I went for a walk with R.M Mottola yesterday. He’s an old friend who lives just off California St in the Lake. We headed down Wyoming Rd to the DCR path along the river.
I had never been on that part of the river before and quite enjoyed the riverside trail. We headed upstream about a half mile, just passed North St when RM pointed out one of his local favorite landmarks …. what he calls Telephone Pole University. The path goes past an Eversource-NStar facility. Just over the fence from the trail, on the back end of the property, there’s a field of relatively closely spaced telephone poles, with some equipment on them and some wires between then.
R.M says that this is used as an occasional training facility for Eversource linemen. If you’re lucky enough to pass by when class is in session you may see Telephone Pole University students learning how to navigate the poles and haul equipment up on them.
What’s one of your favorite oddball attraction in or around Newton?
… of course the definitive collection of Newton oddities and odd ball attraction is Bruce Henderson’s photo scavenger hunt from a few years ago.
We definitely have to get DCR to put in a set of bleacher seats for fans of TPU.
@Bea Seeking – I’ll start the lobbying campaign immediately 😉
This one’s in Needham. A model railroad in the middle of the woods: https://g.co/kgs/etMrxb
I’ve seen Eversource line workers at TPU passing a basketball around while on the poles, working on balance, I guess. I love that RM (a neighbor of mine) came up with that moniker.
As for oddball attractions, I wrote about a few in Wellesley on my blog: the Babson Globe and the Waban Arches: https://backsideofamerica.blogspot.com/2022/07/wellesley-wild-weird.html
And I can vouch that Martini Junction that Ann cited is fantastic, although I haven’t been there in years. And yes, I wrote about it on my blog: https://backsideofamerica.blogspot.com/2013/01/whimsical-woodlands.html
@Ann – Yes, the Martini Junction railroad in the woods is a fabulous find. I discovered it about 15 years ago when my daughter was young. I took her and a couple of friends to the parking lot of the town woods. I had programmed in the location of the model railroad into a handheld GPS. I gave the kids the GPS and said the GPS has a big arrow on it. If you go in the direction that the arrow points eventually you will find an amazing thing in the woods.
Of course the GPS didn’t know about the trails. It was just blindly pointing in the physical direction of Martini Junction so the kids were trying to figure what trails to take that would get them there. It was great fun and kept them amused for a good while and it was fabulous when they suddenly found the railroad right in front of them.
I’ll have to check it out again in the days ahead and see if it is still intact.
@Dave Brigham – how cool was that? A basketball game from the top of the telephone poles!!
As for The Waban Arches … I think one of these coming weekends I may be organizing a six mile walk from Echo Bridge in Newton, out the Sudbury Aqueduct to Wellesley College. The Waban Arches are towards the end of that hike and are definitely worth a visit. The Waban Arches are sort of a cousin of Echo Bridge and have a lot of physical details in common.
For those who’ve never seen Dave Brigham’s Backside of America (link above) its definitely worth checking out. He’s got lots of installments covering all sorts of local curiosities.