History
Stretching 33 miles (53 km) from Montgomery to Kingston, the Wallkill Valley Railroad operated from 1866 until its last regular freight run on December 31, 1977. During the 1980s, its owner, Conrail, began to salvage the former corridor's steel rails and sell off sections of the rail bed. State law mandated that in such sales, offers be made first to the state, then to the involved counties and municipalities. The state bought a 1.4-mile (2.3 km) portion of rail bed between Shawangunk and Gardiner in November 1985 for the construction of the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in the hamlet of Wallkill.
While Montgomery and Shawangunk purchased their sections of the railroad – 2.0 and 2.3 miles (3.2 and 3.7 km), respectively – in 1985, eventually creating the 3.22-mile (5.18 km) Walden–Wallkill Rail Trail, the towns of New Paltz, Gardiner and Rosendale initially declined to purchase their sections of the rail line. The town of Shawangunk has been evaluating plans to bypass the state prison to connect the Walden–Wallkill and Wallkill Valley trails since 2004, and such a connection was listed as a project in a 2008 county-wide transportation plan. The latest proposal involves diverting the trail along Birch Road. The Wallkill Valley Rail Trail was the seventeenth rail trail created in New York state, and became a National Recreation Trail in 2007.
Read more about this topic: Wallkill Valley Rail Trail
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In all history no class has been enfranchised without some selfish motive underlying. If to-day we could prove to Republicans or Democrats that every woman would vote for their party, we should be enfranchised.”
—Carrie Chapman Catt (1859–1947)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)