Silver Comet Trail: Bicycling a ‘path to the past’

September 4, 2001 — The drive from Smyrna to Rockmart was nothing special. I spent the first half of it waiting for Atlanta to ease its grip on the greenbelt. I spent the second half eager to remove my bicycle from the back of my friend’s pickup truck.

I traveled to this countrified corner of Northwest Georgia with one goal in mind: to ride the Silver Comet Trail — all 37.47 miles of it — from Rockmart to Smyrna. I realized early on that such a plan was going to include much more time in automobiles than one usually associates with pedaling a bike.

First I had to drive from Gainesville to Smyrna, where I met up with my friend Richmond. We dropped my car there and took his truck to Rockmart. Three hours later, upon our return to Smyrna, we got back in my car to head back to Rockmart and Richmond’s truck. From there, I embarked on the 90-minute drive back to Gainesville.

And I thought riding bicycles was supposed to conserve natural resources.

The Silver Comet Trail, however, proved to be worth both the time and the petroleum. It’s a concrete and macadam path to the past — and no motors are allowed.

Built on an abandoned railroad right-of-way, the Silver Comet Trail is named after the luxury passenger train that roared along the route from 1947 to 1969 — until the jet airplane and the family car forced it out of business.

The Silver Comet ran from New York City to Birmingham, Ala. In 1992, the Georgia Department of Transportation purchased 57 miles of the right-of-way — from Smyrna to the Alabama border — for more than $7 million dollars. At the time, the DOT envisioned the land as a nice corridor for a commuter railway should another metro Atlanta airport be built to the northwest.

That day could still come, I suppose. But until then, thanks to the efforts and funds of entities both public and private, the Silver Comet Trail stands as Georgia’s most ambitious rails-to-trails project to date. Construction began in July 1998 and is expected to be finished by December 2002.

When completed, the trail will stretch to the Alabama border, where it will connect with the Chief Ladiga Trail, and provide a continuous 101-mile path from Atlanta to Anniston, Ala.

But, right now, 37 miles is what we have to work with. And, believe me, that is enough to work up a pretty good sweat.

You can make the Silver Comet Trail — which is open to cyclists, skaters, runners, walkers, wheelchairs, strollers, dogs and, on certain sections, horses — as easy or as difficult as you’d like. It never rises or falls by a grade of greater than 2 percent. It is flat concrete in Polk and Paulding counties and flat asphalt in Cobb County.

It’s a smooth ride, to be sure. And you don’t have to do it all at once like we did. Most folks — perhaps in an effort to conserve both time and fuel — choose one of the 14 parking and access sites along the trail, and begin and end their journeys at the same spot.

But I wanted to see the whole thing. And that’s what we did.

If automobiles have ever made you and your bicycle feel a little unwelcome in your quest to “share the road” (that’s what the signs say, right?), the etiquette displayed among bikers on the Silver Comet Trail will make you feel as though you’ve walked onto the set of your own personal Truman Show.

There are smiles and nods for everyone, and plenty of room to ride side by side.

When we set off from Rockmart, however, the smiles and nods were few and far between — so, too, were the people. Unlike the parking lot in Smyrna, which was overflowing on this Saturday morning, Rockmart seemed downright deserted. It made for a peaceful beginning.

It should come as no surprise that the sections of the Silver Comet still out of Atlanta’s reach are the most picturesque, and that the people you encounter on these outlying miles are the most colorful (in terms of character, not clothing — the Cobb County folks clad in fluorescent spandex take the prize there).

There was one elderly man who didn’t let the 90-degree temperature, or the fact that it was Saturday, stop him from wearing his Sunday best. He had wrinkles on his face and a fedora on his head. Pee Wee Herman would have envied his mode of transportation.

Then, at the 800-foot-long tunnel that cuts a hole in Brushy Mountain, we encountered a gentleman wearing an engineer’s cap. As he guided his bicycle into the darkness, he blew repeatedly into a wooden train whistle. It filled up the tunnel — known for its aesthetics and its acoustics — rather nicely.

For every tunnel there was a trestle. The one at Pumpkinvine Creek is 126 feet high and 750 feet long. The water roared beneath us, and I had trouble keeping my eyes focused forward.

Near Ma White’s Bottomland, closer to Rockmart, the path is at its most pastoral. Large rolls of hay dot the rolling green fields. So do cows. A historical marker tells the story of a Civil War cannonball that nearly made Ma White Ma Dead.

It was easy to imagine the Silver Comet trucking along, through tunnels, over trestles, and between narrow walls of trees and stone.

I wondered if the kudzu vine so dominated the landscape back then. But you know, for all of its predacious predilections, kudzu has a rather sweet-smelling aroma. The same can’t be said for suburban sprawl.

The ride was relaxing. We easily fell into a rhythm.

But the Cobb County section has a way of causing such rhythms to be interrupted. There are more roads to cross. More people to pass.

And when we arrived again at the still-stuffed Smyrna parking lot, part of me wanted to turn my bike right around and ride 37 more miles back to Rockmart.

I wasn’t looking forward to spending the next two-and-a-half hours in my car.