Spindletop Caboose Fleet

Howdy everyone!

Okay so I finally am getting around to a filler post.  I am planning and working on a very long post that is a complete project tutorial.  Hopefully it will be useful for passenger car modelers.

Anyways, today is about the caboose fleet.  Now, many of you may be asking "why does a modern day railroad have cabooses?  Or cabeese?  Or whatever the heck the plural form of caboose is?  Didn't those go away?"  These are great questions.

First, I have no idea how to pluralize caboose...  I like cabeese though.

But more importantly, the caboose is not entirely defunct!  Yes the majority of them are museum pieces or scrapped, but there are several surviving in the world.  Even better, they are being put to good use by all sizes of railroads! 

The main purpose a caboose serves nowadays is a "switching platform" or a "shoving platform".  According to some regulations put forth by the FRA, any reversing move over a certain distance (I think it is 3 miles, but don't quote me on that) requires a shoving platform.  This can be almost anything that allows an operator to be on the end of a train that is being pushed from the front.  This operator will relay instructions and warnings to the engineer.  This way a train can easily access industries and locations that would normally require a lot of difficult or time consuming reverse moves and runarounds.  This is where the caboose comes in.

The caboose was already designed to accommodate conductors so it makes perfect sense that they be used for this task.  And this is the role they will be playing on the SRR.

This is SRR 10001.  She was a quick build I am using as a proving ground.  This is an old Athearn Blue Box wide vision caboose that I have had for years.  I sprayed it black and grey with a rattle can.  The yellow and white on the handrails and stepwells were from paint pens.  The lettering and conspicuity stripes are from Microscale decal sets I had leftover.  I like how the scheme turned out on this one, so it will be applied to all other SRR cabeese, except SP ones.  I am still working on a numbering system for them though, but that is for the future.

Since the SRR was so heavily intertwined with the Southern Pacific, I figured that for sure some of their equipment would have been retained.  In this case it is a bay window caboose, a classic of the SP.  This is an Athearn Genesis caboose with lights built in.  Quite beautiful really, a ton of detail work, lots of quality equipment like the interior, and the lights are incredible.  All LED and nary a flicker.  Another fun point of the Genesis rolling stock: the bearing caps turn.  Yes you can see them spinning along just like the prototype!

I do plan to have a few more cabooses one day.  For now these two are all I have room for!

And now, the random picture of the day!

I was out at lunch on Thursday the 10th and caught a very interesting moment.  Here we have three trains going three directions all in one shot!  The location is Tower 87, where Englewood and Settegast Yards meet and cross.  The train on the hump in the distance is being broken up into Englewood, which is over the main lines into Settegast with the EMD locos going south, and 9589 is turning North into Settegast from the Sunset line out of Beaumont.  Downtown Houston is just behind the humps, about 5 miles.  This is one of my favorite spots for railfanning!