Biery v. United States

SCHALL, Circuit Judge.

Plaintiffs-Appellants Dorothy L. Biery, the Julia R. Chalfant Etvir Trust, K.A.K. Farms, Inc., American Packaging Corporation, and Collins Industries, Inc., are landowners in Kansas. Each of them owns land abutting a 2.88-mile stretch of rail corridor near the City of South Hutchinson, Kansas. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their predecessors in interest granted various deeds covering that land to the Hutchinson & Southern Railroad Company. The Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (“BNSF”) eventually succeeded to the interests of that railroad.…