The Otago Central Rail Trail is a 150-kilometre walking, cycling and horse riding track in the South Island of New Zealand. A pioneering project for New Zealand, the successful cycle trail joined the New Zealand Cycle Trail umbrella organisation in 2012, having been one of the inspirations for it.
The trail runs in an arc between Middlemarch and Clyde, along the route of the former Otago Central Railway. The trail has become a popular tourist attraction, with 10,000-12,000 users per year as a conservative estimate, and yearly (and ongoing) user increases for 6 out of the last 7 years (as of 2011). The trail is also accepted as being, by a large margin, the biggest non-farming economic factor in the Maniototo-Alexandra area.
Read more about Otago Central Rail Trail: History, Trail Walking / Cycling, Usage / Statistics
Famous quotes containing the words central, rail and/or trail:
“The central paradox of motherhood is that while our children become the absolute center of our lives, they must also push us back out in the world.... But motherhood that can narrow our lives can also broaden them. It can make us focus intensely on the moment and invest heavily in the future.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they willthe very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)
“These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)