Like watching a train wreck but you can’t help yourself. In today’s term, it’s like traveling down the highway at a good pace until you start to see brake lights. You try to look ahead for the reason you’re crawling along. Eventually, you discover its source. Even though the car accident is on the other side of the road and not impeding your movement, everybody slows down to look. Rubbernecking is natural.
Go back more than a century and people used to pay to watch a real train wreck. In the early 1900s, showmen would travel across the county putting on staged wrecks at state fairs and festivals. A mile or shorter set of tracks would be laid out and two old locomotives put on opposite ends. Conductors would climb aboard, get the trains up to speed and jump before the head-on crash.
According to historian James J. Reisdorff in his book The Man Who Wrecked 146 Locomotives, the most famous train wreck was in Waco, Texas, known as the “Crash at Crush” which drew 40,000 people.
The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 16, 1896, reported the crash. “A crash, a sound of timbers rent and torn, and then a shower of splinters… There was just a swift instance of silence, and then as if controlled by a single impulse 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…”
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