From Rails to Trails: The Making of America’s Active Transportation Network by Peter Harris is the inspiring and fascinating story of how thousands of miles of America’s former railroads became rail trail corridors, used for active transportation and recreation. The book details the history of the extensive U.S. railroad network, which reached its peak mileage of 255,000 miles in 1916. Railroads were a powerful force in the U.S. industrial heyday, but their trade is not remembered all with love. There was plenty of corruption to secure routes or get incentives for the government, and many citizens grabbed portions of their land for railroad jobs. When the railroads were past their prime and the lines began to be abandoned, it seems like an obviously brilliant idea to get the government, either federal or local, to turn them into linear parks. There were many expensive structures such as tunnels and bridges that could be used relatively cheaply and reused for paths. Also, the right-of-way was nice and flat because trains have a hard time operating on grades over 3%. As Mr. Harris points out, we have thousands of miles of trails in the US, including the long-distance jewels that make up the “triple crown” (the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest trails). But these can often be quite steep and only suitable for serious hikers or mountain bikers. It’s nice to have another trail resource for the rest of us.
But despite the railroad’s desirability, there was considerable opposition, from neighboring landowners who wanted compensation for land confiscated from their ancestors or worried about crime entering their area from trail users, and from developers who saw looking forward to this extraordinary land.
Mr. Harris also chronicles the dismal state of walking and cycling infrastructure in the US in the mid-20th century, around the time many abandoned rail lines became available. The heroic efforts of some local groups to convert to rail routes are described. Early on, these local groups had to constantly reinvent the wheel dealing with governments and opposition. But in 1986 that changed when the Rails-to-Trails Maintenance, a national non-profit group with which Mr. Harris was involved, was formed, as this group was able to develop a standard playbook for dealing with this type of negotiation and the publicity involved. To date, the national and local effort has resulted in 24,000 miles of rail-road corridors, many of which are now national treasures. There is a continuous effort to improve this network on two fronts: creating coherent active transportation networks in local areas and trying to connect trails from coast to coast and from north to south.
All of this inspired me to try to try more of these trails. I’ve already ridden some of the local ones, like the Monterey Peninsula Trail, and there are some other great ones not too far away, like the Bizz-Johnson Trail north of Lake Tahoe. I am currently doing armchair research of them reading Rail-Trails West and Rail-Trail Hall of Fame: A Selection of America’s Premier Rail-Trails both from the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, but in the future I’d like to try one up close.
Photo Credits: All photos below are from Rail-Trail Hall of Fame: A Selection of America’s Premier Rail-Trails
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I am a Mechanical Engineer born in 1953, Ph. D, Stanford, 1980. I have been in the CAE engineering field for decades. I also have a lifelong interest in outdoor activities and fitness. I have had both hips replaced and a heart valve replaced due to a genetic condition. This blog chronicles my adventures in staying active despite these bumps in the road.
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