Denison Herald
July 25, 1972

GREAT TRAIN WRECK

Frank Barnes, then a retired Katy employee at Austin, was a patient in the Katy’s Employees Hospital here in April 1961, recalled for the Herald how two trains were sent crashing into each other.

Barnes could speak with considerable authority because he was foreman on one of the locomotives sacrificed before an awed multitude on a prairie a few miles north of Waco on Sept. 15, 1896.

The talk of the nation at the time and long remembered by oldsters in railroad circles, the carefully planned head-on collision created among other things the shortest lived town in Texas history.

The town that lasted only one day but had a population of 40,000 was Crush, so tagged in honor of William G. Crush, of the Katy passenger department, who conceived the idea of a deliberately staged collision and carried it through to the accomplishment of nationwide fanfare.

Barnes, who kept official photos of the great train wreck at his bedside in the hospital here, remembered minutely the details of the great granddaddy of all spectaculars.

“Mr. Crush got the idea for a man-made train collision while on a trip from here to St. Louis,” Barnes explained.The boiler of the locomotive pulling Mr. Crush’s train exploded, wrecking the train.


Seeing the big crowd that gathered at the scene, Mr. Crush wondered if that many people would come to see a wreck after it happened how many more would come out for a real wreck billed in advance.”

Crush won permission from the Katy management to go through with his daring idea, and the first announcement of plans for a staged train wreck launched off nation-wide publicity.

Platforms were built in the open pasture for passengers who arrived on several special trains operated from many parts of the country.

Barnes was quite candid as he described the two out-moded locomotives which were groomed in the shops of Denison for lead roles in the drama.

“They were 35-ton teapots that were being replaced by 80-ton engines, and the wreck turned out to be a grandstand way of junking the old equipment.J.T. McElvaney, who was superintendent at Denison, said he had several more he would like to dispose of the same way.”

The locomotives, one painted green and the other bright red, were given six boxcars each and sent from Denison to the wreck scene, one by way of Dallas and the other by Fort Worth.They ballyhooed the big show along the way.

Barnes remembered that the crews took their trains to the site three days early for tedious rehearsals of the split-second timing needed to bring the engines together at the predetermined point.

“The plan was,” Barnes explained , “to have the trains start two miles apart, attain a speed of a mile a minute and collide squarely in front of the crowd and the platform where the official photographers would be stationed.

“With the trains traveling 88 feet per second, even the slightest error would affect the collision point sharply.”

In their practice run, the crews determined the proper throttle settings and marked them with clamps.They were to start their locomotives, count off 16 exhausts, make final control adjustments and jump off.

“We kept practicing until each train could make mile to the contact point in two minutes from settings and marked them with a standing start,” Barnes recalled.

The promoters sought to leave nothing to chance.The track behind both trains was cut just before the zero hour to keep one train from running away should the other leave the track before contact.Couplings and brakes were rigged to guard against the accidental separating or stopping of the train before the crash.

Something that wasn’t anticipated did happen, however – and with tragic results.The boiler of one of the engines exploded in the collision and the fragments of steel fatally hurt one young man and injured several others.

When the nervously awaited hour came, the action had to be postponed for several minutes, and the excited multitude could be crowded back a safe distance from the track.

Barnes recalled that “Finally the “go” signal was given.Everything went off as we rehearsed.Engineer C.E. Stanton opened the throttle to the clamp.Counted the 16 exhausts, and jumped off the engine.I was right behind him.We watched numbly, praying that nobody would be killed.”

The whistle cords of both locomotives were tied to the wheel driving rods in a manner that caused them to toot repeatedly, instead of a continuous wail, as they raced toward their doom.Adding to the din were hundreds of torpedoes placed on the rail which ripped off their staccatos under the wheels of the train.

A yellow clipping from the Waco News-Tribune, speaking in the present tense, takes over the description of the spectacular events.

“Suddenly there is an ear splitting roar as the two powerful locomotives smash and rip and tear into each other box cars and flat cars climbed atop their leaders and disintegrated, the engines rear up like battling lions, and then fall slowly back to earth, each telescoping the other.”

Then the sky literally fell in on Crush, the promotion minded passenger agent.

Catastrophe followed.The News-Tribune continued it story:
“In a split second after the crash, there is another deafening roar – the boilers of the locomotives have burst, tossing thousands of chunks of metal hundreds of feet into the air, to rain down on the helpless spectators.

“The crowd surges apart.Pieces of metal from the sky fall but most escape the barrage.A man falls from a mesquite tree, his skull ripped apart by a flying chain; another falls from another tree, his leg broken and twisted.A farmer’s wife suddenly drops to the ground on a 14-year-old boy behind her, screams in pain as one bolt from an engine fells both of them.

“A Hewitt (Tex.) man, standing between his wife and another woman, is practically decapitated while neither of the women was touched.A photographer standing on a hastily erected platform suddenly can see only out of one eye.A farmer’s wife, riding along public road a half mile away, is knocked out by a piece of timber thrown through the air by the mighty explosion.”

Two persons, a man and a woman were fatally injured and several others were hurt.

He served out a long career with the Katy passenger department but with no interest in promoting another great train wreck.”