NH should support Rail Trails
Back in the 1990s, when work began to convert the long-abandoned Northern Line to a trail, this paper would report on progress of the “rail trail,” always in quotation marks. I can also recall an area businessman asking, “Tell me again, where did this thing come from?”
For those still wondering, and all those whose sweat equity built the trail, as well as those who contributed money to extend it from downtown Lebanon westward as the Mascoma River Greenway, the national rail trail story is now a film. Search PBS Rails to Trails and you’ll find it.
Note that the brief footage of the late David Burwell, Dartmouth ’69, the co-founder of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, doesn’t note what an enormous effect his efforts had on Americans physical health and mental well-being. His legal work laid the tracks for conversions nationally, as well as drew in billions of private investment near rail trails. Now we need a follow-up film, trying to answer the question that activists in this state have been asking: Why does the NH Department of Transportation continue to stifle these enormously popular projects, as it has for thirty years?