In 1964, Wisconsin closed this railway line. Today, 60,000 visitors come here every year

A railway line in southwestern Wisconsin that has been without a train since 1964 has found a very different purpose. The 32.5-mile Elroy-Sparta corridor, once used by the Chicago and North Western Railway, is now a public trail running through prairie, wetlands, farmland and woodland. It has also become a connected strip of habitat where wildlife can move through a landscape dominated by agriculture.

Why trains stopped using the Elroy-Sparta line

The railway was built in the 1870s as part of the Chicago and North Western Railway’s expansion through Wisconsin. Its route crossed the Driftless Area, a hilly part of the state that escaped the glaciers that shaped much of the surrounding Midwest.

The original line passed through three tunnels and several small farming communities. But the route eventually became difficult to justify.


In the early 20th century, the railway built a bypass with easier grades and without tunnels. The newer route gradually took over traffic, leaving the older corridor with less and less use.

By 1964, trains had stopped running altogether.

What remained was a 32.5-mile railway corridor, complete with three stone tunnels and former depot buildings, but without the trains that had once defined it.

From abandoned railway to public trail

The old railway could easily have become an unused strip of land. Instead, Wisconsin bought the corridor and turned it into a recreational trail.

The Elroy-Sparta Trail opened in 1967, following the old railway route through Kendall, Wilton and Norwalk before reaching Sparta. The trail received National Recreation Trail status four years later.

Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources describes the project as the first rail-to-trail conversion in the United States. Its success also helped establish a broader movement to reuse abandoned railway corridors for recreation and conservation.

The idea eventually spread well beyond Wisconsin. More than 25,000 miles of former railway corridors across the US have since been converted into recreational trails.

What happened after the trains disappeared

The railway once required a cleared and maintained route for locomotives. Once that activity ended, nature began filling the space around it.

Grasses and wildflowers returned to sections of the old rail bed. Trees and other vegetation gradually spread along the surrounding slopes. The corridor now passes through a combination of prairie, wetlands, woodland and farmland.

That mix gives the route a second role that is less obvious to people using it for recreation.

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Instead of acting only as a trail, the former railway provides a continuous stretch of vegetation through areas where agricultural land can otherwise break up natural habitats.

For animals, that uninterrupted cover can provide a safer way to travel between places where they feed, nest or find water.

Why old rail lines can help wildlife

The ecological potential of former railway corridors has attracted research, particularly in heavily farmed parts of the Midwest.

A peer-reviewed study, From Right-of-Way to Greenway: Parameters for the Ecological Function of Midwestern Rail-Trail Corridors, looked at former rail corridors in Iowa’s Corn Belt. The research examined whether these corridors could do more than provide recreational space and also serve as useful ecological infrastructure.

The researchers pointed to a basic problem across the agricultural Midwest: large areas of publicly protected land are limited, while natural habitats are often separated from one another.

Long, narrow strips of vegetation can help bridge those gaps.

Using GIS mapping and drone photography, the researchers examined the physical characteristics of rail-trail corridors and considered how they could be managed to support wildlife movement and habitat.

The Elroy-Sparta corridor illustrates how an old transportation route can take on that kind of role after its original purpose disappears.

Wildlife corridors are bigger than abandoned railways

The idea behind the Elroy-Sparta Trail is part of a much broader conservation principle.

Animals need connected habitats to move through their surroundings and complete different stages of their life cycles. Those connections can range from a small strip of vegetation between two wooded areas to corridors stretching hundreds of miles for animals such as elk, deer and pronghorn.

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The US Fish and Wildlife Service has recognised the importance of such routes as landscapes become increasingly divided by roads, farms and development.

An old railway may not provide the scale of a major migration route, but it can offer the same basic advantage: a continuous path through an otherwise fragmented landscape.

The railway is gone, but the corridor is busy

Today, the Elroy-Sparta corridor attracts nearly 60,000 visitors each year.

Cyclists and hikers use its crushed limestone trail, travel through the three tunnels and cross the quiet stretches around its rivers and surrounding countryside. For them, it is a recreational route with a distinctive railway history.

For wildlife, however, the corridor serves another purpose.

Birds, deer and smaller mammals can use the vegetation along the route to move through the landscape, often without drawing attention from the people travelling along the trail.

The irony is hard to miss. A corridor once built to move trains through Wisconsin is now helping people explore the landscape while providing a route for wildlife to move through it.

More than six decades after the final train passed, the Elroy-Sparta line has not disappeared. It has simply changed its traffic.