D Deasy | TribeLive 5/29/2004
Walking the straight and narrow is a must at the Rev. Ed Schleicher’s retreat-on-rails near New Castle.
Watch your step — or else you might slip off a coupler and land on the real train tracks that run through Schleicher’s sun room.
“I say, ‘Welcome to paradise,'” says Schleicher, 63, parochial vicar at St. Mary of the Assumption Church, Hampton.
About nine years ago, Schleicher paid scrap value for two cabooses, shipped the rusty cars to Lawrence County and created Caboose Falls.
Today, his 10-acre getaway hides a trio of repainted, rewired and refurnished cabooses, all distinct in style and parked — steel wheels and all — in the woods of Union Township. Railroad signs and signal lights dot the property, and every half-hour, another CSX freight train screeches through a nearby valley.
“I needed a diversion,” says Schleicher, a one-time noncommissioned protocol officer and athletic conditioning coach in the U.S. Air Force. “It’s a lot of physical labor — in the sense that there’s always gravel to shovel, and trees to cut up and move.”
A 150-ton crane placed the cabooses in the woods after they arrived on flatbed trucks. “One of the trucks got caught on the side of the road. … I was sweating,” Schleicher says, recalling the 12-hour ordeal.
On his days off, Schleicher regularly treats invited friends to multicourse meals prepared and served on fine railroad china in his oak-paneled dining car, dubbed “Martha,” after the Biblical housekeeper. One end of Martha doubles as a kitchen, complete with microwave oven, refrigerator, freezer, and four-burner stove.
On one St. Patrick’s Day, the menu for three guests included a basil-laced shrimp cocktail, a spinach and red cabbage salad with Dijon dressing, and a combination of beef and pork filets with crab — napped with hollandaise sauce — complemented by two Pennsylvania wines.
Schleicher calls his sleeper car “Mary.” It has a bay picture window and built-in single bed, plus a bathroom with a shower.
Caboose Falls also harbors a red cupola caboose once owned by Reserve Mines of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It sleeps eight.
Friends gave Schleicher a lot of the railroad collectibles that crowd his cabooses. Items range from sturdy lanterns to fine china and crystal made for the Baltimore & Ohio, and Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroads.
Using a crayon and felt-tip pen, Schleicher drew the original design for his Caboose Falls dinner plates. Cooking also is “one of my hobbies,” he says.
Indeed, Schleicher was unshaven and working outside the day a well-dressed woman showed up in a Mercedes and walked through the electronically secured gate of his fenced-in property.
“She wanted to know if I knew the owner,” Schleicher says. “She said she understood it was a very exclusive five-star restaurant.”
“How does one make reservations?” the woman asked.
“It’s a very select group who only comes by invitation of the owner,” Schleicher replied. “She got in her Mercedes and drove off.”
Schleicher grew up in Wilkinsburg and served from 1961 to ’66 at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., before deciding to become a priest and completing theological studies at Christ the King Seminary in Buffalo, N.Y. Prior to ordination, Schleicher also worked for Three Rivers Youth and helped establish Academy House, a Mt. Lebanon residential treatment facility.
He is the son of Betty Schleicher, 95, of Bloomfield, who rode in steeplechase races at Rolling Rock as a young woman.
Ordained in 1982, Schleicher lived in the New Castle area during the 1990s as an administrator of three local Roman Catholic churches: St. Margaret, St. Michael, and Holy Cross.
“He’s a railroader from way back,” says former parishioner Henry Hegerle, an engineer and fellow train buff from the Knoxville section of Pittsburgh.
Hegerle accompanied Schleicher through the McKees Rocks train yard where Schleicher chose his cabooses from cars being liquidated by the defunct Pittsburgh & Lake Erie Railroad Co.
“They were waiting for someone to save their cabooses. … Cabooses had sentimental value,” says Schleicher, who grew up watching and riding trains with his dad, the late Earl Schleicher, a loan officer with Pittsburgh National Bank.
“We lived near the railroad station, and we used to go for walks,” Schleicher says. “We used to go to the station and watch trains.”
Flatbed train cars carried Schleicher’s scrap cabooses to New Castle for total makeovers at Kasgro Rail Corp. “They were gutted and steam-cleaned down to the bare metal,” Schleicher says.
Schleicher luckily found and paid $10 for his train cars’ original B&O and P&LE decals. Sherwin-Williams supplied paints to match the railroad companies’ trademark blue and yellow colors.
Both cabooses now sit on train tracks obtained through a New Castle area scrap dealer. The blue one is a bay window caboose; the yellow one is a transfer caboose. Both cars belonged to the P & LE Railroad Co. and date to the early 1950s, Schleicher says.
Patio Enclosures installed the bulletproof glass atrium that unites the cars. “I got tired of walking between the cars in the rain,” Schleicher says.
Dan Kubick of Patio Enclosures remembers the priest’s request for the unique sun room. “That was a first for us in that type of application,” said Kubick, branch manager in Macedonia, Ohio, for the company. “It took a little engineering to get the architectural figures. … Initially, there was some head scratching.”
In the end, Schleicher’s project earned a price break because of its unusual character. Patio Enclosures pictured Caboose Falls in a company newsletter as an advertising tool.
“People see it as, ‘I didn’t know you could do that !’ ” Kubick says. “It was definitely an unusual project. You don’t hear about someone living in a train in the woods.”
