John Surma, the chairman of U.S. Steel, first heard of the Great Allegheny Passage trail plan when he was biking along the Potomac River in 1983.

Mr. Surma, a Pittsburgh native, asked a bicyclist how far the trail ran. He was told the path covered about 20 miles, and then the stranger said the words Mr. Surma recalled yesterday: "Some day it's going to go all the way to Pittsburgh."

Now, 24 years later, the trail runs from Washington, D.C., to McKeesport.

Mr. Surma was on hand yesterday as Allegheny County officially took possession of a 1.5-mile portion of the trail -- one of the final pieces of the 335-mile Great Allegheny Passage, the network of hiking and biking trails that will stretch to Point State Park in Pittsburgh.

The newest trail segment runs along the route of a former natural gas pipeline on the southern bank of the Monongahela River in West Mifflin and Duquesne. The county bought the land from U.S. Steel.

Mr. Surma and county Chief Executive Dan Onorato said they want to work with Linda McKenna Boxx, the president of the Allegheny Trail Alliance, and Hanna Hardy, the Steel Valley Trail Council president, to get the trail to Point State Park completed by 2008, the year of Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary.

Ms. Boxx said the last nine miles have been the toughest to acquire and complete, including this most recently added section.

"We've encountered difficult land acquisitions that took years of negotiation," she said about other sections of the trail. "All of that seems easy compared to what we are facing in the Mon Valley."

Another trail segment they've still not purchased runs along the Sandcastle property in West Homestead and is owned by Kennywood Entertainment Co.

Andrew R. Quinn, director of community relations for the waterpark, said there are a couple of "pinch points" where the company has not figured out how to run the trail. One is over a culvert that has collapsed, leaving a hole in the parking lot. The other is near a bridge abutment.

He pledged those problems would be resolved so that the trail would run uninterrupted past Sandcastle by next year.

Ms. Boxx said other uncompleted sections, through the Regional Industrial Development Corp. sites in McKeesport and Duquesne, are on hold until the trail council determines the alignment of the trail.

Mr. Onorato said he thinks it's great that a major manufacturing concern such as U.S. Steel has joined with the county to develop the last sections of the trail.

"You can have trails and you can have manufacturing. It's not one or the other; we want them both," he said.