Making Coffee on the Old Cabooses

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Comrade Milosh von Rektormann, Imperial Landgraff of the Grand Dutch of Columbus, Ohio (or just Mike Rector, after Ellis Island got through with him) has just about pumped me dry for everything I remember about working on the old N&W cabooses.

But this morning I received an email from an old friend who had been a Trainman on the Lehigh Valley RR. He was telling me how the LV men arranged an ersatz little oven for grilling sandwiches on top of their caboose coal stoves, so I had to respond by telling him how the N&W men provided for making coffee over kerosene lamps. I had not told Mike this story, so here goes...

"We usually made our coffee over top of the chimney of one of the kerosene lamps on a caboose.Smoke Box Netting was still available... there was always a stack of that stuff around every engine terminal.A piece of that would be procured and a little wall-mounted shelf would be fabricated from it. Four sides would be bent upward, to insure the coffee pot did not get knocked off. And the resulting boxed-in shelf would be nailed to the wooden caboose wall perhaps 3" or 4" above the top of the glass lamp chimney. Worked like a charm. No need to fire up the coal stove on a Summer night... the kerosene lamps were enough to make coffee and knock off the chill, too. But when you went up into the cupola, you had to remember to turn down the lamps to a low flame, so their light would not interfere with your night vision from the cupola. When a caboose went in for shop ungrade, the shop forces just left the little coffee pot shelf in place, and painted it with the same gray paint used for the w
 alls."

There were two types of this material. One was a woven mesh made from stout steel wire... that was hard stuff to work with. The easier material to work with was just sheet steel, about 1/8" or 3/16" thick, with oblong cutouts punched into it. Many times I wish I had brought a piece of that stuff home...

Codicil: There were a few of the old 1926-hire Punkin Vine Conductors (like Bernard C. Kirk and Casey O. Young) who had large coffee pots made from heavy-gauge sheet copper. Bernard told me his was made in Roanoke Shops, and any Conductor could go down to that place and request one. Old Bernard was a real Prince Among Men. Treated his men well and always went out of his way to instruct new men on Train Orders and other things they needed to know... he was a good teacher. His caboose was cleaner than Hotel Roanoke... and he even had curtains on the windows, too ! He also painted the outside of his caboose and lettered it, too (while laying over at North Winston,) until the Carmen complained that he was taking their work and the Trainmaster made him stop. I asked Bernard if he paid for the paint himself, and he told me he got it from the Shaffers Crossing Shop Track !

Oh, for the Good Old Days !

-- abram burnett,
The Turnip-Patch Pitch-Fork Mafia
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