the caboose that never was

[John Greenly]

Jim, when you asked for photos of my Grandt HO caboose, you didn't know what you were getting into….

When I thought of getting back into modeling after 40+ years away in other worlds, I looked on Ebay for something to get started with and found a Grandt kit for C&S caboose 1005.  I had always loved the looks of these little waycars, so I got it.  This was back in the winter a year ago before I found this forum and all your collective expertise and information.  I looked around on the web and found some nice pictures of caboose 1006, found out it still exists, thought it would be fun to modify the kit to build it instead of 1005, and someday go visit the real one too.  I liked the looks of the passenger car style two-pane windows, and I liked the way the block lettering made the car look even smaller.  By the time I decided this I had already put together the car body, but I went ahead anyway.  The hard part was that the window on one  side had to be moved sideways as well as made taller and the upper pane added.  This meant cutting a section of the side out and moving it over, then reconstructing the window opening in the new place.  Would have been a LOT easier with the side separate to lay flat on the work surface….  But, here is the result:



What  I didn't notice, in my profound ignorance of the wonderful variety of C&S cabeese, were the two most glaring mistakes I was building in-  first, the 1005 brake system is totally backward end-for-end for 1006, and second, those nice passenger car-style quarter-round corners don't exist on 1006. ( I do think they go nicely with the windows, though).  To this day I still haven't had the heart to find out how far off the overall dimensions are, it would be too depressing.  Anyway, here are a couple of other views of The Caboose That Never Was:



S.P. came by with his truck that day.

Here's one with fingers (and another visitor) for scale- this is really a little caboose!  Grandt did a truly wonderful job with this.



and here are a couple more.





These are all pictures of the side with the moved window, the other side is neater.  I did some weathering on the roof, but not much on the sides up to now, hadn't decided how much to do.  I notice now that I forgot a couple of grab irons on the end beams, and the coupler lift bars too.  And I need to put glass in the windows.  Grandt supplied .008" wire for the grabs and handrails, and I have used this since for all my new construction.  Once you get used to looking at this, the larger sizes generally used on HO models look, as they are, way too thick.

Ah, I just had a thought!  Since this caboose never existed, I shouldn't have put the number 1006 on it.  I haven't gotten around to putting the number above the doors yet anyway…  why not give it a number that never existed either?  What do you all think, how about suggestions for how this caboose should be numbered?

Cheers,
John

John Greenly
Lansing, NY

[Jim Courtney]

Beautiful model John!

Ah, I just had a thought!  Since this caboose never existed, I shouldn't have put the number 1006 on it.  I haven't gotten around to putting the number above the doors yet anyway . . . why not give it a number that never existed either?  What do you all think, how about suggestions for how this caboose should be numbered?

OK, challenge accepted.

So we're looking for a short body caboose, with passenger car quarter-round corners and symmetrically placed double pane windows, one per side, right?  

According to Derrell Poole's article in the Oct/Nov 1995 issue of Outdoor Railroader, the DSP&P (and it's owner the U.P.) built a total of 23 waycars by the year 1884, numbered 60-82, renumbered 1500-1520 during the UP renumbering system of 1885.

Per Derrell's drawings in the article, the last four waycars, 79-82, were built with quarter-round corners and double pane windows. They were the first cars lettered as "Caboose". Derrell traces the numbers of the waycars 79-82 through the subsequent receivership: Number 79/1517 disappears after 1893, likely wrecked, and 82/1520 was gone even earlier, after 1890, probably from the same fate, or it may have been transferred to Utah, never to return.

Two of these cars though, numbers 80/1518 and 81/1519, survived until the new C&S was formed and were assigned numbers 313 and 314 respectively in 1899. Following this so far?

Derrell reports that both cars survived to be renumbered 1010 and 1011 in February and May of 1912. It isn't known whether 313/1010 or 314/1011 were actually rebuilt with single windows per sides and end cupola. Maybe so, maybe not.

1010 is listed by Derrell as scrapped in January, 1915, while 1011 lasted a couple of years longer, scrapped January, 1917.

So, I'd suggest picking numbers 1010 or 1011, which ever you like best, assume that the car was in fact rebuilt to the modern configuration, and survived (despite Derrell's data) to what ever era you are modeling.

And, after all those rational assumptions, so what if the brake wheel is on the cupola end. Who knows how they really looked.

***********

So you're using 0.008 wire for HO grab irons?

If the real things are about 3/4 inch diameter, I use 0.012 wire in S scale, where an S scale inch is 0.0156" (0.75 x 0.0156 = 0.0117). If an HO scale inch is 0.011", then 0.008 seems about right. They look great, nice and delicate.  I have one of these Grandt kits in HO as well. I may have to get out my loops and try to build one.

Again, beautiful model building!

[John Greenly]

>OK, challenge accepted.

>So we're looking for a short body caboose, with passenger car quarter-round corners and symmetrically placed double pane windows, >one per side, right?  

Jim, yes, exactly.  This is fantastic!!!!

1010 and 1011, wonderful!  I couldn't have imagined a more perfect possibility.  I am trying to get up a roster for the period 1915-1918.   I like to work out things that might have happened, but for which complete data are not available so I can have some fun speculating and making one-of-a-kind things.  Equipment that didn't survive into the modern era is very appealing from this point of view.   So, making a hypothetical caboose 1010 (think I'll use that, requires  fewer "1"s) is absolutely fascinating to me.  

I wonder if I can find a copy of Derrell's article.  Very many thanks for taking the challenge and coming up with such  perfect solution!

John

[Jim Courtney]

I wonder if I can find a copy of Derrell's article.


Derrell's C&S caboose chronicles ran as a three part series of articles in the Aug/Sep--1995, Oct/Nov--1995 and Dec/Jan--1995/1996 issues of Outdoor Railroader.  

The photos, drawings and Derrell's research is the best organized discussion of the C&S cabooses that I've ever seen. The articles contain many of Derrell's drawings in 1/4" and 3/16" scales on slick paper. Also included are C&S Engineering drawings of the proposed 1908 caboose rebuild program, including elevations and floor plan.

If you can find back issues on Amazon or eBay, they are well worth purchasing, just for the C&S caboose content.


********

BTW, that looks to be a 1902 coal car, with tapered stakes in some of the photos. Care to share of couple of photos of that car?

[John Greenly]

I found those back issues and ordered them today from this outfit:

http://www.montageww.com/augsep1995outdoorrailroader.aspx

they have a bunch of back issues of various rr publications.


Jim, you have an eagle eye for coal cars, yes that's my 1902 car, not finished yet, but I'll take photos to post in the next day or two if you like-  don't think I have much to contribute compared with your excellent work!

I just took a few minutes and put the new 1010 number on one side of the caboose, it looks very happy.

I wonder if anybody has made a model of this car in any of its known incarnations-- I'd love to see a picture! Or also any photos of the real thing.

John

[Jim Courtney]

Excellent work?

I'm flattered, but I don't ever seem to get anything finished! As retirement forever seems to elude me, I seem to have a chronic case of builders block. Seeing other folks C&S work, like Keith's, Jeff's and yours tends to inspire me to get back to the work bench with its gazillion unfinished projects. And Bob Stear's beautiful models in On3 are certainly something to aspire to!

Glad you found the back issues.

As for photos of 1010 and 1011, don't hold your breath, I've never seen any.

Nor have I seen any photos of two other cabooses that made it to the 1911-12 renumbering:

Colorado Central 27 (later 1726), renumbered to UPD&G 62, made it to the C&S and was renumbered 301, later 1001. Derrell's research shows it was scrapped in January, 1915.

An early DSP&P waycar, number 67, became DL&G 1505, renumbered 305 on the C&S in 1899, and was later numbered 1004. Derrell's info has this car surviving longer, wrecked in 1923, finally off roster by March, 1926.

I know of no photos of any of these cars. The fact that 1001, 1010 and 1011 were all scrapped between 1915 and 1917 might suggest that they were never rebuilt to the modern configuration (ie flat roof, no cupola on the end, paired windows on the sides). With traffic decreasing on the dismembered South Park Division and the US Safety Appliance deadline of 1916, perhaps the C&S chose to get rid of them rather than rebuild them (or maybe the C&S didn't like cabooses with binary numbers).

Anyways, perhaps one of the cabooses, say 1001 or 1004, remained in their original flat roofed configuration. Another speculative model that you could build.

BTW, if you don't have a copy, Grandt's Narrow Gauge Pictorial VIII, by Derrell Poole and Ken Martin is a must have reference for anyone building models of C&S rolling stock. The book is still in print, you can order one directly from Grandt Line:
http://www.grandtline.com/books/

Darrell Poole has a chart that's chock-full of info on the C&S cabooses in the back of the book.

[John Greenly]

I do have NG Pict. VIII, and had studied Derrell's caboose table, so I knew that 1010 and 1011 existed, but I didn't know anything about their configuration.  Jim, you've put me onto paydirt again, though ,because I went back and leafed through the caboose photos there and on p. 113 there is a photo of caboose 313, which is my car- 1010!!  The date is listed as ca. 1910, and the car has been rebuilt with the new undercarriage (note added 9/15/17: this is wrong, see the further discussion below in this thread) and brakes. The car still has four windows and no cupola.  All that would have to be done to get 1010 as I have it would be to add the cupola and delete the two windows under it, as was done with the other cars that survived.
That probably never happened, but I think this caboose now definitely has a new title:  the Caboose That Might Have Been:



So, I've blundered into something really fun!  I went around all day yesterday with a big smile on my face-  this really made my day!
Small pleasures are important in this crazy world.

John

[Jim Courtney]

I'd forgotten about the photo of C&S 313, with the big block lettering.

As I recall, the caboose is on a work train, behind locomotive 66, cleaning up flood debris in Blackhawk, on Gregory Street. I believe the photo dates a bit earlier, circa 1907-1908. I'll have to check my reference books.

Good looking coal car!

[Keith Hayes]

Very nice Mr. Freely. Welcome!

[nedsn3]

Fascinating. Great discussion, and wonderful modeling. I too just ordered the three issues to get Derrell's articles. Can't wait to read them! I checked volume VII too and there it was. I have an "extra" OMI caboose and now I have some idea what I may want to number it. Thanks. Ned

[John Greenly]

many thanks, Jim, Keith and  Ned, for the kind words.  Jim gets the credit for making this a fascinating and happy discussion for me!!

Jim,  I've put up some photos of my coal car, on the old 1902 coal car thread.

thanks,
John

[Jim Courtney]

FWIW, since you've found a source of Outdoor Railroader back issues, there were some more Derrell Poole C&S related articles published there:


Feb/Mar, 1995:  "Identifying C&S Narrow Gauge Freight Cars". Includes complete roster from St Charles cars of 1897-98 to the SUF cars of 1909-10.

Apr/May, 1995:  "Tiffany Reefers"

June/July 1995,  "American Steel Foundries Coal Cars".  The ASF 1902, Phase 1, coal cars.


In Finescale Railroader (successor to Outdoor Railroader):


Oct/Nov, 1998,  Derrell published 1/4" scale plans of the 1900 AC&F stock cars, as built. Also referred to as the Phase 1 stock cars.


In Model Railroader, May, 1996, Derrell published and article on his prize winning C&S outfit car 0114, including 1/4" plans of the car, a former 27 foot UP built boxcar.

[John Greenly]

Hi Jim,

Good stuff.  I looked through the back issues when I ordered, and did indeed get the ones with Derrell's ASF coal and Tiffany reefer articles. That magazine had some good content.  

By the way, the source that I posted above also has some back issues of Narrow Gauge Down Under.  Do I remember that somebody here was looking for something in that publication?

thanks,
John

[John Greenly]

Well, I had a second Grandt HO C&S 1005 caboose kit on the shelf, and it caught my eye recently….  Fevered thoughts began to brew and finally deflected me from my Rhode Island intermediate tender project.   I just had to make another hypothetical caboose, to go with the caboose that might have been, No. 1010.  This time I modified the kit more heavily.  Here it is, nearly finished, with its stablemate:



Anybody want to guess what number I'm going to give it?

Cheers,
John

[Chris Walker]

Call it 1002 and while you're at it, stick a pair of Trucks under it.

Then this can come back to life... http://c-sng-discussion-forum.41377.n7.nabble.com/Eight-wheel-Caboose-on-C-Sng-tp488p1918.html

[Bill Uffelman]

Should be pictured in a flood cleanup scene in Blackhawk.

Bill Uffelman 

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 10:57 PM, John Greenly [via C&Sng Discussion Forum]

<[hidden email]> wrote:

Well, I had a second Grandt HO C&S 1005 caboose kit on the shelf, and it caught my eye recently….  Fevered thoughts began to brew and finally deflected me from my Rhode Island intermediate tender project.   I just had to make another hypothetical caboose, to go with the caboose that might have been, No. 1010.  This time I modified the kit more heavily.  Here it is, nearly finished, with its stablemate:



Anybody want to guess what number I'm going to give it?

Cheers,
John

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[Jim Courtney]

Call it 1002 and while you're at it, stick a pair of Trucks under it.


I'm working on that version of C&S caboose 303 / 1002, Chris, but in S scale:






Still a lot of work to do, though.

But there is a good chance that this caboose, riding on 20-ton Peninsular trucks, really was!

http://c-sng-discussion-forum.41377.n7.nabble.com/Derrell-s-Eight-wheel-Caboose-Hiding-in-Plain-Sight-td3634.html

[Chris Walker]

Good Lad !  I had the feeling you would be the Guy to come through, it was probably seen a lot more often than it was ever caught on film.  

Heck, 1002 may even be in more photos like on the end of a long freight where the trucks can't be seen.

[SteveG]

And in the vein of 'there is a prototype for just about anything...', there is an apparent full-scale 'caboose that never was' in the C&S equipment collection in Breckenridge's Railroad Park:


Unclear to me if that actually started out as a DSP&P waycar, was adapted from another line's 4-wheel cabooses, or is a complete scratchbuilt fabrication for the park, but the hardmount journals argue toward the latter explanation.

[John Greenly]

Jim, that's a great caboose you're working on!  

Well, of course Bill Uffelman had mine pegged: the photo of caboose 313 at the flood cleanup at Blackhawk.  But I'm not going to number my model 313, and, at the risk of reopening a can of worms that has been analyzed closely already, I'm fascinated and befuddled by that photo.  Here is the photo from Poole and Martin's NG Pict. VIII, the best reproduction of that image that I am able to make to show the undercarriage detail (no photoshopping at all, just good light and a camera taking a picture of the page):



and here is a version that has less shadow detail but shows a bit more of the righthand end of the caboose, from the Kindig et al Pictorial Supplement, p. 380:



(this is the first time I've posted images from books, please advise if this is not acceptable)

This photo has been discussed in detail, notably by Jim Courtney, in the Eight wheel caboose thread:
http://c-sng-discussion-forum.41377.n7.nabble.com/Eight-wheel-Caboose-on-C-amp-Sng-td488i80.html#a1933

Clearly, despite the addition of Westinghouse brakes, the undercarriage is not the modern version, and it is probably impossible to really figure out the details of what is under there with much confidence.   But, as  I was studying the image, all of a sudden I realized something that I don't think has been discussed, that really made my head spin.  That is the apparent spacing of the wheels.  I just could not make sense of where the wheels are under the car, compared with the 9 ft wheelbase that I believed the car to have.  The wheelbase in the photo looks a lot shorter.  To try to make sense of this, I've made a photo ("M") of my model, which does have a 9 ft wheelbase,  from the same perspective, to compare with the second Blackhawk ("BH") image. Here it is:

 

I think I should explain how this was done.  Mathematically,  the perspective of a photo, that is, where the camera was located and how it was oriented,  can be characterized exactly if you know the distances between four non-collinear points on an object in the image.  So, for instance, a perspective view of a flat wall of a building can be corrected to a straight-on view if you know, for instance, the height and width of the building (the two bottom and two top corners of a rectangular surface), or the size of a window (again, four corners).  In this case, I assumed that the car body dimensions in M and BH are the same.  

Then all I have to do is make a photo in which the four corners of the car side are all at exactly the same points in the image M as they are in BH, and I'm guaranteed to have the same perspective view.  It's quite fascinating to do this, because you discover that indeed there is exactly one unique relation of the camera to the object in all three dimensions that gives the correct positions of the four points. It's VERY sensitive to small changes in distance, height and horizontal locations.  I did it by putting the BH photo on the screen of my ipad, and taping on strips of paper to coincide with the roof line and the bottom edge of the side, and then marking the corner locations on those strips.    Then I aimed the camera at the model and moved it (including changing the focal length, to get the right field of view at the right distance, also a unique value)  until my chosen lines coincided, and the corner positions matched.  Photo M is the result.  (the locomotive in M is there just for fun, it's not the right dimensions to match BH).  Unfortunately I see from the preview that the two photos aren't displaying at exactly the same size as I insert them in this post (BH is larger).  I'll try to figure that out and fix it, but you can check to see how they compare, just hold a straightedge on your screen along the roofline of BH and then scroll down to M and see if they are parallel, and the same with the bottom edge of the car side.

I think you will see that the positions of the wheels (look at where they bear on the railhead) are not the same in the two images.  They are substantially closer together in BH than in M.  Notice that the far wheel on the other side is not visible in BH, it is hidden by the right wheel on the near side.  In M, on the other hand, that far wheel is clearly visible between the two wheels on the near side, because the wheels are further apart.  In fact, a simple comparison with the 9 ft wheelbase in M  gives that the wheelbase in BH of caboose 313 is about 6' 4"!  

What is going on here?   Am I somehow not seeing where the wheels are?  I think the clearer version of BH from NG Pict VIII leaves no room for error: we are seeing the two wheels on the near side of the car, yes?  

Am I losing my mind?  Well... never mind, might be true, but irrespective of that, am I seeing this correctly?  I am quite confident of the image perspective comparison, but maybe I'm just not seeing the actual wheels in the Blackhawk photo somehow?  If, on the other hand, this is correct, then the original undercarriage must have been replaced with this weird thing, as an expedient for accomodating the new brakes…?

Anyway, since for sure my model caboose doesn't have the same undercarriage as 313,  I'm numbering it 1010, and declaring it a second hypothetical version of my Caboose that Might Have Been, as it might have looked if it did later receive the modern undercarriage but not the body rebuild, between 1910 and 1915 when it was scrapped.  If I'm right about this weird undercarriage, than maybe it would have been replaced later…  I find it hard to imagine that the car could stay on the rails very well with a 6' 4" wheelbase!!