Sudbury Town Meeting OKs Land Buy For Bruce Freeman Rail Trail

SUDBURY, MA — Town Meeting on Saturday made way for the town to purchase a key piece of land to complete a stretch of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail through Sudbury, one of two key projects in town involving the regional pathway.

With Town Meeting permission, the Board of Selectman can now begin negotiating a sale price with CSX, which owns the 1.7 miles of abandoned railway between Route 20 and the Framingham border.

Sudbury has a short window to negotiate a purchase. The federal Surface Transportation Board has given the town permission to make a deal only through Nov. 20. The federal government has also approved a $100,000 grant for the town to make the purchase, but that expires in December if not used. The town is pursuing other grants to cover the approximately $1.1 million cost to buy the land.

Meanwhile, MassDOT is working on an extension of the BFRT trail north from Route 20 in Sudbury to the Concord line.

The BFRT is an approximately 25-mile multipurpose pathway that stretches from Lowell to Concord. Plans for the trail have it extending all the way to Route 9 in Framingham, including the two sections being worked on by the town and MassDOT.

The most recent section of the trail opened in 2019 between MCI Concord and Powder Mill Road in Concord, just a half mile from the Sudbury border. That small section is scheduled to be complete by 2023, according to Friends of the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail.