For lots of people who aren’t living the RV life, they look at we travelers as modern-day hobos. And, in some ways, they’re right. Right? We are vagabonds, traveling the country and seeing the sights.

But how do you truly celebrate the hobo lifestyle? Well, what about a tiny RV built to look like a caboose? A few years ago I actually built one, sort of. It’s still out there but here’s an idea for doing just this. That I actually did.

Sorta.

A caboose-shaped RV

To call this an RV would be a bit of a stretch in some circles because it basically started out life as a motorcycle trailer. As such it was pretty small, had a tilt bed and those tiny wheels that I remember seeing under the old Coleman pop-up trailers of my childhood.

In fact I can still hear my dad.

“Those darned wheels are spinning so fast I’m surprised they’d don’t disintegrate right in front of us.”

The first thing that had to be done was to take years of neglect out of the motorcycle trailer since we got it out of a field. Once the floor and the metal parts got sanded, badly because I am not that diligent, the construction begun.

Since anything I build is likely going to fall apart shortly after I show it to the first of my friends, I enlisted the help of a friend with the construction.

We first started with plywood walls and then built the cross-sections with curved tops. The idea was to create a trailer that looked like one of the Santa Fe cabooses that were part of the bed and breakfast we used to own. As such, that meant that we were going to have to figure out how to create a bowed roof.

But that was a problem for future us.

The exterior walls of caboose were then built out of that textured wall board that I would see on the walls of some houses in the area. Not usually the fancier houses, but the ones that came in on wheels. We had a lot of modular homes in the area.

Our local hardware store was always a treasure trove of things that people had ordered but never picked up and there were smaller plastic windows in that section of the store that caught my eye. It seemed that the odd size of these meant nobody was interested and they kept getting less expensive until I figured someone would buy them so that someone became me.

Little red caboose

Now that the caboose walls were finished, it was time for some paint.

I didn’t realize this before I moved to a rural community, but barn paint is a real thing. Believe it or not, there is actually a barn red paint and it’s one of the cheapest kinds of paint I could find. Since I figured cabooses should be red and barn red was cheap, you’ll never guess what color the caboose ended-up being.

Okay, barn red.

The roof

Even though we had created the bows so the roof could be bowed, we hadn’t figured out how we were going to put a roof on this thing yet. So, back to our local hardware store where we were looking for another bargain.

Seeing noting in the regular hardware department we meandered out to the garden section and that’s where I found steel galvanized corrugated pieces. Once again, someone else’s inability to make decisions, or at least a purchase, was our gain.

The garden section would, apparently, cut you pieces of this metal material and then I don’t know what their intentions were with the remainder but they were marked way down. I cleared out these as well along with some tin snips and we found that the various pieces could be cut such that they would work really, really well.

Oops

Towing the caboose trailer with a Corvette.

If I hadn’t mentioned it before we actually never had plans at all for this thing. I sort of had a vision and my buddy, Jason, had some skills. But that’s about where it all ended. The third wheel in this tricycle of a project was the local hardware store. Often decisions were made more based on cost and availability more than anything else.

If it would do, it would do. And it could be cut to fit.

The last bit of the puzzle was the back. We wanted to make it such that we could put things, like ourselves, inside the caboose. But things like hinges and latches cost money so we were back to alternative ideas.

What we came up with was about the most inconvenient “door” you could imagine. Essentially the door was just another piece of the same wood that we used for all the rest of the sides of this build.

A piece was cut to fit in the hole and then we did go back to ye olde hardware store for one last thing - a gate latch. The thinking was that the weight of the door would keep it in place in transit and the gate latch would be the final piece of this puzzle of retention to make sure the door didn’t fall off when rattling down the street.

So the door fell off when rattling down the street.

More latches were installed which solved the problem. Unless you were inside.

As mentioned, the back was just a single sheet of that exterior wood siding stuff held in by one, er, now two gate latches. We also put a couple of handles on the door as you literally had to unlatch it and lift it out.

Lifting the back door off the caboose trailer

Hinges. We don’t need no stinking hinges.

Oh, and lifting it out was a process because it had become pretty weighty.

But if you were inside the caboose and it were latched closed, you were stuck inside there.

This happened to friends of ours who volunteered to be in the caboose in a parade, throwing candy out the windows as it was being towed down the street by one of our guests in a Corvette.

At the end of the parade the driver went off with the rest of his car club and, well, our friends were locked in the back of the caboose trailer. Of course by the end of the parade both our friend and her daughter had a lot of interest in finding a restroom. But there was no provision for that inside the caboose.

Finally Peggy found them and released them so they could release the coffees that they had enjoyed while they were still in their original form.

While the caboose never did make much of a camper, it was a great way to tell the story of the bed and breakfast we owned which was actually made of railroad cabooses. Real ones.

Funny thing I parked it out on the highway at one point with a big arrow on the roof to attract attention and it did just that, but with the wrong audience. Someone actually stole the caboose trailer and took it up into the hills surrounding the B&B.

Caboose trailer interior? Maybe…maybe not.

You have to sometimes wonder about people as, by this time, the caboose had the business’s logo on the side and the big green arrow on the top. So it wasn’t at all inconspicuous. And, this unique style meant it could be found quite easily so a neighbor went and retrieved it.

People.

The interior

Oh, right. What does this look like inside. Well, here’s one possibility.

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