A caboose is a crewed North American railroad car coupled at the end of a freight train. Cabooses provide shelter for crew at the end of a train, who were formerly required in switching and shunting; as well as in keeping a lookout for load shifting, damage to equipment and cargo, and overheating axles.
Originally flatcars fitted with cabins or modified box cars, they later became purpose-built, with bay windows above or to the sides of the car to allow crew to observe the train. The caboose also served as the conductor's office, and on long routes, included sleeping accommodations and cooking facilities. [1]
A similar railroad car, the brake van, was used on British and Commonwealth railways outside North America (the role has since been replaced by the crew car in Australia). On trains not fitted with continuous brakes, brake vans provided a supplementary braking system, and they helped keep chain couplings taut.
Cabooses were used on every freight train in the United States and Canada until the 1980s, [1] when safety laws requiring the presence of cabooses and full crews were relaxed. A major purpose of the caboose was for observing problems at the rear of the train before they caused trouble. Lineside defect detectors and end-of-train devices eliminated much of this need. Older freight cars had plain bearings with hot boxes for crews to spot overheating – as freight cars replaced these with roller bearings, there was also less need for cabooses to monitor them. Nowadays, they are generally only used on rail maintenance or hazardous materials trains, as a platform for crew on industrial spur lines when it is required to make long reverse movements, or on heritage and tourist railroads.
Railroad historian David L. Joslyn (a retired Southern Pacific Railroad draftsman) has traced the possible root of "caboose" to the obsolete Middle Low German word Kabuse, a small cabin erected on a sailing ship's main deck.[ citation needed ] [2] [3] This was absorbed into Middle Dutch and entered the Dutch language circa 1747 as kabhuis, the compartment on a ship's main deck in which meals were prepared. [4] In modern Dutch, kombuis is equivalent to galley.
Eighteenth century French naval records also make reference to a cambose or camboose, which described both the food preparation cabin on a ship's main deck and its stove. Camboose may have entered English through American sailors who had come into contact with their French allies during the American Revolution. It was already in use in U.S. naval terminology by the 1797 construction of the USS Constitution, whose wood-burning food preparation stove is known as the camboose. [5] In modern French, cambuse can refer both to a ship's storeroom and to the North-American railcar.
Camboose as a cook shack was in use in English at least by 1805, when it was used in a New York Chronicle article cited in the New English Dictionary describing a New England shipwreck, which reported that "[Survivor] William Duncan drifted aboard the canboose [ sic ]." [6] As the first railroad cabooses were wooden shanties erected on flat cars as early as the 1830s, [7] they would have resembled the cook shack on a ship's deck.
The earliest known printed record of "caboose" used to describe the railcar appeared in 1859 in court records in conjunction with a lawsuit filed against the New York and Harlem Railway. [6]
The most common pluralization of caboose is "cabooses". [4] [8]
Use of cabooses began in the 1830s, when railroads housed trainmen in shanties built onto boxcars or flatcars. [9] The caboose provided the train crew with a shelter at the rear of the train. The crew could exit the train for switching or to protect the rear of the train when stopped. They also inspected the train for problems such as shifting loads, broken or dragging equipment, and hot boxes (overheated axle bearings, a serious fire and derailment threat). The conductor kept records and handled business from a table or desk in the caboose. For longer trips, the caboose provided minimal living quarters, and was frequently personalized and decorated with pictures and posters.
Early cabooses were nothing more than flat cars with small cabins erected on them, or modified box cars. The standard form of the American caboose had a platform at either end with curved grab rails to facilitate train crew members' ascent onto a moving train. A caboose was fitted with red lights called markers to enable the rear of the train to be seen at night. This has led to the phrase "bringing up the markers" to describe the last car on a train. These lights were officially what made a train a "train", [10] and were originally lit with oil lamps. With the advent of electricity, later caboose versions incorporated an electrical generator driven by belts coupled to one of the axles, which charged a lead-acid storage battery when the train was in motion. The addition of the cupola, a lookout post atop the car, was introduced in 1863. [11]
Coal or wood was originally used to fire a cast-iron stove for heat and cooking, later giving way to a kerosene heater. Now rare, the old stoves can be identified by several essential features. They were without legs, bolted directly to the floor, and featured a lip on the top surface to keep pans and coffee pots from sliding off. They also had a double-latching door, to prevent accidental discharge of hot coals caused by the rocking motion of the caboose.
Cabooses are non-revenue equipment and were often improvised or retained well beyond the normal lifetime of a freight car. Tradition on many lines held that the caboose should be painted a bright red, though on many lines it eventually became the practice to paint them in the same corporate colors as locomotives. The Kansas City Southern Railway was unique in that it bought cabooses with a stainless steel car body, and so was not obliged to paint them.
Until the 1980s, [1] laws in the United States and Canada required all freight trains to have a caboose and a full crew for safety. Technology eventually advanced to a point where the railroads, in an effort to save money by reducing crew members, stated that cabooses were unnecessary.
New diesel locomotives had large cabs that could house entire crews. Distant dispatchers controlled switches, eliminating the need to manually throw switches after trains had passed. Improved signaling eliminated the need to protect the rear of a stopped train. [12] Bearings were improved and lineside detectors were used to detect hot boxes, which themselves were becoming rarer with more and more freight cars gaining roller bearings. Better-designed cars avoided problems with the loads which helped as well. The railroads also claimed a caboose was a dangerous place, as slack run-ins could hurl the crew from their places and even dislodge weighty equipment.
Railroads proposed the end-of-train device (EOT or ETD), commonly called a FRED (flashing rear-end device), as an alternative. [12] An ETD could be attached to the rear of the train to detect the train's air brake pressure and report any problems to the locomotive by telemetry. [12] The ETD also detects movement of the train upon start-up and radios this information to the engineers so they know all of the slack is out of the couplings and additional power could be applied. The machines also have blinking red lights to warn following trains that a train is ahead. With the introduction of the ETD, the conductor moved up to the front of the train with the engineer.
A 1982 Presidential Emergency Board convened under the Railway Labor Act directed United States railroads to begin eliminating caboose cars where possible to do so. [13] A legal exception was the state of Virginia, which had a 1911 law mandating cabooses on the ends of trains, until the law's final repeal in 1988. With this exception aside, year by year, cabooses started to fade away. [14] Very few cabooses remain in operation today, though they are still used for some local trains where it is convenient to have a brakeman at the end of the train to operate switches, on long reverse movements, and are also used on trains carrying hazardous materials.
CSX Transportation is one of the few Class 1 railroads that still maintains a fleet of modified cabooses for regular use. Employed as "shoving platforms" at the rear of local freight trains which must perform long reverse moves or heavy switching, these are generally rebuilt bay-window cabooses with their cabin doors welded shut (leaving their crews to work from the rear platform). BNSF also maintains a fleet of former wide-vision cabooses for a similar purpose, and in 2013 began repainting some of them in heritage paint schemes of BNSF's predecessor railroads.
The form of cabooses varied over the years, with changes made both to reflect differences in service and improvements in design. The most commonly seen types are:
The most common caboose form in American railroad practice has a small windowed projection on the roof, called the cupola. The crew sat in elevated seats to inspect the train from this perch.
The invention of the cupola caboose is generally attributed to T. B. Watson, a freight conductor on the Chicago and North Western Railway. In 1898, he wrote:
During the '60s I was a conductor on the C&NW. One day late in the summer of 1863 I received orders to give my caboose to the conductor of a construction train and take an empty boxcar to use as a caboose. This car happened to have a hole in the roof about two feet square. I stacked the lamp and tool boxes under the perforation end and sat with my head and shoulders above the roof ... (Later) I suggested putting a box around the hole with glass in, so I could have a pilot house to sit in and watch the train.
The position of the cupola varied. In most eastern railroad cabooses, the cupola was in the center of the car, but most western railroads preferred to put it toward the end of the car. Some conductors preferred to have the cupola toward the front, others liked it toward the rear of the train, and still others had no preference. ATSF conductors could refuse to be assigned to a train if they did not have their cabooses turned to face the way they preferred. This would be a rare union agreement clause that could be used however it was not a regular issue.
The classic idea of the "little red caboose" at the end of every train came about when cabooses were painted a reddish brown; however, some railroads (UP, and NKP, for example) painted their cabooses yellow or red and white. The most notable was the Santa Fe which in the 1960s started a rebuild program for their cabooses in which the cars were painted bright red, with an eight-foot-diameter Santa Fe cross herald emblazoned on each side in yellow. Some railroads, chiefly the Wabash Railway, Pennsylvania Railroad, Norfolk and Western and Illinois Central Gulf, also built or upgraded cabooses with streamlined cupolas for better aerodynamics and to project a more modern image.
In a bay window caboose, the crew monitoring the train sits in the middle of the car in a section of wall that projects from the side of the caboose. The windows set into these extended walls resemble architectural bay windows, so the caboose type is called a bay window caboose. This type afforded a better view of the side of the train and eliminated the falling hazard of the cupola.[ citation needed ] It is thought to have first been used on the Akron, Canton and Youngstown Railroad in 1923, but is particularly associated with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which built all of its cabooses in this design starting from an experimental model in 1930. The bay window gained favor with many railroads because it eliminated the need for additional clearances in tunnels and overpasses.
On the West Coast, the Milwaukee Road and the Northern Pacific Railway used these cars, converting over 900 roof top cabooses to bay windows in the late 1930s. [15] Milwaukee Road rib-side bay window cabooses are preserved at New Lisbon, Wisconsin, the Illinois Railway Museum, the Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad and Cedarburg, Wisconsin, among other places.
The Western Pacific Railroad was an early adopter of the type, building their own bay window cars starting in 1942 and acquiring this style exclusively from then on. Many other roads operated this type, including the Southern Pacific Railroad, St. Louis – San Francisco Railway, Katy Railroad, Kansas City Southern Railway, the Southern Railway, and the New York Central Railroad.
In the UK, brake vans are usually of this basic design: the bay window is known as a lookout or ducket.
In the extended-vision or wide-vision caboose, the sides of the cupola project beyond the side of the car body. Rock Island created some of these by rebuilding some standard cupola cabooses with windowed extensions applied to the sides of the cupola itself, but by far, the greatest number have the entire cupola compartment enlarged. This model was introduced by the International Car Company and saw service on most U.S. railroads. The expanded cupola allowed the crew to see past the top of the taller cars that began to appear after World War II, and also increased the roominess of the cupola area.
Additionally, Monon Railroad had a unique change to the extended-vision cabooses. They added a miniature bay to the sides of the cupola to enhance the views further. This created a unique look for their small fleet. Seven of the eight Monon-built cabooses have been saved. One was scrapped after an accident in Kentucky. The surviving cars are at the Indiana Transportation Museum (operational), the Indiana Railway Museum (operational), the Kentucky Railway Museum (fire damaged), and the Bluegrass Railroad Museum (unrestored but serviceable). The remaining three are in private collections.
A transfer caboose looks more like a flat car with a shed bolted to the middle of it than like a standard caboose. It is used in transfer service between rail yards or short switching runs, and as such, lacks sleeping, cooking or restroom facilities. The ends of a transfer caboose are left open, with safety railings surrounding the area between the crew compartment and the end of the car.
A recent variation on the transfer caboose is the "pushing" or "shoving" platform. It can be any railcar where a brakeman can safely ride for some distance to help the engineer with visibility at the other end of the train. Flatcars and covered hoppers have been used for this purpose, but often the pushing platform is a caboose that has had its windows covered and welded shut and permanently locked doors. CSX uses former Louisville & Nashville short bay window cabooses and former Conrail waycars as pushing platforms. Transfer cabooses are not to be confused with Missouri Pacific Railroad (MoPac) cabooses, as their cabooses were fully functional.
Drover's cabooses looked more like combine cars than standard cabooses. The purpose of a drover's caboose was much more like a combine, as well. On longer livestock trains in the American West, the drover's caboose is where the livestock's handlers would ride between the ranch and processing plant. The train crew rode in the caboose section while the livestock handlers rode in the coach section. Drover's cabooses used either cupolas or bay windows in the caboose section for the train crew to monitor the train. The use of drover's cars on the Northern Pacific Railway, for example, lasted until the Burlington Northern Railroad merger of 1970. They were often found on stock trains originating in Montana.
Although the caboose has largely fallen out of use, some are still retained by railroads in a reserve capacity. These cabooses are typically used in and around railyards. Other uses for the caboose include "special" trains, where the train is involved in some sort of railway maintenance; as part of survey trains that inspect remote rail lines after natural disasters to check for damage;[ citation needed ] or in protecting the movement of nuclear material within the United States. [16] Others have been modified for use in research roles to investigate complaints from residents or business owners regarding trains in certain locations. Finally, some are coupled to trains for special events, including historical tours.[ citation needed ]
The Chihuahua al Pacífico Railroad in Mexico still uses cabooses to accompany their motorail trains between Chihuahua and Los Mochis [ citation needed ].
Cabooses have also become popular for collection by railroad museums and for city parks and other civic uses, such as visitor centers. Several railroad museums roster large numbers of cabooses, including the Illinois Railway Museum with 19 examples and the Western Pacific Railroad Museum at Portola, California, with 17. Many shortline railroads still use cabooses today. Large railroads also use cabooses as "shoving platforms" or in switching service where it is convenient to have crew at the rear of the train.
Cabooses have been reused as vacation cottages, [17] garden offices in private residences, and as portions of restaurants. Also, caboose motels have appeared, with the old cars being used as cabins. [18]
A bay window caboose numbered FCD-17 is still being used by the Philippine National Railways for non-revenue maintenance trains. It was built in Japan in 1962 and is used as an inspection car by the Philippine National Police. [19]
A conductor or guard is a train crew member responsible for operational and safety duties that do not involve actual operation of the train/locomotive. The conductor title is most common in North American railway operations, but the role is common worldwide under various job titles. In Commonwealth English, a conductor is also known as guard or train manager.
Brake van and guard's van are terms used mainly in the UK, Ireland, Australia and India for a railway vehicle equipped with a hand brake which can be applied by the guard. The equivalent North American term is caboose, but a British brake van and a caboose are very different in appearance, because the former usually has only four wheels, while the latter usually has bogies. German railways employed brakeman's cabins combined into other cars.
A tender or coal-car is a special rail vehicle hauled by a steam locomotive containing its fuel and water. Steam locomotives consume large quantities of water compared to the quantity of fuel, so their tenders are necessary to keep them running over long distances. A locomotive that pulls a tender is called a tender locomotive. Locomotives that do not have tenders and carry all their fuel and water on board are called tank locomotives or tank engines.
The end of train device (ETD), sometimes referred to as an EOT, flashing rear-end device (FRED) or sense and braking unit (SBU) is an electronic device mounted on the end of freight trains in replacement of a caboose. They are divided into three categories: "dumb" units, which only provide a visible indication of the rear of the train with a flashing red taillight; "average intelligence" units with a brake pipe pressure gauge; and "smart" units, which send back data to the crew in the locomotive via radio-based telemetry. They originated in North America, and are also used elsewhere in the world, where they may include complete End of Train Air System (ETAS) or Sense and Brake Unit (SBU) devices.
A passenger railroad car or passenger car, also called a passenger carriage, passenger coach, or passenger bogie is a railroad car that is designed to carry passengers, usually giving them space to sit on train seats. The term passenger car can also be associated with a sleeping car, a baggage car, a dining car, railway post office and prisoner transport cars.
An observation car/carriage/coach is a type of railroad passenger car, generally operated in a passenger train as the rearmost carriage, with windows or a platform on the rear of the car for passengers' viewing pleasure. The cars were nearly universally removed from service on American railroads beginning in the 1950s as a cost-cutting measure in order to eliminate the need to "turn" the trains when operating out of stub-end terminals.
The Virginia and Truckee Railroad is a privately owned heritage railroad, headquartered in Virginia City, Nevada. Its private and publicly owned route is 14 miles (23 km) long. When first constructed in the 19th century, it was a commercial freight railroad which was originally built to serve the Comstock Lode mining communities of northwestern Nevada.
On February 8, 1986, 23 people were killed in a collision between a Canadian National Railway freight train and a Via Rail passenger train called the Super Continental, including the engine crews of both trains. It was the deadliest rail disaster in Canada since the Dugald accident of 1947, which had 31 fatalities, and was not surpassed until the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster in 2013, which resulted in 47 deaths.
A bank engine, banking engine, helper engine or pusher engine is a railway locomotive that temporarily assists a train that requires additional power or traction to climb a gradient. Helpers/bankers are most commonly found in mountain divisions, where the ruling grade may demand the use of substantially greater motive power than that required for other grades within the division.
The Niles Canyon Railway (NCRy) is a heritage railway running on the first transcontinental railroad alignment through Niles Canyon, between Sunol and the Niles district of Fremont in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, United States. The railway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Niles Canyon Transcontinental Railroad Historic District. The railroad is operated and maintained by the Pacific Locomotive Association which preserves, restores and operates historic railroad equipment. The NCRy features public excursions with both steam and diesel locomotives along a well-preserved portion of the first transcontinental railroad.
The San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum, in San Luis Obispo, California, was founded to preserve and present the railroad history of California, and specifically the Central Coast, by collecting, restoring, displaying, and operating historic railroad equipment. The museum also maintains a research library, and document and photographic archives, and is developing an oral history program. The museum is open every Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm, and other times for groups by arrangement. The museum hosts special events in May and October each year. The museum's website, periodic emails, and the quarterly Coast Mail newsletter provide information on activities and resources.
A brakeman is a rail transport worker whose original job was to assist the braking of a train by applying brakes on individual wagons. The advent of through brakes, brakes on every wagon which could be controlled by the driver, made this role redundant, although the name lives on, for example, in the United States where brakemen carry out a variety of functions both on the track and within trains.
This article contains a list of terms, jargon, and slang used to varying degrees by railfans and railroad employees in the United States and Canada. Although not exhaustive, many of the entries in this list appear from time to time in specialist, rail-related publications. Inclusion of a term in this list does not necessarily imply its universal adoption by all railfans and railroad employees, and there may be significant regional variation in usage.
The Fremont and Elkhorn Valley Railroad was a 17-mile (27 km) heritage railroad headquartered in Dodge County, Nebraska, which offered excursion services on the line. Its equipment is now owned by the Nebraska Railroad Museum.
The Tidewater Southern Railway was a short line railroad in Central California in the United States. For most of its history, it was a subsidiary of the Western Pacific Railroad. It was originally built as an interurban system, connecting to the Central California Traction Company, Western Pacific Railroad, Southern Pacific Railroad and Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in Stockton, California. Its mainline went southeast from Stockton to Escalon, California and thence to Modesto, California before splitting into two branches ending at the towns of Turlock and Hilmar. Until the mid-1930s, there were plans to extend the line to Fresno and even toward the Los Angeles area. Today, much of the line is still operated by the Union Pacific Railroad. Of all the former interurban railroads in California, the former Tidewater Southern retains the highest percentage of still operating trackage.
The National New York Central Railroad Museum is a railroad museum located in Elkhart, Indiana dedicated to the preservation of the New York Central Railroad (NYC).
Samtrak was a heritage railroad that operated in Oregon from 1993 to 2001.
This article lists some of the terminology used at present and in the past by Australian railway employees, contractors, railway historians and railway enthusiasts. Many of the terms appear from time to time in specialist, rail-related publications.
Lee Hall Depot is a historic train station and museum located in the Lee Hall neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia. It was built in about 1881, with a one-story cargo bay, and the two-story main section was added in 1893. Another one-story wing was added by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway to the north end of the depot in 1918 to handle an influx of military personnel to Fort Eustis. The building is currently in use as a local history museum, focusing on the station's history, and the history of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Warwick County.
An accident occurred on the four-track mainline of the New York Central Railroad at 10:02 P.M. on March 27, 1953, 2.4 miles (3.9 km) east of Conneaut, Ohio. It began when an improperly secured load of pipe broke loose from a gondola car on an eastbound freight train, damaging the westbound passenger track. A passing westbound freight crew notified the first train and stopped to assess what had happened, but a fast westbound passenger train could not stop and was derailed by the damaged track, colliding with the adjacent westbound freight. Finally, an eastbound fast passenger train struck the derailed equipment from the first two trains. There were 21 deaths and 49 people were injured.