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On the 15th of September, 1896, around 40,000 people gathered in the temporary town of Crush
in Texas. The crowds were there to witness a unique spectacle: two trains would, for
the sole purpose of entertaining the masses, be driven head first into one another at high speed.
The staged train wreck would be a once-in-a-lifetime sight for many in the crowd...
and for a small number of onlookers, the very last thing they would ever see.
A deliberate train crash as a publicity stunt was not unprecedented. A successful crash had been
carried out in May of that year at Buckeye Park in Illinois. The park was a newly built leisure
destination accessible primarily by rail, and the railroad wanted a big stunt to promote it. In an
era where only modest entertainment options were available to most people the prospect of seeing a
train crash live in front of you was irresistibly alluring. Around 20,000 people turned up to watch.
Whilst admission to the spectacle was free, the railroad made a sizeable profit
by laying on express trains to the event and charging for tickets.
While the smash was nominally billed as a science experiment, much was done to maximize the drama.
A special elevated track was installed to afford the crowd the best possible view,
and dummies were placed in each engine - the real drivers having hopped off after getting
the trains underway. The Buckeye Park train crash went off mostly without a hitch. The
trains collided at almost exactly the calculated impact site, resulting in a spectacular wreck.
The crowd were thrilled, and surged forward to clamber upon the wreckage,
snatch souvenirs, and pose for a photograph on top of the mangled cars.
Only one person had reason not to be ecstatic. TP
Peck, a passenger office clerk, was hit in the leg by a flying bolt,
and suffered a broken bone. He was quickly carted off to hospital and promptly forgotten
about as the railroad celebrated a successful - and more importantly, profitable - crash.
William George Crush, a general passenger agent with the Missouri Kansas Texas (or MKT)
railroad, was almost certainly inspired by the phenomenal success of the Buckeye Park event.
Having recently replaced their engines with larger models, the MKT railroad
had a surplus of smaller engines for which they had no use. Crush put forward an idea:
they should orchestrate a crash of their own and advertise it across the state.
Doing so might not only bring in a great deal of revenue,
but also raise the profile of the railroad.
His superiors liked the idea, and put Crush in charge of the event. He planned a spectacle
that would follow a similar pattern to the Buckeye Park crash.
Again, admission would be free, with the railroad profiting primarily from
ticket sales for transport onboard express trains to the crash site.
In the lead-up to the crash the event was promoted across Texas.
The doomed engines were painted in bright colours and put on show
in various towns throughout the state, and advertisements were placed in many papers.
Word spread fast and far - so far, in fact, that it reached the ears of Thomas Edison in New York,
who sent one of his photographers to document the event for posterity.
Soon enough the Crash at Crush was a phenomenon. Anticipating crowds of 20,000, the railroad made
preparations to entertain. Two wells were drilled to provide water for onlookers, and a Ringling
Brothers circus tent was erected to serve as a food hall. A carnival midway was put in place,
along with a grandstand, speaker's podiums, a platform for the press, and two telegraph offices.
The site even had its own railway depot over which a sign was erected
proclaiming the site a fully fledged temporary town. Naturally it was named after its creator:
Crush. As well as laying on entertainment, some time and attention was dedicated to safety.
It was decided that the audience should be held back 200 yards (about 183 meters) from
the collision - the length of two football fields. Naturally the press would be allowed
to take up positions much closer. A special length of track was built separate from the rest of the
rail network to avoid the nightmare scenario of a runaway train getting back onto the main network.
Finally engineers for the MKT railroad were consulted about the possibility of
the boilers within each train exploding. Should this happen
it would be disastrous... but engineers thought it extremely unlikely.
The boilers were built to resist rupture. They would hold, organizers were assured.
On the day of the crash itself the temporary town was flooded with visitors. The MKT railroad had
laid on special express trains to bring in visitors from every part of Texas,
with tickets going for two dollars apiece. It was an offer that few could resist, and by midday the
population of Crush was approaching 40,000 people. Some visitors arrived riding on top of the trains,
as there was no more room inside the carriages. Onlookers thronged the hills around the site.
So intense was the interest that the crash had to be delayed as the crowd pressed forward
through the cordon which had been set up. Only once they had been moved back to a supposedly
safe distance could the trains approach one another and "shake hands" by coming nose to nose
and pausing for photographs. The engines and the cars full of railway sleepers which
they pulled were then backed up along the track to their calculated starting points.
Crush himself signaled the start of the main event. Sitting astride
a white horse he dropped a white hat onto the rails and then, very wisely, retreated.
Drivers on board each train set them running and then jumped to safety.
The trains, now unmanned, sped towards one another at around 72 kilometers per hour
(or 45 miles per hour) even if anyone involved in the Crash at Crush had experienced second thoughts
there was now nothing they could do to prevent the trains from colliding.
And collide they did... with enormous force.
Witnesses describe how the moment of impact (characterized by crashing iron and rending
timber) was followed by a brief second of silence.
Then, as if controlled by the same impulse, both boilers exploded at once,
transforming what was left of the trains into shrapnel which flew directly into the crowd.
A Confederate veteran present at the scene likened it to a battle,
with people falling to the ground all around him.
A photographer lost an eye when he was hit in the head by a flying bolt and other spectators were
peppered with debris that ranged in size from tiny scraps of hot metal to most of a boiler stack.
Panic seized the crowd as 40,000 people
tried to flee or take cover or avoid being trampled by those around them.
By the time the last piece of debris had landed, two people were dead
and dozens were injured, some severely.
Should such a disaster take place today it would likely have resulted in a lengthy investigation,
and perhaps action against the organizers of the deadly event. 1896 was, however, a different time.
No sooner had the initial panic subsided, and while the dead and injured were still being
removed from the site, onlookers swarmed the wreck seizing anything they could find as a souvenir.
Several people were so keen to grab something to mark the occasion
that they burned themselves on still-hot pieces of metal in the process.
Crush was fired on the spot... but quietly rehired the next working day.
He went on to have a long and fruitful career with the railroad,
although he never again organized a spectacle like the Crash at Crush.
Civil suits were all settled out of court, with the railroad handing over modest settlements and
lifetime train passes. Although press coverage of the event was universally condemnatory,
it was also extensive - something which resulted in a net gain for the MKT railroad.
Yes, two people had died and many more had been injured at their ludicrously
dangerous event... but their name was now a household one nationwide.
The Crash at Crush remains a unique and bizarre chapter of history:
a disaster from which nothing was learned. For many years after the tragedy railways across
america continued to organize such spectacles, although none ever ended with the same terror and
bloodshed as the Crash at Crush, and none ever achieved the same degree of infamy.
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