Standing at the end of the 2.5-mile Marion County rail trail on the outskirts of Fairmont, the city’s Planning and Development Director Shae Strait sees nothing but possibility in the Parkersburg to Pittsburg Corridor, better known as the P2P corridor.
"It's the beginning of the amazing opportunity we have here. P2P across its entire length is 238 miles of contiguous rail trail,” he said. “There's only four gaps remaining in all of West Virginia, and the entire city of Fairmont is one of them.”
Most of the P2P corridor in West Virginia, some 180 miles of trail, is already built up between Parkersburg and Morgantown.
The National Road Heritage Corridor and seven local partner organizations have launched a major regional planning effort to unlock the community and economic potential of the P2P. They are leveraging a $145,500 Appalachian Regional Commission grant, combined with $140,000 in matching support from the Just Transition Fund, Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and the City of Fairmont.
Those promoting the project want to utilize the unified trail for more than its physical attributes.
“I think most people view it as recreation,” Strait said. “There's nothing wrong with that, but we know as professional planners and we need to spread the word … about the larger impacts on health, on economy, on transportation and so forth.”
Strait said Fairmont has already committed to break ground on two miles of new trail to close their gap and make the corridor a reality, and they’re not the only ones.
"The energy is contagious, and everyone sees the benefits of it,” he said.
Tapping into the economic potential of outdoor recreation
Amy Camp is the owner of Cycle Forward, a consulting firm working with the West Virginia and Pennsylvania communities on the corridor by creating a plan to draw more benefits from the trail.
"What we're doing right now with that corridor is creating a master plan that will help us to plan for the future of the various trails and how they link together,” she said. “Our vision is for a place that has new thriving businesses and vibrant communities along this interconnected rail trail corridor.”
Public meetings are currently being held in communities up and down the P2P corridor for the master plan, which is estimated to be completed in about a year.
Camp cautioned that creating a vision for economic prosperity is not fast work, but she said diligent planning with public input ensures this ambitious vision will work at its best.
"That contributes to business attraction, resident attraction and retention,” Camp said. “When you do treat a trail as an asset, it helps to create more livable places.”
Two of the corridor’s main gaps are in Harrison County, just south of Marion County.
Kent Spellman, chairman of the nonprofit Harrison Recreational Trails, said they are making similar strides to Fairmont.
"Harrison County Commission recently purchased a section that would go from Wilsonburg into Clarksburg proper,” he said. “We've been working on that since the mid ‘90s. So to have that finally acquired is a really big deal for everybody, and we expect that to be built out relatively soon.”
Spellman said local trail use has seen a surge in recent years, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. In his almost 40 years of advocacy, he said West Virginia hasn’t reached the true potential for economic and community development driven by trails. But that is actively being corrected.
"Up in the Morgantown area, we did a study just before the pandemic that showed that the rail trail in Morgantown brings about $6 million a year to that local economy,” Spellman said. “And I think we could see that in other places if we were to intentionally develop our communities around those trails.”
Making the vision a reality
The national Rails to Trails Conservancy estimates there are more than 40,000 miles of rail trails across the country. Organizations like the Industrial Heartland Trail Coalition want to add hundreds of miles to create a system that connects Parkersburg to Cleveland, Ohio, and Erie, Pennsylvania, and beyond.
Spellman said that scale is a key factor in driving the economic potential of the trail corridor. A connection to Pittsburgh would mean access to the Great Allegheny Passage, an established long-distance biking trail to Washington, D.C. That trail’s conservancy organization estimates it receives around one million visits every year, driving tens of millions of dollars into the local economy.
Spellman said he wants the same for the P2P.
"When all those gaps are closed and that's a continuous trail, it will be one of the longest trails of its type in the world,” he said. “That makes it a destination for people to come and really spend some time doing long-distance cycling on those trails.”
Central West Virginia is a key part of that vision, and one that seems on the cusp of becoming reality. Spellman foresees someday connecting all of West Virginia via rail trails, stretching down to Charleston with Harrison County as the state’s rail trail hub.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
