Train Trek
A Trek Along the Cocheco Railroad
There’s a certain type of person obsessed with trains.
I am not one of them.
However, I can’t pretend not to understand—at least a little—the allure of a chugging locomotive traveling through rolling hills, babbling brooks, or whatever other enchanting scenery you might be picturing.
What I have always been obsessed with are escapades of varying levels of spontaneity.
The escapade that most recently captured my attention just happened to involve trains—historical trains, to be exact. My good friend Alec was conducting a bit of historical research on our hometown (as one does when sick in bed) and discovered a forum post describing a railway that had snaked from our hometown of Dover, New Hampshire, thirty miles northwest to Alton Bay.
This particular line caught his attention because it partially ran through a small forest abutting my childhood backyard. We’d spent many summers over the years exploring this area, including a stone tunnel over Blackwater Brook that once supported the railroad in question. Here’s a photo of some of my friends, including Alec (the one with the yellow hard hat), standing beneath it:
So when Alec suggested we map out the route and walk it, I was game—against the better judgment of my underutilized winter legs.
Using insights gleaned from a series of posts on a train forum and maps found in various historical archives, we mapped out the route on AllTrails with waypoints marking stations along the route. The route maintains close proximity to civilization, so we wouldn’t need to carry much on our backs—just some snacks, water, and other basic essentials.
We decided to tackle it the very next weekend: June 1st.
We parked at the Dover Public Library a little before 5 a.m. and followed the sidewalk to the Dover Community Trail, one of many rail trails in the region, passing through the active Dover Amtrak station. The original Dover Train Station was on Third Street, but there’s nothing left to see, so we made a beeline for where the Community Trail follows the Cocheco River a few streets down.
Further down the river, we passed Beckwith Youth Baseball Park, where Alec remembered playing games on a field that had felt much larger back then, especially under the lights.
Beyond the field, the trail continues through a lightly wooded area and eventually links up with a more popular portion that passes under NH Route 16 and behind a few corporate buildings (including Liberty Mutual, my old workplace—this office no longer in use since the pandemic).
This part of the trail is where you first start to see remnants of the railroad, such as small stone tunnels for water to pass under the raised bed.
After passing the trailhead, we reached the first section where there was no trail, and we’d have to stick to our map of the ROW (right-of-way) between property lines through high overgrowth to avoid taking any big detours.
This was also the first section where we started to get wet. It had been raining all weekend, and the sun wasn’t around to burn the moisture off the grass yet, so the dew soaked right through my once water-resistant shoes. I don’t believe Alec’s shoes were ever water-resistant.
Regardless, we pushed through this brief no-man’s land and back onto the street. The entry point off the street is diagonally across and marked by a metal barrier.
This section of ROW opens into a little cul-de-sac where a childhood friend lives. We walked right across the circle and into the first really rough portion of the trek.
I’d actually traversed this section long ago as a boy. My friend and I would pass through the woods here into another friend’s neighborhood on the other side. The walk was a lot rougher and longer than I remembered from childhood.
Not only was this section of ROW extremely overgrown and thorny, but it was all swamp beneath the brambles.
We eventually got through the worst of the overgrowth by ascending a small wooded hill bordering the ROW and following alongside until most of the watery, thorny bits were behind us and we could get back down into the grass.
After a fair bit more traversing through this forgotten portion of trail, the grass gave way to a dirt path lined with stone, then to a paved side street and driveway.
This section was very close to my childhood home, so I left Alec momentarily to use the facilities and change into some boots (Alec had spare shoes in his backpack for when the day dried out).
With dry feet and emptied guts, I jogged back over to Alec to continue the journey through the stretch we were most familiar with—where Alec and I had spent many summers and after-school evenings exploring the woods with our friends.
The section of ROW in my childhood woods led to a large open field used primarily for hay production. I’d only wandered this far a handful of times as a boy, without the faintest idea that it would be possible to just keep wandering all the way to Alton Bay.
With the field now crossed, we arrived at the first of many points where we had to trust our map and make an educated guess through a wall of vegetation. With some keen observation of barely perceptible differences in vegetation and a bit of gut instinct, we were mostly able to stay on track.
There were some portions through the overgrowth that were fairly clear, like where we found the remnants of an old car discarded in a ditch. Others required us to struggle through brambles or pop out into fields when it got too dense.
We eventually spotted Pickering Road in the distance, where the first station along the route would have been.
Reaching the old site of Pickering Station felt good. It was the first time that day we felt like we were really doing this.
Across the street from Pickering Station, where Pickering Road intersects with England Road, the ROW was supposed to continue. The forum said it was very overgrown back in 2019 but would quickly open up to easily traversable trail. Either a lot had changed in those six years vegetation-wise (likely), or we got thrown off our route (also likely), but the overgrowth never seemed to let up—and it was THORNY.
Alec and I spent over an hour fighting through a quarter mile of thorns, hoping to find the ROW pictured in the forum, but we never did.
Eventually we fought through the worst of it, with dozens of tiny cuts all over our legs and arms to prove it, and reached what appeared to be a recessed portion of ROW. Alec decided to try following the ROW itself while I ascended a hill across the way to bypass some overgrowth through the woods.
After about ten minutes, I stopped when I found the flooded portion of ROW pictured on the forum so I could wait for Alec. But soon I realized I couldn’t hear anything that sounded like my friend fighting through overgrowth. After speaking on the phone, it turned out he hadn’t made any progress and was trying to find the route I had taken.
Knowing we could waste another hour here, I decided to take one for the team and backtrack the way I came to get him. This was the only portion where we were stupid enough to try different routes.
Because of the wasted time, I completely forgot to take a picture of the flooded ROW area. It looked like a slow-moving river and smelled quite awful even from afar. So here’s a photo from a little further down where the ROW was walkable again and we found another stone tunnel:
The next portion was fairly uneventful. There’s a long section used as a horse trail—we had to avoid quite a bit of horse manure, but it was a welcome change from trying to avoid thorns. The horse trail eventually turns off into private property, so we had to do a bit more bushwhacking before passing over a swampy area behind a few houses to get to cross a street intersecting the trail. Across the street was what appeared to be an abandoned property with a little bit of B&M Railroad history left on it.
The forum had mentioned these boxcars, but the poster hadn’t noticed the B&M Railway logo. I peered into the reddish boxcar, but it was just completely rotted out and trashed. Still, it was fun to imagine these boxcars on the same journey we were on long ago.
The trail was pretty clear beyond the boxcars—not maintained trail, but easy enough to walk through until reaching a sand pit that had seen its fair share of illegal dumping.
Moving right along, the ROW trail passed by a few industrial buildings before leading back into the woods.
This part was again pretty uneventful—just a nice walk through the woods. Although we were beginning to feel in our legs that this was going to be a day of hurt.
Putting our aches aside, we were at least greeted at the other end with the corner of a green fence surrounding another industrial building which marked the site of what was once Gonic Station—the next milestone achieved!
The ROW continued alongside the edge of the green fence and back into the woods for a short stretch before reaching a small field beside the Spaulding Turnpike.
This was one part we weren’t looking forward to. We’d need to take a giant detour to bypass the whole highway, take a smaller detour and try to go under an overpass, or book it across the highway at 9:30 a.m. I’ll let you decide what we did:
The brief part of the trail beyond the Welcome to Rochester sign had some railroad ties left in place, as if they’d taken out the iron eighty-odd years ago and decided to wait for nature to take care of the rest (nature is still working on it):
Just beyond the previous photo, the elevated portion of the ROW drops off where there had been a rail bridge some time ago.
This portion of trail was pretty well maintained compared to the last hour of hiking. We were really starting to feel the soreness in our legs by this point, so when we reached downtown Rochester, we sat down on the first bench we saw, took some ibuprofen, changed our socks, ate some snacks, and mentally prepared to get moving again.
Once we got back on our feet, we noticed the sky was opening up to make way for a beautiful day.
We soon passed our third waypoint: the site of the Rochester Station, now a plaza with a Chinese restaurant and a recovery center.
Not long after the site of the Rochester station, near Spaulding High School, the ROW became part of the Farmington/Rochester Recreational Trail.
After a long slog on the trail, we were greeted with one of the more interesting stops along our journey: the site of an old sawmill near Rattlesnake Brook in Farmington, unofficially known as Rattlesnake Falls. After some digging in historical archives, I found that the sawmill was almost certainly the “Cocheco Novelty Mill” owned by General Jeremiah Roberts. It was built around 1850 and operated for fifteen years until the Civil War dampened business in time for steam power to make water-driven mills obsolete.
Here are some photos of what’s left (no photos of the mill in its prime seem to exist or remain).
We spent a few minutes clambering over the stone foundation looking for any remnants of the past (nothing but the foundation) before getting back on the trail, knowing there was still a long way to go.
The next waypoint wasn’t much further up at the intersection of the Farmington Recreational Rail Trail and Meetinghouse Hill Road—the site of the Bernardi Greater Shows Derailment, which occurred on July 22, 1928.
Not much further up was another point of historical interest: the site of what was most recently the Collins and Aikman Automotive Interiors plant.
The factory was originally built in 1966 as part of the Davidson Rubber Company (owned by McCord Corporation, then Ex-Cell-O Corporation). The plant’s parent company was purchased by Textron in 1986, then Collins and Aikman in 2001. The plant completely ceased operations in 2006 with Collins and Aikman having filed for bankruptcy the year prior and was demolished by 2010.
In 2013, the site was named a Superfund site by the EPA with multiple toxic contaminants found on-site and in the groundwater beneath it. The Superfund Proposal Document is where I was able to source the information about the history of the site through the years.
I was surprised not to be able to find much in the way of photos of the plant at all, except for some paywalled images in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the low-resolution aerial photograph visible in the EPA document.
Beyond the remains of the plant and the current site of Metal Farm, LLC (the current owner of the plot), the recreational trail continued. This part of the trail was either still under “construction” or being re-cleared, as the ground was freshly razed and there was still some clearing equipment left out and about.
At the next intersection with Route 11, we took the opportunity to stop by a Domino’s, eat some pizza in the parking lot, and charge our phones a bit (AllTrails was chugging through battery). Across the street from Domino’s also happened to be roughly the site of the Farmington Depot.
The absolute last thing we wanted to do at that moment was start walking again, but we had one last point of interest not too far away to get us moving before a long slog of not much to see.
The point of interest was a large concrete arched bridge over the Mad River, completely hidden from view of the street. It’s wild to imagine all the people driving on NH11 every day passing by this forgotten structure just behind a garden center. It was a little difficult to find from River Road, as there was no indication of where the ROW was at all. So we again had to make some guesses based on the map before finding it a little ways through the woods.
I was unable to find any early photos of this arched bridge, unfortunately.
Moving on, we eventually passed across Ridge Road where we were supposed to reconnect with maintained trail along a flooded portion of the ROW. Unfortunately, we chose the wrong side of the flooded ROW to travel along and soon realized—after bushwhacking over chunks of granite for about ten minutes (when we saw an older couple leisurely walking on the other side)—that we were on the wrong side.
Lucky for us, the flooded portion didn’t last much longer, and we were able to cross over onto the actual trail.
After this trail, we began what would end up being the worst part of the journey. Not because it was difficult to traverse or hard to navigate, but quite the opposite. The ROW after this trail all the way to Alton was just NH11, so we’d have to spend the next couple of hours walking alongside the highway with not much to see and only the sound of speeding cars to keep us entertained.
Along Route 11, we lost our minds a little bit.
I fell between cycles of imagining I was a desert cowboy wandering to find water and completely becoming one with the road, forgetting the world around me.
Reaching the Alton traffic circle honestly felt like the biggest milestone of the day, even though the journey was far from over. We had made it all the way from our hometown—about twenty-eight miles—and only had a relatively short stretch left before we could finally say we were done.
We decided to take another break at McDonald’s, where Alec immediately made a beeline for the bathroom and disappeared for a solid fifteen minutes (he had a spiritual experience in there, his words, not mine). I stared dumbly into the ether before ordering a small vanilla milkshake, drinking it, and throwing it away basically unconsciously. Some primal part of my brain just knew I needed some fast calories to get through the final stint to Alton Bay.
We somewhat recovered at McDonald’s and gritted our teeth to complete the home stretch through downtown Alton, the B&M Railway park, and just a bit more bushwhacking to the Bay.
About one hundred yards after the B&M Railroad Park, Alec took a seat on a bench for another break. I didn’t realize what dire straits he was in, so I trekked on a little further to make out where our next section of ROW might continue through the brush.
While I was finding the trail, Alec was in a mental battle to get back up and finish this thing. With a few good handfuls of trail mix, he found enough energy to get moving again and meet up with me to complete our final bushwhack.
The “trail” I scouted followed the bank of Mill Pond into more unmarked woods. I was honestly feeling a lot of internal frustration at this point—it felt like we should be done by now, but here we were still fighting through overgrowth and not even sure we were going the right way.
Eventually we did get some indication we were on the right path with some signs of ROW and this interesting find:
Not long after the telegraph discovery, the woods opened up to reveal we were at the top of the Merrymeeting River Crossing bridge—or what was left of it, anyway.
The easiest way to get to the bay from here was to trek down the road a bit to the left of the trestles and pass over a footbridge into a little recreational park.
From there we walked through an adorable little neighborhood along the Merrymeeting River (seems like a lovely place to live), patted a friendly cat, and tried to hold back tears as we finally laid eyes upon the bay.
We didn’t spend much time waiting around—just enough to put on some fresh socks and pull off a couple of ticks—before heading over to a little waterside restaurant called Shibley’s at the Pier.
I got a shrimp cocktail, Bloody Mary, and some steak tips to close out the day. Alec got a lamb burger and water.
The staff didn’t question our disheveled appearances, which was appreciated, and I tipped them well.
Although we were battered, worn out, and ready to sleep, Alec and I knew this was a day we’d hold in high regard. As we get older, we let these spontaneous adventures grow fewer and farther between, despite them feeling more like living than most of the days in between.