Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 102: Penn Central (Part 3)

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

more like conn'd rail sean's twitter: https://twitter.com/as_a_worker the antifada: https://fans.fm/theantifada sources for this series: The Men Who Loved Trains (Rush Loving Jr.) and Wreck of the Penn Central (Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen)   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

This is I cast started. Yes, it started. It started. I want to get this nice, crisp, can crack two weeks. We already forgot how to do all of this shit. I was about to say, I need to really get that. Hogs. Welcome back. It's been. It's been too long. We missed you. Alice missed you. Yeah, I missed you. These, these two plus guests, plus Sean.

Plus from the antifreeze. Hello, Sean from the antifreeze. I didn't miss anybody. No, these guys, they didn't give a shit, but I missed you. And that's the important thing. Hello and welcome to all of you. Fuck. If we forgot how to do the introduction. I did. I forgot which one of us does it.

I forgot the name of the podcast. Jesus. I'll have some senior moments here on episode. I'll talk about my dad. My dad. We're all old now. I had surgery and recovering from that surgery. You're making us old. It didn't work very well.

Some old. It was, it was. Yeah, because what was it? Liam got COVID. Yeah, I had a mental breakdown on my birthday and Alice had her hair done. Yeah, I had my hair done. Alice and women do be having their hair done. That's right.

And me, I'm just normal. I'm just a normal guy. Tweeting about Marxism into the picking Twitter beast with conceptual James. Yes, sir. Just ratio and University of Chicago economists. Just a normal ass. Thanks. Do the intro.

Don't do the intro. Hello, and welcome to will. There's your problem. See, he likes me better. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. This is reverse sexism. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice. Oh, Kelly. I'm the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam.

You remembered. No, I remembered. Oh, hi. I'm Liam Anderson. I'm the one who's been screaming at you more often than not for the podcast, but my pronouns are he and him. And we have a guest. Yeah, hi.

I returned my name is Sean KB, and I use he and pronouns. And I'm here talking right now. That's a great question. We're here to fucking providing finally going to do 10 central part three and be rid of this railroad. Oh, you forgot about the super bonus, Alice. I'm going to kill myself. I genuinely I thought this is a podcast about engineering disasters,

and we managed to spin the existence of one railroad into five hours of content across two months, three months. We're getting my understanding is we're going to try to get to 10 hours today, right? I don't think we're going to quite hit that unless you include the Penn Station rant. I don't know that that's for pure, not to go all talking baseball for a minute, but for purists of the podcasting game, which I don't think we really are. I'll give it an honorary 10 hours because it's also taken metaphorical years off my fucking life.

All right. Well, I've blocked out the rest of this evening and into part of tomorrow to record this. So I'm in for my my Corinne and Megan are at the fucking bar right now. I'm just sitting here with a dewy, crushed watermelon. Drank for my own death. It's a it's it's a canned cocktail, Alice. I'm a fancy boy now. Hmm.

Interesting. We're all passing stuff. Money's ruined him. Life of a podcaster's life is not an easy one, as it turns out. Doing the like a sunpike, a swag walk towards a big pallet of canned cocktails. That is how I choose to live my life by and large. We did two episodes on Penn Central in its first two years. Now for the third year of Penn Central.

No, no. Now we're going to do 30 years in one episode. All gas no breaks, baby. That's fucking good. Yeah. But but first we're going to do the goddamn news. I still got it on the drops at least. Yes, girl.

One billion dollars and a piece of the true cross are now at the bottom of the Black Sea. The piece of the true cross thing is really funny. Yeah, I guess we're going to have to do an orthodox church episode as a sequel to Protestantism. I suppose this shit doesn't work either. Sorry, folks. It's time to convert to Catholicism. And the words you are doing is like skeptic thing of being like, listen, empirically, this shit does not work.

He's a true cross on the ship. Didn't do shit. Seems as though making icons and artifacts like a primary part of your religious order might have been a mistake. It's crazy how they put it. What do you like it's idol tree like at all Christianity is idol worship. But like idolatry, whatever will come for me. You know, I pronounce the St. Joseph word of McGeece the other day instead of magis.

McGeece. Yeah, yeah. I'm not very bright. It's my it's my problem. So this is the the Russian guided missile cruiser Moskva. Or what? Dumbass hour. Yeah, which happened, which was the flagship of the of the Black Sea fleet,

which is bombarding Ukraine. It was, in fact, the ships that the guys on Snake Island were like, go fuck yourself too. The contractor flipping the house next to me and Philly. He has he has a Ukrainian Trident on his like 2001 Chevy Venture minivan. Yep. That's the type of guy. That's a thin blue line sticker. Yep.

And then he has a Russian warship. Go fuck yourself. Sticker. Yep. Wow. Yeah. Is he a Ukrainian extraction or is he like an Irish guy? Just another huge dub for that kind of guy.

Is Russia not Ukraine's England? I mean, basically. Could be. All Ukrainians Irish spiritually. And like it's a country mostly made of bogs. They speak the same language kind of, but it's like mutually unintelligible. Did several previous genocides. Yeah.

No, it's totally. This is it. This is it. Russians are Brits. Ukrainians are the Irish. That's what happened. And depending on who you choose to believe, either the Ukrainians sank the ship with two missiles, or it just kind of blew up and sank on its own, which is the Russian line.

And also that they're not mad about it. That is objectively funny for each ship. It's again, another reason why Russia is just large Britain. So this thing is now at the bottom of the sea. It's very, it's very funny. And I honestly, I could believe the Russian narrative that this just happened by accident also, but I think it's more edifying to believe that a guy called like Khrisha fired a missile at this thing over the horizon and just blew up.

It's great. Wasn't it, wasn't it? You guys that did an episode about the, what was it, the Kursk? Yeah, Milo. Yes, Milo. Yeah, that was so it was a formative moment in Putin's career as a politician when that submarine went down. Yeah, strangely, all of his disasters really seem to be linked to the Russian Navy.

Maybe he's been like cursed. I don't know. Kursk, yeah, yeah. They should have sold it to PepsiCo, man. Didn't China buy one of the then Soviet Union's aircraft carriers? I believe so. By lying that it was going to be used as a floating casino in Macau? I believe that's true.

I can be wrong. Fantastic. And I'm sure someone in the comments is going to correct us. I love naval history. It's great. I love to be corrected by the comments. This is the greatest moment in military history until a couple of days ago when the US Army accidentally triggered an airspace alert over the US Capitol because their plane

full of display parachutists failed to answer the radio. And so everyone thought they were going to do 9-11-2 into the Capitol. Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God. Go Navy beat Army. It was literally the US Army parachute display team parachuting into a nationals game. And they, yes, quite literally, this is the funniest fucking thing. The reason why they weren't identified is because they used the wrong frequency.

They used the one for rotary wing aircraft, which means that in the year of our Lord 2022, the they them US Army literally did identify as a helicopter. That's pretty funny. Just perfect. Just incredible. So it's been it's been sort of a week of competence worldwide. Well, the good news is that we, of course, thrive on that competence. Of course.

Yes. And not on idiots being idiots. We turn that into podcast and we pass the savings on to you, the consumer. We do. Come on down to Alice's big house of podcast discounts warehouse. Yes. In other news, I don't think this was well reported on. No, you may not have seen this.

Oh, so there's this like movie awards thing. And one of the actors slapped a comedian who was hosting. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. That's that. I mean, that sounds like it would have been a pretty big deal. But like, I haven't heard about it.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny for centa millionaires to just sort of beat the shit out of each other. Then it's fine. I have taken the the official and I feel comfortable in saying this is these. This is, you know, my general philosophy is that it's funny to watch billionaires rock each other's shit. I think that Will Smith probably should have committed to to to like a blow to the head. More than just like a closed fist.

Blow to the head. The response that he got, like a shitload of his projects being canceled, he's banned from the Academy for 10 years. He had to make this like groveling apology. He may as well have done because all of the writing about this is like he fucking stabbed the guy. Yeah, exactly. No, if, if, if, you know, if you insult, if someone insulted Korea in front of everybody. In front of like millions of people on TV.

Yeah, live TV. Alopecia is a medical condition. Like, yeah, there's, there's a lot of what I think is generally like white people commenting on it. There's like racist undertones for sure. Sure. But yeah, I would absolutely rock your shit. Like I personally would rock your shit and I'd be happy to take whatever comes with that. That's in keeping with like the Liam Brand, right?

And the second they let you into the cave, man. Yeah. The second they let you into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you're Alice, I'm Jewish. Getting the Oscar packets every year, just like by virtue of your consideration. And I'm just like, haven't seen that. Haven't seen that. None of these are once upon a time in America.

Why is it that like every, like there's one vote in every category for ambulance next year? And it's like, that's Liam today. Oh, I'll never forgive him for what he did to Taylor Swift. But I really like Jake Gyllenhaal as an actor. Just show up to the birthday party, man. It's not that big a deal. He is a great actor and I do like Jake Gyllenhaal playing like weird guys. So, yeah, I'm excited to say it.

For what it's worth, I don't think there's a single person within the city limits of Philadelphia who has not said, oh, yeah, Will Smith was right to do that. If there is, then they're going to be a stand up comedian because those are the people who have been the whiniest motherfuckers about that. You think it's so fucking dangerous. Here's some actual danger. A little bit. A little tiny bit of danger.

You might have to go see your dentist. Did you see the fucking tweet that was like, if he had done this to Betty White, it's like, yeah, but she's dead. The best genre of tweet that came out of this are the one that made me most prone to wanting to throw my fucking phone across the room was, this is what Trump did to America by normalizing that. 00:13:12,560 --> 00:13:16,960 It would have been if Ted Cruz on the debate stage would Trump what after his life was like,

all right, motherfucker took off his shirt and the first time I ever respected Ted Cruz. That's what pissed me off was like, you know, he goes after your wife and you roll over for him like a dog. When what Ted Cruz should have done was make sure Trump had a nice time on the debate stage. It's a matter of time, right? Until we see two candidates, secret service details have to pull them apart from a slap fight. And I can't wait.

I think that's going to be a moment in American history. That's authentically American politics. It's a great metaphor for it. It's just like two fucking out to lunch center millionaires, like just vaguely slapping at each other. Is anyone going to be upset if we go back to the mid 19th century and Congress people start beating each other with Keynes again? As long as the problem with that is that some the guy who did the cane beating was a

secessionist. Yeah, the ends were bad, but the means were yes, yes, yes. We'll have campaigns that consist entirely of rolling a very large ball again. It's going to be it's going to be like the stakes instead of like the 19th century abolitionism versus slave power, whatever the stakes are going to be like you support woke capital versus you like are trying to get like someone's going to get like someone's going to get like beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate chamber for like not calling Disney pedophiles.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I believe that all Pennsylvania said it. We have fucking Dr. Oz running for Senate in Pennsylvania. Oh, that's you guys. Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it fucking sucks, Sean. There's there's like the attack here.

The attack on like he's on television dancing with Michelle Obama. And I'm just like, what the fuck is this? Like it's the Obama's a fucking, you know, whatever, terrible person anyway. Like what are we doing? That's all the same class. It's great. That said, pack a fucking lip and you might have my vote. No, I think because because Bernie said that he's probably going to run again.

Like he's going to run again if Biden does and Biden is almost certainly going to run. So I think the move here is just when Bernie is going into the debates, we just like slip him a set of brass knuckles just to get the score. Bernie really going to run again. That's what he said. That's what he said. He said, I'm laughing actually to me. This is funny.

I'm like, I'm so totally grimly resigned to it that I'm like, you know, that bit in like an Anthony Bourdain show, where like a senator, like, yeah, yeah. You know, I thought he was only running if Joe Biden was not going. But Joe Biden was the other way around. He's going to run if Biden runs. Oh, I thought he was going to run if Biden didn't run tail. I thought that's what it was like. So you know that bit in like an Anthony Bourdain show where like he sees someone,

you know, put a hot sauce on something. I put ice cream on something. He's like, all right, yeah, fuck it. Let's go. That's that's that's how I feel about Bernie in in 2024. It's just like, yeah, okay. At this point, just hire us. We will be better than your 2020 campaign staffers.

That's true. That is true. Hire us. You're like vermin supreme or something. Ross, you're quiet. Am I quiet? You sound okay to me. Oh, does he?

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Mike thing. I forgot about the fucking Mike thing. Something happened. No, I can hear you, Ross. We can hear you. Leave it. Leave it.

Leave it. Leave it. Leave it. All right. I thought we had solved this problem. The lesson, the lesson for Bernie, right, is not that it was a mistake to install a bunch of like careerist podcast grifters in his campaign. It was that they were the wrong careerist podcast grifters.

It should have been us. We would have done a better job. I mean, yeah, I'll buy that. See, here's the thing. I'm an only child, so my arrogance sort of knows no bounds. Same. Yeah. Sean, do you have siblings?

I do. Yeah, I have a brother. Oh, okay. I don't have the same arrogance. Yeah, no, I highly recommend it. Sean, kill your brother. Yeah, no, I would absolutely like run up the campaign into the ground. And I would I would make sure Bernie posed like bare chested,

packing a lip, like all sorts of depraved shit. She's like, Mr. Sanders, you're 98 points behind the polls. However, you would do the Herman Cain smoking out again, but with Bernie. Yeah. Yeah, you could put it. No, you could put us on Biden's campaign and really tank it to be funny. Get there in front of a camera and say, I'm pretty sure Joe Biden took a shit on my friends, friends toilet.

You know, here's the thing. I begrudgingly like Joe Biden in that I find him very amusing. Total senility is like a huge asset for him, it turns out. I just like everyone in this area has a Joe Biden story. Yeah, exactly. Like he like Corinne was at a Flyers game once and wandered into his suite and the secrets are and her her not her niece, but her very young cousin wandered into Joe Biden's suite at the Flyers game.

And apparently he was just happy as a clam to like interact with people. I like begrudgingly like, yeah, dude, like I know he's a war criminal, but I like that he's just like, I'm going to be president and I'm going to eat ice cream. And I've got to like launch thermonuclear war. If so, as I'm fucking careful. Like he has like a couple of good instincts curiously about like LGBT rights and about unions sometimes. And so because he has a mush for brains, now he'll just go totally off message.

For you. Amazon were coming for you. The workers will gain power over this country and shit like that. All right, let's go building a guillotine. Party. Walsh has fucking bazookas for hands down the stairs and builds US and start to. You guys want ice cream? Joe Biden in a back suit.

Just show it up. And I love that it's all Obama era fucking num nuts. Politico insiders that are like, oh, yeah. What's his name? The former press secretary that's now. Axelrod. Is it Axelrod? I think it might be.

And I just know all of these guys fucking plan together. They're all the same guy. It's all just one block. One one endless mobius lanyard. Yeah, but every every now to get, yeah, he'll say something where I'm just like, you get him, Joe. And then the other 90% of the time I'm like, Jesus Christ, man, take a nap. Yep.

Yeah, well, if you run Bernie, he'll be like 82 years old. So just run my fucking dad at this point. It's fine. It's a good point. Yeah. Do you want Maoism, but it's not called Maoism because my dad thinks he needs to blend in? Just fucking run parental by this point. It's like getting weird.

Anyway, that's our opinion on the Will Smith slap. That's right. Deliriously off topic. 15 minutes. All right. So these are the various like heraldries of the like Holy Roman Empire and 1126. Okay. So I thought I thought we'd start with a little bit of the philosophical mindset of the railroad

executive slave boy. What is a train? What is a train? So generally speaking, one of your justifications for private railroads is they compete with each other, right? To provide services at lower rates and they do so by improving practices like they operating practices, labor productivity, equipment, physical plants, so on and so forth. Cut waste, all of this like capital show.

Right. Ruthlessly, ruthlessly suppressing wages and making working conditions worse. Absolutely. And passing the savings on to you, the consumer. Yes. Have you seen the fucking BNSF shit? No, no. BNSF is doing some what?

Oh, the new scheduling procedure. Yes, I've been following that. Yeah, that's incredible stuff. They're putting people on a point system like you have to work 30 days straight before you can win one time off point where you may be able to see your children. It's dark, dark, dark shit. Yeah, it's bad. Now, the thing about railroad competition, right, is that if you it sort of ignores geography,

right, is that you have you have a factory. There's a railroad line next to it and it's owned by one company. Yeah, New York, New Haven. You want to like move hats from Danbury, right? Yes, you have one option. Yeah, you can't build Danbury to or conversely. You can't build another railroad and then the other side of the factory. I mean, you should probably knock down Danbury, which would be the solution because Danbury

fucking sucks. You should probably not build Danbury to. I agree with that one. I miss Danbury. I mean, the Danbury mall used to have a wizards of the co-store, which I dearly miss. I got magic boosters there. What? I was like.

Oh, fuck it, Danbury to. Let's go. I'm next to Liam's house. Fix the meta. That's what I'm saying. Wizards after the car and all went downhill. This is true. They ruined the fucking game, man.

They made everything too fucking powerful, too fucking fast. I missed this. Danbury to is like a Connecticut enclave in Pennsylvania. Yeah. It's an exclave outside of Philadelphia. It's part of the Connecticut Western Reserve. Danbury to is actually Cleveland. The town of the town of King of Prussia has started as a separatist,

revanchist movement to trade territory. Don't give them ideas, Sean. Don't give them ideas, Sean. You sort of had we made Rhodesia again. You sort of had direct railroad competition in the 19th century. It was chaos and pandemonium, right? Everyone was trying to start a railroad to go anywhere from anywhere. You're like, you managed to get financing to build a railroad from either two places that

already had five railroads or from nowhere to East armpit, right? So it is the Holy Roman Empire. Yes. It's that map of all of the thousands of small principalities, and each one of them is like a bespoke cool sigil for a railroad. So in the 20th century, a lot of these railroads started merging, and that meant there was less competition. Under the leadership of Bismarck and, yeah, I got you.

Yes. It's more like great power competition, right? You had spheres of influence or communities of interest, as they called it, right? So we're in Metternich territory, yeah. So like, you know, the Pennsylvania railroad buys the majority stake in the Norfolk and Western to get bituminous coal in West Virginia, or like the Baltimore and Ohio affiliates with much smaller railroads, the Redding and Central Railroad in Jersey.

To get access to New York City, you know, stuff like that, right? And if you're a railroad executive, you know the benefits of a balanced system, right? You have some competition in large markets like New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Cleveland, places like that, right? And the illusion of competition keeps the regulators and anti-monopolists at bay, right? It keeps labor scared as well. But the stability is really there to stave off every railroad executive's worst nightmare, which is nationalization, right?

Yeah, because then you might have to wear an identical jumpsuit and a pair of rubber boots and be poor, right? Yes. Yeah, you'd stop having stock options because the government would own the railroad. The theory was sort of this. If you had a major railroad and it slid into bankruptcy in a way that was actually hopeless, and it was taken over by the government to provide the essential service of moving freight, right? Profitability would no longer be essential concern to that railroad, right? Sure. Even if the government forced them to operate cost-neutral, they would, of course,

be able to offer better service, better wages, better working conditions than a railroad that was obliged to provide a return to shareholders, right? Right. The same thing with the postal service versus FedEx and UPS, right? Which is why they have to do so much lobbying to try and strangle it. Or the city of New York building the independent line when the rest of the subways were still private. They built it in order to basically undercut using public funds, the private subway network, which eventually then, of course, gets municipalized. Man, the government's really good at doing stuff, it turns out. It turns out.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary. So there's a sort of domino theory in effect here, right? We must deserve peace in Southeast Asia. Yeah, I was going to say this was why the Milwaukee Road had to occupy South Vietnam. Yes. If the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 scared the shit out of the entirety of the capitalist class, Wilson nationalizing the railroads in 1917 was the equivalent for the railroad-owning class. They did not want to see that come back.

That's why they worked a lot harder in World War II than they did in World War I. But if you had an actually nationalized railroad, labor unions would be able to point to the nationalized railroad that was offering better wages. They could conduct a strike to make those happen on other private railroad. Shippers would also demand better service or at least consummate with what the government railroad can provide. And you'd have to do it. And if management capitulated, they'd probably become insolvent. They'd get nationalized. This would continue across the nation until all of a sudden, horror of horrors, there's this big government railroad that provides great service, great benefits to employees,

great economies of scale, and no one was getting rich off of it, which is terrifying. I would hate for that to happen. Yeah. Everyone's read Atlas Shrugged, right? Yeah. As many as know, the fears in that book are the fears that these people have in mind. The fear in that book is that the railroads might be good. So these sort of communities of interest forms, and they're like gentlemen's agreements,

your big railroads were more than happy to pick on little tiny railroads, but none of the big railroads seriously competed against each other or at least tried to become an existential threat to each other. When I amass all my soldiers at the enemy border, but I don't declare war yet. It's a form of class solidarity among the railroad owning class, right? And it worked for a while until it didn't. Solidarity not forever? The capitalist class has a hard time having solidarity with one another.

I have a news item. I have a news item. No, I'm going to read this quote from Steve Keely of Fox 29. Somebody stole $1,000 worth of Red Bull from the Woolwich Township Wawa in Glaston County, South Jersey at 9 50 p.m. on Wednesday. Liam, you don't have to incriminate yourself. You have a fifth amendment, right? I love the idea of that's got to be a lot.

That's 250 Red Bulls, man. That's. Yeah, you're set for like a week at that point. Yeah, me personally. Yeah. I had to help my parents with some phone stuff today. And they called me late last night to be like, can you please come help us? And I mentioned that my demands were a bag of Cheetos are the biggest Red Bull they have.

And to her credit, my mom dutifully went to the mini mart in their building. And she was like, is this size good enough? It's like the 20 ounce. I'm like, I don't think they make a bigger one. See if they will, mother. Give me like a like a a a cask. Yeah, see if they'll do it at a two liter. Oh, a two liter of Red Bull is like such a fucking idea.

You have to make it real. Make it real. I know what you were saying, Roz. Sorry to interrupt you. Well, we recap our last two episodes really quickly. Penn Central was the merger. The New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad, both of which were and the hot guys.

Yeah, I feel a weird sort of parochial sense of ownership there. You know, and they failed instantly due to all the grift, as well as other external factors, decline in Northeast industry, so on and so forth. Our friend Stuart Saunders. What's his name? Bevin. I forget his first name.

Bevin. Fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Devon Bevin. Bevin Bevin. Yeah. And Al Perlman, they were all fired at the end of our last episode.

Paul Gorman of Western Electric, who was appointed president for the bankruptcy. He is now the railroad's president. He wants to hell out. This is a dead end job. Al Perlman, of course, was immediately recruited by the Western Pacific and pretty much instantly turned it into the most profitable railroad in the West.

So incredible. Yeah, big loss there. The physical plants, a terrible condition. Yeah, look at Jesus. Yeah, freight trains are breaking even at best. Passenger trains are all losing money. Trains are getting lost. Revenues were being propped up by this sort of steaming heap

of shit accounting, right? They managed to lose money on an oil company. I think we talked about that a little bit last time, yeah? Yeah. Literally just sucking profits out of the ground and you're going to lose money on it. Incredible. The railroad was in bankruptcy as of June 21, 1970,

the largest corporate bankruptcy ever until Enron. The reorganization was given to Judge John P. Fulman and several trustees. We'll get into a few of them later, right? Your big congressional interest was the passenger trains, right? They wanted them to run and they had the power through the Interstate Commerce Commission to force them to run, right? Some people had this idea of creating a quasi-national corporation

to run the passenger trains because they weren't making money and the railroads couldn't really financially support them, but no one really liked it because they could just force the ICC to force the trains to run. It doesn't matter what the railroads make money or not, right? Mm-hmm. So Fulman took one look at the Penn Central finances and said, to hell with the ICC, I'm going to shut down the passenger trains anyway.

And faced the ICC. Yeah. But why though? Just because he was like a bankruptcy judge and was therefore like, no, it's important to me that the creditors get their end out of this. Bankruptcy judges are the worst fucking people on the planet. No, I believe that. Well, I can confirm.

My dad did bankruptcy law for when he was still a practicing attorney. And yeah, literally worse than Hitler. That's like those ghouls that do the eviction law, like judges that sit there banging their gavel like 30 times a day. And every time they're banging that gavel, it's like another family that's thrown out in the street. And that's just par for the course. It's another day in the halls of justice.

Maybe the government shouldn't get to decide which loans are in our discharge and bankruptcy. Thanks for nothing, Joe Biden. Oh, yeah. Billiness, billiness legislation by Joe Biden. This was enough to get Congress to spring into action, right? Wow. That's that's not a sentence I ever thought I'd hear on the show.

There's going to be a lot of brinksmanship in this episode. Congress like could spring into action back then, maybe in a way that we haven't seen since like the 1980s or whatever. There was still a little juice. There's still a little gas in the engine. You can still do some stuffing. Well, this wasn't like filled with guys who are there exclusively to resent the idea of them doing anything.

Yeah, I never understood that one. Just be a fucking lobbyist, man. It's fine. No, because it's important that they take up the seat and get the perks to stop anybody else from doing that. And solicit underage girls for sex. What's up, man? Yeah, actually.

I mean, so don't bleep that. Don't bleep that. That one's true. Yeah, I think that is actually like not actionable. Once all the congressmen were interested in keeping the passenger trains running, you know, heard that the passenger trains might stop running. They started to get worried.

They got a guy at the FRA named Jim McClellan, right? He was an operations guy from the Southern Railway. He got him to sit down with some of our guys from our favorite consulting group, McKinsey and Company. Wow. Oh, no. Camille appearance in this story. Mr. Butchuck, hello.

Yeah, the passenger trains were running. Way more efficiently if you let me murder a dog up there. Yes. One of the big scandals right now, or the big scandal in France is that Emmanuel Macron just like hired out his government to McKinsey over the last couple of years. He's just been like,

they build like a billion dollars making France worse. Camille Le Pen can look at can point to that and be like, yeah, you don't want a government run by consultants that look like Pete Buttigieg. Well, vote for me, the fascist. Yes. So he and McKinsey and Company, and also accountants, Arthur Anderson.

Which no longer exists anymore because of the Enron scandal. Yes. I think it's part of extension now. I believe so. They started chopping up the National Passenger Rail Network, and they finished it in like a month, right? It was sort of an ad hoc thing. You know, there were a lot of political

give and takes on that one. They got rid of what they thought were the unprofitable trains, but they had to keep some of them because congressmen complained. I do like the idea of the loves trains caucus. Yeah, bring that shit back now. It was it's just it's just Biden. It's just Biden. Like as the executive.

Yeah. One man dictatorship. There were a lot of trains that were kept that went to West Virginia. So in October, of course, I mean, and like congresspeople used to like planes because back then private planes hadn't been invented yet. And therefore you couldn't be on flight logs if you did all of your shit on a private train.

Exactly. So, you know, in October, Congress passed and President Nixon signed the Rail Passenger Service Act, which created what we now call M tracks, right? And those are one of those things that Nixon's like an unreasonably effective liberal president, just like the EVA and shit.

Yeah, his his hand is going to be forced a couple more times through this. Oh, there's a barricade situation in Kensington. Someone shot at a bail man. Come on, do that. You don't want to do that shit. You're going to get the U.S. Postal Inspectors on your ass. That's better.

Most frightening U.S. law enforcement agency. 98 percent conviction rate at trial. You don't want to do that. But this national rail system that was hashed out over a couple of weeks is essentially the same as what we have today. But that's a whole other story, right? I never knew that Amtrak was a creation of McKinsey.

That I would never have guessed that. Yeah. Well, actually, the original Amtrak plan is drafted by McClellan and McKinsey. It was actually significantly more generous than what we got. 00:39:00,720 --> 00:39:01,680 Come on, man. Couldn't even get the McKinsey plan.

That's America folks. So the passenger trains are gone except the commuter trains. Maybe Penn Central could hash it out. And Judge Fulman needed to appoint a new president because Gorman wanted out, right? So they got a guy from the Southern Railway. That was gunpoint? Because no one wants this job, right?

No one wants this job. So, well, they got a guy that the Southern Railway wanted out. You're being promoted, and fuck you. You're being promoted. Get out of here. The guy named... Alcoholic on his seventh wife. He hasn't played child support.

He hasn't shaved in a week. Just push that guy into... Stumbling into the office. What's up guys? Let's do this. We got a bottle with three X's on it. And he's wearing a barrel with straps. He's like, oh, let's go.

Let's build Amtrak. So this is... We get William Wild Bill Moore. Oh my God. To a new president. A guy who was too... Like the Southern Railroad was sick of his shit. And his name is Wild Bill.

Anyway, he's going to be here in 10 minutes. It's not the Southern Railroad. It's the Southern Railway. They were very strict about that. Excuse me? They named it after the one in Britain. They're patrician Southerners. And they kept the green, too, so...

Yes. So, he was a Southern Railway operations guy. He was born in Hazard, Kentucky. Yeah, near our friends, the trailbillies. He was born in Bad Vibes, Kentucky. He was educated at Virginia Military Institute. And he had what was described... Generating America's most normal leaders of tomorrow.

He was described as having an abrasive management style. Yeah, he does. He went to VMI, dude. Just brandishing his sawed-off shotgun. Yeah. He was abrasive for the standards of the Southern Railway, which was... This motherfucker came out of Bloody Harlan. He was strike-breaking when he was 13 years old.

So, the Southern Railway wanted rid of him. The president suggested Fulman be a good fit for Penn Central. And no one else wanted the job, but Moore decided to take it. But he wanted a really high salary, which they gave him, right? So, Moore succeeded Paul Gorman, who had taken a job at International Paper Company, right? And he set out being a gigantic, holy terror to everyone who encountered him, right? He refused to move to Philadelphia. Fuck you, too, buddy.

He did all his business in a private train, which was constantly touring the system. Fuck, that's gross. Like, GoldenEye? Yeah. I closed a bunch of rail yards. He consolidated a bunch. He scrapped all of L. Perlman's improvement plans.

He culled the workforce. He went after crew... Yeah. You got some of the McKenzie guys in. Oh, just wait. He went after crewing regulations, right? So, for instance, in Indiana, you needed a five-man crew on each train. But all surrounding states, you needed a three-man crew.

So, the procedure was, when you reached the Indiana border, two guys would get on the train and do nothing until you got to the other end of the state, and then they got off. Dream job. That's incredible. I'm going to stay in Indiana. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the problem. I would stay in Indiana for that dream job. I'm not fucking leaving. Go Colts, baby, with like a sawed-off shotgun by myself. Imagine the seniority you'd need to get, though, to be one of those guys. You're just feather-bedding on out of that. Sounds beautiful. He shoved enough money into lobbying to kill that regulation in Indiana.

He and a couple other railroads. Or he recruited some other railroads to help him. And he was also... He was very clever, right? So, Judge Fullman ordered the railroad to dispose of the corporate jet, right? Like no corporate jets for the railroad. And Morris still wanted a corporate jet. So, he borrowed an extra one from one of his friends at the Scott Paper Company, right?

What is with this close relationship between railroads and paper companies? They're good customers. Yeah. Paper is a big railroad commodity. I guess so. That kind of makes sense, yeah. So, he borrowed an extra one from his friend at the Scott Paper Company and had them build a railroad for an equivalent amount of toilet paper.

Wow. Okay. The crisis of the 70s were back down to barter economy. We live in the dumbest country on like conceivable. You also hated everyone. He was well-known for firing anyone on the spot for any reason, especially management. Right? Sort of gangist-con management style.

So, Moore had this idea, all right, we're going to increase revenue and slash expenses, right? So, already bad physical plan, let's make it worse, but we're going to have more traffic than ever before, right? For some reason. And the state of the railroad just continued to decline. Everyone was miserable, right? And in late December, 1972, after the railroad had been hit hard by Hurricane Agnes, Moore on that in a couple of slides, Moore was on a metro liner heading to a meeting in Philadelphia

when a coal train derailed in the tunnel in Baltimore. And he phoned ahead to find out what the delay was. And the superintendent told him, well, a coal train derailed in the tunnel and has really wedged in there, right? It'd be a day at least to clear the tunnel. And Moore told them to have it fixed in an hour. What? That's such a fucking realistic dickhead.

Star Trek ass. I feel like that's something. I'm surprised they could do it in a day. Something like that would take a week now. So, he called him back in an hour and fired him on the spot, right? Wow. Yeah, but he was on a radio phone on a public to the railroad channel and an anonymous engineer radioed in to say,

Merry Christmas to you too, you son of a bitch. Hell yeah. And that was when Moore realized he'd hit the wrong button and the whole call had been relayed over the train's PA system. This guy didn't know dick about trains apparently. Oh, my apparently, yeah. I mean, so he, you know, this is when some of the trustees start to really take notice after they hear this shit, right?

One of which was Jervis Langdon, who was a former Baltimore and Ohio guy, now a Penn Central trustee. He decided we need to get rid of Moore because he wasn't producing results and everyone hated him. Right? Yeah, but apart from that. Yeah. Well, listen, he may be a son of a bitch,

but he also doesn't get shit done. He may be a testable person, but he's also off-putting and hard to work with. Listen, you can't argue with the numbers. They're really bad. Well, he had to come up with a reason to get rid of him, which was apparently he was using railroad employees to do repairs on his house.

Sure, he was. Yeah. Why not? So he was forcibly retired January 2nd, 1973. Langdon became president of the railroad. The superintendent who was fired was rehired that day as well. Oh, that was nice. That was nice.

Yeah. And so Jervis Langdon is different from his. It's like a de-stalinization, you know? Yes. He's like rehabilitated. He has to come back from the gulag. Yeah, the secret speech against Moore, and leaps by the CIA.

The guy can get his job back. I feel like this is a lot more like late Soviet Union and that they run through a bunch of people really quickly on the counter-revolutionary. So Moore's the undrop of, and then next we're going to get ourselves that. Langdon is Gorbachev, who's Yeltsin, dare I ask. We'll get to Yeltsin.

So Langdon, you know, he's different from his predecessors, right? He didn't even pretend the railroad could be saved without government help. There were a lot of reasons for this, but the largest concerns were the commuter trains and the economic state of the Northeast Rail Network as a whole, right? Joe?

Sure. So you believe in Glasnost, Perestroika, the third one? Yeah, here's the Eastern Bloc. If you were a shipper in the Northeast or a railroad passenger, you had some alternatives to Penn Central, and none of them were especially good, right? The first was the Erie Lackawanna, right? That was from a merger, the Delaware Lackawanna Western,

which was a railroad from New York to Buffalo by way of Scranton and Binghamton, and the Erie Railroad, which was a railroad from New York to Buffalo by way of Binghamton with a branch to Scranton, but also continued to Chicago, right? Didn't have a large service area, but it was the only plausible alternative to Penn Central for through traffic, right?

Those shippers who were lucky enough to be connected to its main line were provided with reliable but not very quick service to major terminals as well as points in the Southern tier of New York and Northeast Pennsylvania without having to deal with Penn Central, right? Joe? And you pay a premium to avoid having to deal with Penn Central.

Right, yeah. There are a lot of people who want to avoid using Penn Central. The Erie Lackawanna was pretty quick to modernize its facilities after the merger to shift emphasis from bulk traffic to ports to faster parcel traffic and piggyback trains, you know, trailer-on flat car stuff, right? They offered a slower scheduled piggyback service than Penn Central. It's 29 hours versus 24 hours between New York and Chicago,

but all the shippers liked Erie Lackawanna because the Erie Lackawanna train showed up. That will do it. It's 29 hours versus like 48. Question mark, question mark, question mark. It's like those old, like the steamers in the 19th century that had a departure time and not an arrival time. Yeah, it gets there when it gets there.

The Penn Central works by the tides. Check to see what the high tide was that day to see when it would wash in. I think we'll get to that in a couple of slides. So they made a bunch of money when they got a major contract with United Parcel Service, UPS, right? This was a smaller and more manageable railroad. It was affected by the client in the Northeastern industry,

but it was mostly solvent at this time, 1970, whatever. I think 1972 were on, right? 1971, excuse me. The other Northeastern railroads were not doing as well. Oh, because they didn't have that cool stripe livery. That's the other one, I thought. That'll do it. That'll do it.

It's a really good, it's a really good. There's some, there's still a, somewhere in North Jersey, there's one Erie Lackawanna painted unit running around. I think one of the shops just painted it that color for fun. Hell yeah. I've seen it once. Tripped it. Yes.

Yeah, the Redding Company, which went from Philadelphia to Redding, and the Anthracite Coalfields in Williamsport. That's down here, right? And if you needed to ship cargo between any of those points, the Redding was very good at it, right? You're talking about beeline service? Yeah. Yeah, we're going to talk about the beeline service, right?

It was a beeline service. We'll tell you in a second. I'm impatient, dammit. Your usual railroad freight service is, you know, you pick up the car at the industry. It goes to the yard, it sits for a day. It goes to the bigger yard, it sits for a day. It goes to another big yard, sits for a day. It goes to the small yard, it sits for a day.

It gets the customer, right? And it could take three days to go 300 miles, right? The Redding decided we're going to compete directly with short-haul trucking. So with two hours noticed, a crew would be dispatched to haul between five and 20 cars from any point on the railroad to any other point in the railroad in one go. Trips that usually took days took hours, right? Crews were paid at a premium rate. You might earn, you might get a hundred hours pay for five hours of work.

That's intense work right there. Yes. You had to bend some union roles to make it work, but everyone was basically fine with it, right? Yeah, sure. The issue was most of the shippers were shipping the points off the Redding network. So you had to interchange with Penn Central, you know, and if you got to the interchange point in two hours instead of 20, it's still sat in the yard for like two days and then got lost, right? Oh no, my potatoes.

And so they did great on that service. The bread and butter traffic, which is the anthracite coal, that was almost completely gone by the 70s because no one was using coal to heat their house anymore. So Redding Company filed for bankruptcy in 1971. Was that sort of like the path not taken? What Redding tried to do with all the spot pickups and... That would make a lot more sense for like Carload Freight if anyone was like still trying to do that. It'd be a lot more difficult to do on a bigger railroad.

But I mean, if you look at stuff like what the Swiss are doing now, it's kind of the same idea. And I mean, since because of the economy is a scale of, you know, trains, you can pay people a lot of money and still be competitive with trucking. Right, right, right, right. And this is pre deregulation of trucking too. So trucking isn't quite as cheap as it is now. This is true. You know, labor hasn't been smashed down to the point that somebody makes $300 a week

being like a carrier trucking company. Also, this is like around the time of the oil shocks too. So you'd think that railroads would have been able to pick up some of, you know, some of that business. Well, how expensive fuel was getting. Let's never accuse anybody of having like a good idea that wasn't left to die in the dark. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

You had the central railroad in New Jersey. I like this. He went from New Jersey to New Jersey. Wow. That's right. I keep a name out of your mouth. From New Jersey to New Jersey, too. Yes.

West Jersey to East Jersey, North Jersey, the South Jersey. It was really. Central Jersey is real. If you wanted to ship something from one part of New Jersey to another part of New Jersey, the central railroad in New Jersey was the way to do it. What if you want to ship something out of New Jersey? Kill yourself. They have like a branch line that went across the river to Bethlehem, I want to say.

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Right. But yeah, you have to deal with Penn Central. Yeah. Penn Central again. They were the first to go bankrupt in 1967 after they were shut out of the Penn Central merger. Bastards. You had the Lehigh Valley Railroad, which went from New York City to Buffalo by way of

Wilkes-Barre instead of Scranton. And once the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, it had no reason to exist. That's tough, man. It was all hauling bull commodities, right? Right. So it filed for bankruptcy in 1970. You had the St. Lawrence Seaway. That was a good way to ship in the Northeast because you could have boat cargo on boats

that could now go out to the Atlantic Ocean, come around and into ports on the East Coast. That opened in 1950. It was great for freight rates and terrible for railroads. And then you had trucks, of course. Interstate 80 was nearly completion at this point, right? Ever closer to the point where the teamsters were brought to heel, as you said, Sean. So then it got worse. Oh, no.

Oh, no. The tides. The tides. 00:56:50,400 --> 00:56:50,960 I told you. The tides. Weather is happening. I hate when that happens.

So Hurricane Agnes hit in 1972. On June 14th, 1972, there was a tropical depression formed in the Caribbean, quickly became a major hurricane. It tracked up the United States Eastern Seaboard, caused tornadoes and floods all the way up to upstate New York. This is Elmira in the Southern Tier. Jesus. Yeah.

This is the over. Is that water supposed to be there? Is that? It's supposed to mostly be in the Susquehanna River. But now the whole town is the Susquehanna River. Wow. Riverfront property expand. Exactly.

Do you know some people pronounce it Susquehanna? Susquehanna? Yeah. That's wrong. But some people do pronounce it. I call it Susquehanna, man. My roommate from beautiful Yorktown Heights, New York, is like, no, it's Susquehanna. No, it's fucking not.

It's Susquehanna. And I know that because I grew up next to it. If you're caught in the flood of the Susquehanna River, does that make you Mormon? Oh, yeah. It's like one of the ways we actually all became Mormon. You, me, and Derek are Mormon now. It's a good point. Yeah.

Oh, I shouldn't be drinking the seltzer, but I am anyway. So it's the Mormon Jewelry. Oh, hot drink. Yeah. This causes billions of dollars in property damage. It wipes out villages, small towns, big towns even, right? Kill 119 people severely damage the entire Northeast Railroad Network. A lot of marginal lines were abandoned after this, where the ICC allowed it.

There were patchwork repairs to some main lines. The area Lackawanna was hit the worst. Its whole main line in the southern tier was destroyed. That's a tough way to go, man. Yeah. Unable to afford real repairs, it filed for bankruptcy June in 1972. They didn't have insurance for that shit. That seems like something you'd want to be insured for.

That's a good question. Safe suede. Given the corporate culture of the 1970s, it's clear that they spent the insurance money on some kind of scam. The only question is what? Yeah, the insurance company went bankrupt probably. That's why you can't get flood insurance anymore. And the insurance company were washed into the Susquehanna and all became Mormon.

And the name of that insurance company, AIG. I would like my golden parachute to be diamond plated, please. It seems we went into a accounts receivable and all of the insurance policy money was spent on private jets and... Just whores. Yeah, and whores. Yes, yes. Nice young ladies to occupy said private jets.

And whores. There's now zero major northeast railroads that were financially solvent. Uh oh, this seems like a problem. Except maybe the Chessie system. Right. Chessie live. And the Chessie system relied very heavily on trackage rights from the Redding and Central Railroad in New Jersey north of Philadelphia.

Right. And so, and the biggest northeast railroad, the Penn Central, was in the worst shape. Those who want to hear is like the granddaddy company is eating the most shit. Yes. Oh, yeah. So we literally laid out massive amounts of like actual capacity here at this point. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And you're talking about, you're talking about are the grocery store shelves going to be stocked at this point? Right. Wow. Yeah. Real redolent of this era that we're in right now. Biden's America. Yeah, let's go Brandon.

Just say fuck. Just say fuck. You know what I mean? It's not that hard. Fuck go Brandon. Yeah. Fuck go Brandon. Fuck go Brandon.

That sounds like Funko Pop. Oh, wait, let's let's let's fuck Brandon. I don't know. We go now to the offices of the Association of American Railroad. Is he eating its own shit? Yeah. I've heard a photo of the cast of this podcast. Yes.

I think Liam has to be Mel Brooks. Smiling with my friend. Oh, that's anti-Semitic, but it's fine. I'm used to it. That's pro-Semitic. No, you're anti-Semitic, remember? Yeah, it's phylocemitism. It's the juice, just rice.

Well, if you're Mel Brooks, you get to live to be like, what is he, 98 right now? Yeah. Or you just throw it as Mel Brooks. Also, I made fucking Blazing Saddles. I'll live with it. Ninety-eight years old, never got canceled. I mean, this is not bad.

Yeah. Yeah, because he's grown up. Did you guys know that Blazing Saddles is super racist? This movie could have never been made Blazing Saddles today. That's all like 2015, like pre-gamergate. Fuck it. Oh, I remember.

01:01:53,840 --> 01:01:55,360 Top water stays. Yeah. So there's a problem here, which is these railroads, you know, they're all in terrible shape. And their regulatory structure, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was all designed in the late 1800s. It's designed for railroads that are making shitloads of money. Right?

Yeah, because they can't have envisioned. And in the 19th century, they couldn't envision losing money on a railroad. Every time you say ICC, I think, because I, you know, I'm a communist, I think of the International Communist Current, which is a group of left comms. Because I'm, I guess, a secret liberal. I'm on the International Criminal Court here. Oh, I just kept thinking ICP.

I kept thinking it would take quite a posse. I would love for the International Communist Court. Yeah. The, the interstate. We're now gathered for gathering up the juggalos. It's your railroad in the ICC. Yeah. You're regulated as a public good, but not funded as one, right?

You're expected to take a reasonable profit on the side. And there's now no profit to be had, right? By the end of January 1973, the situation was very, very bad. Penn Central Legal Council, Bob Blanchett, who was the only New Haven guy to stick it out this far. Why do you guys all have false teeth with cyanide in them? The only hat guy left.

Yeah. The only hat guy left. It's like the, like the last Romanian guy at the Siege of Stalin grads. Just like the last of the Caneti cutters. There's a rumor he had a room, a secret room in his house that was a Shrine to Napoleon. What? I hope that's true.

Is he a short gang? Fuck that one. Yes, he was a short gang. He was five foot three. Okay, there we go. My 1970s guy from Connecticut with a Shrine to Napoleon. Very normal. Please.

That's a type of guy. Bob Blanchett warned Judge Fulham, the railroad only had enough money to run the trains until the end of February, right? Yeah. And he was like, why are you talking in that French accent? You're from Danbury. Wait, wait.

Take a hand out of your fucking jacket. Why did you ride a horse directly into the ICC office? You psycho. Is that a, is that a battleship? Did you tow that here? Langdon, Langdon wanted government help, right? And at the offices of the Association of, or the American Association of Railroads,

there was a lot of her rumping after this, right? I see why you have to slide now. Yes. So we got Jack Fishwick from the Norfolk and Western. Sorry, that is a fucking innsmouth ass name. Yes. You got Hayes Watkins from the Chessie System. Hayes Watkins.

Wow, when I was on Total Frat Move, that would have been a fucking banger username. They were the only, they, they, they, along with Langdon were like, we need to find a solution to this problem. The other 19 railroad presidents who made up the body didn't give a shit. They were like, the Northeast is Siberia. Siberia should solve its own problems, right? Yeah, you're trying to talk to some guy from like Union Pacific about this shit.

And he's just like, no, they didn't. He's just like, no, they didn't care. Actually, Frank Barnett from the Union Pacific overheard the actual state of Ben Central finances. Please don't tell me Union Pacific is going to be the fucking hero here. Union Pacific is going to be not there. There's no heroes here. Yeah, yeah.

All right. Where we're going, there's no hero. He, he heard the actual state of Ben Central finances from a meeting that his legal counsel went to and realized what was going to happen to Ben Central if nothing was done, which was nationalization. Oh, no. Right.

That are a complete breakdown of like commodity transport in the Northeast. Small famine in like a full state. Yeah. A famine in New York City. Yeah, the economy could not survive like no train, right? Yes. But that was bad news for all the railroads, but especially bad news for major interchange partners like the Union Pacific, right?

They had to protect the industry. They had to protect their profits. They had to protect their phony baloney jobs, right? So, so Frank Barnett Langdon and the Union Pacific legal counsel William McDonald hashed out a plan, right? For a limited intervention to bolster the South Vietnamese forces. Yes. The, the, the Northeast rail network would be fundamentally restructured.

It'd be pruned. It'd be streamlined. It'd have some government help, but we're going to avoid the N word. And in 1971, that's pretty progressive. Yes. You could never make place in Seattle today. The way they started doing this was by provoking a crisis, right? Much like Vietnam.

Yes. Hmm. They're going to have their picture. Yeah, I was going to say. So. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Yes. From a manual.

So Langdon informed Judge Fulham that the Penn Central needed $800 million from Congress to continue operating for three years, right? We'll blow up the railroad. Yeah. Or we'll blow up the railroad. One hostage every hour. Or the city will starve. We will execute a burrow every day.

All right, Brooklyn, time to go. This said to the creditors, like, okay, we just need to cut our losses, liquidate the railroad now, right? But the Congress got uneasy because that meant trains would stop running, at least temporarily, right? More likely for a longer time than that. And this was when the Penn Central trustees said, okay, in order to continue operating, we have to cut train crew sizes, right?

And if they didn't do that, or if the unions protested or God forbid did a strike, Judge Fulham will order the Penn Central shut down and liquidated immediately, right? But they know the unions are going to strike. So that's like, this is a gambit, right? Yes. I see. Yeah, February 9, 1973, the United Transportation Union President, Al Chester, gave the order to hit the ground, right?

That's when you leave the locomotive. So 80,000 engineers, conductors, trainmen, all the railroad workers of all kinds, they left their locomotives, they left their tools, they went to the picket lines. New York City commuter trains were stranded. They started at noon, it was a Friday. No one could get home that day, dad. Dude, if you're going to do it, make it fucking count.

That's the way you do it, man. The idea of a strike as a protest? Yeah. No, a strike is making capital bleed. It's about, in New York City alone, it's about 100,000. 100,000. Where does Ross go? No, not the fucking mic again.

His mic busted. Am I? I'm my best. Yeah, you are. You're here, you're back. I was going to tell a fun strike story, if you will. Please do. At the time I went on strike.

Oh, yeah. Let's hear it. All right, yeah. I was working at a job, this was four or five years ago, for this particular company that shall not be named. I was working on a very large deep foundation project for a very prime time public works project. One morning around 7.05, so like five minutes

after we got to work and we put our tools on and we started banging away and working or whatever, all of a sudden the shopster called everybody over and just said, tools down, tools down. So we all did, of course, put your tools down, walked back, sit in the heated shanty for a little bit. Turns out that the company that we were working for, which had 26 projects up and around the five boroughs

in the tri-state area, was behind by months on paying the benefits. And I tell you, we shut down every single job this company had billions of dollars of work and machinery just sitting there, shut it down for two, three hours, until, of course, all of a sudden this company that said they didn't have the money to pay the benefits, courier to check for 13 million dollars

down to the union hall. Yes. And then we fucking took our tools back down and we went back to our tools. Amazing how they come up with that money, we all of a sudden, every single job they had is shut the fuck down. That fuck it up.

Let me call accounting. Can you put the cut down? Can you please put the cut down? That was a very powerful moment and we were all just like, hell yeah. That's beautiful. We felt pretty good. Suck shit unnamed entity.

Yes. Entity we shall not be named that got completely fucking owned in the course of one morning. Pay your benefits, motherfuckers. True. So this did exactly as intended, facing the prospect that Fulham would just shut the railroad down immediately,

which, by the way, would have eliminated a commuter train service in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. You're a real sort of brinksmanship thing. Yeah, Boston, New Haven, yeah. Congress passed a resolution within 24 hours, which forcibly ended the strike and ordered the Nixon administration to drop a plan

to save railroads in the Northeast within 45 days. Nixon signed the bill at six in the morning. Just after the first commuter train started rolling that morning. Was it? There were still all the regulations and arbitration about striking railways at that point in time, right? It was still under the Railway Act of what, 19,

something or other? Yeah, it was a couple. I'm not sure what the Staggers Act did for unions. For some reason, one of the problems with researching this stuff is that all the railroad history books are kind of, they discount the union aspect, I think, a little bit too much. You know, it's always like, oh, well, the unions cost

money and they're bad. So I don't know what the actual labor regulations were, but I know the deregulation was still 10 years off at this point. The strike notice just says, capital can suck my balls. Less than 10 years off. Excuse me, three years off. We're going to talk about railroad deregulation in a couple of slides.

But yeah, so the Nixon administration, of course, in their plan to save the Northeast Rail Network, they just said, yeah, let's let the private sector handle it. So McDonald and Barnett of Union Pacific and Langdon of Bend Central get to work, right? Sucking their own dicks. Yes. Little dick sucking cabal, chill.

Yes. So Jervis Langdon told The New York Times, Bend Central had to be cut in half to an 11,000-mile system, which no one liked. Fulham, Judge Fulham, ordered the railroad shut down and sold off by October 1st, if it didn't turn a profit, right? Management continued to escalate the problem, right? I don't know how that works.

Yeah. Nixon's secretary of transportation, Claude Brineger. Doesn't matter, he's dead. Brineger? He's dead. Ridiculous name. He said there's no problem here. The government has no business bailing out a private company, and his staffers had to convince him.

Little are you going to learn. Yeah. His staffers had to tell him, no, this is actually a problem. This is going to be bad. So eventually, the DOT put out a report on behalf of the Nixon administration. Everything Langdon and Union Pacific said, rails had to be abandoned. They had to eliminate jobs.

Only the strongest routes can survive. The alternative was death or worse, nationalization. There's that N word again. Yeah. Well, it's the 70s. So there was a bill that was essentially drafted by the AAR and Shippers, and to a certain extent, union leaders called the Regional Rail Reorganization Act, the 3R Act, that was passed and signed by Nixon January 2, 1974.

The idea was they would create this thing called the United States Railway Association to distinguish it from the previous United States Railroad Administration. Right. And they would decide what to cut, what to sell, and what to add into a new Consolidated Railroad Corporation or Conrail, right? It's coming. It's coming. And the real goal, the real goal was to avoid railroad nationalization at all costs.

And it was going to cost them. Hell, yes. The unions were in on this. So the unions didn't want nationalization either. The unions were actually pretty well against nationalization because they thought they had a better chance pitting the railroads against each other and pitting them off their financiers. Probably they kind of right. They had done pretty well with it in the past, and they thought it would continue to work in the future.

That is a 70s union as decision, though. Yes. This is by far the best way I can continue to grow the pension fund. Therefore, that's what I'm going to do. It's worked to five guys before me. It's like a deeply American unionism way to do it too, because we never had sectoral bargaining here. We always had pattern bargaining.

So whoever it was whose contract was at first who had the most power to make that happen. Would basically set the pattern for all the other bargaining units in different companies. So like America's system of labor has always been very decentralized and sort of competitive in this way. So it makes sense. You do competition in unions. That's a terrible idea. It makes the unions more efficient.

Spoiler alert. It cuts waste. The reason we're such a great union is our low labor costs. You would not believe the 70s porn stash I can grow. All right. So now that Jim McClellan had done M-Track, he was put in charge of actually pruning the Conrail system. Yeah, you have to wield this axe.

Yes. And this was extremely unpopular, right? Because previously there was this sort of abstract idea of pruning the system, right? Now McClellan had to go into the map and say which lines were going away. He actually had to take service away from like this paper plant, but this other paper plant would have it. Or this little town. Yeah, this town would be okay.

These workers would have a job. These ones wouldn't. Yes. So and McClellan had some problems while he was doing this. I believe he still had McKinsey with him. Well, that's sure to help. Well, the weird thing like all of the McKinsey guys just get locked themselves at an office and you just hear like gunshots and like dog noises the whole night.

These guys aren't helping at all. Why isn't this team of bloodless ghouls giving me a hand? So they had some problems because they were they were nominally working with the Department of Transportation, the United States Railway Association was supposed to be the one who made the final decision, but they were sort of relying on the Department of Transportation to tell them what to do. So they're in a serious muddling through situation. Yes, they're muddling through this fucking thing.

And one of the like apportioning of blame. Yeah. Yeah. One of their first meetings went disastrously because they did a computer simulation of the entire railroad. And all the numbers came out backwards and no one could figure out what was going on. Oh, that's. This thing says the six railroads in the United States. Guys just taking punch cards out of the computer and crying.

According to this, there's four hundred and forty four car loads that come out of this town at thirty five people each day. There were shippers who came out and interfered all the time. Big one was Purdue Industries. You know, they had the chicken guys. Oh, yeah. Remarkably evil. They had a chicken plant, I want to say in Salisbury, Maryland, which was the only industry on a two hundred and twenty five mile

two hundred and twenty five mile branch line. A two hundred and twenty five mile an hour line into a chicken plant. I'm just imagining like a nuclear size explosion of chicken feathers. Listen to you on high speed rail in America. Where we cannot offer you a three hour trip from New York to D.C. But we can offer you two hundred something mile per hour train flying into a factory filled with life chickens. Wow, you saw the movie Chicken Run. Well, they want to keep this two hundred twenty five mile line open to serve the chicken plant.

And they got it. Of course. Yeah. You know, I did weeks and weeks and weeks of work because this all happened really quickly. That's that's the one of the weird ones here. You know, eventually McClellan and some other guys from the F.R.A. after they had been really, really trying hard to do like data driven decisions, they just got everyone in the room with a big board and an orange highlighter. And they're like, OK, this route goes this one doesn't. Just throwing darts at a dartboard. Basically, yeah.

It's funny because like for all the fears of nationalization, this creates far more distortions than anything else would. You just like get a bunch of like stakeholders in a room and have them fight out who's going to get the thing. Like if you nationalize it, you just keep everything running, build up the plan, get it going. But this is like what the conservatives say they hate so much, you know, like jockeying for pork barrel and all that stuff. Also, it's also you didn't have to national. Yeah. So this was issued as the what became infamous as the Orange Line report.

They sent it to Congress. Everyone hated it and was unhappy. Right. Well, it has bypasses on consensus then. Yes. Well, that's the thing that the United States Railway Association was making decisions in a report from the Department of Transportation sort of emphasized this. Right. So this is just a recommendation. Right. This is not the final network. So DOT took the heat. Right. And then and then USRA could make their own decisions and they had definitely some problems here. Because it was they didn't know if they were going to are we going to run this as one big

corporation or are we going to try and carve it up into multiple railroads? Right. Because we start with one big railroad, five small railroads. Do we end with one big railroad? Or do we try and preserve competition? I'm doing air quotes here. Yeah. The appearance of competition. Yeah. The appearance of competition. Right. And where they're really looking at competition, Philadelphia, New York City, sometimes Pittsburgh, a little bit of a lot of Connecticut. Danbury is getting. Danbury versus Danbury to Danbury to might take some of that happens.

Yeah, that's right. This is true. Yeah. Yeah. So McClellan and his assistant, Gerald Davies, they come up with a plan. We're going to give the area Lackawanna, which is not on this map for some reason, because sort of like actually something like that, right? We're going to give that to use the orange pen. That would have made sense. We're going to give the area Lackawanna, the Norfolk and Western and five hundred million dollars. We're going to give the Reading and the Central Railroad in New Jersey to the Chessie system and five hundred million dollars and two billion dollars of low interest federal loans.

Everybody's getting quite a lot of like cash and hand out. Everyone's getting a lot of money. And this ensures going in and like blonde bimbos are coming out the back. And this ensures competition in at least New York and most of Pennsylvania. Right. And Jack Fishwick, who had previously been interested in the area Lackawanna, the Norfolk and Western guy, he was like, now that it was actually being offered to him, he was like, I'm not touching that unless you indemnify me against any losses, which is a ridiculous thing to ask, right? Because it's free railroad. It's less than free. We're paying you to take this railroad. Yes, but I need guarantees. I'm not going to lose a sense.

I guess it reflects like a real sort of crisis in confidence in railroads. So Fishwick would later go on a record is saying that what the other solvent railroads need to do is set up a firewall from like Pittsburgh to Baltimore. And no one goes beyond this point. Everything else is like abandoned is wasteland. Duck shit, Chicago. All these all these all these lands are yours, except Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine. Just absolutely all the provinces. Land, no trains there. So Hayes Watkins of the Chessie system said something similar, right? Even with the upfront

offers of cash, low interest loans, so on and so forth, right? And while this horse trading was going on, the railroad network was continuing to deteriorate, right? A new phrase came into the railroad lexicon, which was the standing derailment, right? That doesn't sound like a positive phrase. We have a boxcar sitting in the yard selling the track gives way underneath it. Oh, the tracks are just subsiding away. Yeah, they're just like like a rail falls over because this is around the time when that infamous Penn Central 1976 video comes out where they try and convince the government that they need federal funding, the one where the the boxcar just falls off the tracks in front of the camera that everyone, everyone who's feeling that swears

was not staged. And at this point, they have no reason to lie. So I want to believe. Yeah. We have tracks out of service. You have yards that are jammed. Repairs and maintenance were deferred. There were thousands and thousands of miles of slow orders, right? You know, you have these situations where there'll be like 70, 80 miles of dead straight track and you have to go 10 miles an hour on the whole thing. Jesus. No one shipped by rail unless they had to, right? So again, this is a very urgent problem. And McClellan and his folks at the FRA were really driven here by trying to create competition in the Northeast, right? You know, they couldn't just turn this all into one railroad because without competition, right? The new consolidated

railroad corporation, it would become lazy and inefficient, right? Yeah, it's almost Soviet in nature. Yeah. Yeah. Unlike the current system we have, we're fucking entire berms and fucking railway ties are just crumbling into dust in front of us. Right. Yeah, but they're doing it freedomally. Well, if it were inefficient, it would be like the European railroads which are also inefficient and that's why they were nationalized, right? That's what I think of when I think of European railroads as inefficient. Yeah, a boxcar falling over for no reason. Yeah. So in blackface for some reason. So the offers to solvent railroads fell apart. You know, the Chessie didn't want it. Norfolk and Wester didn't want it. He didn't have very much to work on to

create this competition he wanted. And he just started to turn to chain smoking and drinking bourbon in his office while he tried to like make all these dots connect, right? Understandable. Just slowly driving himself insane. Yeah. Well, the original plan to sell part of it to the Chessie in Norfolk and Wester was graded in the bar in the first floor of the USRA building. Nice. That's how business was done. Yes, it's true. 1770. Back of the napkin percentages agreement. Yes. Yes. Finally, when he was supposed to deliver this report to the USRA directors, he had a long, very elaborate and detailed and boring presentation and was forced to admit

that Conrail was going to have to be one big railroad. There's no other way we can do this. To stave off nationalization, we must do a single large sort of quasi-state. We're not calling it nationalization, so leave me alone. Yeah. So the new secretary of transportation, William T. Coleman, was furious about this. He pressured the USRA to go ahead with something he called controlled transfer. They're just going to split the railroad and someone's going to buy it. He almost reached the deal with the Chessie system and the Southern Railway for certain parts of the system. The Southern Railway in particular, I'm going to switch to green for this. Remember that 225-mile branch line? I do. They wanted that.

The chicken run. Yes, because they had a car float that went from Cape Charles to Norfolk. They could theoretically serve that profitably, but the other thing is once they had a foothold in Wilmington, they could get all that sweet, sweet chemical traffic and then eventually convince someone. Delicious benzines. Yeah. Well, they could convince someone to bring that down the Northeast Corridor onto their main line. They almost reached the steel, but it fell apart because the Southern wouldn't agree to the union demands that for crews operating on former Penn Central Territory, you'd still get the Penn Central pay and the Penn Central benefits. They wanted to abrogate the contract, obviously. It's kind of new.

Well, they tried something clever. I love when a union tries something clever. The railroad tried something clever and it backfired. Coleman Transportation Secretary was facilitating negotiations, but he knew there was one meeting where one of the big union guys, Fred Kroll, who represented the clerks, he wasn't going to be there. He went on to make the Kroll show. Yeah. He wasn't going to be there. Coleman was like, well, why don't you use the Southern Railway's corporate jet to get to the meeting quicker? Jesus Christ. Motherfucker, there's trains right there. You're literally in charge of the trains. Get out of the fucking train. I hate every time you hear a railroad guy on a plane. Anyway, they started the meeting with the

leaders of, I want to say there were 22 unions in total and there were about 12 of them there. Kroll was in charge of one of the biggest ones. Coleman was really close to coming to some kind of agreement to let the Southern get this one branch line without all the union benefits. Right? And he was like, we're really close. He phoned the pilot of the private aircraft. Right? And he said, listen, just keep it in the air in extra 30 minutes. I think we got something here. And the pilot was like, okay, when it turned out, the pilot hit the wrong button. Oh, no. The cuss of the Pennsylvania Railroad. No one knows how to use a fucking speakerphone. And it went out over the PA system.

Just this union guy just fuming in the back of a private plane. So yeah, the deal was off. Oh my God. After they committed some technical kidnapping. They need to like make the PA button like big and red. Do not push unless you really mean it. Maybe the pilot was sympathetic to the union. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Solidaristic pilot. Coleman was also working to erode the power of the USRA, the ICC,

have restructuring brought under DOT control because he also wanted control over some of the Midwest railroads that were also starting to fail. Right? Load of that going around in the 70s. Yeah. And so finally, you know, this nothing was happening. No progress is being made anywhere. A representative of 10 major Penn Central Shippers named Charles Walker decided he was from Texas, of course, of course, he decided what we need to do is give White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney a call. Oh, wow. It's the last roll of these guys. Just keep showing up. Just keep showing history. I'm thinking about crafting a new conspiracy theory. I'm going to work on it. I'm going to

workshop it. Where was Dick Cheney on November 11th, 1963? November 22nd. Yeah. Sucking the blood out of children. Yeah, but in which city? Because if it was in Dallas, I have some further questions. Yeah. So this was this was. Do you know when Dick Cheney shot that guy? Yeah, his friend and then mate his friend apologized to him on national TV. I'm sorry I stood in front of your shot. I took that blast. No, sorry. In November of 1962, at the age of 21, Cheney was convicted of DUI. That wasn't a crime back then. No, you had to be really fucked up to get convicted of that.

Yeah, cut that cut that. Yeah, OK. Thank you. So Dick Cheney, apparently, if you called him at exactly 7 30 in the morning, he would answer the phone himself. No other time. I don't know. That's bizarre. I don't get that. So Dick Cheney answers the phone. He's like, what can I do, Charlie? What's cooking? And and Charles Walker says, how would you like all the trains in the northeast to stop running on the day before the New Hampshire primary? So Gerald Ford signed the railroad revitalization and regulatory reform act. Well, I don't think it is.

He's not. I just checked his Wikipedia. I could have sworn he was dead. I like how we went. We went to like Gerald Ford signing the thing like he did at 10 minutes later. Yeah. And as February 5th, over the protests of his own transportation, transportation secretary in Conrail began began operating on April 1st, 1975. Nice. Problem solved, boys. Problem solved. Our hands. Nothing bad will happen again. That's right. Well, while it was while it was now one big railroad, Conrail was, in fact, provided with competition, right? Oh, no. The U.S. R.A.

The rest to create competition. They found. Let me switch the blue here. It's so funny. This is the most American thing ever. We're going to centrally plan the absence of central planning. Yes, yes, yes. They found the only solvent railroad in the northeast, which was the Delaware and Hudson. The Delaware and Hudson went from Wilkesboro to Albany to Montreal. That is a trash. No offense to any chemical beckers up there. And they're like, all right, you have trackage rights to New York, Philadelphia, and Alexandria now. Today's your lucky day.

Get the Philly duck. It's just like three guys in a room. Oh, wait, I forgot. Also, Buffalo. Oh, that's really prepared them then. Bells, baby. Let's do it. And they ran one train a day on each of those lines. Fantastic. All right, give me a second. I'm going to use the restroom. There's your competition.

That's amazing. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, the deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. The Delaware Hudson. The DNA has some pretty sick paint schemes, though. I'm going to Google these. Hold on. Oh, I'm going to look at it. Delaware Hudson. Railway. Oh, that is nice, actually. Yeah, I really like the shield.

The like sort of like Chevron down the front kind of thing. Yeah. I always have a sauce for DNA's. Oh, that's really nice. Yeah. Oh, no, I'm on the Wikipedia article. I'm about to get some spoilers. There's a photo here of a two D and H like PA ones like running over the rustiest trestle in the world belching like totally black smoke. So I'm just going to put that in the old Twitter group chat there. Oh, yeah. They're rolling coal. Oh, they really are. Like one of them is like visibly the one behind is visibly darker, which is very funny. Wow, that is smoking.

That's very, very smoking. Oh, that is. Oh, boy, that is smoking. Because since we're in the 70s, we have a bicentennial livery as well, which I really like a lot. It's like, so are we looking at pictures of Delaware and Hudson trains? Yeah, I put a couple of them in the Twitter chat. I found a couple of a couple of Alco PA ones with the smokiest exhausts. The DNA Chalcos look really good. They just ripped off the Santa Fe and painted blue instead. Looks very nice. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just roiling cloud of like perfectly black smoke. Yes.

That's how you know trains, though. That railroad lasted a surprisingly long time. Yeah. Thanks for nothing, Canadian Pacific. Yes. Right. It was CP, not CN. Yeah, Canadian Pacific, but most of that line are at least Albany to Montreal because the rest of the railroad wasn't real. Right. Yeah. We're going to get there. Yeah. That all one train a day thing that you left. Yes. So, okay. Now, this is now a government run railroad, right?

Socialism has been achieved. Socialism has been achieved, yeah. The fondest dream of this podcast, we can shut it down. The world is our in power. Yeah, yeah. Dictatorship of the class. You got the big blue locomotives too. Like it's perfect. It's blue for the Democrats who do socialism. Biden's America, man. Yeah. So, there's a big difference between a government run railroad and a nationalized railroad and whatever Conrail was, right?

Oh, sure. And Conrail is this sort of monster, right, to start out with. Some rough beasts slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Yes. That's really good. Go mountain hawks, baby. How do you have this encyclopedia knowledge of which team is where? Because Lehigh is in Bethlehem.

So, it's sort of size and organization. It's monstrous. It's a private corporation. It's incorporated as a private corporation. It's just the government owns 85% of shares. And it's like a private venture. The government's been on the day trading. This is also technically how Amtrak has arranged, except the government owns 100% of the shares. Employees own the remaining 15% of shares in Conrail. It was directed to be profitable in exactly as bad shape as the Penn Central that preceded it. Oh, OK.

Yes. We order you to be profitable. Yes. By its third year, it was still posting a million dollar loss each day, which again, seems pretty quaint in this era of Uber. Yeah, I was going to say it works for Uber. What's the fucking problem? If they only had some angel investors. Or the government of Qatar.

Yeah, if we made this more tech, then I think we could really like. If we disrupted the railroading. Train.ly. Yeah, it did have an angel investor, the government. You had most of the same people, you had most of the same grudges. Your operating subsidies didn't cover operating costs. Deferred maintenance continued to be deferred. And the pruning that was supposed to make the network profitable just didn't happen.

That was too difficult. Maintenance deferred. Well, now you have actually somebody to blame, right? Like competing different agencies and associations or whatever. There's now like an actual. There's actual shmucks running the thing, yes. There was some consolidation of operations, but they did not let go of employees because it was too expensive.

So at like the Buffalo Terminal, where all six railroads that had been merged into Conrail had a terminals there. Most locomotive engineers who lived in Buffalo were just being paid to stay at home. Nice. Universal basic income brackets railroads. They have gotten the bag. This is simultaneously the best and worst time to be a railroad employee in American history. Because the severance package that Penn Central had agreed to

pay you under Stuart Saunders was basically that if you were laid off as a result of a merger, they would pay you not your base wage, but your average pay until you reach the age of 65. Yes, that's beautiful. I love it. Because they relied so heavily on overtime. Yes, it was cheaper. It's like a New York City police bar. So generally cool.

That's why you have fucking retired cops, 56-year-olds down in South Florida, sitting there drinking cold beer, making $130,000 a year on their pension. Because they racked up like 100 hours a week of overtime in the last three years. So their average salary was like $200,000. It's like by a bunch of cops retired after 9-11 is because they all worked a shit ton more hours and it boosted all of their pensions. Yeah. If it's good for the pigs, it's good for the railway.

That's right. That's true. Are we going to talk about railroad retirement at all? As opposed to the one opposed to social security? Or are we going to skip that? You would eventually, you would also be getting railroad retirement obviously after. 01:46:25,760 --> 01:46:27,440 Oh, man, that.

What a life. Dude, this shape, yeah. Fuck up, fuck up, fuck up some commerce, man. The 4R Act said the government would cover base pay in a situation where someone was laid off. But if you did like four years in like the Air Force or something in between Korea and Vietnam, you could have like gone your entire career working very little, had every single need met by a different like union or government agency and just live the rest of your life in like total indigence.

It's like hacking capitalism. That's the perfect sort of like window of time and space to do that. It's perfect. That's why houses are $730,000 now. Right. Yeah. And you can raise all of your kids to believe deeply in their own self-reliance and stuff. Right.

Yeah. So it was cheaper for the railroad to keep the employees on and pay them to do nothing rather than pay them severance. Greatest cut shot on our video. Even with the government covering base pay for anyone laid off, they just use that much overtime. This is what they took from us, man. I'm a return guy for this sort of setup.

There was a time where you could fall into like some giant unwieldy mega corporation or like public corporation like mob bell or whatever. You could end up in like a basement office. Nobody even knows you work there. You're making $60,000 a year. You have all these like fucking tasks that just no one ever checks on if they're done. And somehow you retire at 55 with a full pension and health care for the rest of your life. This is what they took with them from us.

We have to return. I'm sorry. Actually, all into the merger, we have to give you this yacht. It's actually more expensive because if we fire you for cause, we have to give you two yachts. Oh, man. The third world Maoists were right about the 1970s and the fucking labor aristocracy. They're not right anymore, but this was a real aristocracy of labor.

A lot of the departments in Conrail didn't coordinate. For instance, the sales department found a shipper who wanted to move livestock by rail from Chicago to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, then truck them to the slaughterhouse. And livestock cars are a pain to handle, right? You got to clean them after each trip. You got to move the train really fast. You got to feed and water the livestock every 33 hours by law to prevent the livestock from dying before they're supposed to, right?

So once the sales department had this guy like, yeah, you should ship by rail. It'll be great, right? The operations department got wind of it. They're like, we're not handling livestock. And so they demolished the livestock pens in Lancaster before the deal was signed. Jesus, don't worry, we have more. And because of the archaic regulatory structure, right, Conrail was being denied full rates for various shipments, right?

Freight rates were regulated by the ICC on a per mile basis. And that meant if you were a shipper and you had friends on another railroad, you could slide them some cash if you wanted by going an indirect route. Famous example is there was a lot of paper that was going from Mobile Alabama to the northeast. Paper again, man. This paper connection, man. It's crazy. We're going to learn that Dick Cheney owned all the paper.

It's the Koch brothers. It's a vast conspiracy. God, it really was, wasn't it? Yeah, the Koch brothers, the Irvings. I think Koch, Koch, is Koch industry is Georgia-Pacific? Yes, I forget. Yeah, okay. So paper from Mobile Alabama to the northeast.

I don't know where in the northeast. A lot of the big source for this podcast is a book called The Men Who Love Trains. I used the wreck of the Penn Central earlier. That one only covered the first two years. This one goes all the way to Conrail. So, but their example is like, okay, some shippers were shipping paper from Mobile Alabama to the northeast. Let's say they're shipping to Philadelphia, right?

Logically, you would take the Gulf Mobile in Ohio to Montgomery. You'd ship the Southern Railway to Potomac Yard in Alexandria. You'd ship Conrail to Philadelphia, right? But if you had a friend on, let's say, the Illinois Central, you ship that paper on the Gulf Mobile in Ohio to New Orleans. You ship the Illinois Central from New Orleans to Chicago, which is the longest run they have. And they make the most money off of that.

And then you ship on the Chessie System to Philadelphia. And then Conrail gets the full raid to haul those cars 1,800 feet to their destination and then a charge for car rental fees. Good. The quest for competition has created the worst of all possible work. Yes, it's so easy to rob the government. And so on these kinds of shipments, and there are a whole lot of them all over the country, Conrail actively lost money, right?

I mean, there were a lot of kinds of shipments on the railroads at that time, which you would lose money on. And you were required to take them. That this is an interstate commerce commission thing. But now not a Conrail's government. People are really poking them. Oh, hell, yeah. Take them for all their work.

Yeah. They're losing a million dollars a day. Let's make it two. Sounds like a challenge. Double or nothing, KB. Dude, I tell you, if I was one of these engineers in 1974, man, oof. I'm dreaming of that. I just popped a narrow ganset and now I'm just dreaming about being a 1974 railway worker.

It's all downhill from there. So they were they were taking an engineer. We used to not build things in this country. It used to be a proper country, I say. It's a deep part of the government out of 30 million dollars in 26 days. So there was there was a proposal from the Conrail planning department, which was still full of McKinsey guys. Oh, God.

Actually get paid not to shoot dogs. What if we deregulated the railroad industry? Stop doing that. No. So the idea of deregulation for the railroad industry is, OK, railroads can set their own rates. They can negotiate with shippers, right? You're going to you're not going to allow the shippers to go do these circuitous routes anymore.

And a lot of the railroads were against it. They thought it was a terrible idea, especially the Southern Railway, because they they made a lot of money pulling this shit. And the Norfolk and Western ripping off the government. Yeah, exactly. The Norfolk and Western also because under the under the current rate structure, because they were mostly hauling coal for export, they could charge anything they wanted for anything.

Because if you run like a relatively efficient railroad at this point in time, you're still making money, right? If you're like in that anthracite coal and you're getting it out for export, you can still make bank. It's just the Northeast is a cluster. Yeah, the Northeast is terrible. Not anthracite, bituminous. Anthracite's dead.

Bituminous. Thank you. OK. Yeah, we're using the worst coal now, which will not come back to holding us. No, no, we're going to we're going to move. I mean, probably right after the story ends is when we move to what's it? The what's the shitty the coal in Wyoming? Tarsens.

No, no, there's I forget. I forget the word. It is a type of bituminous coal. It's not brown coal, but it's worse than east coast bituminous. The Wyoming coal, it is low sulfur, but it's low energy density. EPA regulations ironically led to a lot of coal power plants moving to Wyoming coal, which is worse than a CO2 sense, but better in a sulfur sense.

That's a whole episode right there. Yeah, coal probably deserves a well, there's your problem. It is apparently just sub by two months. That makes sense. I mean, the the yeah, what the the whole Wyoming coal situation is the Powder River base and stuff is yeah, it's weird. So anyway, there was some lobbying that went on because a lot of railroads that deregulation would hurt them financially.

Western railroads, especially they were making so much money off of long halls. Does this have this weird sort of thing where you have like capitalists going, like, don't deregulate me and you have unions going, don't nationalize me? Yes. Strange bedfellows. Yeah, but at least at least what no socialist ideology does to America. Yeah, exactly.

At least of the Chessie system and really just the Chessie system. They were like, yeah, deregulation is a great idea. Conrail, I thought deregulation, probably a good idea. I didn't quite figure out exactly how the lobbying worked, but after a lot of controlling, a lot of the association of American railroads. Notably at gunpoint, of course. Yeah, yeah. They agreed to support the bill, the Stagger's Rail Act of 1980, right?

Yeah, it's when the car falls over. Yeah. So the previous regulatory structure did allow for a sort of informal cartilization of rates. They couldn't do that anymore. But a lot of these railroad owners realized that they were also being screwed over by shippers who were going circuitously, all this stuff like that. Computerized car tracking helped with that.

So with the Stagger's Act, the railroad could negotiate their own rates with shippers. They could set their own rates. They could route cars however they wanted to. It also significantly reduced the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate things like mergers and abandonment of branch lines, right? All under Democrat Jimmy Carter. Yes. 1980.

The president who never did anything bad. But yeah. That's a take. Yeah. Before you blame Ronald Reagan for neoliberalism. Also blame Reagan, but like, it's everybody folks. We'll get to Reagan. Well, I wish John Hinckley would have.

I'm going to see him in concert in this. I really like the justification that like, well, Hinckley tried to kill a lot less people than Reagan did. So we don't know what the problem is. I'm going to shake Hinckley's hand and I'm going to say thank you for your service. Oh, they're going to get mad at us in the comments, baby. Guy who gets a time machine and the first thing he does is take Hinckley to target practice. I thought the Secret Service guy saved him.

Hinckley? Yeah. Guy who takes a time machine and doesn't kill baby Hitler kills baby Secret Service. Anyway, I hope I don't get you guys delisted from YouTube. My God. We don't have advertisers. I don't care if we get demonetized.

We're not monetized. Don't fall in love, man. The only answer to your hair is this one. So now that we have free reign, let me tell you what other president should have gotten. Number one, George Washington. Number three, John Adams. I have a soft spot for John Adams. I'm sorry.

Well, Bill Clinton was the first black president, but I still think he should be redacted. Oh, yeah. No question about it. So Conrail's first president, Ed Jordan, had successfully integrated the management side of all five railroads to a certain extent, right? And he invested in plant and equipment, and the railroad failed to turn around. Completely burnout. By 1980, he left to teach at Cornell University, right?

Oh, that's that's what you know, man. That is really his life. That's what you know when you're burnout is Cornell. Yeah, Ithaca, yeah. Stanley Crane, who was a former Southern Railway president and staunch opponent of deregulation, became the president of Conrail on January 1st, 1981. But he made his mark days before by standing off with a New England union local who was fighting a cruise size reduction.

Um, they threatened to strike on Christmas Eve and stop all trains on the northeast corridor. Leverage, baby. 02:00:22,080 --> 02:00:23,520 Yes, leverage, baby. Well, buck the children, coal and all the fucking stockings. Sub-humanist coal. Yeah, the coal and all the stockings, but we kind of want that. Yeah.

Well, Crane told his union relations guy, he was like, I'd fuck him, let him strike. Oh, OK. Yeah. Oh, OK. Yeah, man, because he was the Grinch apparently. And the union postponed to the day after Christmas. Pussies, cowards, boo.

And then the New Year's and then called it off entirely. They reduced the crew sizes. I think there's nothing that'll happen if you're not willing to ruin Christmas to get what you want. That's what it's there for. It's a lesson. Ruin Christmas. That's right.

When in doubt, ruin Christmas. ABRC, always be ruining Christmas. Don't let capital be the Grinch. Yeah. Lever has to ruin Christmas first. So his second act was to kick out all the McKinsey guys. Well, I mean, Oh, that's something.

So it's sort of feeling a bit like Tito here, you know, or Gaddafi. It's like on the one hand, but on the other hand, we made it feel bad first. Some Pete Buttigieg looking motherfucker with like big sideburns and crazy mop hair murdered seven dogs. Well, so the Conrail was headquartered. I'm not sure if it was at Suburban Station or 1701 Market Street in Philadelphia, but one of those two buildings. The first thing they did was take them out of the top floor and put them down to the eighth floor. That's what happens.

They don't use your leverage. Yeah. And then the McKinsey guys are going to strike and stop killing dogs over Christmas. I had a lovey-dovey Christmas dead dog. I remember being very confused when I worked. Do you remember when I worked it on the five? What was it? Three Logan Circle and Conrail was there for some reason?

It sounds about right because there's still a bunch of Conrail offices. For what's left of Conrail there? Yeah, because a couple of those buildings in one pen center were entirely like Pennsylvania Railroad and then Penn Central. Right. 1701 Market was entirely Penn Central. That's the ugliest building in Philadelphia by the way. It's terrible.

It's really bad. Google this real quick. It's really bad. It continues to do business as an asset management and network services provider in three shared asset areas that were excluded from the division of its operations through its acquisition by CSX Corporation. Oh, wow, that is a hideous building. We told you.

Yeah. Hold on. Let me make sure we're thinking of the same building. I sort of guessed the address. The one that looks like a sort of multi-level car park. It looks like a parking garage. Yeah. But like if a parking garage was run by the NSA.

Right. Yes. This was built by the Pennsylvania Railroad right before the merger. Yeah. Well, they have eight dollars to do it. Yeah. Parable building. Anyway, so the first thing Crane did

was demote the McKinsey guys from the top floor to the eighth floor and then a month later he fired them all. Joe has boss. It made him feel bad first though. Good. Yeah. He then started ripping up unnecessary track really aggressively like Al Perlman did, but he did it on the Pennsylvania side, which is so far been immune to this kind of cost cutting.

Right. He was the guy who reduced horseshoe curve to three tracks as we see here. Aesthetic. Yeah. And this was sacrilege to the old Pennsylvania Railroad guys. They were like, this was like demolishing the Vatican. Reduced the cover to three tracks. Yeah.

The main lines were all modernized. They started using lower maintenance rail. They started introducing centralized traffic control, which again, the unions had opposed previously because it would have meant fewer people on the job. But like also it was kind of safer. And at this point, they're breaking the power of labor. Yeah. Bull 1980s.

Yeah. They got new railroad traffic, especially trailer on flat car, container traffic, old, unprofitable traffic was demarketed. He started lobbying Congress to end lifetime stipends to laid off workers. And to get Conrail out of the commuter train business. Even was. Yeah. Both of which worked.

He got one last bailout from Congress. $300 million from Ronald Reagan. Wow. The small government guy. That's really good. Blood from a stone. Jesus. Yeah.

It's impressive. And he started. It's like, what did he do? Telling me he was going to spend it on fucking Stinger missiles? No, death squads. That wasn't me. There was like a weird relationship with the Reagan administration to former Republican stalwart the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But this was supposed to be the last bailout. There would be no more bailouts. Right. This is when he starts making the hard moves on labor, right? Because you're starting to like finally bring like the actual capitalist imperative to bear on this shit. You're finally breaking through. You're finally using the algorithm.

Fuck the workers. In our good socialist railroad, of all things. Yeah. Can anybody hear me? Okay. I was making jokes to myself. All right. Cool.

Got it. Weas. Full time. No, I was asking if Ronald Reagan and the railroad ever explored each other's bodies, but I couldn't tell if Ross was just trying to record me. Yeah, I would believe that. Some sort of Bohemian Grove shit. Because Reagan was a California guy.

Yeah. No, absolutely. Tying Ronald Reagan's body to the track and letting the railroad explore it. As Sean waxes his mustache. Oh, don't make Ronald Reagan into Penelope pit stop. Come on. No, let's not. So, guys, it's the president's death.

Who's next on my hit list? It's a secret service agent just like pinching the bridge of his nose being like, so you're going to put Ronald Reagan in a Penelope pit stop outfit. Time to watch you. And then Norfolk Southern does the thing where they put a train on the ground in a horseshoe curve, which is fucking embarrassing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And central never managed that one.

So March 1st, 1980, crane releases a statement with the commuter trains gone with the deregulation and new rates with the reduction in physical plant. All of this stuff. Conrail was still $200 million short of profitability. Which means 12 percent across the board wage cut. Motherfuckers. That's how they get you. Eat my holes.

Yep. So the secretary of transportation, Drew Lewis, is like, this is my chance. He's the guy who also oversaw the Pat Coase strike and fired every air traffic controller in America. Boo. Drew Lewis is like, this is my chance. We're going to sell off Conrail in chunks. I'm going to do some ghoul shit.

Yeah. Yeah. Straight up ghoul shit. The kind of guy that gets off on firing. Yeah, he wants this railroad off the books immediately. And if it fucks over the East Coast, even better. Yeah, because now we're getting to the point. We've gone from sort of your Nixon Republican where it's like, fuck you,

but also I am going to like feel some responsibility that you don't starve. So that you can vote for me and my creepy friends. As opposed to the Reagan thing, which is just where the ideology is, fuck you, die. Yes. Yeah. Die then. And all along, of course, like from the Jimmy Carter into Ronald Reagan, this deindustrialization process in the Northeast and everything.

And the rust belt is like continuing on mass. Millions of people losing their good union jobs or whatever. So now's the time to strike. It's open season. Once Pat Coe comes down, it's open season on labor. Oh, yeah. And you don't even need the government at that point. You just need capital to start turning the fucking screws.

Well, so all the railroad unions were like, nah, they're not going to do shit, right? But the tide was already turning in Congress, right? Congress had bailed them out several times before. To the tune of a couple hundred million dollars each time. But it's all a Congress at this point. Democrats and Republicans alike, because there was a Republican Senate, but a Democratic Congress. They were sick of running this railroad that had cost them something like $7 billion so far, right?

And they were in the long term process of shedding labor as like a central part of the coalition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So union leaders had a cold reception in Congress. The Republican Senate in particular said, Congress owes organized labor nothing. Wrong. Yeah. At this point, the sort of loathe of my brain that's dedicated to Al Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa

and the Irishman going solidarity is like just blaring. Let your tweet about a weird Scandinavian Protestant heaven. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's like you sit in total silence watching God carve a chair forever. And if you make any noise, you go to hell. Yeah, that sounds great. Oh, yeah. No, the other one is like, every Finn has a special lobe in their brain where the

second the Russians get too angry, they just decide that the only way to get to heaven is to kill Russians. And the more Russians you kill, the higher your rank in heaven is. Yeah. Bring back Valhalla. Yeah. Conrail's labor relations guy, Bob Swart, did something. Bob Swart.

Bob Swart. I somehow named Bob Swart. Bob Swart. He did something unprecedented, right? Oh, boy. I feel like you never want to hear that sentence. And he opened up the books. It was like, this is the money.

This is how much money we need. Union's like, we're not interested in that. Well, they didn't have help in Congress anymore. They knew there was no money coming. And the alternative was Conrail got sold off. Everyone was out of a job, right? Because Reagan wanted this thing gone. And the books were the books.

Everyone believed them at least this time. And the pay cuts went ahead. They did it. Lost a game of chess. Yeah. Well, finally broke their back. Drew Lewis was still intent on selling Conrail in pieces, though, right? Crane was like, no, give me a year to make this thing profitable.

Then we'll sell it off in one whole piece, right? And Crane had been building support in Congress for this for a while. Drew Lewis sort of surrendered after this because he's like, okay, everyone likes this Conrail thing. We can't do anything to it, right? So after deregulation, pay cuts, shedding the computer systems, reduction in physical plan, reductions in workforce, Conrail showed a profit in 1980 of $39 million. Which is, like, perfect as far as the White House is concerned, right?

Well, this is true. Crane didn't even touch the bailout. He gave it back to Reagan in the form of a large comedy track, check. I hate a novel to check. Yeah. You're not fucking Ed McMahon, dude. I believe the next year they posted a profit of $200 million and then they undid the 12% pay cut.

So I mixed bag there. Yeah. The problem was now Conrail was turning a profit, which meant Congress definitely wanted to get rid of it. You now have a going concern. Which is too close to being nationalized. The US government isn't in the business of making money. Yeah, no, especially not when someone's handing you a big novelty check.

The US government isn't in the business of being handed big novelty checks. The US Congress is that is that gif of the guy dangling the keys. I wish I didn't quite finish writing as much as I wanted to on this slide, but I feel like if we really went into how Conrail was split up, that would be a whole nother episode, right? Let's not do a whole other episode. Let's do a whole other episode. You gotta get to 10 hours.

Yeah, one hostage every hour. One burrow. This is a slide I'm tentatively titling, the assassination of Conrail by the coward Ronald Reagan. I like that. Nice. So other railroads were sort of taking notice of Conrail's turnaround, right? And a profitable Conrail meant a competitive Conrail.

And I want to say at this point Conrail was the biggest railroad outside of Russia. And so deregulation had made mergers possible that never were before, right? So at the Chessie system, there was this guy named John Snow, right? Later from the show, yeah. From the show, exactly, right? And he sort of orchestrated this merger between the Chessie system and the Seaboard coastline, creating this weirdly named company called CSX, right? Yeah.

You should express. Has no identity whatsoever. It's just letters. CSX was the temporary merger name until they came up with a better name. New railroad dot doc. Yes. There's still some McKinsey guys in a basement somewhere trying to formulate that one. If they just fucking called it something with Chessie in it and put the fucking cat on there,

everybody would have been way happier with it. But no, it has to be just letters. So it's Chessie, Seaboard, and then X. The X is for X. Extraordinary. Yes. Extreme. Chessie, Seaboard, extreme.

Yeah. Jim McClellan had gotten himself in the planning department at the Southern Railway, right? Which had to react to this merger, because this merger came like two days after the Stagger's Act or something like that, right? And they realized, okay, who do we merge with? Because the original Southern Railway merger partner was going to be the Chessie system. He's looking for a dance partner now. Yeah, exactly.

And they're like, all right, all right, what do we do? What do we do? What do we do? Norfolk and Western, go. So, yeah, you phoned up Jack Fishwick at the Norfolk and Western. They were like, yeah, we need to do a merger. And so Norfolk Southern happened. Could have called it the Northern and Western, the Southern and Southern.

More like the Southern extreme. Yeah, the Southern, Norfolk Southern extreme. We make our conductors grind on the rails. There's a signal. Ask their crews about their bathroom policy. Shut out the window, baby. Well, no, so there was this was an issue during like the Conrail split up talks is that so one of the things Norfolk Southern did not do was invest in amenities on the locomotives,

including flush toilets. And crews started protesting at some point. And so what they what they did was initially they were like, there's a 55 gallon drum in the nose of the locomotive. Here's a plastic bag. Take a shit in the plastic bag and then get rid of it. Oh, man, it's a man. Then some crews in protest just started throwing the plastic bags full of shit

anywhere they could make a ruckus. And then so Norfolk Southern trucker bombs, Norfolk Southern, rather than installing flush toilets like every other railroad had, they turn up the drum. No, they started numbering the plastic bags and you had to turn them in. You had to turn them in at the end of the run. This has to be Mackenzie again. It has to be Mackenzie again. Oh, my God.

I mean, granted, I've seen at 6 30, the tower crane operator ready to walk off, walk up like 400 feet into the air with a bucket in his hand that he has to shit it. Oh, my God. It's like some rudimentary, you know, labor practice here. Give somebody the opportunity to shit without a numbered bag. Yeah, just put a put a toilet in the locomotive. I mean, this is why train crews will still like stop the train at a railroad crossing and go use the bathroom to gas station.

Good for them. That's great. You know, the Canadian locomotives have flush toilets and they all have coffee makers in them. That's pretty good. I wonder if there's a pipe connecting the tube. That's efficiency. You really want your train engineer to have as much caffeine as you want. Oh, yeah, I didn't say that.

Yeah, especially since you're not allowed any form of entertainment in there and you're sitting there at a signal for 10 hours, just stopped. Yeah, totally. So both these systems were gargantuan, right? They're mostly located in the southeast. CSX got as far north as Philly. In Norfolk Southern got as far north as Potomac Yard in Alexandria, Virginia. Both of them sort of knew, OK, Conrail is going to be up for sale.

What do we do here? Whoever got Conrail would become top railroad, right? You would be America's next top rail. They also thought, OK, Conrail is probably going to be sold off in pieces, right? Now, we hit a new secretary of transportation, Elizabeth Dole. Huh, wife of Bob Dole. Yeah, my question remained. A secretary of transportation is one of those positions that no one thinks means anything.

It means a lot of things. Yes. Too many things. That's why they always give it to wives. Like what's your face? Wife of Elaine Chao. Elaine Chao. That's about sort of Biden's level of homophobia, I think, is to be like,

yeah, it's just like your wife. Yeah, he's kind of like a wife. Yeah, I will say that's what being gay is. All the way down. It's just people to judge at the water. They're like, yeah, you know, the old wife. Am I right? Like trying so hard.

So Elizabeth Dole is now like inheriting the Drew Lewis privatization scheme. And Drew Lewis had retained Goldman Sachs to figure out how to sell a railroad, right? Good city, baby. They said, all right, do an initial public offering. Just do that, right? And for whatever reason, Mrs. Dole's aide said, no, you can't do it. You absolutely cannot do that. Don't do that.

Put it up for auction, right? So they tried an auction. Only one credible bidder came forward, at least initially. With two billion dollars, the Railway Labor Executives Association. The Railroad's own union. Which at this point. You thought socialism had failed? Yeah, no.

Just fighting against time for this greatest moment. You want a giant novelty check? I got a giant novelty check and a giant novelty 358. This is what you do is paid for. Fuck it. We will have flush toilets on every locomotive. Some will say too many flush toilets. An improbable number of flush toilets.

We had two stalls in case the engineer and conductor have to go at the same time. An entire car on the train devoted to flush toilets. It's got like marble tiling in there. It's just really nice. It's like an open toilet seat. Every engine has an executive washroom. Luxury first-class caboose. And an espresso machine, but not one of those chintzy ones like the Italian ones.

I ain't got the real one. You can pull a real nice shot off of it. Yeah, and that's four and a half tons and your dues paid for it. Let's go boys. We're actually going to have a barista on each train. They get Railroad Retirement too, by the way. So. Oh, what could have been?

This is the problem is that this is clearly unacceptable for the union to own the railroad. Insane communism. That's communism right there. We don't do that. Stanley Crane didn't like the idea. He said, let's do an IPO or try a merger. He started shopping around. He talked to the folks at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, right?

He's like, hey, what if we did a Transcontinental Railroad? You and me. New York to Los Angeles. Let's go. All right. And they can't do that either. That's too efficient. So they they they came over.

They started touring the property like, yeah, this might be a good idea. Let's try this out. Oh, no, they were just trying to scare the Southern Pacific into a merger, which also didn't happen. Lot of scare tactics in this story. Railroad executives love bluffing. This is true. Meanwhile, this is from that one guy who was willing to ruin Christmas.

Yes. And that other guy who was like, you have one hour. I will fire you and then fire the guy. Yeah. And then got fire. All but two executives. All but two railroad executives love bluffing. Yes.

But meanwhile, Mrs. Dole was still trying to find bidders for the auction and delegated Goldman Sachs to do the same thing. And they all the Goldman Sachs came up empty handed. They're like, no one wants to buy this thing, whole cloth, except the Railway Labor Executive Association. So what the buy it? Come on, man. That's fun.

Ideologically, that's just impossible. What you're allowed to do is like use the New York City Teachers Fund, pension fund to bail out New York City, but you're not allowed to have any workers actually have a stake. No, of course. That's common. I believe after they failed to purchase Conrail, they kept going because they had just this huge slush fund.

They tried to buy the Denver Rio Grande Western. They tried to buy another railroad. I forget what it is offhand. That's what I would be doing. I would absolutely be using my railroad purchasing slush fund. And I would not be using it for good purposes. That is a good purpose by the railroad that you work for. Yeah.

That's not what I would be doing. They tried to buy the Southern Pacific. They tried to buy the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. They tried to buy the Chicago and Northwestern. They're throwing good money at it. Yeah. The Chicago and Northwestern was already employee owned. I mean, this is only a one small step forward.

What's the hold up? How did they? How did they shut them out from all of these? Fast. Oh, you just don't let them buy it. Fast people. There's a capitalist came together and said no. Class solidarity.

What's happening? Class solidarity. God damn it. There you have it. They shouldn't be allowed to have that. It feels like chasing. So after a year of not finding any more bidders for this railroad, CSX announced interest in purchasing Conrail.

This is late 80s, right at this point. I think 80, no, actually early 80s. CSX was like, okay, we're going to buy Conrail. They're in a good financial position, especially compared to Norfolk Southern. So they're like, we're interested. And McClellan, again, he's still a planner at Norfolk Southern. At this point, he's not like a high ranking guy, but he manages to catch one of the executives here.

And he's like, this is an existential problem for us. Yeah. Because if they buy it, then it all is CSX. Everything's CSX, right? It is the only railroad on the East Coast. He sort of starts something which is now referred to as the go crazy strategy. Oh, boy. The madman theory.

Which was Norfolk Southern then took all the money they had and said, we're going to buy a Conrail with all this money. Like the day after CSX announced they were thinking about buying it, Norfolk Southern was like, here's all the money we have. Give us Conrail, right? And so Mrs. Dole announced that Norfolk Southern was the winner in 1985. And Norfolk Southern then backed out because they didn't actually have that much money. Wow, more bluffs.

So finally Conrail was given to an IPO, an initial public offering in 1986. And at this point, the battle lines were kind of drawn between CSX and Norfolk Southern. Like we're going to fight over this. But Conrail was now a completely private company. And there was just a huge mess for about a decade. Well, CSX and Norfolk Southern bickered and argued about how to split up Conrail. And again, the unions were definitely more like, can we get CSX, please? A lot of the Norfolk Southern unions, their employees refer to it as Nazi Southern.

The whole sort of like black color scheme doesn't help, I think. And the poop bags. And the poop bags. And the poop bags. The split actually occurred in 1997 after a decade of bickering and arguing. Most of the former New York Central went to CSX. And most of the former Pennsylvania Railroad went to Norfolk Southern, which is... So the whole thing was for nothing.

And we may as well not have merged the two in the first place. Yes, this is the same systems as was proposed in the 50s. Oh, damn it! So what you're telling me is that three episodes of this shit, fucking 10 hours. And the conclusion is, yeah, it went back to the way it was at the start. Yeah, this is the original idea. They did the original idea.

And that turned out to be the one I made sense. So this is the angriest I've ever been, I think. And today there's a day you have Conrail shared assets operation, which operates trains and tracks in Detroit, Philadelphia and New Jersey, on behalf of both of the companies where it was impossible to find ownership. Fairly, right? The Conrail split so far has been the last railroad mega merger, because whatever the next one will be,

it'll probably, they'll try and do a transcontinental railroad of some sort. I mean, we're now going to get Canadian Pacific, Kansas City Southern. I don't know what that'll do. I don't see a mega merger happening again, because at that point, it'll be so close to monopoly. Like, my God, I mean, they're already monopolies. Yeah, it's already very much like the cartelized managed competition. Oh, yeah.

Pepsi, Coke thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's the difference between Norfolk Southern and CSX, other than flush toilets in the locomotives? That's a pretty big difference, man. Yeah, nothing. Actually, CSX is a lot better than not derailing trains right now.

Yeah, I was going to say. But what did we learn? What did we learn? Nothing. Oh, wait. No, there's another slide. Motherfucker. Okay.

I was going to say, if you search for competition long enough, you might just find. Real kind of enough doors. Maybe the real competition was all the first we made along the way. As part of Penn Central's divestiture of non-railroad assets during the prolonged bankruptcy, they sold off a bunch of real estate around Grand Central Terminal above their rail yards. Oh, we're about to get our last member of the Hall of Press.

I recognize that fucking bill. They also tried to sell Grand Central Terminal itself to be demolished and replaced with an office tower. Oh, my God. And that was the Supreme Court case that gave us the historic reservation movement. But among the buildings they tried to sell was the grand but aging and no longer profitable, Commodore Hotel, right? Now, there was this guy who owned a whole bunch of apartments in Queens and Brooklyn.

Oh, no. His dad was a notorious slumlord, right? He wanted to move out of the apartment business and into big-time Manhattan real estate. And become respectable and move up in the world. His name was Donald John Trump. He almost shot him. Yeah. Well, he got this small one million dollar loan from his father,

Fred Trump, and he secured an option on the Commodore Hotel. What? We should put on Fred Trump was in the clan. This is true. That's true. After he got that option, he secured control of the building with a bunch of financing, right? And this was Trump's first big-time Manhattan building, the new luxury Grand Hyatt Hotel, which is actually just a building from 1919 with the new facade.

Oh, shit. It really is. Yeah. It was really handsome before then they put the disgusting glass. It was a bad to say. Yeah. All of the brick is actually still there underneath the glass, except the first six stories, which are the most architecturally interesting part.

So, you know, they took all the brick and the ornament off or they covered it in the glass. They put the new sleek black glass facade. He really wanted an atrium and they told him he couldn't have it because it's a building from 1919. And but the architect who designed it went on to work for Trump for a long time afterwards, right? But this this was not architect's name, Albert Spear. Now, now, now, go look up Albert Spear the second and Oh, no, that's not real, is it?

Yeah, no, Albert Spear and partner have built all of the stadiums for the World Cup in Casa. Yes. What's really, really funny is that if you go and watch if you go and watch a World Cup match in Casa, you can, you know, sit in a seat in a stadium that like has a body count of slave laborers that was designed by Albert Spear and built by the Bin Laden group. It's incredible. Just a perfect confluence of dark energies. I love architecture.

It's morally, I would say it's one of the best things. But so this is the building. This is the building that kickstarts Donald Trump's real estate career, right? It was generally regarded as a great success. It's symbol of the revitalization of Manhattan during like the financial crisis or his own knuckles at the moment. Shortly beforehand, right? Oh, the 80s people loved this.

Yeah. And it was everyone loved this until the accounting discrepancies came out about a decade later. But this that was that by that time Donald Trump was a celebrity. It didn't matter, right? So anyway, my point is our entire system, our system of capitalism, our entire lives, it all comes back to Penn Central Railroad. And that's why it took 16 hours of content to try and describe it and come back to the same place. It's true.

Because it explains everything. It's like looking into the fucking multiverse. It all goes back. Sean, buddy, are you OK over there? Oh, I'm great. Yeah, I'm good. I'm just staring into the abyss. It's all caused.

Thinking, thinking keenly about the past and the future. If you hate, if you hate the current political climate, get mad, go back in time. Get mad at the standard railroad of the world. Well, what did we learn? Ah, go back in time and kill all of the like Penn Central guys. Sorry, Raymond Lowey. Yeah.

Release release episodes of your podcast more frequently. But go go back in time and convince the the Pennsylvania Legislature in the 1830s that the main line of public works was sufficient. Jay Sakai was right. And the Maoist internationalist movement was correct only up until about 1976. I aspire to be a labor aristocrat. Maybe they'll give us podcasters sweet pension deals at some point. Yeah, podcast retirement.

The IPC, the International Podcasters Commission. Well, the segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Oh, thank God. Dear, well, there's your problem and all just fuck up. I used to work for an exploration drilling company that operated in remote Western Australia. Oh, no. Good day. Good.

Good day. Bill Shorten wants to rack off me fucking drill rigs. Welcome to Bundavista podcast. Yeah, I didn't even make any sense. I'm tired. At the time, I thought that heavy diesel experience would be a useful career move. But it turned out the company was more adapted in bezelment than it was at technical development. Oh, that's tough.

Such as life. The crew, I spent most of my time with operated surface rig that used a technique called air core drilling, which would typically drill to depths of about 100 meters in America. And that's 300 feet in a grid pattern across swaths of Australian bushland, which is much better geotech than you would ever get in America. Well, you don't also have swaths in bushland. This is true. We can probably fight.

We can probably fight. Air core uses a rack of three meter long drill rods in which when each rod has been fully fed into the ground, the drill is unscrewed and raised. Then the next rod is placed into the gap, screwed into the previous rod, and the cycle continues deeper and deeper. I've actually done this before. I am I am slightly confused here as to how this works. Okay.

I forgot it was Ukrainian Easter. It's Orthodox Easter and they're doing an entire procession outside my window right now and singing. There's the priest. Oh, wow. They really are. You're like continuously drilling this pipe into the ground. The drill like tips back.

It's it's trips basically. And you put like another bullet in a chamber. You put like another pipe in and then it interlocks with the threads into the other one. Shooting the ground with Anton Sugar's like air gun thing. The reason it's called air core is because each rod is made up of two nested tubes. Impressed air is forced down the gap between the outer and inner tube. And when it gets to the bit at the end of the drill, it does a hairpin turn and comes back up the inside of the inner tube,

hopefully bringing the sample with it. Okay. Okay. I see. Right. One particular hot autumn day, the crew had drilled into some clay that had been comfortably compressed underground for millions of years. Drilling into it and allowed it to decompress inside our tubes and hoses,

blocking the lines that were supposed to feed out the samples. After trying the approved methods of clearing the lines with no success, the driller came up with a plan. One of the young off-siders was to distract the geologist and client by showing them a funnel web spider nest we had seen nearby. This is the lazio approach. Yes. This is...

Walsing, Mathilda, bass boosted plays. Not a poisonous spider, but incredibly venomous. Meanwhile, the sample hose had been disconnected, leaving the outlet of the drill pointed at a skyward angle like a howitzer. Finally, a less than recommended return camp was fitted over the drill head, allowing the rig to turn its air compressor on itself, and sneeze out a slug of clay that, to this day, still may have not hit the ground. Just sort of less at oil exploration, more sort of artillery there.

I'm thinking, what I'm hearing is just... Sounds exactly like a t-shirt cannon. Yeah. The geologist being unable to hear any difference in the rig's usual roar gave the off-sider a safety commendation for pointing out the hazardous spider and drilling resumed. Fantastic. Attached is...

I mean, that's expedience, right? That is expedience right there. That's how you get things done. I don't understand Christianity. Yeah, I... I thought the church next to you was Ukrainian Orthodox. It is Ukrainian Orthodox. It's Ukrainian Great Friday, I think, dude.

They don't go on your calendar. They're just singing and shit, dude. We now enter a segment I like to call Liam Endors is the special military operation. They call me Liam Donbass Anderson. Solidarity to all working people. Leave me alone. Liam's going to drive this to this drill rig to the Donbass operation as artillery. All right, I'm from America and I'm here to help as I just spit into a tank barrel.

Yeah, if there's any oil under Ukraine, we'll find it. We can get like a 14-year-old's view of like American foreign policy again. Are we done? I think we're done. Are we done? I think we'll be done. I think we can go back to doing engineering disasters now. All right.

All right. Justin? Rod's. Guys. Hello. I hit the thing. Stop. Stop hitting the thing.

I'm begging you to stop hitting it. All right, all right. All right. Thank you all for making a show that I'm going to call a bloody delight just so that I can hear you say that phrase in your accents. Oh, I said bloody delight. Bloody delight. It's a bloody delight.

Back off me fucking you. Listen to the Antifada. Listen to the next bonus episode. The Boston molasses disaster. Does anyone have any commercials? I was trying motherfucker. Yeah, all of what Liam just said. This is the Antifada.

Listen to Lion's Eye by Donkeys. Listen to Ten Thousand Losses. Listen to Kil'Jane's Bond. Listen to Trash Future. We have a bonus episode that I am still writing but which we will be recording within three days. Fuck you. I don't believe it.

No, we will. We will. I'm going to endorse this sort of a program of special measures whereby I just stand over both of you the Makarov and we make the fucking podcast on time. Yeah, all right. Bye. I can see it. Stop fucking singing out to other spanners now.

Bye, everybody. Spanners. I had a great time. Thanks, everybody. Bye, guys. See you on the next one. All right. I think that was a podcast.