Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, September 15th, 1896, the crash at Crush. So let's go to the town of Crush, Texas,

a small town along the rail line between Dallas and Houston.

And calling it a town is actually a little bit of an exaggeration because Crush at this moment existed for one purpose and one purpose only, which was to take two locomotives along those train tracks and smash them into each other.

Believe it or not, listeners, this is one of our most requested episodes. We've been getting emails about this since basically the moment we launched the show, and I'm very excited to finally be getting into it. But shout up to Anthony and other listeners who have suggested it over the years. I really don't think it requires much of an intro. That's the story. They crashed some trains into each other. But as one of our

sources for this episode was headlined, it said, quote, a train company crashed two trains,

you will believe what happened next. So here, as always, Nicole Hemmer of Vanderbilt and Kelly

Carter-Jackson of Wellesley. Hey there. Hello, Jody. Hey there. Let's get one thing out of the way, which is that this town is not named Crush because of the two

trains crashing each other as a person whose last name happens to be Crush, who's the sort

of carnival barker behind this whole thing, basically names the town after themselves.

But it works out perfectly to say the crash at Crush.

But it is one of those cases of like pneumonia determinism or whatever, right?

Like that name, he was going to be wrecking stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what?

The larger context here, of course, is railroads are the new technology linking the country together, dotting the entire country, and especially in places like Texas, starting to

finally connect all these small towns and even lead to the creation of new towns as the railroad

pushes west. So you have the Missouri, Kansas, Texas Railroad. It's the MKT, often known as the

Katie. And it first starts to extend between Dallas and Houston in the 1880s. And we have this man by the name of

William George Crush, who works for the MKT, and he has a little bit of a brainstorm.

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