I’ve recently returned from a trip to England, and getting around there is about more than getting used to driving on the left. England has been around for a bit longer than the United States, and they’ve had to accommodate that history in ways Americans have yet to master. Where we tend to pursue things in isolation and move from fad to fad, they’ve been forced to deal with the practical reality that they just can’t tear everything down when something new comes along, or build things without thinking how they affect everything else.
I’ve been writing about a transportation issue here in the U.S. (See here and here.) The last working railroad into the central Adirondacks is slated to have a key section turned into a trail this year, unless sanity prevails. For a number of reasons the trail advocates are determined to see the tracks ripped up and strenuously deny there is any way to work together. It has to be one or the other as far as they are concerned. New York State seems to be clueless as well. So, when I traveled to Hebden Bridge and found what they do there, it was quite a contrast. Warning — lots of photos!
Arriving at Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, England
When you arrive at the town, one of your first questions might be is “How do I get around?”
The station itself is not far from the town center. It’s an easy walk.
It’s made easier by one of those things that makes travel simple: lots of signage right around the station to orient you to all of the choices you have.
Not everyone wants to walk, so there are other choices as well.
Where it really gets interesting is the possibilities for the cyclist.
This bike rental program makes it easy to get around once you arrive by train, with lots of info at the website. Or, you can ‘roll your own’. The railroad makes it easy to bring your own set of wheels if you like.
This is how you get transport modes to support each other. Public transport with options for greater flexibility.
It doesn’t take all that much space to accommodate a few bicycles. The railroad makes it easy.
Around the town
Hebden Bridge has been inhabited for centuries. From agricultural beginnings and its role as a market town, it became a mill town in the 18th and 19th centuries. The mills are largely gone now or repurposed; today the town’s economy turns on tourism and as a locale that attracts ‘creatives’. It’s not all cakes and ale; the town has had to cope with disastrous floods in the central area recently, and the overall economy is not as strong as everyone would like — but they’re doing what they can with what they have. That’s sustainability in a nutshell.
Hebden Bridge does not have the luxury of putting all its transport eggs in one basket. It would be possible to make everything car-centric, but it would make no sense. Hebden Bridge is making use of all the transportation resources at its disposal in a way that allows them to support each other. It’s a kind of force multiplication, where the sum is greater than the individual parts. That extends beyond the town limits.
The Big Connection
Hebden Bridge is also a nexus on a major cycling trail system: The Pennine Cycleway. The railway station has facilities to accommodate trail users. In fact, rail connections are one of the key features of the cycleway.
Too many Americans have a generational problem with trains. Older people who came of age in the 50s, 60s, and 70s grew up seeing railroads in the U.S. go bankrupt and disappear while the country invested heavily in highways and air travel. They simply don’t believe trains can ever be viable again. Younger generations grew up driving everywhere, and taking advantage of cheap airfares to fly; they may have never even been on a train. When trains are in the news today, it’s usually as the centerpiece of a wreck, collision, fire, or chemical spill. Routinely carrying people across the landscape in comfort doesn’t make it into the headlines. It’s a problem.
Meanwhile, BACK IN THE U.S.A.
Right now, trains are running in the central Adirondacks. You can board an Adirondack Scenic Railroad train at Union Station in Utica, NY (Also served by Amtrak, and just off the NY State Thruway) and travel up to Thendara or even Big Moose. You can take short excursion runs, or special event trains, even charter a train if you like. If you drive into Lake Placid, you can take an ASR train to Saranac Lake, and from Saranac Lake you can ride the rail bikes of the Adirondack Rail Explorers to Lake Clear and Beyond. You can do canoe/kayak trips, hikes, and bike rides using the train to get you to a starting point or bringing you back from a trip.
For now, that is.
Activities on the rail line are the result of over 20 years of work by the non-profit group behind the ASR, to restore the line that runs all the way from Remsen (just north of Utica) to Lake Placid. The former NY Central tracks are owned by New York State; the state was allowing the line to slowly disappear into ruin when the group came together to restore a short section at Thendara for the 1992 centennial of the line. The public response was so great, the state adopted a management plan in 1996 calling for the restoration of rail service and trail development in the corridor.
Since then, the group has managed to restore the line all the way to Lake Placid. A middle section between Big Moose and Tupper Lake still needs to be upgraded to passenger standards, but the entire line is in use. Trains do not run year round — the corridor is used by snowmobilers in the winter — but railroad maintenance to clear brush, repair washouts, etc. keeps it open for everyone. For its part, the state has never delivered on the promised trails, and has been a terrible landlord.
Between the railroad and the rail bikes, the line hosts thousands of riders at the northern and southern ends, creates local jobs, and pumps millions of dollars into a local economy heavily dependent on tourism. The entire line is on the State and National Register of Historic Places because the tracks and structures are largely intact — and it’s the last active rail line into the central Adirondacks.
But that’s not enough for some people.
The Current Situation
A small, but well-financed, politically connected, and very vocal opposition centered in the Lake Placid — Saranac Lake — Tupper Lake area (the Tri-Lakes Region) has been working to get the railroad torn out and the line turned into a rail trail all the way from Lake Placid back to Thendara. The alliance includes wilderness advocates who want a trail with no motorized access, snowmobilers who want the rails out of their way, cyclists who want their own luxury bike path, and NIMBY people who just hate trains, think they are a waste of taxpayer money, hurt property values, etc. There’s also those with the conviction that government investment in a public resource is wrong (unless it benefits them directly.)
Some of them have been trying to kill the railroad for decades. They’ve engaged in a determined campaign to paint the railroad as obsolete, dangerous, rotting away. Their web pages are full of exaggerated claims for trail benefits and misinformation about the rail line. They censor their Facebook page to keep any awkward questions from being asked or pro-rail points from being raised. They deny anyone rides the trains or that anyone would ever want to ride a train to Lake Placid ever again. (Wrong) They see absolutely no historic value to the rail line — not even as a tourism draw — and assert a few markers and kiosks are sufficient to meet state historic preservation laws.
Unfortunately, the state seems to have bought into a lot of their claims.
The trains currently serve people of all ages, all capabilities. They make remote areas accessible for people who might not otherwise be able to experience them. Trail advocates will deny that to anyone unable to buy a snowmobile, or physically fit enough to get there under their own power. A restored passenger rail line running all the way from Utica to Lake Placid would be a potential economic boost for every community on the line. Their plan to truncate it would be a huge blow to the local economy, diminish a major tourist destination, isolate it from access to America’s national passenger rail system, and place the remaining section of the rail line in economic jeopardy.
Anti-Rail Trail Advocates have been making the cyclists the primary public face of their group, and are drawing on the resources of a national rail trail group. They’re promising a ‘free’ trail built and maintained at public expense will draw in thousands of “wallets on wheels” as they describe visiting cycle tourists, and locals will use it for commuting en masse. They absolutely deny that there is any place to ride bikes in the area and the only way to meet that need is by turning the railroad into a rail trail. (Not true. Definitely not true. )
Never mind that the laws that originally fostered rails to trails were intended to preserve rail corridors for possible future use, or that they were never intended to be used to demolish an active rail line. They want what they want — and that’s the removal of the tracks.
The 1996 plan for the rail corridor has been undergoing review for the last few years; the Cuomo administration came up with a ‘compromise’ that pleases no one. The state is giving up on the plan to restore the entire line, but will provide funding to upgrade tracks from Big Moose to Tupper Lake, through some of the more remote wilderness in the park — but they’ll also rip up the last 34 miles of the track between Tupper Lake and Lake Placid to turn it into a multi-use trail through the tri-lakes area. The state has rejected every plan that would combine rails AND trails. The case they’ve made for this is being challenged on multiple grounds. It simply makes no sense.
In an area heavily dependent on tourism, New York State is planning to take out the last working railroad in the tri-lakes region, and cripple the rest of the line by removing the prime tourist destination at the northern end. They’ll drive the Rail Explorers out of the state even though they’d like to expand their business. The state’s parsimony has held back rail restoration for years and they’ve never delivered on their promise to develop trails. They’ve rejected every outside effort to design trails around the rails as either too expensive or non-compliant with land-use regulations — yet they’ve found ways to bend the rules elsewhere for snowmobiles and mountain biking.
The compromise solution looks reasonable at first glance — everybody gets something, nobody gets all they want — but it’s a simplistic short term ‘fix’ that won’t work over the long term. It will take 3 years to remove the rails and build a trail; a complete upgrade of the whole line for passenger service could be done in a few months for about the same cost as the compromise with minimal interference with current rail operations.
The additional costs of adding trails around the rails would be more than made up by the multiplier effect of both rails and trails working together. (In fact, the state promises to finally develop trails in the stretch where track will be upgraded in the compromise plan — so why not the whole line?) It would also free the trail design to take advantage of terrain and routing choices where the train does not go. Either/Or thinking does not serve the public interest, and there’s nothing more expensive in the long term than a cheap fix now.
The cycling advocates are particularly intense in their desire to get the tracks removed. They see no personal need for the rails and totally deny their proven positive impact on the tourism economy. When spokespeople for the group were asked if there was any way they could see working with the railroad to mutual benefit, they literally could not think of anything. The best they could come up with was helping design historic markers and support for turning active train stations into museums once the tracks are pulled.
All they are concerned about is having their own private bike path; the negative effect on the larger community is something they claim will be made up by the arrival of thousands of hypothetical new visitors arriving to ride a 34 mile bike trail that connects to nothing else. For all their claims about sustainability and the benefits of cycling for exercise, they would be ensuring that cars would be the only transportation option for visitors. Making the area truly bike-friendly is going to be more complicated than just ripping up the tracks. They haven’t thought it all through yet.
They claim this will be a “world-class trail”. They have no clue about what a REAL world class trail really looks like or how it works.
A similar fight is going on in the Catskills. A rail line owned by Ulster County, the Catskill Mountain Railroad, is in jeopardy. Again, rail trail activists are trying to take a heritage railroad and turn it into a bike path. The line has been operated as a tourist railroad and is a major attraction for the Kingston area, but Ulster County officials and a local NIMBY faction have been making life difficult, refusing to spend money that was supposed to be used for track repairs and so on. The rail operators have reached a new agreement with the county, but the fight to save the line is not over.
It doesn’t have to be this way. What I saw in Hebden Bridge and in England shows how rails and trails working together can be a net gain for everyone. The lack of vision and the degree of partisan self-interest on display in New York State is appalling — but all too often par for the course in America.
If you can get to the Adirondacks or the Catskills this summer, enjoy the trains and the rail bikes while you can. Once the track is gone, they’re not coming back. (And if you want to donate or otherwise offer support at their web pages, it would be much appreciated.)
Let’s save the rails and build some true world-class trails. Why NOT both?