Circus World Museum train

I started working on a project a few years ago that was my initial reasons for wanting to use the Circus World Museum Library. The train that went to Milwaukee for the parades had been making history each and every year. While the Circus World Museum had been an active participant, they hadn't been recording the history they created. I started trying to re-create the historical details almost 40 years after the first parade.

While I found lots of notes and records in the CWM files, what I started running into was that the photographic documentation didn't match a lot of the Parade records. It wasn't until several members of the working train crew explained to me that the paper list was a guide but wasn't the way it actually got loaded, that all of this started to get sorted out by photos rather than records.

I started trying to record the flatcar loads to help identify photos later on and that helped a lot but there were still discrepancies at times. Then the load that went to Milwaukee wasn't always the same order on the same flats coming back to Baraboo. Then on top of all of that, the flatcars were repainted different colors and with different titles. Sometimes three times in their duration of travelling down the rails for the Great Circus parade. Then wagons were trucked to the lot in addition to the train load which then brought a trucked wagon back on the train and a trained wagon left to return on a truck. This project got really complicated.

After spending nearly four years working on this, I finally gave the Circus World Museum a copy on a CD of the project that they can now put their fingers on instantly instead of walking to the filing cabinets, pulling files and spending hours looking for an answer to a Circus World Museum Train question. Is it 100% accurate? NO! There were still a few unanswered questions but I'll guess that 99% of everything that could be discovered and properly sorted out is recorded there.

Beginning with the easiest flatcar of all, RBBB # 355 is shown below with photos taken over a couple of year's journeys to CWM.