The RoW is highly valuable for all sorts of stuff. Back in the day, iirc, Qwest was owned by Phil Anshutz, who also owned the Southern Pacific Railroad. He used the SP RoW to lay down huge tracts of Fiber, which the other railroads copied.
They can and do run all sorts of stuff long the tracks - fiber, natural gas pipelines, and soon high transmission power lines.
> Southern Pacific Communications decided they needed a new name to differentiate the switched voice service from SpeedFAX, and ran an internal contest to select a name. The winning entry was "SPRINT", an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications.
If you want to talk about "Back in the day", telegraph companies had been running their lines along ROWs since the 1860s. They would obviously have to duplicate ways across vast expanses of the country otherwise. In exchange, they would leave a few conductors open for the railroads to use for their communications.
They can and do run all sorts of stuff long the tracks - fiber, natural gas pipelines, and soon high transmission power lines.