AFTON – The Afton Free Library and the Afton Historical Society are pleased to present author John Taibi, in a special program introducing his Volume 2 of Roads, Rivers, and Rails. The program will take place on July 24, 2014 at 6:30 p.m. in the Susquehanna room of the Bolster Community Center, 105 Main St. in the Village of Afton.

Taibi provides readers with a ride in his automobile and drives them through Route 7 communities that had at one time been richly served by the railroad. In Volume 1 (published in 2012), the Albany-Schenectady to Oneonta portion of this highway corridor was explored, and in Volume 2 the westward journey resumes at Oneonta, and progresses through Otego, Wells Bridge, Unadilla, Sidney, Bainbridge, Afton, Nineveh, Harpursville, Tunnel, Sanitaria Springs, and Port Crane before ending at Binghamton – the Parlor City.

The auto tour, in book form, gives readers a unique perspective of the region that the railroad had served to develop, how the railroad interacts with its neighboring roadways – mainly modern NYS Route 7 and its ancestral origins – and water-borne “highways” that were serving the region since before the coming of the railroad itself.

The Susquehanna River is one of the world’s most ancient waterways and America’s oldest major river. It keeps the Susquehanna Division Heritage Trail company from when they first meet at Cooperstown Junction – near Colliersville all the way to Nineveh where the two temporarily part before reuniting at Binghamton. The railroad also interacts with other waterways such as the Cobleskill and Schenevus Creeks, the Unadilla River, and many more minor streams.