Now You See It, Now You Don't!
TellZall's object for January is the Caboose
As children, as even as adults, we are often fascinated by trains. If we have to stop our cars for a train, we count the many cars that pass by. People have model train sets, and a very popular children's television program and book series is Thomas the Tank Engine. Throughout most of the 1900s, people expected to see a caboose at the end of the train. Today, cabooses are a thing of the past. No longer does a caboose signal the end of the train; instead, old cabooses are parked in various places around the United States, sometimes rusting in junk yards, or at other times finding new life as the home for a small shop or tourist site.
Railroads began to emerge in the United States in the decades preceding the American Civil War, and they continued to grow throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Very early on, trains began to put a caboose on the end of each train. Aside from the locomotive, where the train engineer and other workers might stay, the caboose was the only other train car to house train employees. In addition to the train conductor, who used the caboose as an office to handle the paperwork associated with the train's cargo, the caboose also housed a brakeman and a flagman. Some cabooses had a cupola on top, which allowed either the conductor or another employee to ascend to view the train from above and to look for potential dangers. Early cabooses were made of wood, but eventually they were constructed from steel instead. Probably the most common caboose color was red, but it was possible to see yellow, orange, or other colored cabooses occasionally. Railroad employees had a number of slang words that they used for the caboose, such as "crummy," "clown wagon," and "waycar," among others.
Improved railroad technology eventually led to the demise of the caboose. Even in the late 1800s, some railroad employees were no longer needed because of improvements in technology. Early trains had required brakemen to set the brakes on each individual train car by hand, but automatic brakes made that process unnecessary. Railroad companies constantly sought ways to make railroads safer and to cut down on the number of accidents. One result of this effort was the introduction of electronic signals on the tracks. These electronic symbols made flagmen obsolete. As the process of keeping track of cargo paperwork was computerized, conductors no longer needed to process mounds of paper. Today, trains have replaced the caboose entirely with a radio device called an EOT, which stands for "End of Train." The EOT can pick up and send electronic signals along the tracks, and it has made the conductor and caboose unnecessary on modern trains. The EOT is also known as FRED, or "Flashing Rear End Device."
