Jeremy Cluchey, chairman of the Merrymeeting Trail Board of Supervisors, stands April 25 by a rail corridor that advocates have been hoping to develop into a trail. The tracks are part of a trails proposal that would extend a trail from Gardiner to Brunswick along the Cathance River. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

BOWDOINHAM — State lawmakers could soon approve a rail trail almost two decades in the making, providing a potentially crucial economic and recreational link along the Kennebec, Cathance and Androscoggin rivers.

Lawmakers on the joint transportation committee voted 11-2 on April 15 to recommend allowing construction of the 33.5-mile Merrymeeting Trail, sending the project to a potential vote in front of the full state Legislature, where the fate of the trail hangs in the balance. The trail would replace the existing state-owned Lower Road railroad tracks connecting Brunswick to Augusta. The line hasn’t been used consistently since the 1980s, but the corridor would be preserved for rail in the future, per state law.

Advocates have been working toward this bill since 2008, and the recent action in the Legislature puts the project closer to reality than ever before, despite an uphill fundraising battle. Detractors say the bill’s approval could effectively prevent trains and their economic benefit from ever returning to the region — and an interested rail operator could preempt the trail plan altogether, even if the bill does pass.

RAIL UNTIL TRAIL

In the late 19th century, mail, freight and copies of the Boston Globe arrived by rail every morning at Harward’s Station, a wooden shack just east of Bowdoinham that served as the area’s train stop.

There, passengers could hop on a half-dozen daily trains to Boston or Bangor. Rail-side businesses could drop their goods off and ship them to Portland or Waterville in a flash. Workers could ride in for the winter to help harvest Kennebec River ice, which would then be shipped back out to the rest of the world.

But rail service on the Lower Road slowed after ice harvesting hit its peak between 1870 and 1890.

In 1936, Harward’s Station was demolished to make way for a road bridge over the rail. By 1960, thanks largely to competition from the newly constructed Maine Turnpike, passenger service had stopped altogether on the Lower Road, the rail corridor that runs from Brunswick to Augusta along the western side of Merrymeeting Bay and the Kennebec River. Freight wasn’t far behind.

Without rail service, businesses in the area shuttered. In Bowdoinham, shipbuilding, kindling and fertilizer factories alike closed.

“That industry isn’t part of the area now,” said Jeremy Cluchey, a Bowdoinham resident and chairman of the Merrymeeting Trail Board of Supervisors. “There hasn’t been freight run on this line since the 1980s, and there hasn’t been interest from businesses.”

The rail line that runs between Gardiner and Topsham crosses railroad bridges like this one over the Abagadasset River. The rail line is part of a trails proposal that includes this stretch along the Cathance River in Bowdoinham. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

The rail line has been almost entirely dormant since 1986. State officials acquired the Lower Road in 1991 with the explicit intention to either restore rail service or preserve it for future rail use, but the Maine Department of Transportation has only minimally maintained the tracks since, and few freight companies have expressed interest in returning to the line.

Some stretches are now entirely unusable by trains. Augusta has covered up part of the track with gravel for downtown parking, and a rail bridge across Route 24 in Richmond was removed altogether in 2017 to improve access and safety for trucks on the road below.

Cluchey said when residents, businesses and local leaders along the corridor realized trains weren’t coming back, they formed a group advocating for a different use for the state-owned line. Since 2008, the Merrymeeting Trailblazers, as the members called themselves, have worked to build support for the trail.

“First and foremost, before anything else, (railroads) are publicly owned assets — and for the better part of 40 years, this one has brought no benefit to the communities through which it runs and to the taxpayers who pay to support it,” Cluchey said. “We don’t want to look back 40 years from now and be able to say the same thing.”

The economic impact of a trail along the Lower Road corridor could be significant. A 2023 report found trail users would spend between $1.7 million and $2.6 million annually in commercial centers along the line, primarily on lodging and food. Health costs could go down for Mainers along the corridor with brand new access to recreation — adding up to a total annual savings of almost $300,000 for health-related expenses.

Gay Grant, a Gardiner city councilor and former state legislator who served on the transportation committee, said she has already seen significant economic and quality-of-life improvements from the Kennebec River Rail Trail, which runs along the Lower Road from Augusta to Gardiner.

“The more people get out and recreate with something as exceptional as a trail like the Kennebec River Rail Trail — we’re seeing lots of folks from every age, from every walk of life, use that trail, and we believe that will happen when that trail is expanded down through some of the prettiest landscapes that you’ll see in the state of Maine,” Grant said.

TRAIL v. RAIL

Initially, Cluchey said, the Merrymeeting Trailblazers hoped to blaze the trail beside the rail line, keeping the tracks intact for future use as required by state law. But as plans got more serious, lawmakers were consulted and engineering studies were commissioned, trail advocates realized how expensive and environmentally harmful such a plan could be.

A 2023 estimate from Portland-based engineering firm VHB found a “trail-with-rail” model could cost $150 million. And sensitive wetlands along Merrymeeting Bay would be at risk because of the required landscaping.

“The cost of that basically makes it impossible,” Cluchey said. “It runs over multiple streams and rivers, there are bridges. It also runs through really narrow stretches where there’s solid rock on each side, where it’s been blasted out years ago.”

Under the “trail-until-rail” plan supported by Cluchey and others, the rail line would be ripped up and replaced with a multi-use trail. Regardless, the corridor would still be officially dedicated to the return of rail, as required by state law.

“Should rail become viable in the future, that’s what (rail corridors) should be used for, and I fully support that,” Cluchey said. “In the meantime, can these languishing public assets be put to a use that delivers economic, health, social, environmental benefits for the state, for the community, for taxpayers who own this line, until that future gets here?”

That future, Cluchey said, is still several stations away.

VHB also estimated retoring freight transport along the corridor would cost about $55 million, and passenger rail would cost $363 million. Road crossings and bridges make up much of that overall cost. Annual maintenance was estimated around $3 million, and annual operational costs could reach nearly $20 million. Amtrak has not included passenger service expansions in Maine in its near- or long-term plans, making passenger service unlikely along the Lower Road even if the capability to do so returned.

Even the political feasibility of restoring rail service is in question. State lawmakers soundly rejected a proposal on April 24 to restore passenger rail service from Portland to Bangor because service would be too slow, attract too few riders and cost too much to establish and operate.

Rail advocates and businesses think otherwise, though.

Three members of the Lower Road Rail Use Advisory Council — a group set up through state law to recommend legislative action on the Lower Road — signed onto a report supporting a plan to put the trail beside the railroad, despite the environmental and cost concerns. The return of rail service, advocates say, is entirely possible and would have enormous economic impact.

Those three members were outvoted in the Lower Road Rail Use Advisory Council process, 11-3. The majority’s recommendation for an interim trail was approved by state legislators in the transportation committee in April, and lawmakers are expected to vote on LD 29, in the coming weeks. Cluchey’s wife, Rep. Sally Cluchey, a Bowdoinham Democrat, co-sponsored the bill.

F. Bruce Sleeper, the president of TrainRiders Northeast and the author of the minority report, said removing the rail to pave a trail would only nominally preserve the corridor for future trains. Of the thousands of miles of rail across the country that have been removed to place a trail, Sleeper said only about 100 miles of railroad have been rebuilt.

This photo taken in April 25 shows railroad tracks in South Gardiner that are part of a trails proposal along the Kennebec River that would connect Gardiner with Brunswick. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

“In theory, trail-until-rail preserves the corridor for potential future rail use since the trail can be removed later and replaced with new rail infrastructure,” the report said. “In reality, however, this is untrue, since the cost of reconstructing a rail line from scratch is an order of magnitude greater than repairing even a substantially deteriorated corridor. As a result, the removal of tracks and other rail infrastructure from a rail corridor means that the line will never again be used for rail purposes.”

The Cumberland & Knox Railroad has recently inquired to the Maine Department of Transportation about returning freight service to the line, representing the first explicit interest in the Lower Road from a rail company in years. The company hopes to use Brunswick and the Lower Road as a hub, connecting to its services to Rockland.

This new interest could prevent any trail along the Lower Road, even if LD 29 is passed; rail use takes precedence along the corridor, per state law.

Finn Kelly, the government affairs and public relations manager for Maine Switching Services — a rail services company that helped Cumberland & Knox submit a proposal to the Department of Transportation — said he thinks restoring freight service to the Lower Road is less expensive than the engineering estimates from VHB showed.

He said the VHB report calculated high-end improvements for freight service along the line, including improvements Cumberland & Knox does not need.

“We believe that there are portions of it that could actually have a train running on it today, safely,” Kelly said.

The Department of Transportation has yet to approve or deny the Cumberland & Knox plan, and the Legislature has yet to vote on the bill — leaving the future of both the trail and rail hanging in the balance.

PAYING FOR THE TRAIL

As expensive as restoring train service could be, the trail-until-rail plan isn’t cheap, either. A 2023 report found a gravel trail would cost $34.3 million, and a paved trail would cost $43 million.

The rail line that runs between Gardiner and Topsham and is part of a trails proposal, crosses a number of bridges along the Kennebec River, including this one in South Gardiner. Joe Phelan/Kennebec Journal

LD 29 contains no funding provision. Trail advocates would have to come up with the money on their own.

Mathew Eddy, the executive director of the Midcoast Council of Governments and a supporter of the trail-until-rail plan, said he expected finding the money — either to upgrade the rail or build a trail on the line — to be a “very difficult path.”

“Either one was going to require a long-term investment strategy and ability to go forward,” Eddy said. “What we have focused on is a core-out strategy, where we would really begin to identify funding sources that would assist in building the system out around the village centers in Richmond, in Bowdoinham and in Topsham.”

Eddy served as the chair for the Lower Road Rail Use Advisory Council, the group that recommended the trail-until-rail plan for state approval. Based on the level of organization from Merrymeeting Trail advocates during that process — from public hearings to written testimony — he said he expected the group to find a way.

Cluchey said those advocates are under no illusions about the potential difficulty of raising the money, especially given the Trump administration’s ongoing hostility toward federal grant funding. He said the fundraising will likely begin with the trail’s fiscal sponsor, the Kennebec Estuary Land Trust, and later expand to public-private partnerships and contributions from towns along the corridor.

Like Eddy, he said he thinks the most likely path forward is in small segments — building out from village hubs along the line and slowly joining the southern end of the line in Brunswick to its northern end in Gardiner, where it would connect to the Kennebec River Rail Trail and carry through to Augusta.

“We’ve been at this for 17 years,” Cluchey said. “It’s not something we expect to happen overnight.”