Canaan Yard

or West Canaan

East of here is the beautiful Canaan Union Station.

    The Canaan yard is located west of Route 7 across from the present day lumber store.

The access is straight down a wide grassy (or snowy depending on your choice of seasons) path.

Looking west towards the yard with the highway behind us. Up ahead at about the limit of this picture is where the yard proper started.

Now it is a residential development on the right where the engine house (above right) stood and a small industrial area on the left which would be behind where the Mountain Express is posed in the left picture. Pictures above and below are from the Connecticut History Online archive. 

At the west end of the yard was the Brown Hoist skip loading coaling tower, boilerhouse and winch to run the skip, the water wheel fed water tower and in the early days a wooden Howe Truss bridge over the Blackberry River. Above is what it looked like in the late 1890's and below is what the site looks like today.

This is taken from about the same spot as the old picture above. Hard to get a train through now.

The concrete in the foreground is the footings for the water tower and my son is standing on the east bridge abutment above the river. Yard is to the right and Washining to the left.

Turning around and looking back towards the yard we find the pit for the skip loader car next to the roadbed.

The timbers and connectors for the trestle for the coal laden hopper cars or the skip ramp are still there in the pit.

West of here is Washining a small flag stop east of the Twin Lakes