet derived from the combined industrial venture. e truth of the matter however, is far more likely to be that the entire land use agreement was simply a product of plain ignorance on the part of both UP and SF, as to the true nature and extent of the title held by UP constituting the RR R/W, in which event it was a monumental but innocent blunder. Quite interestingly in this same vein, as noted above, the problematic agreement originated in the 1950s, when the railroad and pipeline interests were in legal eect unied through close partnership, so it was denitely a mutually benecial arrangement serving a genuinely common purpose at that time. at close relationship had been severed however, also as previously noted, which had a dual eect, not only turning the parties into adversaries, but also importantly placing them upon distinctly separate corporate platforms, with distinctly dierent objectives, which meant that they were no longer working in unison, as one entity with a common purpose, the great legal signicance of which we will soon observe. roughout the prior litigation, UP had maintained that the title issue was irrelevant, because there was never any controversy over which SF line or lines were subject to the contested agree ment, and SF had contractually agreed to pay rent to UP in all of the relevant locations, without any regard to the title held by UP, so there was no need to embark upon an investigation of the nature or quality of any of the title held by UP. In addition, UP could have built a reasonable argument that the use of the word “property” in the agreement was simply a mutual mistake, and thus sought reformation of the agreement to eliminate and replace that word with words which better dened the location of the SF facilities, in accord with the true intent of the parties. Finding no justication for bypassing the title issue however, the CCOA deemed it necessary to squarely address that issue and proceeded to do so, potentially awakening the many sleeping servient land owners to their opportunity to assault SF for making unauthorized use of their land. One exceedingly important element in this legal resolution process, at least, was abundantly clear, and that was the fact that all RR R/W created by means of the federal RR R/W grants was intended solely to serve railroad purposes. Dening the full or proper meaning of the phrase “railroad purpose” therefore logically became the second issue of controlling signicance to be addressed by the CCOA. Mindful that the federal grants in contention were not merely typical conveyances, they were federal laws, the CCOA reminded the litigants that like all other laws the meaning of such granting language is dictated solely by the will and the intent of Congress at the time the enactment was made. e well documented Congressional intent clearly demonstrated that the Act of 1875, and all of the relevant subsequent Acts, provided the railroads with only an exclusive easement running no deeper than the surface, the CCOA found, while observing that the Congressional intent regarding the land rights or property rights conveyed by the earlier Acts were not as clearly dened. Nonetheless, the CCOA concluded, there can be no question that UP held no fee interest in any portions of the RR R/W descending unto UP from the 1875 Act or any later Acts, because “the 1875 Act granted the railroad substantial rights to the surface…but it did not make the subsurface the property of the railroad” since granting fee title to the subsurface to any railroad company was clearly deemed to be both unnecessary and inappropriate by Congress in formulating those Acts. Having thus specied that any RR R/W acquisitions made aer 1875, by virtue of federal grants, were not within the scope of the land use agreement between the litigants, and therefore required no valuation, the CCOA moved on to evaluate the rights of UP under the earlier federal grants, which contain no stipulation that the granted RR R/W consists of an easement. Once again, the decisive factor in ascertaining the scope of the title which vested in the railroads under those early Acts was the intent of Congress in using the phrase “railroad purpose”, the CCOA emphasized. If any protable endeavor in which any railroad might engage quali- es as an activity serving a railroad purpose, then UP could prevail, but approving such a policy would in legal eect give all railroads the capacity to dene what constitutes a railroad
PLSO_MayJune2015
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