East Branch Trail

The East Branch Trail runs 5.2 miles through northeastern Crawford County, from PA 89 north of Spartansburg through the borough and south to Glynden Road, tracing the East Branch Oil Creek from its start at Clear Lake. A portion of the trail is a rare dual-lane rail trail: an 8-foot lane for walkers, cyclists, skaters, and wheelchairs beside another 8-foot lane for horses and Amish buggies, the first arrangement of its kind in Pennsylvania. The riding is true rail-grade flat through farms, wetlands, and patchy woods, with the Spartansburg trailhead sitting beside the lake, its dam, and the old mill.

• When it opened in 2010 this was the first dual-lane rail trail in Pennsylvania, built so Amish horses and buggies could travel off the highway on their own gravel lane.
• The corridor began in the 1860s as the Oil Creek and Allegheny River Railway, built to link Corry and Titusville during the oil boom, and later ran as the Pennsylvania Railroad's Chautauqua Line until 1978.
• The Clear Lake Authority, a small Spartansburg municipal authority, bought the defunct corridor in 1988, more than two decades before the trail opened.
• East Branch Oil Creek officially begins in Clear Lake at Spartansburg, at the confluence of Stranahan and Patrick runs, and the trail follows it from the very top.
• The trail sits on the main spine of the planned Erie to Pittsburgh Trail, a roughly 270-mile corridor between the two cities.

Spartansburg grew up around East Branch Oil Creek and Clear Lake, and by the twentieth century the surrounding countryside was settled heavily by Amish farm families whose buggies still share the corridor today. The railroad came in the 1860s, when the oil strike outside Titusville created urgent demand for a line linking that boomtown with Corry and its east-west trunk railroads. The corridor was built as the Oil Creek and Allegheny River Railway, following the East Branch of Oil Creek down its valley, and later became the Pennsylvania Railroad's Chautauqua Line, which kept running trains until 1978. The Clear Lake Authority, the small municipal authority in Spartansburg, purchased the defunct corridor in 1988 and spent the following decades shaping it into a multi-use trail. The first section opened in 2010 as the first dual-lane trail in Pennsylvania, pairing a lane for foot and wheel traffic with a parallel gravel lane so Amish horses and buggies could stay off dangerous roads. Development has continued. In late 2021 the authority won a $500,000 DCNR grant to extend the trail and rehabilitate the old railroad bridge at Sportsman Road, matched by $500,000 from the Appalachian Regional Commission, part of the long-term plan to run the trail 17 miles down the valley to Hydetown as a link in the Erie to Pittsburgh Trail.

• PA 89 NorthMILE 0Directions
• SpartansburgMILE 1.4Directions
• PA 89 SouthMILE 3.1Directions

• Rails-to-Trails Conservancy (TrailLink) · East Branch Trail (PA)
• FreeWheeling Easy in Western Pennsylvania · East Branch Trail
• Pennsylvania DCNR · East Branch Trail
• Erie to Pittsburgh Trail Alliance · What is in Progress?
• Wikipedia · East Branch Oil Creek (Oil Creek tributary)