Theatre critics often refer to disasters on stage as ‘train wrecks,’ as if missed entrances and technical difficulties force plays ‘off the tracks’ established by scripts, blocking or lighting cue sequences. The term has been around long enough to grow cliché and to lose much of its original referential power, but the industrial nature of the metaphor is significant. Why, in the locomotive and its annihilation, does theatre find a useful image to describe its own failures?