A group of rail trail enthusiasts headed out into a blustery Thursday morning to see what could be the future of the Northern Rail Trail.
The Friends of the Merrimack River Greenway Trail, the Friends of the Northern Rail Trail, and the Central New Hampshire Regional Planning Commission hosted a hike along a section of Pan Am’s recently abandoned Northern Railroad in Concord.
The organizations are working to convert the 6.5-mile long railroad bed into a multipurpose and non-motorized trail that will connect to the existing 58-mile long Northern Rail Trail, which stretches from Boscawen to Lebanon.
There are two railroad rights-of-way to the east of North State Street in Concord near the state prison. The one nearer to the road – less than 100 feet in some places – was part of a line running to Claremont that was fully abandoned by 2008.
The newly abandoned line, which hikers walked Thursday, runs at times alongside the Merrimack River, all the way north past the old Sewalls Falls dam site and the Hannah Duston memorial. It also skirts lands owned by the Morrill family and farmland once tended by the state’s prison, which now sits unused due to lack of staffing.
The state didn’t want to buy the Claremont line when it came available, and so it fell into the hands of various private property owners or remained under Pan Am’s control. Between Concord and Hopkinton alone, that once-continuous line has been broken up into more than 40 parcels.
The Northern Railway was built in 1847, according to the Friends of the Northern Rail Trail’s website. Passenger service was discontinued in 1965; by the next decade, freight was also discontinued.