Pere Marquette Rail-Trail
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The Pere Marquette Rail-Trail is a rail trail in Michigan.
It occupies a 28 mile abandoned CSX railroad corridor in Midland County and Isabella County. The railroad corridor stretched from Clare east to Saginaw.
Today the trail has been paved with asphalt for hiking and bicycling and in places may be up to 14 feet in width.
[edit] History
The first portion of the trail was opened in June 1993 and dedicated on July 17 of the same year. This portion was almost wholly contained in the city of Midland, Michigan and started at The Tridge (as of 2006, The Tridge is still the current starting point of the official part of the trail). Mileage markers are located every half mile.
As construction has progressed through the years, the trail has expanded to include service to the following locations (dates of service included in parenthesees):
- Averill (Midland County) (1994)
- Sanford (1994)
- North Bradley (Midland County) (1995)
- Coleman (1995)
- Loomis (2001)
In 2005, the Chippewa Trail opened as a spur to the Pere Marquette Trail. It runs 3.5 miles from the Pere Marquette's terminus at the Tridge to the Chippewa Nature Center.
[edit] Plans
The rail trail has had plans to extend west to Baldwin, Michigan, and then also as far as Ludington, Michigan. The ferry service could also be used to extend the trail westward into Wisconsin. More feasible plans of extending the rail trail through the city of Clare have surfaced in the past few years, where there is a connecting route through the city to the Pere Marquette State Trail, which may be converted and added into the rail trail.
