Red Caboose Motel, Lancaster County
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
In nineteen sixty-nine, a Lancaster County man named Donald Denlinger placed a half-hearted bid on nineteen surplus cabooses the Penn Central Railroad was selling off. He offered seven hundred dollars each, a hundred dollars below scrap value, not expecting to win. He won.
Within a year he had lined the cabooses up in a field near Strasburg, fitted them with beds, and opened what became the Red Caboose Motel. Each car was painted in the livery of a different North American railroad. By nineteen eighty-four the Guinness Book of World Records recognized it as the largest privately owned collection of cabooses anywhere.
The motel has grown to thirty-eight cabooses plus historic rail cars, and the tracks of the Strasburg Rail Road, that eighteen thirty-two charter railroad, run right past the front door. It remains one of the more pleasantly improbable places to spend a night anywhere along the old Lincoln Highway.
