Fire last night/this morning destroyed the Virginia Museum of Transportation's "bus and trolley annex/spin-off," the Commonwealth Coach & Trolley Museum in Roanoke, which featured a large collection of Virginia transit buses; it is not yet reported if any trolleys were involved.

The museum was first formed in 1999 when the Virginia Museum of Transportation decided to de-accession its fleet of transit coaches which had been collected throughout the years.

http://www.roanoke.com/news/local/blaze ... 2142f.html

Oh, no; and I never quite made it over there from VMT, always thinking 'on the next visit..." A bit like my being a native New Yorker and not doing that 'tourist' trip up to the WTC observation deck...

Is it known yet if anything was saved or is recoverable?

Here is another link
http://www.wdbj7.com/content/news/Build ... 85223.html

This and other unfortunate events often serve other organizations well as motivators to revisit and update their practices and policies. As the fiduciary agent for our museum, whenever I learn of a loss at another museum, I take a look at our organization and raise the matter with our officers. I will be reviewing our insurance policies and discussing the need to insure any items in our collection that are not currently insured against loss.

This article suggests that the one streetcar (body) owned by the group survived: http://wset.com/news/local/commonwealth-coach-and-trolley-museum-starts-to-clean-following-fire

Is it the St Louis car or the Brill?

The St Louis one is the only car shown on their website as being part of the groups collection.

BERA shows a 1917 St Louis car and a 1927 Brill (body only).

I believe this is the brill, no idea if they actually still own it, it was scrapped, etc.

Alan,

I agree with your comment, but then the issue becomes how much to insure your vehicles. Depending on the streetcar (in our case) our six restored streetcars are priceless and to an extent, worthless. There's no market for a Twin City Line streetcar. Our Minnesota streetcars are one-of-a-kind. You can't go out and buy another. You can go to Gomaco and for $1+ million dollars, they'll make a replica for you, but it's a replica not the original.

So, do you insure your vehicle(s) for replacement, i.e., replica cost? Or for the amount of money it took to restore the car? In either case, current property insurance rates under which the vehicles would be insured, would price the coverage into the stratosphere.

I'm not sure how other trolley museums view this issue. It would be interesting to find out.

After the terrible fire at the National Capitol Trolley Museum some years ago, our Museum made a firm commitment to protect all our cars and buildings with fire suppression systems. We accomplished this goal over a couple of years, costing us over $100-thousand dollars.

Thanks!

We did not carry insurance on the collection and still do not for the reasons Jim Vaitkunas notes in his post. However, we have a generous amount of coverage on the contents of the buildings. In the case of the 2003 fire, the cars destroyed were considered contents and the claim was paid accordingly. The amount of the claim was not near the replacement cost of a single vehicle. The funds did help cover the cost of shipment for the Brussels car from Orlando which we considered a suitable replacement for one of the three lost Austrian trams.

I have one piece of advice: smoke detectors and sprinklers. If that is not an option then be sure your collection is stored in such a way that all cars of one type or one system/city are not stored in the same building (if you have multiple buildings). At National Capital we were fortunate only in the fact that all the Washington cars were not stored together in the barn that was burned. Ditto for the trams.

Wesley

I wonder if the red/white/blue bus in the picture with the trolley body is the Highway Post Office bus owned by the Railway Mail service Library and if it survived?

That vehicle was certainly at the main VMT site when I went there in October 2012 and doesn't feature on the CC&TM list of "owned" vehicles on their website. There were a couple more buses on display at the main site at that time - The 1934 Dodge School Bus and a 1966 GM Fishbowl bus, but 5 years have passed since my visit, so that may not be the case now. The Dodge must fall into the "irreplaceable" category.
Perhaps someone a bit nearer (or who has been there more recently) could confirm !

Folks,
Fire is a very real danger. The Western Railway Museum has a 200,000 gallon water tank supply. It has been used to load tank trucks for two off-property fires and in August for a fire that burned right up to our tracks/ property. Car Barn Three has a suppression system and when it is built so will Car Barn Four.

Ted Miles, WRM Archives Department

I believe that the 1927 Brill, shown in a 2000 photo earlier in this thread, may have been scrapped. I'm hoping for confirmation (or refutation) of that but for the time being I've removed it from the updated "beta test" Preserved Cars roster linked from here.