Danbury Part 2: Trains

[dmaze]

Danbury's other attraction is the Danbury Railway Museum, located in a former New York, New Haven, and Hartford yard at the end of a Metro-North commuter line. This was a worthwhile afternoon in my book (apologies to narya may be in order though). A little less than half of what they have is New Haven equipment, but much of it is in very good shape. Several Budd RDCs, which the staff claimed actually ran; a B&M 2-6-0 that clearly didn't.

One interesting thing was that a lot of their equipment was open. You could walk through a CN caboose, for instance. (Which seemed to very comfortably seat eight bilingual railroaders; were that many people ever necessary?) The one RDC that was open had a very nice interior, though not apparently its original one.

Definitely the most interesting thing there though was a retired Sperry Rail Service car. A lot of the interior was crew quarters, with bunk beds, a small kitchen, and a common room. All of the exciting electronics seemed to be at the back of the car but there wasn't a whole lot of indication of what you could get from a bunch of gauges and a rack of electronics.

So a nice train setup, but quite a hike; probably a little far to go just for the rail museum (we spent a couple of hours there including an excursion around the yard and had pretty much seen the whole thing) but worth seeing if you're in the area anyways.

(For the record, note that when I say "Danbury's other attraction" there are no coffee shops at all in the downtown area. There are two Starbucks with Danbury addresses if you happen to be in need of such a thing, but bring a GPS to try to find them.)