Pinckney's old rail line is now the Lakelands Trail

The trail that runs through Pinckney gives itself away by how flat and straight it is. Nothing in glacier-carved Livingston County runs that level on its own. The path is dead-flat because it used to be a railroad, and railroads hate hills.

Trains first reached Pinckney in the 1880s on a Grand Trunk branch line, hauling for the farms, mills, and shops strung along it. Most rural Michigan branch lines died young, but this one was stubborn — freight kept rolling into the 1980s. When the trains finally quit for good, the corridor got a second life as a rail-trail, the surveyors’ old grading work now carrying bikes and boots instead of boxcars.

These days it is the Mike Levine Lakelands Trail State Park, a multi-use path running roughly east to west across southern Livingston County and on into the counties next door, stitching together Hamburg, Pinckney, Gregory, and Stockbridge. The stretch through Hamburg Township is paved; elsewhere it is crushed stone underfoot. The DNR tends to split the corridor in two — one side for hikers and bikers, the other for horses — so you can share the line without anyone spooking anyone.

The name honors Mike Levine, a southeast Michigan inventor and philanthropist who put millions toward trail projects around the state, this one included; Michigan renamed the trail in his memory.

That railroad pedigree is the whole appeal. Engineers a century ago graded this route gently because a loaded freight train can’t climb a steep grade, and a kid on a bike inherits that same easy gradient. You can roll on at a town trailhead, ride for miles without ever working up a real hill, and step off in the next village — the same easy run the boxcars made, minus the smoke.