The Circus Train: How Such Attractions Reached Distant Cities

Last revised: October 1, 2026

A circus train was the show’s own string of cars, moved by whatever railroad the route crossed that night. The wagons stayed loaded. Iron plates bridged the gap between flatcars, and a run at the end of the cut let each wagon roll off in the order the lot needed it. William Cameron Coup built that system for P. T. Barnum’s show in 1872. The train people mean by the name is the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey train. Its last performance was May 21, 2017, at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, New York.

The length changed with the work. The Ringling brothers’ first rail season, 1890, was 18 cars. In 1932 the combined show moved in four sections, 90 cars, and the first section left town before the night show was over. On June 15, 2010, one of the two arena units measured 61 cars and 5,409 feet. The engine on the point belonged to the host railroad. The cars belonged to the circus.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus train on the Southern Pacific between Elgin and Austin, Texas, circa 1984

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey train on the Southern Pacific between Elgin and Austin, Texas, circa 1984. By then the show was an arena company in two units, and the railroad’s freight power handled the move. Mike Bledsoe photo. American-Rails.com collection.

On this page: At a glance · Runs and plates · April 18, 1872 · Eighteen cars · One show · Four sections, 1932 · Ivanhoe, 1918 · July 16, 1956 · Red Unit and Blue Unit · A carnival train · The parade train · May 21, 2017

At a glance

Item	Detail
What it was	The show’s cars, behind a railroad’s engine and crew. Wagons stayed loaded. Crossover plates between the flats, and a run down to the ground
Who supplied what	The circus owned the cars. The railroad supplied the locomotive, the caboose, the crew, and the track
First big rail circus	Barnum, Coup, and Dan Castello. First loading April 18, 1872, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Some sixty cars. Own flats, built for the wagons, before that season ended
Ringling on rails	First show May 19, 1884, Baraboo, Wisconsin, a wagon show. First rail season 1890: 18 cars, including two advance cars. May 3 to October 21. 147 stands, 8,181 miles
The combined show	Ringling bought Barnum & Bailey October 22, 1907, for $410,000. The two shows became one for the 1919 season
1932 train	90 cars in four sections: 23 stock, 40 flat, 27 coaches. The first section was the Flying Squadron
1947	107 flats, stock cars, and coaches, Circus Historical Society
Last canvas date	July 16, 1956, Heidelberg Raceway, Pittsburgh. John Ringling North. The train left at dawn for Sarasota. The arena show kept moving by rail
Two units	From 1969, a Red Unit and a Blue Unit, each its own train. Reporting mark RBBX. Blue Unit, June 15, 2010: 61 cars, 5,409 feet, 4,490 tons
Last performance	May 21, 2017, Uniondale, New York. Closing announced January 14, 2017
The other trains	Hagenbeck-Wallace and the wreck at Ivanhoe, June 22, 1918. Royal American Shows, a carnival, on a 99-car train until 1982. The Circus World Museum parade train, a different move from the working Ringling train

Runs, plates, and the order of the cut

The trick was to unload a city without unloading the wagons. Coup’s flats had clear ends and one deck height, so a wagon could roll from car to car. Crossover plates covered the couplers. At the end of the cut the crew set a run, a pair of gangplanks from the last flat down to the ground. A team, and later a tractor, pulled the wagon along the plates. On the way down, a line to a snubber kept it from running away. The same end-ramp loading is what railroads later meant by circus loading, when a highway trailer was backed the length of a piggyback cut. The 1950s piggyback boom inherited the name from this ramp.

Two cars that went out ahead of show day were a different train. The advance cars carried the billposters and the paper, days or weeks in front of the performance. The twenty-four-hour man came in a day ahead of the show train to hold the lot, the license, the water, and the route from the unloading track to the grounds. The Flying Squadron was the first section of the show itself. It left after the evening performance, or before that performance was over, and it was supposed to be on the lot before dawn with the layout gang, the stakes, the cookhouse, and enough canvas to start the city.

The railroad treated the sections as extras. In a Southern Railway account of a 1952 move, the first section came off the New York Central at Cincinnati with white flags on the engine, bound for Lexington, and a switch engine was already waiting. Car inspectors walked the train. At the far end, coaches and stock went to the passenger station, and the flats went to an industrial siding where a ramp could be set and the vehicles driven off into the street. The circus agent had already paid the bill.

April 18, 1872

Dan Castello had already taken a show from Omaha to California by train in 1869, two elephants and two camels, in the weeks after the transcontinental railroad opened. That was a show riding the new road. The 1872 season is the one that built the machine. Barnum, Coup, and Castello had opened the wagon show in Brooklyn on April 10, 1871, as P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome. For the second season Coup put it on rails so it could skip the small towns and play the ones that could fill a big top.

The first loading was April 18, 1872, at New Brunswick, New Jersey. It took twelve hours. A camel slipped and broke its back. The rented cars were short, and the decks sat at different heights. Coup wanted a train of some sixty cars built for the wagons. An Ohio builder turned out the flats before the season was over: clear ends, steel enough under the decks for a loaded wagon, every car the same height so the plates would lie flat. Sleepers for the people, boxcars for the gear, and stock cars for the animals came with them. From then on, a large American circus was a railroad show. Rival owners copied the plates. Coup also chartered excursion trains, to bring a surrounding county in for the day.

Eighteen cars out of Baraboo

Five Ringling brothers, Albert, Otto, Alfred, Charles, and John, gave their first circus performance in Baraboo on May 19, 1884. It was a wagon show. They bought their first elephant in 1888. The rail season came in 1890.

The route book counts it. They opened in Baraboo on May 3 and closed at Chicago Junction, Ohio, on October 21. Twenty-four weeks and three days, 147 stands in eleven states, 8,181 miles. The train was 18 cars, including two advance cars. Fred D. Pfening Jr. itemized the other sixteen: a performers’ sleeper, a workingmen’s sleeper, an elephant car, five horse cars, and eight flats. One ring. A 125-foot round top. The winter quarters stayed on the river in Baraboo, where the railroad shop and the train barn sat near the bridge into town.

The train grew with the next seasons. A Sauk County history puts a wreck on May 17, 1892, at Concordia, Kansas: four cars destroyed and twenty-six horses killed. Barnum & Bailey was still a separate company, and still the show the brothers were chasing.

Bridgeport, then one show

James A. Bailey’s widow sold Barnum & Bailey to the Ringling brothers on October 22, 1907. The price in the next morning’s New York Times was $410,000. The English stockholders had ratified it in London. The property was turned over the following day at Bridgeport, Connecticut, where that show had already gone into winter quarters. The old name stayed. For a decade the brothers ran two circuses, and two trains.

For the 1919 season Charles and John made them one show, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, and kept the billing Bailey’s show had carried, the Greatest Show on Earth. Winter quarters left Baraboo for Bridgeport with that combine. In 1927 John Ringling moved them to Sarasota, and they stayed there through 1959. In 1960 the quarters moved to Venice, Florida, fifteen acres on the airport with a rail connection the arena show still needed. They remained into the early 1990s. By 2010 the cars were being shopped at Palmetto.

In September 1929 John Ringling bought the five circuses of the American Circus Corporation: Sells-Floto, Hagenbeck-Wallace, John Robinson, Sparks, and Al G. Barnes. Each of those had been a railroad show. The Times of September 10 said the purchase brought the last sizable circus in America under his control. The Depression took the duplicates off the road. The combined Ringling train was the one that kept the four-section movement.

Four sections, ninety cars

Through the canvas years the show traveled in four sections, each an extra on the railroad that happened to be in the way. The Circus Historical Society’s note on a 1925 lithograph puts the habit plainly. The train often ran near 100 cars. The Flying Squadron left before the last performance was finished and was due in before dawn. The unloading in the yard was advertised as its own free show.

A 1932 loading list gives the cars, section by section. The two advance coaches are inside the total of 90.

Section	Stock	Flats	Coaches	Cars	What went in it
Advance			2	2	The paper, ahead of show day
1st, Flying Squadron	3	15	4	22	Layout gang, stakes, cookhouse, blacksmith, baggage stock, menagerie top and cages. Out by about 11 p.m.
2nd	5	11	6	22	Sideshow, concessions, electrical department, big-top canvas, poles, and rigging
3rd	5	14	4	23	Wardrobe, props, trunks, and the seats
4th	10		11	21	Ring stock, lead stock, elephants, and the sleepers, including private car Jomar
Total	23	40	27	90	145 wagons and vehicles on the 40 flats

The fourth section was stock and coaches. The elephants rode in three of its ten stock cars and came in with the performers. The menagerie cages had already come in on the Squadron, so the canvas city could start at dawn. One hundred forty-five pieces on forty flats is a little under four wagons to a car. Late in the 1920s the show took delivery of forty steel flats, 70 feet long, Warren truss, and gave up the 60-foot wooden flats.

The canvas-era peak on the Circus Historical Society’s count is 1947: 107 flats, stock cars, and coaches. The Southern’s 1952 move, Columbus to Lexington, was three sections and almost seventy circus-owned cars. Labor, the lot, and the railroad bill were already closing in on the tent.

Ivanhoe, June 22, 1918

Hagenbeck-Wallace was the other giant railroad circus, based at Peru, Indiana, and second in size to the combined Ringling show. In the early morning of June 22, 1918, its train stopped near Ivanhoe Tower, east of Hammond, Indiana, so the crew could get at a hotbox. The rear of that train, wooden sleeping cars lit with oil lamps, was still on the Michigan Central main.

An empty Michigan Central troop train, steel Pullmans, ran past the signals and into those cars at about 4 a.m. The engineer was Alonzo Sargent. The accounts of the wreck put him asleep. The lamps set the wreckage on fire. Eighty-six people were killed, and more than 100 were hurt. The people in those sleepers were the performers and the working men. Many of the unnamed dead lie at Showmen’s Rest in Woodlawn Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois, under a plot the Showmen’s League had bought only months earlier. A marker there counts 56 stones for the unnamed and unclaimed. The show went on with what it had left. In September 1929 it was one of the five shows John Ringling bought.

July 16, 1956

The last performance under canvas was the night of July 16, 1956, at Heidelberg Raceway outside Pittsburgh. John Ringling North had already said, in that day’s Pittsburgh Press, that the tented circus as it then existed was a thing of the past. The New York Times counted 9,856 seats filled, the first capacity house of the season, and the show over at 12:02 a.m. The band played “Auld Lang Syne.” The canvas came down for the last time, and the train was to leave at dawn for the winter quarters in Sarasota. Everyone was to be paid at the siding.

In 1957 the circus came back indoors, in buildings Irvin Feld booked. Britannica puts the company at about 300 people after a tent-era force of about 1,400, some eighty of them performers. What the train carried from then on was an arena show: the acts, the animals, the rigging, and the wardrobe, from one building to the next.

Two trains, and the host railroad’s engines

On November 11, 1967, Irvin Feld, his brother Israel, and Roy Hofheinz took the show from John Ringling North for $10 million. The ceremony was in the Colosseum in Rome. Feld had been the booking agent since the tent came down. In 1968 he brought in Gunther Gebel-Williams and Circus Williams. In 1969 he put a second company on the road. The new one was the Red Unit. The company already out became the Blue Unit. Each unit was its own train, with its own trainmaster. The railroad crew carried a circus radio. The company’s own instructions held the trains to 60 miles an hour, and they put the stock cars directly behind the locomotives, where the ride was smoothest. Elephants rode facing each other and tethered, with water in the car and a handler who could reach them on the road.

The reporting mark on the cars was RBBX. The coaches were rebuilt passenger cars, and they were the performers’ house for the season. A second number, the house number, marked a car’s place in that year’s train. Move the car, and the house number moved with the job. The pie car was the diner.

The length has dates on it. Rhett Coates, in Trains for February 2011, put the Red Unit at 42 cars in 1985 and 59 cars in 2011. On June 15, 2010, Kenneth Kuehne photographed the whole Blue Unit leaving Huntsman Canyon at Moapa, Nevada, for Las Vegas: 61 cars, 5,409 feet, 4,490 tons. Five thousand four hundred nine feet is a little over a mile. That is one unit. The other unit was a second train, somewhere else on the map.

Missouri Pacific SD40-2 3193 and SD40 3027 leading the Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey circus train near Kyle, Texas, circa 1982

Missouri Pacific SD40-2 No. 3193 and SD40 No. 3027 with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey train near Kyle, Texas, circa 1982. Kyle is on the MoPac between Austin and San Antonio. The engines are the railroad’s. The cars are the circus’s. Mike Bledsoe photo. American-Rails.com collection.

The elephants’ last day in the ring was May 1, 2016. Six worked the show in Providence that Sunday, and five worked Wilkes-Barre, the two units on the same afternoon. The trains ran another season without them.

Royal American Shows

Royal American Shows was Carl J. Sedlmayr’s carnival, founded in 1923 and based in Tampa. The product was the midway at the fair: rides, shows, and the lot that went with them. At full size it moved on a 99-car train, with a crew the Tampa Bay Times later put at about a thousand, out of Carrollwood for a season that ran to Canada and back through the big fairs. Laura Sedlmayr told that paper, in a January 18, 1998, account of the show’s end, that the cost of the 99-car train is why they switched to trucks in 1982. The last Royal American date was Lubbock, Texas, in 1997.

A carnival train and a circus train loaded the same way. Flats for the equipment, sleepers for the people, a cookhouse, a private car for the owner. They were different companies. The Ringling train was still moving an arena circus in 2017, thirty-five years after Royal American had gone to trucks.

The parade train from Baraboo

Circus World Museum opened in Baraboo in 1959, on the old winter-quarters ground. C. P. “Chappie” Fox, the director, and Ben Barkin talked the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company into a street parade of the restored wagons. The first Great Circus Parade was July 4, 1963, in Milwaukee. That year the wagons moved by truck.

The rail move began in 1965. More than thirty flats carried the wagons from Baraboo to Milwaukee, about two hundred miles, and the trip itself drew a crowd. Burlington 2-8-2 No. 4960 took that train on the North Western on July 1, 1965, and again on June 30, 1966. The engine’s story is on its own page. Schlitz sponsored the parade through 1973 and then let it go. The parade returned in later years under other money. It was a museum train of historic wagons, run once a year to a parade. It was a different movement from either Ringling unit.

Chicago and North Western executive F7 locomotives with the Circus World Museum circus train en route from Baraboo, Wisconsin, to Chicago in May 1982

Chicago & North Western executive F7s, the railroad’s business-train engines, with the Circus World Museum train in May 1982, Baraboo to Chicago. American-Rails.com collection.

May 21, 2017

Feld Entertainment told the company on January 14, 2017, after the shows in Orlando, that the season then under way would be the last. The reasons the company gave were ticket sales and the cost of the operation. The last performance was the night of May 21, 2017, at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. The New York Times counted 146 years, from Barnum’s 1871 show to that evening. Ringling’s own first performance had been the wagon show in Baraboo in 1884, and the train that carried the combined circus had been the company’s house since 1919. When the lights came up on the last show, that house was at the end of its last move.

Burlington 4960 — the Mikado on the Schlitz parade train, July 1, 1965, and June 30, 1966
Southern Pacific · Missouri Pacific · Chicago & North Western — the host railroads in the photographs
The 1950s — circus-loaded piggyback, the ramp with a new job
Railroad glossary

Sources

PBS American Experience, “The Circus” (2018). April 18, 1872, New Brunswick. Twelve hours. A camel. Some sixty cars, and flats built in Ohio for the wagons. Fred Pfening III on Coup’s reason for skipping the small towns.
Britannica, “W. C. Coup,” and “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.” End-loading on crossover plates. Castello and Coup. Barnum’s 1871 show. Combined in 1919. Last canvas performance July 16, 1956, Pittsburgh. Feld booking in 1957, about 1,400 people down to about 300. Sale November 11, 1967, Rome, $10 million. Second unit the year after the 1968 purchase of Circus Williams.
Smithsonian, “America’s Big Circus Spectacular Has a Long and Cherished History” (March 22, 2017). Castello, Omaha to California, 1869, two elephants and two camels.
New York Times, October 23, 1907. Purchase the day before, $410,000, ratified in London by Mrs. James A. Bailey’s agreement with the English stockholders. Turnover at Bridgeport the day of the story.
New York Times, September 10, 1929. John Ringling buys the five American Circus Corporation shows: Sells-Floto, Hagenbeck-Wallace, John Robinson, Sparks, Al G. Barnes.
Circus Historical Society, route of 1890, from the Official Route Book of Ringling Bros. World’s Greatest Railroad Shows, season of 1892. May 3, Baraboo, to October 21, Chicago Junction, Ohio. 147 stands, 11 states, 8,181 miles. 18 cars, including two advance.
Fred D. Pfening Jr., “The 1890–1891 Seasons,” Bandwagon, July–August 1993. Eighteen cars: performers’ sleeper, workingmen’s sleeper, elephant car, five horse cars, eight flats, two advance cars.
History of Sauk County, University of Wisconsin digital text. May 17, 1892, Concordia, Kansas: four cars destroyed, twenty-six horses killed.
Wisconsin Historical Society, National Register, Ringling Brothers Circus Winter Quarters, Baraboo. Quarters 1884–1918. Winter headquarters to Bridgeport with the 1919 combine.
Sarasota History Alive, Venice circus marker. Sarasota quarters 1927–1959. Venice from 1960, fifteen acres at the airport. Roy Hofheinz with Irvin and Israel Feld, 1967.
Circus Historical Society, “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Trains – 1925.” Four sections. Flying Squadron out before the last show and in before dawn. Near 100 cars in the 1920s. 107 flats, stock cars, and coaches in 1947.
Showmen’s Museum, Ringling train loading list for 1932. Advance 2 coaches. Sections of 22, 22, 23, and 21. Totals 23 stock, 40 flat, 27 coaches, 90 cars. Fourth section: elephants and private car Jomar. Forty steel 70-foot Warren flats from the late 1920s, in place of 60-foot wooden flats.
Southern Railway, Ties, September 1952, “Circus Train.” Three sections, Columbus to Lexington via Cincinnati, New York Central to the Southern. Almost 70 circus-owned cars. White flags. Coaches and stock at the depot, flats at an industrial siding.
Smithsonian, “The Hammond Train Wreck of 1918” (June 22, 2018), and the Showmen’s Rest marker, Woodlawn Cemetery, Forest Park, Illinois. June 22, 1918, about 4 a.m., Ivanhoe Tower near Hammond. Hotbox. Wooden sleepers, oil lamps, empty Michigan Central troop train. Engineer Alonzo Sargent. 86 dead, more than 100 injured. Fifty-six stones for the unnamed.
New York Times, July 17, 1956, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 6, 2014, quoting the July 16, 1956, Pittsburgh Press. Heidelberg Raceway. 9,856 seats. Over at 12:02 a.m. Train for Sarasota at dawn. North on the tented circus.
Ringling Bros. train instructions, as given to TrainWeb by the circus. Two units. A trainmaster on each. 60 miles an hour. Stock cars behind the locomotives. Elephant cars: water, a handler, animals tethered facing each other.
Rhett Coates, Trains, February 2011. Red Unit 42 cars in 1985, 59 cars in 2011. House numbers changed with a car’s place in the train. Reporting mark RBBX.
Trains, December 22, 2010. Kenneth Kuehne, Blue Unit at Moapa, Nevada, June 15, 2010. 61 cars, 5,409 feet, 4,490 tons. Cars shopped at Palmetto, Florida.
Associated Press, May 1, 2016, Providence and Wilkes-Barre. Last elephant performances, six animals and five, the same Sunday.
BBC, May 21, 2017, and New York Times, May 21, 2017. Closing told to the company January 14, 2017, in Orlando. Last show that night at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale. The Times counted 146 years from 1871.
Tampa Bay Times, January 18, 1998, “End of the Ride.” Royal American Shows, Carl Sedlmayr, a 99-car train, trucks from 1982. Wikipedia, Royal American Shows: founded 1923, last date Lubbock, Texas, 1997.
Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, “Great Circus Parade.” Shepherd Express, December 5, 2016. First parade July 4, 1963, Schlitz, Chappie Fox and Ben Barkin. Rail move from 1965, more than 30 flats, about 200 miles, Baraboo to Milwaukee. Schlitz through 1973.
American-Rails.com photographs. Mike Bledsoe, Southern Pacific between Elgin and Austin, circa 1984. Mike Bledsoe, Missouri Pacific 3193 and 3027 near Kyle, Texas, circa 1982. Chicago & North Western executive F7s with the Circus World Museum train, Baraboo to Chicago, May 1982.

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