Bluford Shops - 21180 - Caboose, Transfer - Texas Mexican - 316

Model Information: This model features: Fox Valley Metal wheels and Wire grabs and cut levers.

This short body bay window caboose design was developed by International Car and MoPac in the 1970s. Several other railroads used very similar cars. These were assigned to road service and were NOT transfer cabooses.

Prototype History: A transfer caboose looks more like a flat car with a shed bolted to the middle of it than it does a standard caboose. It is used in transfer service between rail yards or short switching runs, and as such, lacks sleeping, cooking or restroom facilities. The ends of a transfer caboose are left open, with safety railings surrounding the area between the crew compartment and the end of the car.

A recent variation on the transfer caboose is the "pushing" or "shoving" platform. It can be any railcar where a brakeman can safely ride for some distance to help the engineer with visibility at the other end of the train. Flatcars and covered hoppers have been used for this purpose, but often the pushing platform is a caboose that has had its windows covered and welded shut and permanently locked doors. CSX uses former Louisville & Nashville short bay window cabooses and former Conrail waycars as pushing platforms.

From Wikipedia

Road Name History: The Texas Mexican name first appeared in 1881 during a reorganization of a previous three foot gauge line linking the Gulf port of Corpus Christi, Texas and the city of Loredo on the Mexican border. The line was 157 miles long putting it between Spokane International and Duluth Winnipeg & Pacific in relative size. The TM was standard-gauged in 1902.

Since 1900, TM was owned by the Mexican government through a trust administered in New York. The TM acted as a funnel for traffic to and from Mexico, in fact the end of the line was half way across a bridge over the Rio Grande west of Loredo. The bridge, which was completed in 1883 was the first direct railroad connection between the U.S.A. and another country (the first connection to Canada that didn’t involve a ferry followed six years later!)

TM completely dieselized in 1939 with a fleet of 7 Whitcomb boxcabs. These strange little diesels had four axels set in a rigid frame. That sounds a little, well rigid, by diesel standards but think of it as a diesel powered 0-8-0. A few years later, TM built a few diesels themselves with 4 powered axels in a rigid frame plus a pair of un-powered leading wheels – essentially a diesel 2-8-0. They even built another diesel from an old baggage car.

TM did go on to buy more sensible locomotives including Baldwin switchers, EMD F7’s, and 7, 9, 18, 28, and 38 series geeps. By the 1980’s, there were 16 various geeps on the roster. For a while in the 1980s, TM provided passenger service under the name TexMex Express between Corpus Christi and Loredo with some success.

In 1982, the Mexican government sold their stake in TM to a Mexican company. As the privatization of the Mexican National Railways (FNM) loomed, Kansas City Southern was assembling a system to take advantage of new traffic moving north and south due to the passage of the NAFTA treaty. KCS was positioning itself to acquire a large stake in the “Northeast Concession” (that would become TFM) in the privatization of FNM. Over a period of several years, shares in Texas Mexican were traded back and forth between KCS and companies in Mexico. KCS officially took control of TM in 2005 when they also purchased all remaining shares of TFM. That left a gap between Corpus Christi and the end of the KCS at Beaumont, Texas. KCS had already leveraged trackage rights over Union Pacific to bridge that gap in exchange for not fighting UP’s acquisition of Southern Pacific. Today, TM is a wholly owned subsidiary of KCS and operations are largely integrated into those of KCS.

Brand/Importer Information: Bluford Shops began in 2007 as a side project of two model railroad industry veterans, Craig Ross and Steve Rodgers. They saw a gap between road names available on N scale locomotives but not available on cabooses. They commissioned special runs of Atlas cabooses in Atlantic Coast Line, Central of Georgia, Monon, Boston & Maine and Southern plus runs on Grand Trunk Western and Central Vermont on the MDC wooden cabooses. While these were in process, they began to develop their first all new tooling project, 86' Auto Parts Boxcars in double door and quad door editions in N scale. By January of 2008, Bluford Shops became a full time venture. Along with additional N scale freight cars and their own tooling for new cabooses, they have brought their own caboose line to HO scale. They also have their popular Cornfields in both HO and N. The future looks bright as they continue to develop new products for your railroad.

The town of Bluford in southern Illinois featured a small yard on Illinois Central's Edgewood Cutoff (currently part of CN.) The yard included a roundhouse, concrete coaling tower (which still stands) and large ice house. Reefer trains running between the Gulf Coast and Chicago were re-iced in Bluford. Things are more quiet now in Bluford with the remaining tracks in the yard used to stage hoppers for mines to the south and store covered hoppers. Intersecting the IC line in Bluford is Southern Railway's (currently NS) line between Louisville and St. Louis. Traffic on this single track line remains relatively heavy.