Train wreck

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Train wreck at Gare Montparnasse, Paris, France, 1895

For the American rock band, see Trainwreck (band).

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 mislain track, or miscommunication, as when a moving train meets another train on the same track, or when the locomotive explodes. Train wrecks were occasionally staged for public entertainment; crowds watched as two vacant trains were deliberately sent speeding toward each other.

1 Legal consequences
2 As metaphor
3 See also
4 External links
5 References

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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."^{[citation needed]} 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".^{[citation needed]}

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.