Walk the Traction Line Recreation Trail far enough in either direction and you hit a wall, not literally, but close enough. At the southern end, the pavement simply stops at Danforth Road in Florham Park. At the northern end, it stops at Howell Place, a few hundred feet from the Morristown National Historical Park and the statue of Washington near his old headquarters. No connector trail picks up where the asphalt leaves off. No signed route carries you onward to Loantaka Brook Reservation or Patriots' Path, even though both sit close enough that a hiking app will happily plot you a walking route between them.
That's not an oversight. It's a leftover.
The 2.7-mile trail that runs through Convent Station, past Fairleigh Dickinson University and the College of Saint Elizabeth, wasn't planned as part of Morris County's trail network. It was a trolley corridor first, used by the Morris County Traction Company to run electric trolleys between Newark and Dover from 1914 to 1928. When the trolleys stopped, the land sat as a utility easement for decades until Jersey City Power and Light Company donated portions of it to the Morris County Park Commission in 1981. The trail opened in June 1986, built to give residents a flat, paved place to walk and bike alongside the NJ Transit tracks. Connecting to anything else was never the assignment. It still gets cleared of snow within 24 hours, still runs its ten Fit-Trail stations for cardio and strength work, and still has no public parking at either trailhead, because none of that required it to link up with the rest of the county's greenway system.
That gap is now, for the first time in the trail's history, an open question instead of a permanent feature.
A survey window that closes in one week
The North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority is running a corridor study to look at extending and improving the Traction Line, specifically exploring whether it can connect directly to Patriots' Path and the Rahway Valley Rail Trail. The project is part of the broader North Jersey Trail Network initiative, done in partnership with the New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition and the Rails to Trails Conservancy. NJTPA is asking residents who already walk, bike, or roll this corridor to flag the specific gaps, difficult crossings, and barriers that keep it from feeling like one continuous route rather than three separate ones, according to Morristown Green.
The public survey closes on Labor Day, which falls on September 7 this year, one week out from today. If you've ever wished the Traction Line kept going past Convent Station instead of dead-ending at a residential street, this is the one window where that opinion gets recorded somewhere official.
What makes this study different from the usual municipal wish list is who's asking. A rail-trail built from a utility company's old right-of-way and a county open-space system built from farmland acquisitions have operated as two separate institutional histories in Morris Township for forty years. This is the first coordinated attempt to treat them as one network instead of two.
The other island: a farm that became a garden instead of a trail hub
The Traction Line isn't the only piece of Morris Township's outdoor life that grew up separate from everything around it. ValleVue Preserve, home to the Ted Largman Community Garden on Picatinny Road, tells a similar story from a different direction.
The land came from the old Vallevue Farm in Washington Valley, preserved in pieces starting in 2015. By 2021, nearly 30 acres had been protected through a funding partnership between Morris County, Morris Township, the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority, and the family that owned the land, according to Morristown Green's coverage of the preservation. The most recent 7.76-acre addition protected the Washington Valley viewshed and a six-acre meadow, and let the township complete a loop trail around the property starting from the community garden's parking lot. It also preserved a farm pond that drains into Gillespie Brook, a tributary of the Whippany River.
That land already connects to something bigger. The 2009 addition of former St. Mary's Abbey acreage, preserved by Morris County and the Township, is now managed by the Morris County Park Commission as an extension of Lewis Morris Park. So the garden parking lot on Picatinny Road is, in a roundabout way, already tied into the county park system on one side. It just isn't tied to the Traction Line on the other.
The garden itself runs as a working plot system, not a passive green space. The township's own page for the Community Garden at ValleVue Preserve describes a 3-acre organic garden jointly run by the Morris Township Environmental Commission, the Parks and Recreation Department, the Trust for Public Land, Morris County Historic Preservation, and the MCMUA. Part of it is set aside as a "Giving Garden," where volunteer gardeners grow produce specifically for local food banks and kitchens rather than their own kitchens. It's the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a map but shapes how the space actually gets used.
What's already on the ground, all separately
Line up the pieces of Morris Township's outdoor infrastructure and a pattern shows up fast: each one was built well, and each one was built on its own.
- The Traction Line Recreation Trail: a former trolley corridor, donated by a utility, maintained by the county.
- ValleVue Preserve and the Ted Largman Community Garden: preserved farmland, funded jointly by the township, the county, and a national land trust.
- Collinsville Playground: a township parks and recreation project that got its splashpad and new outdoor fitness equipment through a grand opening on June 13, with a ribbon cutting at noon, a live set from the Mess Around Band, a face painter and balloon artist, and a FIFA watch party built around that afternoon's 3 p.m. match, according to TAPinto's coverage.
- Ginty Field: free outdoor movies at dusk all summer, plus a 2026 concert series at the field's gazebo, each show starting at 7 p.m. unless the township's flyer says otherwise.
- Lewis Morris County Park: the county park that the old St. Mary's Abbey acreage now extends into, reachable from the ValleVue side of the township but not from the Traction Line without leaving the trail system entirely.
None of that is a complaint about Morris Township's parks system. It's arguably generous for a township this size. But the generosity has come one project at a time, funded by whichever combination of township budget, county open-space trust, state Green Acres money, or utility donation happened to be available for that particular parcel in that particular year. Nobody was funding the seams between them, because until this year, nobody was studying the seams at all.
| Asset | What it is | What it doesn't connect to |
|---|---|---|
| Traction Line Recreation Trail | 2.7-mile paved former trolley corridor, Morristown to Madison | Patriots' Path, Rahway Valley Rail Trail |
| ValleVue Preserve / Ted Largman Garden | Preserved Vallevue Farm acreage with a working community garden | Traction Line, Collinsville Playground |
| Lewis Morris County Park | County park reached via the old St. Mary's Abbey acreage extension | Direct trail link from the Traction Line |
Why this year is worth paying attention to
Every one of these places already works on its own terms. The garden doesn't need the trail to function. The trail doesn't need the playground. That's exactly why the disconnection has lasted this long: nothing was actually broken, so nobody was forced to fix it.
What changed is that a regional planning authority is now asking, in an organized and time-boxed way, whether the gaps between Morris Township's outdoor spaces are worth closing. That's a different kind of attention than a single township budget line or a single open-space grant application. It's the first time the question has been framed at the scale where an answer could actually reshape how the pieces relate to each other, rather than just adding one more well-built island to the collection.
If you already treat the Traction Line as your regular loop, or you've walked the ValleVue garden path and wondered why it doesn't just keep going toward Loantaka Brook, the NJTPA survey is where that gets recorded before Labor Day closes the window. After that, whatever residents said becomes the record this round of planning works from.
That's the kind of granular, on-the-ground knowledge that shapes how a place actually feels to live in day to day, long before it shows up in any listing description. If you're weighing what daily life looks like across Morris Township or its neighboring towns, or you're ready to talk about what your own property is worth in a market that keeps shifting under these kinds of local details, Bonnie & Greg can walk you through it block by block. Start with a free instant home valuation and we'll take it from there.
