Easy. Half an hour after such a law was passed in each state, they’d go to court and have the law or rule thrown out. It is true states have a lot of power - like whether or not to have the death penalty, but there is zero chance that any federal, state, or local government agency ever passed a law or created a rule about what color a caboose could be. It’s just nonsense.
Basically, I guess, the federal government regulates interstate commerce, which more or less means what railroads do with each other and their customers. What a railroad can or can’t do within each state is largely up to that state…within limits.
If you look closely at a Walthers HO DM&IR wood caboose, you can see that the real caboose looks kinda like a four-wheel bobber caboose with part of another tacked on to make a longer car. That’s because that’s what they originally were. Minnesota’s Railway Act of 1911 (IIRC) said all cabooses had to be at least 24’ long, and have at least two 4-wheel trucks. So railroads in Minnesota that had bobbers - like the DM&IR’s predecesor roads (DM&N, D&IR) put two bobbers together to make one caboose. Minnesota also set state regulations regarding things like the size of loading docks, giving a conductor a right to arrest the same as a sheriff of the county the train was in, and outlawed building of common carrier narrow-gauge lines.
I spent a happy weekend there. Got in late Friday afternoon and went to a Pennsylvania Dutch place for dinner - Chicken and Waffles with Cream Gravy and Shoofly Pie washed down with Kaffee for dessert. Watched some TV - mounted in the cabin car’s pot belly stove - then to bed. Up early the next morning, got cleaned up in the bathroom mounted under the cupola, then had a hearty breakfast in the Motel’s dining car (which rocked when the sound of a passing train - piped over the PA system - was loudest)
Then on to a day spent railfanning the Strasburg, followed the next day by a solid breakfast in the dining car and a day spent in the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania and the Toy Train Museum.
Back on the road at sundown after a great experience - to include the Motel
Since my railroad is freelanced, I could choose any color I wanted but I always liked the idea of a bright red caboose so that’s what I chose. Rather than paint my cabeese, I built my fleet using Atlas cabeese in various roadnames that had bright red bodies and black roofs. I then just relettered them for my own road and did some light weathering. I remember reading John Armstrong’s first book on layout design and learned that each crew had it’s own caboose assigned to them which required more cabeese than what would otherwise be necessary. I put that into practice but discovered I had a few more cabeese than the layout could accomodate. At various times in the operating session, I would have too many freight trains having terminated in my main yard rather than being on the road or in the staging yards and my caboose tracks would overflow. I ended up pulling a couple off the layout to alleviate this problem.
I had planned to build an AMB Laserkit of an Gulf, Mobile & Ohio caboose. The kit contains painting instructions for the mid-60s, bright red with white or yellow handrails. However, I needed the paint scheme for the early 50s, and all I could find were b/w pictures. Still, they already showed that the handrails were more silvery than a bright color. Thus, I went to the experts and contacted the GM&O Historical Society. They responded immediately in a very detailed manner; I especially like the “Coca-Cola Red” story:
"GM&O was not very standardized so you see numerous variations once you start looking closely. Here’s some examples:
Underframes: As steel underframes were installed, some cars lost their truss rods while others kept them.
Exterior Sheathing: Wood side cars like cabooses and boxcars had to be resheathed every so often as the wood aged or became damaged. As the exterior sheathing was repaired and replaced over time, some cars had a break in the top horizontal board at the cupola while others had a continuous board across the length of the car (I believe this variation is discussed in the kit instructions). Later in their careers, some of them got plywood sheathing and at least one got steel sides. Others kept board sheathing all the way until retirement.
The story he gave me was that he painted it the way that the decal sheet instructed. Then he found pictures of similar cabooses, and none of them matched the way this one was lettered.
That was why he was selling it.
I intend to strip it and repaint it for my SGRR, but I have about a half dozen unpainted examples to do first.
Because I wanted a spray can on line, I ended up with boxcar brown. It’s not as red as I wanted, but it’s okay in a pinch. Thanks for all the response.
I use Tamiya TS-49 “Bright Red” in the spray can for cabooses. Their “Fine Surface Primer (Oxide Red)” is a good general boxcar red color; TS-1 “Red Brown” is good for more brownish-red boxcars.
Most hobby shops (brick-and-mortar and online) carry Tamiya paint.
A good thing about Tamiya - besides the fact that their spray cans result in a finer spray than hardware store “rattle cans” made for painting patio furniture etc. - is that you can also buy small jars of the same exact colors, so you can touch up paint where necessary.
Back before Mcginnis, the Boston and Maine took a cheap cut. Cabeese were painted box car red (the cheapest paint) except for the ends, which were painted bright red. The red helped with one of the caboose missions, namely marking the end of a train, and making it easier for overtaking trains to see the train ahead of them.
I use red auto primer from a rattle can for box car red. Spray the entire car, ends and all. The big box stores (Wallymart, Home Despot, Lowes) carry a line of rattle cans (Krylon or Rustoleum) that always has a good bright red. Mask the caboose and spray the ends with red. Bright red goes on well over red auto primer.
CPR started changing from all brown cabooses by painting just the ends red, then switched to red sides with bright yellow ends before switching to all yellow. Interestingly, a green tinged yellow was used for fire trucks for awhile because it is generally more visible than red especially in poor lighting or at night when the difference is most important. But, we’re back to red for fire trucks now probably for historical reasons having little to do with visibility.
Red doesn’t look red in poor lighting conditions, it looks “brown” (the eye doesn’t see colour in very poor light).
At least one NE-5 and several NE-6’s were painted all-black after the arrival of Pres. Pat McGinnis in the mid-1950s, but the unions complained about visibility when making reverse moves. So the NH modified the scheme to paint the ends white with orange doors and window frames. Not too many NH cabooses got the black paint; perhaps half a dozen or so. They stayed black until PC and CR re-painted them.
At the same time these were being painted black, the NH was also painting cabooses McGinnis orange-red (or red-orange).
Found a can of True colour boxcar red which is a useful colour. Browner than oxide red but still red rather than brown. I have not as yet dullkoted it so the actual colour when flat may be even more of a flat brown.
BTW the plural of caboose is cabooses. I wonder sometimes reading posts if there are a lot of younger people here who don’t realize “cabeese” was a word someone made up as a joke some decades back - not sure if it started with an MR article, or someone’s NMRA presentation, or what.