Good Medicine Aboard My Own CABOOSE

Image Gallery The caboose at the and of the rainbow- Everyone who owns A vintage railroad oar seems to end up collecting railroad folklore, as well an a host of colorful anecdotes o! their own adventures.

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Issue # 126 - November/December 1990

By Adolf Hungry Wolf

How to add an old railroad car (or two!) to your homestead

IS THERE AN EMPTY SPOT ON YOUR PROPERTYthat could use a unique workshop, studio, roadside store or guesthouse? How about buying an old caboose, or a bunk car (a boxcar with windows, converted to house railroad track workers)? Right now, North American railroads are in the last stages of updating their rolling stock, modern train operations having made most vintage cars unsafe. In addition, most trains no longer carry cabooses, so thousands of these veterans are now sitting idle.

The purchasing agent for your nearest railroad can tell you whether the company is selling any old cars. A couple of years ago, one big railroad company had more than a thousand cabooses for sale. Soon, however, all wooden cars and most of the steel ones made before the '40s will be gone. Most will be scrapped, but some will be purchased privately. Typical prices for steel-bodied boxcars and cabooses run between $2,000 and $4,000. Wooden cars, when they can be found, are generally cheaper.

Over the past to 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. We live in the wilderness without phone, electricity or running water, and our four teenaged kids do their schooling at home. 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. Got all that? Good; then we'll proceed with how you can do something simultaneously practical and exotic like buying a caboose.

First, before you get too excited about the whole idea, see if your local zoning laws allow it. Most caboose owners have their own land—usually rural acreage, where regulations and clearances tend . to be more accommodating. 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. 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. Today, they just want to get rid of their old cars. Period.

Railroad-car buyers are often disappointed when they look at what's available. Most of the cars are beat-up or worn-out. My own caboose—in which I'm writing these words—sat on a weed-grown siding for more than two years before I first saw it. By then, every window had been smashed, doors were off their hinges and the floor was so littered and dirty I could hardly walk on it.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print