Crash at Crush Anniversary

[StillGrande]

Today is the anniversary of the "Crash at Crush" event by the MKT in 1896. Here is a link http://www.lsjunction.com/facts/crush.htm.

How common were such events back then? When did they stop doing these? Obviously they were not very safe activities [:0].

[TomDiehl]

That link doesn't seem to work. I'm not familiar with the incident you are talking about here, what was it?

[tree68]

IIRC it was a staged cornfield meet. Things didn't go exactly as planned and there were casualties.

[chad thomas]

I used to have a book that covered many of those staged cornfield meets. From what I could tell they were common events back in those days. They usually used locomotives that were up for scrap. And they were usually small locomotives.

[StillGrande]

The "Crash at Crush" was a publicity stunt by the MKT as developed by William Crash near Waco TX (the temporary town which sprang up to service the crowd of 50,000 was named Crash) in an attempt to generate traffic on the MKT (how a crash would generate business is beyond me but it was evidently successful). Dependig on the report there were either 2 or 3 people killed (all of them say 2 men, one mentions a woman also killed). Mr. Crash was evidently told by several engineers that the boilers would not explode on impact. One engineer said they would. One did, showering the crowd with debris. Mr. Crash was fired on the spot, though when it turned out the stunt was a huge success, he was rehired the next day.

There is also mention of another gentleman who witness the crash and decided there was money to be made doing this and it could be done safely. He evidently staged some 73 crashes (the last in the 1930's) and made quite a bit of money. He never had a casualty at his crashes. At some point, he even started setting the trains on fire with kerosene to make it a bigger spectacle.

Here is another link.

http://www.nscale.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3830

And the first one I posted (don't know why it didn't work before)

http://www.lsjunction.com/facts/crush.htm

[espeefoamer]

QUOTE: Originally posted by TomDiehl

That link doesn't seem to work. I'm not familiar with the incident you are talking about here, what was it?

Click on the website in the above post,scroll to the bottom of the page,then type in "crash at crush" in the box above the words "click here now".A list of websites will show.

[videomaker]

I live not far from that sight and go by it every Sun on my way to church..I have some old photos taken at the time it happened by a Waco photographer. It sure looks different now than in the pics..The photographer was one of the nearly 200 people injured...Videomaker

[Anonymous]

William G. Crush, not William Crash. The Texas Collection at Baylor University has all the info you could want. Crush was fired, rehired within 24 hours, and retired from the Katy in Dallas, where he was a passenger service agent.

It seems to me we've been through this before, with links provided. If I find it, I'll post it here.

The thread is old. Here it is:

http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=36621&REPLY_ID=375411#375411

Here's a couple of links that will give you some info:

http://www.texasalmanac.com/history/highlights/crash/

http://www.texasescapes.com/TexasRailroads/Crash-at-Crush.htm