The brick building at the edge of downtown Huntington spent nearly forty years doing nothing. Built in 1928 as a passenger station for the Wabash Railroad, it later served the Norfolk & Western line, sat vacant by 1979, and briefly housed a print shop in 1989. The tracks it once served carried the Wabash Cannonball on this same stretch of line from 1950 until 1971. Then in 2013, Jon and Shelly Schenkel donated the building to the city, and it got a new job: the physical anchor for every trail Huntington has built or is currently building.
It is called Schenkel Station Trail Hub now, and if you have noticed a skatepark rebuild, a stretch of new pavement near the hospital, or a fresh coat of paint on a trailhead kiosk this year without connecting the dots, that is the point of this piece. Huntington isn't adding recreation projects at random. It is filling in the spokes of a wheel that already has its center.
What the Hub Actually Connects
The Huntington Area Recreational Trails Association, known locally as HARTA, uses Schenkel Station as the starting and ending point for five separate bike routes through the city. The refurbished depot has internal and external gathering space, a trail map kiosk, and a bike repair station, which makes it function less like a monument and more like a transit terminal for people on foot or on two wheels.
The most consequential spoke on that wheel got longer in September 2024, when the Erie Rail Trail was extended by 0.74 miles using a $784,300 grant from Indiana's Next Level Trails program. The new 10-foot-wide shared-use path does not just add mileage. It links, by name, several places residents already visit on a weekly basis:
- Huntington University
- Parkview Huntington Hospital
- The YMCA
- Crestview Middle School
- Heritage of Huntington Senior Living Center
That list matters more than the mileage. A trail that connects a hospital, a university, a middle school, and a senior living center is not primarily a scenic amenity. It is a second transportation layer for a specific set of daily trips, the kind that used to require a car for even a half-mile distance. The total trail network in Huntington now runs past eight miles, all of it eventually threading back to Schenkel Station.
HARTA has also been installing trail kiosks since May 2024 to help people find their way through the growing system. Kiosks are already up at the Parkview YMCA, in Roanoke, and at Schenkel Station itself. Through the rest of 2026, more are scheduled for Andrews, Erie Heritage, Drover Park, and the Lime City Trail, which means the map residents use to navigate this network is still being drawn in real time.
The Skatepark at the Far End of the System
If Schenkel Station is the hub, the most visible spoke under construction right now sits at Yeoman Park, where the city's current skatepark, more than twenty years old, is being replaced entirely. The new design will roughly double the footprint to about 20,000 square feet, built by Hunger Skateparks, a Bloomington-based company that has built parks across northeast Indiana in towns including Auburn, Columbia City, and Kokomo.
Getting there took a specific kind of local effort. The project reached its $100,000 Patronicity crowdfunding goal in 2025, a target set in partnership with the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority, which matched public donations dollar for dollar. Construction is projected to begin this fall, in 2026, with a mosaic planned for one of the park's bowls that weaves in the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 988.
Christina Knecht, the city's community engagement volunteer coordinator, described the stakes of building something current rather than dated:
"You want to be the coolest place and the newest place."
The line reflects a genuine pattern the project is responding to. Skaters, like most active recreation users, tend to travel to wherever the newest infrastructure is, and an aging park with outdated features works against a town trying to keep young residents engaged locally rather than driving to Fort Wayne or Kokomo for a better ride.
The Older Anchors That Already Pull People Outside
Two destinations on the west side of town predate all of this trail-building by roughly a century, and they explain why the newest section of the Little River Trail was routed the way it was.
Sunken Gardens, dug from an abandoned lime quarry and dedicated to the city in 1924, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and draws a heavy seasonal crowd for its winter Christmas light display. A short walk from there sits the Historic Forks of the Wabash, where the Wabash and Little Rivers meet, with restored 19th-century cabins, a canoe launch, and a suspension bridge that crosses to a small island in the Wabash River.
The first completed segment of the Little River Trail, 1.5 miles long, runs directly through the Forks of the Wabash park, tying that historic site into the same trail system that now radiates from Schenkel Station. The final segment of the trail, which would extend the route south along the river to the PAL grounds on the east side of the city, has not yet been designed and has no completion date attached to it. A separate stretch, the planned connection along West Park Drive linking the Little River Trail more directly to the Forks, is tied to a road reconstruction project that is not expected to go out for bid until 2028, so that particular gap will stay a gap for a while yet.
Reading the System as a Whole
None of these projects exist in isolation, and treating them that way misses what is actually happening in Huntington this year. The city restored a dead railroad depot before it had much of a trail network to justify one, which meant Schenkel Station sat waiting for years as the spokes slowly got built around it. The Erie Rail Trail extension gave that hub a functional route to a hospital and a university. The Yeoman Park skatepark, breaking ground this fall, gives it a destination on the north side of town built specifically for a younger demographic that the old park had stopped attracting. The historic gardens and the Forks give it a reason to keep pulling people west, toward the river, the way the depot's original railroad did a century ago.
The parts that are still missing, like the final Little River Trail segment and the West Park Drive connection, are missing for identifiable reasons tied to design timelines and road construction schedules, not neglect. Knowing which pieces are finished, which are funded and under construction, and which are still years out gives a resident a much clearer picture than scrolling past a single announcement about a new skatepark or a ribbon cutting at a trailhead.
The depot itself is the quiet part of the story. A building that sat empty for decades is now the reason a hospital, a university, a senior living center, and a skatepark under construction all belong to the same map.
If you want to talk about how a specific block or street in Huntington fits into changes like these, Daniel Morken has spent years tracking how projects like this reshape daily life across Northeast Indiana, one town at a time.
