The West Bloomfield Trail: a railroad turned quiet woods

The flat, easy path that runs through the woods and wetlands of West Bloomfield isn’t just a nice place to walk a dog — it’s a ghost of a railroad. The corridor was laid in 1884 as part of the Michigan Air Line Railway, a branch of the Grand Trunk system, cut through the township to reach the farms and small industries scattered across this lake country. Trains need level, gentle grades, which is exactly why the trail feels so effortless underfoot today.

For a while there were two ways through here. Alongside the steam railroad, a light electric trolley line went in around 1899, running cars from Pontiac through Farmington and on toward Detroit. It became part of the Detroit United Railway, the sprawling interurban network that knit southeast Michigan together with electric streetcars before everyone owned an automobile. From roughly 1899 to 1929 those interurban cars carried passengers and freight along this very strip.

Then the cars won. As people bought their own automobiles and the rail lines lost their reason to exist, the trains stopped, the rails were pulled up, and the quiet roadbed was left behind. Rather than let it grow over and disappear, the community kept the corridor and turned it into a recreation trail — a 6.8-mile run of preserved natural ground threading between the lakes.

Walk it now and the old purpose hides in plain sight. The straightness of the path, the way it crosses roads at level, the absence of any real hill — that’s the railroad’s logic, still shaping your stroll a century after the last car rolled through. A string of historical markers along the way tells the story for anyone who looks. It’s one of the better ways to spend a slow morning in West Bloomfield, walking a railroad that no longer is.