In the days when cabooses were still used regularly, how or who would remove the caboose from the train when it arrived at a yard. Would the road crew set it out somewhere, or would they just leave it with the train and let the yard crews deal with it?Too young to know,
KingJPW
Yard Duty, The National Freight Yard Simulation - http://groups.msn.com/YardDuty
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RE: Caboose Operations question., SHEPLEY1935, Nov-02-02, 03:00 AM, (1) RE: Caboose Operations question., GMOF3A, Nov-02-02, 08:11 AM, (2) RE: Caboose Operations question., SHEPLEY1935, Nov-02-02, 12:09 PM, (5) RE: Caboose Operations question., chuckzeiler, Nov-02-02, 10:04 AM, (3) RE: Caboose Operations question., KingJPW, Nov-02-02, 10:27 AM, (4) RE: Caboose Operations question., chuckzeiler, Nov-02-02, 04:11 PM, (6) RE: Caboose Operations question., MJL, Nov-03-02, 02:45 AM, (7) RE: Caboose Operations question., chuckzeiler, Nov-03-02, 09:48 AM, (8) RE: Caboose Operations question., MJL, Nov-03-02, 03:04 PM, (9) RE: Caboose Operations question., AM_ROAD, Nov-03-02, 03:25 PM, (10) RE: Caboose Operations question., MJL, Nov-03-02, 05:29 PM, (11)
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The transfer cabooses will be set out on a track separate from the home road cabooses. The home road cabooses will be cleaned, stocked, and serviced and made ready for the next assignment. The track in the foreground leads to the RIP (Repair In Place) track, which is where rail cars found to be defective will be spotted for repairs.
In the second photo of response #3, they have pulled clear of the caboose track, and are now backing down to tack the caboose to an outbound train. In this case, they would take all the cabooses in between with them, drop off the caboose assigned to that train, then pull up and back to drop off the cabooses that were not needed. I'm not sure how that particular caboose was assigned to that train. It was most likely the next out.Here's photo of a caboose being tacked onto the rear of an outbound train. This switcher first coupled onto the cabooses, pulled back onto east end of the outbound yard, shoved forward to couple on to half the train, backed up with half the train and cabooses, shoved all of this onto the front half of the train, which was on the next track over (the train was too long to fit on one outbound track). Then he backed up with all but the last caboose, and shoved them back on to the caboose track.
Some cabooses were stenciled for a particular service. At one time, this had been a Pool caboose (Note the P on the cupola). Now it is assigned to Local Service.
A large P painted on the caboose indicates that it was a Pool caboose, that is, it could travel to another railroad.
As Don said in response #1, cabooses were originally assigned to a specific conductor. Here's an example of a waycar (as cabooses were called on the CB&Q, C&NW and a few other railroads) assigned to a conductor, on a train with an unassigned waycar ahead of it This train is the CGI (Chicago - Grand Island), which was a run-though train on the CB&Q and UP. This train also shared locomotives. It started at Cicero, will run to Galesburg (about 160 miles) where the crew with change. A Galesburg yard engine will remove the red waycar and the hopper.
Then there's the case of too many cabooses. When the caboose tracks were full, the BN would hump the cabooses with the inbound train that they came in on, and send them down to an unused track. This would happen mostly to the transfer cabooses, since they didn't need to be serviced anyway.
This picture is just for amusement. It's on the caboose track. At least they got the windows clean.
The arrow and bars shall return!Firm beleaver in Ceo David Gunn (Amtrak)