Most of the cars are beat-up or worn-out.
Railroad-car buyers are often disappointed when they look at what’s available. Today, they just want to get rid of their old cars. However, don’t let that classification fuel any fantasies of main-line railroads hauling you and your car around on their tracks or letting you camp on their sidings, as some used to do.
OLD STYLE CABOUS PORTABLE
Often property taxes do not apply, especially when cars are put back on their wheels (they lift off for moving), since they are classified as portable structures. Most caboose owners have their own land–usually rural acreage, where regulations and clearances tend to be more accommodating. Got all that? Good then we’ll proceed with how you can do something simultaneously practical and exotic like buying a caboose.įirst, before you get too excited about the whole idea, see if your local zoning laws allow it. Together, we own and operate Good Medicine Books, the publishing and mail-order arm of our Good Medicine Cultural Foundation and Historical Society, for which we have assembled these cars as the Rocky Mountain Freight Train Museum. We live in the wilderness without phone, electricity or running water, and our four teenaged kids do their schooling at home. Over the past 10 years our family has acquired four wooden cabooses and five kinds of boxcars (along with rails, ties and assorted artifacts) that we use for studios, offices, guest rooms, playrooms, warehouses and workshops. Wooden cars, when they can be found, are generally cheaper. Typical prices for steel-bodied boxcars and cabooses run between $2,000 and $4,000. Most will be scrapped, but some will be purchased privately. Soon, however, all wooden cars and most of the steel ones made before the ’40s will be gone. A couple of years ago, one big railroad company had more than a thousand cabooses for sale. The purchasing agent for your nearest railroad can tell you whether the company is selling any old cars. In addition, most trains no longer carry cabooses, so thousands of these veterans are now sitting idle. Right now, North American railroads are in the last stages of updating their rolling stock, modern train operations having made most vintage cars unsafe. I am advised that they were almost an instanty sold out.Is there an empty spot on your property that could use a unique workshop, studio, roadside store or guesthouse? If so, you might want to buy a train car–an old caboose, or a bunk car (a boxcar with windows, converted to house railroad track workers) could be the perfect structure to fill that space. The new Rapido Caboose is super detailed and also comes with an interior. I am advised that the Rapido Cabooses sold out almost immediately. I would certainly buy a few if they later bring out the old style caboose. However, they are the newer style caboose and I have no need of them. I will likely add working marker lights to many of the cabooses based on the remarks made here.Īs I mentioned in my original post Rapido has now produced a line of cabooses with working running lights. The newer True Line and Walthers are better detailed than the older ones by far. The layout I am slowly working on will have lighting so I will likely be running trains both day and night.Īs for the cabooses I would not likely replace them. Passenger equipment is mainly old Rivarossi and some new Spectrum, Hornby/Rivarossi and Walthers coaches. I have acquired a number of newer cabooses made by True Line and Walthers. I kept the original rolling stock and upgraded the wheels and trucks.
Since returning to the hobby a few years ago I have replaced the steam engines mainly with Bachmann Spectrum, Proto Heritage and BLI engines. My original steam engines were Rivarossi. They are mainly Roundhouse, Athearn and Train Minature. I first entered HO model railroading in the early 1970's and from then to 1980 is when I bought the bulk of my rolling stock, including cabooses.
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