99% Invisible - 538- Train Set: Track Three

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta.Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.Train Set: Track Three

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Happy National Train Day, everyone. For those who missed it, it was May 13th this year. How do I know that? Mainly because 99Pi's resident train, aficionado, Kurt Colestead keeps reminding all of us. Because I love trains, okay? It's also the one year anniversary of our first collection of stories entirely about trains.

We called it Trainset Track 1. And to the surprise of no one, I had more than one episode's worth of train story ideas, even before 99Pi fans started writing in with more ideas. So Track 1 gave way to Track 2, and now here we are for the final part of our train factory. Trainset Track 3. gave way to track 2 and now here we are for the final part of our train factory. Trainset Track 3. Greetings passengers, this is your conductor speaking. Our first out today is the fictional island of Sodor.

In the late 1980s, I first encountered Shining Time Station, which was this mesmerizing animated show that played during primetime on PBS. Reach for the speed, reach for the whistle, go where the rail may run. Reach for the words, reach for the story, follow the rainbow's side. The show debuted when I was four years old. At the time, my family lived in this little red brick farmhouse in upstate New York, and like a lot of households in the 80s, ours didn't have cable.

So when my brother and I got to watch TV, we watched a lot of households in the 80s, ours didn't have cable. So when my brother and I got to watch TV, we watched a lot of PBS. And in the era of less sophisticated animation, this shows Claymation was mesmerizing. I was enchanted by the charming characters, the backdrop of verdant rolling hills laced with locomotive tracks, and of course, its's breakaway star.

Thomas the Tank Engine. Thomas is a tank engine, who lives at a big station on the island of Sodor. He's a cheeky little engine with six small wheels, a short stumpy funnel, a short stumpy boiler, and a short stumpy dome. Its early seasons were narrated by none other than musician Sir Richard Starchy, better known to the world by his stage name. From a beetle ring a star is among the show's cast and talked with reporters in New York. I love kids I used to be one.

In this cartoon world, anthropomorphized trains chug chug chug along the picturesque countryside of this hilly bright and colorful island. The stop-motion animation makes the series feel rich and three-dimensional. As a kid, that's what I saw, an inocuous series about trains. But decades later, I read this essay by Gia Tolentino with a fun upbeat title. The repressive authoritarian soul of Thomas the Tank Engine Anfamous. So I know a lot of children's shows have many levels of meaning so that they can have

little jokes for the parents who might be watching. Is that what you're talking about at these subtle dark jokes? Yeah, that's part of it, but it also runs much deeper and goes all the way back to the origin of this fictional world. Shining Time Station and its characters grew out of a series of books that were published in the 1940s and were written by Anglican Minister Wilbert Audrey. He started out by telling train stories to his son Christopher who was ill and bed bound and then those started to become the basis for books.

Well, so far that's not so dark, just telling train stories to his sick son. Yeah, it sounds really nice, but Audrey had this very make the British Empire great again, by, and like many a grumpy old man, he lamented the trajectory of his era. In particular, he was a big fan of the 19th century, and he launched for the time in those pesky 1900 troubles like class consciousness and civil rights and post-colonialism started to pervade his precious society. So to get around all of that, he set his stories on this imaginary island off the coast of England, which was a magical place untouched by all of this post-war progressiveness. So how did that manifest? Like how did Audrey's mid-century worldview

make its way from his books all the way to that 1980s cartoon show that you saw? Well, to be clear, the entire train Utopia he envisioned was really a dystopia by almost any standard, a really disturbing place where the demands on these cute anthropomorphized train characters are often excessive and unreasonable, and the punishments for disobeying are strangely severe.

That sounds nightmare-ish. Can you give us an example? Yeah, there are tons of examples of how strange this is. In some episodes you see sentient vehicles being outright murdered, just crushed or ripped apart, dismembered effectively, and often for pretty minor offences. One of the most vivid and horrifying examples I found is in this episode called The Sad Story of Henry. And it starts off whimsically enough with an engine named Henry who gets a spiffy new paint job and he wants to shelter it from the rain as it dries off. Makes sense, right?

Once an engine attached to a train was afraid of a few drops of rain. It went into a tunnel and squeaked through its funnel and wouldn't come out again. So Henry comes to a stop in this railway tunnel and refuses to move. Eventually the big boss, Sir Topham Hat, comes along and has his hints been tried to push and pull Henry out of the tunnel. When that fails in the train still won't move, he declares that they will strip away the train tracks out from under Henry and break off the tunnel permanently. We shall take away your rails, he said, and leave you here for always and always and always.

They took up the old rails and built a wall in front of him so that, then we couldn't get out of the tunnel anymore. He was very sad because he thought no one would ever see his lovely green paint with red stripes again. Okay, wait. So, for the crime of taking shelter in a storm so his paint wouldn't run They basically in prison Henry for life inside of a tunnel. Yeah, they walled him alive Which is straight up out of a horror film, right? And he goes through this disturbing mix of facial expressions as the walls are stacking up around him brick by brick It's like he's frightened but also confused.

The whole thing is just awful. And then they go on to describe Henry's friends passing by on adjacent tracks. One of them shouts a greeting, but another callously remarks that Henry got what he deserved. Meanwhile, for his part, Henry can't even respond to them. Paul Henry had no steam to answer. His fire had go out. Which I'm not really sure how to interpret, like did he starve to death? That's really creepy if so. Or even worse, maybe trans can't die.

So he's just internal purgatory, forever with no fire to go anywhere. The last line in the scene is especially chilling. With Ringo Starr asking this leading question. But I think he deserved his punishment. Don't you? No, I don't. Actually, I don't. I'm gonna, I suppose there's a kind of a message here for kids about listening to their parents or something, but oh my god. Yeah, now the punishment seems so far out of proportion to the infraction, and I

can't believe how I missed this when I was a kid. Okay, well our train journey is off to a very positive and uplifting start. So let's get this train rolling to the next station before we get break into a tomb like poor Henry. 1. Draw the line on the back of the head. 2. Draw the line on the back of the head. 3. Draw the line on the back of the head. Attention passengers, I've just been alerted we need to make an unscheduled stop. Please remain seated at this time. Trains are nothing if not fast and massive, which means that slowing them down on short

notice is going to be incredibly difficult. Yeah, like they're not known for being nimble. No, there's a reason that we stop cars and not trains at the train crossing. Right. And so from the start, railways have worked on ways of warning operators far enough in advance if they do need to stop. One popular solution was flags set out on the sides of tracks to warn oncoming trains of dangers ahead. But flags only work when you can see them. And that puts trains in foggy places like the UK in danger. Right. So in the mid 1800s, an English mechanical engineer started to game out potential audible alerts that could be used on even the

foggy day and would be loud enough to be heard over an already noisy train. And the solution he came up with was explosives. I mean, trains explosives generally don't go well together, right? I mean, yeah, normally, but we're just talking about little explosions here, just powerful enough to make a sound. Okay, well, I guess it's fine then. In the UK, they call these detonators in the US, they're known as torpedoes, and oncoming

trains would just roll over a set of these, they detonate with a series of bangs, and that of course pierces the steady train noise and gets the attention of whoever is at the helm. And they sound basically like this. I mean, it's hard to convey when you're trying to, you know, mix the sound of a show so that doesn't destroy people's ears, but that does feel loud. That feels like that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, it's a pretty loud sound. I mean, it's a very loud crack.

It's like a firecracker. And of course, you know, if there's a construction site, those construction workers will have a set of these that they can run back up. Just in case somebody didn't get the memo that this track is closed down, and then train to carry sets of these two so that if the train breaks down, they can send somebody back up the rails to lay down explosives. And again, make sure that the next guy knows there's something in the way. Yeah, sort of like roadside flares that you put behind your car when you're broken down

on the side of the road. Yeah, exactly. And when people are working on the rail line, even if they don't expect another train to come, they still might lay down some detonators just in case, right? Because an under construction sign only tells you so much. And if there's some kind of human error in the system, it just serves as a nice backup way to make sure that they're going to get the message. And of course, these bangs help the rail workers too, because if there's an approaching train that they somehow don't hear because it's running quiet at night, meaning it's not using horns and signals out of respect for sleeping locals, these workers get some alert as well to get the heck out of the way.

Well, better safe and sorry, I suppose. In this case, it's safe meaning lots of little explosive devices stretched out along a train track. Absolutely. In advance of our next stop, please check the seat back in front of you for your complimentary copy of the Guinness Book of World Records. When you think of record-setting wonders of engineering, usually think of grandfights, like the world's tallest tower or the longest bridge. But cities and countries will still take pride in a world record designation at the

opposite end of the side spectrum, boasting about things like, the world's shortest railway. A number of towns, cities, city-states, and nations around the world brag about being home to the world's shortest railway. A number of towns, cities, city states, and nations around the world brag about being home to the world's shortest train. But which one has the most legitimate claim? It turns out the answer lies not so much in the actual inches and feet of train track, but in how key terms get defined. In this case, words like short and nation. The good old Guinness Book of World Records lists the shortest train line by track length, as the Fisherman's Walk Cliff Railway Fnicular in Bournemouth, England. This wee railway is just 128 feet long. Meanwhile, the Vatican Railway, serving Vatican City, would seem to be a very distant

second at 4,200 feet long, but they claim the title of the World Shortest National Railway, which makes sense because they are the world's smallest nation. And right here in California, there's Angels Flight, which operates on Bunker Hill and downtown Los Angeles. Whenever anyone asks me for something to do in LA, I send them to the Grand Central Market for lunch and then a ride on Angels Flight. It's nearly 300 feet long, just one city block, and the ride only takes about a minute, which they argue makes it the world's shortest train in terms of duration. But it doesn't have to be a competition. As far as I'm concerned, all trains are good trains, especially For Deluxe passengers traveling in private train cars today, our next stop will be the city and state of your choice. A few years back, I learned that Amtrak provides a service that most regular train users probably

don't know anything about. For an admittedly high fee, they will hook up your private train car onto their train line that they're already operating and tow you around the country. Your private train car, which everyone's happens to have. I mean, that sounds absolutely luxurious, but more like something out of the, you know, the 1800s than, you know, today. Yeah, the error of rich industrialists. And the equivalent today is probably a swank private plane. But back then, a private train car was just one of those things

that rich people could own. And there's this one car, for example, that was originally designed and built for Charles Schwab, who you might recognize as a famous financial executive. And it was a seriously posh ride befitting a man of his fame and fortune, with fancy bedrooms and bathrooms and more. When meal time came, you wouldn't even have to walk to the diner.

This car has a phone dining room, kitchen, and staff of two, including a chef. The chef and steward slept in humble accommodations off the kitchen, but guests of the Schwab family slept in these beautiful, full-down births with wood inlay. Oh, that is nice. That is like all mahogany inside. It's really, oh yeah. Really beautiful. It looks like a library. Right, so you wouldn't even necessarily know it was a train car at a glance, because it has all these posh finishes and this wonderful gas-laden system,

which by the way was upgraded a few years later in a pretty sophisticated way. The car was built with gas lamps and modernized the 1912 with new electric lighting powered by batteries under the floor. Generators connected to the axles recharged the batteries as the car rolled down the rails. And the thing that I actually like the most about this particular design is actually less flashy and not immediately visible. It's this chair that's set up against one wall and it looks normal in off-edic lands, but if you lift the seat, there's a toilet underneath, and if you pull down the seat back, you discover a full-down sink. I mean, that is super cool. It seems like a kind of public place to have your toilet and sink.

Yeah, hopefully you've got the whole car to yourself. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay, I'm still having a hard time picturing it. How did you get your fancy private train car, which I assume is just stored in some kind of train yard somewhere onto the back of the train that you're sort of hitching a ride with? Like, how does that work? Exactly. And so that's where Amtrak comes in, right?

Because for a fee, they will do all kinds of things for you. They will store your private train car. They will hook it up to an existing train that's running along one of their routes. And what I found really remarkable is that this is a thing that's still ongoing. I mean, it sounds like a historical, an aggritistic thing, but it's something you can still do today.

Like, Roman, if you want to go out today and buy a train car, you can do that and then pay Amtrak to store it and to tow you around the country. I kind of want to. I feel like this is a missed opportunity. I would feel like a, you know, a Gulded Age Baron, if I did this and that would feel pretty awesome. So tell me a little bit about the price.

Now I'm really curious, like what is this cost? Well, I saw one breakdown that it could cost over $10,000 for a 3,000 mile trip. And that's on top of the tens of thousands you'd paid for the car itself or the thousands you'd spend a rent one. So a private car probably isn't in the cards for me anytime soon, but it's fun to fantasize about.

Yeah, exactly. Well, this is so cool. fantasize about. Yeah, exactly. Well, this is so cool. I have a new thing to cover. I mean, that is having my own train car and traveling across country being pulled by a ham track. That is awesome. I do hope you'll swing by Minneapolis

and pick me up on your way. Attention passengers. For those wishing to disembark at the upcoming station, please check and make sure you board in the right car to begin with. We take it for granted that trains have to start and stop at stations, right? Well, unless you're the snowpiercer train. Well, yeah, and then you just go on forever until everybody dies, but the Brits were way ahead of the game on this one. Questioning whether

trains did have to stop at stations. Oh, okay. Yeah, and so back in the mid-18 of the game on this one, questioning whether trains did have to stop at stations. Oh, okay. Yeah, and so back in the mid-1800s, on some routes, they began using what are called slip coaches, which are cars that could be detached at speed and then coast to a stop at a given station. Okay, so you're going to have to walk me through this because I cannot picture it. Yeah, it's kind of tricky.

And basically, each slip coach car has this designated engineer. And that person would unhook the last car in the chain when they approach a target stop. And then they'd slowly bring in inferlambing and hit the brakes. Meanwhile, the rest of the train just keeps going. The guard had two controls, the slip lever and the brake.

To prepare for the slipping to take place, the guard first had to remove the safety pin. And like any good railway changing of the guard moment, it drew a crowd. At best, preparations were being made to receive the slip coach. Using his brake, the guard brought the coach to a smooth standard adjacent to the castle. I mean, even with an engineer on hand to control the slip car, it seems incredibly delicate to detach from a speeding train. Yeah, there are literally a lot of moving parts to this whole thing, right? And so as you can imagine, there were incidents. Some of these were pretty mild, like a coach getting slipped by accident in the middle of nowhere

and then people getting stuck in the middle of nowhere. But in some cases, slipped cars would actually ram into the back of the train that dropped them off. So for instance, if a car was dropped off, but the rest of the train had to make an emergency stop, the car would just crash into the train itself. So is that why they stopped using them like accidents and things going wrong? Yeah, in part, but there were other factors too. For one thing, trains were getting faster, making the process more dangerous, and slipping

coaches was labor intensive. Not only did each slipped car need its own engineer, but they also had to have people reattaching the cars when they were getting picked back up, slipping only worked in one direction. Plus, for the system to work, passengers had to be locked in their individual compartments. And if they got in the wrong car, well, they had a long time to think hard about their mistake while stuck in that car, waiting to be slipped at the wrong station. And you'll never guess what show spent an entire episode teaching kids that

very less. I'm guessing it's Thomas the Tank Engine. Right, of course it is. Hey attention, make sure you get into the right coach, the one that's stopping at your station. All aboard. I'll get you there on time with my brand new slip coaches. James was very pleased with himself. and new slip-clotters. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

James was very pleased with himself. But of course, something goes slightly wrong and things escalate. Prepare to un-couple the rear coach! Don't slow down too much in the station James, or the last coach will bump into the back of you. But James liked everyone to see his shiny red paint, so he slowed down. The last coach got stopped and bumped into the back of the other slip coaches.

Suddenly Sir Topham had understood. James had only pretended to know about slip coaches. Oh James, you better watch out, it might be life imprisonment for you. Oh yeah, and the show No Mistake goes unpunished. It just goes to show. There really are only two ways of doing things the wrong way or... The right way!

The right way! Ah! Ah! Let's go! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side! We're going to the West Side!

After the break, Kurt takes us on a tour of his new favorite museum. Guess which kind of museum it is. Our next stop is the De-Commission Subway Platform in downtown Brooklyn, New York. So I recently took a trip to New York City and met some of my NIA MPI colleagues who lived there for dinner and they told me about this transit museum which I absolutely had to see. So this is close to the 9% visible, and I am in the New York Transit Museum, and it tells the history of the subway construction,

subway cars, subway turnstiles, but possibly the most remarkable thing about it is that you basically enter through what looks like the entrance to a subway station. In fact, I have to imagine that sometimes people walk down those steps thinking they're going to get the F-Train only to find that there's a museum that looks like a whole subway station. And that's because it was actually a subway station. It was built in the 1930s and then converted into this museum in the 70s.

There are tracks and there are trains from all eras of the MTA. It's really quite something and you can walk through them, see the vintage advertisements. And those are real ads on real trains on real working subway tracks. And every winter they do what's called the Hulledaden Estalgetrain, where they frank and stand together a train from a hodgepodge of different cars from different eras, which you can ride on like a normal everyday subway. The place is awesome, so if you're a train nerd like me the next time you're in Brooklyn, be sure to check out the New York Transit Museum. It's well worth a stop. Our final stop today will be in Durham, North Carolina.

Nick named the Can Opener Bridge, there is a rail overpass in Durham, North Carolina that has become famous for scraping the tops off of trucks that dare pass beneath its tracks. The Norfolk Southern Gregson Street overpass was designed to allow safe passage for vehicles up to around 12 feet tall, which probably seemed like more than enough overhead when it was constructed in 1940. Over the years, though, trucks got taller, and more and more trucks hit the bridge. Despite the implementation of a series of bright signs, flashing lights, and other warnings that the driver's two tall vehicle

is about to be loudly decapitated. These collisions just kept happening. A local resident named Yurgen Hen was working in a nearby building when he began to notice the high frequency of incidents involving the bridge. It's pretty crazy sometimes. I sit there at my desk working peacefully and all of a sudden there's this massive crash out there, and almost fall out of my chair.

In 2008, he installed a video camera to document the collisions. Since then, he has captured and posted over 100 videos. These short films capture a delightful spectrum of mayhem, at least for those inclined towards infrastructural shot and Freud. Especially tall trucks are stopped entirely by the bridge and bounce back like a person hitting their head on a kitchen cabinet. Shorter vehicles slide under with just a painful screeching sound, and in some cases where the vehicle's height is just right or rather just wrong, the entire tops of the vehicles are peeled back like a sardine can, hence the name, the can open a bridge. After watching dozens and dozens of these incidents, one starts to wonder how such an

obvious problem can go unfixed for so long. The railroad, the city, and the state have all taken actions to reduce incidents involving the bridge over the years, and the state have all taken actions to reduce incidents involving the bridge over the years, but with limited success. The railroad installed a crash beam to keep trucks from hitting the bridge itself, and this protected the infrastructure and any freight and passengers that might be traveling overhead, but it didn't do a lot for the trucks down below. Understandably, the rail company's concern is not with the trucks on the road, but the trains on the rails.

For its part, the city of Durham installed a supplemental array of warning mechanisms, introducing three low clearance signs posted at each of three intersections in advance of the bridge. A pair of smaller roadside signs with a stated height limit of 8-1-1-1 inches were also put up, which shaved a few inches off the actual limit to introduce another safety buffer. At one point, the state of North Carolina also installed an over-height while flashing sign with blinking orange lights correctly in front of the bridge. Trucks however continued to crash into the beam, so the sign was removed in 2016 and

replaced with a higher tech over-height must turn variant coupled with an LED display, all linked with sensors to detect approaching oversized vehicles. The system was integrated with a new traffic light so that when the sensors were tripped, the stoplight would turn red. The idea was to give the truck drivers more time to notice the warning sign before plowing ahead. Despite this more sophisticated intervention, however, the bridge continued to claim in

main trucks. Since no amount of warnings seemed sufficient, other solutions were considered over the years, like raising the bridge, lowering the street, or redirecting truck traffic entirely. The railroad long argued that raising the bridge would require significant regrading on both sides, potentially costing millions of dollars. Lowering the street was also deemed impractical because a sewer main runs directly below it, installing a low clearance bar in advance of the bridge or otherwise redirecting over right traffic away from the area entirely would be challenging too. Delivery trucks need to be

able to drive right up to the bridge then turn in order to access a set of restaurants nearby. Rewrouting them just is infeasible. Finally, after years of delays and buckpassing in October of 2019, a work crew converged on the site to do the improbable and raise the bridge. What was once the 11 foot 8 bridge is now more or less a 12 foot 4 bridge, according to the new road flanking height limit signs. Though according to Euricant Hens measurements, the actual clearance is around 12 feet 8 inches. For the not-so-low cost of half a million dollars, the North Carolina Railroad Company

jacked up their tracks as much as they could without impacting nearby crossings on either side of the can opener. Of course, this height still won't accommodate every truck. The state allows vehicles up to 13 feet 6 inches. Sure enough, a metal chunk was clipped off the top of a truck in a video posted by him just a few weeks after this fix was enabled. For decades, the Cannot Opener Bridge has represented a perfect storm of financial limitations, physical challenges, and political bureaucracy all conspiring against a complete and permanent

design solution. Even now that the bridge has been raised, it may still prove to be a flawed piece of infrastructure and a persistent nuisance. All cities have things like this, ill-fitting byproducts of conflicting priorities that trip up citizens or scrape their vehicles, but few are as large, troublesome, or as widely shared on the internet as the can opener bridge. The story about the Cannot Opener Bridge first appeared in our book, The 99% Invisible City, by Kurt Colestet and me Roman Mars. You can get it in all kinds of languages all around the world, so talk to your local bookseller and get yourself copy. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Kurt Colestet, with Jacob Maldonado Medina and

Martinganzales, edited by Kelly Pran, original music by Swan Riau, mixed and sound design by Martín Gonzales. Chris Bruebe played our affable conductor, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. For us the team includes Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of his below- logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM Podcast family. Now, headquartered just one barbed stop north

in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too.

There's a new TikTok with Chris Barouba, you definitely should check out. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99PI.org. Thank you for riding with 99% invisible, stitcher and serious XM. All passengers must now disembark, as the train is about to be permanently locked away for a minor rules in fraction.