In an earlier post I mentioned that, in DC, there were only a few miles of abandoned rail bed available for trail conversion. One of those pieces is the St. Elizabeths rail spur in SE. It's only 0.65 miles long, but it would still make a useful trail connection should the Shepard Industrial Spur (Pictured is the last train to travel the spur) ever be made into a bike trail, which is why it was added to the DC Bicycle Master Plan. Now, according to an article in the post:
President Bush's 2007 budget proposal calls for allocating $306 million for the [new Coast Guard] headquarters, a three-year project that would involve constructing and rehabilitating buildings on the hospital's 176-acre west campus, according to a spokesman for the General Services Administration, which is managing the project. The total project would cost $330 million, and groundbreaking is expected to take place next year, he said.
This could be good news in that converting the rail bed to a trail could be added to the project. The Coast Guard should be interested in providing its employees with an option to easily bike to work.
But it's probably bad news since the Coast Guard will most likely want a wide security perimeter that would preclude the construction of a trail. With emphasis on security we've had lately, I would not be surprised it the trail were deemed a security threat.
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