Sigh. For the life of me, I never saw that machens road crossing the railroad tracks to the machens trailhead, all the previous times I've looked there. I'd always hoped that I could get to the machens trailhead by crossing the clark bridge from the confluence trail, then taking the west alton trail (which was too overgrown to get through, the last time I tried to ride it from one end to the other) then finding a suitable route from west alton to the machens trailhead. Yet now that I googlemapped it, there it is, running right over the tracks and to the trailhead, such as it is.

Either my eyes are blind, or my brain is on vacation in the Bahamas, (in which case, I'd kind of like to be where my brain is, just now...) for me to have missed that. I previously thought the machens trailhead just buried you in the middle of floodplain farm fields.