Pssst! ... Hey Kid, Wanna Buy a Caboose?

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Everything was shaping up rapidly and, not only was Chuck Bartlebaugh going to make the cross-country anniversary trip, but it looked as if he would make some money, too.

"I guess I should have known better," Chuck laments. "A few days after the news commentator contacted me, I received a letter from the railroads stating that they could no longer offer me free passage. They felt I was getting too much publicity and that, if they went through with the deal, they would be letting themselves in for a big liability risk because my caboose was sure to draw crowds too large to handle wherever it stopped. They were very nice about the whole thing, and they were right . . . I guess. But there was no way I could finance the trip myself, so I had to put it off. I haven't forgotten about it . . . I've just delayed it."

As a result of the publicity he'd received, people began stopping by the siding almost every day to see Bartlebaugh. They all looked at his cabooses and asked questions, quite a few showed an interest in buying and most were very open to his way of life. Once more, Chuck began to think about dealing used cabooses for a living.

In the two years between 1967 and 1969, Bartlebaugh had been doing more than planning shopping centers and transcontinental trips . . . he had also been busy building a network of contacts that would eventually help him locate and buy a good number of the used cabooses in North America as they came onto the market.

"I wrote letters to all the railroads, in an effort to locate the cars. There are over 200 major rail lines and another 100 smaller ones, you know, and that made for a lot of correspondence. I drove around a good deal, too, checking railroad yards for cabooses that looked abandoned. When I found one, I asked around to see who had the responsibility or authority to sell it. Usually I had to write a lot of letters back and forth—in addition to contacting people on the telephone and really just making a pest of myself—before I could obtain the information I needed.

On one occasion, Chuck called a major railroad and talked to 27 people in his effort to find out which one could authorize the sale of a caboose he'd found. He got all the way up to one of the vice-presidents only to be referred back to the very first person he had called. It was then that Chuck decided to try and go about it a different way . . . the only trouble being that there was no different way.

Bartlebaugh persisted in trying to cut through the red tape of "official channels" . . . and he finally succeeded. By 1970, thanks to his private grapevine of railroad contacts and friends throughout the U.S. and Canada, Chuck was able to find and buy cabooses with a minimum of hassle. "I now know people who will tell me when a caboose is going to be released," he says. "When this happens, I just check my list to see who's authorized to sell that particular car, contact the person and add another caboose to my collection."

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