Train of Thought for Buying or Selling a Caboose
It happens to everyone.
You wake up one morning and don’t feel quite the same about something you moved heaven and earth to get. You experience no blinding revelations or quotable insights, but even so you realize: Love is not always forever.
If you’re Saylor S. Milton, you take a deep breath, place a classified ad, and hope for the “closure” that everyone these days seems to so desperately seek.
Someone, somewhere will provide it. For, in a world where the last seldom come first, a small cadre of joyous eccentrics would rather have a caboose than a locomotive--or a Mercedes, or anything else.
And one of them will almost certainly buy yours.
Seven years ago, Milton, a 67-year-old citrus rancher, went to great lengths to buy himself a caboose. He owns Fillmore Self Storage and figured he would set up his office there in an old train car.
Milton outlined a number of well-worn reasons for doing this.
He told me he’s a train buff.
He told me he fondly remembers the troop trains roaring by his family’s summer cottage at Faria Beach during World War II--the GIs waving, the beach dwellers waving back.
He told me an office in a caboose would be a distinctive attraction for his business. He thought maybe he would even set up a dummy conductor in the window.
These are sound enough reasons for a man to desire a caboose, but I think they obscure the real reason.
Years ago, I interviewed an elderly Minnesotan who had amassed a ball of twine that was said to be the world’s largest.
“Why did you want the world’s biggest ball of twine?” I asked him.
He delivered his answer in the slow, deliberate tones one uses when dealing with an idiot.
“I wanted the world’s biggest ball of twine,” he said, “so I could have the world’s biggest ball of twine.”
Can cabooses be far behind?
*
A broker found the caboose that was to be Milton’s on a siding near a lumber yard in Sacramento. Nobody knows how long it had languished there.
In 1978, it was christened number 999375 at the factory of the International Car Co. For a while it roamed the Midwest on the old Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe line. Then it plied the tracks between Bakersfield and Sacramento until the day it was “surplussed,” a victim of advancing train technology.
New pressure gauges made it unnecessary to have a brakeman in the rear car; the nation’s cabooses became obsolete, bound for service as the playthings of middle-aged men.
It took months for old 999375 to make its way down from Sacramento. Three times, it was lost, stalled for weeks on obscure sidings in obscure towns. It finally reached Santa Paula, where it was hauled to Fillmore by the tourist train based there.
“I’ve never taken a ride like that in all my life,” Milton recalled. “There was diesel soot and smoke all over the insides, but I was thrilled to death. Dirty as it was, it was my own caboose!”
The rest was easy. Milton hired a crane company to pick up the 28-ton car and set it on 60 feet of track he’d had laid in his storage yard. He dismantled the six crew members’ bunks, installed his filing cabinets, and painted the outside as red as a circus executive’s red vest.
But now he doesn’t spend as much time there. Instead, he mans the phone at his Faria Beach home, and he writes--local history, train lore, reminiscences, philosophy. He thought of a kids’ book about Susie the Caboose, but he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
For $20,000, you can bring home old 999375 and name it whatever you wish.
Maybe you need it as an extra room for a boisterous teenager.
Maybe you’d like to set up your easel in it--it’s got bay windows and plenty of light.
Maybe you’d like to start a place like the Caboose Motel in northern California, where all the rooms are cabooses lined with knotty pine.
Or--if you’re a true contender for this kind of thing--maybe you want a caboose so you can have a caboose.
“It’ll make me sad to see it gone,” Milton said. “I’ll miss it, but life goes on.”
Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
