I’ve posted a few times about my railfan adventures chasing the stone train that serves the Tilcon Danbury Stone Plant and the operations there. This story is about the same train operating on a rare routing that I was fortunate enough to see and record. The loaded CT-2 departs from Cedar Hill yard in New Haven 5 nights a week during the stone season. Usually they come up the Metro-North Waterbury branch then cut over to the the old New Haven Maybrook line and follow it West from Derby CT to the plant, just RR East of Danbury. Often after dropping the loads and picking up the empties they will continue West to Danbury then cut over to the old Danbury & Norwalk line for the trip South with a switching stop in Bethel, CT. When there are track problems with the Maybrook line, they will bring the loads North up the Danbury & Norwalk. There is usually no advance warning of this. What is special is the movement of 40 full hoppers of stone powered by 4-6 GE U-Boats through the tight balloon track at Danbury. The sounds, sights and smells are awesome…
This photo was taken in the 50’s, but the track configuration hasn’t changed. I have a friend on the crew and I’ve told him of my desire to record the movement of loads through Danbury. I was fortunate enough to get an email notice a few days in advance that due to track work, CT-2 would route North on ‘the DAN’ three days this week. I arrived at the Danbury Metro-North station just as the last commuter train #1890 was arriving at 00:15. I got set up in time to take a short test video of it rounding the loop. Despite the fact that I had no lighting other than available light from the parking lot, the movie came out OK. It’s very dark, but you can see -AND hear- the train. The reason for making the recording was for the sound, so I wasn’t too worried about the light. The Metro North video is about 1:30 minutes and 97 MB in size. The rock train (P&W CT-2) arrived a few minutes late at about 00:40 with 2 GE U-Boats on each end and 40 stone hoppers in between. I recorded the entire train as it passed the parking lot. Monaural camera sound doesn’t really capture how awesome it is to stand in the middle of a horseshoe curve of track that is probably not much more than 100 yards between legs. This is the same track in the aerial photo above. That photo was taken in the 50’s - long before the current commuter station was built and before the roundhouse and freight sheds were torn down. That big gas ball was taken away last summer. My recording was made from a spot near the track and inside the loop to the right of the river where the road was. The train approaches from the south on the track at the right. It pulls around the loop continuing North on the track to the left. This was once the junction of the Danbury & Norwalk RR with the Housatonic RR. The video lasts 6:30 minutes and is almost 500 MB! I’m not going to post links to the videos here because of their size. My ISP limits my bandwidth, so at 500MB 5 or 6 downloads would kill my monthly quota. If you would like the link, please email me so I can control the number of downloads. The videos require Quick Time to view and must be downloaded. They can’t be viewed as streaming video. Metro-North Commuter Train #1890 00:01:30 97MB - AND - P&W CT-2 Stone Train 00:06:30 436MB