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Fri, 17 Jul 2015

Rail Trails #15

The weekend of 7/11, I rode the D&H Rail Trail Northern Section, mostly in Vermont, the Zim Smith Trail including the Route 9 Bypass which runs partly on the Hudson Valley trolley, the Cohoes Black Bridge Trail, the Kingston Point Rail Trail, and the final part of the Catskill Scenic Trail.

I have a goal of riding every named Rail-Trail in New York State. There are many more railbeds not used for trains anymore which are also ridable. They are usually unnamed, unsigned, and unpublished. I speculate that this is because the owner is either indifferent or away. I've ridden some of these but I'm more interested in getting the named trails ridden first. I'm uploading them to OpenStreetMap as I go.

The first trail ride for which I have a date is June of 2004. So this has been a ten-year project for me. Given that I'm not done yet, and they're continually making new trails, it looks like I've got another set of trails to ride.

Trails I've ridden:

Trails I haven't (yet) ridden:

posted at: 05:54 | path: /bicycling | permanent link to this entry

Ride starting Sat Jul 11 15:24:37 2015

20.15 km 66096.92 feet 12.52 mi 5579.00 seconds 92.98 minutes 1.55 hours 8.08 mi/hr

Rode a portion of the Catskill Scenic Trail that I hadn't ridden earlier. On a previous ride of the CST, I got to this section and it immediately had ties and was wet. Since the section north of Grand Gorge Station is quite muddy, I expected that the trail was in poor condition and not rideable. Starting instead at Hubbell Corners, the trail is quite pleasant. Mostly grass over cinders, there are some portions where the grass is gone, and the cinders are exposed. This makes for easy cycling.

posted at: 05:27 | path: /bicycling | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 15 Jul 2015

Ride starting Fri Jul 10 17:54:51 2015

4.48 km 14691.34 feet 2.78 mi 2205.00 seconds 36.75 minutes 0.61 hours 4.54 mi/hr

Bicycled the Kingston Point Rail Trail, or at least the part of it which is currently open. It is a rail-with-trail that parallels the tracks goling out to Kingston Point. There will be more once they have finished pulling the rails from the two horseshoe curves. I also did some noodling around in the park, looking for some trolley tracks that I had been told are still present. Turns out they're on the trail going out to the rail-trail from the park.

posted at: 02:51 | path: /bicycling | permanent link to this entry

Ride starting Fri Jul 10 13:52:52 2015

31.68 km 103932.28 feet 19.68 mi 6587.00 seconds 109.78 minutes 1.83 hours 10.76 mi/hr

Bicycled the Zim Smith trail again, but specially to ride the "Route 9 Bypass". It uses part of the Hudson Valley trolley line. It's less than a mile and a half, but it's still worth riding.

posted at: 02:43 | path: /bicycling | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 14 Jul 2015

Archives

36.48 km 119692.91 feet 22.67 mi 9297.00 seconds 154.95 minutes 2.58 hours 8.78 mi/hr

Rode the Delaware and Hudson Washington Branch, now the D&H Rail Trail, in Vermont. There are three sections, because not all of the NY section has been converted into a rail-trail. This one is the North section. Didn't see a lot of railroadiana along the way. All the bridges are original, and have some ties before and after the bridges. Saw a couple of signal boxes along the trail. Poultney still has both its passenger and freight stations.

posted at: 05:50 | path: /bicycling | permanent link to this entry

Ride starting Fri Jul 10 16:16:59 2015

5.34 km 17515.34 feet 3.32 mi 1382.00 seconds 23.03 minutes 0.38 hours 8.64 mi/hr

Bicycled the Cohoes Black Bridge trail. It's a portion of the D&H line that ran close to the Hudson. I had bicycled a portion of it earlier on the Cycled The Erie Canal rides in 2012 and 2013. This bridge wasn't open until after that. I saw route markers painted on the rail-trail so I'm guessing that at least last year's ride was routed on the Black Bridge Trail.

posted at: 05:20 | path: /bicycling | permanent link to this entry

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