I grew up in Manhattan and did as much bicycling as possible in the city. How did you discover rail-trails, and what led you to take this up as your life's work? There are all sorts of great trails that appeal to me for a variety of reasons-some are beautiful to ride on, some are beautiful to look at, some are beautiful to think of how they came into being. Very often I feel like when I'm out on a particular trail, it's my favorite at the moment. I've got so many favorites, it's hard to nail any one down. It's million-dollar engineering for the benefit of the bicycle. If you look to the side, you can see that at one moment it's 40, 50 feet below you to a ravine, and then not far along, it's a clifftop above you. And as you're pedaling along, you can sort of see just how much spectacular engineering they did.
They filled in the valleys and they cut through the hillsides, and they found the flattest routes possible, and then made them super graded so that they're gaining just inches in elevation every mile. And they're great! But in an area like along the Torrey Brown Trail in Baltimore, which is a beautiful mix of hills and valleys, you can really understand how much work the railroads did to make a perfect rolling environment for themselves. Of course, there are rail-trails in Florida and in parts of Indiana where the land is so flat that water doesn't even flow. I still marvel about it, particularly while riding my bike on rail-trails in hillier areas. The engineering on these corridors was just spectacular. Johns Hopkins Magazine caught up with Harnik to learn more about what draws millions outdoors each year to enjoy the long, flat, canopied pathways of America's rail-trail system. In From Rails to Trails: The Making of America's Active Transportation Network (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Harnik, now 72, recounts the rich history of bicycling, the rise and fall of railroads, and the grassroots activism that led to the creation of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy. And in all cases, they make for a pleasurable, active experience in nature. In cities, they reduce traffic and add to the urban canopy. In rural areas, these rail-trails can be a boon for tourism, drawing bicyclists, runners, skiers, and even snowmobilers who will spend money at nearby restaurants, shops, and lodging.
The Conservancy-established shortly after Congress amended Section 8(d) of the National Trails System Act to allow out-of-service rail corridors to be converted to trails until a time when the railroad might need them again for service-has helped create a network of 2,000-plus rail-trails to date, spanning more than 20,000 miles from coast to coast. When Harnik co-founded the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy roughly a decade later, in 1985, it was that guidebook that helped him and his colleagues identify unused railroad rights-of-way that could be repurposed as recreation trails. rail corridor he could find, in an effort to inspire others to explore them. The more recent atlases have fewer corridors than the old ones." Nielsen went on to publish a 1974 guidebook of every abandoned U.S. He came up with the idea that if you take an old railroad atlas and keep looking further and further back in time, the abandoned tracks leap out at you. "He got really interested in where do the rails lead and how do you find them. "Nielsen was a special guy," explains Peter Harnik, A&S '70. Co-founded the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy