Cotton Valley Trail bastards

I'm going to go ahead and kick a hornet's nest and throw it into a feces tornado.

If you ride the Cotton Valley Trail in Wolfeboro you are already familiar with the treacherous rail crossings and the dicey two way sections where bikes have to pass each other in the space between the rails. The reason for the rails is rarely evident, but they're there because rail car hobbyists use their little cars on the old line.  They would only permit the trail to exist if they got to keep the rails.

We coexist. They've done a lot of work out there. Some of them are actually cool about it. But a car this morning came straight at me with no intention of slowing, stopping or backing up, even though I was moving fast, down grade, and had both a blinking and a steady high intensity headlight on.

Obviously some of the rail car people consider themselves the primary users out there and they're willing to draw blood to verify that claim. I bailed to avoid the collision while the two dubs in the rail car looked straight out the windshield of their motorized conveyance, sunglasses on, as expressionless as a couple of terminator robots.

So, Wolfe City riders, watch out on the Cotton Valley Trail. The terminators may be out. By their own edict and willingness to inflict harm on non motorized users,  THEY HAVE THE RIGHT OF WAY. If these people with their motorized toys are going to pretend they are train traffic on an active rail line, they put every other user at risk when a cyclist or pedestrian gets caught between the rails in one of the long stretches.