It’s always a thrill to pull out of a train station and feel yourself picking up speed, wheels click-clacking over the rails. It’s even more thrilling when your train has no roof or sidesye7, is as low-slung as a Mazda Miata and comes with a warning to watch out for bears crossing your path.

I was in New York’s Catskills region, riding a rail bike, a pedal-powered contraption built to cruise along train tracks. While the rails-to-trails movement has seen thousands of abandoned railroad rights of way converted to public greenways and bike paths, not every line is rail trail material, particularly since building one can cost north of $1 million per mile. Rail-biking, on the other hand, opens the door to using existing rails recreationally, with no need to tear up the tracks.

It’s a concept that’s long been popular in Europe and South Korea, and whose American footprint has been steadily expanding over the last decade. In 2015, a company called Rail Explorers started the country’s first rail-biking operation. Today, the company has seven locations across the United States, and there are now more than a dozen rail-biking outfitters running excursions in 16 states and counting, from Maine to California.

My trip, an eight-mile round-trip pedal, much of it paralleling the Esopus Creek, departed from Phoenicia, N.Y., home to Rail Explorers’ Catskills Division.

The atmosphere at Phoenicia’s historic railroad station was surprisingly upbeat for 8 a.m. on a gray, damp morning, even before Sam Huang, 40, our tour leader (“riding engine,” in Rail Explorers parlance), grabbed a mic and launched into a high-energy introduction and safety briefing.

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