Okanagan Rail Trail extended in Kelowna

Just newly declared open, the Okanagan Rail Trail is already being extended in Kelowna.

Work on a section of the trail from Gordon Drive west to the downtown corner of Ellis Street and Manhattan Drive is now underway.

A contractor, CapCon Construction, has been hired by the City of Kelowna to build the trail. The company won the tender with a bid of $500,000.

The path is being created on the route of an abandoned railway that runs along Weddell Place and Recreation Avenue, next to the curling club and Elks Stadium.

“The schedule is a bit weather dependent, but the optimal objective is by the time the snow shuts us down we have a crushed gravel path between Ellis and Gordon,” Andrew Gibbs, the city official overseeing the Rail Trail project, said Wednesday.

“We’re hoping we’ll be able to pave it by the spring,” Gibbs said.

West of Ellis-Manhattan, the railway right-of-way extends about 100 metres toward the Tolko sawmill.

Next year, city transportation officials will consider ways to tie the endpoint of the Rail Trail into the boardwalk off Sunset Drive that runs through Waterfront Park.

At the end of September, the trail’s grand opening celebration was held in Lake Country.

Although there’s a closed-off section between Kelowna’s airport and Winfield, hopes are the trail will one day stretch almost 50 kilometres from Coldstream to downtown Kelowna.