Plymouth to Quincy
Jun. 13th, 2004 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dmazeThis was one of those mad biking plans. It was a bit longer than I had expected, and not really as scenic. Nice day for it, at least, a little warm but not so terrible I was perpetually overheating. Brief summary: 37 miles from the Plymouth commuter rail to the Wollaston (Quincy) T stop, in about four hours, mostly following route 3A.
I left South Station on the 12:40 train to Plymouth. This was not the most thrilling of commuter rail trips. In one of the Douglas Adams books -- quite likely So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish -- he talks about airplane window seats that are scratchy and foggy and you can't see anything out of at all, which entirely describes the left side of this train. After we hit Zone 5 enough people got off that I could finally get a window seat and get my bike out of the aisle, but it just wasn't that pretty a trip.
I kind of expected the Plymouth commuter rail to be around the center of Plymouth. In fact, it was on the very northern edge, by a Wal-Mart and not much else. (Maybe it's not surprising that there are zero forward-commute trains from there; they all take the other branch of that line to Kingston/Route 3.) The very very end of the track was right next to a "B 36" milepost, so my route was a little inefficient compared to the train line.
From the Wal-Mart parking lot, I headed up 3A and immediately crossed into Kingston. Either the first half of the trip wasn't that exciting, or I just don't remember anything from it. In any case, I followed 3A through unexciting parts of Duxbury and Marshfield. (Looking at a real map now, I could have done much better going up Bay Road and Washington Street through coastal Duxbury.) On something of a whim, I turned off of 3A when I got to Scituate, following Country Way.
Along Country Way I encountered Northeast Train and Model, and so I felt obligated to stop. It was a tiny store. About three quarters of it was train things, but they had other model kits as well. Their train stuff, in turn, was mostly HO and mostly rolling stock. After playing with N-scale 40' boxcars for a while, an HO-scale MBTA commuter rail car is huge. Anyways. Didn't buy anything. Went on my way.
Made it to North Scituate, took a quick look at what was clearly an abandoned passenger rail platform. From here on in I was mostly following the proposed Greenbush commuter rail line. I didn't really see who was going to ride it. Neither Scituate nor Cohasset looked that developed, and people from further out would ride one of the other Old Colony commuter lines. Maybe coastal Scituate is more developed, or something.
Passed a stone marker with "C" on one side and "S" on the other. (There's one of those near Porter Square, too.) Apparently the Cohasset-Scituate line is historically the dividing line between Massachusetts Bay Colony and New Plymouth Colony. Rode through central Cohasset, then met up with 3A in Hingham to ride west towards Quincy. Biking on four-lane highway isn't terribly fun. There's a bridge where 3A crosses over the Greenbush line, rebuilt in 2002. Optimistic buggers.
I rode across Hingham and Weymouth, and came to the Fore River Bridge. This is a %@#$ing huge drawbridge, basically. I don't know bridge terminology, but they're replacing a two-parts-swings-open-in-the-middle bridge with a middle-part-lifts-vertically-straight-up bridge. They're still in the process, it looks like, of finishing up the new bridge and taking apart the old one.
Also in this area, they seem to be building a new power plant. On the north side of the bridge in Quincy is the Twin Rivers Technologies plant. This is only remarkable because they have a rail line with tank cars labelled "Technical Animal Fat". What would you do with 200,000 gallons of tallow?
...and then I biked through Quincy, passed Quincy Center because I wasn't sure if my T pass would work there, and showed up at Wollaston with 37.06 miles for the trip and took the T home.
It was a longer trip than I had expected; I was aiming for about 30 miles. I'm actually a little glad I went alone; I wound up stopping every two or three miles, just because, and walking up some hills, and there was some side randomness, and I didn't have a good map and didn't actually know where I was going ("if I follow 3A long enough I get back to Bostonish").
Finally, if you happen to be looking for a Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, possibly because you moved and the USPS has been sending you 10% off coupons, there's on on 3A in Weymouth.
I left South Station on the 12:40 train to Plymouth. This was not the most thrilling of commuter rail trips. In one of the Douglas Adams books -- quite likely So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish -- he talks about airplane window seats that are scratchy and foggy and you can't see anything out of at all, which entirely describes the left side of this train. After we hit Zone 5 enough people got off that I could finally get a window seat and get my bike out of the aisle, but it just wasn't that pretty a trip.
I kind of expected the Plymouth commuter rail to be around the center of Plymouth. In fact, it was on the very northern edge, by a Wal-Mart and not much else. (Maybe it's not surprising that there are zero forward-commute trains from there; they all take the other branch of that line to Kingston/Route 3.) The very very end of the track was right next to a "B 36" milepost, so my route was a little inefficient compared to the train line.
From the Wal-Mart parking lot, I headed up 3A and immediately crossed into Kingston. Either the first half of the trip wasn't that exciting, or I just don't remember anything from it. In any case, I followed 3A through unexciting parts of Duxbury and Marshfield. (Looking at a real map now, I could have done much better going up Bay Road and Washington Street through coastal Duxbury.) On something of a whim, I turned off of 3A when I got to Scituate, following Country Way.
Along Country Way I encountered Northeast Train and Model, and so I felt obligated to stop. It was a tiny store. About three quarters of it was train things, but they had other model kits as well. Their train stuff, in turn, was mostly HO and mostly rolling stock. After playing with N-scale 40' boxcars for a while, an HO-scale MBTA commuter rail car is huge. Anyways. Didn't buy anything. Went on my way.
Made it to North Scituate, took a quick look at what was clearly an abandoned passenger rail platform. From here on in I was mostly following the proposed Greenbush commuter rail line. I didn't really see who was going to ride it. Neither Scituate nor Cohasset looked that developed, and people from further out would ride one of the other Old Colony commuter lines. Maybe coastal Scituate is more developed, or something.
Passed a stone marker with "C" on one side and "S" on the other. (There's one of those near Porter Square, too.) Apparently the Cohasset-Scituate line is historically the dividing line between Massachusetts Bay Colony and New Plymouth Colony. Rode through central Cohasset, then met up with 3A in Hingham to ride west towards Quincy. Biking on four-lane highway isn't terribly fun. There's a bridge where 3A crosses over the Greenbush line, rebuilt in 2002. Optimistic buggers.
I rode across Hingham and Weymouth, and came to the Fore River Bridge. This is a %@#$ing huge drawbridge, basically. I don't know bridge terminology, but they're replacing a two-parts-swings-open-in-the-middle bridge with a middle-part-lifts-vertically-straight-up bridge. They're still in the process, it looks like, of finishing up the new bridge and taking apart the old one.
Also in this area, they seem to be building a new power plant. On the north side of the bridge in Quincy is the Twin Rivers Technologies plant. This is only remarkable because they have a rail line with tank cars labelled "Technical Animal Fat". What would you do with 200,000 gallons of tallow?
...and then I biked through Quincy, passed Quincy Center because I wasn't sure if my T pass would work there, and showed up at Wollaston with 37.06 miles for the trip and took the T home.
It was a longer trip than I had expected; I was aiming for about 30 miles. I'm actually a little glad I went alone; I wound up stopping every two or three miles, just because, and walking up some hills, and there was some side randomness, and I didn't have a good map and didn't actually know where I was going ("if I follow 3A long enough I get back to Bostonish").
Finally, if you happen to be looking for a Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, possibly because you moved and the USPS has been sending you 10% off coupons, there's on on 3A in Weymouth.
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Date: 2004-06-13 08:48 am (UTC)Friday I biked to the Franklin Park Zoo (Mass Ave-->Symphony, hard-to-find bike path-->Forest Hills T, getting lost from there to the zoo even though it's only about a mile). 21ish miles? Underwhelming zoo but fun.
Saturday, minuteman path-->Lexington roads-->Concord Center-->random dirt path (former rail bed?)-->Bedford-->Minuteman path. 30 miles. Very nice. The dirt part was surprisingly excellent -- normally I don't like dirt paths but it was very scenic, twittery forest, and at one part it's buckled into neat mogul-like things which are fun to bike over.
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Date: 2004-06-13 08:57 am (UTC)The trail from the Bedford Depot to Concord Center is the Reformatory Branch Rail Trail. I should do it again at some point, though I've switched my tires to more-road, less-trail. It's a nice trail; the time I rode it with
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Date: 2004-06-13 09:33 am (UTC)The Reformatory Branch (ooh, title!) had a few muddy patches, and I wouldn't want to ride it too soon after a rain, but it wasn't at all bad (and considering that we *did* have a lot of rain this week it must dry out fairly quickly). And I was doing this on hybrid tires. I didn't find the traffic on the Minuteman too bad until we got in toward Arlington, where, of course, it's always terrible on a nice weekend, but you can use Mass Ave instead.