My family had a soft spot for trains. It started in Ulster County.
My grandmother loved to reminisce about the annual train ride from the Bronx to Rosendale, marking the beginning of her family’s summer residence in their beloved, full-to-bursting little farmhouse. Those trips began when she was a girl, long before the Great Depression, and the growing extended family continued to return to the house on Mountain Road throughout her life, jamming beds for cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents into every corner.
My father and my uncle loved the train, too. They told me about afternoons spent plaguing the Rosendale station manager with questions, soaking up all the lore and the romance of train travel. When they heard the whistle, they’d race up the road to see the train arrive, then watch it chug off across the trestle.
My uncle taught me to spit off the Rosendale trestle. My cousins and I crossed that trestle on hot summer days to reach the ice caves on the other side. It felt like a very dangerous walk, and in fact it was. I remember seeing through the rotting boards to the road and the river below, having to watch where I took my next step. It was exhilarating.
Trains were still running over the Rosendale trestle when I graduated high school. They stopped just a couple of years later.
Now it’s a rail-trail. A beautiful one. The trestle is perfectly safe now.
I have mixed feelings about those improvements.
Sure, it’s great that it’s an easy walk which most everyone can now enjoy. I’m happy that the long-forgotten tracks along the Ashokan Reservoir are now a place where stressed-out people can get out in the fresh air and maybe relax a little. But I miss the trains. I have my doubts about the long-term wisdom of destroying the once-busy commercial and passenger mass transit lines into the Catskills. And I kind of hate how perfectly perfect the walking trails are.
I’ve learned we had a busy rail line in my home town of Franklin. Merrickville and Franklin Depot were part of the New York Ontario and Western line. Now, buried under the weeds, and also in spots underwater, are tracks and tunnels winding over and through the mountains and back toward the Hudson River and New York City, while others reach out to the west. It’s a connection to a thriving past that is impossible to picture now. It is not a trail for modern hikers to explore. It is an abandoned rail line.
It is in Andes, between Delhi and Margaretville, where the past and the present feel like they are not so far apart. I discovered the Andes rail-trail recently and walked it with my daughter. It felt refreshingly imperfect, like it had refused to be modernized.
The station itself is gorgeous, and clearly well used by the local folks. The trail is a narrow path with a few delightfully bumpy areas where the heaves and hollows of the tracks are still in evidence. The first couple of miles are typically bucolic Catskills scenes, mountains and meadows and vistas that can spoil you for anywhere else in the world.
At one point the old tracks lead onto private property. The rail-trail officially ends, and the walking rail veers up into what’s called the Bullet Hole Spur. The trains never went here. It’s a narrow path through the woods and up the hillside with long switchbacks. It’s challenging enough to get your pulse going a little.
And what’s ahead is just remarkable.
The first attraction on the spur was a series of rock formations left behind by glaciers. A sign along the rail-trail pointed out that the Catskills were once underwater, and are actually an eroded plateau. The giant rocks along the trail are what’s known as glacier erratics – rocks pushed along by the glacier then left behind. The last ice age in the Catskills was 22,000 years ago. The rocks are still here.
Farther up the trail is a pine barren, which is a magical spot with nothing but tall pines and a soft blanket of pine needles beneath. The wind whispers among the pines with a sound it makes nowhere else.
Along the trail are hemlock trees believed to be more than a hundred years old. And at the top, there is a meadow, a stone wall, reminders of the farmers once toiled to make a living off this rocky land.
The trail then goes down to the Bullet Hole Stream, turns back, climbs back to the top, and retraces the path back down to the railroad tracks.
I felt like I’d seen all the landscapes of the Catskills in just one four-mile walk.
But it was the history that sealed the deal.
First, there’s a sign marking where the Andes turntable was. It was a hollow with a large wooden platform, where trains could be spun around and reversed. It was built, according to the sign, after a train going in reverse derailed, went over the embankment, and trapped its engineer in the water below. A rescuer held the engineer’s head above water for hours until he could be freed.
Then there was the sign explaining that the spot nearby was where there was once a trestle. It was 450 feet long and stood 45 feet above the Bullet Hole Stream. On that trestle, in 1921, the film “The Single Track” was shot. Andes was a stand-in for Alaska, which, if you’ve been to Andes in the winter, isn’t really as outlandish as it sounds.
According to the sign, the director didn’t know he’d hired local extras for the fight scene who, in real life, couldn’t stand each other. It was a Hatfield and McCoys kind of situation. When the cameras rolled, he was absolutely delighted with “how realistic” the fighting looked. The locals were beating the starch out of each other, and apparently everyone went home satisfied.
Sadly, that film no longer exists. I would love to see it.
State inspectors had been threatening to shut down the trestle just before filming, finding it to be a little too rickety for safety. The filmmakers also were concerned it looked a little rundown for a trestle in the great wilds of Alaska, so they did a classic Hollywood fix and combined paint and clay to make the span look more structurally sound. It worked so well the state inspectors came back to inspect the next year. It passed.
I saw deer while I was walking. I saw snakes sunning themselves on the path. A sign warned hikers that they should wear bright colors during bear-hunting season, which it happened to be.
The Andes rail-trail in its four short miles offered me beauty, quiet, history, and it made me laugh.
The only thing that could improve it is if a train came down the track.
Join the family! 
