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By Julie Ingwersen

CHICAGO, Jan 24 (Reuters) - A fire in a closet on the fifth floor of the Chicago Board of Trade on Thursday was promptly contained and did not disrupt business at the world's largest grain exchange, although some price display boards were down.

The fire was contained before the start of trade in CBOT financial and agricultural products, and the markets opened on time. Business was orderly, traders said.

But because of the board outages, the CBOT brought out whiteboards for staff in the trading pits to post handwritten price updates, harkening back to an earlier era when market prices were posted on chalkboards.

"When I started 30 years ago, we used them (chalkboards) at the Merc (Chicago Mercantile Exchange). It was fun then, but you can't keep up with a computer," one CBOT trader said.

"When they bought them out, we laughed, because how are they going to write fast enough?" she said.

Agricultural futures prices were visible on one of the four price boards that span the walls above the trading pits, and so shortly after the market opened, crews carried away most of the whiteboards.

CME Group spokeswoman Mary Haffenberg said electrical circuits to the price boards were affected by the fire.

She said price information was still available through computer screens, hand-held devices and various other means.

Some floor traders said the outages gave an advantage to those who trade through the CBOT's electronic market. The majority of trade in grains and oilseeds has migrated to the electronic platform since side-by-side trading was introduced in August 2006.

"The boards are a tool. You take away a tool from the floor trader," one veteran pit trader said.

The 44-story Chicago Board of Trade building, an Art Deco landmark located at the foot of Chicago's downtown LaSalle Street financial corridor, was designed by Holabird & Root and built in 1930.

The building houses the world's largest grain exchange. The CBOT and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange merged to form the CME Group Inc <CME.N> last July. (Additional reporting by K.T. Arasu; Editing by Christian Wiessner)

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