Two years after it was first presented at a public input session, a nascent plan for a pedestrian and bicycle path connecting Devens from the Red Tail golf course to Harvard at Old Mill Road has not advanced significantly. The need to coordinate the requirements of numerous stakeholders, including CSX railroad, MassDevelopment, the U.S. Army, and volunteer committees of Harvard, has made advancing the plan difficult.
“I remain optimistic that this connection can happen, but with the complexity of the easement issue, it may take some time,” said Neil Angus, a planner with the Devens Enterprise Commission, the permitting authority in Devens. Gaining an easement for the railroad underpass at Old Mill Road is the most complicated problem to be sorted out, and Angus said he has asked Mass-Development to look into it. The U.S. Army had an easement years ago, but Angus suspects it expired when the golf course was built in the late ’90s and the army road was eliminated. If so, he said, CSX, a transportation corporation that controls 20,000 miles of track nationwide, would need to grant the easement.
Transportation Advisory Committee member Stacia Donahue said her conversations with a supervising engineer at MassDOT point to an arduous and expensive process with CSX. “We are just hoping the Army still has the easement,” she told the Press.
The route that transportation committee members highlighted this week differs from the one prominently featured in the presentation two years ago, though it was included. In both cases, the connection would start at the Red Tail golf course, go under the railroad bridge on Old Mill, and continue to the town center. The original presentation, however, routed people to the shared-use path that will be added to Ayer Road during its 2026 renovation: Anyone headed to the schools would need to brave the shared-use path’s intersection with the Route 2 interchange.
Committee members have more lately emphasized the connector’s potential to create a route to the Bromfield School that wouldn’t run along Ayer Road. That route would require regular maintenance on an existing but unpaved trail that starts at the end of Lancaster County Road and leads to Depot Road, after which a bicyclist could pedal from Depot Road, to Under Pin Hill Road, to Lovers Lane, to Elm Street, and finally to Minister’s Path, which leads directly to Bromfield. (See map.) Only trail bikes could handle the rustic trail in its present condition, however.
To get a state grant for the connector will require Harvard and Devens to join forces on an application. If MassDevelopment and the railroad can work out the easement, said Transportation Advisory Committee Chair Gabe Medjanis, the committee would apply for a MassTrails grant.
Harvard-Devens water pipe: An opportunity?
Another project that requires cooperation between Harvard and Devens, but on a much larger scale, is the $5 million water pipe connection from Harvard to Devens. The pipe will connect town center homes to Devens’ water supply. From town center, the pipe will run to Depot Road’s dead end, under the CSX tracks, and on to the Devens water treatment plant. That project prompted some transportation committee members to ask whether a path there, too, was feasible. Angus, however, said starting the path at Depot Road would be harder than starting it at Old Mill Road, as it opens onto a less accessible part of Devens and the track crossing would be level with the ground instead of going under the railroad bridge, as it would at Old Mill. Still, he said, installing the water pipe “presents an opportunity to work with the railroad at the same time to clarify the Old Mill Road easement.”
