End Of The Line Traditional Cache
Double8: No longer able to maintain cache. Thanks to all that found and logged this cache.
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The cache is placed to blend into the enviroment. There is only has room for log, so bring your own writing instrument and TWEEZERS. Stealth is required, the park may be busy depending on the time of day or year. The cache is placed by permission of Missy Rathmann of Eureka Parks Department.
The History of the Caboose
The little wood shanty that used to trail faithfully after every string of freight cars-like many other railroad scenes-has undergone many changes in the past hundred years.
The box-like shelters train crews used to build to shield their cooking fires on spare platform cars in the mid 1800s, the converted box cars with sliding doors used around the turn of the century, the cupola-topped wooden cabooses popular after World War I, all have given way to ever more modern, efficient and better-equipped cabooses.
Today's SP caboose with its sleek bay windows of shatterproof glass, automatic oil heater, electric lights and refrigerator, drinking fountain, radio-telephone and specially-designed Pullman-type crew seats is fast becoming an operating symbol of the technological advances continually being made by SP. Rapidly disappearing are the old-fashioned hard benches and feather dusters, the coalbin and the kerosene lamp and the lazy board. The caboose has become a rolling office, efficient and functional, vastly different from its forebears. The origin of the caboose is un-certain. Even its birthdate is unknown. The most generally accepted story of its beginning is that a man named Nat Williams - a freight conductor on the Auburn & Syracuse Railroad during the 1830s - made it his custom to sit in the last car of a freight train on a box or barrel and direct the train's operation. As trains and runs grew longer, some railroads provided platform cars for their train crews, and eventually converted box cars for crews to use as shelters.
This Caboose
The C-50-3's were built by International Car Company (ICC) in 1970 for Southern Pacific (SP) #1800-1874 series, these were the first cabooses delivered with no roofwalks and end ladders, as the ICC had decreed they be removed for safety reasons. As they had no reason to support anything heavy, metal rods were sufficient to support the roof, and hang any safety appliances from. This order also heralded the reduction in side windows, and the introduction of the heavy collision posts around the end doors. Starting with this class (C-50-3) the bay is narrower than preceding classes.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Gurer'f na rkgen bar, harira dhnagvgl. Pbhag ntnva.
Treasures
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