Obviously I know why railroads are often built on the banks of rivers - they offer a flat/low grade path that penetrates far inland, often through mountains that would pose great difficulty for railroads. And railroads are not the only transportation often built along rivers, roads are also often built along rivers for similar reasons. Although with roads theoretically there's more freedom to build them elsewhere since the flat/low grade isn't completely necessary, although it does make building them easier.

Anyway, the reason I'm thinking about this is because I live on a fairly large river, and it always depresses me a bit that it's difficult to actually reach the water's edge because there's a railroad going along it for nearly the entire length. Only in a couple spots that there happens to be land on the other side of the tracks can I actually reach the water's edge.

The other side of the river has a bit more parkland or undeveloped land on the riverbanks, but it's similar over there too - rail takes up a very large portion of the riverbank. I would never swim in the river or anything due to pollution, but the fact remains, it's really hard to enjoy and make use of the defining geographic feature in my area due to development. And not even "bad" development, but railroads!

Anyway there's no real point to this post, I was just sitting around thinking about things and figured I'd post my thoughts here in case anyone wants to share their thoughts related to this.