Hello Everyone. While my collection of Santa Fe engines and Rolling Stock has been growing fast. I've run into a problem, a caboose problem. I own two athearn cabooses that could work as Santa Fe but every time I look for a new santa fe caboose I can tell its fictional. I know intermountain made a proto santa fe caboose but i can't find any in stores. I see the ones upcoming later this year from athearn, walthers, and intermountain. but is there any caboose currently in production thats proto and dosen't break the bank? thanks geep_fan
Actually the original Athearn caboose is a very good representation of Santa Fe's early steel cabooses given the modeling technology of that day. Intermountain does make a better looking caboose given today's technological improvements. Their 1st Santa Fe cabooses are of the red/yellow Ce- classes built after 1966. More recently they've come out the older early mineral brown steel cabooses. You don't say which era you're modeling. So we can't tell you which one is correct for you.
Since Santa Fe ceased to exist in 1996 when they became part of BNSF, your RR will have to be fictional. And Santa Fe stopped using cabooses about 10 years before for long distant trains. Only a few were kept for local switch jobs. Even BNSF only uses them as shoving platforms today. Also the only cabooses Santa Fe kept after 1986 were the wide visions. But there's currently no good model of those, except maybe the new Rapido. All the other models that are available in Santa Fe have offset cupolas vs centered ones on Santa Fe's. The best Santa Fe caboose books are by Frank Ellington & Steven Priest
I was a little surprised to find a 'conventional looking' ex-BN extended-vision caboose - very much in BN green - out at Flagstaff last November. Obviously a shoving platform. The relatively small number of newer ex-ATSF extended-vision cabooses vs. the hordes of newer BN cabooses probably have skewed the post-1996 merger survival rates significantly. I'm in the east so it doesn't really count, but man, I can't remember the last time I saw an ex-ATSF caboose still in service anywhere. I've seen some really nice ones still running, but all on tourist roads and the like - including a really primo extended-vision one on the Grand Canyon. If somebody has a picture of any surviving ATSF caboose as a shoving platform - anywhere - still in ATSF red, this sure would be a good place to post it.
I saw one regularly as recently as last month. It's used, along with a pair of Warbonnet-painted GP60M's, as the Corona switcher in Corona California. The caboose and engines are parked behind West Coast Conversions in Corona.
