The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1983 — today
Fort Wayne's paved network is mostly other people's corridors, kept. The legal device that keeps an abandoned railroad corridor intact in the United States is railbanking: under the 1983 amendments to the National Trails System Act, a railroad and a trail sponsor may agree that a line proposed for abandonment instead be preserved as a trail on an interim basis, holding the corridor together — as one parcel, under one negotiation — against the day rail service might resume. The Pufferbelly is the local proof of why the device exists, by counterexample: the Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw was abandoned in the 1970s, before railbanking was available to save it, the corridor was sold off to developers and private owners, and the trail that finally used it had to be reassembled lot by lot over twenty years, the right-of-way work running second only to fundraising among the builders' burdens. The Fishing Line Trail shows the smaller, luckier case: one mile of the former Grand Rapids and Indiana corridor in northwest Fort Wayne, held together and paved, with the City planning its extension up the same roadbed toward Noble and LaGrange counties.
The Towpath is the same mechanism worked on older ground: a canal corridor of the 1830s–40s, reused by an interurban railroad, reused again as a trail — three transport eras on one strip of land, each inheriting the previous one's grades and crossings. Even the network's newest small trails sit in inherited landscapes: Beckett's Run Trail crosses the Wabash and Erie Feeder Canal on culverts, and the Rivergreenway itself was laid in the one corridor a river city never sells — the levees and flood banks along its three rivers. The pattern the record supports is not that Fort Wayne chose picturesque routes for its trails; it is that trails are what the city could still assemble, because flood ground, canal ground and rail ground were the ground left whole.
Sources: National Trails System Act, as amended 1983 (16 U.S.C. § 1247(d)) — interim trail use ("railbanking") of railroad corridors proposed for abandonment, the standard federal mechanism, stated here in brief. Input Fort Wayne (18 Apr 2018) — the FWJ&S corridor sold to developers and private owners after its 1970s abandonment; reacquisition as the trail's laborious element; right-of-way and fundraising as the paired burdens, per Castleman. City of Fort Wayne — Fishing Line Trail on the former Grand Rapids and Indiana corridor, with extension plans on the same corridor; Beckett's Run Trail's two culvert crossings at the Wabash and Erie Feeder Canal; Towpath Trail on the Wabash and Erie Canal corridor. TrailLink, Towpath Trail — the corridor's succession: canal, fill, interurban passenger service to Huntington, trail in 2011.