Can you name the various types of cabooses ?.
Tracklayer
There are a great many terms to describe a caboose, not all of which are suitable on a family forum. You know the bay window style, but more traditional cabooses have a “cupola” on top.
There’s the drover’s caboose, which looks like a cross-breed between a caboose and a passenger car, used in conjunction with livestock cars. Cattle have to be off-loaded and exercised and fed periodically on a long train ride, and a drover’s cab provides extra seats for the cowboys who wrangle the cattle to ride along. Drover’s cabeese went away when railroads realized that it was a lot more economical to slaughter the cows before loading them on trains and ship them in refrigerated cars.
A “bobber” is a fairly generic term for a single-truck caboose, often found on logging railroads or industrial railroads–they didn’t need to be big enough for sleeping quarters or meal preparation, just big enough for the conductor to have a place to sit. Some railroads like the Sacramento Northern used short “bobber” style crummies in order to save space on their car-ferry across Suisun Bay.
A “transfer caboose” is like a crummy in the middle of a flatcar–they are often used in conjunction with lighter weight car ferries which could be unbalanced or overturned by the weight of a locomotive. The transfer cab is used to “reach” onto the ferry, or a couple of flatcars are kept handy for that purpose.
I’m not sure how many other specific “types” of cabs there are–cabeese are such a varying species of rolling stock. Some of them could be really weird–when the Central California Traction between Stockton and Sacramento switched from electrics to diesels, they didn’t have enough cabeese (conductor and brakemen normally stayed in the box motor with the engine crew) for their trains. So their shop foremen removed the motors, poles, etc. from a couple of interurban box motors, and added marker lights and toilets to convert the boxcabs to improvised cabooses!
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QUOTE: Originally posted by Jetrock
There are a great many terms to describe a caboose, not all of which are suitable on a family forum. You know the bay window style, but more traditional cabooses have a “cupola” on top.
There’s the drover’s caboose, which looks like a cross-breed between a caboose and a passenger car, used in conjunction with livestock cars. Cattle have to be off-loaded and exercised and fed periodically on a long train ride, and a drover’s cab provides extra seats for the cowboys who wrangle the cattle to ride along. Drover’s cabeese went away when railroads realized that it was a lot more economical to slaughter the cows before loading them on trains and ship them in refrigerated cars.
A “bobber” is a fairly generic term for a single-truck caboose, often found on logging railroads or industrial railroads–they didn’t need to be big enough for sleeping quarters or meal preparation, just big enough for the conductor to have a place to sit. Some railroads like the Sacramento Northern used short “bobber” style crummies in order to save space on their car-ferry across Suisun Bay.
A “transfer caboose” is like a crummy in the middle of a flatcar–they are often used in conjunction with lighter weight car ferries which could be unbalanced or overturned by the weight of a locomotive. The transfer cab is used to “reach” onto the ferry, or a couple of flatcars are kept handy for that purpose.
I’m not sure how many other specific “types” of cabs there are–cabeese are such a varying species of rolling stock. Some of them could be really weird–when the Central California Traction between Stockton and Sacramento switched from electrics to diesels, they didn’t have enough cabeese (conductor and brakemen normally stayed in the box motor with the engine crew) for their trains. So their shop foremen removed the motors, poles, etc. from a couple of interurban box motors, and added marker lights and toilets to convert the boxcabs to i
Can’t forget the bay window one of my favorites.
“Cabeese” isn’t a real word; it’s a made up joke word used by some in the modeling community to refer to multiple cabooses.
Types?
Bay window, off-set cupola, center cupola, transfer, bobber?
Or RR’s?
NE, NE-2, NE-3, NE-4, NE-5, NE-6?? (NHRR classes)
Or Nicknames?
Hack, crummy, “cabin” (PRR)???
Whatcha gettin’ at, man?[(-D][(-D]
Well I guess you could divide them up many ways, but generally I guess most cabooses would fit into one of these categories:
“Standard” would be kind of a generic caboose with two four-wheel trucks and a cupola roughly the same width as the body of the caboose. Could be wood or steel, cupola usually would be towards the rear of the car. (I would include cars with centered cupolas here, some might consider them a separate type.)
“Drover’s” cabooses as noted in an earlier post above, were usually similar to a standard caboose, except they included a small passenger section for workers travelling with stock in a stock train.
“Bay window” cabooses are a steel or wood car with no cupola, but with an extension on the sides to allow the crew to look ahead and see the side of the cars ahead in the train. Most have a side extension the full height of the body (like a bay window on a house) but some had just a window (kind of like the “all weather” windows on some diesels).
“Bobber” cabooses as was pointed out are small four wheel cabooses, usually wood. Some lasted surprisingly long in service, but some states eventually outlawed them (for example, my state of Minnesota required cabooses to be at least 24’ long and have a minimum of two 4-wheel trucks beginning in 1913.)
“Transfer” cabooses are used when moving a string of cars from one yard to another, or sometimes even from one part of a yard to another part in a really huge yard. These can be old standard cabooses with the cupola removed, many were just shacks built on top of old flatcars. In the transition era, they were sometimes made from the floor and trucks of old steam engine tenders.
“Wide Vision” cabooses were first built by International Car Co. for the DM&IR in 1952. They’re kind of a combination of a standard and a bay-window caboose, in that they have large cupolas that are wider than the caboose car body. This became popular as freight cars became taller, most cabooses built i
Skinny, two axe-handles wide, hi-hip, round hip, flabby, saddle-bags, elephantine, tight, althletic,… oh, wait, you meant…[:I]
I was just wondering. I thought maybe there were a few designs and types I might have missed over the years - which there was…
Thanks guys.
Tracklayer