Simple Caboose Coloring Page

Add this Simple Caboose Coloring Page to your collection. The car is drawn from directly behind, the view a person gets standing on the track as the train pulls away: the end door in the middle, a railed platform across the back and the little cupola box perched on the roof. Simple caboose coloring pages nearly always show the car from the side, where the cupola turns into a bump. From behind it becomes a small house sitting on a bigger one. Ages 2 to 8. Free letter size PDF.

How this coloring page was created

The concept we entered on Colorin AI was: "One bold simple caboose car seen from behind with a little roof cupola on top and two round wheels below." The printable came back in seconds.

"Seen from behind" is what made the drawing symmetrical, and symmetry is what makes it easy. From that angle the door lands dead center, the two platform railings mirror each other and the wheels sit level, so a young child has an obvious middle to work out from. From the side, none of that is true and the car becomes a long box with a lot going on at one end.

What's in this simple caboose coloring page

The best thing on this page is the cupola. It is drawn as a separate little structure with its own peaked roof and its own three windows, sitting square on top of the main roof.

Children color it as a second, smaller car, which is roughly what it is: the raised lookout where the crew sat to watch the train ahead. It also gives the top of a fairly plain drawing something to be about.

The count: the cupola carries three windows, a square at each side and a wider one in the middle, under a peaked roof with a projecting eave. The main roof is one broad curved slab with an overhang at both ends. The end door has an arched window in its upper half and a short vertical handle. Two grab iron handrails run down the wall, one on each side, each capped with a ball at the top and bottom. The platform railings hold six vertical balusters on the left and six on the right. Below the deck, the frame beam carries two decorative scrolls, each curling in on itself, with a round bolt beside it. A coupler box sits in the center. Each wheel is drawn as three rings inside each other.

Coloring Ideas and Techniques

Caboose red is worth using here. It is the traditional color and this drawing has a single large wall to carry it, which almost no other page in this set does.

Give the cupola roof and the main roof the same tone. They are two parts of one roof in real life, and coloring them differently makes the little box look like it was set down on top rather than built in.

The twelve balusters are the smallest repeated shapes on the sheet. Leaving them white against a colored wall is quicker than filling them and reads correctly, because railings are open metal with the wall visible behind.