The Mechanism: How Rails Become Trails — and What Actually Built This System

The legal mechanism of the rail-trail is railbanking. When a railroad moves to abandon a line, the corridor would ordinarily break up — easements expiring, parcels reverting to adjoining owners, the through-route lost forever. The National Trails System Improvements Act of 1983 amended the Trails Act to stop the breakup: under 16 U.S.C. § 1247(d), a qualified trail sponsor may take the corridor into interim trail use — railbanking — by agreement under the Surface Transportation Board's process, the corridor held intact in public use, legally un-abandoned, against a possible future return to rail. Around that legal core the financial mechanism grew: federal transportation-alternatives money, state trail programs of which Indiana's NextLevel Trails is the current form, and local matches — the standard stack by which Indiana's conversions were bought and built. A canal becomes a trail by the simpler path of a towpath already in public or utility hands; this city's mill races are industrial works told in the corridors section, and no canal corridor exists here to convert. Mishawaka's system used none of this machinery, and the contrast is the entry's substance. Its corridor was assembled by municipal redevelopment: a bankrupt plant's site acquired by the city in 1997, cleared, and rebuilt as parks with city capital and tax-increment money, phase by phase, with the state-federal partnership reserved for the Merrifield extension through INDOT and MACOG. The mechanism article thus closes with the two mechanisms side by side, as the record holds them: the railbanking stack that builds trail systems on dead railroads, and the redevelopment stack that built this one on a dead factory's riverbank.