Views of the Cleveland skyline from the RTA Red Line Rapid viaduct as it crosses over the Cuyahoga River and approaches downtown from the city’s West Side are spectacular.

The problem is that if you’re on a train, you can’t pause and drink in the panorama. If you were on foot or on a bike, it would be another story.

That's one reason why volunteers from the Rotary Club of Cleveland are pushing the idea of turning a disused portion of the Red Line right-of-way into a three-mile greenway connecting five city neighborhoods to downtown Cleveland.

Jason Rohal, left and Leonard Stover on the RTA viaduct over the Cuyahoga River on Tuesday.

“We want this to be more than a trail,” said Leonard Stover, an investment advisor and Rotary volunteer during a tour of the potential trail on Tuesday.

He sees the greenway as Cleveland's answer to New York's High Line, a linear park atop a disused elevated rail line on the lower West Side of Manhattan that has become both a neighborhood park and a global tourist destination.

“We want to beat the High Line,” Stover said. The Red Line “is higher, it’s longer and it’s got a better view and we won’t spend a billion dollars to do it.”

Even if one discounts the local pride in Stover’s words, it’s easy to agree the Rotary’s vision is pretty terrific.

On Tuesday, Stover and Jason Rohal, a Rotary member and an architectural designer at the Cleveland firm of Vocon, climbed in Stover’s black Ford F-150 truck for a visit to the now fenced-off greenway site – after obtaining permission from RTA dispatchers.

The Rotary (which is sponsoring the Cleveland Tall Ships Festival 2013 through the holiday weekend) started cleaning, mowing and maintaining the land in the ravine next to the Red Line on the West Side more than 30 years ago. The idea was to remove trash and weeds and improve the area's appearance for commuters and visitors arriving from Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on the Rapid.

The project, initially called “Rapid Recovery,” morphed into the urban gardening and tree-planting project that later became the non-profit ParkWorks organization, and later LAND Studio.

Yet through the decades, Rotary volunteers continued their commitment in collaboration with RTA to clean and maintain the West Side Red Line right-of-way.

Leonard Stover on the Red Line Rapid viaduct over the Cuyahoga River.

In 2009, Rotarians discovered and removed the formerly buried tracks of a disused streetcar switching yard. They dug up and sold 100 tons of rail and raised $45,000, which they invested in mowers and dump trucks to continue their work.

That same year, Stover and other Rotarians hit on the idea of perpetuating the maintenance of the right-of-way by turning it into a linear public park that could fuel revitalization among all the neighborhoods it passes through.

Since then the Rotary helped organize two planning studies by Vocon and the non-profit LAND Studio, and by Cleveland- and Akron-based Environmental Design Group, to advance the greenway concept. They've also produced a video promoting their concept.

The latter study estimates that completing the greenway would cost between $5.1 million and $5.5 million, depending on whether it is finished with aggregate or asphalt.

Stover said the Rotary is negotiating details with RTA. No timeline has yet been set for the project, which, like other trail proposals under consideration in Cleveland, may take several years or longer to become a reality.

Yet on paper, at least, the greenway concept is taking hold.

In addition to the studies conducted for the Rotary, the greenway concept has figured in two recent important plans for the near West Side.

One is the December 2011 "Ohio City Vision," completed by Peter J. Smith Co. of Buffalo, N.Y. The second is the June 7, 2013 "W. 25th St. TOD [Transit-Oriented-Development] Plan Recommendations," written by the Cleveland office of Michael Baker Corp. with Dimit Architects of Lakewood.

The rail trail would connect the Zone Recreation Center at West 65th Street to downtown Cleveland at the Carl B. Stokes U.S. Courthouse, the 24-story tower that overlooks the Cuyahoga River from the city’s East Side at Superior Avenue and Huron Road.

Along the way, it would connect with the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s Red Line Rapid station at West 25th Street and the resurgent Ohio City neighborhood.

It would then cross over the Cuyahoga on the east half of the RTA viaduct, which overlooks early 20th century industrial buildings in the Flats on Columbus Road Peninsula, and the graffiti-covered industrial ruins of Scranton Road peninsula, which are actually strikingly beautiful.

Running north atop the viaduct, the rail trail could link to the future Canal Basin Park, envisioned as the jumping off point to the 110-mile Towpath Trail that will tie Cleveland to its early 19th-century, canal-era hinterland and to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park that lies between Cleveland and Akron.

As Stover jounced his truck along the trail on Tuesday, it passed through through landscapes that looked like a cross between a French Impressionist painting and early 20th century industrial scenes that could have been photographed in black-and-white for Life magazine by Margaret Bourke-White.

It was a tour of infrastructure: There were brawny railroad bridges, plus handsome brick warehouses and factory buildings, some of which await rebirth as loft apartments for the millennial generation.

If connectivity is the big game of 21st century urban planning in Cleveland, the Red Line rail trail could play a fantastic role in fueling the next wave of urban resettlement in the core city.

Standing atop the RTA viaduct Tuesday, overlooking the river, Rohal said, “This is one of the few spots where you could sit and enjoy the river traffic, the barges, the skyline.”

Stover seconded the sentiment.

“This to me is one of the most exciting things in the city,” he said. “You see the city working.”