When Robert Thomas, 78, was 11 years old, he envisioned a hiking trail in Northwest Philadelphia that would follow the corridor of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s abandoned Fort Washington branch. He even gave a presentation about the idea to his sixth-grade class.
“It was my first feasibility study for a trail: ‘Why we should connect the Wissahickon with Fort Washington,’” says Thomas, partner and founder at Campbell Thomas & Co. architecture firm and commissioner at the Philadelphia Historical Commission. “This is 67 years ago, and here we are, still working on it.”
In 2008, Thomas conducted the first official feasibility study for the Cresheim Trail: a six-mile, multi-use recreational trail that would reclaim abandoned railroad right-of-way to connect existing trails in Wissahickon Valley Park and Fort Washington State Park in Montgomery County.
Now, his childhood dream is finally on track to be realized.
“We’ve built such momentum with planning and designing the trail. And now things are starting to take shape,” says Bradley Maule, executive director of the Friends of the Cresheim Trail.
The Friends of the Cresheim Trail, a nonprofit initiative working to extend the trail, has been active since 2012, building almost three miles of natural surface trail in City-owned parkland on an almost entirely volunteer basis. Thanks to recent grant funding from the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, via the Regional Trails Program and the Community Conservation Partnerships Program, respectively, the complete Cresheim Trail route is in its planning and early design phases.
The existing Cresheim Trail starts near the Richard Allen Lane Regional Rail station, eventually following Cresheim Creek as it approaches Germantown Avenue from the southwest. The Cresheim Rail Trail will begin on the other side of Germantown Avenue.
“The first phase that we want to do goes from Germantown Avenue up to Stenton Avenue, which is the border between Philadelphia and Montgomery County,” says Maule. This first segment is considered a “rough draft” of the formal trail, which Maule encourages hikers and bikers to use and get familiar with while its full design is in progress. Connecting the rough draft to the existing trail will require SEPTA to rehabilitate a trestle over Germantown Avenue for use as a pedestrian bridge.
Maule says that the difference between building natural surface trail and building rail trail is “night and day.” Whereas volunteers can build trails on City-owned parkland with tools and manual labor, the multi-county rail trail will require collaboration and license agreements with various public utilities and municipalities that own the old rail corridor.
For the first phase, the Friends of the Cresheim Trail has a license agreement with PECO, which owns the land under the right-of-way, to follow the former Pennsylvania Railroad corridor. But from Flourtown to Fort Washington State Park, the trail would turn onto a former Reading Railroad right-of-way, which is municipally owned.
Once the design phase is completed, the project will go out to bid. It could be another two years before trail construction begins.
As part of the Circuit Trails network, the completed Cresheim Trail will be 10 feet wide and ADA accessible. The central mission of the trail, Maule says, is to connect communities with green spaces dedicated to transportation and recreation, while reenvisioning infrastructural relics.
“It builds on this — especially in Pennsylvania — rich tradition of reusing these old and historic corridors for new purposes.”
