Some things defy reason.
There’s a rail corridor that runs west from Kingston, NY into the Catskills, a rail corridor that’s been there over a hundred years. I’ve been working with a group trying to save it.
With the collapse of the Penn-Central Railroad decades ago, the line became an orphan and fell into disrepair thanks to Hurricane Irene, and neglect, not to mention decades of subsidized highway and air competition. It’s the only rail line into the Catskills from the mid-Hudson valley. The Catskill Mountain Railroad runs a tourist operation on 6 miles out of what was a 30+ mile corridor that continues into Delaware County. The Delaware & Ulster Railroad runs an expanding operation on their part of the line out of Arkville in Delaware County.
The tourism potential of the line is unarguable, and there is potential for freight as well. The CMRR has been leasing the line for years from Ulster County, which assumed responsibility for the part that lies within Ulster County. The CMRR was running trains on a stretch out of Kingston, and on a stretch out of Phoenicia along the Esopus Creek.
Unfortunately, the railroad and the county had a falling out years ago. Part of the arrangement was that the railroad was supposed to restore the line, and was doing so — but not fast enough. The aforementioned flood and storm damage took a toll, and the current county government under County Supervisor Mike Hein has become decidedly anti-rail, as have other actors in the local political arena.
Add in New York City, which owns the Ashokan Reservoir, and has always wanted the railroad gone. About 5 years ago, NYC and Ulster County were having a big legal battle over the way the city’s releases of water were making problems for everyone downstream on the Esopus Creek. The lawsuits were made to go away when a deal was struck. NYC would pay Ulster County around $2 million to remove the rails. Ulster County will then spend millions more to turn the stretch along the reservoir into a rail trail. The CMRR gets 6 miles out of Kingston, and stops well short of the reservoir. A stretch of track out of Phoenicia will be turned over to a rail bike tourism outfit, the Rail Explorers.
And so one more rail corridor is being broken up. Where other countries don’t toss away infrastructure and make joint use the norm — rail with trail — that’s just not what we do in America. A New York Times article estimated something like 45 million people live within a two hour drive of Kingston; the potential for tourist rail alone with that base to draw on is huge. The line runs right past Belleayre Ski Center for one thing. Restoration ain’t gonna happen now. Once rails come up, they almost never go back.
Rail banking was the program devised to fund turning unused rail corridors into trails to preserve the rights of way, but now the rails to trails movement has become predatory instead of preservationist. It actively targets rail lines to convert into trails — and it’s also a useful tool for NIMBY interests and those opposed to public investment in infrastructure.
Rail trails are an oxymoron — once they’re done, there are no rails left. The name is a lie. They might be nice amenities for some people, but you can’t live on amenities alone any more than you can survive on a diet of nothing but desserts.
The rail corridor parallels NY State Route 28; removing it means forever after everything in that corridor will have to roll on rubber tires on pavement. The energy and environmental costs will add up in the years to come. Ulster County is making its economic base less diverse and less resilient. That’s not good with climate change reshaping everything.
They’ve just started taking out the rails this week. (Click on the photo for more) They are making no effort to salvage any of the rail for reuse anywhere else on the line — they’re ripping them loose, torching them into pieces, and dragging them off. Haste and waste — and they’re trying to do this with no announcements the work has begun, as unobtrusively as possible.
But it ain’t over till it’s over. Stay tuned. If you’d like to help stop this, watch this space, and feel free to donate.