This showed up yesterday on i09, one of the many aggregators of "cool" clickbait on the internet, and it started showing up on my Facebook feed repeatedly after being reposted by associates:

http://io9.com/were-ready-to-move-into- ... 1533321360

We might as well start preparing for an onslaught of people that want to buy our old cars from the "back 40" for such projects. Your answers to such inquiries, of course, will depend on the pieces in question and the circumstances.

There were some other unusual adaptive reuse transportation vehicle photos at the end of that article. So, I though I would include a link to one in (off the coast of?) Ohio, on South Bass Island (near Put-In-Bay), a really stunning use of part of a lake freighter:

Link: http://shiponthebay.com/

Can't forget GN 441, now a hotel room at the Izaak Walton Inn on the former Great Northern:

http://www.gn441.com/index.html

I wonder how this might have been handled, or if it would have been handled a little differently (i.e., a retro interior), if this had been, say an AB set of F-units.

The caboose on Mercer Island looks strikingly similar to the one outside the depot in Ridgeway Wisconsin. Both look like some shop job built on an old pressed steel car frame. Does anybody know the story behind these two cabooses?

As for people rushing to purchase old cabooses for conversions, stories like these posted on news feeds catch people's attention for a fleeting moment before they browse on to the next "cool read".

The cars are part of a series of 50 (I think) Northern Pacific cabooses built from boxcars to alleviate a caboose shortage in the late 1920's. Some of these cars were built with side doors for local service. As a class they were amazingly long lived and probably represent the best preserved class (as a percentage) of NP cabooses.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

When folks who dream of moving into a old rail car find out how much it costs to move one (especially a heavyweight passenger car), all but the most enthusiastic and affluent will want to "Go to Plan B". Back in 1971, when Amtrak and the big railroads were dealing off surplus cars, my first wife and two daughters were living in a modest tract house in Duarte CA. We though it was time for each girl to have her own bedroom, and I suggested we see about buying an old sleeper and moving it up against the back of the house. The daughters thought this was a swell idea, but their mother was not amused, and I shudder to think what the City of Duarte Dept. of Building and Safety would have thought about this plan. (we wound up buying a larger, but still quite ordinary, house a year later, about five blocks east in a newer tract.)

Thanks Michael for clarifying! When I saw the one in Ridgeway last November, I first thought it was some faux caboose for the local depot. The sides seem uncommonly high.

NP Bay Window Caboose