Is it that I just haven’t found them or is it that all but the very expensive cabooses come with no windows?
My very first HO purchase ever was an Athearn caboose. For 98 cents, I think. It had windows. Since then, I’ve bought cabeese for a few bucks up to several hundred dollars. They all had windows.
Taken as you have written it, your question is about something that doesn’t exist.
Perhaps you would like to rephrase it.
Ed
Hi restotrator,
American Model Builders (AMB) offers excellent quality glazing kits for a lot of popular lower priced caboose kits:
http://www.laserkit.com/laserkit.htm
I have used their windows in Athearn BB cabooses and they fit so well that there is no glue required. They are a perfect press fit.
The only problem I had with them was that I tried to put the Athearn windows into a Riverossi caboose. To the naked eye the Riverossi caboose looked identical to the Athearns, but the Riverossi windows were ever so slightly smaller so a couple of the AMB windows cracked when I tried to force them into place. That is absolutely not the fault of AMB, but it does show how presice the AMB products are.
Dave
The older Bowser N5c caboose kits did not come with windows as I recall. But at that time I think it was Eastern Car Works that had inserts for them.
Hi Ed,
I have purchased a lot of Athearn BB cabooses and IIRC none of them came with window glazing. Most of the kits were NOS and I don’t think they had been opened.
Dave
All my cabooses are brass, and none of them have window glazing.
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They were expensive too.
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-Kevin
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Athearn blue box cabooses don’t come with windows. You have to buy them separately. Tyco cabooses have windows installed. That’s all I know and since I model the post caboose era I only have four. Three are used by railroad police and the other one is MoW.
Every Athearn caboose I ever bought had windows. What many didn’t have was glazing. Also called glass.
Windows would be the holes in the car sides that you can see through. As has been noted, many model cabeese have these windows in their unglazed form.
The glass that goes in a special framed hole in a wall is not called a “window”.
Note also that if you do a search for “window” on the Walthers website, you get a lot more than little bits of clear plastic.
Put another way: If you break the glass in your WINDOW, and you go to the hardware store to get a new piece of glass, and you say you want to buy a window, they will likely say they don’t sell windows. I know that’s what would happen at my hardware store. Because they don’t sell windows. They do sell glass.
Ed
Ahh yes, a firm lesson in proper semantics. It’s always so welcoming in here. ; )
You are absolutely correct, I mispoke(mistyped?). I did mean “glazing”, or to be even more accurate; “scale, imitation window glass panes”, likely made out of clear plastic material of some type.
Although, shortly after posting this I did find that several of Walthers Mainline brand cabooses do have “glazing”, but still it is not common for many products to include it.
I have glazed a lot of HO rolling stock windows with clear plastic from Entemann’s breakfast pastry.
FYI:
Window : A window is an opening in a wall, door, roof or vehicle that allows the passage of light, sound, and/or air. Modern windows are usually glazed or covered in some other transparent or translucent material. (wikipedia)
Glazing : Glazing, which derives from the Middle English for ‘glass’, is a part of a wall or window, made of glass.[1][2] Glazing also describes the work done by a professional “glazier”. (wikipedia)
Cabeese : (humorous) plural of caboose (wiktionary)
Cabooses : There is some disagreement on what constitutes the proper plural form of the word “caboose.” The most common pluralization of caboose is “cabooses,” with some arguing it should remain “caboose”. (Wikipedia)
The plural form of caboose is cabooses. (wordhippo)
Grammar??? Nope:
Ed
Comment deleted.
Dave
Hello restorator. To answer your question. All cabooses come with windows, some with glass and some without. You can always glaze them yourself by cutting and gluing clear plastic inside of the shell which is cheaper and less trouble than trying to find glass that fits perfectly.
The window panes for an Athearn caboose are sold separately.
Bay Window Caboose Window Set HO Model Train Parts (2) - Athearn #12856
Ready to Run models from mostly everyone now have windows installed but the kits like Athearn will not.Some companies offer or once offered window kits you glue in place using clear parts glue. I have done so in the past but now use clear styrene cut a little larger and check fitment before gluing in. The bay window caboose kit is most challenging to fit windows in.
Steven McDonough
All of the Athearn caboose kits I’ve bought over the years (bay window and extended vision) came with window glazing inserts to be installed when building the kit. I believe the old MDC/Roundhouse 30’ caboose kits didn’t have inserts, but may have had just a sheet of clear styrene? I can’t remember right now for sure.
As noted, there are companies that make window glazing inserts for various cabooses, engines, and passenger cars, normally not very expensive.
Conversely, none of my dozen-or-so Athearn caboose kits came with glazing, and they included the Santa Fe-style steel caboose, the Espee-style bay window type, the wide-vision style, and the shorty wood one on the wreck crane flatcar/boom-tender.
I use Evergreen .005" and .010" clear styrene sheet as glazing for anything with windows that doesn’t include glazing as part of the kit. One sheet, never mind the whole package-worth, will do a lot of windows.
Wayne