As investigators seek cause of circus train car fire, NCDOT ponders what comes next
The fire that broke out on a string of former circus train cars in Nash County last week burned four of the cars beyond repair and left five others unscathed, according to the N.C. Department of Transportation.
NCDOT, which owns the cars, plans to try to sell the undamaged ones and hasn’t decided yet what to do with the ones that burned, said spokesman Jamie Kritzer.
“We will be able to determine our next steps when we can get a full assessment of the damage,” Kritzer wrote in an email.
It’s not clear what started the fire, which was reported at about 7 a.m. Thursday on a remote section of state-owned railroad track east of Spring Hope. The State Bureau of Investigation is leading the effort to determine the cause.
The fire appears to have started in an old baggage car at the center of the train, said Chief Deputy Brandon Medina, spokesman for the Nash County Sheriff’s Office. Because the cars were in a wooded area about a mile from the nearest road, firefighters couldn’t immediately reach them, allowing the fire to spread to other cars in both directions, Medina said.
As the fire burned, a locomotive carefully moved the cars to the Old South Franklin Road crossing, where firefighters could get at them. The fire was out and the crossing reopened by 3:30 p.m., Medina said.
NCDOT bought the cars from the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2017 with plans to refurbish them for use on the Piedmont passenger train between Raleigh and Charlotte. The state paid $383,000.
The state then received two federal grants, totaling $157 million, to buy six locomotives and 26 passenger cars, all new. NCDOT put the old circus cars up for auction on the state’s surplus property website in late 2020 but didn’t receive any offers.
The state was asking $45,000 for each of the circus train cars, except for the baggage car, which was filled with various hand and shop tools. The opening bid for it was $55,000.
The rail cars were not insured, said Kritzer, the NCDOT spokesman.
“The department does insure all active rail cars in service,” he wrote in an email. “However, these cars were not insured because they had not been refurbished and we were not preparing to put them in service.”
NCDOT has kept the cars on the remote unused section of track about 40 miles east of Raleigh because the state has limited room to store rail cars elsewhere, Kritzer said.
