Boxcar Children

#11 Caboose Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 1966.

Grandfather Alden has a friend who owns a railroad, and he rents out cabooses to people who want to travel with the railroad. It’s a bit like traveling in a trailer, having a contained living area that includes a small kitchen, but the caboose is attached to a train and travels the rails, no need for driving. This story picks up after the Schoolhouse Mystery, with Grandfather Alden renting two cabooses so he can travel with his grandchildren. He will travel in the bigger caboose with Henry and Benny, and the girls, Jessie and Violet, will travel in the smaller one.

When Grandfather Alden takes the children to see the cabooses, the conductor, Mr. Carr, tells them that the bigger caboose has a history, but they’ll be hearing more about that later. A postman, Sid Weston, is at the station to deliver a letter for Mr. Carr, and he wants to have a look at the bigger caboose, but Mr. Carr doesn’t allow it. The Aldens wonder why he seems so curious about it.

When they embark on their trip, the Aldens are able to travel back and forth between the two cabooses to visit with each other. They enjoy watching the countryside going by while the train is moving. At every place the train stops, there is something interesting to see. At one stop, they get fresh corn to cook, and at another, they see beavers building a dam. There’s a man who lives by Beaver Lake who people call “Old Beaver.” Old Beaver is kind of a hermit, but he’s dedicated himself to protecting the beavers and their habitat. For some reason, when the Aldens tell him about the cabooses they’re traveling in and the number of the bigger caboose, 777, Old Beaver is disturbed and runs away.

Benny can’t forget about what Mr. Carr said about the bigger caboose having a “history,” and everyone wonders why Old Beaver had such a strange reaction to hearing the number of the caboose. They find out from a station master called Shaw that the caboose used to belong to a circus train. The circus owner’s wife lived there. A man who works for the station now used to be a clown with that circus, called Cho-Cho. His wife, Chi-Chi, was a tightrope walker and best friends with the circus owner’s wife, but she died suddenly when she fell during one of her performances. Cho-Cho left the circus after that.

There is a mystery surrounding Chi-Chi’s death because she used to own a beautiful diamond necklace that was given to her mother by royalty. She used to hide it when she wasn’t wearing it, and not even Cho-Cho knew where she kept it. After her death, nobody could find the necklace, and the police believed that it was stolen by the Thin Man who worked for the circus sideshow. Cho-Cho was friends with the Thin Man and didn’t want to think he had taken the necklace, but people had seen Chi-Chi showing him the necklace before she died, and nobody remembers seeing him give it back to her. After he was accused, the Thin Man ran away, and people thought that was an admission of guilt. The man called Old Beaver was the Thin Man’s best friend, and he blames the accusations for making his friend run away. Nobody knows where he is now.

It’s a sad story, but it confirms what Benny suspected, that there’s a mystery surrounding their caboose. Could the necklace be hidden there, or is there something there that could tell them where the necklace is?

My Reaction and Some Spoilers

Like many of the other early Boxcar Children books, there is often more adventure in the story than mystery. The mystery of what happened to the necklace is a definite mystery, but the Aldens end up finding the necklace more by accident than solving the clue that was left behind by Chi-Chi for Cho-Cho. Once they find the necklace, they understand what the clue was supposed to mean rather than figuring out what the clue meant to figure out where the necklace was. Still, it was a nice story. Finding the necklace also solves problems for the unhappy former circus performers they’ve met. Figuring out where the Thin Man is so they can tell him that his name has been cleared adds a secondary mystery for them to solve. The Thin Man’s name is cleared, Old Beaver feels better for knowing that the Thin Man is no longer a suspect, and Cho-Cho gets the necklace.

The idea of traveling in a caboose, or better yet, a pair of cabooses, sounds like the kind of fun adventure that many kids would enjoy! It’s a colorful way to travel, and while the kids travel by railroad, they learn a few things about the train and how it is run. At one point, they get to see the engine of the train and talk to the engineer. The things they see along the way are interesting, too. There is a point where Benny separates from the others to go see a talking horse from the circus while the rest of the family tours a glass factory and gets to pick out some pieces for themselves. The places they visit aren’t always the kinds of things families would seek out as destinations, but it’s charming that they get to travel this way on a train. They have fun along the way, and there’s always something interesting, wherever they stop.

There is a note from the author at the beginning of the book about the inspiration for this story, a trip that she took by caboose herself:

To My Readers
The Little North Railroad is a storybook railroad, but the cabooses are real cabooses. With the help of six very kind trainmen, I myself took a trip by caboose, riding on the back platform and feeling just like Benny. I ran the Diesel engine, blew the whistle, rang the bell, and watched as the trainmen set off dynamite on the track, just as it says in these pages. As for the story, the adventures are wholly imaginary.

Gertrude Chandler Warner