Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The 1927 Norfolk & Western caboose that is being donated to the town of Windsor was moved by the town on Thursday, March 27, from the train car’s location in Suffolk to Repair Tech Industrial Contractors’ facility in Franklin for exterior renovations.

The Windsor Town Council had previously reached a consensus to pursue acquisition of the caboose with the hope of ultimately putting it on display in Windsor as a tribute to the locality’s history as a train town.

Windsor Town Manager William Saunders noted during the Wednesday, March 26, Windsor Planning Commission meeting that the caboose weighs 52,000 pounds, with the cab accounting for about 30,000 of that total. Beneath the cab are two truck assemblies, each featuring four wheels. The assemblies weigh about 10,000 pounds apiece. 

Saunders explained that the moving plan was to use a crane to lift the cab off the truck assemblies and place it on a lowboy tractor-trailer for transportation. The truck assemblies would be picked up separately and put on another tractor-trailer, allowing the caboose to be moved, essentially, in three pieces to Repair Tech.

Barnhart Crane and Rigging Inc. handled the move, which ended up requiring a new permit Thursday when it turned out that the cab would not fit on the lowboy. The larger tractor-trailer that the cab was placed on was higher off the ground.

With the new permit came a new required route of travel that took the increased height of the load into account. Windsor Mayor George Stubbs outlined the new route.

“The route that’s got to be taken with the new permit is they were going to leave the site (off Shoulders Hill Road in Suffolk), go out to 17, turn right, go up to 664,” he said. “They’re going to take 664 Monitor-Merrimac (Memorial Bridge-Tunnel), go across the tunnel to Newport News, pick up Route 64. They’re going to 64 to 295. They’re going to come off at 295 onto Route 460. They are going to start heading back east, and they’re going to come to the stoplight in Windsor at Dairy Queen where they will turn right and go 258 South to 58 and then turn right there at the stoplight and go up to Repair Tech.”

Stubbs said the projected travel time Thursday was two hours and 35 minutes.

Commissioner Debra Hicks asked Saunders during the Planning Commission meeting how long it was going to take to refurbish the caboose.

“We really don’t know,” Saunders said. “We’re taking it to a contractor in Franklin to work on it. We told him we’re not in a real rush, that he could work on it between other jobs if he wanted to, possibly save us a little bit of money, so we don’t really have a time frame on that.

“But the main thing that we were trying to do in a timely manner was get it away from where it was because the owner is developing that land for a neighborhood,” he continued. “They’re already starting to put some of the infrastructure in, so it was kind of in the way. So once we’re getting it off of that site, we’ve got some breathing room to just get it done.”

Commissioner G. Devon Hewitt asked where the caboose will be placed when it is rehabilitated and ready to be presented.

“(Council members) have not made a decision on that yet,” Saunders said. “We have several properties in town. We have the piece on Bank Street, we have the vacant lot next to Centennial Park here behind Town Hall, and then up there on the corner next to the police department across from TowneBank, that piece of property is owned by the town. So one of them may be the likely candidate, but they haven’t made a decision at this time.”