From Richard Reynolds

RBBB Ferry, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. RBBB Crossing the Upper Bay on Car Floats - - This photo shows how RBBB crossed the Upper Bay from New Jersey to Brooklyn. The barges were called “car floats” because they were designed to handle railroad cars on tracks built upon them. Coming from Sarasota to open in the Garden, the show trains always used car floats to get across the Bay from New Jersey to Brooklyn. There were no railroad tracks from NJ into Manhattan except for the tunnels that took the Pennsylvania RR under the Hudson River, through Pennsylvania Station and thence under the East River. However, circus trains were prohibited from using them back then. So they took the boat. The car floats were each some 350’ long and had three tracks apiece. They usually operated in pairs with the tug boat between them. The route was always (as far as I know) like this - - - Pennsylvania RR to its Greenville piers (Jersey City) then onto New Haven RR barges for the 3 ½ mile ride across the Upper Bay to the Bay Ridge piers (Brooklyn). The train was then re-assembled into its sections and took the Long Island RR to Fresh Pond (Queens). There it switched to the New York Connecting RR (jointly owned by the PA and New Haven RRs) for the ride north through Queens and across the Hell Gate Bridge (opened 1917) high above the East River, and into the Bronx. The cars would then go either to New Haven’s Harlem River Yd. (Bronx) or Mott Haven Yd., also in the Bronx (jointly operated by New Haven and NY Central). From either of those yards the show (wagons and lead stock) would march south to Madison Square Garden, then located on 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th Sts. However, what is shown in this photo is not a voyage to the Garden opener but, instead, to an under canvas date at Westbury, Long Island. We see two New Haven barges (nos. 67 and 68) loaded with flat cars. They are lashed to the New Haven tug “Transfer 20”, the prow of which shows here. The tug was under the command of Capt. Beckwith Brown. This particular move occurred in 1950. The show played Newark on June 6-8 and then went to Westbury, Long Island for a June 9th date. The route of movement across the Bay was the same as described above - - - Pennsylvania RR to Jersey City (Greenville), thence car floats to Bay Ridge. This shows the barges approaching the Bay Ridge slips. The Long Island RR then took the flats and stocks to its Mineola-Garden City yard where they were unloaded. The sleepers did not go on the car floats. Instead they were permitted to traverse the tunnels under the two rivers via Penn Station. That was the first time circus cars had ever been allowed to do that though only the sleepers were permitted at that time. It helped that all of them were the newish ex-WWII hospital cars. Around the 1970s, the “new” RBBB train was permitted to go though the tunnels under Manhattan. It actually moved as a passenger train instead of a freight train as in the old big top days. RBBB followed this same car float operating procedure to reach these subsequent dates - -Newark to Hicksville, LI (1951), Newark to Mineola, LI (1952) and Asbury Park, NJ to Mineola (1954). However, I do not know if, on these later dates, the passenger cars went through the Hudson and Manhattan tunnels as they did in 1950 Prior to the opening of the Hell Gate Bridge in 1917, Barnum and Bailey (based in nearby Bridgeport) had to be car floated across the East River from the Bronx for the many under canvas openers it staged in Brooklyn. Photo is from New York Herald Tribune. Pictures of RBBB trains on the car floats are rare indeed.