JOEL ROSE, HOST:
I like to go for long bike rides, and for me, there is nothing quite like a good rail trail. That's a former rail corridor that's been reborn as a multi-use trail for bicycles and pedestrians - gentle hills, no cars, just mile after mile of unbroken trail.
So this is beautiful with the purple and yellow wildflowers...
KEVIN BELLE: Yeah.
ROSE: ...On this side of the road. Some crickets.
There are thousands of these trails all over the country, and now there is an ambitious plan to connect them from Washington, D.C., all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I'd like to see this cross-country trail for myself. So NPR producer Rolando Arrieta and I grab our mics...
(SOUNDBITE OF ZIPPER ZIPPING)
ROSE: ...And our bikes.
There we go.
And we ride along on a tour organized by the Rails to Trails Conservancy.
BELLE: All right, let's hit it.
ROSE: Our tour guide is Kevin Belle, the project director for the Great American Rail-Trail, as it's known. We jump on our bikes and start riding on the Montour Trail in Western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh.
BELLE: So many of these trails are named after the railroad that used to be running through there.
ROSE: It's cool how the old rail trails just cut through the rock like that.
BELLE: You can see, like, how the rain used to run. You can envision an old railroad.
ROSE: This is - feels almost flat. This is so mellow. It's nice.
BELLE: And that's what we're trying to create, right? Railroads could only go at a certain percent grade. So that makes rail trails accessible to so many more people because you're not going up and down steep inclines. Typically, it went through towns, like, every 5, 10 miles, and that makes it so that if you go on a long trip, you don't have to carry a lot with you. You get to actually experience the towns, which I think is the coolest part about a trail like the Great American Rail-Trail.
ROSE: The proposed route for the Great American Rail-Trail is 3,700 miles long, and more than half of it is finished, including the Great Alleghany Passage in Pennsylvania, along with big stretches in Maryland, Ohio and Washington State. Belle says that's already paying dividends for small towns along the trail.
BELLE: This is an economic development driver, and there's so many little towns that you can see on trail that you wouldn't see, like, driving, you know? So that's why we wanted to show this off.
ROSE: We stop for lunch at an ice cream stand by the trail in Paradise, Pennsylvania. There are places like this along rail trails all over the country. Brandi Horton is the VP of communications for the Rails to Trails Conservancy.
BRANDI HORTON: Forty years ago, there were a handful of multi-use trails across the country, just a handful. It is something that has just snowballed. We want this, you know, for us, for our kids, for our grandkids.
ROSE: Take me back to the beginning of the Rails to Trails Conservancy. Like, what is happening in that moment, I guess, 40 years ago, right?
HORTON: Yeah, 40 years ago. So a lot of freight was moving to roads and to trucking, and so railroads were just losing money. And they were trying to figure out what they were going to do with all of this real estate. And Congress panicked. They got a little bit nervous, and they thought, if we just let the railroad sell this land, we'll never get it back.
ROSE: So Congress passed the Railbanking Act of 1983, which made it easier to protect these routes from development by turning them into trails. This is technically just an interim use. Railroads could still ask for some of the land back. Though in practice, Horton says, that's unusual.
HORTON: Reactivating rail corridors has been very rare. But the importance of protecting those corridors is that we have protected a transportation interest in our country, and you can't get that back.
ROSE: How far have we actually gone now? It's (ph)...
Back on our bikes again. Kevin Belle explains that railbanking opened the door, but it's the energy of volunteers that really made Rails to Trails happen.
BELLE: It started with passionate people who had these old rail lines in their backyards, you know?
ROSE: I feel like we're going uphill a little bit.
BELLE: Yeah, rail trails can be deceiving on the eye 'cause you're like, I look like I'm going flat, but why do I feel like I'm going through molasses?
ROSE: Forty years ago, the idea of a transcontinental rail trail would have sounded crazy. And to be fair, it is still a long way from reality. There are long chunks of the preferred route that are not done, particularly in Wyoming and Montana where large segments of the trail haven't been built or even planned yet.
So they've left you the hard work?
BELLE: I would say that's accurate. I would say none of this has been easy.
ROSE: Fair.
BELLE: But the things...
ROSE: Fair.
BELLE: ...That would be the easiest have largely been done.
ROSE: The Rails to Trails Conservancy is trying to shed light on those remaining holes, like the 9-mile gap between Pittsburgh and the beginning of the Montour Trail. But there have also been some really big wins, like the Hellbender Preserve in Eastern Ohio.
AARON DODDS: So we split this tunnel in half.
ROSE: Aaron Dodds shows me a rehabbed rail tunnel. He is with the Jefferson County Soil and Water Conservation District, which runs the Hellbender Preserve. It's named after the largest native salamander in North America, which thrives here along with some other species.
DODDS: A lot of salamanders are in this tunnel, long-tailed salamander, spring salamanders.
ROSE: We also stop in Western Pennsylvania at the McDonald Viaduct, a steel bridge nearly 1,000 feet long that used to carry coal trains for the Montour Railroad.
JULIAN WOLFE: This was one of our major critical infrastructure projects that took a lot of money.
ROSE: Julian Wolfe is the president of the Montour Trail Council, an all-volunteer organization that's been working on this trail for decades. When the volunteers first took over the McDonald Viaduct in the early 1990s, Wolfe says it was in terrible shape.
WOLFE: The bridge decking was old and rotting. Some of the wood boards were missing. It did not have any of these guardrails, did not have any of this superstructure.
ROSE: Wolfe says it took years to raise enough money to bring the viaduct back to life as a multi-use trail. Now former Council President Ned Williams says it's a crucial connection.
NED WILLIAMS: That's the underlying message of this entire adventure here is making connections, right? And this is one little one. It's 963 feet, but it's a really important connection.
ROSE: Williams says a big project like this can involve a lot of moving parts - engineers, lawyers and government at all levels.
WILLIAMS: All those elements have to be brought together and very carefully blended, and if you're really lucky, you end up like this (laughter).
ROSE: Lucky and very, very persistent - that has been the formula for the rails to trails movement from the start, and it is still how they roll.
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