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Transportation Enhancements fund Katy Trail

Missouri's Katy trail, funded by 10 TE projects in three different categories representing $2.7 million, is a good examples of the impact of Enhancements funding.

From Connections, Summer 2008
Publication of the National Transportation Enhancements Clearinghouse

Meriwether, former executive editor of the Detroit Free Press, spent his childhood in Columbia, Mo., in the 1950s and 60s. His family lived only a few miles from the once sprawling Missouri-Kansas-Texas (or Katy) Railroad, but Meriwether mostly remembered the rail corridor as a forlorn, almost dislocated strip of community history. “When I was growing up,” he says, “the Katy was a down-at-the-mouth, dilapidated railroad.”

After he graduated from the University of Missouri and moved away in 1966, Meriwether rarely saw his hometown again until 1990. The railroad of his memories, though, had vanished. “I was visiting my mom in the hospital,” he says, “and then sort of to unwind, I found the Katy Railroad in its new form, which was the Katy Trail,” now operated by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (MDNR).

What soon defined his relationship to the new rail-trail was its developing emotional association with his mother. “I just found the trail extremely peaceful and calming and regenerative,” he says. “It gave me spiritual sanctuary at a time when my mother was dying.”

Building the Katy Trail, however, took much effort. “The big opposition was mainly a lot of noise,” says Pat Jones of Williamsburg, Mo., who, with her late husband Ted, helped fast-track the trail’s development. She recalls that some local organizations, including the Missouri Farm Bureau, stirred up groundless fears of crime on the trail and local landowners losing property rights. “Any change makes you worry,” she says, “but a little sharing goes a long way.”

Indeed the Jones family gave the Katy Trail a hearty two-handed push when they bought 200 miles of the corridor’s right-of-way and then donated it to the state to get the trail built. Their only stipulation in the hand-over? Be a good neighbor. The project quickly took-off, and transportation enhancements (TE) funding has since added more than $2.7 million through 2006, helping boost everything from trail development to bicycle and pedestrian amenities to preservation of historic transportation facilities along the trail—like the depot in Sedalia.

Jones has enjoyed watching all of this activity on the Katy Trail attract new commerce and resurrect many of the rural communities along its banks— it passes more than 40. Rocheport, which Jones says used to offer only a few antique stores, has now become a destination complete with bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, and even a winery. This last development has Jones especially gushing. You can find a number of vineyards right off the Katy Trail, some within a tenth of a mile, as Missouri has sprouted into a small yet ambitious player in the American wine industry.

Economic advantage, transportation options, and recreation are hardly the trail’s only mass appeals. More than half of the crushed limestone pathway—the longest continuous rail-trail in the country—re-traces prominent historical footsteps as it follows the original route of Lewis and Clark’s westward exploration. The trail hugs the Missouri River and its knobby entourage of hills and forested valleys during this eastern stretch. Then, when the Katy Trail splits from the river near Boonville, the corridor strolls through the state’s crop-striped countryside and prairie, with community pit-stops never more than a handful of miles apart.

“The thing that always stuck with me was the emotional experience of the Katy Trail,” Meriwether says. While not everyone may share his particular relationship with the trail, few people who use the corridor—including many of those who initially opposed it—still doubt the trail’s enormous value.
From Marthasville to Hartsburg to Defiance, says Sue Holst of the MDNR, the Katy Trail brought “new life” to once struggling railroad communities, even in its first few years. The pathway has since entrenched itself in Missouri’s landscape and personality, as a transportation option, recreational facility and an economic boon.

Related articles:

Index of articles on federal funding programs

Supporting trails and greenways

Read more about debates on trails and bike/ped facility funding:

Interview with USDOT Secretary Mary Peters

Letter from American Trails to Secretary Peters

SecretaryPeters' remarks at 2004 Trails Symposium

Sen. Coburn's proposal to redirect federal bike funds

Rep. McHenry opposing bicycling and trails funding

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