A short brick walkway runs between the post office and the history center just off King Street. Most people use it as a shortcut. Under a plan presented to Shippensburg Borough Council on September 1, 2026, it becomes part of a marked walking route. The route follows Neff Avenue and Seneca Street, passes through the railroad underpass and ends at the Shippensburg Area Little League fields, where the Dykeman Walking Trail begins.
Shippensburg's trail network is coming together in small pieces. The first new connections are signs, paint and sidewalk in the middle of town. The large Cumberland Valley Rail Trail extension to Orrstown Road is moving later on the calendar. If you walk, run or bike here, the network you'll use over the next year or two is being built from downtown outward.
The first new piece is mostly signs on sidewalks you already use
The Dykeman extension comes from two volunteer groups: the Friends of Shippensburg Community Parks and the Shippensburg Community Team of the Appalachian Trail Community Conservation Collaborative. The Shippensburg News-Chronicle reported that Blyden Potts walked council through the design. He described the King Street-to-Little League stretch plainly:
"As far as this particular project, the extension between King Street and the Little League, it's mostly just signage. It's going to go on existing sidewalks."
According to that report, here is how the route is laid out from downtown:
- It starts at a new trailhead on King Street.
- It goes through the brick walkway between the post office and the history center.
- It follows Neff Avenue and then Seneca Street, with a short new sidewalk section on the Country Corner property along Seneca.
- Painted trail lanes mark the stretch behind the Firefighter Activity Center and through the railroad underpass.
- It then reaches the existing trailhead at the Little League fields. The last link here is still undecided: one option cuts diagonally across an unused Garfield Street right-of-way, and the other stays along the road and goes through the parking area.
Two grants totaling about $26,000 pay for the work, and both run through the Friends of Shippensburg Community Parks. An $11,420 Appalachian Trail Conservancy Community Conservation Grant covers work planned for the rest of 2026. A $15,000 South Mountain Partnership Community Impact Grant covers the portions scheduled for 2027. Volunteers will do much of the work, and contractors will build the sidewalk.
For a town project, that budget is small. It can cover this much because the downtown half of the route runs on sidewalks that are already there.
Past the Little League fields, the work moves onto the trail
Once the route reaches the Little League fields, the plan shifts from wayfinding to fixing the trail. Potts told council that some stretches "are encroached with bushes that aren't really wide enough" and that in places "the trail isn't as level as it should be."
The design sets these targets, as reported by the News-Chronicle:
- The walking trail will be at least 36 inches wide for wheelchair accessibility.
- Sections shared with bicycles will aim for 48 inches where possible and will be no narrower than 40 inches.
- Three new benches are planned, including one overlooking the wetland pond.
- New trailhead and directional signs will go up.
- The pedestrian bridges, which are more than 20 years old and deteriorating despite repairs, will be rebuilt. That bridge work is scheduled for 2027.
The plan also renames part of the trail. Today, everything between the Little League fields and Dykeman Road counts as the Dykeman Walking Trail. Under the plan, the King Street-to-Dykeman Road route keeps that name and is generally made wheelchair accessible. The loop around the north pond and wetlands becomes the Dykeman Wetland Trail, which this project will not upgrade for wheelchair access.
The section between the Little League fields and Dykeman Road is also designed to carry bicycles coming from a proposed "Railroad Street" route to the rail trail's Shippensburg Station trailhead. That one design choice is what turns Dykeman from a park loop into a link between downtown, the park and the rail trail.
The creekside link starts at Branch Creek Children's Park
The new King Street trailhead connects to a second project, the Middle Spring Greenway. The News-Chronicle reported that erosion-control socks and stakes were placed along Branch Creek Children's Park, next to the Borough Office and Branch Creek Place Senior Center. The park will get a trail along the creek and a spot with stream access. At the September 1 council meeting, Potts said the greenway was underway and would run to King Street.
The Cumberland Valley Rails-to-Trails Council describes where the greenway is headed. It follows Middle Spring Creek between the Orrstown Road rail-trail extension and the Shippensburg Public Library, and it ends at a proposed green space next to the library called Liberty Square. That space was created when several buildings were demolished. The borough's 2022 Revitalization & Connectivity Plan pictured Liberty Square as a civic space with lighting, trees, landscaping, a plaza and an amphitheater. Those features are still a proposal.
So the downtown pieces fit together. The Dykeman route reaches King Street through the brick walkway, and the greenway reaches it along the creek past the borough office. And in August, SCPRA representative Josh Mitchell described the Dykeman work to council as "connecting Library Square to the Dykeman Area."
The rail-trail extension is the piece that slipped
The greenway is supposed to end up meeting a bigger project led by the Shippensburg Community Parks and Recreation Authority. That project is a 1.3-mile extension of the Cumberland Valley Rail Trail from Shippensburg Station to SCPRA's headquarters on Orrstown Road, which carries the trail into Franklin County.
The money is there. Franklin County's adopted 2027–2030 Transportation Improvement Program lists the extension from Fort Street and North Earl Street to the Orrstown Road trailhead with $1,264,094 in construction funding programmed for federal fiscal year 2027. That program estimates a letting date of April 29, 2027.
The more recent update came at the August 18, 2026 council meeting. According to the borough's minutes, Mitchell said the project had been delayed by PennDOT and FirstEnergy. The let date, the point when the project goes out to contractors, is "probably going to get moved from April 2027 to April of 2028."
The project with the most money behind it is now the furthest from a shovel. The $26,000 volunteer project has work planned for the rest of 2026, and erosion controls for the greenway are already in place downtown. The longer ideas sit further out still. The Dykeman organizers have spoken of a "long-range dream" of a trail reaching the Tuscarora Trail. CVRTC calls a link from Orrstown Road to the Chambersburg Rail Trail a very long-term goal because of railroad corridor ownership and how much land would need to be acquired.
Where the network already works this winter
Both ends of the future network are already open, and that's why the downtown links matter. The Cumberland Valley Rail Trail is complete for about 13 miles, from downtown Shippensburg at the edge of Shippensburg University to Greenhill Road past Newville.
Shippensburg Station
The Shippensburg Station trailhead at 51 East Fort Street is mile zero, with parking and restrooms. Besides the comfort station, it has the Cumberland Valley Railroad Museum in a refurbished Penn Central boxcar that opened in 2018, a refurbished B&O hopper car, the Steam Plant Sculpture Path, and the Conrail Historical Society's Conrail Railroad Museum and Archives, housed in an ex-Conrail boxcar that opened in 2023.
Shippensburg Township Park
Township Park at 304 Britton Road is mile one, also with parking and restrooms. The mile between the station and the park is paved, and most of the trail beyond it is crushed limestone. All road crossings out to Newville are graded to ADA specification. For a winter walk with a stroller or on a bike with narrow tires, the paved first mile is the easiest stretch.
Dykeman Park
SCPRA describes Dykeman Park as a 56-acre area around historic Dykeman Springs, open dawn to dusk, with walking trails, ponds, picnic tables and a baseball field. This is where the 2026 signs, surfaces and benches are planned, and where the bridge rebuilds are set for 2027.
The rail trail begins at Fort Street, and the walk to Dykeman runs through downtown and the railroad underpass. The signs, paint and sidewalk planned for King Street, Neff Avenue and Seneca Street mark that route first, well before the Orrstown Road extension adds miles at the far end.
If you're thinking about how walkability fits into what your home is worth, it helps to know which connections are funded, which are scheduled and which are still ideas. A new trailhead a few blocks away is a different selling point than a rail-trail extension still waiting to go out to bid. Lisa Mack and her team follow these projects across Shippensburg and the Cumberland Valley. If you'd like to see where your home stands, Request a Free Home Valuation and we'll walk through it with you.
