From Don Covington

Circus Train Accident Tragic (By CINNAMON BAIR LAKELAND LEDGER Saturday, July 23, 2011) On a foggy January morning, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus' private train trundled through Lakeland on its way from St. Petersburg to Orlando for three days of performances that were to start that night. It was about 9:15, and many of the "Blue Unit's" 150 performers and crew were still sleeping after the show the night before.Kydyrjan Boulibekov, a circus horse rider from the former Soviet Union, had just woken up to use the restroom. He was walking down the train corridor when his car went off the tracks."Maybe it saved me, 'cause where I slept, the refrigerator fell down," Boulibekov said.Seventeen of the train's 53 cars had derailed. Photos of the wreck, which happened near U.S. 92 and Fish Hatchery Road, showed a zigzagged pile of silver-and-red rail cars, many of them on their sides.The Jan. 13, 1994, wreck is likely the most notorious in Polk County history. In fact, there are many in this county who still remember the circus train wreck, even though it's now been 17 years.The train's problems started a little earlier in the morning. A Lakeland-area ambulance driver noticed something was amiss with the train — possibly a sticky brake — and called railroad authorities to alert them. The train made an emergency stop, but a "roll by" inspection by the train's conductor and brakeman didn't turn up the problem, The Gainesville Sun reported that Jan. 16.Fifteen minutes later, the train had rolled about two and half miles into Northeast Lakeland when witnesses saw a wheel fly off one of the passenger cars."There was a tremendous shower of sparks, and we saw something fly into the weeds," Bob Antantis, who was watching the train from a mini-warehouse near Lake Parker Avenue and Gary Road, told Ledger reporters. "When we went over there we found two halves of a train wheel."The loss of its wheel caused the passenger car to derail, but if the engineer noticed it, he didn't stop. A Ledger graphic published on Jan. 14, 1994, shows that the derailed car continued to slide along the tracks for another two and a half miles and 15 minutes before it caused the final pile up.Two circus performers were killed: 39-year-old Theodore Svertesky, the circus' lead elephant trainer, and 28-year-old clown Ceslee Conkling. Fourteen other circus employees were injured, but none of the circus' 60 animals were hurt."It's Ringling's most serious train accident in more than 100 years," circus spokeswoman Laura FitzGerald told The New York Times.A year later, the National Transportation and Safety Board ruled that the wheel that caused the accident had likely broken into three pieces due to overheating and metal fatigue.