Bike Trails PA & MD. Heritage Rail Trail & Torry C Brown Rail Trail
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Raw file: Heritage Trail 3.gpx (484.93 KB)
My wife, brother and I are bicycle enthusiasts who enjoy riding the ever increasing number of rail / canal trails mostly in the Northeastern US. We also do volunteer work for NOAA by recovering US Coast & Geodetic Survey Benchmarks. We often combine these hobbies while trail riding.
Unlike geocaching, benchmark hunting serves a valuable purpose by providing NOAA with updates on the condition of their 700,000+ benchmarks across the Unites States. Information on Benchmarks is available here: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/datasheets/
We have been riding these trails for over 10 years now and I decided to share some of the .GPX files I’ve created. Of the hundreds of trails available in this part of the country, I selected these for their quality, scenic beauty, lack of excessive grades or hazardous terrain and overall riding or hiking enjoyment.
These files contain tracks for trails, waypoints for significant features such as parking areas, road crossings, bike shops, campgrounds, points of interest and USCGS benchmarks along or near the trail. All waypoints include elevation data for use in plotting trail slope and planning outings.
This file was compiled using a variety of resources including:
NOAA - http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/
Garmin’s Mapsource & Basecamp software
USCGS Topographic GPS Map Files. Available free for many States here: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/
Google Earth / Google Maps
Garmin’s Birds Eye Imagery
Various Internet & Print resources
Traillink.coms Heritage Trail web page: https://www.traillink.com/trail/heritage-rail-trail-county-p...
Heritage Rail Trail website: http://www.heritagerailtrail.org/
York County Parks & Recreation website: https://yorkcountypa.gov/search.html?searchword=heritage%20t...
Maryland Department of Natural Resources website: http://dnr.maryland.gov/publiclands/Pages/central/tcb.aspx
NCR Trail Snails website: http://www.ncrtrailsnails.com/ncr_trail.html
Personal Knowledge
This file is for Pennsylvania’s Heritage Rail Trail and connecting Torrey C Brown (formerly North Central Rail Trail) in Maryland. Together, these two trails take you 41 miles from York, PA. South to the suburbs of Baltimore MD. The 21 mile Heritage Trail portion parallels the tracks of the restored New Freedom – York civil war era steam locomotive. Information on the excursion train schedule is available here: http://www.steamintohistory.com/
Also included in this file is the 1.7 mile paved Hollow Creek Trail in nearby Seven Valleys PA.
Free, legal 24 and 100K topo map downloads for PA and MD are available here: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ Segments of these maps covering the above trails can be loaded into older GPS receivers with limited memory using Garmin’s Mapinstall program available here: http://www8.garmin.com/support/download_details.jsp?id=3291
I’ll post more trail files as I update and clean them up.
I always enjoy conversing with fellow bike trail enthusiasts so please feel free to contact me with comments, questions, inclusions or revisions. – Enjoy!
**************** Revision 2/11/18 ***************
Added 71 waypoints
Updated parking area information.
Realigned track in four locations using newer Google Earth imagery.
Updated dead links on header page.
POI Packages
Change History
bdhsfz6 - Feb 11, 2018
Added waypoints & changed tracks. See updated header page for details