West Essex Trail
hiking trail in New Jersey, United States
The West Essex Trail is a former railroad track bed of the Erie Lackawanna Railroad Caldwell Branch now hiking trail located mostly in Essex County, New Jersey in the United States, with a small section in Passaic County, New Jersey.
Background
The northern trailhead is located where the Erie Lackawanna Caldwell Branch rail line split from the still active Montclair Branch. Proceeding south the trail crosses County Route 612 in Little Falls at 0.2 miles (0.32 km). 1 mile (1.6 km) from the trailhead, the trail merges with the Lenape Trail before crossing Bowden Road. At 1.5 miles (2.4 km) the trail crosses the Peckman River on the old railroad bridge before crossing Pompton Avenue (Route 23), where there are remnants of the old Erie Railroad Cedar Grove station on the south side of the tracks and stairs leading down to Pompton Avenue. The trail crosses Keeney Street in Verona at 2.4 miles (3.9 km). Just north of Keeney Street was the Erie Railroad Overbrook station. Lastly the trail crosses Durrell Street in Verona, New Jersey at 2.7 miles (4.3 km) before terminating at the southern trailhead located on Fairview Ave in Verona. The rail bed continues through Verona passing under Bloomfield Avenue (the tunnel has since been filled in), Essex Fells and Roseland before rejoining active rail lines in Roseland at Interstate 280. The trail is mixed use and available for walking, hiking, biking, and jogging.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “West Essex Trail” is hiking trail in New Jersey, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through West, Essex and Trail, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7985126. Authority coordinates are 40.846, -74.237. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “West Essex Trail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.