Railroaders' Nostalgia > RF&P 923 Caboose: another Circus Train Adventure story

Little, Blue Caboose:  Lost & Found in 1987

(NOTE:  this story has appeared online before, and can also be seen on the Walkerville & Southern [museum] website, as they now have that caboose in their collection and added this narrative to the car's official back-story.)


RF&P 923

It was during the first half of 1987 that a curious “Lost & Found” phenomenon occurred that will never again be duplicated and, perhaps, was a taste of things to come in the railroad industry.  The two-year tour of the 117th Edition of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was but three months old, and had reached the show’s yearly three-week stand in Virginia (now the home state of the show’s owning company, Feld Entertainment, Inc.). 

 
First the show played Norfolk, then Hampton.  Richmond, usually the first Virginia town to be played each year, was last up in 1987.  The next stand, Baltimore, Maryland, would see the 44-car Red Unit Circus Train move on Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad to Potomac Yard, then on Chessie System [former B&O], rails to get there.  As the show departed Richmond on the morning of Monday, March 16, a little blue, 40-ft. caboose, RF&P 923, went with us all the way to Baltimore --- and didn’t return to Virginia for the entire first half of 1987, remaining with the show during its entire trek across the Northeast, until June of that year!  Why this occurred is a story unto itself, with both humor and a dreadful thought that, due to the pending elimination of Virginia’s caboose law (repealed on July 1, 1988), the car might be soon scrapped.
 

When cabooses jump

 
After the show spent two weeks performing in Baltimore with featured elephant star “King Tusk,” the train carried the 350 personnel, animals and equipment to the next scheduled stand:  Charleston, West Virginia.  RF&P 923 also went along for the Circus Train-run, or "jump" in Circus parlance, all the way across the Allegheny Mountains on the former C&O Railway via Charlottesville and Staunton (apparently having traversed CSX’s former Norfolk Southern trackage rights from Alexandria to Orange, VA), on March 30. 

 
A week later, on April 5/6, the Red Unit was enroute to New York City, and was rolling north via Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor (starting at the Penn-Camden Connection north of Washington, D.C.), screaming along at maximum authorized Circus Train speed:  60 mph.  Amtrak trains zoomed by us at twice that speed; I have the Super8-mm [Sound] movies to prove it!  RF&P 923 screamed along too, on the rear of the Circus Train, and all the way northward through Penn Station under New York City, and to the storage site in Queens NY on the Long Island Rail Road, adjacent to Harold Tower.  (The show had taken a LIRR routing out to Jamaica Station, then reversed direction down the freight branch).  The caboose was spotted up with the show’s coaches, positioned directly underneath the Purple 7 elevated railway at the point at which that line begins its descent into the sub-surface railway system under the East River toward Manhattan.
 

The multi-week engagement in Madison Square Garden allowed the show personnel to make use of RF&P 923, and  that we did! 

 
As an employee at that time in the show’s Properties Department, “Ring One” (in the show itself), I was also privileged to have the opportunity to film scenes of the caboose with my Super8-mm movie camera on “Dark Days” (when the show didn’t perform and the stage lights remained dark).  The footage I acquired is priceless:  exterior and interior shots of the caboose (the exterior was painted dark blue with the final, newer RF&P logo, and the clean, nearly dustless interior had that pale green, shiny primer paint seen in so many of that era’s locomotive cabs), as well as scenes of the Circus Train storage site – including the RF&P caboose – taken from a unique perspective:  aboard a Purple 7 elevated train, as it rolled by, and above, the Long Island Rail Road storage site.
 

By then, we were getting used to having RF&P 923 as part of our mile-long-mobile-home.  And it became a Party Car - in addition to the Tunnel Car, a former U.P. baggage car that had been used to carry equipment wagons.  (That Tunnel Car came off the show-tour before the end of the decade, and was recycled:  it is now the Red Unit’s dining car, the “Pie Car.”)
 

The Red Unit’s 117th Edition played in many other venues throughout the Northeast during the second quarter of 1987, and the little blue caboose went right along with us.  On May 18 we jumped north from Manhattan to New Haven, Ct. and May 25 continued on to Hartford.
 

Then, on June 1, the southbound jump to Philadelphia, Pa. on Conrail’s Hudson River west bank line found RF&P 923 being occupied by show personnel – and not just for railroad-related purposes:  it had become accepted as a forty-fifth Circus Train car.  (This particular Labor Day train-run was documented in a Chicory Productions VHS tape entitled Hudson River Railroading, and showed the train rolling along beneath the huge bridge near Bear Mountain, N.Y.  Caboose RF&P 923 was focused on as the train was seen disappearing around a curve, away from the camera.) 
 

Circus Caboose Madness, indeed!
 

The first two weeks of June the show played the regular (yearly) scheduled, two-week stand at the Philadelphia Spectrum.  This particular year, it was to be followed by a rare, four-day jump all the way west to El Paso, Texas.  (That long rail-ride would form the basis of the abridged feature article that was eventually published in the March 1994 issue of Passenger Train Journal, and which was referred to as “El Paso-Bound” on the Pie Car’s menu board on June 15-18.) While the show played Philadelphia, the Circus managers - some of whom were self-admitted railfans - had actually discussed the RF&P caboose having remained with the tour since leaving Richmond several months before.  Their final thoughts were that if it stayed on the train for the jump to El Paso, we would paint it silver and paste red Circus banners on it – with appropriate, at the time, “RBX” reporting mark and Circus Train number.  (In 1995, Ringling Bros.' railroad reporting marks were changed to four-letters:  "RBBX.")
 

Sometimes the spoken word will have a most interesting effect…..  The caboose vanished in Philly.  One day it was there with the Circus Train, and the next – poof!  We never saw it again, and records later showed that it, like much of the nation’s caboose fleet at the time, might soon face the scrapper’s torch.  Too bad – yet another piece of Americana slipping through our fingers, as the show might say, “Right before [our] very eyes.” 
 

But that’s not the end of the story….
 

RF&P 923 survived the scrapper’s torch, and is preserved today as part of the collection of usable equipment owned by the Chesapeake Railway Association in Maryland, on the Walkersville & Southern Railroad.  Thank goodness for small favors!  But why was it on the Circus Train for so many months during 1987, away from its home railroad, and several years before RF&P came under control of CSXT?  We were told later – and this is a quote – “Because RF&P forgot about it.”   RF&P 923:  Little blue caboose, Lost & Found.
 

Postscript:  At the Circus, the Ringmaster always gives the audience a sincere invitation at the end of each performance.  Maybe it’s a good thing, or maybe it’s just me:  I take that phrase as a positive incentive for inviting children of all ages to return to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey the next time it comes to town.  So, what has that got to do with rare railroad equipment in danger of scrapping?   To them as well, I will say that famous, invitational phrase:  May all your days be Circus Days!
 

# # # # #
 

RF&P 923 was built for the RF&P Railroad in January 1971
by Southern Iron & Equipment Co. in Atlanta, Ga. ---
 



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/25 13:50 by rbx551985.

Very entertaining story. As a former railroader, I can attest to odd things happening. One month, an empty SP boxcar came into the yard I worked out of in Southern California four of five times riding back and forth between Barstow and Watson yard on the regular train.
JB

Interesting backstory, rbx551985.

Here's the caboose in question, photographed on one of the South Eutaw Street leads in Baltimore on 03/21/1987.
In the background are the Maryland Baking Company/ Maryland Cup Company (then owned by Fort Howard Paper) buildings, with the "SWEETHEART PAPER CUPS" signage. This site is now occupied by M&T Bank Stadium.
Note that, at this point, RF&P 923 is no longer wearing its Linking NORTH and SOUTH herald,
/Ted

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THAT'S the car.  I have a lot of S8mm movie film inside that car as it sat under the Purple-7 elevated commuter rail line at Hunter's Point (Long Island) in Spring 1987, and more.  Some day maybe I'll find a way to transfer it so I can post it on TO.COM.