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The photographs displayed above capture an accident that took place on the Turkey Creek bridge, about 17 miles east of Sharon Springs, Kansas, on 12 April 2002. During a run from Denver to Chicago, a loaded Union Pacific coal hopper, the 57th car in the 100-car train, experienced an overheated axle bearing (commonly knownas a hot box) and derailed: Example: [Collected via e-mail, July 2009] The crew stopped the train and got out to investigate; but by the time they traversed the approximately half-mile distance from the front of the train to the problem car, the wooden bridge on which the latter was stopped had already caught fire. The crew unhooked the rest of the train from the cars stopped on the bridge, leaving six 280,000-pound coal cars to tumble into the creek as the conflagration engulfed the bridge. No one was injured, but the total damages were estimated at over $2 million (approximately $250,000 to replace the lost coal cars, and $1.8 million to replace the destroyed bridge with a steel and concrete version). A February 2010 version of this piece entitled Why American Business Fails falsely attributed the bridge fire to rules prohibiting the movement of a train with a defective part:
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