Great Northern Railway caboose car X549 was a twenty-five-foot wooden caboose, one of forty-seven built at the Waite Park Car Shops in St. Cloud, Minnesota, between April 1923 and November 1923 at a cost of about $1900.00, and its original number was 90775. It was extensively remodeled to its existing layout in the early 1940's and spent most of its useful life in the Spokane, Washington, area. X549 served the Great Northern Railway until 1967, when it was sold for scrap to the Michelson Steel & Supply Company of Everett, Washington. Purchased from the scrap yard, it entered private ownership and became a playhouse for children, then served in a park in Everett and later as a store and music studio in the Country Village shopping center in Bothell, Washington. It was later acquired by the City of Tenino as a raffle prize. Reconstruction began in February 2020 to remove damaged wood, replace it, and repaint the caboose in its original color with the GNRY logo, while missing metal parts, interior lamps, a sink, and a stove were obtained. With the help of local volunteers, the reconstruction was completed in February 2022. Cabooses gave train conductors an office for paperwork and waybills and a place to watch the train for problems such as smoke from overheated wheel bearings or shifting cargo loads. They also figured in an era when brakemen set brakes by hand, running over the tops of cars to turn brake wheels after the engineer whistled. After Westinghouse invented the airbrake in 1869, multiple brakemen were no longer needed, and by the end of the 1980's cabooses had been removed from all freight trains and replaced by flashing rear end devices and trackside monitoring equipment.