This inventory of abandoned New York State railroads was performed by NYS DOT between 1972 and 1974. Some of the abandonments they anticipated didn't happen. Other railroads have been abandoned since then. The status of some of these railroads is different. Some have been turned into trails, just as the NYS DOT hoped. Some have not (yet).
The Inventory PDFs came from the New York State Library Digital Image Project at http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/scandoclinks/ocm70660447.htm, but they're not there anymore. They scanned the images into PDF files at a nice high resolution (yay!), but they don't convert them into text. That's fine -- I'd have nothing to contribute if they had!
The inventory is split up into NYS DOT regions. I expect, given the differences in style between the documents, that they were done by ten people, one from each region.
I've cleaned up all the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) mistakes, and have put them into HTML format for the web. There were a few mistakes in the original documents. I've cleaned up all the ones I've found. I'll take responsibility for any remaining mistakes.
Each chapter ended in a set of locator maps. They show the route of the railroad and give the chapter number. They're all on one page at reduced resolution. Click on the map for a high resolution copy.
Regions 8 and 9 are in print at Lulu.com, which is a print-on-demand house. I can upload more if you want them in print form.
These documents were published in 1974 with no copyright notice under the UCC, so they are in the public domain (as any government-produced, taxpayer-funded work should always be). The image at the top of this page appears on the frontispiece of each inventory and is uncredited. Fred Abele is the likely compiler of the reports. Perhaps he is the artist as well?
I've found some other states that have similar inventories: