a Caboose
Caboose Farm 1979
The caboose is not the end…
By Ann Burnside Love
Pete Fedak drives spikes into his 39-foot railroad track
TOWARD THE END OF THE LINE — ‘Actually, it looks like there’s a simple enough explanation: A railroad track on top of Catoctin Mountain captured a caboose one day and kept it. It would have been hard, though, since the stretch of track is only 39 feet long and umpteen miles from any other track. But it's a nice, perky, bright red caboose trimmed with sunshine yellow, a wooden one from the old days when a caboose was very special, and it's easy to see why that lonely length of track coveted it.
And it certainly arouses interest. Every third car on Manahan Road slows as its occupants gaze at the little caboose sitting serenely beside a large pond with an island artfully off-center, smooth green grass all around, trees and rolling hills beyond. A limousine carrying Sadat, Rabin, and Carter back to Camp David from Gettysburg in September 1978 paused while its occupants stared.
The answer, however, lies on the opposite side of the road in the bright yellow house trimmed with red shutters, the renovated farmhouse that is the weekend home of Peter and Susan Fedak of Rockville, MD. The Fedaks bought the farm in 1971 as a retreat from their busy professional lives, he as an attorney in solo practice and she as a research chemist at the National Institute of Health.
Arriving at the farm on a sweltering Sunday afternoon, the first member of the family I spot is Pete Jr., 4, as he climbs the hill toward the house after two swims in the pond. Dad, he points out, is down there floating on a raft. Susan comes out of the house; small and very slender in a swimsuit under her white terry jumpsuit, her long black hair bunched high in back as befits the weather.
Though she wears no makeup, looks as young as a teenager, and is very open and friendly, her speech is precise as befits a scientist who has worked 18 years in her profession. (As a sometime country girl, she is also betrayed by the elaborately painted flowers enameled onto her toenails: the lady definitely has more than one foot in the city.)
As we walk down to the caboose, she tells me they were well underway in their renovations to the farmhouse in 1974 when a friend of Peter’s asked his help in locating a caboose in good condition for use as a playhouse for his children.
Pete, in turn, passed the request to another friend, Del Rentzel, who was then on the board of directors of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and after a very long search, a suitable one was located in the Midwest and subsequently hauled to a B&O yard in Baltimore.
At this point, the first friend discovered that zoning regulations prohibited placing it on his property; since so much effort had been expended, Pete and Susan decided to buy the caboose, which was vintage 1923. But before they could take possession, they had to have track.
There followed a lengthy undertaking during which they leveled ground, put in gravel and all the proper underlayment, bought crossties from a neighbor, and a single length of track from the Western Maryland Railway and laid them—doing all that heavy work themselves with the occasional help of friendly neighbors with forklifts and such. “Pete even leveled the track by eye,” said Susan, “ending up less than a quarter of an inch off.”
We're admiring the freshly painted caboose as Pete joins us, a very tanned man of medium height with a thick head of youthfully gray hair. He's wearing light blue denim overalls hemmed above the knee and carrying a much-worn walking stick he found in an old barn.
En route from Hagerstown, workman steadies a pole to make sure the caboose will clear under bridges
“It would have cost several thousand dollars to get the caboose from Baltimore to Foxville by truck,” he says, picking up the story, so another way had to be found. The Western Maryland could haul it to Hagerstown. “I was in court in Upper Marlboro one day when the judge’s clerk called me out to take an urgent phone call. The caboose had arrived in Hagerstown, been separated from its undercarriage (the wheels), and loaded on two separate lowboy trailers. Now en route to Foxville, the boxy caboose wouldn't fit under a bridge to get out of the railroad yard. Did I mind if they sawed off the cupola on top?
“You'll ruin it!” I told them. “Find some other way! I'll be right there.”
Rushing back to his client—who was deaf—he explained via a translator (with great difficulty on the part of the client trying to understand what a caboose had to do with her divorce) the reason for his call.
An understanding judge brought a speedy (“and just!”) end to the proceeding, and Pete made it swiftly as far as Smithsburg where he intercepted a cavalcade that meant somehow they'd solved the bridge problem. He followed it up the mountain where it took two cranes to unload and position the undercarriage and then set the caboose back on top.
Now a proper setting had to be created. The property was rechristened “Caboose Farm,” and in 1975 a cooperative project with the soil conservation people was evolved to build a pond. The area beyond the caboose was already swampy, and when bulldozers got to work, they found the right kind of clay underneath to hold water, so under Pete's supervision, a beautiful large basin was created.
The surrounding wild field and brush-covered slopes were then cleared by hand by the Fedaks and visiting relatives who also helped rake, seed, and cover the vast lawn with straw. “That fall the grass was unbelievably beautiful,” says Susan.
Today the pond has come to maturity, is stocked with fish and bright swimming rafts, and the exterior of the weathered caboose has been painstakingly restored. Inside it has been insulated and wired for electric heat. Eventually, it will serve as a playhouse for Pete Jr. and his friends.
Instead of the old caboose stove and green-painted office space for a freight train’s conductor and bunk space for him and the brakeman who rode keeping watch from the cupola, the interior will be painted in Susan’s favorite sunny shades of orange and have room for multiple sleeping bags, toys, and kids.
What led the Fedaks to Catoctin Mountain? As a military aide to President Eisenhower, Pete had frequently flown in and out of the Camp David area by helicopter and admired the countryside. And these energetic people have more projects than the caboose, the pond, and the restoration of the farmhouse.
They have expanded what was originally a cinderblock sheep barn into a large, comfortable home in Rockville, doing much of the work themselves there also. The barn at the farm is being restored, and Pete plans to create an entertainment area in it utilizing a large mahogany bar carefully salvaged from a tavern owned and operated by his immigrant Hungarian grandfather and later his father in New Jersey. Pews from an old church in Georgetown also await reactivation. But it will be a while before this project reaches fulfillment. “Believe in pay as I go,” says Pete.
Two cranes help reassemble the undercarriage and box after the caboose arrive at the end of a 55 year line - on a mountain in Foxville
Peter and Susan Fedak inside the caboose that will soon be a playhouse for their son
Why do the Fedaks work so hard at all these projects when both are also deeply committed to their professions?
“We like the achievement,” says Susan simply. Then she adds: “When we hit Frederick, we leave everything else behind—his practice, my work. It’s a blocking-out process; it’s natural to us, though it might not be to other people.
“I guess we don't want to find out when we're 50 or 60 that we've lived life in the subjunctive case: ‘We should have . . . ' ‘We could have . . .’”
Perhaps color tells their story best. Everything they touch takes on bright hues: reds, oranges, yellows. “I think there’s something uplifting about colors,” says Susan. “They signify a zest for living.”
She's right. There's certainly evidence of that at Caboose Farm.
“And,” she says with a smile, “your guests never miss your house.”
…100 years and still chugging along…