The Department of Parks is awaiting official word to begin work on reconnecting the railway trail between Stonehaven Road and Shelly Bay for recreational use.

The remnants of an old cottage chimney on the North Shore Road trail indicates the spot where work will begin and will form a continuous walking path.

Senior superintendent Martin Brown said: "The finished product from the survey and design stage, to the installations stage will come in somewhere within the region of $300,000."

"The whole thrust of the design has been to minimise the impact both visually and environmentally. There's very little new development, we're using the existing pylons, the existing rock cuts and the old trail."

Mr. Brown said that the Department was awaiting the decision of the Planning Department before any work could begin.

Last year the Department put out a bid for tender, with Sousa's Landscape Management winning the contract.

The project, will see five bridges constructed on the existing pylons near the foreshore.

The contract was awarded on a "design and build basis" meaning that Sousa's will do most of the work.

Mr. Brown said: "They've come up with quite a good design. We're using the existing contours created by the original railway trail, and are retaining 98 percent of mature vegetation on site."

Mr. Brown added that the bridges will be made from aluminium trestles as opposed to wooden ones which have a shorter life span.

He added that in the long run the wooden trestles would become more of a maintenance concern than the aluminium.

"We've come up with a brushed aluminium product which is light weight which for installation means we don't have to use as much heavy machinery on the site. It's sort of a dull steel colour and the material is typically used for floating docks and marina uses. It's used in a very salty coastal environment."

Mr. Brown added that the trestle style is almost a throw back to the design of the original railway.

"Where possible we're coming up off the concrete bases, where that's not possible we're creating new anchor points for the spans. The line is not going to be a straight line of the original trail, so we can retain the vegetation and contours as much as possible," he said. "The path itself varies in width from eight feet and at its narrowest points five feet."

Getting the project off the ground has not been an easy task. Mr. Brown said the one problem the Department encountered in planning is that some of the land was found to be privately owned, so alternatives had to be found.

"It's been a very long process to get linkages back. In some areas we realised it's not going to be very practicable."

Mr. Brown explained that with all the necessary planning work out of the way, now it is just a matter of wait and see.