Danbury Railway Museum

The Union Station depot that now houses the Danbury Railway Museum is a 1903 brick building erected by the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad after it realigned the tracks in 1901; it replaced the three smaller stations the city’s Danbury and Norwalk, Housatonic and New York and New England lines had operated since the 1880s. After the station fell into neglect under the Connecticut Department of Transportation, Metro‑North closed it in 1993 and, within a year, the Danbury Railway Museum was founded in 1994 as a volunteer‑run nonprofit to restore the structure. The museum’s turntable, constructed around 1914 and the only intact surviving turntable in Connecticut, survived a roundhouse fire in the 1980s and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 15 2005, joining the station’s own 1986 NRHP designation. These milestones mark the museum’s transformation from a disused commuter hub to a restored heritage site and the sole holder of Connecticut’s surviving turntable.