I was looking through a 1984 issue of Trains magazine and in the photo section was a picture of a Southern piggyback train with a EOT instead of a caboose. My question is, when and what railroad first started replacing cabooses with the EOT technology?
I believe that cabooses went out when the railroads won the right to operate with a 3 person crew. This was a big payroll savings for the company. Needless to say the unions were not happy with the decision. So EOT markers became common practice on most railroads about the same time. The exact year of the rule change, I’m not certain, but someone here will know.
By the way, cabooses aren’t totally dead. They are still used for local trains that pick up and deliver the cars to and from shippers. They are also found on MOW trains. Regular mainline trains were the ones that lost their cabooses.
It wasn’t that long ago here in Canada… Mid-Late 90s…
Didn’t the State ( “Commonwealth” to be correct ) of Virginia have a law requiring trains within the state to have cabooses on them?
There goes one now.[swg] This photo was taken just last week.
Yeah, that’s obviously a local. You can see both ends of the train at the same time! [:)]
It was the Southern that invented the EOT, and it’s partly why the NS stuck with the VHF frequency so long after the industry standardized on UHF.
I can remember it was around 1984 that I first started seeing trains with FRED on Conrail.
The Florida East Coast was using EOTs in the late 70s. I think it was a 1978 Trains article that talked about them radioing information on brake pipe pressure to the cab or wayside receivers informing dispatchers that the train was intact and maintaing pressure. I think the first ones didn’t have a flashing light and they had to design a new EOT because the FRA was coming out with a requirement for a marker light at night.
I remember seeing a box with a red flashing light that mounted on the coupler like an EOT on the caboose on Rock Island trains. The cabooses were manned and I believe the box just contained the light. It was a simple, portable way to provide a rear end light on cabooses that may not have had a built in marker light.
Jeff