Spike TV is running an hour long documentary of train wrecks right now.
5:00 - 6:00 Central time Sunday.
dwRavenstar
you had the same idea as me
K
It’s airing again at 12:30 central time tonight
***! Why on earth did they switch that to a channel I dopn’t get and put in it’s place the food network??
Haha, I know how you feel. I wish I still had Natl. Geographic instead of some womens channel. Nothing against women, im just not interested.
In the early part of the 20th century, train wrecks were staged for spectator amusement.
More accurately, they were loco wrecks. Locos that had outlived their usefullness would be sacrificed for the show. Engineers would fire up the steamers and start them on a collision course and then jump off before they got going too fast. Then the locos would continue toward a head on collision at a predetermined point. These were real crowd pleasers and there is actually film footage of some of them. I guess this had the same sort of appeal as building implosions do in modern times.
With DCC, it is now possible to stage head on wrecks. The only way to do that with DC was to reverse the wiring on one of the locos. Does anyone want to contribute a few BLIs for this prototypical recreation.
And could I have the remnants afterwards? [:p]
I don’t think so, Tim.[X-)]
One such staged wreck was called The Great Crush Crash, and took place on September 15th 1896 between Waco and Hillsboro Texas in front of a crowd of about 40,000 spectators. The trains collided at 60 mph each (120 mph impact). After the impact, both locomotive boilers exploded killing two people and injuring several others, even the photographer that took the picture of the locos when they impacted lost an eye from a flying bolt…
Tracklayer