Between 1896 and 1935 a unique and bizarre series of spectator events occurred across America. Those events were the staged head-on collisions of steam locomotives done as profit-making spectacles. Starting in earnest during September of 1896, there were hundreds of these wrecks completed with varying degrees of destruction, carnage, and human injury.
You may have heard of the “Crash at Crush” before but you likely don’t know that Crush, Texas was not the first time this had been done. The famed wreck at Crush launched the practice into the national spotlight and proved that the huge undertakings could be as profitable as they were destructive.
In this podcast we examine the people, the places, and the things that lead to this very American activity becoming so popular and why it died a quiet death as a profit making enterprise in the middle 1930s. We tell the story of the times, the trains, and the consequences of taking tons of steam driven steel and iron and pitting it all against good sense and physics to make a dollar.
This is truly an odd tale of profit and performance art.
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Only in America
Any other third world place and they would still be working and hauling freight
Think DC-3 here
Between 1896 and 1935 do you think there were that many third world countries that even had rail transportation system yet? Even in they did, I doubt they would have had the money to buy a used engine with a questionable amount of service life still left in it and ship it overseas. Used engines would probably have been available in nearer countries for much less shipping cost. Mexico bought some secondhand passenger cars and some locomotives from the US over the years but they can be shipped over there without even lifting them off the rails.