Doug Bronson & I have been working on South Pacific Coast Caboose project. The SPC owned several of these small combines, used a cabooses (SPC 45 -48). Originally built by
Carter Bros in 1882, some of these cars would proceed to run on the Southern Pacific narrow gauge through the 1900s. The one and only survivor today (requiring substantial
restoration) is South Pacific Coast caboose 47.
As built, these cabooses used a version of the Carter Bros swing motion freight truck, and didn't use Pass. car trucks at all. However in the case of caboose 48 on the
Slim Princess, sometimes Pass Car trucks were added later.
Doug is designing the masters for the prototype Carter Bros truck. When the new trucks are ready, the kit can finally be available. For my sample, I've borrowed a couple
of trucks from the Colorado Central Baggage car...these are not the right trucks 'as built'. We'll probably provide these Pass car trucks with the kits to enable later
version of the cars to be modelled along with the original Carter Bros swing motion freight trucks.
The colour scheme here is based on 'as built' colours, from what I can glean from Randy Hees' paint scrapes on the original. The interior in reality was probably more sparse,
with way less polished woodwork! The interior here was based in part on Caboose 1010.
The model is not complete yet, with most of the iron work to be added. The windows work. they operate and slide upward and the clearstory windows required no glueing at all
around the window frames.
