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Old 04-03-2023, 08:24 AM   #2775
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: Real-Life Weirdness

Just learned of this, but back in the late 19th century, apparently staged trainwrecks were a thing some railways would do as a spectacle (often not charging admission, but instead relying on the fact the most convenient way to reach the location of the spectacle was by taking their trains). A notable instance of this was the Crash at Crush, wherein a Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad employee by the name of William George Crush put together a full spectacle, complete with Ringling Brothers circus tent and infrastructure put in place specifically for the spectacle (wells drilled, telegraph offices erected, carnival games and sideshows arranged, etc), naming the "temporary town" Crush, Texas. But something unexpected happened in the collision - shortly after the awe-inspiring impact, the boilers of both trains exploded more-or-less simultaneously, meaning the minimum safe distance (200 yards) the onlookers had been forced to stay at (the crash was actually delayed about an hour due to people refusing to retreat to said minimum safe distance) was no longer sufficient to be safe from all the incidental fragmentation. Two people died and at least six more were seriously injured (there's a photograph of the moment of impact, and the photographer lost an eye to a flying bolt shortly after taking said photograph). MKT fired Crush immediately (despite having approved his proposal, and their engineers' assurances that a boiler explosion was all but impossible), but they actually avoided any significant negative press over the event (if anything, the event may have benefitted MKT, even after the payouts to those injured and the families of those killed, as it got a lot of press but apparently most of it didn't blame the railroad), so they wound up rehiring him literally the next day (I guess they could see the way the wind was blowing pretty quickly, and saw they weren't going to wind up blasted by the media).
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