From Rails to Trails

- Coming up.

It's one of America's most unlikely movements.

- Woo Woo!

- The fight to convert abandoned railroads to trails.

- There's no way of getting something as terrific as a trail without putting some work into it.

- A movement that met roadblocks at every turn.

- They legalized the theft of our property.

- What does that trail mean for communities that have been there for decades?

- Sparking political battles from small towns... - That is prime real estate!

- To the nation's capital.

- I knew nobody else would do it if I didn't.

- A movement that changed America one mile at a time.

- Certainly the beginning of a course correction, but even now, there's a long way to go.

- I'm Edward Norton, and this is the story of a national transformation from rails to trails.

- Major funding for From Rails to Trails is provided by the Speedwell Foundation with additional funding from the Lawrence and Lillian Solomon Foundation, Laura H. Richards, Crawford Taylor Foundation, Peter Goldman and Martha Kongsgaard, Conine Family Foundation, Charles N. Marshall, Tone Family Fund, Vermont Tourism, and the following.

[PLAINTIVE MUSIC] [MUSIC CONTINUES] - This is the old train station or train depot.

- For a century, this South Texas rail yard was alive with freight workers and the rumble of locomotives bound for the Mexico border.

- So as trains came in and eventually crossed over into Mexico, they would switch out the cars.

- The yard fell silent in 2003 and the rail corridor, like so many others across America, was soon abandoned.

- It has been abandoned for many years waiting for a purpose.

- That is prime real estate!

That doesn't mean we put a road over it, that means we protect it.

- In 2004, the county dropped a bombshell.

It wanted to convert Brownsville's old railroad into a toll road.

- It was going to have at least three to four lanes, and it was parallel and very close to an existing freeway.

- What is the motivation for a road when so many people don't want it?

Why did we need two freeways going to the same place adjacent and parallel to each other?

So right after I was elected, the director came to my office, put a big map up on the wall and said, look at that.

Isn't that a lovely corridor begging for a road?

And I said, well, that may be what you see.

But as a physician, I look at that and say, look at that.

Isn't it a beautiful corridor for a trail, where people could have access to activity every day?

Brownsville is a poor area with very low access to healthcare.

We have one in three that are diabetic as opposed to one in 10.

On a national average.

80% of our people are either obese or overweight.

Those are hard facts.

Hello everybody.

Happy Cinco de Mayo.

- The people of Brownsville began to organize, calling themselves Friends of the West Rail Trail.

- That trail will cost maybe 10 to $12 million.

Toll road is $180 million.

- They gathered together in living rooms and church buildings and school cafeterias, and spoke about how they weren't going to accept this.

- Lucky for the people of Brownsville, they did not have to blaze an entirely new trail.

[ENERGETIC MUSIC] For the past half century, Americans have been fighting similar battles across the country.

A committed core of activists have converted 26,000 miles of old rails into trails.

- There's no way of getting something as terrific as a trail without putting some work into it.

It didn't just fall into place.

People worked hard for it.

First you have to realize that you have an abandoned railroad track in your community.

Then you have to find out that it's not being used.

Then you have to bring it out to the public to discuss.

Of course, lots of people say, this is a terrible idea.

I don't want to spend tax money on the trail.

So then you have to build your momentum.

- Please do what's right and let this be a natural car free trail.

It is cheaper, it is safer, cleaner, and it is better for everyone.

Thank you.

- In Brownsville, organizers went door to door collecting signatures.

- And, showed up at the city commission, wheeling a wheelbarrow with 5,000 signatures, And said, you know, enough is enough.

This is what we want.

You are our elected officials and you should listen to us.

- Not only me, but four of my friends have also been hit by cars biking.

Two of them had to be hospitalized.

New right now, a battle is brewing between the city of Brownsville and Cameron County.

- At the center of it all, the old West Railroad.

- Organizers knew they had to play hardball.

When a county judge didn't back the trail, they got out the vote for his opponent.

- I'm proud to support a west rail trail hike and bike trail only, and I look forward to making it a reality.

- They had organized to the point where they were a force to be reckoned with.

- It took more than a decade, but the movement finally secured nearly $9 million to convert the old rail line.

- When people decide to work together for the betterment of their community and to see that dream become a reality, it is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

- You hear the birds, you see the water, you see the kids playing on it, and you think this was worth it.

Because a road here, you'd be driving fast and you'd miss all of that.

[UPBEAT MUSIC] - From Hawaii to Maine and points in between, a network of these rail trails crisscrosses the country, it now connects towns that were once linked by trains.

- Woo woo.

[MUSIC] [MUSIC CONTINUES] - (singing) We're a great big rolling railroad Hear that diesel engine's power We're a thousand wheels of freight train, Doing 90 miles an hour.

- It's hard for Americans today to realize how important railroads were to the country.

It was just the defining transportation technology.

Trains ran everywhere - From the moment the first regular rail service started in Baltimore in 1830, it was clear this technology would transform the country.

American entrepreneurs saw a chance to connect this far-flung country and to make a fortune along the way.

- It's like the tech companies today.

It's the excitement of what was going on, how to raise money, how to make money, how to get a big return on your investment.

- It was more profitable to build railroads than to operate them.

Thanks to the federal government.

It granted the rail companies millions of acres of land.

- Since the railroad industry was a private for-profit situation, individual entrepreneurs decided where they wanted to build the tracks.

- Intense competition created a chaotic rail building frenzy with no master plan.

- It wasn't the government said, we're gonna put in tracks here and there.

Everybody built their tracks as quickly as they could To try and beat the other guy.

There were seven different routes between Chicago and St. Louis.

Nine routes from Chicago to New York.

It was very redundant.

- As they laid their tracks, they laid claim to the right of way, often cutting through private plots, from small farms to sprawling Native American reservations.

- They did not have a whole lot of interest in being sensitive to who lived nearby.

They just whooshed their line right through.

- Along the way, the railroads forever altered the land itself.

- Railroads need to maintain a pretty consistent engine speed.

They were always looking for routes through the flattest area, and if it wasn't flat enough, they would make it flat by bridging over valleys and cutting through mountain.

Now you can see here, the hillside goes way up here, and if the railroad hadn't cut this out, we'd have to be way up there or way up there.

Their engineering was unbelievable.

Here's this beautiful brick line tunnel.

They cut a tunnel through the mountain.

This trail that we're on actually goes uphill for miles, but the railroads smooth out the grade so evenly that you can hardly feel that you're going uphill.

- These smooth surfaces would eventually lend themselves to another form of transportation.

[UPBEAT MUSIC] When the bicycle arrived on the scene, it too demanded smooth surfaces.

- As you can see, the American streets are very bad.

You have the potholes.

When they took them outside with the narrow steel tires and the deplorable roads that we had, it just was not a happy marriage.

- So bicyclists became a politically organized bunch fighting for better roads and for the right to ride on them.

It was called the Good Roads Movement.

- If you formed a group and looked like you belonged on the street, you had some authority.

So they would dress in military garb, uniform hats to establish some presence on the streets.

- The bicyclists, which were basically more urban people that wanted to go out of town into the countryside and ride their bicycles and said, come on, you know we need better roads than this.

Bicyclists were paving the way for another form of transportation.

- It looked like a buggy.

Only it'd had no shafts for a horse to be harnessed to.

The street was never the same again.

- The automobile became the totally dominant force in America.

When motor vehicles came in and the motor vehicle industry took over the Good Roads Movement and it became a car- oriented Good Roads Movement.

- The federal government fueled this revolution, much like it had done for the railroads a half a century earlier.

As early as 1916, Congress spent $85 million on new roads.

- America was so excited about the potential that came with the automobile that it got prioritized over every other form of land use and of transportation, and that came back to bite us.

- Trucks started taking a lot of business away from the railroads, and then cars took passenger business away from the railroads.

So both of those things really cut into the profitability of the railroads, and some of them started going out of business.

- By 1963, nearly 50,000 miles of track across the United States sat abandoned But trains weren't the only mode of transit that took a back seat to the car.

Bicyclists finally had smooth roads, but the streets were choked with intimidating traffic.

The bicycle was soon regarded as little more than a child's toy.

- When I was a kid here in New York City, bicycles were not used by adults at all.

Of course, there was no bike lanes.

We were just sort of fitting into the edges of the city, looking over our shoulders if there's room to squeeze by someplace.

But, for the whole rest of my life that made me wanna find car free places to bike.

- I welcome this opportunity to speak to the people of America about a subject which I believe to be most important, and that is the subject of physical fitness.

- In 1962, President John F. Kennedy launched a national campaign to get people out of their cars and into the great outdoors.

- I think that mental and physical health, mental and physical vigor go hand in hand.

- Automobiles were shrinking the open space.

So I think there was this natural yearning to keep open spaces available.

- I hope all of you will join in a great national effort.

- Tuning in from Rochester, New York, outdoor enthusiast Waldo Nielsen was inspired to hike 50 miles in a single day.

To avoid busy roads, Nielsen chose a novel path, one that was practically built for walking.

- The corridor is already in place, The hardest work has been done, And the path has been carved.

Incredibly smooth, slight grades, accessible to literally anyone.

- After a successful journey, Nielsen wanted to pay it forward.

Through diligent research, he identified more than 35,000 miles of abandoned railroad tracks across the country.

He then published his list in Right of Way.

- He wasn't a an organizer, he wasn't a political activist.

He just thought, let's make a list of all these railroad corridors so that people can walk on them.

- Nielsen's book would become a catalyst for a new movement that would reclaim these corridors for the bicyclists and pedestrians who'd been pushed off the road.

- Pull up the tracks, pull up the ties, and really you've got the trail largely made.

That's the beauty of it.

We don't have to start from scratch.

- In the heart of the Midwest, a pioneering naturalist would set this new movement in motion.

Her name was May Watts.

- She was 70 when I first met her, but she was such an extraordinary person.

She just wanted people to be interested in nature and in plants and how everything was interrelated.

- She was sort of thinking ahead to how can we protect the spaces that we have left before they're gone?

- May Watts made her home west of Chicago, where the open prairie had been devoured by suburban sprawl.

- The suburbs were created for people to have more space, but what was happening was, as she calls it, the bulldozers were drooling.

- On a trip to England, Watts discovered there was a better way.

For centuries, English footpaths had connected people to the nature around them.

- If you've been to England, you know that anyone can access these footpaths.

What struck her was how everyone could walk the paths together, young, old, and she saw this model for democratic access to nature.

- What she saw across the pond would seed an ambitious idea, one that took root in her own backyard.

- She was out driving and she crosses the old, abandoned CA & E railroad track.

She gets out of the car and she looks down, and then she says, this is it.

- Along that 50 mile stretch of empty track, Watts found a dormant prairie lying in wait.

While agriculture and sprawl had erased most of Illinois's native plants, here along the tracks, they were thriving.

- When the trains travel on the tracks, the sparks light fires along the railroad bed that propagate the seeds of many of these native plants.

It's very similar to a prairie burn.

- Watts was struck by a novel idea.

What if the old railroad corridor could be converted to a trail?

- You didn't have to travel to get to nature.

Nature could be right there outside your door.

- In the fall of 1963, she penned her now-famous letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune.

- We are human beings.

We are able to walk upright on two feet.

We need a footpath.

Right now, The right of way lies waiting, and many hands are itching for it.

Here is a potential path.

This is a proud resource.

The time to act is now.

- Readers responded in force.

Watts quickly attracted a cadre of smart, hardworking volunteers.

- It was spearheaded by a group of women.

They were community volunteers.

They were gardeners, they were mothers.

- And their husbands, and then other people that they drew in, and there's a little hardcore group of them that dug in deep.

- As the volunteers walked along the idle tracks, they imagined a place of endless possibility.

They called it the Illinois Prairie Path.

But just as May Watts had warned, private developers and city planners were itching to get their hands on the corridor.

Soon, several sections were paved over for parking.

- In the Chicago suburbs, it was running through several different counties.

The state didn't take the lead on it.

The counties were arguing with each other.

- I think anytime we think about something like a trail, we understand it to be exquisitely local.

But the reality is, you know, the beginning and end of a trail doesn't respect the beginning and end of a county line or a city limit.

So there needs to be regional cooperation.

- Meanwhile, the power company held a perpetual easement along the corridor, its lines hanging over the proposed path.

- They pitched it to Commonwealth Edison that this would be a great PR boom for them in getting this path realized.

And if you look at one of the brochures, sure enough, they tout that they were instrumental in helping the Illinois Prairie Path become what it was.

[GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC] - Through sheer force of will, The grassroots group would eventually realize May Watt's vision.

But because they hit so many unexpected speed bumps, the Illinois Prairie Path would not earn the title of America's first rail trail.

That's because another rail trail was blazing ahead, 200 miles away in Wisconsin.

[COWS MOOING] - The property was homesteaded by my great-grandfather.

It's unique and it's beautiful and I love it.

I love being able to talk about my hometown, the beauty of the terrain.

It's magical.

I may be prejudiced, and I may be a little bit overselling it, but that's too bad.

That's Tommy Thompson and that's what I love about this area.

- Halfway between Chicago and Minneapolis, Elroy, Wisconsin was once a significant stop along the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad.

- Just think of this, 15 freight trains went through Elroy every single day, and 10 passenger trains.

- But in 1964, facing stiff competition from trucks, the line was abandoned.

And like so many other small towns across America, Elroy was dealt a major blow.

- Population went from 2,200 at the turn of the century to now down around 1,500.

- To draw people back to Elroy, A local politician named Alan Thompson had an idea.

- My father was very much a visionary, always looking for something to promote Elroy.

And he said, well, with the trains gone, maybe we should turn that into a bicycle trail.

So he took it up at the county board, They took it up with the Department of Natural Resources, and they came together with the decision that this would be a tremendous idea.

- The 32 mile trail would run from Elroy to the town of Sparta, passing through three cavernous tunnels.

Unlike the Illinois Prairie Path, this corridor was relatively rural, so the state could snatch up the entire stretch for a mere $12,000.

- Well, the advantage is that you have one decision maker, the state saying, we'll take this, we'll pay for it, and we'll operate it.

We consider the Elroy-Sparta Trail, sort of the first successful rail trail.

The state bought it.

They surfaced it with a nice crushed limestone surface.

- And when you tell people the trail goes through three railroad tunnels, one is 3,800 feet, it's intriguing for people to come and see it, and to ride it.

I still think it's the greatest and most beautiful bicycle trail in America.

- Slowly and steadily, a national rails to trails movement began to emerge.

Its members were as diverse as they were passionate for the cause.

- I was very involved in the Women's Movement for a decade, working for the Equal Rights Amendment, and we failed.

We did not ratify that amendment.

And I really felt such responsibility and I needed to do something, and I really wanted to create a safe place for women to be physically active, and the trail was just the perfect answer to that.

- I came at it really from the environmental movement.

I was working on the bottle bill trying to get returnable bottles, and we lost that one along with the ERA.

The nice thing about rails to trails is it's kind of recycling, and so let's recycle these railroads, which has been much more successful.

- Not all cyclists were so gung ho about trails.

Many of them saw it is another strategy to displace cyclists from the street, and if you have a trail, then we're gonna be kicked off the road, and so we're not gonna support that.

- But the wheels of change were already in motion.

By 1968, there were about 30 rail trails across the country.

- Suddenly the people that are scared of riding in the road said, Hey, this would be great for us.

And then even the people that preferred to ride on the road said, okay, well, you guys can have your railroad corridor, and we'll use it too, but we'll still ride on the road.

And the word just started quietly spreading around the country among bicyclists.

Wow, you mean there's this long trail that has no cars on it?

- But not everyone was on board.

- I'm not against the trails.

I'm just against how they took the land, without doing it like they should have done.

- Dick Welsh has been fighting rail trail efforts for four decades.

- The federal government, they can actually take property without appropriating money for it.

- His battles began in 1969, when Welsh and his wife built a house outside Seattle on Lake Sammamish, where an occasional freight train chugged through their yard.

- We built a dock and we walked across the track all the time.

And you knew about when the trains were coming anyway.

We never had any bother with it.

I mean, in fact, it was kind of something different.

Though the train tracks weren't a bother, The threat of their abandonment was.

Welsh saw that as rail corridors were abandoned, adjacent property owners were fighting to keep what they felt was their land.

- Well, I've always been into property rights to a certain extent.

You buy a piece of property, you don't go back and read through the whole abstract and see what all the deeds said.

I don't think very many people do that.

Now, I did.

- Looking at old property records, Welsh contended that the railroads only had an easement allowing them to pass through private property.

- If you looked at our deed, it says "subject to a railroad right of way."

That's why everybody thought that they would get the land back once the railroad quit.

- To fight back, Welsh formed the National Association of Reversionary Property Owners.

The group's private property claims were an affront to rail trail advocates.

- Though the railroads were built often by private companies, they were subsidized by tremendous public and federal investment, and ultimately in corridors that were built on public land spanning the country.

So I think the idea of turning them into trails is a very elegant way of continuing those basic principles that this is public investment on public land for essentially a whole new form of infrastructure.

- As legal challenges mounted, it threatened to stop the rails to trails movement dead in its tracks.

But 20 miles northwest of Dick Welsh's home, another effort was heating up, which would prove that the movement was here to stay.

- My husband and I, our property was the one that immediately abutted the railroad track.

So we'd gotten a letter from Burlington Northern that indicated they were going to abandon the line.

- In the summer of 1970, a group of friends and neighbors in Seattle gathered to discuss.

- I don't know whether you said it first or I said it first.

- I don't remember either.

- We looked at each other and I think we both said, let's make a trail.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

And the whole group immediately was on board.

- Yes.

- So I was very pregnant and I didn't know what I could do to help with the trail, but I thought I could go to the library.

I discovered that those rails were laid in 1885.

- A century earlier, Seattleites had donated land for the railroad to ensure that their city would become an economic powerhouse.

- People donated it for the purpose of Seattle being the queen city.

And now once again, donating property to the city for the trail would also be good for the city.

- They decided to call it the Burke-Gilman Trail, For the two businessmen who brought the railroad to town.

They went door to door hoping to get the buy-in of every neighbor along the tracks with handmade brochures.

At an environmental fair that winter, they cornered the mayor.

- He's 10 feet or so from me, and all of a sudden I knew what to do.

Pull the baby out.

And so of course he stopped and he said, who's this?

And out of my mouth came, a little girl that needs a bicycle trail.

- The mayor volunteered to rally the community with a hike-in along the tracks.

- The rally got so much publicity.

- Yeah.

- I mean, it really put us on the map.

Some of the radio stations came to the rally and one of them walked up to me.

He said, so I'm going to organize a real opposition group.

What do you say?

- It seems the trail committee weren't the only ones who saw the value of this slice of Seattle.

The Burlington Northern Railroad wanted to sell it and reap a profit.

Adjacent property owners wanted it for themselves.

- We didn't know if the city would fund the trail, but the right of way was so valuable you could not replace it.

- The trail advocates had to move quickly.

Hoping to take the corridor off the market, they convinced the federal government to reconsider the railroad's abandonment.

- It legally stopped them from immediately selling the land.

- Yeah - Yeah.

- And then the mayor and the county then could negotiate.

- The case set an important legal precedent.

From now on, when a rail corridor was abandoned, public agencies and civic groups would be given the first opportunity to buy it, so they could use it as park land.

- Not only paved the way for us, but it set a national precedent and opened the door to a whole bunch of subsequent rail to trail conversions.

- Right.

And so we made new law.

- Right.

[CYCLISTS CHATTING] Thanks to its big city setting, The Burke-Gilman brought national attention to rail trails.

The movement was even starting to turn heads in the nation's capital.

- The current situation on the Rock Island railroad line is symptomatic of the problems that confront the entire United States rail industry.

- For Congress, rail trails were an elegant solution to a vexing problem.

As railroads continued to go under, their unused tracks scarred the American landscape.

So in 1977, the federal government set aside $5 million to help communities turn them into trails.

- They got 130 applicants from around the country.

Everybody was stunned.

130 different communities are actually thinking about this?

They found nine really strong project possibilities and all nine of them became trails.

It really raised the level of the movement tremendously.

- One was right in Congress's backyard.

The Washington and Old Dominion Trail, or W & OD, became a playground for DC power brokers.

- When we would go to Congress and say, we are working on rails to trails, and they go rails to trails?

- Or whale to snails, or?

[LAUGHING] What are you talking about?

And then we'd say like the W & OD, and they say, oh, I love the W & OD.

[CREEK BURBLING] [BIRDS CHIRPING] I had a love of running.

I-I, I really like to run.

- A young government lawyer was among those in Washington who saw the potential for rail trails.

- I couldn't cross this black bridge up here cause there were railroad tracks.

- His fateful encounter with a lightly used railroad would prove to be a pivotal moment.

- If that were a trail, I could have run home.

- As a lawyer, he knew that if the train ever stopped running, the corridor would be broken up into private parcels.

- Railroads are bought for railway purposes, and if you abandon the railroad, it reverts back to the guy that originally owned it.

- That got him thinking, what if there was some way to preserve the right of way by saving a corridor in some sort of bank?

- So my thought was, when the railroad is through, the rails the trails community or a state or local body comes in, assumes all the liability, pays all the taxes.

- He sat down to write a bill, which would become the rails to trails movement's secret weapon.

- In the case of interim use of any established railroad rights of way pursuant to donation, transfer, lease, sale.

The reason it's long is that I didn't want anybody to read to the end.

A lot of people pay a lot of money to a lobbyist to write what I wrote.

- Members of Congress who did read the entire bill, understood that the corridor was in the bank so that a railroad could someday use it again.

Its use as a trail was legally only temporary.

- It was to hold the right of way for the future so that the high speed rail or whoever could come back and build the right of way into a railroad again.

- In March of 1983, Ronald Reagan signed rail banking into law.

It was roundly condemned by rail trail opponents.

- Rail banking was just a disguise to steal property.

They legalized the theft of our property.

- Soon after rail banking took effect, Missouri farmers waged one of a series of legal battles that would make it to the highest court in the land.

It all began in 1986, when Jayne and Maurice Glosemeyer learned that the tracks running through their farm were set to become the longest rail trail in the country.

- We were never asked if we wanted the trail to go through our property.

We read about a proposed trail in the sports section of the St. Louis paper, and they just assumed they could walk right over our rights.

- They found out that in order to build the Katy Trail, the corridor had been rail banked, and that flew in the face of the Glosemeyer's assumption that if the railroad went under, the land would be theirs.

- Our easement said, for the purpose of a railroad and no other purpose, that's about as clear cut as you can get.

- Agriculture, it's in your blood.

You wanna pass it to your children, and you don't wanna pass something hindranced to your children.

You want it to be cut, dried, clear.

They can farm it, they can take care of it as they were meant to take care of it.

- And so the Glosemeyers and 143 of their neighbors went to court challenging the very constitutionality of rail banking.

- Fighting the US government is a scary concept, but we were trying to preserve our constitutional right to own property, that no one could just take it from us.

- But their case wasn't the only one working its way through the courts.

- You can see all the old industrial fixtures still.

This was a huge tank farm.

- Thanks in no small part to the US Supreme Court, Burlington, Vermont's waterfront is a cyclist's paradise.

But back when Howard Dean was a young doctor, it was a different story.

- It was a dump, there was trash, there was bricks, there was construction debris.

It was a disaster.

- Then in 1980, real estate developers came knocking.

- and it was about to go into developers' hands and have 10 story condos put on it, and we were just appalled.

The public was gonna be denied access to what we saw as an unbelievable asset.

I come from eastern Long Island, and I grew up in what was a very rural place.

I can remember riding my bike through potato fields, wild blueberries.

I saw that all get run over and disappear.

I didn't want that to happen in Vermont.

- So the future governor decided to make his first foray into politics.

He and local lawyer, Rick Sharp, set out to stop the waterfront condos and fight for a bike path instead.

- Gotta remember the mentality of the 1980s yuppie was to have a condominium right on the lake with nobody going by in front, spoiling their view.

We felt that the bike path should not be an afterthought in a transportation corridor.

Instead, it should be upfront.

- I never thought of the bike path as political.

It was community organizing, contacting the legislatures, getting into the press, going on the radio, having meetings every three weeks, local newsletters, which is really important.

- Soon the group had built enough support to make their case to Burlington's socialist new mayor.

But Bernie Sanders wasn't on board with their plan, claiming it would cost taxpayers too much.

- He had cut a deal with the developer that you could develop the condos, these two big condo towers, but we were having none of it.

- The grassroots group kept the pressure on.

- I get this phone call and it's Bernie.

Howard, In five minutes, I'm gonna announce $750,000 bond issue to build a bike path.

And you can tell your friend Mr. Sharp.

Bang.

The frank truth of this is, is grassroots pressure pushed Bernie into doing this.

However, there was a guy in the North End who had big development of condos and he sued.

- Just when it seemed the path would be built, a neighbor threatened to stop it.

- Paul was a very private guy.

He didn't like the idea of bicycles going by the back door of his luxury condominiums.

- Airline pilot Paul Preseault claimed the land was his.

- He owned both sides of the railroad right of way.

He claimed that when it was abandoned, it reverted back to him.

- And so like the Glosemeyers, Preseault challenged the constitutionality of rail banking.

He even resorted to sabotage.

- He began putting things in the right of way.

So he started with a big dumpster over here and they made him take that out.

And then some rebar.

The unfortunate thing for us was that he laid a log right across the pathway here.

- As Preseault's case made its way toward the US Supreme Court, the rails to trails movement was at a crossroads.

Legal challenges were mounting, and abandoned corridors were being gobbled up by private interests.

It was clear to advocates they needed to organize.

- David Burwell, who had a long history of trying to find alternatives to automobiles, was actually working for the National Wildlife Federation at time.

He was getting calls saying, you've gotta save these abandoned railroad corridors in South Dakota because they're the only place where the pheasants can breed.

And if you don't save these corridors, then we won't have any pheasants to shoot.

David wasn't really a hunter, but he was thinking, maybe this needs its own group.

And that's how things got off the ground.

- In 1986, the Rails to Trails Conservancy opened its doors.

It got to work searching for abandoned corridors and building coalitions to convert them.

- My first job at Rails to Trails Conservancy was to literally assess what was out there, what was abandoned, what was still active, what was possible, who were the trail advocates, who were the government officials that were interested.

- And that's what this organization did, is it took a great idea, a lot of energy in different places and really coalesced a whole movement.

- The organization was in its infancy when it was handed a major victory.

In the Vermont case, The US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of rail banking.

The Conservancy could now use this tool to convert corridors in every corner of the country.

- We were in the office when we got word, and it's like, ah, we won.

We won.

We-we won.

Oh my gosh.

We won.

- While the court ruled that property owners could be compensated for their losses, the case was a serious blow to opponents.

- By then I knew that there was no way to stop the trail.

The politics was against us, so we sold out and moved.

I didn't wanna live near a trail.

- In Vermont, The victory cleared the way for completion of the 14 mile Island Line Trail.

It extends onto a causeway in Lake Champlain where cyclists can catch a bike ferry to the Champlain Islands.

- It certainly had a really big effect on Burlington, Vermont.

Not only do our locals use it regularly, it's the number one attraction for the city of Burlington.

- Working with grassroots organizers from coast to coast, the Rails to Trails Conservancy built out the Nation's trail network.

In 1990, they saw an opportunity in Atlanta.

- A railroad circle on a two mile radius.

And so the recommendation of the report was, this will be abandoned and the charge to the city of Atlanta is to catch every piece of it as it gets abandoned and turn it into trail.

- A Georgia Tech graduate student named Ryan Gravel crafted a plan for the old rail loop.

He called it the Belt Line.

It would eventually include a 22 mile trail alongside a light rail line connecting the people of Atlanta to new housing, retail and parks.

- He got a chance to travel to Europe and noticed that man, people are getting around the the city without having to get in a car.

Why can't we do that in Atlanta?

Atlanta is a cool place to be, but what is our Achilles tendon?

It's traffic.

- But how to pay for it?

City leaders knew that amenities like a trail and transit would eventually attract higher priced real estate development.

So the city designated a special tax district, which would capture rising revenue along the Belt Line.

- And then what the Belt Line does, is to clean it up environmentally, recruit new companies and businesses to locate there.

And so, as the taxes grow, we essentially get a small portion of that new value that's been created.

Not everyone really believed in that concept.

A number of people said, this is a boondoggle.

Why would we put public resources into this glorified sidewalk?

- Atlanta took a leap of faith and it paid off in spades.

- We've invested about $800 million into the Belt Line, but we've seen over $9 billion of private investment that has followed this public infrastructure here.

- The politics of building rail trails was increasingly focused on the fight for funding.

And advocates were once again calling on Congress.

The federal government has a lot to say about transportation routes.

So let's get people healthy, let's get people back biking.

- What creates the mind shift is when Congresspeople perceive the benefits.

My constituents can save a lot of money if they can walk and bike and not have to be maintaining a car.

Some people said there should not be a federal role in funding for walking and biking facilities, but back when it was left to state and local, we had almost no facilities.

It's only When the federal money started acting as a catalyst - In 1991, rail trail advocates hit the jackpot.

For decades, they had been hamstrung by laws that funded transportation through gas taxes.

Gas-free ways of getting around were often left out of the equation.

- In fact, a lot of state departments that we now call transportation departments used to be known as the Highway Department.

We got into this mode as a country where it was as if highways are the only form of transportation that matters.

- Then transit activists finally forced Congress to break with the past.

The President signed a transformative bill with a wonky name, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act or ISTEA.

- The key word and the key concept in this bill is intermodal.

This is the first time in the history of transportation legislation that one bill brings together the several modes by which we move people and goods in this country.

- The law set aside more than $2 billion for non-auto projects like trails and bike lanes.

- They'd gradually taken back some of the lane space that they had given to cars over all those years and made it available to bikes.

This would've been completely unimaginable when I was a kid in New York, but it's still more pleasant to be on a rail trail.

[LAUGHING] - Rail trails were about to enter a golden age.

And a gritty New York neighborhood would become the movement's unlikely epicenter.

- I moved into an apartment on 10th and Washington in '93, and I moved in there 'cause it was cheap 'cause no one wanted to walk over this far.

I mean, it was busier at two in the morning than it was at two in the afternoon because there were a whole bunch of gay clubs.

And the reason the gay clubs were up there is 'cause no one else was up there.

To me, when I first saw that there was a train that used to run in here, you know it was romantic.

The reality was it was not romantic.

You didn't live on the wrong side of the tracks.

You lived under the tracks.

And then after it was abandoned in 1980, everyone just assumed it was coming down.

- In 1999, Hammond picked up the New York Times and found that the day had come.

The West Side elevated line was slated for demolition.

- What surprised me when I saw the article was that it was a mile and a half and it was continuous.

It's a mile and a half of Manhattan.

How often do you get a mile and a half of Manhattan?

- Though he had no idea what should become of the elevated line, he was convinced it should be saved.

At a community meeting, he met a kindred spirit named Joshua David.

The two decided to lead a campaign to save the High Line.

We didn't come up with the name, but we realized that's a great name.

But I was a history major working in dot com marketing.

Josh was a travel writer.

We don't have a vision for this.

I mean, there was thought about, do you put housing on it?

Do you put a trolley up here?

But we quickly learned to talk less and show more pictures of the High Line.

People fell in love with those photos, and so people over time said like, this is sort of what we want.

We want this natural landscape.

- But days before leaving office, Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed a demolition order.

- I don't think Mayor Giuliani cared about the High Line either way, but it was like how things work in New York.

The real estate lobby's very powerful.

They lobbied for him to tear it down.

- It was an unlikely time for New Yorkers to embrace an ambitious project.

- I mean, we had 9/11 to deal with.

Who's gonna care about the High Line when this is happening?

I mean, people were saying there goes the city.

You know, much less this weird preservation project that had no funding and no real plan.

But what happened was it actually galvanized support for the High Line.

It became a symbol of hope and optimism for New York.

- The new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, reversed Giuliani's demolition order and plans emerged for a different kind of rail trail.

On the High Line bikes and roller skates would be banned and the design would take center stage.

- We said, if we're gonna do this, we don't want to just put up a stair, put up a bench and a walkway.

We want to do something really special.

- There was many a sort of fantastical proposals from housing, to the mile and a half long lap pool, to rollercoasters.

We really wanted to keep it wild, keep it quiet, keep it slow.

It was meant to be a place for exploration, discovery, wonder.

Traditionally, parks were seen as an escape from the city, and the High Line was really about this moment to celebrate and showcase the city and have this dialogue with it.

- The Highline would be the only rail trail in the country that you might get dressed up to actually walk on.

Nobody would dress up to go on their regular rail trail.

- I don't think we, beyond our wildest dreams, imagined its popularity and the sort of spinoff effect and how it would begin to influence and impact other projects, you know, all over the region and the world.

- As other cities sought to replicate the High Line's success, many stumbled into the project's pitfalls.

- It's sparked a conversation around gentrification and displacement.

Displacement is the issue that you want to prevent.

- While flashy urban rail trails tend to spur high priced real estate development, longtime residents don't typically share the wealth.

In Atlanta, They've addressed the problem by setting aside some of the billions in new investment for affordable housing.

- There are many community leaders who are looking to create new green spaces to draw more value to that area, and that is not necessarily something that is to be avoided at all costs.

It's more about who gets that value.

- Well, I think the first step is always bring them to the space.

I think people's imaginations run wild when they see something like this.

- 10 miles east of the High Line, they have yet to even break ground on the three and a half mile Queensway.

But they're already taking steps to make sure the community will benefit by simply asking them what they want.

- So the specificity that you're asking about, that's still being worked on now.

- How's it gonna affect me?

That's usually what you hear from folks.

- We would love to have you at a PTA meeting.

Yeah, we would love to come.

- We want that feedback before we even get to constructing any of this.

That's the point of having that engagement.

[LIVELY MUSIC] - In 2019, the rails to trails movement entered a new era.

- Peter had this big map on a bulletin board in his wall and popped a pin in it for every completed rail trail in the country.

- Green was complete.

- Green.

- Blue was underway.

- I was standing at his office.

I could see that there was a line all across the country developing.

- Now the Rails to Trails Conservancy would set out to complete the Great American Rail-Trail spanning 3,700 miles from Washington, DC, to Washington State.

- You think about how many people benefit.

There are 50 million people that live within 50 miles of the trail.

- Hmm.

- Wow.

It truly is an iconic piece of of infrastructure.

- I envision a time when every young person in America, that will be part of their rite of passage - That's great.

- To adulthood, They will ride the Great American Rail-Trail across their country.

- I'm coming up on 1,000 miles, and that's from the Capitol Building in DC.

- Mike Kohler is riding the Great American Rail-Trail as part of an outdoor therapy program for military veterans.

- I think it's a lot of reflection time when veterans get out in the middle of nowhere, completely isolated in some spots.

Days like this, I'm glad to be out here right now.

- There are still more than 1,600 miles of gaps in the trail where travelers can be temporarily routed onto roads.

- I wish it went all the way through, but from my understanding, there's more and more people all the time who are trying to get it built and connected.

- Gradual slope - From this stake to the left stake is the center line of the proposed trail, right?

And then as we get to that bank.

- An hour north of Indianapolis, the Miami Central will bridge one of those gaps in the cross country trail.

- Does this proposed line here, can it come to the other side of this tree?

- In order to build the 3,700 mile trail, it's gonna take countless conversations like this one with neighbors across the country.

- No way.

I do not want to lose that much property to the curve.

- But that's the outside edge.

The pavement will be right.

When I talk to folks at conferences at other states, we all have the same issues.

You know, they're not in my backyard.

You know, hey, I want a trail, but I don't want it near me.

But once we have asphalt go down and once they see kids and families start to hike on it, the fear goes away.

- Yeah, I think we're 95% in agreement.

- Cool.

Thank you guys.

- Hey, thank you.

- This is the latest chapter in a 60 year political saga.

Just as they did in the early days of the rails to trails movement, advocates are continuing to organize, negotiate, and fight one mile at a time.

They do this work because they believe that by building trails, they are also building stronger communities.

- There are a lot of challenges out there.

I mean, you talked about the environment, you talked about physical and mental health challenges, disparities and opportunities.

But I am really optimistic about the trails movement ability to be a big part of those solutions.

- It's very gratifying to look at the total amount of investment we have in trails and what that has given us and what it's given the American people.

- Hello, how are you?

- Good morning.

- Good morning.

- There is a form of civility and connection that people demonstrate on trails that I don't see almost anywhere else.

- Hi guys.

- You'd be out on a trail and to pass almost everyone with a wave and a smile.

- Hi.

You just don't experience that In other venues in America.

You get out from behind a windshield and there's just a different connection.

This kind of enterprise spans an entire lifetime, from little kids learning to ride with their training wheels all the way up to people who need walkers or even wheelchairs.

I've done 207 rail trails and it'd be nice to get to 250.

If it ever happens that I end up in a wheelchair or a motorized wheelchair, I'm still going out on rail trails.

[COUNTRY MUSIC] - The companion book, From Rails to Trails, is available for $19.95 plus shipping.

To order, call 800-848-6224 or order online at bit.ly/railstrails.

[COUNTRY MUSIC CONTINUES] Major funding for From Rails to Trails is provided by the Speedwell Foundation with additional funding from the Lawrence and Lillian Solomon Foundation.

Laura H. Richards, Crawford Taylor Foundation, Peter Goldman and Martha Kongsgaard, Conine Family Foundation.

Charles N. Marshall, Tone Family Fund, Vermont Tourism, and the following.