This trail has been greatly improved and is now asphalt from Mattoon to Charleston.

Overall, trail was great! There are a few spots where some of the gravel was deeper and more difficult to navigate but our hybrid bikes handled this okay. The area around the trail was very well maintained and is in a very beautiful area along lake Shelbyville. We grabbed breakfast in town before our ride but would recommend parking at the visitors center (near the dam) to begin your ride. The trail is not marked in town.

We started our ride at the Pana end of the trail with plans to have lunch in Taylorville. The trail was an easy, flat ride with short sections of bumpy trail but our hybrid bikes handled this well. Near Taylorville there was a lot of debris (branches/leaves) on the trail including a fallen tree. Despite being able to get around that, we ran into the bridge closure that prevented us from grabbing lunch in Taylorville. Very disappointing!

The trail was rough and not really suited for road bikes. Where they patched it with ground up asphalt is very rough and not packed well and sucks you’re tires and pulls you.

The trail from Mattoon to a trucking company looks good but from the trucking company toward Charleston which is where we started the trail was not good for road bikes. They have used what appears to be recycled asphalt and it is rough and not packed down well.

Access to the trail is easy and I picked the West end trail head in Mattoon. I parked at Peterson Park where there are many shaded parking spots. The start of the trail is one block west and one block north of the park. The trail starts off paved and once out of town is crushed gravel. The trail is pretty well maintained and used quite a bit, but there were still a few sections where my comfort bike got a little out of sorts in deep gravel. Overall though, the condition of the trail was good. The trail is pretty flat and there are only a couple of places along the route where it is necessary to cross roads. The scenery is very peaceful and at one section, the trail cuts through a country club - so you may be sharing the trail in that section with a golfer or two... Both Mattoon and Charleston offer many opportunities for dining, so you won't go hungry! I will definitely be back and will use this trail for 50 mile rides in the future.

Rode today and cant go through to Taylorville and cannot ge on at Taylorville. Get on at Pana and its clear for about 12 to 13 mi. Straight shot.

I really enjoy this trail, it offers wonderful scenery and it is very well maintained, it is a full concrete path with several wooden bridges including one over the little Wabash it offers some great hills and if you go down both forks it is about a 7 mile round trip.

My wife and I rode the trail on 7/5/2018. We started from Pana and rode north to Tayorville. The trails is in pretty rough shape in areas and in need of some maintenance. We should have brought our hybrids instead of our road bikes. It would have made for a much nicer ride.