Miss your chance to own an old circus train car? NCDOT will try again to find buyer.
The state’s online auction of nine railroad cars once owned by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus failed to generate a buyer, but the N.C. Department of Transportation says it will try again.
NCDOT put the cars up for sale last month, along with seven other old rail cars it determined it no longer needs. All 16 cars were listed on an auction page on the State Surplus Property website, which accepted bids until Monday morning.
The state received one offer each for two of the cars, both passenger cars built in the 1960s with an asking price of $75,000 apiece. The state is still evaluating those offers, said Jason Orthner, director of NCDOT’s Rail Division.
The state will organize another online auction for the other 14 cars, probably by the end of the month, Orthner said. NCDOT will consider lowering the asking prices and revising the terms and conditions of the sales to try to entice more bids, he said.
“What we have here is a very unique product, and you don’t have just your normal folks who are interested,” he said. “It’s difficult to nail down what the price point is for this market.”
The state set minimum bids that ranged from $9,000 to $200,000. The state was asking $45,000 for each of the circus train cars, except for a baggage car that’s filled with various hand and shop tools. The opening bid for it was $55,000. Seven of the nine circus cars were built in 1964, while the other two are older.
Circus cars parked in the woods
NCDOT paid $383,000 for the Ringling Bros. cars shortly after the circus gave its final performance in 2017. They are parked on a state-owned rail line in the woods of Nash County. NCDOT painted over the Ringling Bros. name and logos, though faded “The Greatest Show on Earth” insignia still appear on some of the cars and someone painted an elephant, gorilla and tiger on one side of the baggage car.
As with most of the other old cars, the department expected to have them refurbished for use on the Piedmont, the state-owned passenger train that runs between Raleigh and Charlotte. All 19 cars now in the Piedmont fleet — 14 passenger cars and 5 baggage/cafe cars — were originally built in the 1950s and 1960s for other railroads.
The state has since received two federal grants, totaling $157 million, that will allow it to buy six locomotives and 26 passenger cars, all new. Last summer, the General Assembly passed a bill requiring the department to develop a plan for its fleet of rail cars and put those it doesn’t plan to refurbish up for sale by Dec. 31.
Orthner said NCDOT received lots of calls and inquiries about the cars, including visits from several prospective buyers who wanted to see them in person. He said the market for old rail cars includes private collectors, companies that operate excursion trains and even developers or business owners who want to place a car on their property for show.
“There’s a wide variety of different folks that could get them, including railroads that want to put them into their fleet,” he said.
He said the state doesn’t intend to keep them, saying, “It’s our intent to move these cars.”
Rail service recovering from pandemic
Like a lot of mass transit, North Carolina’s passenger trains have been hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. Before COVID-19, Amtrak and the state operated three round-trip Piedmont trains a day between Raleigh and Charlotte, with stops in Cary, Durham, Burlington, Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury and Kannapolis.
NCDOT suspended all Piedmont service over the summer, leaving only the Carolinian, which runs daily between Charlotte and New York. NCDOT restored one daily round-trip of the Piedmont in August, then added a second last month. Orthner said the state may revive the third train as soon as April.
The state plans to add a fourth daily round-trip of the Piedmont in 2024, to coincide with the opening of a new Amtrak station in Uptown Charlotte.
In addition to extra cleaning and disinfecting, the trains are operating at reduced capacity to allow passengers to remain apart from each other, and masks are required on board. For details, go to www.ncbytrain.org/.
This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
