Poughkeepsie has The Walkway Over the Hudson.

The City of Beacon has the Beacon Line.

The Beacon Line Project is a long term advocacy group centered on finding ways to use this relic of Beacon's industrial past. Whether light rail, trolley, hiking, biking, alone or in combination, the Beacon Line Project aims to draw attention to the line and potential plans for its use and to keep the drum beat alive until one vision or another is realized.

Click on the tabs below, each one a link to an outline of an idea for the Beacon Line's potential use. Which vision should dominate?

Contact us at the Beacon Line Project to submit your own ideas or to contribute in other ways to the worthy cause. The only vision that is not acceptable is the current status quo: that a potent transportation alternative, owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority no less, should run right through our city, and simply lie fallow.

Notes:

• Dia and Beacon Institute's participation is voluntary, but it's an obvious and excellent linkage for them to the wider city and tourists. Dia has an old rail bed running behind their property to Dennings Avenue and would require very little work to make a bike lane connection to this web of trails.
• On weekend summer days, renting bikes at the train station and/ or Dia could be commercially viable.
• Signage: Directions and maps mostly, but the trail intersects no streets until Churchill Street, where the trail should probably end for now. Maybe go to Fishkill and Hopewell Junction/ the Dutchess Rail Trail someday as a Fishkill Creek Greenway
• With views of Wey-Gat (Wind Gate, the Hudson Highlands) and the magnificent falls in Madam Brett Park, this is a tourist destination in and of itself:

  

  

• Scenic Hudson has already built much of these trails. There is the Klara Sauer Trail along the Hudson, and the trails in Madam Brett Park. However, these trails are disconnected. It is Scenic Hudson's long standing goal to unite Dennings Point with Madam Brett Park. This is the way to do it:

  February 4, 2012:

  Wonderful News!

  http://thehudsonvalleygreen.com/2012/02/04/long-buried-tunnel-revealed/

  A long lost tunnel has been refound, allowing the connection of Dennings Point and the Klara Sauer Trail with Madam Brett Park (making the following section on this website obsolete). Many thanks for Mark Roland for getting this news out and David Miller and his childhood memories. This amazing development does wonders to improve this area for residential and tourist enjoyment. Celebrate!

  As part of the City of Beacon's future T.O.D. developments with the M.T.A., the city needs to get a concession from the M.T.A. that a small notch of land under the Beacon Line bridge and along (but not near) the main MetroNorth tracks can be fenced off so that the small necessary trail linkage be made possible. This is the small bit of land the M.T.A. needs to fence off:

  

  This is a view of the Beacon Line bridge over the main MetroNorth tracks, taken from the Dennings Avenue bridge, looking south. The red line indicates the proposed trail as seen in the map above. It requires a small notch of land, far enough from the tracks, that, properly fenced off, would not in any way endanger bikers or walkers or prevent MetroNorth from using the cinder road along the tracks for maintenance trucks.

  The trail here would be tight, single file, with a high fence for safety, but it is a short stretch. For drainage purposes the base of the trail might even be wood or metal grill for a short distance due to the fact that this weedy area is now a drainage ditch. It is in the M.T.A.'s interest to concede this small notch as I frequently see people using the cinder road along the main tracks for access, and this is dangerous.

  It is vital for the M.T.A. to make this concession, as other schemes to connect Madam Brett Park with Dennings Point are not good. Either you would have to cross over the Beacon Line tracks, or drive a new trail far inland, involving streets and private property close to homes, that doesn't even connect until South Avenue goes under the Beacon Line tracks.

• Revive the Tioronda Bridge, for pedestrians and bikes only:

  John has documented the travesty that has befallen the architecturally notable historic bridge:

  Remember the Tioronda Bridge and the rush the previous administration was in to have it removed? The city administrator at the time, Joe Braun, was adamant about the need to remove it as we needed to build a new wider and stronger span to accomodate emergency vehicles. Never mind that the Tioronda Bridge was one of two such historic bridges left in the state, and that even with a new bridge, most emergency vehicles wouldn't be able to squeeze through the RR underpass a few hundred feet away from the bridge. So, despite its status on the National Register of Historic Places, the bridge was removed and the bow string truss sections stored on private property near East Main street. Now that the property is being developed, the truss's had to be moved and are now piled on top of one another next to the gate of the city Transfer Station.

  

  As John notes, the bridge was on the National Register of Historic Places as a rare example of an old bridge design that only exists in one other place. The decaying sections of the bridge can be revived as guardrails, or copied.

  

• The main map above shows the Madam Brett trails extended all the way to Church Street, along Fishkill Creek. Some of this extension would involve elevated platforms over the old mill works aside Fishkill Creek where the Madam Brett Park trails now end, as Scenic Hudson has currently done over the Fishkill Creek to go around the old Beacon Terminal property. Beyond that, at no point would you need to involve M.T.A. owned land along the Beacon Line tracks, until Route 9D, even though it looks to be quite close in the main map above. A closer examination of the land shows that much of the trail can use historic and existing road beds and rail beds across the demolished Tuck Tape Factory area.

  To get under Route 9D, there are two ways to go: you would have to elevate out over the creek again, or get the M.T.A. to concede another notch of its property, in a similar manner as profiled above for connecting to Dennings Point. Past 9D, there are many ways to run the trail up to Church Street over land that the City of Beacon now uses for storage and vehicle lots.

  The best way to extend trails from Madam Brett Park to Church Street remains to be determined, there are many possible routes, and you would have to take into account various proposed real estate developments along the creek being considered by the city. But even if the trail ends at Madam Brett Park and no such extension is made, bikers and walkers can go under the Beacon Line tracks at the South Avenue underpass and use Tioronda Avenue to get to Main Street Beacon. Although, that would not be ideal, it is not scenic and there are no sidewalks: an interim solution at best.