Four New Cars for Danbury

Ending 2025 on a positive note, the Danbury Railway Museum last week received a quartet of new cars for its growing collection of mainline electric equipment. Metro-North M3A-type cars 8002, 8003, 8106, and 8107 were brought onto the museum grounds in a late-night move. Thanks to Jordan Helzer for alerting me to this Facebook post, and to DRM and Marc Glucksman/River Rail Photo for the above picture from that post.

The four identical M3A cars were built in 1984-1985 by Budd and ran for their careers on the old New York Central electric division to Croton-on Hudson and White Plains. They're similar to the two M2 cars already at Danbury, which ran on the old New Haven, but unlike those cars they're "pure" 600V DC cars and do not have equipment for high-voltage AC operation. They also don't have pantographs. Most of the M3A class is still in regular service, but these were early retirees and were donated to DRM by Metro-North for preservation. The DRM traction collection has now grown to 15 pieces, quite an impressive collection and one that is exclusively mainline electric in nature, while the overall PNAERC roster is 2,086 cars.