Athearn’s stock Colorado Midland caboose is on the left and my modified caboose is in the right. The body style is wrong for a CMRy caboose but the two things that bugged me the most were the cupola and the white handrails and ladders. White grabs and ladders would have been very uncommon during the CMRy’s lifetime and black and white photos suggest they would have been the body color or black. The cupola on the Athearn caboose is wide and plain, but I replaced it with a narrow 3-D printed Colorado Midland “Bombay” style cupola from Panamint Models through Shapeways. While I was at it I repainted the caboose a redder color and relettered it to include a correct road number (the Athearn caboose numbers are wrong...the number 5340 was assigned to a boxcar on the real CMRy).
I took as inspiration these exceptionally well-painted brass HO CMRy cabeese. FWIW, there are lots of great photos of CMRy cabooses in the original "Horseshoe Pass" scheme and then in the later "Midland Route" scheme, but fewer prototype photos seem to exist showing the common "Pikes Peak Route" scheme.
In the end painting the curved grabs on the car sides and the car ends black turned out to be a bridge too far, so freight car red they remain. I'm probably not going to loose a lot of sleep over that.
