Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 126: The 1946 Naperville Wreck

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

smashy miles's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/interurbanera miles's patreon: https://www.patreon.com/interurbanera Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ 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/

If you refrigerate it, you can get that down to like a month, but you should not just have an old bottle of vermouth, and most people who think they don't like drinks with a vermouth in them are wrong. They are drinking old vermouth. They're trying to make it themselves, and they don't know what they're doing, and they're tricking themselves. That's freaking hilarious. Okay, well, that's going into the fridge.

Yeah. No, so the thing is, the thing to know is that Alice doesn't know what she's talking about. Well, vermouth is disgusting and tastes like butthole. You haven't had good vermouth, by the way. I'm tired of mixed drinks that have amouros. Mixed drinks are the ones that God doesn't care about, like, okay, he doesn't want me to drink, fine.

I think that God respects anaprol spritz. I don't respect anaprol spritz. You should. I'm 100% on board with you, and I love vermouth. Thank you. I love you too. Get fucked. Get fucked.

I'm also fine with vermouth. I think we're three to one on this one. Yeah, but the thing is, and I'll repeat this for the viewers, I'll repeat this for the viewers. I will. If you think you don't like vermouth, you're wrong. What you're doing is you're not refrigerating your vermouth. It's a forcified wine.

It needs to go in the refrigerator, otherwise it will spoil within like a week. It'll taste bad. Liam, FYI, I just wanted to fill you in. Since they're a little bit under the weather, I'm totally happy to take the lead storytelling. You guys insert joke here as you go along. I found an amazing amount of original source material, including the original interstate commerce report. Beautiful.

We're really well-informed. Yeah, if you feel comfortable and confident in doing that, yeah, that's fine. 100%. Cool. I have just something, which is, you have allergies. No, no, I'm actually sick. Are you coming to the park? Are you still coming out on Saturday?

Well, it depends on how sick I am. Okay. No, I'll give you a tug job. I don't really care. Oh, God. What kind of tugboat, steam or diesel? No, not that kind of tugboat, but you could do it on a tugboat. No, no, I'm, it's going to be one of those glass bottom gator boats.

It's a railroad tug. There we go. Yeah. There's glass more like first ass. Oh, God. I mean, one of my favorite Merrill writing terms of all is the manned helper service, which is a guy who sucks you off full. I mean, yes, but also, so in really mountainous terrain, they usually pair a few locomotives

at the bottom of a grade to shove a long train up a hill. Before they were remote control units, you would have to have a full cruise stand in those helper locomotives, especially in the steam era, to shove the trains up a hill. And so that would be a manned helper service. You would be able to shove the trains up and down the hills and make sure they break on their way down. And yeah, it's, and there's a place in Helper, Utah, where that was very famously done on the Rio Grande.

I misheard you for a second there as there's a place in Helper, Utah, which I'm possibly probably. Yeah. I was about to say Mormonism is a heresy. I went on Brigham Young Money about this, and I had a great time. Young Money. Brigham Young Money. Great.

It's a great podcast. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. I am recording. We are good to go. Highball. Okay.

Yes. All right. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. All right, go.

I am Alice Coldwell Kelly. I'm the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Go fuck yourself. Hi. Go fuck yourself, too, buddy. Thank you.

Oh, you missed you so much. I love you so much. Aw. Hi. My name is Liam Anderson. He is number two Arizona lost 15 seat Princeton, which I think is very funny. And we have a guest. We have a guest.

I'm Miles Callan and he, they pronounce works good for me. Oh, that is juicy. Let's get that Flemmy cough button in here. That is juicy. My throat is sore is just below where I'm able to clear it by coughing. They put us on a cough button on soundboards. What that does is it boosts the microphone input so everybody can hear you coughing. Oh, God.

Oh, God. Everyone can experience my suffering. Remember when you had COVID and you were just, and you sounded like Jordan Peterson? I very much suspect this is COVID round three based on how long this has lasted. Oh, man. So today slash tonight, I guess we're talking about why the U.S. doesn't have high speed rail and it's because of this one incident in 1946. You see here some train cars, but they're kind of on their sides and like spread out.

They only do that when they feel threatened, right? It's true. Yeah, they're not supposed to be like that. So back in 1946, there was a train wreck on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy just at, say, Naperville, Illinois. This would change the course of history. Are they going to get you from pronouncing it Quincy, first of all? Is it Quincy or is it Quincy?

Quincy is the suburb of Boston. Okay. I've never been sure about this because I have just enough like reflected knowledge from fall out fall here. So I can't tell whether or not we're going to. Quincy is, like I said, the suburb of Boston. You may know shocks as we like to call them Tommy from Quincy. All right.

They might not podcast sometime. Yeah. That's right. Today we're going to talk about the infamous Naperville wreck. It's actually not one of those wrecks that necessarily people remember, but it's infamous to us. Yes. We'll be infamous to you, slightly less friendless nerds after the following four and a half hour

presentation. But everybody I know is sick. We have to do. I'm not sick. I'm feeling good. I also feel good. The goddamn news. You and I, we're immune.

You know? God damn news. Hey, you used my joke. If you're just listening, you're unable to see the chai on the other side. This is a picture of Silicon Valley Bank, which we have subtitled in jump you fuckers. And we hope that they do, of course. If you're not familiar, Silicon Valley Bank, 16th largest bank in the United States, became the sort of like go to bank for a lot of Silicon Valley guys, a lot of hedge fund guys, a lot

of VC guys. I don't know why I said hedge fund. That's not true. A lot of VC guys. And all of those VC guys, they have a lot of money and then they distribute it to companies that they think are going to create like Uber to or we work to or whatever. And those companies, which have like four guys who will wear hoodies to work and you know, like three of them are on visas, they suddenly have like $400 million in their bank

account. Um, and they're like, well, okay, we don't need a second bank account, right? Like the guy who gave us this $400 million has like banks at Silicon Valley Bank fucking Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, banks with Silicon Valley Bank, um, or you know, unfortunately, yeah, it was his wineries bank there. And unfortunately, Silicon Valley Bank, uh, was very, very heavily leveraged into one sort of narrow and very stupid kind of money venture capitalists and their sort of like ghoulish projects.

Um, and then the Federal Reserve made the economy slightly more real, they kicked interest rates up a bit. Um, and all of this shit fell over like instantly. The thing that was designed to sort of like, uh, you know, drive down wages and all of this other shit turned out, um, it like everyone knew it was going to like take out a bunch of weak companies. No one knew, except for, you know, us, anyone on the left, anyone who'd been paying attention that a bunch of really weak companies includes most of fucking like this field in Silicon

Valley. And so the bank falls over, right? Um, uh, the bank falls over on Friday. And then, uh, the FDIC sort of takes it over, puts it into receivership. And now what, uh, Dark Brandon has done is a surprisingly radical move, which is, uh, well, the crux of this is like, with a fiat currency, money is money, right? It's worth the same everywhere, um, except if it's in a bank account. And then it's sort of like a more complicated financial instrument, which has risk attached

to it, which might be worth more, might be worth less, um, not any more. Like, yeah. So like, uh, previously you're like, uh, you're, you're holding some bank account were insured up to $250,000 by the federal deposit insurance corporation. I see. Visual. I don't know. Yeah.

Commercials. Yeah. I thought. Yes. But then there's also a subsequent commercials thing on top of that for another 150,000. Yes. Okay. Yes.

Yeah. So long times as I took, uh, banking finance, you would have to be very, very stupid to keep sort of more than that in one bank account as a company anyway. So yeah, um, that's so, but that's gone now because now, uh, you know, the feds have just guaranteed all of the deposits of Silicon Valley bank after a lot of like sweating and whining by like VC guys on Twitter. And so now, now your money is worth the same everywhere. And this is like a surprisingly large intervention and hopefully it's going to stabilize things.

But Suisse has collapsed on sort of a semi-related thing. Um, yeah, they, but they are getting 54 billies from, uh, from Switzerland central bank. Finma. And Finma. Yeah. Finma. And why are they giving them goats? I, I, because I, I, yeah, you know, yeah, shut the fuck up and uh, first republic is

getting $30 billion from Jesus Christ, JPMorgan Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley and yelling testified before the finance committee was like, everything's fine. I mean, everything kind of is like, I wouldn't, I wouldn't panic. I wouldn't believe people on Twitter who are telling you to go and like take money out of your bank account. They've only, they've only borrowed $11.9 billion from the, uh, emergency loan program, uh, from starting on Sunday, which it's probably not that bad. No, it's, it's, no, it's genuinely not though, but what this bracket banks are going to be

fine. Yeah. And frankly, thank God for the federal deposit insurance corporation, uh, WPA instrument. Like if that, without that, we would be in free fall. Also, there's something annoying to me about people being like, why are people getting a bailout from the FDIC? I'm like, it's been around since the W, since like 30s. It's not a bailout.

It's what it's for. It's what it's for. Yeah. Literally doing its job. Yeah. I'll tell you who this is good news for is, uh, podcasters because guess who banks with Silicon Valley bank? Patriot, allegedly.

I'm not sure that's true actually. Uh, but yeah, so as soon as I knew that this didn't implicate us, I was happy, but I think the main thing here is that like, uh, on the one hand, this is like sort of a big centrally planned piece of like sort of Keynesianism, right? Is we're going to, we're going to keep all this shit going in order to preserve the wider economy. What I would like to see and what I think a lot of people are increasingly would like to see is a little bit less market, a little bit less Keynesianist Keynesianism and the

government deciding, Hey, if we own this shit, maybe we should just operate it. Why do we have like private banking in the first place? If we're going to have to take it over every time there's a crisis and it falls over because we don't actually have an economy based on building shit or trading shit. Go figure, right? Yeah. Just an idea, you know, maybe, maybe, uh, nationalize it, nationalize all of it. Are you suggesting a third bank of the United States?

Yeah. And I think they should have a beautiful building that you should get to have to model an excruciating detail on city skylines too when it comes out. I agree. Yeah. I think, I think, I think it'd be fun to have a third bank of the United States would go back to the old banking system where they issue federal reserve notes, which are exchangeable for privately pressed bank notes from private banks and no one knows what anything

is worth. No, no, no. So like, yeah. We'll do this even nicer. It'll be artisanally small batch printed on a printing press. Oh, I like it. I like it. Yeah.

My, my, my, my sort of my California bunker smells like, um, smell of like rosemary or whatever. Yeah. Cool. So what happens when a locomotive gets tired? Yes. In others, it's just happening again. Yes.

Yeah. We got to put the thing out. We got to do that. Yeah. At this point, I'm, I'm like, we're just going to have a segment on here. That's just the weekly derailment as a gag to rename the goddamn news, the goddamn derailment of the week. I like it.

So the, um, so, uh, BNSF, uh, the Burlington, Northern Santa Fe, uh, sometime late last night or early this morning, uh, derail the train on the, uh, Swinomish, uh, reservation or Swinomish, no, no, it's Swinom, Swinomish, right. Yeah. Um, is this is, uh, a reservation. It's, uh, it's a Native American reservation in Northern Washington, right? This is near Anacortes, Washington, uh, or is it Anacortes? I don't know how to pronounce that.

That's okay. Um, yeah. So this is sort of, um, you can see here, we've got two locomotives on the ground. There was another train car back here, which has since been re-railed and pulled away somewhere back there. So this is on the reservation, but it is also next to the oil refinery that's on the reservation. So yeah. America is so cool.

Yeah. Um, I love that it's clearly like super, uh, marshy track as well. And it's probably like, eh, it'll be good for 25 miles an hour. Who cares? And then it gets squishy and GP 39 and looks like a, what is that a GP 38-2 goes smooch. Probably. Yeah. Yeah.

This is what really, uh, freaked me out about that. I'll get to that in a second, but, uh, yeah. So what you can sort of see here is back here is a derail, right? It's a device to deliberately derail trains, but why would you do that? I got you 3d printed them as well. Yes. Yes. Oh my God.

No, no, this is, this is, this is much more extensive than that. This is actually part of a switch. This actually works as opposed to portable derail, which even, even the real ones don't work. Um, most of the time now, yeah. So you do this because over here, there's a swing bridge, um, which normally is locked in the open position because there's not that many trains. They close it for when a train comes.

So the question here is why did the train go off the derail when he's supposed to stop and get permission from the bridge tender before proceeding and confirmation that the bridge is closed? We don't know that yet, but it is kind of interesting to see, okay, here's a, the result of a failsafe, which is still catastrophic, but less catastrophic than the other option. Yeah. Better put a train on the ground than put a train in the water, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Both, uh, both crew members on this train were, uh, they, they got out uninjured. They were fine. Good, good, good. Yeah. Yeah. This happened twice on the Northwestern Pacific in California back in the, uh, 50s and again in the 80s where this derail was not present before a swing span or a lift span in this

case over the Brazos River. And, uh, both times two diesel locomotives went in the drink and, uh, the second time there was a railfan right there at the bridge as it happened and took pictures as it splashes into the water. That's absolutely spectacular. I'll put a link in the description. Wasn't there also an incident where, uh, someone, uh, there was a lift bridge and of course the counterweight comes down onto the tracks when it's open and, uh, the locomotive just

whacked into it and then pank it. Yeah. Yeah. Not a great, not a great situation. Um, yeah. Yeah. They don't run trains so good here. Yeah.

Well, one thing I thought was interesting about this, especially after that article came out in the American prospect yesterday is, uh, this locomotive here, this is a GP 30. It's been rebuilt into a GP 39, but the body and frame of this locomotive were built when JFK was still alive. The Kennedy administration. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

We really don't do it so well, Alice. Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. Um, in fact, here is a picture of this locomotive in 1962, uh, lettered for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, which coincidentally is the railroad we will be talking about today. But for bad, you know, it's all held together. Beautiful.

Yeah. Well, this is interesting, D-Ramut, because you have a, you know, a failsafe worked. But why did, why was the failsafe needed? You know, what happened there? You know, it could be operator error or it could be something weirder. Um, hmm, it was probably, I mean, it makes sense. Were they switching? Obviously it's a local.

So it's a local train. There's a bunch of, uh, this track back here goes back to the oil refinery and they were coming out of the oil refinery, uh, presumably, uh, presumably with, uh, all the cars. I wonder if it was foggy or there was some impaired clearance or something. Honestly, it could be, it was late at night, so everyone was tired, you know. Yeah. It happens. Who amongst us has not been able to get in when they got sleepy.

Got called in with two hours notice. Oh, yeah. We were just about to go to bed. But yeah, so this is, this is what happens when the crew is fatigued that, yeah, the train has to take a nap. We've all been there. We've all been there. Yeah.

We've all thought, oh, I'm going to have a late night, you know, before I go to the bars, I'll take a nap. Yeah. And that's what that train did here. That's okay. The BNSF disco nap. Keep working on yourself, girl. It's okay.

So that was, oh wait, in regards to that article from the American Prospect, that was about, you know, how railroads get around to mission standards, and that's by just reusing old locomotives forever rather than buying new ones to the point where, of course, well, now you can't buy a new locomotive, basically. Yeah. EMD stopped producing four axle locomotives with the GP-60 in the 1990s. Think about how long ago the 1990s was, well, maybe we shouldn't, but you get the idea. Nobody else has come out with a four axle locomotive that is a road switcher that is not some

horrible rebuilt genset piece of shit or some experimental thing that nobody bought. So think about that. The youngest locomotive is potentially as old or older than any of us. Yes. Boom. How fucking old do you, okay. Yeah, don't ask that question. Yeah.

Don't answer it. Oh, hell yeah. That's that juice. Sure. It doesn't meet EPA tier four regulations. Anyway, that was the goddamn news. Hang on. Okay, I have some news.

I have some... What? It's gone. It's gone. No, no, I'm going. So you're just going to have to live with it. So two things to advertise, I guess. We never do this, no, you can't buy that on the show.

These are favors. So one, you can invest in WTYP, Fave, the Tropical Hockey League if you ever wanted to own your own Tropical Roller Skate Hockey Team. What? Yeah. Yeah, they contacted us. I'm doing this for them. Okay.

Remember how we were going to buy a Roller Hockey Team? No. You got to check the group chat more, Alice. We weren't going to buy it. We were going to sponsor it. Oh, are we? Oh, well, neither one. Well, there's your back.

Yes. That's a ball, I think. And number two, a friend of mine, Abigail Sweetman, has a Patreon where she's releasing a cookbook. She already has recipes out. It's called Feed Your Friends. You can Google search for Abigail Sweetman on Patreon. The recipes are super yummy.

Go buy them or go subscribe to Patreon. Thank you. How do I Google search on Patreon? Or you Google search and find the page you have mine. It's the Google of the mind. You know what? I'm glad you're sick, honestly. Perusing my mind's Dewey Decimal system.

Yeah. Yeah. I honestly thrilled your sec. It makes me happy that you're suffering. All right. Now that I've been allowed to talk, back to the shelf. Sorry. Sorry for the fucking inconvenience.

Did you play it twice to annoy me? Yeah. Red. I love you so much. Can I plug my Patreon too? I mean. Yeah. Do whatever you want.

God. All right. I'm under the brand Interurban Era and you can find me at patreon.com slash interurban era where I build scale models and make chill modeling videos for you guys to enjoy. So go stop by. Yeah. Okay. But how many like roller hockey or whatever teams do you sponsor?

0.003 roller hockey. I really liked that we were going to sponsor a roller hockey team. I think that's pretty funny. All right. We'll sponsor whatever you want if it's funny enough. Yes. I really can't trust that one. And also we have the money, which, you know, we may not.

I don't know. It depends how this SBB thing goes. Oh yeah. In a way Joe Biden is sponsoring both a short track racing team and a roller hockey team. Thank you. Yeah. You owe me after the bankruptcy bill of 2005. Motherfucker.

Very good. All right. Shall we get into it? Yeah. Let's do the podcast. Yeah. Sorry everybody. All right.

The thing we're here to talk about. Let's start with the basics. Shall we? 79 is a weird number. Why do most passenger trains go this speed in the United States now? This is part of this wreck and its legacy. Yes. Is it because it seems like the like lowest number, the closest to 80?

I bet there was a train going 80 miles an hour. And they were like, if we take it down by one, it's safe. Honestly, it probably has grounds in the way trains are scheduled as well. Like you would have a train depart union station at 1203, not 12 noon. So you wouldn't be confused whether it's midnight or midday. So this would probably follow the same logic of you're paying extra attention. It's not 80, which you could fudge up to five miles an hour in either direction. You're going 79.

So you don't hit the emergencies by over speeding. So in this case, this is on the BNSF probably between Portland and Seattle. This is on the Burlington Northern side of the bay. You can see the top one says T dash 79. That's for Talgo equipment. A whole nother. Well, there's your problem episode. That's a tilting train.

Yeah. It's supposed to be allowed to go faster. Yes. Below that is P for passenger at 79. So similarly engineered. You're good to go. And we invested in that tilting equipment. All your tax dollars at work.

And at the bottom is freight at 60 miles an hour. So this actually pretty nicely engineered stretch of track. Oh, there's a lot of places in the United States that are under 50 and a lot that are even under 25 miles an hour. Well, it does that inspire confidence. My favorite is a stretch between the border at Rouse's point and Montreal, which has one curve. It's 30 miles and the speed limit is 25 miles an hour. Oh, the good old Blue Ridge Parkway approach. Miserable.

My favorite one of all is the approach to Portland Union Station goes across the steel bridge. And it's speed mile an hour. Do you want guys want to guess what it is? Five, ten. Lower. Two. Two? It's six miles an hour to go across six miles an hour.

I was right the first time I had it. But yeah. Jeopardy rules or whatever. Is that Jeopardy? I don't know. Oh, that'd be Price is right. Price is right. I don't care.

So how do they determine that number? The hint is corruption. They paid off the guy doing the formula. Yeah. Hey kid, here's $79. If you had my credit. Nice exponent. Be ashamed if something happened to it.

Right. Before the Napierville wreck speeds around the United States. This is before 1946. Mind you speeds across the United States rail service. On main lines varied. But in some stretches, including on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy could get up to 110. 110 or even more. Most were often below 80.

In fact, so this is not this is not such a spicy like, oh my God, giant conspiracy to slow down trains. Yeah. Back then at least. But it's something to keep in mind. Clients to invent locomotive that's first to 100 can't drive it anywhere. Interesting. This is to protect women's uteruses. Yeah.

Oh, yes, yes. Otherwise they're flying out of there. Yeah. So. Right. So there's a couple of important things about speed. It's not like in a car where you want to get up to around 65 miles an hour and hold it and keep going. Typically, especially with passenger trains, you have to stick to a timetable.

If you go too fast, you have to wait at the next station until you're on time. So it's irrelevant. So track speed is just the fastest safe along that route to maintain the timetable. Did you get scratched by the cat? No, I got bit by a pizza boy. Oh, are you okay? Yeah. Ow.

I did it again. Put him out in the hallway. Oh, no, he's doing it again. Oh my God. You're very silly. He's fine. He's just antsy because he's never been fed before in his life. Oh, that's true.

That's true. You do laugh at him when he's hungry. It's true. Yeah. You say, ha ha ha ha. You have no thumbs. It's got a whole hour and 12 minutes before he gets fed. Oh, that's sweet boy.

I know just how it feels. So anyways. Yes. That's basically the difference between timetable speed and posted track speed. That's about as much as you need to know for layman's point of view. Signaling and safety before 1946 was a haphazard array of whatever a specific railroad and believe me, there were dozens. Really?

Yeah. There were dozens of class ones in the United States, not just four back then. So every mechanical department had their own idea of what they think they should use. And it was like competing standards. I was thinking the different like different banks if we're issuing different currencies. Yeah. Yeah. Like free and post grouping for the UK folk, you know, it was absurd.

And so certain railroads had money they could spend on safety shit, which included all sorts. Yeah. Pennsylvania, New York Central, Santa Fe, the CBNQ, the Illinois Central, any of the UP roads as well, they all had money back then at least to spend on this stuff. Can you guys hear that? I'm so sorry. I get my door open in my view here. What I believe is the now Disney movie Anastasia in my little bit.

Yeah. That's Disney. Fucking hell. It's Disney now. Yeah. Yeah. One second. I'll be right back.

Keep going. Good movie though. So I think it's inherently reactionary. Of course it is. It's like Rasputin used magic to make the Bolsheviks do the thing. But when I was a little girl, I wanted to be Anastasia when I grew up, right? And that's the only like Disney-esque movie that I had that for. So it's a revolution.

Yeah. Exactly. My wife doesn't respect my recording time. So becoming a wife guy is difficult. Being a wife guy is difficult when your wife has such terrible goddamn taste in movies. You're not married yet. It doesn't matter. That's your common low life.

I'm not doing a fiance guy. I'm not being that fucking dude. Fix it again, Tony, the wife. Oh no, fiance. I thought you said fiat guy. Nevermind. I am kind of a fiat guy. Yeah.

Fiat wife, uterus breaks down by the side of the road a lot. I'm sorry, your wife is rusted. We have to tow her uterus back to the Italian garage, the uterus garage. The worst part about having a fiat wife is the Soviet Union has copied your wife in a way that is like worse but slightly more resilient. Except their wife is made out of rust. Yeah, because they bought, used Soviet Union steel secondhand in the 60s and then loosely screwed it together by communists.

Yeah. Actually, I've been sleeping with a Trabant this entire time. Anyways, so. Just reminded of, well, I forget which podcast that Nate Pathay was on describing the acronym for Dodge. Oh, Dick on gay entertainment. Yeah, Dick on gay entertainment. When we discovered homophobic truck owner memes, and it was like, oh, actually Dodge

stands for like Dick on Dick gay entertainment or like GMC stands for like gay men's cocks and like there's a bunch of memes that are like, hey, sorry, you can't park your Ford truck out here in case people think it's a gay bar. Like, it's like so juvenile homophobia that it becomes funny again. Amazing. So signaling and safety before 1946 was a haphazard array of railroad specific signaling and stopping ways. You had two types of signals, Santa for the little waggy hand one and searchlight or

color position light, whatever involves a stoplight esk signal. Beyond. Yes. Question. Yeah, I'm getting a lot of echo from you. Are you sure you're on the right microphone? Do you want to echo from someone? I'm not getting echo.

I moved my mic. Is that better? No, I don't think it's you. I've got headphones on. Okay. Yeah, I can't understand why that would be so unless it's like maybe drunk from the wrong microphone. Do you have like a webcam mic on?

Yeah, I didn't know I'm using a webcam mic right now. Oh, okay. Okay. All right, fine. The echo is gone now. So I wonder if it was me. In which case, I apologize. My mic, I realized was super close to my headphones.

Oh, I don't worry too much. Yeah, I'm not. I never do. Yeah. So you had search lights. He had seven fours. You had sometimes you had derails like we saw in the news article to protect sightings and other things from overruns.

Sometimes they had install a switch that immediately go to went into the ballast for that on certain operations. You see that a lot. What does that mean? You see that a lot in Japan. So like imagine a sighting with switches on either end. But right before the switches that enter the main line, there are two more switches to derail the train in either direction to prevent head on collisions into the sightings for

each. Okay. Okay. Thank you. You get to go on to get to go in the forest now. You just go over here for a minute. Right. I'll deal with you when I can deal with you.

Yeah. I'm confident that actually saves lives. It seems like it would be a very good way to avoid a cornfield meat, which is the next thing we should talk about. So in classic railroad slang, a cornfield meat is typically when two locomotives run head on into each other in the middle of a cornfield. So I have increased most recently, right? Yeah.

Oh yeah. Yes. So more of an olive grove. Yeah. You did that. You did that joke. Don't worry. It's a good word.

Normally what happens is people only listen to one and then never another one, which is something we really try to boost on this one. 34 minutes in. Yeah. So basically those were ways that you could prevent disaster more or less in 1946. Since then other modern technologies like positive train control, automatic train stop, which was pioneered in the 1920s and we'll talk about later. But more or less, this is the same thing.

Train runs red signal automatically throws it into emergency is basically the logic circuit for that. So you run a red light, imagine driving a car, you run a red light and automatically your car's computer slams on the brakes with full brake application. Yeah. That's how it works. All right. Cool.

Next slide. Should do that. Should make that real. What is a streamline? Why are you saying it like a Nazi, man? Because it is bright and shiny. Just like the glory. No.

Jesus. I was building a very normal train. And then you have these it's so good. Fucking designer. I don't know how to say the password is called designed or indeed what the verb for designed is. So. Design designing design.

The flying hamburgers. One of the first streamliners. So yeah. So basically wind splitting as it was known around the turn of the century was the basic idea to reduce, you know, friction through the air as you talked about in your F104 episode. It had both obvious aesthetic benefits of looking really cool. But it also helped moderately very marginally with fuel efficiency and other things. You're looking at the Burlington's effort.

What is what is far and away the most famous of the firsts while there were many earlier designs, including streamlined steam locomotives, the McKeen motor car, which was an early wind splitter design and wooden and steel interurban electric trains that had aerodynamic noses attached to them. This is the one that captured the world by storm. They made a film about it, the first version of Silver Streak in 1934, not starring Richard Pryor. It went on a tour all around the country.

This particular engine, the Pioneer's Effort, which you're looking at right now, set brand new speed records well of 110 miles an hour for diesel trains. And to this day, it holds the Denver to Chicago speed record, which remains unbroken today. It was an immense zeitgeist. Many other railroads copied. Some had exact duplicates like Boston and Maine. They had the Minuteman. But the queue was basically the only railroad that rostered precisely this type of equipment.

The advantages of the Streamliner design especially here is that it is a diesel multiple unit, which means the front blank area behind the three windows where the railway post office are or in front of it. There's a six cylinder went into one distillate engine that runs on grain alcohol. I kid you not. Oh, brother. Yeah, it's cool. It runs clean.

It ran really well. They were super reliable amazingly. And then down underneath, it went to the single truck in the front, which had two traction motors, electric traction motors. Just like a diesel locomotive diesel electrical locomotive is today. These were married part of a married pair. You can see that they're held together with Jacob's vogies between each car versus having two sets of trucks underneath each car. It reduced maintenance and allowed it to accelerate and decelerate faster and more efficiently.

This exact engine you can go visit in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It is unbelievably gorgeous both inside and out, and I highly recommend going to see it. Okay, next slide. Okay, so by 1946, the idea of streamliners had matured to the point where that single diesel multiple unit wasn't going to cut the mustard with longer trains. So they went to E&B. How much longer are trains getting at this point? We're talking like a factor of two or three or just depends. Heavyweight cars, which we'll talk about later, there are longer trains that could go into the 20 and 30 car consist lengths sometimes.

Often they would be broken down into second and third sections, which we'll also talk about later. So 10 to 15 cars is typically how long a steam powered or early diesel powered streamlined train would be. The Zephyr was the abnormally short one, even back when the Pioneer Zephyr was built, your typical train was much longer than that passenger train. So they went back to EMD, by the way, Bud, our hero, and EMC, or eventually became EMD, built the Zephyr. This is an EMD E5A, the only type, only rostered by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. E3s and E6s, which look similar, were rostered by other roads. This is the only one that has a full stainless steel outer frame and the only one with fluting. It's unbelievably gorgeous.

These were about, I think, 1600 horsepower each. And you can see there's a B unit, which has a no cab, which is behind it. These will be paired together in many different combinations of sets, one of which is ABBA, for your Swedish music fans there, to pull increasingly longer or shorter passenger trains, depending on the tonnage. So you'd stick one engine if it was a short train, or up to six or eight units if it was a super long train. This beautiful E5 hauled the train of the ill-fated wreck. You can also visit the last E5 ever built at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois. So let's go on to the Exposition Flyer.

I was just going to say a fun fact about the nose of this thing. This is the only, of the many locomotives which shared a similar sort of Art Deco streamlined nose like this one. This is the only one that's entirely made of metal, because they paid extra to get it done that way. So they'd get the stainless steel look, all your other like E-units and F-units. They're only partially metal. They got a frame underneath, and then these sort of nice curves and stuff are all done up in Bondo. What? Welded steel plates.

So it was welded steel plates like a card modeling kit, and then they would smooth all the joints with Bondo after they ground the welds. Beautiful. I love trains. Yeah. That's why they're all painted, so you can't see the Bondo. Yeah, quite literally. It's like modern airliners. Oh, you imagine the amount of Bondo on those things? My God. It'd be funny if they actually put Bondo on airliners. Oh, buff out. 600 miles an hour.

Yeah, Ryanair. Right? They're using hot glue. They can't afford Bondo. Yes, but very hot glue. That's how you know it's safe. Yeah. The hottest glue. All right. So let's talk about the Exposition Flyer, which was the train that was involved in this wreck in 1946. I have to say, the Exposition Flyer is the one for, that's the swinger's train.

No, baby. Painting over this big thing of Bondo, the giant pineapple. It's a whole other meaning to buffet lounge. Oh, God. Oh, come on. That was actually very good. I'm very proud of you. Thank you. So here's a timetable from the time in which the Burlington was running this train, and here's a picture of the Exposition Flyer, basically around the date that it ran. You can see behind the two gleaming E5s, there's a bunch of older 1920s-era heavyweight baggage cars,

mail express cars, and other things. And then towards the back, there's some more streamlined, recognizable stainless steel cars, usually built by Bud or Pullman Standard or American Car and Foundry. So why was the Exposition Flyer? Why did it exist? It was designed to connect Chicago with San Francisco, and they were holding the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition. So it was a way to get from here to there. We have to talk about real quick.

So today on Amtrak, you would take the California's effort. Same route. Back then, there was so much demand for passenger that you would run more than one section of a train. So you would have a train that you would get on at, say, 805, and that was the advanced section. So it's a whole train that runs ahead of schedule that you would jump on. Then there was the 830 train, which would be the advertised Exposition Flyer, for instance. Then, if there was more demand, you would run second, third, and fourth sections, which were identical trains spaced out in time. Same day, same departure, same arrival, all perfectly engineered to get you there on time

without having to gouge like airline fees, increasingly more expensive things. You would just get on one of the sections and be there. So that's important for later in the story. The Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy just after World War II experienced the height of its tonnage in passenger car and freight tonnage mileage. The railroads were in better condition after World War II than they will ever be. The track mileage per tonnage mile was insane at that point. All the stuff was hauled by extremely powerful, extremely beautiful equipment, honestly. The network of passenger service the CBNQ provided was one of the most extensive in the country,

serving tiny towns with little doodle bug motorcars all the way up to the gleaming zeffers. So let's go to the next slide. But it wasn't just the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy. The Quincy did not go all the way to San Francisco, please. It collaborated with two other railroads to get all the way to San Francisco. The Rio Grande traded off in Colorado and went through the Rockies and not around them. And then in Salt Lake City traded over the entire train consist minus the locomotives in both cases. Over to the Western Pacific, we took it across the Nevada desert and through Feather River Canyon, which is a gorgeous way to get through the Sierras,

and down into the tide water leading to San Francisco Bay. It ended in the beautiful mole, which is a large dock where you connect with a ferry that would take you right to downtown San Francisco from Oakland in like 12 minutes. It was fantastic. You can see here this is actual promotional material from the exposition flyer in the era in which we're looking. You can see the happy smiling sun guiding this scheme hauled a passenger train all the way from beautiful Chicago to wonderful San Francisco. And you can see the egregious use of too many typefaces on one piece. Oh, I kind of like it. It's very busy.

I mean, honestly. Winner. Ice and snow disappear like magic when you go west on the exposition flyer, the speedy scenic route to sunny California. Oh, no change of cars. Standard and tourist Pullman's lounge car for all sleeping class passengers, luxurious reclining chair cars, all air conditions, delicious meals at sensible prices, hostess, let's say hostess nurse service. Yes, in case you were sick. Oh, this is definitely a swing of thing. I show me your mommy milkers is what I'm saying. Christ. So this arrangement worked extremely well and would continue on with the Western Pacific Rio Grande and CBNQ California's effort after the exposition flyer was canceled many years later.

So let's go to the next slide. Okay. Do you think we're flying through these slides? Don't worry. I just checked it. There's 40 of them. We'll get through it quick. Here's some more beautiful material showing Western Pacific steam locomotive hauling ass through the desert, presumably. And I found these wonderful matchbooks that have these beautiful typefaces on them. That's really cool. The noir detective finds on your body. Yes. This is a swinger thing. They are fucking on the exposition flyer.

So here's an important decision. God damn it. You beat me to it. Well done. I have a very sexy disorder. What do I call it? Kiff. Exlexia. No extra fare. Wow. Yeah. There's a distinction that should be explained. The Pullman company used to gouge customers with Pullman fare, which was more expensive but offered delightful things like, you know, wonderful bedding and actually comfortable beds and free meals aboard the train. Like it actually was worth the money, but it was more expensive by a considerable margin.

So one thing you have to realize with privately owned passenger service versus today's nationalized Amtrak service is that a lot of trains often would be kept within a single railroad. It was not uncommon to have railroads cooperate like this for the exposition flyer or the California's effort later on. But now that Amtrak has nationalized the system, this is no longer necessary. So let's get on to the next slide. So here's the route map real quick. You can see Chicago on the right hand side and you can see San Francisco on the Z left. And it goes rather conveniently sweeping through. It is definitely not that straight or sweeping. Believe me. I guess you have sort of a Chicago to New York electric airline situation here.

Oh yeah, absolutely. But the simplified map actually does a pretty good job. So you can see what happens. I believe the things circled down there are where the crew change points and the railroad change points are. So you can kind of get an idea of the three circles there basically in the center of that is where the CV and Q hands it off to the Rio Grande. And then that little hot dog shaped thing in Salt Lake is where the Western Pacific would hand off the train. So let's go to a Z next slide. But this is what you're actually going to see this unbelievable World's Fair, which was a perfect complement to the New York World's Fair. Basically a lot of people went to both while it was open, immense, immense amounts of people went to go see both of these millions and millions of people.

This was built out in the middle of San Francisco Bay on a fill. And it had a very particular type of architecture that was developed precisely for this event called Pacifica style architecture sort of. How shall I say it Pacific Rim meets Art Deco very beautiful, but it didn't stick. So this is one of the only places on earth. You can see that version of the architecture. The shower featured in the flyer there was demolished, but the beautiful administration building little horseshoe shaped thing in the center of the image and the two seaplane hangers still exists today. The rest has been wiped. Imagine getting a seaplane to this though. You could. A lot of people the Pan Am terminal was was here and also in Alameda. So you could take a Boeing 314 flying clipper all the way from anywhere in the Pacific to here to go look at this beautiful Golden Gate International Exposition. I've never heard the Tartarian architecture people talk about this one.

It's 1939. It's June 1939. You are getting a flying boat to go see this shit. Everything is going to be fine forever. It's the end of history brackets 1939 edition. Yeah, I was about to say that depression was almost winding up. You know, and you're not paying attention to the news from like Europe at all. Yeah, it's over there. It was a very hopeful event as you might imagine. Most world fairs tend to be regardless of natural political events. But yeah, this one was a uniquely amazing one. I really have to say they did a great job in the next slide. We'll see how the island was built. This could be its own. Well, there's your problem episode because it's now radioactive thanks to some fun stuff that happened in the Cold War. And it was completely hydraulically dredged with that dredger you see in the upper right where they would just like Mark Twain steamboat.

Yeah, all the dredgers even to Intel today look like that in the Bay Area. If they aren't the regular like crane type that has the big clamshell bucket. It's one of these guys. They're fantastic. But yeah, they just sucked up the sand and presumably flora and fauna on the bottom of San Francisco Bay and pooped it out to create treasure Island in the next slide. We can see this is just a timetable you guys if you really care about timetables guys you can pause this episode and look at it but it's not essential. And then some of the other beautiful scenery you roll through you roll through the the beautiful Rocky Mountains there. Both these pictures are of the expedition flyer in the steam era when it was hauled with steam locomotives including this gorgeous Rio Grande steam locomotive through this spectacular scenery. And then in our next Missouri Pacific section as well from St. Louis. Yeah, which is pretty cool. A lot of connecting sleepers and stuff to kind of tea into the service so you can get where you need to go.

And then in the next slide. So dieselization occurs right around World War two. A lot of Western roads because they did not have access to clean water and I don't and I mean, we're not talking about polluted water we're talking about availability of water line trackside. The war production board heavily leans towards giving diesels to Western railroads that ran through deserts and other dry territory. The Rio Grande was a good example of the Santa Fe with the prime example of this. And you can see these beautiful MDFTs pulling the expedition flyer through Colorado. Deal civilization also had a large impact on obviously how fast the train could run now that you don't have to stop for coal slash oil or water. You could have crew changes be much wider and yeah fantastic photo. Yeah, it's gorgeous isn't it.

And I love that early Rio Grande scheme. At any rate, it allowed for a much tighter faster schedule people were happier there was less soot coming in through the windows. It was altogether a net improvement for your average passenger, even if it was less exciting than being behind esteem locomotive. It was definitely better for operations. And then in our next slide. We'll bring the two together. Here's the expedition flyer hauling. It's trained behind a pair of v5s. This was a couple years before, but take a real close look at this because this is a very important slide in this whole story.

So you can see right behind the two gleaming locomotives is a an express box car where you have just regular just a regular shitty box car incredible. You know how you have aerodynamics going to fuck all of that, you know. Well, absolutely that but cool thing about this box car. So there's a difference between an express and a regular. The express ones have high speed trucks and they also have steam through lines for the heating of all the passenger cars. So they were especially built for this kind of thing. They also I think have in most cases heavier underframes to handle all that all that weight going through them. Right behind it is a couple of a couple of baggage cars and a mail storage car.

Then a couple more baggage cars. Railway post office where they sorted mail on route. In the 1946 consists there is a express refrigerator car, then two more baggages, two coaches. One dining car, a parlor lounge and a final coach on the rear. I have to say this picture is spectacular. I don't know who had the foresight to take this. This is honestly very sick. Yeah.

Sick in a good way. Sick isn't good. Not sick isn't bad. Some of these cars are even air conditioned. It should all be actually. Every human. I really like the 1910s car. Boom!

Stainless right here. Right smack dab in the middle. I'm going to say this. I do not think this car is air conditioned. Which one? No, that's the suffer box. That's scum class. You pay your ticket by having your face spit on.

This was built as an 80 seat car, but it has 108 seats now. So the fun thing about heavy weight cars is the clarestry roof. So you can see in the car to the right of that, it has air conditioning because it has a smooth, roundy roof. That one next to it that we're originally talking about doesn't. And you can see that by the black line above separating the roof in half there. That's an important distinction we'll talk about later. But by 1946, the entire consist was air conditioned. So you can notice also that it's a mix of lightweight and what are called heavy weight cars.

So there's a difference we'll talk about later. But it is important in how this train wrecked. All right. So this is a different sort of transition era, a transition era of different railway cars, not necessarily steam to diesel, but lightweight versus heavy weight. Now the exposition flyer has a real history goes back a little bit. Yeah, it's really quite bad. How's this? No, no, that's no better.

I'm really not getting it. That's weird. I was, I was getting, well, then maybe it's Liam. It's been bad for me the whole time. I don't have no idea. I have, is this coming in and out for me? I have moved my, my headphones from my, my mic about now I'm closer to two and a half, three feet. Is that better or worse?

Miles, say something. Something. Okay. Yeah, I didn't hear an echo there. Okay. Not sure. Yeah, who knows. I'm so sorry if it's me.

I wouldn't, I wouldn't. Yeah, I don't worry about it. Fix it in post. So this wasn't the first time the exposition flyer wrecked. Let's take a look at the first time this happened. Next slide. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. 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. During its decade of operation, the flyer had enough wrecks that it became known in some circles as the explosion flyer. Oh, that's not, you know, you know, it's good when you're getting a derisory next time, you know, yes.

Okay, let me see if I can do this in my 30s radio announcer voice. Great build and head on collision. A little after 10 in the night of September 22nd, the engineer of Western Pacific's crack exposition flyer looked down a stretch of track near Pleasanton, California, and saw the most horrifying sight that can meet a trainman's eyes. There was many, not many yards away, loomed the giant shape of a dead head in unattached freight locomotive, hurling him down the single strip of track. Both engineers threw on their brakes, passengers on the exposition flyer, an hour out of Oakland were jarred from their seats. In instant later, both locomotives met head on.

A hurricane of escaping steam roared into the cab of the flyer, suffocated and scalded to death the imprisoned engineer and fireman. Both engines left the rails and twisted agonies of hot metal, dragging them the baggage car and their two passengers. The flyer's baggage men hurled clear through the front end of his car into a litter of sheared steel, died in the hospital a few hours later. This like wire reporter or whatever missed his calling as a Norwegian black metal lyricist. Really? Only these three trainmen were killed. 12 other persons, nine of them passengers were injured. The engineer of the freight locomotive had managed to jump after applying the brakes and escaped along with his fireman. Neither could explain the accident. Only official comment was made by a division superintendent on the line as, evidently, he said, somebody made a serious mistake.

A boo boo has occurred. There was a boo boo involved incident. So yeah, that's a cornfield meat, folks. It doesn't get any more gruesome than that. Corn or field or meat than that. The engineer was involved in an oops type situation. They call it a cornfield meat because that's what you get turned into when the locomotive hits you. Cornmeal. Cornfed.

Cornfield meat. So let's go on to the reason this episode exists. 44 dead engineer held, say, says the newspaper. By whom? Like in someone's arms? Yes. So they basically slapped handcuffs on him in the hospital, more or less. Cool. Okay. So, Justin, can you read the Fern Heft one?

Uh. Senator Top. Fern Heft, a reporter for the Naperville Sun, who was at her home a block away from the scene, said bodies literally were squeezed from the windows of the last coach. Ms. Hoft said she was leaving for her office when she heard the crash was sounded like a big explosion, followed by a lot of smaller explosions. Wow. Yeah, she didn't really have the sort of Norwegian black metal gift of lyricism.

I'm about to say a large boulder, a small boulder the size of a large boulder. Yep. Exactly. But yeah, it was plastered all over, predictably, all over the newspapers the next day. Sensational writing abounded. If you want to pause the video and look at some of them, I think they're clear enough to read, but a lot of them were pretty gruesome, honestly. Let's go to the next slide.

But what actually happened? So a train three minutes ahead of it had stopped because there is an undercarriage issue. So they've noticed some debris flying from underneath the car and slammed into emergency. You see on the second picture here, the train has just kind of devoured the train in front of it. It's like a delicious train. Exactly. Because they were so tightly scheduled, just three minutes apart. Let's open the car to get the delicious cornfield meats inside.

Exactly. Because they were just three minutes apart, the flagman had to jump on the ground and did not have time to go the required distance to properly flag down the train behind it. So it ran into the... Hold on. Are we getting ahead of ourselves a little bit here? Why was the train three minutes ahead of the other train? Signaling and how shall I say it, scheduling. So the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy was actually quite good at running its railroad.

It was confident that three minute headways for large and heavy passenger trains like that were acceptable. And honestly, millions of passenger miles for decades before this proved that it was all right. It's precision scheduling. What could go wrong? In a way, yes. Time table train order in this case, but very much the same thought. So it was acceptable. There's an important part of why this wreck occurred in the first place.

And the engineer of the train that rammed the rear of the first train was not paying attention. He blew through a red signal. There were no automatic train stop or any other forms other than line side traffic lights, if you will, a line side signals. So by the time he had reached the... He went through a yellow and didn't notice it. He went through a red, which is about where the middle of that thing is. And by then it was too late. Now, much like a stop light on a road, you have to be stopped right at the red.

But of course, he was already going over 40 miles an hour by then. He applied some of the train break, but didn't throw it into emergency. And it rammed into the last few cars of the train. What I was trying to get out here is the exposition flyer today was very crowded. So they ran the advanced exposition flyer three minutes before the regular exposition flyer, which is why these trains were so close together. And this is not very far out of Chicago Union Station at all. These are both westbound trains.

Important context here for why they're running these trains so close together at high speed. Yes, and perfectly put. Yeah. So let's talk in the next slide about flagging. No, it is not gay hanky code. I was about to make the joke. You know, you're flagging down the fucking swings express. Like a black handkerchief in your right-hand pocket.

Yeah, sure. So without getting into minutia, basically, if trains stop a breakman on the rear end of the train, hops off of the flag or a red lantern and walks at least a quarter mile or more down the grass. What's a red flag? Literally a flag that is red. Blood play. No, no, no. Oh, it's fisting, apparently.

Oh. Oh, you mean in the hanky code, yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Because obviously, if it had been a yellow flag, it would be like, oh, okay, he's telling the train he's a piss, but like, I see. Right, yeah, exactly. So, yeah, typically, if you weren't running three minutes apart, this would be a totally fine thing. He could walk the distance, flag down the train, train stops, everybody's alive.

But because they were running such a tight schedule, it didn't work quite that way. You can see on the right, there's the actual prescribed rules in the general code of operation book about how to flag. If you want to really dive into that, you can pause and take a look. What I'm more interested by is that on the left here, we see the guy's uniform, and he appears to have like service stripes, which I know railroads ran on sort of like paramilitary lines, but that's really something. Yeah, so those were typically, I believe, awarded for years of service versus Valor or, you know, whatever. Yeah, yeah. So that guy probably, I don't, I can't see how, I can't see the pips, how many there are.

But I'm sure he's got three service stripes. So like 15 years maybe, which is a lot of fisting. Probably 30, honestly. Yeah. Yeah, he's an oldie. But most of these people were lifers. I mean, in this case, some of the people on board were lifers, but they didn't know it yet. Oh boy.

Yeah, exactly. So let's take a look at the before and after of what happens when a streamlined E5 locomotive runs into the back of passenger train. You have a horrific slice of bacon out of the conductor's side. So keep in mind that trains, the driver's side is on the opposite of American automobiles. So the engineer's side is ostensibly okay, although the glass shattered and it was an FRA safety glass at that point. So big glass shards. Oh no. Yeah.

But this other guy has had a train through the face. Yeah. You don't want to train through the face. So you can see the front truck is gone. The ICC report shows that the truck basically yeeted from underneath the locomotive. That was a magical term. Yes, absolutely. You're appropriate railway terminology right there.

But you can see the immense damage that that locomotive is, although comparatively think about it. That's not too bad from a front end wreck perspective. We've done stuff with Gareth before about crash worthiness. One thing I've learned from that is that the integrity of the outside of it matters very little if everyone on the inside is corned beef. Exactly. Exactly. Big, very rigid sort of tank around which a bunch of shards of glass and other train are flying around. So here's an important public safety announcement to use for this wreck.

The engineer instructed the breakman in the locomotive to jump. He jumped and he died. So he did not survive. He was trying to save his life and it didn't work out. So just be careful. Don't jump off of moving equipment, especially not above 5 miles an hour. I feel like sort of silly and corriptus at this point, right? Like do you want to die jumping or do you want to die getting a train through the face?

Can the engineer and fireman survive though? One of them did. One of them didn't. So we can go to the next slide. I wrote in the description here, opened like a fucking hot pocket. Is that how you open a hot pocket? You just dive in sort of like nose first? Absolutely. Have you ever eaten a hot pocket else? No, never.

The closest thing in terms of temperature is I would say pop-tarts, which we do have and managed to get the sort of like 500 degree heat on the inside, room temperature on the outside sort of vibe. Okay. So the E5 ramped through the rearmost coach here. These cars are 85 feet long and there's probably only 15 feet of that car left. You can see it completely peeled away. It's pretty horrific by any standard.

Obviously, most of the depths that occurred will go into the numbers in a little bit, occurred in this car. Yeah, your soup. You're sort of like now coating for the front of the locomotive, you know? Yeah, pretty horrific. Other people, of course, an immense amount of people were injured on both trains and other deaths occurred throughout the consist, but the bulk of them were in this car horrifically enough.

So let's take a look at the next slide. This is probably the most spectacular picture of all. This is an aerial shot that shows exactly what happened and how it happened. You can see the lead locomotive is completely buried in the center of the frame underneath all those passenger cars. You can also see the lightweight coach, the Bud stainless steel car on its side and mostly ripped in half in the center, the lighter-colored car. And a heavyweight car shoved off the left side as well.

You can see what little is left of the car, the lead locomotive plowed into there. But also, like, look at all of the crowd that came to see this. It's kind of fascinating in its horror. The whole town turned out to see how many people had been turned to graving. So there were 45 deaths at the end. We just didn't believe in controlling scenes at that point. You wanted to show up, you shot. We'll deal with you.

Come look at the horrible, horrible thing that happened. Try some rings off somebody, you know? I'm not gonna stop you, whatever. You can get a souvenir. One of the accounts in the paper described the bodies being lined up like matchsticks. I need to move this cat. Oops. Let's get back to the major picture.

Where were we? Up, up, up. There you are. There we are. Okay. Incredible. Yeah. So very horrific scene. That cross was actually quick on the scene and took all the bodies out of the destroyed passenger car first.

And they filled three morgues in around Naperville with these. Yeah. Following this wreck, four different investigations ensued. First, actually we'll go into the four different ones later. But first and foremost, the DuPage County Coroner's Inquest recommended that manslaughter charges be filed against the engineer for the installation flyer. He was charged but not taken into custody as he was in the hospital at the time. But he wouldn't recover enough to be directly questioned in any of the investigations.

Yikes. Yeah, it's pretty bad. They managed to clean the wreck up fairly quickly and the triple track, what was known as the race track just outside Naperville, was running fairly quickly after the wreck. We can go into the next picture. That's a jagged sort of sharp angle. Yeah, it's pretty horrific. You can see the side swipe, the broken windows.

One of the accounts said that there is a severed leg dangling out of one of the windows of one of the coaches. It was pittery macabre. You got a bunch of people standing on top of the car who were just loafing around. Yeah, those are just regular people. It doesn't even look like they're there for the wreck recovery. This is like, hey kid, do you want to see a dead body? Oh yeah, of course I do. You want to see a leg?

So let's go to the next slide. So here in the foreground we have a 1915 built Northern Pacific heavyweight car. What does that mean necessarily? So these older cars were built out of riveted steel. In this case, it has an underframe that is made out of riveted steel that is then filled with cement. So this provided rigidity, much like a skyscraper basically, but you hid all of the... Concrete, not cement. It's concrete. Enlighten us about the difference.

Concrete has cement in it. Concrete is cement, aggregate, water, admixtures, and then you let it set. Cement is just what you make concrete out of. I'm very precise about these terms because I went to university for this. I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to know this. Alice sounds like she's going to murder us. I have two things in mind. First of all, I'm thinking of myself, who is very tired.

And second of all, I'm thinking of Devin. Hi, Devin. How's it going? I'm sorry. So we can look at this 1915 era built Northern Pacific heavyweight coach. These are the earlier ones. The typical heavyweight coach you see are the Pullman sleepers are built in the 20s. So you can see the little arches underneath the Northern Pacific lettering. There used to be beautiful stained glass in there.

And in some cases, depending on the rebuild, they were entombed. And so when the cars were restored, they found the stained glass in them. However, obviously this one was cut up for scrap right on the scene, as you would imagine. You can see the vestibule of the lightweight stainless steel coach on the right above that guy's head in the two-tone jacket, which is a bit scary. And you can see more loafers on top. There's like, you know, 20 people in this photo and like three of them are working. Yeah. And if we go to the next slide, you can see the...

Smoke break, Dallas. Smoke break. You need jobs, you know. This picture looks as if they're taking bodies out of the car. You can see there in the center, there's a white cloth of some sort. Is that what I think it is? I have no idea. This looks like... At this point, I'm tired enough that this looks like, you know, name any one thing in this photo. Yeah, right?

Alice, do you want to drop off in the three of us? No, no, no. Absolutely not. Just chuck it. Just chuck it, bud. All right. Let's continue on to the next slide. So one of the major issues with this wreck was that it was a mix of old and new equipment. You can see that the Northern Pacific car pictured here, and also we talked about earlier, was the oldest in the consist a 1915-year-old Bill Pullman, which was then 30-plus years old, which doesn't sound that old compared to some of the 60- or 70-year-old equipment

that Amtrak still operates here and there, although most of the heritage stuff has been retired for new equipment. It came off better than a lot of the sort of light and more modern stuff, which is splashed across it. It's interesting how this roof has gone and peeled like fabric, you know? Yeah. It's a little disconcerting to say the least. Heavyweight cars tended to fare quite good in derailments. This was before the reason why Pullman decided to build the concrete floor steel-sided. Pullman Heavyweights was following 75 years of using complete wood construction on coaches,

and I'm sure there's a podcast episode about passenger cars catching on fire whenever stoves would tip over or telescoping into one another because the train would just ram through them. These cars helped reduce that. As seen here, telescoping can still occur, and that's one of the scary parts about it. Although you are safer in a heavyweight car, it was not a guaranteed safe place to be. The lightweight cars were actually fairly okay. The real problem was mixing the two together in the consist, which caused the lighterweight cars obviously to take more of the impact force and be far more damaged than some of their heavyweight counterparts.

Alright, let's look at the next slide. Here's another view. You can see some of the wonky equipment, the vestibule torn from the car in the center there. It looks like some really old maintenance away cars, some wooden coaches with open vestibules on the left there. These guys look like they're from the 1870s. Yeah, easily. The Q actually kept a lot of old maintenance away cars like that around for hauling tools and material around. You have all three eras of American passenger equipment in the 20th century right in one picture.

So you can get an idea of the old wooden fire traps, the more resilient but still vulnerable steel, and the flexible lightweight cars. Four separate investigations ensued. As we talked about, the coroner's office recommended mandatory charges for the engineer. Then the second one. This is a really weird one and not one I would imagine they do in the aviation industry. So the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy decided to take an identical consist with skilled engineers and recreate the disaster, but with a full break application. So they took an entire... What? Not in a simulator.

No, this is forensic files in real life, motherfucker. Get on board. Not on a test track. No. The same piece of track after the repair. That's incredible. Yeah. What a strong bet that this is like operator error. We'll do it again.

What are they totally engineer? How do they pay them off to do this? You're like the train equivalent of a test pilot. You've got the right stuff. Chuck Yeager. You're train Chuck Yeager. Train Yeager. Or Casey Yeager in this case if we want to mix it up. Casey Yeager, that's right.

So yeah, this guy with balls of steel. Oh my God. I would not like to be the guy whose job it was on Friday to do the train crash on purpose. Yeah. Get a passing grade in train crash. So the ICC document details how they did this and it's freaking wild. So they parked the train exactly the stop train ahead of the one that they were going to ram. Exactly where the real one was originally in the wreck.

Fuck me. They went into exactly the same speed for the train that was to ram the stopped consist ahead of it. They applied the brakes in a full emergency brake application from the first red signal versus blowing through the red signal. And the train comes to a stop in less than one passenger car length from the back of this thing. Can you imagine doing that test and you're behind the throttle and the head of the CBNQ? No, I don't like to imagine that. Right.

Stressful for anybody. I think once you make it though, you have kind of a job for life, you know, if you didn't already. Oh, this is Johnson. He's our traincrasher. So this is a way, the Q thought this is a smart way to make splashy headlines. It's like, look, this disaster could have avoided if you actually paid attention to the signals, which was true, but a very risky way to prove this. I love the DuPage County District Attorney Lee Daniels. He said the railroad was, quote, rehearsing the evidence.

And if that is not a title for a new R film, I don't know what is. Yeah. I mean, the main thing I think is back in the day, publicity stunts used to be stunts. Right. It was absolutely wild. I could you imagine being trackside for that in the cab anywhere near this thing when they were playing around with it? Just nuts. I would have been on a nearby rooftop with like, you know, eating popcorn, drinking some beers, you know.

In a 16 millimeter. Yeah. In a 16 millimeter movie camera. Yeah, my dirt cheap 1940s like a camera, you know. Yeah. Third is the most important investigation and kind of the crux of this whole episode. So the Interstate Commerce Commission did a larger investigation on the wreck focusing on the strength differences between heavyweight and lightweight cars and their effect on mixing the two types in one train. It also recommended automatic train stop guidelines, but we'll talk more on that later.

And finally, the fourth investigation, the DuPage County grand jury found that though the railroad and some employees were negligent, no single act caused the wreck. Rather, the accident resulted in a combination from many factors. No indictments were made and charges against the expedition flyers engineer were dropped. Yeah, that's what we want to forget about this now sort of thing to get out of a grand jury. So I went through the original Interstate Commerce Commission ruling documents and found some little tidbits here. This is basically the the abstract. And you can read through it. It's available online. It's kind of it's kind of fascinating, but very copy burned. So it's kind of hard to read.

It's a good document. That means it's official. Yeah. So from this from this accident, they determined that the track was good for 80 miles an hour posted speed limit. The Illinois of the Interstate Commerce Commission recommended 79 max for areas that were not equipped with any automatic train stop technology so that if you blow past a red it immediately goes into emergency. And a lot of railroads don't have that even today. They haven't even implemented a test or any type of positive train control. We put our faith in one very sleep deprived guy. Yeah, waiting for a stoplight of some sort, which is absurd.

Here's the distinction. They applied a 79 cap on speeds nationwide every railroad from a to Z was a given this guideline you cannot go faster unless you install these automatic train stop signaling requirements. It's going to be one of those great pieces of railroad decision making where it's like two cents cheaper to just not do it. They just don't do it. Yeah. It's the it's the classic. What was it American Airlines, all of removal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So without getting into American Airlines, all of removal thing. Oh, so American Airlines saved like some number of millions and not a small number by removing one olive from each of their like salads.

Oh, you wouldn't notice the extra olive, but you know, it adds up pretty quickly. So unlike so unlike modern congressional things that are forcing railroads to upgrade to new technology that is actually considered new. The ICC actually took a rather moderate stance. The inductive automatic train stop system had been around since the 1920s. The magnet on site of track locomotive has magnetic anomaly detector on the side of the truck of the locomotive. If it goes past it and it is energized the electromagnet, it immediately kicks it into emergency stop. That's as simple as it gets. Yeah, they had stuff even simpler than that well before that like in the 1890s.

The Pennsylvania Railroad had a system where there was there was literally like a glass bulb on top of the locomotive. And if you went under a stop signal, there was a lever that dropped down from the stop signal, broke the bulb and the bulb let the air pressure escape from the system and caused an automatic emergency break application. It's like a physical interlock between a signal and a train that's so cool. That's pretty smart, honestly. So this all turned into some grand astounding. Let's also put some perspective in here. The general public's view of railroading after World War II had bumped them off of their trains in favor of troop movements and other inconveniences like course we had a war to fight. Your average Joe trying to get to go see grandma was more or less inconvenienced throughout the entire war to always not travel.

Why are you trying to see grandma instead of landing on the beaches at Anzio? Exactly. So the general public was pretty sour on the railroads for many, many reasons for everything from financial finangling to bad service to all sorts of things. So the will was not in favor of like, oh, yes, let's all band together to make this concerted safety improvement. The airlines, which were nascent at the time, of course, it was all propeller driven at the time, prop liners, DC-3s, Forest 5s, 6s, and your lucky constellations, all that sort of thing. They took it as an opportunity and we'll get into that in a little bit. But it was the combination of some lobbying efforts by them and also seeing the writing on the wall with the railroads and also wanting to stick it to them. There was also planning of interstate highways and not just the classic one that we always talk about, but, you know, the New Jersey Torn Pack is a pre-war project.

So is the I-10 Pasadena Freeway. So this idea of having a national network of roads sounded like more of an appealing thing than trying to get these horrible railroads to get their shit together. So this culminates in the next slide. In the end, though, the embattled engineer was absolved of any major blame by both the ICC and the DuPage County Grand Chury. In an October verdict, the latter declined to take action against the Burlington Railroad over the crews of the train, instead of charging everyone involved with nine quote, unquote, negligent acts ranging from improper scheduling to poor intercommunication between conductors. Rule change as follows. In 1951, the ICC mandated that trains were only permitted to exceed 79 miles per hour if automatic train stop equipment was in place

and most rail agencies didn't mix cars of different weights on the same train, the heavyweight versus lightweight thing. So now we're into epilogue mode. What happened after this ICC ruling? About to say this is one of your infamous unfunded mandates, which has resulted in really bad outcomes on the railroads basically forever. Yeah, I mean, if you think about big picture railroading, we can look in the next slide at the pretty Santa Fe, we're going to get seven. Yeah, think about it this way. The in the 19th century, the Robert Barrens robbed the US government absolutely fucking blind. And the 20th century was the government retribution for that.

So they ruled and the ICC ruled in 51 the trains traveling 80 miles an hour above or more were to have automatic cab signaling our automatic train stop or some sort of train control system. Only the Santa Fe implemented inductive automatic ATS as prescribed after the incident. Nobody else not a single other class one railroad in the United States or Canada decided to implement this because nobody decided it was a worthwhile expense. In an interesting move. The Chicago Burlington and Quincy the railroad involved in this accident decided that instead of implementing inductive ATS that they upgraded their track on all the other parts of the system so they could run 79 miles an hour over the entire route. And you come up to the lowest common denominator. Yeah. And weirdly enough, the schedules barely changed.

So they just upgraded some of the slower routes and the schedule improved so it was such a weird maneuver just not to have to put the system in place. Santa the Santa Fe was the only railroad that implemented afterwards and they ran well above 90 miles an hour in scheduled freight and passenger service west of the Mississippi. Now they weren't the first since this technology, as I said was a couple decades old. There are a couple of other installations of inductive ATS and as we're on the New York Central's water level route. The Southern Railways main line in the south and the Chicago Northwestern commuter routes out of Chicago. So literally within like visual site of where this wreck is is another railroad using the system, the safety system. It's in the mind boggles. I love standardization, you know, yeah.

So yeah, the Santa Fe prospered with the higher main line speeds was able to reduce their transcontinental Chicago to Los Angeles train schedules by, I think they shaved like over 10 hours off of their schedule by implementing ATS and just constantly improving their track and main line. There's an alternative future that could have happened for some of these railroads if they decided to spend a goddamn dollar on what they were doing. Let's go to the next slide. So predictably, regional airlines flourished after this decision. As part of reconversion after World War Two, aircraft manufacturers like Douglas, Boeing, Conver, and Lockheed benefited from filling in a regional aircraft market still flooded at the time using World War Two air DC threes. Planning the DCC replacement in itself is a future. Well, there's your problem episode. Let's be honest. The airlines grew and with it, it's not the network of interconnected local regional and long distance passenger trains eroded almost completely after World War Two in a slow decline. Eventually passenger service fragmented so badly, there wasn't even a single daily train between most major American cities, let alone medium and small sized cities that once built up around the railroad depot in every single one of them 70 years before. Listen, the good news is those regional airlines are going to stay around forever, and that's going to preserve sort of like passenger transport between those sort of medium to small cities, right?

And they're completely safe. There's never been a problem with the DCC three. Yeah. And especially no problems with this twin engine Conver we have on the screen. None at all. So then that's kind of an interesting plane there. It was a Rolls Royce Dart powered Conver. That's an interesting turbo problem. At any rate, the other picture I was going to use in this slide was an Allegheny Conver, which eventually became US Air, which is now the world's largest airline apparently. Go figure. Let's go on to the next slide. Passenger service split between the Western Pacific, the Rio Grande and the Burlington continued after the 1949 cancellation of the exposition flyer, the newly designed all bud lightweight built legendary California's effort started in 1949 and continued in pretty much great quality until 1970. Here it is crossing the hills, not too far away from where the first wreck of the exposition flyer was. This is over near Livermore. The wreck was over between Senol and Pleasanton so less than 10 miles away. The Zephyr is probably one of the finest American passenger trains in history. And it deserves respect. It's a very, it was a very great operation. Let's go on to the next slide. The Chicago Burlington and Quincy fared well into the 1960s. Note the E5s here in this picture have been bumped down to express freight service. Eventually the head of the CBNQ conspired to cook its own books to make it appear as if the still very profitable and very nicely appointed Zephyrs, which ran to most corners of its system, were losing money.

This ruse worked and most services were terminated by the Interstate Commerce Commission by the 1960s. Not long before the Burlington Northern merger with the Chicago Burlington Quincy being part of that and Amtrak were to change the entire landscape. So things didn't work out so badly for the queue. It was a well-run railroad that managed to scrape together one of the better mergers of the 20th century. The Burlington Northern was a lively government about it. Yeah, they flatly cooked the books and they got caught after they had finished the whole thing and they got a slap on the wrist for it, which is freaking hilarious. The Chicago Burlington Quincy's passenger service, especially the Zephyr Express service, was profitable until the day they killed it. It allowed everybody along the lines in the Midwest in which it served to have fast and frequent service between all of those little secondary and tertiary cities with Chicago. It was fantastic. It's a shame that it died before Amtrak. This is also like a common story on a lot of railroads as they cooked the books to make the passenger trains seem like they were making a lot less money than they were because you could do that. And in fact, you could do that in a way that was tax advantageous, especially if you fudge the numbers on how much wear and tear on the tracks is coming from the passenger trains versus the freight trains.

Yeah, my favorite corrupt story is with the Southern Pacific because some of the best corruption comes from the Southern Pacific Railroad. In the 1960s, the head of the Southern Pacific sent a secret memo to all the travel agent and booking agencies in California in a bid to kill the lark. What they said, basically, it was an overnight train between San Francisco and LA, which would be super useful today, let's be honest. They said to the booking agents from now on, if somebody wants to travel on the lark, tell them the train is full and suggest the daylight instead so we can kill off that train. They followed suit. The numbers plummeted immediately to a tenth of the daily ridership that it was before. And the ICC was like, well, guess it's losing money. You can cancel that. And they did. Love that chicanery. And as a final, and the final bon mot in the slide there, in 2014, artist Paul Kuhn was commissioned to create a sculpture to commemorate the wreck with the questionable title of tragedy to triumph. Wow. I love art grants. More like fart grants.

Yeah, it's not much there. Not sure what the wheel sets in that family kind of refueling in order. Yeah, I'm not. There's a whole artist statement on the century walk.org link that we can put in the description. It's very, it's very municipal art. And I say that sort of derogatory, you know, something here. The funny thing is the art was inspired by a book that somebody did about this wreck. So go figure. That concludes the wreck, the Napierville wreck of 1946. All right. On this. Yeah.

Well, what did we learn? Oh, fucking. Don't make your generations of cars. You'll 550 but trains have to go 79 ridiculous. Let the trains go 550. You'll be all right. Never trust railroads to, you know, obey regulation in the spirit to which it's intended. You have to rise it to be watertight. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the takeaway I wanted folks to have from this is, you know, when you're writing regulation for railroads, these are big They will find a way to get around it. They can't wait to violate it.

They have lots of lawyers. They have lots of money and they have lots of ways to run their system worse that they don't give a fuck about you. So they will just do that. They're waiting for you to give them a reason to run the run the railroad worse than they already are. And this is an example where the interstate commerce commission came in and said, you have to install this technology or run your train slower. And they were like, well, I guess we're going to run the train slower. And the national passenger railroad network suffered greatly as a result because all of a sudden these trains were not as competitive with driving or with airlines than they were before. Because again, the because the speed limit was lower and no one was any safer as a result. Ultimately, you know, this is not like a not not so much a question of is it actually safer to go 79 miles an hour versus 110. I mean, but you have you have these regulations where it's like you need to install these safety mechanisms or do this other thing will pick the railroad will do the other thing.

I mean, another another very timely example is the electronically controlled pneumatic brake mandate that certain folks are pushing for DOT and FRA to go through the actual text of that was. You either need to install these break this braking system, or you need to limit the train to 30 miles an hour, which they will happily do. They don't give that will they would definitely do that. Yeah. So this is this is part of a I don't know this is one of the first I think examples of one of these situations where railroads egregiously and flagrantly and so on and so forth violated the spirit of the law. And it resulted in not one of the first examples. I mean, they do this constantly, but I can't think of one of the most iconic examples. We all suffered for it. And, you know, this is why I'm kind of cynical about regulating the railroads, because I think, you know, if you want actual change to occur, you got to nationalize them. You got to have them actually run in the public interest. Absolutely. Yeah, it's time for us or a three slash Conrail to honestly when I was talking with a with an author railroad historian about this the other day and he posited an interesting idea and that any place that we should run passenger equipment.

It should also be owned by the government for freight as well. So if you take the skeletal and track network, for instance, you purchase all that from underneath those railroads and then you create a bonanza of smaller class ones from all the lines that are not part of that skeletal system. And anytime that we want to increase passenger service on a particular line, the government buys it upgrades the line to 125 or better, and then inaugurates both freight and passenger service on that line which is now well maintained, well operated, and well, just better quality than anything that we've managed to do in the 21st century when it comes to railroading. Yeah, I'm still I'm still very much I work under the one big railroad theory. I think that's the way to go. Yeah, if possible, absolutely. You know, what I proposed is probably a half step towards one large national network, a nationalized network would be phenomenal for many, many, many reasons, and probably save so much. Like we saw, we see the bad example with British Rail and the beaching ax and blah, blah, blah, everybody who lived through the 1960s and Britain bitches about it. And rightfully so in a lot of cases, let's be honest.

But we look at the positive example, which was Conrail, they rationalized overly competitive network in which like four railroads were coming into some tiny ass town to serve 1.5 industries. You know, and rationalize it down to one main line with spurs that go to all the, you know, the producers and industries that were necessary. Maintaining the track all the while buying new equipment when it was needed, upgrading things that didn't, you know, I would say some reservations. British Rail was a much better example of how these things should be run than Conrail was. Yes. I can see that as well. What positive examples would you want to highlight? Well, it'd be like DSBB in Switzerland. You know, that's the one. I hate to cut this short, but Alice is dying. We need to wrap this bitch up. I'm fine. I'm fine. But yes, also shut up.

We have a segment on this. I heard the Alice, like, no snort sigh and I was like, oh, oh, my baby's tired. I feel that. I ate and I don't feel tremendous. So let's do safety third. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. There are 50-50 chance of this being the right drop. Hey, I made it. What was the other one? What was it, piss? No, it's Rich Piana saying dick, but like at a distance.

Oh, I heard this. Sorry. I'm a yellow flagger. They call me. Hi from New Zealand. There's a lost Johnny Catwoman. Hi from New Zealand. I could be wrong. I haven't heard you guys cover any food industry related incidents on this segment before. Whatever it is, I don't like it already. I'm pretty sure we have problems here. We have talked about the meat deck.

That's true. That was that was certainly food. I work in the deli section of the supermarket. I'll be honest, I think calling it a deli is a bit of a stretch. One of the main things that this deli slices or sells is sliced meat, which obviously they slice. Right. Yes. Yes. To do this, we use an industrial meat slicer. I was going to try and get a photo of one for you, but my supervisor yells at anyone who has their phone on the moon working. So I've included.

I apologize for that. No, it wasn't even me at that time. So I included a photo of a similar model and screenshot from one of your American OSHA guides on meat slicer safety that I found while searching for the first image. I think it's title sums up things pretty decently. That's preventing cuts and amputations from food slicers and meat grinders. I mean, I'm in favor of preventing them. I'll say that. Basically, this thing's an extremely sharp metal disc that spins really fast and the same bit of meat gets pushed across the blade over and over again until the whole thing's been turned into a shaved ham that we can sell for roughly $6 more than it's actually worth. I'm remembering the tweet here that's like, this is an unholy blend of the meat of several different animals.

You know, this is sort of beyond the size of God. We also have a low sodium version if you prefer that, you know, that sounds delicious. Yeah, yeah, right. In other words, the machine that's designed to cut through flesh and small bits of bone very quickly without stopping at all. Oh, good. And using it requires you to put your hands and fingers near it, which isn't a great combination. Officially, we're meant to wear chainmail gloves when using knives to operate. Chainmail gloves, nice. I am the knight of the meat counter. Yes.

There's an ad like that going around for Jersey Mike's right now. None shall ask. Officially, we're meant to wear chainmail gloves when using knives or operating the finger remover machine. But most people find those annoying and don't bother. I'm sure this hasn't been helped by the fact our former department manager, who also gave the extremely limited safety training for the machine, would straight up tell you that the gloves were a waste of time and inefficient. Cool. Well, does someone like creaking some old wood or is that just a really loud mouse wheel?

No, there's definitely something there. There's rocking chair, but... I'm sorry, guys. I have to talk about all train stuff. I don't have my hands anywhere near my mouse or keyboard. Yeah, I'm sorry. It was me. I'm sorry. At the time of the incident, I was probably the only person in that place to actually use the chainmail gloves. I was also the only one of us who hadn't been fully trained to operate the slicer.

On a particularly difficult shift when both of these people who usually operate the slicer were off sick, the aforementioned supervisor who likes yelling at people told me to slice some ham. Oh, no. The ham was going to be his junk. Yeah, I'm scared to slice the ham. Although I tried to tell him I didn't actually know how the machine worked, he wasn't hearing any of it. I was very tired. Yeah, imagine that. And I'd already been told off by management after he got mad at me once before,

and I didn't want to lose my job, so I caved in and abandoned my right to refuse unsafe work. Here's a tip from our podcast to yours. Don't do that if you can help it. Yeah. Even if you're really sleepy, because you know what really wakes you up is losing a finger, right? This is true, yeah. Well, until the blood loss puts you back to sleep. Yeah. You'd be very awake for a minute, but it's not like a good way of being awake. It's not a good minute, yeah.

Well, I was pretty worried about using the machine. I did my best and started to think I might be getting the hang of it. Then my hand slipped and my fingers ended up pushed towards the blade. Oh, no. Now, the long story short is I'm very, very glad I stuck with the gloves. The ends of one of them, they were too big for my hands and hug off the ends of my fingers a bit. I don't know why I'm yawning so much. I'm not even tired. I'm just dragging you all down. They ended up caught between the blade and the rest of the machine,

meaning my hand was stuck and the blade kept grinding itself against the glove while my hand was trapped against it. I had to shout to the only other person on the shift, my dickhead of a supervisor, to turn the machine off because the switch was on the other side of the machine to my free arm and I couldn't actually reach it. Now, he even had the nerve to tell me off afterwards when I'd finally extracted my hand from the machine and then said that we shouldn't write it up in the internal health and safety incident reports because one employee being stupid isn't worth telling management about. Now, arguably what I did was stupid, yes, but I'm pretty sure the stupidest thing I did was do what he was telling me to do when I had no way of knowing how to use the machine.

Oh, no. At the end of the day, I didn't get injured thanks to the gloves that no one else wears, but I'm still so angry at that arsehole for the whole thing and I've pretty much become that guy at work who's a total nerd, pestering everyone to follow safety procedures around the amputator tron 3000. Can I read this next line? Yeah. Because Jesus, motherfucker, do I not want to find out what would have happened if I hadn't been?

That's a beautiful sentence. Yes. As a last note, since then, I've noticed that my supervisor has started wearing the chainmail gloves when he uses the slicer. It's an unspoken victory. This was just kind. Thank you so much for your podcast and for giving me something to listen to while I'm at break at work. You're all awesome. All the best, Pat. You're welcome.

Thanks, Pat. Thank you. See you then, Pat. Thank you then, Pat. All right. Okay. Miles, if the people want more miles, where can they find more miles? Our next episode will be on the Chernobyl disaster. Do not care. You're wrapping this big show. Shake hands for danger.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go? This is a trash huge. You're listening to Kill James Bond. Listen to while there's your problem. That's us. Where more miles? Where be miles? You can find more miles on YouTube at YouTube and Urban Era, Interurban Era.

Or you can find me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Interurban Era. Links hopefully in the description. All right. Thanks. All right. Good night. That was a podcast. We did it. We keep it under two. Did we keep it under two? We kept it under two.

We kept it under two. I was very tired.