Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 113: Battery-Electric Locomotives

Episode Date: September 12, 2022

join us to explore the exciting future of 0-emission battery locomotives which are still entirely inferior to their hundred-year-old electric counterparts Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Slides: https://youtu.be/V0qcxyyllQ4 Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Uh, all right. Well, I believe we are now going okay. All right. This is good Okay, um Sorry, no wait. I have to apologize. It's the only time this is ever gonna happen. Uh, I want to apologize for my mic quality I'm in undisclosed location and I promise you I'm getting a travel mic and travel XLR mixer Uh, so this is the last time god willing. Yes, Alice wait, why is your location turned to mount weather virginia? Oh, uh, so here's the thing is that's wrong actually. I'm in the raven mountain complex. Yeah, uh, we're at the local, uh, cia fbi dea

Weldister treat and uh Right after this we're gonna go uh Enhanced interrogate, uh, our clown merchant who ripped us off if you know what I mean Because because of the like reciprocity agreements after they turn the greenbrier into a bunker They had to turn one of the bunkers into a luxury hotel and spa and they did that at raven rock. So That makes sense to me. Yeah, according to liam's mic quality raven rock is now a gamer dungeon I'm in western pennsylvania is where I am site site are for relaxation Yes, I'm I'm

Here's the thing right is that when I mercilessly beat a 12 year old child to death. I do it properly Yeah All right, that was Ted. I'm changing it to my second input so I can watch the slides on my television. The future is now This is true. Welcome to well, there's your problem It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm justin rizak I'm the person he's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go I am alaskogal. Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, liam. Yeah, liam. Hi I'm liam anderson. I'm your least favorite host, but uh suck my fucking dick

Uh guy who guy who left a review on this podcast on pod chaser.com just to get mad at me I Sorry pod chaser This is what I call pod chasing. But yeah, I just to you specifically I say, how does my dick taste? I like it here myself. So I'm gonna turn me down a little bit. What is what does this say batteries bottom text? This is this is a disgusting which we have a vacilli month. We have a we have a guest as well actually Tom from uh, tom from uh, 10 000 losses

Big shots tom pain Was just like, please tell me italy month was over and I was like, I think it is too. Um, it was horrible We should just turn into an italian disasters podcast We also have a guest today. No, we don't Yeah, we go. That would be me. I talk about train cities and other garbage on the internet. Uh, my name is alan He him dude, whatever so Is it he him or any?

That was that was confusing He him but also just dude Uh, is is dude the pronoun is dude. Yes. Yeah. Yeah is is dude a pronoun because it is a neo pronoun. It's a neo pronoun, bro That'll do it But before so today today, we have a slide that says batteries Bottom text we're actually we're going to be a little bit more invented in isli great italian invention I'm going to force this into the paradigm of italy month. This is the this is like the the legacy of Galvani and volta here. I I I mean I mean

It's september august was italy month. We're recording this in september Italian month is in is in your heart alice. I think yes. Yes. That's also congratulations to my dad for not dying in august Oh That's always a good thing Yeah, today. We're we're specifically going to talk about the concept of battery electric locomotives They don't work kind of bad and shut up A silly idea We finally got another trains episode their gadget bonds now and you know this

Yeah, we got we got another train episode you sick bucks. Do you we know you want it? and we're gonna we're gonna try and avoid some of the well trodden territory around batteries like uh, um Let's say resource extraction or something like that. This is going to talk a lot about you know railroad operations and why battery locomotives are likely to have a hard time competing with Uh diesel locomotives for a while and likely will never outperform traditional electric locomotives When they're a bad thing on the demand end rather than the supply end if you yes Uh, and some of the ramifications of that but uh, first we have to do a goddamn news

Oh, it's not gonna be a fun news segment this episode. This is not a good one. This is your future everybody Oh, it's your present. Uh, so if you're familiar with the yeah, I must have said everybody Yeah, the the the city of Jackson, Mississippi. That's the state capitol. It's home to 150 000 people Got a water network that services about 250 000 people and that water network. It doesn't work and it's about to hit 90 degrees um, yeah It's um, it it's pretty crazy that you know, you just let a water system go offline like this. Um Um Well, this is the sort of the the proximate cause of this is ironically enough flooding

Uh, the pearl river flooded and that destroyed all of the pumps at the city's one water plant um Theoretically this puts 250 000 people under a sort of a boil water advisory, but the water pressure you don't want to be add Yeah, exactly. Yeah The the water is there, but it can't get through the pipes. So you can't you know, you can't uh, you can't we certainly can't drink it You can't chow. You can't flush your toilet. You can't fight fires with it. Uh, don't forget though that the governor Was a tape reuse or reuse tape. Uh, he's getting water delivered to the exact executive mansion

Yeah, he literally has a big tanker truck parked outside the uh, the state house um And this is why like it's frustrating when I'm sure We've all seen it is when some giga brain liberal will be on twitter or whatever and they'll say like, oh, we We why should we care about the people in the red states? It's like, well These are the people you should be caring about that get fucked over Is it mississippi the blackest state or is it alabama? It is one of the two. Yeah, Jackson is both blacker and poorer than mississippi on average

It's a it's a classic example of white flight in the 60s and 70s Decimating the tax base and the state ripping all of the services out of the city Leaving all of the results in poverty and suffering to black people and then now getting the feds to clean it all up after them Um, so you've got the national guard deployed that there's not that much they can do other than delivering pallets of bottled water Uh, the the federal government's on the hook for like 75 percent of the funding to to fix all of this shit um It's frustrating because it's like it's It's

Tons of cities in the south are like this where you've seen just money just drained out of the cities into the wealthy white suburbs where it's just like Where you see like tax policies and different things where they once in a while like whoopsie didn't mean to do that when it's like obvious Like yeah, that was the whole plan all the like the entire time So I think I think mississippi is like uniquely bad in that respect. Um, because even in like alabama, you know, they have the The big alabama pension fund there has been making major investments into city centers I mean places like birmingham and mobile are very much on the upswing Jackson is not Um, it's not seen any form of like, you know, it's still very much in decline. They don't even have gentrification there

They haven't invented it yet I also want to point out that we knew about these issues back in 2015 and it was supposed to cost anywhere from 750 to about a billion dollars and Just didn't get fixed and alan. I did want to say to your point Yeah, I mean if you were if you're a listener of this podcast, hopefully you sort of know better than that Obviously these poor black people are getting fucked by the state and getting fucked by the government on purpose And for you to say well who gives this shit? It's like poor black people are disproportionately suffering And they don't need you to fucking do white savior shit to them

Yeah, and it's just frustrating because it's like I've mainly the listeners of this podcast and most of the people here would know better But it's the just uh the people we see on twitter. That's just twitter Yeah, and as you said, this was a known issue It basically happened in miniature last year February of last year the water went out for weeks Like 225 days. They had a boil water advisory. It was a state of emergency seven years ago I want to make that known. Yeah. Yeah

um, so I mean one thing you can do is uh, there's there's a group of uh, sort of local Like a group of groups the mississippi rapid response coalition. They want like two million dollars in donations There's going to be a link in the description. Unfortunately. We'll be an act blue link So you will get a bunch of texts from pete bootage edge You'll also for some reason get an email from joe biden's campaign Where the subject line is all gas no breaks Which gave me a laugh when I saw it because I don't I don't need to they roll who uses act blue And the biden campaign therefore of course got my uh, my email address

But I did I I did uh get a chuckle out of biden saying all gas no breaks. I was like, all right as someone who's incredibly like Roll it riding a bike downhill with no brakes constantly. That's also on fire. I dig this He's a literal accelerationist there, but yeah, yeah So you will get a bunch of emails from like liz warren at three in the morning going like your name. I need you Uh, but it won't be it won't be what you think it is. You will have you will have a A big structural Bailey delivered to your house. Yes But do it anyway. Simply you must suffer. This is this is your duty

Uh in other very different news Too much water in pakistan a modest a modest proposal A modest proposal presents itself here Um, so so this is this is like an order of magnitude worse than the already horrible thing that we talked about up front Uh, who orders the magnitude actually Oh, the thing is I don't actually know how much an order of magnitude is I just use this It's a multiple of 10 Yeah, okay. Yes, um

So if if you're young enough, you're probably going to get to remember this as being One of if not the first big climate change disasters of your lifetime, uh, and there are going to be many more to come Uh, essentially what happened is that pakistan had a way too big monsoon season. Um, yes You may recall in in may of this year temperatures across the subcontinent but including in pakistan hit Sort of ridiculous numbers 120s or so um This was bad at the time it killed some people at the time

But it has downstream effects like melting a shitload of glaciers and making the soil much less absorbent and making the air much more moist um and all of these things continued to sort of broil away and then Pakistan gets hit with a massive low pressure system from the south and it floods um Specifically it floods all of the low-lying parts of pakistan, which is where all of the agriculture is where people is yes, um Like all of the parts of the country that are habitable have been flooded. Yes. Yeah, um, like

Officially something like one in seven pakistanis have been like affected by this. I think that's a huge underestimate That's an underestimate very much. So yeah, this is kind of um And and one in seven means a lot of other people are going to start hurting because basic services are going to break down I mean this this is this is very it's very difficult to understate how bad this is for pakistan I mean this is like a crazy event. This is like imagine if I don't know The entire east coast the united states was hit by a category five that would be about the The uh like from from like washington to new york city

That's about the scale of this disaster. It's one of those sort of like apocalyptic sort of higher order things that like presents a serious threat To the governability and habitability of the country. I'm thinking, you know, what about just I think malaria dengue fever Uh, yeah, everything bad We'll get there. Yeah, because right now Right now the death toll is like 1200 which is terrible. However, it's it has to get warning, right? As of as of friday, they were still telling people to evacuate because the indus river is gonna flood again. Jesus Execute Kylie Jenner by running her over with her own private jet is what i'm saying I read some of the pak pakistan is responsible for something like 0.7 of global star emissions. Um, and uh, yeah, if if you uh

As we were saying if you lived in say sinned In may you're in one of the hottest places on earth and now you're underwater and very much at risk of getting Any number of waterborne diseases the one I was like most think of was cholera. Uh, and those There was a color color outbreak was in Yemen. Sorry Yeah, but but those are sort of overwhelmingly like the really big killers numerically. Um, right So, uh, you're not gonna have food. So congratulations. You're dying of god knows what I was about to say you're getting very very a lot of fields Underwater on it. Yeah, there's a lot of crops are just gonna be unharvestable Of course, if you have cholera, there's gonna be no water to drink. So congratulations. It's fine. You just you just buy your grain in from you

Uh, well, no, no, you crane the other thing is the um, the government of pakistan Uh, this is gonna be familiar territory to you perhaps, but they're not, uh, very confident at the best of times But um, the IMF has also been holding a bailout back from them. Get fucked Uh essentially, uh like in relation to the the Just ousted prime minister everyone calm Uh, don't elect sports personalities as your leaders. It never works out

Tom Brady 2024. Yeah. Yeah Uh, but but in general like this is one of those things that sort of defies individual charity But you should still do it anyway. Uh, the un high commission on refugees wants like 160 million dollars worth of emergency funding. Uh, the link for that at least will not get Pete Buttigieg emailing you Congratulations. You get a sternly worded email from the IMF saying we we can't give these people money. They have to learn austerity Yes, yeah, it doesn't work Yeah, yeah, and and this is you know at some point in your lifetime. This will look quaint to you. So yes

Uh Well, don't worry any more time. You will in fact move to see man-made horrors behind your comprehension Yes, this this is a man-made horror beyond your comprehension. That's in our lifeline. So don't worry it counts You you you probably cannot get a clear understanding of this from the numbers or from news media It's the the the totality of it fucking exceeds um A lot of sort of ability to to understand it Yeah, it's uh, it's pretty bad

That's not looking good out there. Yeah um, well That was the goddamn news Okay, so do we want do we want to tell them that it's gonna be okay and then like You know, should we cheer them up a bit? Okay. Welcome. So I'm like a I'm like a deeply annoying pessimist or it's not pessimist optimist. Excuse me Um, so yeah, I honestly think it's gonna be okay in the end But the problem is is that you have to deal with all the garbage first

Literally and figuratively Yeah Uh, this is the part of the podcast where we devolve into shouting. Uh, right. Yeah, actually I uh, not to get uh to uh, to behind baseball here, but yeah, I I've become reluctantly somewhat of an optimist because uh, if I'm too cynical, I'll fucking kill myself and that's not really a joke Yeah, no, no, I know. So I just like I either have to not think about it or all or I'm like god willing It's gonna work out. I'm gonna do my level best to be a good person Uh, what happens next is between, uh, I guess the universe and god

so uh Smartest shit I ever did was become muslim right because What that did was essentially Forstall any possibility of me killing myself. I don't know why not very Like religiously observant in a lot of other ways, but anytime I think about killing myself now I'm like, oh can't do that. God's gonna be mad at you. So now I'm just gonna deal with this shit Uh, which is in some ways healthier and in other ways like, you know, it doesn't matter whether I'm an optimist or not I'm I'm here for the fucking duration. I'm stuck with you. Yeah. Yeah. I after my

After my third suicide attempt, I just was like, all right, fucking I can't even do this, right? I guess I'll try to live It's like a Dorothy Pocke poem, you know, uh Like I'm like I'm here. I guess I just become like really existential sometimes that I'm like, hmm. Maybe the crystal girls are right Cut it cut this podcast All right. All right. Well, we're actually here to talk about railway, uh electrification rather than um Committing suicide pending suicide. Yes. Yes. Why is this guy fighting for the IRA?

They had a lot of weird splinter factions in their time the IRA existed in california It's a little known fact for the art here stands for railroads. Yes. Let's talk about no raid and how they did nothing wrong now Okay, why why do you? Why do you electrify a railroad? It's cool. Um, keep in mind. I'm talking about Uh, let's pretend pollution isn't an issue. Why do you electrify a railroad? Uh, generally electric locomotives are stronger than their contemporary partners Yes, uh, that's a big part of it. You know, your steam locomotive was only good for about 100 miles

Then you needed rewatering or refueling that requires a bunch of elaborate facilities You have whole towns that spring up just to refuel steam locomotives, right? So like thermon to west virginia um famous ghost town because because uh, you know, but these whole towns like disappeared the moment refueling Steam locomotives is no longer an issue, right? Yeah, of course, right? If steam locomotives had, you know, they are high maintenance There's lots of moving parts, right? They could really fuck up in tunnels if you stalled out in the tunnel you were fucked Congratulations, you're Yes, well, this is that what this guy's deal is. That's what that guy is So basically a lot of the western railroads in the early days and we'll get to this in one of the next slides

But basically in the early days, uh, the western railroads had a lot of tunnels and they were had a lot of tunnels at high altitude They were really long Um, and generally the smart thing to do would you would have a tiny section of electrification where it's just like Oh, this gets you through the tunnels and it's it's good. Uh, but southern pacific was incredibly stubborn And they didn't want to do that because capital costs, whatever, uh, bullshit So instead they came up with ridiculous ideas including stuffing a guy into an asbestos Lined bag and feeding it with oxygen while you go through a tunnel I I would say that one of the places I least want to have asbestos is on the inside of a respirator

Yeah, no, it's just probably fine as long as you don't breathe it in Wait a year Just hold your breath the whole way through. Yeah Oh, that's gonna make me anxious to think about let's move on So, you know steam locomotives, they're dirty. They're dangerous. They're difficult to work with uh at the best of times, right? So well, there was an alternative in 1752 ben franklin invented electricity, right? but uh Willfully disrespecting italian month once again. This is true. Um, it's initial applications were kind of unclear

Like what can you do with this? I don't know. I can make a key because shine. I can I can shock an intern Yeah, it's because like you can kill what a son this guy is Well, if you're in iraq you could create a battery to impress the ladies Now in 1884 electric streetcars were demonstrated for the first time only a few years later The city of scranton pennsylvania had a fully electric uh streetcar system. That's why they call it the electric city Of scrantonian progressivism culminating in the current president. It's true Uh richmond virginia was another early adopter Large-scale electric trains though were not proven feasible until the baltimore in ohio electrified the howard street tunnel in 1895

Then the game was on right So your basic workings here You have your overhead electrification system is you have this bare-ass wire Right, that's You know, it's a power line, right? It's held over the track at a constant elevation You know, it's held in place by a messenger wire. That's the upper wire, right? And that forms a catenary curve between the two catenary hangers right catenary curve is just the natural curve that any

String will form when it's between two, uh, two supports, right? um Those are the the wires held in place by hangers, right? The whole shebang is usually carrying current and that's often 25 kilovolts, uh, ac not always There's lots of different electrification systems out there that 25 kilovolts ac is the best is is the most often used once it's a good standard Yeah, and you what you do is you put a a pantograph on the top of the train to like yes pull electricity down, right?

Yeah, and that's one of the hardest parts about overhead wire electrification is that you can have the hangers like raz is talking about but the issue with the hangers is that They can only clip onto the top and the sides of the wire because if they're clipping onto the bottom Your pantograph will snag them So one of the hardest parts about like electrification is designing the wires in a way where the hanger in the clip Doesn't go under the wire. It's only just attached to the top Um, I I I can solve this immediately with cartoon logic which is behind the pants So the pantograph just goes as normal

It smacks all of the hangers out of the way but behind the pantograph There's a little like hand on an extendable arm that puts them back down after it Um, it's like the it's the Wallace and grommet thing except there's a exactly So, um as as you have higher speeds these systems become higher maintenance. They become more complicated In fact at the end of the wires in order to compensate for Expansion and contraction. We have this contraption here This this keeps it in account So, yeah, it's it's essentially just a counterweight and it pulls on the contact wire in order to keep it at constant tension

regardless of You know the temperature right and that's what they It's it's essentially just a pulley and they stole some weights from gold's gym And and that's uh, that's all it is right big wake make wire stiff. Yes. Yes I lift things up and put them down But um, the yeah hot and cold days the wire is doing uh sets of reps. Yes. Oh, is that what that is? Yeah So lots of benefits to this electricity system, right, especially compared to steam locomotives

You have no fuel on board your train. That makes stuff a lot simpler Yeah, but you could have done that with the old timey thing of just having a steam plant on the line uh Yes, that's true. You could do like a uh an atmospheric railway. Uh, yeah Should accept for Irishman through at 120 miles an hour. Yeah Um, you have a constant power supply which essentially can provide arbitrary amounts of power to the train That means you can do fun things like short-term overload of the traction motors on the train, right? You can go up to like I think the gg ones were capable of 8 000 horsepower, but only for like 30 seconds

um talks Yes, lots of lots of lots of acceleration there. You have lighter You have Lighter locomotives with less maintenance at least in theory. There is an extent to which a locomotive has to be heavy in order to Put traction onto the rails Right, but this is sort of the same concept as a pickup truck or not a pickup truck, but a dump truck handling much better when the

Sort of while load is full Yeah, okay. Well, what when your pickup truck does a burnout? That's cool when a train does that that's wheel slip and that's bad Yeah, that's very common The the car guy version of this is uh having a rear engine car that the engine in the way is over the wheel So when you accelerate you do less of a burnout. Thank you, Alan. Yeah, that yeah, unfortunately My iq is in the single digits and I only understand Vroom vroom and exhausts Understandable

Sometimes making the train lighter is very important in the case of like high speed trains or like commuter trains that start and stop Frequently then you want as light a train as possible and then overhead electrification is very very useful That's when you do all-wheel drive with emu. Yes, exactly. I mean you look at uh You compare a locomotive to like a subway train. That's like a muscle car versus, you know, like a fancy european Sporty type car m5 versus charger. Yeah Yeah, exactly that works um So, you know, uh, you do have disadvantages, which is this stuff is expensive to put up

Uh, you know and electric trains are only going to be able to run on electric lines Still much better than steam engines and this was recognized fairly early on Yes, you have some problems like if the line falls down trains don't work if the line gets twisted the trains don't work trains don't work If you snap off any of the hangers the the trains have a bad time, right? I get a question though, uh, because I read through the notes ahead of time, uh, like like like a good pupil Right and yes, there's a form of electrification that we never addressed that's very common in the uk Which is third line electrification the terrifying one. Oh, if you want I have a story with that if we go to the next slide Yeah, are you setting me up for that? Yeah. Well, okay, then let's do that

Um, I so I put this one together Yeah, what ross was saying before the baltimore in ohio was it was actually the first in the world to electrify Uh, which is saying a lot for a country that doesn't have much life electrification anymore um, but basically they had sort of a third rail But it was just above the locomotive and there was just like kind of a carrier wheel that just kind of like rode on it um, and and that was just that was just a uh, a short thing for when Um, they wanted to get out of baltimore through one of the tunnels and they didn't want the steam locomotives to choke Out everyone and the passengers so I I like it a hell of a lot better having the the electrified rail be

Not where I can fall onto it is the thing. Oh, well so the bottom right image is in south jersey and that's on the pennsylvania redding shorelines and Um, that specifically I love that image because it's in at the town where I grew up hitman um, but the the the funny story about this one is it mainly had third rail just like the the british southern trains, uh yeah um, it mainly had third rail just like the british southern trains and but the funny part was uh

And it sucks nowadays because there a there's no passenger trains on this section anymore And there's no electrification obviously and more um, but when these were running, uh, they were third rail powered, but there was a Uh section of the track that wasn't third rail powered. It had like trolley wire. So these could do both um, and the reason why is because um, there's a town along the main line this went from camden to vine land in south jersey And there was a town along the main line called, uh, glosster city and the mayor of glosster city Eventually banned the use of third rail because it if you look up like old newspaper clippings it fried like a dog and hurt like a kid So not good. Um

But the prsl at being like early 1900s railroad and technically it wasn't even the prsl at that point But being like early 1900s railroad doing the most logical things to skimp on money They didn't put the trolley wire up for like three or four years And instead during that period of three or four years They just didn't stop in glosster city and they would just before they went through glosster city They would get up to about 60 70 miles an hour And then they would just fly through the town with no power

Just exiting on the other side fingers off And they would just exit on the other side of glosster city and then get the third rail again going probably about like 50 miles An hour bleeding off the speed in between uh But eventually, uh, they they had to put wires up because you know, you're missing on a few passengers there So you might as well stop Yeah I I do love that you can do that with with third rail and like put in put in those gaps, but like

Okay, but why isn't it practical? Why can't you have these big long third third rail? Like electrified railways and save yourself all of the time and maintenance This is a Stations every five minutes. It's a fun. It's a fun electricity problem, right? Which is you know, if you have um, you know Modern modern electrification you you you run at high voltages. That means you have very little current You have to deliver that means you have very little current loss, right? Uh, if you have a third rail, it's down next to the ground. You can't do high voltages

Right, which means you need a lot more substations because you're losing a lot more current because you're Pushing so much through the rail You also can't use ac traction with those or ac current because of the skin effect Where the all the current really concentrates towards the outside of the rail and that reduces the you know, the carrying capacity electricity is Fucking weird. Yeah. So in short it it it was it was tried for long distance service pretty early on and obviously it works it works in britain but it's more expensive and requires more equipment than

overhead line although it is Definitely less delicate. I will give it that and that's why they use it on like subway systems and stuff Okay, so it's a it's a it's a tool in the toolbox, right? But for like large-scale like main line Railways you need you need the overhead spicy cable. Yeah, and and some of the first implementation of that in the us would be the The pensy on the keystone corridor which they electrified that in

1915 and they the pensy Before the gg1 the pensy was known to have some wacky electric locomotives They had so many like different prototypes and and weird freight and passenger amalgamations of box cabs but the funny thing about the keystone is That picture the gg1 is not on the keystone. That's like one of the branch lines but the the funny thing about the keystone is that the current electrification and the current catenary poles that exist nowadays for like septa and the

Keystone trains is that that's the same catenary poles from like way back in the day They really just built like the railway in like 19 one time. They built it one time and they're like, yeah, this is good It's fine. There's nothing needs changing. Nope Yeah, right. They were right to do it uh The the funny part is is that around the same time a slightly slightly later I think it was like three or four years later the the new haven electrified from new haven in new york city And they also did ac power

um And but the weird part was the new haven had these like crazy triangle catenary wires that like were suspended in this crazy like Almost it looked like a trapeze sort of thing And uh, unfortunately, that's not there anymore because taking care of that was just way too much money. Um, But there was a lot of different ideas In the beginning. I don't know if the wire on the keystone is the same It's probably not the same wire, but the catenary poles are the same wire Are the same same fixtures wires the wires are essentially consumables

um right Although they're copper. They're very easy to recycle um and steel And uh, that's why there's no electric trains in zimbabwe It's why there's barely any electric trains in britain They had that there was there was an electric train system set up in zimbabwe and then

Then then someone stole all the wires overnight Maze we didn't get to that in the rhodesia episode. I didn't know about it at the time I found it while I was researching for this one Just uh, it's uh, the law of attrition of stealing electrified wire It's so you let the first one or two guys go and they get kind of zapped zapped and then the rest of the guy's like, oh my wire yeah And I just desecrate this corpse and I'm ready to go to market. It's a great criminal scheme for two thirds of the guy is doing it exactly and then the other um

The the one oh my god one of the most common comments you see online on railroad forums or just people that don't know about like railroad electrification Or just railroad history is that when you talk about it? They're always like america is too big for electrification Like you can't we're not shut up. You can't do it across the crazy distances. That's me. I'm saying that and uh There's two examples, which I always point to um the the example. It's not on here right now is obviously uh, the soviet union Yes I've heard of this place. I know it's it's a weird country. No one knows about uh existed a while ago and then the other one is the um The other soviet union, which is the milwaukee road

Which the milwaukee road is similarly dismo oppressive systems characterized by authoritarian governance that both looks like montana. Yeah uh, and uh The milwaukee road uh little background is a railroad that was based out of chicago They had a bunch of different freight lines and passenger lines raiding out chicago But they had this massive brain idea that Hey all the other Uh, kind of midwest western rarrows that are super big and super powerful have like a connection to the west coast we should do that too

and They made the pacific extension to their network, which is basically like It's that one time when you're playing minecraft and you sort of walk in the straight line for a really long time And like you look at the map later and the map looks normal except for that one straight line That was That was essentially the milwaukee rose network because it had this normal stuff around chicago than one line That just went forever in the one direction all the way up to seattle It was it was the voyage improve. Yes

And it was like it was the best engineered trans guy on little line by a country mile Oh, you could start some arguments online with that. It was it was but it didn't go near anything. Oh, yeah So there was not a lot of not a lot of online traffic. There was uh, you know If you wanted to ship something from chicago to seattle, it was great if you But but there was nothing from points in between or very little traffic. So, you know, you'd be Yeah, bowing wasn't invented yet. So like why would you need to ship anything to or from seattle? Exactly And Seattle was kind of a backwater. Um, oh, yeah, still is fuck you amazon

Oh, do you have a basketball team? Oh, not anymore. It's the howard schultz empire It's just a little schultz. He's running around will never be more mad that their football team has a name now It's not just the football team. They should have just kept that But yeah, the milwaukee road, um It part of their main line like I said, uh, some of the western railroads, uh, mainly like the great northern and some of the other ones When they went through a really long tunnels, they generally tried to electrify so they could avoid Uh, just suffocating their crews in long tunnels. Um The milwaukee road took this to a longer extent whereas just like well if we're gonna electrify through these tunnels

We might as well electrify across this entire section So they ended up electrifying. I think like four hundred and sixty miles through montana and idaho through some of like pretty much the most like hostile terrain in certain areas, uh, and Um, they they electrified not with ac but with 3000 a volt overhead dc um Which is an interesting choice, but it was back in the early 1900s when ac wasn't like as known So it was sort of like the the easier choice to go with and unfortunately

Unlike modern railroads nowadays, uh, they actually used hydropower. So back in 1917. They were completely like green powered trains Uh, there's an apocryphal story that when the first train went over the rocky mountains owing to the um Owing to the regenerative braking when the train got to the end of the division Um, the electric company owed the milwaukee road something like 13 dollars and seven cents It's great and uh The alice the thing you'd like about this is any railfan kind of knows a story here but basically after world war two, uh

The united states was kind of the place to go to if you wanted a really really powerful electric locomotive We had like g e westing house and like a few other really weird ones Oh, did the soviet union buy some then and yeah, and the soviets were like the soviets were buddy buddy with us after world war two So they were like, oh well Can we have some of those because we're electrifying now that we're rebuilding and so we build these locomotives? I forget the specific name for them, but g e builds these locomotives That have these nice stream lying with the kind of like similar kind of e f unit looking Cowling on them and we're going to ship them over

To the soviet union, but unfortunately in the late 40s as you know, we kind of stopped being buddy buddy with the soviets and uh these all these locomotives that we g e was going to ship over is stuck in the united states and The milwaukee road and some of the other uh electrified Midwest western routes were kind of like well I guess we should buy these and become the soviet union Yeah, and because they were originally destined for the soviet union the american crews named them little joes So the little stallons. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah So the little joe is one of the most famous uh american electric locomotives

That you can like easily point to yes uh so So we have this this big legacy of electrification sort of in the uh in the um Like the late 30s through really even into the 50s. Um, the question is what happened? Right. Well americans you you love developing technological legacies and then destroying and then shitting all over them. Yes okay, so we're best at so Let's talk about oil and the problem with oil

Oh, everything's gonna be oil again, isn't it goddamn drakes? Well, you son of a bench Fundamental problem with oil is that it's really good Right, it puts it puts a lot of energy into there's a lot of energy There's a lot of energy in a very little volume. Um, it just comes out of the ground Yeah, you drill a hole and it comes out on its own It doesn't kill you as much as the thing that's like an order of magnitude up in terms of energy density, which is uranium yes, um You know you you it comes out of the ground on its own and you burn it for energy

Basically freeze a lot of times you don't even need a pump. That's changing pretty rapidly now. I mean I don't know. I mean the the saudis are having a lot of trouble pumping oil right now. I've heard but You know, this is uh while it lasted it was a great system Fantastic, right? It literally tasted sweet. Yes so Diesel locomotives are sort of used as switching engines pretty early on because the engines are pretty weak They were not like super duper, you know, they weren't ready for the prime time, right? It takes a while for the technology to mature until electromotive division

Which is a division of general motors at this time. They come out with this thing called the f unit in 1939 right And that was when it was all over at least for the steam locomotive. It was delayed slightly by the war, of course um And your diesel locomotive is very similar to an electric locomotive Except that there's a big diesel engine in it that big diesel engine turns a turbine that turbine creates electricity Not a turbine it turns it turns an alternator And then it uh that creates electricity it sends the electricity down to traction motors that are in the wheels, right?

And it makes a hell of a noise. It's really makes a big makes a big noise. It's cool Uh, they look great f units look fantastic You know, but you do you do carry fuel on board You do have higher per unit maintenance costs than an electric locomotive because You got an engine in there to maintain and engines are complicated It also makes pollution, but railroads don't care about pollution. No, it makes a hell of a lot less pollution in the steam locomotive, right? um The other thing is you had multiple unit control

So you could just have some cables that went from one locomotive to the other And all these locomotives can be controlled by A guy in this cab, right? You don't because steam locomotives you needed a crew for each locomotive That's why they got so invested in making really big ones That cuts down on crew costs um Diesel's you can just lash up an arbitrary amount. Boom. You have as much power as you need Yeah, that's the big long coal train that has like five or six of these at the front

mm-hmm and the question is We really move towards diesels in the united states as the primary form of mode of power This does not happen elsewhere in the world Uh, and why is this? Well sticking my hand up here. You had oil like You had it like in the united states. It was just there. You didn't have to buy it from anyone They'd have a lot of oil. It was very cheap, but

I think a big A big aspect of it and like soviet union had oil too. They still electrified um The big part of it is our railroads were largely privatized or entirely privatized, right? And they were private railroad companies. They competed with each other and i'm doing air quotes right now under competed because it was a lot of It very cartelized industry always has probably always will be And uh as uh private companies they hate the words capital costs

Yes, um, you know, they have to oiling in a horror Exactly That they have to not just cover their own costs But they have to make a profit and they have to make a really big profit, right? Investing in infrastructure does not return a profit except over some future time Which I don't know Let me worry about sustainability of your own business is is not like that's not good business ends caring about that This was always a fun fun aspect of the pennsylvania railroad. They had very creative accountants, right?

They called their electrification program maintenance Right, which thus allowed them to count it as operations Spending as opposed to capital spending and that then of course They could just say well, we took a pretty big loss this quarter. I guess we're not going to pay taxes Now the the icc cracked down on this at some point the pace of electrification slowed dramatically after that criminal court the the interstate The interstate commerce commission

Um And there's this sort of general expectation that in the industry that electrification was inevitable Even in the 1950s even with the cheap oil. It was still cheaper to operate electric locomotives than diesel ones, right? Um, but no one wanted to be the first railroad to make the investment, right? The industry as a whole it's sort of like, you know, you know how penguins will crowd at the edge of a cliff Until one of them falls waiting for someone to go Yeah, and then one of them falls off and the rest of the penguins see if they get eaten by an orca or not right, um

To see if it works similarly railroads work very similarly They were all crowding up to the edge But someone had to go first because there was to get eaten by an orca to get eaten by an orca or not Um likely not I think if anyone had electrified at this point They would be they would be a dominant player in the industry basically forever Um, they all scared each other out of it Yes, exactly. I mean the only the only railroad with like a really Yeah, there's there was a couple

You know the milwaukee road had an electric district the pennsylvania had an electric district Uh, but that was really You know that all of these were like short sections of much larger railroads as opposed to You know a wide-scale electrification program And I think I think if the pennsylvania railroad had got the wires as far as pittsburgh We'd be living in a very different world um Yeah

It's it's that and if the milwaukee ended up electrifying all the way to chicago Yeah Other railroads would have been forced to make these investments once someone had dramatically lower operating costs as a result Um, in the meantime while the industry is uh psyching itself out of this Diesel electric technology rapidly advances. You got bigger and more powerful locomotives A good deal of the benefits of electrification are realized simply by doing nothing, right? But this takes decades, right? And even modern diesels aren't capable of some of the stuff that early electric locomotives could do like regenerative braking or

Short-term overload attraction motors or something like that. They do have regenerative systems. It's just that they can't use that electricity They just burn it off in a big radiator in the back of the locomotive It's literally it's another lost technology. Yes um, right I miss curbs I think we all do yeah, yeah We have a this big locomotive industry for a long time. You have Electro motive division of general motors. You have ge transportation for a while. You have alco and bald wind lima, right?

Note that a lima locomotive works is in lima, ohio. It's lima in ohio, but lima in peru um Especially whatever makes sense. Don't worry about it. Exactly. Um, you know, they provide all kinds of motive power, right? And it looks like okay, maybe maybe this dieselization thing is here to stay until The energy crisis. Oh, yeah that thing where everybody realized that hey, maybe we uh, you know Need to come up with alternate sources of energy and then yeah forgot to ever do any of forgot to do it Yeah, crazy because like not like something like that happened recently or anything

Uh, yeah, so yeah in the in the 70s and 80s there was kind of a repush mainly the 70s But there was kind of a repush to electrify stuff again um, the map that's shown up here, um It says 70s, but some of these like roots were from Older sections from when they've just were talking about it forever Like obviously the Harrisburg to Pittsburgh section is there that the pensy wanted to do forever The the big ones though are the longer distance ones that either the santa fe the southern pacific Roots wanted to be

Specifically like the one in the image in here is a e 60 Or e 60 concept image for the southern pacific And what's sad about these is that a lot of the manufacturers at the time really thought that this would happen um, because not only did they create like concept images and everything they actually uh G e started building like e 60s, which are the uh freight electric freight locomotives And they they had like actually like a backlog of these things for a bit because they thought these electrification things were going to happen um and They they built a lot of uh

They built a decent number of these e 60s and then suddenly they realized like oh I guess this isn't going to happen. We we made the commercial mistake of thinking that anything was going to get better Yeah, yeah, and and they they had like they haphazardly sold these to m track and uh the national railroad of mexico Later on in like the late 80s 90s uh m track it wasn't Wasn't the best locomotive for m track because it was a freight locomotive that was like kind of adapted to be a passenger locomotive Um, I I love the e 60s. They're bricks. They look they look good But just yeah, they they weren't the best passenger locomotives

um And yeah, it's frustrating because like the the santa fe routes the the long one from chicago to la Almost happened it it was so close to being happened And if you talk to any like older boomer fomer or boomer historian Around that era this is like their terrible like 9 11 moment because It went it went as far as getting like there was a whole energy bill that basically went through the senate and house in the 70s And a big portion of it was passed But then a section of it later it was trying to get passed and it got all the way to reagan's desk and

Unfortunately, as we know When you look back everything bad happened around reagan and bregan vetoed that section of the bill So Points of diverter Onto the bad timeline. Yeah, and and and the reagan era in the 80s in general just saw kind of a like Disinvestment in infrastructure Then like disregarding highways because highway, but like the

everything Yeah, everything else was sort of uh, kind of put on the back burner like oh, you don't need to spend money on that No, no, that's fine But yeah, every every manufacturer sort of got into this. I mean along with g e emd also built some test units um The one here in the middle image with sort of the yellow and gray

sort of primer scheme Is uh, is the test unit that was sent to the pennsy later conrail. I mean penn central and then conrail um to test uh to replace their e 44s And they were actually fantastic and if you read about uh them, they were really good There was also a second unit that was built that had a weird truck configuration. It had a Had a bbb truck configuration, meaning there was three trucks with one in the middle Um, I always do not like that truck configuration because that's like a mechanical standpoint. What happened would go around corner I don't like it

Don't worry about it. You know, yeah, but uh slower. Yeah it's uh They were really good though because they were really powerful and really reliable, but it's just like emd realized with conrail that The electrification probably wasn't going to get expanded nor was it probably going to continue because later on conrail and amtrak Kind of had problems working together with each other because generally you should separate freight and passenger lines so

Conrail was sort of inadvertently kicked off of the northeast corridor and thus they had a lot less electrification miles so um, they they switched over to diesel instead and actually Dewired a good portion of the nearer network um, and you can still see a lot of these uh old electrified sections mainly the One of the longest ones is the port road section, which is from the mouth of the susquehanna all the way to harrisburg Uh, that was all electrified and now it's not yes

But yeah, this this was like the one hopeful moment that kind of was dashing and passing and American railroading So yeah something nice. Yeah could have had something nice, but nope No, we can't pleasant breaks. Yeah. No, fuck you. Sorry. This this didn't just turn America You don't get anything nice. You don't get health care, but we do get a shit ton of b2s. Yes uh So you have I mean, this is how close you got um, this is actually a section of uh, catenary the union pacific put up I forget exactly when um, but it was probably 70s 80s

And uh, this was just a test section to see how it would handle in the desert, right? And of course underneath that we have the big Fef uh steam locomotive on an excursion Um, probably the only time you'll see that locomotive under wire Um, you complain about diesels under wire. He says here's a steam locomotive under wire if it shows up in denver, you might That's a good point. Yeah um Now this thing called climate change is happening now, right has been happening for quite a while And railroads are already an extremely environmentally friendly way to ship pretty much everything

Probably a good idea to consider the environmental damage caused by burning so much diesel, right? Sure as as you say a diesel train is like A million times better than a shitload of trucks to try this is true This is absolutely true, but the most polluting diesel train that you could you could make I think tom colletti and I did a um We did some back of the envelope math about transporting the the relative environmental, uh impact of You know a a steam locomotive with x number of passenger cars versus transporting those people in teslas

Um, it breaks even at around 10 cars Um That was a very back of the envelope math. I wasn't like a serious thing. Anyway, so top three diesel consumers in the world in reverse order Union pacific railroad burlington northerns santa fe railroad and the us army So there is there is a lot of room to improve through electrification of railroads But at this point there's less of excuses not to electrify conventionally, right? capital cuts

So we're working on electrifying the us army first. Yeah, exactly. We're gonna we're gonna put up trolley poles for the tanks We're gonna have a trolley m4 So big extension cord. Wait. Oh no, is what is the abram's m4 m1 m1 m1 excuse me Everything in the army is m1. It's m. Yeah, it's m1 The m is for military Yeah, and the one is for it is it is the one thing that they use. Yes the first one. Yeah, yes So all right, you got some issues here and and a lot of them are caused by Excess height cars, right? You got clearance issues. Um, lots of clearances need to be raised to accommodate wires, right?

You can see this is a double stack container train Right and it's very tall because there's two containers stacked on top of each other And it's making me nervous because it's right up close to the thing. It is right up close to the wires. Yes Um, this is it's it's generally a um Double stack under wire impossible. This is it can be done. It can be done the issue is um A lot of the united states Is has railroads which are currently

You know, you're up at the bleeding edge of the tallest cars you can Shove through a tunnel or under a bridge, right? Um, this is this is a diagram here of aar plate h Right, uh plate h allows her cars up to 20 feet tall Yeah so You know, there was a lot of headroom on a lot of lines and railroads decided to capitalize on that Stacking containers too high on a train is more efficient than one high You can get double the amount of containers on the same train

Uh, less than double actually because the cars need to be longer because there's a Well, so the lower container can sit lower, right? But they made use of all this headroom Um, uh, that means there's not enough room for wires without a lot of expensive Infrastructure investment to raise clearances even higher than they already are You might have Yeah, pretty serious capital costs in you know, at least in in urban areas. Yes. I think in more rural areas Like I bet you could probably go from like Omaha to like Denver and like raise like three overpasses total, but

Oh, you know, it's that's that's still externalities. That's the next turnality. Yeah, um So well, no, actually that's not an externality because the railroad would have to pay for that That's an in I I don't know the opposite of an externality Exoality, yeah, so Every overpass and tunnel really becomes a chore if you want to keep using excess height cars um One solution of course would be to stop using excess height cars But uh railroads really don't want to do that, right railroads all those containers of sex asses

Yeah, well, you have to run you have to run more trains and uh, we'll get to that being a problem in the next slide Uh railroads really like their double stacks and their auto racks and their excess height box cars to the point where uh, national de mexico in obviously mexico Uh ripped off the wires, baby. Yeah, they they the they electrified. It's very high density freight corridor between Mexico City and uh kerataro Yeah, they were they were also going to electrify a line from the

Pacific to the Gulf Coast to do like a to do a competitive Panama canal sort of thing, but right. Yeah, that's another story That is another story, but you know, okay, so they got this line up and running. They were going to extend that further as well um They had two pretty nasty accidents pretty early on which was uh, not good this this whole this whole charade is going to be an episode at some point. I want to do but um Pretty shortly afterwards Yeah, pretty pretty shortly afterwards. This whole thing was privatized. Um, the railroads were privatized and the new owner

which was tfm I forget what that stood stood for but uh, uh, it was pretty quickly changed to yeah Pretty quickly changed to kansas city southern de mexico And uh ferromex Yes, and they they pulled down the wires that were brand new so they could run double stacks on that line Yeah um And double stacks are not incompatible with wires as a lot of railroads would have you believe when you're talking about transit projects

Uh, it's perfectly fine as long as the wires are high enough um But this is this is a big big excuse not to electrify it conventionally is that you know, clearances are going to be an issue In addition to just the upfront capital cost is a lot, right? um Even though you get much reduced Um operating costs afterwards and you know eventually eventually you're going to amortize this event investment like it's not improving my railroad Yes, an industry that you know for a hundred years has been like no

I would rather have one cookie now than two in ten minutes. Yeah, exactly It's a long history of self-sabotage on american railroads, which is the subject of this slide um I'm enjoying the i'm enjoying the locomotive graveyard here. Oh, yeah, this is uh larry's truck and electric It's like a used car lot, which I guess it kind of is that's basically what it is. Yeah, god God damn cash for clunkers ruin this country I Yeah, bring a flat car. Yeah

Um, so the state of the american railroad industry today is it's pretty borked Right. A lot of this is has to do with a management concept called precision scheduled railroading Long time enemy of the pods. Long time enemy of the pod. Yes, and this a lot of this is not especially new um, and a lot of the problems with psr are not necessarily how it is um The management philosophy is so much as how it's been implemented, right? That's poorly very badly. Um, they implement a lot of the bad stuff and avoid the good stuff, right to to paraphrase Voltaire, it's neither precision nor scheduled nor railroading

But you sort of start with good ideas, right? We're going to precisely schedule trains That means we have better personnel and equipment utilization Because everything is scheduled and predictable, right and then simply fails to deliver on that um so Trains get much longer They get uh more irregular, right? We have where did where did this idea of psr come from because like did they steal this from the airline industry or Was it just like oh we should put it on a computer? I

I Where does this come from? Where does this originate? So this is from I want to say All sorry, I don't mean to put you on the spot. Yeah So sort of the Lenin of psr is Ewing Hunter Harrison, right? Yeah, you son of a bitch Uh, and he he was ceo of the Illinois central Um, and he was one of the first people to push this idea. We're gonna precisely schedule trains We're going to do all this other stuff that gets us the most out of our infrastructure

Gets the most out of our people gets the most out of our equipment, you know Remove all this sort of mishmash, right and it works really well on the Illinois central but um Eventually he gets he gets higher positions and on more complicated railroads It sort of devolves into cost cutting you know and so this was sort of like uh, uh, you have you have a You have a great idea and then

It starts to fall apart under You know conditions of in this case, you know investors complaining Parastroika. Yeah, basically. Um, so You look at this inefficient system and you're like we can make some some efficiency savings here And the minute you try and do any of that the whole thing collapses because it turns out that it's actually been built on a Bedrock of inefficiency This is this is true. And I mean there's there was You can look at like the physical infrastructure of any railroad and say there are a lot of improvements to be made here

It's a jagged block of off horror shows Alice The big issue is that psr as it's been implemented does not include infrastructure improvements Um, but it does it does rely a lot on technology Which was sort of developed in this in the same period we're talking technology was invented in this in this period Yeah, technology was invented sort of around like 1980, right by adam technology. Yeah, technology. Yes Generally psr good, uh, just how they run it was zero infrastructure Because the thing is that true True psr has never been tried. That's

Actually not entirely true because a lot of the older railroads did have something similar to psr But they actually a good uh infrastructure so yes, um So You have you have new technology like distributed power units. That's a dpu You put a locomotive in the middle of the train and it's controlled by radio from the front of the train That means even your older main lines with lots of curves could now handle very very long freight trains without having like a

A string line derailment or something like that. That's when just the length of the train north and south and about that Yeah, that's that's when just like the length of the train and the in train forces cause some cars in the middle to flip over on a curve It's cool. Um, but center beam cars in the front Sort of a sort of a curable space program sort of problem of like this thing is too big to be structurally processed anymore Yeah, it goes outside the physics range. Yeah, yeah Um, you have infrastructure investment deferred you have the reverse of infrastructure investment For instance, uh, you have capacity added through longer trains rather than through more track and more trains Um, and this causes a sort of paradoxical effect where there's

More congestion with fewer trains on the tracks while still reducing through hours. It's like a magic trick. Um, it's amazing It honestly is amazing. It is the ultimate bean counter like circle jerk. It's amazing Yeah So I I have sort of a simplified example here um, let's say I got to move 150 cars each way over a section of railroad which takes about one Shift to cover like one cruise shift, right? It's getting uncomfortably close to the nightmare about me having the train is heading towards Whatever 40 miles an hour exam question and I haven't revised

This is this is this is similar, right? So let's say Some of this line some of this line is double track and it goes down to single track and I have a number number of passing sidings right Uh along this route and and then I get to my terminal, right? Why does the siding have to pass really? Isn't that a regressive expectation? There's no clip through the other train Uh, oh, we'll get to that. Um

How Yeah, so so the uh These are these passing sidings have a length of 75 cars, right? Hmm So the old way to do this is you run four trains of 75 cars two each way, right? Sure. Um, and then you know, they pay four crews one day of pay each right and that's

That's pretty good. Everything gets there on time. Everyone's happy Um, now we have precision scheduled railroading. Uh, we now have the capability of running longer trains But our passing sidings are the same length Right god, I see immediately where this is going. Yes. You run two trains Double the length, but they can't pass each other Exactly. You run two trains. They're double the length, right? You call up two crews One one crew takes one train All the way to the end of the division, right?

The other crew takes the other train to the end of the double track and then sits and waits right They do this a lot and they sit there and twiddle their thumbs for like six hours, right? Jesus The other train makes it the full length of the trip The crew on the stop train times out and the railroad calls up a new crew at three o'clock in the morning To take the first train to the end of the line Wait, but but but I see the magic trick here. This is way worse But you're paying for three days of train crews instead of four

Yes Oh my god, you've cut costs by 25 percent simply by having one crew do nothing My god, I I feel like I've just seen the prestige And at the same time, uh, you're uh fray arrives one day later Yeah, and you're using like half of your like infrastructure What what do you all you have to do like that? Efficiency Yeah, we call it the aristocrats Alice. Yeah, apparently all you have to do is

Increase congestion on the network and pay a railroad crew to do nothing and the railroad has saved one full day of pay I uh now So if you're not this man doing business exactly doing business here, this is the deals This is some deals right here. Now, let's say let's say we add an m-track train to this mix by the way Uh, if you're if you're more of a passenger guide and a freight guy here Now prior to the longer trains any of these passing sightings Could be used to stop and let the m-track train pass or weave it straight through the middle of them Yeah, exactly

Now that there's trains longer than the passing siding The m-track train is still shorter than the passing siding which means it always has to stop There's there's no possibility to delay the freight train even if it's like empty coal cars or something But ross This is when I reply to you on twitter and say but but there's a government mandate This is the freight trains have to get out of the way of amtrak. Well, they don't fucking listen, alan How are they going to even if they want to they literally cannot even if they even if you wanted to dispatch To prioritize the m-track train. You now cannot do it, right?

What the law says The law the law says one thing but it doesn't regulate the size of trains. Um, it's it's a classic It's a loophole it honestly. I know it's just it's just you have to explain all of this to someone And it's like the the levels of things you have to explain to answer one simple question Yes, why is my train light? Okay, so imagine I have to ship 150 box cars Full of sex arses might want to sit down. I'm gonna get you a piece of pay for in a pencil And and this is something that if if PSR was like properly implemented You would be running trains to make the most of your infrastructure

Without causing all these delays. They would run on a actual precision schedule, right? And you would be making spot infrastructure improvements like I don't know Maybe I join up two of these passing sidings. Boom. Now I have room for the big long train Um, and and everyone I run some of the 75 car trains like slightly closer together even Yeah, or or you know, you and if you if you could run 250 car trains and have this long passing siding That's actually two days of pay for the crew as opposed to three, right? But that does require you to put track down what you don't want to do, right? Um, you're also you're also missing one of the like annoying most annoying parts for the crew

Is that since you're in this long land barge that's stuck out in the middle of nowhere and you clock out You then have to get a shitty van back from your train to either a local hotel or all the way back to your like base of operation So then you're yeah a good part of your shift is just riding like an hour or two in like a van Another good part of it is sitting there in a train where legally you have to pay attention and you can't have like beyond your phone or whatever Well, yes, like as a matter of design Nothing happens. Oh, well once you're once they call it Tied down, which is basically your train is stationary and you have all the brakes on You're technically allowed to like look at stuff that isn't in front of you

Um, I have a I've seen a friend of mine that literally has like He brings like model trains with him and he'll like airbrush like decals on them just waiting for a shift to be over Um, this is my toy car. This is my real car. This is my toy car. This is my real car You have you have some long-term effects from infrastructure pruning Uh, some of this was done in like uh 60s and 70s when railroads were in like a pretty shitty place, right? But you also have stuff that's designed to let's say let excess height cars through like I believe down here This is I want to say this is the Howard street tunnel. It may not be though Um, this used to be a two track tunnel, right?

But because they want higher cars in and it has an oval cross section at the top They simply got rid of one of the tracks and put the other track in the center, right? Um, and this this is a fun one because there's uh, there's one of these in Philly. It goes underneath the uh art museum. Yeah Yeah, and um, yep, you know, they csx will Park trains there like just blocking the railroad crossing to get to the skookle river trail For like hours and hours and hours and hours. Ross can't ride his bike. Yeah, but also it's idling. You have this like four idling diesels in this And it's and it's in like a very much a residential neighborhood. There's a bunch of high rises right there And and you know, it's it's um, it's pretty crazy, right?

Um, you also have uh weird forms of pruning One thing that's very expensive to maintain comparatively are switches, right? So this is Thurmond, West Virginia up here, right? This Used to be a very important line for coal Now not so much. Um, but uh You have a double track main line throughout But here at Thurmond because one of the tracks goes off one way the other track goes off the other way They rejoin eventually and that's the you know, yogi bear a fork in the road, uh, you know, when you get there take it

Um, but sometimes you want to route trains one way or the other way So there used to be a crossover here now in order to do a crossover Of course, you need four switches right Or What they did here is they got rid of two of those switches by just having the line go down to one track and then back up the two tracks Oh my god Now at the cost of just a little bottleneck you save two switches

this is like It's one step away from fucking fits corral doing a train full of empty coal cars Don't worry in a minute. We're gonna get to the Flintstones car where the railroaders have to do it with it Don't worry when uh, when you have two trains on the same team, they can clip through each other And there's this this big disconnect here between like, uh infrastructure pruning and sort of these long slow trains And there's a surge in railroad traffic at the same time, right with like the fracking boom Uh, you know the when we decided to make it worse. Yeah Yeah, you have like, uh, lots and lots of crude oil by rail all this stuff

All that stuff is fine to ship at like slow speeds, you know, because it doesn't go bad It's been in the ground for a couple million years. Yeah, what if we can get oil but also cause earthquakes? Yes, uh, and then you you know, this so this infrastructure is immediately very strained Um, but also in terms of like manufacturing while we're doing all this infrastructure pruning and making the trains longer Everyone's moving to just in time shipping, right? Which means that has nothing to do with rods if there's if there is uh If the railroads are becoming more unreliable, it's very difficult to ship high value goods by rail anymore All that stuff moves the trucks

Right, so the railroads are really painting themselves into a corner here We're the only thing that's good to ship by rail are like bulk commodities or like stuff like paper Yeah, stuff like that where doesn't matter how long it's in transit rapidly approaching British rail sectorization here It's something wild that if you like so, um, there there's some like figure out there That's like 40 of all freight in the united states moves by like rail or something like that But that is ton miles and if you remove that if you remove the heavy stuff

The heavy stupid stuff like gravel and coal It goes down to some like either single digit or like in the teens of actual stuff. We move on rail Yeah, by weight. It's a lot by value not so much exactly um so And then of course a lot of that stuff is also fossil fuel related which theoretically in our green electric future Would be traffic that would dry up

Um, yeah, we don't know with that oil. We don't want that coal Yeah, he might be still shipping some metallurgical coal and that'd be it Um, yeah, one of the funny things we always joke about like east coast railroads Is there is so many east coast railroads back in the early 1900s that were literally just built as coal conveyor belts To cities and that's all they were um So when people are always like nostalgic for like it said railroad say like the lack of water or something And it's like well the whole point of that was just to move coal from coal mines to city and like

Yeah, there should be passenger stuff on it. Maybe but like the whole point of the railroad is kind of gone now Um, the other effect of this is of course, it's taken a big toll on employees Number one, they've been cutting huge amounts of staff cutting lots of engineers lots of uh, conductors cutting All kinds of positions everywhere because they're just not needed anymore because if we can run a big stupid slow train Uh, we don't need as many people, right? Uh, we also start putting people onto the extra board, right? Which if you're a senior engineer, you get the few scheduled trains out there And if you're like a junior person

You get the shit work, right? Uh, and that on the if you're on the extra board, you can basically be called up at any time To take a train from your terminal to anywhere else with very short notice Yeah, and so they could call you up at three in the morning. They could call you up Like I don't know Maybe you're with your buddies at the bar because you thought, you know, it looked like you're gonna have the day off Nope too bad. Yeah, you got to sober up and get out here now Um, basically how like most railroad jobs work is that you're on like five days a week and during those five days

You can just get a call on your phone at any time of the day Four hours before your shift that tells you you're gonna have to come in And and there is it's very much it's it's very similar to how the service industry is starting to work now Where schedules are like arbitrary in order to like optimize her when there's the most customers or whatever No one knows what their actual shift is going to be until right before it happens precision precision scheduled waiting Yes, exactly. Um You know, and again, you got in cab surveillance now. So, you know, it's not like you're gonna go on your phone You know or maybe, you know, maybe you play with your model trains. I don't know

You know, uh, the um, you also have stuff like autothrottle now you have fuel economy systems Um, which really slowed the trains down Yeah, so autothrottle basically is the railroad's attempt to techify fuel usage So normally when you're driving a train, uh, and you're an engineer that does engineer things, uh, and knows like The layout of the track that you're running on, you know when to throttle up, you know when to throttle down You know when a dynamic break, you know when to Uh do certain things just to efficiently run the train at a certain speed and because you know what's coming up next

Um, but instead a lot of what the railroads do nowadays is there's this like autothrottle that like they force the engineers to use It's basically a computer that tries to do the same thing But the problem is is that the computer is optimizing for fuel usage Um, so what it does is like an early cvt Yeah, and and what it does is that it essentially will run the train at like half speed because basically the slower You run something usually the more efficient it is So these trains that would normally go like 40 50 miles an hour are going like 25 miles an hour And you talk to any of these engineers that run these trains. They fucking hate the computer

It also doesn't really work Is the other thing It's only like uh some one of the engineers I talked to that has to do with these He told me that they only save like two or three percent fuel burn like it's not like substantial There's there's an old joke old railroad or joke um one day a conductor came into uh came into the office one day Right before his shift was to start

We found out the railroad Had uh saved a whole bunch of money by eliminating the engineer and replacing him with a monkey right so so and he's like How come how come the engineer is replaced by a monkey, but I'm not He's really getting worried for his job security. So anyway, he boards the train with his monkey

Right. Um, and there's a little display in the locomotive now And the display tells the monkey. Okay. This is your throttle position This is where you need to be. This is when you need to break the monkey's well trained He knows exactly what's going on and the conductor's getting more and more worried. He's like, what am I here for? What is my job now? I I'm Like he's like really like What's gonna happen? And then suddenly

He didn't notice there was display on his side too It lit up and it said feed the monkey Anyway, that's autothrottle So, you know a lot of these these working condition issues are why there's going to be that huge railroad strike in 14 days now This is a um, you know, this is you know, it's not just about pay It's about just the working conditions have become impossible, right? It's it's just it's not no longer Like a sustainable job for a human being to do Um, right. Thanks for nothing Warren Buffett

ironically, well ironically Burlington northern Santa Fe, which is the one Uh, Warren Buffett owns they have not formally adopted precision scheduled railroading But they have some of the worst working condition on the ground anyway It's funny because bnsf is the one that's slightly better than the other three. So yeah, it's right And by slightly better, it's like wow We actually attempt to do certain things and that's not setting a high standard They were also they were also trying to push push that insane attendance policy. Oh, yeah, is really what got this strike going um

so anyway, uh A lot of this stuff starts to come in in the 90s where we're using less locomotives We're using less trains to haul the same amount of stuff in a lot worse way than we used to um and this happens, uh Right after the railroads went on a mode of power buying spree, right? Um, is that how you get the big used car lot full of trains? Yes, um, you know, they there was this boom bus cycle

There was a lot of equipment ordered to handle back and crewed fracked gas powder river basin coal stuff like that Very shortly after all this equipment is procured psr goes mainstream. You have this huge mode of power surplus No one's ordering any new locomotives because there are so many of them just lying around Right because you don't need them because you're running these giant long stupid trains Exactly right and you're you're running them with maximum fuel economies You're running you're running like a train with three locomotives and 150 cars And you can do it because there's a locomotive in the middle and one at the end as well as one at the front um

And and new locomotives start getting more complicated and more expensive, right? The epa starts to crack down on non-road diesel emissions after two 2004 they phase in Several tiers of emission standards over time ending with here for uh, basically the government told diesel manufacturers That they were like hey, you actually have to try to innovate now Yeah, we're turning the big economic imperative back on The pretty stark difference between when we see this old metro diesel locomotive here Uh big cloud of black smoke coming out versus this nice new clean modern m-track locomotive from seamans Which is you know, you can see a bit of heat haze above it

And that's about it the the metro locomotive is a tier zero or tier zero plus locomotive And then the uh seamans charger is a tier four So you you can see the nox um emissions in the one chart Uh that show the amount compared to each other Yes Isn't that just one of the like really really you could have essentially none of this in the atmosphere kind of It's a big. It's a big smog producer

That uh your your your sulfur diacides and your nitrous oxides those are those are criteria pollutants particulate matters another one It's it's that and it's the nitrous oxide basically causes like the acid rain type stuff And it's also one of the that in particulate matter are just like if you live next to this area You are guaranteed to have like asthma basically. Yeah um Yeah, so the new diesels they're more efficient. They're much more efficient like the technology got a lot better pretty quickly Uh, but they're also more expensive

right and Again, there's all these all these locomotives lying around. I don't need to buy a whole bunch of new ones, right? um the result of this is that the the locomotive industry sort of rapidly collapses um electromotive division is bought by caterpillar 2004 GE transportation holds out for a while they're sold off the wab tech in 2019 right The financial crisis of 2008 of course exacerbated these these problems these companies are sort of mined for assets

Right and and there's no they they become zombie companies, right? Yeah like especially at EMD like from a mechanical perspective EMD was always fucked because like um, this is this is a car thing Liam so you get this but uh GE always had prime movers that were four-stroke engines and four strokes are notoriously a lot easier to have better emissions On where EMD had two-stroke prime movers um, so essentially when these like, uh, EPA regulations went into effect EMD was kind of fucked from the start because they they mainly developed two-stroke engines

So yeah, yeah, and he moved a four-stroke. That's essentially having your your uh, your power density like right off the bat Yeah, and you can tell the difference between like a locomotive that uses a four stroke and a two stroke because the The four stroke will sound like the typical And then the the two stroke will sound like a giant chainsaw. This is like Yeah, that's the main difference um And they start moving they start moving production to non-union plants Um, and the build quality kind of tanks especially for EMD

Uh, no one wants to buy any locomotives Uh, you can barely purchase any new mainline freight locomotives in america today and yeah No one really wants to and the crazy part is is like these charts show is that The EPA has mandated a tier four since like 2013 2014, but if you look at that chart, um with the adoption rate You can see that the green on the top of the list is tier four and you can see that it's barely part of the fleets of these Railroads nowadays. Yes Uh, it's and you can see that the tier zero still exists like they're not they haven't disappeared

Hi, it's justin Uh, 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 Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for Um, 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 Yeah, there was it it was uh, uh, this was this was sort of um inadvertent problem from environmental regulations I mean, I think we do talk about that a lot in this this program is uh, you know stuff like, uh,

how we how Wyoming was able to supply all the nations coal because it was technically slightly better under ekpa regulations This is sort of another thing not to say that environmental regulations are bad. It's just that you have to come out of every loop hole Or they will be ruthlessly exploited Exactly Yeah, well, none of it seems to really be outcomes based, you know, it seems to be a little more procedural Hey, you guys should do this. Okay. When when Pete Buttigieg emails you to be like, uh, hey, I need you Hey, you uh reply back. Hey, you should do something about this shit. Yeah

Wow, the secretary of transportation should give a shit about trains. No fucking way anyway Now that we're now that we're an hour and 32 minutes into the program um Talk about batteries Um batteries, how do they work? It's what I would call safe and legal thrills to throw your car batteries into the ocean Recharge the eels. Come on so

I would say what I would call like the autonomous battery future, right? Uh, the autonomous battery future and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race 100 I I highly endorse Um, uh, Paris Marx's new book about like in large part why the electric car is You know, not the silver bullet that it's often imagined to be I wish you haven't been on the show sometimes. Why do I have to buy a new watch every four years? Why do I buy headphones that have batteries? Yeah, that are not give me the option to swap out the battery like I had on my Samsung s2 throw that used battery

Into the ocean right to the ocean. Just give me a trolley headphones Yeah, I mean, this is sort of well, that's just headphones with a cord. I mean, yeah I'll use that with my uh, my my my my phone that doesn't have a headphone jack rose Because tim cook was brave rose. Oh my god. I mean inspiring sort of too broad of a topic to fully cover here But there's like this sort of as the autonomous battery future comes upon us I don't think the autonomous part will happen, but the battery part might Um, you know, you sort of look at there's this ideological Opposition to any infrastructure investment. You really focus on vehicles instead of what they run on, right?

Everyone wants these autonomous cars, but they don't want any infrastructure to support them. Um, which is No, yeah Yeah, no I It's a pretty crazy thing when okay back in 1997 there was uh, I want to say the automated highway institute developed a system using buicks

uh of automated cars in dedicated lanes on california freeways they they did a demonstration pilot and The one thing you had to do was you had to punch a nail Into the highway every foot so the cars knew where they were Right. Um, and then they were able to demonstrate all this stuff that's been promised By uh autonomous car companies for ages, you know, like platooning cars Having cars join and leave platoons seamlessly all this stuff all you needed was nails

And I think the nails had like an rfid thing on them. Anyway, that went nowhere We're not even willing to invest that much in infrastructure for an autonomous vehicle No, they have to be they have to be able to work on regular roads which have not been changed at all And also have not been maintained. So they're falling apart This is true. This is true. But if you have a universal thing All vehicles can use how can I make money off of not using my Priority By selling my uh janky system that cannot work with anything else but only works with my vehicle

A system that actually doesn't work at all. I mean in a case of uh, Ask me about usb micro b now, so usb micro b uh Proprietary god god Yeah, if you have a connector that only works for printers, you shouldn't have that connector. Yes bring back the serial I went to a big serial port again rs232 baby, let's do this

But you know in the autonomous battery future, you know, you have all these you you're gonna have autonomous battery cars You have all these individualistic solutions to problems, you know, like I don't know you're gonna you're gonna replace public transportation with pods Um, we're gonna we're gonna everyone's gonna have a pod You know that you have a complete abdication Say it louder best. Yeah, you're gonna you're gonna this complete abdication of any kind of planning role for governments Right. Um, and and you really you really leave everything to As Riley likes to say on trash future a wizard will do it. Yes. Yeah And this is just the whole

philosophy of Like development today. It's the philosophy of everything government. You mean private public partnership No, I fucking don't And there's this fundamental expectation that we'll be able to keep on keeping on exactly as we are There's no great social upheaval or changes the structure society to avert climate change or deal with dwindling resources or stuff like this Someone's gonna sweep in with cheap batteries autonomous cars will all be rich and part of the leisure class, right? And the paris marks thing is that like your life isn't gonna change that much

Right, you're never gonna have to confront anything. You can still drive your car It's just gonna be a slightly different type of car now Yes changing my lifestyle to help the environment now Yeah So this this applies to people but it also applies to railroads, right? Well railroads are kind of people They are kind of people. Yeah, I mean the southern pacific. I mean, yeah, that's the southern pacific Prove that back in the 1870s. Absolutely So

Let's talk about the battery electric locomotive um Oh, it's cute. Yeah, this is this is maybe the good It might have their face. It's cute as a button, but down here is a monster Not here, but down there is a monster There's one thing battery electric trains are good at and that's serving lightly used branch lines where overhead line electrification is not necessarily worth it All right To have never done the beaching acts and to have done a bunch of british sort of like

Little little rail cars of these. Yeah. And one of the best examples is the uh, dutch student respond Class 150 which were built originally in the mid 1950s And basically what these were is it was like a rail car. So it was like kind of standard Thing you'd find everywhere except instead of having like a diesel motor They had just a ton of lead acid batteries just in the middle of the frame Fuck that rose And in they had about the equivalent of 520 to 603 kilowatt hours

Which to give like a modern equivalent that's about the equivalent of like seven teslas In in these things of lead acid batteries No, I'm sorry. This just flatly rules. I don't yeah, and um They they actually ran these from the 50s until like 1995. Um, but Uh, and they had a bunch of nicknames. Uh, they were called a cut a cute blitz Or battery lightning, and I'm not going to try to pronounce the other ones But uh, let me let me have like to run at these soyra bomber acid bombers

stick Oh, oh boy. Dawson intercity uh fashion lamp and express a pocket torch express or this one, uh Henger bauch schweiner pot bellied pigs, and I you know, I like it. It feels a bit henger boich myself Bauch excuse me and the reason why they were called pot belly pigs is uh later in their life because the batteries were centered in the center of the chassis They started to sag because the

The the actual tons of lead acid batteries that are in Um, but these are really because that's a sway back and not a hog back. This is true. Oh, yeah And and these are actually really cool because like, um, yeah on unlike branch lines that otherwise would have like a dmu They they took over the roll on that the only downside is because of the lead acid batteries and because of batteries, um having just Uh limited uh capacity you could only really run these things a very flat roots because otherwise if you're going up some hills you would drastically cut the uh The amount of distance or range you could run these but otherwise they were really good

Yeah, I mean one of the things which is really nice about trains. They're really good at coasting Um, you know, you you can get up to a good speed and then shut off the throttle and go many many miles without touching it Um, but that changes when there's a gradient Yeah Any other thing is on a train range is very important, right? Um You know, especially not so much on branch lines, but for mainline trains I'll give you an example m-track runs the california zephyr Roughly 2 000 miles from chicago to san francisco

In 51 hours, right, which is not a great schedule. Um But on this trip it refuels once in Omaha, Nebraska And they don't even strictly have to it's just a top off, right? so You need you you want to have a lot of range, especially for passenger trains, but also freight trains Uh, that are anything other than short branch line services. Sure um So, uh, let's look at maybe a more modern example, which I kind of like

Um, this is the so very cute. Yes This is a viva rail class 230, right? They took old london underground d stock from the late 70s And they refurbished them and they stuck some batteries on there. These are already family resemblance there. Yeah, yes They they already use these on a few branch lines in the uk, but those are diesel versions Right. Yeah Viva rail is so far built two battery versions of it Uh, of both two car units to demonstrate the technology

I think both of them caught fire at one point. Uh, I mean, yeah, oh What are you gonna do? I'll they've repaired them. Um, these are I'm not sure if those were the battery ones or the diesel ones, but they've had at least two fires on these Um, they're currently owned by railroad development corporation to demonstrate their pop-up metro concept, right? Which is like, okay, if you're a town or small city You have some unused railroad track. Hey, we'll come in and build some temporary platforms Uh, and we can see how rail mass transit would work here Which I think that's a fun idea. I like it. Um, not bad. Yeah

Yeah, so they're they're housed at the rock hill furnace trolley museum right now And they sort of shuttle back and forth on that track to show off the potential customers Which is very funny because they have to run on pennsylvania trolley gauge No, rock hill furnace is standard gauge. Oh, it is. Oh, okay. Maybe I'll think of the other one that's like close by or something Yeah, no, the uh, that that is the standard gauge trolley museum. Um, I think it's standard gauge The one in the one in washington pennsylvania is pennsylvania trolley gauge. Oh, okay. That's really one thing enough And I think electric city trolley museum is also standard gauge But I know it is because it has a

Yeah, yeah so And these are these are good for like low intensity routes where you can do it in one charge They advertise a 10 minute recharge time Right and that's pretty quick But for passenger service, that's a completely unacceptable dwell time But you can't just sit at a station for 10 minutes and expect people to use the train like that Um, you know, you could potentially add a bunch of charging the infrastructure at every stop and partially recharge

But that's a lot of effort, right? Yeah. And by that point you're you're back up to something like electrification anyway in terms of like Yeah, yeah, that's that's gonna be a big theme coming up um Now it's not just uh folks in the uk who have uh, or folks over in europe who've thought about this. Uh, we've got um a long island railroad Try to refit some of their multiple unit trains with batteries Right back in early 2021 they started this project. They were gonna Uh, they run on third rail electrification

Um, which they probably shouldn't at this point. It probably I think I I think at this point They should just consider wiring up the whole system with overhead lines because that's capital cost That's capital cost. Yeah um You can get rid of one of those uh extra Extra power systems that are in Penn Station that probably be a net good That'd be a lot less complicated to maintain. Anyway, uh, especially with all the grade crossings, you know All the kids who could get fried by the third rail. Um, so anyway

They were like, okay We need to electrify our whole system. What if we try with batteries? Can we just sling batteries on through our existing rail cars? because right now the um The trains that go on to say for instance the oyster bay branch They have to switch the diesel at some point Right. Hmm. Um So they spent about $850,000 on the project and concluded that actually no, this won't work

The cars the cars can't take the weight. I think was the reason Um, and and so that's not happening, but I think that are a big sort of press event here Well, they look at our futuristic new train Yes Yes, our futuristic new train we bought You know half a dozen years ago. Yes Yeah That has batteries in it like your like your headphones do it's it's like basically it's wireless literally

I believe this was just a stock. Um, what is this an m9 that they just dragged out there with a diesel for this m7 I think m7 they brought out the m stands for military They just dragged it out there with a diesel for the press event That's really funny. Yeah So, um, yeah refitting these things doesn't always work I mean these these batteries are heavy. You do need new rolling stock if you want to throw batteries in there Or at least something that's comp that that it's not like simple engineering, right? So that's that's sort of uh on the passenger idea of like what I would consider practical

Which is okay. You switch the batteries maybe for the end of the line or for branch lines but you know Folks are trying to take it further to mainline Diesel locomotives Convert those to batteries. Sure. I know so this is the wab tech flex drive What a name I'll let alan explain this because he runs. Yeah, this um, as you see it has like, uh

2400 kilowatt hours of capacity which again in like tesla numbers. That's about like 32 teslas right So there's a lot of batteries in this thing There's a lot of batteries to the point where they had to interrupt the the walkway on the side of the locomotive Yeah, although it looks like this this door might allow you access through. I don't know It's an interesting firefighting challenge if one of these decides to have a bad time Uh, no, no, don't think about that. You just you just don't worry about that. You just take a plane full of sand Yeah

Yeah, literally the sand tank the sand hook. Yes. I imagine this thing derails in the howard street tunnel Oh, dear. Uh, you just weld the tunnel together. That's it It's about to say you just melt downtown baldemore. Yeah Oh, the sum of old fizz horrors. No, but what essentially this is this is a jivo basically It's uh, without the prime mover and just instead just a ton of batteries And our listeners who are not into trains a jivo is the type of diesel locomotive. That's pretty modern Yeah, and jivo is essentially just your bog standard just diesel freight locomotive

That you'd find in the united states um And what this is is you rip the diesel engine out of the thing and instead you just fill it up with batteries like it's very It's very dumb energy But obviously there's a lot of engineering that goes into the battery kind of section of this This thing's probably very heavy compared to a jivo. I actually don't know I would I would be very interested to look that up It says four hundred and thirty thousand pounds here and then presumably I can go to wikipedia here

jivo, but uh, yeah this this thing um It's so in in railroad terms um in yards in the past it's still nowadays Oftentimes you'd connect this thing to a diesel locomotive called a slug and what a slug is is It doesn't have a prime mover meaning it doesn't have a diesel engine But it connects to the electrical system of the diesel engine that's moving cars around And what this does is it gives you more motors per It gives you more electric motors per the diesel engine So basically the diesel engine can work super hard at low speeds

But not do a burnout but instead has more like electric motors to move and more traction to move stuff with And normally that's only used really slow speeds like five to ten miles an hour Just moving like cars around like a yard and that's usually what slugs are good at But this is essentially a slug with your electric motors and everything, but it has a ton of batteries um, so it can move around Using the batteries and stuff like that, but that's that's not what it's mainly built for um, because like generally you wouldn't just put one of these on a train you'd also Oh

No good, yeah, that's not fucking stankaster, man. That's uh, Hi, Allen. Hello. Hello. Sorry. I'm like a computer blue screen. I'll do it But yeah, we're away on the uh flex drive Yeah, so basically it's a slug And yes Yeah, 32 teslas and when um When you put so you take two diesel engines and you put one of these in between the two and you essentially run the thing as a

Uh hybrid consist so basically like ross was saying earlier when normally when you have a diesel engine and you go downhill Or you need to break you use dynamic brakes and The thing uh, we'll just put heat back in the atmosphere like you're not recapturing the energy So the idea with this thing is that when you go down the hill and you use dynamic brakes All of the energy goes back into the batteries. Yeah, okay. Yeah Well, actually, it's not a hybrid but when you attach it to a diesel it becomes a hybrid. Okay, gotcha yes

and and the the idea with this thing is that like No capital cost you just buy the thing and put it into your consist um And it's found that bnsf ran like some test trains with this over the course of like a year and they found that Like generally it's saved between like 14 to 15 percent fuel burn on one trains run over like It's much better than auto throttle. Um Yeah Yeah, which which is a substantial amount like it's it's not like you're you're throwing computer at the thing

You're actually throwing a physical asset at the at the problem But it's still not like a substantial thing like electrification would be it's just kind of like Yeah, this I guess works better than nothing, but it's not like, uh, it's not revolutionary, you know And this is this is uh, this has been much touted as like the coming of the battery freight locomotive, but it's It can't run on its own Or it can for short distances, but this is absolutely not something that's going to pull a long train. You can't attach Several of yeah, like like honestly if you wanted to use this thing by itself

It would actually be really good at running like local freight trains, which uh, That's also a problem because the class ones hate local freight. So Multiple issues here. This is the closest thing to a battery. Uh road locomotive ever built now I'm gonna cite a few things from a a study Uh called economic environmental and grid resilience benefits converting diesel trains to battery electric I'll put a link to that in the um the description but this uses a number of

Figures that I was kind of suspicious of but you could move an average train And that's like four locomotives and some number of cars. I forget a perfectly spherical train It's perfectly spherical train and Yeah, an average of 241 kilometers With a boxcar holding 14 megawatt hours of electricity Right and that would have more for longer runs. You'd couple more boxcars together. Of course this has This has 2.4 megawatt hours

So that's that's not going to get you 241 kilometers But that's uh 241 kilometers is a pretty pretty short run for a freight train I don't know how they got that average because I thought that was uh There's some trains that'll go less than that and there's a lot that will go a lot a lot more than that So, yeah, but you only need a couple dozen of these things in order to achieve that short run This is the thing. Yes. You need you you need a lot. You need a lot of batteries Well, it's kind of like It's kind of like the rocket equation where your rocket is carrying the fuel

That is also the fuel you need that you're putting up in there So it's like your your your locomotive is carrying the weight of the batteries But the batteries are also propelling you and it's just like when does it become too? Yeah, and obviously these uh, these batteries are they're getting higher energy density They're getting smaller all the time The other thing these researchers suggested that well if you had a charger rated for 72 megawatts You could charge eight of these cars at a time, right? That's nothing like that comes out of the wall pretty much. I shame 72 megawatts is a lot of electricity

The whole yeah whole m-track northeast wall out big big wall The whole m-track northeast corridor between washington dc in new york city Averages 63 megawatts Um Now that's an average that that that is um, that is taking into account a lot of downtime At night where there's very few trains running, but but that that's a lot of electricity, right? You are investing into a lot of electrical infrastructure to support these battery trains, right? um

And you have to build that out to every place where you fuel trains Which given these things have a limited range is going to be a lot more Maybe we can have more of those little towns like thurmond that only exist to like charge up these I imagine that it's going to be like staffed by like two guys at most. Hmm, you know, and I but A town of two guys. Yeah, the thing is like 241 kilometers is like steam locomotive numbers It's not very good And just come back. We've we've returned with a you know It's a return of dave and bob

If we're like a really basic comparison a fuel tank on a sd-70, which is a comparable diesel locomotive to this right same basic shape and size um The fuel tank holds 4900 gallons of diesel which Back of the envelope calculation that equivalent equivocates to 203 megawatt hours God boy, it was so fucking efficient. It's really good. It's it's Disgustingly energy efficient is the thing. Yes. They're really good energy density now. Obviously

not all of that is available, right because uh combustion Combustion engines aren't that efficient, right? Um, so, you know, it's not like you have a full 203 megawatt hours But you have a lot You have a lot of fuel in there and that's why say m-track and go Three quarters of the way across the country on one tank of gas

um One tank of diesel. Excuse me. Um So, yeah, this is um that this is Pretty limited in the range department on its own obviously when you attach diesel engines to it. It's much better much better Now there is a company trying to do a complete Uh electric battery electric road locomotive, right net of course progress rail right

Progress rail is sort of the tattered remnants of electromotive division. I see it's it's owned by caterpillars. So It's owned by caterpillar now. Yeah offset all of the like, um It's something. Yeah. Yeah So they've come up with a large line of products only one locomotive has been built to my knowledge Which is this is this is it here. This is the one it's the one in the picture here, right? Um, oh and this was supposed to have completed in-service testing last year, but to my knowledge it has not started testing Um, it's very cool. Like if you look at the bottom left one, I really enjoy putting the like new products

sort of like clean green livery on The same form factor as a diesel locomotive. Mm-hmm I really like that. I mean this this is this is one of this is not a very good render I will say that this is Well, the white locomotive no white locomotive on a white background not very good. Um Well, they're they obviously don't have much of a graphic design department. You could solve this by putting it on a black background That's all you have to do impossible

So anyway, they have several products on offer right now They have this heavy eight axle road switcher down here Um, it needs eight axles because it's that heavy, right? Um, it also has a panograph in the back, which is interesting. That's presumably for in motion charging, which I yeah, I only receive an in motion charging. I think it's I've seen some renders of them. They just pull to a certain section of the yard There's just a rail above the track that's just that makes sense again. This is like it It's doing so much electrification to avoid doing any electrification

Right. Oh, yeah So union pacific has ordered 20 of their switcher locomotives, which I don't have a renderer those up here Um bhp, which is a big mining company in australia They ordered two of these big guys for evaluation on the airline Um, they're big long australian iron ore routes, you know, they go from They go from the iron ore mines and pill barrel nowhere to nowhere Yeah, exactly a conveyor belt kind of thing. Well, I was it is it is a it is an australian railroad It is a conveyor belt system

What I'm slightly confused about is it does not seem to have the range To make it to the end of the line Without recharging, which is not the case with their big diesels they got now You know, you know, and this is where you sort of you you've got to look at these things as um For the purpose of railroad operations, these are just diesel locomotives with less range and You know less emissions Um, you know, but they they don't offer any of the performance upgrades that overhead wire would get you

Except maybe you could do short-term overload on the traction motors, which that railroads don't even want that because you know They want to run everything as slowly and cheaply as possible Um Yeah maintenance so these these things are This is what's on offer from progress rail again. I don't think any have been built except one prototype And they're they're trying to fire up their new factory in uh, what should we call it? Fort Worth, texas the new non-union one. Um, they got a second new non-union factory in brazil We're outsourcing there

Very good in No one needs and the which doesn't work Maybe lula will fix that. I don't know We can always hope Oh brazil is a whole another story of they had a big electric rail network in torreo town Hey brazil definitely a very fragmented rail network for how wealthy the country is. I will say that They well, they used to have a whole Just like mexico they used to have a whole nationalized rail network and it was all electrified and

Then they didn't keep up. They didn't do the upkeep and then the government eventually Neoliberalized and privatized blah blah blah the story. Yeah But this these guys, uh, uh battery capacity on the big guy here 14 and a half megawatt hours, which is Not super great It's it's just it's not good for like the long hauls. It seems to be expected to do I don't know what the deal is here. I don't I don't know why bhp is interested other than maybe they're trying to Show to the investors. Hey, we're a green It's kind of worth eating that cost to try and greenwash a bit maybe yeah

We we we have these two locomotives on a siding that we use like once a month when the investors come out to see the See the mines Yeah, um not to be out done m-tracks getting in on it. Um, cool. Yeah so m-track This was found in a document a while ago and like we know that m-track is buying new passenger train sets from seamans because they've already started working with them for some of their long distance locomotives and their Genesis replacements, which are they're replacing their locomotives from the 90s, which is good

but the the issue with these are that These rail are these train sets that they're getting are based off of the night jet The obb the austrian night jets in europe and those are very good trains The the issue is is that m-track Unlike the night jets which are totally electric overhead wire based m-track wants flexibility and with these are totally overhead electric wire cringe yes and and and and with with flexibility comes compromise and

The compromise here is that what instead of having an electric locomotive you have a diesel locomotive which it has It can run on overhead wire when it's under wire But it then it has a diesel locomotive that pulls it when you're not on the corridor or wherever that's electrified But the the super cringe moment comes from the fact that They need to run so so a decent amount of m-track services run out of Penn station And specifically out of Penn station. They don't go on the corridor. They actually go up the old new york central's west side Connection or line from Penn station all the way to the connection on the metro north's connection along the Hudson river

So and and that's about there's about 10 mile section of track that goes from Down like midtown Manhattan to the top of Manhattan to connect with the the Hudson line And there is some third rail In there that comes out of Penn station and the current genesis locomotives from the 90s Have a little third rail pickup on them that just allows it to get out of Penn station without just filling Penn station with Sometimes they don't bother turning off the diesel engine though Yep And the uh, so so Amtrak solution to this is instead of

extending the third rail or even Doing overhead wire for the the the short 10 miles from Penn station to the connection on the Hudson They're going to put a battery tender on these uh empire. Yeah They're gonna put a battery tender on these empire corridor trains or or any of the Medium to short distance trains that run on this corridor um, so that would that would include the empire corridor the euthan allen the uh, I think it's the Adirondack and um, I Maybe the maple leaf

Which are all like medium to short distance trains that run out of this section What are they using for the lakeshore limited? It's They probably will use some mixture I don't know because they still have to eat the lakesh I don't know They're probably gonna use the genesis until they like from fall apart like the blues brother's car when they pull into Penn station Yeah

Yeah, basically um And like yeah, it's just frustrating because you can you can easily electrify that section And I guarantee like again metro north similar to long island railroad use third rail and it's one of those things like LIR are where eventually They're gonna need to put up wires. I think that's it's it's definitely like you start you start looking at like how Because like the whole idea of this is um, you can avoid the locomotive changes that are currently a problem on the northeast corridor because you have

The locomotives diesel, but there's a panagraph on the second car Right an extra powered axle um, but you know these are um Uh You know these are sort of clutches like fundamentally. It's a clutch You know, especially since so much of this right of way that m-track is now running trains on has become state-owned um, like the stuff that's off the corridor it would make sense now you have control over the track Just put the wires up as opposed to

You know assuming that we're gonna have this future of Yeah, diesel traction that would that would require amtrak to see to recognize and then seize an opportunity This is this is Never this is true. I mean you're you're looking at and I mean I mean all the way down to richman that's state-owned track now You know, so yeah, the three corridors that m-track could electrify tomorrow if they wanted or applied for the grants are the DC to richman corridor, which is the virginia one. They could do the empire corridor, which is the um, basically

pockypsy to Schenectady, which is like your upstate new york stuff. I thought that was known by the No, that's owned by m-track. It's just csx has rights to run great trains if they want And then the last one is the new haven to springfield, messachusetts corridor, which is entirely I was a not fucking electrified already. I they run a lot of trains on that corridor too. I mean Yeah And they um Condot also runs their own trains from hartford to new haven too on that

So I yeah, they could do it tomorrow if they really want to battery tender here is this entire section at the front of the car That's going to be one huge battery rest of it's a passenger car right and then And then that battery is there to get you The first 2,000 feet out of Penn station That's so good and then it it also is uh, it's supposed to be able to provide a little bit of extra oomph While accelerating as well because you're gonna regenerate you know

electricity from the brakes theoretically Yeah, theoretically you can use it similar to that wob tech locomotive where like on on breaking your dynamic brakes will Like it's it's essentially like a Prius Yeah, you'll you'll generate some energy when you slow down So it's it's not a terrible idea. It's kind of it's kind of uh, what if we just uh, what if we just did stuff better? Um, so we go to from a not a great idea to a much worse idea um So this is oh, you know, it's bad like from the nazi super weapons episode

You know, it's bad when you get to something that only exists in drawing form Yes Oh, well Metra has is uh, they they're notorious for having a lot of interesting and dumb ideas that only would come from them yes, um the uh, so Metra is the chicago uh commuter rail system and they are I think one of the most backwards of the big commuter rail systems and that's saying something Yeah, really there are a symbol of everything wrong with american passenger railroads

The you know, you have lots and lots of trains running not very many services um, you have really bad equipment utilization Um, you have I mean, I mean they got like a million stations in chicago giant terminals and they can You know, they're still running old fuck all with the old timey consolidation old timey like uh commuter service where one train makes one run maybe two runs a day You have one crew to do that. I mean, it's very very expensive to provide not that much service, right?

Anyway, they want to electrify they're like we we are going to be the future and what they did was rather than go to a manufacturer and try and order well Ideally you'd put up wires, right? They don't want to do that. They're they're the future of railroading here at Metra by perpetuating a um frankly antiquated and racist

mode of commuter rail service Yeah, the premium service for white people is basically what it is. Um, they they uh They they issue an rfp and said we're offering a challenge to manufacturers Take four of our old f40 ph's That's the classic m-track locomotive, but they also had a bunch and repower these with batteries

right um And and and a big part of this is that they they are they have an entirely emd fleet Despite emd no longer existing and they want to keep it that way. Yeah, right? So they're just gonna retrofit retrofit and retrofit. Yeah. Oh, oh So like beyond this battery locomotive, there is no more emd locomotives being produced Especially like passenger ones and the newer passenger ones that were produced weren't that good You know

Yeah, yeah, the f1 the f125s. They weren't that good They had a lot of issues the only people that bought them was metro link in la um the um, so so What metra is doing besides these battery locomotives is they're taking the sd70 mac Which is a like freight locomotive uh for like long distance freight and they're converting it into a passenger It's a very bad idea. It's not gonna work very well. Yeah, the The most hilarious thing about that though is the sd70 mac will be the only locomotive that they will have that has ac traction motors

Oh, my god. I love I love how they just sort of experiment and they just fucking around because you nobody's buying or selling new locomotives anymore Exactly. I mean, it's uh, it's it's well. I run a railroad People are yeah Oh, no, metro is like the ultimate example of what if you gave some like backwards ass fomers a railroad to run What is what is a that's metra that feels like a slower It's a rail fan, but like the really bad really bad kind. Yeah, it is a slur. It's basically More friend of the show jay if you're less than i um

I'll go by the term once in a while. So yeah, you're reclaiming it You know reclaiming it in front of the show and mascot jeremy zora So they love you zora. They sent out this rfp to to convert for their oldest locomotives into new modern battery locomotives um They I believe they they send it specifically to a couple firms um, and none of them responded Except of course progress rail who are like, yeah pick us. Yeah, we'll do it Yeah, we'll we'll fucking do it. I got one cast of failure. Just like please we need some money out of this

We need to get a little bit of money out of our camp close the plant. You're like you mother fuckers I was reading I was reading like an article that apparently like They reached out to alstom to try to do this and alstom just like sent a polite letter that basically said like you can't serious Do not do this So Now there's a lot of obvious problems with taking the oldest locomotive you have and trying to make it the most modern one Right, but yeah singer can do this with porches. You can't do this with locomotives

I would say this might be a good fit for metro Because they have such terrible equipment utilization. You know, this thing's gonna because it's a railroad run by lunatic Yeah, this thing's gonna sit in the yard at at the end of the rock island line It's gonna charge there and then it's going to make one run. Sorry. Sorry. Did you say cock island? No, I said rock island Did you say big thick? No, I did not I know This is this is the point in the recording where derangement begins to set it. I just wanted to be gross I honestly just wanted to be gross in many ways when we do a podcast that goes over two hours

And specifically over two and a half hours it becomes You know the very little sense the audio log found next to like a bloody hand on the wall You guys remember alien or like dead space. This is basically what's happening in real time It's it's the it's the audio log found by the skeleton sitting on the toilet and fall out So anyway, what what this locomotive is going to wind up being used for Ross perseveres bravely ahead Surrounded by the bodies of his It's going to sit in the yard and charge overnight at the end of the rock island line And then they're going to use it for one run in the morning

And that's going to sit in the station in chicago For the whole day in charge and then they're going to use it for one run in the evening Because that's how bad metro is with equipment utilization It's really bad It's it's a terrible way to run a railroad and they're committed to continuing to run it that badly Um So that's a lot of time for charging though, maybe the battery locomotive will work out for them. I don't know Um, you know

Paying a crew a whole day's pay for two and a half hours work Let me get into weird stuff. Oh, this wasn't the weird stuff. Oh, that's pretty weird. This is pretty fucking weird. This is pretty fucking weird. So Uh Promotive, yeah, I like this idea of this sort of just rogue verse card Actually I I've yelled about one of these uh in one of my videos yeah there's there's always been this sort of a

um an attempt To take your like uh intermodal type Vehicles of some sort. So you're like container carrying vehicles And make something weird that carries containers Um, this this doesn't have to apply necessarily to the battery vehicles that are here Like uh in germany and in japan there's been attempts to make these like Like either emu's so like they they're sort of like containers sitting on like flat cars and they have like panographs where it's just like um

Where it's just like this weird emu train that just has containers on it There's been attempts at that. There's been attempts at making like weird like Uh attempts at uh kind of like hybrid consists where you have like these diesel powered things that just like only carry like a few containers People love containers. People love doing stupid shit with containers. That's a universal fun little box that brings you your crap Yeah Yes, it's the it's the present I uh unwrap but instead of unwrapping it's the door creaks open

Uh I don't my my uh Containers trigger me though because I worked at this one warehouse like over a summer once and it was a This is like back in like just out of high school. It was um It was one of those jobs where hey, I need money. Uh, this pays decently Uh dumb idea And it was a party supply warehouse And it was one of those weird ones where instead of just being like the supply warehouses

Yeah, like this was an industrial party supply warehouse Um the difference being like this is the one where like say you had like a a wedding out in the middle of a field You it's construct that giant canvas tent like out in the field This is the warehouse that would send you the poles and the tent canvas, etc, etc And like they had shipping containers outside of the warehouse that they stored a lot of the poles in and oh my god We would have to go in these shipping containers with these long ass steel and aluminum poles that banged around on each other inside of a steel container. Oh my god I

I can still hear the ringing from that just insane reverberation inside of these containers Hey, but what if one of those was just attached to a couple of autonomous vehicles and was just you know Moving around the railroad system on on its own sort of imperative So this is so true. This is parallel systems concept for an autonomous Container moving system, right? You see they they build it. What if all of the advantages of a train? What if we just took those and we like a used car basterie? Through them in the ocean. Yes um

The eels are a valid This is the perfect metaphor for the thing that we were talking about earlier with electric cars of making a thing that is Only useful when it's done in a collectivist way because that's how the technology works Into an individualist thing into an autonomous thing in a way that actively hinders it Yes, so well, we're gonna throw we're gonna throw the beep boop machine at the problem and it's gonna Basic idea of parallel systems is we're gonna do last mile container delivery by rail, right? So This would essentially you'd have a big intermodal terminal, right where containers would be unloaded from trains or ships or whatever And then you could load those individual containers

Onto these sets of bogies here. They are autonomous, which I don't know how that works on a railroad Um, I know how automatic railroads work. I don't I don't think you can do an autonomous railroad arise If you don't embrace the future you work Do you put it on the computer if you and and the ai will decide what gets priority? There's already if you don't put the word Autonomous in the name. How will I scam the investor already centralized dispatching? You don't you don't need to make it autonomous because you still have to give it orders

No, the ai only possible. Yeah, yeah I need a like a robot a lot of these projects side Ready to catch paper orders from like a guy on the side of the tracks another robot actually exactly I think my main problem with a lot of these projects is that they the people that come up with these often Are assuming an idealized world where all the rail infrastructure is just like I can just use it like There's no consequences to be using rails. Like I don't have to think about Ones you know about like um rules about like reciprocal switching or something like that, you know

You don't have to worry about regulations or deregulations or what a great grade crossings. What's the idea is this is this is last mile delivery This would go to like a small container terminal and be loaded onto a truck from there but um, it's It's very strange. It was developed by a couple SpaceX guys um It's supposed to have virtual couplers so you can run a bunch of these together, but Why not just actually have just platooning but for a train but like why I hate they already do that. Yeah, they Um, another issue is that you couldn't for all of this you still couldn't directly deliver to a customer

Um, no because boxcars have doors On the side. Yeah, this has doors on the end This has doors go on one end of the train and like go all the way down through to get all of your crap This has to go to a container terminal. Yeah, exactly and as yet we have been unable to fully automate Yeah doors doors on the end. They're very convenient for trucks, but for trains. It's just not that efficient Compared to like spotting a whole bunch of boxcars next to a building you can do that very easily in one move But if you try and do it on the end that means you're going down and up a whole bunch of switches It's just not efficient. There's no reason to do it that way. It takes up a lot of space

um, so we're you kind of you're you're you're really taking this and and and um, we're moving a lot of the efficiencies Uh that even individual boxcars have compared to containers. Um, I don't really see a purpose in this At all it just seems like a Uh, it it's trying to make a container do something that a container really can't do and trying to make a train do Something that a train really can't do and we added ai on top, which means of course it's god's own creation and perfect And you know angels are sounding trumpets as uh, this thing comes down the tracks on the blockchain. Yeah. Yeah

Atrocious. Yeah, what's the other one is intramotive? Autonomous rail And this again is like make it into a little car Yeah, this is something which I really don't understand how it works and their website is very flashy and has no information It's incomprehensible, dude But what I understand here what I've guessed is you have this large battery pack And it fits on the front of a railroad car, right? and then somehow

Yeah, that's my question. Yeah, there's some kind of adapter, but I believe this is designed to use existing railroad This is easy. This runs on uh usb 3d e-sata. Actually there's like a printer cable back there. So what five years is e-sata? Once you toss this big battery pack on the front of the rail car It can drive the rail car to its destination Regardless of the rail car, which is I assume why they showed it covered in graffiti um So a bit a locomotive can do that and in fact the locomotive can do that with a bunch of different cars at once

Okay, but imagine imagine this the future. I'll shut up imagine this. What if you have six cars for six different customers? And all you need I like all you need are I like this disease as a last mile replacement for trucks Uh, your actual train brings your like stack of 150, uh, you know Oh, they sort of go out from like the mother. Yeah, exactly No more roads only rails and you better look where you're going Otherwise you'll be mown down by one of these because these now comprise all street traffic Yeah, so so imagine you have you have six different customers. They need six different cars shipping terminal like south That might actually be all you need are six of these big battery packs

Which power these wheels through some way which I don't understand Uh, and then they can all be autonomously driven to their destinations Now Let's think about this in actual railroad terms Uh, there's a big industrial park near northeast Philly airport Which might need this kind of six different cars for six different people But in order to get those cars up the uh bridesberg industrial branch there These cars would have to travel across

Four tracks of m tracks northeast corridor Yes And they would have to dodge 130 mile an hour trains. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. One train leaves. Don't sell this to me like it's a dang it It's uh, when the when the robot pod decides, hmm, I will get in front of the train the way you do that now The way you do that now is Conrail brings the cars to the uh to the junction Uh, and then the dispatcher tells them all right, you're clear to go across all the main line They go across all the main line everything goes as a unit and then they drop off the cars

Uh one by one at the industry Here it's like The idea is you sort of send these cars off as they're loaded Which means they arrive at completely unpredictable times at the interlocking. That's fine. Great. Uh, and that means you're a coward What are they gonna do? Are they gonna are they are they gonna are they gonna try and squeeze the cars in between each passenger train? Are they gonna try and or they just hold them all Until the scheduled time when they can all go across at once Hold them until there's five or so ready that they're training and they go cross train tracks. What's so hard about this?

You're being playing a game of you're being difficult for no reason to buy robot train boys. This is Playing a game of frog or except the frog is a four-time container. I I I feel like these are missing like fundamental um Fundamental realities of how railroads operate like you can't um, you know You you talk about like completely revolutionizing rail transport number one. This is very revolution resistant industry Number two, there's no there's no way. Oh, yeah There's no way to gradually phase in a system like this outside of maybe some very niche markets If this is anywhere near a main line, it's unusable

I'm just amazed at the parallel systems one got past the render right phase like I'm amazed that they actually made a product I'm gonna be honest uh containers Not really like the primary form of moving stuff outside of like long distance stuff like that A lot of places will get like 53 foot dry van trailers on a truck, you know, you get something like that containers are Not a lot of distribution centers get like containers. They tend to be limited towards port areas or near like Like what you would call it a big inland ports otherwise

Everyone likes drive-anns better Well, even the crazy technology called box cars So this is this is kind of Missing the point Uh, this is a solution in search of a problem But it does use batteries and it is autonomous, which I it's cool. It's the future. It's the way of the future Yeah, there's still a dispatcher and I hope they uh, I hope they can figure out how to get it to respond to orders over radio Speaking of future

So but people want this to happen anyway um, of course The politicians have gotten in on this, uh, which is fun because battery electric Vehicles are the future period, right? You got to do it Um, you have you have I talked about the government abdicating planning before but there is an extent to which the government decided Yeah, we'll do some planning, but in the most minimal and worst sense possible So for instance, charlie baker governor in massachusetts Uh, it's not been broons

Most uh intelligent man. Oh, yeah, not a very um Hey, you want to get to work kill yourself Hey, he's been I mean the way the way the mbta has been uh pretty pretty recently a good chance you might die on it We've had a lot of mbta episode requests. We finally got charlie off the mbta by killing him We got him off the mbta and into the state house Yeah, no charlie charlie got off the mta because they shut down the orange line. They kicked them off at scully square Yeah, and there's a lot of it's linked to road projects, unfortunately, so but charlie baker recently, uh, put in an author as a

Funding authorization bill for the t right which was Planning on modernizing a bunch of its commuter lines with electric locomotives Uh, you put a specific line in the funding bill That they would not be purchasing electric locomotives, but battery electric locomotives right And this is screwed up, uh A good amount of pretty long planning process I I see something here if you look at the picture, there's a little triangle off that big

There's a little little triangle And it's it's got the wires. It's that the wires are already there. They're already there already there All right Yeah on on uh On mbta's providence line ends most of their other lines that branch out into the uh southern portion They run on the northeast corridor. So it's like there's already electric. There's already electric You don't even have the capital costs and you still don't want to make them Yeah, and and and the mbta was like pretty they were looking like they were getting pretty gung-ho about like, okay

We're gonna we're gonna put up at least a decent amount of wires. They were still like well, we'll run battery services on the Unlike the the the outside of the routes, but like core service would all be electric right now. It's I don't know what they're gonna do. I mean they might be able to skirt around it by saying well these have the capability of drawing from overhead lines as well as running on batteries, but but this is uh I don't know. It's pretty it's it it's an unnecessary curtailment of

Being able to use existing technology A technology that's real and works um The only thing we can do is the impossible is something I always say on on trash nature It's like yeah, this is the only sort of thing that our political settlement makes You know makes allowances for is we can only do shit that doesn't work Yeah, and and the only way you would be able to like do battery electric trains In in in a way that

Makes sense there would be electric multiple units of some kind right because they'd be lighter They'd be able to make the runs But that would require replacing all of the mbtas fleet Which is expensive and you know that that is It's just a bad decision and an expensive one and here we are Because I don't know if you could do like a bat again We've we've seen that there are no battery electric locomotives in existence yet

There is one battery electric slug But there's nothing that's like a road locomotive. Yeah, and um, this is what mbta is expected to procure at this point It's committed to it in the same way that like so much road infrastructure is committed to uh, self-driving Yeah So, yeah, they they wanted them to buy things that don't exist. Um, another one was right. There's a bunch of It's just it's just fucking gadget pond suit. I honestly don't understand it There's a bunch of politicians in los angeles Mostly in los angeles

They sent a letter to pete buddha judge. Fuck you. No, uh, they sent a letter to pete buddha judge being like, please stop texting me Yeah, ambiguous sort of like phrases well, they california Burn that state to the ground. They'll do it anyway by themselves. Yeah. Yeah, that's already been happening for a while Um, they asked him to get california high speed rail To uh ditch funding for overhead line Because by the time it would be finished

Uh batteries would make overhead lines obsolete bro. I swear the technology just needs a bit more investment It's not there yet, but any day now any day there. Yeah, just one more round of funding And then please god just give me another 785 million dollars and i'll do it. I swear i'll do it It won't just go up my nose and then they would Why spend money on capital when I can spend twice the amount of money on research Oh, the other thing the other thing they wanted to do was have that money diverted to transit projects in the la area Right. Now this did not happen. Thank god, right? But also because of because of dark peat People

Judge has activated the laser eyes and he's like Wait, are you dark peat? You mean obama? That feels I I is that racist? I can't tell. I am Well, peat talks like obama. Oh god. He does Okay, you've talked me out of this being racist now. Fine. I'm on board. I don't know yet to consult chris It's fine anyone who's listened this far in is not gonna be that exercised about whether or not we're cancelled You don't you don't make this kind of commitment idly

But like People are really into this battery stuff like it's supposed to be complete magic, right? You know, this is this is the future and the old ways are dying Uh, and and it's just not the case. I mean if you look at innovation, but like I think there's this tendency You know, we've seen we talked about this a million times especially in the united states It feels like for these sort of what you talked about, you know back in franklin amf app You know, we talk about these these sort of um gajibons or you know hyperlink or this or that or whatever it's called I don't care. I I protect transfer protocol

Yeah, dude. I'm tired. I'm hungry. We're all tired. We're all hungry. I think we talk about yeah But it's it's important. I think you know, one of the things too is that this this is used to sort of Innovation as a weapon basically. Yes. Yes Where it's or not maybe not as well, but certainly as a cudgel Yes, and we you see these things certainly and I think you see these in cities all the time. We see it in philly Where you know, there's the where we have we're not talking about buses even but we got battery buses And none of them are fucking in service. I think the frames all crack. Yeah What's that gadget gadget bonds are the star citizen of transportation? Yeah

Yeah, and you should be wary when people you know post them to here and shot and thought shit and they're just like Oh, this is this flying bus is gonna change how we think about no, it's not no It's fucking not the best autonomous vehicle driving program right now is gm supercruise And they have to manually program the roads into the into the program by hand They have to go on their little scanning cars and scan the road Like that's not that's that's innovation Not even for innovation sake, but innovation just as a selling just to avoid doing anything better. No, it's not right But like this there's this idea that new means better and it doesn't necessarily mean that give me my fucking headphone jack bag

Yeah, exactly um Sometimes oh, well, it's more waterproof suck a dick To paraphrase a show that I forgot the name of Sometimes things that are new Are worse you you're paraphrasing the marvelous life of Caleb Gallo there. Yes, that's the one. Yeah Wow We don't disrespect freckle on this show

So so the your media knowledge is is beyond my comprehension I'll send you that video because it's great. It's a good one. Yeah. Um, so the uh People are getting way into this battery stuff even though it's not very good It is not international standards It is not something that anywhere else is considering on the scale that it's being considered in the united states like it is for mainline service everywhere that has good functional railroads

Battery technology outside of branch lines is a joke. It's not real. Um Hydrogen trains too, but that's another situation The lesson here as always is go nuclear Yeah, there's a fundamental Like physics problem at the end of the day the physics issue with batteries versus overhead line electrification Right, which is the train that carries its fuel with it Is always going to be inferior to one which does not carry fuel with it just from a performance standpoint, right? It's lighter. It has infinite range. There's fewer things on it to go wrong

You know high speed rail or high density rapid transit service would be Impossible with battery systems right now because it'd be too heavy and the performance would be too bad You know, if you got a if you got to like start batteries waste shit. Yeah batteries are heavy. Yeah batteries Um, they and then when we're not even talking about firefighting efforts like A giant car, you know freight train on fire full of batteries and other combustibles is not And they're a subway train. They're a consumable That the charge on them will run down over time at that point You have to take them all out of the train throw them in the ocean

Build a bunch of new batteries and put them in essentially a new locomotive, right? Exactly, it's ridiculous and it's wasteful and these people just simply don't give a shit because there's so enamor with the idea That everything can just be batteries and everything has to be the most convenient It can possibly be and I'll say this is someone who owns four hundred dollar headphones that are battery based. I'm a fucking idiot Don't do that I think I think a large portion of this just comes from the fact that like People relate to the things that they use most often. I think that's absolutely true And and like who doesn't understand a battery, you know

Yeah, pretty much and it's like not only your phone and all the stuff like all the tech gadget wisdom jigs that people buy Nowadays, it's also the fact that like in the united states just a lot of this train infrastructure Just doesn't exist here for a lot of people so they don't understand that like hey We can do this in like other parts of the u.s. It's not impossible But instead they just default to be like well my car runs on that battery. I got the locomotive should too like That's just it's it's just a small brain thinking like well I think a lot of it is I've had this this thought and I know we're just sort of riffing at this point, but

I always got mad at people who treated computers like they were appliances That oh you just and I think with a lot of people think of their car And think of a train basically it's just a giant appliance That's especially if they have new ones. They look like a fucking fridge or whatever right? Why should I have to ever consider like Why I why I look at what and I think there's also Besides those of us who are really into trains the average person See well a why wouldn't you fly? Oh, yeah, you know what I mean? I'm talking like more on takes but I always get a laugh out of Alan and Roz

You may do this too. We talked about this on the train, but people who book trains during the amtrak Thanksgiving rush that have like marda equipment not marda Mark equipment and shit like that and are at njt equipment and are like how come I was promised wi-fi How come it doesn't have wi-fi fuck you amtrak and it's like well, can you didn't look at your ticket? It's also because like what you didn't know what to look for Yeah, my least favorite twitter post of all time is always the person that posts like the dc To new york city like amtrak ticket versus plane ticket and they're like Balls you failure because it's like the day of amtrak ticket that's like really expensive

And i'm like oh my fucking god. It's like yeah, they're right in some way, but at the same time It's also like oh, there's so many levels of things that you should talk about first I feel like i'm a large i think the answer is clear Uh, we demolish new york all of it. We keep grand central and we keep penn station We rebuild penn station brick by brick of course I i'm go full return on this shit rest of it leveled you can move to albany for all i fucking care I leave it. It's just a trade depot now the most efficient form of logistics is a train Running off overhead line electrification and the electrification is supplied by a nuclear power plant

Yes, we we yeah, welcome to the northeast Welcome to philly. We know northeast corner is mostly hydro. All right, because that's right. You're right. We build a shitload of those We attempt to like make them as climate proof as possible Which probably will involve some really weird ways of cooling nuclear plants in the future Yeah, but that is a surmountable engineering challenge. We do all of that Ideally we transition to a form of economy where you buy fewer sex arses that travel less distance to get to you And uh, if things it's going to be fine. That's that's the solution final locally made

uh, amish sex arse union from the uh from the farmers market Yeah, I think you buy fewer sex arses or you buy sex arses that are produced more sustainably or uh, you know delivered to you in a more collaborative and more consensual fashion Uh, or I don't know like that. That's the solution. That's what we want to get to everyone knows it And everyone is trying to like sell you something and distract you and keep you like off of that one Shit that everyone knows that we need to do by being like check out this cool new shit that doesn't fucking work In the podcast. Yeah, and well, the other thing is, you know freight locomotives. There might be a little I know I'm I'm trying to

Maybe there's there's there's a little bit of a case for batteries and freight locomotives Just because batteries are heavy and freight locomotives need to be heavy. It doesn't matter There's a case there's a case for lead weights in and in fucking freight locomotives Yeah, some of them have like the concrete blocks and I'm actually Especially slow The only use for batteries I can see in railroading like a serious use is um, so when you do have electrification of like trains with the like the the good kind with the wire, uh, generally when you do regenerative braking and you put power back into the wires

Sometimes there's not anything that's using the section of wire that you're currently on that That could use that power To accelerate so basically all you're doing is you're raising the voltage of the wire when you regenerative The the power back into it and that's obviously kind of wasteful because when you raise the voltage all you're doing Is this making basically just a bigger resistive grid just miles a month long um, so the the best use of batteries is to put them in like a shed next to the the like electrified section and

Just when you regen brake on the the train the excess like higher voltage goes back into these batteries And later if there's another train that's accelerating The grid can adjust and the batteries can feed back into the line instead of you getting your power from somewhere else It's like that's down on the list. I feel like SEPTA has already done like a big project to add those kinds of batteries One didn't have a prototype bus that had a curse system. I I don't remember I My brain my brain is much SEPTA essentially this is like a curse system except the curse system is not located on the vehicle

I understand SEPTA did a big project to uh bring those kinds of batteries to the market frankford line And I believe that worked out pretty good, but I am not sure But it sounds like I would work out for you that I have to leave. Yes Well Have fun with dinner. Thank you. Uh, I will mute myself. Okay. Thank you listeners I guess might have a good night. Good night I guess my final conclusion here is sort of um, you know, we're going down this battery road and

We talked a lot about the dysfunction of american railroads and again I I focused on american railroads because they are some of the most dysfunctional in the world I mean, we are we we are sold this idea that american railroads are the greatest in the world constantly and it is It's propaganda. It's it Yeah, I I constantly tell people people like aren't don't we have the most efficient freight network? I'm like, no, you've been gaslit. You've been gaslit girl. No Hey, look look at this. I mean look at this indian railways train right here on the screen in front of you It's gigantic. It's electric power. They got double stacks. I love the panograph. Oh my god. It's so tall. I love

Yeah You know, of course, china has all those high speed trains, you know But if you're like looking purely in terms of freight you are you are you you see a lot of statistics that sound impressive But actually you start looking into the details and it's like jesus christ. How do they get any trains out at all? well, it's But people people gaslight us into thinking this because the railroads make money and that's the only thing that matters is that Yeah, and if you're electrifying a railroad purely for reasons of environment and you don't want to change anything about how they operate poorly Maybe yeah, maybe you could use batteries and you could still have really shitty railroads at the end of the day

Right, but if you want something A modern effective railroad system that serves more customers actually benefits the environment Has better working conditions for workers has like, you know schedules has like good passenger trains has all the all the all the nice things That other countries have And you can do that without reducing freight volumes probably increasing them even You have you're basically talking about Yeah, i'm talking about switzerland that switzerland doesn't have battery trains. They're increasing overhead line electrification That's always going to be the superior technology

And you have to develop a mindset where you invest in infrastructure rather than investing in Fancy your vehicles because we're looking at a situation capital cost. We're looking at a situation where we're going to have you know these these billion dollar locomotives On 10 mile an hour track. I mean This is yeah, this this whole thing this this There's there's just a disconnect here that needs to be fixed and overhead line electrification on some of america's densest rail lines Busiest rail lines is an obvious thing to do

um, you know Some of these freight train lines they get like 60 70 trains a day Maybe you want to centralize that the the power distribution there. I don't know. I but this is We're so far behind That we're considering crazy technology. It's it's desperation is what it is. It's not Yeah, I think my favorite thing is that like if we do keep the current system and do not change it whatsoever But like force these companies to electrify. I guarantee They will just take the current like g-vos and sd 70s and just like slap pantographs on them. That would be cool

Um, yeah, actually be not as bad Yeah Yeah, it would kind of be cool. Honestly. Yeah. All right. Well, what do we learn? Nothing the no no nothing has been learned battery frustrating. Yeah, it's bad Yeah, battery. Okay under certain very Some fine circumstances. Um, otherwise bad. It's just uh, just don't do it. Just don't don't do it. Uh, it's a bad idea Uh, safety third safety third Hello, Justin Alice yay, Liam. No, Liam dumped out early. Oh, yeah

Oh Liam Liam wasn't wasn't tough enough for a three hour podcast episode. I was about to say maybe we can come in under the wire I don't know um My story comes to you today from the world of sailing Nice. There have been several times. Oh, I do that. There have been several times over the years I've shaken hands with danger that I thought about sharing with you all from nearly drowning in a capsize My bolson's chair harness coming undone while 50 feet up amassed

Almost getting electrocuted on a yacht in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean Man, I sometimes I don't like getting a train too far from my apartment because I'm like, what if I get sick and I need to Go home. This is why I would not be in the middle of the Atlantic. Yes Uh, maybe you could have a big ship with a doctor on it. Have you considered that? Yeah, that's the thing I need to be subscribe to the patreon so I can get rich enough so I can have like a private medical Stuff like the president personal personal physician who follows. Yeah. Yeah for sure. Yeah, I'm you get your own battleship. Yeah Oh, well, there you go Since this is a podcast with slides, however, I figured a story with a photo would be most appropriate

My tale relates specifically to the texas amateur big boat racing circuit. We're wealthy oil men lawyers This is like the only regatta that has the guy who arranged for jfk's assassination in it Yes We're wealthy oil men lawyers tech bros red necks and the occasional old austin hippie All race aging sailboats at lakes and bays across texas for everlasting glory and more importantly bragging rights While drunk middle-aged men with large boats and larger egos is certainly not the best combination for safety

How beautiful boaters are beautiful boaters The worst that usually happens is the odd collision from time to time This story actually takes place off the water at a lake in central texas Like many lakes in texas. It was a reservoir created courtesy of the army core of engineers damming up a river in the early 60s for flood prevention This particular lake was in a canyon with steep sides and necessitated a very steep and intimidating boat ramp To be carved into the canyon wall to bring boats from the yacht club on a ridge down to the water I've been at a boat club like this, but it was on the acaquan reservoir Which it's not a canyon. It's just a steep valley

Um, for you know, we throw your boat down this concrete slide Well, I was I was rowing so we had to carry the boat Jesus down the hill and then worse when we were finished the race we had to carry it back up You're like those sort of like those those mountain goats who like, you know, graze on the side of gravity dams It's like, uh, it's like, uh, it's like, all right Congrats on doing well in the race. Your prize is you get to walk up About eight 80 feet of mountain Time for leg day, we just had leg day now it's leg day 2.0

Use one leg when you're rowing and the other one when you're walking it's fine. Oh, there you go. There you go I just sort of hopped away up. Yeah. Yeah so, uh This incident occurred on a sunny saturday morning a few hours before racing was scheduled to begin While many teams had launched their boats from the trailers prior to the evening. I wish we had a trailer um So several late arrivals still needed to get their boats in the water The regatta organizers had established a system where one trailer would be back down a ramp and unloaded into the water

While another trailer boat would wait at the top as send down The ramp was just widened up to fit two trailers. So then one trailer was unloaded It would be driven up to the top as the other trailer would back down the ramp This is so smart Art sounds efficient to me as long as no one screws up. It's like a cable way, but with you know, uh, fords. Oh, yes Our team had already splashed our boat So I had gone up the ramp to help myself to the free breakfast tacos at the clubhouse to top the cliff Yeah, that sounds nice

I was walking back down to ramp beer in one hand and chorizo and egg tacos in the other That sounds really good right now when I heard a loud bang followed by someone shouting from the top of the ramp I turned to look I would not turn to look. I've got my taco. I've got my My my beer my delicious beer a shiner buck that is that is someone else's problem I'm gonna go sit on a picnic table and I'm gonna eat this To my surprise. I saw a boat laid in trailer without any attached vehicle hurling down a ramp towards me I dove to the side narrowly avoided this is the thing. I would have been killed, but I would have died happy Yes, I dove to the side narrowly avoided being flattened like a goomba by roughly four tons of steel wooden fiberglass

The truck at the bottom of the ramp still in the process of unloading their own boat was not so lucky See attached picture Yep Yep donk Miraculously the only casualties were sprained knees sustained by the driver of the truck at the bottom when he jumped out of the way And my spilled shinor buck No

Those are good beers. I like a nice shinor buck shinor brewery is a good brewery Uh, this was not a paid endorsement. I just like it. Um Texas Germans good people Apart from the ones who've gotten really right wing Uh Anyway Oh, and the truck ended up being totaled due to the damage. Yeah, it looks it I

You know, you know, I feel like a good body shop could fix that. I'm gonna be honest I don't know. I I feel like the hit by boat thing is kind of gonna be a detriment. Yeah There might be frame damage. Could be frame damage. That's true, but I Maybe maybe not. I don't know. I think to the a pillar would probably be the issue. I might do it. Yeah The cause of the runaway boat trailer was due to an improperly locked trailer coupler that popped off the toe hitch When the trailer backed over the top of the ramp This can occasionally happen if the coupler isn't checked after attaching the trailer to the hitch And free spirited trailers will usually be kept in check by safety chains

Unfortunately, this particular boat owner had simply spot welded his safety chains directly to the trailer frame Yeah, for safety. Yeah, that's stronger than a weld. I learned this from gary's mod I What's stronger not only a weld, but a spot weld. Well, that's fine if it's stainless steel um No, what's stronger what's probably just what's stronger than a weld is a good weld He spot welded his safety chains directly the trailer frame and the chains tore clean off the trailer when it broke free The racing had to be delayed for a few hours

So a tow truck could come take away the ruined vehicle, but the regatta continued without further incident The next year the regatta organizers instituted a safety checklist that every boat owner was required to sign before going down a ramp So I suppose they learned their lesson There haven't been any further accidents, but i'm always wary when I walk down that particular ramp Yeah, no kidding. It kills your shine a buck and also almost you I was about to say yeah Those are two tragedies right there. That's right. Um On a personal note, I wanted to thank you all for providing me with lots of laughs and fun Esoteric knowledge over the past few years. I've been a fan since

Before the first episode of will airs your problem I got hooked on franklin when it just came out and i'm happy to see how far y'all have come Here's to many more hours of disaster-based entertainment Sincerely m That's m from james rondon. This is m This is 007. What do you know about shin a buck? You know about sailboats well, sir

What do you know about trailer hitches? A james one doesn't know shit about trailer hitches. I imagine spot wells Oh great secret agent sissy welder 007. This is a standard trailer hitch If you press hit and here this this welder will only react to your finger Now listen 007 this is a mig welder From linkin electric my five is cutting back There's an mi6. I forget which one We had to go to harbor freight

Or no harbor freight of chicago electric, excuse me. Um same difference. We've we've been cutting back for a while This is true and safety third. That's safety third Our next episode is on the boston molasses disaster. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? You know all of our stuff. Yes Uh, I I do a youtube channel, uh, and uh, they're cool videos. So yeah, that's stuff Yes, go go. It's just under my name. If you can't find it, I'd be surprised. I'll be in the link it in the description Now in between the peepoosh judge link, um Along with many other things. Yes. Yes

All right Well, that was a podcast. Yep three three hours two minutes 48 Uh, it was a train episode you dirty fucks. You got what I have to say. Yeah. Yeah, you you hot you paid for this um All right. Well, hi everyone. See y'all