The recently christened Fall Line trail will one day travel through some of the region’s choicest urban, rural and suburban vistas as a 43-mile multiuse bicycling and walking trail running from Ashland to Petersburg.
It will be a decade or so before it’s complete, but that did not stop Brantley Tyndall from trying to follow its intended route. Tyndall, president of the Virginia Bicycling Federation and director of outreach for Sports Backers’ Bike Walk RVA, had to use a machete to cut through brush along the way.
“I really wanted to see the experience from end to end, because we’re trying to get people interested in how cool this trail is,” Tyndall says. “What really strikes me about the Fall Line alignment is that about every 5 miles, you’re in something totally different. It celebrates lots of different parts of the Richmond region … in a brand-new way.”
When it’s completed, the Fall Line trail will wind through seven localities, including Henrico, Petersburg and Chesterfield, as well as the city of Richmond, and it will cross three rivers — the Chickahominy, the James and the Appomattox.
Gov. Ralph Northam gave the trail a gubernatorial blessing in mid-October 2020. The Fall Line has already received about $5.7 million in state funding, and it’s projected to cost up to $106 million.
“Piecing together … the trail is going to come largely from transportation funds, from the local jurisdictions contributing their own transportation money, from the region and the newly established Central Virginia Transportation Authority,” says Louise Lockett Gordon, director of Bike Walk RVA.
The Fall Line will connect with the Appomattox River Trail at the southern end in Petersburg and with the Virginia Capital Trail in Richmond.
The 52-mile Capital Trail, which spans the historic Route 5 corridor between Richmond and Williamsburg, has been a roaring success. In fiscal year 2018-19, the Virginia Capital Trail Foundation reported that the trail had generated $8.9 million in economic activity. Last year, the trail saw 1.2 million visitors — a 42% increase from 835,271 in 2019.
Gordon says that trail planners have learned a lot by observing the challenges of the Capital Trail, which was completed in 2015, nine years after its start in 2006. “These things are successful, and you have to plan for success,” she says, “which means a lot of people will be on it.”
