But bringing the park to fruition will not be easy. The modest neighborhoods and light industrial areas through which the abandoned rail line passes cannot provide the tens of millions of dollars that were raised privately by Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit group managing the construction and maintenance of the elevated park on Manhattan’s West Side.

Nor is everyone on the same page about the Queens railway’s destiny; at least one elected official has called for a simultaneous study of reviving the rail line to provide better train service to the increasingly popular Rockaway beaches, damaged as they might be in the short term by Hurricane Sandy. (Mr. Benepe, who is well schooled in community opposition, imagined the potential horror of nearby homeowners at the prospect of the train line’s rumbling to life again.)

Still, the trust has already raised tens of thousands of dollars for the project, in addition to the state grant, and it has broad experience in fostering linear parks, having worked on four dozen such parks, mostly on ground level, around the country. The trust is currently the project manager of Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, a 2.7-mile former elevated railway that is being converted to a park, in the mold of the High Line.

The QueensWay would have fewer obstacles than the High Line in its creation. For one thing, the land is already owned by New York City (the High Line was owned by CSX Transportation), and the city’s parks department endorsed the trust’s recent grant application to the state. In addition, while there are at least a dozen bridges and a viaduct along the route, most of the QueensWay runs atop earthen berms or through gullies, said Andy Stone, the trust’s New York City director. Rather than having to reconstruct a steel structure more than a mile long, as in the High Line, the linear park would, in some places, require nothing more than the clearing of tracks, the selective removal of trees and the pouring of asphalt.

Unlike the High Line, the QueensWay would welcome bicycles. While the trestles are relatively narrow, long stretches are wide enough — up to 25 feet — to accommodate walkers and bicyclists. New bike paths could connect the park to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park to the north, as well as an existing bikeway in Jamaica Bay to the south. About 250,000 residents live within a mile of the proposed park, and its backers see all kinds of ancillary benefits, from health to traffic. “That’s a lot of carbon footprint,” said Marc Matsil, the trust’s New York state director.