Bicycling the pre highway Old Rt 128 in Massachusetts

This is something I thought about for some time. Except for a short stint in Charlestown, since living in Massachusetts I've lived in the Rt 128 corridor. First in Woburn, then Wakefield and Gloucester. I feel I know the full personality of 128 from Gloucester to the Mass Pike, and I've travel the full distance to Canton hundreds of times.

Especially during my Wakefield days, I often jumped off today's Rt 128 to take local roads when the traffic was bad, or when I just needed a different perspective. Over time I learned that the roads I would take through Waltham, Lexington, Woburn, and Stoneham were part of an older, marked, Route 128 that predated the current limited access highway. I wanted to learn more.

I'm not the first to research this ... there are many resources that present the history of Route 128. I'll include them in this blog in their own post. 

This summer,  in a single day, I will bicycle the pre highway Route 128. The route has morphed over the years (from when Route 128 signposts were first posted in 1927). There is no definitive route for a specific year that I can find, but many references to various local ways that comprised Rt 128 in the years between 1927 and about 1940, when the first sections of today's limited access highway were built. So, my route will be an amalgamation of what I could piece together from the 1927 to 1940 timeframe.

Below is a map of the current Rt 128 from Gloucester to Canton, in blue. The red and green tracks are the Old Route 128, as it meandered from Gloucester to Hull. I generated the GPX using Google Maps to trace the routes and https://mapstogpx.com/ to generate the GPX files. I then used https://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ to superimpose the GPX tracks on a map of eastern Massachusetts.