A Berkshire County rail trail has received a new round of state funding. As Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes reports, it's part of an effort to address longstanding inequities between the eastern and western regions of the commonwealth.
The Ashuwillticook Rail Trail has been slowly unfurling across Berkshire County for decades. The multi-use path has become a beloved fixture. Its 14-odd miles take users on a scenic ramble north to south through the Hoosac River Valley.
Berkshire Regional Planning Commission Executive Director Laura Brennan said its potential is yet to be fully realized.
“So right now, we have an extensive bikeable and walkable path that leads from Pittsfield up into Adams, and it's a wonderful asset,” Brennan said. “It is primarily used for recreational purposes, but the longer and more available trails like this are, the more they can become an alternative, not just for recreation but for active transportation to jobs, to appointments, to social engagements.”
First opened in 2001, the trail has seen a series of expansions over the last 25 years, but remains unconnected to key Northern Berkshire communities.
The BRPC received over $17 million last year to design the last 9.3 miles that will take the trail from Williamstown through North Adams to its current northerly terminus in Adams. This month, the commission got another chunk of change from the commonwealth to assist the project.
“This particular investment from Massachusetts is $64,700, and it will help us conduct what's called a transportation security index,” Brennan said. “It's a very well thought of survey tool out of the University of Michigan, and it's not only going to help us with the work that we're doing to extend the trail, but is it is also going to make us more competitive for transportation-related grants of all types from federal and state and foundation sources in the future.”
Quentin Palfrey is the Director of the Federal Funds & Infrastructure Office, the body within Governor Maura Healey’s administration which distributes money from the federal government across the commonwealth. He said the new funding for the Ashuwillticook is part of an official recognition that Western Massachusetts – with its sparse population, economic struggles, housing woes, and other challenges - has long been underfunded by the Boston-based state government.
“We worked with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, did some work to look at how federal funds have flowed and what communities have benefited from them,” Palfrey said. “One of the things that we saw pretty consistently was that rural communities, Gateway Cities, and in particular Western Massachusetts and northern Berkshire County, that absolutely that's borne out in the facts that there were fewer resources that came to support some of these programs.”
That’s not news to municipal leaders like Nick Caccamo, the town manager of Adams.
“Anything in the 495 corridor and east tends to get a lot of support from Beacon Hill and the commonwealth,” Caccamo said. “So, we're happy for any investments out west. We surely could benefit and use more, and would welcome more. Opportunities like this to send back to Beacon Hill [that] there are opportunities for investment, particularly in like outdoor recreation, and hopefully that resonates with state leaders.”
For the community of around 8,000 at the foot of Mount Greylock — the tallest mountain in Massachusetts — outside support for projects like the rail trail has a serious impact.
“Arguably, it's probably - outside of maybe the Greylock Glen - the singular thing that brings more people to the community is on the rail trail itself,” Caccamo said. “We put a lot of time and resources into maintaining the trail and hopefully extending it and with that comes a lot of permitting and a lot of design costs, and it is just not an easy process.”
Palfrey said the FFIO has been working for years to directly confront the regional funding deficit in smaller communities who haven’t reaped the benefits of federal resources, specifically focusing on Berkshire County.
“The first stop of our 13-location tour of trying to identify the needs was in Pittsfield,” he said. “When we asked the legislature for new resources, in 2024 the legislature passed a bill, Chapter 214, that is we think of as the Federal Funds Bill. It created a pool of $750 million for matching funds for these regional technical assistance grants and for this lending program, and at the heart of that was this idea that we were going to try to overcome some of the regional inequities, and so we've prioritized it every step in the process.”
It will still be a long road ahead for the Ashuwillticook.
As Brennan of the BRPC explained, the design phase of the Williamstown trail extension is expected to take at least six-to-seven years.
“We have wetlands to navigate, we have difficult terrain, we also have some involvement from rail lines, and we have to make sure that everything that we do and plot out is safe, and long-term sustainable,” she said. “Which is why these things take so long. It's not just cutting a swath through the woods, and it's no longer using an existing rail bed to create trail. Now it's putting trail down where there had not been rail before.”
She sees the project as tool to solidify a shared identity for a region with deep internal divisions, a weak transportation system and long separated by rugged terrain.
“I think it's another way that we can all think of ourselves as the Berkshires, as opposed to individually siloed communities,” Brennan said. “And I think that there's a lot of enthusiasm from towns that are not yet touched by the rail trail, and there's an eagerness to have it be a part of one of the things a community offers. It's no longer something that people shy away from having in their backyard. In fact, I think there are a lot of people who would love to be an abutter to a rail trail like this one or an expanded version, so that they would be able to walk right out their back door and enjoy everything that all of the mileage of the trail has to offer.”
