Poll... western style transition era caboose

done

You do realize that as far as generic goes, they have already been done. Prior to the late 1960's all cabooses were made by the railroads themselves.

Only the Wide Vision cabooses AZL offer can be considered generic western style.

Every other all steel caboose of western style is road specific. ATFS is the Marklin caboose, AZL did the SP style, UP style, Bay Window style, and Offset Cupola. Center Cupolas's tended to be Eastern roads.

For the most part, every caboose was custom made specific for a railroad, that wasn't made by that railroad, so it's going to be very difficult to select a prototype. Look what MTL did with the dilemma, they choose an Eastern US caboose style that resembled what most roads were running then, and just painted that model with western roadnames. I Know, I'm just one of those guys who are caboose sensitive.

If only Rob Ray still sold caboose kits. Nothing injected molded will look as good for an early road specific wood caboose. But it is about time Z scale had a good steel offset-copula caboose.

By AZL........in the year 200?



Best,
Sven

I've done the same, really easy to do. I just suck at painting.


Luckily, Marklin has two different versions of Milwaukee Road cabooses I've done, although only one is prototypical.

I've got a BN and NP one too.

It seems to me that generically speaking the current arsenal of Z-scale cabooses covers a lot of ground, in theory at least. (meaning...mostly...availability)

Here's what I see would solve some of the demand...
1. Marklin doing another run of their offset cupola cabooses with knuckle couplers.   Maybe since they collaborate with AZL, then AZL could take this on somehow.  This could give you a more widely available and less expensive version versus AZL's brass Ce-1.  Primarily pointing toward the ATSF market but you could fudge quite a few "close" roads as well.
2. Micro-Trains expanding the roadnames of their "NE-5" style caboose.  New Haven, for starters. (been trying to piece together decals for one of these for quite a while and it's not easy)   I'm sure there are other schemes of interest.
3. Re-run of the Animek Rio Grande caboose kits.
4. Re-run of the AZL EV Cabooses.  Among others, MKT would be a good road since there are now GP38-2's, pending SW1500's, the MTL SD40-2's, etc.
5. Re-runs of the AZL brass.   Wouldn't expect that every other year, but every 5-10 years would seem reasonable.  Guessing everything but the Ce-1's is approaching 10 years or more.   Maybe start a list and when you hit the magic number?


I agree that the "Early wood/rebuilt wood-steel" cabooses are probably underrepresented for sure.  I know Athearn did one in N/HO that seemed to be fairly popular so that might be something to emulate.  One problem there might be companion rolling stock like era-matched boxcars and so forth for the wood cars. (and even locos, too)

But really, Robert summed it up best...cabooses are pretty road specific and if the above aren't appropriate and/or easily found, it sounds like a good candidate for Shapeways or another 3D-printed option of some sort.   And yeah, I get it painting and decaling are a challenge.  And with AZL, MTL, et al products having pretty nice decoration it really does make them attractive sources for good rolling stock.