Cabooses are a real pain and at last I understand why the railroads were happy to get rid of them. My question is: at what point is the caboose from an arriving train disconnected, before the engine is or after. A train comes in on an arrival track, and at some point the road engine and the caboose go their separate ways. It would seem to me the caboose would have to stay with the train until the engine was cut loose, but I don’t know. I’m trying to place magnetic uncouplers on my HO layout and I can’t figure out exactly where they should be relative to …blah blah blah…you understand. Thanks
Freight trains without cabooses have no soul. That’s one of many reasons I don’t model the modern era. I also disdain magnetic uncouplers. If visible, they are unrealistic; they aren’t necessarily in the place you’d want them, and they’ll uncouple cars when unwanted. Obviously, I’m not going to be a help to you.
Mark
Generally after. The inbound train puts its train in the arrival track and the headend crew takes the power to the engine track or service track. Later a yard engine moves the caboose to the caboose track.
Before or after should really have no impact on wher the uncoupling ramps go. They should go at the clearance points in the track. Regardless of whether the caboose is cut off first, last or never.
In some yards it was possible to do a “flying switch” from what I’ve heard, where the caboose was cut off while the train was still moving and it’s momentum would be used to switch it into the caboose track. I doubt that was very common, but the key point is the caboose might be cut off before the train is entirely in the yard, depending on where the caboose track is located.
Otherwise, I don’t think it really matters which was done first. The engine would be uncoupled from the train and move to the roundhouse / service area; a switcher would grab the caboose and take it to the caboose track.
BTW before the 1960’s the conductor had a caboose assigned to him exclusively, and he and his brakeman would live in the caboose when it was away from their home terminal.
[tup][tup][tup]
If I live to be 100 years old I will NEVER get used to seeing a freight train without a caboose.
IIRC there was a nice article in CLASSIC TRAINS Magazine a couple years ago about doing a “flying switch” move on a caboose on the Grand Trunk Western.
Amen to that. I feel sorry for the kids growing up these days. They don’t get to see the caboose marking the end of the train as well as the occasional conductor or brakeman standing at the back of it waving.
To expand on what Dave said, remember that the inbound engine has a crew that wants to go off duty, and generally they can’t do that until they put the locomotive on a service track or house lead. The caboose isn’t going anywhere until a yard engine shows up, except in those cases where it was cut off on the fly (I’ve seen film of this being done on the N&W). However, the caboose crew may get off when they pass the yard office or some designated pickup point. To really feel the full impact of caboose operations, model a road where cabooses are assigned to crews, and therefore have to be changed when through trains pass through a crew-change point such as a district (or subdivision) terminal. So long, Andy
One of my favorite Nicholas Morant photos shows the caboose track in a Canadian Pacific yard. Each caboose has what looks like a weathervane sticking up above the cupola, each one a different shape (like a star or half-moon or IIRC a Scotty dog.) Since cabooses (oops, I mean “vans”) were assigned to specific crews, they needed some way to easily spot ‘their’ van in amongst the other ones. One guy put up a sign/symbol to identify his caboose, and eventually he was making them for other crews too.
Thanks for all the in-put. It seems I can do anything I want to do! If there is one thing I have learned in my brief experience with model railroading is that railroads made very creative and efficient use of their limited space, and I have the same space limitations they did. It seems to me that there must have been enough variation from yard to yard, on how they handled cabooses, and layovers, and crews, that the answer to my question is, do what works best in my particular yard. I keep forgetting how user friendly model railroading is!
A couple of final notes:
A train is not a train until it has a marker. The marker(s) are carried by the caboose, so once the train arrives, the rear end crew removes or extinguishes the marker. The train then ceases to be a train.
Generally cabooses were handled in groups to the cab track; frequently they were the handle by which a switch engine and crew switched out the train. Once the switching was complete, the caboose was “kicked” into a track where other cabooses were held, and a switch engine would then take then to the caboose track. The practice, I am sure, was different on each road, and even in different terminals within the same road.
On the SP, this is how we handled cabooses, and at West Oakland, the 40 Lead job got the assignment to shuffle the cabooses around.
Cabooses were a pain to the Company, and the crews handled them as efficiently as they could, to avoid excessive moves and delays which could interfere with an early quit.
As Andy mentioned, Conductor-assigned cabooses complicated matters and generally warranted a cab track job, whose sole lot in life was constantly shuffling cabooses hither and yon.
Couple more caboosey things…remember that if you have an all-wood caboose (which wasn’t uncommon even into the sixties-seventies) that didn’t have a steel underframe, you couldn’t push on it or it might collapse. So for example if you’re going to add a helper to the rear of a train, you’d have to move the caboose to behind the helper, it couldn’t just push on the rear of the all-wood caboose. I would imagine there would be limits in yards too - plus the assigned crew might want their car put on the caboose track right away!!
Warren McGee (long time NP conductor - in his nineties and still going strong) noted that once NP went from assigned cabooses to pool cabooses, the cabooses became pretty crappy. Crews would steal whatever supplies were in the caboose, to be sure they had enough for the future, so it was a constant battle to keep everything you needed I guess. Plus they weren’t kept clean the way they were before.
Even with cabooses with steel underframes or all steel construction, railroads placed limits on the amount of force that could be applied. For instance, while the SP would allow a Consolidation to push on the rear of a caboose during helper service, a cab-forward articulated was prohibited. Also, on very heavy trains (the definition of “very heavy” was era-dependent), helper locomotives were placed within the train to limit forces on cars, particularly their drawbars/couplers and to limit sideway forces on sharp curves. One doesn’t want to break cars or pull them off the track.
Mark
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission ordered that if a pusher behind an occupied caboose exceeded 3500 HP the crew had to leave the caboose and get on the helper. Also, if the pusher exceeded 3500HP, it could not be cut off on the fly.
Don’t know about other roads, but on the B&O it was pretty common to cut pushers off on the fly. Don’t recall ever seeing a B&O caboose that was not equipped with a chain from the end railing to the cutting lever and an extension handle down to the anglecock to enable a man on the platform to safely cut off a pusher on the fly.
How common are / were trains with two or even more cabooses? Was it possible to see two cabooses from different railroads on one train?
Wolfgang
Trains sometimes operated with more than one caboose. Sometimes an extra caboose was in the middle of the train to facilitate a “split”. Sometimes cabooses were deadheaded to balance train flows (station runs 6 trains out, only gets 5 trains in, so they need 1 extra caboose a day).
Anything is possible. I would say that you could probably find a picture of cabooses from 2 railroads on the same train. But it would be relatively infrequent.
Some local freights would have a caboose on the hind end for the flagman and a caboose right behind the engine for the conductor (and maybe the front brakeman if there was a fireman on the job). That way the conductor would be right there to make the setouts and pickups. It also provided him a good place to do his paperwork, especially the all-important timecard.
Not that infrequent on some roads. Union Pacific pool cabooses regularly operated over the SP, and often with SP cabooses in the mix, and the SP cars made it onto the UP, often running with a UP caboose.
As a little note, I was in Roseville one December 24th, back in the 80’s, having come up out of Oakland on an SJRVY. I got called, along with 13 other trainmen and enginemen, to deadhead back to Oakland late that Christmas Eve. Our transportation? Nothing less than a four unit, 10 car caboose hop. The warm cabooses were our transportation back home to be with our families for Christmas. In that mix of SP cabooses were two UP cabooses, probably the most comfortable and best riding ones in the group.
Two cabooses at the rear of a train was unusual but did happen. I was just watching the N&W DVD “Hooters on Blue Ridge” and one train there ran by with two N&W center-cupola cabooses on the rear. As noted, this would most likely be when too many cabooses were at one end of the line and needed to be balanced, just as sometimes a train would have more engines than it needed to balance power.
Otherwise a caboose at each end of the train happened also. I believe on DM&IR ore trains it was common to have a caboose behind the engine for the head end brakeman - especially I’m guessing if the steam engine didn’t have a “doghouse” on the tender for him to ride in.
I remember reading that during the 1960’s that CB&Q/GN train 97,which operated from Chicago to Seattle,would have cabooses seperating the GN/NP/CB&Q blocks on the CB&Q’s part of the run.The train would be blocked as I listed above with the CB&Q block set out at Daytons Bluff in St. Paul and the GN/NP blocks seperated and delivered to GN’s Union Yard and NP’s Northtown yard in Minneapolis,respectively.
Have a good one.
Bill B
My wife and i agree. A train without a caboose is like a sentence without a period at the end of it. [tup][tup][soapbox]