I love trains. I love the smell of creosote. I even love the ailanthus trees that proliferate on railroad tracks.

Those cars are being temporarily stored and not actually abandoned, even though the track has a generous growth of weeds. Railroads will use out-of-service tracks (no present active customers) to store strings of cars during slow business periods, or off season for the car's normal use. That way the track is still earning income from storage fees and this track use keeps yards and sidings from being cluttered up with stored cars.

Those aren't abandoned. They're just in storage. A random sign that some of them are relatively new is that, at <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="64">1:04</a>, you see a car whose reporting mark and number (FMSX 6(?)521) is written towards the top of the car. That's something they only started doing a couple of years ago. 99% of the graffiti is painted on the lower half of the car, and they finally figured out that putting the car data higher up means it doesn't get painted over so much. Having said that, the graffiti people have also realised that, if they avoid painting over the car data, the railroads tend to leave their work on the car, rather than painting over it to put the data back. So putting the data higher isn't needed as much now as it was, say, ten years ago.

Cool exploration! 👍

Cool but they are NOT abandoned so resist any desire to take "souvenirs". Weeds grow quickly and are expensive to control (which requires toxic herbicides) so only doing necessary plant control is better for the environment.

I wish they would fix up these old railroad tracks.