A Bit More Progress on Caboose

I made a bit more progress on the caboose project for our garden railroad over the past few days.  I am definitely at a nice stopping point now.  I think I can call this little project "completed".  I'll probably change a few more things in the future but, for now, this project is done.

Here is a photo, below, showing the 'before' version of this caboose when I first purchased it...  note that this caboose started life with only two axles and four wheels...  no window panes...  no lighting...  shiny molded plastic with molded-in color...   and, generally, very toy-like...  there really was nothing special nor attractive about it.  It didn't even roll well!

My goal was to make it a bit more realistic-looking and I had a lot of ideas.  

The first thing I wanted to do was to remove those two axles and replace them with two typical railroad trucks which would make it roll much more smooothly.  This required a lot of cutting and then rebuilding areas to allow for mounting the two new trucks.  Since the original two axles and four wheels were mostly plastic, just adding the two metal trucks alone probably tripled the total weight of this caboose but now it looks much better and rolls much more smoothly.  

The rest of the photos, below, show my finished caboose...

The caboose got a new paint job mostly to cover that shiny plastic look and I added some extra paint details and a subdued two-tone color scheme...

I added end-of-train lighting in the form of two lanterns mounted on the rear of the caboose.  This detail is a really nice touch.  

I weathered the whole caboose...  perhaps slightly more heavily than I had planned but I think it looks better than a perfectly clean caboose.  What is also very obvious in this photo due to the sunlight reflections is that I added window panes to all the windows.  I also added awnings over every side window.  These little window details made a huge difference!

As it gets darker outside in these photos, it is becoming easier to see that I also added interior lighting.  You can just begin to see, in the photo below on the truss bridge, that there is a soft glow on the interior of the caboose...

I added two figures to this caboose...  the obvious one is the woman at the rear of the caboose...  the other figure is up in the cupola which can be seen in one of the photos further down the page...

During my painting process of adding weathering details, I also used powders to add some rust details such as seen in the coupler below as well as on the new trucks in the following photo...

Here is a close-up of one of the new end-of-train lanterns.  You can also see the new awning over this one window...

Here is the photo of the conductor sitting in the cupola.  There is also an interior light in this cupola making it easier to see the conductor.  I added an additional warm light to one end of the interior of the caboose.  

I painted and weathered the planks for the catwalks on each end of the caboose roof...

The lighting for this caboose is powered by a rechargeable 9 volt battery which is mounted inside the caboose on the floor.  That is the one part of this caboose kitbash that I was not completely happy with...  now, to recharge the battery, I need to remove the under-carriage of the caboose to gain access to this battery which isn't ideal.  It is just clipped in with four clips but it is still a bit finicky.  

The under-carriage required a lot of work in order to convert this from two axles to four axles on two trucks.  It required a lot of cutting and then adding some bolsters for mounting the two trucks.  Plus, I bulked up the under-carriage with some timbers and even added a toolbox on each side.  

This was a nice little project and, for now, I am done working on this caboose.  I'm pretty happy with the results and this is a nice addition to our little garden railroad!