I'm sure that most participants on this forum are aware of the current situation at the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad. The rails-to-trails advocates have succeeded in convincing our State and local politicians that the Allegany Highlands Trail is a better economic package for western Maryland than our tourist train. As a result, there will be no more State subsidies after the fiscal 2006 distribution.

As a result, if current plans by politicians materialize, the 2005 season will be the last year that WMSR trains run all the way to Frostburg. In fact, much of the debate today concerns whether the tracks will ever extend as far as Brush Tunnel again.

State Transportation officials and the Trail Alliance are upset about the outpouring of public support for the WMSR that was manifested in a public meeting last Thursday. Most of the negotiations regarding the WMSR have taken place behind closed doors, including a meeting on February 17th in which the State thought they had a deal with the WMSR Board of Directors that the Frostburg trips were dead. One State official said she feels "betrayed".

In order to get a feel for how much public support is there, I have created a poll on my WesternMarylandSurvivors group on Yahoo. You may need to register for a Yahoo ID if you don't have one already.

This link will take you directly to the poll;

http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/W ... id=1697069

As a community, we can make a difference.

wm303,
even if you have a yahoo account, you cant see anything in your group because your group is set up so that only members can see anything..
maybe you could temporalily change the settings so that non-members can see and vote in your poll, then change it back to members-only when the poll is over.

I also own a yahoo group, and if you make that change, you will also unfortunately open up your message forum to spam, so you might have to manually delete spam messages for awhile, but it would be worth it if you can let more people vote on your poll..

Scot

Hi friends,

This is yet another example of the fact that the trail lobby is just that, a lobby. We of the rail persuasion have yet to organize into a lobby of any sort, and most times rail loses to trail because of it.

In this case, the lack of organization in terms of a rail lobby has been offset somewhat by public opinion, but don't count on that lasting.

Across the country active or potentially active rail lines are being targeted by the trail lobby. They sing a sweet, organized song.

Certainly, some trails are GOOD preservation, and thus the situation is touchy, but the evidence is clear that not all trail objectives are in that category.

Add in local politics (especially the backroom kind in Cumberland) and you have a potent mix of money, power and secrecy.

Rob

What I don't get is how eliminating the railroad to complete 32 miles of a trail between Wahsington and Pittsburgh will somehow magically bring more visitors. There is already a fair amount of the bike trail in the Cumberland area. How do we as railfans persuade the Maryland politicians that the trail folks are blowing smoke you-know-where?

Common sense alone should tell them that they already are getting about as many trail riders as they will ever get, and they will be losing a fairly large number of train riders. (What is their ridership nowadays?)

As I noted on a previous post about WMSR, the trail advocates are not only well organized, they are well connected as well. I wonder if someone like the AAR (which has a "railfan" organization) might not be a good partner to counter the trail/environmentalist/green coalition? They have been a potent political force in fighting truck length/weight with others. While the WMSR is not vital to the national freight system there have been other lines that if they had been railbanked might have helped the current congestion problems.

Oh and by the way can anyone tell me of any case of a trail that has ever been turned back into a railroad?

It may have been changed since the last post, but I just joined the group and was given membership instantly, and made my entry to the poll. Local supporters of the WMSR might masquerade as supporters of a different trail and thus contact Rails-to-Trails to get some accurate estimates of trail building costs. Trails aren't free nor even cheap. Some years ago, we helped fend off the trails people on the Lamoille Valley for a while by simply quoting RTC's own construction cost figures. It was going to cost more to tear up the track and build a trail than to fix the washouts and use it as a railroad. Eventually the snowmobilers won, but we held up the process about ten years anyway. In the WM case, there appear to be some backroom deals going on, which should be brought to light in the public's eye.

Thanks. This is all new to me. I'll make the change.

The current WMSR "crisis" is all about M-O-N-E-Y. In Maryland it is always easier to get capital funding for new construction than it is to get consistent operating support for day-to-day costs. And comparing the limited on-going maintenance costs of the trail to the upkeep of the railroad, locomotive and cars makes the WMSR even less attractive as a going concern.

Wesley

It strikes me that trail hikers likely spend less money per capita in a local economy than train riders. Surprising studies haven't been conducted to compare the impact of the two visitors' categories.

Not exactly a trail that was replaced by a revived railroad thrugh a tunnel, but part of the Northern Central Trail in Pennsylvania did co-exist with a temporarily revived Northern Central Railroad (under Stewartstown RR management?) throught the Howard Tunnel.