Joe Mato presented selections from his collection of images of The Hartford and Connecticut Western Railroad, which later became the Central New England Railroad before being absorbed into the New Haven system. The presentation will focus on how the railroad came to be, the people behind it and the construction of the railroad when it first started. There will be pictures of locations and landmarks starting from Millerton, New York to the town of Winsted in Connecticut. Joe Mato grew up in Danbury next to the Maybrook Line. His interest in the railroad started when he was 3 years old but he never worked for the railroad and became a commercial airline pilot. Before he stopped flying, he started working at the Danbury Railway Museum and later he fired locomotives at the Valley RR and volunteered at Steamtown in Scranton. In 2005, Joe and Bernie Rudberg started the CNE Bus Tours, showing people one segment of the CNE railroad at a time. Bernie died in 2016 but the tours continued until Covid hit in 2020.
