Rails to Trails - Of History and Industry

The cover story of the Winter 2023 issue of Rails to Trails, the magazine of the Rails to Trails Conservancy, featured our local Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail. Author Cory Matteson stopped by our Peninsula store while researching the story in late 2022 and spoke to Ron and Kevin about the trail's benefits to both locals and tourists.

"People can ride anywhere onto the Towpath, stop [at a station and], for $5, throw their bike and themselves onto the train and come right back to where they started," said Ron Bercaw, a longtime sales associate at Century Cycles. "We have a lot of people that'll rent bikes and go to the train station just—right up here—and jump on and go to one end of the park or the other and ride back."

"In about 3 miles, you'll come to this big farm store called Szalay's, and they're kind of famous for sweet corn," he said. "They cook food out during the summer; they have live entertainment. And then about a half mile past that is the Beaver Marsh, where there's a big beaver dam. The river otters are repopulating down there. [You'll see some blue herons, some ospreys maybe if you're lucky."

The mid-November morning I visited Peninsula, Bercaw and Kevin Madzia, the shop's IT Manager, spotted two bald eagles outside the shop window.

"Now that the trail is more connected all the way into Cleveland, it gives people around here more opportunities to go places," Madzia said. "And it's also bringing people from all over the country, because they're using that Cincinnati to Cleveland route. I've talked to people that have come from all over the country just to do that."

He continued, "I did the same thing with that route from Washington, D.C. to Pittsburgh [via the Great Allegheny Passage (gaptrail.org) C&O Canal Towpath (canaltrust.org)] a few years ago, and I ran into a mother and daughter there from Idaho. They flew to Pittsburgh just to ride that trail. And we're starting to see that here, but I think we won't really see it take off until it's 100% connected."

You can read the whole story and issue of the magazine at: https://www.railstotrails.org/magazine/#latest