The Secret Tunnel in Belmont Center

OK, maybe this wasn't a secret secret but I didn't know about it so it was a secret to me.


I was biking around Belmont Center this afternoon. And thought I might head back to Cambridge.


The tunnel under the railroad tracks going eastbound toward Boston on Concord Avenue is always a drag when you are driving, because you have to make that left turn against oncoming traffic from two directions with no one sure of the right-of-way (like that would matter here in Greater Boston). It's even worse on a bike.


So I go through the tunnel and veer off to the right and into the rotary (did I mention the rotary, yes that is part of what makes that intersection a killer). What do you know there is an World War monument (that would be World War I) and a Support Our Troops banner.


But what's that under the tracks along the rotary? A tunnel entrance.


The other side comes out about halfway down the hill from Pleasant Street, so it's hidden. But there is a bike path, so that's my eastbound path from now on. Westbound, I think it still makes sense to use the main tunnel.

P.S.: I've always identified the train station in Belmont Center with the one described by William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. The station where Quentin Compson gets off when he takes a train ride out to the suburbs.