In seeing a handful of film reels, older and newer, I noted that some trains would run more then one caboose. Can anyone tell me the purpose behind that? Were the caboose just being moved from one yard or division etc. to another?
Thank You in Advance
Alvie
I can think of multiple scenerios:
Jim
Yeah, there were some times when a railroad had more trains going one direction than the other, so they needed to send extra cabooses back. They sometimes also had crews deadheading back in their own caboose if the rairoad assigned them to a specific crew. In the case of livestock trains, the livestock owners had drovers who rode the train to oversee the handling of the animals. They would ride in extra cabooses tacked onto the train unless the railroad had drover cabooses which had extra seats for riders.
John
Think about how railroads sometimes have to balance power by running locomotives “light” or in a caboose hop. The same sort of balancing may be needed at times to balance caboose assignments (back in the days when a caboose was found on every train). For most main-line railroad usage, the cabeese were in pool assignments - not assigned to individual crews.
During the grain rush in the midwest, for example, there may be more demand to run trains of grain toward market than back to the fields. Equipment and crews may build up at the terminal, and so the crews may “deadhead” back to their home terminal and the cabeese get tacked on as part of the train. The crews may be sent back to their home terminal separately from the caboose they rode in on. My father was a conductor for the Illinois Central, running from Freeport, Illinois in to Chicago. He and his crew would sometimes deadhead back from Chicago by riding along with another freight… and he was really happy when the timing allowed him to deadhead in comfort on the Land-O-Corn or Hawkeye passenger train.
You also have the additional possibility that a caboose normally assigned out of a small terminal (perhaps used regularly on a small branch line) is due for some major service or re-build, and so it would be transported to the railroad shops for that service or re-fit.
Bill
I can remember seeing a Chicago & North Western freight going through Milwaukee headed for Proviso (Chicago) with five cabooses in tow. I assume that was an indication that the traffic flow is not balanced so suddenly Proviso was running out of cabooses-- which might be a seasonal thing.
Had I seen the same thing on the CNW east west main, in addition to uneven traffic flow I might have suspected that the cabooses had been sent to the car shops in Iowa and were being returned after repair.
Dave Nelson
Hello Alvie,
Several photos of the part of the Santa Fe that I model, Cajon Pass (the First District of the old Los Angeles Division, ca. 1947), show freight trains with two or more way cars (Santa Fe for “cabooses”) on the rear end, usually eastward trains. Retired railroaders who used to work on that line told me that there would typically be a rush of westbound freight trains over the weekend aiming to make Monday morning deliveries in Los Angeles. Anticipating the need to run more westbound trains than eastbounds, the railroad “deadheaded” extra way cars from the western terminal at San Bernardino to the eastern terminal at Barstow. Since the way cars were assigned to specific crews (until 1955 on the Santa Fe’s Coast Lines) , they had to make the dead-head move too, but they could do it by using their passes on secondary passenger trains. They even got paid for taking that ride!
So long,
Andy
Some times on the PRR we would use 2 cabins since the engine was in the middle of the local.
You see there was 3 industrial branch lines in Columbus that lacked runarounds or in one case the runaround was embargoed due to broken rail so,with the engine in the middle we could work all industries…Of course today these areas are long gone as is the once proud PRR.
I believe the Missabe Road often used 2 cabooses on some long ore trains, one behind the engine and one at the rear of the train. Not sure if the one behind the engine was for the front-end brakeman or brakemen, but I’d assume so. With 170 ore cars it was a long way between the engine and the end of the train.
Not as long as a 200 plus car coal drags that the C&O and N&W was well known for.[:D]
It can also be that the regular caboose needs to go to the shop so a second one tagging along aows the crew to transfer their stuff to the temporary one
Some local freights ran with two cabooses. One on the hind end for the flagman and one right behind the engine for the conductor and/or the front brakeman. If there was a fireman on the job both the conductor and the front man could ride in the caboose, but if there wasn’t a fireman one of them would have to be on the engine.
In the event a engine didn’t have a fireman the head brakeman would ride the cab with the engineer.
Why?
Simple Union job classes…The conductor was not a member of the headend crew.The job of flagman was reclassified to rear brakeman with a job description clause to flag when necessary…This eliminated the job of flagman and shorten the crew to 5 men.
However,if a local was extra long a third brakeman was added to the crew to help the head brakeman do the switching.The conductor and rear brakeman would work the rear of the train.This in theory saved time.
On the SP it was common to place a caboose anywhere we had open auto racks and piggybacks to prevent pilferage, the practice of employing a standard cabooses ended when one such application resulted in a string-line with severe injuries to the crew, after which we were provided with surplus passenger cars (including a sweet ex-city 10-6 sleeper with soft bedding) that had been reclassified as cabooses, all were later conveyed to the SP police.
Dave
DSO17 Writes:
This might vary from time to time and from road to road and from place to place on the same road, but here in the East on both B&O and PRR-PC-CR it was common for the conductor to ride in the cab of the lead engine if he was on the head end and there was no fireman. Not always, but from my observation, more often than not.
The conductor was in charge of the train and he rode any place he wanted to except for the engineer’s seat (or the fireman’s seat if the job had a fireman)
In the locations I was familiar with, the rear brakeman positions were advertised “rear brakeman”, but commonly called “flagmen”. Their most important duty was still to provide flag protection when neces
On the B&O many times you would see the extra caboose as part of the helper engine(s) consist. Many times you would see this on coal trains. My uncle worked as a conductor in WV for 20 years and talked about two things, the extra caboose and never sitting in the caboose when they lashed up more than two helpers on the end of the train. He talked about cabooses that got crushed from the helpers. But the extra caboose was usually for the helper engines and would go with them when they cut out the helpers. Alot of times extra crewmen were transported this way to fill in on the extras boards at different divisions when needed.
In the steam era?? DMIR went up to about 220 cars on ore trains in the taconite era. Course the iron ore train would be shorter (due to shorter cars) but as heavy or heavier, since coal is relatively light compared to ore.
[;)]
NYC ran a westbound daily SuperVan train that arrived Collinwood Yard (Cleveland) with two cabooses. This train (SV7? SV9?) normally had about 40 FlexiVan cars, a 21000 series caboose, 30 or so more FlexiVans, and a second caboose.
A new crew boarded as soon as the train stopped (sometimes before) with the train crew occupying the first caboose. The train was cut behind that first caboose and headed west for Chicago.
As soon as the first part of the train cleared, another set of power (usually 2 or 3 GP40s) would back down on the rest of the train, another train crew would board the second caboose, and that train would get out of town. It took the same route west along the lake as the first but diverged at Berea, OH to head down the Big Four toward Columbus and Cincinnati.