Caboose

Sometimes you find a story when you're waiting for something to end. In this case it was at a railroad crossing while my son and I were sitting in the car watching a freight train pass in front of us. When the last car rolled by my son noticed something I hadn't-- there was no caboose.

When he asked me why I had no answer and so that's how I ended up spending a day on one of the few remaining cabooses still in service. It was in Oregon in 1997. Even well before then nearly all of them had been replaced by something called an ETD which stands for End of Train Device-- a piece of technology that keeps its electronic eyes on the train's slack, air brake pressure and other things the engineer used to be made aware of by the person sitting in a caboose.

I forgot to ask why cabooses were traditionally painted red but just discovered that they were because red happened to be the cheapest paint to buy-- who knew?