TCRy 9857

This caboose was built with its steel frame and wood sides in the early 1920s by the Mt. Vernon Car Company. After serving the Florida East Coast Railway for almost a decade of service, many of these cabooses were put up for auction and sold to various shortlines all over the country. The Tennessee Central Railway picked up a handful of these types in 1937, and used them on the rear of freight trains thru Nashville, either eastbound to Harriman, TN or westbound to Hopkinsville, KY. When the TC closed in 1968, many of the cabooses were purchased by, effectively, anybody who could afford it! 9857 would be relocated to the Nashville suburb of Antioch shortly after the TC’s demise, and would be a backyard display for several decades. 9857 would be repatriated back to home rails in August of 2000.