Stand at the Morris Avenue trailhead across from Washington's Headquarters on a weekday morning and you'll watch the same choreography play out. A runner waits for a gap in Washington Avenue traffic before stepping onto the asphalt. A commuter on a bike does the same thing thirty seconds later, phone in hand, checking the time against the next train on the parallel Morris & Essex Line. Neither of them thinks of this as infrastructure. They think of it as the path.
That's about to change, at least on paper. The Traction Line Recreation Trail, the 2.7-mile paved corridor that runs from Morristown to the Madison and Florham Park line, is the subject of an active regional planning study right now, and the public comment window closes with Labor Day, which lands on September 7. If you've ever cursed that Washington Avenue crossing, or wondered why there's nowhere to park near the trailhead, this is the week that complaint has somewhere official to go.
A Trolley Line That Was Always About Somewhere Else
The Traction Line's asphalt sits on a railbed that never belonged to walkers or cyclists in the first place. From 1914 to 1928, the Morris County Traction Company ran electric trolleys along this corridor, carrying riders between Newark and Dover, with cars also running to the old Bertrand Island Amusement Park for a day at the rides. When the trolleys stopped, the right-of-way sat mostly dormant until 1981, when the Morris County Park Commission acquired portions of the land. The trail opened in June 1986, developed with cooperation from the New Jersey Department of Transportation and the local utility that had held the easement. In 1993, the county landed a $495,000 federal grant through the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act to extend it further.
None of that history was designed to serve a commuter walking to Convent Station. It was designed to move vacationers to an amusement park. The fact that it now functions as a transportation spine is an accident of geography, not intent, and that distinction matters for what happens next.
Walk the full length and the trail's borrowed past shows up in small details. About 0.8 miles from the Morris Avenue end, the path ducks under Normandy Parkway through a 1914 concrete underpass once known as Sneeden's Bridge, built with Art Deco flourishes to appease residents of the historic district above who had fought for years over what would replace an unsafe grade crossing. Further along, near the trail's southern stretch, an old estate wall runs alongside the path at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Florham campus, a leftover boundary from the Twombly family property the university now occupies. The trail also passes the College of Saint Elizabeth and the century-old brick station building at Convent Station, built between 1913 and 1914, so a single run threads past two colleges and a train depot that predate the trail itself by more than seventy years.
The Commute Nobody Counts
Ask Morris County Park Commission's Director of Recreation and Visitor Services, Kristin Biase, what the trail is for, and the answer isn't recreation first.
"It also acts as an important transportation corridor that many residents rely on to get to work, commute to nearby destinations, or connect to other parts of town without needing a car."
Biase has also noted that usage has climbed since the pandemic, with more residents folding the trail into daily routines rather than treating it as a weekend outing. That's a meaningful shift for a path that offers ten Fit-Trail exercise stations along the route but was never engineered with commuter volume in mind. There's no public parking at most trailheads. Cyclists heading north toward Washington's Headquarters still have to time the same Washington Avenue crossing the trail's original planners left unresolved. A trail built to move pleasure-seekers to an amusement park is now absorbing the weight of people who need to get to work, and the seams show.
What Nearly Twice The Length Looks Like When It's Funded
Here's the point of comparison that puts this survey in perspective. Morris and Passaic counties have already opened the Pompton Valley Rail Trail, a 5.1-mile path built atop a former railroad corridor in Pequannock and Wayne Townships. The project came with upgraded crossings featuring high-visibility signals, tactile surfaces for visually impaired users, and a new bridge over the Pompton River. It was funded by a $32 million federal grant administered by the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, the same agency now studying the Traction Line.
Morris County Commissioner Douglas Cabana, who serves as liaison to the Park Commission, put the comparison in blunt terms when Pompton Valley opened:
"This trail is nearly twice the length of the Traction Line in Morristown, and we hope it becomes just as popular for families and residents to enjoy."
That's the scale of investment NJTPA has already proven it will commit to a comparable local trail. It's the reason a public survey about crossings and gaps on the Traction Line isn't a symbolic gesture. It's the first input stage of the same kind of process that just delivered $32 million a few townships over.
The Survey Closing This Week
The study underway is officially the Traction Line Recreation Trail Extension Study, and it's exploring something residents have likely wished for without knowing anyone was working on it: a direct connection from the Traction Line to Patriot's Path, Morris County's 55-mile trail trunk with another 35 miles of spurs reaching from East Hanover to Allamuchy Mountain State Park, and from there potentially to the Rahway Valley Rail Trail, a proposed 7.3-mile corridor in Union County that's already partly built as the Summit Park Line, complete with a footbridge over Morris Avenue installed in October 2022.
Right now, none of these three trail systems talk to each other despite sitting close enough that a rider could reasonably expect to move between them. The study, run in partnership with the New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition and the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy under the North Jersey Trail Network initiative, is asking residents to flag exactly three things:
- Missing connections between the trail and nearby neighborhoods, parks, or transit stops
- Difficult or uncomfortable crossings, the Washington Avenue intersection being the obvious local candidate
- Any barrier that currently keeps someone from walking or biking a trip they'd otherwise make
Morris County Commissioner Stephen H. Shaw, who serves as Third Vice Chair of the NJTPA Board of Trustees, framed the ask this way:
"Whether you walk or bike these trails regularly or just enjoy them from time to time, we want to hear from you. Your knowledge and experience of our trails helps us identify opportunities to improve safety and make our trail network even better."
The survey covers the Traction Line study alongside a parallel one for the Pompton Valley Rail Trail's own extension, and it closes with Labor Day. That gives residents who use this trail on a normal Tuesday morning a short window to put their specific frustration on the record before the study moves into its next phase without them.
Why This Is Worth Five Minutes
A trail that started as a way to get people to an amusement park is now being evaluated by the same regional authority that just spent $32 million turning a comparable path into real infrastructure. The gap between what the Traction Line currently is, a well-used but under-resourced local asset with an awkward road crossing and no parking, and what it could become, a genuine link between Morris and Union County's trail networks, is exactly what this survey is measuring. The residents who already know where the trail breaks down are the ones NJTPA needs to hear from before September 7.
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