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One Man's Love of the Circus
Mar 15, 2006
By Noel Widdifield
LSOL.com Managing Editor |
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Tom’s circus train started by accident. One of the club's previous members had a circus train. Tom was the buyer and brought it home on Mother's Day.
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Tom’s circus train started by accident. One of the club's previous members had a circus train and he ran it at some of the places the club ran. Before long people who came to the shows expected to see the circus train. When the man left the club and changed hobbies he sold his train. 
Tom was the buyer and brought it home on Mother's Day. Good thing he has an understanding wife!!! He says that he spent a fortune and much time getting it to run reliably including staying coupled and on the track. Then a funny thing happened. Every time he set up his train to run it was longer. It grew and grew and is now over 100 feet long.
He is not sure how it will end except those 10 wheelers are starting to look really silly on front. Especially when there is only one of them pulling. He is thinking maybe a new Hudson would really look good and pull all of those cars without a problem. Tom buys kits from Hartford, Northeast Narrow Gage, Circus Crafts and even Bachmann. He always improves what comes in the box. Very little he buys stays untouched so he will never have collectables. Tom scratch and kit builds most of the circus wagons and has built some flat cars for his circus as well. The Mack truck has a real redwood bed made from an old deck from his house. 
Most of the decals are from his own design. The wagon wheels are an example. The flatbed circus cars are also made from that deck redwood. 
His flat cars are Mt Vernon style but not completely prototypical. He has 17 of them. The first two were made from kits by Circus Crafts in California. Tom suspects they are not being made any longer since the guy that had the company is in his mid 80's. I check of their website confirms that they have stopped production although a few kits are still available.
One of the commissary wagons, #96 and #99, is from a Circus Craft kit and the other is from material he purchased and built from his plan. 
Some of the other wagons are also Circus Craft or from Circus Craft plans. 
The Circus Craft kits contain all of the parts and great drawings of the completed wagons. 
The finished kits are very detailed and beautiful. 
Tom mostly runs narrow gauge and very seldom runs standard gauge except for the circus train and a couple of SD45's and a string of passenger and freight rolling stock. Some of the other stock he has includes a few LGB locomotives, a Bachmann Christmas train, a Bachmann Blue Comet with extra cars, a Back Forty Mining train, a Daylight Hill Logging train, a Thomas, and an Egg Liner with a few Lehman open trolley cars. 
His favorite train to run for himself is his little mining train with the Porter and Hartford gondolas, Scatter Jack and the work caboose. 
When I asked him how much he had invested in the circus trains, Tom said, “I do not have a clue as to how much is invested and do not really care. This I do know, the look on people's faces when the train runs cannot be bought at any price.”
If you have an interest in circus trains you should consider “The Circus Moves by Rail” by Tom Parkinson and Charles Phillip Fox and published by Carstens Publications, Inc. It is an excellent source of information about circuses and about the trains they traveled in. I used it extensively for this article.Top of Page
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