With one final auction, NCDOT is now rid of former Ringling Bros. circus train cars

The saga of the former Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus train cars stashed in the North Carolina woods has come to an end.

The last of the train cars have been sold, five years after the N.C. Department of Transportation bought them from the circus and seven months after they caught fire on a remote track in Nash County.

NCDOT bought nine railroad cars from the circus as it was shutting down in 2017 with hopes of refurbishing them and using them on the Piedmont, the state-owned passenger train that runs between Raleigh and Charlotte. In the end, only two of the cars will survive.

Four were badly damaged by the fire last March and had to be scrapped. Of the remaining five, two were sold through the state’s surplus property website in May to companies that operate tourist trains in New Hampshire and West Virginia. The state received $26,301 from the sale.

That left three cars that were put up for auction online this fall. The buyer was a company that intends to scrap them, said NCDOT spokeswoman Lauren Haviland. The winning bid: $28,750 for all three cars.

NCDOT paid $383,000 for the cars — eight that had been used by the circus as dormitories for performers and other workers and one baggage car. The state has routinely bought and refurbished used rail cars for the Piedmont; all the passenger and baggage/cafe cars in the fleet now were originally built in the 1950s and 1960s for other railroads.

The Ringling Bros. cars were built in the 1960s by the St. Louis Car Company, which also made some of the coaches the state already owns. With the market for used passenger train cars relatively small, NCDOT considered the purchase a good deal at the time.

NCDOT didn’t have room for the cars in its yard on the north side of downtown Raleigh, so it parked them on a stretch of unused state-owned track east of Spring Hope.

Fire that destroyed four cars considered arson

The state then received federal grants that allowed it to order new rail cars for the Piedmont. NCDOT put the old circus cars up for auction in late 2020, hoping to get back what it paid for them, but didn’t get any buyers.

As it prepared to try again, fire broke out in the baggage car sometime before dawn on March 10 and spread to three other coaches. The train was a mile in the woods, beyond the reach of firefighting equipment, and had to be pulled to a crossing before the flames could be put out.

Investigators have determined that the fire was deliberately set but have made no arrests, according to Maj. Eddie Moore of the Nash County Sheriff’s Office.

“We are currently waiting on results from some testing at the NC SBI Crime Lab, and we are expecting that back sometime in the next couple of weeks hopefully,” Moore wrote in an email. “After that, we believe that we will be able to wrap this case up.”

In addition to the last three circus coaches, NCDOT this fall also sold two other old rail cars it had once planned to refurbish — a baggage car built in 1965 and a passenger coach from 1953 that was originally used as a hospital car by the U.S. Army. They sold to different owners for a combined $9,800.

Meanwhile, the new train cars are on order. NCDOT expects to receive new cars for the Carolinian, the train that runs daily between Charlotte and New York, as early as 2026, Haviland said. The new cars for the Piedmont won’t be ready until sometime after that, she said.