Why don't trains use CABOOSES anymore?

what's up guys this is Heiss and today we are once again at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden Colorado and behind me is a really neat Caboose Denver and Rio Grande Caboose 49. backdated to look like it did back when it was a new thing back in the 1800s still with Lincoln pin couplers and all of that sort of fun stuff but I wanted to answer the question today why don't trains have cabooses anymore everyone's heard about a caboose but when they see a train the train doesn't have a caboose on it so I figured hey let's take a look at a couple cabooses and answer that question along the way so let's go take a look so here we have the interior of caboose 49. this is about as plain and simple as it gets you got a couple different births for crew members to rest on three of them in total got a coal-fired stove the car insulated around it so it doesn't burn down you'd have a bin for coal as well to supply that stove we've got a desk for the conductor simple desk the simple oil light as well and then lastly we have the cupola the cupola is the fancy name for the bit of the Caboose that sticks up out the top and on these early Denver and Rio Grande cabooses they also had an extra handbrake right here at the cupola so whoever was sitting up here whether it be the conductor or the rear Brakeman can operate the brakes on this Caboose from their seated position and they did that because in this era when this car was built not all the trains had air brakes yet and so all you had were these mechanical handbrakes there's also brakes on each end of the car out the door all three handbrakes Supply the same lever under the car so whichever one's tied tightest is the one that actually applies it but the whole purpose of having this cupola and this raised portion was so that the crew members of the train could actually inspect the train from afar they could watch and make sure that none of the bearings were catching fire or overheating so that's one of the biggest cause of problems in the early days of railroading was a journal box catching on fire a hot bearing a hot box called by most railroaders it was really easy for the crew members of the train to sit up here in the cupola and get a great look out at the train ahead of them so they could actually see all the cars from a nice vantage point and make sure everything was okay another fun feature of this Caboose is the lamp box on top where they could put different colored lamps in order to communicate with the engineer who could communicate back with whistle signals because this was much before the dawn of radio perhaps Chief among the reasons that cabooses went away though was those hot boxes we talked about let's go take a look at what that means right here we have the truck that actually supports a train car Caboose trucks look very similar to this as well and inside the journal box when you pop open the lid we have the axle and the axle has a polished journal with a brass that sits on top of it and underneath the axle we have a actual pad that sits in a bath of oil so as the axle spins it picks up that oil and Wicks it and it can lubricate between the brass and the axle itself on top to make sure everything's rolling nice and freely this sort of setup is called a plane burn it's a simple bearing some people call them friction bearings but that was false advertising by the companies that invented what we're about to talk about which is Roller bearings these bearings worked quite well for the road for a long time but if they ever had an issue they were ran out of oil or if they ever ran hot meant that they had a flammable source of fluid with them which meant that they could cause fires and end up causing a lot of problems for the train and you'd have to set the cars out so as such if you had a hot box which was relatively common with the amount of train cars the railroad had and the amount of different bearings and how heated they would get you'd end up having to set the car out it would be a whole bunch of work so it was really important that we could see when that would happen with the Caboose so as time moved on and Technology became more advanced we came up with new kinds of bearings and made it so that these heavy train cars could use them as well these are called roller bearings manufactured by timkin at least on this car there's many different types out there but there's actual individual little rollers inside this cage that mean that the actual weight-bearing surface is rolling on a spinning roller that then spins on the axle and that means rather than two surfaces sliding over each other you have two surfaces rolling over each other which means that you don't have the same amount of friction to start and once rolling you're not worried about picking up oil on setting oil on fire these bearings allow the train to be started a little bit more easily and once rolling they're actually pretty comparable to the plane bearings but you don't have to worry about the oil you don't have to worry about making sure there's enough oil in the journal box it became a huge maintenance saver for the railroads to equip cars with these roller bearings and so in modern day railroading pretty much everything out there is still roller bearing there's a couple things that might have plane bearings still but they have all sorts of extra fun rules to deal with them because of the hot box situation so without hot boxes there was less for the conductor and Brakeman at the rear of the train to look out for another problem for railroaders that came along was the increasing demand of the amount of freight that needed to be hauled by the railroad right next to me there's this gray box car this is a shorter box car and right behind it is a taller one a high Cube style Box Car the pressure is to haul more freight portrayment bigger and taller cars which meant that we couldn't see the whole train is easily out of that couple anymore it was no longer the tallest thing because the cars were hitting the same height because that way we can move more freight per train and as well more trained cars per train meant that the conductor and Brakeman being back in the Caboose means they couldn't necessarily see the whole train anyway you couple that with the fact that the bearings didn't really need as much attention as they once did and you start to see several reasons why the Caboose went away one of the more nuanced reasons why Caboose has fell out of favor was also protecting the train itself big reason to have crew at the back of the train was so that if you stopped on the track you could send your crewmen out far enough that they could flag down any trains coming behind you tell them hey you need to stop We're stopped on the track up ahead with the Advent of signals and more advanced Train control the signals could protect the train rather than somebody actually physically walking out there and it was more safe and more robust so yet another reason why we didn't need to have a crew at the rear of the train but to finish the answer to this question let's go take a look at a bit more modern and bigger Caboose Colorado and Southern 10606 still old enough that it's made out of wood but it's a lot more equipped and you guys are going to love to see it so here we are in the CNS 10606 it's a much more modern Caboose when compared to the Denver and rear Grand number 49. it's a lot bigger too because it's standard gauge and a lot longer as well the car has a total of five bunks for their one here two of which are births that fold down they could be stowed so you'd have more space when you didn't need them and when you did need them you could drop them down and have the extra bunks the interesting question that births pose why are there beds in a caboose I don't go to bed at work I don't sleep on the job why are the railroaders sleeping on the job well back in the early days of railroading there were no hours of service requirements guys could be on the job for more than 16 hours more than a day until their train got to the destination they lived out of the Caboose so they needed to have beds because they were going to sleep at some point and in the early 1900s out came a 16-hour law and so it still made sense well you're going to be up 16 hours you're gonna have multiple guys you can rotate who sleeps who doesn't whatever makes sense to still have them and then later we get towards a 12-hour law and it starts to approach a more realistic shift and so once shifts became 12 hours maximum you didn't really need some of the amenities as bad as you needed them before and so labor laws played into it a little bit as well much larger conductor's desk equipped with electric lighting the electric lighting would have been supplied by a battery box that was charged off of one of the Wheel sets with a Dynamo attached to it we got more storage closets and now we got some serious amenities here we got a sink of fresh water we got potable drinking water we have a fold down table more storage for food and other items bigger coal stove one that's easier to cook on and the eras that we ran cabooses folks tended to be on the train for a long time so being able to have a hot meal was nice and as well water right next to the stove so you could have heated water here's where we had storage for Flags one of the duties of the train crew at the rear of the train was to protect the rear of the train if the train stopped unexpectedly for some reason and they were operating in a place without signals and then back here we've got the cupola that's got all kinds of storage all the way around it and as well an insulated ice box so that you could have large blocks of ice and keep your food safe and cold in there and here's editor me on the backside I'm so used to our little Narrow Gauge cabooses I forgot that this actually has a bathroom in it so there's actually a toilet behind this door here and it just leads out onto the tracks don't use it while you're stationary the koopaloo's got two seats on either side it's much more equipped than the one in the 49 and up top here is the big important difference between the 49 and this Caboose other than all the fun extra stuff that we've shown you this Caboose has a conductors valve so the conductor can control the air brakes of the train from back here radio didn't come to transfer quite some time and so you're relying on your rear crew if they saw something happen ahead of them in the train they needed to be able to bring the train to a stop so the conductor had his own valve right here with instructions stenciled on how to use it right on the wall and so if I was the conductor riding in the Caboose I could see smoke from a hot box up ahead I could slowly set up the train and safely stop the train right from where I'm sitting in the Caboose without any way to contact the engineer and so this was an important role and one of the reasons why we retained five-person Crews for a long time you needed to have a whole crew up at the front end engineer fireman and a Brakeman so you could switch cars out get switches and all that and you need to have a rear Brakeman and a conductor so somebody could sit here and watch the train you could do any switching moves on the back and as well you could protect the train with the flags from the rear however with the changes to the bearings meaning you had less hot boxes it became a lot more convenient for the railroads to install Wayside detectors that could catch each axle as it went by and check their temperature also with technology Improvement as well with technology improvements we came up with something that could do this by computer rather than needing a person to watch came up with the end of train device some people call them an eot some people call them an ETD and many of us call them a Fred a flashing rear end device or if you're a Railroader that F stands for something else but that device could couple into the brake pipe at the back of the train and rather than having a human staring at a gauge seeing what's going on you could send the signal back via computers and radio back to the engineer up front with the engineer knowing what was going on with the rear of the Train's air brakes you could see if the brakes had charged all the way up at the all the way at the back of the train potentially miles away and with an accelerometer built in you could know if the train had started to move and he could buy more power or anything like that if all the slack had been taken out of the Train the engineer really didn't need someone back at the back of the train anymore and so with all these changes the railroads lobbied to have Caboose is removed because it was you had to have a caboose on a freight train back then and so in the mid-1980s based on all these reasons the railroads got rid of the Caboose they no longer became required they didn't have to have them on the train and they moved the conductor up to the front so the engineer and the conductor riding the engine together and most jobs don't need Brakeman anymore and we haven't need a fireman really since the steam engine was around so your five-man Train Cruise became a two-man train crew most of the time these days and now caboosas aren't gone some railroads still have them and they still use them in service but they don't use them for this purpose they're not the home for the rear of the train crew they're now used to shelving platforms so it's an easy platform for someone to ride on to protect a shove into an industry because you have to make sure so you've got eyes at the front of the train and if the locomotive is at the back well sometimes it's a lot more comfortable to ride from a caboose platform than it is from hanging off the side of a car and so a lot of industrial jobs and shorter switch moves like that will still use cabooses they actually use them all the time just passed us at the BNSF here in Golden anyways guys thanks so much for watching I hope you guys enjoyed this little look at a couple cabooses here at the wonderful Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden Colorado and as well I hope you guys liked the answer to why we don't use caboosas anymore they were a huge part of early American railroading but not so important anymore with the changes in technology on the railroad both on the trains and on the Wayside so thanks so much for watching we'll catch you all next time [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right [Music]

Channel: Hyce

Views: 961,297

Keywords: trains, railroad, how trains work, steam trains, train game, train crash, train wreck, caboose, train caboose, why don't trains use cabooses, rear end, fred, flashing rear end device, etd, eot

Id: jqPsuAivUQg

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2023