It needs to be resurfaced if it is to be anything more than a recreational trail. Here is what the surface looks like at its best:
A nice walking trail, don't get me wrong, but a far cry from commuting corridors in Cambridge and Somerville.
That's because it was cheap. They brought in Iron Horse Preservation to do the rail removal and preliminary grading. IH has the know-how and the equipment to do a good job, but they have to be
well-supervised to ensure they behave themselves. That's how you get a well- brush-cut trail with level surface, fine crushed stone acceptable for multipurpose use, drainage issues and washout-prone sections of roadbed properly addressed (or at least well-mapped as problem spots for future fixes if more invasive culvert work is needed later), sprayed for weed control, with all trash and discarded rail hardware properly picked up. You won't get a paved trail or wood decking at lookout points; Iron Horse doesn't have that in-house capability. But you'll get an acceptable starter trail clean enough for problem-free finishing touches and cleanly surveyable for future upgrades like paving. Or you net a good prep job so the professional landscapers and pavers like DCR can come in and finish the job without problems. Needham got itself an effective base surface here. What they choose to do with it in the future is up to them, with motivation level for upgrades dependent on what it connects to. Ball's in Dover's court if Needham is to see a future where this gets further tarted up and manicured.
Needham/Newton and Watertown all employed Iron Horse, spent the money to do their own trail design, and gave onsite supervision to Iron Horse for following the letter of that design. When the first segment of the Watertown Greenway was being cleared I walked to the back parking lot of the Mall and sat around for a Saturday picnic lunch watching them work at clearing out the weed-choked, trash-strewn ROW behind the Mall. They worked like a well-oiled machine, and there were a couple town DPW supervisors going back and forth barking out orders, rummaging around in the fresh-cut brush to ID any railroad ties that inadvertently got dropped in the undergrowth when they were stripping the roadbed, going through checklists of next-steps after they got their first looks at the now-daylighted roadbed, and making sure that when they ran the bulldozer over the rock ballast that a divot-free surface was left behind for the DCR trucks. I came back the following weekend to see it cleared; trail hadn't even been built yet, but the roadbed was nicely smoothed out and almost looked usable as-is. It was totally ready for DCR to come in and do its thing with the full landscaping and pave job.
Then there's the other side of the coin: the unsupervised Iron Horse jobs. IH has this lovey-dovey sales pitch about them being a preservation-minded nonprofit willing to build a "free" landscaped trail done entirely by them in exchange for the scrap proceeds of the rail hardware. It's pitched as being perfectly cash-neutral, everybody wins, everybody feels self-satisfied, blah blah blah. And they're very effective at sticking to their talking points in front of a skeptical Board of Selectmen when the inevitable questions get raised about how they can pitch it in such "free as in beer" terms. Danvers, Lynnfield, and Methuen all brought in Iron Horse and took the full hands-off "free" trail package. Danvers/Lynnfield did it because they were impatient waiting for DCR to come in and wanted something interim in place to keep the final landscaping commitment from getting jerked around in the state TIP budget. "Free" was seductive because of their impatience. Methuen was just flat-out naive, asked no questions, did no follow-up.
Iron Horse ended up doing complete shit jobs on the Topsfield Branch and Manchester & Lawrence: trash and toxic discarded ties left behind or improperly disposed, barely brush-cut, lumpy roadbed full of un-leveled divots where the ties used to be, washouts galore (Danvers would end up impassible in spots after every winter), skimpy quantities of spread crushed stone with the surface mostly the old bike-unrideable railroad rock ballast, and roadbed left un-level at grade crossings creating ADA access issues. Iron Horse had skipped town and pocketed a large profit off the scrap rail before anyone realized the mess they left behind. The "free" deals had no indemnification for shoddy work, so public money had to be spent to clean up the mess. Which usually involved local-yokel Boards of Selectmen and Legislators trying to sandbag DCR with the fix, or the all-volunteer trail lobbies who initially promised to maintain the trail by doing annual trash pickup suddenly going AWOL. This "Iron Horse Scam" has been perpetuated all around the Northeast by gullible towns who take in the "free" offer, and the states--MassDOT in particular--have let themselves get ripped off time and again for the scrap rail hardware without getting equivalent value in return.
It's a fine line. You either do what Needham/Newton and Watertown did by paying the going rate for control over the design and supervising thoroughly enough to keep an otherwise capable subcontractor fully on-the-level. Or cede that control and get robbed blind by known scam artists. This is why states like New Hampshire and Connecticut centralize all rail trail construction on publicly-owned landbanked ROW's at the DOT/state-EPA level as designated state parks and don't allow the towns or trail lobbies any direct control over construction. Even in cases where it's just a bare unmaintained trail like NH's network of limited-liability "as-is" snowmobile rail trails. Some states even have laws that rail hardware has to be removed by default within X years after abandonment--under state supervision by state-approved contractors--on all abandoned ROW's that aren't formally set aside as going concerns (i.e. reactivation candidates, or rail-with-trail preservations that allow recreational track 'speeder' vehicles such as a couple old lines in Maine). Done as a control over the environmental considerations over discarded ties, and to keep scavengers from ripping the states off on rail scrap the states themselves can recoup money on. In hyper-balkanized Massachusetts, unfortunately, it's every man for himself and all kinds of ratfuckery gets perpetuated in the name of trail politics. The only thing you can say for a more hopeful future is that there's so few abandoned and unspoken-for ROW's left to fight over in this state that there's few opportunities for the "Iron Horse Scam" to rear its ugly head again.
^^What does this have to do with Needham/Dover? When Dover talks about going bare-bones, that signals an unwillingness to apply the supervision Needham did to make sure the job gets done right and the trail--crushed-rock and barebones as it is--has a usable surface. The BCRT lobbyists pushed the "free" trail sales pitch
hard on all the towns on this corridor (suspiciously hard), even to point of arguing against town-supervised design as it would slow things down. Needham/Newton did their homework and weren't comfortable leaving Iron Horse unsupervised; they chose their M.O.'s. Dover? Read the tea leaves and they are MUCH more likely to not appropriate a cent and just let Iron Horse do whatever the hell it wants. So not only is there risk of an intentionally unmanicured trail...but it's at risk of all the bad behavior evidence left behind with other "Iron Horse Scam" victims. Lumpy surfaces inappropriate for bikes, washouts galore (and there's a couple rock cuts on this line that are notorious for drainage issues), near-nonexistent weed control, shit grading at street crossings, and improperly disposed waste tossed to the side of the roadbed in the middle of the Charles River watershed.
It's crucial that if this initiative in the town passes that the commitment gets held to a real supervised trail design. If not as complete as Needham's, then at least with
somebody steering the ship. Because evidence abounds at what happens when Iron Horse is left to their own devices: an otherwise competent outfit becomes born bad actors. Any commitments to build that then subsequently get watered down with less and less town involvement have to get taken as a worrisome sign that this is really, really not going to end up a usable trail. Certainly the concerns don't end--not by a longshot--if the vote passes. Dover has to be kept honest every day until the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Are there enough hands holding their feet to the fire to ensure that?
Then consider the effect on Medfield. Medfield has little to no reason to supervise its trail portion if Dover disengages itself and lets Iron Horse take them for a ride. Medfield then becomes more likely to take the "free" trail too because doing an effective supervision stops mattering when Dover is the weak link in the chain. They'd be motivated to get a contiguous trail for continuity's sake, but no more. And you can't really blame them for thinking that way. That doesn't leave much of a future for the corridor. The active tracks from Route 27 to downtown Millis probably aren't going to be active in 10 years. Right now they're only being used once or twice a month during warm weather to take hopper cars of rocks CSX drops off from Framingham 1 mile down to Environmental Rd. so a local gravel company a short distance away from the tracks can side-load into their trucks. Chances are that inefficient operation isn't going to last long, and with the line having no other prospects it's likely to go abandoned in short order. Then you've got a chance at a contiguous trail to West Medway another 7 miles away, and potential to grab one of the many power line ROW's converging out of there to connect straight to the twin Upper Charles paths in downtown Milford. Maybe even grab the near-100% intact Boston & Pascoag ROW to Blackstone to hook into the Air Line/SNE Trunkline trail. A lot of extensions that have to get strung together to join it to the greater Eastern and Central MA trail networks, but something an incremental 20-year effort can accomplish at netting something truly useful and well-connected to other suburban trails.
None of that happens if Dover--the linchpin of all that future potential--pulls a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
