About the Cape Cod Rail Trail

The Cape Cod Rail Trail follows the bed of a 19th-century railroad that once carried trains down the Cape to Provincetown. It opened officially on September 25, 1981, as a 19-mile bike path from Dennis to Eastham, and has grown in stages to 25 to 26 miles today. It's run by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR).

The account below follows a 2021 history of the trail by Christopher Setterlund on CapeCod.com, built from newspaper records. Where other sources give slightly different dates for the railroad years, we note it.

The Railroad Years

The trail's route was first a railroad right-of-way owned by the Cape Cod Railroad in the mid-1800s. Trains reached Hyannis and Yarmouth Port first, and by 1872 service ran to Woods Hole and Provincetown. The Cape line then merged into the Old Colony Railroad, which was leased in 1893 to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, usually called the New Haven.

Other histories put the building of the Yarmouth-to-Orleans section in the 1860s under the Cape Cod Central Railroad, with the Old Colony finishing the line to Provincetown in 1873. The overall story is the same: by the 1870s, rails ran the length of the Cape.

The Great Depression hit the New Haven hard, and it began cutting lines it no longer needed. In June 1959, passenger trains over the Cape Cod Canal stopped. By the 1960s, towns were already talking about what to do with the tracks running from Dennis up through Eastham.

From Tracks to Trail

Harwich led the way. In 1964 its voters agreed to take the tracks through town by eminent domain for a bikeway if the owners gave them up. The idea got a boost in 1967 when the Province Lands Bike Trail opened in Provincetown, and again in 1975 with the Shining Sea Bikeway in Falmouth.

It took most of the 1970s. Penn Central absorbed the New Haven in 1969 and soon went bankrupt, but because it hadn't abandoned the tracks, the towns couldn't take them. In July 1978 the state agreed to support Harwich's eminent-domain taking, with conditions that included work on Route 124. Construction began on an 8-foot-wide asphalt path from Route 134 in Dennis to Locust Road in Eastham.

Named by a Third Grader

In 1979, schoolchildren in the trail towns were invited to name the new path and design its logo. Eric Dubin, a third grader from Dennis, sent in the winning name: Cape Cod Rail Trail. Scott Pearson, an eighth grader from Dennis, drew the winning logo.

Opening Day

A 7-mile section from Brewster to Eastham opened unofficially in October 1980, and an estimated 600 to 800 people a day used it right away. The full trail opened officially on September 25, 1981, with a ribbon cutting at the Route 134 trailhead in Dennis. First-day riders received certificates from the state Departments of Environmental Management and Public Works. The trail cost $1 million and ran 19 miles to Eastham, where riders could connect to the Cape Cod National Seashore.

Growing to 26 Miles

• 1995: the trail was extended 3 miles to LeCount Hollow Road in Wellfleet, making it 22 miles long. That's why DCR's mile markers end at 22.
• 2007: the Old Colony Rail Trail opened between Harwich and Chatham, joined to the main trail by a bike rotary. It took the name of the railroad that had run the line a century before.
• 2015–2018: work on a western extension began in 2015. Bridges over Route 134 in Dennis and Station Avenue in Yarmouth were up by June 2017, and when the bridge over the Bass River was finished in 2018, the trail grew by 3.7 miles to Yarmouth.
• 2019 onward: a short section past LeCount Hollow Road, already well underway in 2019, now reaches the edge of Wellfleet Hollow State Campground. The planned link on to Route 6 was dropped in 2021. See trail extensions.

Who Owns and Runs It Today

The Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), the state parks agency, runs the trail from the Nickerson State Park office in Brewster. According to Wikipedia's account, the state bought the rail corridor in 1976 and the Massachusetts Department of Transportation owns the line today, leasing it to DCR for trail use.

What's Next

The trail is still growing west. A roughly 4-mile section from Yarmouth into Barnstable is scheduled to be finished in 2031, and a further section toward Sandwich is in design. The long-held goal, in Setterlund's words, was a bike path across the Cape from Falmouth to Provincetown. Where each piece stands is on our extensions page.