One of the questions we get asked all the time is "How the heck did you get those cabooses there?" It's actually a pretty complicated process.
The first thing you have to do is find cabooses for sale. When the Featherbed Railroad Company was founded in 1988 the railroads were retiring cabooses. In those days it was easy to find retired cabooses and they were relatively inexpensive. But, you still had to get them where you wanted them.
So, Kelly & Sherry McLean and Len and Lorraine Bassignani found nine cabooses and used the McLean's expertise in moving (they own Broadway Moving and Storage - a great company!) to move the cabooses here. Essentially, to move a Caboose, you have to put it on a special trailer called a Low Boy. Each caboose weighs approximately 50 tons, so you also need one heck of a truck to pull that trailer.
Once you've got the cabooses to the location where you want them, the next trick is getting them off the truck and to their permanent home. First, you lay track according to Federal guidelines. Then you place the wheels.
Then you get the best crane operator you can find to lift the cabooses off the Low Boy and onto the wheels on the track. This crane operator has to be good enough to miss tree limbs, bushes, electrical wires and even the guy who might want to stand under the caboose while it's in the air!
To turn a caboose into a permanent building you weld the wheels to the track and then bring in plumbing, electrical and gas. Now you've got a permanent building.
The next step is to take an empty, rusty metal "building" and turn it into a unique guest suite with all the amenities. We're still working on that side of the story and hope to get pictures, but we'll be happy to show you how a caboose looked before it became a suite - we have one left like that hidden away in the back.