For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
One engineer warned that they locamotives would explode and they shunned him as a debbie downer naysayer.
Doesn't seem that far off from today where profits trump safety and any reason that stands in the way is ignored.
Really? :)
While accidents do happen, the rate of accidents is going down. Injuries in general: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-number-of-deaths-by...
Fire: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fire-deaths-by-age
Drowning: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/drowning-deaths-by-age-gr...
And even motor vehicle deaths, could plausibly have topped: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/road-deaths-by-type
(this is world wide, in the developed world these peek many decades ago)
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/01/pedestrian-deaths-rea...
Politics is swinging to the extremes, violence is changing it's clothes, taking on other less familiar forms. Trust in the system is at a low.
Economic inequality is rife; infrastructure and the environment is approaching levels of instability previously unheard of.
These aren't media bubbles. These are failures to maintain or achieve higher order awareness. All of these things are feeding into each other in myriad ways; they can't be reasoned in individual contexts for solutions. That's the thinking that got us where we are. They need to be reasoned about as a whole.
Problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them in the first place.
I do agree that trust is probably at pretty low levels — exactly because communication is more accessible than any time in history and therefore people have more opportunity to question authority.
But a lack in trust doesn’t translate directly to violence. I think that people are becoming very complacent with distrust. The daily media barrage of reasons to distrust so many things has reached the point where it doesn’t cause outrage anymore. It has convinced some people that distrust is normal.
They're warnings for the future, because while its true that we're currently living in a pretty safe environment and are overall pretty well off, our children won't have that luxury.
Once these issues actually start getting reflected in global statics, its going to be way too late to actually realistically pull this proverbial ship around.
And he didn't even mention half of the things on the horizon with the potential to seriously harm society such as global warming and the evermore increasing amount of automation destroying the livelihood of a lot of people. (automation isn't bad, its just going to cause a lot of problems and unrest very soon)
What's clear is the data about the recent past, and the trends are very good, both for accidental and deliberate death (among other things) on a time-scale of decades to centuries.
There are indeed some reversals (in the last few years: some kinds of crime, pedestrian deaths, opioids) which the optimists hope will be short-lived.
This can be accomplished by pointing out just a few recent innovations that have extended the global expected lifespan.
- The S bend flushing toilet and access to improved sanitation
- The era of vaccination
- The discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics
- The invention of the movable type printing and subsequent information technologies accelerating knowledge transfer
- Precision medical equipment: MRIs, CT Scans, surgical scopes, ultrasounds, X-Rays, and minimally invasive surgery
- Mechanized agriculture and the era of food surplus
All of the above along with quite a few other innovations cement the idea that anyone wishing to go back to any time period before something like the 19th century is basically out of their mind.
Say what you want about politics, I'm not sure it's anything we haven't seen before. Nationalist right-wing politics isn't new. Political disunity isn't new. Overall, "Trust in the system" doesn't have anything to do with how likely I am to make it to 80 years old.
Our era may have some turbulence, but it's got nothing on dying young because you ate your own shit and didn't even realize it.
While that may be how you interpreted it, that isn't what he stated.
Death rates of various causes have been decreasing primarily due to technological and medical advancements, not because people are more conscious of others safety or less focused on profits. Companies time and time again still choose the cheaper options over peoples safety. If you need evidence look at the oil/gas industry, the pharmaceutical industry, politicians, companies that manufacture products over seas for pennies on the dollar while employees kill themselves from stress, and countless others.
You can even further apply this to tech companies such as Facebook, because while they may not be directly causing peoples deaths, they are having a major negative impact on society and constantly make declensions to maximize profits rather than look out for user safety and well being
But GP is correct that the overall balance is much more towards safety today than (say) 100 years ago. It's not really technological advances that sets how many people die to build a skyscraper (and medicine is equally helpless now as then). How many people die in factory fires etc. isn't about the owners being more or less greedy now, it's about whether the fire safety inspector has teeth, which is a political choice.
And in a way a rational choice, too. Every such choice amounts in some way to putting a value on a life, and now that we are much wealthier, this implicit value is much higher.
While I understand the noble reasons behind it, I do raise an eyebrow considering the fact it can be convenient for a malfunctioning society to sweep it failings under the rug that way.
On the other hand, I do feel slightly patronized, as if I weren't able to handle the "truth"...
Or the gun lobbying industry trying to block regulations on registration and background checks?
Or the crazy number of petrol-refinery incidents in recent years (which could probably be prevented with stricter regulations or monitoring but that would cut back on profits)?
Or the links between social media and suicide rates?
Or every industry lobbying against climate change related regulations?
Or the Boeing 737 MAX incidents that could have probably been prevented with more training and stricter regulations (but, you know, those pesky profits)?
Or the entire tobacco industry and links to cancer or other deadly conditions?
I think it's pretty easy to make the case -for many companies- that "profits trump safety and any reason that stands in the way is ignored". The only things that stop this are regulations which make those dangerous practices less profitable or consumer backlash which make them less profitable. Either way, it's still always all about the profits.
Out of curiosity, do you think that's more a result of companies willfully choosing to reduce profits to be more ethical or because things are generally more regulated these days?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/02/14/most-amer...
Also note that the small uptick the last couple of years is closely aligned with the opioid epidemic, and even then is still basically flat since the turn of the century and down significantly from the peak in the early 1990s.
Still possibly an example of companies choosing profits over lives, but the companies in this case are the drug companies.
Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths.
PS: I'm not on the "ban all the guns" side of the debate or anything. My point was just that corporations most certainly do profit from death or violence even today and the main thing stopping them is regulation or consumer backlash. Otherwise their sole existence is to maximize profit.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/13/us-gun-death...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599773911/how-the-nra-worked-...
That "absurdly high" time was three decades long, not a one-time blip. Prior to that (i.e in the 1950s) the rate was lower, but going back so long ago the country had a much lower population density.
> Maybe it is all just related to opiates but I've yet to see any significant study there and the numbers on a per-state basis don't seem to align with opiate-related deaths.
It's not surprising that those aren't strongly correlated. You get more overdose deaths in rural areas and more drug-related crime in urban areas, because rural areas have longer emergency response times and worse medical services in general, while the higher density of urban areas increases the propensity for robberies by addicts and territorial disputes between dealers.
> And there would be better studies regarding the nature of these crimes if there weren't corporate lobbying being done to block that research.
Meh. The problem is the entire frame is political.
Suppose you have a wife who kills her husband with a gun, a wife who kills her husband with a kitchen knife, a drug dealer who kills a rival with a gun and a drug dealer who kills a rival with a machete. There are two natural categories of homicide there, but it's domestic disputes and gang violence, not guns and knives.
But the CDC will measure what you ask them to, and what you ask them to measure is begging the question. If you ban red cars and then measure accidents involving red cars, they go down, but only because you're purposely trying to manufacture evidence for banning red cars, and purposely trying to frame things in a way where "ban red cars" is the default solution to motor vehicle fatalities. You can't really blame gun owners for objecting to research that uses that type of framing.
The specific example they used is a good one. Someone had the CDC study whether having a gun in the house net improves safety. The frame is explicitly set up so that if the answer is no, the presumptive solution is to not have a gun in the house. But it's a false dichotomy -- it ignores every other possible solution.
Suppose that it goes the other way if you keep the gun in a gun safe. Then we get a net safety benefit if people have guns in gun safes, so what we really need is more gun safes rather than fewer guns and maybe we should provide subsidies for gun safes.
Or the problem is really teenagers gaining access to firearms without adequate safety training, so we would save lives to add firearms safety training to the public school curriculum.
But the framing determines all of that from the beginning. If the only point of the study is to provide government authority to a predetermined narrative, you're doing politics rather than science.
We would benefit from having the science without the politics, but that isn't what has happened, so without some way to separate the science from the politics that is more effective than what we've used in the past, we can't actually get that. And politically-framed studies are worse than nothing, because they're partisanship masquerading as facts.
You had me until the very end. You made a very persuasive argument regarding the framing of research questions. The problem is that it's too persuasive. Clearly almost all studies are heavily biased by their framing, and it stands to reason politically-based framing biases abound in science generally.
IMO, we'd be better to err on the side of more empirical data and empirically informed policies, however flawed. And we should be prepared to mitigate biases with more data at least as much as we're prepared to shutdown research altogether, which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.
> which as I understand was the outcome of the CDC research--they're prohibited from studying gun-related issues altogether.
The text of the Dickey amendment was: "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control".
That's not actually a research ban, but under a Clinton Whitehouse it had been their motivation for doing the research. And at the same time Congress reduced the CDC's funding, so even though they could have potentially still done research on e.g. methods to reduce firearms deaths without gun control, they didn't actually do that and the research was cut out entirely.
We then had some Democrats calling the text a "research ban" because it banned politically-motivated research they wanted, but the larger barrier was really the reduced funding combined with a Democratic executive that didn't really want to do gun research that wasn't directed toward promoting gun control.
Both of those have actually changed as of this year, because Trump signed an appropriations bill last year providing more CDC funding.
The risk now is that because the shoe is on the other foot, if a Trump CDC produces research to the effect that e.g. not prohibiting upstanding adult citizens from carrying a gun in a school zone would help to deter or mitigate school shootings, or showing that a large proportion of shootings are drug/gang related and proposing solutions to address homicides related to that, you may see Democrats decrying bias the other way. Or just ignoring the results entirely and pretending they don't exist.
And that's really the problem. You need people acting in good faith who are willing to take solutions that address the problem without scoring political points against the other team. That isn't a research problem, and more research doesn't fix it if whichever side the outcome of the research disfavors will only dismiss it for not supporting their existing policies.
But if you want more research, it looks like we may be getting it. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it also may not do any good, unless we can get past the partisanship -- because there almost certainly are ways to reduce "gun violence" other than gun control. Which should make everybody happy, other than the people who would rather score political points than actually solve the problem. And those people are themselves the bigger problem in general.
This is definitely looking like a local minimum and good trend for ordinary violence, but it won't be easy to say that the world is safer & healthier after we've broken the food web...
The Saudis didn’t cancel their Boeing 737 max order because they valued safety over profits. They did it because unsafe flights are also unprofitable.
In fact I’d argue we are even willing (collectively) pay massive amounts even for the false appearance of safety, i.e Homeland Security in the United States, even in the absence of concrete evidence that it actually makes us safer.
If an executive can eke out a bonus from cutting corners, they will do so. It's long-term vs. short-term profit mindset. An executive may not care about the long-term profit of a company if they can make a quick dollar today and vanish tomorrow.
> The Saudis didn’t cancel their Boeing 737 max order because they valued safety over profits.
Yes, obviously people will stop flying on the 737 Max today. But that didn't stop the CEO of Boeing from forcing unsafe modifications on the 737 in a desperate gamble to compete with Airbus. The fact that we're discussing this today shows that your statement about "drive for profit naturally increases safety" to be false. The 737 Max wouldn't exist.
Another example of this is VW and the emissions scandal.
Customers, likewise, do not always do what is in their best interest. The 2008 mortgage crisis happened because customers were taking out loans they had no business taking out. And on the other end of the table, banks didn't care about risk because the risk was abstracted away from them. It was someone else's problem. Which ultimately became the government and taxpayer's problem.
> In fact I’d argue we are even willing (collectively) pay massive amounts even for the false appearance of safety, i.e Homeland Security in the United States, even in the absence of concrete evidence that it actually makes us safer.
Propaganda certainly works. Anti-vaxxers are a thing now. Which just proves that safety is a two-way street. Millions of people still smoke. The number of people texting and driving is so high that we have to have advertising on TV telling people constantly to stop it. Motorcyclists still refuse to wear helmets. If it weren't law, great numbers of people would still ride in cars without seat belts. And yes, they would buy cars without airbags if they were allowed to and it were cheaper than models with airbags.
No, it was a one-time stunt. Similar spectacles were made by other people, not by them.
Using a single employee as a scapegoat, on the other hand, is quite modern - as is misguided outrage over "profit over people" based on fake facts, if I may say so.
Not because people are more empathetic, but because the legal system effectively penalizes reckless behavior like this.
Try living in a country with lax consumer protection and liability laws, and you'll really come to appreciate life in the USA quickly. (I know I have)
To wit they've done everything. Bus derby, RV derby, trailer derby ... it always ends in wonderful amounts of destruction and spectacular crashes.
Oh, and it turns out RVs disintegrate rapidly. I learned that it's not the carnage, per se, but the becoming of carnage that is entertaining. The show was over too quickly. In fact, it ended when one of them caught fire shortly after they lost their radiator. If there were more vehicles then that wouldn't have meant the end of the show. Maybe buses--well built buses--would have been more fun.
OTOH, the only demolition derby I'd been to previously was last year's derby at the Alameda County Fair, which was all cars. So probably I should be careful about generalizing.
EDIT: The 2017 fair had an RV demolition derby with 5 RVs in the arena: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-Al1TISq_s
Doing that just takes a lot of people and labor (you've probably seen old films of track laying from the late 1800s-early 1900s).
They wouldn't install a switch, as that would be too costly for something so temporary; so they probably just broke the track, moved it sideways a bit, connected it to the new "spur", moved the trains/cars onto it, then reconnected it back to the original line to allow traffic thru. Then basically the reverse to move in equipment to dismantle/haul away the remains.
Train robbers are land pirates.
If I remember correctly can’t diesel-electric locomotives put out one or two megawatts!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_55
NB The Deltic engines were pretty interesting:
Strange to think that a railroad executive would turn out to be an overgrown four-year-old crashing real trains together for the fun of it. Especially considering the lives put at risk.
I'd rather say it's impressive your four-year-old nephew precociously identified great ideas in human entertainment, decades before his time!
Special Effects are cool, but the interactions between different materials, pressure waves both in the structure and in the air as well as the influence of heat are fascinating and hard to model, and Hollywood has little incentive to even try. Only in the last two decades have we even started to properly simulate cgi explosions (the helicopter crash from Matrix is the earliest example).
Basically cinema and YouTube have me spoiled to demand more than what I can perceive. But special effects can't mimic the real thing.
> By the 1930s, staged train wrecks were starting to lose their popularity because wrecking old but otherwise useful locomotives was seen as wasteful at the height of the Great Depression.
Also:
> ...staged train wrecks were a popular—albeit destructive—event at fairs and festivals across the U.S., long before anyone ever thought of wrecking old automobiles at a demolition derby or monster truck rally.
Not to mention the various incantations of robot wars. People still want to see things in real life go boom.
I know stunts with WWI surplus airplanes were a common attraction in the 20s, maybe trains just started to seem old-fashioned?
Movies also sounds likely, to me, they were coming of age. In fact IIRC booming, as cheap entertainment.
The very point of a train crash, or any crash, is to seriously total the equipment and see debris flying, and also the theoretical possibility of a memorably injury, isn't it?
What does anyone get out of a couple of locomotives playing bumper cars, with fireworks to give it at least some dazzle to go with it?
What’s next? Stinger missile demonstrations as art.
I pretty much lost interest after the episode where they blew up the concrete truck. I don't know much about mining or blasting[0], but I think even the most basic honest attempt to answer the question of "can you remove cured concrete from the drum of a concrete truck using explosives?" would have involved drilling some holes, filling them with explosives, and using the explosives to shatter the concrete. You know, the way miners use explosives to shatter rock.
For those of you who haven't watched that episode, they throw a stick of dynamite into the drum, observe that nothing happens, pack the remaining space in the drum full of ANFO, and then basically obliterate the truck. Adam picks up a fragment of the truck and delivers his catchphrase "Well there's your problem".[1]
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for myths involving guns and explosives; those aren't things the general public has a lot of experience with[2]. But let's not sensationalize them, let's look at what they actually do, under realistic (if unusual) circumstances.
[0] I've toured a couple deactivated mines and read a couple of books. In every case, the basic process of "drill holes, fill with explosives, removed broken up material" was covered. I'm not an expert, but I find it hard to believe they couldn't have found one for the purposes of science.
[1] Haven't seen it in a while, don't care to re-watch it. There might be some bits missing, but that's basically how it goes.
[2] In the case of firearms especially, I firmly believe if more people had an understanding of how they work and their effects, even in extraordinary cases, we might be able to have a semi-intelligent conversation about them.
Even as a teenager I was aware of the applicability of controlled demolition to that problem. It would be theoretically possible to do so with the right research.
However, that wasn't really the point of the Myth. The myth was the guy blew up his truck with a stick of dynamite. The employment of the ANFO was to show the required investment of effort to create a result commensurate with the Myth's outcome.
If anything, it was very educational in terms of demonstrating how much effort and oomph it takes to create a catastrophic failure of modern equipment; and instilling somewhat of a sense of security in that that sort of oomph was not necessarily something someone would just find laying around.
I mean, I get where you're coming from. They decided that blowing up the truck would be more entertaing than actually teaching how to go about resolving the problem. I think it's a missed opportunity in hindsight to introduce some fairly esoteric skills into the public consciousness; but the time (War on Terror in full swing) would have likely condemned doing so as reckless no matter how much you and I may disagree. People would have pointed their fingers at "teaching impressionable, unstable youths the finer points of controlled demolition and explosives handling" as a contributing factor in every subsequent explosives related incident.
Don't get me wrong; I hate ratings hunting programming, and the swill broadcast television has become today. That episode was legit though.
Plus the sound of a cement truck being annihilated by ANFO will forever be associated with the concept of the universe momentarily unzipping. That was a hell of a spectacle.
There are even 'adventure experience' companies that will let you crush a car with a tank, a price.
Also - there are companies that let you have control over large equipment (loaders, bulldozers, excavators, etc).
Today's YouTuber stars make a fine living out of smashing stuff up. They know it is lowest common denominator stuff that will find a ready audience.
However, these stunts come to an end, after a while the audience needs something new and not yet another thing smashed up.
The thing with the trains is that they were only good for scrap. Being wrecked made little difference to the resale value, bent bits of tin are still of the same weight as finely engineered bits of tin.
The current trend of wasting stuff for likes rarely involves stuff that is going to be recycled. How many iphone X's does it take to stop a bullet content results in a lot of waste of new stuff with not a lot recycled. This is in contrast to this train wrecking stunt-meme of a century ago.
Although people were killed in the train wrecking stunts people did not go there with that a as premise. Motor racing was about the deadly crashes for most of the last century, if you were a Formula 1 driver then it was a 1 in 3 chance you might not last the season. Spectators went for the chance to see a spectacular crash being part of the entertainment.
Public hangings also used to be popular entertainment. So, all considered, pretty good show.
Oh, we can have frankfurter rolls and sarsaparilla floats at the fair grounds!
Look through old wills and it's shocking to see what people list. Each shirt individually gifted, because they only had 3. Each pair of socks. Their toaster. This wasn't even 100 years ago. We don't realize just how much more buying power we have today. It's a completely different world.
For cars, crash tests are routine, which is good. For planes, unfortunately, there are less common. Now, we need destructive testing for e.g. nuclear reactors (in the controlled and safe environment, of course). We used to do that, but stopped for political reasons.
I tried their repository, http://digitalcollections.baylor.edu
For anybody else that was curious, in 1896 $2*40k = $2.4M in 2019
The $2 charge was not the admission price, but the cost of a round trip train ticket to the event from anywhere in Texas. Other possibly more reliable sources say that this ticket varied in price and was as much as $5 depending on origin: http://www.lsjunction.com/facts/crush.htm.
So while there was a lot of economic activity associated with the crash, it wasn't the equivalent of a modern event with $2.4 million of gate receipts.
https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1890-1899#...
It looks like $2 was the daily wage for many skilled people during that era. Train conductors made about $3 a day, a carpenter would get $2.05, and an unclassified worker made $1.65.
But putting down the rail sounds expensive, could it be that this was cheaper back then?