Working On The Railroad –

Tales And Recollections From All The Live-Long Days

By Jan Howard

A Newtown resident has exchanged a long career as a railroad engineer for an avocation that not only keeps him involved with railroading but also allows him to share his love for railroading with others.

Through his photography and his volunteer work with the Danbury Railway Museum, Peter McLachlan enhances other people’s knowledge about what it was like to work on the railroad.

He has many stories to tell of his love of railroading and about the years he spent bringing passengers or freight to their destinations.

Mr McLachlan will share some of these stories during a slide presentation, sponsored by the Newtown Historical Society, on Monday, March 13, at 7:30 pm in the meeting room of the C.H. Booth Library on Main Street. His program will include color slides illustrating the history and development of the New Haven line from 1954 to the present and examine the American love affair with the railroad. The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served at the program’s conclusion.

If you remember the train whistling on the way through Newtown, you may have already “met” Mr McLachlan.

During his years as engineer, Mr McLachlan ran trains of one to 150 cars through Newtown to Maybrook, N.Y., and Cedar Hill in New Haven. Having been a Newtown resident since 1946, he always greeted his family on the way through town by blowing his train whistle.

“If I didn’t blow the whistle, I’d be in trouble,” he said. “People would say, ‘I heard you go through last night.’ Now people would complain if you blew the whistle in town. But you have to blow it at crossings.”

Mr McLachlan said he ran through Newtown hundreds of times.

Mr McLachlan and his family lived in Danbury until he was about eight years old, when they moved to Newtown to a house not far from where he now lives. He attended St Peter’s School in Danbury and graduated from Newtown High School in 1956.

Mr McLachlan has always loved trains and railroading, even as a small child.

Following the move to Newtown, he would stand on the bridges over the tracks on The Boulevard or School House Hill Road to watch the trains as they came through. “My sister and I would come home dirty from the coal smoke,” he said.

Those steam engines “were wonderful,” he said. “Steam locomotives were alive.”

Mr McLachlan said he has since met some of the train crews who remembered him and his sister standing there.

The train locomotives are mostly diesel now. “I just loved running them,” he said.

He began working on the New Haven Railroad in 1956 when he was 18. He was offered a job starting the Monday after graduation during one of his many visits to the Danbury station to take photographs.

“That was a shock. All of a sudden I was a railroad man,” Mr McLachlan said. He remained with the line until his retirement in October 1998. During that 42-year career, he served for about three years as locomotive servicer and preparer and turntable operator and 39 years as a locomotive engineer.

As a volunteer with the Danbury Railway Museum, Mr McLachlan still operates the same turntable he operated all those years ago. “I figure I’ve been around it 10,000 times,” he said. It is the only operating turntable remaining in Connecticut.

“I’ve found people like trains,” he said. He has presented his slides and talk in New York City and several other places. He encourages program attendees to ask questions during the slide presentation.

 “I’m the only member of my family to be a railroad man. I’ve loved it,” Mr McLachlan said. “They never had to wonder where I was as a kid. I’d be sitting and watching the trains.”

For additional information about the program on railroading, please call the Historical Society at 203/426-5937.