History of the Caboose:

For more than a century the caboose was a fixture at the end of every freight train in America. Like the red schoolhouse and the red barn, the red caboose became an American icon. Along with its vanished cousin the steam locomotive, the caboose evokes memories of the golden age of railroading.

There are conflicting versions of how the caboose got its name and where the word was first used. One popular story points to a Dutch derivation of the word "kabuis," meaning a little room or hut. The English word "caboose" was first used as a nautical term for a ship's galley.

More certain is the origin of the first railroad caboose, which can be traced to the 1840s. A conductor named Nat Williams on the Auburn & Syracuse, a short line in upstate New York, decided to use the empty wooden boxcar at the end of his train as his "rolling office." Williams sat on a wood box and used a barrel as his desk. He stored flags, lanterns, chains, and other work tools in this first caboose.

The genesis of the unique cupola located atop the caboose is credited to T. B. Watson, a Chicago & North Western conductor. In 1863, when Watson's regular caboose was reassigned, he used a wooden boxcar at the end of the train for a caboose. The boxcar had a hole in the roof, which prompted Watson to sit on a stack of boxes with his head and shoulders protruding through the hole, giving him an excellent view of his train as it journeyed from Cedar Rapids to Clinton, Iowa. Back at the home terminal, Watson relayed his positive experience to a master mechanic at the railroad's Clinton shops. He suggested that a "crows nest" be added to the new waycars the North Western was building there. Thus, C&NW may have been the first railroad to have cabooses with cupolas. The caboose provided the train crew with a shelter at the rear of the train. They could exit the train for switching or to protect the rear of the train when stopped. They also looked out windows to inspect the train for problems such as shifting loads, broken or dragging equipment, and overheated journals (hot boxes). I can testify to the fact that they were very hot indeed, especially on a summers day at a county fair, thank God ours had a large air conditioner on the roof. 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 very 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").

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 did something unique; they left their cabooses unpainted, but ordered them with a stainless-steel car body. They were the exception to the rule of painting cabooses.

Who's in the caboose?

For most of the 19th century and the first few years of the 20th, most cabooses carried a conductor, brakeman, and flagman. Before the era of automatic air brakes, the engineer signaled by whistle when he needed to slow down or stop. The rear end brakeman's job was to climb over the moving train and make his way forward, turning brake wheels that rose above the car roofs. The head-end brakeman, riding the engine, would work his way rearward. When the train stopped, the flagman detrained from the caboose and walked back a prescribed distance to signal approaching trains that a stopped train was ahead. Once underway again, the caboose (or "rear end") crew would sit up in the cupola and watch for smoke from overheated wheel journals (called hotboxes) or other signs of trouble.

Caboose designs have always been driven by three factors: safety, crew efficiency, and a need to keep the cost down. This last factor reflects that cabooses are "non-revenue" equipment. In other words, these cars don't make any money for the railroads. Nevertheless, cabooses cost money to build and maintain, so railroads often sought ways to reduce caboose construction and operating costs through design.

Most railroads opted for a caboose with two trucks (called "bogies") and eight wheels, but some eastern roads chose a no-truck, four-wheel design called a "bobber." The lack of trucks reduced the amount of steel needed for the caboose, thus lowering the final cost. This car got its name from the way it would "bob" down the track. Its tracking was so bad that several states enacted laws prohibiting the use of bobber cabooses (although by then the railroads had already stopped buying them).

Cabooses were one of the last car types to change from mostly wood construction to all-steel construction. It was hard to justify replacing a perfectly good wood-bodied caboose with a safer steel body if it wasn't earning money for the company. Nevertheless, safety concerns and legislation had most wood cars replaced by steel by the 1960s. A few railroads, including some of the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe predecessors, used plywood-sheathed cabooses up through the 1970s.

In the 1980s, reduction in crew size affected caboose size again. The last new cabooses returned to the "shack on a flat" configuration to reduce the area needing heating and cleaning.

Technology and the Caboose

Cabooses are a distinctively American institution. In other parts of the world, cabooses have been rare. Even so, in the United States, technology began chipping away at the caboose's usefulness as early as the turn of the last century.

In the late 1800s, George Westinghouse's automatic air brake system eliminated the need to manually set brakes on a moving train. Air brakes were followed by electric signaling circuits to protect train movements and eliminate the need for flagmen. Lineside electronic "hotbox" and dragging-equipment detectors check on today's longer trains more efficiently and reliably than caboose crews can. Also, conductors now use modern computers, eliminating the need to store and track administrative paperwork.

History of the Train Station [Back]

railway station, train station, railroad station, is a facility at which passengers may board and alight from trains and/or rail-transported freight may be loaded or unloaded.Historically, the term (railroad) depot has also been employed in North America.A station usually consists of at least one building for passengers (and possibly freight) plus other installations associated with the functioning of the railway or railroad. A small station with few facilities and/or limited use may be known as a "halt" in UK usage, or in US usage a "stop". In the United States, a station is technically distinguished from a depot in that a station is a designated stop, with or without a depot.Early stations were sometimes built with both passenger and goods facilities.