page_title: Caboose
section_title: Etymology
hierarchical_section_title: Caboose / Etymology
caption_attribution_description: A "Bobber" 4-wheel caboose of the Denver &amp; Rio Grande Railroad preserved at the Colorado Railroad Museum, Golden, Colorado.
context_page_description: A caboose is a manned North American railroad car coupled at the end of a freight train. Cabooses provide shelter for crew at the end of a train, who were formerly required in switching and shunting, keeping a lookout for load shifting, damage to equipment and cargo, and overheating axles.
  Originally flatcars fitted with cabins or modified box cars, they later became purpose-built with projections above or to the sides of the car to allow crew to observe the train from shelter. The caboose also served as the conductor's office, and on long routes included accommodation and cooking facilities.
  A similar railroad car, the brake van, was used on British and Commonwealth railways. On trains not fitted with continuous brakes, brake vans provided a supplementary braking system, and they helped keep chain couplings taut.
  Cabooses were used on every freight train in the United States until the 1980s, when safety laws requiring the presence of cabooses and full crews were relaxed. Developments in monitoring and safety technology, such as lineside defect detectors and end-of-train devices, resulted in crew reductions and the phasing out of caboose cars.
context_section_description: Railroad historian David L. Joslyn (a retired Southern Pacific Railroad draftsman) has traced the possible root of "caboose" to the obsolete Low German word Kabhuse, a small cabin erected on a sailing ship's main deck.  This was absorbed into Middle Dutch and entered the Dutch language circa 1747 as kabhuis, the compartment on a ship's main deck in which meals were prepared. In modern Dutch, kombuis is equivalent to  galley. 
  Eighteenth century French naval records also make reference to a cambose or camboose, which described both the food preparation cabin on a ship's main deck and its stove.  Camboose may have entered English through American sailors who had come into contact with their French allies during the American Revolution.  It was already in use in U.S. naval terminology by the 1797 construction of the USS Constitution, whose wood-burning food preparation stove is known as the camboose. In modern French, cambuse can refer both to a ship's storeroom and to the North-American railcar.
  Camboose as a cook shack was in use in English at least by 1805, when it was used in a New York Chronicle article cited in the New English Dictionary describing a New England shipwreck, which reported that "[Survivor] William Duncan drifted aboard the canboose  [sic]." As the first railroad cabooses were wooden shanties erected on flat cars as early as the 1830s, they would have resembled the cook shack on a ship's deck.
  The earliest known printed record of "caboose" used to describe the railcar appeared in 1859 in court records in conjunction with a lawsuit filed against the New York and Harlem Railway.
  The most common pluralization of caboose is "cabooses". 
  It was common for railroads to officially refer to cabooses as "cabin cars."
caption: A two-axled "bobber" cupola caboose at the Colorado Railroad Museum, known for the uneven ride its lack of trucks created
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