Information needed!

SAVE0255, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. I received the message below from Frederick Neill who has done extensive study on the Barnum & Bailey tour of Europe 1898-02. Any assistance would be appreciated. Buckles Buckles, Thankfully (!) I'm getting near the end of my Barnum & Bailey visit researches to UK. However, I've hit a slight puzzle - almost certainly due to the fact we have had no shows as large as B&B plus few ever using near "standard" US methods. Hence I've nothing to check against at UK end. What happened was in 1899 the show visited Torquay and because the rail sidings were limited the wagons had a 5 mile trip to the lot. No real problem, except the 'Torquay Times' noted that a menagerie pole snapped and the pole wagon had to do a 10 mile round trip to collect the spare - this did cause some delays. My logic queries why the spare was not being carried but seems to have been left on the rail flat. Or did US shows do this anyway? The only reason I can think of for not carrying the spare would be pole's weight - is that why? I would imagine that there would have been a fairly standard way of doing things in many of the large shows - so, after the flats had "unloaded" would there still have been a lot of items (at least spare poles) on board? Keep up the blog, many thanks in advance Fred Neill (neill.frederick@gmail.com)