Centralia Car Shops NE-5 B&M caboose 405

[sd40dash2]

This one arrived in the mail the other day.






I added uncoupling levers, painted the end grabs, replaced the couplers with Kadee 158s (trip pin removed) and lightly weathered the trucks, couplers, ends and underframe. Nice easy project.




Judging by the box art, this appears to have been a custom run by Des Plains Hobbies.





I've been aware of the various Centralia cabooses for a long time but this was the first one I've owned. Nice model but it doesn't look like many of these are being made anymore. Thankfully eBay allows for relatively easy purchasing of old stock like this over time.

[carrman]

I hope the Centralia cars are able to be made again since Ron Sebastian passed away.

[Colin 't Hart]

They also have tooling for a Soo Line caboose which has only been used to release products in kit form. Maybe time for a RTR version?

[sd40dash2]

Oct 17, 2019 23:22:53 GMT -8 Colin 't Hart said:

They also have tooling for a Soo Line caboose which has only been used to release products in kit form. Maybe time for a RTR version?

Here's the 2002 MR review:

mrr.trains.com/news-reviews/staff-reviews/2002/05/centralia-ho-scale-soo-line-wooden-caboose

Yeah, it's odd they would have spent all that money to tool up a model and only do one kit run. But if the owner (?) has passed on as suggested above we may never see this again. Must be a popular kit as I see very few of them on ebay.

[sd40dash2]

Oct 17, 2019 18:27:37 GMT -8 carrman said:

I hope the Centralia cars are able to be made again since Ron Sebastian passed away.

Thank you for this. I was unaware of his passing which seems to have happened very recently.

model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/37605

www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?3,4877110

[ambluco]

I believe Intermountain owns them. I have other runs under the CCS name from Intermountain.

[stevewagner]

I'm not sure whether InterMountain owns any former Centralia Car Shops tooling, but I have four ready-to-run B&M cabooses of this same type in four different paint schemes that InterMountain sold that were produced using CCS tooling. I have an Illinois Central side-door steel caboose and a Union Pacific steel caboose produced by Centralia itself. A few years ago I bought a Soo Line styrene wood caboose kit produced by CCS for DesPlaines Hobbies at the West Springfield, MA, show, but it was lost or stolen that same day. One of the real Soo cabeese of that kind ended up in New England and I think is now at the Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum in Willimantic.

[Colin 't Hart]

I understood that Intermountain only does the distribution.

[Colin 't Hart]

Oct 18, 2019 3:48:28 GMT -8 sd40dash2 said:

Must be a popular kit as I see very few of them on ebay.

They do appear from time-to-time, and can go for more than what they retailed for originally.

I was lucky to be able to pick up two in the last year or so at an average of just under original retail including postage. Postage to me here in Sweden was more of course...

[Colin 't Hart]

I wonder if Dennis Storzek tooled the Centralia Car Shops styrene version of the Soo Caboose kit? He has also tooled a resin version -- these are just as rare and generally sell for around $60 -- which is not a bad price for what is probably quite a nice resin kit.

[stevewagner]

Colin, you might e-mail Dennis Storzek at Accurail to ask him. He certainly has answered some e-mails I've sent him.

[rockfan]

Very nice caboose!

[lvrr325]

I have a UP caboose in similar packaging I got from a guy dumping at GTE in Albany a mostly western collection. I got it to be a fairly close stand-in for some that made it to Sayre, PA as run-throughs (right caboose, not quite the right paint).