It’s been a long haul, but last Saturday morning June 6, a piece of the planned Corkscrew Rail Trail was formally opened for public use. Mona Berg of Berkshire Mountain House, one of the consenting landowners, cut the ribbon at the north entrance of the trail on Knapp Road to the applause of a group of about 40 interested and appreciative persons.
[private] The trail is just over two miles long running form Knapp Road to about 1/4 mile into the Town of New Lebanon. It is open to hikers, bicyclists, horse riders and in the winter time to skiers and snowmobilers. Other cooperating landowners include Ted Cooke, Phil Gilbert and Dale Riggs and Don Miles of the Berry Patch.
Joe Ogilvie of New Lebanon, President of the Corkscrew Rail Trail Association, and Millie Smith, Vice President, said that besides the landowners, many thanks were due also to former President Kevin Carpenter, Rensselaer Plateau Alliance President Jim Bonesteel, Bev and Rik McClave, Thom Pecoraro, Art Karis, Bill Jennings and Christine Vanderlan, as well as to a number of other volunteers who helped out. “I have never worked with a group of people so motivated,” Smith said.
Smith added that the Association hopes others will now take an interest in the trail. They have hopes, she said, of eventually extending the trail deeper into Columbia County and also north up to Petersburgh, and maybe up to Hoosick Falls.
Rensselaer County Legislator Stan Brownell thought that connecting up to Hoosick Falls was a real possibility. The Hoosic River Greenway, he said, now extends down along the river and comes close to the Petersburgh line. He was confident that some day the connection will be made.
“It’s a great start, a great start!” commented Stephentown Town Supervisor Larry Eckhardt. He viewed the opening as the culmination of a dream of the organizers – a dream akin to that of Stephentown forefathers who dreamt of bringing the Town into the global community via the Lebanon Springs Railroad, the predecessor of the Rutland Railroad. It is this railroad bed that the trail follows. The name Corkscrew comes from the fact that this portion of the railroad, from Chatham up to Bennington, was noted for its many turns and twists, and so was dubbed the “Corkscrew Division”.
It was ten years ago that local organizers started actively planning to develop a trail along the old Rutland right of way. At a public meeting in May of 2005, featured speaker Craig Della Penna, Executive Director of Northeast Greenway Solutions, said that most such projects are not top-down but grass roots efforts with local people sponsoring them. They don’t usually get done all at once, he warned, but are the culmination of years, even generations, of piecing together short sections of trail, especially in an area like this where all of the Rutland rail bed has reverted to private property and much of it is built upon.
The first step, he advised, is to establish an active group of interested persons. The group should make friends with departments of transportation, knowledgeable railroad organizations and other potentially helpful organizations and land trusts such as the Rensselaer-Taconic Land Conservancy. Once the group has some direction, he said, they might want to have a feasibility study and reconnaissance survey done by a professional, which would check on all the land ownership and compile a database. From there it’s a matter of making contacts in a defined, systematic fashion.
Della Penna advised patience because it’s not quick or easy and tends to be a long process, and once started, there may still be a series of unconnected gaps in the trail for generations. “But you build what you can, where you can, and you see where the future takes you,” he said.
Apparently some people were taking notes at that meeting.
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