Rock Island Trail - Jackson County segment Grand Opening Saturday, completing statewide trails vision

By all accounts, Jackson County, the KCATA, and the Rock Island Corridor Authority have done an excellent job bringing this trail together.  It is a top quality trai in a beautiful location--and a location where hundreds of thousands of residents live within bicycling and walking distance. 

This new trail segment is a fitting western capstone to the statewide Katy/Rock Island Trail System.

What this grand opening means: Finally, Missouri has a truly statewide trail system

MoBikeFed and our allies across Missouri have been working for decades to complete the envisioned statewide trail system connecting the St Louis and Kansas City metro areas.

As rail traffic on the Rock Island slowed and finally ceased in the 1970s and early 1980s, communities along the tried their best to convert the corridor to a rail-trail.  Another effort in the early 1990s also failed.  The corridor soon became an eyesore and dumping ground stretching 18 miles through the heart of Jackson County and then another 250+ miles east across Missouri.

• Visit MoBikeFed's Rock Island Trail History & Advocacy page for a detailed history of the advocacy efforts to preserve the corridor and build trail along the many connect segments and sections of the Missouri Rock Island Corridor.

Missourians we working on the connection from the other direction, too: When the Katy Trail was created in the early 1990s, everyone involved saw that it was a long and important trail to the state. 

But it lacked one thing: Easy connections from the trail to the two major metro areas in Missouri--at the far east and far west sides of the state.  

MoBikeFed "Complete the Katy Trail" petition dating to 2005

The Katy went from almost St Louis to almost Kansas City.  But it didn't quite get to either.

Katy Trail visionaries Ted & Pat Jones saw how important the Katy-KC connection would be--leaving $1 million in a fund specifically earmarked for finalized the connection.  That million dollars sat unused for more than 20 years.

With the Taum Sauk disaster of 2006, an opportunity opened.  Taum Sauk was owned by energy giant Ameren, which also owned the Rock Island railroad corridor across Missouri. 

In 2012, MoBikeFed worked with Missouri Rock Island Trail Inc, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, and many supportive organizations across Missouri and the Midwest to present Ameren with over 12,000 citizen signatures and statements of support for the Rock Island Trail

With the opening of the 47-mile Rock Island section of Katy Trail State Park in 2016--on the corridor of the former railroad, until recently owned by Ameren--the possibility of a truly cross-state trail system came a lot closer to reality.

Then Jackson County and the KCATA acquired 17.7 miles of Rock Island Corridor from Union Pacific. Since then, they have been working diligently to raise needed funding and build the trail.  

And now it is complete--and open to the public.

We want to express our gratitude and thanks to everyone involved in making this long-temr vision become a reality: Jackson County, KCATA, Missouri State Parks, many cities, counties, and staff, numerous elected officials across Missouri, organizations of all kinds who have stepped up to support the vision, and to many hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of ordinary people who walk, bicycle, and use trails who have taken the time to express their support for the statewide trail vision.   

Thank you.

The work continues . . .

Like any major trail system, we are always left with some gaps.  These gaps shouldn't at all subdue our celebration for what we, as a state, have accomplished--for the connections we HAVE made.

We know that the major pieces of the job are done--the pieces so hard many thought they would never be completed. But we also know, the work continues.

In fact, it never ends.  Every trail connection made creates a dozen or five dozen more opportunities.

The major gaps that remain in the statewide Katy/Rock Island Trail system--and opportunities created by the completion of these major trail segments:

• The fate of the 192-mile Rock Island Trail section Windsor-Washington remains to be determined.  Missouri State Parks is working with allies and supporters across Missouri right now to raise the $10 million dollars it needs to accept the corridor.  Deadline is December 2021. More info.

The Katy Trail-Chesterfield connector over the Missouri River was opened in 2016. The bike/ped path was added to the I-64/40 interstate highway bridge by MoDOT, who had identified the need and the priority of this river crossing.

• The trail still lacks a complete, seamless connection from St Charles through St Louis County to St Louis, the Arch, and the Riverfront. Great Rivers Greenway and many allies in the St Louis region are working to make that happen, and in general bicycle/pedestrian/trails connectivity from St Louis County and St Charles County to the Katy Trail has improved dramatically in the past 10 years. 

• On the Kansas City side, seamless trail connections from the terminus of the Rock Island Trail to downtown, the Brusch Creek Trail, the Trolley Track Trail, and Indian Creek Trail, and Little Blue Trail, the Blue River Trail, and Line Creek Trail, and other places around the metro area are under consideration and development.  Again--you don't have to wait: You can make those connections via low-traffic bicycle routes right now. But creating seamless trail connections among all those existing regional trails is a regional priority that is underway but far from complete as of 2021.
   
• The current Katy/Rock Island Trail System connects the Kansas City metro area, Columbia, Jefferson City, and the St Louis metro area.  But what about other major metro areas like St Joseph and Springfield? What about other parts of the state, like northern and NE Missouri, south-central and SE Missouri? In the long term, we would like to see seamless trail connections to all regions and sections of Missouri.
  
  Work on some of these is underway already.
   
• Will the Katy Trail every continue west past Clinton, Missouri?  The railroad corridor stretches west to Nevada, MO and on through Kansas.  Right now the corridor is in active use as a railroad.  But . . . the railroad's largest customer, by far, is a coal-fired power plant near Clinton.  What will happen when that plant is reconfigured or decommissioned?  Who knows--but possibilities may open up in upcoming years or decades.
   
• The Greenwood Gap. The trail connection across this gap of about 10 miles between Lee's Summit and Pleasant Hill is currently the longest gap in the existing Katy/Rock Island Trail System. Work is underway to create a seamless trail connection to plug this gap.  (Keep in mind trail riders can bridge the gap right now with a short ride on existing low-traffic paved or gravel roads.) 
  

  Governor Parson, state, county, city, and citizen leaders break ground on the Sedalia Katy Connector in 2019
   
   
• The Pleasant Hill Overpass. Just south of Pleasant Hill the original Rock Island railroad crossed another railroad.  The trail crossing will require a complex and expensive new bridge.  In the meanwhile, the trail is detoured through a piece of private property and along a MoDOT highway. State Parks, Pleasant Hill, and other interested parties are working on solutions to this gap, which amounts to about one mile.  
   
• And finally, a something to celebrate!  The largest gap in the Katy Trail was finally closed just last month.  After nearly two decades of diligent work, local supporters, the City of Sedalia, and Missouri State Parks held the grand opening of the Sedalia Katy Trail Connector in May 2021.  This project closed the three-mile gap in the Katy Trail at Sedalia.