On September 15, 1896, the Missouri–Kansas–Texas Railroad crashed two unmanned locomotives into each other at speed as a public spectacle. The Crash at Crush was the idea of passenger agent William Crush, who built a temporary town for the event and charged nothing to watch — the railroad made its money selling tickets on excursion trains to the site. An estimated 40,000 people came, "more people than the second-largest city in state at the time."
Engineers had assured Crush that the boilers "were unlikely to explode." Each train ran four turns of its driving wheels, the crews jumped off, and the locomotives met at about 45 mph. According to The Dallas Morning News: "both boilers exploded simultaneously and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half of a driving wheel." The debris killed two spectators and cost a photographer an eye. Crush was fired that day and rehired the next. Scott Joplin wrote a march about it.
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