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Abandoned turnpike bike trail deal set
Sunday, November 18, 2001 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
BREEZEWOOD, Pa. -- For one thin dollar, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission turned over 8 1/2 miles of abandoned turnpike last week to a land preservation agency that wants to resuscitate the route, complete with two miles of tunnels, as a bicycling trail.
As pleased as the buyers were with their bargain, they couldn't match the downright giddy response of out-of-town veterans of bike trail development.
"This is going to be one of the most successful trails in Pennsylvania," said Bob McKinley, manager of the Regional Trail Corp., a nonprofit umbrella group whose endeavors include the 43-mile McKeesport-to-Connellsville Youghiogheny River Trail, North, a route that drew 400,000 riders last year. "This trail could be almost as successful as mine."
"This is just an incredible, unique attraction," said Karl R. King, project development director for The Progress Fund, a Blair County-based nonprofit agency arranging funding for history-related tourism. "It just has great potential."
The road spills from eastern Bedford County into a little-populated piece of the Buchanan State Forest in Fulton County. Before it does, though, the west side of the abandoned pike sits a half-mile from the "live" turnpike, another half-mile from the stretch of Interstate 70 that can carry drivers from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., in two hours. Thirty minutes south, at Hancock, Md., is the heavily biked C&O Canal tow path.
"If you're into cycling at all," McKinley said, "you're going to run this [turnpike] trail."
The draw, according to all involved, is the road's two highway tunnels, one that is the longest tunnel the turnpike ever had at 1.2 miles. Cycle out of one of the tunnels and onto the empty pike -- silent, four lanes, no cars and no life -- and "it's almost apocalyptic, like maybe a couple of weeks after the bomb," said Bill Plank, a board member of the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy.
From 1940 until 1968, this was a working part of the original turnpike, carrying motorists 6,782 feet through Sideling Hill, and through the 3,532-foot Ray's Hill Tunnel. Both were two lanes, bottlenecks that the Turnpike Commission decided would be cheaper to replace with a 13.5-mile bypass than to bore portals for another two lanes of tunnels.
And there it sat, closed to through traffic, officially open only to turnpike-sanctioned activity that included training for snowplow drivers, rollover crash tests for vehicles and bit parts in front of the camera, such as a recent commercial for a Mercer County-based tire retailer.
A few years back, though, cycling enthusiast Bill Metzger of Mt. Lebanon suggested the mostly-forgotten piece of pike as a link for a Wheeling-to-Philadelphia bike route, replacing a lung-busting mountain climb over a piece of Route 30 near the Bedford-Fulton counties line.
The Bedford-based Southern Alleghenies Conservancy agreed to shepherd the project to reality, a job that planners say could take a year or more and cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to more than $1 million. The cost will depend on the scope of the work, which in turn will depend on how much grant money can be raised. Options range from simply removing safety hazards, such as culverts, to repaving the old highway.
"It'll do very well," said Metzger, a member of the Pennsylvania Pedestrian and Pedalcycle Advisory Committee, who attended Thursday's ceremony to watch the deed change hands. "Where else can you ride a bicycle down the middle of a four-lane highway?"
Before a crowd of 40 gathered at Ray's Hill, Turnpike Commission Executive Director John Durbin waxed lengthy about pike history, telling how the abandoned road was used to train line painters, salt spreaders and dump truck drivers.
When the Turnpike Commission marketed the empty road as a safety test facility, the Federal Highway Administration wrecked cars here a decade ago to evaluate road barriers.
And this is where Neal Wood, the turnpike's retired chief bridge engineer, gave birth to now-ubiquitous roadside rumble strips, officially Sonic Nap Alert Patterns, which were tested here 14 years ago.
In July, a crew overseen by Creative Advertising and Consulting of Sharon filmed a commercial for Flynn's Tire, a regional retailer and wholesaler based in Hermitage.
Then, there were tests of sign reflectivity, with local senior citizens recruited to be driven into the near-complete dark of Sideling Hill Tunnel and see which signs were most visible.
Sure, there was science involved in using a darkened environment. But there also was convenience, given an alternative of driving the volunteers up and down the abandoned turnpike at night.
"These were older people," Wood said. "A lot of them go to bed early."
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