Being a sports fan in late 19th century Texas was a largely boring experience. Basketball had just been invented in 1891 and barely existed outside of high schools and a handful of colleges. College football was just getting off the ground at the University of Texas and Texas A&M. Your options were basically Texas League baseball (go Dallas Hams!) or, if you were lucky, attending a Jack Johnson fight.
The good people of the Lone Star State needed new amusement. Fortunately, they had in their midst a visionary: William George Crush, a passenger agent for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. Like many ideas that change the course of human history, Crush's conception was beautiful because of its simplicity:
1. Take one steam locomotive that had been taken out of service from the railroad and paint it green.
2. Take another retired locomotive and paint it red.
3. Place both locomotives on the same track, at some distance apart but facing one another.
4. Crash them into each other at high speed.
So was born TRAINFIGHT. (Crush didn't come up with that name. I did, which means I own all TRAINFIGHT copyrights and am entitled to a portion of the sales from any TRAINFIGHT apparel, fruit snacks, or video games. Get at me, Electronic Arts. Let's make some money.)
The first TRAINFIGHT. (Photo via The Texas Collection at Baylor University.)
Outwardly, Crush presented this to his superiors at the railroad as a promotional event. Marketing was clearly in just as sad a state as athletics in the 1890s if "let's crash two trains and then people will want to ride the train more" was seen as a viable strategy for business growth. But the company signed off on it all the same.
Crush didn't stop with devising the rules and regulations, though. A proper TRAINFIGHT wasn't something you could just put on at the local high school or in the town square. No, this needed its own arena, a venue in which spectators could appreciate all the intricacies and emotions of the sport. The spot for that arena was found in McLennan County, 15 miles north of Waco, an uninhabited patch of land that was perfect for a TRAINFIGHT.
Wells were dug. Four miles of track were put down. A grandstand, food tent, and carnival-style midway were erected, as were two telegraph offices. TRAINFIGHT was best seen in person, but that didn't mean the rest of the world wasn't anxiously waiting to learn the results.
The only price of admission to the event was a two dollar round-trip ticket, valid anywhere in the state. Crush predicted 20,000 people would show up. By mid-afternoon, 40,000 eager sports fans were swarming the grounds of this newly created town, appropriately named "Crush, Texas." To put that number into perspective, the Crush TRAINFIGHT crowd would not fit into the football stadiums at the following schools:
- Vanderbilt
- Duke
- Washington State
- Wake Forest
- Four schools in the American Conference (Tulane, SMU, Tulsa, and Cincinnati)
- Eight Mountain West schools
- Every Conference USA school except Rice, UTEP, UTSA, and UAB
- Every Sun Belt school except South Alabama
- Every MAC school (excluding UMass games played at Gillette Stadium)
The people had spoken. They wanted TRAINFIGHT, and they wanted it now.
Of course, it would be irresponsible to invite tens of thousands of people to the middle of nowhere for a locomotive crash without making some effort to ensure their safety. The company engineers were certain the steam engines wouldn't explode on impact. They'd been designed to withstand the force of a collision, and that's precisely what Crush was proposing. Police on hand made sure the crowd was at a safe distance, or at least whatever they determined was a safe distance.
The time had arrived. TRAINFIGHT was on. Atop a white horse, Crush rode to the center of the track, where the trains were predicted to meet in their violent ironbound embrace. Perhaps he paused for a moment to consider the enormity of what he had created. It is one thing to conceive of a brand-new sport. It is quite another to see that sport about to be played for the very first time. Crush took his hat off, raised it in the air, and waved it back and forth. This was the signal to the engineers to send each locomotive on its final journey.
Consider the experience of being a spectator at a sporting event. Every fan thinks he or she is going in the hopes of witnessing something unrepeatably extraordinary. But the set of possible feats you actually want to see is tightly constrained by the rules. Russell Westbrook dunking over Dwight Howard is within that set, because it is both amazing and productive under the agreed-upon terms of the contest. Russell Westbrook stopping at half court to drop kick the ball into the shot clock and then doing a series of back handsprings into the tunnel is only amazing.
The crowd at TRAINFIGHT was no different. They wanted to see something spectacular with constraints; two steam locomotives barreling into one another and then collapsing in a heap of wreckage. What they actually saw was two steam locomotives barreling into one another, collapsing in a heap of wreckage...and then, contrary to the promises of the engineers, exploding.
(In defense of the engineers, let us point out that 19th century science, like 19th century medicine, was held to a lower standard: do your best and try not to drink on the job every day.)
Three people died, and several others were badly injured due to the blast. Crush was fired that night, though he was rehired the next day and stayed with the railroad until he retired after 57 years of service. What wreckage the crowd didn't carry away as souvenirs was cleared out by the company. TRAINFIGHT's reign as America's pastime was over. The legacy of this sport lives on, however, thanks to the arts. Composer Scott Joplin wrote "Great Crush Collision March" to give music lovers all over the world a taste of the TRAINFIGHT experience.
Perhaps I am guilty of misunderstanding the culture of the time, but I would have gone with Dvořák.