A week or so ago I took a ride on the Lebanon Countryside Trail. It was a nice ride on a cloudy day. We just barely avoided getting rained on. The relevant part of the trip for this blog, however, is that the very southern-most part of the trail follows the old Middletown and Cincinnati roadbed to Middletown Junction.
Here’s my sister getting ready to tackle the trail. We rode from the Countryside YMCA down to the junction. This skips a small part of the trail on the old DL&C roadbed, but also skips a long ride on a shared use road up Deerfield hill.
There was a lot of utilities along the trail. Everything from power lines, to water, to natural gas. The M&C bridge over the Little Miami also carries some pipes over in addition to the trail. From the photos I’ve seen Lebanon used the bridge for this before they built the trail.
This is where the trail turns off the road and joins the M&C roadbed. We’re looking south towards the junction from the Lebanon industrial park. It’s almost a straight line under 71 to the Little Miami.
This is the same spot, on the other side of the roadway, looking north. The roadbed here is pretty overgrown, and only runs for a short distance until being broken by the industrial park. After the industrial park it picks up again near Hageman junction. The M&C was surveyed and built well. The grade is generally downhill towards the river but is very easy to bike. It’s less than 1% of grade.
The bridge over the Little Miami was a highlight of the trip. However, it’s very hard to get a good photographic angle from the trail. Here is the bridge looking straight down. The steel work is very ornate and detailed, it’s sad they built such an ugly looking cage on the thing.
We eventually made it down to the junction. This is a shot of where the M&C wye tracks joined the Little Miami Railroad. By the time the M&C was built the Little Miami was owned by the PRR.
Here’s some concrete left in the ground. I’m not sure exactly what this was used for. My guess would be a signal at some point? There were also a ton of ties scattered about and we even managed to find a spike or two.
The junction lies in a natural low-land. The roadbed is really built up. You can tell because of the dip between the wye tracks. Lebanon’s Countryside trail uses the left leg of the wye. It junctions with the Little Miami Trail, also built on the old railway ROW. Here’s a shot looking up the unused wye track. The ties here are in the ground and can still be seen.
We also found a telegraph pole still standing, and one spike that was weirdly wrapped around a tree.
I eventually want to get down there and get some more pictures of the junction. I found some maps and most of the interchange tracks ran parallel with the Little Miami, a part of the wye I failed to explore. The park I checked out took long enough, it was dark by the time we actually made it back up the hills to Lebanon.
For any bikers or people looking for some nice recreation, I recommend Lebanon’s trail. Be forewarned however, the same hills that kept the Little Miami from building up from the valley to Lebanon in the 1800′s also make life difficult for the cyclist. The trail is very hilly. If you’re just exploring the junction I recommend starting at the YMCA. If you’ve worked up some nice endurance, then you can probably make the trip all the way down the branch into Downtown Lebanon.
