Old Plank Road Trail making a cameo in “From Rails to Trails” jolted me. I expected the Illinois Prairie Path in a film about the nationwide movement of converting old railways into recreational trails, but not Old Plank. It reminded me of hiking the length of Old Plank in brutal summer heat.
Rail-trails make memories for multitudes.
But the conversions from rails to people-friendly trails was/is a tough pull. It’s “a movement that changed America one mile at a time.” Now more than 26,000 miles of rail-trails lace the entire nation.
Director/producer Dan Protess and executive producer Peter Harnik, who authored, “From Rails to Trails: The Making of America’s Active Transportation Network,” build the film “From Rails to Trails” as a story of a 60-year grassroots political movement. Edward Norton narrates the film for public television.
With good reason, their film has a Republican governor, a Democratic government and a former Secretary of Transportation and highlights bills signed by two Republican Presidents.
It’s also a personal journey.
“I would have to say the 606, it has completely transformed my life,” Protess said. “I live in Bucktown. I used to go jogging on the streets and sidewalks every day. I would go run south from my house under some pretty dingy underpasses to the West Fulton area. And it’s mostly just having to stop and start for traffic every two, three blocks. As a jogger, it kind of ruins the fun.
“But then, . . . almost exactly 10 years ago, they built the 606. I’m a little less than a half mile away from it and it’s just totally transformed my life. I jog on it every morning and often go with walks with my family every evening.”
From its opening a decade ago the 606 became a very heavily used rail-trail on an abandoned storied rail line.
The Chicago area had a big hand in the start of rail-trails in May Watts.
In Sept. 30, 1963, the suburban woman’s letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune pushed for a public path on the abandoned Chicago, Aurora and Elgin Electric rail line and started a change.
The film pulls out her key sentences, “We are able to walk upright on two feet. We need a footpath. Right now the right of way lies waiting, and many hands are itching for it.”
But the Illinois Prairie Path took years to come to fruition, long enough that the film credits the Elroy-Sparta State Trail in Wisconsin as the first successful rail-trail, opening in 1967. The 32-mile trail on the abandoned Chicago and North Western Railway line is a rural line going through three tunnels, including one of 3,800 feet.
“I still think it is the greatest and most beautiful bicycle trail in America.” former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson said.
Opposition came from landowners (and others), who assumed that the rail right-of-ways would revert back to them when abandoned and were litigious when the right-of-ways switched to trails.
The film explains how railbanking became law, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. “Railbanking is using an out-of-service rail corridor as a trail until a railroad might need the corridor again for rail service,” is how the Rails to Trails Conservancy describes it. It’s a clever way to enable to public recreation.
That was not the only enactment that favorably impacted rail-trails. The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, signed by President George W.H. Bush in 1991, altered priorities.
Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, then a young doctor, became involved in the grassroots fight for the Island Line Trail, but he demurred in a phone interview when asked if it was a takeoff for his illustrious political career.
“I got involved in politics because I loved Jimmy Carter and was a delegate,” he said.
He had some witty lines in discussing rail-trails, such as cracking, “New Hampshire didn’t do that because they never want to spend money.”
By contrast, Vermont has urban trails and two cross-state trails.
The fight for the Island Line Trail included “opposition from farmers who thought passerbys would scare the cows,” he said.
As a politician, he spoke a political truth, “This has to come from the local level.”
On the film level, there’s some uniqueness.
“We figured out this method where I was on one bike with an audio recorder around my neck interviewing the subject and the cinematographer Ben Kolak was going backward on a segue pulling focus and also looking over his shoulder to make sure he didn’t crash into anything at the same time and managed to have what felt like some pretty natural seeming interviews,” Protess said. “I tried to do so with Secretary [Pete Buttigieg], he was Transportation Secretary at the time, but the Secret Service nixed that.”
The technique works, much like rail-trails are a time-tested success.
The film airs at 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 20, on WTTW. It airs on WTTW World multiple times starting Thursday, Oct. 16, and streams on PBS app and PBS.org starting Wednesday, Oct. 15.
