Did Lionel make a caboose with flashing red lights?

2 Bay Window cabooses with flashing rear light are the set cabooses from C&O 6-31707 and WM 6-31719. I don’t know of any others.

They also made one for the Erie. I have one on my layout. It’s on the inner track, at the bottom.By the way, the Lionel bay window caboose was based on the early Erie bay windows, which were riveted, and are close to scale, except the width is about a foot and a half too narrow. The K-Line EL bay window is accurate for the later welded ones, except are slightly too wide by about a scale foot. TheK-Line also has working marker lights.

It's pretty easy to add a flashing red light to a caboose...

Almost all the steel sided cabooses Lionel made in the early 90’s have the flashing rear warning light.

Thanks for all of the info.

I love the look of Menard's, and it works great, but the coupler isn't compatible with the Lionel lobster couplers on my cars, and the only thing that works is to haul it behind a heavy tanker car, which for some reason has a lot of free play inside the coupler, so no derailments occur.   I guess I could get out a file and start filing open the inside of the Menard's, but I would probably screw it up and ruin it.   Also, the Menard's coupler is not exactly at the same height as the Lionel's.   

So, better to trade it away, and try to get a Lionel caboose.

Mannyrock

I've never had any significant issues with the Menards couplers mating with my existing Lionel/MTH rolling stock, including their lighted caboose.

I have the pre-production Menards caboose with the rear flashing lights. Menards gave it to me at no cost so I can't complain too much. It is much smaller and lighter than most cabeese manufactured by Lionel or MTH. Frankly, the only reason why I run it is because of the rear flashing light effect. If not for that, I would have just used it for spare trucks to use on other Menards cars requiring a center rail pickup. Menards no longer sells it so that could be an indication of an issue (e.g., poor sales, manufacturing issues, unreliability, or customer complaints.) As GRJ suggests, I would just add a third-party red flasher to an MTH or Lionel caboose.

I have several Atlas/Roco extended-vision cabin cars that I added a red flashing light* circuit to. A member of an HO club that I used to belong to came up with the battery-powered circuitry for HO cabins; it was no problem to modify it for O. Plus the two D cells wired in parallel (instead of the single  AA in the HO version) allowed the flasher to operate for years!

*At that time Radio Shack was selling a 1.5 volt really tiny incandescent bulb that did the job just fine. It was so small that it would fit in an Athearn GP-style headlight hole and looked extremely prototypical doing so (think headlight lens here).

You can prevent couplers from detaching w/o hacking them up - just use a small, thin black zip-tie and trim off any excess material - no one will notice.

Hi Ritchie,

The problem isn't that the caboose and lead car uncouple.  The problem is that the really tight coupler fit causes derailments. :-)

Mannyrock

@Richie C. posted:

You can prevent couplers from detaching w/o hacking them up - just use a small, thin black zip-tie and trim off any excess material - no one will notice.

Not with the Menard's couplers, they don't work like that, the uncoupling mechanism slides horizontally.

@Mannyrock posted:

The problem isn't that the caboose and lead car uncouple.  The problem is that the really tight coupler fit causes derailments. :-)

This is a known issue with some of the Menard's cars, you have to break out your files (or a Dremel) and take some material off.  A bunch of the new Lionel cars have a similar issue with a similar fix.

@Mannyrock posted:

Hi Ritchie,

The problem isn't that the caboose and lead car uncouple.  The problem is that the really tight coupler fit causes derailments. :-)

Mannyrock

The possible solution is to couple the caboose, which uses a fixed knuckle connected to the truck, to a car which has a knuckle that freely moves horizontally independent of the truck direction.  Some Menards, MTH, and Lionel cars have knuckles like this. My Menards Chicago Fire Department car has one fixed knuckle (pick-up roller truck) and one that freely moves (non-roller truck).