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:
“We teach boys to be such men as we are. We do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. We scarce educate their bodies. We do not train the eye and the hand. We exercise their understandings to the apprehension and comparison of some facts, to a skill in numbers, in words; we aim to make accountants, attorneys, engineers; but not to make able, earnest, great- hearted men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Crash on crash of the sea,
straining to wreck men, sea-boards, continents,
raging against the world, furious.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)