BEST OF
PENNSYLVANIA Armstrong Trails
The Allegheny Valley Railroad once supported a booming coal and timber industry across western Pennsylvania, but the trains stopped running in the 1970s. Conrail, the line’s owner in 1992, was open to selling the corridor to the Allegheny Valley Land Trust (AVLT) but was unwilling to formally railbank it with the Surface Transportation Board (STB), the governing body for railbanking. In response, the land trust unilaterally filed the railbanking declaration, along with the deed from Conrail, specifying that the corridor was railbanked directly with the AVLT. Several landowners adjacent to the line filed suit, believing that absent STB authority, long-ago property easements granted to the railway should revert back to them. RTC filed a legal brief in support of the trail project. Moody v. Allegheny Valley Land Trust was decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1999, where the court momentously agreed with the AVLT that private railbanking was allowed even without action by the STB. Trailgoers on the Armstrong Trails (armstrongtrails.org) today can enjoy a 52-mile trip along the eastern bank of the Allegheny River, where they’ll encounter numerous glimpses of the route’s history: the remains of iron furnaces, a coaling tower that was used to refuel steam engines as late as 1957, a locomotive turntable and a half-mile tunnel.
TEXAS A-train Rail Trail
When the Union Pacific railbanked a disused line near Dallas-Fort Worth, the corridor was quickly snatched up by the city of Denton and transformed into the A-train Rail Trail (rtc.li/a-train-rail-trail). Not long afterward, the corridor was reactivated for rail use when the Denton County Transportation Authority sought to create a commuter line. The expansive width of the corridor allowed the A-train’s tracks to be laid down alongside the bike-and-ped trail, preserving an already- beloved community asset.
MISSOURI Frisco Highline Trail
From the rear of his presidential railcar, Harry Truman addressed an assembled crowd in Springfield, Missouri, in the summer of 1948. His impromptu remarks, delivered along the Frisco Highline, were the first instance of his famous whistle-stop campaign. But the history-making status of the Highline wasn’t enough to save it; passenger operations ceased in 1954, and the line’s new owner, Burlington Northern Railroad, filed its intention to railbank 30 miles of the corridor in 1991. A local nonprofit named Ozark Greenways purchased the corridor, offsetting the cost by salvaging and selling the route’s rails and ties. A 10-mile section of the Frisco Highline Trail (rtc.li/frisco-highline) opened in 1999, fittingly on National Trails Day, and when Burlington Northern abandoned another section of the line, it was acquired and added to the route. Other additions over the years have extended this scenic pathway through the Ozarks to 37 miles.
Learn more about these and other trails at TrailLink.com.
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