45 Miles of Old Railroad: The W&OD Trail Is Arlington's Other Main Street
The Washington & Old Dominion Trail runs from Shirlington to Purcellville on a 19th-century rail bed. In Arlington, it is commuter route, gym, dog park and front porch at once.
Arlington's busiest road may be the one closed to cars. The Washington & Old Dominion Railroad Regional Park — the W&OD Trail — follows the bed of a railroad that ran from 1859 to 1968, cutting diagonally across the county from Shirlington through Bluemont and Bon Air to the Falls Church line and on to Purcellville, 45 miles west.
On a weekday morning the Arlington stretch runs like infrastructure: commuters on bikes rolling toward Rosslyn and the Custis Trail connection to Key Bridge, runners doing tempo work, parents walking kids to school. By lunch it is recreation; by weekend it is a county fair in motion — training rides, strollers, dog walkers and the occasional unicyclist, all sharing ten feet of asphalt and a parallel gravel horse path in places.
The trail's genius is that it was saved whole. NOVA Parks assembled the abandoned right-of-way in the 1970s, when the corridor could easily have been sold off in fragments, and the continuous thread it preserved is why Arlington has a car-free spine that threads neighborhoods rather than skirting them.
November is one of its best months: the tree canopy over the Four Mile Run valley turns, the summer humidity that makes the trail a steam bath is gone, and the low sun does the rest. Trailheads at Shirlington, Bluemont Junction and Columbia Pike make it easy to sample a mile or two. Most Arlingtonians who try it end up, sooner or later, riding all the way to Purcellville for lunch — and letting the downhill do the talking on the way home.
