If you tried to park at the Harvey Road trailhead this summer expecting the same gravel pull-off that's been there since 2019, you already know something changed. A culvert project running under the road for Little Cohas Brook has eaten into that informal lot, the one that doubled for years as a spot to watch planes lift off from Manchester-Boston Regional Airport while your dog sniffed around the guardrail. It's a small inconvenience. It's also a preview of something bigger that most people walking this trail haven't connected yet.
For thirteen years, the story of the Londonderry Rail Trail has been a story about money. Not state money, not federal money, but the kind that gets raised one warrant article, one corporate check, one bake sale at a time by a volunteer group called Londonderry Trailways. That changed this year. Between February and August of 2026, three separate developments moved the real obstacle to finishing this trail off Londonderry's plate entirely and onto a highway construction schedule the town doesn't control.
Thirteen Years, Six Miles, and Whoever Could Write the Check
The first mile of paved trail went down in 2013. By November 2019, Londonderry Trailways had stretched that to four and a half miles, a stretch running from Little Cohas Marsh out to Harvey Road, funded through a mix of town taxpayer votes, a state grant, and donations from local businesses like Kluber Lubrication. Each phase since has followed the same pattern: raise the match, secure the grant, pour the asphalt, repeat.
The remaining gaps were always framed as fundraising problems. Back in 2019, Trailways president Bob Rimol put the cost of finishing both remaining pieces, the final mile north to the airport connecting to Manchester's trail network and the connector east to Derry, at about $1.2 million combined, with roughly $800,000 of that expected to come from a state grant. Phase 7, the half-mile connector that finally links Londonderry's trail to Derry's, sat unfinished for years after that: nobody had assembled the rest of the match.
That's the version of this trail most residents grew up with. Slow, but self-directed. If Londonderry wanted the gap closed faster, Londonderry needed to raise more money faster.
What Actually Happened in 2026
On August 6, the New Balance Foundation stood at the North School trailhead and handed Londonderry Trailways a $50,000 grant earmarked specifically for Phase 7. Eleven days later, Trailways board members Sandy Lagueux and Bob Rimol told the Town Council that the Derry connection will likely open by 2028, a link that would finally stitch together a contiguous 15-mile paved stretch running through Salem, Windham, Derry, and Londonderry.
On paper, that reads like the same fundraising story with a happy ending. It isn't. Because six months before that council meeting, in February 2026, a federal lawsuit over an entirely different piece of infrastructure got resolved, and that resolution is now the thing standing between Londonderry and its own trail connection.
The lawsuit involved the Derry Rail Trail Tunnel, a passage meant to carry cyclists and walkers safely under the new Exit 4A interchange on I-93. The tunnel was in the original 2019 plans for what was then a $164 million construction project. In 2022, state transportation officials quietly scrapped it, swapping in what trail advocates nicknamed the "spaghetti loop," a route that would have forced trail users more than 1,000 feet out of the original railbed, up steep inclines, through sharp turns, and under a six-lane crosswalk instead of below it. The savings from cutting the tunnel: about $770,000, on a project whose second construction phase alone was projected to cost $33 million and whose full scope was forecast to top $134 million.
A group called the Committee to Save the Derry Rail Trail Tunnel sued in August 2024. A federal judge sided with them the following year and ordered a settlement. That settlement, reached in February 2026, requires the New Hampshire Department of Transportation to build the tunnel as originally designed, reinstating the direct, at-grade-free path under Exit 4A.
Here's why that matters more than the grant announcement three weeks later. The half-mile connector between Londonderry and Derry doesn't just cross open ground. It runs directly through the footprint of the Exit 4A project. You can raise every dollar you need for Phase 7, and it still doesn't get built until the highway work around it does. State transportation officials have said Exit 4A's second construction phase, the one that includes this tunnel and the roadway crossing the trail corridor, isn't slated for completion until May 2028. That date, not a fundraising thermometer, is now the real constraint on when Londonderry's trail actually reaches Derry.
Fundraising used to be the whole problem. Now it's necessary but no longer sufficient. Even the state's draft ten-year transportation plan for 2027 through 2036, which would have funded some of the remaining engineering, was vetoed this year. Trailways leaders are betting that the money already in hand, paired with construction that has to happen anyway for Exit 4A, gets the physical gap closed on roughly the same 2028 timeline regardless.
The Small Version of the Same Pattern
The Harvey Road parking squeeze is a miniature of exactly this dynamic. That trailhead sits along a section of trail that's been open since 2019, well before any of the Exit 4A drama. The culvert work under Harvey Road for Little Cohas Brook isn't connected to the interstate project. It's a separate, smaller piece of infrastructure that happens to run under the same road the trail crosses, and it's disrupting access in the short term to fix something that needed fixing regardless of what trail users wanted.
If you're planning a walk or a ride this fall, two other trailheads are still fully open. The lot across from North Londonderry Elementary School on Sanborn Road puts you close to the trail's straight, elevated first mile, the old railroad embankment that runs east through quiet residential streets. The Park and Ride on NH Route 28 near I-93's Exit 5 sits further south, closer to where the trail passes under the interstate and into the wetlands around Little Cohas Brook, the stretch where turtles sun themselves in the peat bog and the trail briefly forgets it's a few hundred feet from six lanes of traffic.
What's Waiting on the Other Side
Once that half-mile gap closes, whether that's 2028 as Trailways hopes or later if Exit 4A's schedule slips again, Londonderry riders and walkers gain direct paved access to Derry's side of the corridor without detouring onto local roads. That means reaching Hood Park and its pond-side beach, the "Lover's Leap" overlook along Derry's trail, and the public art project where local artists painted Robert Frost's words onto the pavement itself, a tribute to the decade Frost spent teaching at Pinkerton Academy just up the road. From there the paved route continues on to Windham and eventually Salem, the same 15-mile stretch Lagueux and Rimol described to the Town Council in August.
None of that changes what the trail feels like today. It's still 4.5 miles of flat, well-shaded asphalt through wetlands and neighborhood streets, still busiest on weekend mornings, still worth a midweek visit if you want the benches to yourself. What's changed is who's actually setting the pace toward the version of this trail Londonderry has been building toward since 2013. For most of that history, it was the town. As of this year, it's a state highway schedule that happens to be building through the same ground.
If you're weighing what a specific stretch of Londonderry, or a neighboring commuter town, actually offers day to day, Chris Pascoe has spent years working these streets and can talk through the parts of town that don't show up in a listing photo. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer from someone who actually walks these trails.
