While I could probably come up with a new wish list (SmartBike expansion, revoke the Maryland "ride right' law, required bike parking at all area local, state, fed government facilities, etc...) I had fun last year doing a Bridges theme, so I'm going to do that again. This year I'm going to do 12 area rail-to-trail conversions that would make a nice addition to the trail network.
Rail trails were what sucked me into bike advocacy in the first place. Riding on the Capital Crescent Trail for the first time I thought "why aren't there more of these?" The next day, by coincidence, I found an abandoned copy of the Rails-to-Trails magazine on a Metro train and it's been all John Laroche ever since.
Railroad mileage peaked in the United States somewhere around 1929, when the automobile began to give it strong competition. Since then nearly 200,000 miles of railroad track has disappeared. In the 1960's, as a major wave of railroad abandonment coincided with the environmental awakening and Lady Bird Johnson's American beautification efforts, some abandoned railroads were turned into ecological parks. In 1965 the Elroy-Sparta State Trail in Wisconsin became the first abandoned railroad to be turned into a trail. Severl more trails followed. In 1983, concerned with the threat of losing rail corridors that could never be put back together, the National Trails System Act of 1968 was modified to include railbanking.
A corridor that is railbanked precludes abandonment and railbanking preserves the railroad's right to transfer all forms of ownership, including easements, to a trail group. This arrangement can be very beneficial to the railroad company because it's able to sell the entire corridor, instead of pieces, therefore reducing transaction costs, and allows the railroad to avoid the expense of removing railroad structures, such as trestles and culverts. It also avoids time consuming and costly inquiries or litigation to resolve ownership questions.
Railbanking equally benefits trail organizations, whose acquisition of the corridor might otherwise be vulnerable to ownership challenges.
In addition, "The abandoning railroad has the right to re-establish rail service on a railbanked corridor." So it's kind of a win-win. As a result rail-trails began to explode and a few years later the RTC was formed to encurage and promote rail trails.
Railroad corridors make great trails for the exact reasons they made great railroads. First of all the railroad was often there before anything else was and got first pick of the land (or, because of their power and wealth, got others to move), so they chose the flattest/straightest route they could. Then they made it even flatter with tunnels, cuts, bridges and build-up because trains do not do well on steep inclines. This means a rail-trail is often flat and straight - both of which are good for energy-conscious cyclists. Furthermore, since people often moved to be near the railroad, rail trails are near people, even in dense areas where stream trails would be difficult to impossible.
The DC area already has several rail trails including the W&OD (coincidentally Rails to Trails trail of the month), Capital Crescent, B&A, WB&A, College Park Trolley, North Bethesda, Bluemont Junction, and soon the Metropolitan Branch (though only for a few of it's miles). These are among the most popular area trails.
But several other opportunities await, and I plan to go through 12 of these over the next 12 days. Ordered closest to DC to farthest.
One item not included on the list is the very short spur to PEPCO's Benning Road Peak Power plant. A small bridge carries a rail spur over Kenilworth and onto the PEPCO plant property. The plant is scheduled to close in May of 2012 and DDOT has scheduled the bridge for demolition at that time. I'm not sure if the bridge could be modified into a pedestrian bridge - in which case it could easily connect to the west entrance of the Minnesota Avenue Station - but it probably wouldn't serve as a very good bike connection. Even as a pedestrian bridge it would only be really useful if the PEPCO property were redeveloped; and the District could probably include a pedestrian bridge in their RFP.
Still, why does DDOT have to pay for its demolition? Why not PEPCO or CSX? I wonder if the bridge can be recycled as a bike bridge somewhere on the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail. That would be cool.
Photo by blazer8696
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