Driving That Train
For $250 Donation, Naugatuck Railroad Lets You Take Control Of Real Locomotive
July 11, 2006
By DAVID OWENS, The Hartford Courant
Since childhood I’ve been hooked on trains. My buddies and I would ride our bikes to the train station in our suburban Philadelphia hometown to watch commuter trains and the occasional freight train pass through.
We even bummed a ride on a Reading engine one afternoon at it shuffled cars outside a nearby tank car repair shop.
But I’d never run a locomotive - until Sunday morning.
I drove to the East Litchfield station on the Railroad Museum of New England’s Naugatuck Railroad. I waited only a few minutes before I heard a low-pitched horn blasting from the south. Then the engine, an American Locomotive Co. RS-3, rolled into view.
For train nuts, RS-3s hold a special allure. This is no Winnebago on steel wheels, like so many of the locomotives that crisscross the nation today. An RS-3 has a stylish rounded body and reputation for getup and go that made it a favorite of train crews.
When RS-3 No. 529 was delivered in August 1950 to the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, the company was in the midst of “dieselization.” The diesels were replacing steam engines at a rapid pace; manufacturers included American Locomotive, the Electro Motive Division of General Motors, Fairbanks-Morse and Baldwin.
Railroad accountants loved the diesels because they were cheaper to maintain and allowed railroads to shed facilities such as water towers, coal towers and costly maintenance shops needed to machine replacement parts for steam engines. The railroads also no longer had to spend money hauling coal. Diesels were also more efficient and more comfortable for the train crews.
"This was one of the last batch they bought to kill off the last