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Why Don't Trains Have Cabooses Anymore?
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- Опубликовано: 6 сен 2016
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Carrying a brakeman and a flagman back when brakes were set by hand, when it was time to slow the train, the engineer would blow the whistle. This signaled to the brakemen, and one would emerge from the caboose and work his way toward the engine, while another would leave the engine and work his way back toward the caboose. At each car, the brakemen would stop and turn its brakewheel with a club. Once the train stopped, the flagman would leave the caboose with a flag, lantern or other visual display and walk back down the track to warn any approaching trains.
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Now that you know where all the cabooses have gone check out this video and find out Why a Gecko’s Feet can Stick to Almost Anything:
ruclips.net/video/7ySPl_WVgvc/видео.html
We still use cabooses (cabeese ) when moving high/wide Schnabel Cars which require crew to operate and manipulate rail car to clear obstructions.
@ 2:40 if a train brakes in half and the air line parts the WHOLE TRAIN STOPS NO INPUT FROM ANYONE NEEDED !
Loss of air will set the brakes .
Today I Found Out acctually, cabooses are still in use, but not many are. CSX uses some on mainline, and Norfolk Southern uses them to carry crews while switching.
@@williamjacobs236 (sorry for the late reply). that didn’t work so well at Lac Magantic
It was more comfortable to sleep off a hangover in the caboose as opposed to the locomotive
I worked on the last order of 500 cabooses ever manufactured in the USA. I welded the air brake assemblies and safety appliances. We manufactured them all at Fruit Growers Express in Alexandria, VA. I remember distinctly the very last caboose rolling off the assembly line.
what year
Burlington Northern used to have green caboose and Union Pacific had yellow. Still I miss seeing those obsolete houses on rails
That's such a cool memory. I always wanted to own an old caboose as an art studio or just to enjoy the garden. I love history.
Did you know at the time it was the last one?
Did you cry?
I always looked forward to seeing the Caboose at the end of trains. The new flashing light just doesn't have the same affect as the Cabosse had.
Yeah, it won’t wave back to me either :(
Same, come to think of it... Wonder how many of these boxes have been stolen or hit with rocks, baseball bats, etc.? That'll show 'em! LOL
Right back at you, sister. I was born decades after they basically died out, and it’s just so refreshing to see a caboose on a vintage train for some reason. Maybe it’s because I associate it with an ice cream shop somewhere in the Michigan countryside that was inside a retired train caboose.
I work for the railroad as a conductor and I can say this video covered the topic pretty well. There are still some cabooses around. They use them for trains which go around and deliver railcars to industries, and the conductor can sit in the caboose and shove the train backwards and watch out for anything in the rail.
Now I am trying to figure out if my memory is playing tricks on me, but I recall also seeing them on maintenance trains I see moving around our light rail system at night after the last commuter train has run.
WirelessHotShot rider cars. easier to stand on a platform then hanging off the side of a car especially a lumber flat for a couple miles during a shove.
It's not your memory playing tricks. Maintenance trains often use them because they are often going backwards as well as forwards. For safety reasons, you can't back up a train blind, you need someone to 'protect the point'. (At least that's the term used where I worked.) So one train crew -- usually the one with the least seniority -- is assigned to ride the van to protect any reverse movements.
WirelessHotShot this video annoyed me so much because he kept saying caboose instead of brake van
BRAKE VAN!!!
Brake van was never used in this country. It was a caboose----- or a waycar on some railroads.
Fun fact: while Caboose no longer completely serve a purpose in most cases it is possible to actually see them. Someone who owns a caboose can pay to have that caboose stuck onto any tail end of a train and enjoy the travels with the train as a private car (not automobile car) in the train. It is relatively fun if you ever experience it but it is relatively uncommon and useless unless going across the country
Mac Tonight what country is that fun fact from?
MissConcupiscible United States.
It is pretty neat
One would only be able to do that on a passenger train. Just to clarify to others. Amtrak does that where you can pay them to tow your private care, though I can't think of any other passenger services that do that off the top of my head.
If you pay, a freight company will take you as well I believe. It might not be so fun though, getting stuck in a siding for eight hours in the middle of nowhere waiting for an opposing train or a crew change.
Cabooses are still used, we had one come through the yard the other day. They are rather helpful on work trains when you need to back up 10 miles and don't want to ride a car.
Trains are incomeplete without caboose. Its not a whole train
EOTDs exist. EOTDs are a lot safe where they can see the back of the train from the locomotive and a lot of other things. Railcars just got a lot bigger such as intermodal or autoracks (cars)
Mostly they eliminated them because labor unions lost power after we deregulated the railroads, and companies were looking to make more money as usual. Reagan helped remove state laws that required them. Lot of good jobs lost.
@@benkleschinsky that's not why but ok
@@SouthJerseyRailfan Guilford strikes. Ah the good old days.
@@benkleschinsky i'd say it's simply just because the railroads didn't want to pay more people. i don't think the federal government had anything to do with it
The trains braking system uses air pressure to keep brakes OFF. If the train brakes in two, the brakes operate without intervention, as the connectors tear apart...
tcpnetworks If the train breaks in two, it brakes in two.
tcpnetworks actually there are times we can get a pinched hose effectively bottling the air and not apply the brakes whether in an emergency application or just making a reduction. very nice to have the option in plugging the train from the tail.
once train brakes are released the pressure in the lines keeps the brakes released but when the air pressure drops the valve on the uses the air in a tank on each car to apply the brakes . It's called pressure differential braking . Same system as used on pre-121 trucks . Pre -1980s . The system was designed by George Westinghouse .
once train brakes are released the pressure in the lines keeps the brakes released but when the air pressure drops the valve on the car uses the air in a tank on each car to apply the brakes . It's called pressure differential braking . Same system as used on pre-121 trucks . Pre -1980s . The system was designed by George Westinghouse .
KC9UDX Are you a ham, mate? DE WS1O
my school's kindergarten class took a locomotive ride from Hamilton, Ohio to Richmond Indiana USA every year up until my class's train derailed. no one was seriously hurt but the school never did that field trip again. that was back in 1977
That had to shuck. Yet, school buses continue to be used despite 2 (don't know of any more) having been hit by trains.
Maybe you kids had something to do with the Derailing eh.. dont worry i wont say anything..
Dallas Ponder would be nice if he was understandable
Dang what line / Hamilton and Richmond are two rust belt cities that have REALLY gone downhill since the loss of some railroad lines. Very sad. I've been to both recently and I'm always seeing crossings but no tracks.
@DJ Music Vault
That’s the story all over the country, which has lost more than 2/3rds of its railroad lines in the last 100 years, but especially in places like Michigan, where I live. We no longer have a continuous railroad network, as so many lines have been abandoned that they no longer connect the two peninsulas, moving cars from one city to the next can be a challenge involving hundreds of miles due to missing track, and many cities have no rail service at all, thus no more heavy industry or the jobs that go with it. It seems like the abandonment of rail lines starts a chain reaction which takes other lines and industries with it, until eventually it all fails and crumbles, the people move out, and everything falls apart.
One comment and one correction: Cabooses are still used in the US on a daily basis, though for limited and specific tasks. For instance, the BNSF trains on the Boeing Sub-division climb caboose-first on the steepest grade in the US to the airplane factory in Everett WA. Interesting note, these cabooses are green. One of the last comments mentioned setting the brakes in the event of a (paraphrased) "train break." The air pressure on a modern train releases the brakes. If anything interrupts that pressure, like a derailment, the brakes go into a failsafe mode with automatic engagement.
John Clark Green for Burlington Northern!
Air brakes are complex, the air both applies and releases the brakes.
First you have to charge the train to 90psi or you'll have no brakes at all
Ive always thought it would be baddass fun to drive a train for a living
Jon Deal it is.
Future job right here
It is very badass
When I was a kid I decided that if I could not be a fireman, I would be happy being a garbage man, after all you get to ride on the back of the truck and you only work one day a week...
It looks fun... but then you’ll end up having to deal with incidents where idiot people cross the tracks in front of you and die right before your eyes because the train takes a while to completely stop when you put it into emergency braking
2:38 - Actually, if the train breaks in two, the air brakes automatically apply on both segments. No need for intervention by the engineer to stop the loose end. This is part of the ingenious "fail safe" system designed by George Westinghouse in 1869 - improvements have been made over the last 150 years but it is the same principal today as then.
I heard that brakemen put out of work by the flashing red end device, (sometimes called FRED,) use a different word starting with F for the device.
Yes I was told that by a guy who worked for the railroad to.
Wonder how many FREDs are sitting in somebody's garage, dorm rooms, etc.? LOL
You don't need to activate the brakes when the train splits up. The brake hoses will tear appart, air will rush in or out (depending on the break system) and all brakes will be activated automatically, no need for any device to activate them.
That is exactly what I was going to write. Good job!
NeoDerGrose you can get a pinched hose essentially bottling the air of the tail end portion which wouldn't apply the brakes whether in an emergency or regular brake application. having the option to plug it from the tail is nice. some models actually can assist in brake application to speed the single through the train.
vslash27 I never heard of an incident where there was a pinched break hose. What does happen from time to time is, that someone forgets to open all valves between the waggons.
What is right is the faster break reaction time. The normal breaking signal travel through the train with the speed of sound, transported by the shockwave of the air pressure. Electronic signals on the other hand travel by the speed of light, wich obviously is much faster. This is already a problem over here in Europe but it's a much biger with the long trains in the US.
NeoDerGrose a pinch or blockage can happen many different ways. the idea to dynamite behind is nice.
I haven't heard of a pinched airline, but what has happened is that if there is a lot of water in the air line when the weather is cold, ice plugs may form in the line making it impossible to release pressure.
I'm not saying an airline may not be pinched or somehow impaired. I'm a member of a railway equipment preservation group and although it's easy to see how equipment is carefully designed to prevent something from going wrong, given the large number of combination of things that can occur and the number of train miles, something might happen involving unanticipated foreign objects, forgotten tools or some unapproved design modification.
2:39 No, the breaks on the rear part will activate immediately regardless of whether that device was on the rear of the train or not. Air brakes are applied the moment the pressure drops. As soon as the train "broke in two" the rear portion would lose all air pressure.
carl witt unless there's a tap closed between the front and back . then you can drop your train by the eot
carl witt thats what i thought. air is used to disengage brakes not engage. so brakes are on when there's no air.
Joe Smith The brakes are only applied if there's air in the car's air reservoir to apply them. If there is absolutely no air anywhere on the car, it has no operable brakes except the hand brake. They are not like truck brakes, there are no springs in the brake cylinders to apply them, they are applied by air pressure, that's why each car has its own air reservoir - to apply the brakes when an air reduction is made to the brake pipe or it has a total loss of pressure when the train breaks apart or the emergency handle is pulled. Also, when using an EOT, if an angle cock is cut out in the train somewhere, the brakes can NOT be recovered and charged in the first place, so there will never be a need to apply the brakes to the rear portion of the train using the EOT. That feature is for a faster emergency application when initiated from the head end. This cuts the time needed to apply the emergency brakes in half since the trainline air pressure reduction is coming from both ends of the train and meeting in the middle instead of only the front. When trainline pressure drops below a certain point, the PC light in the locomotive illuminates, when this PC light is on, the locomotive's electrical propulsion system is disabled so the train can't be moved until the brake problem is resolved. A lot of this also holds true for DPU trains too.
Joe Smith actually air is used to apply the brakes. the train line charges air tanks on the cars and is controlled by valve on each car. As the pressure lowers in the line the tanks lower too but that pressure from the tanks goes directly to the cars brake cylinder to be positive pressure applying the brakes.
sigh.... guys.... breaks on trains and 18 wheelers are applied by spring pressure.The springs are always trying to apply the breaks and it's only when a pneumatic piston pushes the springs back that the breaks release. When you press on the brake peddle, air is RELEASED from the system, allowing the springs to apply the break. The harder you press the peddle, the faster the air is released, the more the breaks are applied. If a train were to "break in two", the point at which they separate would severe the air line releasing all the air and applying FULL break to both halves.
I remember growing up in the late 50s and 60s and playing in my grandmother's backyard in Clearwater, Florida. The train tracks ran parallel to the backyard and the train would run through several times a day. There was always a guy who stood outside the caboose where there is a railing. And whenever I waved to him, he always waved back. Sometimes he waved to me first. I remember being so excited when I heard the train getting near because I wanted to wave to that guy so badly. I also loved the train traveling at night and blowing it's whistle. Most people don't appreciate being awakened by the whistle of a train but I loved it. I never had a problem falling back to sleep. I'm 62 now and I still love the different sounds a train makes. Those sounds always bring back good memories.
Some Class I Railroads here in the US still occasionally use Cabooses. If Radioactive waste is being transported, cabooses are usually attached at the end to house armed guards.
Yeah, you gotta *Waste*
any *Radioactives*
that try ta get away!
My grandfather used to be a caboose man in the late '50's. Through him I learned to love trains! I still miss the cabooses!
Me too. They were always my favorite part of waiting on trains when I was younger because the guys in the caboose always seemed happy when waving back at kids. Just another pleasant little chunk of childhood we'll never get to enjoy, again. :(
I'm surprised! I'm a Railway Conductor by profession, and this is the first RUclips video where I didn't have to correct anything. I would amend one small statement though. When you said brakemen aren't necessary anymore, they actually are. For the most part, US railways do fine with just a Conductor and Engineer. Since the demise of the caboose, brakemen have found a new use. In the territory I work on, every train has work to perform(picking up or setting out cars). If there are a lot of work events scheduled for a train I get called as a brakeman to assist the conductor in performing the work. It saves time, and makes the work we perform much safer.
Also, we still use cabooses today, but not in the same capacity. Now a days we use them in yard operations and as shoving platforms so we can shove(back up) long distances without having to ride on the side of a car.
Kabuki Kitsune I didnt bring it up because every railroad has a different name for it. FRED EOT ETD
He made one big mistake at the end (2:38) "even if the train brakes in two, the brakes can still be activated . . ." "Westinghouse" air brakes, which are almost universally adopted on trains use the compressed air pressure to disengage the brakes. So if the train "breaks in two," and the airline is parted, the brakes apply automatically.
I'm only familiar with Freight trains. There is no conductor on the train, crew consist of Engineer and Fireman.
Train crews today on freight are an engineer and a conductor. There are no firemen any more.
Good video. I volunteer as a docent at our local museum and specialize in our train collection. Just today I helped train a new class of docents, explaining all of this to them. Our caboose is circa 1910, a wooden body type that, like most of our equipment, came from the L&N. We also have an observation/lounge car, vintage 1926, and an 0-6-0 steams switch engine built in 1908 in the shops of the Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific Railroad.
I've been asking myself this question occasionally for years. I used to love watching trains when I was a kid in the 80's and always waited for the caboose. Then they just disappeared. Thanks for the upload! Guess you have a new subscriber now lol
Around here in northeast Indiana, Norfolk Southern has several trains running with bright red cabooses again. No idea why, since they aren't needed, but I do like them.
PsychoticBovine I'm a conductor. if the train requires backing up for a long distance, they use a caboose so the employee doesn't have to hang on the side of the car.
Aaron cammon
hey, thanks for that info! I find the caboose to be rather charming,
A train without a caboose is like a chick w/o an ass!
That train does in fact have a long back up move on it's trip from New Haven to Woodburn and back
Local trains sometimes use transfer cabooses, little house in the middle of a flatcar.
Another important thing about the caboose. Any train making a slow run on a stretch of track can have someone outside on the back denoting anything about the track that may need maintenance. Some train companies run older trains that still use a caboose. There is one near me called Roaring Camp. They have a few steam engines. It's a tourism thing. They run a narrow gauge forest excursion train, a wide gauge down to the Santa Cruz beach boardwalk and a few times a year they bring out Thomas the Tank Engine (There are a few of these Thomas the Tank Engines across the US).
Using a caboose is always an Option which any railroad is free to do at its discretion.
As for Roaring Camp and similar tourist railways using cabooses,
it's all about maintaining an image of history,
although it can still have a practical purpose.
My father use to do the paperwork in the caboose and said the lifestyle was great. Good pay, great food, comfortable accommodations and travel along the CN route between Montreal and New England.
I've only been around for 33 years but I do remember seeing a caboose at the end of a train a couple times in Kentucky back in the 90s, especially away from the larger cities. Something about them always had a familiar sense of joy knowing the line of train was over. These newer replacements just aren't the same...
Because they found out they could do the same thing without paying someone? Mystery solved.
Mr. C uhh no, they found out that releasing the brakes from the rear first to the front worked better...
That had a lot to do with it, but a lot of money was also saved on purchase and maintenance of caboose cars, not to mention the time and expense of switching them on and off trains.
So, Trains went on a diet to shrink there cabooses.
Train shaming. Triggered! ;-)
Like he said advanced technology said "bye" to the caboose.
robots took your job once again
Well conductors and switchmen still exist, robots not yet...hopefully never especially if they glitch....
The problem with the "glitch" idea is that it's highly more likely that a human will make a mistake long before a computer does. The fear of this is mostly about wanting to know that a human is making a decision... and can be blamed if something goes wrong. With rare exception, a computer is far better at "doing" something than a person is.
The last time I saw a caboose on a train was back in the 80's when I was a kid. Like pre-85' on our local railways. We used to wave at the guys in the caboose from our bicycles and they would wave back at us:-). Just one of those little things that kids these days will never experience:-(
I remember seeing cabooses through the 1970s, well after air brakes and automated signalling apparatus were in place. From what I've read, they used to have a person with a radio to let the engineer know when the couplers on the train were all pulled tight or pushed together, since a locomotive could only start when there was slack in the train, but needed to move slowly until all the slack was taken out. Modern EOTs have inertial sensors to report such information.
For the record, train brakes don't need that device to activate the brakes. At least in the US, trains go into full automatic emergency braking whenever line pressure is lost. The train and the decoupled cars will go into full braking automatically regardless of the EOT device.
You caught that too. Yep, old Westinghouse triple-valve was around long before anyone dreamed of these EOT's
True. However, with the length of the trains, it can take a relatively long time for the rear cars to go into emergency if the break was near the front. The Engineer can use the EOT (aka SBU, FRED) to start an emergency application from the rear of the train, greatly speeding up the process. When I worked on CP, it was policy to trip the emergency on the SBU any time the train went into emergency.
Adam Parker
Good to know, glad to have people with more information to educate us :)
Eyebrows Mahoney if the train line is blocked for any reason the tail end portion might not fully go into emergency leaving the brakes released so the eot is needed to open the train line from the tail end in that situation.
vslash27 If the trainline is blocked for some reason, the EOT won't allow the locomotive to come out of emergency to ever move in the first place, so your scenario can't/won't happen. Also, many EOT units use an air powered Dynamo to power them. Without power it will never send a signal to the HOT device in the cab, thus the train is unable to recover the brakes and unable to be moved under its own power. This condition renders the locomotive's electrical system inoperable until the brakes are charged and the PC light is off.
I think the red flashing devices behind a train are also called "FRED"s (Flashing Rear End Device). I might be wrong because I'm just a train enthusiast, not a historian, but I find this sort of stuff pretty cool.
GA5MλSK it's slang. Fred and Freddy. eot or ETD is correct. just refers to the end of train device which should have a red marker.
vslash27 CP and CN actually call them SBU's, for Sense and Brake Units. There's a bunch of names for them...
Jon Calon I know lol I work for cn. I didn't want to throw too many letters at people.
I've heard them called Japanese conductors as well
Perhaps they called them "Bone Breakers" - 1:37, because for long train, by the time the slack got taken out and traveled back to caboose of a starting train, the sudden snatch could be so violent it could throw someone against the walls, floor, etc. That's why they supposedly had handles inside for holding on to...
When a train brakes in 2 the brakes for the whole train are quickly applied in "Emergency" (which cannot be overridden until the train stops and someone walks back to the breaking point)
Cabooses were finally retired from service permanently in the mid-90's. Occasionally they are seen in mainline train service, although not an everyday sight. Good video nonetheless.
still used as a platform on the local "Chip Train" (NECR 500) when the train is returning from its trip to the plant.
The Reading And Northern railroad uses a caboose on their WHFF job.
Caltrain912: Yes, there are still rare uses for them; certain government trains, massive oversized special heavy trains -- that sort of thing.
Anything that needs crew bunking and/or office space, basically.
The legal requirement to have one on all freight trains was removed in the 80s
The air pressure in the break lines in carriages and through out the train keeps the breaks off (not engaged) as the breaks are automatically on if any carriages went missing without isolating the air line the train would stop.
Matt Westmacott you are correct. The Engineer lowers the air.pressure in the line and it applies the brakes and the ever so slight increase in air pressure releases the brakes. so it is possible to waste the air by setting and releasing the brakes too many times and th Sen you can in fact have a runaway.
One little detail. If a train breaks in two, the engineer doesn't need to do anything to activate the brakes in the rear part of the train. The brakes apply anytime the air pressure in the brake pipe drops. If the train breaks in two, the brakes apply automatically from the pressure drop in the air line. There is no need for the engineer to do anything. This happens anytime something causes the gladhands between cars to separate. This is actually a good thing, because there is no need to either uncouple cars or break the train to cause gladhand separation. It has happened because a train ran over some debris that was between the rails, such as a box.
I grew up in Clinton,Iowa and had a huge Chicago-Northwestern railroad yard for servicing engines and cars. This line ran North and South through the city along the Mississippi River. Union Pacific ran East and West across the railroad bridge across the river. I miss seeing the caboose on the trains.
EOT's are also called FRED i.e. Friendly Rear End Device according to a guy who worked for the D&RGW many years.
Mike O'Brien actually the Fred is the box on the head end that the EOTs talks to. Front End Device.
FLASHING Rear End Device
Thanks for all the "well, actually's" but "friendly" was colloquial, at least in the D&RGW anyways.
+Aaron common The device that the EOT talks to is called Wilma. Fred is another name for an EOT.
@@conductorcammon FRED stands for Flashing Rear-End Device, & it's located at the back of the train where the caboose used to be 🚂
There's a slight error in this video. If a train breaks in two, the engineer doesn't signal the ETD to apply the brakes. See, the brakes on a train car are engaged by *springs*, and the air pressure is needed to *disengage* them. So, if the air pressure fails, the brakes will automatically come on full, without anyone having to do anything.
You can believe something and have it wrong.
***** A mere thirty seconds of googling led me to this page: www.railway-technical.com/air-brakes.shtml
tl;dr The brake application pressure comes from an auxiliary tank rather than springs, but other than that, my description was right. *Falling* air pressure results in an *increased* application of the brakes.
***** My original point was that the ETD isn't an emergency braking system. If the train splits, then the brakes go on by themselves as the air pressure *falls*.
It functions as part of the emergency braking system. In addition to reporting the tail end air pressure, it also has a valve in it to release all the air at the tail end to get a train into emergency faster, when so commanded. Some of them even are equipped with a bleed valve which allows for better breaking control.
HiddenWindshield if the trail line gets pinched behind the separation there will be no application as there won't be a sudden pressure drop to trigger an emergency application. that button allows the train to be dynamited from the tail end.
Actually, all trains (at least in the US) still carry shipping papers (called a Consist) so that in the event of an emergency, the list of all of the cars and what they are carrying can be provided to emergency responders.
Here in Bogalusa Louisiana we have a Caboose parked off the track right next to the old train station still as historical landmark now :) gone but not forgotten.
Cabooses must be resurrected and reinstated at all costs. Cheers!
On the Union Pacific they referred to the caboose replacement as “Conductor FRED” the
F-ing rear end device !
My father had a friend that used to teach elementary school out of caboose in Ontario, Canada. It had been converted into a classroom (a one room school house essentially). The railway would drop him off on a siding in a remote northern town. After teaching for a few days he would leave the kids with some homework, hook up to a freight train and then move on to the next little community down the line.
The Mk3/4 Driving Van Trailer is the ultimate evolution of this. Still in service in the UK today.
If this guy talks much faster it'll sound like a teletype machine.
They were all bought to make olde tyme ice cream shops.
Alan Fox *shoppes
In the US most are made into tacky motel rooms.
Ah, Peter, I was gonna say that! You beat me by a mere three days! :-)
the little red box is actually called a FRED for flashing red end device
The bit about men sleeping in the caboose reminds me of something. I knew a guy in Oregon who was track maintenance for Southern Pacific and later Union Pacific in the Willamette Valley. He told me of an incident on the Willamette & Pacific shortline (now known as Portland & Western), where an entire train crew (minus the engineer and fireman in the lead engine), including the guy who was supposed to be on-watch in the cupola, were all sleeping on the job in the caboose. Up until that time, W&P had been a hold-out in continuing to use cabooses. Well, on this run, one of the freight cars mid-consist developed a hot box, partially derailed and ended up taking-out nearly 15 miles of track before someone finally woke-up and discovered it and the train was stopped. Needless to say, the crew was fired on the spot and the incident, according to my source at least, ended up being a factor in the line's decision to finally abandon cabooses and install trackside hot box detectors.
When I was homeless in San Diego in the late nineties, they left a caboose sitting on the tracks. I used to sneak in and sleep. One night they hooked it up without seeing me. I got a joyride but it only lasted 4 miles until they stopped.
I love trains
I do,too!
You could still see new uses for a caboose. For one, an extra air compressor in the caboose for really long trains. For another, housing the train's crew on long trips (and keeping a reserve crew in case the engineers get tired). A third use would be if something incapacitated the engine (landslide, robbers, etc.), the conductor in the caboose could signal for help.
this whole video is a sham. Little to no information was correct. The real reason the cabeese (slang) were scraped is because of the buff and draft forces over a 100 car or longer train. Even the slightest bit of buff or draft of the couplings near the head end was enough to throw you across the caboose at the tail end.
Liam Dai You are generally correct but the crew that is going off duty do not normally ride buses to get back to their point of origin. The off duty crew will stay in a bunkhouse owned by the railroad and then when they go back on duty, they will run a train back to where they started from.
There is another reason the caboose is not used on freight trains. SAFETY On long freight trains slack action between cars adds up and many deaths and serious accidents to crew members being snatched back and forth have occurred; broken limbs, broken backs, broken necks, whiplash, etc. You are correct about car information being transmitted by computer from terminal to terminal. There was no use for a car at the rear for two crew men on train when both are on the front; that is what EOT or FRED is for.
the picture at 2:08 was taken on the GWR in the UK. in the UK we only used brakevans (as they're known in Britain) on freight trains, as passenger carriages already had brake pipes and look outs, making them redundant.
Railroad for a living. This is accurate information.
Then perhaps you can answer a question for me: I once read, somewhere, that train brakes use vacuum to disengage the brakes, so that if the air hoses were to break for any reason, the brakes would automatically engage and stop the train. Is this correct?
+Gert Brink Nielsen
That is one system, largely used in the UK for example.
The system used in the US and I believe most of the world uses air pressure, but in a failsafe way. basically some air is stored in a tank on each car, this pressure is fed by the main brake line running down the train from the locomotive. Control of the brakes is done by changing the pressure of this line. A decrease in pressure tells a valve on each car to apply the brakes using the air stored in it's tank.
Of course if the train breaks apart or something else fails, there is a sudden loss of pressure, which the valves detect and cause an emergency application of the brakes. Since each car has its own air tank, the brakes have enough air to apply, even without the locomotive.
This system is quite a bit more complex than vacuum brakes, but it works better on a long train, because the air to activate the brakes only has to come a short distance from the tank on the same cat, rather than the air (or lack thereof) coming from the far end.
"Highball on the roll-by, Fred's blinkin'. Callin' the driver, over."
Paul Deevy ... You are correct. A reduction of pressure in the trainline pipe applies the brakes. Full pressure (90psi) releases the brakes, unless the air in the reservoir is bled off.
Gert Brink Nielsen they use low pressure 40 to 55 psi to release emergency brake 75 to 90 psi to apply road brakes or so engineer on Norfork Southern an engineer on BNSF both told me when I asked them but then what would a train engineer know?
there are no more cabooses because they joined the blue team.
I don't think anyone will get that reference
Detach the caboose, it will kill us all!!
Another reference to another RT's work which itself references Red VS Blue.
Ivan Alvarez one of the reasons I clicked on this video
Ivan Alvarez i got it
All cabooses aren’t red, Conrail ones are blue, hell the Milwaukee Road cars were yellow and orange!
PrekiFromPoland- are you dumb or something? (btw anime sucks)
My grandfather was an Engineer for the railroad. When the caboose got phased out, he was quite vocal about why it was happening. Religion, Politics, Railroads, we subjects you didn't bring up during family holiday dinners. :)
I still saw cabooses on trains up until mid 1970s. My brother and I went to wave at the men in them, and they waved back. Being a kid was simpler in those days.
In Britain we call it a brake van
And they're usually plain, or possibly creosoted wood...
Yeah but you guys still use brake vans
Tim McAndrew not since the 1970's
Carlo Allen what? I seem to recall seeing them recently
Tim McAndrew they really don't use them anymore, unless its a private railway or used by the national network using the shark variant of the brake van for clearing ballast.
Nice pic of a Great Western suburban train from the early 20th century. Was that London or Birmingham?
I don't know--AAAAAAGH!!
OMFG! that made my day! at 1:47 that car is in Helper Utah! I grew up there!
The Norfolk Southern railroad runs a small branchline near my house that still uses a caboose as a platform for someone to stand on while the train reverses, they actually just got a new caboose a few weeks back.
It would be cool to own a caboose and just use it for a little cabin
I know this is a late reply but I know a guy who has a UP yellow with a crows nest, sitting in his front yard….
...cabooses became less necessary when they eliminated the brakeman with the advent of airbrakes around 1880??? Oddly, I remember cabooses still on freight trains well into the 1970s... I guess they still had some kind of use...
Cabooses still carried a conductor and a nominal brakeman in the 70s, although by then the latter knew their days were numbered. All they had to do on many shifts was sit in the cupola and watch for hot journal boxes or other problems. With the advent of computers, a tremendous amount of paperwork was eliminated, and with it the need for a tail-end conductor, especially with the trend toward unit trains that traveled from A to B and did no pickups or set-outs along the way.
Cabooses lasted well into the 1980s. They nearly all bit the dust after the railroads came to an agreement with the union over work rules. It was kind of like the union requiring Firemen on diesel locomotives long after steam locomotives were eliminated.
As someone mentioned above, railroads still use cabooses during switching and transfer runs where the train has to back up around blind curves. The caboose gives crewmen somewhere to stand on the rear of the train so they can be the eyes of the engineer during backing. The crewmen are in radio contact with the engineer, but also have a brake valve so they can dump the air into emergency if need be.
They were always a combination of crew bunkhouse and conductor's office.
They were retained on trains long after they were necessary because (as has been mentioned) of union contracts that required more crew than were strictly necessary (AKA "featherbedding" in some circles) and because of federal rules.
The first Class One railroad i know of which ditched them - originally in favour of just a red flag and red lantern on the last coupler - was Florida East Coast, which, since it operated/operated strictly within the state of Florida, was not covered by most federal operating rules. (Though, since they received cars from other states and sent cars out of Florida, they WERE covered by the federal interchange rules governing equipment maintenance and design.)
One very important reason for the caboose going away is not mentioned here, and that is the development of wayside detectors, especially the "talkers". These devices are fixed to the track and look at the train's wheels, bearings and whether the train has dragging equipment, loads that are too high or wide (think shifted loads and tunnels...) and then communicate any found issues to the train crew. Initially, these had big light displays and could be seen from the back of the train. But when these detectors became able to transmit their findings via Radio, the caboose was finished on mainline trains. The rolling inspections were now automated and the guy at the back was moved to the cab of the locomotive and the van/caboose became just an occasional "shoving platform"
Are you in an Englishman in America? In the UK the rear of the train used to be completed by a brake van, which is the same as a caboose but a lot smaller. With the USA being a far bigger country I guess there was no need to provide living space in the UK brake vans. Not only that, but the loading gauge in America is far more generous than over here.
There is one preserved at the Mangapps Railway Museum in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. I had a ride in it a few years ago - it was quite extraordinary!
They also could slow the train if the train did not slow when it should.
If the train breaks, the brakes can be activated because of a gauging device? Makes no sense to me. Air pressure keeps the brakes *open*, if the air pipe breaks, e.g. because a coupling fails, the pressure is lost and the bakes slam shut immediately -- it's a simple pneumatic automaticism, nobody needs to push a button or "activate" the brakes.
similar to how a semi truck air brakes work. if it looses pressure the brakes activate. also i see cabooses quite a bit still in use. not sure what for but i see them
The sensor is designed to recognize a virtual split of the train, not a physical one. Modern brakes are applied via a fly by wire controls system rather than via the operation of a physical valve in the cab. The disadvantage of this system is false positives. A dead man sensor at the end of the train will trigger irretrievable braking in the event of signal loss with the brake controller system so that the engineer is never operating a train with a failed brake controller. This is the virtual splitting of the train, the engine is no longer capable of engaging the brakes despite normal physical systems. So the ETD sensor is just a fail safe for the controller, as well as a method for improving the old system you describe via providing more paths for release to atmosphere than just the fail point.
now *_that_* makes sense.
Thanks for sharing.
Cabooses today are known as "shoving platforms" usually they are found on work trains, or transfers to another railyard. If on a revenue freight train they usually need to back up so the conductor stays behind the train to guide the engineer via the radio and handsignals.
rubadux the air pressure charges the tanks of each car which has two. as pressure lowers in the line in a brake reduction the tank in the car lowers it's pressure to equalize. but the air from the tank goes to the cylinder applying the brakes. when the train line breaks it's a rapid reduction which triggers the second tank or emergency tank to dump it's air into the brake cylinder to apply a really powerful brake. no air in the car at all will have no brake as there is a spring pushing to release the brake shoe which is why cars have a mechanical handbrake to apply the brake on set out cars.
also if the line gets pinched for any reason behind a separation there will be no emergency brake application. no sudden pressure drop to trigger the brakes. so that button is nice to plug the tail end if that happens.
Regardless of the advances in technology, no freight train will ever be complete without a caboose. Every freight train I run on my Lionel layout has one, and each is a sharp looking car. My favorite is a brick red Santa Fe bay window caboose with white lettering. The car has a sharp illuminated interior with a red flashing light. Wow! What a beautiful car! It was $60 and worth every cent.
As a kid back in the 1980s I remember a train with caboose that was blocking the tracks. Traffic was backed up and the train wasn't moving. All of a sudden, an ambulance came down the other side of the room with its sirens on. Someone peeked out of the caboose window and went back inside and the train began to move, allowing the ambulance to pass. This was when the caboose was going out of fashion and shortly after, there were no more.
i thought train breaks were fail safe i.e. if the air hose brook the reaks snapped shut ?
Brakes*
Yes. If there is air applied, the brakes release. If the air escapes, the brakes apply.
Care to explain that to the good residents of Lac Magantic?
woodrat2296 the train line didn't break so there was no emergency application. the train wasn't properly secured to prevent movement in the case of unintentionally release. all trains are now heavily regulated for extra hand brakes to ensure even if no one is around if the air brakes try and release there is still a mechanical feature applying the brakes.
It is a Vacuum hose rather than an air hose so that atmospheric pressure will close operate the brake if the Vacuum is removed, neat little failsafe solution
remote monitoring and emergency braking systems all monitored by computers no need for a caboose.
I worked on the engines and cabooses for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad from 1973-75. They were yellow, and the cupola stuck out from the side. The caboose was also called a "way car". Every freight train had a caboose. It made it possible to throw a switch after the train passed it, so you could back the train onto a siding.
Some are still used but not for this purpose. Some local freights use them as riding platforms or shoving platforms.
Idgaf, bring em back!!!
Excuse me, it's obviously cabeese. You don't call geese gooses do you?
I thought they were always referred to in the singular. "Why don't trains have a caboose anymore?" Conductors would stay in "the caboose" etc.
I do. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go water my cactuses.
joblessalex lol
joblessalex I do... : (
joblessalex sometime I call them gooses LOL ;-D
Your natural style in the outro is much more comfortable to watch than your more formal/stiff presentation style in the main part of the video - hopefully this might be helpful feedback :)
Very few of them were red around here. P&LE were mostly yellow. Monongahela were mostly green. Cabooses are still used in some revenue operations like industrial switching (Union RR in Pittsburgh uses them frequently) and in Maintenance of way operations.
Trains brake when they lose air.
There is still over heating on trains defect detectors are like stationery couches.
They were mainly used in the US and Canada, not in Europe or Asia. A common misconception by many Americans who believe they were used everywhere.
Americans think they invented everything.
+sweiland75 we did
JeevesReturns
Why did you invent a universe with Donald Trump?
hello bro, Indian Railways used and still use caboose
India is a exception to the rule indeed, problem is that the money flows to those in power and not back in to the company so that upgrades or new material can be purchased. It's a huge problem in India, which is also why the railways are very old at basically. For India to get a much safer system you first need to get rid of corruption :(
JeevesReturns Moron....
I may not see cabooses anymore but they're still valuable in my eyes. And cabooses still rock!
Where I live, there are multiple cabooses in just my small town, but they have all been turned into either a tiny free museum of sorts about the areas rail history, or it’s been turned into an ice cream store. Yes, there is a caboose in town, that you walk up to and in the window is an ice cream shop. But all those are off the rail and permanently set in place. I’ve only ever seen one caboose being used on a main line ONCE, and it was just a few weeks ago. It was part of a rail train. So they were hauling tons of extra track, the very thing they were riding on, and in the middle and end of the train, we’re large machines that grab and place the track down as the train rolls along for crews working behind to be able to replace the old track. And in the middle of the train of all places, not the back, was a yellow caboose. Because it was on a replacement rail train, and in the middle, I reckon it’s repurposed not as an office or sleeping quarters, but as some sort of control point from a distance for the machinery on board that grab the fresh steel tracks, instead of using the controls attached to the machine itself where that could he hazardous, especially since it was painted OSHA yellow, the same color as the machinery
For the record, correct plural of "caboose" is "cabeese", not "cabooses".
Anson Mansfield and when one derails, it goes cabosh.
Anson Mansfield for the record if mouse plural is mice and goose plural is geese by that logic the plural moose should be meese .... no point just saying
kenny moyer Exactly, you speak the truth!
Look at those fucking meese!
cabossi
berings today still can fail. it's not as common and there less likely to have any indications when the will fail. not like the old style babid berings that would smoke.
*Babbitt
*bearings
*they
For the railroad CSX, for switching ops, uses a bay window caboose with the windows border up. But it has an End of Train device on it.
Boarded up maybe?
My dad worked for Burlington Northern Railroad as a cabooseman. He told me some interesting stories, including the one where a sniper tried shoot him in the caboose.
I once fell off a train car
Hello random RUclips person, I choose to believe you. How did that happen?
Toarcade I was part of a WWII battle reenactment and we were taking a train from the Germans so I climbed on top of a train car that was in the railyard so I would have a good shooting position. When I went to climb down I got excited and missed a step so I fell off the car.
John Beauvais cool story bro
Liam Goodison thank you, I have a friend named Liam are you him?
Dont think so unless you play Elite Dangerous
is it just me or is this video sped up?
It seemed to me like he was quickly skimming through a wikipedia article.
That's the 60fps rate, instead of standard 24.
that doesn't affect video speed
Bernard Morey: Also, I find it odd that so many Canadian and American subjects are narrated or presented by people who are so obviously foreign. It is not offensive, just a bit of a disconnect, don't you think? (Like lumberjacks in Oregon or BC, whose story is told by a Welsh coal miner.)
Cocaine is a hell of a drug...
EOTs are some times called FREDs for Flashing Red End Device, well at least by my uncle Fred.
Note worth mentioning: early British carriages had brakemen who sat on the top of the carriages, however, decades later it was changed for brake compartments because it meant that the guards or brakemen wouldn't get rained on or even fall off the carriages. Maybe after the import of railway/railroad equipment to the US this idea of a top deck stuck and the cupola was invented for the same purpose as the compartment. Note 2: Britain did have coaches/carriages notably in the South of England, where there were cupolas instead of leaning windows. These, however were called "Birdcages" Brakevans still did not have them, however...
So where do the engineers sleep now?
Devin Martin, hotels or dorms.
The engineers do not work long hours like they use to.. at the nearest town, they usually leave a train while a new crew gets on.. the engineers then go to a nearby hotel to spend the night.. and when their shift begins again, they board a new train that'll take them home..
Devin Martin in the engineer chair.
at home, hotels or dorms as said by puller, now companies do Crew Changes where a crew is set to wait for a train so they can take over instead of an engineer working long hours
Devin Martin
He’s high on cocaine’
Don’t need sleep
I seen a HI-Rail truck (a pick-up truck that can on on both rail and road) pulling one down the track just a month ago doing maintenance work.
I like to see this guy walk a mile back towards the end of a train to find a problem. What he didn't say it was managements way to cut down on crew size, and cut down their maintenance costs.
As Stockholders Dividends became more essential to operations than the services once provided, the reduction of a variety of cars made mixed carloads of freight less common and the need for Crew Members who performed the functions that made serving shippers possible the Caboose became a redundant feature.
The simple answers always seem to overlook those reasons for the absence of a rear of train crew.
PSSB precision scheduled stock buybacks ☹️😡
The red lights on the rear of the train is called F.R.E.D. Or flashing rear end device. The implementation of this device caused job losses being that the two railroad employees assigned to a caboose were no longer needed
Not all cabooses were red; some were orange, some were yellow and some were green depending on the railroad that used them. Some were even blue; case in point being those of the Norfolk & Western. Also an EOT doesn't so much as go over the coupler but actually gets clamped to the side of the coupler through the use of hooks that fit in the slots on the side.
They were still common in the USA on freight lines up thru the 1970s here in New England.
(I used to live near such a line in years past).
I've been told they are still used in some areas of the country today.
yep that's correct, some smaller companies or excursion trains will still have them on the end
Cabooses are still regularly used in the US, just not on through freight runs. Situations that require shoving long distances or the work to be done prohibits the controlling locomotive to be on point, i.e cars on both ends. Distributed Power Units are quickly replacing EOT's too. Also, EOT's only have one air brake adjustment, emergency. They very quickly open the brake pipe to atmosphere and apply the brakes from the rear up.
Most rail road companies in the states are starting to move a way from the EOT devices and just putting another engine there. It serves the same function as the EOT but also provides some extra breaking and power to the train as a whole.
The advent of two man crews and the End of Train Device was ALL formed on the Florida East Coast Railway. During the strike that began January 23, 1963, things didn't move for weeks. The FEC started to hire people to move and drive trains and things got quite violent in late 1963 all the way to 1972. This was the longest and most violent strike the USA had ever seen. Two man crews became a thing because there was no one to sit in the caboose in the back, so what they did was they put a red flag at the end to mark the "bottom" of that train. Since FEC runs on relatively flat land, it was easier to apply brakes than on most railroads. In 1969 in New Symerna Beach, FL in the FEC's electronics shop, Dale Cornett & assistant Bob Douglas created the first End of Train Device. The thing was a heavy package, due to the battery weighing 75IBS. Tests of this invention were on the FEC and it became approved by the FRA in 1972. After that, the invention started to be produced on the FEC and slowly but surely, the caboose was being phased out. In 1975, one brakeman named D.M. Shelley (now engineer, qualified for THRU FREIGHT by T.J. Frederick Jr. - Superintendent of Road Foremen of Engines - Shelley has been with the railroad for 45 years, since 1971) rode the last caboose to Miami and that was that. FEC was the first RR to use EOTs, two man crews and the first Class 1 railroad (now Class II as of 1992) to go cabooseless. Other railroads started to follow suit in the 1980s. So you can say FEC was the main killer of the caboose! Today, FEC was and continues to be on the forefront of railroad innovation and technology.
I remember when I was younger there was an old light orange caboose in my town train yard that just got pushed back and forth to make room for passing trains until one day a few years later it just disappeared. Always did wondered what happened to it. If I could have taken it somehow I would have as a hang out spot for my friends and I
at 1:17 the KHR (Kamloops heritage railway which I am a part of) caboose came by and is currently undergoing a complete rebuild of the air lines