The St. Louis-San Francisco railroad was the first to purchase a new caboose design offered by International Car Company, featuring a wider-than-normal cupola, providing the best of both cupola cabooses and bay-window cabooses. The Frisco purchased 75 of these new cars in 1957, numbering them 200 to 274 and delivered in a freight car red (also known as "brown") paint scheme. These modern cabooses featured several advances in crew comfort beside the improved visibility for the rear-end crews, including riding upon smoother-riding outside swing-hanger equalized GSC trucks (similar to those found on Union Pacific's cabooses) and the inclusion of Waugh 10-inch-travel cushioned underframes to reduce the dreaded slack action that rear-end crews dreaded on the undulating mainlines common in the Midwest. (An old Frisco brakeman I knew, James Milling, told stories about working freights in the 1950s and '60s, and being slammed against interior bulkheads when trains would pick up speed when the headend started downgrade while the caboose was still going upgrade, and again when the slack was taken in when the headend slowed as it hit an upgrade and the train’s rear was still rolling downgrade. He said he would get off at the end of a run with black and blue bruises all over his body. He was known for his colorful exaggeration, but his stories were always based upon experience.) In 1968, these cars were renumbered 1200 to 1274 in order to avoid conflicts with locomotives in the Frisco’s new computer system.
These cabooses were later painted caboose red (with a few, such as SLSF 1240, getting blue with red cupola Bicentennial schemes in the mid-1970s), and later still in the road’s final scheme of "Mandarin Orange" and white, as seen on SLSF 1216 paying a visit to Union Pacific’s Bailey Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, on August 19, 1980. (James, that old Frisco brakeman, was not a fan of this final scheme, and called the color applied "titty pink.") Clearly, locomotives were not the only equipment involved in pooling, as off-line cabooses were very common on many railroads in the 1970s and beyond.
This album will have all the Frisco pictures I find. My family moved to Ada Oklahoma in 1964 and Frisco was the most active line in Ada. Many of our friends had parents who worked for Frisco Railroad. This will be pictures of anything Frisco.
