Crash at Crush

[Bleipriester]

There is little I can add to this, it is all in here:

Crash at Crush - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Is it brilliant or mad?

 

[ozro]

They didn't have TV back then, so I bet all 40,000 in attendance told the story their entire lives.
Little madness in destroying valuable equipment, brilliant in raising money and I am guessing nothing at the time matched the entertainment.

 

[toobfreak]

Katy engineers assured Crush that his grand idea was safe, specifically that the boilers on the steam engines had been designed to resist ruptures and that, even in a very high-speed crash, they were unlikely to explode.

Wow! That is just incredible! I mean, I'm not train expert nor mechanical engineer, yet at that, just understanding the steam pressure these boilers were under + the likely fatigue of the rivets in what were aged trains who had seen better days, my first thought is that those boilers stood an almost certain chance of exploding!

Crush insisted on restricting the general public to a minimum of 200 yards (180 m) away from the track, but allowed members of the press to be within 100 yards.

Again, just incredible. A more reasonable distance should have been more like 500 yards for photographers and 700 yards for the general public. Who in their right mind would get with 100 yards of two speeding steam locomotives crashing head on at high speed? What could go wrong?!

 

[Bleipriester]

Wow! That is just incredible! I mean, I'm not train expert nor mechanical engineer, yet at that, just understanding the steam pressure these boilers were under + the likely fatigue of the rivets in what were aged trains who had seen better days, my first thought is that those boilers stood an almost certain chance of exploding!

We can only guess...

Again, just incredible. A more reasonable distance should have been more like 500 yards for photographers and 700 yards for the general public. Who in their right mind would get with 100 yards of two speeding steam locomotives crashing head on at high speed? What could go wrong?!

Where is the spectacle when you are light years away from the action?

Btw, these aren´t my quotes.

 

[toobfreak]

We can only guess...

Engineers don't guess.

Where is the spectacle when you are light years away from the action?

Yep. Like getting within 100 yards of exploding nitro. Good fun there.

Just remember the tremendous pressure within a steam boiler is what drives these locomotives to climb mountains pulling 100 cars.

Those boilers amount to what is in effect a giant pipe bomb, and the bigger the pipe, the more damage they do.

 

[Bleipriester]

Engineers don't guess.


Yep. Like getting within 100 yards of exploding nitro. Good fun there.

Just remember the tremendous pressure within a steam boiler is what drives these locomotives to climb mountains pulling 100 cars.

Those boilers amount to what is in effect a giant pipe bomb, and the bigger the pipe, the more damage they do.

Trains were sophisticated already at the time. If there was a considerable risk of the boilers to explode, Crush maybe wanted them to explode for a better spectacle. After all this was a PR stunt.

 

[toobfreak]

Trains were sophisticated already at the time. If there was a considerable risk of the boilers to explode, Crush maybe wanted them to explode for a better spectacle. After all this was a PR stunt.

My point is that these boilers were about 1/2 inch thick cast iron with about 300 psi pressure steam from within all held in by rivets. With about 3,360 square inches total surface area (an estimate), and 300 psi, that is about one millions pounds of pressure exploding outward from behind 1/2" thick iron ruptured outward requiring only a few rivets to rupture to set forth the explosion.

Times two.

Kinda surprised a lot more people were not killed.

They were probably lucky and the tanks mostly ruptured upward and not laterally outward towards the crowd.

 

[Muhammed]

There is little I can add to this, it is all in here:

Crash at Crush - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Is it brilliant or mad?

This thread is worthless without video.

 

[toobfreak]

 

[Bleipriester]

So, this was unexpected and it never happened again in later train crashes.