McDonald’s chugs to eBay to send caboose down the line

Would you care for a 30-ton caboose with that Big Mac?

The McDonald’s franchise in Hillyard has added a new supersized item to its menu, at least for another day.

McChooChoo, the frontier-era caboose where a generation of Spokane-area youngsters celebrated birthdays before the rail car was closed down about four years ago, is on the eBay auction block. Bidding will close Saturday.

“It’s just been a landmark, an attraction with no practical use,” said Chris Weber, chief financial officer of Spokane Food Services, the franchisee that runs 24 McDonald’s restaurants in the area.

The cost and trouble of maintaining a 60,000-pound rail car, which hosted its first birthday party in 1978, has also become a burden.

The highest bidder will own this slice of Spokane history including the McDonald’s characters inside and out, the tables, chairs and benches and even the tracks that have held it in place since December 1977. The catch is that the buyer must arrange and pay for the shipping.

“How do you get rid of something like that?” said Weber, of the decision to auction the caboose. “Where do you go?”

The company decided that eBay was the place to go, since one of its bookkeepers, Toni Weatherwax, had been selling items on the online auction site for almost five years. Since she had the know-how, she is arranging the auction, already corresponding with several bidders.

One interested party was the McDonald’s Museum in San Bernardino, Calif., the city which boasts the first McDonald’s.

The museum did express concern over the cost to ship the caboose, so Weber hopes maybe an ordinary person will buy it.

“If you could put it up in the mountains and it could be a cabin, that would be really neat,” said Weber. He also thinks that it would make a great place to play for someone’s grandchildren.

The caboose moved into the neighborhood after it was retired from Burlington Northern. It was meant to enhance the décor of the restaurant. The hamburger joint’s original theme was that of a train station, meant to reflect the industry upon which the Hillyard neighborhood grew, and the fact that the railroad runs through the restaurant’s backyard.

Birthday parties in McChooChoo included games, cake, ice cream and Happy Meals, plus bragging rights: A birthday in the caboose was cool. Even as adults, many from Spokane still fondly remember the parties they attended in the McChooChoo.

According to Weber, the owner of the franchise, Mark Ray, recalled when the train first pulled into its station. It traveled from Vancouver, Wash., by a train which stopped right behind the McDonald’s, and was lifted into place.

The company that originally moved the car was Hite Crane and Rigging, which is still in business.

Bud Gill, vice president of Hite, said they have received numerous phone calls for estimates from all over the country.

“It isn’t going to be cheap, I can tell you that,” said Gill. “It’ll be somewhere in the neighborhood of six to seven thousand dollars.”

The caboose has been connected to power lines since its arrival, so power will need to be shut off temporarily, and the car will need to be jacked up and rolled out to where Hite can hook it up to a crane.

McDonald’s would like the McChooChoo to be gone by the end of August, when they will probably landscape the area.

Weatherwax said that there are around 106 people watching the auction – on the eBay listing, there is an option to click to monitor the bids a buyer is interested in making. She added that over 1,000 hits have been made to the site.

“It’s been fun to see the types of people bidding on it,” said Weber.