Southern Trailblazers: The Chief Ladiga and Silver Comet Trails
Behind the counter at Wig’s Wheels in downtown Anniston, Alabama, a U.S. map dotted with tacks shows how far visitors travel to reach the small city. With hotels, a campground, restaurants, a brewery, and extensive mountain biking and hiking networks nearby, Anniston has long attracted outdoor enthusiasts, said owner Patrick “Wig” Wigley. But another map, taped to the shop’s counter, highlights a long-standing challenge: an impasse that for decades prevented Chief Ladiga Trail users from reaching downtown.
That weathered map traces the paved Chief Ladiga Trail from the Georgia line—where it connects to the Silver Comet Trail—west into Piedmont, then south through Jacksonville and Weaver, only to stop just short of Anniston. Good news: It’s outdated.
In spring 2025, city and state leaders joined cyclists, runners and walkers in an April rain to cut the ribbon on Anniston’s long-awaited 6.5-mile extension, finally linking the trail to Fourth Street in the city center. “It’s exactly what we’ve been waiting on for as long as we’ve been waiting on it,” Wigley said.
Today, the Chief Ladiga Trail ends near Anniston’s Amtrak depot. Although negotiations continue to equip the station for bike loading, planners and advocates now envision Anniston as a starting or ending hub for people tackling the Chief Ladiga and Georgia’s connecting Silver Comet Trail, both Rails to Trails Conservancy Hall of Famers, in a single one-way journey. The extension strengthens connections between northeast Alabama, Atlanta and the many communities in between.
Meanwhile, work barrels forward on a transformative connection at the far end of the Comet. The project, called the Silver Comet Connector, will link the current terminus in Smyrna, a city of about 58,000 in metro Atlanta’s inner ring, with downtown Atlanta proper via the city’s vibrant 22-mile Beltline. The recent gains on the trails’ opposite ends are building excitement among advocates along the paved paths between their current western and future eastern end points.
“[The Chief Ladiga Trail] is changing the face of what the city is going to be five or 10 years from now.”
— Patrick Wigley, owner of Wig’s Wheels in Anniston, Alabama
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.
Revitalizing Anniston
On Saturday mornings after the Chief Ladiga Trail extension opened, Toby Bennington would visit Michael Tucker Memorial Park on Anniston’s north side, find a spot in the busy lot and talk with riders. With group rides forming in Georgia communities along the Silver Comet Trail, Bennington—Anniston’s former director of economic development and city planning—wanted visitors to know what the city offered.
For years, the park had been “a stopping point to nowhere,” he said. Wigley would sometimes shuttle cyclists from his shop because the shoulderless, hilly roads into downtown were too risky.
Closing that gap became one of Bennington’s major goals. It took advocates years to secure the right-of-way, build support and line up funding. “I look back on it now,” he said, “and it’s one of the proudest projects I’ve been involved with.”
Now retired and preparing to move closer to family, Bennington still receives monthly trail-use reports from Jacksonville State University researcher Jennifer Green, which show steady growth. Anniston public relations officer Jackson Hodges said the new downtown connection is drawing more people to the city’s outdoor assets and to trail-friendly businesses like Cold-water Mountain Brewpub. By late October, Hodges said Green’s geofencing data showed usage up 35% from the extension’s opening, with “about 2,700 people [per week]” on the trail and local businesses reporting increased traffic.
Bennington plans to keep following the trail’s progress. “What I would like to see when I come back over is people, families, signs of prosperity,” he said. “I’d like to see some of the vacant buildings (downtown) being utilized and the city being prosperous.”
Wigley, meanwhile, is seeing more residents visiting his shop and spending time on the new trail. “Early on, we would see walkers,” he said. “Just like us, just being adventurous, just on foot. A month passes by, you see the same people, now they’re all on beach cruisers. They’re one of us.”
The trail, he said, is also helping local users address a stigma around the city’s safety via Wednesday night shop rides. The day before I popped into Wig’s in mid-November, the weekly ride took participants about 14 miles up the Ladiga to Jacksonville’s historic train depot before they zipped back. “We aren’t having any trouble out on the trail,” he said. “That trail is changing the face of what the city is going to be five or 10 years from now.”
Meanwhile, the extension of the Chief Ladiga Trail is bolstering Anniston’s rep as an outdoor-recreation base camp among all those who’ve added thumbtacks to the shop’s U.S. map. “They get out there and think it’s the best thing they’ve ever ridden on,” he said.
Catalyst for Access
A couple hundred feet from Comet Trail Cycles in Mableton, Georgia, and right beside the Silver Comet Trail, stands a 40-foot shipping container with a mural painted by local high school students. It shows runners, a walker and an adaptive cyclist traversing the trail as a Silver Comet passenger locomotive rolls by. The hashtag #AccessThe Comet is emblazoned in the sky above the scene.
For Charlie Monroe, Cobb County’s natural resource manager, this container, called the Bike Barn, represents the purpose of the trail: access to natural resources for all. It houses a set of world-class adaptive cycles owned by Catalyst Sports, an Atlanta nonprofit that connects people with physical limitations to gear and programs to help them pursue their athletic goals.
Read our companion article on Catalyst Bikes on the TrailBlog.
Models for the South
The Chief Ladiga Trail, named for a Muscogee (Creek) Nation leader, is built along the route of the former Seaboard Air Line Railroad, a major passenger corridor traversed by the Silver Comet from the 1940s to the 1960s. Alabama’s first rail-trail, it offers connections to the northeast Alabama communities of Anniston, Weaver, Jacksonville and Piedmont while allowing users to view the region’s natural splendor in the process. From Anniston, the paved trail gradually rises by 700 feet up to the Georgia state line, showcasing the region’s wetlands and countryside and bolstering Alabama’s case for extending the Appalachian Trail into the state via the Pinhoti Trail. The Chief Ladiga runs through portions of the Talladega National Forest, whose oaks, hickories and loblolly pines put on a late autumnal show during my November visit. With the Anniston extension, the trail runs 39.2 miles from its western terminus to the State Line Gateway, where it meets the Silver Comet Trail.
The two rail-trails were among the first that Marianne Wesley Fowler, who joined Rails to Trails Conservancy in 1988 as its Southern regional organizer, played a hand in building support for—and were among the first to be developed in the South, period. During that time, added Fowler, now RTC’s senior strategist for policy advocacy, there were scarcely any rail-trails to showcase besides the St. Marks and West Orange trails in Tallahassee and central Florida, respectively. “I wanted to have a model rail-trail in every state so RTC could then refer other people and decision-makers to them,” Fowler said.
Just weeks after she was hired, RTC co-founder Peter Harnik handed her a copy of a notice from CSX Transportation that it intended to abandon an Alabama segment of the former Seaboard Air Line. “And he said, ‘Organize a group down there!’” Fowler recalled. Not having any contacts in that corner of Alabama, she picked up a phone book and started cold calling.
While she encountered some early hesitance and even some denial about the fate of the rail line, including from Piedmont’s then-mayor, she also garnered valuable support for the project that led to a community meeting in Piedmont about the rail-trail proposal. At the meeting, a man in a white linen suit burst through the doors and took a seat in the front row. “I go back into my spiel,” Fowler said. “And then all of a sudden he says: ‘I remember you! This lady called me up and said we needed to have a trail, and I didn’t believe her. But now I believe her, and you better believe her too and do what she says. And that was Mayor [James] Bennett. So that and a whole lot of work from people down there just really, really had that trail take off.”
The Chief Ladiga Trail’s development required a state constitutional amendment in the early 1990s because Alabama had no rail-trail projects that predated it. So would the Silver Comet Trail project in Georgia. Federal grants also played a major role. An Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) grant awarded to Piedmont and the Calhoun County Commission led to the construction of the first 8.9 miles of the Chief Ladiga Trail. ISTEA funds awarded to Jacksonville, Piedmont and the Cleburne County Commission helped lead to the trail’s expansion in the mid-1990s. Jacksonville and Anniston were awarded National Recreational Trails Fund grants in 1997 to begin connecting those communities. And an ISTEA grant awarded to the City of Weaver a year later helped bridge the 2.5-mile gap between Jacksonville and Anniston.
In Cobb County, Georgia, a bulk letter sent from RTC to Brenda Tate first piqued her curiosity about the rail-trail movement around this time. “I thought it was so interesting,” she said. “And literally, the very next day I was driving across the county to my office, across a railroad track that I had crossed so many times … and suddenly there were no lights there to warn of an oncoming train. There was no crossing guard. The rails had been taken up. The crossties had been taken up. There was just a lot of gravel left, and I went: ‘Oh! I wonder if that’s what they were talking about.’”
The Georgia Department of Transportation purchased the old Silver Comet right-of-way from CSX in 1992, but not before Tate and other advocates who formed the nonprofit Georgia Rails Into Trails Society (yes, GRITS) convinced state and local decision-makers of the benefits of developing the corridor as a rail-trail. “Georgia had never heard of this before the concept was presented to them,” Tate said. To help sell the concept to Cobb County commissioners, Tate, like Fowler, sought a model. She organized a trip to the West Orange Trail. “It’s like their eyes were opened,” she said. “It just took showing them what it could be, and then they could see it for their county. Cobb County was the first to buy into it.”
Atlanta’s PATH Foundation, which is now working with stakeholders to forge the Silver Comet Connector, in 1998 formed partnerships with the state and the cities and counties along the Silver Comet Trail, as well as with advocates like GRITS, to get the trail designed and built. In the late 1990s, the foundation’s second-ever capital campaign raised $3.65 million to match roughly $5 million in public funding to launch the Comet.
Since the 1980s, rail-trails have formed throughout Georgia and Alabama. Today, there are a combined 63 known rail-trails in the two states and an estimated 23 projects in development.
“It just took showing them what it could be, and then they could see it for their county.”
— Brenda Tate, Georgia Rails Into Trails founding member, on building support for the Silver Comet
Natural Assets
All the communities along the Chief Ladiga Trail have embraced it in their own way. There’s ample bike parking outside Piedmont’s Pinhoti Pizza Company and bikes suspended from the rafters inside. The Eubanks Welcome Center, Elevated Grounds Coffee Company and Ladiga Trail Trikes are among a cluster of trail-friendly locales within a stroll of a massive mural that features a map of the Chief Ladiga Trail and welcomes visitors to Piedmont. “They’ve done such a good job in Piedmont with catering to the riders,” Wigley said.
Green, director of Jacksonville State University’s Center for Economic Development and Business Research, recently released an economic impact study tying $9.7 million in total output to four major trails in Calhoun County, home of Jacksonville, Weaver and Anniston, over 2023. The Chief Ladiga’s 18,000 unique users—about 70% local and 30% visitors from 32 different states, according to geofencing data—combined to contribute about $2.2 million to the overall number over 49,043 visits. The region’s renowned Coldwater Mountain Bike Trail ($3.7 million) and McClellan Multi-Use Trails ($2.7 million) both generated more revenue; advocates believe the Chief Ladiga extension will become even more of a regional economic driver.
Like the Ladiga, the Silver Comet has been a northern Georgia mainstay for decades. Across its 61.5 miles, users can simultaneously escape the gridlock of the highways leading to and from Atlanta and nature bathe. “Atlanta’s nickname has always been the ‘City in the Forest,’ and if you’ve ever flown in, you’re like, ‘Oh, I get it,’” said Jeph Burgoon, owner of Comet Trail Cycles, a shop housed in a former Silver Comet depot in Mableton, Georgia.
This author will remember the 20-mile ride I took on a Comet Trail rental as much for the autumnal serenity, with leaves trickling down from the tree-canopy-covered trail and patting against the trail’s pavement, as for the ocean of brake lights I glided over while crossing a pedestrian bridge above U.S. Route 278.
Whether it’s providing his youngest customers a launchpad to learn how to ride a bike—“My favorite thing in the world is taking off training wheels,” he said—or offering a safe route for 80-mile round-trip overnight rides to grab pizza and camp in Rockmart, Burgoon has many reasons for his bike shop, but said he wouldn’t have opened it if it weren’t right along the Silver Comet.
Even before the Comet connects to Atlanta’s downtown trail network, Burgoon said he’s already seeing an uptick in customers riding to Mableton from the city. As the connections form and bike travel grows safer, he said more people are going to discover what he has, that it’s often quicker to pedal around the Atlanta metropolitan area than it is to drive.
Connecting the Comet
The connections are forming at breakneck speed, in trail development terms. At the end of a driving tour through Atlanta’s bustling Westside, Pete Pellegrini parked near a pickleball court off Marietta Boulevard NW to show me the first completed puzzle piece linking the Beltline with the Silver Comet. The Woodall Rail Trail, a 0.7-mile path along an inactive industrial rail corridor beside Woodall Creek, is the off-ramp from the Silver Comet Connector to the Beltline. Before we got there, Pellegrini, a PATH Foundation project manager, showed me the path that trail developers are forging to get to this point.
As with the Silver Comet, this $2.4 million segment was funded through both public and private contributions—state and federal grants with matching support from the PATH Foundation and the Upper Westside Community Improvement District. Pellegrini stood with Atlanta’s mayor and other leaders at the May 2025 ribbon cutting, reflecting on the many steps behind such projects. “There are a lot of layers,” he said. “It’s like an onion.” But this three-year process, from design and permitting to engagement and construction, he said, was fairly fast.
The work continues apace. A week after my visit, Pellegrini attended the ribbon cutting for another connector segment—a 0.4-mile, 10-foot-wide stretch from Chattahoochee Avenue NW along MacArthur Boulevard to the Whetstone Creek Trail. “This is indicative of the energy and activity that is happening in northwest Atlanta, and the west side,” Solomon Caviness, Atlanta Department of Transportation commissioner, said during the Nov. 19, 2025, ribbon cutting. “With this new segment, we’re expanding safe, nonmotorized access for pedestrians and bicyclists and enhancing mobility along one of our city’s key corridors.”
During my visit, Pellegrini pointed out construction zones while navigating a dense metro corridor, including routes beside new apartments and through a floodplain along Woodall Creek. A boardwalk, bridge and elevated trail will carry users safely above much of the waterway and provide signature elements for the Silver Comet Connector. When I visited in November, stacks of timber poles lined the future path; by month’s end, they were standing.
For longtime Connect the Comet advocate Wendell Burks, who once described the corridor as blocked by five “walls” of car-centric infrastructure, the progress is remarkable. While there are some gaps to be addressed, he said seeing the progress is a dream come true.
“Right now, the pieces seem to be in place for it to come together,” he said.
“The two trails combined, that’s what forms one of the longest contiguous paved pedestrian paths in the United States,” said Hodges, Anniston’s public relations officer. “To extend that even farther and truly be able to go into the heart of Atlanta, from all the way into the heart of Anniston, it’s very exciting.”
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