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.

How?

At first glance, to get to the platform at Beacon Station, you have to cross the busy main Hudson Line tracks. MetroNorth, Amtrak, CSX: by federal law their rail cars must conform to a minimum set of standards to use these tracks. For this reason, whatever rail cars you run on the Beacon Line must be substantial rail cars, not little dinky trolleys, since they would also use the main Hudson Line tracks.

Unless... you don't cross the main Hudson Line tracks at all.

At first, that doesn't make any sense, because you need to get to Beacon Station. Historically, there used to be a large web of tracks all over the area of Beacon Station in Beacon's industrial past. Wouldn't it be nice if one of those old lines still existed that doesn't cross the main Hudson Line tracks? Incredibly, one complete line does (and a few other fragments). It is buried in the weeds, but all of its rails are intact, all the way to the West parking lot of Beacon Station. You can even see it on Google Maps:

In the Winter, with the snow, or in the Summer, with the foliage, this abandoned but still complete line is pretty hard to see. Actually, I shouldn't say abandoned: the M.T.A. still uses it for parking various maintenance contraptions well up the line in the weeds. You can see these contraptions occasionally from the Klara Sauer trail or Dia or as your MetroNorth train slows down to pull into Beacon Station. The contraptions look like they've gone off the rails, but of course they are still on rails buried in the weeds. Here is one encounter with one of the M.T.A.'s contraptions parked on this spur:

In the Spring, you can see the line clearly, without any snow or foliage in the way. Start point:

Across from Dia:

Nearing West parking lot:

View from Long Dock Road overpass:

We're talking about trade-offs here. You limit what you can do with the Beacon Line in some ways by using this spur, but you can use a much larger range of rail cars, most notably, much smaller and modest rail cars, dinkey ground-level access trolleys (no need for platforms), because you are not crossing the main Hudson Line tracks.