Fact Check-Picture does not show Mercury train that killed a cow in 1938

A 1936 Mercury streamliner and a cow named Bessie did not meet in a New York railroad collision as suggested in photos and posts circulating on social media. Reuters found the origin of the story based in satire.Examples of the social media posts can be seen here and here .A user posted the original photograph of the Mercury engine on Tumblr here in 2015. These trains were indeed introduced in New York in the 1930s: multiple train websites and blogs feature a Mercury train engine like that in the Tumblr post ( here , here , here ) . Old footage of the locomotive can be seen here .Things got interesting when fellow Tumblr.com user, facts-i-just-made-up, wrote and published a story in a tumbler thread after another commentator expressed interest in bringing the discontinued trains back into use(here).Tumblr user facts-i-just made up, whose real name is Ari Bach, is an author( here) . Bach told Reuters in a series of messages via Tumblr: “I made it up.”The story featured in these posts describe the image of “three toothy skulls with phallic lobed craniums” and the “bladed jaws” of a train designed to usher in the Apocalypse. In a social media…
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