Biking the Boston 'Burbs (Trails, MDC, & Towns beyond Hubway area)

Informative, F-line, as usual, and, as usual, somewhat sobering.
 
Scipio said:
Did the Trapelo road rebuild project include bike lanes through Waltham, or just Belmont? I rarely ride through the town, my only observation is that the Charles River path out that far could use some more or at least more convenient curb cuts where the path intersects roads. I bet that any infrastructure improvements in Waltham itself going to have to go through a certain hometown hero vehicular cyclist.
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Just Belmont. Project limits are at Waltham town line, so Waltham section is same as it ever was.
 
On another subject, the needham segment of the new rail trail (forget the official name of it) has all railroad ties removed and converted to gravel. Still waiting for Dover s approval, I believe.

I remember ten years or so ago driving up to the shingles factory in millis cliquot that still uses that train line... But on maps you can clearly see that the line originally veered south but that part has been inactive for a very long time. Does anyone know the status of that part? I imagine it is gobbled up by private encroachers..
 
On another subject, Bruce Freeman Phase 2 construction is finally under way in Acton. Over the last 5 weeks they're hauled away all the rails, and now there's a mountain of ties next to where 2A intersects the trail. AFAIK by 2016-17 the trail will deadend at Rt.2 near the Concord rotary.
 
bigeman312 said:
The Bay Colony Rail Trail is only planned for between Needham and Medfield, not as far as Millis:

Bay Colony Rail Trail - Frequently Asked Questions

^A little out of date.
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According to Wikipedia the whole line went to Woonsocket... There were many company failures and the final result was the formation of the Bay colony RR but I don't believe this included the entire rail ROW to Woonsocket. Even on USGS maps from the 1970s, it says for the remainder of the railroad that it was just railroad grade, so it seems this was abandoned in a long time ago… I'm just wondering what the status is because the right-of-way itself went through Bellingham and ultimately onto Woonsocket.
 
FK4 said:
On another subject, the needham segment of the new rail trail (forget the official name of it) has all railroad ties removed and converted to gravel. Still waiting for Dover s approval, I believe.

I remember ten years or so ago driving up to the shingles factory in millis cliquot that still uses that train line... But on maps you can clearly see that the line originally veered south but that part has been inactive for a very long time. Does anyone know the status of that part? I imagine it is gobbled up by private encroachers..
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Dover's fighting the trail they were originally for. Total trojan horse move by one of the NIMBY'est communities in Eastern MA, aided and abetted by those two bicycle nihilists who ran the trail lobby and its abandonware website. Needham got punked and now has spent the money for its trail leg that's just going to dead-end at the Charles River for years and years because they thought Dover was acting in good faith. Not that the rails were really worth saving for the future the way the Needham Line gets squeezed for NEC slots, but that particular trail is Exhibit A for how those $1/99-year trail lease agreements MassDOT passed out like candy to the first outfit that filed an application were abused and perverted by NIMBY earth-salters. Just an all-around disaster of infighting local-yokels who never should've been left without adult supervision. If the rest of it ever gets built, it'll be because somebody got their local Legislators to sandbag it on DCR's back at thrice the necessary cost to bust over the opposition.


Medfield Jct. to end of track at the vacant warehouse across the street from Millis Post Office on Route 109 is still active, operated by Bay Colony RR. There's only 1 customer--Tresca Bros. Sand & Gravel on Route 109--that side-loads crushed stone from a pickup spot along Environmental Dr. one or twice a month during warm months. Bay Colony's lone locomotive is usually parked either behind the Medfield Animal Hospital or in the small yard in downtown Millis. GAF was the factory in Millis that was the main user; they shut down 6 or 7 years ago and the factory is halfway-demolished. I can't imagine this line is still going to exist in another 5 years. Right now its only purpose is so CSX can take a half-dozen carloads of rock from Framingham to Medfield Jct., set them off, and Bay Colony to come up and drag those cars exactly 1 mile to a dirt driveway, so Tresca can send a bunch of trucks a mile down 109...then move the empties back to Medfield Jct. for CSX to pick up.. It's only a matter of time before Tresca gets a trucking rate that's cheaper than having 2 railroads move it 10 miles eight or ten times a year. That's as dead-man-walking as it gets.


Rest of the line was part of the Boston & Pascoag RR. Millis to West Medway was abandoned the second commuter rail got cut back to Millis in 1965. West Medway to Bellingham Jct. was cut a couple years earlier. Bellingham Jct. to Woonsocket didn't make it out of the 1920's before abandonment, though Bellingham Jct. itself survives on the active Milford Branch 1 mile past Forge Park station as a wicked S-curve at Depot St. with a freight siding repurposing a few hundred feet of the old mainline. A few feet north of the state line in Blackstone to Downtown Woonsocket remained as an industrial stub until the mid-00's. Woonsocket to North Smithfield is the active P&W Slatersville Secondary, although the last customer closed 4 years ago so it's an any-minute-now abandonment filing. And the last segment from North Smithfield to Pascoag was another one that didn't make it out of the Depression.

^^That's where the mighty Needham Line all used to go. By decade's end there'll probably be nothing left of it west of the Needham Jct. wye except for that S-curve in Bellingham. Amazingly, almost all of it is free and clear except for some encroachment in West Medway where a residential subdivision obliterated it, and Harris Pond at the state line in Woonsocket which has submerged the old causeway it ran on. I'm kind of surprised nobody thought to spur the SNE Trunkline trail north onto it at Blackstone and bring it to Bellingham where it can hook into the nearby Upper Charles trails in Milford and/or rail-trail-to-be Medway-Needham. You'd have a nearly contiguous trail from Hartford to Boston that way, instead of stubbing it out in the middle of the industrial park in Franklin where it's blocked from going anywhere.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
^^That's where the mighty Needham Line all used to go. By decade's end there'll probably be nothing left of it west of the Needham Jct. wye except for that S-curve in Bellingham. Amazingly, almost all of it is free and clear except for some encroachment in West Medway where a residential subdivision obliterated it, and Harris Pond at the state line in Woonsocket which has submerged the old causeway it ran on. I'm kind of surprised nobody thought to spur the SNE Trunkline trail north onto it at Blackstone and bring it to Bellingham where it can hook into the nearby Upper Charles trails in Milford and/or rail-trail-to-be Medway-Needham. You'd have a nearly contiguous trail from Hartford to Boston that way, instead of stubbing it out in the middle of the industrial park in Franklin where it's blocked from going anywhere.
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Reading more about this line online, it's amazing how much rail activity there was even in sleepy Medway - it was new to me, but Im sure you're well familiar with the streetcar line that served Millis and Medway... Pretty cool. At any rate, there doesnt seem to be any movement in Millis, Medway, or Bellingham to convert the railbed to a rail trail. Very puzzling. Not that it hasn't been done, but that there doesn't seem to be any impetus to even consider it.
 
FK4 said:
At any rate, there doesnt seem to be any movement in Millis, Medway, or Bellingham to convert the railbed to a rail trail.
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Bellingham probably has their hands full at the moment turning the Trunkline into a proper trail. The Trunkline as a whole has seen far less love than the Air Line in CT, with the segment east of Blackstone apparently having been one of the least-maintained until the towns recently started taking an interest in improvements. Perhaps if the SNETT starts getting more use, a trail on the Charles River Branch ROW might get some consideration. However, I could imagine that with an abandonment that old the ROW property lines may be far from clean.
 
Uncivil_Engineer said:
Bellingham probably has their hands full at the moment turning the Trunkline into a proper trail. The Trunkline as a whole has seen far less love than the Air Line in CT, with the segment east of Blackstone apparently having been one of the least-maintained until the towns recently started taking an interest in improvements. Perhaps if the SNETT starts getting more use, a trail on the Charles River Branch ROW might get some consideration. However, I could imagine that with an abandonment that old the ROW property lines may be far from clean.
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There's very little abutting property built up on the Bellingham-Blackstone stretch, which was a whole lot of former industrial sand pits dug up to supply grading material for all the expressways in the state when they were built ages ago. Most of those pits are long since closed, and would take a metric asston of imported topsoil to build anything useful on top. They're doing just that in Millerville right along the RI border/Woonsocket city line because that's a pre-existing density pocket along the ROW, but it's still miles and miles of barren sandlots along an intact ROW north. It shouldn't be all that difficult to gain the necessary easements since most of that property is under ownership of those long-closed sand pits, and some criss-crossing power line ROW's.

It would certainly be a far more useful spur trail than the dead-ender at Grove St., Franklin that has no further connection possibility at any point on the compass. Once you hit the active Milford Branch at Bellingham Jct. there's a power line ROW offset 60 ft. from the tracks that parallels the rail line into Milford Center. That's where it can snake along after crossing Depot St. to link to other destinations.


  • B&P trail through Medway, Millis, Medfield, Dover, Needham. One residential subdivision blocker in West Medway to detour around, and a fait accompli rail line abandonment in Millis is all that has to be squared for the straight shot to Needham Jct. Having an East Coast Greenway designation with DCR as lead agency steamrolls the Dover opposition.
Then all you have to do is seek a rail-with-trail side path through Hersey on the adjacent power line ROW and add footbridges over 128 and the Charles to get around the active tracks and dump into the Cutler Park trail system at the bottom of the rail embankment. Cross the Boston city line into West Roxbury, and put a path along VFW Parkway to reach the planned Arboretum-Rozzie path and get a thru connection to SW Corridor Park and the Emerald Necklace.

A true Downtown Hartford to Downtown Boston contiguous trail (or close enough, as there's still a bunch of missing Air Line bridges NE of Willimantic to fill in).

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  • The power line ROW along the active Milford Branch tracks dumps into downtown Milford, where the twin Upper Charles rail trails fork off.
The westerly Upper Charles trail, when completed, reaches Route 135 in Hopkinton and can be routed through conservation land from there to reach Southborough commuter rail station.

The easterly Upper Charles trail is 95% complete (though DCR was never able to pave it because CSX still owns it in Holliston and is charging the town monthly rent for a crushed stone surface while they remain at impasse over sale price). That one reaches to Whitney St. in Sherborn. Only a 4.5 mile gap remains between this trail-head and the eventual southern trail head of the Bruce Freeman Trail at Route 9 (really, really delayed by CSX asking too much for the Framingham-South Sudbury ROW). North of Whitney it's blocked into Framingham center by the active CSX south freight yard, which isn't going anywhere. So a detour through conservation land would close the gap to 1/2 mile on-street to reach downtown, then a trip around the Farm Pond side path to Mt. Wayte Ave. closes the rest of the gap to the Bruce Freeman to exactly 1 mile. Streetscape through Framingham State U. and put a badly needed footbridge over Route 9 and you're on the Freeman.

From there you'll eventually have a straight shot to Downtown Lowell, plus the east-west Central Mass trail. And all the requisite gap minimization for finding a way to get the EC Greenway into New Hampshire and Maine.

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So the Greenway's map does ultimately need some tweaking for better routings than some of the really hard ones in Eastern MA density that their system map currently earmarks. But that Blackstone-Bellingham spur of the SNET ends up the missing link that enables it all...the Hartford-Boston direct spur, and the mainline Greenway to Northern New England. Hopefully they're well motivated to seek a route through the sand pits to make this happen.



(BTW...there should be zero conflicts if MassDOT and RIDOT act on RIDOT's request for a joint study before 2020 of future Woonsocket-via-Franklin commuter rail. The ROW is so well-buffered that the trail can be shifted 20 feet to the side (and probably paved up a lot nicer than the barely navigable 'as-is' trail currently there) the whole way to Blackstone. Franklin Line would never need more than 1 track on the 8 miles between Franklin Jct. and the junction with the P&W mainline at the state line, and the ROW is so sparsely abutted that that they'd easily have room for a thick tree buffer between tracks and trail. Some places you could offset it as much as that power line ROW is offset from the Milford Branch between Bellingham Jct. and downtown Milford.)
 
Bike lanes in Marlborough?

I stumbled across this - I don't actually know much about Marlborough. It just didn't strike me as the sort of place that would be putting in any bike infrastructure, however modest.
 
Balerion said:
Bike lanes in Marlborough?

I stumbled across this - I don't actually know much about Marlborough. It just didn't strike me as the sort of place that would be putting in any bike infrastructure, however modest.
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They're rich. They can afford it. They also have the well-utilized and paved Assabet River Rail Trail going downtown Marlborough to downtown Hudson, with future connection to the Central Mass trail when it's completed into Hudson. And they have the other Marlboro Branch on the SE end of downtown left to trail (the Assabet/ex-Boston & Maine line to northern downtown was separate and never connected to the ex-New Haven line that stared at it from the south end of downtown). That one would connect to the whole Sudbury Reservoir + aqueducts path network into Framingham.


So, yeah...it's plausible. They have a decent number of pre-existing recreational options that are multiplying in total scale as new interconnections get built. If their paths are an attraction to residents they've probably got a lot of bike owners pushing this as a sensible investment at the town level.
 
5-foot bike lanes, big whoop. That's some paint that can be slapped down. This is just a roadway widening project with some greenwashing.

Maybe it's called-for, I dunno. I wouldn't get excited though.
 
Looks like the Marlboro bike lanes are because of MassDOT. Likely the R.O.W. wasn't too constrained, so MassDOT wasn't in a position to drop it as they have on so many projects where the R.O.W. is narrowish.

To go without bike accommodations on a MassDOT project these days requires a design exception which appears to be easy enough to get if the R.O.W. is narrow and can't be easily widened. The state still seems to be very shy with using eminent domain.

With luck, MassDOT will take it's new separated bike lane design guide seriously and make far better facilities; although with a several year backlog of projects, it might take 4 or 5 years before we see one of them completed.

With the state starting this it's one less obstacle for Cities and Towns to adopt bike infrastructure: for many towns the heaviest traveled roads in town are State owned. Putting even simple cheap bike lanes on state highways helps remove the argument that adding lanes to town owned collector streets won't help anyone because they don't connect to other infrastructure.

P.S.: the same thinking applies to sidewalks.
 
The entire Salem Bike Committee resigned last week: http://www.salemnews.com/news/local...cle_f4991939-de3a-5597-ae3e-f8590dda1d97.html

It looks like half of it was frustration at with how long it took to implement weak projects, and half frustration at being shut out of Salem's review process. Salem seemed from afar like one of the more progressive cycling suburbs, and I've had decent experiences the few times I've passed through.
 
Scipio said:
The entire Salem Bike Committee resigned last week: http://www.salemnews.com/news/local...cle_f4991939-de3a-5597-ae3e-f8590dda1d97.html
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I liked this tweet in the comments:
jonorcutt @jonorcutt
@StreetsBoston In advocacy 101, bike advisory committees a prime example of wasting time in the "wrong room." Real policy made elsewhere
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I've found that volunteer bike advocacy is much more effective from outside of these navel-gazing town boards that don't typically have the power to get anything done.
 
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Sounds like the Salem BAC had to deal with a department as idiotic as the Boston Public Works Dept. No actual changes despite policy changes and absolutely no public process.

But BACs can work if the local transportation and public works departments believe in making their community better for people on foot and on bikes. Brookline is a decent example. They don't get everything that they ask for, but they have made some decent progress.
 
Natick reaches agreement with CSX on the Cochituate Rail Trail.

They've agreed on a purchase price, but Natick still has to find the funding. This is the stretch of ROW that connects Natick center to the short section in Framingham that has already been built.

NATICK - The town and CSX have reached an agreement under which the town could purchase a former railroad line eyed as a walking and biking trail for about $6.3 million.

The town would need to obtain the funding for the roughly 22-acre purchase by Nov. 1. Either party may abandon the deal at any point until then, among other terms of the agreement outlined in a recent memo to selectmen.
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Belmont continues to inch forwards on a trail running east-west through town, most likely along the Fitchburg line tracks in a rail-with-trail. It connects to the existing Fitchburg Cutoff path on the east and to the not yet built Mass Central path in the west. It has a lot of support, but also vitriolic opposition by residents of Channing Road who abut the tracks and proposed trail. It seems to be fears about the usual crack dealers on bicycles coming over from Cambridge to steal their TVs, at least from online comments that I've seen. Trail politics suck.

The Belmont Community Path Advisory Committee did a study published in 2014 where they recommending building a path and presented several routing options. The follow-up Belmont Community Path Implementation Committee released an update last month: http://www.belmont-ma.gov/sites/belmontma/files/file/file/cpiac_update_to_bos_121415.pdf . From the update it looks like Belmont's city council is tasked with choosing the final routing. The route is broken up into five segments, each with at least one north and south option.

The Implementation Committee is writing the RFP for a planning consultant to do another study by Spring 2017, and then hire the design consultant. With a schedule like that I highly doubt there's a path until 2020.
 
Scipio said:
Belmont continues to inch forwards on a trail running east-west through town, most likely along the Fitchburg line tracks in a rail-with-trail. It connects to the existing Fitchburg Cutoff path on the east and to the not yet built Mass Central path in the west. It has a lot of support, but also vitriolic opposition by residents of Channing Road who abut the tracks and proposed trail. It seems to be fears about the usual crack dealers on bicycles coming over from Cambridge to steal their TVs, at least from online comments that I've seen. Trail politics suck.

The Belmont Community Path Advisory Committee did a study published in 2014 where they recommending building a path and presented several routing options. The follow-up Belmont Community Path Implementation Committee released an update last month: http://www.belmont-ma.gov/sites/belmontma/files/file/file/cpiac_update_to_bos_121415.pdf . From the update it looks like Belmont's city council is tasked with choosing the final routing. The route is broken up into five segments, each with at least one north and south option.

The Implementation Committee is writing the RFP for a planning consultant to do another study by Spring 2017, and then hire the design consultant. With a schedule like that I highly doubt there's a path until 2020.
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Quite a few blood-boiling comments in that thread. I understand the concerns about more crime, but most of the people commenting sound like they've never even set foot on the Minuteman path.
 
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