Your Editorial Team doesn’t know if American literary great William Faulkner ever had occasion to visit Kingston, but his famous line — "The past is never dead. It's not even past." — fits the current battle between the Catskill Mountain Railroad and rail-trail advocates like a glove.

In 2016, following a couple of years of fierce battle between the railroad, trail advocates and county government, a compromise was reached that, we thought at the time, made everybody happy: CMRR would live and get a little breathing room to expand to Stony Hollow out by Route 28A and the trail-only advocates got one of the finest ones in America, if not the world: The Ashokan Rail Trail. Neither side got everything they wanted (or it wouldn’t be a compromise), and the county, which owns the old Ulster & Delaware tracks, got an amenable solution to a thorny problem.

Fast-forward to now, and the CMRR and trail advocates are again at it, over a 1.6-mile section of as-yet-undeveloped railbed that separates the railroad from its long-coveted goal of running all the way to the Ashokan Reservoir. The railroad is so committed to this project that it, under the nose of county government, got a $4.5 million grant from the state DOT to do it. Arising in opposition are the Woodstock Land Conservancy (WLC) and Friends of the Catskill Mountain Rail Trail (CMRT), which have made a website, Kingston Ashokan Trail, to advocate for at least keeping the 1.6-mile section trail only, at the most, its foes allege, displacing the railroad altogether and making a trail-only connection from Downtown Kingston to the Ashokan. (For the record, WLC Chair Kevin Smith told us the group doesn’t want to shut the railroad down altogether.) The Ulster & Delaware Corridor Advisory Committee, convened by Ulster County Legislature Chair Peter Criswell (D-Kingston) last May, is expected to make a recommendation at some point; its next meeting is this Thursday at 5 p.m. on the sixth floor of the County Office Building on Fair Street in Uptown Kingston. (You can’t miss the C.O.B. — it’s the only thing on Fair Street that looks like someone took a giant Rubik’s Cube and spray-painted it black and silver.)

We have some thoughts on this, aside from, as the very wise Yogi Berra said, experiencing déjà vu all over again. For context, let’s compare economic impact figures. The railroad, it says, carried over 60,000 passengers last year, resulting in, it says, some $8 million for the Kingston and Ulster County economies. The over 80 miles of Ulster’s rail trails, according to the county, drew 1.4 million users, contributing $17 million to the county economy. While the economic impact of Ulster's rail trails is larger than the CMRR, the case has not been made that adding a few more miles to this already extensive system will raise these numbers at all. But what is clear is that CMRR has proven to be a popular and growing business, and to sacrifice it to make an 80-mile system an 85-mile system could actually result in a net economic loss for the County.

In this dispute, both sides want what they want. But we want to figure out what’s best for both parties, and what’s best for Ulster’s residents, the ones who own this public good anyway.

The Catskill Mountain Railroad has had its issues, but has, your Editorial Team reckons, also proved it deserves to exist. Besides, while there are quite a few rail trails both in Ulster and surrounding counties, the CMRR is unique in this region. It attracted 60,000-plus riders for its family-friendly events, including small children and the elderly, both segments of the population for whom rail trails are a mobility challenge. While we figure a Kingston-Ashokan rail-only trail would be a hit, we don’t think there are 60,000 people who look forlornly west (or east), saying to themselves, “I wish I could ride my bike to Kingston/Ashokan without those annoying train tracks being in my way.” We’ve heard earfuls on the matter from both sides, but we haven’t yet heard why ripping up tracks is an urgent need. And, as relentless Kingston advocates, we don’t want to see the City of Kingston businesses which make money when the railroad is running lose that revenue stream.

While the outcome of this struggle, essentially a fight between dueling aesthetics on the field of public perception, is unclear, your Editorial Team would, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, like to make a modest proposal. We refuse to see the matter from an either-or perspective as that just encourages absolutists and purists. Rather, we think it would be great if the CMRR and the trail advocates work together to maximize the corridor’s potential. How about an arrangement, seen elsewhere, where cyclists get space on the train to carry their bikes to the trail? Provided the current federal funding freeze doesn’t wreck its budgets, we’d also like to see public money used to subsidize cyclists’ rides so the service can be cheap and easy to use.

Compromises are a vital part of democracy and living in a community. This is a perfect opportunity for one. We call on both sides to work together to make it happen.