Sunday, November 07, 2010

1949 Ringling-Barnum #9


9, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

6 comments:

Chic Silber said...

Life was much tougher in the days

of wooden wagons & iron men

Some of us don't appreciate just

how good we had (or have) it

Chic Silber said...

Just happen to have 1 of these

lights (as shown on uprights)

available to some avid collector

JIM ELLIOTT said...

Someone, please fill me in on the cable spools. Were they rolled into a wagon or hoisted into the wagon? I didn't relize, they used these spools.

Anonymous said...

As heavy as these would be,I would think they would be rolled into either of the regular baggage wagons in the light dept. Early wagons 114 and 113 were drop frame wagons and the back floor would only be a couple of feet off the ground, and pretty easy to roll up that distance. I am not looking at a 1949 loading list to tell which wagons were used when this photo was taken. If you blow this photo up, you will see the "ringling" written on the side of a couple of these spools and if they had been loaded on their sides, I think this would have rubbed off pretty fast. Again, not sure about 1949, but #112 was for the bigtop and #111 was the midway power plant in other years.
p.j.

Chic Silber said...

Rolling heavy feeder cables onto

these spools is no easy chore as

the core diameter is much smaller

than the sides so that if you try

following the lay you are skidding

as you go so the best approach is

to lay the spool on a turntable

& wind the cable onto it

I've rolled my share of cable

Anonymous said...

You are correct Chic, as they used a small a-arm set up with a rod in the middle of the spool. They also buried all these cables a couple inches also each day. I was talking about just rolling the spool from the a-arm into the back of the wagon. Not rolling the spool around the lot.
p.j.