Caboose Train

Peter,

  Very nice. Thanks for posting. Good variety that you have there!

Tom

Looks good!!

Well that's something I never heard of nor seen prototypically or modelled!   That must have been some sight to see in real life and I like the way it looks on your layout.

- Greg

Caboose train is good for a railfan excursion or whatever.

I've been planning to run a caboose train for laughs on my 3-rail layout because I have inadvertently accumulated a substantial surplus of cabooses. Sometimes I bought cheap cabooses just for the wheelsets but I end up repairing them. Cabooses are probably the most common postwar Lionel train item because virtually every set had one.

I seem to recall NYC trains in the 1960's with more than one caboose fairly often, maybe because they were deadheading to a repair shop?  (maybe at East Rochester?)

The caboose trains are not that common but they have been done before. 

How about 19 caboose's going to the area for the Red Caboose Motel in Strasburg PA in 1970. 

Lee Fritz

Love it! 

As a youngster I can remember a Pennsy steamer pulling a string of cabin cars along the mainline every so often.  Our ballfield, where we were every day, was right next to the Mainline and we would see all sorts of things on those tracks.

Norm

Very cool idea!! It looks a little like the caboose train they run in the 1:1 scale at the Illinois Railway Museum which is a huge fan favorite. 

By the way, the Woolworths building in the background looks really sharp too!!!

Just saw the all-caboose University of Louisville "Cardinal Express" tailgate train while watching television coverage of the game versus Florida State on Saturday.

What, me worry? 

It'd been hilarious if you'd put a simply boxcar on the end of that train of hacks!

Now I want to go home and do the same thing. Awesome.

Tom M posted:

Now I want to go home and do the same thing. Awesome.

Yeah, but dang it, the RR I model only ever had one hack, so I couldn't possibly do such a train because one caboose is really all I have...

I thought about building a shop building for an imaginary company that contracted with railroads to build and repair cabooses, just so I could have a lot of cabooses in its yards, but realized it would be another "industry" that would take too much space....and I already have too many of those...

Alfred E Neuman posted:

Just saw the all-caboose University of Louisville "Cardinal Express" tailgate train while watching television coverage of the game versus Florida State on Saturday.

What, me worry? 

I saw these cabooses during the NCAA regional baseball tournament in Louisville this past spring.  There is a rail line between the baseball diamond and the football stadium.  It was awfully hard to concentrate on the game when trains passed.  There were a few railfans at the games as they would comment on the locomotive consists.

You can see a couple of the cabooses over the outfield wall.  The rail line is between the wall and the cabooses.  Note the decking installed on top of the cars for tailgating.

Tom

I always say a train just isn't complete without a caboose at the end.  Why not the whole train! Very cool Peter!  

Very cool Peter!  I think I will follow your lead and run a caboose train myself.  Thanks for the idea!

 I would think that back in the day when railroads had cabooses on every freight, caboose trains were somewhat common as railroads shuttled caboose cars between yards when a particular yard ran short. 

I have a video of the Pennsy and often there were two cabooses on freights.  Sometimes there would be  a caboose right behind the locomotive consist and one at the end ...  or there would be two caboose cars on the end of the train.  

I like it Peter. That's a really great idea. I do think the appropriate term is "cabeese". See you at York.

Gerry

Wow! Really cool and such a fun to watch video. Thank You. 

What Trumptrain saw on the Pennsy, I saw as a kid on the Southern, from my grandfather's barnyard that overlooked a Southern railline (the one I wrote about concerning the "haunted" trestle)...freights occasionally ran with two cabooses.

Cabooses were like engines in that they sometimes had to be staged in advance at the terminal that they were going to leave from on trains. Like Colorado Hirailer said, the Southern sometimes did this on the Alabama Division between Sheffield and Birmingham.

Peter, that's so neat.  I recently realized that I have a lot of cabooses and thought it'd be fun to run a train of them.

As a kid, I didn't have any passenger cars, so I just put together a caboose train pulled by a Santa Fe F3 ABA and played make believe!

Train Mountain at Chiloquin Oregon has retired cabooses parked all over their substantial acreage. The original idea was to set them up as cabins for rent, with access provided by their extensive 7.5" gauge railway. Don't know how far they got with developing that idea; the original proprietor died years ago and left the place in a trust.

I used to think it would have been even cooler if they had built a loop of actual standard gauge track around their hill on the original 2000+ acres, with spurs at various places in the woods to set out cabooses for people to camp in.

Actual operating track would also have provided a more authentic setting for their collection of full-scale railroad items. How about that for a unique model railroad idea? "Caboose Park at Train Mountain Railroad Museum" or something like that. You could run all kinds of different locomotives and cabooses or whatever.

 http://www.tminst.org/index.shtml

I love the caboose train, Peter.  We once did that at my club. We all brought in all our cabeese and made one long train. It was a lot of fun and something different to keep interest in the club. Since, at the time, I tended to store my cabeese in train sets, it took me months to get everything back to where they bleonged.