On this week’s episode of Give Back New Hampshire, our focus is the Friends of the Northern Rail Trail. Their mission is to improve, promote, and maintain the Northern Rail Trail as a four season, multi-use trail.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Myra Mayman: My name is Myra Maymon. I'm co-president of the Friends of the Northern Rail Trail.
Don Moyer: My name is Don Moyer. I'm vice president of the Friends of the Northern Rail Trail, and I lead the maintenance team.
Myra Mayman: And so here we are. We're, this is it. You're standing on the Northern Rail Trail at its current end. The key thing about this trail, differentiating it from a lot of others, is that it's incredibly varied. What we're looking at now is a quite beautiful field of big field of corn growing along the Merrimack River.
As you proceed north, you go through deep woods, open fields, mountain views, along the streams, the Mascoma River. So it's it's tremendously varied.
Don Moyer: The 59 miles goes through ten New Hampshire towns, and to me, there's at least 6 or 7 different personalities to the trail in terms of what you'll see. But the beauty to me, the majority of it is a tree lined tunnel that you're just riding around and you see the curves and the track and what's around the next bend just keeps pulling you and pulling you.
Myra Mayman: There's a lot of historic artifacts. There's a whole series of granite mile markers that were put in by the railroad for the engineers.
Don Moyer: It's just beautiful workmanship, and a lot of us, myself included. It's the history of the trail, the fact that you're riding where steam engines went down. When you see these historical artifacts, it's not just the exercise that's getting outdoors, but it's, you know, seeing the historical artifacts along the way.
Here in Franklin, there's a turntable. It's probably a 30 or 40 foot diameter granite stone circular wall. And there was a small train line that ran from Bristol to Franklin, that's all it did was hauled goods back and forth from there. And this turntable was where the engine would pull into this turntable, and men would go down to the pit and push the train around and then send it back up the trail. And this granite turntable is in perfectly restored condition. There's obviously the mechanism isn't there, but you can go up there and you'll see just this beautiful turntable that's up there.
Myra Mayman: If you go further north, you come to Potter Place in Andover, where there's a museum and an old caboose. The Andover Historical Society maintains that, and that's a real attraction, particularly for kids.
Don Moyer: It's absolutely gorgeous. I mean, it's a destination in itself. It's one of our it's one of our highest used places to start your trail. Whether you're heading north or south, people go to Potter Place to see the station itself. It's beautiful.
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Don Moyer: What is becoming more and more each year is we're having more climate events. So there was a rainstorm caused damage in 12 locations— $45,000 worth of damage from rain and flooding washing out the trail. So the challenge of getting the funding for that emergency repair work and then getting the work done is those are just kind of what we're seeing more of.
Myra Mayman: I'm very proud of the fact that we've created something that's a real public good and something that's open to everybody, free of charge, and I'm proud of that.
Don Moyer: It's the trail users that motivate us. And our trail users love the trail. And when I'm out in the trail working, I have never had anyone not say thank you for working on our trail. They are just so appreciative. It's the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life because all these people love this trail so much, and the fact that they say, thank you for working on our trail, it's possessive to them. It's their trail. We're working on it. It just tells you how much they they like it, what, how much it means to them.
