Greenways + Railroads: A New Way to Explore the Triangle (Part 1/2)

Whether you're new to the Triangle or have lived here since North Hills was a gravel lot, chances are you've noticed two things: 1) We have amazing greenway trails, and 2) you can always hear a train horn blowing if you listen close.

In this two-part series, we'll show two different ways you can utilize the great bike infrastructure combined with the quick Amtrak service to plan a fun day trip to Cary or Durham.

Bike to Cary, train back to Raleigh

Our first story – about the trip to Cary and back – features Tim Pflaum. In fact, Tim created the route below and sent it to me one afternoon.

Hey, do you want to ride bikes to Cary and take the train back, then do a writeup and put it on the blog? People could do the route on a weekend with a friend.

Sure! That sounds like a great idea. Let's do it.

The intent here was to use primarily low-stress routes, including greenways and neighborhood streets. For the most part, we succeeded – there were only a few hairy sections. We'll get into those later.

The route below is a 16 mile one-way trip from The Bike Library to the Cary Amtrak station. (If you're seeing this on email, the map won't load... but it's there on the website!)

TBL to NCMA: Miles 0-6

Starting from The Bike Library, head through Dix Park and hop on the Rocky Branch Trail. From there, it's Greenway all the way to the North Carolina Museum of Art. The views at the top of the hill are great! It was a tremendously windy day when we rode, and our bikes may or may not have blown over as we took a remote photo of ourselves with the iconic museum backdrop.

NCMA to Wade Park: Miles 6-10

From NCMA, we took the Edwards Mill bike path to the Lenovo Center (Forever PNC in our hearts, pls don't sue me @Lenovo) where we crossed the road and popped into the Wade Park neighborhood. I'd never been that way before, and it was a little eerie on a Thursday afternoon to ride through the empty neighborhood. I imagine on the weekends it would be much more lively – maybe even a good spot for a mid-ride refreshment at some in the mixed-use development.

We kept on rolling and crossed over the I-40 before hitting the first tricky part of the route.

Hairy Crossing #1: Mile 10

At mile 10.3 of the above route, we did a bit of a hairpin turn across one of the busier roads. There isn't great infrastructure here, so please be careful if you choose to do this route exactly as listed. Once we crossed over that road, we were in the clear.

Red Grape to Black Creek Greenway: Miles 10-16

After that crossing, we were on neighborhood roads until Black Creek Greenway. These were super nice, flowy roads and we were able to fly down them. Gravity works, so we had to climb a pretty gnarly hill at one point, but overall it was a good section. From there, we took Black Creek down to Chapel Hill road. We stopped to take a photo with an awesome little sign from the Town of Cary.

Chapel Hill Rd. to Cary Depot & Home (Plus Hairy Section #2): Mile 16

The Black Creek Greenway took us to Chapel Hill Rd. then Harrison Ave, but we really can't recommend that particular route because Harrison is a very high-stress road and it doesn't really fit in to this style of ride. We'd recommend crossing right over Harrison and taking Academy down into the station. That's a bit lower stress and will make for a nice ending to the ride. The embedded map above shows the right route.

While we waited for the 5:30 train, we had coffee at Brew and visited Hunky Dory, a really cool little record store near downtown. It was a quick hop over to CYN (Cary's Amtrak station) where we got our bike tags from the attendant, loaded our steeds into the luggage car, and made our way home!

Overall, it was a great afternoon adventure - we started around 2pm and were able to make it back to Raleigh before 6pm. If you end up doing this ride, build in some time on the back end to explore Cary's new park and see what other gems you can find in the town. It's a pretty neat trip and one I'd highly recommend for anyone looking for a fun weekend adventure.