Well There‘s Your Problem - BONUS Episode 21 UNLOCKED: Pennsylvania Station

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

roz was in Rome for the week and it was hard to record and edit so we're making this THE FREE ONE for this week Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Hello and welcome to a bonus episode. It's the bonus episode. I'm not doing the trash huge noise. You've got to resist it. It's not the free one. Surely you know what episode, what podcast this is a bonus episode of. If you have access to the bonus episode. You are much more confident than I am.

I might put this one on the free feed as a treat. Give us money anyway. Yeah, that's it. This is the kind of content that you could be having a more relaxed and more loose. It has the sound of us pissing on it also. Kind of. Well, there's your problem. That was a glass of meat being filled up.

It does have a very Eurea color. Very nice advertising. Yeah, so what do you see on the screen in front of you? Sure. So we got Gareth Dennis back on. Hi, Gareth. Yeah. Thanks for coming.

Thanks for coming. Hi, everyone. Hello, patron listeners. Hello. This episode is called the Penn Station rant. Perfect. Yes. Me and Liam can just log off and the train knowing about caucus of this episode.

No, we need you. We need you. We need you. It's weird. It's weird to react to you guys ranting. Yes. Oh, Justin, before you start, I have I have treats. This is a bonus episode, which means that as a guest, I have to bring treats.

That's not really a thing I've just made up right now. But Liam, I have treats for you. Yes, go on. Liam, in a recent episode, I believe you made sexual noises about the sound of my voice, which made me blush very, very vigorously. Good. And then I thought, well, I need to bring a treat then. If ever I get to appear on a Utrecht episode, I need to bring a treat.

And it just so happens to be that I used to recite Burns poetry when I was a kid. And there has to be a Burns poem that is very, let's say, very relevant. So if you give me 45 seconds, this is a treat for you. This is Liam Anderson, which is a modification of John Anderson by Burns. Liam Anderson, my Joe, Liam. When we were first acquaint, your locks were like the raven. Your bonny brow was Brent. But now your brow is belt, Liam.

Your locks are like the snow. But blessings on your frosty paw, Liam Anderson, my Joe. Liam Anderson, my Joe, Liam. We'd clam the hell together. And money a canty day, Liam. We've had we and another. Now we mourn, taught her down, Liam, and hand in hand we'll go and sleep together at the foot.

Liam Anderson, my Joe. Fantastic. Very, very. It's the pace of the podcast has slowed to a trun to believe that. Liam's sort of like militantly aggressive thing, having to confront being genuinely touched emotionally is quite something. I'm honored. This is beautiful. Yeah. It's funny because is in podcasting, especially this podcast tradition, I have my dinner in front of me.

And I was just going to come off of you to slurping noises. But I thought, no, no, no, no, no. Gareth, thank you so much. You're a dear friend. That was beautiful. Alice, I'll kill you. That's reasonable. I'd like to see you trialed, man. All right. Now that now that we got two of the two thirds of the podcast threatening each other.

That's right. Here we go. We're going to start with history. Welcome. Welcome to New York City. Oh, truly walk in here. The city that is walking here. Yes. OK, so so for railroads to get to New York City, there was something called the Hudson River problem. Problem being the Hudson River, right?

It's named for how it is. Yes. So so so in order to get over the Hudson River, you had to build a bridge or a tunnel, which no one thought was feasible, right? The other option is you could take a ferry. So all these railroads, they built terminals in Jersey City in Weehawken in Hoboken, right? So we got some of them here. So this is the Weehawken terminal. This is from the West Shore Railroad. We got the Pennsylvania Railroad exchange place terminal up here.

I like the Pennsylvania one. Like it's very contiguous. You know, you don't even have to go outside the building to walk to your ferry. Oh, yeah. This was the largest train shed in the world briefly, I believe. None of it's left, of course. Of course. You had communipot terminal down here.

This is the central railroad in New Jersey. That one's still there, but it's unused. You had the Hoboken terminal. That's the Delaware Lackawanna in Western. That one is still there. It is still used and it also has ferry slips. You can just sort of walk to the ferry even now. There's like one ferry that comes each hour.

It's somewhat less cool, but still kind of cool. Yeah. There's no ferries that meet the trains anymore. And then you had Pavonia down here, Pavonia terminal. This was the Erie Railroad. And that was another, you know, the ferry comes to meet the train. That's gone. There's a couple others.

The Susquehanna Railroad terminal was way up here. You had a weird terminal down here, the Lehigh Valley had, which I think was sabotaged by Germans in World War I. Surely not. Operation Pastorious. I... Was that World War II? I'm going to have to check which one of those...

Which one of the two doomed German attempts to sabotage New York? This was. Well, this one worked and the Lehigh Valley Railroad got sued by the Russian provisional government. Ah, okay. Operation Pastorious was the second World War I. Yeah. That was like the weird, not Bolshevik government.

Like Kerensky, yeah. Yeah. The Long Island Railroad came from the other side and from Long Island, you know, they got stuck either in Queens or I believe Flatbush terminal, which is now Atlantic terminal they had built by now. You know, and you had to transfer to the ferry. It was annoying.

Freight customers in Manhattan had easy access to river shipping, but not so much by rail, except by the New York Central, right? Which had Grand Central terminal, of course, direct access to Manhattan. And they had their west side line, which served a bunch of industrial customers that would otherwise ship by one of these numerous railroads who got almost there, but not quite, right? But it saves you like going the long way around because you can get it directly to where it's going.

And this is something the New York Central guards very jealously, right? Oh, yeah. And there's a sort of unofficial, you know, truce here that they had for a long time. So this is Grand Central Station. All these guys staring at each other across the hugs and spitting into the water at each other. Yes.

There are three iterations of Grand Central Terminal. There was Grand Central Depot, which is this one right here. This is Grand Central Station. And Grand Central Terminal, which is the current building. That was later than this, right? But yeah, they had a, they were all on the same spot. But the location was, as the name implies, Central, right? You know, the railroad had this advantage with shippers and commuters, right?

And that meant, you know, you could ship a whole bunch of places without transloading or taking, you know, getting from one train to another, right? And this station was approached by way of a long tunnel under Park Avenue. Initially, they put steam locomotives in there, which is really dumb because in 1902, that that tunnel was so full of smoke that a commuter train missed a signal and whacked into another commuter train, killed like 12 people. Sort of the boring company of its day.

Yes. So they installed third rail electrification in 1904, and they began plans to build the newer, much bigger Grand Central Terminal that exists today, right? But yeah, the informal truce here was like, number one, Manhattan is the New York Centralist territory. And this was, A, a sort of informal truce, but also B, it was so damn hard for anyone else to get into Manhattan, right?

Because everyone else is... It was the rise of way just to get, like, to lay track in Manhattan. Well, everyone else is coming from the West. The New York Central is coming from the North, right? And the North is easy. The West, you got to deal with the Hudson River, right? So around 1900, it was, you know, no one could figure out how to do this, right? Or I guess 1890.

1890 is when the first serious scheme to get other railroads into Manhattan is proposed by a guy named Gustav Lindenthal. Oh, boy. Lindenthal? I'm bad. Enemy of the show. Yes. No, I like Gustav Lindenthal.

I made all the best bridges. Enemy of the show. Yes. So Gustav Lindenthal's idea is to build a bridge which was twice all the largest suspension bridge ever conceived. That was my reaction when I just flipped the slide to get the full high-res. Oh, there we are. Yeah.

There it is. So the idea is... The most mighty engineering feat of bridge building known to the world. Yes. They would build a 14-track bridge over the Hudson River. Yeah. Enemy of the suspension bridge. I like this idea a lot, actually.

That would connect to a Manhattan terminal that would be near the current location of what's now the Fashion Institute of Technology. Oh, yeah. Actually, my grandmother went there for library science for some reason. Wow. I love it. It's a railway's flow. I'm loving the idea of 14 tracks full of commuter trains all going in the same direction,

bringing a bow wave on the suspension bridge as it goes forward. So 10 tracks would be for commuter trains. Commuter trains, long-distance trains. Four tracks would be for rapid transit. It's unclear to me exactly how the rapid transit trains would make it all the way up to this bridge because it was going to be 135 feet over the surface of the river. Yeah. Big crane.

Yeah. Big jet tug. An elevator like the Waterloo and City Line had. They just have a big corkscrew incline at sign. Yes. Oh, my God. So this would be... With four tracks, you'd need to do like a double helix.

It would look awesome. I think we'll scratch this thing out. Like one of the roller coaster launch things. Yeah. Yeah. Like a flume. Yeah. Your rapid transit flume.

If you live or die, that's between you and God. So this bridge would be a mile long with a 2,850 foot center span. Jesus. Again, 135 feet over the river. So you can see down here, this is the proposed bridge and this is the Brooklyn Bridge. Oh, dear. Yeah. No, that's scale.

And then you'd stick this high level union station at one end of the bridge in Manhattan. Right. Which you build on top of this kind of pyramid. Yeah. You know the Best World Shops Pro. Best World Pro Shops. Best World Pro Shops. Best World Pro Shops.

I'm tired, man. I mean, how many blocks would you be bulldozing on the other side? Crikey. I mean, yeah. Did the Pharaoh Khufu wonder about blocks when he made his pyramid? Of course not. And neither should we. I found a rare map on the next slide.

Oh, yes. I'm going to keep talking here. So you need a mile of two and a half percent grade on the New Jersey side, right? Oh. So Samuel Ray and George Brook Roberts. Samuel Ray was, I think, chief engineer and George Brook Roberts was the president of Pennsylvania Railroad. I'm just imagining you're on your little rapid transit thing at the top of this mile

long, two and a half percent grade. Don't look down. And the brakes go out and you're just like, you start to roll forward at like one mile an hour and you're like, don't like this. Don't like where this is going. In a way, we go. Once or not. So Pennsylvania Railroad was a major investor in this project from the start in 1890.

But the idea of the project was it's going to be shared among the several railroads which had New Jersey terminals, right? Gustav Lindenthal, of course, designed the bridge and he was a self-educated civil engineer. Hell, yeah. I love those words together. He was notable for several bridges he hadn't built yet. Ask the best kind of self-taught engineer. Self-taught.

I haven't actually done any engineering. The best kind. He went on to design the Queensborough Bridge and Hell Gate Bridge. I immediately love this guy. Okay. No, he has all the best bridges. Oh, man. And he was beloved by railroads and municipalities alike for being able to build these bridges

a lot cheaper than anyone else. What corners did he cut? So one of the things he did was point out that a train is a distributed load and not a point load. Sure. It's a lovely thing. Yeah. Okay. So that meant you could use less material because you were considering a train as a train

rather than what other engineers were doing, which is considering a spherical and frictionless train, right? He's rolling my perfect train orb across the bridge. Russian warship, yes. I appreciate the sort of like true to life filthy color of all of the water in this map. Oh, my God, yeah. It looks great. So the idea here is, right, this is again, it's a 10 track, 10 tracks for steam railroads,

four tracks for rapid transit. Based on this map, that rapid transit would be what is now the seven train, right? You see the 42nd Street tunnel up here and that would have gone around and then gone up a big ramp into the Union Station and presumably doubled back somehow and gone over the bridge, right? Well, sometimes. You said a 2.5% grade for those who are curious as to what that actually is. That's a one in 40.

That's so steep. That's horribly steep. So it's unclear how fully fleshed out the terminal design was. I'd love to see pictures if someone has them, but the bridge was actually surprisingly close to getting done, right? They actually broke ground on this thing in 1895. What? Yes.

It must have been up to a mega bridge. That's actually what this cornerstone is right here. The North River Bridge, ground broken June 1895. First foundation masonry laid June 18th, 1895. I mean, for sure the ground would have been broken. This thing would have sunk 20 meters into the ground once it was finished. Remember how the Nazis had those giant concrete test cylinders? Yeah, they had the Schwerer Belastungskörper.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Sure. That word. That's just a normal thing to be able to require. Sorry. The heavy test body, which same, which they put in Berlin, it was a big concrete cylinder

to like, and the idea was because Berlin's built on a swamp. The idea is we build this, we measure how far it sinks, but it sinks more than this. You can't build the big fancy fucking folks that you want to build. And it did. And they still wanted to fucking build the thing. And because it's like too large and too inconvenient, it's just wedged into the swamp that like, neither the British nor the Americans nor the Soviets could blow it up with anything. So same as the flag to him really.

So yeah, it's just still there. Just there still. Yeah. Ah, Germanium. Good stuff. Yes. So Samuel Reeve went on vacation to London in 1892. Oh, awful mistake.

The new Pennsylvania railroad president, Alexander Cassit arranged for him to make it a working vacation. And great. Your boss fucking telegrams you to be like, you have to do some work while you're there. Yes. Stop. Go study the go study the transportation system in London. Now, he had previously been there about five years earlier, and he saw the Metropolitan

Railway and he was like, this is the worst thing I've seen in my life. I'm going down here. I'm getting choked out by steam. Well, it's a round. It isn't even round. This is bullshit. Yes. But what he saw at this visit was much different.

He went to go see the new city in South London Railway, which had board deep under the Thames and used its entirely electric traction, right? And Rhee was fascinated by this. He thought a similar solution would be great for the Pennsylvania railroad. That is, you'd have some small electric trains that would link to waterfront terminals to sort of distribution system in Manhattan, right? That actually sounds sensible. But he still favored for trains that needed to get into Manhattan.

He was still like, we're going to have to build a bridge. The bridge is the way forward. We're going to build Charing Cross Terminal, but bigger. That's the idea of this, right? So when he got back, the Army Corps of the Board of Army Engineers, which I believe is a predecessor to the Army Corps of Engineers, they kind of put the kibosh on the project, right? Pathetic.

Okay. Okay. We actually need it to be 150 feet tall, not 135. Oh, there we go. What if you made it even sillier? Yes. The panic of 1893 happened, right? Costs started escalating.

The railroads weren't making as much money. A lot of railroads started to get a little uneasy about the project, right? They still broke ground, but then the Pennsylvania railroad kind of dropped out of the project, and everyone else did as well, right? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. George Brooke Roberts pulled out of the project, and Pennsylvania railroad wasn't financially

backing it anymore. So it was completely unfeasible financially. Shame. North River Bridge. Shame. Yeah, that's a bummer. New York City could have been like a good 20% weirder. Yes.

I've built New York as a whole thing. This would be the weirdest passenger train station ever built by a long shot. Get in the fucking train ziggurat. Yes. You have to ascend to the heavens to get your train. I guarantee you. You have to be a privileged guard to a fist fight just by building this. You build this in the 1890s.

By the 1950s, a new American civic religion has started that involves people throwing sacrificial victims off the roof of this. I mean, the two towers, the two towers at their end of it would have been like presumably heavy enough that they would have dented the crust. So they would have ended up creating new like kind of large lakes underneath each one, which would be nice. They would have been the tallest structures in New York City when they were finished. Incredible.

And also solid brick. You see in the previous slide, this is the tower compared to the Woolworth building. Nice. Yeah. That's beautiful. We should have done this. I'm going back in time to like threaten the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad with a Glock that I brought from home.

It's funny how you think you wouldn't just unload a shotgun directly in your face. I would be killed instantly as an anarchist. I call this gun the Union Buster. It's for the protection of passengers, of course. So George Brooke Roberts was killed by the Pennsylvania Railroad presidency in 1897 as most Pennsylvania Railroad presidents were. And it's kind of like me, but like Glock. Yeah.

Why don't you like Six Hours? What have you got against Six Hours? I mean, nothing. I like a Six Hours fine. I just think the Glock is a funnier name to say. Oh, okay. Yeah. That's absolutely true.

That holds up. Yeah. His successor, Frank Thompson, was killed by the office of the Pennsylvania Railroad presidency in 1899. Jesus Christ. It ages you faster than the U.S. presidency. You know that picture of Barack Obama before and after, but all the time. Pennsylvania Railroad presidency was also arguably more powerful than the U.S. presidency at this

time. So Alexander Cassit. I said Alexander Cassit was president earlier. I was wrong. He was a vice president, but he assumed the presidency. He gained the mandate of heaven. Yes. He gained the mandate of heaven.

Sure. That same year. He achieved certain relics of the Pennsylvania Railroad that you're not allowed to say. Yeah. God Emperor of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I don't know if they finished the North River Bridge. Yeah. Oh my God.

No. Okay. Someone needs to write a whole fucking novel length thing about this where the PRR becomes the new civic religion of the United States. Yeah. Read that. Yeah. Read it.

So Cass' thing was modernization and improvements, right? And he planned and constructed a lot of them, right? So down here is the Rockville Bridge. That's just upriver of Harrisburg on the Susquehanna. It was the largest bridge in the world when it was built. By what? What? The North.

The North. Or I am not as in best. It's very long. It's the best. It's four tracks. Wow. Yeah. It's not three tracks.

Mm. Another one was Washington Union Station up here. This was a sort of this was a assassinate a president in that. No. This was to replace the station where McKinley was assassinated. Nice. Nice. Yeah.

Assassinated the world's fate. I think of Garfield. Oh, Garfield. Garfield was assassinated. I don't want to say the B and P station, right? Ah. So this was. The BP station.

Yeah. The commemorative coin dispute. The old station was right on the National Mall and it had tracks going down the road in the National Mall, which is not very good. The main station was a replacement for it, which was much more dignified. Right. I think it's pretty cool. Our tracks going down the National Mall.

Oh, yeah. I think it would have. I think it would have been funny if they kept it as right. It was right where the Aaron Space Museum is now. So another thing you supervise the quad tracking of the Northeast corridor, double tracking the main line at the Pittsburgh, but he still he faced a conundrum. How did we get the railroad into Manhattan, right? Because he wanted to do it.

He was like, this is what we have to do, right? And the Pennsylvania Railroad, of course, controlled two routes in from the West by way of exchange place and a ferry and from the East by way of the Long Island Railroad, which was a Pennsylvania Railroad subsidiary, right? If they could have a shared terminal in the middle, that would be ideal. But how do you get there? Right. Massive.

Ziggurat bridge station. He considered reviving the bridge project. And in fact, the options that really presented themselves were you either redo the Union Station bridge, you build a bridge from Staten Island, they might build their own bridge by themselves, or maybe they could build a tunnel, but no one could figure out how to do that, right? How would steam trains get to the station through a tunnel, right? And breathe this in. Have a series of like submarine airlocks to vent steam up.

Simply do not breathe it in. So anyway, Cassett took his annual European vacation in 1901 and Samuel Rhee returned the favor. He telegraphed them and said, hey, do some work now. Stop. Yeah, you need to. Are you on holiday? Stop. Are you on holiday?

How's this feel, asshole? Hey, we actually needed to come in in your day off. Stop. And he said, go take a look at the Gare d'Orsay in Paris, right, which is the recently completed by the Kamen Faire de Paris. Chemin de Faire de Paris à Orleans. OK, thank you, Alice. No worries.

Chemin de Faire means iron way. Yeah, I see. So this station was new. It was light. It was open and airy. No steam locomotive somehow, right? Which means it was also very clean, right? And there were electric locomotives operating off a third rail that propelled trains through

a two mile tunnel into the station. And Cassett saw this and he talked to some of the engineers behind it and he was convinced we're going to build a tunnel. Oh, but that. Yeah, we're going to do a tunnel and we're going to do electricity. Yes. The plans were drawn up for what was to become the New York improvements. That sounds nefarious.

Yeah, so euphemism was something shifty. So, all right, the New York improvements were, you know, it was not just the station. It was a whole system of railroads, right? So if you look at the original Pennsylvania Railroad, or rather, it wasn't the Pennsylvania Railroad to start out with. This was the United Companies in New Jersey main line, later acquired by the Pennsylvania Railroad. They went sort of up through Newark, right?

And then it branched off, went down to Jersey City, exchange places down here, right? Now, the New York improvements included the Pennsylvania Tunnel and Terminal Railroad. That was the North River tunnels. And it continued into what's called Sunny Side Yard over here, right? I see. It does bypasses. Yeah. And then this connects to the New York Connecting Railroad, and that goes to the New Haven Railroad

to Boston, right? In addition, the New York Connecting Railroad goes south to a freight terminal in East New York. I believe this is now the location of Broadway Junction, or no, it's actually closer to up here, right? Where the Long Island Railroad intersects with it there. But they, again, also had a branch up here, right? And then you have this whole complex down here.

This is for freight, right? So you had a freight branch. It went down to Greenville Terminal here. There was a car float across the river. They were considering a tunnel for that a while as well. That didn't happen. It may happen at some point in the future, though. And then you had this Bay Ridge branch, right?

That served all the industries in Brooklyn. And then you had, I believe there was also the South Brooklyn Railway that went all the way down to Manhattan Beach. So there's a big freight component to this, as well as the passenger component. I mean, a lot of this was... Massive. This is a huge amount of infrastructure. Oh, yeah.

All of it was big. Everything here was big, except the car float. That was kind of dinky. Because they were like uncertain about it because they were like, oh, probably there was a tunnel. Yeah. At some point. So, yeah.

And a lot of this, this was as much about serving Manhattan as it was improving freight service in Brooklyn, where there were still a shitload of factories, and also increasing the amount of freight traffic that go on the Long Island Railroad, which at this point was only doing commuter service, which was looking pretty bad financially at some point in the future. Right? There was also, there was a crank plan to put a huge seaport at Montauk, which this may have served, but... How?

That would have been a fucking height, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Just at incidentally make the East River one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world? Oh, yeah. No, it would have been, that would have been shit from Europe, mostly. Yeah. You know, you'd come in, you'd go into Montauk, and you know, you'd go into this peaceful farming community, which is now the world's second biggest city in the space of three years.

So this is, wait, so this was planned, this has been planned out in 1901? Yes. Okay. Actually, yeah, a little bit earlier than 1901, but yeah. Okay. All right. So this is the plan, and the difficult part was going to be the North River tunnels here and the East River tunnels over here.

The North River tunnels were supposed to be the difficult part, and why are they called the North River tunnels? Because it's to the west of Manhattan, therefore, to be perverse. In order to throw the New York Central off the track. You can't find us. When the Swedes and the Dutch settled New York and Philadelphia, not respectively, and mixed those around, the Swedes were in Philadelphia, which was New Christianity back then, and then Manhattan was New Amsterdam.

They referred to the Delaware and the Hudson as the South and North Rivers, respectively. What? Yeah. None of these guys are very good at it. Should we like to do things a bit crazy? None of these guys are that great at navigation, it seems. Holding map at 90-degree angle, the fuck is this shit? So all right.

So it's time to do a land grab, right? Going my big, like, minutes into episode before land grab counter. So Alexander Cassit wanted the station to be in a very prestigious Park Avenue address, right? And the engineers told him, no, you can't do that. It's going to be too steep of a grade. And Alexander Cassit said to himself, when people are drunk at 2 a.m. and need to piss on a building.

Not that I've ever done this. He said, wouldn't they rather piss on Park Avenue than anywhere else? I give to you Park Avenue and he took his dog out and pissed all over the floor. It's just as good to him. Why don't I use my massive, enormous hand that I have? Yes. Depicted here. Depicted here.

The huge hand. I would pay you good money for that hand. It would be very, very useful. If I had a hand like Godzilla, yeah, I'd be unstoppable. Yeah, we'd have to like lose your energy if you spent dragging that hand around. I wouldn't drag it. I'd have some sort of, I don't know, splint not split like a truck bed.

Yeah, the truck goes around next to you. Yeah. So instead of putting the station on Park Avenue, they would have to sleep with the word I was thinking of. They would have to put it in Manhattan's seedy, unfashionable, impoverished, crime ridden in generally unpleasant, tenderloin neighborhood. Yeah. There's never anything tender about a neighborhood called the tenderloin.

Is there? No. The loin is tender. That's why it says it right there. So there was a lot of issues with this site, not the least of which, which was the lack of subway access, right? But Penn Station, in Cassett's mind, was going to be a long-distance station first, right?

So this is not so terrible. You know, this is a big station catering to an exclusive clientele of long-distance riders. They're all going to arrive with luggage by cab, right? Right. So the first step was acquiring the land. I'm sure this all went about, was all gone about like aboveboard. The first thing that Pennsylvania did was that he pulls out his shotgun and says, give

me your land, motherfuckers. The first thing that Pennsylvania Railroad did was set up a company called the Stuvescent land company, right? Stoivison. Stoivison. Stoivison. Whatever. It kind of feels that hard.

No wonder it's going to be so hard from Stoivison because, as you can see, there appears to be a Spanish imperial fortress holding gargoyles in this image. That's just whichever Vanderbilt firing off from the top of that. Stoivison concept art always looks so good. They set up a couple of small LLCs through a larger LLC, right? They sent out individual buyers to haggle for each individual building, right? They couldn't get all of them, but what they did do is get a representative sample of them that would be useful later, right?

No, Jesus. In the meantime, they drummed up a new project, which is the Long Island Railroad was going to build a new terminal 20 blocks north at 50th Street, right? The land value in that area shot up to a huge extent. Everyone's like, I know you need this building, therefore I'm going to charge you four times what it's worth for, right? Classic American speculation. But the numerous sales between 33rd and 31st and 9th and 7th Avenues, those went unnoticed,

right? By stealth and by guile, the Pennsylvania Railroad triumphs. So they acquired a good representative sample of buildings, a good amount of the buildings in general, in fact, by December 1st, 1901, when the New York Tribune figured out the Pennsylvania Railroad was behind the purchases. And they said, my God, they're going to build the North River Bridge. Oh, bamboozled again. I'm back, baby.

Alexander Cassett, the most devious genius of his age. The following day, the New York Times performed its intended duty of shitting all over the New York Tribune, right? And they revealed that the bridge was off, the Pennsylvania Railroad was building a massive underground terminal, right? And Cassett took, because the New York Times was basically founded in response to the Tribune having marks as a correspondent. Yeah, and so it's also a convenient thing for the Pennsylvania Railroad to leak to.

This is true, yeah. Well, Mark, is that famous Russian? Yeah, he was Russian. He was, he was shut up. And we hear at the Times are the reasonable moderates about ideas like slavery, for instance. So the Pennsylvania Railroad was building this massive underground terminal. Alexander Cassett took this opportunity to graciously reveal the plans. He incorporated the Pennsylvania New York Extension Railroad Company.

And now he had to do something difficult, which was actually get a charter to build the damn thing, right? The bridge had a federal charter, which meant they didn't have to worry about New York local politics too much. The tunnel did not, right? This meant that Alexander Cassett, who remember as one of these posh mainline Protestant, you know, square haircut guys, had to talk to Tammany Hall. Yes. If you want a good book, I don't even know if it's good.

But if you want a book on why Tammany Hall is good, actually. Yeah. Machine made. Highly recommend it. I love Tammany Hall. I love machine politics. I love sending guys to vote in big beards and then shaving them around the back of the building to send them in to vote a second time. I love this shit so much.

I've mentioned before that one of my primary things that I admire in politics is a healthy amount of corruption. I admire Huey Long for this. Yes. Same thing. I admire your kind of your boss Tweed thing, where you're like, nothing is too good for the workers. And therefore, we will provide them with this sort of marble palace, which we have, like, grifted every single fitting and fixture in there for five thousand times its price. So Cassett had stated publicly many times he was above bribery and working with the corrupt

spoil system. No, you're not shut up, which Tammany, of course, would have nothing to do with. You know, they've wanted those bribes. You need to pay off the right people. Oh, yeah. But these potentially tense political negotiations were cut short when the Tammany supported and first mayor of Greater New York. This is he was the first mayor after the five boroughs were consolidated.

Robert Anderson Van Wick. He was found to have rigged the price of ice. Wait, what? Yeah, you just rigged the price of fucking anything back in those days. Yeah. He he had he had granted an effective monopoly to the American ice company to land ice at New York City's piers, right? And ice was a big deal.

Everyone had ice boxes. There wasn't really mechanical refrigeration. So of course, all this ice was being collected by people on grueling, arctic expeditions. Right. What the hell else do you put in your GMT? Exactly. So he had granted this one company a monopoly. And he was thought even now for the the men who went out and like Sealskin Park is to hack the ice in your drink off of an iceberg.

Oh, my God, I got a big chunk of ice. This one's got a penguin in it again. There is a third one this month. What do I do with this? You've never seen Mr. Pappers penguins. That's what you do, Roz. This penguin has been frozen for like a month.

I don't know if he's going to be able to do tricks. This was known as the ice trust scandal, right? Van Wick, I think it made something like four hundred and eighty thousand dollars personally off of the stock price increase of the American ice company. It's a lot of money. And this was this was in all of the pavers, right? Sure. Because again, ice was a much more

a much, much more necessary commodity at the time, right? So in the next election, Van Wick found him running against a reformist fusion candidate named Seth Lowe, right? Which now? A reformist fusion candidate. Yes, he had like some features of traditional American dino cuisine, but also really, really kick ass sushi for some reason. Yeah.

And topping it all, topping it all off the cook is Dominican. Hmm. Doesn't make sense to us either. There was a fusion candidate in the sense of fusion power. So Seth Lowe had united the various warring anti-Tamini factions, right? Who I should be clear, were also as personally corrupt as Tamini was. Generally speaking, yes. And Seth won the next election,

along with thirty nine of the seventy three seats in the board of aldermen, right? Right, which is like New York's really big city council. Now, Seth Lowe himself was in support of the New York improvements, right? So the charter was now assured all that was left with some horse trading over whether the board of aldermen or the board of rapid transit would award the franchise, right? And the aldermen wanted all these unreasonable things, right? Like a union shop in eight hour day, preference to immigrant labor, so on and so forth.

Well, all of this unreasonable shit. Yeah, those bastards. Exactly. Well, the board of rapid transit was full of good government types, right? Who didn't care about all that stuff, right? There should be an honest about it. Yeah, exactly. In the meantime, all the properties within the project boundaries were emptied, extra police patrols had to be assigned to keep the peace

in what was now four deserted blocks of the tender line, right? Oh, yeah, that's like a kind of a frightening vibe. Yeah, Cassett agreed to several demands such as an exorbitant rent to the city or he described it as exorbitant, right? Supervisioned by the board of health, extra safety provisions in the tunnels, right? But he would not budge on any labor provisions. Absolutely.

Rail not higher. The Irish won't do it. He was afraid the labor provisions would spread to construction projects on the rest of the railroad. Ah, yes. That's one of them in the dual. I learned a thing today about Costco that Costco bought stores that were already unionized and then basically gave all those benefits

to non union workers, too, that they would ever try to organize. So the alderman held firm, right? And so did Cassett. Cassett said, I'm fed up with this project's off. We're not coming to New York City. And everyone hated that, right? Labor hated it. Capital hated it.

Tammany Hall hated it. All the reformers hated it. They all lost something and gained nothing, right? Yeah, if you're just taking your ball and going home, like, exactly. So the border rapid transit assumed jurisdiction and approve the project without conditions. Nice. Well, there we go.

Liberalism. The province. Roll straight over. And after a little bit of extra politicking, the alderman acceded. The project would go on. They started acquiring property by eminent domain. Demolition proceeded immediately. In 1903, construction began in earnest.

The first and hardest part was, of course, building the tunnels. Oh, that's that's an awkward topography. Yes. So what we are looking at here are is a cross section of the entire tunnel profile, right? So there were two sets of tunnels that need to be built, the North River tunnels and the East River tunnels, right? Right.

The North River tunnels were supposed to be the hard ones. They would be driven under the Hudson River through this horrible river silt that could give way at a moment's notice, right? And this required the use of tunneling shields, right? They didn't have tunnel boring machines. Then it was like, you know, you had a bunch. You had a shield in the front. You could open a little slat.

Someone would take a little shovel and dig out five inches. They'd close it. They'd proceed to the next slat, right? Now, in some locations, the silt was so soft they didn't actually need to excavate. They could just push on the shield. So that fits out, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, they just shoved it forward with some hydraulic jacks and all the silt oozed out around. And then they shoved it into little narrow gauge train cars removing from the tunnel, right? In other locations, you did have to excavate, of course. Some days they made 15 feet a day. Some days they made three. They would shove out.

They put big cast iron rings behind the shield. Those were lined with concrete, including two benches on each side of the track. You can see these here. That was so if a train derailed, it would keep going straight as opposed to jackknifing and turning into tinder, right? Because they thought at the beginning, they would be running wooden cars into this station. That didn't wind up happening, except for, I think, like the first year.

Yeah. Tinderbox in a tunnel. Again, the North River tunnels are supposed to be the difficult ones. There had been several tunnels driven through the East River previously, and its solar mechanics were a little bit more well known. And in fact, there were some problems during excavating the North River tunnels. So when they were digging under Weehawken, which is where the Erie Railroad's terminal was, they caused a sinkhole and a bunch of freight cars

from the Erie Railroad fell in the tunnel. Whoops. That's good, right? Oh, dear. Well, free rail cars. Yeah, free rail cars. This is where this was while Erie Railroad high up officials were touring the rail yard. Oh, good luck. Yeah, I just watched the freight cars fall in the sinkhole in front of them.

We own those. Yes, boss didn't know you guys were coming in today. Well, I try to kick a rail car even further the water. Just like in the tunnel with the rail cars, like this isn't necessarily related. Maybe you overloaded them. Yeah. So they were not happy with that. But nevertheless, the North River tunnels proceeded rapidly and finished in 1906.

They did find an unexpected problem when they were finished, though. The tunnel was found to be rising and falling slightly, just by a little tiny bit. Because it's in like silk. That's not anchored very well. It's anchored to more silk. Ah, this explains my next question, which is going to be why the hell have they screwed a pile through the bottom of the tunnel?

Well, these screw piles were intended to counteract this situation never installed. I've just been calling them orgies this whole time. Yeah. So it took them two years to figure out why it took them two years to figure out why the tunnel was doing this. It was rising and falling with the tides, right? Eventually, you know, there are some people who are worried

this might make the tunnel unusable. But Samuel Ray was like, this is fine. It hasn't worsened. It's probably good, right? And well, God, I agree. Yeah. Well, kind of the art of getting away with it here. The tunnels are 114 years old. It hasn't been a problem yet.

So. Oh, OK. Now, the East River tunnels are another matter. I don't love the knowledge of how fragile that is, that it's just like in the silt and it just goes up and down with the tides. Bouncy, bouncy, rolly bouncing. So the East River tunnels, there were four tubes that were going to be driven under the East River, two for the Long Island Railroad, two for the Pennsylvania, right? The engineer in charge was a guy named Alfred Noble.

Oh, that guy. No, a different guy. Oh, no, not that guy. No, not the dynamite guy. This is the guy who did the Sulox and the Panama Canal. Right. Oh, man with the plan. The American Society of Civil Engineers does award a Nobel Prize every year. Just just like this as a fuck you. Yeah. Doesn't quite pull the numbers.

Noble wanted all the tunnels to proceed at the same pace, a pace, right? So he frequently reassigned crews to different tunnel heads. Why? What? Why is that used? What for what benefit? I don't know to do like muscle confusion on the silt. The main main thing this caused was confusion and delay. Yeah. Right. Not to mention some labor unrest.

Yeah. People weren't familiar with the crews they were going to be working with every night or every day, right? You know, and they encountered some unexpected geology, right? Oh, that's exactly what you want to encounter. That's the sense I want to hear. So they encountered some pockets of sand and glacial till, right? And when, you know, that was that was entirely different from the silt.

You wound up with blowouts. You wound up with some blowouts. Blowout is so these tunnels are pressurized while they're under construction to keep the water out, right? Sure. And so what happens in a blowout? Let me skip ahead and announce a little bit. A blowout is when essentially the air finds a way out of the tunnel into the riverbed.

And then it forms a big bubble that like. Oh, it's a quiff. It's a quiff. Yeah, it goes straight up out of the river and you get a little geyser, right? It's a quiff. Now, blowouts are a particularly nasty way to get killed. There's a number of ways to get killed in a blowout. If you're Sandhawk, right? The air pressure drops really rapidly.

So you might get a fence. You get the fence. That's one option. The other option is that once the air pressure drops, the water rushes in and you drown, right? I'd say that one. Now, the third option, the third option is you get sucked up with the air pressure and then you wound up embedded in the riverbed. Fuck. No, no, thank you.

Give me the bends. Yeah, I'll risk the bends at that point. Now, there was one guy. This is in a different tunnel. This was a fucked you dying quicksand underwater. That's the worst shit I've ever heard. There was one guy when they were building the tunnel for what's now the two and three train in 1916. There was a Sandhawk named Marshall, maybe, right?

Who got sucked out of the tunnel while the in a blowout. And he was expelled from the East River in a 25 foot geyser. Fuck, no. Nope. Some kids want these days. Some guys. I was looking for the drop, as you said that. He was picked up by some guys in a passing barge. They took him to the hospital.

They found he only had some bruises. He was back to work the next day. Just a guy that day. Oh, well, I mean, the only thing I have to say is suck this place dry. Do you think we have time? So anyway, in the East River tunnels, they had so many blowouts, they had to start staging barges above the tunnel head on the river to dump tons of cement clay.

Where do you get? Span, there. So that barge would, if there was a blowout, I was worried you'd just come home slurring. It's always sustained minor brain damage. Boss said it was fine. Yeah, the barges would be able to dump cement and clay over the blowout immediately to, you know, make the problem less bad.

Although it didn't solve it, right? You just still get the bends. And also, like you're both your eardrums just get like fucked. Yeah, you're fucked. You get you get you get turned into Elmo at that point. The media, the media did greatly exaggerate difficulties building the tunnels. They were very difficult to build, but the media was like, oh, yeah, they killed 20 guys a day here, right?

But, you know, they eventually shut up when the Pennsylvania Railroad hired our friend Ivy Ledbetter Lee, who, as we mentioned in two episodes ago, or the first Penn Central episode, the Nazi guy, the Nazi guy, yeah, the guy he did PR for the Nazis later. He developed an innovative new way of quelling the press, which was called issuing a press release, right? Oh, I thought you were going to say which is called murdering. He was the guy who understood that the journalist is at heart lazy.

And so if you give them an article that's already written, they'll print it. Exactly. Well, there you go. Yeah, so this is this method has been used to great success by corporations ever since created a generation of lazy stenographers who call themselves journalists. Anyway, so the East River tunnels were completed in 1908. This left the question of the station, right? Which is where we have to introduce.

An architecture firm. Oh, no. So this is Charles Fallon McKim, right? He was a son of Quaker abolitionists. This is William Rutherford Mead, a cousin of Rutherford Hayes, who was a questionably legitimate president of the United States, who ended reconstruction. And this is this is Stanford White pedophile.

Of such things are architecture firms made to two prodigious moustaches and extremely well-supported dome of a head and also pedophilia. Yes. Together, they formed an architecture firm called McKim Mead and White, which is a whiskey. Yeah, which was to become one of the most influential and respected architecture firms ever. Is it still around?

Sort of. Has it been like amalgamated into something that's like six letters or whatever? No, it got. The firm was renamed at some point. Load bearing nonsense. And it may or may not. I don't I don't think I don't think they exist in any meaningful form. OK, sure.

Right. But they their last like notable work was like 1960 something. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, depending on who you are, you might argue their last notable work was like 1895. Do buddy trash. They got their start designing houses in what's called the shingle style, right? Throughout New England. I hate it. Yeah. And then like the shingle style.

I like the style. Also, why? This is this is the William Low House up here, right, which is the most notable one. Here's the Isaac Bell House down here. I like the top one. I don't like the bottom one. Good news. The William Low House was raised in 1960.

Tell. All right. Oh, my God. So and they did a couple of buildings you might call Richard, Sony and Romanesque, but they really made it big when they won the contract to the Boston Public Library, too, which I quite like. They won the contract to design Madison Square Garden, too. Right. Madison Square Garden. Yes. Madison Cube Garden. Come on. It was right there.

Vincent Scully, the architecture critic, saw the one set about the William Low House is sort of once a climax and kind of conclusion for McKim, Mead and White, you know, since it was almost he said it's almost immediately abandoned by the more conventionally conceived columns and pediments of McKim, Mead and White's later buildings. Essentially, they stopped doing original things once they realized they could make money just doing bozar.

Right. Yeah. I like this fucking like big Renaissance palazzo up here. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's Madison Square Garden, too. It's it's it's a fun little building, right? Well, not a little building. It's a big building, right? It's a fun little big building. Yeah. So Campanile on the top, you know, they started doing much more formal like bozar style buildings because they they they had much more prestigious clients.

They made a lot more money. They could do bigger buildings. So stuff like the entire campus of Columbia University, for instance, here's the Agricultural Building at the World's Colombian Exhibition in Chicago, which Louis Sullivan said set back American architecture by 50 years. And the Brighton Pavilion, but less imaginative. Yeah. The firm only got more prestigious after something called the Trial of the Century. And that was the criminal trial after.

This is his favorite thing. Yeah. That was the criminal trial after Stanford White was murdered by Harry Kendall Thaw on the roof of his own building, Madison Square Garden, too, in front of an audience for being a pedophile. I mean, yeah, you've built in this crime. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Advanced form of self-defense. Yeah. No jury would convict.

It's a little more complicated than that. Harry Kendall Thaw also had some proclivities. Wasn't someone fucking someone's sisters? They were like fighting over a child at the time. Stanford White had fucked Harry Kendall Thaw's wife while she was 16. I know about this because I know about the fucking wife, too. She was like an early celebrity, right? Yes.

The fucking Evelyn Nesbitt, right? Yes. Yes, Evelyn Nesbitt. Jesus, pulling that shit for that was amazing. No, no, no. I read Greg Jenner's book Dead Famous, A History of Celebrity, and Evelyn Nesbitt and her fucking pedophilic love triangle is sort of the prototypical early 20th century debutant celebrity thing. It's like she was one of the first models, even.

Yeah. Oh, wow. I mean, nothing changes. The murder itself was so when Thaw shot White in front of a whole bunch of people, they all thought it was a shot and that's disappointing. I was hoping it would have been knife. There we are. Well, they all thought it was some kind of fun party trick and they all applauded. Oh, that was a murder. Yeah. He approached and produced the pistol.

So do you have ruined my wife, which is the weirdest possible thing you could say. And then shot him twice in the face and once in the chest. Now, this this happened. I got it. I got to ask the question. Why stop at three? All right, I wouldn't do it on a rooftop like with a 1906 pistol. You're taking your life in your hands for each time you pull that. That's true.

But like, yeah. Well, you know, I'm cranking the big knob that says gunshots to see if I get applause or not, you know. So the this happened in the middle of the Penn Station project, which is also another interesting thing is that Harry Kendall thought was the son of a major Pennsylvania railroad freight forwarder, little awkward. Kind of like, you know, the planning meetings are a bit weird once like one of the architects has been shot in the face by one of the clients.

Oh, no, you just do a week in a week in a birdies type of thing. It's fine. So but when they were when they were designing the station, right? So Alexander Cassit didn't know shit about architecture or architecture firms, but he wanted to rival the New York Central's under construction grand central terminal. And Samuel Reeve suggested, why don't you use McKim, Mead and White? And this was a match made in heaven because Cassit didn't know shit about architecture. And McKim, Mead and White had never designed a train station.

Hell yeah. Absolutely perfection. The blandest possible station, please. So Cassit's attention, you have a grand entrance New York City for long distance inner city travelers and only inner city and long distance travelers, right? Commuters would, of course, continue using exchange plays for convenient ferries in the new Hudson and Manhattan railroad tubes to access the financial district, which is where the jobs were, right?

So the station was designed as such. Now, Charles McKim got the broad outline to the station and talked Cassit out of the most stupid things he suggested, put a hotel on top. No, hey, what for some pine crows? Yeah, well, it worked for most things. And and and and and Charles McKim was like, no, no, we're gonna, we're gonna keep this low slung and Greco Roman as fuck, right? It's a fucking it's a curia for trains.

Yes. Those big arch windows. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, he talked him out of the hotel on top. He talked he talked him out of cheaping out on the main waiting room because Cassit wanted to keep this low slung instead of having the massive diacletian windows.

Now, the the responsibility for the design of the station was divided vertically, right? Everything below street level was the railroads problem. And everything above street level was the architects problem, right? And there's a lot of stuff that wasn't worked out until last minute. So, for example, it wasn't until they were actually building the platforms that someone was like, you know, these should probably be high level platforms and not flat platforms that are like on the ground, right? We have to step up onto the train, right?

The overall design was again, it was focused on one type of traffic, the one that was supposed the railroad expected to increase indefinitely, which is the long distance passenger, right? That seems sustainable. Yeah, obviously. You're never going to have a reduction in long distance rail traffic. Never, never, ever. So, you've prepared a little like virtual tour for us here.

I got a virtual tour of the old Penn Station, right? So, let's say you enter through the front door here, right? And you go through this sort of Doric, not quite Temple Front. I don't know what you call it when there's not a pediment on there. This is like a colonnade, I guess. Yeah, this whole thing is made out of pink granite, just a little bit pink, right? But you got this sort of austere Doric thingamajig, right?

So, we're on the plan, we're over here, right? And we proceed forward through the long shopping arcade, right? Okay, yeah. So, even back then, the train station was a mall, right? Yeah. Did you have a pizzeria UNO, at least? No. Rat bastard Nazis.

I don't think they'd invented it yet. I'm thinking about rat bastard Nazis yet. It was 1911. Also true. Now, they're getting there. But yeah. Yeah, exactly. They haven't quite gotten there yet.

They got to do World War I first. About the time that John Moses Browning was about to invent a much more effective way to shoot pedophiles in the face. Now, if you were arriving, if you were the sort of clientele which the station was really designed for, you might bypass the shopping arcade entirely. You might arrive by cab, which went down a big ramp, right? That delivered you directly into the main concourse here, right? There's nowhere to sit down, sick of this anti-homeless bullshit.

All right, excuse me. That main concourse. They make cities for everyone. This is the general waiting room, excuse me. If I want to sit down, I have to buy some food. And because it's 1911, the place that I buy food from is called Harry's Horsemeat Pies. Yeah, you got it all. Got it all.

Horn and hard art, auto man. Don't be a hooligans, Irish pub, yes. And the scale is quite something. I mean, at least the Tredarch people are happy anyway. Return. So guys, the idea is you start to proceed downwards as you approach the trains, right? You go into the space. This is based on the Baths of Carcala or the Tepidarian.

I knew I was fucking, I knew I wasn't crazy. It's not a Curia, it's a Baths. It's a Bath. It's a Tepidarium, but it's 20% larger than the original. You got your big columns, you got your diacletian windows, you got your coffered groin vaults, right? It's supposed to be. Architecturally, it's a Tepidarium.

And yet when I take all my clothes off and start stridgling myself in there, people act as if I'm insane. You got a statue of Alexander Cassett himself here in a niche. Obviously. Yeah, one of the few statues in there. I think Samuel Rhee was on the other side, because I think both of them died before it was finished. It's a big, dumb, bozar space, right?

And if you wanted seating for ticketed passengers, we're in here, right? For ticketed passengers, here's the women's waiting room, and here's the men's waiting room. Yeah, I don't know what happens if you want to wait together. Shot now, not acceptable. All right, so once we've gone through here, you can get tickets over here, right? Once we've gone through the general waiting room, you go to the concourse, right? Which is your big glass grind vaulted sort of thing, right?

You know, it's all made out of steel. It's a bit padding to me. Yeah, a little bit. And you could see, you know, the trains and walk down the stairwell there, right? I wonder who made that clock. I believe it would be Benris. The excellent clock. This is my favorite bit so far.

This is nice. This is a nice train shed. Oh, yeah, this is a very nice train shed. You could, you know, all the floors were made out of little glass blocks. So when you went down a platform level, you had lots of light. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, I love that. The columns have this sort of deliberately industrial look,

which is very uncharacteristic for McKim. That's good. You know, this was sort of, it's one of these buildings which is sort of transitional from, you know, sort of a formal bozar to like, this is the high tech space where the electric trains are, right? Sort of business in the front, party in the back sort of thing. Exactly. Right.

Also, some seriously nice looking slab track there. Just going to, you know, since you've got me on, you know, be rude not to. So there's an upper concourse for arrivals. Hold on. I forget the upper concourse is for departures. The lower concourse was for arrivals, right? So, you know, this was all separated, right? Just to, for extra space, right?

And the effect is you come in and you like descend the stair, right? Yes. Like a deadly tot, yes. Or you take an elevator. There were also elevators. That's all that's glamorous, Russ. Well, you know, you might have a bunch of luggage. Fuck you.

We'll get to that problem in a second. No, no, no, no. Your servant fucking has the luggage. Yeah. Or you have a bowl and a water vise. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Apparently there was a big shortage of them for most of the station's existence.

So you descended the stairs to most modern trains in existence, right? This is a DD1 electric locomotive, right? Ran off a third rail. You can see it has it's one of the old timey ones where there's a big motor in the middle and the wheels are driven by a jack shaft. Looks like they've gone make the steam train, but it's not a steam train.

It's electric now. Yeah. It's wild. It's like a big insectoid submarine. That's so happy to see you. And, you know, these brought you through the North River tubes as far as Manhattan transfer in Harrison, New Jersey. The train would stop.

They'd put a steam locomotive on. You'd have passengers who'd join the train at that point if they had commuted by the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad from the financial district, right? Then you were brought swiftly to your destination, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, or whatever, right? And this is a very grand and extremely impressive journey

for the long distance traveler. You also had these brand new steel cars here, right? This is crazy expensive, right? Yeah. This is all very new, very expensive. No one thought you could build a steel rail car before they actually started doing it because they thought it would be too rigid

and it would shake itself apart. Once again, Alastair is vindicated. This is the experience for the long distance traveler. I'm noticing a general omission of the experience for anyone else. All right. Now, if you're taking the Long Island Railroad in here, you get dumped into one of the sidetracks under a street,

right? And then they put you in the lower concourse and they say, go to the subway. Go to the subway right now. I smell crazy in there. Fucking rat. You rat. You piece of shit.

Yeah. The cops are like, are allowed to hit you with like whips on your way there. They're hitting you with like, uh, I want a person. Yeah. I want a person. This is for people. This is for people.

Yeah. This must be about the time of the rise of the transit cop, right? Yeah. The systematization and the professionalization of railroad police. Oh, now railroad police have been like around since like the Civil War.

Uh, yeah. The subway specific one. You could, uh, you go to the railroad museum with Pennsylvania. They have a old, old-timey Pennsylvania railroad police cop uniform on display. And it's got like a, they got like a Nazi armband but with a keystone on it.

Yeah, it's not great optics. I mean, didn't, didn't, didn't the federal government take the title special agent for its investigators off of the Union Pacific police too? That, that sounds about right to me. Oh my. Now, even then, um, you know, the old, the old Long Island railroad concourse, it was a dark and dingy.

It wasn't as dark and dingy as it could have been because you still got the glass blocks up there. Right. You see this nice old-timey elevator shaft here. Right. It looks like steerage in the Titanic. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the sort of, that's the sort of feeling we're getting here. Right. It's very functional. Um, I mean, I don't hate the aesthetic, but it's- You're allowed to glimpse upwards the, um, the like, the nice people. You could, you could experience being trampled underfoot

by capital. Hey, don't, don't laugh. This is exactly what the HS2 station it used to be. Another part of the station was building the New York Connecting Railroad, right? Um, you know, in 1917, they opened the New York Connecting Railroad, which we mentioned before, connecting the New Haven Railroad to the terminal, making it possible to take

one train from Boston to New York City to Washington, D.C. Right. It also facilitated a bunch of freight operations on Long Island, but the big one was Gustav Lindenthal finally got his bridge. Right. The Hellcase. Oh, come on, man.

That's not mega bridge. Paint that bridge, please. I'm begging you. I think this is right before they comprehensively painted it. It looks better now. Are these men playing cricket? Yes.

In the United States of America? Completely. Yes. There's a cricket field at the base of the, uh, God. Playfoot. College. I know it's probably very important to the diaspora,

but I'm begging you to play football instead. I always thought, I always thought if you played cricket in the United States, a bunch of guys would show up in black vans and send you to a black site. Yeah. You're not allowed to have that knowledge here. Absolutely. So this is, so this is 1917.

When did the, when did the, that was, that was the connecting rail in 1970, but when are the actual station open passengers? Station open 1910. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm consumed with visions of, of, uh, an American with an American accent saying things like a sticky

wicket or silly mid-on. And I'm just, it doesn't work. It's, this is psychic violence that I've inflated upon myself here. Hey, uh, it's Brooklyn. I got 293 runs. Hey. I, next slide please.

So yeah, they opened the station to public 1910 after both Cassit and Charles McKim were dead. Right. Yeah. This is another, another project which killed a lot of people. Digital clock in the background there. Oh, shit.

Nice. Yeah. This is, uh, this is a later, later photo of the station. Now they, they had some problems with the station almost immediately, right? Some of which were pretty minor. The skylights leaked.

All of them. That's every, every skylight leaks. Yeah, it's normal. The bi-level design was confusing to some passengers. Oh no. Yeah. You had an inherent problem with the design that the vertical distance from the street level of the

platform was very high, 45 feet from platform to surface and they sort of tried to mitigate that with this long processional entrance, but also that meant you had to walk pretty far to the platform. The station as built had only one escalator, right? Which, if you want to move a lot of people over a vertical distance, you use escalators, right? They're, they're the most efficient way of moving a

lot of people over a vertical distance. And you have an elevator for like disabled people or people who need to use a wheelchair, right? But you have, you have the escalator moves a shitload of people really efficiently and they only had one of them, right? Yeah. Oh dear.

They only did one. 01:15:35,480 --> 01:15:38,040 It seems like, well, I mean, there's, there's a lot of platforms. It saves weight, Roz. So all these passengers are like hauling their own luggage up and down on these stairs all the way up to the street.

The porters are doing it for the bras. Yeah, they were always short of porters though. Yeah, because everybody looks at it and they're like, who the fuck would want this job? Those guys. They had a lot of elevators. Most of them were dedicated to baggage and express freight. They later installed a whole bunch of escalators,

but the big problem was still coming, right? So that Penn Station was designed to. Penn Station was designed for. Sorry, Adam. I followed me there. You killed me. Oh my God. I'm dead.

That's it. 01:16:19,480 --> 01:16:19,480 01:16:19,480 --> 01:16:19,960 That's it. Oh. It's your own time. Thank you, Liam. You're welcome.

Penn Station was designed for long distance trains. The long distance train shows up to the platform. They idle there for a while. They get loaded up with staff and supplies. The passengers board pretty leisurely. The train leaves like a cruise ship. It's like a cruise ship. That means you can get away with having a lot of

narrow platforms instead of a few wide ones, right? Yeah. Yeah, this one's going to New York. This one's going to like Buffalo. This one's going to Chicago, whatever. Yeah, I assume it doesn't. But does this have anything to do with the madhouse that is boarding at Penn Station today?

Yes. Oh, okay. So yeah, at this point, you might be running you're running long distance trains once, twice a day. Maybe it's busy. You're running some extras. So you're not trying. You don't have to run a whole bunch of trains

frequently off of these platforms, at least as it was intended. But it's very at odds with the commuter train, which arrives. It farts out as many passengers as possible, as quickly as possible. Then needs to quickly take on passengers going the opposite direction, at least in theory, or it runs through. And through running at Penn is a problem we'll get to later.

But that requires large platforms for the passengers to spread out and a way for them to quickly get to the concourse and get the fuck out of the station, right? Sure. Now Penn Station was completed before it got any subway connections and it functioned as intended for a while, right? But fairly shortly afterwards, the 7th Street IRT line arrived in 1917 with a shuttle to Times Square

and then they opened the full line in 1918. The Independent Subway 8th Avenue line, that's the A.C.E. trains. That was the 123 trains before. That showed up in 1932. All of a sudden, for some reason, and no one could have predicted this. But suddenly the Long Island Railroad Flatbush Terminal and the Pennsylvania Railroads Exchange Place

were suddenly a lot less attractive for commuters. But it's the place where you exchange. It says in the name. Didn't you guys read? No, that's where they're supposed to go. Why did the commuters not pay attention to where they're supposed to be? I love the idea of like a septa study or something that's like, we can't do this because all passengers are idiots.

It would be a much better railroad if we simply did not allow passengers. That is the general class one railroad opinion. Yeah, that's not far off. Pleased to announce my new role at Norfolk Southern. The number one rule about running a profitable railroad is not to run any trains, right? The congratulations on your role as senior vice president of putting coal trains on the ground.

The other issue was the station itself had spurred a bunch of development in midtown, right? Areas like Times Square suddenly became much more prestigious, you know, and you had like these midtown skyscrapers showed up like this. They look like old state buildings. Of Times Square. It looks like a giant pile of shit.

Looks like 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag. It was 10 pounds of shit in a five pound bag, and then it got nice, and then it got shitty again, and now it's nice again, which sucks. Yeah, yeah, it was strange. Like read Times Square Red, Times Square Blue for some like authentic 1980s, 70s and 80s filth. Ross is only mad because he is banned from life

from the Times Square M&M store. Is the Times Square M&M store sort of like the Leicester Square M&M store, kind of like tourist flypaper? Yeah, I like it there, which probably says more about me than it does about the Mars Corporation. I was way too into the green M&M. You would talk to Carlson. Anyway, and so the station spends most of its life doing something

it's not intended to do, which is commuter trains. And they start trying to modify it over time. So for instance, they installed overhead wire for trains that went as far as Washington, D.C. and Harrisburg and New Haven, right? And that meant they had to enclose the concourse, no more light open and airy stuff, because otherwise people would trip and fall on the wires and die. Who cares?

They installed some escalators in the 1930s, which I really like the contrast of the escalator with the big bozar bullshit. I think it's weirdly steep compared to the stairs. You don't have to walk down them. You don't need the rest of the landing, right? They started putting advertisements in there, not only advertisements for cars and airlines.

God's sake. World War II was really hard on the building. The big glass concourse had to be painted black in case of an air raid, and they did. From where? Yeah, by one. The American bomber. The American bomber.

Yeah, you never know when the zeroes are going to show up out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in the meantime... The war was simply like them on fire. In the meantime, the railroad itself was increasingly divesting from its unprofitable commuter trains, right? And they were only operating them where required by law. So the Pennsylvania Railroad had purchased new MP54 multiple unit cars,

those are the ones we saw for the Long Island Railroad before. Yeah. They bought them in 1908. They bought identical cars in 1915 and 1926. Oh dear. The Long Island Railroad bought identical cars, the last delivered in 1930. And these were the last commuter cars either railroad bought until they were sort of forced to in the 50s, right?

And as these cars aged, their reliability decreased and decreased. Commuter service became more expensive to operate, more unreliable, less profitable, less pleasant to use, right? I mean, you can see by then that picture is showing a busy station, right? Yes. So unprofitable, but clearly highly in demand. Yeah.

I mean, you had sort of the... It's like Yogi Berra said. Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Because you were running fewer and fewer commuter trains, and so everyone was packing on to fewer and fewer trains. And the service was worse and only the people who absolutely needed to use the service were using it.

Of course, they couldn't afford to pay. And the whole time they're being advertised here, if you drove, you'd be home by now. Exactly. Because you're also building big highway projects, automobile travels more accessible, airlines are taking away the high wealth intercity travelers, which Penn Station was designed for, right? Not even Moses time yet, and it's still the trajectory is being set. Well, Moses had built a whole bunch of parkways in Long Island,

which definitely took away from the Long Island railroad commuters. Jersey was still fucked. Yeah. But if you say, if you're Don Draper, you're trying to get home from Madison Avenue to Ossoning, then... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

The biggest intervention came in the 50s. The general waiting room was renovated with a new ticket counter called the clam shell. That's this right here, right? We sort of blocked to the grand possession with the large cantilevered steel awning in the shape of an airfoil. You know? Why? Airlines stuff.

It's indoors. Modernity. Yeah, I know, right? It's modernity, right? They wrapped all the columns in plastic so they were easier to clean. Oh, come on. The thing is, they wrapped all the dirt in there so they weren't cleaned at all. The station was covered in grime and dirt and nicotine, right?

Because everyone's smoking in there because of the 50s. It looked like pink granite with an inch thick layer of tobacco on it. Just yellow, yeah. So it looked like hell. It was really crowded. Looks good to me. It was obviously falling apart and a railroad didn't maintain it because it didn't want it and didn't need it and didn't make money off of it, right?

The Pennsylvania Railroad was trying to end all commuter services early as the late 1950s. I mean, they just wanted the station gone. If they had their druthers, they would abandon the whole New York connecting railroad. But the only thing that kept the trains running were legal mandates. And even as ridership was declining, as I mentioned before, the trains were getting more crowded. But the city couldn't force the railroad to maintain the station or to keep it around. So in 1954, the air rights were sold to a guy named William Zekendorf, right? Those plans for redevelopment fell through.

But in 1962, a better offer came around. Hooray, oh. Madison Square Garden 4. It's not even square. It's not square. It's round. I don't see any squares there. Madison Circle Garden.

James Nolan, sell the team. So the Pennsylvania Railroad executives and the railroad itself both had shares in these things called the New York Islanders and the New York Knicks, right? And they both needed a new stadium. Why not put it on top of that useless old railroad terminal? I have reasons. I hate the fucking aisles. Is that good enough?

What apologies to our former roommate, fuck your hockey team. A guy named Irving M. Felt felt the same way, right? In return for the air rights, he'd offered the railroad a brand new air conditioned station at no cost and a 25% stake in the new Madison Square Garden. And the Pennsylvania Railroad's new CEO, Stuart T. Saunders, thought it was a great deal. So the contract was signed, Penn Station was coming down. The same Stuart Saunders who just, you know, come in from Norfolk and Western to manage the Penn Central merger, of course.

A guy who looked a bit like even more evil Dick Cheney. How much of the aisles of the Knicks does a PRR own at this point? I don't remember the stake off hand. But it was less than 50%, but it was a good chunk. And I'm sure the executives owned a whole bunch through their investing club, right? Now, the New York Times editorial board wrote that, you know, until the first blow fell, no one was really convinced that Penn Station would be demolished or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age

of Roman elegance, right? Yeah, there was this campaign to save Penn Station, right? Oh, yeah, there was a campaign to save Penn Station and had some pretty, pretty wild people in it. But, you know, one of the things they did is they kept the station open while they were demolishing it. So every day you walked in, everything got a little shittier. You could see sort of the condition of the station when they were demolishing it.

Everything's covered in grime. It's all nasty and dirty. Because it's happening at the same, pretty much exactly the same time as the old Houston was being pulled down in London. And it, which also was like this kind of Greco-Roman sort of monument. Oh, it was a shit station, frankly. But it was. But it was our shit station.

Yeah, it was our shit station. God damn it. Trust me. You can see, I hate the fucking jaunty, like, advertisement hoarding on the front. Like the new Madison Square Garden Sports Center. Is that a GG1 on it, though? Oh, yes. Over here.

Well, it's a new air-conditioned station they're offering you. Consider that. And you can see here's one of the columns being removed on the interior. You can see it's plaster around a steel beam. Oh, there's cheating bastards. Yeah, a lot of it is sort of, you know, it was. It's a set. It's just a set.

It is. It was just a set. I mean, although one of the weird things is, if you look at it now, this kind of plasterwork, it's very hard to do. You need a 90-year-old Italian man to do it. I mean, it's a set piece, but we even can't even do the set piece anymore too easily. So yeah, it took a couple years to take it down. They built the stadium within the footprint of the station as it was being demolished.

Oh, that sucks, too. Because the front was, the front is actual granite, and it was really hard to tear down. Why did you just leave it at that point? That could have been cool. That would have been kind of cool, actually. Yeah. Because we can't have nice things, Gareth.

Come on now. Now, Irving Felt said he believed that the gain from the new buildings in the Sports Center would more than offset any aesthetic loss. And he said 50 years from now, when it's time for Madison Square Garden to be torn down, there'll be a new group of architects who protest. Yeah, no, wrongo. So there's, there's a facet of protest that a lot of people focus on here, which is we had a lot of architects, architecture critics,

people like that come out to save and station, right? So, you know, here's, here's a, here's a photo here with, here's Jane Jacobs, right? Here's noted fascist sympathizer, Philip Johnson. Who did? What's, I feel like less publicized is a sort of long, slow simmering protest from people who actually, you know, use the trains, for which this is more than like an aesthetic loss. It's an active degradation of train service, right? You're like tens of thousands of workers.

Yeah, you're talking hundreds of thousands of people each day, right? Oh, they don't mass, uh, they don't mass. So what, you know, what's that fucking architected journal, huh? If that's so smart. Yeah, I mean, you know, the implication here is buy a car. Fuck you, right? I haven't ever said fuck you buy a car to some people, Roz. Yes, you have.

The homage are different. So, you know, but the Penn Station that was coming was an objectively worse station from a lot of aspects, right? You know, and everyone involved in this process, uh, was worse off at the end of it, except for a few Pennsylvania Railroad Executives, right? You know, this is just, it's an indignity that was, you know, forced on a lot of people. I mean, obviously Penn Station is, you know, it was designed as this sort of upper class, you know, uh, a portal to the city, which was only for, uh, you know, the best of the best.

But what it turned into was this is the space where everyone goes and, you know, there's some, some amount of, uh, what do you call it? Um, you know, you entered the city with, you know, a certain amount of dignity, right? And now, that's true. To what extent was that, was there kind of an inverse snob, not an inverse snobbery, a snobbery over that? And then suddenly the workers in the working class was using this sort of grand edifice that was supposed to be for the, no, no, no, no, this is darling.

This is supposed to be for the middle classes. Meant about an hour more of Gareth's posh voice. Well, I think we should tear it down and we'll build JFK airport. I've got a, I've got a long stick with a cigarette for some reason stuck in the end of it. So yeah, I, I, everyone was worse off from this except for the people who directly profited off the real estate development. And I guess the, uh, Nick's fans and Islander's fans could get to the stadium really quick. Yeah. So they demolished this thing and they put the station in the basement.

It's been largely unaltered since then, right? You know, Vincent Scali, who also previously criticized, uh, McKim, Mead and White for their shitty Bozar architecture said, um, one entered the city like a God, one now scuttles in like a rat. So maybe he's not, maybe he's not that critical of McKim, Mead and White's Bozar architecture. I mean, you can, I kind of have to sit like, maybe we'll touch on this again later, but like, I'm not a fan of the, the Bozar's architectural style. I guess it's just, it's a bit gross.

But the, the, you don't have to just, you don't have to bury under the ground for it to be, like there are, there is a middle ground. Oh man, you don't have to just bury the whole thing underneath, uh, sports real estate, no necessary. And, and this is, this is where we get to the, the, the new Penn station, right? Um, where they took all the minor problems were made worse and none of the major problems were solved, except now the station was air conditioned, right? Great.

It looks great. I love it. I'm really happy with this. I prefer this concourse to Moynihan. We'll get to that. Um, what do you have now as a whole station that's sort of like the original Long Island railroad concourse, you know, it's the rats worn at tunnels. The hallways are confusing.

They lead nowhere. You have to rely entirely on signs to figure out where you are. The concourses are all like clutches. Um, you know, like the entire New Jersey transit concourse was just, Hey, a clutched concourse. It was like carved out of a storage room one day. There's no central plan to work off of. There's no clear procession through the station.

You, you don't know where you are a lot of times when you're in here, right? Nope. It's, it's, it's utilitarian, but without the utility part, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah. Tarry and so in the meantime, of course, Penn Central failed. Commuter trains were taken over by the state of New Jersey, the city of New York.

Long distance service was taken over Amtrak. They all said about their own plans to use or improve the station. And this is where I think we'll divert from the usual sentimental crap about the head house. And we'll give it to Gareth. Let's talk about what makes a train station work. Yes. Oh, yes.

My business. Right. So this is going to be quick. I thought, um, I would adopt Justin's, uh, Socratic method and go, what is a station? What is one of those trains live? It's, it's, it's a flat bit next to a rail where you have, like, you, you'd spill a couple of things on the, on the track. Yeah.

You spill things out of your wagon and some of them might walk. And others, you might need to get a guy to move. Um, yeah. So here's one of the smallest ones in the, in, uh, in the UK. This is Buley station and North Inverness. And it really pushes the limits on what you can define as a station. Although it does have a platform. So, uh, that's better than some stations I've seen.

Um, so, uh, here's, here's the stage. So, right. This, this next bit is going to be very quick. Uh, so next slide, please. There we go. So this is, this, this is, uh, so here you have a track. This is a nice track, right? And then the previous station, as we saw, so if we go to the next slide,

this is going to be super quick far. You see, we can have, we can insert a platform. So if you have a train coming along, uh, on this single line track, uh, it can stop, people can get out, or they can get on and the train can move. And it goes in either direction. And this is, well, if you've got a single track, obviously it's very low capacity because that train has to go miles away somewhere else before it can go past another train going in the other direction.

So that's where you get clever. And next slide, please. Introduce another track. Oh, and if you wish, I know, right? And actually that was the first problem. Yeah. My, uh, yeah, when I, my, my first ever correct train crash I witnessed was in Inveruri, um, and it was indeed a class 170 doing double track drifting, uh, on,

because it split the points and stayed on track, but just, but smashed up a signal and some location cases. So yes. Anyway, I digress. Um, next slide, please. So you can see, you can add the platforms and then therefore you, you have a station where one one side, you get onto a train going one direction on the other side, you go onto a train going another direction.

It's very, very simple. Um, but if you've, that's fine if you've only got one kind of train, right? Well, what happens if you have another kind of, if you've trains, maybe that you want to, keep going through without stopping and then trains that you do want to stop. Next slide, please. Oh, you're going to have an up, down and up, an up, down. Fuck, cut all of this. I sound stupid.

And up, fast and an up, slow line and a down, fast and a down, slow line. Exactly. Yes. You have a loop and you, you have a station loop. And yeah, so exactly. You could have the, the up and down slow in, if you're in the UK and name things weirdly. Um, uh, so yeah, in blue here is our, is our like our stopping train. And then you've got the white tracks for whatever other stuff you want to send

through, whether it's freight or maybe fast trains or whatever. There was some in Pennsylvania, railroad parlance. This would probably be one, two, three and four. Cause they numbered the tracks in order of when they were built. Up and down, fast and slow is kind of like a cricket thing. I feel like by comparison, if you use it in the US, you do get like black-sighted. Yeah. They take you, they drag you into the van and, and, uh, limbs in there actually, uh,

to take you somewhere fun. No limbs here. Leaves here. Leave the scape from the van. Don't worry about it. I thought you, no, you're driving the van. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Because it's your van. Oh yeah. No, that makes a lot more sense. I don't want to be there. I wouldn't have wanted to be in the back of my van when I owned it. I was always pretty concerned for my passengers. The, uh, the problem with this station is that, um, there's a lot of time to take, but trains have to slow down.

They have to negotiate their way through the, the switch, then go sit by the platform, then negotiate their way back onto the track. Actually, this can be quite problematic for line capacity. If you've got like a mixture of trains going through and train stopping, this is actually a bit crap. So next slide, please. What you can do is introduce, um, so kind of exactly what I was just saying, you have a proper slow and fast line.

So you can have like more tracks, more tracks, more tracks. More tracks. The trains that don't stop keep themselves themselves on the middle track, the two like middle tracks in white there. And then the blue tracks have your, they're like commuted trains or your suburban trains or whatever the passenger trains that want to stop at the station. Also has the fun little advantage that when you're standing on one of those platforms waiting for your nice slow commuter train,

you don't get like, uh, all of your shit blown past by like a 125 mile an hour express train. I was, um, for, for bizarre reasons, I was in Milton Keynes last week doing a lecture. Um, and, uh, and I didn't think, I didn't expect to see this, but from Milton Keynes, uh, central station trains go through there real fast. Uh, I think they're at full 125 miles an hour and someone was standing, not even the wrong side of the yellow line. Um, and they just burst, they just squeezed their coffee and it just sprayed all over their own face.

I was like, oh, I mean, I mean, I mean a weird sort of romcom, sort of from the late nineties, uh, with this sort of, uh, skit. Anyway, so yes, you've, you've got fast and slow lines and they kind of keep themselves themselves, which is, which is good. You'd think that's good, right? But next slide, please. What if you got them going to stop, uh, an express train somewhere? Yes.

If you have the issue where you do need to get some stuff onto this, uh, into these platforms to stop, or maybe you need to have them like mediums, like some kind of like, uh, some trains stop there and you've got to get the faster trains to go through or like semi-fast or whatever bizarre names you want to call the services. The trouble is, if you want to do that without clogging everything up, like the, like the station we had earlier, um, you're going to need to put in longer switches,

by which I mean, um, the trains can go through these switches faster, but that means that they're longer and more complicated. So, uh, yeah, so then you can start having challenges here and this gets more expensive. Um, but you still have a pretty good, uh, operational station. Like this layout is pretty good, actually. This, this is a pretty good station. Next slide, please.

There are other alternatives. Um, if, for example, you've got a situation where you have, uh, two fast lines, but in a pair, and then you've got the two slower lines and two kind of, um, like, uh, commuting lines, but kind of running together like this. You might have a layout a bit like this, where you've got kind of a separate, maybe fenced off set of fast lines and then, and then a pair of kind of slow lines together.

You see lots of these in the UK. You probably see loads of these in the US as well, right? It just depends on what the operational layout is at the railway. Um, but you might see this later. You don't see this too much in the US. Because we don't have, we don't have separate fast and slow lines. No, they're just all slow, Gary. A lot of suburban London stations are like this.

Like my commute to school was like this, where you had like one platform for, like, there was nominally for a slow line that backed onto the express lines also. Yeah, you might say like, um, the east, that the east side of Crossrail has loads of platforms like this. So they like nominally got a platform that you could use, but it's like 30 centimeters wide and it's for the fast trains. And then the wider ones, they've got the slow trains coming through

and they've kind of got a fence blocking off the fast platform. I guess you kind of have this on the Washington metro, where it parallels the northeast corridor, but it's fairly clearly, it's a nearby right of way. It's not the same right of way. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, and again, so, so, um, uh, next slide, please. You might find that you do have two sets of platforms

because you have maybe one is semi-fast or you've got maybe two operators or you've got, I don't know, you've got London overground and you've got Southern or whatever. It's some strange situation. It's going to mix Southern and Southeast and the two least complimentary liveries. Oh my goodness. Yes. And, and, so that's fine.

If you've got the two systems separated, then okay, fine, you can have them like this. And, and actually, okay, I didn't include it, but you could get really fancy and start having exchange platforms where actually they like loop over each other and it all just starts getting very clever. But, um, if you have a situation next slide, please, where say, oh God, yeah, um, if you have a situation

where maybe the true tracks are merging at this station, it starts getting very messy. And you start at it. This is a deliberate diagram to look horrible and messy because as soon as you start merging these operational sort of these two different operations merge into each other, it becomes a mess, right? And you start hitting line capacity.

The best railway station was the one at the start with just the two or not the one quite the start, but the double track, the first double track one where you just have double track because all the trains will stop and they just convey about through and you get loads and loads and loads of capacity. Um, so next slide, please.

So what you're telling me is we've worked out the sort of mathematical ideal railway station and the quest of railway engineers ever since has been to find ways of making it worse, but more interesting. I'm confirmed, that's absolutely it. Yeah, the less complicated the station, the more trains it can handle.

It is, that is it. And if, and the more trains you handle, the less fun it is. So for example, you have here some absolutely psychotic Swiss railway station approach here. It's might be like the approaches like Zürich Central. I don't know. It basically somewhere very European

where they are obsessed with creating straight lines out of double slips. Oh, my head hurts. Oh, what the fuck is this? You might notice there's a diagonal going through the double in between the double slips here. Oh, my God. This is a railroad.

This is the railway of a people who love the uncertainty principle. They're also all standardized double slips. They're all the same switch over and over again. Oh, my God. I'm going to throw up. Yeah. I mean, so this is a thing that's straight.

Like the Europeans love to just run trains at like fast through all those diagonal like routes like that. So that straight line that's kind of obvious crossing in front of the train. They've run through that like 40 miles an hour, 50 miles an hour, which is, I mean, good God. I wouldn't want to do that. We don't do that in the UK because we're pussies.

You don't like hearing six noises of it going over those points a second. I just, oh, my God. Just the maintenance for all those and all the gaps. It's just horrible. Anyway, so the point of this image was to say, like once you start doing complicated things like the previous sort of map with all the kind of crossings,

switches smooching over each other, you start having to do horrible, complicated stuff that is, which is bad for all sorts of reasons. So next slide, please. So those, all of those were through stations where you have a pair of tracks and they go through and the trains just kind of continue in both directions, in opposing directions.

What happens though, if you want to stop trains at a thing, like, I don't know, because there's a river in the way or because you don't want to bulldoze any more train or, I don't know. You run out of country. You get to the coast. Yeah, you're at the edge of the map. You're at the edge of the map.

Yeah, exactly. Well, next slide, please. You can install a terminal platform. So a little terminal station here. And this is actually, you know, this is okay, particularly this layout, because the train comes in and it just goes back out again fairly straightforward. This is the optimum terminal station

from my experience in transport fever. Yes, yes. Do not do next slide, please. Yes, do not do next slide. Oh, why'd you do go and do that? Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, now you have a headache. Because immediately you've got conflict.

Yeah. Yeah, you've got trains coming in and then parking up and then getting in the way of the other trains, possibly wanting to go out. You've also got a load of track that's, you know, you've got switches that are kind of slow to traverse. You've got all sorts of gubbies. It's just not, it's lots of conflicting moves.

It's not great. Don't do this. Don't do terminal stations. It's just not great. Your trains can't reverse easily because then you have to do a bunch of spaghetti past like far end of this. Oh, yeah.

You've got passing loops and stuff. Oh, man. So, so next slide. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you have a, just just maybe you have a turn table, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Wait, what are you drawing a dick and balls? Anyway, so next slide. So if you've got multiple services coming in and terminating, again, things get complicated, right? And the challenge is if you've got all sorts of switches crossing over each other, and kind of a bit like what we talked about earlier, as you get further from the station,

unless you want to keep speeds really low, which is obviously bad for journey times and capacity. That's a shit. You want to kind of get, you want, yeah, if you want trains to be kind of accelerating kind of naturally at the station, then your switches are getting longer, which means that they're taking up more space,

which is difficult for, which kind of holds your geometry. It means that you've got to build those more stuff. They're harder to maintain. They're very expensive to install and look after. So this becomes messy. So yes, this can work, but ideally you'd have these like separate situations of trains coming in and then going off in their own direction

and not kind of crossing over and connecting with each other. Next slide, please. Say you have a different situation, right? Oh, I hate to have a different situation. I don't like this. I don't like this one. This one makes me uncomfortable. Yeah.

So you have a through, so the blue ones here are through platforms. Looks like you're going to get on water hammer. Like water hammer 40K. So in this situation, you've got a real mess. You have got, because you've got trains coming into this terminal platforms and they've got to get in the way of the trains

that are potentially doing the normal good fast thing of coming through the platform, stopping and then going without doing anything fancy, which is exactly what you want. So in this situation, the blue railway line, if you like the blue service is good. That's good. Trouble is the red trains are just getting in the way.

They're making a right old mess. And worse, if you're getting further and further, as you get further and further from the platforms, ideally you're going to be increasing the speeds of the switches, which means longer switches, which means blah, blah, blah, as we described. And you can set up some seriously dangerous accidents where you put a train in the way of something

that's going very fast. Yes. Do not do that. These things happen. Yes. Refer to previous and or future episodes. Yes. Yeah. So if you go to the next slide,

I said this is going to be quickfire. This is what you can do, which is better, which is where you have grades, this fancy thing called grade separation. Now, don't let anyone tell you that the highways people invented these first. In fact, the first motorway junctions were based on railroad junctions.

Yes. And so the railroads did this first, which is where if you've got this nice situation, okay, you've got your nice through tracks, and rather than snarling them up and putting a load of complicated crossovers and stuff on them, what you do is you get your trains up to speed, and they can actually join the tracks

kind of going almost at the speed that the through trains would be, and then they can go away and happy days. And likewise, the other direction, you can see there's a train coming in, it leaves the blue line, comes underneath, and comes into the terminal platform. So this is better.

This is not a bad situation if you have to have terminating and through tracks to get... Fiddling with a sort of like Z axis here, like... Yes. Suddenly we've discovered that you can do another dimension. Wow. I don't want to do another Dove edge. Yeah, this is obviously also complicated.

But so I wanted to give just an example of what this actually looks like in Practicati by looking at King's Cross railway station, which fans of well-known turf JK Rowling might know. So we have here some pictures of a before and after at King's Cross. And this is the 1970s. In fact, behind me, I have the original drawings from this for some bizarre reason.

Some nice old guy from the Permanent Way Institution gave me them. I don't know why. Anyway, so here you can see a nice old signal box. On the left and the top left, you can see King's Cross pre-remodeling with nice signal boxes, isn't that lovely? And a horrible, complicated mess of tracks. Look at that, tracks that go everywhere.

But what you don't want to do is allow lots of flexibility. And indeed, this railway station, they were like, well, we're never going to transport this many people again because the railways are in decline. So what they did was bulldoze all that and simplify it a lot. And admittedly, they did electrify, which is good. And that's where you get the top right-hand picture. So you can see the top right-hand picture.

There's less track. You can see the less track. Yeah. They go into the charming little signal box. Yeah, they bulldoze that. And they put a load of OLE up, which made all the like, Gricers who want to take photographs of like steam trains, made all them really angry. Actually, steam trains were gone by this point,

but they still wanted to take pictures of their like slightly shonky modernization erode diesel that like sprayed oil all over them. Oh, who doesn't? Oh, exactly. Oh, exactly. They got the Hogwarts Express out of here. Like, is there a secret track that just like appears? Does it come out of a wall? Like, I don't, I never understood that.

I always like to think that they just like, just like disintegrated it through the, they just demolished it. Reconstitute it. And then just built a new one. They actually cut platform nine and three quarters out and it's like nine and five eighths now. So at the bottom, you can see the same thing.

You can sort of see the differences going on here of like, but also you'll notice that there are more slips on the new layout to try and do more with less space. And actually what they did, they actually closed one of the three tunnels. There were three tunnels and they closed them to down to two tunnels, which was obviously very clever. So if we roll forwards to five years ago,

this was a dreadful idea. So what we decided to do is basically reverse all of this only a few decades later. And you can see that the kind of the, you've got an 11 platform, Kings Cross, lots of S&C to achieve, to get the trains kind of onto the two tracks, sorry, two pairs of tracks,

two gasworks tunneling out. And you can see that the remodeling has kind of extended those out. I was talking about longer switches for a reason. So we've actually got these longer switches so that the stuff happens, the trains can basically, the driver can basically put them, go into full notch and accelerate away.

Oh, you never want to go full notch, good grief. Anyway, that was a Minecraft joke, everyone. That was a Minecraft joke. Anyway, yeah. So the reason for putting this diagram up is more so that I could put these pictures up. So next slide please. And in fact, you can do like a forward and back

because we've got almost in the same position from the helicopter before and after. So like the next slide again is the new layout. And then you can like roll back to the previous layout again. And you can sort of see all the tracks all smushed together. And then the next one, they're kind of more opened out. And actually that everything can go a bit faster because we've opened up another bore of the tunnel.

Anyway, so this is compared to this, the sort of, so for example, compared to Penn Central, this is a very straightforward, simple setup, right? This is despite being like one of the main, like north facing terminals in London, Kings Cross is actually quite a small station. It manages to do quite a lot because it's quite simple, but it is, let's face it, quite a small station.

And the majority of capacity is the main, the reason they could do this is because, wait for it, they built some through platforms for Thameslink underneath the station next door. That's impossible, you can't do that. So rather than terminating a load of suburban trains, you've got through platforms that do, that have like twice the capacity.

So that really helped in simplifying Kings Cross, right? This will be relevant folks. Yeah, so there's Kings Cross, nice little back and forth. Next slide, please. This is just pornography for the benefit of everyone here. Thank you, Gareth. There we go, yes. This is Newcastle East Junction,

which for a very long time, I think possibly undefeated champion, held the record for the most diamond crossings of any way out. Look at those sexy cubs. There was one in Chicago that came close, but I don't think it was this much. This is, yeah, I mean, this is a mess. Like it's beautiful, don't get me wrong. But to maintain this, you require a load of dudes.

And they, yeah, I've got a picture of them actually building this and that, in fact, the same train you can see that like Malard looking thing. It's like just right next to them. It's just right next to them going through a speed. Well, you're like, you're like, you have to cast this in like one piece or some crap. Yeah, so this is like lots of very heavy pieces of metal.

Oh, golly. Yeah, just, yeah. So nowadays you just can't build this. I mean, just, you just. I like how they gave up putting ties in and it's all on like concrete plinths. Yeah, well, it's like, it's worse than that. It's long timber.

So it's like way beams that they've then got to like curve and lay on the truss and wall track. It's so great to just like hear an engineer say, technically, now this cannot be done anymore. Yeah, I would not like it. Basically, all of the things that allow me to sign off on a design as a design lead would, I have no, I just don't have the tools to check

that this would be okay anymore. Is this a single slip on a curve? It is, yeah, it is. Also, what some of my favorite stuff is like, you can look at the length of some of those little bits of rail where, where the tracks are like kind of half crossing over each other. There's, I think there's a little bit just near

where you've scribbled, just a bit further down. You can see there's like a triangle of metal. That's, that's, I can't quite, the John Maddening needs to be a bit further down. If you follow down from your single slip on a curve, you can see there's like a weird little triangle of metal that is intersected by rails going in all directions. And I would not like to be that little piece of metal

because I would get pummeled. Yeah. Anyway, so sorry, I just put this in for a reason. This kind of works on the principle of like faith, I guess. Well, just, you know, the whole thing is like, this is the opposite of the Alice methodology, which is that it's all quite squidgy and you just hope and pray. So the reason I put this in is to show what you can get.

If you've got tracks intersecting each other, this is really horrible and complicated. You don't want this. Also, just two bonus laugh at the UK slides. With girder rail. Once you have girder rail, you can do anything you want. It just drives me off. I learned this from Travis.

Yeah, but try convincing anyone in North America to use girder rail. Having just spent the last two years trying to do that. It's really hard. No one likes girder rail in North America. I say North America. I mean, the Canadians, the Canadians hate this stuff. Oh, I wouldn't have girder rail. Anyway, so like the next slide where we can laugh at the UK.

So relevant to what we've just discussed about Penn Central, here are some, and I really need to emphasize this, brand new renders of the HS2, so the new high speed line in the UK, high speed twos, like feather in the cap, terminals that are in Houston and that are barring underground. This is just Penn Station again. This is, I see what you're doing. This is the same thing a hundred years after the fact.

Yeah, we, what we have done here is the worst thing. We've done the worst thing. And what's even funnier is if we go to the next slide, which is possibly my favorite of all these, invisible, magical oversight development that's invisible. We're going to put a hotel on top of it. Oh my God, I don't need to do that.

Yeah, but no, Alice, as you can see, you can see through the hotel to the clouds on the other side, so it doesn't count. We're going to put a transparent hotel on top of it. And now we're going to have a pile of bird corpses with the photo. Yeah, this thing is going to be covered in those little plastic spikes. Like this is going to have so many, those little anti-pigeon plastic spikes all over it.

Oh my God. Anyway, sorry. That was just me interjecting and like hijacking two slides to laugh at bad decisions that we're making, that we are not learning from our friends in who have to try and use Penn Central. Yeah, and I think that does dovetail with, one of the problems with Penn Station today,

everyone wants to fix Penn Station, right? There's a big obsession with it. People argue online about it all the time. Constantly. People try to do it in real life using real money. And there's a lot of it. And they run into a major issue which no one actually wants to address, right?

Which is, what's the problem they're fixing? Yeah. And this is the hard problem, right? By and large, there's two big theories about what the problem with Penn Station is, which is either A, there isn't enough capacity, or B, there isn't a pretty headhouse. Oh, dear.

Most of the big funding has gone to B. Oh, no. Well, the thing is, right, having a pretty headhouse will increase your capacity because it'll motivate the workers to go faster. Of course, yeah. To be fair, put it back the way it was. We're going to get to that.

So there's been some money spent on operational improvements, right, since the station was replaced with the current basement, right? So there's direct trains for more locations in New Jersey now through the Aldean Connection. There's the West Side Yard, which is this guy over here, where all the Long Island Railroad trains are stored now, making it into a sort of quasi-through station, right?

You got newer. That's good. You got newer and more reliable rolling stock. You got the Empire Connection, so M-Tracks only using one station in New York City now, instead of two, because before they were using both Grand Central and Penn, now all the trains go into Penn, right?

But yeah, I guess to understand what the improvements that have been funded are and what the problems are, we got to actually look at the station and how it operates, right? So here's our tracks. This is why I put King's Cross up earlier, just to, like, compare the differences in scale. Yeah, you just move the difficulty slider up a couple of notches here.

Yeah, so we have several active platforms. This is an M-Tracks-centric map right here, right? So these platforms are in use. The fact that it's so complicated that you have, like, a fucking Mercasa projection of your platform map is like, oh, this one actually really de-emphasizes the size of the fucking...

So we have a lot of platforms here. They serve a lot of different types of trains. You got long-distance trains, right? They idle at the platform a while. All of them terminate here. Some of them are international, like the Toronto train and the Montreal train. Most of them have some weird boarding procedures.

Essentially, they come in from over here is Sunnyside Yard, right? Sunnyside... Yeah, Sunnyside is where the M-Track and New Jersey transit trains are stored. They come in from Sunnyside. They stop at the platform for a while, right? The passengers get on.

The catering gets done, right? They leave. They go to, like, Chicago or Montreal or New Orleans or more Chicago, right? You have intercity trains. Some of them come from Washington, D.C. They stop here. They change crews.

They keep going either... Either if they terminate here, they go to Sunnyside Yard. If they go through, they go out to Boston, right? Some of them start here. They all come here. They pick up passengers. They go down to Washington, D.C. Some of the trains go up this thing

called the Empire Connection here. They go north, right? Then you have the commuter trains. Oh, gosh. Oh, no. And there's a couple of ways they come through. So some of them come in. They go to the platform.

They fart out all their passengers. And then they go back. That's the Long Island Railroad side. Some of them come in. They fart out all their passengers. And then they go into the West Side Yard. Going the other way, New Jersey Transit. Some of them come in.

They fart out all their passengers. They go back. But again, most of them come in. They fart out all their passengers. And then they go to the Sunnyside Yard, right? That's fine. So we have a lot of... You have this sort of distinction

between what you would call a revenue move and a non-revenue move. Hey, it's Justin in post-production. And I don't think I had enough time to explain this adequately. So a move is anytime you move the train. You might be moving it from a station to a station or from the station to a yard

or a hundred other things if you're talking about freight trains, right? A revenue move is one where the railroad is making money, right? Like if passengers or freight are on the train. And a non-revenue move is when the railroad is not making money. That could be a wide variety of things, but in this case means the train is empty. So you want to maximize the time the train

is making revenue moves versus non-revenue moves. In our case, just under about half of all moves in Penn Station are non-revenue, right? The train is empty and going to the yard. Now this is phrased in terms of capitalism, right? We're talking about when the train is making money, but even in a post-scarcity communist utopia, you're going to want to maximize the amount of time

the train is doing something productive versus the time it's idle or unproductive, right? It's because you can't conscript everyone into the communist railroad core, right? The nation needs artists and poets. Anyway, back to the show. Right, so. You're sort of empty, so you're still empty as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I thought that there was a drop. A lot of trains act like they're through trains, but they discharge all of their passengers before they leave. And again, these are very narrow platforms, so it takes a while, right? Fucking miserable. Yes, and there also are...

Operationally, those aren't better, because at least they reduce your conflicting moves. This is true, yes. And you have two different yards for two different operators. Again, Long Island Railroads over here, New Jersey Transit is over here. Soon Metro North's going to be coming in. I don't know how that's going to work.

M-Track is also at Sunnyside over here. You have different power systems. This has third rail and overhead line. Oh, don't do that. So Long Island Railroad's all third rail, New Jersey Transit's overhead line, M-Track's overhead line, except the Empire Connection, which is third rail.

Yeah, well, they run these diesel locomotives with the third rail shoe, which they are supposed to turn on when they're in the station area, and a lot of times they don't. Oh, my God. They're getting sprayed with oil. It's back.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah, they're getting some nice diesel fumes. Yeah, of course, the Westside Yard is also fun, because it's probably the... They use some of the most expensive real estate in the world for storing trains. They built Hudson Yards on top of it now, and so it's fine.

You know, you had the vessel and stuff like that, right? Oh, great. That's all I heard, though. Are they closing? Yeah, that and the Neiman Marcus. I do like the Neiman Marcus. Neiman Marcus probably has a smaller body count, at least.

We can say that before. This is true, yes. So, but yeah, it's a terminal and through station, right? But just as I pointed out earlier in my snazzy rubbish sketches, this is bad, folks. It's a through-menal station. Yes.

Now, if you wanted some real gore, I could put Chicago Union Station up here. Oh, Jesus, no. That's two terminal stations back to back. Join them up, people. Just join them up. Yeah, just do it. You already tore down the center concourse

to put a skyscraper up. Just join the platforms up. So, yeah, the big capacity constraint here are the North River tunnels. There's two tracks. At rush hour, you got 24-ish trains per hour. There's that and there's the bridge called the Portal Bridge over here,

which is notoriously unreliable swing bridge. But yeah, you have capacity constrained by the tunnels. You have capacity constrained by the platform, so the trains got to sit there a while while people sort of file out, right? You got a capacity constrained by the lack of stations. Penn Station is the only one in Manhattan for people commuting from New Jersey and Long Island,

although they're starting to change that when the East Side Access project starts, at least for Long Island. All these trains are very crowded. They're at their maximum length. Most of the Jersey transit trains are now bi-level, right? So, you know, you're far not like 2,000, 3,000 people onto these tiny platforms.

Yeah, I was going to say bi-level is bad. Bi-level is very bad in this situation. Yeah, don't do that. You know, and this has been the case for a long time now. And they're looking at right now since Joe Biden has passed the infrastructure bill. Amtrak wants to shove a lot more inner city service in here, right? Hell yeah, more Amtrak.

I'm a vulgar Amtrakist. I'm like, more Amtrak trains is always good. There definitely needs to be a lot more Amtrak trains because all those fucking trains are full all of the time now. Every single. And they're so expensive, too. My God. But like immediately, my brain is going,

take the commuter trains out of there. Build a new station. Build a new separate station. Ideally, build Manhattan Crossrail. That was a square garden five. But it was so much of a hassle to build the old one that like... What? I don't know.

Gareth, have you considered that New Jersey and New York don't want to have the same commuter trains? It needs to be New York Crossrail. Sort of like a Christie Cuomo like ego fight. Yeah. Speaking of which, let's talk about the first relatively good plan to fix this. And I was saying relatively good plan.

It's kind of, oh boy. I'm hearing Chris Christie in my head going, you have been stopped. Yeah. This looks like a bit of a Crossrail situation. This is a bit of a segregation of commuter services. So this was called access to the region's core. Or there's the second one.

The first one was trans-hudson express or the tunnel. Right? Yeah. I like that. Well, then it became access to the region's core, the arc tunnel. This was sort of a relatively good project that got worse and worse, and then it was canceled.

Right? Standard. Yeah. So this is what was called alternative AA. And so I was not sure of what the operations here were supposed to be like, but the idea was you were going to connect with brand new tunnels and a brand new station cavern, Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal. And you'd have trains that they'd come in from the Northeast corridor,

the commuter trains. They'd go stop at the new platforms and then they would go up to Grand Central. And then it's a little unclear to me as to what would happen then. You just link everything with a big basement, essentially. Yeah, essentially. I think New Jersey's transit trains would then go out to Sunnyside this way. Right?

And apparently the Long Island Railroad would do the same thing, but backwards they'd stop in other stations here. Yeah. And then they would go down to their own yard down here. Right? So we're still not doing through running, but we're pretending a lot better. That's still quite through running.

Yeah. I mean, just do through running, folks. I mean, if you could just unify the rolling stock and the power systems. If we could only do Conrail 2 at the point of a gun. The one thing that's always been missing from these things is just basic coordination between the different transit agencies. The other thing is something more efficient than Penn Station, right? So this was estimated to cost $8.7 billion back in 2003-2005-ish, right?

This was reduced. That's about double that in today's money. Yeah. So that was reduced in scope. That's not that much money, though. Well, it was reduced in scope to, rather than doing all those extra tunnels, you would have a separate tunnel for New Jersey transit that would terminate in a cavern under Penn Station.

And that was it, right? Well, that's going to be less expensive, though, right? It's less expensive, obviously. It's less tunnel boring. You do have the issue that you can't get the trains to the yard now, but well, whatever. Small oversight. Yeah, and there's a little oversight. So now that they reduced the scope, the new cost estimate was $15 billion.

Yeah, classic. Do less with more. So they started construction in 2010, right? They started excavating like the tunnel boring machine pit, right? And a guy named Chris Christie became Governor of New Jersey. Oh, fucking asshole. He initially supported the project, and then he saw the cost overruns, right? And New Jersey was directly on the hook for about $1.8 billion of this, right?

Yeah, and that money needs to go to like building an enormous like Springsteen Museum. Yes. It's a good state. Leave it alone. We need to like slightly increase the size of the font on the Trenton makes the world. Stop it. It's a good bridge. We need to redo the whole bridge with slightly larger letters.

Actually, when they renovated the bridge, they did redo it in slightly larger letters. Oh, my God. You see, I have come to a deep psychic understanding of the state of New Jersey purely by accident, by imagining what a bunch of like blowhard Northeastern Italians would do. And this has worked out for me perfectly. Yeah, that's, you nailed it. So a lot of this was being funded through the American Reinvest and Recovery Act, you know, Obama, right?

Abamna. Abamna. Barack Obama, as the BBC said. But New Jersey was directly on the hook for about $1.8 billion through the New Jersey Turnpike Authority for some reason. And so Christy decided, all right, I'm canceling my share of the project, which effectively canceling the whole project. Then they spent that money on road improvements in Hudson County.

Big Springsteen Museum. Yeah, uh-huh. So two years later. The entire state, the entire state of New Jersey went into New York City and spent that money on a t-shirt at San Gennaro. So having canceled. Yeah, let me get an extra, extra, extra large. Yeah, it'll be $1.8 billion.

Having canceled this project two years later, Hurricane Sandy hit, right? And flooded the existing North River tunnels, right? And then there's been this sort of slow rolling salt corrosion in the concrete ever since, which requires really heavy repairs, which M-Track says they got to take one of the tubes out of service in order to do it properly, right? So now there was an absolute need for two more tunnels.

They could jump a building. Yeah. Oh, no, we're not building them. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's America, Gareth, we're dumb as fuck here. Oh, it's not just, don't worry, we can all be friends together. Yeah.

Well, yeah, the other fun one is that there was a little bit of advanced warning about Hurricane Sandy on account of it was a hurricane, which takes a while to get up there. Don't they land quite a few states south normally? Yeah, this came up from like, I don't remember where Sandy started, but it took Georgia, I think. Georgia or some crap, yeah. I mean, you had like two or three days warning.

Anyway, so they had like a huge amount of their rolling stock stored in a yard in like your long branch, right? Which is protected by one sand dune from the ocean. Oh, no. All their electric locomotives got flooded out and a huge amount of the rolling stock. They just didn't move it. It's like, you could have just a guy, just a guy down there scraping salt off all the electrics.

Standing at the head of an electric locomotive with a harpoon in hand, like grimly reciting rhyme of the ancient Mariner. No, that's it. Yeah, yeah. So, all right. So Chris Christie, of course, canceled the funding for these tunnels that were already under construction. So we have to, luckily, Andrew Cuomo still wanted a project.

Oh, no. I still want a project. That was the dreadful Cuomo. Oh, my God. So Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a U.S. Senator from New York. He was most famous for the Moynihan report where he did phrenology to determine the cause of black poverty back in 1965, right? 1965.

Oh, it's a good year for getting the calipers out. Exactly, right. You know, he blamed poverty on sort of ghetto culture and the existence of the welfare state. Also, one of the architects of LBJ's war on poverty, which maybe is why it didn't work that well. Okay. Love a great society, guy. Oh, my God.

They're all so cool. But he also thought a major issue with Penn Station was the lack of a pretty headhouse, right? Because he remembered, back when he was a boy, in shining shoes in the Penn Station concourse, right? Fuck my ass, dude. The solution. Even when America does meritocracy, it still finds a way to fuck everything up.

So the solution was, what if we glass in the courtyard of the James Farley post office across the street from old Penn Station, right? Because it covers the end of some of the platforms, right? Platforms which are used for Long Island Railroad and M-Track, right? But not New Jersey Transit, which has the worst capacity constraints. Fuck those guys, right? Oh, yeah. Through them.

And this project languished for a long time until champion of the people Andrew Cuomo wrote in, right? I think he got this. He'd be given an opportunity to fuck with the people of New Jersey and also be photographed opening something. Yes. So now, what does this concourse do, right? And I think maybe...

Makes it more annoying to wait for a train. Gives you somewhere to shop in New York City, which previously didn't have a lot of stores. No, there's no stores in this concourse yet. Nope, there's not. They haven't opened that part yet. Oh, wait, what? Yeah.

Yeah, they're still working on the stores part. You go in here and there's nothing. You can't even get your like shoes shined by a future senator. No, no, you can do that at 30th Street Station, though. So what you have are you have some escalators, right? That go down to various platforms and those platforms are very thin. If you're in the box here, you can get down to the M track platforms, right? And then these extra platforms.

Fuck you. They've got some gamer lights on there on the top, though, on the roof thing. You've got some RGB on there. Oh, yeah, they've got some RGB, yeah. And so the general idea here, right? You know, you get a nice glass roof space to wait for M track. It's very similar to the philosophy of old Penn Station, in that this is only for long distance trains, really, and inner city trains.

So what they did was they learned none of the good lessons and they decided to implement everything that didn't work about the original concourse. Question mark. There's another problem, which is this. All these escalators are at the end of the platform. Okay. So that when you board the train, rather than boarding at the middle

and walking a short distance to your seat. Standard practice. You board at the end and walk a much farther distance to your seat. Fucking stupid. That's not good for passenger flow. I take it no one did any passenger flow model in this public design. I feel like the main result of this is probably reduced theoretical capacity. But again, because they do all the crew changes here.

All those trains are sitting there for 10 minutes regardless. It kind of doesn't matter. But if you were getting serious about really frequent service on the northeast corridor, what do you do with this concourse other than get rid of it? It's actually worse than Penn Station, right? Because at least Penn Station, if you bought a ticket, you could go into your gender segregated waiting room and wait there and sit down, right?

This doesn't have unisex waiting rooms. It doesn't have gender segregated waiting rooms. It doesn't have any waiting rooms. So I think I'm not sure if there's regular ticketed seating. There's ticketed seating in the old new Penn Station concourse. This is the new location of this. Yeah, exactly. This is the location of the new Club of Sella, right?

Which you can get into if you have either a Sella tickets or long distance tickets. Club of Sella sucks. It's not worth it. They don't even have booze. Noted. They don't. If I'm going into the club, I want booze. They don't have booze.

They have free snacks and coffee. What do they have? Coffee. Great. And they bring you down to the platform in an elevator, which I guess is nice, although I bet in this one they don't. Because I don't know where the elevators would be. I dislike Club of Sella.

Ticketed seating also sucks. It's just trying to rip airport shit, where it's like, I will give you like a VIP lounge. Give me a bar in the train station I can sit at and relax and wait. That's what I want. Bring back Bridgewater, you bastards. Yeah, you need a Weatherspoons. That's why I used to do an upper east of the station

when I was catching the train. There was a Weatherspoons in the station. You could sit in the Weatherspoon. This is what Weatherspoons was still cool. It's so right. Explosion face guy. This is one of the few aspects of British culture that I would defend here is you can absolutely get drunk

in Weatherspoons waiting for your train. Listen, Europe and a lot of other places do it better than us, but we do it better than you in this one. Yeah, I mean, this has been... A lot of people focus a lot on like, well, there's no seating in here, but there's also like 10 million other problems going on which are based on like basic train station function.

And the other thing is, Cuomo wanted this to be his signature project. He was very, very demanding while his project was underway. And this is also... It's half about the train station. It's half about a land grab to support the rest of the Hudson Yards development. They wanted to lease the whole building to Facebook.

They were doing a whole bunch of crap. They were doing a massive work of public art that makes you want to kill yourself. Well, God forbid you use a post office which is right above a rail corridor. Maybe you could run mail by rail. No, we're going to get rid of the post office. We're going to put Facebook in there.

And that's fucking great. Well, the thing is right, like New York City known as mailing anything to or from it. And if they can use an Amazon distribution center. Yeah, I mean, certainly not to other cities which also have former post office directly next to the train station like Philadelphia or Washington, D.C.

No, we've got to build the like Amazon and like UPS fulfillment centers out of town. But why did Cuomo... Cuomo was Cuomo-ing all over the people who were running this project. Most notably Michael Evans. Did you guys want that? He was Cuomo-ing all over them.

He was Cuomo-ing all over them. I mean, he was being a huge fucking asshole. He wanted to get this thing. He wanted to get it delivered in 2020. And his solution to that was just screaming at his underlings, right? And it was apparently bad enough that the project lead, Michael Evans,

fucking killed himself in late 2020. Jesus. Yeah. And yeah, it was... And it's a shame because, you know, I guess he believed in the project and kind of it's a bad project. Yeah, but still it doesn't exactly like Warren being...

Hounded to an early grave. That's one of the worst people in American politics, which is fucking saying something. And it's fucking... It's disgusting, man. It's like I can't... I don't know. Now, they did get it open in 2020.

December 30th, 2020. What a deposit, baby. Oh my gosh. Nice. Yeah. And it's still only half open. I don't believe they've opened the retail section yet. You know, but...

You know that's a failure on the capitalism is you can't even spend money if you want to. Yeah. Like it's supposed to be the one thing you can do anywhere and you can't even fucking consume. But I got to say in terms of like, at least how I use Penn Station, right? Because when I go to Penn Station,

I have a single-minded determination, which is I'm going to buy two gigantic cans of beer, which I'm going to take on the train and drink on the way to Philadelphia, right? That is possible in the old concourse. It is not possible in the new concourse. And I believe...

What reason do you have to be in there? Yeah, exactly. As a result, consequently. And I believe M-Track's intention is to eventually force all the M-Track passengers into here. But it's bad. But it's bad and I don't trust that there's going to be... Slag with a star and two big cans of IPA

and it just says, come and take it. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but not ironically. I don't trust that they're going to put a shitty newsstand in here with giant cans of beer, of which in the old concourse, there's like 50 of. Yeah, thank God.

So yeah, I'm going to avoid using this concourse until I'm absolutely forced to. But there has been a recognition that two more tunnels are needed. So let's talk about Gateway and Penn South. Oh, boy. All right. What the fuck is this?

Yeah, it's pixels. It's pixels and I stole it from trains.com, which... Is that water? Yeah, photo bucket. Photo bucket, watermark. All right, so they want to put two new tunnels in. Under the North River. And they have the funding for it finally.

This is not going into construction, right? So the basic conceit here is we have two new tunnels for M-Track and New Jersey Transit, but mostly New Jersey Transit, which will terminate into Penn South. Hooray. Which is going to be underneath existing buildings, which are all going to get demolished to put in this cut and cover station,

including the last part of the original Penn Station complex standing, the powerhouse. Oh, no. Oh, dear. And, you know, they go into these sub-ended platforms and then question mark. Because... And as we know, mixing through and terminal platforms is...

Oh, that's great. Well, the first thing you might notice is that these platforms don't connect to New Jersey Transit's yard. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I also don't see any great separation

to ensure that the operations don't impact on the capacity of the through station. Yep. Yeah. Oh. What about that? Fix it in post. This...

This... The tunnels, like, start somewhere over here. So, I mean, it doesn't really go into... I'm a little bit confused as to the actual track layout, because I think this is still in flux. They may be getting rid of Penn South, but I'm not sure, right? But the current situation is basically centered around,

we're going to minimize disruption of existing services while also minimizing the amount of new service we can provide at the maximum cost. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's the British sort of way as well. That's what we've been doing with our changes to railway plans.

It's good stuff. Mm-hmm. So, it's a disease of the mind. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. You're going to make it more expensive and worse.

That's the fundamental thing. Make it more expensive and worse. That'll be, yeah. The idea is if they build Penn South and there'll be enough capacity, they can start doing open heart surgery on the actual station, right? Because, I mean, one of the problems,

especially with A-interlocking back here, it's called A-interlocking, is that, you know, they put a bunch of buildings on top of it. So, it's very difficult to reconfigure the tracks at all. Mm-hmm. Reconfiguring platforms. Again, that's very difficult. Because, you know, one of the perennial things

is let's just widen the platforms and have through trains. And that's... It's very difficult. It's doable. But because the stations are running at the absolute bleeding edge of capacity, actually going in and doing it would be very difficult. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, anyway, this is a project. So, how will Penn South relieve Penn Station, given that they're all terminal, and Penn Station is primarily through? I would answer that with question mark. My guess is... That's a totally different use case. My guess is eight New Jersey transit trains come in.

And then that's eight viewers. And then they're buried there. They're entombed there. Oh, they just die. Definitely never got a key door. It's like platform nine and three quarters. They are vaporized. Outside of the train station, yes.

You come into these stubborn platforms, the train is reduced to a soup like a marginate, and then the next train comes in. So, this was Andrew Cuomo project, which, again, they may get rid of the Penn South aspect and just build the new tunnels. This is still in flux. It's budgeted at $14.5 billion,

which, A, is slightly less than A.R.C. And then the slightly shrunk version of the original class. And if you can get a job doing union labor, building those tunnels, you can make a lot of money. But they were going to use this theoretical extra capacity to start really renovating the main concourse, right? So, here's some renders that came out of the Cuomo administration. This fallout too, FMV.

I really like how it's fairly clear that they didn't use an extended font. They just took a regular font and squashed it. Just a fucking design by Biff Tannen here. It's funny because there's not actually any real passenger improvements here that are visible. It's just they put a sign in front of Madison Square Garden. I'm using Word Arc.

And track the necks. That is our answer. We must rid ourselves of the New York necks. The other big improvement is they're putting much taller buildings around it. So, this is... I was going to say, are all of the buildings we can see new? These would all be new.

This is where the powerhouse would be, or maybe this one. This is where the Hotel Pennsylvania was, which is being demolished right now. That's the other original part of the Bend Station complex. That's also Statler of Statler and Waldorf. And then even if they do all of this, that this is before the NYPD gets their hands on it

and decide to put in a bunch of big, concrete counterterrorism planters to stop someone from driving a truck into that big glass frontage. It's already covered with those. Oh, my God. Great. Perfect.

It's going to be some kind of concourse that's behind the arena. It all looks very modern. It still looks like a horrifically constrained site, which is completely inadequate. That's the theme of this. As long as this arena is here, there's very little you can do.

Basically, what we need is Casart's big, giant hand again. Now, what if we leave it to the private sector? Let's not do that. Maximum efficiency. Let's not do that. So this is a company called Ameristar Rail. Their idea is they want to privatize the Northeast Corridor. So here's their idea.

Suck my dick and die. Here's their idea to increase platform capacity. Oh, I do not like that. That's bad. I'm seeing this cross-section, and I'm just realizing what that is and what it says. It says platform, flat cars. That's a great way for a bunch of people to lose a foot.

I'm also very interested in the people in the exit only line who are all doing the soy walk. What you do, their proposal, is we maintain a couple tracks for rapid intercity service. This has nothing to do with commuter service, which is the fun part. You have tracks for rapid intercity service with very frequent trains.

We implement what's called Spanish solution boarding. So you exit on one side of the train, and you enter on the other side. Yeah, I've done it. It can work on commuter trains. In order to do that, they need to extend the platforms. Extending the platforms in-pen would solve a lot of problems.

Just in terms of moving trains through more quickly, because people could board and exit faster without clogging up the stairwells. So their idea to do this is to roll in some flat cars, put some deck planking on top. And that's the platform extension. Kind of into it, actually. That's so rough-shot and terrible.

Imagine rolling a wheelchair across this. Yeah. So I'd be like sort of a semi-permanent surface. I understand. M-Track has a few of these platform flat cars, actually, for temporary track work. This would be like permanent until you could get a more permanent solution.

And I'll say you do have issues with the columns here, which might block doors, which would be bad. Oh, my. But yeah, so this was their idea. I don't know. I don't hate it as like a stop-gap solution, but also you should be figuring some more permanent solution. And also this is, again, missing the point.

My answer to this diagram is simply, do you not feel shame? Do you not feel shame that this is your incremental solution? Aye. If it works, it works. It might not work. Yeah, the trouble is, right. Okay, so British Railway Brain, which I have, is every temporary solution should be assumed

as being the long-term solution. Yeah. And let me tell you, this would be a horrible long-term solution. They would never get rid of it, bud. Well, it'd be pretty... Yeah, that's, as soon as those are there, they ain't going anywhere. This is just disabled people.

Yeah. That's true. The other problem is you're also... The entire British like rail sector is a temporary solution to how to move tin out of fucking tin quarries. Not entirely wrong. It's just outgrown from there, yeah. It's true.

I can confirm. The other thing here is you're doing this solution to the intercity trains, which are not like the capacity problem as of yet. Maybe if they ran more of them. Right. All of the big bi-level like New Jersey transit trains, these are not being...

They're not getting the little platform flat cuts. Oh, no. No. They continue as normal. I mean, you do... You kind of have the reverse situation where the intercity train should be bi-level and the commuter train should be single level.

Yeah. That would be the sane and sensible solution. We do the backwards of that. Because again, the dwell time is not as important for intercity trains or long distance trains. No, and it means you can run... Because the dwell, you can then run fewer of them, which gives you more space for the commuter.

Right. Right. It's not that complicated. It's all backwards. So this is one solution. And then you have like... Let's talk about the solution. Everyone's always talking about...

Well, what if you just rebuilt the original headhouse? Oh, no. Yes. Yes. Yes. I will not be dissuaded. Return. What if we returned?

Put it back the way it was, brick by goddamn brick. Uh-huh. So these were some renders that were created for the National Civic Art Society by something that I used to think was an architecture firm, but now realized was actually a graphic design firm. Ew. Worse.

Right. The National Civic Art Society, you might remember, are the people who were really chuffed when Trump did that classicism executive order. 02:38:20,600 --> 02:38:21,880 The weird Trump freaks. Yeah. Which, you know, that thing, that thing, that...

Well, A, that executive order wouldn't have done anything, but also B, like, yeah, this weird as hell hell, right? The so-tread that they even wanted, like, call it Pennsylvania Station. Like, you have to say the whole thing, like a tribe called Quest. You do. Yes.

You have to find an assassin, baby. And this is, again, this is one of those situations where you look at the problem, like, we don't have the nice headhouse as opposed to... The station has a major capacity constraint, which we don't have... We can't do very much about without, you know, major surgery on the station, right?

They do... You can see here, they do suggest wider platforms, which would help. You got escalators. You got probably a generally better passenger experience. But the other thing here is that if you rebuilt the original station, even with those improvements, you'd still be well below the passenger capacity needed.

I mean, if you... You could do it, but I think you would have to take out the other half of the station and rebuild the second concourse. Like, it would not re... Or build an identical concourse to the first one. You would not... It would not be something that was historically accurate. It'd be a pastiche.

I mean, the original was a pastiche. Let's get real. I mean, it's all steel with plaster over it, right? And I mean, I don't hate this idea, right? But if it's not executed well, it's going to be an embarrassment. I'll say it. I hate it.

Just work out what you need this railway station to do. And then work... Why is it all like, oh, let's look... Oh, it's just so backwards. It's so backwards. Why do we do this in the Anglesphere? Why do we do this? Because we're very dumb.

You know that. This is true. Yep. I don't think these guys have any momentum anymore because, of course, we've got to keep Madison Square Garden there. That's the priority one. Contract the nicks. And the Rangers.

I fucking hate the rags, too. And so you have some alternative proposals. This is from the Regional Plan Association, right? Which is really where you start to have to look at the problem a little bit more holistically, right? See, because you ask, is the problem Penn Station or is the problem, how do we get more rail capacity into Manhattan? Then you have a lot more options, right?

Because maybe the place you start is at not Penn Station. And then when you move more people in through an alternate way in, like something, I don't know, maybe fucking go back to ferries even. I don't give a shit. Do flying taxis. You could just do a proper S-Bahn. If you do an S-Bahn, you just do an S-Bahn. You really start to reconfigure some of these commuter servers

so they work with each other. You build a new station and say lower Manhattan, even, I don't know, upper Manhattan, right? Connects to different subway lines. It can really shove through a lot of trains really quickly and is built for that task. And then once you've moved a significant amount of that capacity out of Penn Station into something which can handle the actual passenger loan needed,

then you can start saying, how do we improve this station, the Penn Station? I really like the line you have about not doing open-heart search, right? Yeah. I was actually from someone on our Discord who I think would prefer not to be named. So, yeah, I guess that's the problem with Penn Station, is that you're focusing on Penn Station. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah.

Don't do something else. Do something else. Actively, do not listen to this podcast. 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360

02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360

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02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,360 --> 02:42:22,360 02:42:22,440 --> 02:42:24,360 Yes, don't listen to this podcast.

Don't listen to your brain. Yeah. It's a stupid question. We've all spent too long trying to answer. Yeah. Now, what we could do instead is we could reconfigure your transit system from Stuttgart and still achieve the same effect. We are going to Stuttgart.

We are going to make Stuttgart's Railway very good. This is something that a lot of the German, I want to say the Green Party, really hates Stuttgart 21. But you should not listen to Green Parties on rail infrastructure. Every time I looked at this project, I was like, that's a pretty good project. We should be doing that. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah. I mean, they've done what you've just described in the crayons slide before, which is they've kind of taken a bigger look at what actually needs to happen to achieve this. So they're building a new station. They're essentially building a new station underneath the existing one. They're perpendicular to it. And it's a through station rather than a terminal station. And it's in fact got half the number of platforms,

and it has 50% more capacity. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing what you can do when you actually design for high capacity, as opposed to trying to sort of tweak around the edges. And I don't know, it demolished two blocks of buildings for stop-ended platforms that don't really work very well. And it's worth saying like two, you could have a four-track heavy, kind of high density, kind of through route, going through Manhattan, right?

Going through lower Manhattan. You could build a platform with, you could have two four-track. You could have a four-track platform that would have, honestly, absolutely immense capacity. You could get 120,000 passengers per hour per direction through that sort of, you know, only four tracks is all you need. It's just that you conveyor belt it. You have long trains, you know, 12-car trains or whatever even longer if you like.

And just absolutely design for that. And go for like a deep bore so you don't need to demolish stuff up top other than maybe shafts. Like, you could do this. It's not beyond the wit of humankind to achieve this. You got really good bedrock. You just have to build a second train station and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. I always thought, you know, the way you would, you know, if I were

mayor slash god of New York City, I would, you know, you'd link Hoboken Terminal with Atlantic Terminal. You have a station in like Washington Square. You'd have a second Manhattan station, you know, you'd have another station under, you know, Brooklyn and you would try and unify whatever the highest ridership New Jersey transit line was with the highest ridership Long Island Railroad line with, you know, very high frequency trains that would use these tracks. You know what I'd do if I were mayor stroke god of New York City?

Sure. I would rig the ice market. Yes. And I would contract the nicks and I would contract the nets. I would get rid of the aisles and I would all the aisles actually play out on Long Island again. And I would get rid of the the Rangers and I would get rid of the New York Giants. So when you say get rid of, do we mean sort of like North Korean failed international football team kind of like get rid of?

I would be released to other teams. However, their owners would be in front of Madison Square Garden. And I would make Penn Station cool. And there would be a giant statue to me. I am bordering on the delirious. It's been so long. Let's face it. If oh, it's been so long.

It's this is a long one. Let's face it. I could I could try and be mayor and or God of New York. But all I'd end up doing is doing the like the the like Scottish slash British guy thing of just meandering around looking at everything going, holy shit, this place is like a city, isn't it? And just being lost. And then like American like like locals would laugh at me a lot

and would possibly get me to say things. That's pretty much that would be my. I think what you need to do is to become a single man. You would be a hit in bars. Become like the Lord Mayor of New York City. Yes. Yeah. You just get like a big chain.

And then you get to engage in all the like various. Yeah. Yeah. And engage in all the like various local folk ways and customs and traditions. Wouldn't that make it like not to think about that would make it like a tiny square mile of like the financial district though. Yeah. Take over what truly church owns.

Oh, yeah. Also, I don't like the end of Alice's description there. Alice, I don't I don't didn't like the last bit. I can't not think about trains. It's not a thing. I'm not wired that way. They made me this way. So anyway, well, what did we fucking learn from this?

Trains. We spent three hours answering the wrong question. Always duct tape your mic cable into that. 02:47:31,480 --> 02:47:32,840 Thanks for enough advice. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's the issue is we spend all this time thinking about Penn Station and what we learn is stop thinking about Penn Station.

Yes. It's sort of a Zen cone, right? Like the answer to the question is not to contemplate the question in the first place. Yes. We've achieved we've achieved Buddha nature in Penn Station. On the Daniel Patrick Moynihan concourse, we've achieved Buddha nature. I'm there meditating on the floor because there's nowhere else to meditate. Completing bitterly about it.

He is right, though. Yeah. When you post this on YouTube, it'll just immediately disappear. Absolutely. Total total non attachment to all things, including getting your train on time. Yeah, you are. So so a Buddhist monk walks up to a falafel stand and the guy says, oh, what can I get your boss and make me one with everything?

Yes, yes. Now, in order to annoy Alice as much as possible, this will continue for another four and a half. All right, now time to talk about St. Louis Union Terminal. Bye, everyone. Bye, bye, bye. All right. Are we really ending it? Fuck, I was ready to go.

I should say you perked it up. Yeah, this is the delirium that I gave.