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:
“Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning.”
—Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)
“Perchance the time will come when we shall not be content to go back and forth upon a raft to some huge Homeric or Shakespearean Indiaman that lies upon the reef, but build a bark out of that wreck and others that are buried in the sands of this desolate island, and such new timber as may be required, in which to sail away to whole new worlds of light and life, where our friends are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)