Though I am normally San Diego based, I was far enough north in the state a few Fridays ago to see some of the coverage of the LA stations. Yes, it was tragic, and obviously Conan’s joke was ill-timed. But so what? None of that is an excuse to censor a joke.

Two model train locomotives crashed head-on into each other and ended up off the tracks, on their sides, and on fire. That is indeed extremely similar to the results of the Metrolink wreck on September 12.

I’m definitely not a fan of censorship, but I find it hard to fault KNBC for choosing to pre-empt the bit on Monday, with the 10-day-old incident still relatively fresh in the minds of people in L.A.

I think if Conan does this bit again in two months after the Large Hadron Collider is fixed, and KNBC pre-empts it then, that’ll be the time to complain.

So their experiment was to see what happens if sufficiently large douchebags are collided, with a model train loop and the front engines showing the faces of Spencer Pratt and Chris Angel (this week; it was Spencer Pratt and someone else the first time the sketch was done). And the trains were turned on, allowed to run around the track in opposite directions, and crashed into each other, derail, and catch on fire.

As a side point the collision of douchebags was said to potentially threaten the entire douchebag continuum and so `cameras’ were pointed at Ryan Seacrest, Geraldo, Paris Hilton, et cetera to see if they survived this little train crash.

I doubt anyone would argue the pulling of the bit, at least in the Los Angeles area, on the 12th of September (the first time the bit was done; the sketch was taped before the crash). It’s more questionable ten days later but I was surprised Late Night was doing a bit about a crash of trains and cartoony loss of life when the crash was still quite so recent.