08/22/2026
A little history about the Island Line Trail (as it’s now known)
The Rutland Built a Railroad Across Lake Champlain on Hand-Laid Marble
Three and a half miles of open water between Colchester Point and South Hero, and the Rutland's answer was to fill it in by hand.
The Rutland-Canadian Railroad went in during 1899 for one reason: the Rutland was tired of paying the Central Vermont for the privilege of reaching Canada, and wanted its own road north to Alburgh and Rouses Point. Crossing the lake islands meant building causeways, and the causeway across to South Hero was riprapped with Vermont marble and limestone laid up by crews largely made of Italian immigrant laborers. It took about a year. A two-hundred-foot gap was left in the middle so boats could still pass between Malletts Bay and the broad lake, and a swing bridge carried the trains over it.
The line hauled milk, marble and lumber, and it carried the Mount Royal and the Green Mountain Flyer. The milk trains were the money until trucks took that business away in the 1950s.
Then it ended twice. A three-week strike in June 1953 finished off passenger service permanently. A second strike in the fall of 1960 ran forty-one days and was stopped by a federal injunction with a one-year cooling-off period. When that year ran out the strike resumed, and on September 25, 1961 the last Rutland train moved. The railroad applied to abandon everything that December, the ICC approved it in September 1962 effective the following January, and the rails came off the causeway in 1964. The stone is still out there - people walk and ride it now, and a small ferry runs across the gap in summer where the swing bridge used to be.
Did you ever ride the Rutland, or watch them take the rails up?
