Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and we're going to end today's show with a preview of a new documentary coming to PBS next week. Have you heard of the Rails-to-Trails movement? Perhaps you know or participate in. The conservancy with the same name, dedicated to turning abandoned railroad tracks into walking and biking paths for the general public, comes from a 60-year-old grassroots movement that saw the opportunity to make nature accessible as railroad lines were abandoned across the country. That was as commuting became more by car. Next Wednesday, October 15th, PBS is bringing that movement to television with the premiere of the documentary for From Rails to Trails. Here's the 32nd trailer narrated by Edward Norton.

Edward Norton: It's one of America's most unlikely movements. The fight to convert abandoned railroads to trails.

Speaker 1: There's no way of getting something as terrific as a trail without putting some work into it.

Edward Norton: A movement that met roadblocks at every turn.

Speaker 2: That is prime real estate.

Edward Norton: I'm Edward Norton, and this is the story of a national transformation, From Rails to Trails.

Brian Lehrer: Joining me now to discuss not just the documentary, but the movement, because he's sort of the man, is Peter Harnik, co-founder of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, and executive producer of the documentary From Rails to Trails. Peter, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Peter Harnik: Thank you, Brian. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: This is one of those segments where I have to do full disclosure because I am a big Rails to Trails fan. My wife and I tend to build our summer vacations around rail trails for biking. In the last two years, we've gone to places along the Empire State Trail and the Harlem Valley Rail Trail, also the two paths along the Delaware on both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania side, what they call the towpath in the Lambertville New Hope area. We've been to the wonderful Lake Champlain Causeway bike trail, which I know is in the film, and more, and we donate to the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, so full disclosure.

Peter Harnik: That's wonderful. I just had a mental picture of you just stuck in your studio 24 hours a day, not getting out.

Brian Lehrer: 23. You've biked over 200 trails across the country, I see.

Peter Harnik: That's right. 207. Not that I'm counting.

Brian Lehrer: Let me actually open the phones here for a limited time and invite people to shout out any favorite rail to trail that you have ridden on a bike or walked as A pedestrian or walked your dog on or whatever. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. How'd the movement get started?

Peter Harnik: Back in the day, when the railroads were the most powerful industry in the country and were dominating everything, they built 254,000 miles of track, which is much, much larger than the interstate highway system is today. It was overbuilt, and as the economics changed, they had to start abandoning some of them, and many of them lost. Starting in the 1960s, people started realizing, "Wait a second, these are fabulous corridors to just walk on and bike on and enjoy nature and everything else, and let's try and save them." It isn't as easy as you think, which is what the film is about.

Over 2,000 of them have been saved now, from short segments to several hundred miles long, and it's become a cornerstone of the new America.

Brian Lehrer: You do attribute the birth of the Rails to Trails movement to an individual named May Watts. Who's she?

Peter Harnik: May Watts was with the Morton Arboretum in Chicago. She would go to England, and England has a wonderful system of just allowing people to walk through the back lands of all these properties without any restrictions. She came back and said, "A, we have to do that here, too, because it's such a wonderful thing," and B, especially in the Midwest, where we used to have millions and millions of acres of prairie that have all been plowed under, there's hardly any prairie left. The little bit of prairie that was left was alongside these railroad corridors because they had never been plowed. She started the movement.

I love the story because she actually wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune, and people say, "What good would a letter to the editor do?" It actually started the movement back in 1963.

Brian Lehrer: We heard a clip in the trailer of one of the opponents to a particular rail trail somewhere saying, "This is prime real estate." How much opposition has this movement faced? It sounds like mom and apple pie sweetness when you describe it the way you do, but land use is always controversial in so many places. What have the main sources of pushback been?

Peter Harnik: As you say, land is very controversial. The railroads acquired the land in numerous different legalistic ways way back when, and especially in agricultural territory and in farm country, there's often lore in the family, "The railroad stole the land from our great-grandfather, and they said, if they ever stop running, we'll get it back again." In some cases, that's true, and in other cases, they got the land in different ways. It's a legal morass. Many of these rail trail projects end up in court to try and straighten out who owns what and who paid for what and who needs to get repaid for what.

For a while, it looked like every time there was an abandonment, which is a legal procedure, an abandonment, then the corridors got all split up, and it was really impossible to put them back together, like Humpty Dumpty. Then Congress passed a law saying that if a railroad abandons a track and a local community thinks that it might be reusable for railroad purposes in the future, which might be mass transit or any other kinds of railroad uses, we can use it as a trail in the interim. That's called rail banking. It's putting the railroad corridor into a bank for the future and using it as a trail.

Quite a few trails that you've been on, and some others are banked. Others have been purchased outright and are owned by the city, the county, the state. It's a lot of different ownership, but there is conflict.

Brian Lehrer: Let me get a few callers on with their favorite rail trails, and one or two are calling and texting to oppose some ones in our area that are either proposed or that are up, and they don't like that they're there. Michael in Park Slope has a favorite. Hi, Michael.

Michael: Hi, good morning. Thanks for putting this program on. My favorite is the Elroy to Sparta bike trail in the state of Wisconsin.

Peter Harnik: Okay, beautiful. That's featured in the movie.

Michael: It's through this beautiful terrain.

Peter Harnik: It's featured in the movie.

Michael: It has interesting tunnels.

Peter Harnik: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: Tunnels through the mountains and forests and tunnels. Bill in Manhattan has another one. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hi. For years, my wife and I have gone up to the Cape, and we started there about 2008. The thing that attracted us most was to bike the Cape Cod rail trail. My wife loves it so much that last summer she injured herself, couldn't ride a regular bike, and we actually purchased a recumbent trike, had it shipped to the Cape, and put together by a local bike shop. She was able last summer to enjoy her favorite thing, the bike.

Brian Lehrer: All right, here is one dissenter, at least in certain circumstances. Mark in West Orange. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hello there. I think it's a great idea. However, there is a proposal that has been approved to have an old railway from Montclair to Hoboken, where it should have been saved for light rail for commuting purposes and public transportation. That was a waste of an opportunity, in my opinion, because it can never be claimed back.

Brian Lehrer: I'm just going to jump in for time. Another listener writes, "Rails to Trails is great except in denser urban areas where right of way is near priceless for reusing as mass transport." 30-second answer on this, Peter?

Peter Harnik: Practically all of us love railroads. We're all big fans of railroads. We're not calling for the disassembly of any railroads anywhere. We say if the economics doesn't work out for railroad use, then let's use it as a trail. If the economics works out for reestablishing it as a railroad, we're all in favor of that. Plus, with rail banking, you can put the railroad back in. Then there's this new thing called Rails with Trails, where in some cases you can put a trail alongside a railroad and get a double benefit out of it.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I will just mention so people know that this is part of the movement, though we've been talking mostly about rail trails out in the country. The High Line is a rail trail, right? That was a railroad bed up there.

Peter Harnik: Definitely.

Brian Lehrer: That's where we leave it with Peter Harnik, co-founder of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, now executive producer of From Rails to Trails, premieres on PBS next Wednesday.

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