FACTORALY - E83 TRAINS

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Do you like trains? We do. They are to travel what podcasts are to entertainment. You can do lots of other things whilst enjoying getting from A to B. Or in the case of this episode, from Stockton to Beijing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello Bruce. Hello Simon. How are you on this merry day? I'm recovering nicely thank you very much. You may remember the last time I had a cold. Yes, an entire week ago that was, yeah, you're sounding much better. Thank you very much. Good job. I've been putting things up my nose. Haven't we all? And hello to everyone who is here listening. We hope you're well. For those who have stumbled across this for the first time, my name is Simon Wells. Yeah, I know. And that guy over there is called Bruce Fielding. And we're both professional voiceover artists. We say things for a living. Yes, we encourage people. We explain. We treat. We send people to sleep. We educate entertain we do all that sort of voicey lovely stuff the

voicey stuff voicey stuff so that's how we know each other we we met over voiceover but we stayed for the facts absolutely it turns out we're both nerds we're both pub quizzers sadly um and that's what we're doing here we We're here to divulge a load of useful-ish knowledge on a particular topic for you, our dear listeners. And especially at the moment if you're travelling somewhere. Yes, if you happen to be on a long journey. Yes, or even a short one. Either way.

And you need to have something to listen to to entertain you as you're chugging along. Yes, on a train. Indeed. What we normally do is we normally try and take a fairly simple subject and explain it for about half an hour or we take a really complicated subject and we shorten it down to half an hour train i think falls into the latter very much the latter yes yes this could very easily have made an entire series of episodes.

Well, in fact, there are TV series all about trains, aren't there? There are, yes. From Michael Portillo travelling around with his Victorian Bradshaw's timetable to all sorts. All sorts of strange people on trains. What's the train um in terms of the things that run along the tracks the train is the whole thing it's it's a series of carriages linked together and attached to some form of engine or locomotive that pulls or pushes it along so it's the whole thing um and it comes from we often come to the etymology point and say this is a really boring word it's always meant thing. And it comes from, we often come to the etymology point and say, this is a really boring word. It's always meant this. This is the opposite.

This hasn't always meant this. The word train comes from the 14th century. And it's originally French, traineur, from the Latin verb trahere, meaning to pull or to draw along. So you can sort of see the connection, you know. Yes. The locomotive pulls a whole load of carriages and that's a train. Yes.

But originally it was used in reference to the long flowing part of a dress or a skirt or a cloak. That was your train. Yes, like a wedding dress. Precisely that, yeah. You know, the length of the train on a wedding dress says how wealthy you are.

Oh, really? Or it used to. So it basically says, I can afford to spend a whole load of cash on a piece of fabric that nobody can ever use for anything else and it's going to get dirty and i don't care because i'm so rich that i can afford to spend all that money on 30 feet of fabric that doesn't matter that's purely a showpiece yes i mean the long the longer it was i mean royalty was allowed to have a certain length and nobody was allowed to go longer than royalty sure yes yes so that's where it comes from

it comes from fashion really um it then sort of became a series of things so uh a train of thoughts a train of events a train of camels sure exactly a caravan train yes um it then sort of became that that ended up being linked to trail and track so all those words that sort of and travel even anything that begins with a tra they're all connected um it then became to draw out and make your plants grow in a particularly desired way so training your plants and then that became to train someone to teach someone to educate someone oh to pull them along with you yeah to sort of draw them out into a particularly desired direction um by giving them education so all of those things are related and then obviously eventually it became the word train that we know now,

but not until several hundred years later when trains were invented. So, it's had quite a long history before it got to what it means now. Cool. So, who invented the train then? I don't know. Yes, you do. Every schoolboy knows who invented the train well then every schoolboy is wrong okay so what it wasn't stevenson then well it wasn't it wasn't and largely it wasn't

so it's another one of those inventions that has had lots of different people contributing to it and then one person comes along and takes all the credit think edison and the light bulb okay bell and the telephone yes um it was a whole series of different things so before before a steam engine was used to pull a train a steam engine was just used to operate machinery uh it was a static thing you know the james watt thing right so we all know j Watt invented the static steam engine. Did he? No, he didn't. Damn.

This is terrible. It is, isn't it? We keep on disillusioning people. We must stop doing this. So there was a fellow from Devon called Thomas Newcomen. Okay. Who pretty much definitely did invent the steam engine of some sort james watt came along and improved it uh so his steam engine had a big wheel on it which could

then be attached to a drive belt that could then be attached to lots of other things okay and that was used to pump water out of mines it was used to operate machinery in cotton mills and and all sorts of things um and his was the most famous and he got the patent for the idea of attaching this to something with wheels that could pull something along and he got the patent for the steam locomotive in 1784 so to all intents and purposes yes james watt invented the train let's go with that but it's not quite as simple as that no because the first train was the stockton to darlington train wasn't it yes and no oh god come on simon right the first commercially successful passenger train was the one you just said. Tell us a bit about that. Okay.

So September 1825. Right. And this was the first locomotive hauled railway in the world. Yes. From Stockton to Darlington. And it used George Stevenson's Locomotion One to pull it. Locomotion One. What a great name. Isn't it? Everybody's doing's Locomotion One to pull it. Locomotion One, what a great name. Isn't it?

Everybody's doing the Locomotion One. So I've heard, yes. But the oldest locomotive in existence, you can actually still see. Oh, can you? At the Science Museum. It's called Puffing Billy. Oh, Puffing Billy, yes, I've heard of that.

Yes. So you're saying that the Stockton to Darlington, Stevenson's Locomotion One, all a load of nonsense, right? No, no, totally valid. Oh, good. Totally the first recognisable, commercially successful passenger railway service

that took people from place A to place B was that. Oh, good. But it was preceded by, by again lots of other little different things there was a a fellow called richard trevithick from cornwall yes um and he was sort of one of the first people who came up with the idea of putting people on a wagon or something on the back of a locomotive to pull them along that was in 1804 so you know quite a long while before that and he built a an engine called um catch me who can oh nice isn't that a great name for a train how fast did it go a whopping 12 to 15 miles per hour i could catch it there you go hop on your bike um and he he created this thing with

with the help of some other engineers in 1808. And he built a circus. Please see our previous episode on circuses. He built a steam circus in Bloomsbury. And he created this circular track, 100 feet in diameter. And he plopped this locomotive, Catch Me Who Can, on this track. And it went round and round in circles. And it was a novelty thing.

People came along and they paid a shilling to get on the back of this thing and ride on this railway what an absolute novelty never been done before but it wasn't commercially successful he went bankrupt all sorts of stuff happened and then you know 15 20 years later we have the fully recognized Darlington railway service that that you stated so So again, it's been built upon things that were built upon things. Fair enough. So from there to the bullet train, there's obviously quite a lot of in-between stuff. Yeah, some things must have happened, mustn't they? So we went from steam trains to electric trains and diesel trains.

You know, all in the attempt of making them stronger to pull more load, making them faster to get people places quicker. Yes. Can we talk about India for a second? Oh, yes, let's. Because the Indian railways are quite interesting. I know nothing about the Indian railways. Do you not?

Teach on. Okay. Well, are you sitting comfortably? Reasonably so. Then I'll begin. The Indian Railways have the second largest rail network in the world. Do they really? Indian Railways is one of the world's largest commercial employers. 1.7 million employees.

Million. 1.7 million. Goodness. So 1.4 million regular employees and 300,000 casuals. Man. They have, of those people, they're classed by class 1 to class 4. They have 2,500 doctors, 55,000 paramedics. It was the Victorians that encouraged the Indians to build the railways.

Yeah. Encouraged. Look, let's say encouraged. You're not suggesting that during the days of British rule, we forced them to do so, are you? Nope. I wouldn't say that. Good. The mascot of the Indian Railways is an elephant, which symbolizes safety and reliability. That's what I think when I look at an elephant. Yes, railways aren't particularly, sometimes they aren't safe when you're building them.

I suppose not. There's one on the Ugandan railways that was built, moving away from the Indians one for a bit. The Ugandans wanted a railway built to Lake Victoria. Okay. And they needed a bridge over the Savo River. Okay. And they employed lots of people to build this bridge. Unfortunately, they built it very close to where two man-eating lions had their home.

Okay. And the man-eating lions um killed 135 people wow in the building of this bridge over the servo river eventually they were shot and you can see them uh their their skins are on display at the field museum of natural history in chicago of course they are wow why wouldn't they be yeah okay so slightly perilous to i thought we were sort of going to encounter you know landslides or explosions or falling machinery or things like that i was not expecting man-eating lines very good Very good. Now, I'm going to talk about songs and films later on. Okay.

But while we're at the beginning, there was a film, one of the earliest films, made by the Lumière brothers, which is called L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat. Très bien. Which is 1896, which featured a steam train pulling into the station okay and the rumor is that as the as the audience watched the train pulling into the station on screen yeah they ran screaming from from the uh from the theater thinking that it was actually a real train coming to run them

over wow can i imagine if they'd had um 3D glasses and surround sound at the time? Oh God, yes. I expect there are probably quite a lot of songs, movies, etc, etc, that involve trains. It's similar to the roads and cars and so on. There's always sort of a long train journey. Well, why don't we get into that now, and then we can come back to trains later? Okay, go on then. Fine. Because one of my favourite songs, because of the call and response way it works, is not normal. It's a very unusual call and response. It's called Midnight Plane to Houston.

And a midnight train to Georgia. No, that's different. No, that's what it was changed to. Oh, is it? I was just joking. No, so it different. No, that's what it was changed to. Oh, is it? I was just joking. So, no. So it was originally given to Whitney Houston's auntie. Right.

Who thought that, A, they didn't take planes, and B, having the word Houston in the title probably wasn't a good idea. Okay. So they changed it to Midnight Train. And since Whitney Houston's auntie was in Georgia, they changed it to Georgia. Brilliant. But actually, what the song's about is, I mean, those listeners of a certain age will remember both of these names.

It was actually about Lee Majors, who played the six million dollar man. Yes, sure. And his girlfriend at the time, a woman called Farrah Fawcett, who you may know from the first series of Charlie's Angels. Oh, yes, okay. Big blonde bouffant hair. That's the one. Yes. Anyway, so a friend of Lee Major's rang him up,

and Farrah Fawcett answered the phone, and he said, oh, hi, what are you up to? And she said, oh, I'm getting their midnight plane to Houston to go and visit my family. Right. And he thought, midnight plane to Houston to go and visit my family. And he thought, midnight plane to Houston? And he was a songwriter, so he wrote a song about it. And then changed the name to Midnight Train to Georgia.

Fantastic. On a midnight plane to Houston. I mean, it fits the pattern, but it doesn't sound quite right, does it? No. But the call and response of it is, if you're careful and listen to it, the call and response actually takes the story forward. It doesn't always repeat the same thing again. It sometimes says something completely different.

It's a really interesting song, structurally. Right, okay. I'll have to give it another lesson. But yes, there are lots and lots and lots of songs. In fact, why don't I put a list. We have show notes. Oh, yes, we do. So if you go to factorely.com.

Factorely.com? Mm-hmm. And you go to the blog, and you'll find a whole load of useless information, even more useless information than we give you in 30 minutes here. Would you even believe that's possible? It's crazy. Meanwhile, back on the train. How far have we got with trains?

We're sort of getting there, aren't we, towards today's trains? Yeah, we sort of got through to the Stephensons. I find the Stephensons confusing because there are two of them. So you mentioned George Stephenson built Locomotion 1 for the Darlington Railway. His son, Robert Stephenson, then built the famous Rocket. Right. Not Robert Louis Stevenson. No, totally different.

Okay. I thought that for a minute as well. And there was a competition held near Liverpool, I think it was, called the Rainhill Trials, in which various inventors and producers entered their steam locomotions to see who could win the you know the race to sort of go this particular distance all of one mile yeah and robert stevenson's rocket won it and therefore he got the contract to produce steam engines for great britain ireland the united states and a good half of Europe. Bloody hell. So the Stephensons became very, very prolific in the production of steam locomotives. I would imagine fairly rich as well.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Goodness me. And so, yeah, they sort of dominated steam train production for a good chunk of the 1800s. And then that leads me to one of of my favorite trains i love this uh this is one of my favorite london related facts um you think of your own personal favorite train you might think of hogwarts express you might think of the orient express any of these things my favorite train carries dead bodies oh this is the one out of london to the um yes go ahead i love i love this

story um so in the first half of the 1800s due to a lot of different factors london's population doubled all of a sudden there were you know a couple of million people living in london and when they passed away the little churches and graveyards just weren't enough to cope with the excess number of bodies. Right. So they started building larger cemeteries outside of town. And the biggest one they built was Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, which was open to the public in 1854. At the time, it was the largest cemetery in the world. It was just huge.

And how do you get all of london's deceased to woking you put on a train service uh brookwood cemetery was known as the london necropolis which is just a gorgeous sounding title and so they put on a train service called the necropolis line so there was a dedicated train that went from a separate station just around the corner from waterloo to a dedicated platform inside brookwood cemetery to carry coffins and the mourners with it they had different classes you had a first second and third class carriage for the family but you also had a first second and third class carriage for the deceased. Oh, right. So depending on how rich you were, you could put your coffin into the relevant class carriage. Clutch, yes.

Indeed. And this ran for quite a long time. So it opened in 1854. It only stopped during World War II when the station and a section of the line was irreparably damaged by bombs and they decided it wasn't really popular enough and would cost too much to to reopen um but yeah so sort of for nigh on 90 years you could uh you could get a train full of dead people going from london to surrey and you can still see the front of the old station it's at 121 westminster bridge road in london it's now

got offices above it but it quite clearly says london necropolis railway station on it how about that fascinating that's wonderful dedicated railways are always fun i mean we talked about the orient express um when we talk about films um there was one called the blue train okay what color was it um not always blue actually but mostly blue okay it was one of the wagon lee it was it was on the same from the same company that made the orient express okay right um and it was from calais down to the south of france nice and so when when you were british and you wanted to get down escape down to the south you know down to can and nice yeah yeah and saint-tropez yeah you get the blue train right and all the young youngsters in the 20s

when i bet you i can beat the train okay in my blower bentley so there's a famous race um between a blower bentley and the blue train from the south france from nice to uh well actually to london right um or to calais but the the the bentley was so much faster than the train the bentley actually got to london in the same amount of time as the train to get to Calais. Oh, really? Using the ferry. Yes, of course. To get across, obviously. No tunnel at the time. No. But, yeah, so chasing the blue train. The blue train

was kind of a thing. The restaurant, there's a couple of restaurants in the world named Blue Train. I think there's one in America. I think the Eiffel Tower, one of the Eiffel Tower restaurants is called the Blue Train. Okay. How interesting. It's very sort of lush and plush.

Yes. Trains have a good market in luxury travel, don't they? They're there for the common folk. They're there for the mass commute. But you do get some pretty luxurious trains. You get that. Is it in Canada or in Switzerland? You've got a train that

has a a glass roof both so is it both yes uh to make the most of the beautiful views um you sort of picture these these old trains like the orient express with their their dining cars and their bar cars and all these sorts of things it just. It just sounds... Yeah, absolutely. The velvet curtains and the sprung cushioned seats. It just sounds gorgeous. Bone china. Yeah, absolutely. Sounds gorgeous. I have done it once.

Oh, have you? Yes, which was very nice. Where did you go? I went to Liverpool. Okay. On the Pullman train. Right. And had the most luscious breakfast.

It was very... I mean, I was a guest of Aintree. Right. And basically they organised for us to go up on this dedicated train from King's Cross to Liverpool. And then we got onto a coach and we had like police outriders escorting us to the race race course which was quite nice it sounds it yeah you know the bullet train yes the one that goes from tokyo yeah oh in fact they go all over the shop now yeah and they hit like 200 miles an hour crikey that's a fast old train isn't it that's that's a very fast train are they the the magnetic ones so yeah so so some of the japanese trains use um maglev magnetic levitation

so they actually don't even use a track they float above the track yes rather than relying on wheels yeah so to minimize the friction so yeah hardly yeah, hardly any friction. They just go like, well, they go like bullets. Like a bullet, as the name suggests. So obviously you need very highly trained people to look after those things, especially when they get to stations. Yeah. One of the stations on the bullet train route is a Kishi station. And the official station master at Kishi was a cat called Tama.

Okay. master um at kishi uh was a a cat called tama okay and tamasan suddenly the cat population in in japan just rocketed and and there's a whole load of tamasan merch right and and various things um tamasan was paid in cat food um and is buried in a in a shrine and it's actually been made a god oh my goodness i mean i on the show notes i will put the story of tama yeah the official station master he i'm after he was dead he became like the it's like a super station master than an ultra station master he was absolutely crazy and presumably this was just a local cat that happened to spend an awful lot of time at this particular station and got adopted by the people who worked there. It was a station cat. Great. Like Skimble Shanks.

Oh, good. Good call. Thank you. Thank you very much. Very good. Trains nowadays have carriages with corridors so you can walk from place to place whereas originally they had like independent separate carriages yes that's right so you'd have like six to a carriage yes there was a guy called gerald tierwitt he's actually lord burners

um and for his time very forward thinking he was gay he was gay. He lived with a chap who was married to another girl. And they had children. But he decided that he only ever wanted to have a carriage to himself. Okay. So he would get into a carriage and he'd start sort of sniffing and coughing. And then he decided to take his temperature. Right. Anally.

Oh. Which cleared the carriages out quite quickly how old yeah so so lord burners would do this huh it's a very strange man it's amazing how eccentric you can be when you've got a lot of money isn't it isn't it? Isn't it? So trains generally are sort of made up of several carriages. Yes. And I saw a train once that was made up of 169 vehicles. What? Yeah. So there used to be a train called the Lee Creek Monster.

Right. In Australia. Okay. That hauled coal from Lee Creek Monster in Australia that hauled coal from Lee Creek to Port Augusta. Right. And it did this right up until 2016. And there was a place called Parachilna that had a hotel

where you could watch this coal train come past and you could have like a glass of wine or beer or something. And it took about four or five minutes for the whole train to go past. Wow. And at the hotel, they served kind of weird food. So you could have like emu and kangaroo and snake and stuff at the hotel. But it was, I mean, I bought a cap to remind me of this event. Yeah.

It was quite something to see this train just keep going. You looked into the distance and you couldn't see the end of the train. Yeah, yeah. It's absolutely huge. That's amazing, isn't it? I've seen something similar in South Dakota in America. And again, they're always freight trains, you know, but they are just so flipping long. You know, we had to wait at this level crossing for what seemed like an eternity.

And the train wasn't in a particular hurry. No. But it just, you know, it gave out that iconic, very American sounding train whistle. Oh, nice. And the sort of the slow trundling thud and the churn and screech of the wheels. And it just went on and on and on. It was carrying timber and all sorts of things wheels and it just went on and on and on it was carrying timber and all sorts of things it was uh yeah quite impressive so that brings us to the

elephant in the room obviously or the number one engine in the room right who we have to talk about because we couldn't do an episode on trains oh you know i'll bruise without talking about thomas oh mate i don't know whether to admire you slightly more or slightly less now have you Because we couldn't do an episode on trains. Oh, you know, Bruce... Without talking about Thomas. Oh, mate. I don't know whether to admire you slightly more or slightly less now. Have you ever heard of Thomas? Have I ever heard of Thomas? I was a product of the 1980s, Bruce. I grew up on Thomas.

Okay, well, Thomas was actually invented in 1945. Was he really? Didn't know that. So the first book, which was... It's Wilbert Veer Audrey. Right. He wrote them as bedtime stories for his son christopher okay um and he published the first book called the three railway engines right in 1945 and it was inspired by a wooden toy that he'd actually made by hand

for his son right um there's interesting things like know, it's got the letters NW on it. Yeah. Which now they, I think they make it mean Northwestern Railway. Right, okay. But actually it originally stood for Nowhere. Oh, really? Yeah. Thomas was number one because number one's easiest to paint on a train.

Sure. And a lot of the characters were based on people. So the Fat Controller was based on the Reverend Teddy Boston. Was he? And Gordon the Grumpy Train was named Christopher after a grumpy pal of Christopher's called Christopher. Oh, nice. Okay. And Sodor is just a name that Audrey made up.

Yeah. And there's an interesting thing. They did a study. And autistic children are able to connect very powerfully with Thomas, and the simplification expressions of Thomas and his friends, they help children with autism to understand displays of emotion.

Oh, brilliant. And so actually Mattel introduced Bruno, a brake car, which was the first autistic character in Thomas and Friends. Oh, really? Oh, fantastic. But it didn't hit the tvs until 84 yeah yeah in the uk anyway so that was that was my childhood i i remember you know long before i'd ever heard of the beatles i heard ringo star narrating thomas the tank engine yes it was just gorgeous and all the different colored engines you had percy was the little green one and james was the red one and gorgeous yeah loved it but they had different um different people doing the the voices in america okay yes so in this country um after ring of

star finished um i think at one point they had pierce brosnan doing that i did they a narration they had all sorts of strange interesting people doing narration on thomas do you know they they renamed the fat controller no um there's a more recent uh version of thomas the tank engine which is a little bit cgi it doesn't look right at all yeah and they've decided that uh the fat controller is not politically correct to single someone out on the basis of their size. So they've actually given him a name. His name is Sir Topham Hatt, which almost does the same thing. It's singling him out for the fact that he wears a top hat rather than because he's large. Is he still large, though?

He still looks exactly the same. Yeah. But he's known in the show as Sir Topham Hatt. But it's a very good way of selling merch. Yeah, sure. I mean, the first Thomas products were sold in 1957. Really? Which were cardboard kits for kids to put together.

Okay. And they have a day out. They have a US-based day out with Thomas in Wisconsin. Started in 1996. It's just a money-making machine. I didn't realise he was that popular in America. Massively popular in America. There's one variety of train which I'll touch on very briefly

because it's an equally big subject and might warrant its own episode at some point. um the underground i was gonna just gonna say that yeah well yeah yeah trains don't just go on the the surface they go under the surface as well and um the london underground system was opened in 1863 which is much longer ago than you'd really think. And it was originally powered by steam trains. They used the cut-and-cover method of digging a tunnel. So they dug a trench and then covered it over. So they were relatively a short distance below the earth, and the tunnels were quite large in order to fit these big steam trains.

The carriages were open-topped. There was no ventilation. So they were dark in tunnels. Yeah, absolutely. you know fit these these big steam trains the carriages were open topped there was no ventilation so the whole tunnel tunnels yeah absolutely have you ever been in a tunnel in a train with the with the lights off yes i have yeah it's very weird it's quite dark isn't it yeah so then do that and fill it with smoke and certain zero ventilation it's um it sounds a bit hazardous but that would have been from baker street to Waterloo? Yeah, apparently the Metropolitan line was the first one to open up. Right. Just to ease congestion. Again, with that population boom came an awful lot of people

toing and froing on the streets by horse and cart, and things were getting a bit congested, so they opened the Underground. And then after they'd sort of developed their technology a bit, the tunnels got deeper and narrower and more circular which is what gave rise to the the nickname the tube but uh yeah the idea that they actually used to be powered by steam trains seems so far-fetched doesn't it we're also used to them being electric but and clean yeah exactly and now that idea has obviously gone all over the world yes of course yeah we're not the only ones who have that did you know that

the london until certainly until recently but the london underground used to make more money from sales of the map than from tickets really yeah because they own the rights to the tube map yes of course yeah so they would get money in from people using the tube map oh that's great so so we've got the world's oldest are there any ests are there any train records we've got a few a few train records there are actually an awful lot of them because trains come in different classes and sizes and things so for each record you get you know the fastest passenger train fastest freight train fastest train over or under a particular size or weight or whatever i've got one for you before we start oh go on so the the longest railway platform bench go on so so the

longest railway platform bench is in scarborough. Right. At 456 feet long. Crikey, is it really? So you can seat 228 passengers. Man. At once on the bench. That's incredible. And of course, the longest train station name, and therefore train station name sign is the Welsh one.

Been there. I've been there as well. I can pronounce it, but I don't feel like doing so right now. You don't want to upset any Welsh listeners. I don't want to upset any Welsh folk now. So other than those, we've got the fastest train, which is, we sort of touched on earlier, you mentioned the Japanese bullet trains running on levitating magnets. This is a maglev train in china that goes to the pudong international

airport and in 2004 this train got up to 268 miles per hour crikey which is reasonably fast can you imagine if there's something on the track oh Oh, you just... Well, it's maglev. I suppose it would just hover over it. Yes, yes. Don't know exactly how it works, but... Wow. Yeah. You mentioned your...

Was it 160-odd carriages on your freight train? Yes. The world's longest passenger train contains 100 carriages. That's a long train. Isn't it? And that was operated by the the ration railway in switzerland in 2022 that opened up going up to the swiss alps um i tried to find the world world's most expensive train fare with the likes of orient express and yes and so on i couldn't find a definitive answer

but i found um i found a website that talked about the golden eagle trans-siberian express and the venice orient express and all these sorts of things and it simply casually said their tickets range from seventeen and a half thousand dollars to twenty five thousand dollars but you do get your own butler oh do you oh well that makes up for it that makes it worthwhile um yes those are my records wow well i think uh all of my train related facts have pulled up at the station yes mine fit the buffers um thankfully we've had no cancellations or delays um we hope you've enjoyed this show if you have done so please go ahead and give us a like and a lovely shiny five star review thank you very much we

appreciated that we do obviously you just did that right you did you just did it as i was talking yeah your fingers were already poised or you can you can tell your friends yes um about factorily yeah absolutely and of course if you subscribe to Factorily on your podcast player every Thursday, which is when they come out, you will be getting a notification that you have a new Factorily to listen to. Something to look forward to, isn't it? I think so.

Well, thank you very much for coming along and listening to us talk about trains today. Please come again next time for another fun-filled episode of Factorily. Bye for now. Beep, beep.