[Bike] Climb Near The Clouds

narya and I did the 92-mile version of the CRW Climb to the Clouds yesterday. Finished, though very last (or very close to last) out of anybody who did any of the Concord routes. I got the mountain bike lecture from one of the trailers ("think of it as adding 20 miles to your ride"; does this mean I did an effective century?). But we did finish, even if my body started complaining that it was really really tired around mile 80 or so, and so the little hills in Acton and Concord were wiping me out even though they were, by the outside-of-495 standards of earlier in the ride, pretty wimpy.

In the process got rained on, rather heavily in outer Sterling and more normally in the Stow/Boxborough area on the return. The biker uniform dries pretty quickly, it turns out, though my bike computer stops registering if water gets around the contacts. And so my bike wound up with only 83 miles on it; there were times when it was "hmm, I'm racing downhill but my speed is 0.0" or "I feel like I'm going at a continuous speed, around 16.3, 10.2, 16.1, 8.4 mph". (route)

And now, some rail history geeking

Yesterday's bike trip took us across several of the runs-north-and-south-between-main-lines lines north of Worcester, and across the failed Mass Central. ( possibly incorrect speculation on Massachusetts freight rail )

So, about that Mass Central. In Berlin and Bolton, the part we biked past, there's this big berm that's clearly the ex-MCRR right-of-way. (From West Boylston west, there's a unpaved rail trail; between Waltham and Sudbury there are power lines.) The point at which we crossed it had a "no trespassing, MWRA" sign. It's really visible; if you look at my Google Maps bike trip page, double-click on the 60-mile marker, zoom all the way in on satellite mode and go east to the next turn, you can see it winding along, parallel to the straighter CSX (ex-OC) line. Did they really build what looks like 15 or 20 miles of rail on a big pile of dirt? Or is this some kind of subtle aqueduct thing on an unused right-of-way?