Most Sunday routines in Montclair Village involve three separate stops: a parking spot for the farmers market, a drive up to a trailhead, and another hunt for parking before dinner. Except that's not actually how the geography works here. Park once in the Montclair garage at 6235 La Salle Avenue, and you can walk the market, climb into Redwood Regional Park, and come back down for dinner without ever moving your car.

The reason is a strip of pavement most people drive past without noticing. It used to be a railroad.

The Track That Became a Trail

Before it was a walking path, the route now known as the Montclair Railroad Trail carried passenger trains for the Sacramento Northern Railway, running between Oakland and Chico from 1912 until 1957. When the tracks came out, the corridor sat idle long enough that a freeway was seriously proposed to replace it in the 1970s. That freeway never got built. What Montclair got instead was a 1.5-mile paved trail that starts essentially at the Village plaza and climbs, gently and continuously, into the hills.

The old rail grade explains why the walking is so easy. Trains don't do steep grades, so neither does this trail. It threads through eucalyptus and oak groves, crosses an overpass above Snake Road that most drivers underneath have never clocked as part of a trail system, and runs through a tunnel accessible from either the Cortereal Avenue side or straight out of the Village parking garage. It's flat enough for a stroller, a beginner runner, or a dog with an aging hip, and it connects straight into Redwood Regional Park, whose Skyline Gate Staging Area sits just off Redwood Road, also within the Montclair neighborhood.

That last part is the piece most "things to do in Montclair" content skips. The trail isn't just a pleasant walk near the Village. It's the actual connective tissue between the plaza and one of the East Bay's old-growth redwood groves, the largest remaining natural stand of coast redwood in the East Bay.

What the Loop Actually Looks Like

If you wanted to string the whole thing together on a Sunday, here's roughly how the pieces connect:

1. Park in the Montclair garage or find street parking near La Salle Avenue.
2. Walk two blocks to the corner of La Salle and Moraga for the weekly farmers market, open every Sunday from 9am to 1pm, rain or shine.
3. Pick up the Montclair Railroad Trail from the garage or the Cortereal Avenue entrance and follow the old rail grade up through the tunnel and over the Snake Road overpass.
4. Continue as the trail connects into Redwood Regional Park, near the Skyline Gate Staging Area off Redwood Road, then choose from the park's trails, including the Stream Trail along the creek or the longer French Trail loop through the redwoods.
5. Walk back down the same corridor into the Village for dinner on the plaza.

None of that requires a second parking transaction. It's one continuous stretch of ground that happens to contain a grocery errand, a hillside walk, and a restaurant reservation.

There's a nuance worth knowing before you bring a dog along. The trail's own stewardship group, which organizes volunteer maintenance days along the corridor, asks that dogs stay leashed on the paved sections given some seasonal terrain hazards. Once you cross into Redwood Regional Park proper, the rules loosen. Dogs are permitted off leash under voice control on most park trails, but the Stream Trail and the Serpentine Prairie Trail require a leash regardless. It's a small distinction, but it's the kind of thing you only know if you've actually walked the transition point between Village and park, rather than treated them as two separate destinations.

The Plaza Keeps Reshuffling While the Trail Stays Put

The trail is stable. The businesses lining the walk back down are not, and that turnover is worth paying attention to if you eat here regularly.

Perle Bar, tucked into the heart of the Village, opened in 2017 serving California-French food. It's since remade itself entirely into a modern Vietnamese kitchen, keeping the same address and the same name through a full cuisine change. That's a different kind of survival than simply staying open.

Newer arrivals are filling in around it. 5 Spiced Kitchen has become one of the more talked-about additions, a Chinese restaurant that Village regulars have been recommending on local review sites since it opened. The sushi counter at Kotobuki and the corned beef and cabbage at Crogan's Montclair have held their ground as the kind of places regulars build a routine around rather than discover fresh each visit, and Daughter Thai Kitchen and El Agavero, both fixtures on the plaza, were part of the street food lineup at this year's Montclair Beer, Wine & Music Festival in June, alongside Tante's Catering.

Not every longtime name has made it. Sarber's Cameras ran for more than fifty years before closing. The Montclair Malt Shop lasted thirty-three. Montclair Village Hardware didn't close so much as relocate about a mile away to Woodminster.

None of this is dramatic churn. It's a plaza that keeps roughly the same footprint of restaurants while the names and cuisines inside those storefronts shift every few years. The trail up into Redwood Regional Park doesn't have that problem. It's been the same walk since the tracks came out in the 1950s.

A Village That Maintains Its Own Trail

Part of why the corridor between Village and park stays walkable is that nobody assumes the city will handle it alone. The trail has its own informal caretakers, a group organized specifically around keeping the paved sections clear and the connecting spurs passable. Earlier this month, on August 15, volunteers were out at the La Salle entrance doing exactly that kind of maintenance work, the sort of unglamorous upkeep that keeps an old rail bed from reverting to overgrowth.

That same instinct shows up elsewhere in the Village. The Montclair Village Association, the nonprofit business improvement district behind the farmers market and most of the plaza's public events, has been running for more than seventy-five years. It's the same organization behind the annual Beer, Wine & Music Festival, the spring Taste of Montclair fundraiser, and the Sunday market's EBT matching program, which currently offers a dollar-for-dollar match up to fifteen dollars for fruits and vegetables. None of it is flashy. It's the ordinary machinery of a small commercial district that has decided to keep functioning as a small commercial district, rather than something an outside developer manages from a distance.

The Takeaway for Anyone Already Living Here

The next time you're deciding whether to drive to Redwood Regional Park separately from your Sunday market run, remember that you don't have to. The old rail grade connects both errands into one walk, and it has for as long as the trail has existed. The restaurants at either end of that walk will keep changing hands and cuisines. The path between them won't.

Red Oak Realty has spent years paying attention to the details that make East Bay neighborhoods work the way they do, block by block, trail by trail. If you're thinking about what it means to actually live somewhere in the East Bay, not just visit it, Work with a Seriously Local Agent.