Cycling’s Best Idea: Converting Rails to Trails
Book details how "Active Transportation" advocates championed rail conversions
Oh, the rail-trails I have known! Sorry to get Seussian on you, but getting on my bike and pedaling down a wide, flat trail converted from a railroad track just brings out the kid in me.
It wasn’t until I began designing routes for my cycling guidebooks that I realized the extent and importance of the locomotive-age corridors. Seeing the recreation network now being laid at our bike tires or our sneakered feet made me want to quote one of the great Dr. Seuss’s most famous lines: “Oh, the places you will go!”
On the eve of Celebrate Trails Day (which is this Saturday, April 22, also Earth Day), I would like to celebrate the movement that created trails where once there were rails.
One of the granddaddies of the rail-trail system is a short downhill ride from my home in Seattle. The Burke-Gilman Trail—formerly, many decades ago, the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railroad—bisects the city from Shilshole Bay on Puget Sound in the west to the tip of Lake Washington and the edge of the suburbs in the east. Abandoned by its railroad owner in 1971 and pushed into public ownership by a citizen groundswell, it’s been a rail-trail since 1978 and is on the Rail-Trail Hall of Fame.
It’s twelve-point-one miles of asphalt bliss, interrupted only by street crossings. Well, OK, the bliss is ratcheted down by the plentiful crossings, as it is in the heart of the city, after all. Sometimes enjoyment is dampened a bit more by the trail’s heavy use (see: heart of city) and these days it can be overly crowded with electric-power-assisted vehicles, both bikes and scooters. Those fast-moving e-things can make me cranky, and not in the foot zone.
But I digress, citizens! I come not to slay rail-trails but to praise them!
Extolling Active Transportation
My book Biking Puget Sound uses nearly two dozen former rail corridors in its 60 rides: the Interurban, the Centennial, the Yelm-Tenino (christening trails with the names of towns at each end is popular), the Foothills (where, wow, there’s Mount Rainier looming!), the Tommy Thompson (named, yes, for the former governor of Wisconsin), the Cedar River, the Olympic Discovery.
That’s really what a rail-trail ride is all about: discovery.
By the time I began researching Cycling the Pacific Coast, I was familiar with rail-trails across the nation, and the movement that created them. On the route down the coast, I cycled on many former sites of locomotion in sight of the ocean. (Remind you of a song? See below.)
And I began supporting the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, an organization that lives its mandate, as I realized that every year, and with every shrinkage of the country’s rail system, we are at risk of losing those potential recreation corridors to a slew of other uses, from industrial to agriculture to just chain-linked weed factories.
So I read with relish Peter Harnik’s telling of the rail-trail history, “From Rails to Trails: The Making of America’s Active Transportation Network” (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). The inspirational book is a bit of a memoir, too, as Peter tells of his own path as one of the founders of the movement to save the rail corridors for public recreational use. Thank you for all that energy, Peter!
Sixty Years in Development
The book tells how the first modern rail-trail was born in 1965. It was on a track with a history. What was to become the Elroy-Sparta Trail would sprout from the burg of Elroy, Wisconsin, which had been a locomotive watering hole. Elroy was halfway between Chicago and Minneapolis, so trains had been stopping there for decades to refuel, and in the day of steam locomotives, that meant refilling its water supply. Calvin Coolidge stopped there on a presidential tour, as did Harry S. Truman.
When trains started burning diesel, they stopped stopping at Elroy, and the town lost its main purpose. What’s more, as Peter recounts in the book, the railroad that owned the track found it more difficult to use than other routes. Over the 32 miles between Elroy and Sparta, the grade was great enough that trains needed an extra “helper” locomotive to get up the hills. And there were three tunnels, which had giant doors that were closed in winter and had to be opened manually whenever a train approached.
But that unwanted track between those two towns, which had been in place since 1873, was to be given a new life. The father of future Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson was among a group of locals who wanted to preserve the route as a trail. The host counties were in. The Boy Scouts wanted to help. And in 1965, the Wisconsin Conservation Department bought the corridor on which the old track sat for $12,000, considered quite a bargain. Two years later, it opened as a recreational trail and became a model that would be cited by promoters of a federal bill, the National Trail Systems Act, which would be passed in 1968 (signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on the same day as the passage of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act).
A Nation Stitched With Tracks
With all the acreage across our vast country, there would be plenty of corridors to pick up. The landscape was stitched with rail lines.
Trains were the transportation innovation, debuting in 1805, that built the nation. The “iron horse” was the way to move people and freight quickly and efficiently across massive distances. And for many decades, rail was king. But it began to falter with the wide adoption of automobiles and the increase in bus and airplane transportation in the middle of the 20th century. And in many places, railroads abandoned their rail corridors, which would then be bought by private parties or developers. That would become a barrier for trail creation because the corridors would be parceled out among many new owners, who would want many different uses.
A provision known as “railbanking” would be slipped into amendments to the National Trail Systems Act in the early 1980s that would prevent railroads from abandoning the rights of way to those unused rail corridors if the local municipality would assume responsibility for them. That opened the door for coalitions to convince government entities to save many corridors for recreational use.
There was plenty of opposition, both in the legislatures and the courts. But there were successes too, like state laws giving “right of first refusal” to public entities and court decisions designating rail corridors for “public travel” rather than just for railroads. Many abandoned rail corridors had been lost to development, but increasingly, they were being saved.
Innovative Approaches
When my wheels land on an old rail line south of Seattle, at one point I have to look for trains. That’s because the trail exists adjacent to a rail line that is still occasionally used (and somewhat alarmingly, used by driverless trains). But I don’t mind the rubbernecking to keep me safe, because that innovation is one that allowed the trail to be built. “Rail WITH Trail” is a thing.
So are other multifaceted trail uses, such as running powerlines above a trail, or laying fiber-optic cable in the ground next to the path. There’s even an elevated path that has become a tourist highlight in our nation’s largest city: New York’s High Line. Sadly, it’s not designed for bikes. But it is a nice walk.
Trail Miles Adding Up
Peter went to great effort to quantify and catalog the rails-to-trails movement. I was fascinated by a chart comparing miles of rail-trail to miles of original trail and calculating the percentage of rail corridor converted to trails. New Hampshire had 44.6 percent of its rail miles converted to rail-trails in the century from 1916 to 2016. Rhode Island, D.C. Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Connecticut were top-tier too, but most of the states saw only one-fifth or less of rail conversions.
My state, Washington, converted just 18.8 percent of its 5,698 rail miles to trails, but still, that amounted to 1,072 miles. As an optimist, I’ll take that. Overall, the country had 254,850 miles of rail in 1916, and by 2016, 23,562 miles (9.2 percent) had been converted to trails. Lined up end to end, that would give you eight epic bike rides across the country!
Seeking Elusive Connections
Of course, those trail miles don’t connect. There isn’t some giant cycling Grand Central Station where you can get off one rail-trail and transfer to another. One major challenge today is “interconnectivity,” getting our trails connected so people can move efficiently, safely and enjoyably by bicycle. I dream of an uninterrupted trail stretching coast to coast. Or two—a northern route for summer use, and a southern route for winter treks.
Once you start to imagine those possibilities, you want a trail to your favorite cities, ones connecting all the national parks, trails charting historic routes…. The Adventure Cycling Association is working on this, but many routes are mostly road rides. How about a Rail Plus Trail Tour, where you can take your bike and hop on and off passenger rail wherever you want and ride to another train station? Peter’s book details the hopes, challenges and possibilities of many such endeavors.
The book’s stories would be instructive examples for someone wanting to save a trail. Getting a local town on your side would help. “Small towns all over the country have trails nearby,” he writes, “but most chambers of commerce ignore them.” Hello opportunity! On the Virginia Creeper Trail (great name, eh?) there’s one town, Damascus, with 800 residents. “If not for the trail, its population might be close to zero.” In the tiny town of Vernonia, Oregon (one end of the Banks-Vernonia rail-trail), the amazing Blue House Café sports an indoor bike rack that shows how important its two-wheeled customers are.
Know of an unused rail line in your area that might be saved? Peter outlines that for you too. You need the holy triangle: “a formal plan of action, a public agency agreeing to own the facility, and an advocacy organization pushing for approval.” My suggestion would be to start building an advocacy group, i.e. friends with bikes, then give a call to the Rails to Trails Conservancy to get some help.
But for all the politics, historical precedent and barriers to change, the rails to trails story is an American success story and we should be proud of it. We also should use it, seek out those trails the way we gravitate to national parks. Because they are, after all, also national treasures.
The book made me want to chuck all my commitments and head out in search of all those trails I have yet to ride. High on my list is the Great Allegheny Passage from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., but I’d also like to just wander and discover.
As Peter writes: “Most people agree that silently pedaling down a gentle and smooth paved incline on an optimally fitted bike in perfect weather, shirt flapping in the breeze and scenery flitting by at a delightfully eye-catching pace, is among life’s pinnacle experiences.”
Or, in the words of the great doctor: “There is fun to be done.”
Links:
Read my Seattle Times articles on the rail-trail from Spokane to Coeur d’Alene Idaho and the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes.
From Rails to Trails: The Making of America’s Active Transportation Network by Peter Harnik
Adventure Cycling Association’s US Bicycle Route System
And now for a tune!
An odd train-based video for a fizzy 1980s pop song from the British band Orchestral Maoneuvres In The Dark:
Nice read. I was unaware of that book and just ordered it per your recommendation. Rail trails are enjoying great support and growth in ohio. I am president of the 324.5 mile Ohio to Erie Trail, one of the longest cross state trails that is almost all on former railbeds. On the east coast, you can hop on Amtrak in either DC or Pittsburgh and cycle the 35 miles back on two beautiful trails.
Thanks Bill - a really nice piece. Appreciate all the work you have done over the years. A special call-out to Peter Harnik for his book "From Rails to Trails" - a gift to all of us who love to walk and bike.