In her element. Having just completed morning servicing, Lehigh Valley Coal Co. saddle-tanker #126 steams in the Thomaston, CT yard, just north of Thomaston Station. Although the locomotive will be used to pull passenger cars this day, she really looks much more realistic in this setting...an industrial yard. The brick factory building in the background here is the old Plume & Atwood Complex. It's an old brass mill, that had existed here for 150 years, building everything from clock parts to brass shell casings for American war efforts. This would have been a great setting for a morning photo charter, just doing some switching with vintage freight cars. In fact, back in 2010, I was lucky enough to stumble into an impromptu photo shoot with Flagg Coal #75 right here, doing exactly that. Sadly, there will never be another such shoot here, because literally a couple of months after I took this shot, the old Plume & Atwood complex was demolished. The satellite image on Google Earth now shows an empty lot here. Perhaps the locals like the current look, but the scene captured here was, in my mind, much more representative of the history of this branchline railroad and the factories it served along Connecticut's Naugatuck River.
