Back around the turn of the century Jay Barnaby had an idea to build a caboose for the Appalachian and Ohio 1.0. A visit to the greatest hobby shop in the world that will never close; Caboose Hobbies, provided a handful of pieces and parts. A couple different styles of styrene caboose window castings. Some cool Precision Scale brass caboose steps. A set of trucks and an Intermountain boxcar frame. He dug up some arrangement drawing for a Rio Grande’s steel caboose to use as inspiration for window placement and general dimensions, after all the Grande’s home-built cabs are probably the best proportioned tail end ever seen on a train!
Jay wanted an older wooden sided car, so he started with some scribed styrene from Evergreen Models. He laid out the car body and floor and cut out windows. And just like that, life moved on…college, a new career, a couple relocations, a new bride, couple of kids…twenty-five and a half years blew past! Somewhere along the way Jay handed me a shoebox holding the pieces of his still born caboose. “Always thought this would be a neat model someday” he probably said. About six months ago, while passionately arguing about some obscure but very important detail of some “what-if” model project, Jay asked me if I had paid any thought to that shoebox of parts. “Of course! It’s the next project on my list.”
Now where did I put that box?
