A Publicity Stunt That Went Terribly Wrong

The year was 1896, and a passenger agent for the Katy Railroad in Texas named William George Crush had a fantastical idea to spur up publicity for the railroad he worked for during a slow economic period. His plan? Stage a tremendous train wreck. But the wreck wouldn’t come from one train. It would involve two trains speeding toward each other until they collided.

Crush somehow got his superiors to agree to the stunt, and he began to inform the newspapers around the country about the event. Word quickly spread, and the Katy Railroad began bringing spectators on 33 different trains at the cost of $2 per ticket to the spot where the event would take place.

The trains dropped off their passengers at an area 15 miles north of Waco, Texas, in the central part of the state. There was no town there at the time, but Crush changed that. He created a temporary town that he appropriately named after himself. It was called Crush, Texas.

On September 15, 1896, 40,000 people came to witness the spectacle. They crowded the hillsides of the one-day town where there was a view of a track running at the bottom of a small valley.

At 4:00 P.M., the two trains began to move toward each other. They touched and then backed up opposite each other a mile in either direction. Each engine was 35 tons, with six boxcars…