Battle for the Ashokan Corridor Rail-and-Trail

At a little before 9am on the snowy morning of February 12, Keisha Hoerrner stepped into her office at the Woodstock Land Conservancy on Tinker Street. She’d become the group’s communication and outreach manager in April 2024 after moving to the area from Florida with her husband. 

A few months into the role, she’d started working on a cause the conservancy was advocating for: extending the eastern end of the Ashokan Rail Trail, which runs 12 miles along the northern rim of the Ashokan Reservoir. One option under consideration is removing a stretch of railroad track that the Kingston-based Catskill Mountain Railroad hopes to use to extend its tourist train runs. 

Hoerrner shoveled the walks and sat down to open her first email, addressed to the group’s general mailbox. What she read would jolt her and send the organization into emergency mode. 

“If you do anything to the railroad in that area,” wrote the anonymous sender, I’ll “kill multiple people” and then commit suicide. 

Hoerrner alerted Board Chair Kevin Smith, and they spent the day coordinating with law enforcement, staff, and board members. It wasn’t till Hoerrner got home that the emotions hit, running from terror to anger. Woodstock “was supposed to be this very laid-back place of peace and love, and everybody was so warm and welcoming,” she says. “It was disconcerting to have all that change in an instant.” An investigation by the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office is ongoing, and the conservancy has implemented a rigorous security regime.

Boiling emotions were on display again on April 22 at a packed town board meeting in Hurley as the board was weighing whether to take a position on the disputed portion of track. Town Supervisor Michael Boms says the intensity during the public comment period caught him off guard. “I’ve never seen an issue divide the town that much,” he told the River Newsroom. “I could see blood vessels popping out of people’s heads. It was just way too emotional, way too nuts.”

Competing visions for what kind of tourism and leisure the county wants to promote have driven a deep wedge between Ulster County residents and legislators, all centered on 1.7 miles of unused railroad running along the east side of the Ashokan Reservoir. This year the disagreement has taken a more sinister turn, mirroring the transformation of politics in the country.

Three Options, Two Price Tags 

In 1979 Ulster County paid Penn Central Railroad $1.5 million for almost 40 miles of unused track running from the Hudson River in Kingston to the Belleayre Ski Center in Highmount. Today the fate of that 1.7 miles of track is in the hands of Ulster County’s political leaders.

They have in front of them three choices for that stretch of track: rail only, trail only, or both rail and trail. Embedded in each are competing visions for which amenities best serve residents and attract tourists. The costs of each differ dramatically: All agree that the third option, rail with trail, is the most expensive, though by how much is contested. 

The first, rail only, would expand the operations of Catskill Mountain Railroad, which has operated heritage tourist trains in the area since 1982. Today the company runs trains that start in Kingston and go about five miles west toward the reservoir, ending less than 2 miles short of it. In 2024 the railroad had almost 61,000 riders, according to numbers it submitted to the county.

The company is in the second year of a five-year renewable permit from the county to run its trains on that stretch and pays $60,000 a year for the permit. 

Renovating the existing track on those last two miles would let the railroad bring passengers to the reservoir, where they could get off and walk the Ashokan Rail Trail, say rail proponents. There the railroad proposes building a train station with amenities on land that the railroad leases from a private landowner, with the lease running through 2038, says Catskill Mountain Railroad president Ernie Hunt. From the station, the railroad says it could run a trolley into Woodstock. 

The second option, trail only, would instead extend the Ashokan trail along those two miles, opening up that section to people in more communities, say trail boosters. But the bigger goal it would make possible is to eventually run the trail all the way to Kingston. That matters because Kingston is on the Empire State Trail, a walking, hiking, and biking path running from New York City to Buffalo, the longest such multi-use network in the country, according to the state. The existing trail, which opened in 2019, gets more than 192,000 visitors a year, according to the county. 

The third option, rail with trail, would do both, running trains alongside walkers and bikers. Because that two-mile stretch is single track, doing so would require significantly widening the right of way. The terrain poses significant challenges to that: sections of track run on top of a narrow artificial land bridge called Stony Hollow Fill and in another section through a rock defile. How much more this option would cost, and the environmental impact, are the heart of the debate. 

Trail proponents say the rail-only option would permanently curtail the Ashokan Rail Trail’s potential. “If you do that, you’ve isolated forever the ART—it becomes a totally separate trail that never connects to the larger trail system of New York State,” says Jeff Collins, a Democratic county legislator who headed up a legislative committee to study the issue starting last year. 

Rail proponents say the same about the trail-only option. Hunt says the railroad wants to deliver train riders to the reservoir’s open vistas. “It’s our opinion that if we don’t get this extension, we’re just wasting our time in Ulster County,” he says. “For us basically it’s essential to our existence.”

Rail-with-trail would seem to make everyone happy. But the engineering feats required are immense. For example, Stony Hollow Fill is a half-mile stretch of track built on top of a 30- to 60-foot-high causeway of rock and dirt to even out the steep elevation gain there. There the track, choked in spots by head-high mugwort, soars above the forest floor, parts of which are federally protected wetlands. 

The problem: At 13 feet wide in some places, that section can’t accommodate both a train and a trail. 

Catskill Mountain Railroad proposes several options. One, for example, would run a boardwalk out over the wetlands floor to accommodate the trail. Smith of the Woodstock Land Conservancy rejects that: “We’re talking an extraordinary, very complicated construction project to do that and major, major impacts on mature wetlands,” he says, citing the opinion of a local wetlands ecologist. “I think it’s poppycock.”

Two recent studies looked at the feasibility and costs of trail-only versus rail with trail. In 2023 the Open Space Institute commissioned a study of both for the entire length of corridor running from Kingston through the disputed section. The resulting 136-page report put the price tag of the rail-with-trail option at almost $39 million, more than twice as expensive as trail-only. Catskill Mountain Railroad commissioned its own study last October. That six-page report, an update to a 2015 study, put the rail-with-trail price tag at $18.5 million, less than $4 million more than trail-only.  

Tampering, Sabotage, and Death Threats

The dispute now is about more than corridor widths, wetlands, and price tags. 

In March 2024, a Woodstock Land Conservancy supporter spotted railroad maintenance equipment on the disputed section of track. The conservancy told the county, which investigated and found the railroad clearing trees and installing fixtures, and more on that section. The county sent a cease-and-desist letter to the railroad, threatening to pull the current permit to run trains from Kingston. 

Hunt told the River Newsroom that the railroad leases the land around that track from the landowner, so the county “had no right to send us a cease-and-desist.” But the company opted not to fight it, he says. Smith says that’s wrong—the county has an easement that runs across the landowner’s property, so the railroad can’t work on the tracks themselves since the tracks are within the easement.  

That same month the railroad issued a press release announcing it had won three state grants. One was to be used to fund construction of the train station that the railroad envisions. But last October the county wrote a letter to the state contesting the awards because the projects required county approval, which the railroad hadn’t gotten before applying. The state subsequently suspended two of the three grants, the Times Union reported. 

Then in April Hunt claimed that the railroad got its own death threat: When he arrived for his presentation at the April 22 Hurley meeting, the law enforcement officer checking people in told Hunt that the railroad itself was the target of a threat, Hunt told the River Newsroom. Hunt says he thinks the officer was from the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office, but he didn’t get his name. Ulster County Sheriff spokesperson Collin Reynolds told the River Newsroom by email that the department has no record of receiving a complaint of a death threat against the railroad. The town of Hurley has no police department.

On June 27, the railroad issued a press release reporting it had been the target of sabotage when someone cut electrical wiring and oil lines and punctured fuel and oil filters on two of its maintenance vehicles parked on a bridge. The railroad reported the incident to state police and the federal Transportation Security Administration. Hunt told the River Newsroom he thinks the railroad was deliberately targeted because the bridge isn’t a place “where you just casually walk by.” A month later someone cut audio cables at the railroad’s station in Kingston, he says. 

All of that mirrors trends in the country at large. Dislike and disgust directed at members of opposing political parties has increased steadily since the 1980s, according to a 2023 report by the Carnegie Endowment. Local elected officials have been targeted with more threats since 2018, hate crimes in 2021 were at their highest level in at least 20 years, and the US is polarizing faster than other Western democracies, it noted. 

So it was perhaps unsurprising that Democrats and Republicans in the legislature who took a public position on the disputed track mostly picked opposite sides. The legislature’s Ulster & Delaware Corridor Advisory Committee, set up to study the issue, recommended in May that the county move ahead with a modified trail-only option. It would cede a bit more track to the railroad on the eastern end of the disputed section but leave the rest trail-only. All five Democrats on the committee voted in favor and the two Republicans voted against, according to reporting by the Daily Freeman.

The dispute also may split rail users and bikers and walkers. Manna Jo Greene is a Democratic county legislator who’s led environmental causes for years and appears to be the only Democrat to have spoken out for the rail-with-trail option. “I’m a senior and at the point where I don’t do long hiking or bicycling,” she says. “But taking my family on that railroad is something that I look forward to.”

A Tie-Breaking Study

Legislative leaders now are trying to lower the temperature. In June, the legislature’s Housing & Transportation Committee voted to postpone implementation of the corridor advisory committee’s May recommendation for a modified trail-only option. 

Instead, legislature chair Peter Criswell announced that the legislature would seek a third, independent study of the cost and feasibility of all three options, and a contract to do that was awarded to New Paltz engineering firm Barton & Loguidice. Criswell gave no timeline for the study’s completion because the contract still has to be approved by the legislature. “The goal is to have objective, data-driven information that allows the legislature to make the best decision for Ulster County residents,” Criswell told the River Newsroom by email. 

Path to the Future: Ashokan Rail Trail

Dave Holden April 1, 2020

There’s no telling which way the vote will go once that report comes out. Collins, who voted for the amended trail-only option in May, says he could be persuaded to switch to rail-with-trail if it’s not significantly more expensive and doesn’t have negative environmental impacts, though he’s skeptical that’s what the new study will find. 

“If the cost difference was not significant, definitely. I’ve always said this: If we could do both, we should do both,” he says. 

Greene says she cares about cost but is on board with rail-with-trail even if it’s much more expensive: “I’m one of the legislators who believes that both rail and trail in that corridor are valuable assets, and that even though rail with trail would be more costly than either one of the other options, I think it’s a very good investment for Ulster County,” she says. Once the report comes out, she’d like to see mediators sit down with the sides and negotiate a solution, she adds. 

But the year’s events have rocked Hoerrner’s faith in the ability of Americans to disagree without violence. “I don’t know how you build back any sense of unity or shared values or common principles when you literally cannot communicate with one another,” she says. “It seems like the first step now is to be rude and then move to vilifying people. And then violence seems very easy on top of that.”

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This article appears in November 2025.