Trail of the Month Page 9

The Illinois Prairie Path

Posted 08/01/08 by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in America's Trails | Tagged with Best Of, Hall of Fame, Illinois, Trail Destinations, Trail of the Month

Nearly 45 years ago, when the word "rail-trail" hadn't yet entered the American vocabulary, a naturalist in Chicago took note of a branching network of out-of-service tracks in the city's western suburbs. The Chicago, Aurora & Elgin Railroad (CA&E), known as the "Roarin' Elgin," had built multiple corridors as part of its interurban railway—unusual in 1902 for its electrified third rail. In that unused right-of-way, May Theilgaard Watts saw enormous potential.

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Massachusetts' Minuteman Bikeway

Posted 06/01/08 by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in America's Trails | Tagged with Hall of Fame, Massachusetts, Trail Destinations, Trail of the Month

May and June in Boston can be tough to predict weather-wise. But as soon as the chilly drizzles of winter dry out and the clouds peel apart, you can be certain of one spring ritual: restless legs start pouring out onto the city's many trails and pathways. And no stretch of asphalt feels the joyful tread of more heels and wheels than the 10.4-mile Minuteman Bikeway, which Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (RTC) recently named as the fifth inductee to its Rail-Trail Hall of Fame.

Florida's Pinellas Trail

Posted 10/01/07 by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in America's Trails | Tagged with Best Of, Florida, Hall of Fame, Trail Destinations, Trail of the Month

Great rail-trails very seldom sit still. They branch out; they bridge; they knit together communities. They turn pathways into parks, commutes into convenience, stress into safety, exercise into recreation. And few rail-trails have worked harder to inspire healthy activity than Florida's 34-mile Pinellas Trail, built along the old CSX Railroad right-of-way from Tarpon Springs south to St. Petersburg—where average winter temperatures in the 70s, tidal waterways and the salt-sticky smell of ocean have made the greenway one of the most trafficked in the country.

Missouri's Katy Trail State Park

Posted 09/01/07 by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in America's Trails | Tagged with Best Of, Hall of Fame, Missouri, Trail Destinations, Trail of the Month

Heath Meriwether, former executive editor of the Detroit Free Press, spent his childhood in Columbia, Mo., in the 1950s and 60s. His family lived only a few miles from the once sprawling Missouri-Kansas-Texas (or Katy) Railroad, but Meriwether mostly remembered the rail corridor as a forlorn, almost dislocated strip of community history. "When I was growing up," he says, "the Katy was a down-at-the-mouth, dilapidated railroad."

Pennsylvania and Maryland's Great Allegheny Passage

Posted 07/01/07 by Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in America's Trails | Tagged with Best Of, Hall of Fame, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Trail Destinations, Trail of the Month

Imagine a continuous rail-trail 150 miles long where annually more than half a million visitors hike, bike, ride horseback, ski or fish. Imagine that trail in the making for more than two decades, growing 20 miles one year, three miles the next, a mere mile the following year, 13.5 the next—and so on. Piecemeal—the work of seven different trail-building organizations in two states.