Customer Reviews

Rail-Trails Mid-Atlantic: Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC and West Virginia

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This book is a wonderful guide to bike trails. It makes planning trips easy and fun, and it's very descriptive about the specifics of each trail (gravel, grass, paved, etc.)

I thought I could just find this info on the internet, but to no avail, so I bought the book. I was nicely surprised that the book is exactly what I needed, good descriptions of each trail and a good map, AND how to get to the beginnings of each trail.

We live in Illinois and use the Rail-Trails Midwest book all the time for planning trips and dreaming of trips. We picked up the Mid-Atlantic version for a trip to Maryland in the spring. We've already used this book for two trails in Maryland and a trail in Virginia, which we went out of our way to ride based on the information in this book. Rail trails are perfect for our family with three young children, minimizing our interaction with cars and dramatic grades. I can't do the same routes I might do alone, and so it is great to have a resource to identify these perfect trails.

You will still need to supplement the information in this book with research on current trail conditions, but this book is a gateway to wonderful trips for the whole family.

This book is probably most useful if you want to browse one or several states for trails, you'd rather not use the internet, and you're partial to rail-trails. But there are alternatives to this book that are preferable in other situations.

If you're interested in a particular trail, and need to find lodging or restaurants along the trail, or are interested in the terrain near the trail, the brevity of each trails' description here, and the low-detail non-topographic maps are a handicap. You'd do better with google.

Several examples: suppose you're interested in Deckers Creek Trail near Morgantown WV: neither the text nor the map tells you that the trail rises 1000 feet. Most roads intersecting the trail are not named. There's no mention of the coke ovens along the trail. And this trail is not listed in the index.

Or consider the Allegheny Highlands Trail, Maryland. Today almost everybody calls this the Great Allegheny Passage, or GAP. This book was written in 2006, but its four paragraphs on this trail do not mention the grade, do not mention the Big Savage Tunnel (just across the border in PA), do not mention that it is possible to take a bicycle on the Western Maryland Railroad, do not include a photo of the steam train (instead they have a photo of a parking lot), and their map does not show Cumberland. Disappointing.

The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Towpath in Maryland is barely mentioned in this book -- it's a canal trail, not a rail-trail, you see.

Personally, I prefer google searches, and I go to maps.google.com and turn on Bicycling. I bought this book, but I doubt that I'll use it much. If I do, it will be most valuable as a starting point: just to learn that a trail exists.