The Danbury Railway Museum

Looking for a summer day-trip to find some fun which teaching your kids about transportation?  Just hop a Metro-North train (or drive, if you must) to Danbury to visit the Danbury Railway Museum.

I usually find railway museums a bit depressing as they tend to be dusty monuments to the past.  But not this one.  Not only do they have a beautifully curated collection of memorabilia, but they are still a working railroad!

Housed in a beautifully restored 1903 railroad station (listed on the National Register of Historic Places), the museum was opened in the 1990’s after the building was abandoned by CDOT in favor of a newer Metro-North station a few hundred yards away serving the Danbury branch line.

At its peak the station saw 125 trains a day.  Today it serves about a dozen Metro-North trains to South Norwalk and GCT, all of them push-pull diesel consists.  Fun fact:  did you know that the Danbury line was once electrified, just like the main line?

Danbury is also served by the old Maybrook / Beacon Line running west to the city of the same name on the Hudson River.  Today the line is still used occasionally by Metro-North to transfer locomotives to its Croton-Harmon yards for servicing.

Danbury’s major industry, hat making, drew thousands of migrant workers and is celebrated by a Metro-North passenger car emblazoned with the name “The Danbury Hatter” you might see on the branch.

Inside the delightfully air conditioned station the museum offers a great orientation video showing the mighty New Haven & Hartford RR at its peak, carrying both passengers and freight.  There are also several model train layouts (in five different scales) that kids can operate at the push of a button.  You’ll also find a wonderful collection of railroad flatware and china from the New Haven’s glory days of posh dining cars.

In a tip o’ the conductor’s hat to more recent railroadiana, the museum has acquired parts of the old Solari departure board from New Haven, though it has yet to be returned to full functionality.  Still, it’s nice someone preserved it.

But the highlight of the museum’s collection will be found outside in its rail yard. There you’ll find more than 70 railcars and locomotives which you can tour (in the summertime) on a half hour train ride.  Tickets are $3 for a ride in a coach or the caboose. For $10 you can even ride in the diesel engine’s cab.

The train ride around the yard takes 20 minutes and shows you the museum’s 14 locomotives, 12 passenger cars and 26 freight cars.  The highlight of the ride is a visit to one of the last working turntables in New England.  Built in 1911, the 95-foot turntable would allow all but the largest in the New Haven’s locomotive fleet to enter one of nine stalls in an engine house, since demolished.

The museum also hosts kids’ birthday parties allowing hands-on inspection of the truly largest “boys’ toys” ever built.  Adults can also join the fun as the museum is run by dedicated volunteers.

Connecticut is lucky to have a number of great railroad and trolley museums, but this is my favorite… and the only one accessible by taking a train to get there.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Trucks as Scapegoats

“Why don’t we just ban all trucks from our interstate highways in rush hour?” 

The question was asked of me by a small town mayor in Fairfield County who’d obviously given a lot of thought to solutions to our traffic woes.  He’s a smart guy and thought he’d come up with “the answer” to our transportation crisis.

He said he wasn’t in favor of tolls, but liked them as a traffic mitigation tool.  By charging trucks more to drive our highways in rush hour, they’d be incentivized to instead go off-peak.  He was just taking the idea a step further:  ban them completely at certain hours.

Well, I explained, that’s probably illegal.  This is an interstate, federal highway built to carry trucks.  Wouldn’t it be a better idea to tell the merchants where they are going to only accept deliveries at, say, 3 am instead of 9 – 5 which is more convenient for the stores?

But the truck-haters are not satisfied.  Any number of candidates are calling for truck-only tolls, pointing to Rhode Island’s recent launch of such as system.  It’s been a huge success, raking in $625,000 in its first month of operation.

But it’s also attracted lawsuits, because it is illegal, just like the Mayor’s idea.  Tolling only big-rigs is a violation of the US Constitution’s “Commerce Clause”.  The truckers and big-box stores say it’s not fair to toll them and not charge drivers of cars and small trucks.  I’m no lawyer, but I think they’re right.

Trucks are not the problem.  Cars are.

But it’s so easy to blame the trucks for delays on our roads, isn’t it?  Blame them, instead of ourselves.  Toll them, not me. I’m not creating the traffic, they are.

Trucks are not allowed on the Merritt and Wilbur Cross Parkways, so why are those roads so congested?  Look at I-95 in rush hour and count the number of trucks vs. single-occupancy-vehicles.  Again, it’s the volume of the traffic, not the kind of vehicles that are causing the delays.  It’s the geometry of the highway… too many exits and entrances… and too few alternatives (aside from rail).

Truckers don’t want to be on the interstates in bumper-to-bumper traffic any more than you do.  They are not out there, driving on I-95 and I-84, just to annoy you.  Compared to you, driving solo in your automobile, they are high-occupancy vehicles carrying your Amazon orders and making deliveries to the big box stores.  You put those trucks on the road, and now you want to ban them at certain hours?  Then you’ll be moaning about late deliveries.

You don’t want to pay tolls?  Trucks already do, even in Connecticut.  They pay higher state gas taxes (44 cents for diesel vs. 25 cents for gasoline), even if they don’t buy that gas in Connecticut.  And they must pay to register their trucks in CT, even if they are from out of state, thanks to the International Fuel Tax Agreement, or IFTA.

Add a layer of tolls on top of those costs and guess who’s going to pay?  You!

There’s no free lunch, folks.  And the solution to our traffic is not to blame others… but to look in the mirror.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

Beware of Politicians' Promises

I used to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Politicians.  I actually thought the first two brought me gifts and the latter cared about me and my community.   Well, those days are gone.

We are now neck deep in the primary round of campaigning for our state’s top officials and I hope you’ve been paying attention.  The promises and the BS are piling up pretty fast, especially when it comes to the issue of transportation.

A few candidates have been brave enough to endorse the idea of tolls while others just mouth vague platitudes like “we should have free-flowing traffic on I-95…”.   No explanations of how or who’d pay for it, just the pandering promises.  Why not a chicken in every pot, too?

For the past few years I have had a standing offer to meet with anyone running for public office to talk about transportation.  Republican, Democrat, Independent… I don’t care.  If you want to build an informed platform on this issue, I’ll give you the history and perspective and you take it from there.

I’ll explain Metro-North’s complicated relationship with the CDOT.  I’ll give you the facts about the pilfering of money from the Special Transportation Fund by both Republicans and Democrats.  I know all this stuff, having immersed myself in it for over 20 years.  And I know there are no easy answers.

So far this election I’ve met with two gubernatorial candidates and several folks running for State Rep and State Senate.  I won’t reveal the names, but I will tell you I’ve found two things to be true:  1) Regardless of party affiliation, most candidates know nothing about transportation, and 2) their “solutions” to the problem they don’t understand are facile.

One- party rule is a dangerous thing as the Democrats have shown for the past eight years.  Holding a super-majority breeds arrogance and zero interest in the minority party’s views.  If the Republicans flip things to their favor in November I’m sure they’d be just as arrogant. A pox on both their houses.

Here’s what I do not understand:  why are Democrats and Republicans unwilling to work together, especially on issues of common interest, like transportation?  Did you know that there is no caucus in the state legislature of D’s and R’s from Fairfield County? 

With all the issues this transportation-crippled corner of Connecticut shares in common, the State Representatives and State Senators from this area do not meet together to strategize how to fight for our area’s interests.  Instead, they caucus only with the members of their own party and snipe at each other and whoever is Governor.

It’s so much easier to blame than to fix.

I knew that party politics on the national level was bad, but this is ridiculous.  Whether Republican or Democrat, if you represent voters in Fairfield County you should be meeting with your fellow pols and fighting for the region, not scoring political points by Tweeting attacks to your base.

So pardon my cynicism as we get ready for the August 14^th primary.  I’m just losing faith in the whole system.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media

London's Necropolis Railroad

Imagine a railroad where the customers never spoke, never complained about being late and only traveled one way.  A railroad that offered three classes of service and had only one destination.

Such a railroad was the London Necropolis Railroad:  a train for the dead.

By 1850, London’s population had doubled to one million inhabitants in just 50 years and the city had run out of burial grounds in local church yards.  Public health required that something be done about disposing of the dead, and a cholera outbreak in 1849 hastened the decision.

Two entrepreneurs, Sir Richard Broun and Richard Sprye, proposed opening a giant cemetery 23 miles outside of the city which would have enough room for 5.8 million graves.  The challenge was… how to get the coffins and the mourners to the site.  The solution was a purpose-built railroad offering a package deal.

Family members could buy their deceased a first, second or third class ticket non-stop from the LNR’s London station (near Waterloo) straight to the magnificent Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.  A first class ticket included choice of burial plots, transportation of the deceased and family members (they went round-trip) and the right to erect a marker on the grave.  Second class tickets meant your grave could be re-used and third class passage was for paupers with no markers.

The station’s Waterloo location, close to the River Thames, was chosen to make it easy for funeral homes to deliver their clients to the LNR by boat as well as hearse.  Coffins were received and stored on the trains separate from the mourners, by ticket class and religion.  Each class had its own waiting room at the station, as well.

The train carriages were nothing special, though after continual use for 40 years there were some complaints about their condition.

The train departed London each morning at 11:35 am (11:20 am on Sundays) and would arrive at Brookwood 50 minutes later.  Return trains (for the mourners) departed each afternoon at 2:30 following services.

The railroad negotiated the right to run up to three roundtrips daily if there was demand.  And on the occasion of at least one celebrity’s funeral, the LNR once carried 5000 passengers on three separate trains, one of them 17 carriages long.

But business wasn’t always this brisk… or profitable.  Because fares were set by law and didn’t change for 85 years, the funeral goers were getting a much cheaper ride than commuters along the same route.  In fact, golfers would sometimes disguise themselves as mourners and use the cheap fares to get them to the links adjacent to the cemetery.

By the start of the 20^th century the motorized hearse had been invented and by the 1920’s the train seemed obsolete.  Also, given the distance of Brookwood from the city, it became a less desirable place for internment as family members didn’t like to travel that distance just to visit graveside.

The end came during World War II.  During the 1941 Blitz the London terminal took a direct hit and the railroad, by then running just two or three times a week, ceased operations.

The Brookwood Cemetery continues operations and is still the UK’s largest, including a 4.5 acre section dedicated to graves of thousands of American servicemen who died in the world wars.

Posted with permission of Hearst CT Media