Five Star Trail leased for another 25 years

Westmoreland County’s Five Star Trail will be around for at least another quarter century.

County commissioners, acting as members of the Westmoreland County Industrial Development Corp., last week approved the renewal of the 25-year lease with the Regional Trails Commission and the private freight railroad that operates along the tracks between Greensburg and Youngwood.

The new lease will allow officials to secure additional funding to make improvements along the 6-mile trail used by bicyclists, runners and walkers.

“Our original lease expires at the end of 2021, and we need to be able to show that a new lease will be in place for a significant period of time as a requirement for funding for improvements,” said Jason Rigone, the county’s planning director who also serves as head of the industrial development agency.

Officials said the county is seeking a $324,500 federal grant to improve parking areas and accesses to the trail.

The Five Star Trail was opened in 1996. Its name denotes the number of municipalities it passes through. The trail begins at Lynch Field in Greensburg and runs through sections of Hempfield, South Greensburg and Southwest Greensburg and ends at Hillis Street in Youngwood.

“It’s one of the heaviest-used trails in the county. It’s just perfectly placed. It may not be the most aesthetically pleasing, but it’s there and we are excited to extend the lease,” said Malcolm Sias, president of the Regional Trail Corp., a nonprofit partnership that acquires, develops and manages trail corridors in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Sias’ organization recently hired an engineering firm to analyze a proposed plan to relocate small sections along a 2-mile stretch of the trail between Southwest Greensburg and Youngwood to allow for more separation between the pathway used by bikers and runners and the operating railroad tracks.

Unlike more traditional rail-to-trail projects that transformed abandoned railroad tracks for recreational use, the Five Star Trail serves as a rail-with-trail corridor. On tracks adjacent to the trail, the Southwest Pennsylvania Railroad Co. operates a 66-mile freight line owned by the county’s industrial development agency, which services businesses from Greensburg to Uniontown.

Sias said there have been no issues related to the close proximity of the tracks and trail, but officials believe a larger buffer in several areas along a 2-mile section between South Greensburg and Youngwood, where more space is available, should be explored for a potential relocation. Additional funding for any relocation work will be applied for in the spring, he said.

George Church, who retired in 2013 from the development corporation, was a project coordinator in the early 1990s and helped conceive of and execute the plan to create the Five Star Trail. He said he is pleased his project will continue for another 25 years.

“When we acquired the railroad, we thought, ‘Why shouldn’t we use this for a trail?’ It took off from there, but always with the understanding that it was a railroad first. If people mess with the railroad, the trail would go away,” Church said. “But, everything has been pretty good for the last 25 years.”

Planners saw the land next to the railroad tracks was commonly used by pedestrians and worked to develop the corridor that required three new bridges be built over two areas of Jacks Run and another over Pittsburgh Street in Greensburg, Church said.

“It was one of those things that we hoped would be used. I was glad to be a part of that,” Church said.