House for Sale | How to Get Back on the Track
For train buffs looking for a place to hang their hat, this vintage caboose could be just the ticket.
By Yankee Editors|Jan 01 2010|
Originally published in the March 1975 issue of Yankee.
We‘ve always felt that when retirement comes along we’d like to live out our remaining days on a tugboat or in a caboose. Found a tugboat for sale in Portland Harbor last year (for one dollar yet!), but a week later a Long Island man bought it and moved it out to his island somewhere off Rockland.
Now we‘ve finally found a caboose for sale. And it‘s a real nice one. The interior has been completely remodeled with six bunks, a modern kitchen, oil furnace, 110-volt power hookup, recirculating john, etc. It’s being offered for $7,500, fully furnished; i.e., complete with linens, kitchenware, marker lamps and such.
At this moment Caboose C-90—that‘s its official designation (it was formerly a Boston & Maine and a Lehigh & New England)—is sitting on leased storage track in downtown North Conway, New Hampshire. The land is owned by Conway Scenic Railroad, which operates an 11-mile steam train ride starting the last weekend in May. A couple of tracks over from the caboose is the newly restored North Conway depot, built in 1874, now housing a gift shop, railroad museum and ticket office.
You can leave the caboose right where it is and pay $50 per month for rent of land and track. Or—it could be transported by truck or rail to another location. The lady who owns it is a teacher at Bradford Junior College in Massachusetts, and she has entrusted the sale to the president of Conway Scenic Railroad, Dwight A. Smith. If whoever of you buys it wants to sell it again about four years from now, let us know. About then we‘ll be ready for retirement and … unless a tugboat comes along ….
