After Christmas morning festivities, I went out for a run and found my favorite gift of the day: The new Linden Street Bridge is open. The bridge carries walkers, runners, and cyclists over Route 60, completing an off-road connection from the Beaver Brook in Waltham near Belmont and Watertown through almost to Route 95. The state Department of Conservation and Recreation had completed the Linden Street Bridge earlier this year, but could not open it for lack of a custom-fabricated safety fence along the bridge. For months, a barrier had allowed a longing glance across the bridge but blocked walkers, runners, and cyclists. DCR finally received and installed the safety fence and the bridge is now open. Great to find this gift on Christmas day.
From the end of the Waltham path, near Route 95, people must traverse a short on-road stretch along Route 117 over Route 95 to Jones Road. From Jones Road, people can then access another recently completed bridge, which connects to an off-road path running all the way to Russell’s Garden in Wayland. From Russell’s it gets a little trickier to traverse the 2 or 3 miles to the recently-completed path segment that continues to Hudson, but that connection can already be made mostly on lightly traveled roads (Pelham Island and Landham) and a proper trail is planned for completion over the next two to three years.
The City of Waltham deserves huge credit for supporting and funding this new connection which is a link in the larger Massachusetts Central Rail Trail Project. The MCRT will ultimately connect Boston to Northampton. The Belmont Community Path is another link in the MCRT. The MCRT will ultimately be a regional commuting and recreational asset of huge value.
It’s great to see these improvements, Senator. Thank you for the updates and cheers to the DCR for their work — and for those sharp looking markers that go up.
It’s a bummer that when the Beaver Brook bridge/culvert at Beaver St washed out a few years ago that the pedestrian bridge there was never replaced. There used to be a wooden pedestrian bridge over the brook next to the road bridge.
The road bridge there doesn’t have shoulders wide enough for pedestrians, on both sides nor any nearby way to cross Beaver Street (despite there being a curb cut and ADA bumps to nowhere:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/QrF9tFcz3dDB2XW3A
here’s the street view of the old pedestrian bridge:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/aoDbrRDNjQ7yxEce6
Glad they kept the commuter rail system intact and in-service during construction. Mass central RR was a redundant. Hope they kept the tracks for a circumferential streetcar line (128 median strip) for cross-town line.