The Narwhal recently published a thoughtful piece by Cameron Fenton on the province’s decision to decommission a 67-kilometre stretch of the Kettle Valley Rail Trail between Princeton and the Coquihalla Highway. The reporting is careful, the photography is good, and the framing of “managed retreat” in the face of climate-driven disasters is exactly the kind of work the Narwhal does better than almost anyone else in this country. If you haven’t read it, you should.

But the piece leaves something on the table, and the gap matters because it explains why we keep losing trails like this one. The Narwhal frames the Kettle Valley decommissioning as primarily a story about climate, funding, and the rough arithmetic of disaster recovery. Sixty million dollars to repair, twenty million to decommission, and a province that cannot, or will not, find the difference. That is true as far as it goes. What goes unexamined is why this trail in particular was so easy to give up on, and why that vulnerability is structural rather than circumstantial.

Trails on their own do not generate the political constituency needed to survive disasters, downturns, or shifting development pressure. But you know what does? Rail. When the Kettle Valley Railway operated from 1915 to 1989, it carried minerals, timber, and people, and it had behind it the full weight of the Canadian Pacific Railway, federal and provincial transportation policy, the economic interest of every town along the line, and the basic recognition that critical infrastructure does not get abandoned because of one bad season. When the rails came up, all of that left with them. What remained was a beautiful 650-kilometre recreational corridor with no economic mandate, no transportation function, no industrial constituency, and a maintenance bill that grows every year a storm hits the Interior.

This is the political gap the Narwhal piece glides past. The Kettle Valley Rail Trail is not being abandoned because climate change made it impossible to save. It is being abandoned because, after we tore up the rails, we never built it a constituency strong enough to compete with the other things sixty million dollars could buy.

The contrast on Vancouver Island

The most useful comparison is in front of me as I write this. The Island Corridor, formerly the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway, has not seen passenger service since March 19, 2011. By any conventional logic, it should have been ripped up and converted to trail a decade ago. It is a 289-kilometre right-of-way running from Victoria to Courtenay with a branch to Port Alberni, and the operating and maintenance backlog has been described in studies as approaching a billion dollars. There are loud voices (as little groups and little dogs often have), including Friends of Rails to Trails Vancouver Island, who would happily see it converted.

Thankfully, it has not been converted. The Island Corridor Foundation, fifteen First Nations, five regional districts, and fourteen municipalities have spent fifteen years insisting that the corridor be preserved as a rail corridor, not a trail. In late 2025, regional leaders and First Nations signed a Reconciliation Corridor Agreement to explore passenger rail between Victoria and Langford. The Comox Valley Regional District is working with K’ómoks First Nation on a corridor vision through their territory. A private operator, Island Rail Corporation, is now actively pushing to restore freight and passenger service tied to a revitalized deepwater port in Port Alberni.

None of this is happening because Vancouver Islanders love trains more than people in Princeton love their trail. It is happening because rail has constituencies the trail cannot match. Freight operators have an interest in the right-of-way. First Nations whose treaty rights and reserve lands intersect the corridor have legal and economic stakes in what happens to it. Commuter transit advocates see it as the spine of a future Island transportation network. Port economies along the coast see it as an alternative to congested mainland routes. The Snaw-Naw-As First Nation’s 2021 court action, which set a federal funding deadline tied to a determination of whether the corridor would remain in railway use, created a forcing function that no trail project will ever generate.

The Island Corridor has been dormant for fifteen years, and it is still here. The Kettle Valley between Princeton and the Coquihalla was abandoned, restored as trail, damaged for four years, and is now being permanently severed. The difference is not engineering or geography. It is who shows up to fight for the right-of-way when the money runs short.

What the Galloping Goose tells us about long-term trajectories

The Galloping Goose is the standard counterexample anyone makes when arguing that rail-to-trail conversions work. It is one of the better-loved trails in the country, runs fifty-five kilometres from downtown Victoria to the ghost town of Leechtown, and forms part of the first completed section of the Trans Canada Trail. The trail was created in 1987 on the abandoned right-of-way of the Canadian National Railway, and the Capital Regional District has invested real money in keeping it standing. The 1996 reconstruction of the Selkirk Trestle and Switch Bridge was significant. The 2021 restoration of the century-old Todd Creek Trestle cost $1.7 million, and the trestle still does the job it was built for, minus the trains it was built to carry.

And yet, look at what the trail has lost since the rails came up. The portion north of Leechtown along Sooke Lake, originally continuous with the Cowichan Valley line over the Kinsol Trestle, has restricted public access since 2007 and is no longer part of the Trans Canada Trail. The section past Leechtown is gated. Land slips have closed Sooke portions repeatedly since December 2025. A complete bridge replacement near Six Mile Road took six weeks of detours in early 2026. The Charters Trestle closed for windstorm damage. The trail survives, but its connectivity has eroded, its scope has shrunk, and every winter brings a new closure.

The Lochside Regional Trail, twenty-nine kilometres from Swartz Bay to Victoria along the old Victoria and Sidney Railway right-of-way, tells a similar story. It is beautiful and well-used. It is also entirely a recreational and active-transportation asset, which means that when the corridor was needed for something else, it had no leverage to protect itself. The fact that there is now growing local interest in restoring rail service between Victoria and Sidney is, on its face, a vindication of everything rail advocates have argued for the past twenty years. We took a working transportation corridor, narrowed its purpose to recreation, and are now realizing we need the original function back. It turns out that paving over a working railway and adding a bus route does not produce the same thing as the railway you started with. Wouldn’t you know it?

Rails-with-trails is the obvious answer

The model that should have been the default in this country, and which the Island Corridor Foundation has been quietly advocating for the better part of two decades, is rails-with-trails. The trail and the railway occupy the same right-of-way. The trail gets the recreational and active-transportation benefit. The rail keeps the transportation, freight, and economic constituency that protects the corridor when conditions get hard.

In the United States, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy counts more than 450 rails-with-trails along active railroad corridors, totalling over 1,130 miles, and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2021 best-practices report documented decades of operational evidence that the model works. The safety concerns that railroads historically raised have been addressed through fencing, design standards, and grade-separated crossings. The model is mature. We have known how to do this for thirty years.

The Island Corridor Foundation has spent the past decade specifically working with corridor communities to develop a rail-with-trail system across the 289-kilometre right-of-way. The Capital Regional District’s E&N Rail Trail, a 13.5-kilometre cycling and walking corridor running mainly within the rail right-of-way from Vic West to Langford, is already a working example of the approach. The fact that it took us this long to start treating the rail bed as something other than a binary choice between active track and converted trail is its own embarassment and indictment. But I’m glad most people seem to be here, with recent polling overwhelmingly in support of rails with trails rather than rail only or the very tiny percentage of people who just want trails “because they’re cheaper and safer” (translation: “We don’t want to share”).

The lesson Princeton should teach us

The decommissioning of the Princeton section is not just a climate adaptation story. It is a warning about what happens when we hollow out infrastructure and expect recreational value alone to carry the weight. Spencer Coyne, the Princeton mayor, is right to fight for his community’s section of trail. He is also confronting the consequence of a planning logic that was always going to fail somewhere, because once you’ve stripped the rail, the corridor is one disaster away from being expendable.

If the Kettle Valley Railway had been preserved as a working rail corridor, with the trail running alongside it, the calculus this February would have been different. Repair of a working rail line carries a different kind of urgency than repair of a recreational asset, and it draws on different funding envelopes, different stakeholder coalitions, and a different set of federal-provincial commitments. The trail would have been protected by the rail’s constituency, the way the Goose’s urban core is protected by its function as a commuter route into downtown Victoria, but at a regional scale.

What we are losing in Princeton is sixty-seven kilometres of trail. What we lost in 1989, when the last train ran on the Coquihalla section, was the political infrastructure that would have made saving the trail straightforward. Those are not the same loss, but the second made the first inevitable.

The Trans Canada Trail organization continues to look for an alternative route around the decommissioned section, it’s pretty well their only choice. But the broader lesson, the one I wish the Narwhal had pursued, is that the next thirty thousand kilometres of trail in this country needs to be built alongside or in active partnership with rail even if the rail’s fate seems temporarily tenuous. The Island Corridor should be restored to service, and the trail network that grows alongside it should be the model.

So let me be clear, we do not have a trails problem in Canada. We have a constituency problem, and the rails-to-trails ideology is the engine of it. Every conversion that looks like a gift to recreation is a slow-motion abandonment with a thirty-year fuse. The Island Corridor is proof that we can refuse to light it. Princeton is proof of what happens when we don’t: Tear up the rail, call the gravel progress, and you get the Kettle Valley Trail.