A train wreck or train crash is a type of disaster involving one or more trains. Train wrecks often occur as a result of miscommunication, as when a moving train meets another train on the same track; or an accident, such as when a train wheel jumps off a track in a derailment; or when a boiler explosion occurs. Train wrecks have often been widely covered in popular media and in folklore.
Because of the potential for multiple deaths and extensive property damage and economic loss, the law treats the intentional wrecking of a train as extremely serious, some jurisdictions providing for life imprisonment even where the wreck does not result in death, and the death penalty where it does.
Famous quotes containing the words train and/or wreck:
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)
“The old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most ... and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)