Capping off my small collection of Kusan/KMT rolling stock, I bought a KMT caboose with its original box at the October 2018 York meet. The box was completely intact, but as you might have guessed, at 50+ years of age, it's flaps were hanging on by a wing and a prayer. So I decided I wasn't going to use the box for storage, and instead retain it as a standalone artifact. I could always make a container to store the caboose in like i did for some of my estate-sale postwar acquisitions.
So along that line of thinking, I'd make a show of removing it from its box for the first and only time during my ownership--by pulling it out with a train and a scratchbuilt unloading ramp:
But I have to do a wee bit of switching first...
In case you were wondering, it did take me that long to get around to completing this exercise--the caboose kept getting stuck coming out of the box, and voltage drops on the far side of the layout (where the locomotive was) kept thwarting my efforts to "just yank it out", despite running under DCS. Things sat like in the thumbnail till I finally got off my duff and tried again this past weekend, with the results you see above. Success, in this case, came as a surprise.
I didn't think I'd generate almost 13 minutes of footage after editing, but I tried to do this at a realistic speed. "Tried" being the operative word, as the slack action of 20 cars between the "designated idler" and the motive power made things a lot less precise. Before anyone says it, yes, I know one would not do this in real life--just a single idler to keep the locomotive off the ramp. But full-size cabooses don't come in cartons either 
Bonus, I had enough mistakes on the ramp to make a blooper reel:
Learned a few things about video editing with this one, using titles to provide a sort-of narration, and sound FX in the blooper reel. Wasn't without its mishaps though--I came very close to having to delete the entire project and start over from scratch a couple of times due to getting into editing holes I couldn't (or didn't know how to) recover from.
---PCJ
