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The Rock Island caboose is a bay window style. Instead of the “cupola” extending upward from the roof, as in our CB&Q caboose, the sides of the caboose extend outwards on each side of the car.
This caboose came from Grand Island, NE and belonged to the Union Pacific railroad. The UP acquired the car from the Rock Island Lines when RI discontinued service in 1980. It was built in 1967 and has been restored to its original colors.
The caboose is a newer model heated by oil and had running water and electricity. It shares the same direct deposits style toilet as the 1917 caboose. The caboose housed the conductor and brakeman. They would sit in the seats on either side of the car and watch toward the front of the train for any signs of a problem they might see, such as:
Smoke from wheel indicating a “hot box.”
Freight the train is carrying might have become dislodged and is hanging over the side of the car.
Dirt or dust flying meant they might have a car off the rails.
The exterior of the caboose was repainted by Boy Scout troop No. 31 from Omaha.
According to “Rock Island Cabooses, Past and Preserved,” in 2018, there were roughly 146 Rock Island bay window cabooses in existence in the USA.
[https://www.hebners.net/Caboose/Rock_Island/RockIslandCabooses.htm]
History of the Caboose
Use of cabooses began in the 1830s, when railroads housed trainmen in shanties built onto boxcars or flatcars. The caboose provided the train crew with a shelter at the rear of the train. The crew could exit the train for switching or to protect the rear of the train when stopped. They also inspected the train for problems such as shifting loads, broken or dragging equipment, and “hot boxes” (overheated axle bearings, a serious fire and derailment threat).
The conductor kept records and handled business from a table or desk in the caboose. For longer trips, the caboose provided minimal living quarters, and was frequently personalized and decorated with pictures and posters.
Early cabooses were nothing more than flat cars with small cabins erected on them, or modified box cars.
The standard form of the American caboose had a platform at either end with curved grab rails to facilitate train crew members' ascent onto a moving train. A caboose was fitted with red lights called markers to enable the rear of the train to be seen at night. This has led to the phrase "bringing up the markers" to describe the last car on a train. These lights were officially what made a train a "train," and were originally lit with oil lamps. With the advent of electricity, later caboose versions incorporated an electrical generator driven by belts coupled to one of the axles, which charged a lead- acid storage battery when the train was in motion. The addition of the cupola, a lookout post atop the car, was introduced in 1863.
Coal or wood was originally used to fire a cast-iron stove for heat and cooking, later giving way to a kerosene heater. Now rare, the old stoves can be identified by several essential features. They were without legs, bolted directly to the floor, and featured a lip on the top surface to keep pans and coffee pots from sliding off. They also had a double-latching door, to prevent accidental discharge of hot coals caused by the rocking motion of the caboose.
Cabooses were often improvised or retained well beyond the normal lifetime of a freight car.
Tradition on many lines held that the caboose should be painted a bright red, though on many lines it eventually became the practice to paint them in the same corporate colors as locomotives. The Kansas City Southern Railway was unique in that it bought cabooses with a stainless steel car body, and so was not obliged to paint them.
The “end” for (most) Cabooses [Wikipedia]
Until the 1980s, laws in the United States and Canada required all freight trains to have a caboose and a full crew, for safety. Technology eventually advanced to a point where the railroads, in an effort to save money by reducing crew members, stated that cabooses were unnecessary.
New diesel locomotives had large cabs that could house entire crews. Distant dispatchers controlled switches, eliminating the need to manually throw switches after trains had passed. Improved signaling eliminated the need to protect the rear of a stopped train. Bearings were improved and lineside detectors were used to detect hot boxes, which themselves were becoming rarer with more and more freight cars gaining roller bearings. Better-designed cars avoided problems with the loads helped as well. The railroads also claimed a caboose was a dangerous place, as slack run-ins* could hurl the crew from their places and even dislodge weighty equipment.
Railroads proposed the end-of-train device (EOT or ETD), commonly called a FRED (flashing rear-end device), as an alternative.
An ETD could be attached to the rear of the train to detect the train's air brake pressure and report any problems to the locomotive by telemetry. The ETD also detects movement of the train upon start-up and radios this information to the engineers so they know all of the slack is out of the couplings and additional power could be applied. The machines also have blinking red lights to warn following trains that a train is ahead. With the introduction of the ETD, the conductor moved up to the front of the train with the engineer.
CSX Transportation is one of the few Class 1 railroads that still maintains a fleet of modified cabooses for regular use. Employed as "shoving platforms" at the rear of local freight trains which must perform long reverse moves or heavy switching, these are generally rebuilt bay-window cabooses with their cabin doors welded shut (leaving their crews to work from the rear platform).
BNSF (above) also maintains a fleet of former wide-vision cabooses for a similar purpose, and in 2013 began repainting some of them in heritage paint schemes of BNSF's predecessor railroads.
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*In railroading, slack action is the amount of free movement of one car before it transmits its motion to an adjoining coupled car. This free movement results from the fact that in railroad practice cars are loosely coupled, and the coupling is often combined with a shock-absorbing device, a "draft gear," which, under stress, substantially increases the free movement as the train is started or stopped. Loose coupling is necessary to enable the train to bend around curves and is an aid in starting heavy trains, since the application of the locomotive power to the train operates on each car in the train successively, and the power is thus utilized to start only one car at a time. Slack “run-ins” occur when brakes are applied suddenly to stop a train.
(Webpage created by HSPC member Mark Chavez)
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