Have to–I don’t want all of my little plastic crewmen getting rained on while sitting on top of boxcars.
Seriously, I am a caboose FREAK!! Got lotsa them, and sometimes I even run them as a special train between points on the layout. Believe it or not, during the caboose era, some railroads would run out of them at certain yards and a train of them would be dispatched to relieve the shortage. As a kid, I remember seeing a train of about 25 cabeese running over Donner Pass between Roseville, CA and Sparks, NV. So if you decide to tack on one or two extra cabeese on your train, you’re not really un-prototypical at all.
Gorgeous little things. When trains discontinued them, half the romance of railroading just went down the tubes, IMO.
I don’t know if it counts, but I model logging railroads in general, and my model railroad is modeled after the Cass Scenic Railroad. Being too cheap to buy Bachmann log cars, and kit-bashing them into the actual excursion cars that they used, I have 20 cabooses–all painted for a logging railroad, such as Weyerhaueser, Cass Scenic, Mower Lumber, Durbin & Greenbrier, ect. I usually will run the train with a SW1, the H10-44, the 70t’s, or the Heisler, Shay, or Climax.
This was never really an issue for me, since the most ‘modern’ I got was about 1976. On the new layout I’m thinking of moving it up to the 1990’s so I have been thinking about that. We’ll see, I model ore trains primarily and into the nineties BN was still using cabooses on ore trains but then ‘next door’ the Missabe wasn’t. Of course cabooses are still around, I see a Soo caboose at least once a week being used by CP along the Misssissippi.
I guess bottom line is I’d prefer to use cabooses, but my desire to be prototypically correct might outweigh that…or might not!! [;)]
In Trains, about 1995 or 1996 there was an interesting story about the “Rathole Division” (Virginia and W. Virginia mountains, I believe) on the NS. For safety reasons they still run cabooses on their coal drags. You might call Kalmbach Publications and see if you can get a reprint of the article; it has some very good pictures from which you might want to modify and detail some of these cars from the photos.