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The East Brady Spur is a 3 mile branch of the Armstrong Trail that follows the Allegheny River around the inside of Brady's Bend in Clarion County. It starts at the East Brady trailhead on Verner Street, runs east past the old Phillipston rail yard and its restored locomotive turntable, and ends at the south portal of the Brady Tunnel, where it meets the Armstrong Trail main line. The surface is firm crushed limestone on a flat rail grade. Riding it is a river ride: water close on one side, a wooded hillside on the other, and restrooms at both East Brady and Phillipston. Beyond the tunnel the main line continues north and south.
East Brady Spur
Your comfort. Prognosticated.
-Cory
In a typical year the East Brady Spur has about 104 to 149 days of excellent weather for popular activities such as hiking, dog walking, e-biking, biking, birding, running, and walking, with May, September, and October the best months.
Hourly comfort scores for the next 15 days of weather, tuned to your activity and your own thresholds.
Plan your visit to this trail. Get the best windows for a comfortable outing.
Enjoy the East Brady Spur!
In half of past years, color along the East Brady Spur peaks October 17 to 25, typically around October 20. The trail has 56% deciduous coverage, with the majority being red maple, black cherry, northern red oak, and yellow-poplar.
Allegheny Valley Railroad engine No. 17 steamed into Brady's Bend on June 25, 1867. The bend it reached is a loop of the Allegheny River about eight miles around by water and less than a mile across at its neck. It takes its name from Captain Samuel Brady, the frontier scout. The railroad followed the river all the way around the loop, through the town that became East Brady, and kept a yard and turntable at Phillipston to service its locomotives. Coal soon followed the rails. The Brady's Bend Mining Company opened the first large mine above the town in 1878. Between 1913 and 1916 the railroad bored the 2,468 foot Brady Tunnel through the neck of the bend. Cave-ins injured workers during the digging. The tunnel cut about five miles off the run and turned the river loop through East Brady into a branch line. By the 1970s trains on the line had stopped running. In 1992 the Allegheny Valley Land Trust bought the corridor from Conrail to build a trail. In 2020 the land trust merged with ARTA to become Armstrong Trails. The tunnel, by then leaking and holed, took six years of work to fix, with a steel lining, drainage, and repair of a 20 foot hole in its ceiling. Armstrong Trails reopened it to riders and walkers on November 1, 2024. That closed one of Pennsylvania's top ten trail gaps and joined the East Brady Spur to about 100 miles of connected trail.
