in use in U.S. naval terminology by the 1797 construction of the USS Constitution, whose wood-burning food preparation stove is known as the camboose. In modern French, cambuse can refer both to a ship's storeroom and to the North-American railcar. Camboose as a cook shack was in use in English at least by 1805, when it was used in a New York Chronicle article cited in the New English Dictionary describing a New England shipwreck, which reported that "[Survivor] William Duncan drifted aboard the canboose ." As the first railroad cabooses were wooden shanties erected on flat cars as early as the 1830s, they would have resembled the cook shack on a ship's deck. The earliest known printed record of "caboose" used to describe the railcar appeared in 1859 in court records in conjunction with a lawsuit filed against the New York and Harlem Railway. The most common pluralization of caboose is "cabooses". History Use of cabooses began in the 1830s, when railroads housed trainmen in shanties built onto boxcars or flatcars. The caboose provided the train crew with a shelter at the rear of the train. The crew could exit the train for switching or to protect the rear of the train when stopped. They also inspected the train for problems such as shifting loads, broken or dragging equipment, and hot boxes (overheated axle bearings, a serious fire and derailment threat). The conductor kept records and handled business from a table or desk in the caboose. For longer trips, the caboose provided minimal living quarters, and was frequently personalized and decorated with pictures and posters. Early cabooses were nothing more than flat cars with small cabins erected on them, or modified box cars. The standard form of the American caboose had a platform at either end with curved grab rails to facilitate train crew members' ascent onto a moving train. A caboose was fitted with red lights called markers to enable the rear of the train to be seen at night. This has led to the phrase "bringing up the markers" to describe the last car on a train. These lights were officially what made a train a "train", and were originally lit with oil lamps. With the advent of electricity, later caboose versions incorporated an electrical generator driven by belts coupled to one of the axles, which charged a lead-acid storage battery when the train was in motion.