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Milwaukee Road’s Rib-Side Cabooses by Jeff Kehoe Soft Cover
Milwaukee Roads Rib-Side Cabooses by Jeff Kehoe
Soft Cover
39 pages
Copyright 1995
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction .............................. 4
1/genesis Of The Rib-siders ................. 6
2/construction ...........................8
3/seven Varieties .........................13
rolling Rib-siders! .......................17
4/modifications .......................... 25
5/life Beyond Milwaukee Road ............. 30
6/modeling Rib-siders ..................... 33
appendix And Roster ...................... 37
INTRODUCTION
They've been called waycars, cabins, crummies, vans, hacks, brain boxes and a dozen other names. The caboose has had more nick-names than any other piece of railroad equipment. And when a railroad designed and built its own cabooses, they became that road's signature. Pennsylvania Railroad's porthole-windowed N5c cabooses and Baltimore & Ohio's wagontop cabooses are two such cars.
Perhaps no cabooses were more instantly identifiable with the railroad that built them than Milwaukee Road's "rib-siders." The road's welded, ribbed-steel construction-an advanced technique for the 1930's-strengthened and lightened the weight of the rolling stock built by the craftsmen of Milwaukee Shops. They used the ribbing technique everywhere: on passenger cars, baggage cars, express cars, snow plows, boxcars and, beginning in 1939, cabooses. Students of Milwaukee Road history find it ironic that the only other railroads to have ever made extensive use of rib-sided equipment were those in Russia and China.
In America, the story of the caboose's evolution from its earliest design to its eventual demise chronicles the Milwaukee Road, along with the B&O, as pioneers of the bay-window concept. The success of Milwaukee's bay-window cabooses prompted other railroads to build steel bay-window cars in a variety of styles and colors (though sans ribs). Through 1951, Milwaukee built 315 bay-window rib-sided cabooses. Several outlived the railroad that created them.
It is conceivable that every mile of the Milwaukee Road's 10,000-plus-mile system saw a rib-sided caboose at one time or another. They served as a home away from home for countless conductors and brakemen over the years. Sometimes the cars stayed on the same branch line or division for years. Later, after pooling replaced the practice of assigning a certain caboose to a specific conductor, many of these cabooses drifted from one end of the system to the other. Whatever the case, each racked up thousands and thousands of miles.
The rib-siders were a universal favorite of Milwaukee train crews because of their smooth-riding passenger-style trucks and wooden interiors, which helped muffle track noise. Train-watchers everywhere could identify the handsome homebuilt pumpkin orange cars carrying the markers on the ends of smokey freight trains bound for distant destinations full of intrigue and perhaps even a little mystique-places like Tacoma and Terre Haute, Ontanagon and Oglesby, Mobridge and Mineral Point.
Within these pages is the rib-siders' story: their design, construction, varieties, modifications, uses and preservation. We also will show you how to model one, and the appendix provides a roster of rib-siders that includes some of their regular assignments.
As an outgrowth of the December 1992 all-caboose issue of THE MILWAUKEE RAILROADER magazine, this booklet fills a need for information on a unique caboose for a unique railroad. The rib-side cabooses have always been a favorite of mine, dating back to my earliest memories of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific. Grandfathers from both sides of my family and, for a short time, my father worked for the Milwaukee Road. It was during those halcyon days as a preschooler in the early 1950's that a neighborhood friend and I watched trains race by on the nearby Chicago-Savanna main line. We waited until, at last, the caboose appeared. If it was a shiny new rib side, each of us would try to out shout the other in youthful exuberance, "That's my caboose!" "No, that's MY caboose!"
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