Wednesday, September 3, 2008

A Ride on the Bedford Narrow Gauge Rail Trail

Here's a pair of pics from the Bedford-to-Billerica rail trail that's built on the right-of-way for an old narrow gauge line. To my knowledge this is the only narrow-gauge rail trail in the country, please correct me if I'm wrong.

At the start of the trail in Bedford there's a preserved bit of track:
Here's a shot of what much of the trail looks like. It's got a stone-dust bed that's pretty easy to ride on. The 28mm-wide slicks I use were the narrowest I'd want to use here due to the sandy patches.
The trail is 3 miles long. On the way to the end I took it easy with a 10 mph pace. On the way back I picked up the pace to 16 mph. Any faster than that and the handling on the somewhat loose surface got a little squirrelly - a consequence of the tire width.

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