What is open
The trail is built along the region’s former rail corridor, and two sections are open. The northern one runs from Murwillumbah to Crabbes Creek, a distance the trail gives as 24 kilometres. The southern one runs from Casino to Lismore, given as 29.7 kilometres. Together that is close to 54 kilometres of the old line reopened as a path. It crosses four local government areas, Tweed Shire, Byron Shire, Lismore City and Richmond Valley, and runs on Bundjalung land, which the trail acknowledges.
Who paid, and the recognition it has drawn
The trail lists its support from both levels of government and beyond: the Australian Government, the NSW Government, the regional tourism body Destination North Coast, and the Northern Rivers Rail Trail Supporters. The recognition since it opened has been notable for a piece of infrastructure this new. The trail was awarded Gold in the Tourist Attraction category at the 2025 NSW Tourism Awards, and Silver at the 2025 Australian Tourism Awards, following a Silver at the 2024 Australian Tourism Awards the year before. It also holds Sustainable Tourism Accreditation and a TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice award. Those tourism awards matter more than a self-issued badge would, because they are judged through an industry process rather than declared by the operator.
The visitor numbers, which are the trail’s own
The reason a rail trail is pitched as economic infrastructure and not just recreation is the visitors it brings through the towns along it. On the trail’s own figures, it reported more than 70,000 users in its first four months, and over 100,000 guests within seven months. Those are opening-period numbers reported by the operator rather than an independent count, and we flag them as such. Read with that caveat, they still describe a trail that was used heavily from the day it opened, which is the outcome the public money behind it was spent to achieve.
What is still to come
The corridor is not finished. The trail says a Lismore to Bentley section is set to open, which would extend the Casino to Lismore stretch further inland, and it describes continuing conversations about future connections along the rest of the line. The pages we read do not put a length or a firm date on the Lismore to Bentley section, nor a total for the completed trail, so we put none here either. The shape of it is a staged build-out, in which more of the disused corridor is reclaimed section by section rather than all at once.
Our read
For a region whose recent story has been dominated by the 2022 floods and the long grind of recovery, the rail trail is a rare and largely unambiguous good-news asset: a corridor that would otherwise sit idle, turned into a drawcard that carries visitors through the towns of four shires. The honest qualifications are the two we have drawn out, that the headline visitor figures are the trail’s own and the timeline to finish the corridor is not yet pinned down in public. Set against those, the two open sections are real and substantial, the tourism recognition is externally judged, and the logic of finishing the line, more towns linked and the visitors spread further along them, is not hard to see. We will follow the Lismore to Bentley opening and the funding for the next stages as they land, and report them against what is promised here.