The sequence of failures that turned a depot fire into a catastrophe unfolded with terrible speed. When smoke was first spotted, the pantographs on the trams were raised and the overhead current was live -- standard practice that allowed trams to be driven out in an emergency. The depot's insurance policy required exactly that: in case of fire, staff were to drive the trams to safety. But the cleaners were in the annex while the fire burned in the main wing, and confusion took hold. One mechanic ran to cut the power. The other ran to telephone the fire department. Neither drove a tram out. The window for saving the rolling stock closed in minutes. An engineer from the Norwegian Institute of Technology happened to be passing and, finding the surviving workers in shock, sprinted 200 meters to his home to call the fire department himself. His call at 4:23 was the first the department received. By the time trucks arrived, the main wing's roof was fully involved.

The material losses were staggering for a municipal transit company. Dalsenget Depot housed the city's operational fleet -- twenty-six of Trondheim Sporvei's forty-six trams, including all sixteen of the brand-new Class 6 vehicles. Sixteen of twenty trailers were destroyed. A track-cleaning tram was lost. Total damage reached 9 million Norwegian kroner, of which 8 million represented the rolling stock alone. Behind the fire-proof doors of the depot's paint shop, a single Class 4 tram and its trailer survived -- the only modern vehicles to escape. The company's museum tram and welding tram, stored elsewhere, were also spared. But the heart of Trondheim's transit fleet, years of investment in modern equipment, was ash and twisted metal by dawn.

What saved Trondheim's tramway was institutional hoarding. Trondheim Sporvei had never discarded its old trams; retired vehicles sat at the Voldsminde Depot, some untouched since 1951. Eleven of these antiques were pressed into service by the end of the day. Passengers accustomed to the modern Class 6 trams found themselves riding smaller, older cars with wooden seats instead of leather. Eight buses borrowed from Oslo arrived by train on October 14, since Trondheim's nonstandard track gauge made borrowing trams from other cities impossible. The lone surviving modern tram, the Class 4 from the paint shop, earned the nickname the Happy Widow -- the sole survivor of her generation, now hauling the oversized Belgian trailers that no other vehicle had the power to pull. Ridership dropped 22 percent the following year, and ticket prices rose from 30 to 40 ore for adults.

Politicians seized the moment to propose replacing the tramway with trolleybuses, as Bergen and Oslo had done. Trondheim Sporvei director Fredrik Kleven ran the numbers and argued against it: trolleybuses would cost 1.5 million kroner more per year, require forty additional employees, and last only fifteen years compared to a tram's thirty-five. The city council voted on November 1 to rebuild the tram fleet instead. Twenty-eight new Class 7 trams and fifteen trailers were ordered from Strommens Vaerksted and Honefoss Karosserifabrikk. Costs were reduced by salvaging bogies, motors, transformers, and compressors from the burned trams and reusing them in the new vehicles. Delivery began on April 27, 1957. The decision preserved Trondheim's tramway, which still operates today as the Graakallbanen -- one of the world's northernmost tram lines. In Brisbane, Australia, a similar depot fire in 1962 led to the opposite decision: the trams were abandoned entirely.