When you buy a caboose, you inherit a mystery. Ours came with big gold “L & N” lettering, a cupola perched off-center, five mismatched windows — and no road number anywhere. The paint is too far gone. So we went digging.
Here’s what we know. She’s a 1950s Louisville & Nashville caboose, with vertical wood siding, a steel underframe, and that off-center cupola. Everything else, from the shop that built her to the lines she worked, we’re still tracking down.
And she worked hard. The L&N — “The Old Reliable” — ran cabooses like her at the tail of coal trains through Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Indiana, with a brakeman up in the cupola watching for trouble and the conductor doing paperwork below. Cars just like her were documented still working the Appalachian coal branches in 1962.
What we don’t know yet: her number. It’s under there somewhere — old railroad enamel often ghosts through under a blacklight, and there may be a builder’s plate still riveted to the frame. We’ve also reached out to the L&N Historical Society archives. When we find her number, you’ll read it here first — and she’s getting it painted back on, in gold, where it belongs.
Think you can help identify her? Join the waitlist and reply to any of our emails — railroad historians drink free at the fire pit.
