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State officials have postponed until the end of the month their announcement of the final list of proposed routes for a new South Coast rail line to link New Bedford and Fall River to Boston, but local activists say they still expect the Attleboro route will be on the state's short list.

The Patrick Administration has spent the past year analyzing alternative routes for the project, as well as holding sometimes contentious public meetings with citizens in the communities that could be affected, including Norton and Attleboro.

The billion-dollar project is controversial locally because one of the proposed routes for the trains - the so-called Attleboro Alternative - would send them through busy and environmentally sensitive parts of Norton, Attleboro, and Mansfield. The Attleboro Alternative would also require more than a dozen railroad crossings in and around the center of Taunton.

The next step is for state officials to settle on a short list of six or fewer alternative route proposals, which will then be studied in depth for two years by 12 federal and state agencies, led by the Army Corps of Engineers.

Local activists had hoped to keep the Attleboro alternative off the list. The final short list had been scheduled to be announced on Tuesday in Fall River by the state secretary of transportation, Bernard Cohen, and the secretary of housing and economic development, Daniel O'Connell, at an event billed as "an anniversary celebration for the South Coast Rail Project."

But on Friday afternoon - the last working day before Tuesday, due to the Patriots' Day holiday - state officials sent out an e-mail saying the event would be postponed until April 30.

"We had a schedule conflict with some of the folks that needed to attend," said the South Coast rail project manager, Kristina Egan.

Egan also said there is no set number of how many alternative routes will be on the final list for further study, but she hopes there will be six or fewer. "We're finalizing all that right now," she said.

The postponement came as a surprise to those keeping a close eye on the project's progress, including Norton resident Heather Graf, coordinator of Citizens Concerned About Tracks, a local group opposed to the Attleboro Alternative.

"In all my years of doing anything as an activist, I have never seen anything like this whole process in the past year," Graf said. "It is just bizarre."

Graf predicts that five proposals for the train project will go forward, three of which would travel along the Attleboro Alternative.

The five alternatives Graf expects will continue on for further study are a diesel train line through Stoughton; a diesel line through Middleboro; an electrified line through Attleboro; a special bus line with a zipper lane on Route 24; and two diesel lines, one through Attleboro and one through Middleboro, which would reduce the number of trains traveling along the two routes.

Graf said the last proposal, for a hybrid Attleboro-Middleboro project route, is "dumb."

"The whole construction building cost, the invasion of wetlands - everything you would have to do that we object to would still have to be done," she said. "It's just fewer trains running on the track you build." In the end, Graf added, "The real decision-maker will be (Transportation Secretary) Bernard Cohen at the top."

Despite the fact that the state is continuing to consider running the trains through the area, Graf is satisfied with the work her group has done so far. "We have done the best that we could to date," she said.