Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit

In 1902, the Manchester Dorset and Granville Railroad was chartered as a subsidiary of the Norcross‑West Marble Company to haul prized Dorset white marble to finishers in Manchester so it could be shipped on to major cities, most prominently New York City, roughly 200 miles south. From the Manchester, VT instagram  page: " From 1904 to 1925, the Manchester, Dorset & Granville Railroad line, affectionately known as the “Mud, Dirt & Gravel” moved marble from the quarries in Dorset to Manchester Depot. After being cut and polished at the finishing mill, blocks of marble left Manchester on another train headed to New York City to build massive structures such as the New York Public Library.  Passengers were added later but plan to extend the railroad line through downtown Dorset and on to Granville, NY never actually happened and the rails were pulled up in 1934. The rail bed remained, overgrown and forgotten until a passionate group of local residents purchased a section ...

Almost eight (!) years ago, I came up with my own list of ideas for new rail trails in the Chicago area , that might piggyback off of the success that The 606 Trail has had with regards to community redevelopment, developing excellent bike infrastructure, and connecting neighborhoods across Chicago's North Side. One of the proposals at that time was just gaining steam, the Englewood Trail, which would use a abandoned spur owned by Norfolk Southern Railway between 58th and 59th St in Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, and if all goes according to plan, will be opening as a linear park late next year! While projects like the 606 or the High Line focused heavily on recreation and aesthetics, the Englewood project is designed as an economic and ecological engine. It aims to serve the people currently living in the neighborhood by addressing decades of systemic disinvestment through urban agriculture and local job creation. For those following the history of Chicago’s industrial ar...

Block 61 at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie has a rare quality that I'm always seemingly chasing: the feeling that something important used to be here… and that the land is still deciding what to do with it. Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie is a federally protected prairie reserve near Wilmington, Illinois, managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Established in 1996, it is the first national tallgrass prairie in the United States and serves as a major ecological restoration project on former Joliet Army Ammunition Plant land, which served the war efforts of both World War II and the Vietnam War. The name chosen was “Midewin,” derived from the Potawatomi word referring to a traditional society or gathering of healers. Today's blog focuses on the Block 61 trail to the east; which in many spots feels less like a nature hike and more like an archaeological survey of the Cold War. Men only want one thing. The thing: Step inside and the temperature drops. Sound flattens. The curved...

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   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 Railro...

The Trestle of Trestle Park. FRRandP photo collection. Trestle Park is Milwaukee's tiny answer to the growing trend of linear parks in major cities which utilize abandoned railroad corridors, in the same vein as Philadelphia's Rail Park  and New York City's amazing High Line . While Trestle Park is much smaller than the other parks mentioned, after visiting it, I can say it nonetheless has a great charm in it's small size. Looking from one end of the park to the other. The Park opened earlier this year after being proposed and approved in 2017 . The signature trestle pictured, while certainly it's namesake, isn't part of the park. The park, located in the Historic Third Ward neighborhood south of downtown Milwaukee is part of the Third Ward RiverWalk, along the Milwaukee River. It is part of a large scale redevelopment of the area as well, which was quite obvious on the drive to the park. Many new condos, restaurants, and businesses make up the nearby...