The Crash at Crush

William George Crush came to Texas from Chicago in 1893 to work as a ticket agent for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. In 1896, during a period of lagging ticket scales, Crush, like the Grinch, had “a wonderful awful idea.”

Crush proposed staging a head-on collision between two steam engines, each moving at a speed of 60 miles per hour. Admission would be free, but the railroad would charge $2 (about $75 dollars today) to carry people to the site from anywhere in Texas. Some contemporary newspaper ads put the price at $3.50. 

This was not an original idea. A staged train wreck in Ohio a few months previous a real money maker. Crush envisioned a much bigger crash— and profit— in Texas. Of course he did. 

The higher-ups at the Katy, as the railroad was popularly known, liked the wonderful awful idea so much they erected a new station just north of Waco, near West, Texas, on a previously undeveloped piece of prairie and named it Crush, Texas, in honor of their ticket agent. 

  The plan was to locate 20,000 or so spectators on a hill 200 yards away from the crash site, where they would enjoy, according to The Dallas Morning News, “a perfect view of the destruction.” Photographers and reporters would be allowed within 100 yards of the track. 

The railroad expected about 20,000 people to show up for the crash but more than twice that number arrived at Crush, Texas on Sept. 15, 1896. The News reported that a crowd that big had never before been seen in Texas, except for Tennessee Day at the State Fair several years before. Agent Crush, “on a prancing charger,” kept an eye on the proceedings.

Frank Barnes, a fireman on one of the locomotives, spoke to a Katy Railroad magazine in 1950, when he was 79-years-old, about the Crash at Crush. He said the locomotives were good 30- ton engines, which the Katy was phasing out in favor of  “the 60- ton jobs.” 

“I’ll tell you, those were two flashy engines,” Barnes recalled. “ Old 999 was painted green with red trim and was headed south. Number 1001 was red, trimmed in green, and was headed north… We cut the reverse lever back to the second notch, stayed with the engine for 16 exhausts— that’s four turns of the drivers—and jumped. Those were good engines. They really got up speed.

“From a standing start they made the mile in just two minutes. I figure they were going 50 miles an hour when they crashed.” 

 “The rumble of the two trains, faint and far off at first, but growing nearer and more distinct with each fleeting second, was like the gathering force of a cyclone,” the News reported. Second after impact, “as if controlled by a single impulse,” both boilers exploded. Iron and steel became flying shrapnel. The crowd panicked and ran as debris rained down, killing two and injuring half a dozen others. 

“I still don’t know what made those boilers explode,” Barnes said. “Everything was planned just right, and the crowd really got its money’s worth… nobody would have been hurt if the boilers hadn’t gone off. Even then, they wouldn’t have been hurt if they’d stayed behind the safety lines after the collision.” 

The Katy fired Crush that evening but hired him back a short time later. He continued to work for the railroad until his retirement in a career that covered six decades. The railroad settled several lawsuits from the victims’ families with cash and lifetime rail passes. The injured photographer received damages amounting to $10,000 ($350,000 today). Even so, the Katy pulled in about $80,000, or about $3 million in today’s dollars, on ticket sales. The Katy could afford a little calamity. 

The Crash at Crush became the  deadliest publicity stunt in the country’s history but staged train wrecks continued for the next 40 years. A man named Joe Connolly— they called him “Head-on Joe”—staged more than 70 train collisions. The last one was in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, when staged train wrecks came across as stupid and wasteful.