The caboose was a mobile home for brakemen, whose jobs have been taken over by automatic equipment such as Westinghouse air brakes.

The crew in the caboose existed primarily for safety purposes: monitoring the operation of the train, including when the railcars were out of sight of the locomotive crew. These tasks included monitoring the air brake system, watching for hotboxes and derailments (which do not inevitably cause wrecks), end of train signalling, and the like. They also provided the extra manpower needed to correct problems and to operate the train. Many of these tasks have been deemed redundant today and some are performed by monitoring systems. Personnel are a major expense for railroads and they are always looking for ways to reduce expenditures on overhead. Some monitoring and signalling tasks are now performed by a device attached to the last car in the train. The installation of various wayside detection systems performs part of the role the crew used to do when visually monitoring the train. And railways operate more tonnage miles with fewer incidents than they did in the past, in part due to improved maintenance techniques. For example, the risk of fires from journal bearings is no longer a consideration, since rolling element bearings have replaced journal bearings. Journal bearings were lubricated by oil- or grease-soaked cotton wadding packed into a closed box around the bearing. The packing would catch fire if it dried out and the bearing became hot enough to ignite it. Although roller bearings may become quite hot in the final stages of a failure, the failure mechanism is different and flammable packing is no longer used. It also takes fewer people to run a train than it did in the past. Some operational guidelines go back to the days of steam and are being updated to reflect modern practices and requirements.