LogFAQs > #890762636

Alright, so this is a bit of a long story. No tl'dr.

We bought our house back in June. It was an estate sale, so we unfortunately did not know exactly where the property lines were, until a day before we bought the house.

As it turns out, a large portion of my yard, technically belongs to a local railroad. I would not have bought the house, had I known that 40% of our yard, wasn't really ours.

There's an area behind our garage that I mow and maintain, and it goes back to a woodline. There's about 40 ft of woodline before the actual railroad track. Plenty of buffer. Here are pics before we built the fence, you can see how much yard we would lose. Our property line is at the end of the garage. https://imgur.com/a/Lpj8t

One of the biggest reasons we bought a house, is so we would have a nice fenced in yard for our dog to run around in. (And possibly kids in the future.)

We contacted the railroad about getting a lease/permission to fence in this area behind my garage, along with the rest of our yard.

They say it's $500 just to apply, and that's no guarantee that it'll go through. In fact, one of the fencing contractors I was talking to, has never once seen them approve one of these applications. But he thinks they leave you alone if you just go for it.

$500 for an application, plus an additional permit through the city, would put me at $650. That's over a third of what I paid for materials and labor combined. I'm not made of money by any means, and could not afford this.

So I went ahead and built it. 3 months go by, and no one says anything.

Saturday, I wake up to a tree coming through my fence. Here's a topic with pics for that.
https://imgur.com/a/5ZFK0

Now I have to contact the railroad to get the other dead trees back there removed.

The guy that is coming out, is the same one who dropped off the application originally... he said my name looks familiar. Hopefully he doesn't realize I never submitted the application. But he does know he dropped one off.

I did tell them that I'm not looking to be compensated for the repair, I just want any other dead/hazardous trees removed. There are some long enough that would absolutely come through our house.

Karma's a bitch. I'm really hoping they don't try to hit me for the $500 retroactively, or fine me or something. There is absolutely nothing they need that section of yard for, so here's to hoping.

Part of me wishes I never called, but I don't want to worry about a tree crashing down, every time the wind picks up.
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