History of The Regional Park
When the W&OD Railroad closed in 1968, its 100-foot (30 m) wide right-of-way extended from Potomac Yard in Alexandria to the center of Purcellville. Soon after the railroad closed, the Virginia Department of Highways purchased the railroad's property from the line's owner, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, with the intent of using a portion of the right-of-way for the construction of I-66. Shortly thereafter, the Virginia Electric and Power Company (part of which was incorporated into Dominion Virginia Power in 2000) purchased most of the property from the highway department, as the company's electric power transmission lines were travelling within the right-of-way.
The first portion of the W&OD Trail opened in 1974 within the City of Falls Church under a lease agreement between the City government, the power company and NVRPA. As the trail proved to be popular, NVRPA purchased this and additional segments of the right-of-way from the power company between 1978 and 1982. The power company retained an easement that permitted the company to maintain its lines and to extend them along the right-of-way if needed.
NVRPA was not able to acquire from the power company the portion of the right-of-way that lay within the City of Alexandria. NVRPA also could not acquire the portion of right-of-way that the highway department had retained for construction of I-66 near East Falls Church in Arlington and various portions of the right-of-way that contained existing or potential highway crossings.
NVRPA extended the trail east and west of Falls Church as it acquired portions of the right-of-way. In 1987, the National Park Service designated the trail as a National Recreation Trail. The trail reached Purcellville in 1988. After encountering opposition from the public because of its potential environmental impacts, the final section of the trail opened in and near Arlington's Bluemont Park in 2002.
On October 20, 2007, construction began for a paved trail that would connect the W&OD Trail at its origin with the Four Mile Run Trail by traveling for 3,000 feet (910 m) along a bank of the Run while passing beneath the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway (I-395) in Alexandria and West Glebe Road in Arlington. On May 30, 2009, a ribbon-cutting ceremony heralded the completion and opening of the connecting trail.
Read more about this topic: Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history and/or park:
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“It gives me the greatest pleasure to say, as I do from the bottom of my heart, that never in the history of the country, in any crisis and under any conditions, have our Jewish fellow citizens failed to live up to the highest standards of citizenship and patriotism.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.”
—Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984)