Jerry Tyler had a full-size caboose parked in his backyard on Duck Lake Road for 42 years. It had been for sale for a few years, but moving it presented challenges. It was parked on a low part of his property, about six feet below level ground. Also, the caboose, built in 1890, was just placed on the unattached ‘trucks’ (a railroad term for the 4-wheel assemblies at each end of a rail car).
However, he eventually did sell it and it had to be moved this summer. At age 90, the time had come for him to say goodbye to the car.
Tyler grew up in Muskegon near the railyard. He could see the trains from the family home, which included a bakery. As a youngster, he sometimes took a paper bag of donuts to the rail crews which might lead to the tour of an engine or a short train ride.
“As a kid, the railyard was my playground,” he said.
He has been involved with railroading most of his life and worked for the Grand Trunk Western Railroad for 10 years, starting in 1955 when he was 20. In June 1964 he was promoted to Locomotive Engineer. The locomotives were steam-powered but were being replaced by diesels which needed fewer crew members, so at age 29 he was laid off.
He has some exciting, if not fond, memories of being on the rails. As a teenager, he and a couple of buddies decided to hop a train for a short, two-mile ride into Muskegon but ended up in Grand Rapids. They hitchhiked home the next day. Another time, not yet an engineer, he drove three engines away from a burning building, successfully driving across a main street to save the equipment.
His caboose was moved from the Brown & Morris Industrial Furniture yard in 1975, where it had been for 15 years. The 21-ton car, with the inside stripped clean, was moved with a semi and a lowboy trailer. Needing restoration, it was positioned on a short set of rails with a bumper block made in the 1800s.
It took him five years to finish the exterior and even longer to get the essential interior appointments.
Over the years, he helped restore six other cabooses. Some of these had extra pieces he needed for his own.
The railroad company had a list of required items for a caboose. These included a stretcher, mounted near the ceiling, three cots for the conductor, and two brakemen and warning flares and flags to be used up-rail if the train was stopped. Tyler was able to get most of these items. Nearly all of them included the company initials to discourage theft. A hand saw, hatchet and hammer were kept behind a glass panel for the same reason. There had to be a good reason for anyone to break the glass.
In all his years working on the rails, he only made one trip in a caboose. Why a caboose in his back yard when he never worked in one?
“It would be too much work to get an engine down here,” he said as he smiled.
Now, Erickson’s, specializing in transporting large, heavy items, was making the move.
To provide a surface for the rail wheels to run on and prevent other equipment from destroying the lawn, two layers of 4 feet by 8 feet, high-density plastic Dura-Base mats were used to made a ‘road’ for moving the caboose.
The two trucks were chained to the frame under the caboose and an all-terrain Manitou forklift was chained to the coupler on the caboose. It took the crew an hour and a half to move it to level ground. Power lines near the house had to be raised and the move continued. By the end of the day, the old caboose was close to Duck Lake Road.
Two Manitou fork lifts, each capable of lifting 48,000 pounds, were used to lift the caboose onto a trailer. The destination was in Dalton Township about eight miles away. The moving process was slow, as an Erickson’s crewmember walked in front of the truck and trailer.
The next day, the rail section and bumper block were pulled from Tyler’s backyard as one unit by a Manitou, was loaded on a lowboy trailer and moved to the new location.
With this project now behind him, Tyler can spend more ‘railroad time’ with his Lionel and Marx model train layouts. Included in his cars are two 0-Gage, 1:48 scale cabooses he hand-built from scratch. One is identical to his real caboose, while the other one has a different style roof cupola.
The big Grand Trunk Western caboose is gone, but will remain in Tyler’s memory while the little ones will remain in his basement.
