The recent thread on roof walks had me looking through a bunch of my old, saved e-mails. Found an interesting reply from Joe Pennington to the "nshore" e-mail group that I thought worth sharing--cla Date: 5-23-2002 Mike, The early cabooses were all box car red with black endrails, grabs, platforms and steps. The first steel cupola cabooses were built in 1938(10-29,30-40 series), had 20' truck centers and mulehide roofs. The Murphy steel roofs (as modeled by Hallmark and Overland) were not used until about half way into the 41-99 series. All the wood cupola cabooses had mulehide roofs. The painting of yellow endrails, grabs, stair edges began in 1946. The ladders only went to the roof edge until 1947 when they started using the wrap over roof design.
While cleaning the workshop/layout room, I came across my original notes that provided the aforementioned. I should note that the aforementioned information apparently came by way of Joe Pennington. Best Regards,
Good timing on your post, Chris. I'm currently building another AMB wood kit which I'm backdating a bit. I just added the decals last night. These kits are awesome! Thanks goes out to Ken.
Seeing that caboose across the track like that reminded me, I've seen a few like that. I was called one night about three days prior to Christmas, "Bill, pack and head to Cheynne". "There is a ground blizzard, North of Wendover, the crews can't get off the trains, the roads are closed, the Steel Gang men are stuck in their bunks without food or water". "Meet the Trainmaster and plow the main open and pickup the crews" When I got to Cheyenne, the Jordan Ditcher was on the head end, followed by three SD-40's and three Cabooses filled with food. We had two work train crews, and headed North. Cold, minus 30, the stars, looked like you could touch them. North of Wendover we hit minor drifts, maybe 2 foot deep and poof, everything disapeared in powder snow. Kinda scary, seems like a long time, you can't see anything. All the sudden, the headlight on the ditcher lit up the darkness, until the next drift. North of Bill, Wy, we reached the Steel Gang with supplies, on North a way's, a lone Caboose, crosswise of the main line. They had derailed it and just cut it off and left it there. End of road, well no. The Trainmaster ask, "Can you move it"? I said, "I guess we will find out" Their was no way to re-rail it, so I eased, the wing out. The front plow and wing rolled the Caboose right off the main. That was pure luck. We plowed on North, till day, when we was relieved by Helicopter. They landed on the right of way, we loaded in it and flew to the motel. Oh, I made it home for Christmas dinner. The phone strangely quit working for the rest of that day.
Jim- Nice job on the caboose. I really need to try one of those kits some day. You have done a very convincing job there. What did you use for the mule hide cover? William-It never ceases to amaze me what kind of power these things have. I have pushed snow up to the walkways with just the power. Its amazing how eerily quiet it is, can't feel or hear the joints. When you pushing a lot of snow it starts moving 20-30 ahead of you and just boils up and goes to the sides. Once in a while snow will drift 3-5 ft deep on top of Soldier Summit, on a curve you hit it at 50 mph, like you say, man what a show.
