[:I]Last night I was sitting in the parking lot of Haley Tower (Terre Haute IN) when a West bound train heading for St Louis, passed with a newly painted orange caboose bringing up the markers. In reality it had a FRED on the back end. It was a wide vision caboose. I didn’t get the name, but it said “DO NOT HUMP” on the side as it sort of caught me by suprise.
An EB train was passing at the same time & the engineer of the EB train after looking over the WBer, proclaimed "Thats the way a proper train should look with a caboose on the rear.
Officially what you saw was a ‘shoving platform’ not a caboose. Various Local, Road Switcher and/or yard jobs have long shoving moves required to service some of their customers. Operating Rules require a person to be on the lead end of every shove…if you are shoving more than several hundred yards, at yard speeds, hanging on to the side of a rail car is a very tiring place to be…thus many carriers have taken what were previously referred to a cabooses and permanently secured the doors in the closed position and re-designated them shoving platforms. Person riding on the lead end platform has available a combination air whistle/brake valve to sound required warnings at any road crossing the movement may cross or to apply the train brakes if necessary…all from a secure standing position on the lead platform.
Not all cabooses still used by the railroads are shoving platforms. Some have been altered for other uses.
On the UP, some have been modified with seats and lockers for MOW work trains. These are now called gang cars. They provide some office space for the foreman and a place for the MOW employees to ride to the work site not accessible by road. Some have been repainted light green, while others still have their original paint, but new number.
Some have been converted into blizzard buses. They are used to deadhead crews to/from trains or between terminals when the vans can’t run. These are outfitted with locomotive MU connections and usually are sandwiched between two units. I was lucky(?) to ride one a while back. The seats looked like they came out of an old passenger coach. Not the best ride, even with the cusioned drawbars.
The blizzard bus has been used quite a bit this season. Almost enough to think there is regular passenger service again[(-D].
We still have a couple cabooses, too. The doors work, and they have seats inside and heaters for the winter-time. Not the best heaters in the world, but they do work somewhat. These are used for long reverse moves (10+ miles) where it would be downright foolish for a crew member to be on a platform of a “shoving platform”.
Not all cabooses on the rails are RR-owned, though. The department of defense rosters a bunch, as well as several of the big-name companies (Siemens, Air Products, etc). They are used by those companies to “babysit” their cargo.