Qualla: Metropolitan Branch Trail

Metropolitan Branch Trail: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TrailVoice, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1988, a Brookland resident named Patrick Hare looked at a strip of abandoned B&O railroad land cutting through his neighborhood and saw something nobody else was looking at: a continuous corridor of public right-of-way running eight miles from the Capitol Dome to the dome of the Basilica of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception at Catholic University. He started calling it the Dome to Dome Trail. The right-of-way had been laid down in 1873, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened its Metropolitan Branch to connect Washington with the main line at Point of Rocks, Maryland. The tracks were still active, though running through a less industrialized city than they had been built for. The land beside them was sitting empty. Hare organized eleven cyclists in 1989 to walk and bike the route. From that group came the Coalition for the Metropolitan Branch Trail. Thirty-six years later, after a thousand bureaucratic battles, the trail is now nearly complete.

Image: TrailVoice | CC BY-SA 2.0

Metropolitan Branch Trail: Eight Miles, One at a Time

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TrailVoice, CC BY-SA 2.0. The trail enters Washington at the Maryland border and follows the Red Line of the Washington Metro - which itself uses the old B&O right-of-way - all the way south to Union Station, where it meets the Capitol Dome. One mile in Maryland, seven in D.C. The first physical piece was...

Image: TrailVoice | CC BY-SA 2.0

Metropolitan Branch Trail: The NoMa Difficulty

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TrailVoice, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hardest section was always going to be the south end, where the trail had to thread through the dense NoMa neighborhood and bridge the rail trench by the New York Ave-Florida Ave-Gallaudet U Metro station. In 2002, when WMATA was building that new station, trail advocates neg...

Image: TrailVoice | CC BY-SA 2.0

Metropolitan Branch Trail: Right-of-Way From L'Enfant

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TrailVoice, CC BY-SA 2.0. The original Metropolitan Branch right-of-way south of Franklin Street NE - a strip 200 feet wide in some places - had been laid out in Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 plan for Washington as an extension of Delaware Avenue. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city co...

Image: TrailVoice | CC BY-SA 2.0

Metropolitan Branch Trail: The Fort Totten Stretch

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit TrailVoice, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2017, DDOT began design-build construction on the next significant section - from John McCormack Drive in Brookland north to the Fort Totten Metro Station. Contractor problems and the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the originally planned 2020 completion. An 800-foot replacement con...

Image: TrailVoice | CC BY-SA 2.0

Metropolitan Branch Trail: The Maryland Mile

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ilovecollegepark, CC0. Across the border in Montgomery County, the one final mile to the Silver Spring Transit Center has been slower in coming. Montgomery College built half a mile of mostly paved trail in 2003 along Fenton Street to its Takoma campus, including a bridge over the rail tracks that open...

Image: Ilovecollegepark | CC0