Why H.R. 4924 Threatens the Spirit of the Rails-to-Trails Movement

I try my best on this blog to stay out of current political matters and almost always stay out of social issues. That said, I cannot stay about the threats to the rails to trails movement as we know it.

Across the United States, there are old rail corridors that never quite disappeared. We have visited many of them on this blog: lines where rusted steel and weed-choked ballast once marked an ending, now quietly repurposed into trails filled with movement and life. These are the rail-trails, places where locomotives once thundered and where today you are more likely to hear conversation, bicycle chains, or the crunch of gravel underfoot. They have become connective tissue for places long left on the margins, stitching together urban neighborhoods, suburban downtowns, and rural villages that lost their rail service generations ago. In doing so, they have offered something rare in modern infrastructure: a second chance at connection, memory, and renewal.

Walking the Wabash Railroad Right of Way bridge over the Kankakee River along the Wauponsee Glacial Trail in early January 2019. (FRRandP photo)

The very mechanism that made this renaissance largely possible - the federal railbanking law of 1983 - is under siege. H.R. 4924, the so-called “Rails to Trails Landowner Rights Act,” is not merely another piece of legislative fine print. It is a calculated attempt to dismantle one of the most successful preservation tools in American infrastructure history.

The Fragile Continuity of the Right-of-Way

Railbanking is a simple, elegant idea: when a railroad line goes dormant, the corridor itself—the right-of-way painstakingly assembled through farms, fields, and cities—should not dissolve into scattered fragments. Instead, it could be “banked” for potential future rail use, while temporarily serving as a public trail. This compromise kept corridors intact, preserving their integrity for generations that might one day need them again.

Without railbanking, thousands of miles of railroads - many of them built at enormous public and private expense - would have vanished into a patchwork of private parcels, which would make any sort of rail reactivation at best, extremely expensive, and at worst, impossible. And yet, through this policy, we’ve inherited a legacy of connectivity: from the Katy Trail in Missouri to the High Line in New York, from forgotten coal branches reborn as parkways to prairie lines reborn as lifelines.

H.R. 4924 threatens to tear this continuity apart. It proposes impossible bureaucratic burdens for local governments, hands costly legal liabilities to small trail managers, and forces the Surface Transportation Board into matters it was never meant to oversee, such as maintenance and corridor width. If enacted, it would make the process of preserving corridors so cumbersome that few would even attempt it.

The bill’s backers frame it as a matter of “landowner rights.” But the irony is stark: railbanking already respects private property through existing legal processes. What H.R. 4924 truly represents is a rewriting of the landscape in favor of fragmentation, and turning once-continuous arteries of public good into disconnected, privatized parcels. 

This bill is not about rights. It is about erasure.

It would erase opportunities for communities to convert abandoned tracks into safe routes for walking and biking, at a time when demand for such spaces has never been greater. It would erase the latent potential for future rail corridors, which are critical as we face climate imperatives and rethink transportation away from the auto-centric policies of yesteryear and into more active forms of transit. And it would erase the shared memory embedded in these linear landscapes, the sense that we can build new futures upon the foundations of our industrial past.

It would also erase opportunities for economic development. This blog personally has visited rail-trails and railroad related institutions in many states outside of our own. 

A shot of the Western Maryland Rail Trail and the adjacent Western Maryland Scenic Railroad. (FRRandP photo - June 2021)

We live in a moment when the nation’s transportation and infrastructure priorities are again in flux. Federal trail and active transportation funds have already been frozen or rescinded. Congressional support for walking, biking, and recreation networks is wavering.

To lose railbanking now would reserve decades of progress towards a better transportation system. Thousands of existing trails could face legal uncertainty. Future projects meant to connect communities, stimulate small-town economies, or restore access to nature, would be strangled before they even began.

Every trail tells the story of a place once forgotten. A spur line in Illinois becomes a greenway connecting neighborhoods divided by redlining. 

 A narrow gauge line in Colorado becomes a tourist artery, sustaining livelihoods where industry once did. A branch line in Pennsylvania could transform into an economic catalyst for a fading coal town.

These are not isolated projects. They are a national pattern of rebirth, a quiet second act for America’s landscapes of movement. To pass H.R. 4924 would be to return those landscapes to silence, not the restful kind, but the sterile kind that follows the loss of potential.

Here in Illinois, the evidence is everywhere. The Illinois Prairie Path, reborn from the old Chicago, Aurora & Elgin interurban, now hums with life from the Fox Valley to the edges of Chicago. 

From our blog on the Old Plank Road Trail

The Old Plank Road Trail follows a forgotten right-of-way once meant for a plank turnpike and later a branch of the Michigan Central, uniting towns that were once rail-linked but have since become automobile islands. 

In Cook through DeKalb County, the Great Western Trail. carved from the Chicago Great Western’s prairie mainline, serves as a narrow thread of continuity between farms, subdivisions, forest preserves, and inner ring suburbs. Each of these paths preserves the shape of the old geography, allowing us to walk through layers of Illinois history where the past and present still share a corridor.

Looking east at the Great Western Trail's western beginning in Sycamore at Old State Rd.

Without railbanking, these routes would likely have been sold off, fenced in, and forgotten. Numerous abandoned railroad corridors have, with the only traces available on LiDAR imagery and old topo maps. Instead, the rail trail movement has made sure that these corridors endure as living infrastructure: memory made accessible, continuity made tangible. They are proof that when we preserve a corridor, we preserve a story.

If you’ve ever walked a rail-trail, you’ve walked on history, on land reclaimed from entropy. Now, that history needs defenders.

Call the House Committee on Natural Resources at (202) 225-2761 and tell them you oppose H.R. 4924, the “Rails to Trails Landowner Rights Act.” If your representative sits on the committee, call them directly. This is NOT about bureaucracy or ideology, nor is it a left vs. right issue, it’s about preserving the arteries of connection that define who we are as a country.

The rail-trails are, in many ways, the purest expression of what this nation does best: we repurpose, we reimagine, and we endure. The lines that once carried freight and steam now carry memory and motion. To destroy railbanking would be to destroy that delicate balance between past and future.

Let’s make sure it keeps moving forward. Thanks as always for reading, and have a happy and healthy New Year!