Reflections at 40: Moments That Moved the Dial for America’s Rail-Trails
A birthday is a good time to stop and reflect on major milestones, and as Rails to Trails Conservancy turns 40, Rails to Trails magazine is taking this time to reflect on the people and events that have shaped the national trails movement since the 1980s.
One of RTC’s first hires and now its longest-serving staffer, Marianne Fowler—RTC’s senior strategist for policy advocacy—shared the organization’s national vision for trails in the early days: bringing together “the two key elements in building rail-trails, which were the user enthusiasts and the public agencies that have the power to make it happen.”
Fowler recalled a long-ago staff bike ride through gorgeous scenery along the W&OD Trail in Virginia; the experience stuck with her and helped her understand at a visceral level the importance of community enthusiasm in support of trails. But at the same time RTC was “generating widespread enthusiasm among communities for converting unused rail corridors into trails, we were confronted with the unhappy reality of lack of funding for such endeavors.” The key to unlocking their potential, she said, was found in the federal transportation budget, specifically the inclusion of rail-trail eligibility in the Transportation Enhancements Program passed in 1991.
“Enthusiasm for having a trail in one’s community wasn’t sufficient on its own to really build a movement,” she concluded. “We had to combine that enthusiasm with the power of the government—whatever level of government was appropriate.”
With that knowledge, RTC began to establish field offices around the country to advocate for trails and accelerate trail development nationwide. This winter, we chatted with both long-serving staffers as well as some of the original members of #TeamRTC about some of the pivotal moments that helped move the dial. Many of these reflections represent lesser-known moments that made the case and built the support necessary to create trails across the United States.
You’ve Got to Make the Front Page
In 1986, the same year RTC was formed, the Michigan TRRails Alliance—the Rs emphasized their focus on railroad corridors—was created to do the same; just two years later, the TRRails Alliance became the Michigan chapter of RTC. Roger Storm, who became the first director of the new state office, was looking for ways to promote the organization’s mission when an RTC board member, Rick Oberle, offered a blunt assessment. “He said ‘the only way you’re going to get noticed is if you make the front page of the Detroit Free Press.’”
So Storm set out to do just that. At a meeting Oberle had arranged with a Free Press editor, the two pitched the idea of a multiday, fat-tire bike ride across Michigan with a staff writer joining and chronicling the adventures. Wherever they could, the group would ride along unused railbeds and dirt trails. Despite its rugged and unpolished nature, the Free Press was on board. “They loved it,” said Storm. “They even provided the funding.”
When the story announcing the ride was published in the paper’s Sunday magazine along with a registration form, “We hit the big time,” said Storm. “I’d come into the office and have 50 or 100 messages, people calling about the ride. We knew we were onto something.”
The event even had a fun name—one that would stick around for many annual rides that followed: The Michigander.
Some 200–300 participants turned out for the inaugural summer ride in 1992 as Storm recalled, and RTC needed to arrange everything the group needed over six days. “It was like moving a small town across the state 50 miles a day.”
That reality marked another way that Storm—who these days works for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources—sold the benefits of the Michigander: as a pedal-powered economic engine. “People are going to be on the trails,” he said. “They need to eat. They need to drink. They need to stay somewhere.” Storm found communities across the 275-mile route getting pumped by the prospect of the Michigander.
That rolling party made for great press, and in an impressive logistical feat, the stories—which proved popular with Free Press readers—were delivered to the riders in the pre-dawn hours each day. “We put a newspaper in front of each person’s tent, so you’d wake up in the morning, get your newspaper and read about yesterday’s adventures.”
He added, “There was an energy—people making new friends on this ride. It was like a party going across the state.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 2026 issue of Rails to Trails magazine and has been reposted here in an edited format. Subscribe to read more articles about remarkable trails while also supporting our work.
Johnny Appleseed and the First Field Office
A member of the largest bike club in the country—Washington State’s Cascade Bicycle Club—and founder of the group’s government affairs committee, Fred Wert was excited to learn that RTC, barely a year old at that point, was coming to town to talk about rail-trails. Wert showed up to the meeting with a large map showing the state’s railroads. “I’d marked which ones were active, which ones were already abandoned, and which ones were going to be abandoned based on my research,” he said. The RTC contingent, including co-founder and president David Burwell, was so impressed by Wert’s enthusiasm, “they basically hired me on the spot.”
“RTC wanted to model themselves after the Sierra Club, which had chapters,” Wert continued. The organization’s leaders considered him a natural fit to start the first field office and “go out and be Johnny Appleseed. I was able to talk to bicycle groups, to professional recreational symposiums, to the National Trails Conference, and explain the opportunities.”
In those early days, Wert recounted facing opposition from some parks departments about what RTC was trying to accomplish. “Parks directors were focused on growing grass and mowing ballfields—that was their priority,” he said. “Trails? Those were in the mountains—those were [U.S.] Forest Service things. I said, ‘that’s the problem. All the trails are in the mountains, but the people are down here.’” Wert readily acknowledges the hyperbole in this characterization, noting that the Burke-Gilman Trail in Seattle, built in the 1970s, was among the first significant rail-trails in the nation, but he maintains it was often an uphill battle to get state officials to embrace RTC’s vision.
Though he left RTC in 1990, Wert fondly remembers a major victory on what would become the state’s longest rail-trail, the Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail. When the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad went out of business, Wert said, “The state bought the land and gave something like 20 miles to State Parks. With the tracks and ties salvaged, “It really was quite a beautiful corridor, but they didn’t know what to do with it—they didn’t market it at all, but the RTC state chapter board and staff saw the potential.”
Through the work of Wert and those that came after him, that original segment near Easton has grown considerably and today is a major alignment of the country-spanning Great American Rail-Trail®.
Bridging Enthusiasm and Funding
Having started her career as RTC’s Southern regional organizer in 1988, Marianne Fowler now advocates for policy at a national level. With a wealth of successes over the decades to choose from, she related a story of a trip she took early in her tenure around 1990 with RTC’s founding president, David Burwell, to Minneapolis at the behest of Congressman Bruce Vento. “Vento vented, if you will, and said, ‘I’ve got all these abandoned rail corridors in Minnesota and a state DOT that doesn’t have a clue what to do with them,’ as he put it.”
State officials brought Fowler and Burwell to the Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi River in central Minneapolis. The 23 arches that make up the crossing built in the 1880s are iconic—but at the time Fowler visited, the bridge had been derelict and barricaded for years. “There was all this chain-link fence and barriers closing off the bridge,” recalled Fowler, but even so, “it was a stunning experience, just stunning. As it crosses the river, you can look back and see St. Anthony Falls. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘This has got to be opened up. This has to be a bike and ped crossing.’”
Understanding that governmental efforts were only part of the equation, Fowler made certain that meetings with trail advocates were on her itinerary as well. She worked to create a friends-of-the-trail group and helped organize community activists who could advocate for a trail across the historic bridge. Having harnessed the power of local activism and combined it with both state and federal funding sources, including a $2 million Transportation Enhancements grant (now known Transportation Alternatives, or TA), Fowler said she was delighted to see the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Trail open in 1994 with its signature passage along the Stone Arch Bridge.
The bridge is one of the earliest examples of the impact of TA, which—along with the Recreational Trails Program—has supported 43,000+ trails and walking and bicycling projects to date.
New PBS Documentary
To learn more about the evolution of the rail-trail movement, check out “From Rails to Trails,” a PBS documentary released in 2025 by RTC co-founder Peter Harnik and filmmaker Dan Protess, and narrated by Edward Norton.
A Keystone Moment in the Keystone State
When U.S. Congressman Tom Ridge launched his bid for governor of Pennsylvania in 1994, he set off on a bike campaign across the state. Tom Sexton was three years into his job heading RTC’s Pennsylvania field office (he recently retired as the Northeast regional director) when he caught wind of the ride and asked to join.
“I could ride next to Tom [Ridge] and chat with him about the importance of rail-trails and bicycling and pedestrian issues,” said Sexton, jokingly adding that, with Ridge unable to out-pedal the RTC staffer, “he couldn’t get away from me. He couldn’t go anywhere.”
When the riding group encountered poorly maintained trail infrastructure or uncomfortable on-road segments, Sexton would use the opportunity to talk about the importance of funding and the need to close gaps in order to create a truly interconnected network. Sexton remembers this ride as a keystone moment that helped shape the relationship to come.
After winning his gubernatorial race, Ridge continued holding an annual bike ride that included members of his cabinet, heads of state agencies—and Sexton. And Ridge’s administration proved beneficial to bikers and conservation measures, with the state receiving accolades for its Greenways, Trails, and Recreation Program that championed the creation of rail-trails from the state’s once-extensive rail network.
“So many things flowed from that ride because [there was] access to the governor,” said Sexton.
As RTC’s presence grew, and its Pennsylvania field office expanded to become a regional hub, Sexton carried with him lessons learned from his time with Gov. Ridge.
Connecting With Communities
Kate Bickert was hired in 1996 to build out and run the state’s first field office. In those early days, Bickert said she encountered plenty of people who yearned for the return of the railroads of their remembered childhood, or somehow even blamed RTC for their demise. “We would explain what railbanking was and the importance of just preserving the corridors if, in fact, rail transportation ever did come back.”
Much of her work, she explained, involved “community-level … engagement with people—you know, building relationships over time. That was an important piece of what RTC did and does, which is not just the legislative side, but really promoting the benefits [of trails] and breaking down some of the myths and fears about them.”
Myths and fears were at the forefront of a courtroom trial in 2000 where she served as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought by homeowners against a proposed rail-trail project in Fresno. “There were folks living along that rail corridor who had a lot of fear and misinformation,” she said, due in part to concerns about crime they felt would materialize.
Today, Bickert works at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, but at the time, she recalled, “We had just worked on a study of crime on rail-trails. And what’s the reality when you put in a trail? What actually comes to pass? It’s almost the opposite—that more people being out there [and] more eyes on the street—or eyes on the trail, if you will—actually helped reduce crime in those areas.”
The trail ultimately prevailed and today is known as the Clovis Old Town Trail. And the nebulous fears of crime by and large turned into an embrace, said Bickert, as “people started to actually want to build gates from their backyards onto the trail.”
Legislative Power
Now RTC’s senior strategist for external relations, Ken Bryan has led RTC’s Florida field office since early in his career and well knows the impact state legislation can have on trails. Sometimes, he said, it is headline-generating legislation such as the Florida Greenways and Trails Act; passed to great fanfare among trail enthusiasts in the mid-1990s, the act paved the way for the Sunshine State to expand and enhance its statewide system of trails. Bryan called the law transformational and said, “it’s been model legislation ever since.”
And sometimes, said, Bryan, it’s obscure provisions or arcane details that have outsize impacts. He pointed to the somewhat unusual funding strategy contained in the act—in which the state’s department of transportation pays for the construction of qualifying trails—as the key to making the bill work. Another funding stream, the SUN Trail Program, is “based off a portion of new vehicle registration fees,” explained Bryan, “so as more cars are coming to Florida, we’re using the money to build safe places for folks to get out and walk and bike—some $50 million a year.”
So vital have trails become to Florida’s persona that they’re featured in the state’s Visit Florida ad campaigns. “We’re very dependent on visitors in the state, and trails have been recognized as a big part of that,” said Bryan.
Bryan noted that the state also imposes a small fee that goes to trail funding when building deeds are created or transferred. Such deeds are central to any new development, which—as a matter of course—brings more cars and more traffic.
“Those roads and highways divide our communities and make them more dangerous to walk and bike, and so [the deed fees] help mitigate that by funding our trail networks,” explained Bryan. “The concept is the growth of Florida pays for the conservation of Florida. It’s funding sources like these that have kind of set us apart.”
Driving Culture Change
Although California’s department of transportation is known as Caltrans, for much of its history the department acted more like a Calcars with an almost singular focus on automobiles and their attendant roads. Laura Cohen recently led RTC’s Western Regional Office until a promotion to national policy advisor; she recalled her early years in the job when much of Caltrans’ culture embodied what she characterized as a “what does your stuff have to do with us” attitude toward RTC’s priorities. When a new chief engineer for Caltrans named Brent Felker took over in 2001, Cohen said that she and a fellow advocate, James Corless, who now heads up the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, jumped at the chance to make the case for biking and walking as a part of comprehensive transportation policy.
To her delight, Felker not only took the meeting but invited others, including Brian Smith, then- deputy director of planning and modal programs. “He gathered together all these people from different divisions, like planning and design and maintenance and engineering,” recalled Cohen. “Those people had never been in the same room before talking about our topics and we had a soup-to-nuts conversation about how [Caltrans] should be thinking about bicyclists and pedestrians from the earliest planning stages and throughout the lifetime of every project.”
As a direct result of the meeting, Caltrans formed an advisory committee on active transportation and livable communities—and RTC had a seat at the table. Having passionate advocates for nonmotorized transportation had “such an impact on [the state],” said Cohen. “That single meeting was a real catalyst for culture change at Caltrans.”
Cohen remained an active Caltrans advisor and partner, helping to shape the active transportation policies and practices that continue to this day.
In a state where the car is king—more vehicles are registered in the Golden State than any other—there is a dense network of multiuse trails as well. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a developing 2,600-mile network of interconnected trails that thread throughout the region, an effort guided by the Bay Area Trails Collaborative, which Cohen founded. “At the core of what RTC does is recognize that a multimodal transportation system is key to sustainability, to the livability of communities,” she said. “If we’re only focused on cars, we’re going to miss a big part of the solution.”
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