A private contractor this month is starting the $3.67 million job of creating a bike and pedestrian path between Town Line Road and Norton Park in Plainville as part of a bigger, more complex task to complete the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail.
Crews from Tolland-based Genovesi Construction LLC are scheduled to take until the spring of 2027 to complete the work, and the state transportation department is cautioning motorists on both roads to expect lane or shoulder closures during that time.
Ultimately the work will close part — but not all — of the most troubling gap in the ambitious New Haven to Northampton, MA route. It’s by far Connecticut’s longest and best-known rail trail.
Crews will create about three-quarters of a mile of 12-foot-wide trail; it will run north-south mostly parallel to Redstone Hill Road but a few hundred feet to the east. That path follows the route of the old New Haven and Northampton Canal’s towpath.
This week, Eversource removed out-of-service power lines near a section of the route, said Pete Salomone of the Plainville Greenway Alliance.
There will still be several sections to design and build before the trail is fully linked between Northwest Drive in Plainville and Aircraft Road in Southington. But the state Department of Transportation has a general plan that could close the entire gap, Salomone said Monday.
“They’ve got plans to do it by 2030,” said Salomone, who noted that part of the work would involve digging a tunnel to let cyclists and walkers pass safely below busy Route 72.
Years ago, the state transportation department and the town began planning different routes to skirt the rail line because Pan Am Railways, the regional freight railroad still operating between Plainville and the north end of Southington, was unreceptive to allowing a pedestrian and bike route alongside its tracks.
CSX, one of the major Class 1 freight lines, bought Pan Am three years ago, but appears not to welcome the idea of rails with trails either. The company runs daily trains with tanker cars from its Plainville yard to the National Propane facility on Birch Road, as well as less frequent trains to Forestville Lumber.
The trail will also have to skirt the Plainville yard itself, which is just north of town hall in the town center. CSX uses it to store freight cars on its mostly east-west link between Waterbury and Berlin, and also to serve the Holcim Elevate plant, formerly Firestone Building Products, and another industrial facility in Bristol’s Chippens Hill section.
In Southington, the trail has been completed as far north as Aircraft Road, all directly over the former railbed where tracks had been abandoned for decades. Out-of-service tracks continue a little farther northward just beyond West Queen Street, but the trail can’t go much farther on that route because the National Propane spur begins between West Queen and Birch Street.
Instead, the DOT is interested in extending the trail south from Town Line Road to the former railroad crossing at Newell Street, where it could connect south a block to the Aircraft Road.
Planners continue working on a route for other sections of the trail through Plainville, where CSX freight trains are still running on a short north-south section of the otherwise long-abandoned New York, New Haven & Hartford line.
Some Hemingway Street homeowners have opposed one alternative route that would put the trail alongside their street. They’ve posted Facebook messages concerned about noise, loss of privacy, property values and even a risk of crime.
Steve Mitchell, president of Bike Walk Connecticut, countered that rail trails historically don’t bring the problems that people fear.
“I lived in Simsbury literally along the greenway for 10 years, and I miss it. I never had any problem,” he said. “People want it as place to walk and bike safely, away from traffic.”