Cabooses!
Cabeese is a humorous term, the correct word is cabooses. While many Goose are Geese, many Moose are not Meese, it’s mooses. Goose is the odd word out. And the old cartoon shown above, that’s WAY out there. “meeses” would be like a double plural. The correct word, of course, is mice, but then it wouldn’t rhyme with “pieces”. Good old Pixie and Dixie (the meeces) and Mr. Jinks, the cat.
Oh how I miss studying German. It’s almost 100% according to the rules, no hundreds of little exceptions like English. But that’s because English is made up of words taken from many other languages. Alles in Ordnung.
–Randy
I usually call a gaggle of cabooses “cabeese,” as a slang term. I think it’s particularly appropriate in my case because my Dream Railroad (I’m somewhat reconciled to the fact that I’ll never again have a model railroad, just bits and pieces) has only bobbers on the roster. (If it was good enough for the B&O all those years, it’s good enough for my proposed short line!)
Come to think of it, I doubt if “bobber” is in the dictionary, either.
Deano
Also:
Brain box
Louse cage
…and several unprintables.
Deano
The MR forums truly is a coffee clutch. [:o)]
It would be an interesting - though time consuming - project to try to work back who first used the term “cabeese”. It definetely started as a joke or play on words in the railfan / model railroad community. I don’t think the first person to write it meant it to be a ‘real’ word, or one that would continue to be used. I started reading Model Railroader in 1971, and I don’t recall seeing ‘cabeese’ in print until many years later, maybe 1980’s.
If I had to make an educated guess on who used it first, I would guess John Armstrong, perhaps in an article describing one of his track plans. His plans generally included several puns or plays-on-words for place names, like “Ott Dam”.
Or how about Vans.
Yes,just like “lashup”… In my 9 1/2 years as a brakeman it was always locomotive consist never “lashup”.
By first “lash up” was with a PCM, by BLI, F3 HO A/B NYC set. What is that? And NYC never had a Mars light in the A unit. Realy strange.
Cabeese is another, lol.
My ex use to say, “you guys look cute playing with your toys”.
Rich
As soon as somebody says never along comes someone to the contrary —
I don’t know off hand if all eight of the C Liners had mars lights. They didn’t keep them very long if they did. Not an F3 obviously, but an A unit just the same [;)]
Cheers, Ed
I could be wrong but didn’t Pro Custom Hobbies coin the term cabeese in their ads. They used a lot of puns and cabeese constantly. The rumor was back in the early 80’s their constant use of “Beano” for the B&O- Baltimore and Ohio was what caused the first round of licencing requirements for model railroad products started by the Chessie System.
I think there’s a lot of railfan terms that are unknown to ‘real’ railroaders - like that whole ‘switch vs turnout’ deal. I remember someone (Jim Boyd maybe?) talking about visiting the LS&I in the eighties and asking some railroaders how they liked their “Alco Alligators”. They didn’t know what he meant, when he explained they were the chop-nosed former Santa Fe RSD units, they knew what he meant - but they had their own nickname for them (which I can’t recall now.)
BTW re another reply, I suspect “bobber caboose” has been around a long time, late 19th century most likely. “Bob” goes way back hundreds of years, meaning something short or cut short…like “bobtail” meaning having a short tail, or “bobby sox” being short (ankle high) socks worn by teen girls swooning over a young Frank Sinatra. Back in the 1920’s women used to get their hair “bobbed” (cut short), a rebellion from the traditional long hair of previous generations. (Anyone old enough to remember when “long hair music” was Classical music?)
How did y’all get this far without “waycar”? Waycars were common on the C&NW, CB&Q, and on the Rock Island. (Had a secretary on the RI who typed it ‘weighcar’)
PAW
To the operating crews and dispatchers its a switch…To the white shirts in engineering its a turnout.
A form 19 might have read-Do not exceed ten ( one aught) mph over Timkin switch at MP123.8. Today they use one zero mph.
I agree, Larry. If I had told the switchman, at the steel plant where I worked, to drop four (ingot) buggies just beyond the north turnout, he would’ve thought me to be from another planet.
Naturally, whether they were spotting loaded buggies or clearing empties, they were doing “switching”, and surprisingly, using a “switcher”, not a “turn-outer”.
While it’s my impression that the “correct” nomenclature sometimes refers to the moveable points as the “switch”, we generally took the whole shebang to be the switch, and the points were, of course, points.
As for caboose/cabeese, I had never heard of them referred to as vans until I got into the social aspect of model railroading, despite watching them run past my front porch in the early years of my existence. To me, even here in Canada, it’s still a caboose, just as a van was what used to be called a “shaggin’ wagon”.
Wayne
A switch is what you use to enter a diversion route so,in railroad speak the whole shebang is indeed a switch and the points is something you check before entering the diversion route to ensure they are completely closed.
Ever see a brakeman or conductor push on the switch handle with his foot?
That is to ensure the switch handle locks in place.Some times we would place the switch lock in the locking holes to ensure the handle didn’t move thus moving the points just enough to cause the wheels on the car to spilt the switch and derail…
It’s cabooses when there are only a few of them, but it is cabeese if there’s a flock of them !
Reynold
Puyallup
[(-D][(-D][(-D][(-D][tup][(-D]
Dave
I’ve never heard any RI people in Iowa use “waycar” for caboose.
Jeff
While this thread is still luke warm…
the crossword puzzle in the local paper wanted a 6 letter word and the clue was caboose
the answer was “heinie”