The rail bed under the trail was once part of a serious railroad. The Baltimore and Ohio's Parkersburg Branch connected the eastern seaboard to the Ohio River and, through it, to the Midwest. For much of the nineteenth century, this was a corridor of national consequence. Decline came slowly. Amtrak's Shenandoah began running through in October 1976 but was discontinued in 1981 for lack of riders; the Capitol Limited was rerouted to a different line between Pittsburgh and Washington, bypassing the West Virginia branch entirely. Local freight had already withered. By 1985 the Chessie System had eliminated local service, and in September 1988 CSX, the new owner, pulled up the rails between Walker and Wilsonburg. A line that had carried American commerce for more than a century lay dormant in a single decade.

The state's purchase, finalized in stages between 1989 and 1996, was one of the great quiet land deals in West Virginia history. For a fraction of the corridor's original asking price, the Department of Natural Resources acquired a continuous east-west route across the northern part of the state - including its bridges, its tunnels, its right-of-way through town centers and farmsteads. The first sixty miles opened to the public in 1991. The final stretch westward to Parkersburg was added in 1996, extending the trail to its current seventy-two-mile length. Tunnels that engineers had blasted through Appalachian sandstone in the 1850s were left in place. So were the trestles spanning Middle Island Creek and its tributaries. The rails were gone; everything else remained.

The tunnels are the trail's signature. Thirteen of them perforate the ridges of north-central West Virginia, the longest stretching nearly three thousand feet. One of the most traveled is Tunnel No. 2 at 1,086 feet, a short distance east of Salem. Walking into it is to leave summer behind: the temperature drops noticeably, daylight pulls away at both ends, and the only sound is one's own footfall and the slow drip of groundwater through the stone. Some of the tunnels have ghost stories attached - the Silver Run tunnel near Cairo comes with a well-rehearsed local legend involving a woman in white. Cyclists who pass through often carry headlamps just to keep from running into the walls. Above the trail the hills are forested; below it, ferns and moss grow in the cool damp.

Between the tunnels, the trail strings together a chain of towns that lost their rail-stop economies decades ago and have made varied accommodations with their second lives. Pennsboro and Ellenboro grew up as glass-manufacturing centers; Cairo was an oil-boom town; Salem and West Union were trading hubs for the surrounding farms. Each has a former depot or yard where trail users can stop for water, food, or a stamp on a passport-style trail card the state hands out. The trail is part of the American Discovery Trail - the coast-to-coast non-motorized route from Delaware to California - and through-hikers using that longer system come through these West Virginia towns at a pace that the towns, in their nineteenth-century prime, would have found embarrassingly slow.

Under the state Department of Natural Resources, the North Bend Rail Trail has earned a quiet reputation as one of the finest long-distance trails in the Appalachians. The grade is gentle - what railroads required, walkers and cyclists appreciate. The scenery shifts from open farmland to deep hollow to dense second-growth forest in the space of a few miles. North Bend State Park, midway along the trail in Ritchie County, offers a lodge, cabins, and a connection to a separate network of hiking trails through the surrounding hills. For a state often defined in outsiders' minds by extraction and decline, the rail trail tells a different story: a piece of nineteenth-century infrastructure repurposed without violence, still useful, still moving people through the landscape it was built to cross.