The National Park Service has begun work on building the first of three remaining segments of the Marquette Greenway through Indiana Dunes National Park.

This 2.6-mile stretch will run along the abandoned Indiana Harbor Belt Railroad line between West Beach’s entrance at County Line Road in Portage and the Paul H. Douglas Center for Environmental Education on Lake Street.

It’s been a long time coming.

In the national park’s 1980 management plan, an east-west trail spanning the length of the park was envisioned. A 1997 plan also included the trail.

That abandoned rail line, built in 1906, was built to serve U.S. Steel. That segment of the line was abandoned in 1992.

Work on the segment of the trail between Lake Street and County Line Road includes replacing the 1999 pedestrian bridge over Grand Boulevard. The new bridge will be wider, to meet new trail standards, and taller to allow Gary municipal trucks to pass underneath.

Remaining segments in the national park will be from Lake Street west to Union Station and from West Beach east to Hillcrest Road in Ogden Dunes.

When the 60-mile Marquette Greenway is completed, it will connect Chicago’s southeast side to New Buffalo in southwest Michigan. Almost the entire length of the trail is in Indiana.Chicago, which has a robust trail system, has about a half-mile segment into Calumet Park, plugging the trail into a service road with little vehicular traffic. The New Buffalo segment will be about four miles, according to Mitch Barloga, the trail’s biggest promoter in Northwest Indiana.

About 32 miles of the trail have already been completed, with another 15 miles fully funded, primarily in Gary and the national park.

Some of the bigger challenges for the unbuilt sections of the trail include a 3.5-mile gap on the west side of Gary, between Cline Avenue and Bridge Street, a $17 million endeavor because bridges are involved.

“It’s almost like going through the eye of a needle in that particular area,” Barloga said. “You’ve got industry, you’ve got rivers, you’ve got all sorts of protected lands over there.”

Nature preserves and some other features along the route deserve interpretive signage to help bikers and pedestrians understand what they’re passing by, he said.

Barloga, the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission’s active transportation manager, hopes that within three years some 75% of the trail will be completed and that the entire trail will be finished within five to 10 years.

Even before the trail is finished, a $20 million THRIVE grant from the Lilly Foundation is helping fund connections and signage for the trail.

Indiana has helped fund construction of the trail through the Next Level Trails program begun by then-Gov. Eric Holcomb. “It’s been an incredibly popular program, overly subscribed every year,” Barloga said, but that program could go dormant under new Gov. Mike Braun.

Braun hasn’t included any money for Next Level Trails in his spending proposals, part of his austerity program to cut spending across the board, Barloga said. “Next Level Trails is just one of the victims,” he said.

Barloga and his counterparts across the state have been working to get the General Assembly to restore up to $30 million of funding for trails, but “we’re not getting much traction,” he said.

The Legislature’s deadline for adopting Indiana’s biennial budget is April 29.

On Tuesday, Friends of the Marquette Greenway is holding a fundraiser at the Indiana Welcome Center in Hammond, hoping to get the last of the $50,000 needed to match a Lilly Endowment grant for the Marquette Greenway. The deadline for the grant application is April 1.

“We’re always going to be fundraising,” Barloga said. Not only does the trail need to be finished, but it will continually need to be improved. Part of the friends group’s efforts will be to establish a perpetual maintenance fund to cover things like enhancements, signage and other amenities.

The South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority and Indiana Dunes Tourism are cooperating on Tuesday’s fundraiser, a sign of the importance of the trail to tourism efforts in Lake and Porter counties.

Those tourism benefits, bolstered by the South Shore Line’s program to allow bikes on trains, don’t even take into account the health benefits and enjoyment for residents who will use the trail, Barloga noted.

For residential properties adjacent to a trail, property values have gone up, too.

Doug Ross is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.