Ride the Cross Kirkland Corridor on any weekday evening and you'll pass runners, e-bike commuters, a few dogs, and eventually a chain-link fence where the trail just stops at the edge of the Wilburton Trestle. The 1,000-foot wooden bridge has been wrapped in scaffolding and crane cable for two years now, and if you've been waiting for the day it opens so the Eastrail finally feels finished, you've been waiting for the wrong thing. The trestle isn't the trail. It's one piece of it, and it just slipped a year behind schedule for a reason that has nothing to do with red tape and everything to do with what was hiding inside 120-year-old timber.
That's the part worth knowing if you live anywhere along this corridor, from Renton up through Kirkland and out toward Redmond and Woodinville. The Eastrail was never going to open on a single day. It's opening in pieces, on different clocks, and right now roughly 18 of the planned 42 miles are already rideable, according to the Rails to Trails Conservancy's July 2026 feature on the corridor. The gap between that reality and the story most people still tell about "the trail that's almost done" is exactly the kind of thing that's easy to miss if you only check in on this project once a year.
The Piece That Slipped
The Wilburton Trestle was supposed to open in 2026. That date showed up in county press releases, city announcements, and cycling advocacy posts going back to 2024. Then contractors started pulling apart the structure and found more damage than anyone had planned for. According to reporting from Hoodline in April 2026, crews working on the century-old bridge have replaced roughly 1,600 bolts, repaired or swapped nearly 2,000 timber members, and salvaged more than 800,000 pounds of historic lumber. King County Parks has since moved the target opening to mid-2027, and the project's price tag has grown alongside it, from an original $37 million budget to roughly $43.5 million once the scope of the repairs became clear.
Bill Finkbeiner, an early advocate for the trail, put it simply when construction first began.
"It's not the groundbreaking that matters. It's the point when we get to use it."
That's the right way to think about the whole corridor right now, not just the trestle. The bridge itself dates to 1904, when the Northern Pacific Railway used it to haul logged timber to regional mills and ports. Later it carried airplane fuselages bound for Boeing's Renton plant, and its last regular use was as the route for the Spirit of Washington scenic dinner train before the tracks went quiet in 2008. Converting a structure with that much history into an 18-foot-wide public trail with three viewing platforms was never going to be a simple resurfacing job, and the rot crews found underneath the decking is the reason the calendar moved.
What's Actually Rideable Today
Here's the part that gets lost when the trestle becomes the whole story. Long stretches of the Eastrail on either side of that gap are open now and have been for a while.
| Segment | Location | Status as of this summer |
|---|---|---|
| Cross Kirkland Corridor | Kirkland, 5.75 miles | Open; the first improved section of the original rail corridor |
| North Bellevue segment | NE 4th St to Kirkland city limit, 2.3 miles | Open as an interim gravel trail, not yet paved |
| South Bellevue segment | Coal Creek Parkway to Ripley Lane in Renton, 2.4 miles | Open and paved |
| Wilburton Trestle | Bellevue, over Kelsey Creek and SE 8th St | Closed, fenced, targeted for mid-2027 |
| I-90 crossing segment | Bellevue, crossing I-90 near 32nd St | Under design and construction, targeted for 2027 |
| Redmond Central Connector | Redmond spur | Final section completed last fall, linking to Redmond's light rail stations and the Bear Creek Bridge |
That South Bellevue stretch matters more than it sounds like it should. It's part of what closes the loop for anyone riding from the Kirkland side down toward Renton, and it's paved, not gravel, which is the difference between a trail you commute on and a trail you tolerate.
The North Bellevue piece is worth flagging too, precisely because it's easy to assume "open" means "finished." It doesn't. That segment is still an interim gravel surface, and the City of Bellevue's own project page is upfront that paving is a future phase, not a current one.
Two Kirkland closures that had been snarling the Cross Kirkland Corridor earlier this year have also cleared. An emergency repair on the Eastside Interceptor sewer line forced a multi-month detour between NE 52nd Street and 108th Avenue NE, and a separate closure near NE 85th Street shut the trail while the city built a pedestrian bridge overhead. Both reopened by early summer, though King County has noted that additional short-term sewer work could still force brief closures later in the season, so it's worth checking the county's live closure map before you plan a long ride through that stretch.
Where People Are Actually Stopping
The trail's most reliable gathering point right now is Feriton Spur Park in Kirkland, just off the Cross Kirkland Corridor near Google's Sixth Street campus. It's home to a small amphitheater that hosts the Eastrail Summer Concert Series, free and family-friendly, on Wednesday evenings through July. This year's lineup has included local band Vlad and the Dads, 24 Madison Band, and singer-songwriter Lucia Flores-Wiseman, who finished fourth on Season 27 of NBC's The Voice. The series runs on a $5,000 grant from the Kirkland Community Foundation's Ignite Kirkland program, which is a small detail but a telling one. This isn't corporate programming bolted onto the trail. It's funded and requested by the neighborhood that uses it.
Right next to the amphitheater is Chainline Station, a trailside taproom that pours its own Eastrail Ale, with a portion of the proceeds going back to Eastrail Partners, the nonprofit that helps coordinate the trail across all the cities it touches. It's the kind of stop that turns a bike ride into an evening, and it's a short detour off the trail rather than a destination you'd have to plan a whole trip around.
Further south, Newcastle Beach Park and Kennydale Beach Park both sit directly off the corridor, giving riders a place to cool off without leaving the trail network. If you're renting rather than riding your own bike, The Line Bicycle Experience has a shop on SE 5th Street in Bellevue, a block or two off the trail.
The Practical Takeaway
If you live along this corridor, the useful move isn't to wait for a single finish line. It's to treat the Eastrail the way King County itself is building it, as a set of independent projects on independent timelines. The Cross Kirkland Corridor and the paved South Bellevue segment are done and usable today. The Redmond spur finished its final piece last fall. The trestle and the I-90 crossing are both real projects with real budgets, but neither one is arriving before 2027, and the trestle's slip from 2026 to mid-2027 is a reminder that even funded, under-construction projects on century-old infrastructure can still surprise the people building them.
For now, the honest answer to "when does the Eastrail open" is that most of it already has. The remaining pieces are worth watching, but they're not worth waiting on before you go find out what a Wednesday evening at Feriton Spur Park actually feels like.
If you're weighing a move to a home along this corridor, or thinking about what a property near Bellevue, Kirkland, or the rest of King County is worth with a finished regional trail eventually running past it, The Sessoms Group can walk you through what that infrastructure timeline actually means for the neighborhoods we work in every day. Schedule your concierge consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
