CV Wood Caboose Paint Schemes

Caboose 4012 at Montville, Conn. 

(Photos from Bob's Photos, author's collection, unless otherwise noted). 

From the early 1920s through the 1970s Central Vermont rostered two distinct types of cabooses. I should add that at some points in time and in some areas the term "van" was used to describe a caboose. My understanding is that "van" was more common on the Northern Division of the railroad, which makes some sense since it obviously originated with the Canadian National.  

The first style of caboose consisted of three cars (4050-4052). These were also the first cabooses built for the CV by an outside builder. American Car & Foundry (AC&F) delivered these cars in 1923. They featured a steel underframe with wood bodies. These were very similar in basic dimensions to the "Northeastern" caboose used by a number of railroads such as the Lehigh Valley, LNE, Western Maryland and others. The primary difference was most of this style of caboose had steel bodies, but the CV cars were wood. 

CV 4007, East New London, Conn. (Bob's Photos).

The remaining CV wood cabooses were a total of 28 cars numbered between 4000-4030. The majority of these were rebuilt from previous cabooses or wood boxcars in the St. Albans shops, but they were remarkably similar in appearance and detail. Two exceptions were 4006 and 4021  - I suspect they replaced two previous cars with the same numbers or at the very least they were extensive enough rebuilds of those two cars that the CV Car Classification sheets noted they were "built" in 1951. 

This post is not meant to be a detailed history of CV cabooses - instead I thought I'd share some images that show some of the various paint schemes used on the wooden cars from the early 1920s through the 1970s. The photos will show one or two variations, but essentially there are three different schemes used on CV cabooses. 

Scheme 1: The first was all "brown" or freight car red, with "Central Vermont" spelled out in Roman lettering along the top of the side. 

AC&F Builder's Photo of CV 4050 shows off the early 1920s paint and lettering scheme. 

CV 4013, one of the home built "long" cabooses, shows off her original lettering scheme. 

Scheme 1a: The Central Vermont lettering got smaller and was on the lower portion of the carbody. See photo of 4013 below for an example of the size and placement of the Central Vermont lettering. 

Scheme 1b: Same paint scheme as Scheme 1a with "Rocket" slogan lettering. There were actually at least two different styles of Rocket lettering that I've seen photos of, one of which is shown on 4013 below. The other was a square box type logo that was centered on the car side. 

By 1939 the Central Vermont was still Railroad Roman but had gotten smaller and moved to the lower portion of the side. Some cabooses, like this one, got the flashy "Rocket" lettering. 

Scheme 2: Starting in the early 1940s paint scheme shifted from all brown to a combination of Red #11 underframe and trucks and orange body. This coincided with a shift to the "stacked Gothic" style lettering on its freight cars and cabooses. "Central" and "Vermont" were stacked above one another with the car number below.

CV 4006 shows off her then-new paint scheme of Red underframe and orange body. (Also note how dirty these cabooses got in service!) 

Scheme 2a: Shortly after the introduction of the Canadian National's "Super Continental" paint scheme the CV adopted a Maple Leaf logo. Close comparison will reveal the CV leaf had a slightly different shape than the "standard" CN leaf. The Maple Leaf was added to the cabooses with the words "Central Vermont Railway" spelled out in three lines inside the leaf. The car number also moved to a different position on the car side (usually to the left) with this lettering. 

Here's our old friend, 4013, in the post 1954 or so "Maple Leaf" scheme. By this point 4013 had received the open slat steps. A note for modelers - these are a neat detail to add to your CV caboose fleet! 

CV 4019 at Essex Junction shows how the cars weathered, but you can see tell the underframe and trucks were painted a different color than the car body. 

CV 4050, Scheme 2a (Maple Leaf) scheme. Note the placement of the car number. 

Scheme 3: Orange car bodies with black underframes and intertwined "CV". This would have first appeared in 1963 or so. The CV logo was in roughly the same position below the cupola, with the car numbers (and "CV" initials) along the lower edge of the car. The size of the car numbers on the car side also increased with this paint and lettering scheme over time. 

One note on the roof colors. Although CN vans painted in the orange scheme are documented to have had Red #11 underframes AND roofs, from photos it appears as if the CV cabooses had black roofs. While the walkways may have been orange at one point, there's plenty of photographic evidence that indicates the walks may also have been black. Perhaps it was a case of the walks being orange at first and then being repainted black with the rest of the roof. For modelers, a photo of the specific car you're modeling during your era is of course the best reference! 

 

Wordless Wednesday #277

 

Southern New England Train

I was digging through the boxes of rolling stock the other day in an effort to fully populate the layout with cars. Just for the heck of it I posed an all Southern New England train and snapped some photos. 

Sharing them here:

The first two cars are from a special run of PS-1s Kadee did a few years ago. In both the older square herald scheme (above) and the maple leaf scheme (below). There was a LOT of debate on my old SNE Yahoo (now Groups.io) mailing list about which scheme was the most appropriate. Personally I prefer the square herald since it doesn't read like a CN car. But I sent the North Shore club (that actually commissioned and sold the cars) both sets of art work. Perhaps they couldn't decide and went with both?!!

The next three cars show how most of the SNE cars are decorated ("decorated" may be too fancy a term!) in accordance with Central Vermont practices. Cars are one color - CN Red #11, with plain white lettering. All three of these (Accurail) cars (the gondola, hopper, and single sheathed boxcar) are painted the same color. In fact I painted them at the same time. Guess I really need to weather that single sheathed boxcar!

Not in the train in the lead photo (it was already out on the layout!) is one of the SNE's 50-foot boxcars. Central Vermont didn't have any 50 footers until the early 1960s, but that's the magic of freelancing. This is either a Proto 2000 or Branchline 50 foot boxcar (I honestly don't remember which but suspect it's a Proto 2000) car. I got some feedback years ago (again, on the SNE Groups.io chat list) that I should have used the square herald. I didn't since I didn't have decals for that herald, so I went with the maple leaf. I also opted not to spell out the roadname to the left of the door since the spelled out Southern New England lettering looked a little small on vast expanse of car side! Note the embarrassing obvious decal film showing around the reporting marks....

Walthers did a Grand Trunk three window caboose that I quickly adopted as the SNE standard long caboose. To make it look a little more like a CV van I replaced the Walthers cupola with one from Funaro resin CV caboose kits (each kit included a couple of styles of cupola) 

As I said before some days I really miss the ole' SNE stuff.... they're not necessarily the best models I've ever built but it's like seeing old friends. 

Wordless Wednesday #257

 

Dick Nelson photo, St. Albans, Vt., c. 1957

Wordless Wednesday #199

Three of John Paganoni's scratchbuild vans on Paul Dolkos' former B&M layout

Wordless Wednesday #197

Something I need to get back to...

I recently unpacked my Mac desktop and set it up in the office in the new house. Knowing that this machine would be packed up for a while once we moved, I'd transferred a bunch of information to a portable hard drive that I figured I could use with my laptop while we were living in the apartment. 
One of the things I intended to work on during this "between layout (and house!) time" was the artwork for some Central Vermont lettering - especially things like the flatcars and MofW cars. 
Of course I transferred the Illustrator file that I'd started working on several years ago to the hard drive. 
Great, except that I neglected to remember that I didn't have Illustrator loaded on the laptop. 
The screen capture above serves as a reminder that I'd like to get back to this project. 
First I have find all the bits and pieces on this machine!

Resin Freight Car Cleanup tips

If your summer has been as wet as ours has been perhaps you were Googling "ark building" when you stumbled across this blog. 
In the interest of providing something useful on this blog I'll go ahead and offer a few tidbits on preparing resin kits. That's a perfect task for the summer modeling season. 
These are bits and pieces of a planned eBook on building and detailing rolling stock. While I still hope to finish that book - someday - in the meantime here's a couple of things from the cutting room floor.


Cleaning up the parts 
No matter the manufacturer, I start by cleaning the parts before assembly, and then follow up with a pre-painting touch up cleaning. 
Different manufacturers use different mold releases - some of them are really hard to clean off completely - and you won't realize it's still there until you try to paint the model and the paint either beads up or comes off in sheets. Sylvan mold release seems to be the toughest. 
I've tried warm soapy water, Goo Gone, Sylvan resin prep (which I'm pretty sure is some form of Goo gone), but one thing I've found always works pretty well is Shout. After removing the resin sheets from the tissue paper wrapping I gave each of the parts a shot of "Shout" (yes, the laundry stain pre-treat stuff) and scrub them gently with a toothbrush  before rinsing them under warm water. Then I put the parts aside to dry.

A few tools
I don't use a lot of fancy tools to build these kits, mostly a razor blade, an X-acto, some sanding sticks/files, pliers (to form wire), tweezers, a small machinists square, and starting in the last few years, an Opti-visor....

For drilling holes for grabs and brake components and the like, I prefer my drill press - but an old fashioned (but perfectly serviceable) pin vise works just as well.  Two tools that I find are really useful are shown in the photo to the right: 
The NWSL True-Sander 
Coffman right corner clamps

Removing flash

The most tedious part of building a resin freight car is cleaning up the parts.
But time and care spent on this task definitely shows on the finished model. Despite what the instructions say, I don't clean off all the parts before I start constructing the model. For one thing, I'd run out of enthusiasm before getting started, and for another I'd likely lose half the parts before getting everything together!


If there's a trick to removing the flash it's to be careful to not accidentally remove any detail that should be there. On flat kits it's quite common to find the sides or ends have some detail that needs to be preserved. A perfect example are the rivets on the side of the ends of this car - you might be tempted to sand the edge flat on your NWSL Tru-Sander - but you'd be removing the rivets and other details. The trick is to remove the flash without destroying the detail in the process.  For this, I use a razor blade held at a steep angle to scrape away the resin flash. I've found it's sometimes better to use a slightly dull razor blade for this scraping technique. A sharp, fresh blade can sometimes slice right into the resin whereas a dull blade will meet with just enough resistance that you can avoid digging into the part. 
To remove flash from openings, such as the end of this ventilated boxcar, I use a hobby knife and trim the resin flash to the edges, then use sanding sticks and/or files to true up the openings. 

Wordless Wednesday #174

CV Shower Car #4546

Ryan Mendell is building a very nicely done model of a Grand Trunk MoW car - which you can see on his blog here. 
In the comments section I mentioned how even the CV shower cars had the "Flammable" sign on the side - a common feature of most of the old CV wood work equipment. (And while I certainly thought about it, I didn't pry one of these signs off the cars laying about in East New London  yard way back when ... almost wish I had - it would make a nice conversation piece hanging on the walls in the basement.)
Back to Ryan's post. Although he's not building a shower car, my comment led to a question about what a shower car is, or was.... seems pretty obvious to me - it's a car with showers - in this case six shower stalls (and nine coat hooks??).  
Does this mean the "bunk cars" didn't have showering facilities? Honestly, I don't know. 
I do know the CV rostered three shower cars, nos.  4546-4548, from the late 1940s through at least the mid 1960s (based on the date on 4546 below).  George Dutka obtained some information about the interior arrangement of the shower cars from Jim Murphy, and included them in an early issue of the CVRHS Ambassador. Reproduced below:

A number of years ago, Pete McLachlan sent me a stack of photos of CV work equipment he photographed at St. Albans, which included a photo of CV 4546.  Based on the reweigh date, the car was weighed at St. Albans, Vt., in May, 1965, so this photo dates to after that date. I don't believe this car ever got the white maple leaf that was applied to some of the MoW equipment after 1954. In the 1950s the lettering would be identical except there wouldn't be a pregnant tapeworm logo on the side of the car. 

Note the "Flammable" sign. 

Wordless Wednesday #142

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Wordless Wednesday #14 - SNE Boxcar on Atlantic Great Eastern

A glimpse into my modeling past

Both models in the lead photo are posed on the layout I had in my parent’s basement. This is also the only picture I have of that layout, which remained in my folks basement for many years after I moved out.

I stumbled across this photo (actually, a 35mm slide that I scanned) the other day when searching for some other images. The two cars in the foreground are nothing to write home about except they represent several “firsts” in my modeling and writing careers.

As a rule I don't get emotionally attached to models that no longer meet my needs or those I feel don’t live up to my current standards. Years of frequent moves have made me pretty brutal when it comes to deciding whether to keep, sell, or even pitch old models. But for some reason I’ve kept both the NH boxcar and the milkcar. I doubt I’ll run them on the layout in regular service,  but I couldn't resist taking them out of the display case and posing them on the current layout. 

About those "firsts." The New Haven boxcar, most likely a New Haven Historical Society kit made by Funaro & Camerlengo, was the first resin house car kit I’d built. Interestingly, F&C has just recently re-released these cars, this time with one-piece bodies. When I built this one I didn’t realize you should always verify the lengths of the two sides are the same, and sand them if necessary – so the car is somewhat out of kilter. Also, I didn’t quite get the grab irons on straight. Finally, since I didn’t brace the inside of the car over time one of the side walls has developed a slight bow along its length.

The Central Vermont milkcar is also a first. It’s the first piece of rolling stock I ever scratchbuilt. I’m not positive, but I believe I built this model when home for the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college. I based the model on measurements I took of a car sitting outside Barre, Vermont. The underframe is from a cut-down Athearn express reefer that I shortened by cutting 10 or so feet out of the center and gluing back together. The car body is constructed entirely of styrene. The roof is tissue paper held in place using a heavy coat of Floquil paint. It melted the paper into the plastic. I’m not sure, but I believe the hardware came from a Grandt Line – likely a narrow gauge reefer set. The car was brush-painted using SMP Accu-paint since I didn't have an airbrush at the time. Accu-paint was as thin as printers ink, so it probably took 10 coats to get decent coverage, although there are still some "holidays" visible in the paint finish. 

The trickiest part of the milk car was the lettering – I used a New England Rail Service steam locomotive and milk car decal set for most of the car, although the “Milk” lettering in the NERS decal sheet didn’t match the prototype photo I followed. So I pieced the “Milk” lettering together from an alphabet set of dry transfers.

Both models in the lead photo are posed on the layout I had in my parent’s basement. This is also the only picture I have of that layout, which remained in my folks basement for many years after I moved out. The backdrop was hand-painted, and the trees (I was modeling autumn even then!) were made using several types of weeds with ground foam applied and colored using some of the tips and techniques in an RMC article by Les Jordan that appeared in the October 1979 issue of RMC. 

About that publishing first… I wrote an article on how I built the milkcar and submitted it to RMC. Editor Bill Schamburg, a good friend to this day, expressed an interest in it, but said I needed better photos.  Believe it or not, the photo at the top of this post represented my best effort at the time.  Bill looked it over and sent it,and the article, back to me. My old camera and equipment weren't up to the task of taking publishable model photos. 

In looking at the old photo, I’d give the technical aspects of the picture a D-. However, the scenery, although crude, wasn’t that bad. Say a C+. I won’t attempt to grade my efforts at the two cars, but it sure was fun finding this photo. 

Possible shelf model?

I have a couple of HO scale models on display in my office. And my-coworkers and our clients who regularly visit our offices always comment on them - usually there's a story about someone or another (or them) who had a Lionel train. But I've uncovered one or two "real" model railroaders in the process. 
But let's face it, even the nicest HO scale model sitting on a shelf lacks, well, "presence." 
I'm thinking maybe an O scale model would be a better choice. 
I found that Mullet Scale Model Works makes an O scale Central Vermont three-window caboose. One neat thing about their models is the way the steel components on the prototype are modeled in brass, and the wood parts are laser cut wood. A neat approach. 
I may have to build me one of these.