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A few years back, well, decades, I did a little "reconfiguration" of the side yard of my house, along with the back and front. The power company whose right of way ran right next to my property told me that I had "encroached" on the right of way. Proper measurement revealed that this was not so, but that I had indeed encroached on the town's drainage right of way. I called the town and they checked and said that what I had done was fine with them, as it actually had improved the drainage from the street to the storm drain, which was the general idea of what I did.

The following spring, the power company transformer adjacent to my house failed spectacularly, and initially the power company blamed me, but it was proved that the reason their transformer failed was because the drain, which ran from the base of the housing to the storm drain, had been inhabited by a family of voles, which had clogged the drain, resulting in the base of the housing flooding and thus the failure. It was also found, by an independent engineer (well somewhat independent anyway) that the surrounding terrain, all within the power company's ROW, had all been sculpted so that any surrounding ground water would head for the transformer, AND THEY WERE THE ONES THAT DID IT! when they installed the transformer to begin with.

The power company came in and put in a new drain, larger with a screen at the end to keep critters out, and trenched around the transformer so that any water flow would head for the storm drain.

In the process they parked their backhoe on my front lawn, dug into my property, well off their ROW, and tore up my side yard with their equipment, and then, despite my asking the crew to fix it, they just packed up and left.

IT GOT FIXED!!!

What happens when you mess with a telephone company technical support engineer with very close ties to the company ROW department, also where I obtained all of the relevant surveys and measurements. I had a lot of horsepower in those days, and could call up a deal more. The "independent engineer" above was a retired telco ROW and technical support engineer who had been a mentor of mine before he retired and went to work for the town I lived in as a consulting engineer.

And then there was the time GE built a power station over the top of a subscriber telephone cable, and ended up paying, because of me, a very pretty penny for the phone company to move the cable.

Right Of Way is private property and is almost sacred land.

BTW, in NY State, ROW is it's own access and crossing private property to reach it is verboten.