Rail trail progress: New Haven to Northampton route could be completed in five years

Connecticut cyclists and long-haul hikers, prepare: 2027 could be your big year.

With construction nearly finished in New Haven and designs advancing in Plainville, the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail’s entire 55-mile route should be complete from northern Granby to New Haven’s Long Wharf by then, cycling advocates say.

“I’d say at the outside, it’s done by 2027,” said Bruce Donald, southern New England manager of the East Coast Greenway Alliance. “Our schedule has Plainville down for 2026, but I think it’s unlikely — 2027 is reasonable.”

It’s something cyclists and recreation planners have been dreaming of since the first pavement was put down over an abandoned rail line three decades ago.

From the start, the trail’s advocates have dreamed of an uninterrupted route from one end of the state to the other, and even beyond. The trail runs about 8.5 miles into Massachusetts now, and the long-term goal is to complete another 19 or so to reach Northampton, enough for an 83-mile-long end-to-end route.

“I’ll be very excited when it’s done. What COVID has shown is that there’s a real need for people to have a safe place to ride, walk, skateboard or rollerblade without having to worry too much about cars,” said Barbara Collins, president of the Farmington Valley Trails Council.

When the Plainville-Southington gap is finally closed, cyclists and hikers in Connecticut will be able to travel from New Haven’s Long Wharf all the way to the Massachusetts line in northern Granby on a paved route, with almost all sections fully separated from traffic.

Advocates have predicted it would become a substantial tourist attraction when it’s done, similar to long trails such as the 119-mile Paul Bunyan in Minnesota and the 240-mile Katy in Missouri.

“I think once this thing is completed, once this is done from New Haven to Northampton, it will become second only to Mystic in the number of people it attracts to Connecticut,’’ longtime trail council director Dwight Weed said in 2003, when the route was still broken by multiple daunting gaps including stretches of Cheshire, the Route 6 bridge crossing in Farmington and the abandoned rail bridge over Salmon Brook in East Granby.

Nearly 20 years later, he’s just as optimistic.

“We’ve put counters on the trail, and last year’s count was around 250,000 discrete users,” Weed said Thursday. “We get calls or emails from around the country from people who want to ride the trail. There’s nothing else in Connecticut that competes with this.”

Numerous coffee houses, ice cream shops and restaurants along the route already count on trail users for a significant share of their summertime sales.

In Southington, developers of a roughly 240-unit apartment complex along the route have dubbed their project Greenway Commons, and heavily promote its proximity to the route.

“The trail is very popular, and it’s helped our centers in Plantsville and Southington,” said Lou Perillo, the town’s economic development director. “There’s Zingarella, Lions Den, Praline’s, a brewery with a patio right along the trail — I think they’ll be great meeting places as more people use the trail.”

Donald and Collins both predict a major impact beyond recreation: a car-free way to get back and forth to work, at least in cycling season.

The north-south route will be the core, but spur lines — such as the one from Canton and Burlington through Farmington — will offer links to more than a dozen other communities.

“It’s already started giving some people an alternative way to get to work. There are going to be trails off the trail, through Tariffville to Bloomfield and Hartford up to Windsor, and east to Manchester and Glastonbury; that’s opening up whole worlds,” Collins said.

The federal transportation department this summer awarded the Capitol Region Council of Governments more than $16 million, partly to finish the Plainville-Southington gap and partly to build the Beeline Trail, a branch route through Plainville to the CTfastrak station in New Britain.

Donald’s council also is working on linking an east-west trail in Manchester that would connect to the 52-mile-long Airline Trail between East Hampton and Thompson.

Those connections will bring even more riders to the main route when they’re done, advocates predict. Cyclists from out of the region already travel to ride the route along the old rail line, which was built in the mid-1800s to replace the Farmington Canal.

“We meet people on the trail on a regular basis who have come here because they’ve heard about the trail. There are people from New York staying overnight and even from Europe. They’re spending money here, eating here,” Collins said.

Late on a weekday afternoon in September, Julie Herrin, Joy Wallin and Carolyn Boggs of Boulder, Colorado, completed a 100-mile day on the trail as part of their quest to ride 100 miles in each of the 50 states.

They started out with a round trip on the Plainville-Granby section, then drove to Southington for the Southington-New Haven round trip.

“We really enjoyed this trail. It was great,” Wallin said in the Lazy Lane parking lot as she and the others finished their ride. “We did the top half, got back in the van and drove over here.”

Currently the trail has a roughly 5.5-mile gap between Lazy Lane in Southington and Northwest Drive in Plainville. Pan Am and CSX still operate trains along some of the rail route there, and have been unwilling to permit a recreational trail alongside the tracks.

After years of working with Plainville residents and officials, DOT engineers are designing a route alongside local streets that they believe will minimize any disruption to local traffic.

The project is being done in four stages: Three separate sections in Plainville, and one to complete the Southington stretch, said CRCOG Planning Director Robert Aloise.

Progress has been slowed by lengthy environmental reviews, state permit processes, land acquisition, funding and a brownfield cleanup. There was also a yearlong lawsuit by Yarde Metals, which contested the plan to route the greenway across its driveway.

Until the gap is closed, cyclists and pedestrians are forced to detour onto local streets. The chief choices are going along heavily trafficked Route 10 and Route 177, taking a lengthy and hilly excursion around New Britain’s reservoir, or patching together a route linking small municipal roads — but still facing traffic for stretches of car-centric Route 10 or Route 229.

For the Ying family of Cheshire, closing that gap will mean a lot, especially as daughters Miya, 10, and Yina, 6, get older and are ready for more challenging rides.

“We go all the way up to where it ends. Once we rode to Hamden — my daughter’s favorite sandwich shop is there, Nino’s,” said mother Mengxi Ying.

When the family moved to Cheshire nine years ago, the stretch of trail nearby was just abandoned railbed.

“Back then there was nothing here. Even before they laid asphalt, we walked on the dirt road. It’s nice. It’s open. Now they even have a sidewalk from our house,” she said.

The family would like to eventually explore the trail’s northern half. Even on the southern half, there is plenty of variety, she said.

“The scenery is totally different on each side. There it’s more of an industrial feeling, you ride between streets and restaurants and all kinds of city stuff,” Ying said, pointing toward Southington. “But along this side, it’s more outdoorsy. We love the sound when you ride across the boardwalk.”

On the very southern end, planners expect to finish the last mile and a half through New Haven this fall. That section will probably run along city streets because the old canal towpath and railbed have long since been built over.

Then after the Plainville gap is closed, the last remaining uncompleted stretch will be in Massachusetts.

The trail, which is named the Columbia River Greenway there, currently ends at Main Street in Westfield, where the old rail line was elevated. Contractors this summer installed a series of bridges to the Westfield River, but hadn’t opened them to riders as of October.

That leaves a gap of a bit less than 10 miles to reach the Manhan Rail Trail in Easthampton; the Manhan leads into the center of Northampton.