With friends like these . . .

Isn't it amazing how a remarkable thing can be named just slightly before it bites you on the ass. We see that all the time in politics or in the fickle entertainment business too, where a celeb is on all the A list parties, then he/she does a dork-o-rama, that in hindsight you just knew was gonna happen, and then they are pariahs. Trouble is they got named something like "Mr.Clean" or "Mother Theresa's little sister" then they got caught with their hand down someones pants or worse.

Anyway, this is the case with America's first train wreck, the demise of the "Best Friend of Charleston" in (what else) a catastrophic boiler explosion. Seems these little devils were a tad tough to figure out. Safe operating range was not in the engineers' vocabulary.

Built in New York by the West Point Foundry it went into service in Charleston, South Carolina in 1830. It operated on a small 6 mile service and was immensely popular, being touted as providing lighting fast service at the unheard of speed of over 15 MPH.

The aforementioned boiler explosion was not really the fault of the engine. In actual fact an annoyed fireman either disabled or broke of the safety valve because of its constant hissing and whistling. The fireman died and most of the crew were hurt. To be fair, little was known about the science involved and boilers of that era were terribly lightly built. Combined with inexperienced crews its amazing we got out of that century.

The train was rebuilt and dubbed the Phoenix whereupon in ran for many years. Shortly after the explosion many laws were enacted making it illegal to circumvent safety valves on large boilers. Another first for American industry was born: closing the barn door laws after people kill themselves.

For a while they placed a car with cotton bales between the engine and the passengers. Seems the public needed some time to adjust.