Danbury Railway Museum

Model train layout showing station and rail yard in the 1950s.

Danbury station, ca. 1910

The museum itself is located on a 1.3-acre (0.53 ha) lot at the southeast corner of White Street and Patriot Drive, just across from Meeker's Hardware, which is also on the Register. To its west is a parking lot with room for 25 cars. Immediately behind it, to the south, are the railroad tracks and a 6-acre (2.4 ha) rail yard. The current Danbury station is a short distance away, and sometimes Metro-North stores its trains on the tracks behind the station between runs. The museum's collection of older cars is on the tracks in the yard's interior. A grade crossing on White marks the eastern terminus of the Beacon Line kept in reserve by Metro-North for possible future use.[1]

Yard

Four diesel locomotives lined up at the historic rail yard

New York Central 2013, an EMD FL9, sits in the yard with a Metro-North train in the background

Visitors can ride the "Rail Yard Local" on weekends in the summer season. The ride takes about 30–35 minutes and includes a unique ride by the passengers on the museum's operating turntable, and a tour of the recently restored Danbury fairground's pumphouse. The turntable was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 15, 2005.[4] The turntable, built around 1914 was originally part of a roundhouse and machine shop complex. A fire destroyed the buildings in the 1980s, leaving "the only intact surviving [railroad] turntable in Connecticut". It is essentially a swing bridge, and is located several hundred yards east of the station.[5]

Some of the rolling stock in the yard, including its 1907-built 2-6-0 steam locomotive (B&M #1455[6]), two cabooses, a Budd Company self-propelled rail diesel car, and a Sperry track inspection car, are open to the visitors. The museum is an all-volunteer operation and welcomes anyone who would like to participate in any of the many facets of its operations – including operating its locomotives and self-propelled cars.

By the 1880s, the three railroads that served the city — the Danbury and Norwalk, Housatonic and New York and New England — had built small, separate stations for their lines in the vicinity of the current building. Later in that decade, economic difficulties led to them all becoming part of the New York, New Haven and Hartford, leading it to be known locally as the Consolidated Road. Citizens began asking the new owner to consolidate its three stations into one as early as 1894, two years after the last merger.[1]

In 1901, the Consolidated realigned the tracks and built the new station where the New York & New England's passenger depot had been. A. Malkin's design combined a basic Richardsonian Romanesque structure with some Colonial Revival details, like the small panes in the windows. It was said to be the largest station on the New Haven's New York Division.[1]

In its peak years, early in the 20th century, extant timetables suggest the station saw as many as 125 trains a day. Much of that passenger traffic was related to the city's large hatmaking industry, with workers migrating to and from jobs, and business travelers selling to or buying from the hatmakers. It was acknowledged with a neon sign on a nearby coal shed showing a derby hat coming down on a crown and saying "Danbury Crowns Them All". The hat-related traffic grew around the industry's two big seasons, the Christmas and Easter holidays. Other passengers were commuters going to jobs in Bridgeport or New York City, summer travelers headed for country retreats and hotels in the area, or visitors to the Danbury Fair, held every October.[1]

After World War II, train ridership began to decline with the rise of passenger air travel and the Interstate Highway System. The decline of hatmaking, as many Americans started going around bareheaded, also contributed. Many of the station's original decorative features were removed. The New Haven's passenger train services to northwestern Connecticut, the Berkshires and to Pittsfield, Massachusetts were cut to weekend-only service by 1961. The last named train on the route, the Berkshire, was discontinued in 1968. In the late 1960s the Consolidated was itself absorbed into the short-lived Penn Central conglomerate. The last intercity passenger train left for Pittsfield in 1972, and the next year the Penn Central's final failure put its trains in the hands of Conrail and the station itself became property of the state Department of Transportation (ConnDOT).[1]

Metro-North closed the station, the northern terminus of the New Haven Line's Danbury Branch, in 1993. The city's mayor, Gene Eriquez, who had seen downtown wither as retail business and customers went to the mall built on the former fairgrounds, did not want to see another old building lost to urban blight. The station seemed to him and others the ideal place for a rail museum that could attract visitors, and the Danbury Railway Museum was formed the next year by a group of National Railway Historical Society and local railfans.[7]

The museum soon grew to a hundred members, and the first excursion train was run later that year. A temporary museum was established in an Ives Street storefront while the old station itself was restored with a $1.5 million grant. In late 1995 the restored station was rededicated at a ceremony attended by the mayor and a thousand people. The museum interior was opened in the middle of the following year.[7]

The turntable was restored in 1998. Since 2005 it has been a regular stop on the Railyard Local. Today the museum has 550 members and 60 pieces of equipment.[7]

• List of heritage railroads in the United States
• List of railway museums
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Fairfield County, Connecticut