The Crash at Crush and Other Train Wreck Spectacles

For a brief window from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, people in the United States were watching train wrecks for fun. These staged spectacles would draw thousands and thousands of paying onlookers, but why exactly were they so popular?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, listeners, we are soon to be appearing at New
York Comic Con as part of New York Comicon presents
their evening programming. We are going to do an episode
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if you want to get in on that, we would
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(00:22):
eleven at the Hudson Mercantile. Again that runs during New
York Comic Con, and for more information on it, you
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can get all the info and a link to order
your tickets. We hope to see you there. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History class from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hello,

(00:51):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm tra CYB. Wilson. I'm
Holly Frye. So Holly. You know how sometimes when something
terrible is happening that we just can't look away from,
we say it's like watching a train wreck. Yes, yes,
although people do describe actual catastrophes as train wrecks. A

(01:13):
lot of the times it's something a lot less tangible
with way less risk of injury or death, like bad
speeches or product launches that go really terribly or like
really cris cringeworthy TV shows, things that are not really ready,
you know, I mean, things that are not really going

(01:34):
to cause somebody to actually die. We describe as like
watching a train wreck. But I always thought that was
kind of weird that we would describe something like, you know,
somebody's bad talent show entry that's just awful that you
just can't stop staring at. Like why we would describe
that as like watching a train wreck. It turns out

(01:55):
that for a brief window from the late eighteen hundreds
into the early nineteen hundreds, people in the United States
were watching train wrecks for fun. It's hard to come
up with the exact tally of how many of them
there were, because there were several different people who were
arranging these things in different venues. Over the span of
about forty years, there were definitely at least seventy five

(02:19):
planned train wrecks to watch for fun, mostly playing out
in the southwestern and Midwestern United States often at events
like state fairs. So that's weird. Here's what it reminds
me of. So when my husband and I got married
and we merged our households, we found that we had

(02:40):
multiples of things, uh huh. And somehow in that deal
we had three microwaves, two which were pretty good, in
one which was really junkie. So we gave the really
good one away to somebody who needed one, and then
the junkie one we took out on the back patio
and we blew stuff up in it. So I kind
of understand this train wreck thing. Well. When I was

(03:02):
a kid, my elementary school had a Halloween carnival every year,
and one of the things that they would do for
this Halloween carnival is that they would go buy a
really junkie used car and you could pay a dollar
to get to take a swing at it with a
baseball bat. Yes, so yes, this is It still seems

(03:25):
weird though, so it's what we're going to talk about today.
I also, it's felt like we needed a little bit
of a lighter topic. We've had some heavier things lately,
some lighter stuff too. I in particular, though, had researched
some really heavy stuff and so I was like, let's
just do something goofy. I will say this is mostly goofy.
It does have a little bit of tragedy, but is
overall weird and fun. Yes, the concept of someone going, hey,

(03:49):
let's stage some rex so we can all gock at them.
There is an inherent level of comedy there. Yes, So
we are going to start though with the one that
did actually have a few fatalities. This is the most
famous and most deadly of the United States stage train wrecks,

(04:09):
and it was known as the crash at Crush, which
took place in September of eighteen ninety six, and this
was the brainchild of William George Crush, passenger agent at
the Missouri Kansas Texas Railroad Company also known as the
KD which was shortened down from its initials MKT by
eighteen ninety five. The year before this event took place,

(04:30):
the KD had one hundred and thirty three locomotives and
one hundred and sixty three cars. William George Crush came
up with this idea to try to drum up some
publicity for the railroad and to sell tickets on the railroad.
The railroad wasn't really in financial danger in any way,
but the nation was just starting to come out of

(04:52):
the Panic of eighteen ninety three, so the KD was
definitely interested in protecting its bottom line. The railroad was
also in the process of replacing its thirty five ton
locomotives with sixty ton models, so Crush proposed they take
two of those retired thirty five ton locomotives and smash
them together. It really is just like my microwave. The

(05:15):
venue that he proposed for this stage train wreck would
be a pop up town named Crush, located about fifteen
miles north of Waco and about three miles south of
the town of West, conveniently close to the existing Waco
Dallas track. The designated spot was in a small valley
with hills on three sides, making a natural amphitheater with

(05:36):
plenty of viewing locations. They'd supplement this with things like
a restaurant, a grandstand in carnival attractions, selling two dollars
round trip tickets on the KDI to get there and back.
The KD had some concerns about the safety of this scheme,
namely that the boilers of one or both of the

(05:58):
locomotives might explode on impact, so they asked the opinions
of several of the railroad's engineers, all but one of
whom agreed that the risk of an explosion was low,
so William Crush was given the go ahead to proceed. First,
they laid track from the existing Waco Dallas line, terminating
at a twoy one hundred foot that's six hundred and

(06:20):
forty meters depot platform, complete with a sign telling passengers
that they had arrived at Crush. There was also a
stretch of track for the two trains to travel down
and crash into each other, which followed the natural slopes
of the land, and this gave the track a slight
downward grade from each end toward the middle, which would
help the locomotives pick up more speed. Locomotives nine to

(06:43):
ninety nine and one thousand and one were chosen for
the crash, with one painted green with red trim and
the other painted red with green trim. For their pop
up town, they drilled wells and installed spigots for fresh
water along the spectator area. William Crush, which was apparently
his fortuitous but actual real name, was friends with P. T. Barnum,

(07:05):
so he borrowed a circus tent from Barnum to house
a restaurant. They also constructed lemonade stands to telegraph offices,
a stand for reporters, and a bandstand. They built a
wooden jail, which I found one source saying that that
was made out of a caboose. They hired two hundred
constables to patrol on the day, and they also made

(07:28):
plans for a huge carnival, complete with games and medicine
shows and a variety of other diversions. Clearly they were
expecting this to be a party. Yeah. William Crush and
The Katie advertised this spectacle heavily all through the summer
of eighteen ninety six, calling it the Monster Crash. The

(07:48):
crash and the preparations for it became regular news items
all throughout the Texas papers and outside the state as well.
Organizers fielded queries from all over the country, and in
the day leading up to the actual event, William Crush
estimated that there would be fifteen thousand to twenty thousand spectators.
William Crush had arranged for thirty three trains to provide

(08:12):
passenger service to Crush and the Cadie started dropping passengers
off around dawn on September fifteenth, eighteen ninety six. By
ten am, there were at least ten thousand people already
on the scene. They were picnicking and playing games and
listening to political speeches while they waited. More trains kept
arriving all through the morning and afternoon, some of them

(08:34):
so crowded that people were riding on the roofs of
the cars. The Monster Crash was supposed to start at
four but people were still arriving as that hour drew near,
so they delayed the start until five pm, at which
point there were about forty thousand people there, double what
William Crush had estimated. First, the two locomotives came together

(08:56):
very slowly on the track and touched their cowcatchers together.
That's the little, great looking thing on the front of
a locomotive. They touched their cowcatchers together, kind of like
boxers touching their gloves before a match. Then they were
reversed apart again, and William Crush, on horseback, raised a
white hat into the air and whipped it down to

(09:17):
give the signal for the wreck to officially begin. The
two locomotives pulling empty box cars that were festooned with
advertisements and decorations, then began moving toward each other and
picking up speed. Their engineers pulled their whistle cords and
tied them down, then jumped clear and ran away from
the track. They estimated that at the moment of impact,

(09:39):
each locomotive was traveling at about fifty miles per hour
when they crashed into each other. The collision was incredibly violent.
The box cars unsurprisingly shattered into splinters, but the locomotives
didn't behave as they expected. Organizers had thought that they
would basically push each other up into an inverted V

(09:59):
and the they would expend most of that energy and
the upward trajectory of doing that. Instead, it was more
like squeezing an accordion or collapsing a telescope, and the
two giant locomotives just folded into each other, and then,
to the surprise of everyone except perhaps that one dissenting engineer,
both their boilers exploded. Scalding water and flying debris from

(10:23):
the locomotives, including pieces of iron and steel of all
shapes and sizes, flew into the crowd, most of whom
were along the hills at least two hundred yards away.
At least two people were killed, although some accounts say
there were three. Ernest Darnell, who had climbed up a
mesquite tree to watch, was hit with a ten pound

(10:44):
length of brakechain and was killed instantly. A young girl
was hit with a chunk of iron that fractured her skull,
and although she was reported to be resting comfortably afterward,
she died on the way home. There was a third man,
John Morrison, who survived the wreck itself, but fell between
train cars on the way home and was run over

(11:04):
by the train and died. I haven't quite figured out
if that is the third person some of the counts
referred to as being killed, or if that was a
separate incident. There were also a lot of injuries from
the flying debris and boiling water then at least six
of those were serious, and some of them were sustained
more than a mile away from the actual crash. J. C. Dean,

(11:27):
a photographer from Waco, had been hired to take pictures
of the event, and he lost an eye when a
bolt from the wreck tore through it. His response was
to get up and keep working, telling his brothers, who
were also photographers, how to finish the shot that he
had been framing. Even in the midst of all this
chaos and the tragedy that was unfolding, souvenir seekers rushed

(11:50):
in to try to claim pieces of the wreck. Wrecker
trains hauled off the biggest remaining pieces. After the event
was over, people began to leave the temporary of Crush.
As soon as the event had finished, Workers struck the
tent and the other structures erected for the town, and
the whole thing was essentially gone by nightfall. William Crush

(12:11):
was fired immediately, but then officials at the KADI realized
they'd had an incredibly profitable day in spite of the tragedy,
so they hired him back the next day, and he
worked at the railroad until his retirement in nineteen forty.
The KD began quickly and quietly settling lawsuits and paying
compensation to the people who had been injured and the

(12:33):
families of those who had been killed. Photographer J. C.
Dean was paid ten thousand dollars and given a lifetime
pass on the train. There wasn't nearly as much public
condemnation as he might expect from an event that killed
at least two spectators and injured many others, but the
news reporting at the time was actually relatively pragmatic about it.

(12:55):
A few weeks after the crash, at Crush, composer and
pianist Scott Joplin public his Great Crush Collision March. Joplin
would go on to be known as the King of Ragtime,
whose other most famous pieces include Maple Leaf Rag and
The Entertainer, which would become the theme music for the
nineteen seventy three film The Sting starring Paul Newman, Robert Redford,

(13:15):
and Robert Shaw. It's unclear whether Joplin was actually at
the crash, but the Great Crush Collision March was one
of his earliest published pieces of music and a relatively
early example of ragtime, which is a distinctly African American
form of music that was at the height of its
popularity from the mid eighteen nineties through the nineteen teens.

(13:35):
And we're going to link to that in the show
notes so people can listen to it. Scott Joplin is
the reason I took piano lessons as a child. Really, yes,
I love it, and the part of me that wants
to do an episode about him is at odds with
the part of me that does not like the sad
aspect of the story, which is his death at a
very early age from untreated syphilis. So the Katie went

(14:01):
through waves of financial success and difficulty after this point
until really starting to struggle along with the rest of
the industry in the nineteen fifties. It was ultimately bought
by the Missouri Pacific Railroad Company in nineteen eighty nine.
There's a historic plaque commemorating the Crash at Crush in
McLennan County, fifteen miles north of Waco. Although the Crash

(14:23):
at Crush is the most famous of these staged wrecks,
it wasn't actually the first one, and so we are
going to talk about that first one and some others
after a quick sponsor break. Really frequently, the Crash at
Crush is described as the first staged train wreck in
the United States. It was something that drew a big crowd,

(14:46):
but which no other actual railroad company tried again afterward
for obvious reasons. But that September fifteenth, eighteen ninety six
event was actually predated by one staged by a man
named Al Street. He was a railway equipment salesman from Illinois.
Streeter first tried to stage a train wreck in Illinois,

(15:07):
but wasn't able to generate enough attention, so he turned
his attention to Ohio, where he got the ok to
conduct a crash on July twentieth, eighteen ninety five, a
couple of miles outside Canton. Here's how he described it
in one of the ads that he ran to promote
this event. Quote, two monster locomotives with full head of steam,

(15:27):
starting a mile apart, will rush toward each other at
the rate of sixty or seventy miles an hour, and
allowed to come together with a crash that will result
in the most horrible head on collision ever seen or
heard of. Streeter made arrangements to buy a couple of
retired locomotives and decorated them. One was emblazoned with free

(15:47):
trade and the other with protection, symbolically pitting the two
economic theories against one another. The two engines would pull
flat cars loaded down with rocks like the crash a crash.
Part of Streeter's plan involved selling train tickets a fifteen
cent fair on the Cleveland Canton and Southern Railroad would
get people to the actual location for the crash, but

(16:10):
once people got to that location, admission to the crash
itself was not free. He hoped to sell twenty thousand
tickets at seventy five cents apiece so that people could
then watch the crash from a designated viewing area. However,
the overwhelming majority of spectators had a different idea that
was to climb trees and together outside the official viewing

(16:31):
area and watch it for free, so he only sold
about two hundred tickets in the end. Though these two
locomotives never wrecked, the whole event was canceled at the
last possible minute. Streeter claimed it was because spectators got
too close and refused to move, ruining it for everyone
else and forcing him to cancel for safety reasons, but

(16:53):
the railroad claimed that Streeter owed them two four hundred
dollars for the retired locomotives, which he had known paid,
so the railroad exercised their right to take them back. Spectators,
of course, were outraged, and the ones who had paid
demanded a refund. People were also upset that they had
spent that fifteen dollars train fare for something that didn't

(17:15):
actually happen. Streeter was widely criticized in the press for
wasting people's time and money, even as he claimed to
have lost about eight hundred dollars of his personal funds
in the venture. Streeter didn't give up though. On Memorial
Day eighteen ninety six, he tried again, this time in
Buckeye Park in Marietta, Ohio, about twenty five miles southeast

(17:37):
of Columbus. The locomotives this time were named the AL
Streeter and the W. H. Fisher. Fisher worked for the
Columbus Hawking and Toledo Railroad, and to add some more drama,
Streeter put mannekins aboard so it would actually look like
there were people in there. This time, the wreck did
indeed go as planned. Clarence Metters wrote about the event

(17:59):
in National Magazine, saying, quote, twenty five thousand pairs of
eyes were riveted upon one engine or another as they
rushed together. And so critical was the moment that scarcely
a word was spoken. On and on sped the two
iron monsters at the rate of over forty miles an hour,
and when the crash came it was terrific, both trains

(18:20):
being practically destroyed. Streeter continued to organize more of these
spectacles around the country until the early twentieth century. But
another man organized so many of them that it became
part of his personal brand, and he was Joe Connolly,
who was known by the nickname head On Connolly, who
staged at least seventy three wrecks between eighteen ninety six

(18:42):
and nineteen thirty two and became the most famous organizer
of planned train wrecks. I found one account that said
that he tried to sue someone for staging a train
wreck and using the term head on when that was
clearly his, but I couldn't find any evidence that he
had actually to register that trademark, so not sure what

(19:02):
the actual status of that was. Regardless though, head On
Joe had worked in theater in Des Moines for decades
before putting his hand to staging trade wrecks, and he
was scrupulous about safety. He had a very specific set
of safety rules that had to be followed at any
wreck he staged. He also toll reporters that he had
a quote lifelong desire to see such a disaster without

(19:26):
danger to himself and thought many other people harbored the
same secret desire. He was also a showman, and as
his res went on, he did things to make them
more and more dramatic. He started laying small charges on
the tracks that would explode when the trains rolled over them,
creating tiny explosions that, in normal circumstances were used to

(19:47):
warn other trains of incoming traffic. He'd also douse the
cars in fuel and filled them with flammable materials so
that they would burn after impact. Connelly made a lot
of money staging these crashes over the years, and his
last one took place as the fad was really starting
to wane. This one was at the Iowa State Fair
in nineteen thirty two. He'd staged recks at the Iowa

(20:10):
State Fair previously to a lot of fanfare, but in
nineteen thirty two, the United States was facing the Great Depression.
Even naming one of the locomotives that Roosevelt and the
other the Hoover, wasn't enough to make the event sit
right with the crowd. The explosion itself was reported to
be a good one, but the response from the audience
was really lackluster. That seemed like seeing two huge trains

(20:33):
wrecked against each other for sport was needlessly wasteful in
a time when so many people were hurting for money.
This was doubly true when words started to spread that
Connolly had charged the fair forty thousand dollars to stage
the wreck, and that the fair had lost sixty five
thousand dollars that year, people who were already angry at
the idea that the crash had been wasteful or furious

(20:56):
that it had cost so much money. In addition to
the wreckage of the lower locomotives themselves, al Streeter and
head On Connolly weren't the only people organizing these staged wrecks.
As another example, in September nineteen oh six, approximately six
thousand people paid to see two engines that had been
retired from the Salt Lake Railroad crashed together at an

(21:17):
agricultural park near downtown Los Angeles. Organizers for this one
were James Morley and former promoter football coach Walter Hemple.
This particular wreck didn't go all that well. The engineers
tried to extort extra pay from the organizers. In the
middle of the event. They were doing a prolonged run
up to the actual crash, in which they'd run the

(21:39):
trains at one another and then stopped them before a collision.
The engineers thought it would probably be impossible to find
replacements in the literal middle of the event, so they
asked for an extra three hundred and fifty dollars. Organizers
managed to find replacements with no problem, though in general
engineers were pretty eager to volunteer, so the original engineers

(22:01):
were fired and then the event proceeded as planned. Yeah,
the idea that you would get to just on purpose
run a locomotive that was normally where you had to
spend your working life into another locomotive and just smash
it to pieces like that apparently was attractive to a
number of engineers, and I really didn't find any indication

(22:23):
that any of them were seriously injured while doing this,
although I did find one that was an engineer who
fell while trying to jump free of the locomotive and
sprained his ankle. So in this event at the Agricultural
Park near downtown Los Angeles, the locomotives did run into
each other whistles blaring, but the end result was pretty

(22:45):
anti climactic because they just sort of whammed into each
other with a thud and then stopped and nothing derailed,
and nothing caught on fire, and nothing exploded, and so
people were not particularly impressed. And these are just some examples.
There were lots of life of others, and there's actually
footage of several of them on YouTube. We're going to
link to that footage in the show notes. Thanks. We're

(23:07):
going to talk about some ideas about why maybe this
caught on so well. So for roughly thirty or forty years,
staged train wrecks were a really big deal in the
Midwestern and southwestern parts of the United States. The biggest

(23:28):
crowd reported at one of these events was one hundred
and sixty thousand people, and attendance was routinely in the
tens of thousands. The town of Crush had about the
same population as Dallas or San Antonio for the few
hours that it existed. In nineteen twenty, a staged wreck
on opening day of the Minnesota State Fair doubled the

(23:49):
fair's first day attendance from the year before. All of
this happened at a time when getting somewhere was a
lot less comfortable and convenient than it can be today.
This has led some people to speculate as to why
this all caught on so well. One aspect was certainly
the marketing organizers promoted their events heavily, getting lots of

(24:11):
fanciful coverage and newspapers, and there was often a political
theme to the decorations on the trains themselves. In addition
to the ones that we talked about already earlier in
this show, a stage wreck pitted locomotives dubbed evolution and
fundamentalism after the Scopes trial in nineteen twenty five. There
was also a showdown between the National Recovery Act, part

(24:33):
of the New Deal versus Old Man Depression at the
Minnesota State Fair in nineteen thirty three, And for some
people the attraction was related more to the general politics
of the day than any specific political issue. There was
a general idea that locomotives were symbols of big businesses
and industries that were taking advantage of people and ruining

(24:54):
the landscape, and so it was really fun to think
about their destroying one another. And then, of course is
this fact that humanity has kind of a morbid fascination
with destruction. There's a complicated set of emotional and psychological
responses that feed into the general human trait of morbid curiosity.
In the decades after stage train wrecks, there were demolition derbies,

(25:17):
monster truck rallies, a whole slew of disaster films, true
crime shows, and on and on. These are all still
money makers in many caseses yep, I mean, I think
the thing that strikes me is so weird about the
train part is that locomotives are just so big. Yeah,
they like, that's a lot of metal smashing together and

(25:39):
then doing I don't know, send negative the scrap heap
or whatever, which you know, may made it seem a
little odder to me than a demolition derby or a
monster truck rally or whatever. But also, I mean, people
do just do, as we have shown in our some
past episodes of the show, people go on on to
weird stuff sometimes. I think it's also a factor. This

(26:04):
is the kind of episode that happens when you're looking
for something a little less heavy to write about and
you google weird fads. Right, I've done similar things, Yeah,
it is. It's a I'm trying to think if there
would ever be like an modern day equivalent attempted, Like

(26:26):
would anybody ever go, let's try to crash planes together?
I don't know how you would possibly orchestrate such a thing,
but that sounds very scary. Yes, well, and suddenly I
just remembered when when I was also a kid, in
addition to having the elementary school Halloween carnivals where you
could smash old cars with a baseball bat, whenever the

(26:49):
fire department would be conducting training by burning down a
derelict building and extinguishing the fire. Oh yeah, like there
would always be a crowd to watch that. Oh, anytime
there's a building demolished, there's a crowd. We had one
in Atlanta not long ago, and everyone who lived in
Atlanta had it all over their social media because they
got up in an ungodly hour to go look at it.

(27:12):
We're like blowing stuff up. I mean, I then feel
very tame for like being like what happens when you
put a CD in a microwave. By the way, it's
very pretty. Do you have some listener mail? I do.
I was in our Atlanta office recently, which is a

(27:33):
treat whenever I get to do that, and I went
through some of our incoming parcels, and so I have
some thank yous to give out for that. First is
Katie Katie sent us suffragetsu t shirts if you have
not heard about suffragetsu. Basically in the nineteen teens during

(27:54):
the suffrage movement, a lot of women were studying jiu
jitsu for self defense purposes, and so these are t
shirts showing a suffragette defending herself or depending on how
you're looking at it, just throw in a police officer.

(28:16):
So thank you for the suffragiitti shirts. This is also
from quite a while ago after our episode on Walt Whitman,
Kristen sent us an exhibition catalog called Bold Cautious True
Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War era,
which is just lovely collection. And then lastly, thank you

(28:41):
to Nancy for sending us the Naughty Fairies adult coloring
book of bad Words and were Satitudes. I was delighted
to see a couple of copies of that and on
my desk. So thanks to all three of you and
to the other folks who have sent us faarious parcels
that we try. We try to keep a list and

(29:02):
thank everybody, but I know sometimes we fail. So usually
that's my failure, since I'm here and it all ends
up on my desk there are days when I'm just like,
can't look at this. I'm so busy working on a thing,
and then it gets pushed aside. And then there have
been times I'm sorry to admit this listeners where like
which note goes to which parcel has gotten jumbled? And
I'm like, oh, dear mon dieu, I can't figure it.

(29:24):
Because sometimes they're obvious, like it will reference the gift,
and other times it's just like, here's the thing that
we thought you would love, and I'm like, I don't
know which thing it is, So I apologize that is
my mediocre spatial organization skill. We've also had a couple
of things this year from listeners outside of the United
States run a foul of customs and be apparently tied

(29:46):
up in customs for a really long time before getting
to us, and then it becomes awkward, Hey, remember that
thing you mailed eight months ago? Yeah, we just kind
of thanks So anyway, thank you so much to all
of our generous life listeners, uh for sending us such
lovely and thoughtful things. If you would like to write
to us, we're at History Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com.

(30:09):
We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com. Slash mist
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we are at mist in History. Our website mistanhistory dot
com is where you will find a searchable archive of
every episode we have ever done. We will also find
show notes for all the episodes Holly and I have

(30:29):
done together. We will link to several YouTube videos of
locomotives smashing into each other in the player page for
this particular episode, along with Scott Joplin's March that was
about the crash at Crush, So you can do all
that on a whole lot more at our website, which
is missed Inhistory dot com. For more on this and

(30:56):
thousands of other topics, visit houstuffworks dot com