The Ghost of a Train

A legislative process called railbanking, enabled after the U.S. Congress amended the National Trails System Act in 1983 because of concern over the rapid disappearance of America's rail network, allows former railroad corridors to become rail-trails while remaining legally protected for a return to rail service if trains are needed again to transport goods or people. The Fairmont, Morgantown, and Pittsburgh Branch of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad, now the Mon River Trail, was built in the late 1880s primarily to carry the high-quality bituminous coal of North Central West Virginia. The Mon River and Deckers Creek Rail-Trails were once the region's busiest highways, with trains hauling coal, coke used to make iron, sand for glass-making, limestone, and other goods to markets in Pittsburgh and beyond. Remnants of railroad and industrial activity, including signal boxes, trestles, telegraph poles, homestead foundations, mine portals, stone quarries, and coke ovens, remain visible in the landscape. In 1996, the 51-mile railroad corridor was acquired from CSX and railbanked as a non-motorized trail system through the joint efforts of the Mon River Trails Conservancy and the city of Morgantown, and in 2006 the Mon River and Deckers Creek Rail-Trail System was designated a National Recreation Trail. Whistle posts still mark where locomotive engineers once sounded the whistle before road crossings.

Morgantown, West Virginia · United States