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A 'train wreck' occurs when a train crashes. It most often occurs as a result of an accident, as when a wheel jumps off a track in a derailment, or miscommunication, as when a moving train meets another train on the same track, or when a boiler explosion occurs. Train wrecks were occasionally staged for public entertainment; crowds watched as two vacant trains were deliberately sent speeding toward each other.

Contents

Legal consequences

As metaphor

See also

References

External links

Legal consequences

Because train wrecks usually cause widespread property damage as well as injury or death, the intentional wrecking of a train in regular service is often treated as an extremely serious crime. For example, in the U.S. state of California, the penalty for intentionally causing a non-fatal train wreck is life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.^[1] For a fatal train wreck, the possible sentences are either life without the possibility of parole, or death.

As metaphor

The term is sometimes used metaphorically to describe a disaster that you can see coming but cannot stop, such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's assertion that a government shutdown would be a "train wreck."^[2] Educators warn that attaching a high school diploma to a test such as WASL that fails over half of students would lead to a "train wreck".
The term "train wreck" is also used metaphorically to describe something distasteful or disastrous, yet inevitable, or something distasteful yet compelling in some form ("You don't want to stare, but you just can't look away"). A person may be described in this way as being a "train wreck".
In software development, method chains of the style: getThis().getThat().getTheOther() are referred to as "train wrecks". The term is pejorative because their use breaks the Law of Demeter in addition to being stylistically cumbersome.

See also

★ List of rail accidents

★ Crash at Crush Texas

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References

1. Section 219
2. The State of Newt" Holman, Kwame

External links

★ A train wreck site, with photos

★ BBC News: World's worst rail disasters