Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 105: 1988 Gare de Lyon Wreck

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

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And now, all things are going. All should be well, and all should be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Yes. Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem, it's a podcast about engineering disasters. With slides, I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Kordelkeli, I'm the person who is talking now.

My pronouns are she and her. And for a second consecutive week, Nae Liam? Nae Liam, yeah, my name is Liam Anderson, my pronouns are he and him. You may recognise the voice of our co-host, Liam Anderson, who has not changed at all. No, not at all, even slightly. I am Liam Anderson, I currently have a game on, the Loch Haber Shinty Club is knocking out the park right now, and I have to make actionable threats. So, oh, names, think of it, Elon Musk.

Oh, this is your... I hope that... Oh, you'll definitely have to believe this. I hope the next woman is sexually assault... Yeah, that was fun, let's do another one. It's a shit bag. Jacob Riesmog, fuck, I look forward to your crooked oily... ...in your own anemic feces.

It's very relaxing, isn't it? He is. Welcome to the catharsis pot. That's right. Yeah. That was good. That was really good. Why have I got a nosebleed?

That's the sort of the venom symbiote going on. It's in very good symbiosis with Liam, but no, not yet with you. Oh, my God, he's got a taste for blood. No, we've, of course, got Gareth Dennis back. We sent Liam to go away and watch a load of Shinty games and learn about Railway Permanent Engineering, Permanent Way Engineering, and he came back as Gareth. That can happen. Yeah, absolutely.

So thank you so much for coming on and filling in. No, it's a pleasure. I always love coming and saying hi to you folks. It's always fun to be on and talk about disasters and how we fucked things up. It's great. We have one here, which seems to be going poorly, I would say. I was about to say what you see on the screen in front of you is you see here's the outline of one train car.

Yeah. What you might notice is there's another train car up here. Now, see, I thought that was just that one train car was taking some scrap metal with it in the same way that you or I might take a picnic and have cast into a little blanket and strung over a stick. Yeah, a spindle. Yeah. But actually, this appears to be carnal relations between two train cars.

Oh, I'm just going to show that on television and put a black bar over this. Yeah. Today, we're going to talk about the 1988 Gare de Leon accident. Oh, yes. Yes. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. I picked the most English photo I could find. So.

Crossrail. I didn't see this. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. This is the first train. So Crossrail now renamed the Elizabeth Line, which is now annoying all of the most themselves annoying people because it shows up on TubeLines as Elizabeth Line when all of the TubeLines don't have the word line in the name.

It is annoying. Yeah, I'm intensely annoyed by that. Yeah. I'm one of those people. I also didn't. You had two of those people on this bad cast out. I'm sure they got a backpedal. It will always be Crossrail to me.

Yeah. I mean, so this is what's it so cross about London and the southeast of London. There was the joke made by, I think Molly or Molly Goodfell on Twitter pointed out why didn't they call it Ragefuck rather than Crossrail? So Crossrail has opened. It's it's what fucking is Crossrail? How do you describe Crossrail? Okay.

So Crossrail is a it's a it's a suburban. It's like an S train, like S band type train system. It's more like RER than like a metro service. So it's massive trains, like 12 cars long, 1500 passengers per train. And like really high spec. The stations are epic. They're amazing. They're cathedrals to railways.

They're honestly fantastic. And obviously all the politicians today were going, oh, it runs, sorry, it runs east west through London. So there's like a central section with what, what is it like seven or like some number of massive stations in the central section. Then it connects up as these things often do on to kind of former lines that are now Crossrail bits of railway east and west going out from pannington wonder towards like westwards and then eastwards up to Shenfield and down to Abbeywood.

So lovely. And it's purple. Great. And because the trains are bad, because the trains are high floored and their technology is rubbish, that accounts for the fact that it's not accessible in most in most of the system. And also that it was this late. So hooray.

And also what's the other thing? Oh yeah, all the politicians going like Boris Johnson, everyone going, oh yeah, transport investment is great. Look how fantastic it's going to be for the economy. And like, yeah, you fucking nitwit. You know what's a really good idea? Do some of that in other cities as well. Still up here in Glasgow waiting for my 1930s plan subway extension.

Yeah. We had the first train run through. We had a lot of people show up at like, you know, zero dark 30 to take the first train. And it's always nice to see a sort of a pride festival, a trains pride festival. There were hundreds, like thousands of people queuing at 5am to get onto this thing. It was kind of beautiful. People really like this. People really have like a great deal of affection for this.

Not least because it cuts their commute by like half or more. Yes. A friend of mine is a driver on this and he was waiting to, he was stuck waiting in the back room as like a reserve driver when the first train left. And off of this, he got a little welcome pack of four perfect purple wrapped caramels and a little Elizabeth line bag, which is just such a perfect tweet British thing. And just as he was about to like, look at these things, the fire alarm went off.

It's like, oh, no, you got it. You got to get out. Because everyone had to leave. Yeah. Like it was like a bit of an alarm. Everyone had to go outside and it was all very orderly and everything. You know, it's good loads of people. Well, I was possibly the photos I was enjoying most, including one taken by Sir Peter

Hendy, who's like the equivalent of the Fat Controller. Now on that trail, but he was like the London transport dude. And beforehand. And anyway, he, yeah, it was just a picture he took and everyone in it looked bored and like they were waiting for a train, which I love on the first day of this thing opening already. People are just angry about the fact they have to use it. Like it's been there forever.

But that's what to be fair. That's exactly what public transport should be. Like you begrudge that you get on it, but fine. It makes your life easier, but you're not, you know, you're not fussed by it. And I was, I was loving the fact that within three or four hours of it opening, there were like 20 people within this photograph, all who looked kind of grumpy and didn't care. And we're just going to get their regular train to work.

I love that. Yeah. So we have, because Crossrail used to be high speed one, right? Well, no, no. So it Crossrail, man. I was setting up for a joke here. It give those Chinese rapid metro systems is run for their money. Run the trains at 186 miles an hour.

Yeah. Kill three of the people in this photograph instantly. Yes. Like it. Ferrari acceleration. The joke that I was going to make was that if Crossrail or the Elizabeth line was high speed one, we could so just think of it as like nice thing one. Maybe we could do a second nice thing.

We could do some kind of nice thing too. Up and down the country. Nice thing too. What could that be? I wonder. Yeah. No, I don't know anything about that at all. I don't know what that might be or indeed that its Eastern leg has been canceled.

Believe it will be a bridge to Northern Ireland. It's genuinely, we just had this moment of realizing, oh, transport infrastructure can make everyone's lives better and people quite like it and they appreciate it and they're like support the stuff that it takes to make it happen. Let's not do any more of this. This was like pulling teeth in the first place. Yeah, exactly. We can't do this anymore.

We can't do this. We just have to continue to utterly dismantle everything that remains positive about the country. No, I was on and the thing, the trouble is like I was on, this just typifies it. I was on BBC Radio Manchester kind of grumbling about the lack of the fact that this is great, but like everyone's saying this is great. So I was like, yes, so do this in other places as well. There's no reason not to.

But obviously the response I got from the, from the dear lady who was kind of helming the show was, yeah, but this, you know, we've got, you know, money's very tight at the moment. And I just sort of, I just sort of tightened that kind of crunched my neck and sort of put my head in my hands and did the Picard meme. It helps the economy. The economy doesn't have to be based purely on scams of people can get to work or go to the shop.

So any of these things. My understanding about Britain is that there's one city. It's called London. That's true. Everything else is a tiny little village called like Bumblebury upon fuckweed. Yeah. It's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy is the thing. Like London is this sort of like the one city that everything else drains into is.

Yeah. Some of that sort of like occurs by itself, but a lot of it's just perpetuated by policies that like, well, this is the way it is. It can't be any other way. And therefore it's pointless to try. All those other cities, I'm pretty sure we're made up to make documentaries about the Beatles more interesting. Glasgow was built in 2002 as a film set in order to provide Victorian buildings for

seeing seven London in places that had been demolished. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's like, but the thing is people forget that London, it wasn't always like this in London. It was eventually terminal decline until the mid 80s. Like the city, the population was dropping.

Everything looks shit. And, you know, even more shit than perhaps in other parts of Britain. You know, I think I've already mentioned on this, on other episodes of this fine show about, you know, pieces of rust the size of a small car is falling off the, falling off the fourth bridge. No. And anywhere. And like London looked like every 2000 AD comic, like every comic that's like Britain

in the 80s is shit. What if everywhere was as dystopian as this? Just London. And the thing that fixed it was the DLR. That was basically the thing that turned it around. And also, you know, empowering the kind of what was the Greater London Authority to, or what was the Greater London, the council and then the Greater London Authority, all that local politics.

But like they got more power and then they decided to make their public transport vector. And all of a sudden London started turning around. And it's amazing that no one joins these fucking dots, build trains for, build trains. Build trains. Build international finance capital. Oh, yeah. Build up an entire bubble. Yeah.

Yeah. Just hang up your capital city to, to these yuppies. It's going to be fine. Exactly. Everything about that will be fine. Yeah. Cut to 20 years later and everything is an axe throwing ball. Oh my God.

Yeah. Well, it's just this picture here where this guy, this guy, to be fair, the future of our country here and now, and then that young guy drinking a bottle of water. Yes. Shaking hands across the generations, you know, past and future. Well, in other news. Are you ready for a jarring shift in tone? Yes.

Well, ripped from the headlines. So if, if, if Britain can only do like one thing, the United States of America cannot do that. In fact, we can only do our things. Yeah. And the things that you do, do a guy walks into an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, kills 13 kids plus a teacher and then get shot by the cops. Yeah.

I kind of, I made my peace with this after like Sandy Hook that I kind of intuitively like learned that nothing would ever change. Like the moment that that became acceptable and that was like sort of an acceptable level of collateral is like young, young children getting, getting murdered and nothing changes. That sort of, that's when I got blackpilled about this stuff really about about gun rights or whatever. Like absolute, absolute refusal to do even the most basic common sense like anything, anything you can't fucking take the guns off of someone who like is, who's Twitter at is

future school shooter. No, that guy's protected by federal law. That's a first amendment. Yeah. You can't touch him for that. Yeah. What was this? Was this a student who did the shooting or was it just some guy?

We don't know. We don't know. Okay. Yeah. This happened like an hour ago as of time of recording. Yeah. Alice, I'm exactly the same. I just can't process this.

I mean, I don't, Britain is a, you know, the United Kingdom is a dump collection of countries where we have lots of problems. Sure. But we like to kill our children through neglect. We kill our children through, yeah. We do that too. The right way to neglect. Yeah.

Well, that's true. But like the one thing we did was there was a school shooting and then we've never had one since because we did a load of gun bans and just changed, we just changed the law and made that not happen again. Yeah. And as much as I like season cope about the fact that I can't walk around with a Glock, which I would absolutely do if it were legal, I kind of prefer me seething and coping to pile of dead children.

So, you know, it's, it's kind of, you know, you got to weigh these things. But also you could also sell all schools and Kevlar school uniforms. So that's true. That's true. Texas bulletproof backpacks. Texas, Texas, Texas lets its teachers be armed in schools, I believe. So this is true. Yes.

You know, maybe what this needed was the teacher, if they weren't armed to be armed and if they were armed to be better armed. Yeah. Well, you know, that that's that that's definitely like the teacher to cop pipeline that the whole country has gone down as an interesting one. Because, you know, especially since so many of these schools now have like school resource officers who's like job is to arrest an 11 year old as like a show. All 11 year olds at Deagle.

That's what you have to do. The only thing you can do. That would be hilarious watching an 11 year old shoot at Desert Eagle and then like the recoil like flings them down the corridor. Oh, but no, also, this is horrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Just oh my god.

Like the the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida where they had a school resource officer like a cop functionally who was armed, who was there and when the school shooting happened, just kind of like danced up outside and did nothing. Immediately left. Yeah. I was reading a thing that the NRA is losing some grip of power, but is it basically being replaced by other libertarian weirdos? Like what?

What? Like Justin, what is the NRA is still as much of a total? Is it still gripping grabbing government? I mean, the NRA has has been having financial problems for a long time. The issue is like the NRA is no longer the source of the sort of politics, you know, it's taken on a life of its own. So even if, you know, some of these big institutions collapse, like, I don't know the NRA or like some of these like big evangelical mega churches, you know, the thing has a life of its own.

You don't even need like the, you know, these big, big like political institutions. Because the QAnon and all the crypto people have picked up where they left off. So they're like, especially QAnon. Yeah. Yeah. And if anything, you're sort of your newer generation of gun owners. I get the sense kind of see the NRA as basically libs, which is an insane thing to think, but to them they more or less are just like, you know, 70 year old guys with their pants

hitched all the way up who only want to talk about 1911s. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's plus also legislatively they've won. They've gotten everything they could have wanted. It's secured basically forever thanks to the Supreme Court. Yeah. So, you know, it's not a lot of neat that it's harder to keep that sort of hysteria going

of Biden is going to personally come to your house and he's going to take your AR-15. Basically all the people who like ultimately the capitalist machine, which is what once the NRA wanted the NRA to do this, the NRA did its job. So now it's, now they've like individualized it into QAnon and into all the kind of this new, new wage sort of neo-fash little kids who are now libertarians. Yeah, for sure. They've managed to turn that and it's easier because they can do it. Oh, man.

So yeah. Okay. So they've won but they just need to keep winning. So they've turned it into QAnon. A couple of other things. The NRA also personally allegedly quite corrupt the leadership for the NRA quite content to sort of spend a lot of money and nonprofit money on private jets and vacations and luxury clothing and stuff.

But also there's been a pandemic. It's killed a lot of older people. A lot of older people, especially who are less likely to, to mask and to get vaccinated and a lot of whom are NRA members. So RIP. Yeah. I think they may genuinely have lost some people that way. Oh, you got such a firm hold on the courts at this point that, you know, on, you know,

sort of general, the political establishment that, you know, at this point, I don't think anyone's right to own a gun as being restricted in any fashion anytime in the foreseeable future. Regardless of what kind of, I don't know, maybe, maybe someone will like, you know, they'll bring in an armed team of QAnon commandos and go shoot up a daycare. It won't do anything. Have a body count in the three figures. If anything, it's going to ratchet in the other way and like President Tom Cotton or whatever is going to overturn the assault weapons ban.

Everyone gets bazookas. What they'll have to do. What do you have to do if you want gun control in this country is bring back the Black Panthers. That's the only way you would have movement in the direction of gun control. If you're a leftist and you want gun control, the answer is to buy as many guns as possible, carry them openly and publicly talk about it often. Establish a leftist militia. Yeah.

Yeah. Arm all trans people. That's right. Get BLM, like convert. Okay, BLM actually is an organization to do this at the moment, but like get all the grassroots BLM campaigners to like become corporals. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. Arm up. Yeah. Nice. Now, the issue is if you personally are one of the people being who are arming up, you will be arrested and thrown in prison after these laws come down. Yeah, you'll be extremely disarmed for sure. Yes.

You will go to federal pound me in the ass prison. Yeah, it's almost as if these constitutional rights are being applied unequally. Yeah, I wonder what the... No, we have a democracy here, Alice. Unlike your monarchist... That's right. ...britishly dead queen country. Yes.

Yeah. We fought a war over this. Oh, how depressing. That's one of those unpleasant things about America that you just become completely desensitized to. And you know how this news comes out and you're like, hmm, you know, this guy got a decent body count, huh? And that's all you can really think about it.

Yeah. Well, at least you kind of almost got over the sort of pathological thing. I remember like five, 10 years ago when everybody was like, everybody sort of like leftist to liberal right through to like Michael Moore was like, the reason why school shootings happen is because we make school shooters celebrities. And when they do a school shooting, you know, you put their name on the papers, you put their face on the news, and that's what they want. That's what makes it like that.

By and large, American media organizations stopped doing this and that didn't matter either. It didn't matter, yeah. We've kind of ticked that one off the list of like, and it wasn't that. Yeah, like, like putting lead back into paint. That might, that might help. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. We could, we could, I have two ideas.

One is the sort of the one that I don't want to do, which is to make firearms less accessible. But the other one is to like maybe improve society and try to like counter methods of radicalization, reducing equality, material conditions, slightly, slightly better. Try to like confront things like racism earlier. I don't think that's possible. Everything I've read and have been told tells me that's just not possible. You can't do that. You just have to do it.

No. Can we talk about something fun, like a terrible train crash now? Of course we can. Let's do that. Ooh, nice holding. Yeah, this is. Gerard de Leon. Oh, I've just seen the picture in the bottom right hand corner.

Yeah, the station throw. Yeah. Yes. Can you walk us through that little sort of cat hole that you just made? No, I cannot. That's a, that's a personal matter. Well, you can see, you can see the old, what I presume is the old freight, kind of the freight connections there. There have been seven.

The ones that were down here or somewhere. So you can see sort of there's the old shed, kind of to the right hand side of the station throw. Where everything gets narrow, you can see there's like another shed and another station term. That's it. Yeah. Okay. But your John Maddening is highly pixelated for me. So I'm just seeing blurry red.

You're right. So Gerard de Leon is French for station. Station of Leon. Sorry. Yeah. Famously. They're from the same family as I am, the Gareth. We are inherently stations.

That's what my name is. Gareth de Leon is your crusader ancestor. Yes. Gareth of Lion. Yeah. I kind of, I kind of liked when we had this thing of naming train stations after where they went to, like, you know, Lenin grad ski station or, you know, Yeah.

I would like his cross to be called Edinburgh ski station. That would be quite nice. Oh, that would be good. Yeah. That is, again, that's a 2000 AD comics thing about what Britain under communism would look like as it would be Edinburgh ski station. I'd be, I'd be confusing in like Philadelphia. The 30th street station would be a Pittsburgh station, I guess.

Fuck, that goes. That sounds better. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it would be like Glasgow station, Glasgow skier. Yeah. Yeah.

I like that a lot. Don't ask about what some pancreas would be. Very confusing. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's why I'm thinking 30th street station would be confusing because it goes so many places. Mmm. Some pancreas would be like Midland station.

Yeah. Maybe. Midlands ski. Yeah. Midlands skier. No one wants to talk about Sheffield or something. The first station at this location was built between 1847 and 1849 for. Oh God.

I need to help here. Company de chemin de fer de Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée. All right. Pretend I said that. The railway, the Paris to Lyon and Mediterranean railway company. All right. Yeah. So the American naming scheme of like you say where it goes from to where you think it

wants to go to. I also continue. Yeah. Iron Road, the company, the Iron Road from Paris to Lyon. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

I've been to Canada station several times over the years. It took its current. It largely what its current form is in 1900. Right. Yeah. It looks it. It was a fantasy class wedding cake building. Oh yeah.

That fucking little Ottoman ass looking clock tower. Incredible. It's nice. I like it. I like it a lot. I find it so pretentious. I'm not sure. I'm not.

I think some of the head houses from like the house of an era, but like most of like the train shed and stuff is newer than that as 32 tracks, some are in the old train shed here. Some are newer ones that are over here. Right. They got four underground tracks. I think maybe eight underground tracks actually for the RER. Yeah.

I think it is right. Yeah. And the RER is their cross rail. It's their sort of like trans Paris express sort of S fun light rail. The rezzo express regional. Yeah. It's pretty pretty much an allegory for cross rail. And yeah, it's it's double deck of trains with with like one door per coach or whatever

it is. Like they got three doors on each side and like six staircases. Wow. They're weird as hell. Yeah. They don't work. They're a capacity disaster. But that's that's that's for another episode.

We could just do the other story on that, you know. Yeah. I mean, they already did with a TGV. Just fuck it. Do do do a duplex TGV. So that works when the train sits there for half an hour. But when it's there for 30 seconds, it's it's pandemonium. That's so good.

Yeah. I just learned yesterday. God, I just had a horrible idea. Multi level platforms for multi level trains. You just build a second platform at the level of the second story. And you just someone must have tried that at some point for the record. I wanted to be added to the record that Gareth is weeping. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't work.

It works for elevators. You just mind the guy. It's easy. Just hop over. What are you going to do for one story onto the edge of a platform? Right. You know, today, this is Gareth Leone. It's mostly trains head in south, you know, towards Leone.

Right. Today, this includes TGV services, you know, the high speed trains. Also, Fretcher Rasa goes here now. If you want an actual good train. Oh, man, I took Fretcher Rasa last week and it is still good. It is so fucking good. It's the best train experience I've ever had. God, I got to try some Italian trains.

Oh, for sure. Do that. I mean, all their trains are good, even the ones that are bad are good. That's true, actually. I have this sort of moment of internationalism, right? It's the same thing as when I get in an airport. Like now it sucks because every sort of airline is just a sort of cheap commercial airline. But it used to be like you could go to the airport and you could see this little fucking

U.N. of like national flag carriers and you could be like, oh, cool. That's fucking like, you know, Air Africa or whatever. Exactly the same if I walk into a train shed and there's like as a French train, there's an Italian train, there's a fucking Belgian train over there. And just like, oh, that like that lights up all the fucking pleasure centers in my brain. That's for sure. I believe Tran Italia is actually just trying to compete on the Paris to Leone route, which is really funny.

Although those trains do go to Milan. You know, just because I've taken that it's it's it's actually like it used to be so that so yeah, the like cheap knock, basically the old TV trains, which I'm sorry, are horrible inside. I took that from Milan to no, actually took it from Rome to Paris. And all right, no, it wasn't it was from basically I used the connection up from like the top of Italy to get up to Paris and it was it was not nice. And I would absolutely take the Tran Italia one instead.

Because it'd be so much nicer because those interiors, they are really nice. They're really nice. The trains are very comfortable. Carinthian leather. Yeah, go to the cafe car. They got a goddamn espresso machine in there like they have everything. It's Tran Italia sponsor our podcast. Absolutely.

They probably won't after all the slander against the Italian state we've done on all of the Italian episodes. If it's not Tran Italia, then get the Austrians in. They've done nothing bad through history. Yeah, of course. Plus they've gone on the thing. Fantastic. Oh, baby.

Go for it. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds a bit like the opening to a salt and pepper song. Already made that joke several episodes ago. So you got you got TGVs. You got Fretcher Rasses. You probably got some trains that go to Germany or some bullshit.

I don't know. You got some ESA. Certainly. Yeah. Trains out. Yeah. Yeah. It's big station.

Got slow trains. You got regional trains. You got it's the second busiest station in Paris after Gerde Nord. Right. But in addition, of course, you have the RER platforms in the basement. Right. Sure. These were built in the early 1980s.

They built underground platforms for RER A first, I want to say. And then later they're going to put in RER D. They thought they could fit it in. But RER A was had such high ridership that they actually had to build four more platforms underneath. Wow. Four more tracks underneath for the RER D trains, which in the interim, that was just a stub ended platform until they built the tunnels out to Gerde Nord.

Right. Yeah. The history of these is as complicated as the actual station itself. When you go into the guts of like underneath the original station and try to get the RER, it is quite confusing. And then the metro going through as well. Yeah. It's a bit less confusing than the actual history.

Yeah. I'm just looking here at the sort of RER map. And because it includes everything else, like because you need to make your connection or whatever, it integrates the like the SNCF, the metro. And I think even some bus routes are on here too. Incomprehensible. It uses sort of broadly the London Tube Map design, which is like nice. It's nice and comprehensible.

It's schematic. It helps you understand where you're going and like how to make your connections. This, this is a chaos rune. It's one of those things where you're never going to understand the system until you actually use it. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

I guess it's true of a lot of transit networks, mostly in Italy, which don't make any sense. Right. So RER is complicated. Yeah. RER is very complicated. Don't think about it until you have to use it. And then, you know, just sort of go on a platform and see what happens. Yeah.

Which is you get pickpocketed. Correct. Yes. They pickpocket you on the RER? It's a Paris train station. They pickpocket you everywhere, but the RER isn't particularly notorious. Yeah. Make sure you sellotate your wallet to your boobs.

That's the advice I always begin with. See, this is, this is the thing, right? About crime and like petty theft in the United States versus Europe. You have a lot more pickpockets. Even in the UK, we still have some. Yeah. Like in the United States, if someone wants your wallet, they, you know, they, they come up to you.

They put a gun in your face. They say, give me your wallet. The transaction occurs, right? There's no craft to it though, is there? Yeah. Yeah. It's a lost art. The thing is right because, because two things, the sort of like the availability of firearms,

it works it on both ends. It's much more easy for me to have a gun to rob you with, but also if I just reach in your pocket, there's a decent chance you have a gun. You could just fucking hold me at gunpoint and now the whole situation's turned around on me. Now you're the one mocking me. Yeah. I don't know.

I take that guy's wallet. Well, pickpocketing is like such an elaborate operation though. Right. My dad got pickpocketed in Rome and I now realize that there was a whole series of people involved to make it happen. Oh yeah. It's a really sort of complex. You need at least like four or five people to make it practical.

Yeah. It's like an oceans 11. Yeah. Exactly. Because it's like what happened was we were waiting for the metro, right? The doors opened to the metro and there was a nun there, right? Suspect. Yeah.

Always punch the nun straight. And then three guys got on a train ahead of us and they all seemed to know the nun. And then they just stood there in the open door, blocking everyone from getting in the train, right? Then my dad and I were just standing there like, what the hell are these people doing? Blocking the way into the metro. Did you try and push past them? Meanwhile, I did push past them.

I did push past them. It runs behind you, snicking all your wallets. Yeah. I pushed past them. Dad waited and then dad lost his wallet. Yeah. Like the main thing you got to do is to try at any cost not to look like a tourist. Look as angry and as early as possible.

Always keep moving. Yeah. Yeah. Or we're really tight, like fully tight prince trousers. That's the other alternative. That's an option. You can get those like anti-pick pocket trousers with the like mostly you're going to solve a little logic puzzle to get any of the pockets open.

Yeah. Yeah. My friend, wait, I forget who told me this. I think it was had like a wallet on a chain that was linked to the jacket. Oh, that's funny. You just get like yanked like three feet in like any direction. Oh, it was a purse on a chain and someone on a Vespa tried to grab it. Oh, fuck.

And they got pulled off the Vespa. That's practice. My favorite genre of mugging is much more of a sort of like tourist and global south phenomenon, which is like it's half a it's half a pickpocketing, half a mugging where you just get mobbed by like 20 people or like 20 kids or whatever. And they're like, ostensibly trying to sell you something or even not. They're just like pushing you around and grabbing all of your shit. Right.

Yeah. That's my favorite kind of like street stuff because it does. So there's so little artifice to it. You know, it's just it's very, very sort of straightforwardly acquisitive. See, again, we don't have this in the United States because everyone can buy a gun. Yeah, exactly. You know, with with modern double stack magazines, you could take out a bunch of those kids and throw very, very quickly.

You got to practice that drill, but it can be done. There are trade-offs. It's not important when you're spitting out lead at that rate. Yeah. Absolutely. No, you don't understand. I need to carry this. This is like PDW and I need to go fully automatic with it because what if 25 off and try and take my wallet?

So, yeah, the RER, you will get pickpocketed. Try not to take it too personally. Yes. Also, keep or alternatively keep a decoy wallet, which is the funniest fucking thing you can do. Don't have every single thing you own in one wallet. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, dear.

Anyway, so, yeah, the point of this was to say there are underground platforms. Now, you can get a train on them aside from getting pickpocketed. Yes. This is a Z5300. No, it isn't. It is a coffee van from Shoreditch. A year ago. It's a Citroen H van.

Yeah. I really like this. It looks ugly as hell. The fucking little, like the stripes down the side or the corrugation down the side, I guess. Yeah. The shapes of the headlights. It looks like a jersey arrow with more visibility for the driver. Yeah.

Also, the drivers play Minecraft there, you see. Yeah, he does look like he's got a little laptop there. He's certainly not looking where he's going. That's fine. So, this was a commuter train used on RERD as well as various Paris commuter lines. For a long time, they were built in 1965 to 1975 by Carol Fouch. Right. Stopped using them in, I think, 2013.

A little bit later than that. I think they're the last ones were retired in 2017. Oh, wow. Basically. And these were built entirely out of stainless steel using bud patent processes because Carol Fouch had the bud patent for France. Yeah, that's why they kept using them for so long, obviously. I also like, SNCF have had so many dreadful logos.

This is probably one of the least dreadful logos they've had. Yeah, I kind of like it. I hate the current sort of logos. Also, one little fun fact about these, these are some of the most heavily graffitied trains in perhaps the world. Because the RER is very, very easy to get onto its property, particularly in a lot of suburban Paris. There's lots of abandoned railways where you can just get onto it and then that abandoned

railway very rapidly becomes an intensely used commuter line with no apparent side of train. There's a lot of kids in suburban Paris who want to graffitie trains and you have this big broad surface that you can just really do a lot of really bold color work on. So I think that's a little sort of cultural facet of its own. And when you finish the artwork, someone leans out the window and gives you a cortado. So yeah. We'll tell you this.

I took the Circum Vesuviana in Naples and I believe that is probably more heavily graffitied than anything this could be, especially since these are stainless steel or easier to clean. Yeah. The Circum Vesuviana, it just looked like they were like, ah, well, that's just a fresh coat of paint. Just leave it there. Got to think there's got to be 75 layers of graffiti on there. It's going to start slowing the train down at some point.

Does that become serious additional dead look? Yeah. You're just like snapping off hunks of fordite off of this train. Yeah. So anyway, sorry, Roz. We sidetracked herentially. So this is an electric train, DC. Yes.

1500 volt DC electric multiple unit. What formation is it? No, these weren't that long, actually. There are four unit trains permanently coupled. You couple two of them together, getting eight unit train. Nice. You know, it's a basic commuter train. There's not much to say about it.

It's fine. It's a nice box. Nice little tin can. Yeah. Probably accelerates pretty good. Probably stops pretty good, although. Except when it doesn't get electric. Exactly.

It's fine. Just it goes, stops good. It's fine. Mm hmm. Oh, we will. Oh, wait. So on a 27th of June, 1988. Already?

Oh, God. Jeez. We're only seven slides in and you're already reading a day out, Roz. Crikey. Okay. I've not even got my like grungty Parisian accent out yet. We're already cracking out dates. So.

SNCF ran commuter trains into Gare de Leon from a place called Milan. Yeah. Yeah, they sell. Yeah, they sell them. They sell grapefruit there. Oh, that makes sense. Right. This was trained 153944.

Right. It was an evening inbound train driven by a man named Daniel Salon. Solon. Solon. Solon. I don't speak French. S-A-U-L-I-N. Solon.

Okay. And then the guard was Jean-Charles Beauvais. Yeah. Okay. And this was an eight car train. So it was two of those Z5300s, right? Yeah. Coming in from the Southeast suburbs into Gare de Leon.

Yeah. It was an evening train. So the people who work in the suburbs and live in the city were coming back into town. Yeah. There had been a summer schedule change. So the train skipped this station, Leverde Maison's. That's probably skipping stations is fine. That never caused any problems or puts people out.

Right. How's this green? Leverde Maison. Leverde Maison. Okay. Yeah. Anne of Green Gables. Yes.

It skips Anne of Green Gables because as you can see on the sort of bottom side of the station, they built a mosque and an opportunity to do racism by excluding Muslims from the transit network is not one that the SNCF will ever pass up. Of course. See, the station is called green houses. These houses are all white. There are some red ones there. It's like green of houses.

Like green in the sense of like a village green, I think. Like a common. Yeah. I don't like that. Is that five over ones? They're building the background. No, those aren't legal in Europe. Oh yeah, that's true.

That's another thing we've got over you guys. Yes. Those are legal because of an accident in the building code. So this is sort of an inner ring suburb. We did Grenfell. So the woman named Adelaide Muriel. I don't know. I think it was a deal.

Pretend I said that. I was not aware of the schedule change. Wow. Because that's like, yeah. What was the, how would I pronounce the name? Me a while. Me a while. Yeah.

And she didn't want to keep her kids waiting at school. So she did the only rational thing, which was, of course, to pull the emergency break and get off the train. Oh, deal. No. The most. You could get. The most Parisian thing ever.

You could get, you could get up to a 500 pound fine for that. Oh no, I will go and pick up my pen. If they put a little sticker on the thing, you could be, you could be out 500 quids even. There is no chance. I am missing my little puppies. I am going to the nurse's train right now. I mean, I, I get like, you got childcare as a fucking fraught

subject. Yeah. And I'm like fine. Okay. I guess, but you can't be pulling that. You can't be pulling that shit. You can't pull the emergency break. But it's not an emergency because bad things happen.

The first thing pulling the emergency cord woke diving straight out the window. Yes. Just break the window. Roll free. It's easy. Throw on the suitcase out of your window. Tuck and roll.

Into your garden. This is, this is all OLE, right? So you don't, you can just walk across the tracks. What's the worst that can happen? You get hit by a train. Yeah. I used to go to a summer rowing camp, right? Out of Thompson's Boathouse in Georgetown in Washington, D.C.

That's my connection to the global political elite right there. Sure. Anyway, so there was an emergency exit from the Metro in the back of the Boathouse. And every day, yeah, every day I took the blue line over there and I was like, you know, in the tunnel. And I was like, you know, you know, I could save 15 minutes of walking if I just pulled the emergency break.

There was one of the sort of great British eccentrics. I think it might have been Jack Churchill, I'm not sure, but he was Jack Churchill. Yeah. You know the story about the town. I think possibly we've, we've told this one on a former, we, I don't think I was on it. Oh, just mentioned it again. His house. His house.

His house is how lions led by the donkeys. His house backs onto the railway line. And of course, he learned to recognize his house. And so he would just open, it was one of these old slam door trains who just open the window, throw his briefcase into his own back garden. They didn't have to walk at home. That's fucking great. I would also do that.

Oh, inspired. Yes. So she pulled the emergency break, right? And of course the emergency break, this means we have to talk about train airbrake systems. Yes. I'm getting horrible flashbacks to my first appearance where we were talking about train brake systems with a diagram that looked not dissimilar to it.

Yeah, it might even be the same diagram. I recapitulate all of this. Yeah, exactly. All right. So your airbrake, the principle is right when the air pressure in the main train airline is reduced, the brakes come on. Yeah. It's a pressurized tube runs the whole length of the train and that holds the brakes

open rather than closed and won't lose the pressure they closed, right? So it's always like more than the American system because for me in my head, this feels like a system that fails safe. Obviously. Yeah. Well, is there a different airbrake system in Europe than in the United States? So isn't there a system where you pump air into the system to release the brakes rather than to apply the brakes?

Whereas here, it's the fact that this is the vacuum brake system. Am I merely becoming highly confused? No, I think vacuum brakes are like an old system that was just in Britain, I'm not sure. I know that I'm pretty sure this train had a more modern, like, Westinghouse style airbrake system, right? But like the pressure in the train line controls the pressure in each individual brake cylinder on the cars, right?

Yeah. Sure. You can see these two big rectangles here. The main reservoirs where you keep pressurized air to refill the line, right? Because you've got to brake and then start and then brake again, especially on a fucking commuter train. Yeah. So you have to be able to refill that pressure in the brake line.

Yeah. Lots of braking need the ability to command lots of air to make the brakes work. It's a very complicated sort of system of gas movement here. Yes. Things get fancy around that equalizing reservoir. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah. Yeah.

Because you have the individual, because the actual actuation of the brake pad is from increasing the pressure from the car reservoir. But the increase in pressure is triggered by a reduction in pressure from the main brake part. Yeah. I see. I see the sort of the main reservoir pressure tank line that kind of curves towards the brake pump.

Yes. As I understand it, that's the thing that actually actuates the brake pump. The only conclusion I can draw from this, right? Occasionally you think about inventions and you're like, oh, this seems so obvious and elegant and simple that it's a miracle no one thought of this earlier. Air brakes, not one of those inventions, sort of the opposite. The Westinghouse just happened to have enough influence to make his, enough influence specifically with the Pennsylvania Railroad to make his system standard.

Yeah. We need to get wings and strings rather than doing a running gear at a diagram. We need wings and strings to do a brake system diagram that works. Because this is, it's mostly fail safe. It's not completely fail safe, as we will see, simply because you're using the pressure in the main train line to affect the pressure in a whole secondary system. Yeah. Probably too inefficient to have a whole separate brake reservoir rather than running it off

of the main reservoir. Yes. So anyway, okay, to recapitulate here, when you reduce pressure in the pipe that goes down the whole train, what happens is through a series of bullshit here, every individual car has a compressed air reservoir that then has a valve open, which actuates the brake pad pushing it against the wheel, right? Yeah. And those reservoirs are also recharged by way of the main train line brake pipe, right?

Sure. Yeah. And it's worth noting that, I might be about to shoot your fox here, Ross, but there are lots of levers I can see connected to various things around here. There's so many cocks. Lots of valves, levers, and of course cocks. Yes. Many, many cocks.

I mean, your big ones up here, this is the main... Some might call it paradise. Yes. I'm not making the cut out cock joke again, because I think I already did that the first time. Yes. So if you do an emergency brake application, right, what that does... You've got to dump all this pressure out as fast as possible.

If you dump the air, that dumps all the pressure out of the main train line as quickly as possible it slams on the brake through the whole train, depending on the length of the train. That can take a long time. Makes for a very unpleasant braking experience. It's loud as hell. It's loud. It can knock people over. It can damage equipment, so on and so forth.

Several good reasons why you shouldn't just pull the emergency lever. Yeah. You don't want sort of a space balls type situation. And so this is why, yeah, you generally don't want to use the emergency brake. The wheel flats and all sorts of horrible things as well. It's just bad. It's just... There's a good chance all the wheels will be turning again after an emergency brake.

It's just really bad practice. Yeah. But it's like failsafe in itself, right? In that, once the emergency brake is on, the sort of imperative here is that the train doesn't move ever until it's some time later. All of the things that dump all of the pressure on those just lock open, right? Yeah. It's definitely...

It's a pain in the ass. Yeah, exactly. It creates a situation where it's a pain in the ass to do anything other than kind of wait a bit before you can move the train again. Yeah. Because ordinarily, you apply the brake, you still have pressure in the main reservoir. The brakes are still on. The train's not going anywhere, but it has that reserve so that you can like release

and recharge the brakes relatively quickly. Whereas with this, it just is all just gone. They dump the air, as they say. So anyway, they dump the air. They're sitting at this platform, right? She must have had pretty fast fucking reactions to see it, like to recognize it was going past her station and hit the emergency lever and get it to stop in time and just hop off. Yeah.

Because this is 1988, that's basically now, right? Yeah, more like. Yeah, it's basically now, yeah. Well, it's something. Good work. I feel like these trains, this thing looks like it weighs like about 50 pounds. It probably stops pretty quick. Yeah.

Distributed brakes. This thing will, yeah, it will hunker down pretty rapidly. Nice P-Way here. Look at these lovely, lovely twin-block embedded sleepers. Lovely little hedgehogs under there. Love some concrete. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Bad news. I'm going to use the restroom. We can just look at this lovely train. Yeah, it's very nice. Yeah. Actually, I'm not looking at the train because it's that horrible logo face exactly as you refer to. Oh, yeah.

It's just gross. Just really bad. Underneath, however, lovely. Yeah. Very nice P-Way. I'm not so convinced by the fasteners, but it's, you know, it's not successful. We don't do enough concrete sleepers in Britain, is my opinion. We don't do enough slap track.

Agreed. We're just more of that. More slap track. It looks nice. It's the future to me. Whenever I go on the overground, and a lot of the overground is with slap track, and it's nice. It's just nice.

We need to do more of it. It's fit and forget mostly. It's good. It's good stuff. We will see more of it appearing in the future. What little is left of HS2 will be slap track? That's good. That's good.

I don't know. Every so often when I'm waiting on a train platform, I just realise very acutely that the way that we build Railway Permanent Way, when it's not like this, is the finest technology of the 1860s. Yeah. And it's like, we've gotten better at the metallurgy. We've gotten a lot better at the sensors and stuff. But then at the end of the day, we're like, oh, we just dump a bunch of gravel and wooden

boards in there. Yeah. It's pretty much exactly the way it's looked. The only thing that's really changed since even the early part of the 1800s is that we stopped burying the rails. We stopped putting ballast right up to the rail level. That's pretty much the only thing that's changed. Everything else.

Okay. Yeah. Now we use pre-stressed concrete sleepers. Now we use the fasteners are better and blah, blah, blah. But fundamentally, it's the same shit that was there. I like to point out railroads existed since the 1600s and they pretty much the track, it's basically providing the same function that it did right the way back then. Trains of guts, Nazir, track pretty much does the same thing.

We've kind of, we've ended up devolving because now we have the fucking personal rapid transit thing where it's like, oh, we just have rubber wheels and what we'll do is we're just doing a groove that they can run in and we've just fucking brought wagon ways back again. Yeah. Yeah. We've literally brought wagon ways back except that it's just a car. It's just a car folks.

That's just a car. I'm so angry that they replaced the Glasgow Airport rail link with an admittedly mooted because they're not going to fucking do this either, but the proposal is personal rapid transit. Get in the pod and we're going to drive you in a little fucking cableway, not a cableway, in a little fucking wagon way from Paisley New Street to Glasgow Airport. Oh, it makes me so angry that PRT, okay, PRT is just cars. It's just cars folks.

It's just cars. Justin, Justin, we're the captain now. Sorry. What about, what about Morgantown, West Virginia? That's pretty train like. It's funny you should bring up interesting PRT from that particular area because I've got big mood energy joining me on Rail Natter in a few weeks to talk about funky US gadget bands from the 70s.

So yeah. Anyway, that's a mid episode plug right there. We need to get her on this program. Do the advert. The advert. There's the fade. The fade is happening now. The advert that you hear is this one and also Gareth's.

Right. Yes. Okay. 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, right?

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 you know, it's two bucks. You 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. I put it in in post. Yeah, I know. Thank you. Thank you.

Future Justin. Yeah. Future Justin. Yeah. That could have gone two different ways. PRT discussion, or we could have had the different European Railway Logo Types discussion where we talk about how bad SNCF is and how weirdly good Deutsche Bands is. Yeah, Deutsche Bands always gets the older one and then the newer one, both good.

Yeah, I mean, you know, why not both.gif? Yeah. Yeah. I kind of like the big red Deutsche Bond locomotives are good. All of the SNCF branding looks terrible. It's not good, is it? There hasn't been, like, they did the big orange DGV. Oh, go back to that.

It's all been to downhill since then. Absolutely. Yeah. Just they cannot work out how to brand their system. Yep. Even the Dutch do a great job of it. Come on, France. You've been beaten by the Dutch.

The yellow and blue. That looks real good, yeah. NS always looks great. Look, Gray's on the, I think it's the cop loop, the big fucking. Yeah. The clown shell motherfucker. Love that. Love that guy.

The problem is that now yellow and blue has been co-opted as a color scheme by Ikea. Yeah. And we got to like go in and we got to brainwash people. So instead of seeing NS as the Ikea Railway, we got to make them see Ikea as the NS furniture store. Furniture store. Yeah. I quite like Trinitalia's color scheme, which is whatever the local graffiti artist looks good.

Renfe looks okay, to be honest. I like Renfe in Spain. Their shit's good, yeah. You're joining us on the train livery podcast, everyone. Yes. Because the thing is, I don't have enough technical knowledge to like talk about the trains themselves, but I can talk about the pretty colors. And yeah, this one's terrible.

It's dog shit. Essentially, I'm in the same boat. You know, the trains train, but I like how they look or don't look. I understand an extremely granular and like technical basis, the stuff that they run on top of. But once the train comes over, that's someone else's department. I can just look at the colors. Exactly. All right.

Well, bad news, Gareth. You wrote this slide. Therefore, I'm going to make you do it. Oh, yeah. Okay. Fine. That's fair enough. Yeah.

So, right. The train has stopped. The lassie has run off to get her kids. And the driver has left the cab. And in order to get the train moving in, the driver has to Daniel. He has to go back to the back of the first car. So the first car being kind of, you can see there's three doors. It's kind of at the back of that car, there's a panel.

And basically, there's a lever that you have to kind of switch down to reset the braking system to fill the braking system back up so you can get moving. But because we talked about this, the emergency stop kind of dumps all the air. It takes a bit of time for the whole system to kind of, for that reset lever to basically work. And so the driver is kind of jamming this thing to try and get enough leverage to kind of lift this lever. And eventually you got enough pressure on it. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually you got enough pressure on it by pushing against an adjacent lever for that.

That'll be relevant in some moments. Yeah. And basically like, yeah. So in doing so, the driver kind of inadvertently waggles this other lever out of place. Which you think, okay, well, you know, what's the harm in waggling another lever slightly? Well, the trouble is that lever operated the main brake pipe valve. And he had just closed it, which isolated the brakes on the rear seven cars of this eight car train. Oh no.

Hey, but the good news is that the fucking, the lever is going to turn way more easily because it's only refilling that much of the pipe. So. This is true. And indeed the lever, the other lever moved pretty nicely at that point. But it all is not lost because there is a failsafe when that main brake pipe valve is isolated. And so the train wasn't moving. The failsafe had indeed operated, which is great, right? You think fantastic?

No. Because so long kind of hadn't realized that he'd operated the kind of main valve lever and thought that the emergency brake application had done a thing which does happen on these trains apparently according to the things that we've all read. Which is that it builds up excessive pressure and seizes the brakes. So so long enlisted Beauvier's help and together they just kind of walk down the train manually bleeding air from each brake in turn. Oh no. Which is fine probably. So the failsafe here is like when you when you isolate all of those brakes, the brakes stay on. They stay on basically.

Yeah. Which is good. That's a good failsafe. Unless you go down the train and just release every single brake pad. Yeah. So so this driver like given that brakes are you'd potentially argue the most important kind of critical function like critical system on a train. And the driver really should have waited for a fitter to come and kind of check the train over. But he wanted to get the train moving because because this thing had been sat there for half an hour.

You know, leaving. They're getting pissed off. May not. Oh, my question is like isolating isolating all of these brakes. That's got to put a fucking light or something on up front. Right. There has to be. You'd hope wouldn't you.

However, when song hop back in the cab, the air pressure dial for his braking system is showing normal and often popped happy days thinking everything is working normally. There's not like a fucking break isolation lights or something. There would be a light. Did you? There is no. No. Apparently not. No.

Apparently no light in the United States. He would have had to have done a brake test before he set off. I think also the rulebook is quite explicit about what you have to do in the situation in the UK in like GB as well. And I think you have to do a break test when this sort of that you have to break test. These will also get to that folks. These French careless careless. Well, they've got a bottle of wine in the front of the train. That sounds about right.

Yeah. They got a bottle of wine. That's right. They got a card in the cigarettes. They got a card in the holders for the cigarettes. They got three of their whores. Yeah. So long kind of pulled away without realizing that he had only one eighth of the breaking power that he should have had because only the front car of eight had any function breaks.

This is this. This may have ramifications for. If at any point he had realized this and wanted to salvage the situation, all he would have had to have done is go to the back of the front car or send Beauvais to do it and hit the fucking lever that he had accidentally tripped. Correct. That would have made everything work again. He had an easier option even. Oh no. I accidentally hit the train crash switch.

So yeah, he was 30 minutes late at this point. He's down here. What's the easier option? There are other safety systems that are here. We'll get there. So the dispatcher said, all right, what do you should do is skip the last stop. That's down here. Mason Alfort, Alfortville.

Uh huh. Yeah. Sure. Yeah, whatever. So skip the last stop, right? Just ignore that. No one's going to get on or off anyway. Right.

A lot of people left the train, but after the station, there was a steep grade down into the tunnel under Garadilly wall. Right. It's on the ground. You've got to go down for that. So they keep the underground. Down is probably fine with the train when it breaks. That's fine. The sources I looked at gave the grade as 4.3%, which that's steep.

That's very steep for a train. I can believe that though, because there are bits of crossrail that reach that level of steepness. So I can believe that you can get down to 1 in 21. And especially for Paris, it's everything's built on top of everything else. You might have to take a dive down there. Yeah. If you've basically got what is a grade separated junction, then you might get down to 1 in 21. If all the trains are the same, they're always going to be applying power at that point.

Yeah, it's doable. Well, I just know from when they built the center city tunnel in Philly, they were saying, we're going to do a 2% grade. And a lot of the folks at the Pennsylvania Railroad and later SEPT that were like, that's impossible. You can't get a train up a 2% grade. Defeatists. Pennsylvania Railroad, they're like a 2% grade. We got to build a horseshoe curve for this.

That's true. Yeah. We just like building them. We got to do that. We got to go across like 50 miles and go around. Yes. I mean, licky incline is like the steepest mainline grade is like, yeah, that's like nearly 3% as a grade. So, yeah, you know, 1 in 1 in 38.

Yeah. So, you know, so those guys, SEPT are your idiots. Yeah. Well, we also aren't allowed to procure good electric multiple units. So, you know, I'll do it. Yeah. All of ours have to weigh 70 million tons. Of course.

They have to be able to sustain an attack by by all of the sci-fi baddies from the last hundred years of sci-fi literature. Yeah. That's right. Basically. So, our guy, Salah, this is Salah. Salah. Salah.

Salah. He starts, he starts a plan. I'm on Dan. Yeah. Yeah. Dan starts applying the brakes for the descent. He gets almost no response after he rolls through the station he was supposed to stop at, which he probably could have stopped at.

Right. He's got one eighth of the normal braking power. This was enough to start to slow the train, but not enough to slow it down in time. And this was a problem, right? But not a fatal one. Because the Z5300 had two braking systems, right? Had your normal air brakes, then it had what we call in the United States dynamic brakes, right?

Or regenerative brakes. Yeah. You know, you take the electric motor, you flip the, you reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. Reverse the polarity. I've always wanted to reverse the polarity of something. Yes. And then you run it as a generator and then the electricity goes up into the wires, or

you put it in a radiator or something, right? This is the regenerative braking as a technology, which is brand new and innovative in Tesla automobiles and a century and a half old technology everywhere else. From, yeah, from the 1880s. Yes. But God's sake, it's not new. Yeah. So this is, this was an option he had, right?

But the issue was Dan completely forgot about the dynamic brakes, right? And the drivers on this route trend tended to avoid using them because a lot of times they would cause the wheels to lock up and then develop flat spots. Wheel slide. Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Horrid then.

But then I guess less horrid than crashing the fucking train. Yes. You'd think. So he made a guy who is so ruthlessly committed to avoiding wheel slip that he crashes the train. And you can't get wheel slip on a train if another wheels are attached. Hey, the wheels on this came out fine. Probably.

Yeah. Like that's solid. Yeah. That's all the wheels. Probably good. Just pick them right up and use them again. Yeah. I learned that from AVE.

Those wheels. Nothing happens to train wheels ever. So he makes a decision here. He radios in to the dispatcher at Gare de Leon. And he also triggers the general alarm. Oh shit. Not the alarm general. The alarm general.

So SNCF's general alarm system was apparently very sophisticated, right? After being alerted to a runaway, they could sound an alarm in the cabs of every train. Within six miles of the runaway, right? That froze all the switches in the area. It put all signals to red, which, you know, danger, stop, you know, right? And at this point, they had several options available to mitigate the damage that was about to occur in the big SNCF control room, which we tried very hard to find pictures of.

Yeah. No, due to union regulations, there's no way it would be like three people. At least 30 people crammed into this cupboard. So they, they, they could try and re-route the train onto a through track, assuming RERA was operating at this time. They could re-route the train into an upper platform. So it wouldn't go down a ramp. But you guys still can't figure out how to stop.

And it's like, well, you're going to Nice. They could worse come to worse. Maybe they could even try and intentionally derail it at a safer location in the station, right? They could find some buffer stops. Yeah, they could find some buffer stops. They could take it out of the switch. Who knows, right?

Now, the problem was that after Dan had informed dispatch of his problem, he immediately left the cab to usher the passengers into the rear of the train. Which is noble, but. But. You got a guy. You got a guy. You got a guy. You got a guy, right?

That's literally his job. He's the guy. Fucking make him do it. Yeah. He also forgot to tell dispatch which train he was. Oh, basic radio procedure. The two things you say first, who am I talking to and who am I? Yeah.

Oh, my God. This meant, of course. He just got on the radio and he was like. He should get real bad. Bye. The train doesn't work. Yeah. And then just booked it.

Just left. Parley. Booing. So. So now I could figure out how to, you know, no one knew what the train was. No one knew where the train was coming from. So no one knew how to figure out how they could switch the tracks. Question.

So they would do less damage. If it turns every signal to red when he does this, surely. If you look on the big board and you go, which train is still moving, right? Yeah. So they do eventually figure it out. Like it's a fucking logic puzzle. I figured that shit out. It's not even my job.

No one taught me how to do this. And it took me less time than us going through this slide. Well, I got like four minutes total to work this out, I think. Right. I think I did this in under four minutes. Someone go back and look in the YouTube timestamps. Go in there. See if I passed the test to become like an SNCF train controller.

The other thing is apparently there was some kind of automatic system to route these trains into free platforms, which was disabled by the general alarm. Yeah, that can happen. So this is, this is a, sorry, sorry, Justin. Yeah, this is a thing. So we have this in the UK, you know, GSMR, there's the big red button that you can press. It does the same thing. I don't know to what extent it freezes the operational system, but it does, you know,

it free, it puts everything to red and drivers all stop. But the instructions about its use is make a decision whether it's a good idea to do it or not. So I think we've talked about, I think in previous episodes I've talked about the sleeper train having its brake accidentally isolated and running through Edinburgh Waverly. And the driver of that train had the presence of mind to not push the red button because it allowed other trains to get out of the way. So yeah, slamming the red button isn't necessarily the best idea with a runaway because it might

mean that you're going to hit something. Anyway, I'm sure that won't happen in this situation. So yeah. Well, so the first thing that happened was every radio frequency was immediately slammed with drivers asking, why am I stopped? When am I going to get a green signal? Why am I stopped either? What is going on?

I have to go home and see my misdress. Do they know it's a... And my wife. No, you've gone from your sankerset and you're going back to your wife. And did they not tell, is there nothing to like alert them to the fact that it is an emergency and therefore you should, it is shut the fuck up Friday. Oh no, there's a big loud alarm in every cab. And these guys...

Then why would you... Because I interrupted their cigarette on a holder break. You don't break into a Mayday call on anything else. Why would you do it here? What was? Yeah, because your SNCF in the 80s. Listen, I understand this is a very serious situation. However, have you considered, I don't like sitting here looking at this red signal.

Yes. And it took the controllers to guard early on several minutes to determine what train is the runaway, essentially by process of elimination. Oh my God. And they're all having to talk to everybody who's fucking calling in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the good thing is that there's no, you know, there's no other train in the way. Like they are still going to manage to...

Oh yeah. So there's another train. Oh no. So this was SNCF 153951. There's so many numbers on these trains. I mean... Yeah, that doesn't feel like a helpful classification system. That's too many numbers.

Yeah, you know, they take an M-track train. It's got like three numbers in total. That's for different reasons, though, just in my case. This is true. Yeah, there's not that many of them. Throw some lices in there, you know. Makes it much more recognizable. So this one's going to Grapefruit.

Yeah, this one's going, this is the opposite surface, right? They were scheduled to depart at 7.04 p.m. But the conductor didn't show up, right? The guard, excuse me, it's the guard here. I am sort of... I think I might be turning into a manual Macron here. Ruthless slash and burn of the sort of subsidized French institutions. He was having his cigarette on a holder break.

So he was scheduled to depart at 7.04 p.m. The guard was late. It was parked adjacent to the staircase in the lower level platforms for the future RERD. So most of the passengers win the first few cars, right? The driver was Andre... Tongui. Tongui. OK, right.

So Tongui had a red signal and he didn't know why. And the guard eventually showed up and they were still confused. Why can't we leave now, right? It was about 7.07 p.m. when he got the news. 1-5-3-9-4-4 was a runaway and they weren't able to reroute it. And it was going straight into his train. Oh, Jesus. Getting on the phone.

Hello. Yes, you're going to die in about three minutes time. It was about 90 seconds, actually. Hello. Yeah, you got about 85 seconds. Yeah. Oh, my God. Did Tongui attempt to, like, reverse the train or, like, get it...

No, because behind him was a wall. Oh, that'll do it. It's fine. Oh, that'll do it. So, I mean, the thing about this long train... This is a four-car unit, right? Yeah. A four-car unit train.

The thing about that is it's still a very effective buffer stop. Yeah, great reasonably. Probably get a two or a three on the buffer stop ring. Yeah, yeah. It compresses very well. It goes across a long distance. Yeah. Well, Tongui immediately got on the intercom.

He said, get out of the train. There's a runaway coming. Most passengers started to file out of the train immediately. Try and go upstairs. Think about the other ones. They had about 90 seconds and boom. Oh. Yeah.

Tongui stayed in the cab until... Well, he was immediately killed, right? Oh, fuck. Yeah, one... Well, he was staying in there, standing there still on the... Still standing in the evacuation message. Oh, fuck you. Give this man a medal, yes.

Give him whatever the French... Whatever the crazy French medal is. I guess... What is it? It's like the... They can't give you quite a gal for this because it isn't a gal, but they could give you a quite a... Chimander fair, I suppose.

Yeah. Yeah, there's got to be a gong for that. That's what hero of the piece right there. In Britain, all they do is name a train after you, which feels like it's adding insult to injury. This is true, yeah. The runaway whacked into him at about 44 miles an hour. Doesn't sound like a lot, but these things...

You're the crumple zone, right? Try running it six miles an hour into a wall. That hurts. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So the runaway telescoped into the stop train. You know, the stop train was, of course,

confined by the underground infrastructure, so it didn't really move. It was compressed by about 100 feet. Yeah. That's why you should not do underground terminal platforms, folks. I know it might sound like an easy and good idea, but actually don't do it. At least have a run-on tunnel afterwards

with a long friction buffer still. Well, this one was supposed to be extended into a tunnel at some point in the future. Oh, because the D-line was going to come into it, right? Yeah. In fact, yeah. In fact, it is now through station. But at the time...

You just catch it in the sort of building process, yeah. Yeah. Most people got out of the stop train, and all the people who didn't get out of the stop train, except two of them were killed. Yep. Yeah, there's about 56 people dead, 60 injured at the end of this.

Jesus. There were two people on the stop train who survived. And all the... There's not good odds. All the injuries on this one were particularly bad. Yeah, I can kind of imagine. Not least because you just sort of turned this into a shitload of razor sharp metal debris.

Yes. I mean, there's lots of amputations trying to rescue people. Yeah. Gareth put this in here. Big mess. Yeah, I put this in. Why did I give myself this slide to read out? It's just horrible.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's just a mess. The rescue workers were there for 20 hours trying to save those who were injured and kind of attempting to retrieve the dead. There's a quote from a young firefighter, which is particularly horrific, but I thought it just captures how absolutely horrible this crash was. I tried to lift someone up by the shoulders.

His torso came off in my arms. Jesus. He just lifted the guy right off his legs. Yeah. Lots of very sharp stainless steel everywhere. Yes. I'm coming around on all metal car construction again. I'm thinking that maybe it's not so good now.

Why would you rather it have caught fire? Ah, no. Those are the only two options, right? I can do stainless steel or I can do wood, right? You could do carbon fiber and you get really bad splinters. Yeah. Just do it. I mean, the only trouble with these, these are like, these are solid,

but there is absolutely no, from the trains of this vintage, there is absolutely no collision energy management. Yes. Every four miles an hour is a lot to put a lot of stress to put even like modern safety, you know, modern design, crashworthiness standards. You'd, you know, that's a lot of force to put through a train, but a modern train would have coped better with this. It would still would have been a mess.

And I don't think it would have stopped all of that. It would have still had a lot of fatalities, but collision energy management, I like crumple zones and kind of passing that energy through the train to kind of distribute the forces. So it didn't all happen. Also things like anti-climbers to avoid telescoping. There are lots of things that modern trains have that these didn't, but they would have alleviated it somewhat.

But yeah, this is, this is sort of the calculus of crashworthiness, which incidentally, I find is a tremendously British word. Yeah. Like, I don't know, it leads you to some grim places. Like, you know, the driver sort of is the crumple zone for this and that's sort of inescapable. And I mean, this is, this is, I don't know whether you're going to draw parallels to this one later, Justin, but like this,

this has unbelievable parallels to, to Canon Street, you know, the 1991 crash that happened in Canon Street, which is one of the terminal stations kind of just over the, it's got the bridge over the Thames. It's got that slightly gross kind of modern building with anyway. It was my dad's commute, in fact, and it happened the year I was born. So very nearly robbed the world of a third of where there's your problem. I mean, yeah, it happened a month, exactly a month before I was born.

Canon Street Real Crash. We are, we are the same age, Alex. I didn't realize this. Oh, there we go. You've achieved so much more than I have. But I'm also much less mature. Swings and roundabouts. And so, yeah, it just lots of, yeah, just, just, just really horrible,

really, really horrible, really horrible crash. Sick leather jacket on this firefighter though. Yeah, like that guy is, is tooled up pretty nicely. Is that with like a, like a, like a legacy shiny brass helmet with a leather? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if he's got the like, if they're still using the brass helmets, or if this is the like really early F1 gallows that they were like polishing up. But no, it can't be a galaxy.

There's enough to surround that. Yeah, no, it is. It is just an old brass atrial helmet. Incredible. Either way, that is a nice, that's a nice fit. Well, I will take my house. Absolutely. That's a nice fit.

It was like the Gallet helmets anyway. This is, this has been firefighting helmet corner. Yeah. Here's the train. What that did the impact. You can see actually folded it over. Actually, this is less damage. Yeah.

So this is, this is exactly what collision energy management is about. Right. Yeah. So the train telescoped through, which happened to clap them again. You know, at the same year in the UK with the Mark I coaches, we talked about it on the great heck episode, I think. So the, yeah, the front of the train here, as you say, it's not damaged. It's hardly damaged at all.

And that's collision energy management would mean that both trains would distribute that that kind of energy management would crumple. They'd have the crumple zone that would distribute. So it wouldn't just be the front of the train that distributes, but every single crumple zone through the whole train would distribute that energy. And that would diminish the amount of force kind of going into the, particularly into the stationery train. So yeah, it's a good, good image that explains how collision energy management

didn't work here because all that energy went into the stationery train. Yeah. It's one of those things of like people, it reminds me of people who like don't want to wear seatbelts because they think that we thrown clear of the crash. It's like, oh, no, everyone gets thrown clear dies. Yeah. It's sort of a misunderstanding of like what sort of energy is being transferred where and when that you think it looks pretty good.

So it must be fine. And it's like, exactly. You got to explain this to the FRA though, because they don't believe in collision energy management. There's a video actually that I showed in some of my lecture slides that shows their Budcars because the FRA or actually might not be, it might have been whatever the, it might have been Arima or not Arima, whoever the... The Pioneer Asteroids, they whack into an F40 or something. Yeah, exactly.

And they are testing collision energy management. You know, they've got a load of kind of targets on it to sort of see how much deflect the kind of deformation there is. They are using those, but that was kind of looking at retrofitting existing coaches with the collision energy management. And I take it that didn't go anywhere. Well, yeah. They spent all the money to run the tests and then they never implemented the resulting,

the results. Reminds me of like the same thing with cars is that like a lot of like sort of steel bodied like particularly what you might think of as a muscle car. You throw those into, into a high energy crash. Like the car looks fine. It's just everything inside it has been minted by like flying glass impaled on the steering column. Yeah. Your arm has been like, yeah, like, like death-proofed out.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. What I'm always astonished by is that, you know, they, they do all the, we have to do all these special tests here in America because we can't just adopt the European standards because physics are different here, I guess. That would be like...

European standards are, they're good. Yeah. Everyone in North America, look, it's fine. Use them. They're actually fine. They're good. I think the theory is that our freight trains are different so that they will crush any puny European train, but like rolling stock we're using right now is so bad that any puny

European train is much stronger than anything we got. I was going to say, it's a bit like, that's a bit like saying like an American muscle car crashing into it, like a 1998 Fiesta that's got a Euro NCAP rating of like three. The Fiesta is probably coming off better in that situation. Yeah. It looks completely trashed, but you can walk out. Looks trashed, but everyone gets out and goes, shit, that was bad. And there's just, and there's just several arms on the windscreen from the other occupants.

There's a guy impaled on the steering column. This has been crashed test corner. Yeah. It's really interesting to think about cars and talk about cars lately. Yeah. Don't tell them about what we're doing in the warm-up. They don't need to hear about the many remastered. Speaking of cars.

Speaking of low cars. Oh, I totally regret putting this picture in. Yeah, that's it. Why do they always burn smart cars? I love smart cars. It's convenient. You can push them into the road and then you can make your barricade out of them. Yeah, you can just lift them up.

Yeah. They are. Yeah, it's true. In the aftermath, they decided to put the blame on the driver pretty much entirely, right? He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but with all but six months of that sentence suspended. That seems weirdly merciful for the French justice system. Well, the guard was also convicted, but has his whole sentence suspended, right?

What's her name? I can think of only one reason. Oh, Odile Mirgal? Yeah, she was fined $180 or $180 in euros. Fine. Yeah. That's one of those. To be fair, she could not have known the consequences.

Yes. So I think it's kind of fair. No, it's not. You have to predict the outcome of all this fucking Swiss cheese. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Whereas it's another situation. For me, there's never a really human error exist and it's a thing.

Yes. You don't solve the issue. You don't finish the investigation by going, that was the problem. Why was the driver feeling so pressured to get that train moving again? That's the issue. Why was that happening? Ergonomically, why were the two levers so close to each other that one could be forced while the other one?

Why were the rules not clear about leaving the train to not move? And yeah, there are lots of things, lots of systems that should be in place before the driver gets blamed. Sure. We just did probably the purest example of human error, I think we've ever done on this podcast with the El Faro. And even that wasn't like, it wasn't just, oh, this guy decided it was fine. He decided it was fine for a number of reasons, some of which were spurious and some of which

were structural. They did live through the app. Yeah. This was apparently the first time in the history of the French passenger rail system that a railway worker was sent to prison for his role in an accident. Really? In Britain, we will send you to prison on the drop of a hat on the railway. Or at least we used to, certainly.

Well, no, we go for corporate manslaughter so that no one actually gets blamed. Yeah. And invariably, it's network rail that's state-owned, like if it's a track thing, it's network rail. It's state-owned anyway. So no one's paying. Fine. Yeah.

But that is quite something. For the fact they went, part of me thinks that it would be interesting to unpick whether it is a political thing. Because I don't know, were they ramping up the RER at the time? Or was there some tenuous kind of staff like worker relations thing? I can think of one sort of piece of worker relations, which is related to the screenshot here. Oh, yeah.

The SNCF then and now, very strong, very strong union, very militant union, a lot of communists, although weirdly mostly Trotskyists. And the SNCF unions, they blamed like, okay, they're trying to run these trains too close together. Sure. Specifically the grade into that station was too steep. Sure. They said there was too much pressure to keep the timetables.

They said Dan was scapegoated. And after the sentence is handed down, they go on strike on December 15, 1992. Yes. It was like a big 24-hour shutdown of the entire, all the commuter trains in and out of Paris, just to ruin everyone's day. We love to go on grev. We love to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Burn all of the early 90s non-existent smart cars. They were getting burnt. It was all Citroen C3s, they were all dead. Yes. All the two CVs, sorry, that were just across the city, there were just two CVs being folded up like scrambled up newspaper and tossed at kind of the police. Yes. Well, I believe Dan still served his sentence.

So, yeah, all four months of it, exactly, all two months of it, all six days of it. Yeah. They took him to look at the present. Yeah, listen to unions. Yes. Exactly. Listen to unions, but also, perhaps, if you find yourself, you may find yourself in a suburban French train and you may find yourself disabling every break on that train sequentially.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that was pretty egregious. I will say that. That was reasonably stupid, yeah. If you find yourself doing that, maybe you should ask yourself, is there something else they should be doing here? Also, if you want to get home and the train blasts through your station, what you shouldn't do is ignore the sign that says you will get a small fine if you do this and hit the emergency

break. Because you will get a small fine and possibly kill 50 people. Yeah, exactly. She didn't even get away with the train. I'm getting the fine, yeah. Yeah. See, the thing, what I think the moral of this story is that skip-stop service parents kill. Yes.

That's the moral of this story because it killed twice because the fact that there was already a skip-stop in the timetable change meant that our lastly going to get our kids pulled the emergency break. And then the fact that they then decided to skip the next stop meant that they didn't get a free break test to identify the problem where they could have then just turned the power off. Yeah, you're right. It would be fine.

So, a double whammy of skip-stop service parents killing people, everyone just run full metro every train, every stop. Yeah, I was about to say, you want to express stopping pattern? Build two more tracks, asshole. Exactly. We can see it's freedom, baby. Yeah. I mean, listen, we talk about great separation at crossings.

Why can't we have separation of through trains away from platforms? You get a low extra safety bonus from that. You don't have to stand right next to a train that's going to blast right through. Exactly. You've got the big wall of air pressure. Yeah, or make you squeeze your coffee over yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Everyone can refer back to the, oh, it's not a bonus episode anymore. You unbonused it. So people, all listeners, everyone watching can refer back to the previous episode where I was on and we talked about stations and bypass tracks. So everyone should have their credits from that episode as well. This is true. Yeah. WTYP University.

That's right. Yes. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands for danger. A promising image already. Oh, I like this. Yeah. Hey, WTYP gang and possible guest.

Once again, failure to anticipate that the guest would be part of the WTYP gang. Yes. Yeah, that's true. I am Liam. That's right. This story comes courtesy of my grandfather. Peepaw redacted. Do you want me to do the beeps?

He told me this story at an IHOP after we saw the movie Midway a few years ago. Oh, don't go to see that film. Somehow I never noticed he was missing a few fingers on his hand. So Peepaw had a pretty normal childhood, right? After going into a coma for a few months after a nasty bout with the flu. That's just the shit you could do back in the day. That's just happened. It was normal.

You just got pneumonia as a child and you had 50-50 chances of living. Just normal shit. He finished eighth grade and decided school wasn't for him. Shortly thereafter, some failed artists decided to fuck things up in Europe. Peepaw enlisted in the Navy and began working on aircraft carriers as an aircraft repairman. How he managed to do that without a high school diploma and being underage, I have no idea. Are you familiar with military recruits? I mean, a 14-year-old back then looked like a 40-year-old now.

Yeah, because of all the cigarettes and the drinks. Yeah, cigarettes. It's unclear whether or not Peepaw saw combat. But by early 1945, he was back on the West Coast while the ship he was stationed on was being refitted. While working on getting a bomb mounted onto a plane wing. Just reminded me of my favorite World War II US Navy aircraft carrier story, which is that what you could use the wing mounts for was to make ice cream. You take some fucking some milk or whatever up there.

You fly it up to where it gets cold. You fucking do a little bit of aerobatics, whirl it around. And when the plane lands again, you have a barrel full of ice cream. That's awesome. That's nice. Genuinely a real thing, just as a treat that you could do. It's like doing a railroad breakfast on the... On the shovel, yeah.

On the shovel, yeah. I like that. While working on getting a bomb mounted onto a plane wing, one of the mounts snapped and dropped a 500 pound bomb onto the deck. My grandfather, thinking quickly, tried to catch it. Thankfully for him and for me, the bomb didn't go off. And instead the fin of the bomb crushed and sliced a few fingers off of his hand because it was a 500 pound bomb that he tried to one hand catch.

Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. He says it was so cold and wet at the time he didn't notice till he went to reach for a tool and realized he was a few fingers short. He was sent to the local hospital, missed redeploying with the ship he was stationed on a few days later, and again missed redeploying with it when he returned a few months later

due to complications from the injury. That ship was the USS Indianapolis, which went on to sink horrifically about two weeks later. Whoops, yeah. The aircraft mechanic doing on the Indianapolis. Good question. I don't know. Maybe maybe he had some inaccuracies in his recollection.

Yeah. Well, sorry. Well, he actually... They carried float planes. I take it back. It's perfectly plausible. That's some... Yeah.

Well, I mean, they mostly were... Yeah, it doesn't matter. He actually left that last detail out and I only just found out about it a few months ago while reading a genealogy book a third or fourth cousin had put together. Instead of dying from whoopsie explosives or shark attack, he buried my grandmother, got a BA in philosophy, and supported 10 kids on his salary alone.

Because the 1950s and 70s, 1950s through 70s, wouldn't have served time. Incredible. We got to do the Indianapolis at some point because I can talk about the saddest possible story about command responsibility, one that still sticks in my head to this day. Oh, boy.

Yeah. Apologies in advance of these details aren't very precise. He's in his 90s and his mental facilities aren't always the clearest. I continue his legacy of surviving public service through sheer dumb luck where I've somehow managed to dodge a tornado and not be drowned in a thousand-year flood while at work. Thanks for the show. Don't tell that to your medical insurance.

Yeah, that's right. Oh, we got to go back to like your degree costing $50 and your salary being able to support a family of 10. You know, when a house costs as much as the bricks that built it. Yeah. Return. If you had some absurd fees of salary negotiation. Actually, okay, here's a story about my grandfather.

He was applying for professorships. I forget the precise circumstances, but anyway, we had a really good offer at University of North Carolina. Right. He still had to go in for like an interview or he had some kind of counteroffer at Washington Lee University. And so. I don't think they have a shinty team.

Yeah. What he wound up doing was, you know, he wanted to work at UNC. And so he just told W&L, like he told them the salary offer at UNC and he said, well, double it. And they did incredible. Always ask that sort of question. That's the moral of that story. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, a refugee audacity, really. Don't ask, don't get. That's awesome. So all of you double your Patreon subscriptions. Exactly. Right now. Do it. Moral of the story is be a professor in like the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Yeah, 100%. Best time to work in that sector or indeed most sectors. This is true. So we've been downhill monetarily from there. Yes. Well, that was safety third. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disasters. And we have commercials before we go.

So, Gareth. Oh, yeah. And I have been Liam Anderson. Oh, I'll get one more actionable threading. Oh, who do I want to be angry about? Oh, I know who. Pretty Patel. No matter how you know, you're definitely going to have to bleep this.

No matter how you. And no one ever talks about you every day. It's a long ass beep. Yes. Keep that button down. All right. No, no, I'm, yeah. Real matter of Wednesday nights.

I shout on Twitter and it's an absolute pleasure to be a. Depping for being Liam. I love you guys. And yeah. Hello. Hello listeners. Thanks for keeping supporting the show. Absolutely.

Well, bye, everyone. All right. Off speed is that. Jules. Au revoir. Au revoir. Au revoir. Adieu.