ALBANY COUNTY — A bevy of county and town officials gathered on Tuesday morning to celebrate a $425,000 state grant that is to transform the historic freight depot in Slingerlands into a community gathering place where information on healthy living and on the county’s rail trail will be available.

Walkers and cyclists streamed by as the county executive, Daniel McCoy, and the chairwoman of the county legislature, Joanne Cunningham, spoke from a lectern.

“We want a place where people can connect,” said McCoy.

Behind them stood the depot with board-and-batten siding and scalloped trim under its standing-seam metal roof. The depot, built in 1864, was the first passenger station in Slingerlands. When a new station was built in 1888, it was moved next to the tracks on Kenwood Avenue, used solely for freight.

The depot is part of the Slingerlands Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.

McCoy said the depot had been restored by county workers, saving taxpayer dollars as they worked on the depot and a nearby bathroom facility between other projects.

The grant money will allow the depot to be lifted so a new foundation can be installed. Electricity, water, and sewer will be added.

McCoy said a patio will be built with rocking chairs so visitors can sit and “watch people walk and their kids take off or they go for a little walk and they just want to congregate and talk.”

Inside will be health-care products and blood-pressure machines — “a little bit of education about the trail, about health care, and about spiritual health,” said McCoy.

He also pointed out a building behind the depot that had been a “tattoo place”and now has sinks and toilets for trail users as well as water fountains for people and pets to drink from. It is open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Both McCoy and Cunningham stressed what an economic boon the county trail, which stretches over nine miles from the Port of Albany to Voorheesville, has been to the area.

The trail was used by over 310,000 people last year, McCoy said, and there are over 300 businesses within 300 yards of the trail.

Fifteen years ago, there was resistance to the trail, McCoy said. “A lot of businesses didn’t want us there,” he said. Once businesses — “from breweries to grocery stores” — saw an uptick in customers, he said, they became supportive.

McCoy praised Governor Kathy Hochul for investing in the Capital Region and said, “This grant is a major win for our community, not just for preserving a piece of our past, but because it helped us reimagine the space for the future.”

Cunningham, who lives in Bethlehem, said she herself uses the rail trail “every single week, even in the winter — the rail trail is a beautiful cross-country ski experience,” she said.

Cunningham also said, “The economic development that you can see every single time you ride the rail trail is amazing. There’s a whole bunch of new restaurants that have opened up in Voorheesville that tap into the rail-trail traffic.”

She concluded, “This is what you get when you invest in communities and particularly invest in recreation and outdoor initiatives that people are dying for.”

McCoy concluded by thanking the volunteers that help maintain the trail and said, “All these projects are about more than infrastructure. They’re about promoting the quality of life for our residents, to get people off that couch or out of that chair, out of that house and just even go for a short walk. Or now, when this is done, you can come here and hang out.”