Why Don't Trains Have Cabooses Anymore? 

We still use cabooses (cabeese ) when moving high/wide Schnabel Cars which require crew to operate and manipulate rail car to clear obstructions.

@ 2:40 if a train brakes in half and the air line parts the WHOLE TRAIN STOPS NO INPUT FROM ANYONE NEEDED ! Loss of air will set the brakes .

Today I Found Out acctually, cabooses are still in use, but not many are. CSX uses some on mainline, and Norfolk Southern uses them to carry crews while switching.

@@williamjacobs236 (sorry for the late reply). that didn’t work so well at Lac Magantic

It was more comfortable to sleep off a hangover in the caboose as opposed to the locomotive

what year

Burlington Northern used to have green caboose and Union Pacific had yellow. Still I miss seeing those obsolete houses on rails

That's such a cool memory. I always wanted to own an old caboose as an art studio or just to enjoy the garden. I love history.

Did you know at the time it was the last one?

Did you cry?

Yeah, it won’t wave back to me either :(

Same, come to think of it... Wonder how many of these boxes have been stolen or hit with rocks, baseball bats, etc.? That'll show 'em! LOL

Right back at you, sister. I was born decades after they basically died out, and it’s just so refreshing to see a caboose on a vintage train for some reason. Maybe it’s because I associate it with an ice cream shop somewhere in the Michigan countryside that was inside a retired train caboose.

Now I am trying to figure out if my memory is playing tricks on me, but I recall also seeing them on maintenance trains I see moving around our light rail system at night after the last commuter train has run.

WirelessHotShot rider cars. easier to stand on a platform then hanging off the side of a car especially a lumber flat for a couple miles during a shove.

It's not your memory playing tricks. Maintenance trains often use them because they are often going backwards as well as forwards. For safety reasons, you can't back up a train blind, you need someone to 'protect the point'. (At least that's the term used where I worked.) So one train crew -- usually the one with the least seniority -- is assigned to ride the van to protect any reverse movements.

WirelessHotShot this video annoyed me so much because he kept saying caboose instead of brake van BRAKE VAN!!!

Brake van was never used in this country. It was a caboose----- or a waycar on some railroads.

Mac Tonight what country is that fun fact from?

MissConcupiscible United States. It is pretty neat

One would only be able to do that on a passenger train. Just to clarify to others. Amtrak does that where you can pay them to tow your private care, though I can't think of any other passenger services that do that off the top of my head.

If you pay, a freight company will take you as well I believe. It might not be so fun though, getting stuck in a siding for eight hours in the middle of nowhere waiting for an opposing train or a crew change.

Cabooses are still used, we had one come through the yard the other day. They are rather helpful on work trains when you need to back up 10 miles and don't want to ride a car.

tcpnetworks If the train breaks in two, it brakes in two.

tcpnetworks actually there are times we can get a pinched hose effectively bottling the air and not apply the brakes whether in an emergency application or just making a reduction. very nice to have the option in plugging the train from the tail.

once train brakes are released the pressure in the lines keeps the brakes released but when the air pressure drops the valve on the uses the air in a tank on each car to apply the brakes . It's called pressure differential braking . Same system as used on pre-121 trucks . Pre -1980s . The system was designed by George Westinghouse .

once train brakes are released the pressure in the lines keeps the brakes released but when the air pressure drops the valve on the car uses the air in a tank on each car to apply the brakes . It's called pressure differential braking . Same system as used on pre-121 trucks . Pre -1980s . The system was designed by George Westinghouse .

KC9UDX Are you a ham, mate? DE WS1O

EOTDs exist. EOTDs are a lot safe where they can see the back of the train from the locomotive and a lot of other things. Railcars just got a lot bigger such as intermodal or autoracks (cars)

Mostly they eliminated them because labor unions lost power after we deregulated the railroads, and companies were looking to make more money as usual. Reagan helped remove state laws that required them. Lot of good jobs lost.

@@benkleschinsky that's not why but ok

@@SouthJerseyRailfan Guilford strikes. Ah the good old days.

@@benkleschinsky i'd say it's simply just because the railroads didn't want to pay more people. i don't think the federal government had anything to do with it

John Clark Green for Burlington Northern!

Air brakes are complex, the air both applies and releases the brakes. First you have to charge the train to 90psi or you'll have no brakes at all

Jon Deal it is.

Future job right here

It is very badass

When I was a kid I decided that if I could not be a fireman, I would be happy being a garbage man, after all you get to ride on the back of the truck and you only work one day a week...

It looks fun... but then you’ll end up having to deal with incidents where idiot people cross the tracks in front of you and die right before your eyes because the train takes a while to completely stop when you put it into emergency braking

That had to shuck. Yet, school buses continue to be used despite 2 (don't know of any more) having been hit by trains.

Maybe you kids had something to do with the Derailing eh.. dont worry i wont say anything..

Dallas Ponder would be nice if he was understandable

Dang what line / Hamilton and Richmond are two rust belt cities that have REALLY gone downhill since the loss of some railroad lines. Very sad. I've been to both recently and I'm always seeing crossings but no tracks.

@DJ Music Vault That’s the story all over the country, which has lost more than 2/3rds of its railroad lines in the last 100 years, but especially in places like Michigan, where I live. We no longer have a continuous railroad network, as so many lines have been abandoned that they no longer connect the two peninsulas, moving cars from one city to the next can be a challenge involving hundreds of miles due to missing track, and many cities have no rail service at all, thus no more heavy industry or the jobs that go with it. It seems like the abandonment of rail lines starts a chain reaction which takes other lines and industries with it, until eventually it all fails and crumbles, the people move out, and everything falls apart.

Me too. They were always my favorite part of waiting on trains when I was younger because the guys in the caboose always seemed happy when waving back at kids. Just another pleasant little chunk of childhood we'll never get to enjoy, again. :(

Yes I was told that by a guy who worked for the railroad to.

Wonder how many FREDs are sitting in somebody's garage, dorm rooms, etc.? LOL

Yeah, you gotta *Waste* any *Radioactives* that try ta get away!

That is exactly what I was going to write. Good job!

NeoDerGrose you can get a pinched hose essentially bottling the air of the tail end portion which wouldn't apply the brakes whether in an emergency or regular brake application. having the option to plug it from the tail is nice. some models actually can assist in brake application to speed the single through the train.

vslash27 I never heard of an incident where there was a pinched break hose. What does happen from time to time is, that someone forgets to open all valves between the waggons. What is right is the faster break reaction time. The normal breaking signal travel through the train with the speed of sound, transported by the shockwave of the air pressure. Electronic signals on the other hand travel by the speed of light, wich obviously is much faster. This is already a problem over here in Europe but it's a much biger with the long trains in the US.

NeoDerGrose a pinch or blockage can happen many different ways. the idea to dynamite behind is nice.

I haven't heard of a pinched airline, but what has happened is that if there is a lot of water in the air line when the weather is cold, ice plugs may form in the line making it impossible to release pressure. I'm not saying an airline may not be pinched or somehow impaired. I'm a member of a railway equipment preservation group and although it's easy to see how equipment is carefully designed to prevent something from going wrong, given the large number of combination of things that can occur and the number of train miles, something might happen involving unanticipated foreign objects, forgotten tools or some unapproved design modification.

carl witt unless there's a tap closed between the front and back . then you can drop your train by the eot

carl witt thats what i thought. air is used to disengage brakes not engage. so brakes are on when there's no air.

Joe Smith The brakes are only applied if there's air in the car's air reservoir to apply them. If there is absolutely no air anywhere on the car, it has no operable brakes except the hand brake. They are not like truck brakes, there are no springs in the brake cylinders to apply them, they are applied by air pressure, that's why each car has its own air reservoir - to apply the brakes when an air reduction is made to the brake pipe or it has a total loss of pressure when the train breaks apart or the emergency handle is pulled. Also, when using an EOT, if an angle cock is cut out in the train somewhere, the brakes can NOT be recovered and charged in the first place, so there will never be a need to apply the brakes to the rear portion of the train using the EOT. That feature is for a faster emergency application when initiated from the head end. This cuts the time needed to apply the emergency brakes in half since the trainline air pressure reduction is coming from both ends of the train and meeting in the middle instead of only the front. When trainline pressure drops below a certain point, the PC light in the locomotive illuminates, when this PC light is on, the locomotive's electrical propulsion system is disabled so the train can't be moved until the brake problem is resolved. A lot of this also holds true for DPU trains too.

Joe Smith actually air is used to apply the brakes. the train line charges air tanks on the cars and is controlled by valve on each car. As the pressure lowers in the line the tanks lower too but that pressure from the tanks goes directly to the cars brake cylinder to be positive pressure applying the brakes.

sigh.... guys.... breaks on trains and 18 wheelers are applied by spring pressure.The springs are always trying to apply the breaks and it's only when a pneumatic piston pushes the springs back that the breaks release. When you press on the brake peddle, air is RELEASED from the system, allowing the springs to apply the break. The harder you press the peddle, the faster the air is released, the more the breaks are applied. If a train were to "break in two", the point at which they separate would severe the air line releasing all the air and applying FULL break to both halves.

Using a caboose is always an Option which any railroad is free to do at its discretion. As for Roaring Camp and similar tourist railways using cabooses, it's all about maintaining an image of history, although it can still have a practical purpose.

Train shaming. Triggered! ;-)

Like he said advanced technology said "bye" to the caboose.

robots took your job once again

Well conductors and switchmen still exist, robots not yet...hopefully never especially if they glitch....

The problem with the "glitch" idea is that it's highly more likely that a human will make a mistake long before a computer does. The fear of this is mostly about wanting to know that a human is making a decision... and can be blamed if something goes wrong. With rare exception, a computer is far better at "doing" something than a person is.

Also, we still use cabooses today, but not in the same capacity. Now a days we use them in yard operations and as shoving platforms so we can shove(back up) long distances without having to ride on the side of a car.

Kabuki Kitsune I didnt bring it up because every railroad has a different name for it. FRED EOT ETD

He made one big mistake at the end (2:38) "even if the train brakes in two, the brakes can still be activated . . ." "Westinghouse" air brakes, which are almost universally adopted on trains use the compressed air pressure to disengage the brakes. So if the train "breaks in two," and the airline is parted, the brakes apply automatically.

I'm only familiar with Freight trains. There is no conductor on the train, crew consist of Engineer and Fireman.

Train crews today on freight are an engineer and a conductor. There are no firemen any more.

PsychoticBovine I'm a conductor. if the train requires backing up for a long distance, they use a caboose so the employee doesn't have to hang on the side of the car.

Aaron cammon hey, thanks for that info! I find the caboose to be rather charming,

A train without a caboose is like a chick w/o an ass!

That train does in fact have a long back up move on it's trip from New Haven to Woodburn and back

Local trains sometimes use transfer cabooses, little house in the middle of a flatcar.

Mr. C uhh no, they found out that releasing the brakes from the rear first to the front worked better...

That had a lot to do with it, but a lot of money was also saved on purchase and maintenance of caboose cars, not to mention the time and expense of switching them on and off trains.

You caught that too. Yep, old Westinghouse triple-valve was around long before anyone dreamed of these EOT's

True. However, with the length of the trains, it can take a relatively long time for the rear cars to go into emergency if the break was near the front. The Engineer can use the EOT (aka SBU, FRED) to start an emergency application from the rear of the train, greatly speeding up the process. When I worked on CP, it was policy to trip the emergency on the SBU any time the train went into emergency.

Adam Parker Good to know, glad to have people with more information to educate us :)

Eyebrows Mahoney if the train line is blocked for any reason the tail end portion might not fully go into emergency leaving the brakes released so the eot is needed to open the train line from the tail end in that situation.

vslash27 If the trainline is blocked for some reason, the EOT won't allow the locomotive to come out of emergency to ever move in the first place, so your scenario can't/won't happen. Also, many EOT units use an air powered Dynamo to power them. Without power it will never send a signal to the HOT device in the cab, thus the train is unable to recover the brakes and unable to be moved under its own power. This condition renders the locomotive's electrical system inoperable until the brakes are charged and the PC light is off.

I do,too!

still used as a platform on the local "Chip Train" (NECR 500) when the train is returning from its trip to the plant.

The Reading And Northern railroad uses a caboose on their WHFF job.

Caltrain912: Yes, there are still rare uses for them; certain government trains, massive oversized special heavy trains -- that sort of thing.

Anything that needs crew bunking and/or office space, basically.

The legal requirement to have one on all freight trains was removed in the 80s

Matt Westmacott you are correct. The Engineer lowers the air.pressure in the line and it applies the brakes and the ever so slight increase in air pressure releases the brakes. so it is possible to waste the air by setting and releasing the brakes too many times and th Sen you can in fact have a runaway.

Alan Fox *shoppes

In the US most are made into tacky motel rooms.

Ah, Peter, I was gonna say that! You beat me by a mere three days! :-)

GA5MλSK it's slang. Fred and Freddy. eot or ETD is correct. just refers to the end of train device which should have a red marker.

vslash27 CP and CN actually call them SBU's, for Sense and Brake Units. There's a bunch of names for them...

Jon Calon I know lol I work for cn. I didn't want to throw too many letters at people.

I've heard them called Japanese conductors as well

Mike O'Brien actually the Fred is the box on the head end that the EOTs talks to. Front End Device.

FLASHING Rear End Device

Thanks for all the "well, actually's" but "friendly" was colloquial, at least in the D&RGW anyways.

+Aaron common The device that the EOT talks to is called Wilma. Fred is another name for an EOT.

@@conductorcammon FRED stands for Flashing Rear-End Device, & it's located at the back of the train where the caboose used to be 🚂

this whole video is a sham. Little to no information was correct. The real reason the cabeese (slang) were scraped is because of the buff and draft forces over a 100 car or longer train. Even the slightest bit of buff or draft of the couplings near the head end was enough to throw you across the caboose at the tail end.

Liam Dai You are generally correct but the crew that is going off duty do not normally ride buses to get back to their point of origin. The off duty crew will stay in a bunkhouse owned by the railroad and then when they go back on duty, they will run a train back to where they started from.

You can believe something and have it wrong.

***** A mere thirty seconds of googling led me to this page: www.railway-technical.com/air-brakes.shtml tl;dr The brake application pressure comes from an auxiliary tank rather than springs, but other than that, my description was right. *Falling* air pressure results in an *increased* application of the brakes.

***** My original point was that the ETD isn't an emergency braking system. If the train splits, then the brakes go on by themselves as the air pressure *falls*.

It functions as part of the emergency braking system. In addition to reporting the tail end air pressure, it also has a valve in it to release all the air at the tail end to get a train into emergency faster, when so commanded. Some of them even are equipped with a bleed valve which allows for better breaking control.

HiddenWindshield if the trail line gets pinched behind the separation there will be no application as there won't be a sudden pressure drop to trigger an emergency application. that button allows the train to be dynamited from the tail end.

I know this is a late reply but I know a guy who has a UP yellow with a crows nest, sitting in his front yard….

Then perhaps you can answer a question for me: I once read, somewhere, that train brakes use vacuum to disengage the brakes, so that if the air hoses were to break for any reason, the brakes would automatically engage and stop the train. Is this correct?

+Gert Brink Nielsen That is one system, largely used in the UK for example. The system used in the US and I believe most of the world uses air pressure, but in a failsafe way. basically some air is stored in a tank on each car, this pressure is fed by the main brake line running down the train from the locomotive. Control of the brakes is done by changing the pressure of this line. A decrease in pressure tells a valve on each car to apply the brakes using the air stored in it's tank. Of course if the train breaks apart or something else fails, there is a sudden loss of pressure, which the valves detect and cause an emergency application of the brakes. Since each car has its own air tank, the brakes have enough air to apply, even without the locomotive. This system is quite a bit more complex than vacuum brakes, but it works better on a long train, because the air to activate the brakes only has to come a short distance from the tank on the same cat, rather than the air (or lack thereof) coming from the far end.

"Highball on the roll-by, Fred's blinkin'. Callin' the driver, over."

Paul Deevy ... You are correct. A reduction of pressure in the trainline pipe applies the brakes. Full pressure (90psi) releases the brakes, unless the air in the reservoir is bled off.

Gert Brink Nielsen they use low pressure 40 to 55 psi to release emergency brake 75 to 90 psi to apply road brakes or so engineer on Norfork Southern an engineer on BNSF both told me when I asked them but then what would a train engineer know?

And they're usually plain, or possibly creosoted wood...

Yeah but you guys still use brake vans

Tim McAndrew not since the 1970's

Carlo Allen what? I seem to recall seeing them recently

Tim McAndrew they really don't use them anymore, unless its a private railway or used by the national network using the shark variant of the brake van for clearing ballast.

Detach the caboose, it will kill us all!! Another reference to another RT's work which itself references Red VS Blue.

Ivan Alvarez one of the reasons I clicked on this video

Ivan Alvarez i got it

All cabooses aren’t red, Conrail ones are blue, hell the Milwaukee Road cars were yellow and orange!

PrekiFromPoland- are you dumb or something? (btw anime sucks)

I don't know--AAAAAAGH!!

When I was homeless in San Diego in the late nineties, they left a caboose sitting on the tracks. I used to sneak in and sleep. One night they hooked it up without seeing me. I got a joyride but it only lasted 4 miles until they stopped.

Cabooses still carried a conductor and a nominal brakeman in the 70s, although by then the latter knew their days were numbered. All they had to do on many shifts was sit in the cupola and watch for hot journal boxes or other problems. With the advent of computers, a tremendous amount of paperwork was eliminated, and with it the need for a tail-end conductor, especially with the trend toward unit trains that traveled from A to B and did no pickups or set-outs along the way.

Cabooses lasted well into the 1980s. They nearly all bit the dust after the railroads came to an agreement with the union over work rules. It was kind of like the union requiring Firemen on diesel locomotives long after steam locomotives were eliminated. As someone mentioned above, railroads still use cabooses during switching and transfer runs where the train has to back up around blind curves. The caboose gives crewmen somewhere to stand on the rear of the train so they can be the eyes of the engineer during backing. The crewmen are in radio contact with the engineer, but also have a brake valve so they can dump the air into emergency if need be.

They were always a combination of crew bunkhouse and conductor's office. They were retained on trains long after they were necessary because (as has been mentioned) of union contracts that required more crew than were strictly necessary (AKA "featherbedding" in some circles) and because of federal rules. The first Class One railroad i know of which ditched them - originally in favour of just a red flag and red lantern on the last coupler - was Florida East Coast, which, since it operated/operated strictly within the state of Florida, was not covered by most federal operating rules. (Though, since they received cars from other states and sent cars out of Florida, they WERE covered by the federal interchange rules governing equipment maintenance and design.)

Brakes*

Yes. If there is air applied, the brakes release. If the air escapes, the brakes apply.

Care to explain that to the good residents of Lac Magantic?

woodrat2296 the train line didn't break so there was no emergency application. the train wasn't properly secured to prevent movement in the case of unintentionally release. all trains are now heavily regulated for extra hand brakes to ensure even if no one is around if the air brakes try and release there is still a mechanical feature applying the brakes.

It is a Vacuum hose rather than an air hose so that atmospheric pressure will close operate the brake if the Vacuum is removed, neat little failsafe solution

There is still over heating on trains defect detectors are like stationery couches.

similar to how a semi truck air brakes work. if it looses pressure the brakes activate. also i see cabooses quite a bit still in use. not sure what for but i see them

The sensor is designed to recognize a virtual split of the train, not a physical one. Modern brakes are applied via a fly by wire controls system rather than via the operation of a physical valve in the cab. The disadvantage of this system is false positives. A dead man sensor at the end of the train will trigger irretrievable braking in the event of signal loss with the brake controller system so that the engineer is never operating a train with a failed brake controller. This is the virtual splitting of the train, the engine is no longer capable of engaging the brakes despite normal physical systems. So the ETD sensor is just a fail safe for the controller, as well as a method for improving the old system you describe via providing more paths for release to atmosphere than just the fail point.

now *_that_* makes sense. Thanks for sharing.

Cabooses today are known as "shoving platforms" usually they are found on work trains, or transfers to another railyard. If on a revenue freight train they usually need to back up so the conductor stays behind the train to guide the engineer via the radio and handsignals.

rubadux the air pressure charges the tanks of each car which has two. as pressure lowers in the line in a brake reduction the tank in the car lowers it's pressure to equalize. but the air from the tank goes to the cylinder applying the brakes. when the train line breaks it's a rapid reduction which triggers the second tank or emergency tank to dump it's air into the brake cylinder to apply a really powerful brake. no air in the car at all will have no brake as there is a spring pushing to release the brake shoe which is why cars have a mechanical handbrake to apply the brake on set out cars. also if the line gets pinched for any reason behind a separation there will be no emergency brake application. no sudden pressure drop to trigger the brakes. so that button is nice to plug the tail end if that happens.

I thought they were always referred to in the singular. "Why don't trains have a caboose anymore?" Conductors would stay in "the caboose" etc.

I do. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go water my cactuses.

joblessalex lol

joblessalex I do... : (

joblessalex sometime I call them gooses LOL ;-D

*Babbitt *bearings

*they

Hello random RU-vid person, I choose to believe you. How did that happen?

Toarcade​ I was part of a WWII battle reenactment and we were taking a train from the Germans so I climbed on top of a train car that was in the railyard so I would have a good shooting position. When I went to climb down I got excited and missed a step so I fell off the car.

John Beauvais cool story bro

Liam Goodison thank you, I have a friend named Liam are you him?

Dont think so unless you play Elite Dangerous

Anson Mansfield and when one derails, it goes cabosh.

Anson Mansfield for the record if mouse plural is mice and goose plural is geese by that logic the plural moose should be meese .... no point just saying

kenny moyer Exactly, you speak the truth!

Look at those fucking meese!

cabossi

It seemed to me like he was quickly skimming through a wikipedia article.

That's the 60fps rate, instead of standard 24.

that doesn't affect video speed

Bernard Morey: Also, I find it odd that so many Canadian and American subjects are narrated or presented by people who are so obviously foreign. It is not offensive, just a bit of a disconnect, don't you think? (Like lumberjacks in Oregon or BC, whose story is told by a Welsh coal miner.)

Cocaine is a hell of a drug...

Devin Martin, hotels or dorms.

The engineers do not work long hours like they use to.. at the nearest town, they usually leave a train while a new crew gets on.. the engineers then go to a nearby hotel to spend the night.. and when their shift begins again, they board a new train that'll take them home..

Devin Martin in the engineer chair.

at home, hotels or dorms as said by puller, now companies do Crew Changes where a crew is set to wait for a train so they can take over instead of an engineer working long hours

Devin Martin He’s high on cocaine’ Don’t need sleep

Americans think they invented everything.

+sweiland75 we did

JeevesReturns Why did you invent a universe with Donald Trump?

hello bro, Indian Railways used and still use caboose

India is a exception to the rule indeed, problem is that the money flows to those in power and not back in to the company so that upgrades or new material can be purchased. It's a huge problem in India, which is also why the railways are very old at basically. For India to get a much safer system you first need to get rid of corruption :( JeevesReturns Moron....

Boarded up maybe?