Cabooses, Train Sheds and More in the Railroads Online WINTER UPDATE! 

There actually used to be things on express routes called "slip coach" where they would unhitch a group of passenger cars mid-trip. These were cars that were destined for a station that was a midway point while the locomotive and the rest of the cars continued to the express destination. The slip coaches would then be controlled via brakes to stop at the station, where it could then be shunted of the through line until another locomotive came to pick it up

The caboose can be used to have extra drag on the back when going downhill so they won't constantly bump forwards (but don't 100% brake or the cars will hop off the rails in a bend) and on a train that does not have air brakes it will provide extra braking power.

I absolutely hope that snow plowing gets added eventually

Passenger trains didn’t usually have cabooses, as the main purpose of a caboose was housing the train crew and they could just ride in the cars on passenger trains. What passenger trains did have on the back instead of cabooses, especially nicer passenger trains, were observation cars with either a balcony on the back, or later a large round window. On a bit of a tangent, there was also such thing as a drover’s caboose, which was basically a passenger car with a caboose cupola on top and a section in back for exclusively the train crew. These were used on freight trains, mostly cattle trains, where a small amount of passengers needed to ride with the freight. Namely, the people who were “driving” the cattle, hence the name Drover’s caboose.

So I had to look it up, the little shelf in the back of the caboose held all the waybills for the freight cars. Also, when the engineer wanted to slow down, he would blow a whistle and the brakemen would hop out of the caboose, run along the roof of each car, and turn the brake wheels while another brakeman would start from the front and do the same thing. The introduction of air brakes, along with digital tracking of waybills, and the fact that freight cars became too tall for the caboose to see over, removed the need to have a team stationed in the back of the train, and thus, they became obsolete.

If you're worried about not having enough room for a roundhouse, don't worry. Most "roundhouses" were just half circles, at least from what I've seen. You might be able to fit almost three in that space, so maybe a six engine shed house. You might even be able to fit a water tower to top them off with, straight off the table.

As you run the train, the physical location of the link can move outside of or beyond the pin (due to 64 bit math errors or "floating point rounding errors"). A hard coded status of "being linked" overrides the physical fact that *it can't be linked* because of it's location, so the car stays coupled throughout the entire session regardless of how ridiculous it looks, unless you manually disconnect it. Every time you back the train, the link location resets to it's minimum travel. The problem comes when you reload the save. The physics is established for each link on reload, but if the link is beyond the pin the physics can't resolve to it being "linked", and so the car becomes uncoupled. The solution, until the devs figure out a way to solve the issue, is to set the break on the last car in the train, back into it, and set the break on the engine. This makes sure all the links are compressed inside of the coupler arm. I sort of see this as an end-of-the-work shift chore before ending the session or part of the procedure to leave a train parked on a siding. I haven't had uncoupled cars since I started doing this. Your point about the fire temperature is correct. In reality, keeping a roaring fire makes the water boil more than needed and the energy is wasted as the higher steam pressure escapes out the pressure safety release valve. Not only is it wasting fuel but it wastes water as well. An experienced fireman works to keep the steam pressure just under the safety release pressure. The only thing the real world boiler has that we don't have in the game is an adjustable firebox flew used to dampen the fire (controls the burn rate and temperature of the fire). Also; look up "railroad hump yard" it's a thing, even today.

fun fact: i had a dream about a this game a few days ago, it wasn’t too far off from this update

The longer the train the more practical the caboose for stretch braking. In multiplayer a brakeman in the caboose can apply the handbrakes from the rear to keep the train stretched going downgrade. Without the brakes on the rear a long train will push against the locomotive and derail on curves. The purpose of the caboose was to provide an office for the conductor and his paperwork and also transportation for the flagman and brakeman. The crew in the caboose usually flagman or brakeman were also tasked with observing the train from the cupola to watch for any defects such as smoke from a hotbox. The caboose was equipped with gauges and a brake valve for emergencies. Technology and the replacement of friction bearings with new roller bearings made the caboose obsolete. Modern railroads have since replaced cabooses with electronic rear end devices.

What you did with the chordwood cars is called "kicking" cars. We still do it today. It's not as dangerous as it seems as long as you do it right, and it's actually the most efficient way to switch cars with a small crew

if the caboose has links at both ends, it could be set like a second tender for multiplayer and have the other people switch rails while you still drive

The cordwood track at the smelter is surprisingly good game design. It takes an existing mechanic and forces the player to approach it from a different angle, thus causing emergent gameplay. There's no "correct" way to handle the track - it's entirely up to you to use it how you want to. In my world I setup a shunting yard near the smelter, and parked Betsy there. Then do 3 runs of 9 cars at a time from the logging camp w/ my mogul, detach them all at the shunting yard, and use Betsy as a shunting engine to unload them. It's a bit involved and takes longer than if I did it inline on arrival w/ the mogul, but it's a very different style of driving an engine, and quite fun.

The Letting go of cars on the move in the form of a shove is called "kicking" the cars. You would usually have 1 or 2 cars in the track that have breaks on and "kick" the cars you are letting go at them. The knuckle style of couplers found on trains seen in America will automatically lock the cars that were "Kicked" to the ones in the track with their breaks on.

Whoa that is so cool, the snow fits in a lot with the evergreen trees.

Grey sheds would be pretty sweet to have at industrial areas, such as the oilfields and the smelter.

To make changing trains easier you could use Betsy as a true shunter rather and building big loops like you do currently. Take Betsy and push the empty cars to your larger engines. Could’ve just pushed the caboose to the train instead of doing the loop and reverse. Just food for thought!

In multiplayer the caboose can keep tension on the back of the train when going down hill as a brake car.

The caboose was mentioned as a place for the conductor to ride in on freight trains. There are no caboose on passenger trains because conductors can just use a unoccupied seat to do there paperwork. Only on scenic railroads have I heard of caboose on passenger trains. But it's your railroad so you can run it any way you see fit. Great video by the way!

The process that you did with the empty cordwood cars is called "Kicking the cars" and is an actual railroad practice. I actually got to perform it on a real train, although with modern couplers the conductor runs beside the train while it's moving and un-couples the cars, then uses hand signals to tell the engineer to stop. Then like you did here, the cars coast till they get to another car with it's breaks on to stop them.

If you build those dead end stations like the cordwood at the smelter... Then do it with a grade. The use gravity and a second shunt line to gravity role empty cars too. Then you don't have to do all that manual hitching and unhitching

Imagine they add towns where you transport logs to houses and there was a timeline part of it do definitely night and day cycle and like a whole calender system with season changes like fall and spring

Kan you could store all the classic trains in the open space then have the gear trains up in the mountains

30:17 Shunting like that is pretty common on Eastern European railways, mainly on narrow gauge. The wagons are uncoupled, the loco gives them a boost and they roll into the siding or wherever they need to go. If they don't roll far enough, they use a log wedged between a solid part of the loco and wagons, and they just push using that.

In the age of steam, thr Caboose held the people in charge of changing the switches, so it works best in Multiplayer

Before trains had air brakes, they had a brake crew. They rode in the caboose, and had to go to each car to set the hand wheels as needed.

Love the fact that you're totally geeking out over the caboose. :)

Apparently, they also said they fixed the Climax geared locomotive. Haven't tried it yet but hey, fingers crossed. Also, Merry Christmas from the Masterwork Railroad!

30:12 oh they did that. There were so called "jump cars" at the end of the passenger train. Literally cars, with people and the brake guy, that got disconnected so the train doesn't stop on the station for just 2 cars of people and keeps going on. Imagine: train passes by a small station at full speed, and some time later 2 coasting cars (with no locomotive) arrive... They eventually stopped doing this, because it has killed people working on/crossing tracks that weren't aware of the "jump cars" silently following the train, and also this process required additional personnel that knows how and when to brake the cars.

The caboose was ment to be used to survey the entire lenght of the train and it also used to brakes the train before the invention of the pneumatic air bracking system

Real life cabooses do have "fire places" from my knowledge they are stoves to cook for the crew in the sleeping quarters. Please correct me if I am wrong

I remember asking my dads uncle(guess he'd be a Grand Uncle?) who rides in the caboose when I was a kid in the 70's. They still used them on some lines that he worked on(logging trains mostly in the Northwest). He just simply said, "That's where Brakeman lives." For the longest time I thought he was literal and that a guy named "Brakeman" lived in the Caboose. It became a little more obvious he was talking about a Brake man on the train crew as I got older and started looking into doing railroading. :)

The type of train shed they added is more suited to switched tracks than a turntable, since the tracks inside it are parallel.

The cordwood dropoff would be great with a little shunting yard and a betsy, so you can park full wagons of wood nearby, have the betsy shunt them around, then assemble the empty ones for the big train to pick up again

What a great update! Caboose is brilliant, especially for multi as you said! And the snow just makes the whole place magical.

The caboose brings back memories because one time I went to a birthday party for my friend, The party was on the Essex steam trains caboose. Good memories. (:

I'm loving this! Keep up the great work! Have fun! And looking forward to more updates to your railroad! I can't wait for you, Dapper, and Kosmo to run multiple trains~

A tip from me. If you are bogged down, try to enable brakes on the last few cars, unhook them, and roll off with less weight. After that either leave the empty cars up at the mine or leave them on when you get the bogged down cars. Because you will have less weight due to the empty cars you will probably make it up again.

Train crews in the old days were usually 4, 5 or more people. You had a fireman, engineer and a brake man in the engine, and in the caboose the conductor and 1 or more other brake men. When the train needed to slowdown or stop the engineer would communicate to the caboose using the whistle. At that point the brake men would run along the train cars and depending on the whistle from the engine they would apply the brakes accordingly. The conductor would usually ride in the cupola(top) of the caboose monitoring the train. Once air brakes were a thing cabooses were equipped with air pressure guages so the conductor could monitor air pressure.

Great episode! Can’t wait for the next!

This game has so much potential...they could add actual climate related difficulties and make it so you have to keep your caboose heated so your brakemen dont freeze, add snow plowing and some mechanics for switches to be more difficult to move when its snowy, telegraph stations for multiplayer switching operations so you can have people manning switches at a rail yard...all that i think would be possible with the current framework and would add soooo much to the experience. Love the content Kan!

I imagine another reason you used the mogul is because it's the only engine with a snowplow at the moment

Just got done watching star wars episode 2 imagine my surprise when I go from watching an amazing movie to realizing that there's a new upload from an amazing content creator. 😁

The purpose of a caboose was, at the time when steam engines were still used, they would usually get snuck onto and robbed. To solve this problem, railroads came up with the idea of keeping an armed guard on the train, and since they couldn't keep the guard in the locomotive, they decided to build him his own car and keep him (and the braking crew) in it.

I just realised that if you have a bunch of mates in the game with you, one could be driving the engine and everyone else could ride in the Bobber Caboose as a little excursion train. In other words, you could use the caboose as a makeshift passenger coach. Also, this winter update is just amazing. I love the snowy environment, but especially the engine sheds and caboose (both will be very useful, I dare say).

For gravity tracks check 'Freight shuntyard' Kijkhoek in the Netherlands. Built on a hill, they use gravity and braking systems to shunt the different trains. Very neat!

:O SNOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! also nice caboose ya got there ;)

A caboose is a crewed North American railroad car coupled at the end of a freight train. Cabooses provide shelter for crew at the end of a train, who were formerly required in switching and shunting, keeping a lookout for load shifting, damage to equipment and cargo, and overheating axles.

there used to be a thing they did called slip coaches where they would detach cars off the back of a train and have them coast into stations while the rest of the passengers would not have to stop

Cabooses, also known as Brake vans are utility cars designed to help slow down trains and have a person on the back when going in reverse. Usually there equipped with a furnace, some brake wheels/levers, a cupola to see over most cars, and I’ve heard some have beds and tables.

The slip shunt as you were doing at the smelter is a common thing in places like hump yards, though the cars go through retarder rails that grab the wheels to slow them down. Your method would require the last car on the section you're shifting to have between 10-30% braking power if you use the caboose as a set of buffers. As for boiler temp, it's an efficiency thing, it takes a lot to get to max temp, but not much to maintain the temp. When at max temp the water boils the fastest and produces a lot of steam.

Would be cool when they add day/night cycle and weather once in a while you'll have clear the tracks with a rotary snow blower or a snow plow

Yes, all cabooses have a road number and so does other rolling stock. It helps keep track of equipment.

I hope they'll rework the look of the UIs in the near future, it really feels like a game made in 5 minutes with all the text without individual 'buttons'.

I guess you could put a shunting yard at a crossroad (crossrail?) between the iron mine, the iron mine and a line connecting to the lumber yard. That way you can leave the cord wood along the track and pick it up/drop it off on the iron ore run

Kaboose or break van in uk. Was used in the early days of the railway. The earlier cars used on the rail way only had mechanical breaks operated the same way as in the game. So if a coupling snapped from the loco it would roll down the line until it came to stop naturally. hitting another train or derailing. So a break van was added to the end of every consist so if a link did break. The person in the break van could apply brakes on the van to bring it to a stop safely. Later and modern trains Lost the need for a break van when vacuum brakes were added to all rail cars. Where the train driver could release the breaks through the use of steam or compressed air in every car from the loco. So if a link broke the brake line connecting the cars would break off release all the pressure from brakes on the cars reapplying them and bring the consist to a stop.

it will be cool to eventually see people doing roleplays on this game

try to creat an s bend that incorperates both the iron smelter and the cord wood line into 1 so you dont have to have the 5 step process of loading and unloading

In the UK, a caboose is called a brake van.

We need more of this!! AA

I believe that on long trains, they would use flags and waving from the guard in the caboose to guide the drivers when they may struggle to see the whole train

The snow is epic dude

30:00 Now that move feels reminiscent of The Great Locomotive Chase.

I love how the one thing he is most excited for is the caboose lol

I certainly hope they add a Southern pacific cab forward it'd be so damn cool

this video made my week

There’s a narrow gauge railway in Wales where they have gravity trains where it is just freight cars going down the hill without an engine and some guys sitting on the cars holding the brakes to control the speed

WHAT!?!?!??!?!?!??! Snow! Also, dat caboose dough. Also also, these are indeed narrow gauge trains.

Man caboose is pretty good like you can troll so much and it really usefull imagine you go by a cross pice when a giant slow train is coming from your right and you brake man just slams the brake on the whole train. And if someone makes a proximity voice chat mod thats even funnies cause you can hear the driver on the other train screaming

This is a cool update!

30:17, I think loose shunting like this was a real practice, with low risk and empty wagons at low speeds, especially if you have a crew member working the brakes.

Woooooo! They’ve added a brake van (caboose) no more downhill bumping!

This update has me convinced. I’m buying the game this week

Oh my god this is the best thing ever!

There's a python script you can run that will go through your save file and find/respawn lost cars. It can also be used to renumber/rename cars/locomotives and modify player values (experience & money)

Real railroads did do switching by letting cars fly like that, often with someone riding a car adjusting its speed with the brake. They also did switching by pushing cars on parallel tracks using a stout pole (you'll see some old pictures of engines with that stout pole fastened below the tender).

as a caboose is basically a mobile office space, to do paperworkd in, it should improve the amount of money you make from dropping off cargo. If it was a UK style break van, it would double as a half volume box van or "box car"

The snow was great for the first couple hours driving but when it comes down to groundwork it's a pain. I wish they would have been given the option to turn it off or download it yourself not just do it. Your videos have been great and have given me lots of ideas Thanks

Wow i can't wait to play that

Awesome video dude

Why at this hour woke up to watch this great video

30:12 They used to do that all the time, back in the days, and even worse things. I can send you a link to an old video from a rail yard in Denmark, it's recorded in 1948 and shows how they used to work on a rail yard.

kan: Mind find I catch a ride? SRC #3: go in the caboose

I have an idea to make the unloading process at the smelter a little easier now you have a caboose with -brakes-: If you make the track on the non-station end of the switch a small up-slope, you can: 1. Unload 3 cars, 2. Pull them forward up onto the small slope (Slope only has to be 3 cars long) 3. Switch the switch 4. Unlink the 3 cars. 5. Those 3 unlinked cars will just roll back to the caboose due to gravity 6. Repeat 1-5 for the remaining cars 7. Link everything together again and off you go :D

Yes finally an update

I have bought and I am going to play this game. I have always loved trains and I am going to play this a lot!

When you let the cars roll into the caboose, that’s actually a technique called ‘kicking cars’, and is performed very often in real life. Saves time by sorting cars with less movement

Not sure with the old timey roof markers but standard would be red to the rear and green to front and side ( with the traditional 4 lens marker lamps) with the fixed housing my best guess would be red when caboose is trailing normally, white would to serve as an indicator or " headlight " to other trains when backing and green would indicate the train is in the clear on a passing siding when meeting another train that all switches are lined correctly and the passing train can proceed without issue.

This is a awesome update.

Snow in the games I play to escape reality of the snow outside my window yay!

YEE MORE TRAINS!

The caboose also has a lamp you can place in the top, red, green, or white, each signifying different things, red meaning it's stopped on the main line, which is thus not clear, the class 70 and cooke mogul both also have slots for these lamps, both on rear of the tender and the 70 also has them on the side of the boiler near the front

Think i'll be setting my consists with a caboos at each end, when youre driving manual you'll be right behind your loco in the caboos getting a good view.

AWESOME!

You need to add a siding to park your freight cars on so you can move freight cars to unload freight cars and keep the main line open just in case another train is coming

Happy holidays

Love the vids

There should be a VR experience, it will be awesome

i recommend purchasing an engine SPECIFICALLY for shunting 1-3 cars so that you dont have to navigate the large trains around a million switches. for example near the beginning of the video, you coulve used a shunter engine to get the caboose to the engine onto the mainline rather than backing an entire train down the line. plus, shunter engines would be especially useful for the multiplayer episodes.

The caboose is used for slowing a train down we all know that. When Cabooses put on their brakes it tells the driver in the locomotive to slow or stop. Cabooses are also used for holding extra men to help with the train on long trips. And if the cars get detached from the locomotive the men in the caboose put on the cabooses brakes and the other cars brakes. Your welcome.

actually cabooses/brakevans are also used just in case some train cars disconect on a hill. So the person in the caboose/brake van can bring the train to a stop and the locomotive can collect it again