Chandler Bikeway

Turn one block south off Magnolia and you'll find a wide, landscaped path running down the center of Chandler Boulevard — the Chandler Bikeway, and your route back toward where you started. It's a pleasant walk under shade trees with the Verdugo Mountains ahead of you, but it's also a piece of transportation history hiding as a garden.

This green corridor used to be a railroad. It follows the old Southern Pacific Burbank Branch, a freight right-of-way the city and the transit authority bought in 1991 and, over the early 2000s, rebuilt into Burbank's first protected bike path — separate lanes for cyclists and walkers, dotted with sculpture and murals. It opened in 2004, and it's the classic rails-to-trails move: a line that once carried freight now carries people on foot and on bikes.

Rail is really the reason a neighborhood like this exists at all. Long before the freeways, the San Fernando Valley ran on electric interurban trains — the legendary Pacific Electric Red Cars. A Red Car line reached Burbank back in 1911 and ran until the mid-1950s, and all across Southern California the rule was simple: where the trolley went, the homebuyers followed. Whole neighborhoods, Magnolia Park among them, grew up around those tracks. Then, in the 1950s, the region tore the system out and bet everything on the automobile and the freeway.

So this quiet path carries a bittersweet history in its very shape. It's the ghost of a rail line, brought back to life for a slower kind of travel — and a reminder of the transit network Los Angeles once had and gave away. Follow it back toward Hollywood Way and the corner where we began, past the backs of the shops you visited this morning. That's our tour. Thanks for walking Magnolia Park.