The Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroad once carried freight and passengers through Laconia's granite hills, connecting textile mills to distant markets between 1849 and the mid-twentieth century. By the 1980s, most of the northern New Hampshire branch lines had fallen silent, their iron rails rusting beneath encroaching birch and maple. In 2020, the Granite State Railway repurposed a section of this abandoned corridor as a rail bike route, preserving the original 1890s iron trestles and hand-laid ballast while installing custom-built pedal carts that ride the historic gauge. The Laconia Rail Bike Excursion operates along a four-mile stretch of the former Tilton-to-Meredith line, a segment that once served lakeside resorts and lumber yards. Riders pedal two-person or four-person bikes equipped with canopy shades and coaster brakes, following the Winnipesaukee River corridor through second-growth forest and wetland margins. The route crosses three wooden trestles, each dating to the 1890s and reinforced with modern steel supports. Interpretive markers along the track identify remnants of the original telegraph poles, water towers, and a collapsed icehouse foundation near Mile 2.3. Laconia itself emerged as a knitting-mill hub in the 1830s, its factories powered by water drawn from Lake Winnisquam. The rail link accelerated industrial growth, and by 1900 the city housed eleven textile operations. When textile production moved south in the 1920s, Laconia pivoted toward motorcycle manufacturing—Indian Motorcycle maintained its headquarters here until 1953—and later tourism. The rail bike route passes one of the old mill complexes, now converted to retail space, its brick smokestack still visible from the tracks. The excursion runs Friday through Sunday, with morning and early-afternoon departures to avoid late-day heat. Each rail bike accommodates up to four passengers, making the $59.99 rate a per-bike cost rather than per-person. The pedaling effort is moderate—flat grades with occasional gentle inclines—and the return journey retraces the outbound route. Riders control their own pace, though staff monitor spacing to prevent bottlenecks on the single-track sections. The round-trip takes approximately ninety minutes, including a brief turnaround at the northern terminus near Paugus Bay.