Caboose Gets New Lease on Life
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Worn and damaged boards on the side of the depot’s Katy caboose are being replaced with cypress. A new paint job will then complete the historic railcar’s refurbishing. Photo by Larry Jackson
Solid cypress boards and fresh yellow paint are giving a bright new face to a caboose at the La Grange MKT Depot Museum.
“Thanks to a grant from Second Chance Emporium, we will be able to tell this caboose’s story for years to come,” said Gale Lincke, a longtime director of the nonprofit museum.
The story began in 1937, when a fleet of woodsheathed cabooses was built in the Denison, Texas, shops of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas (Katy) Railroad. No. 835 was among the original group built in 1937 and plied the rails for many decades at the end of Katy freight trains. But in 1964, the railroad retired the caboose as surplus equipment.
It went through several owners before Bruce Blalock, a Katy/Union Pacific engineer, acquired it and moved it to his Smithville bed-andbreakfast, The Katy House.
In 2014, Blalock and Bill Karisch of Winchester, both fervent members of the Friends of the La Grange Railroad Depot, donated the car to the museum. There it joined another caboose Karish had been instrumental in acquiring, the green bay-window car that has been at the depot since 2009.
With careful attention to authentic colors and original Katy lettering, the museum refurbished the Katy caboose and opened it to visitors. It’s thought to be the last remaining wooden caboose built by the Katy. But after nearly a decade sitting adjacent to the busy UP tracks through La Grange, it needed repainting and repairing.
Last month, Second Chance presented the museum with a donation of $15,000. Since its 1996 opening, the busy resale shop now on South Reynolds Street has donated more than $3.1 million to local nonprofits, ranging from healthcare and education to scholarships.
The depot is open every Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with free admission. Built in 1897, the depot celebrated its 125th anniversary last year, when the train station itself was repainted and repaired.
Lincke expects the caboose work to be finished in a few weeks, and then it will again be open for visitors.