From the Sheriff Jim Wilson’s Facebook page, we get this incredibly stupid stunt:
1896…Waco, Texas….Some fool decided it would be a great publicity stunt to run two trains together, head on. A crowd of some 40,000 gathered, of which 3 were killed and six other injured by the flying debris.
Read the whole story here.
They used to do this all over the midwest. The danger to the crowd was part of the appeal. Trains were the biggest machine most people had ever seen or ever heard of…and the fascination of seeing two of them crash head on was well worth the quarter or dime that was charged for attendance.
Extreme Pay Per View…
One wonders if there’s any actual moving footage of one of these events…filmography was in its infancy during these days, so there may well have been a stereoscopic camera or something nearby…