The long journey to community prosperity
On a summer morning in West Newton, Pennsylvania, Leslie Pierce pointed to four brightly painted bed-and-breakfasts—houses just across the way from the GAP Trail—as simple and obvious evidence of the economic boost that came from converting the old railroad line there into a packed gravel bicycle path.
“You should have seen them 10 years ago. They were dumps,” said Pierce, business manager for the Regional Trail Corp., which operates the visitor center there in a replica train station and maintains part of the 149-mile trail. B&Bs and other businesses have popped up elsewhere along it, she said.
In the Adirondacks, supporters of the new 34-mile rail trail under construction between Lake Placid and Tupper Lake are looking for similar results.
West Newton, 24.5 miles south of Pittsburgh with a population somewhere north of 2,500, has the worn hardscrabble look of a former coal and factory town, but not along the rail trail. It runs next to the Youghiogheny River, which like the railroad is another key to its commercial past. Instead, there’s a
