Under The Glass The world through my lenses

Norwottuck Rail Trail

For today's adventure, we ventured out to the Norwottuck Rail Trail. This trail starts in Northampton, MA and ends 10 miles later in Amherst, MA. The rail road was created in 1887 and was used until the year 1979. In 1993 the rail road was developed for recreational use. Pictured above is where we started right at the Elwell State Park.

The view from the old rail road tressel crossing the Connecticut river was impressive. The river was running strong after the recent rain we had.

In all we did a total of 5 miles. A few things surprised me during this walk. First of all it is amazing how flat this area is. Being flat, we saw a lot of farms and fields like this corn field pictured below.

The next thing I noticed was that there were a lot of abandoned things such as houses and old vehicles. Here is what is left of a pickup truck.

It was easy to imagine this area in its heyday. There were a few "track" side buildings along the way. This one here has been left to ruins. It looked like it had a platform of some sort that either allowed passengers or freight to access a stopped train.

Another building that I did not get a good photo of was a multi-tenant building that had a bike shop that you could rent bikes from. Also in this building was a restaurant that sold food, beverages and ice cream.

All in all, this proved to be a nice trail to walk and I can see my family and I doing this again.