Staged Wrecks: The Railroad Crash Between Infrastructural Lesson and Amusement

Abstract

To explore infrastructures and publics from a historical perspective, in this paper I will focus on the entangled development of transport infrastructures in the nineteenth century on the one hand and the rise of amusement cultures on the other. More specifically, I will examine a phenomenon that became popular at US State Fairs at the end of the century, namely staged railroad crashes with two steam locomotives.