Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 129: East Palestine Derailment

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

well i guess we gotta talk about this one huh Brian's twitter: https://twitter.com/4ft8n1half Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

You cannot be drinking at 944 a.m.. It's a podcast beer. I always have a podcast beer. It's not okay I feel like that's maybe an unhealthy habit. Yeah, I got a podcast being I haven't drink being since I worked for the railroad So I feel it's fitting Have you ever had the the C4 Skittles? Oh god, super good They make the what? It's an energy drink. It's it's It's called C4 tastes like Skittles So fucking good though. So tasty

One time I had like a 17 hour work day for a blizzard at the railroad and What was it fuck we I had two bangs and I thought I had a heart attack by the end of the day It's an awful decision. It's a bang like a like a railroad rip it No, it's uh, it's just like this chud Made a drink. That's just like raw Yes, yes, that's exactly yes It's cool that the railroad has rip-its

Yeah, I Cancer in other ways Don't breathe that in folks. Yeah, don't breathe it. Don't breathe this. I I really like I I don't know. I I'm sort of a purist and I think my my true love is gonna be regular Red Bull for the rest of my life But I I respect the bang I respect the C4 where the fuck is I'm I'm simply drinking a strawberry flavored bubble tea drinking an Unflavored seltzer. I've I've I've I've lost my way. We're getting a lot and I'm not

It's 946 a.m. Mm-hmm. Okay Uh, hello and welcome to well, there's your problem. Hi, Roz. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides And I'm troubling relationship with alcohol. Yes. Yeah, don't worry about it I'm Justin Rosnick and the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay go I am Alice Kodall Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. Sorry for screaming that High-energy Liam. Yeah, you'd never get this. Normally. I'm very morose. So, you know, and enjoy it You've become too powerful now that you're not like at work during the day, right?

I I gotta say obviously, thank you patreon subscribers for allowing me to not live in poverty while I record this um But uh, it's it's very funny to me because now that I'm not working a bullshit nine to five I am I am the happiest I've been in years It's like a yoke has been lifted off me last you Two dollars a month you made this man happy. Yeah, I volunteered at a food pantry in my neighborhood the other day And I was just happy as shit to be breaking down boxes putting up boxes. I I yeah super super fun. So uh, I'm going on vacation tomorrow

Whatever this records With with Roz super excited. Yeah, I'm in a good mood It's really fucking alien to me and we have a guest and we have a guest. Yes, honey. Hey I'm Brian My pronouns are they them a gender is a mess Uh X maintenance away management from a class on railroad in the western United States and Yeah excited to be on Thanks for coming. I guess I'm four foot and a half on Twitter, but I guess we just play them

Are you are you actually? Oh, that's just the gauge of track That's what I thought you're all not sad I'm six ones Hey, me too. Damn. How's the weather up there down here in five seven country. Are you five seven? I'm five seven yes Are built like goddamn telephone poles like allen's like what six five or something and then like a bunch of other people I've met our old giants. Yeah, that's why you've become an urbanist

You're like walking around you can actually see the sissy and you're like damn this shit sucks I'm I don't know what like six eight jay has got to be six Sorry I'm just like we have to keep the balance out of this factor of yeah Welcome back. Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about other people's heights. Uh What you see on the screen in front of you is uh a train

Yeah, what is kind of Wrecked and on fire Somewhere in this wreck is the original recording that we did about this When we and then we decided it was like Too bad to be released. It could never be if you heard Yeah, I just had so many more thoughts about the thing by the end of that weekend That was like, okay, all this is wrong. Oh shit leaves the shop, you know No shit leaves the shop exactly except for all the shit that has left the shop

Don't worry about that one though Uh, anyway, this train is not supposed to be like this. Oh really? Yeah. Oh, okay Ideally it safely reaches its destination Rather than piling up into a heap and catching fire and and giving a lot of people a lot of uh Uh some sort of breathing disorder We're really on a sort of like um head and sort of like wave of environmental like illness catastrophes shit Old town full of Corinne McGraths. Yeah It was so close too. It was like what only 50 track miles from the end of its runny

Oh That train had one hour left until retirement. All right, it may be more than an hour. Let's be honest, but That train had five hours left until It's Norfolk Southern, you know, they're not getting there that fast. Well, I just they just uh, they'd get within like Three miles and get stacked up on the yard lead Like that one uh post from Uday Schultz where it shows like how late trains are How tall is he anyway short of shit at least he has short of shit energy. Sorry Uday. I'm sure no He's like he's like about my my height. I think you're short too, bud

The closer one is to New York City The shorter you are. Are you six foot Ross? No, that's not even that's not even rounding up from 5 11. It's six foot flat I know you are. I know you are. I I have a copy of your your identification papers Why? Don't worry about it That uh, in case I ever need to Go ahead Oh, that post from Uday Joker fired me when I saw train numbers that when I was working

I would be hung if I delayed them for 30 minutes and ns was just running them 17 hours late Just normal Like holy shit, Norfolk Southern on a railroad Yeah, so uh today we're going to talk about the east Palestine train derailment That Norfolk Southern recently did and has been in the news for a little bit again. Yeah. Yeah Yep, don't breathe that in folks. Mm-hmm

But first we have to do the goddamn news Strikes work Strike yeah, actually gets the goods writer's guild of america is going on strike 97.5 approval of it. Yeah I don't know exactly what for I don't know. I support anyone striking for any reason at any time. Um, yeah That's a good point. Yeah as vexatious a reason as possible Um, yeah, I like sure whatever Um, also, I believe like Rutgers their strike that's like they won. Yeah

Yeah, uh writer pay has gone down. So as far as I know the basically the the chief demand is give us more money And yeah, pay up motherfuckers Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Otherwise you won't get the I mean, okay Look, the all tv writing is shit now, but still you deserve to be well paid even if you're doing a terrible job Um, that's the cornerstone of my political beliefs. It's why I'm you know, I support, you know, because you know Look at our patreon, right? I do a terrible job with this. I get paid. No, you don't I do a terrible terrible job with it It's not the case. Uh, but like yeah, I think if you if you Um, if your job is to write, you know, uh, they fly now they fly now you should also have a living wage off of that

um So yeah, all all power to the workers even if in this case they are cringe Especially in an industry like hollywood where it's just oh Jesus. Yeah, it's a nightmare vortex like yeah They these people need that like any sort of protection they can get well, we've talked to um friend of the show know about this before and Like one of the things that strikes me is that Hollywood is one of the industries that's been most successful at doing its own mythology for like decades and decades because nobody ever goes like

Are am I gonna make it as a steel worker? You know, just like am I good? Am I good enough to be driving delivery trucks for a living? You know, I I really have to like I have to like pay my dues I have to like You know do all of this shit and then maybe I'm just not good enough whereas hollywood like Uh, you really get this sort of like internalized shit and it's good to see people overcome and be like no This is this is labor and I should get fucking paid correctly. Yeah, it's also that like I think there's there's a thing You know, I'm not a labor expert. I know the things I know but You know as we shift to streaming services and there's a lot of people that aren't getting paid what they're worth or relative to their experience

um Yeah, uh, all I I have to say about that is pay up motherfucker, especially because residuals have gone down as far as I know I know very well about this as I said, but it's it's also one of the reasons why All of your favorite shows get cancelled after two seasons is because it's like a loophole for netflix that you have to start paying Uh, like stuff more after the third season starts Um, so they just cancel it and they just commission something else in you. Um, You can't even get the live the fucking uh, love is blind live stream to work. Why should I believe? It was uh technique pioneered. I believe by nick elodean

Hmm, uh, they cancelled angry beavers after three seasons even though uh, even though it was extremely popular Yeah angry beavers had four seasons bud. What's the four seasons? Yeah, that's still mother fuckers Didn't they make uh the fourth season came like way after the first three? Or am I I miss remember this there's no justice for these things because the simpsons is like, uh, you know Like a horse that's broken three legs and it's still limping. Yeah, it's doing like up to season 50 000 or whatever Venture brothers had to like find that I really like the god. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've been meaning to watch that. Yeah Like I I have a weakness for that kind of fucking animation shit And like honestly like, you know give me a cartoon that tells me how smart I am

Um, this is why we need the wga to win so that shows will be good again. Mm-hmm. I don't I Yeah, I there's a lot of there's a lot of prestige tv. I just I can't bring myself This is this is sort of like the cheese steak part of this episode, but we're just like talking about tv Oh, people get mad at us people got mad at us for that in the comments What are you talking about like we got a bunch of bigger delphi based podcasts I I also assume because we blew up on reddit. Unfortunately that people are like, oh, I'll check it out because it'll make me smarter No, it won't we will make you dumber We'll make you way

We'll make you dumber and angrier Yeah, my apologies to anyone who has come here out of the blue for real serious information about east palestine It will be in the podcast, but you're gonna have to like wait a bit Yeah, you're elective or uh, you know getting into the meat of the of the class, you know You gotta have your your humanities and stuff before you get to the engineering stuff. That's true Also, like youtube youtube has like a time of thing on it. You can just skip ahead. We're not gonna get mad at you for doing that You can just just do We can't get mad at you because we're recording

I actually do like the the people who are like here are the time stamps of one day actually like start covering the subject Of the episode. Yeah, that's cool. Um We could put in video chapters for that maybe something to look into but uh, yeah The other thing that that strikes me is that like Some of the best feedback we get for the show and the stuff that makes me feel really good about it As people who are like, yeah, I work the most miserable job you've ever heard. I like I don't know I'm the live-in security guard for a cesspit or something Um and like I I do like a seven hour shift

So what I like to do is put on like two episodes of your podcast and it just takes me right through And I'm like, yeah, cool. I I no longer feel bad about doing like a five hour episode now I I used to do a a meaningless uh A meaningless like data entry job Uh at a bank it was like it was decent pay the benefits were trash so on and so forth And that was how I plowed through all of hardcore history in like a few months. Oh, yeah I don't do that to you, you know This is why we need to do socialism, right? It's because like uh

Being able to make sort of like Patreon podcast money is a preview of what a functional economy looks like and for some reason It's only accessible to us because like if all the people listening were also able to be like, yeah I just I only need to get up work. I just do, you know, I could go to food bank whatever, you know That would be infinity times better, but instead we're just sort of like Numbing some of the pain of like all of the reasons why the economy is terrible Yeah, I mean I I I do think that I do love the pupils I've gotten a couple dms on twitter that are very sweet that are like, hey like, you know, I I'm a truck like a

long a long haul of trucker and I just put on your show and sort of like Like just do my route. I was like, that's cool. Like I'm I'm really honored and happy to hear that Yeah, and then you get my parents who are just like, yeah, we listened to your ron applause episode now What I don't understand is why you would put a shopping mall on top of a a residential Do I have that right Liam? And it's like dad fucking it's 8 a.m And I started watching Franklin uh in a hotel room when I was working at tagging so No, uh Yeah, Franklin episode 13. I'm happy to announce he's coming out except that I'm doing it

Yeah, it's entirely about the mics. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's it's world building. It's very important. Mm-hmm In other news Geopolitics folks, uh shit's fucked once again, um and and and shit's fucked in a place that a lot of people hadn't been paying attention to which is Sudan um, and the thing about Sudan is that um, it tried to have two militaries The actual military and then the uh, this sort of like paramilitary militia called the rsf the rapid support forces To grow out of the janja weed which shows the militia that did the genocide in Darfur. Um, so nice guys as you can imagine Um, and essentially what happened is the the commanders of these two separate militaries developed beef, which is the thing that you don't want Um, and the rsf tried to like seize all the radio stations and shit like that

They actually briefly captured a handful of egyptian soldiers who are there on exercise, which is going to be very embarrassing to the egyptians Flip some of their migs too. I think right. Yep. Yep. Um, and so now the the Sudanese army is like going house to house Many people are getting shot some of them even on purpose Uh, Sudan has an air force still. Um, which is currently, you know, uh, bombing the urban centers of Sudan uh, and uh, all in all it's it's a mess and I I'm not sure how much productive I can say about it other than the fact that Uh, it's helpful to have one military Yeah, I was gonna say I I think you know in terms of like

Dictator 101, uh, don't you want to keep your sort of brown-shirted thugs? You want to sort of keep them? Not not capable of large military operations. Do you want this sort of like formal operation? This this is the aftermath of a dictatorship because they ousted their dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2021, right? Yeah, and then yes. Yeah. Yeah, and and the idea was like, oh, we'll just transition to like, uh, you know civilian democracy the real military the first military just did a coup and then there was some like sort of process of negotiation where they're like, yeah, we're gonna transition in back into like democracy

um, and now this Um, and it's it's one of those conflicts where like the International institutions like the un and the african union and the you're like very heavily involved And so it's like laden down with fucking acronyms and processes and meetings and protocols And the upshot of all of those is sort of nothing in this case Well, that's my little like five-minute briefing, you know on on on sudan is Shit's fucked Yeah, it's definitely one of those conflict sorts. I don't recommend looking up anything on twitter because you're gonna see horrific

So yes, Ukraine stuff. So Yeah, I mean curiosity. Yeah, and it's it's it's surprising to like this is um, like Khartoum and put Sudan aren't really like Like a history of any of this shit happening. Um, and now it is like roadblocks in the streets and like air raids and shit Um, and it's uh, it's very very dramatic and very frightening So that's the the individual podcast position on Sudan is uh, uh, I mean, I've made this joke before on twitter that like Ocent like open source intelligence, whatever is like seeing the wildest shit you've ever seen in your life I'm like a a twitter video or a youtube video and being like damn

That's sort of my my takeaway from Sudan is like, oh damn Yeah Yeah, well apparently we've gotten a 24 hour ceasefire. So So, yeah, I'm not sure how I mean, there have been hospitals directly targeted, which is super great. Uh As far as I can make out, uh, basically both sides are Genocidal monsters correct me if I'm wrong in the comments, but uh, that sounds right It seems like one of those things when neither of them is particularly ideological. Um, right. It's just a struggle for power as it

Um, I always says Well militaries folks you only need one of them And don't make them equal size. Yeah Inside there are there are two militaries. Yeah Well, that was the goddamn news Um All right First we must ask ourselves. What is train? What is what is train? What is train accident?

And I think it's it's fun here to go back To one of the first rail accidents in american history Which is remarkably similar Through the rail accident. We're mainly going to talk about today um And that was the heights town rec in 1833 on the camden and amboy railroad in new jersey Right And so this was november 8 1833

uh A passenger train from south amboy new jersey to bordentown new jersey Had a mechanical problem at heights town, which was an improperly lubricated bearing Right, which caught fire as the the bearing between The train car and the axle right Um, it overheated it caught fire and it failed and the train derailed at a whopping 20 miles an hour Holy shit. I mean that that was the sort of speed they thought that like your users would fall out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah I don't know anatomy. Don't get mad at me

They're in the same department. I don't know How you think 20 miles an hour doesn't seem that bad, but you got to remember all the the the The train cars were just made of sticks, right? It's like it's made of sticks. It's all hard edges as well. Uh, yeah Uh, so yeah, lots of people have like fewer hit points back then. This is the thing I've determined is that like You you are I now we might have oh, you know 100 hit points something like that Well, we would consider we a normal sized hit, but uh, you're sort of like your average guy back then walking around four or five Um, you know falls wrong dies

Um gets a calf dies. Um, just you know, the thing about your ancestors is they were pussies and they were weak um And some kind of fainting disease brought up brought upon by a particularly withering comment I'll be you to comment would break my ancestors brains. Yeah I Yeah, my ancestors who like presumably spent all day shoveling coal into steam engines and shit They they could not have done my job. Um, no, no, no, they don't have the like strength of character it requires. Yeah So 21 passengers were injured one passenger died instantly another one died later

Um, the only passenger on the train who was uninjured was former president. John Quincy Adams Weird-looking dude by the way. Oh, yeah haunted sam the eagle Um, I believe that americans invented having sex outdoors Uh, you used to swim the Potomac naked. Oh, he sure did I I just got all this like off the dome about John Quincy Adams huge John Quincy Adams had here Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah diplomat not that's great president. Yeah Uh Also aboard was steamboat magnate and future railroad baron cornelius van der built

Who was said to have sworn never to set foot on a train again? And uh, uh, he proved himself wrong there. Um, yeah, I mean the money's too good not to right exactly Uh, I just was a family with multiple cornelia. I I'll say that Yeah, it's a banger of a name. I will say that. That's true. That's true But I think if you did it now like if you named a kid cornelius, you're just like sentencing them to like Like infinity bullying. Yes. They're like, uh, this is like a short word for cornelius. Do they call it morning? Mike my son corny. Yeah So this is like cornelia, but that's sort of like more of a british like columnist vibe, you know, yeah

Yeah, that lady hates hates trans people. Oh, yeah, uh, and has nine divorces and and all sorts of other Slurs you've never heard of. Yeah, in vents new ones. Yeah So this was the first fatal accident of a passenger train in the united states of america and I will now use history to demonstrate that Uh, 190 years later, we have learned nothing and are having exactly the same problems God bless the usi circle. Yeah, how do we get this thing we call norfolk southern? That's the next question We're gonna ask. Oh railroad amalgamation again yes

Again, like we haven't already done all of this and i'm just like trying to remember the jokes that I made I added some more details. Thank you. Um, yeah, so what is norfolk southern? Well, it's the merger of a couple railroads. We gotta talk about Uh, the one which is the norfolk and western Uh, which involves a weird guy Right, we love a little fine. Yeah So the it starts as the norfolk and petersburg railroad. It's founded by a weird guy William Mahone, right?

uh William Mahone or more commonly known as billy He he so he he's a southerner. He narrowly escaped nat turners rebellion in 1831 He was educated at vmi, but rather than taking a commission He went to go work on a railroad, which is sort of what you do back then as you go to a military academy And then you don't go into the military Like yeah, I'm not gonna do any of that shit. Yeah Yeah, so they start construction on that railroad in 1853

Uh, billy mahone was faced with a problem familiar to some listeners of this podcast Which is how to build something on the great dismal swamp Um Lots of mismatched windows. Yeah Grover railroad Actually, he does not grover up the railroad. He he his solution is a corduroy road Which still forms the basis for It's a bunch of logs stacked on top of each other and then you put dirt on top

Why is it called a corduroy road? Because it looks like corduroy That's it. Oh, yeah Because it's logs Yeah Okay, I don't well. That's The Norfolk southern road bed is uh, still based on that corduroy road today to this day So worked pretty good

I mean, uh, fucking putting putting like logs in the ground. It worked for, you know, venice or whatever. It stays up like yeah As railroad career is of course interrupted by the civil war Uh, billy mahone is of course commissioned into the confederate army Quickly promoted to brigadier general, uh, he is most famous for actions at the battle of the crater Right. Oh, yeah, it's a big unforced error. Yes. The good guys fucked this one Yeah, yeah Embarrassed. Stop running into the crater Sort of like prefigures

Yeah, so prefigures a lot of mine warfare in the first world war as well Which is the the planners you're gonna like sap and like undermine the enemy's physicians blow an enormous charge Like kill a bunch of them at once and then like charge through the crater or around the crater And what the union does is they blow up the mine charge into the crater Stand there mill around to get war-crimed where the confederates Yes, um, my crater and it was made for me. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there was a lot of like, um, Not taking of prisoners here specifically and that had a like a distinct racial component as far as I remember correctly Because it was uh, yeah troops on the union side. Yes

I'll I'll although mahone was said to have Tried to stop them from war-criming black captured black troops. Oh, thanks. Good. Yeah, good for him. Frank vanisher shot this fucker Yeah, well It gets weirder, right? Oh, really in railroad lore. It gets weirder. Are you sure? I know right? So after the war he goes back to what he really likes doing which is railroads He gains control of two other railroads merges them all into the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio railroad But then the panic of 1873 hits. He loses control of the AMO to

Clarence Howard Clark of Philadelphia Which is the guy who Clark Park in West Philly is named after. Oh, cool Yeah, so he's he's really tied in with the Philadelphia elite His father made a boatload of money doing finance when the charter of the second bank of the United States expired Um, you know, because all of a sudden the financial markets were in chaos Uh, and it was if you knew what you were doing, you can make a lot of money He's founding member of the union league. He's one of the earliest developers in west Philadelphia Uh, he changes it to the Norfolk in western, right?

That's that's like the northern rich boy just kicks him out of his own thing and wins the civil war again Yes Nice scoreboard, baby I don't love the sort of like So like aristocracy of uh, like Philadelphia, but you know relatively speaking. Yeah Well, my hone goes on to a life in politics and he he essentially founds what was called the readjuster party, right? and the readjuster party is this Uh reconstruction era political party in virginia, which is sort of this

Multiracial sort of radical, maybe not quite anti-capitalist, but certainly radical for the day movement Which was formed around a common cause of Uh, make west virginia pay for our shit If that isn't ever a land of contrasts, right like I I like the the multiracial policy. I like the radical policy. I'm not sure why west virginia is in this A unified front against west virginia. Yeah Prior to the civil war west virginia was part of virginia, right? And west virginia had a lot of debts to service from before the war

for funding things like public infrastructure railroad stuff like that, you know, and uh The readjusters argument was that the pre-war debts assigned to virginia should be proportionately allocated to west virginia owing to their secession um Oh, I mean that's don't don't get on your high horse about secession when virginia also succeeded like well, you know But then they'd use this extra money to improve education fix destroyed infrastructure so on and so forth But this coalition really really hinged on racial equality, right?

Especially in the form of doing stuff like repealing the poll tax um, because otherwise you had, you know, the It was between the readjusters and I want to say the conservatives who were they they were the guys who were like No, I just pay all the debts because they had a vested interest in getting that money back um you know But the the readjusters sort of go through and you know, they they they don't make much progress on the debt front what they do make progress in is like

building schools, especially for african-americans uh, they they they repeal the poll tax so african-americans can vote they uh, you know, they wind up with the first majority black city council being elected in danville virginia Um, including and they instituted a integrated police force completely unprecedented. Um, You know, so and all this purely in furtherance of vark west virginia vark west virginia. Yeah West virginia will pay. Yeah So, uh, uh, yeah, uh, Mahon does a real big about face on the whole confederacy thing after the war. Um

Um, I think maybe maybe one of the only people who went beyond just saying they were sad about it Seems about as best case scenario as you can get Someone who is a confederate officer. Yeah Now the the one issue is of course this this readjust your party A lot of aspects of it are very much supported by The federal institution of reconstruction right and when reconstruction stops and the troops go home Um, uh, race is pretty quickly forced their way back into power. So, um, yeah

So You know weird dude. Yeah, weird dude weird dude. He's uh, uh, my uncle robert has a stalled out, uh, biography on him Oh Yeah But uh, anyway, so You know by this point the the the Norfolk and western railroad is de facto controlled by the pennsylvania railroad Which is a situation that only gets more formalized until they were forced to divest in the 1968 penn central merger um

This is like one of a billion railroads. So just get eaten by the pennsylvania railroad, right? Ah, yeah, this was the one that they were kind of stealing from to keep their own checks and balance Like nnw kind of like fed a lot of traffic into the pennsylvania railroad And once they chopped it off they chopped it It was like cutting their legs off To merge into new york central to do that. So yeah, huh? Yeah, I kind of I crippled the railroad more than I think anyone anticipated

And then nnw immediately went out flank them trying to gobble up as many railroads as possible Oh, yeah, they got real big real quick. Um, yes They did not waste time Now the other component of Norfolk southern is the southern railway Right, so then there's the south bud. Yeah, activating benoit blanc mode at this time. Yeah there's uh Fewer colorful characters in this story, but there's this guy samuel spencer He's another confederate, but not so prominent. He was just in the cavalry, right?

Um, but he also had this shot his ass too. Oh, yeah He had a long career My like my platform now is that every sort of like Should have all these people but by frank furnace specifically and personally very funny though Uh, he had a pretty long railroad career He was president of both the baltimore ohio railroads and the long island railroad But he eventually goes to work for an investment bank

Drexel morgan and company more oh if you want some some sordid railroad financing tails, uh ron scherenau's house of morgan is very good for that Yeah, and so he's gonna be more than another weird-looking dude. Yeah, I ask him about his nose He hated that and Anthony joseph drexel um Samuel spencer sees opportunity here

The railroad network of the south was very fractured and disconnected very quickly running out of money Labor was very cheap. However, uh, especially after a reconstruction ended and suddenly there was a wonder why yeah yeah, suddenly there was this massive pool of uh largely african-american convict labor Um and building a railroad as a hard miserable job that you more or less have to force people to do cool. Yeah yeah um So drexel morgan and company buys out a bunch of these railroads and creates the southern railway

with uh spencer as its president in 1894 right um Now this is an interesting one most railroads in the united states are named railroad Uh, why is it the southern railway? Why is it because they want to be english so fucking bad? Yes, because they're there are all planters cosplaying as aristocrats. Yeah They're all angle files. Yeah No, fucking That's your fault, Alice

Is that why it's yellow and green like the the like the british southern railway too? Yes. Oh my god They were just utterly sickos when it comes to british And like southern like What's the British equivalent of a weeb like it's oh my god. Yeah. Yeah This is horrifying. Yeah I mean the fucking the logo looks like a hate symbol already for one thing. Yeah Yeah um

So spencer works pretty hard to expand the system diversified traffic Before being killed in a train crash ironically in 1906 And lived by the sword died by the sword listed inventors killed by their own inventions Yeah, he's killed by his invention the southern railway um now by the 1920s, this was a big dumb railroad that went all the way from washington dc to new orleans um, you know, it historically had a very military culture sort of even more so than a lot of The other railroads that also had very military cultures Um, I bet I bet they were fun to work for oh my god. I mean getting fired on the spot was just uh

Part of the cost of doing business. Yeah By frank furnace ironically. Yeah I mean like a lot of people I worked with were x military the railroad loves x military people because they're the own Some of the only people who are like oh this nightmare work life is an upgrade Like that or like I mean I knew a lot of people who are like ex-prison guards and they were just double dipping for their second You know, they did 20 years of working in a prison system and then 20 years at the railroad So they'll just get like, you know for all five years that they'll survive after retirement Uh, you know, they'll have like a good five thousand dollars a month or something

So in the early 20th century, there's lots of these attempts to consolidate railroads into much bigger systems a lot of them fail miserably Um, what's the railroad listen to like the entire 50 hour conrail saga? I know right? Uh, once the railroad start hurting financially in the 60s stuff gets starts get go getting These mergers start to get going right? So like the pennsylvania railroad in the new york central become the penn central There's other big mergers like great northern and the chicago burlington and quincy which becomes the burlington northern Uh, the norfolk and western starts really aggressively acquiring other railroads um

the southern railway is more Complacent to sort of stay regional right southern arrow star cruisy complacent and regional. You're kidding me. Wow Like like nnw and like uh, the chesty system were just fueled by like piles of subatomous coal That they're just breaking into high billions of dollars on this one like Stroy the climate. Oh, yeah, it was like one guy in a seersucker suit being like And all of it just going out from norfolk virginia

Yeah, well, they had a they had a cheat code which is because the coal was all for export There were no rate regulations So they could charge anything they wanted Oh god, I did not know that part That explains a lot. Yes Yes I'm bastards So anyway, the penn central railroad fails. It takes every other northeast railroad with it

They become they're nationalized and they become conrail right after deregulation and rationalization of some of the railroad As well as massive cuts to the network in general conrail is returned to profitability and then denationalized So we did that in like 10 sentences took us like two minutes. We could have, but we weren't gonna. Yeah This sort of field was narrowing, you know These railroads that were previously considered huge like the chest speak in Ohio or the baltimore in Ohio They were merging creating strange new companies with names like csx Yeah, chesty system 10 Yeah, most soulless

corporate railroad name I can think of like Bring back. It doesn't even mean anything. Bring it back. Yeah. Yeah, bring the cat back Uh, so the Norfolk and western and the southern railway counter with their own merger in 1982 Creating nor fork southern Uh, according to the according to the unveiling of the signage at the new headquarters of the day of the merger So they had day to fix that and call it norfolk southern the next day um

you know and then Conrail was divided up and sold in 1999 with most of the former new york central lines going to csx most of the former Pennsylvania lines going to norfolk southern and this is how norfolk southern comes to own tracks in east palestine Originally built by the pennsylvania railroad and anyway, that's the the rec line from the heitstown derailment to today Very good. Ironically like They've turned around and owned the owner that owned them. Like now they own the pennsylvania railroad Yeah, this is how we get our beloved haunts Yes, this is how the haunts, uh comes to cause us grief and misery

Writing a pale haunts So, um, anyway, that's the history now we'll talk about some of the technology Uh railroad technology that causes derailments like this now, uh bearings All right, I think the the spinny thing that the axle spins inside, right? Yeah, the the the spinny the part where the spinny thing meets the not spinny thing right, okay

um so In in railroading, there's basically two types of bearing. There's a roller bearing and there's a plane bearing right um now in the early days of railroading and until not too long ago a lot of bearings were Plane bearings you can see here

It's just an axle that rotates in a shaft right And then there's oily rags underneath Oh, so they're all gross Yeah, that oil the bearing Oh Like awful

delicious oily rags They cause so many derailments like There there's like a couple where like vietnam war bombs are being shipped in like southern pacific in california And they catch on fire and then from a hot box And the train explodes because it's filled with bombs literal bombs. Jesus christ Like I think that happened three times at least during the peak of vietnam because all those bombs had to go to the ports somehow Jesus fuck Yeah

It was a total nightmare and the fact that roller bearings I wouldn't hadn't replaced these cars in You know, western railroads had the money. They're just being cheap bastards Yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's it's it's bad news and one of these things catches fire because you've got all the fuel in the form of the oily rags um, you got friction which is adding to the heat because of um, you know, the train's rotating There's uh, but the the the wheel is rotating not the whole train that would be bad the train starts rotating later when the when the bearing fails So like that you can you can start a fire with just the friction from the axle, right? Yes Um, so it spins too fast. It isn't like lubricated enough and you set fire to the oily rags

This this condition here. This is a hot box. That's when the the bearing overheats to the point where it's on fire Um, I'm kind of hot box. Yeah, this is a bad kind Particularly bad problem because owing to the fact that friction causes the fire. It's more likely to happen at high speeds than low speeds Um, so all the derailments caused by these failed bearings are very nasty Yeah, I'm just feed of like 20 miles an hour. Yeah um You know, so in the 1930s Um, especially in the 30s, I think maybe slightly earlier, um

This this company timkins started marketing, uh, roller bearings through railroads um So rather than having just the shaft spinning in the the thing Now we have all these rollers that make contact between the inside and the outside of the bearing That significantly reduces friction That means

Everything runs nicer. There's much less chance of problems. Uh, you know hot boxes are sort of all but eliminated just through this technology And we fixed them and it even looks cooler too. Yes better in every possible way lower friction You don't you don't have to spend as much fuel pulling your train Switch the cars Have you considered what this is going to do to america's burgeoning oily rags industry? Yeah Drive it deep underground with some sort of black market. I'm not really sure Yeah, there's so many jobs in like oily rags and you know, we're just you want to destroy it

American manufacturing is built on oily rags And think of all the random, you know, people have to go put up the tie fires that these cars, you know Oh, we'll be put out of out of their good well-paying jobs It's like when they do the uh, oh the the dot we can't ban we can't allow marijuana because then the drug sniffing dogs won't have a job So Timkin and a few other companies pretty aggressively market this technology, but it's not Fully adapted until really the 1990s

I want to say is hold on you said the first use what happened in the other 60 years World War two No one no no one felt like upgrading the bearings You get a lot of roads who world war two went on for a long time Who convert very quickly like a lot of the western railroads who are not financially imploding kind of convert everything within 20 odd years But uh, the problem is it just takes one of them to fuck up your train And you have a lot of stragglers

Especially like with how Penn Central explodes and everyone around that So It's a definitely a problem that persists I know that like you there's a shit ton of like lead time and like how often rolling stock goes changed and stuff and there's still stuff rolling around from like I don't know caveman times or whatever where like you have to put your feet through the floor and like pedal it but like This seems like such a gimme like it saves money. Why? Why like

You gotta have money to say institutional inertia. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Plus you might have a car that's like nearing the end of its life And you don't really want to upgrade it But you know at some point though the feds had to have been like There are governments in those 60 years who wants to regulate things. How come nobody was like no you got to use these I don't I do not believe Uh, I there was I'm not even sure if it's an actual regulation or just an a r.a. rule Um I mean the only time you really saw

a conventional rag bearings By the 90s at least where I'm more familiar out west, uh It's usually on maintenance away equipment because that stayed internal So if the if you had like equipment that you know ballast cars or just stuff to move around your own railroad's track maintenance stuff They're allowed to go past the 50 year life span So some of the ballast cars I worked with were you know about as old as my grandpa Jesus good lord. I mean and they don't do much. They just kind of sit around a lot of the time So they last forever and they were overbuilt because they're built during World War II or right after it. So

You know sometimes, you know, they'll they'll be put on newer wheels, but Um, usually only when the other ones fail because they just got old and ancient, but Okay, there's no federal regulation on plane bearings But association of american railroads has banned them from interchange service as of 1991 Um, and I think that was shortly after the mississauga derailment, which was caused by a plane bearing car Um, you know, I think some of the canadiens were some of the ones dragging there Like dragging on this one too. Yeah, there's always weird stuff going on up there. So anyway, um This problem hot boxes. It was a big problem for a while. That's why we had things like cabooses on trains

Right. So some guy could look out over the whole I believe you mean kabeases kabeases. Yes kabeases. Excuse me kabease um You know, you had kabease you had a guy who could look out over the whole train and if he looked ahead and saw trains on fire Seems bad and he could you know, send the signal to stop the train, right? um So, you know, that was the old method for detecting these hot boxes But then again, we get the roller bearings that makes hot boxes almost unheard of

But they still happen. You can still have problems with the bearings Yeah, but you can't like still have kabease because you got to employ a guy and we don't want to do that anymore Don't want to do that. Yeah. So you come up with Line side detection equipment the defect detector One of the funny things is that the cabooses were some of the or kabease some of the last pieces of equipment to get roller bearings because they didn't interchange and uh

So ironically some of the last ones were really like that kind of equipment. So The hot box is coming from inside the house Yeah All right I guess this will be my slide. This is you brian. Tell me about these. So detectors you have a whole wide range of them and

On routes like the train the n30 was n32 the Uh, yeah, or it was 32 n. I forget 32 in my bed. Uh This is the old pennsylvania main line. So They had a lot of detectors uh One thing you see with railroads is they often Do invest in their main lines? which like norfolk southern did here but

uh detectors Often, you know, you won't see as many on on branch lines So that's what kind of like makes us worse is that there was a lot of detectors on this trackage but the types of detectors you have are like, uh, you have like here you can see it looks like a bearing and axle measurement Uh, like so this is like a hot box detector But you have all sorts of detectors that do like dragging equipment

They'll have these little flange it like kind of like sheets of metal that stick up that can shatter Something hits it if it's dragging You have detectors for gauge that are some of them are very basic like you had somewhere They just kind of had rods that stick out and if it hit the train Uh, they would it would tell you to stop In various different ways you had strong a triangle up over it, you know, yeah Yeah, you have like falling rock detectors where it's just a bunch of wire next to the track and it looks like a fence And if something breaks the wire it trips and tells you and you have like sometimes

Some railroads invest enough to where these have automatic train stop and others just You know it yells at you on the radio Some of them a dude has to see that it went off and then radio you so there's like human failure points between these uh You get like high water detectors, which I mean that one's kind of a given. Water's too high like uh Where I worked we had a lot for uh, even though it was usually in the desert if you had high water Uh from like a rain from flooding you'd get like a signal indication to tell you to stop uh

And then you have like acoustic some of the more modern systems you have like acoustic bearing sensors where they will Uh you try and use signal analysis to figure out what's going on and a lot of those are less for like, uh emergency situations like this what happened in east palestine, but uh Your big one is the hot axle and hot bearing detector, which is a hot box detector Uh the all you want to find a detector every 20 miles Uh where I worked we had them they varied a lot like in mountain territory They'd be usually every 5 to 10 and then once you're out in the planes, you know, they would space them out to 20 to 30 miles, but And this thing it literally it like looks at the train to determine whether or not the bearing's on fire, right?

Yeah, it's just like a very dumb. Does it see a very big differential in temperature and if it does it yells at you and uh And they'll do like I like I put in the notes. It'll be like c s x equipment defect detector mile post zero zero zero zero one and No defects Yeah, so like microsoft microsoft sam will yell at you to be like God they got so annoying like so like one of the Uh, you know, if you're working on track, you know, you have the radio playing over the section section truck

So every train that passes we would hear this over and over and over annoying which Norfolk and southern uh norfolk southern, uh Turned that off Which is something that Had been talked about a lot in the aftermath of this that somewhere in some divisions where there's a lot of traffic Opted to have not all of the detectors play back a message if there was nothing particularly wrong

And that was because it's just so damn annoying And that makes sense if it's like if it's Like failing safe if it's reporting that everything's fine. Why do you need to hear it sort of saying, you know? Mm-hmm. Yeah, but then you introduce a human failure point so Now that it's not telling you unless it's a critical situation. It's not telling you when it's kind of bad And now you've inserted a person who

You know on a friday night might not be all the way up to you know Might not be having a great time working their just job at a friday night And they have to monitor hundreds of these detectors that's coming through and on like an excel shed spreadsheet and Their job is to monitor that and then to relay to a crew if they think something's getting worse and That's a big part of what led to this

so You just there's so many different spots where Human putting a human into this decision tree is bad Like you want the machine to yell at you Every time you go over it, but it's annoying All right All the railroads have their own special rules about When the defect detector should go off and when it shouldn't when it gets radioed to the office and when it gets radioed to the crew

There's no like federal regulations about this much like rhyme or reason behind this like It's kind of like the feds were like. Oh, hey, we love that you're doing this We think you're doing a good job Uh, we view this tech is great um We think it's in your interest to make sure you do it right because the train on the ground is expensive and And Because it didn't cause too many particularly bad derailments. It never got momentum to get regulated

so Will it now or like Oh, maybe Yeah One of the proposed pieces of legislation by federman. I can't remember. I think it was marco rubio Uh, their proposed bill from the senate Actually did consider some regulations for these which would be great. FRA just like one thing about the FRA Is there's like 10 guys?

They just don't have enough people to like verify all of this So so much of Next works for the federal railroad administration the most overworked woman. I have known in my entire life. No Yeah So they have to rely on the railroads to actually police themselves. They just don't have enough people. They don't have enough money Uh And so like there's a lot of talk about on the media from like, well, why didn't Pete do more about this and that and it's like The structure is very much rigged against anyone doing good here because they just don't have much to work with

Sure, and the FRA is just you know, the the the they they eviscerated the safety portion of the interstate commerce commission And like put it into department of transportation You know, it's not like uh, it was never It was it was it it's a bizarre agency. Um just in its history and like You know, and this is like a regulatory capture deal as well on top of that. I assume when you said Oh, yeah, it's regulatory capture and it's also just like they don't have a choice That they they have to rely on the aar to like get the railroads to self-regulate and sometimes it works But this is a very glaring example when it didn't as we'll see. Yeah

um What else should we talk about how about vinyl chloride? Oh chemistry lesson. Yeah All right. What's a vinyl chloride? It's um It's a little molecule. You see that looks a little like one of those balloon animals. It's a monomer Okay, I don't know how many girlfriends it has like thermoset plastic. Yeah

It's got it. It's got three H's. It's got one cl It's got two carbons with a double bond right Um, and it's a predestination of chemical to polyvinyl chloride Oh, that's thinking everything. Yeah. Yes, and that is a polymer Which is a bunch of monomers stuck together Cool. I love plastics way of the future Then possibly the last detectable fragment of human existence aside from maybe like the Voyager probes. Yeah

yeah Like a microscopic layer of like plastic fishing gear or something in a fossil record Uh is and that's going to be us Yeah It's one of those polymers that uh, whenever you actually make it like instead of unlike polyethylene Which is like your water bottles and stuff like that Uh, when it's formed it's formed through a thermoset reaction. So it can't be recycled It's just being formed once forever chemicals

So it's making it's not too bad. The worst thing is somehow lead ends up in pvc for ductility It's one of those engineering derogatory moments where uh, you know Because I studied mechanical engineering and you know, like we would you know Led's one of those great materials as long as it doesn't touch people Because it makes working with the material so much easier uh And so that's a forbidden fruit of uh material science there I just want to use lead. I just want to use asbestos

I want stuff to be workable in hand and not be on fire and so long as no humans are involved. We've solved this perfectly Just don't put it in you know, something like a ship where it has to be removed every couple decades And then you know, you know Femioma like commercial All those things it's like fossil fuels the big problem with them is that they're really good Oh, yeah, like it's so hard to beat just how good oil is that everything it does it's It's we discovered the best awful thing Yeah, so so pvc is most commonly used uh plastic and things like pipes insulation records siding Like uh, this has been a production of the plastic council. Where would we be without pvc?

You can use it and like fucking everything sexy clothing. Uh, yes Yeah Insulation Yeah third thing A third secret thing. Yeah So now pvc itself is extremely safe, but vital chloride is not it's a really nasty chemical um

And the plastic industry, you know some some horrible shit there Oh, yeah, like coming from a Houstonian where most of our traffic is this kind of shit in Houston Uh, this is kind of about the midway level of oh god. Oh fuck to like inert cargo This is about middle of the pack Uh, it gets a lot worse than vinyl chloride Yeah, you're not moving like sort of like Chemical industry shit. You're not like, you know big tank full of dioxin or fertilizer or whatever, but like molten sulfur Yeah, the molten sulfur is not too bad. It won't like

Sentences from the railroad Uh, I have some context my family all worked in oil. So like, you know, I'm used to a lot of this stuff, but like, uh it's There is so much worse Like, you know, you get your like is it biric acid? And they come in these tiny little tanker cars. They're just little demon tanker cars Like I'll have to share a photo for the pod when edited later. They are tiny Like they're only 10 15 feet long

And uh, it's just like if this is like apocalypse, they're gone. Yeah What is it like butyric acid you said? Yeah, it's something like there's just so many of them like, uh The smaller the tanker car unless it's corn syrup the more evil and awful it is Corn syrup's also kind of evil and awful. Oh, yeah, but in different ways I had to work at derailment with corn empty corn syrup cars and thank god they were empty because uh One of the worst three pairs of boots

All the insects get into that stuff And you're working at derailment Like uh, some of the stories I heard from guys who would work on the grain lines where if a grain train derails and Say back in the day they would bury the cars Uh, say back in the day till like the 2000s Uh, you know, you're just putting a whole, you know, 100 tons of grain in the ground And it starts to ferment and if you didn't do a great job of burying it animals get into that

So you'll just get drunk deer that moose everything like Terrorizing the local town because the railroad was too cheap and just buried it So there's all sorts of you know, that's on the less harmful end But you know, you also like for like until the epa exists, you know Vinyl chloride was moved before then if they had a derailment they just buried these tanker cars along the track The tracks in a lot of places just have a graveyard of

every awful chemical you can think of and uh That's one thing about a lot of railroad track like yeah, the creosote ties are bad, but like it's everything is in that track I've been there for a hundred plus years And most of that before the epa was the thing So just every nightmare chemical you can think of dbt that was moved by tanker cars So there's At least there's not like a constant mix of like dirt and brake dust and grime and like, you know

Small metal particulars just floating around in the air carrying all this shit around as well Congratulations. You've just described chewing tobacco. Yeah Yeah Tetraethyl lead that was moved around at tanker cars. Oh, yeah. Oh boy At 30,000 gallons at a time At least that like smells good because that's another great thing about lead Yeah, lead moves like like lead helps make stuff like very sort of like What's the word like easily workable also like smells and tastes amazing sweet apparently. Yeah

Um, uh, there may be some downsides to it. I'm not sure. No, no, no, no downsides bring back. Let it gasoline. Fuck it Your vinyl chloride here is um, you know, it's it's very flammable splash point is that negative 108 degrees fahrenheit or negative 78 degrees celsius But don't usually get hotter than that in most of the world Yes, perhaps Um, it's heavier than air as a gas and thus it forms a cloud that hugs the ground closely It also gives you cancers um

When it burns it creates hydrogen chloride gas and carbon monoxide and trace amounts of phosphine Which you may remember from World War one. Yeah, the silent killer yeah And like one of the things with this stuff is that if you can Uh, you don't move it you you you synthesize it on site at the plastic plant Uh, you from like the less dangerous predecessor chemicals, which is ethylene and chlorine gas But uh, cool the less dangerous stuff. Yeah

So yeah, chlorine's the less dangerous one. That's that's another fun one But when you do have to move it you use these, uh, D. O. T. 105 tank cars, right? Uh here um, and this is a You know pressurized tank car with insulation, right? Um, unfortunately, they have to use glass wool instead of asbestos because You know can't use the good stuff Uh, T. T. 84. Yeah, you can't use the good stuff

You know, but then you can move it as a pressurized liquid, right? Um, now there's risks that still exist, right? If you have an overheated car the chemical can self-polymerize, right? And that sort of causes pressure to increase which eventually leads to an explosion. Or if you like breach this insulation or pressure in any way at all um Yeah It's a not a great time or if the safety valve gets stuck

uh, um And again the bearings on these cars, um Oh, these these all have roller bearings. They get roller bearings. Thank god. I usually maintain pretty damn well because They make so much money that it's hard not to Uh, like a lot of the oil companies, I mean, I think this one was owned by a smaller operation But you know like Exxon chevron, they all have fleets of several thousand tanker cars and uh, you know, they usually They usually do a pretty good job on maintaining them just because there's just so much money that like even if you're a greedy bastard

it's hard not to but uh Okay, cool. Well podcast over Smaller chemical companies is where you get like the smaller operations where they start it's kind of like fracking companies where they start cutting corners because They're they could just get away with that under the radar because you know, they might on 10 tanker cars or something like that

and uh You get that but much worse when it's not hazmat Which is what we'll talk about later. I guess. Yeah And you have uh, you know, if you have a a boutique chemical company that makes the most horrifying chemical that you know That that you can even think of and of course they don't have the money Yeah, they don't have the money to uh fix the bearings So anyway, uh another we're an hour and 11 minutes in The derailment

Yes Yeah Okay, so uh way back in early February America was fixated on the military's efforts to pop a Chinese balloon Which they eventually did Yeah, um And took a selfie with it At a cost of you know, who knows how many hundred thousand dollars worry about it. Yeah, the selfie was worth it I'll say that's dude's rock moment with the budget

Line item dudes rocking Rocking comedy to I feel like you could have done it cheaper They just flown the plane through it That probably wouldn't work I mean the thing is the only thing they had that could fly that high was a u2 and um Like those things just crashed if you look at them wrong. So flying one through a balloon I feel like you're just like yeah, you're asking it's like gary powers yourself into montana, you know Yeah, they might not give up the pilot either. I don't fucking weird up there

so Norfolk southern train 32 n left madison yard near st. Louis, which was bound for conway yard, which is near pittsburgh, right? There's a 151 cars long 9300 feet long and weighed 18 000 tons Yeah, small beans And it was an arduous journey like a lot of trains journeys are today So for instance the train broke in half at attica indiana, right? It just didn't So no it it broke What's better than one train two trains? Yes

Indiana is pretty flat. Yeah, like How I understand there was a slight grade there to go down to a river and then back up I mean coming from the west where we had pretty gnarly grades And still didn't break our trains it it's Yeah, anytime I look at the eastern railroads. I don't know how they're doing anything and not uploading but Um, just how it's crew timed out before reaching their terminal at peru indiana And the train was a bunch of guys have to like go out in a pickup truck in the middle of the night from a motel

Yeah Right. Yeah driven by the most insane contractor in a dodge caravan To like put this train that has broken in half back together like the crew vans are wild I have never seen someone off-road a bone stock like dodge caravan any but it's like one of the vans Like and I F 350 like maintenance away truck I'd get out of the way because they were not fucking around And like every time like they are just like oh god, they're crazy that that whole thing That's like another one of those like railroad kind of

Oh, hey, this isn't union jobs. So we can just export like, you know, whatever the fuck we want. Yeah. Yeah We've gotten all of the guys who grew up playing like crazy taxi and we have handed them Driver would feel like, you know, you're a limousine driver compared to one of these So this train was also poorly made up right it had the heaviest cars in the back of the train which made it hard to handle So, uh, yeah, according to railway workers united more than 40 percent of the weight of the train was on the rear one third Right and they had a bunch of these heavy tank cars are full of fluid sloshing around that's amplifying forces These replaced adjacent to some cushioned cars, which is where The drawbar, which is the part of the train that has the coupler on it

Um, the drawbar can move independently of the rail car Uh, which increases the slack in the train and that amplifies forces even further, right? You just do the free surface effect to yourself like cool. Okay I guess like one thing to mention here too is that uh A railroad that is co-owned by all the other railroads in st. Louis was the one who built the train The uh, st. Louis terminal railroad And it's kind of one of those curse situations where usually these terminal railroads are pretty good Because at like for like on a macro level policy for like, oh, you know, want to get more freight on the rails

But where you get the bad situation is because they're owned by the class ones You know, you get the same incentives like with psr You know the in norfolk southern union, pacific and others will kind of make they'll rush these crews Because you know, they have to get it out and they're you know, their owners are the class ones. So You get poorly assembled trains and then ns Accepted this train and accepted it as is It didn't change it Yeah, and and before precision scheduled railroading you'd try and block this train for better train handling

You put the heavy cars in the front. They're light cars in the rear, but with psr. You need the shorter dwell times in rail yard so this train is Blocked in such a way it can be assembled and disassembled as quickly as possible Which is why you know, the whole thing the whole thing was a mess Um, that's how it you know, that's how you pull apart in indiana But like not the impression I get not an unusual mass like Yeah, it seems like there's like a bunch of trains like this all the time

Yes Which is why why you've got the derailment of the week thing Yeah, right the class ones are messing up their yards But you know when you're a small railroad that's running a very expensive yard You don't have the money to fix your yard for psr So it's just the same issue as the class ones but compounded to be worse And you know because you can't spread it out about yeah, yeah, okay Yeah, so like these yards were never built for these kind of trains

And uh, it's just getting significantly worse like coming from the west like you know, we had areas where we were extending adding like 5 000 feet to some yards Uh of track and stuff like that, but in kind of like the mess the spaghetti mess that is east st Lewis there's nowhere really to do that Uh, you can't really make any of these yards bigger So it's just an awful situation all around that sounds fucking horrible So uh despite this, you know, uh 32 n makes it most of the way through its journey Um, and this train was what's called a key train, right?

Which is the train that carries more than five cars of specified hazardous material So it was limited to 50 miles an hour um And as it was approaching the pennsylvania border Um Pissed shit himself. Yeah, we get this lovely surveillance image here where we can say That doesn't look good. Yeah, that looks like I don't know what you're talking about. That looks fine It's look look how small the fire is and think how long the train is

What's good? That's a good point I'm very small part of the train is on. I'm deliberately ignoring the massive black smoke cloud on the Yeah 0 0 0 1 percent of the train is currently on fire. Yeah, exactly. So what's the fucking problem? So you can train fires over context on a situation like this if this was like a thursday There's a very solid chance someone would have been around to see this Uh, you know, you finally get to the weekend Everyone who's out there doing track maintenance or single signal work or anything like that on this busy main line

You know, they're trying to get out of work by like three or four if they can because Uh, if you're like a maintenance person, you generally have better weekends than the train crews so You know, we would be the extra set of eyes and we would call in issues whenever, you know, you see them, but on a friday night They aren't there so you've lost more of your kind of safety nets on top of the detectors having issues and all that So like a lot of couple of the DRM months I worked were all friday night ones

So just trying to go to the bar Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I had two on Easter weekend because the people were just trying to get home Yeah But uh, this uh security camera footage was from I believe Salem, Ohio, which is about 20 miles from east palestine Um, and this train went over a defect detector With a pretty significant defect Which was for whatever reason not relayed to the crew right

Does and that has to go through a person Yes, there's someone working a miserable friday night desk job brutal in and someone has worked out Southern because they're headquarters for maintenance and you know On a friday night Probably not having a great time like you're newer at your job because you're working your friday night You know, you might not just not Got this benefit. I don't know like on fire on fire. There isn't any provision for that to be like automatic

I believe according to the ntsb The detector recorded a much lower temperature than would be expected for the car being on fire So it was a miss aimed there's like snow on the ground. I don't know There was snow on the ground. Yeah, so, you know, this is this problem goes completely It was not detected by the detector Which is the one job it has For your one job. Yeah It continues merrily rolling on its way until it gets to the detector in east palestine

Which relays to the crew The train is on fire. You should stop And the crew which was three people. I believe there was engineer conductor and there was a trainee in there The engineer starts applying the brakes To stop the train but before any appreciable braking can happen Possibly before even the detector had finished telling him to put on the brakes the train derails

So is this sort of like as soon as they had the information available to them they did what they could? Yes, and it just didn't matter sort of like She know where it's like train on fight just on the ground it's like someone telling you you're about to get punched as the Fist is landing in your face Yeah, Jesus. Okay. Thank you. Yeah I okay that sounds like it's rain terrain pull up pull up pull up bam, and I'm on the ground Yeah, you really hate my right ground On the ground like terrain

The train did derail next to a biker bar. Oh, thank god You know if you want to go to the bar the crew is fine, right? I can say thank god not yes The crew is fine. Okay. Yes, really into the bike bar. Yeah, it's a hideout. What's the problem? Yeah so the um You know so the first few cars the train made it through find and there was a hopper car the one we see here That derailed and an arrest of the train sort of slammed into it and piled up, right? um Few cars full of hazmat derailed included notably five cars of vinyl chloride

Um, good, right? That's what I've heard. Yes. It's the shit we like. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Fucking Norfolk Southern now this This fire horns anyway Why is it because it has a haunts in the logo, you know a horse? Yeah, how do we get from horse to haunts? You gotta not worry about it group. Okay Okay, or no a facebook page. Excuse me um

It's dumb foam or shit. Um, okay. So no, you know what explain the whole thing ross. No Explain the joke or else so uh So these these There were several hazmat cars on the ground leaking stuff was on fire Uh, the fire was very difficult to get under control. I think it burned for about four days and over those four days these these

Vinyl chloride cars. They're having some in arresting chemical reactions in them, right? uh pressure and temperature is going up and so Folks who were in charge of the cleanup uh We're like We got to do something about this Uh, because having an explosion would be extremely bad

uh, you know, because you would have uh You might have shrapnel thrown long distances. You might you would have you would have sort of an uncontrolled situation Um in that case so the decision was made To do a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride About to have to do some cool shit Uh having worked derailments kind of one of the things that a lot of like from outside the industry a lot of people don't realize is that uh like

When you have a derailment it basically becomes like this all hands on deck You're calling every contractor. They're like a coiled spring ready to just I mean they're vultures really but like They're ready to just just destroy everything and get the track back and uh like They're not usually used to These kind of has meant derailments like some of them are used to it, but

like on the gulf coast where we have a lot of this kind of stuff but yeah, it's Kind of hard like a lot of people are talking about how the track got restored before they just did anything It's just like it's such a like, you know It's almost like oh, okay, you know fold a gap has happened. You know, it's def con one That's like how these kind of things work You don't think there's a lot of decision points and then the half of the management the whole time is trying to figure out

Who's at fault so their department doesn't get railed by uh budget cuts or who they're getting having to pay for it So, you know from track You know, we would have one guy out there making sure the actual derailments being cleaned up and fixed But there's a four or five other track inspectors and management out there Desperately combing over every piece of track to look for a reason that we can say it wasn't our fault And to run trains pasta it's almost like that chair noble kind of like everyone is looking for a reason to not be at fault You know the mechanical department guys are out there taking photo You know, I would be out there taking a photo of every wheel every flange. I could find

Everything and it's all going to go in a big giant derailment report and it's all a rat race to figure out who's screwed And meanwhile hulture is just chopping up every car That derailed or try you know attempting to handle all the firefighting stuff And and at the same time the state regulatory stuff They don't show up like these people are generally like they have agreements with the railroads to like of expectations And the contractors and they kind of expect you to do the right thing Because it kind of again, they don't have the manpower and like

resources to actually Go to every single derailment unless it's bad like this one So That's a grim Yeah, I assume there's some sort of public pressure component to this And like on this main line. This is the norfolk southern main line Like there is immense pressure from every little layer of management above you to get this goddamn track back in service and uh

If you don't you know that that's your head and most of our derailments. We would get a lot of hours cleaned up in 24 hours uh Even if the track wasn't that important to be honest So, you know, like there's just actually crisis response Yeah, like I like I ordered like 10 million dollars a ballast from halfway across the state because you know, we didn't have it close enough and like You know, they didn't even use the track for a whole two days. It drove me insane That's fucking idiots

So it's just like no roads are so cool, man It's amazing they can do this like so fast But it's also because it's so there's so little decisions to actually be made It's just there's a coiled spring Ready to just do it So they'll overlook things that are outside of the norm of a derailment And this is like in like war time conditions, you know Yes, and a lot of these people are all ex-military

Like a lot of your management are ex-army officers or something like that like that persists that attitude so you have a lot of people who are looking at this as like a situation to be solved and you know most of them Don't know what the hell vinyl chloride is Yeah So we got these tank cars lying on the ground temperatures increasing

Folks are like, okay, we got to do a controlled burn. We got to vent this chemical out So they put shaped charges on the five cars Yes Someone give me Someone give me a like a photoshop of the dot car with like contact dra bricks all over it Like contractors will just get this shit out of places you didn't like they have stuff that I would never assume they would have they always had just Everything you just wouldn't think they would have

to do these kind of crazy things so And this used to be something that was all inside the railroad but kind of got externalized Like everything we externalized the explosives guys. Yeah, and like The division I worked on like we had a contractor that would have the track panels all like strategically laid out for where derailments were common and or most important to be fixed and like piles of ballast ready to go and You know like all these materials sit out and one of the frustrating things is that we didn't do this ourselves Uh, and that's kind of like one of the things that like not this is pre psr But you know, it's like the cannibalizing of your state capacity

to do things And while the rear would still have a lot of that compared to other industries like it, you know, they're suffering from that too and So then some of the critical decision making also is lost to that because like most of the contractors They don't know what the fuck vinyl chloride is. They hire someone to know that for them if that comes up Yeah, and They could be you know halfway across the country still before they're dealing with the firefighting and all that Oh, yeah, you have to uh

You would call my mom who works at chemtrak Yeah, and then she would tell you what vinyl chloride is Hey, mrs. Rosniak Yeah, I'm knee deep with some shit. I don't recognize and there's a burning sensation And like a lot of like the epa and your state epa's they're not equipped For the type of timescale the railroads want to work with like you know

Fixed by tomorrow sort of thing. Yeah, okay, uh tcqa whatever the texas epa one it's like a commission instead of an agency or whatever but like, uh Uh, you know their timescale is you know, we got a couple months or years to work on this The railroad wants that track back, you know, 48 hours at most Uh And it's unacceptable to to make it last any longer than that. So it's very hard for Especially in ohio, you know state that doesn't really known for its progressive politics or a funding of its epa Uh outside of late places like Cleveland where they've done a lot of really good stuff with cleaning up the river and everything

You know, they don't have the capacity to oversight the railroads on this Cool yeah So they blow this shit up they blow this shit up right After digging trenches next to the cars to the vinyl chloride liquid will pool in the trench as opposed to like running off into creeks um And we get this wonderful picture of when they these cars essentially, you know There was essentially an explosion but not in the same way that it would have happened if it were uncontrolled

You get this massive plume of smoke That goes directly into an atmospheric inversion Giving sort of the impression that there's just this giant mushroom cloud that's gone off. Um It's that goddamn lake effect weather. Yeah Cool and it just like hangs over the town just like hangs over the town for a while. Yeah Scares the shit out of everyone for good reason. I might add definitely choose your poison situation uh And I I I don't know if the people involved could have really been equipped to make a better decision

Uh, even though they should have it's not like I I I see Yeah I I I see in the notes here that says in a situation where a thing is going to blow up It's generally best to blow it up on your time than its time, which is a good t-shirt Like eod fans, you know Yeah, it's uh, I I don't think there was much else you could have done here because if you wanted to somehow like

Cool down the cars that might not work if you wanted to somehow Transfer the liquid to another vessel where it can be monitored We have to get up next to this car that might blow up at any time And stick a pipe on there and then you have to figure out how to cool the car The the liquid sufficiently that it's not gonna, you know Vaporize and do something unexpected while you're transferring and I think this was basically Once those cars are on the ground and they seem to be Self-polymerizing this is about the only thing you can do

It's this or bigger boom. Yeah Cool, so it could have been worse. Yeah Because I think I think if you want to transfer the vinyl chloride you'd have to cool the whole car down to 90 degrees fahrenheit Yeah, I don't know how east Palestine would have the resources the giant of water or power to do the outside pen. Yeah Yeah, yeah 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 Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for Um, it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes So you can learn about exciting topics like guns pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them The money we raise through patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month

Uh, 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 So, you know and from this we get, you know, all these nasty reports of massive fish kills in the streams and creeks around the town Uh, some people's chickens and pets died Some livestock may have been affected

This was done with a two mile evacuation zone around the uh, the site of the wreck Um, you know, they had they had the whole town evacuated, of course before they did this explosion Um, you know, but sort of since then, you know, a lot of people have been very paranoid to go back to the town Because it's been horribly poisoned by the railroad Yeah And like it's impossible for you to like town, you know, as much as the epa might be monitoring the air quality It's like you can still like Psychogenically be very harmed by this and that's not to say that you're like crazy or making it up because I would be fucking

Psychogenically harmed. I would fucking and not want to go back to my house and this shit Um, not to mention the very real possibility that you are being like materially harmed by it Yeah, and indoor air quality can vary and stuff like that and then yeah There's all this speculation about what's the water supply like especially if you have wells in the area You're not on the municipal supply um You know, there's this like there's no way that for the government to like 100 percent reassure you about this or Yes, anything, but like there there's nothing they can say that would like make you not be frightened of this anymore

I think and a lot of the chemical monitoring is being done by Norfolk Southern contractors. Um, cool. Yeah well, one of the nice things about the arrelments in a cursed way is uh The insurance money is good enough that usually they do a good job on that but Because they're hiring externally, but it varies Uh, especially whenever the railroad's terrified of a regulatory response. So Yes, they will hopefully do a better job than normal because

Out of fear of the state But uh, great one thing fucking fucking great. Yeah, I'm touching the big bug saying it's a fraud sign That's really cursed is you know, this is in the core of the industrial Midwest like One thing with hard that's very hard for testing for chemicals along track like this is it's already deeply contaminated Like don't really have a good baseline. So it's Gonna be harder to tell how much of this was just this derailment or the last 150 years of

Being in the triangle of chemical and steel industry You have like made Liam so Matty has had to get up and walk around You know, you know, I'm sorry. I was reaching for a cable. Uh, my bad. Yeah, but uh, Ted Kaczynski had the right idea is what I'm saying. I'm joking. That's obviously a fucking joke Fucking yell at me in the comments Shut the fuck up, dude You know taking a core sample for uh soil testing and accidentally drilling into another vinyl chloride tank car That was buried there

Tanker car that was buried in like 1944 or something and then like and then hitting the bomb car Call 811 before you dig Yeah, especially no one knows what's under there We have yeah, our our our soil surveys ran out in the 30s. So whatever happens to you there is between you and god The railroad actively doesn't want to know what's under its track and uh, the people who buried this stuff there take it with them to the grave. So Like pirate treasure, but for like sometimes it could be a corvette, you know There are derailments because like like one of the funny stories I heard from a lot of guys before the eight big 90s You know, whenever there was an auto train derailment, you know, just 20 new corvettes disappear

Yeah, sure. We crushed them and put them in the hole And you know, you know, as long as everyone got a corvette, you know, who cares That is that is mutual aid probably Yes, yeah The first thing that happened was uh, what were the tragic things is like every auto rack derailment those cars all get crushed Even if they're brand new if the tiniest derailment Because someone lost you where they were able to sue the railroad successfully by

a railroad essentially had a a whole agreement with employees could buy cars from derailments and Someone and who bought that car got in in a car accident and someone somehow fought a legal battle All the way back to the railroad saying it was their fault And uh, now we just crush them all It probably was the railroad's fault. Okay, that's not crazy. Oh sure, but it's like no fun allowed for anything I think it was like eight years after the railroad had sold it. I don't know. It felt like a stretch But uh, it was like the wheels fell off or something. I don't know I don't know. It's

Frustrating to see when you work at derailment perfectly good product often just to be crushed because that's the only way the insurance money will pay out Most efficient system of resources allocation. Yeah Now the good news about this derailment is of course, uh, our secretary of transportation Uh, Pete Buttigieg was immediately on site and in control of the situation Speaking of speaking of like former military officers. Yeah, I was about to say, uh He was not he was not on the scene. I don't believe he commented on it until like 10 days later Um, when when sort of like it got bad enough. They was like, oh shit

I mean in fairness when the media finally took notice. Um, yeah It was distracted by the balloon like all of us. We were all chasing that balloon across the united states one of the crazy things was like Pittsburgh's press had the derailment pinned on the right thing and everything like the same day as they blew up the train like Like four or five days in and then national media kind of and like with like online just had this like weird scatterbrained like response like a week later It is yeah, and I think one thing is like institutionally like we're so you in the industry

We're so used to this being a thing no one talks about I mean, I think only one of the derailments I ever worked was even in the news at all at like any level and uh Only because it happened literally right in front of you know on a main road like next to a main road and it's like It this stuff is so out of sight and out of mind that it's like jarring how much people Pay attention to derailments now like after yeah it being like a You know who even cares or even aware of it uh There was like some weird circumstances around the coverage. I mean, you know because

When it was burning for like four days. No one seemed to notice They blew it up. No one noticed for another again a week. Yeah, and then you know all of a sudden this becomes front page news everywhere Uh, I guess because they got the balloon Um, you know and then then we then then a bunch of stupid stuff happens, right? Yeah, uh governor mark the wine or yeah, is it mark? Mike for Mike the wine. Mike the wine. Yes, uh he shows up two hours late for his own press conference, right and A guy with a news station tried to deliver a scheduled report from the cafeteria where the pressure was ongoing

Despite being told not to and that guy got arrested And then they released them afterwards, but everyone's like oh my god It's like American Stalinism begins now. Um, you know, they're trying to hide Fucking, you know, American Chernobyl. I I did see that some of this was apparently like deliberate russian disinformation Which is like cool. Yeah, okay. It's like an easy layout, you know to be like all you have to do is just boost a couple of accounts Like yeah, it's cheap. Yeah What was crazy was just like everyone

Fucked up from the communication end for anyone outside of the town deeply fucked up because like I like as much as like I don't think the head of the DOT has to comment on every derailment, but like I'm kind of like whatever on peep, but like It's such as a sign of bad political vibe sense to like just Not realize that like he seemed like he was in a paralysis about this and he wanted to be president too like yeah Yeah, one of the things that you have to do if you if you're president is be ready to like say something

We're fucking like 9 11 to happen. Yeah, and you can't have handle like a little miniature 9 11 specific to your job and like it's such a layup to Rail on the railroads about it, but uh-huh and they kind of just yeah, I didn't intend that one, but uh like They just kind of let it go and while peeps whatever it kind of is like Oh, maybe you shouldn't do go any further because god you have no sense of like timing or messaging

They kind of just let this layup go Yeah, and yeah Meanwhile trump was out there like instantly Yeah Well, no like everyone was like late. It was like what three weeks later. I think at that point And then biden just never even went Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah buttons like fuck that. I'm going to island

And then like a normal dude's rock to be fair Yeah, well like all these deramans like the it's very normal for the epa to order the cleanup And so like at least they did that publicly, but they didn't talk about it enough like It's just bad politics Yeah, and it's not a whole bunch of conspiracy theories seem to be sprouting up around the uh The derailment, right? Um, a lot of people, uh, especially initially were like, oh my god This toxic gas cloud is going to affect people as far away as like southern new york or like tide water virginia

Which uh, did not happen Um, it is again with the like psychogenetic illness stuff, you know, you can you can make yourself sick by worrying about it At least somewhat and this is a very frightening thing. So Um, it's it's very it's like a like I said, it's a layup to just be like this is proof that uh america which i'm spelling here with three ks Has shinobled itself and it's like no america does that in like tons of different ways all the time But like this is not especially special. No, no, exactly. It's it's just eye catching Right. Yeah

What do you do get which is interesting is this a lot more reporting on the sort of constant low rumble of derailments ever since, you know Like uh, you know a locomotive falls over in like, uh, Washington state and all of a sudden this makes the news everywhere. It's kind of like no one would have cared about that uh You know 14 weeks ago That's probably a good thing It was like one in houston that week where it was like a week after when it got into the news and it's like

Uh diesel oil like it has matt spilled and it's like it hit a truck. So the truck's fuel spilled and it's like All right people technically has matt It is has matt but like all you got to do is put some cat litter out and you're done like it's not no water spain Like Oh my god people. I mean, I guess it's good that people are noticing or care about like the destruction of american railroads, but like Man, I also know they're just gonna forget pretty quickly and that's why it took us this long to sort of like get this one right Yes, right

There was one that kind of went well with the response was a bnsf put a train on the ground And next to this one was that one that ran through that derail on a reservation Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah Yeah, and uh, they think So bnsf for some reason Foolishly like I don't I don't know why they had ever agreed to this like from a railroad perspective But they agreed to only move like 20 cars a day To an oil refinery and like the 90s

And then you know the fracking boom happens and now you're moving 100 car trains probably daily and Now it's going through a whole court process because the reservation they violated the reservation agreement and the court signed Excited with them. So we'll see how that goes. Yeah It's just crazy to see this like all like there's good things coming out of it but now the the greater attention to derailments like that, but uh Also, you get that like knee jerky like I'm almost sometimes worried like people will kind of think of it like Chernobyl where it's like Become anti rail and then

Don't know we ship everything via trucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which of course never has my accidents You know, Houston's had chlorine truck like accidents before those are not fun uh I don't want more has meant on the reds. Hey, he just want to kill like 50 families Talk about an actual like chemical weapon situation It's just happening on the street. Yeah. Yeah Like at least you have some kind of separation like this is like semi controlled environment Even if it is built on like five layers of ddt cars crashed on top of each other

Yeah So the one of the media reactions, which I think uh It was one of the weirdest It was very politicized and one which I thought was just flat out wrong Is the brake thing? I'm gonna talk about the brake thing. Oh boy Um, maybe I do need a beer at 10 a.m Hey, it's it's one of my favorite diagrams. It's the Westinghouse outbreak

The Westinghouse outbreak. Yes the device So there was uh A certain media cost out cock on there and I get cheap heat by being like, I'm trying So you know, we there there was a lot of media attention to uh america's quote civil war era unquote braking system

Uh that we use on trains the Westinghouse air brake system So why are we still using these civil war era brakes? And I I'm gonna go full fud about this. Why am I still using a 1911 because it works? Yeah, it's a solved it's a solved problem to solve technology. This is as good as it's ever gonna get I only need eight rounds stopping power stopping power stopping power shut up Yeah, it's like this this was a quote from I want to say sarah feinberg who was the FRA chief back when Wellington northern Santa Fe put a big uh crude oil train on the ground

uh Probably like 10 years back um And uh, you know the the thing here is the Why you know, why are we trying to solve? You know the covid pandemic with a 19th century technology like vaccines, right? 18th century, right 18th century. Yeah, why are we using a roman era alloy like steel, right? Why are we using stone age technology like wheels?

um You know the the Westinghouse air brake is very simple. It's very reliable. It's basically failsafe Each car has a cylinder of compressed air on it compressed air pipe runs the length of the train A reduction in pressure and that main train air pipe Triggers the cylinders on each car to put the brakes on Going to the physics this happens sort of sequentially car by car, right? This brake signal propagates at about the speed of sound down the length of the train which For most purposes is fine

um You know there's the problem here wasn't that the train didn't stop quickly enough when they Tried to stop it. It's that they didn't know to try and stop it quickly, right? It's pretty hard to stop a train when the wheels are not wheels. Yes. Yeah Well, I mean it's stopping. I'll say that like uh, it's a little breaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah And there's there's some ways this brake system can fail, right?

If you overuse the brakes sometimes you bleed off enough air that it's hard to set the brakes again If you if you're a single idiotic frenchman and you go and disable every brake down the length of your train Yes, you could you could do that Um, if you're sitting too long without power the air will eventually bleed off and release the brakes These are both known quantities which can be corrected for with good train handling and hand brakes um now I ask you though

What improves every system and never has faults tobacco Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah tobacco. All right computers No, you motherfuckers. No thinking sand This is gonna be like the train equivalent of that movie the net whether they fucking hack sandra bullock's car, but like And What would be better than just thinking sand thinking sand that talks to each other via radio signals. Yeah, huh?

Nope Not even a hard line of coffee. Fuck yourself. We just did a whole episode about safety critical software engineering and like What a fun noise So, uh, what is electronically controlled pneumatic brakes? I assume it's bad. Is it bad? Oh, we'll get to some ways. It's bad Oh fucking horrific, bud So there was this push um

In a couple of outlets to say, okay, pete buddha just has to do something Why not reinstate this breaking safety rule that the trump administration rejected to mandate These new fancy electronically controlled pneumatic brake systems on hazardous materials trains It may not have stopped this derailment, but it would have stopped other ones, right? And so A lot of people Asked like rhetorical questions like why doesn't pete move to do this, right? Why don't they do something, right? Why did the railroads want to adopt this technology before back in 2008 and they don't want to do it now? And um

Well, we're here to answer the rhetorical question Yay for us put that in the t-shirt. Yeah so the um The ecp system is very similar to the westinghouse air brake system Except that rather than the brake signal being propagated by a change in air pressure It's from a cable that goes down the length of the train, right? Um, and then the computer system on each car shit. Yeah by wire. No, thank you

If it ain't bow and I ain't going Don't worry about the 737 back shit. They just went out That's why I'm always in a 747 god's airplane. Yes I bet god would fly in one of these Yeah This means theoretically you have an instant response along the length of the train as opposed to you know, this sort of One car puts the brakes on the next one the next one the next one so and so forth, right?

So now back in 2008 the railroads are all over this technology, right? It was sort of ostensibly for safety But a big part of it is about labor productivity, right? I was gonna say I remember some other stuff that happened in 2008, and I think there may have been some financial imperatives acting on the railroads Yeah So the roads are making a killing in 2008. Yeah Cole. Yeah. Oh How to reverse it, yeah

So ecp braking involves adding the spoil microcontroller on each car that would be able to monitor vital information Like the status of the brakes Barring town patures various other little bits and bobs where they're currently checked by hand That means fewer car inspections and fewer carmen required to do those inspections Now the railroads have since made all those labor productivity gains by simply telling the carmen to work harder, bitch but uh Yeah, you go from doing two minute inspections to 90 seconds and it's like You could have a long car. I'm good. How the hell do you look at the whole car in 90 seconds?

You can't walk around all in thoroughly. No, I'm sure it's fine Um, you have another couple benefits from the system potentially You know in your conventional air brake system, you can't do a partial release of brakes, right? So if I I'm coming down a hill and I realize I applied the brakes too hard I can't back off gradually. I have to do a full release and then put the brakes back on Um An ecp system would be capable of like a partial release Uh, ecp systems would lead to shorter stopping distances theoretically

And would prevent some kinds of derailments in emergency brake situation theoretically Yeah, see and this is all very well and good and in laboratory environments, it worked very well Uh, but there was a big issue that was discovered during When you apply it to like and you apply it to the the the real environment of the infinite radial plane of indiana Yes. Yes. Now. We must imagine a perfectly spherical indiana Yeah, so the problem was that when they tried it on actual trains in the wild um in the wild

None of it worked In fact, there was a whole lot of weird problems that developed with these systems, right? So one of the most common experience issue early there was an interference issue. Oh, yeah Oh, yeah, I love that shit Which is that on test trains if you had Two ecp equipped trains that passed each other. There was enough electromagnetic interference between the two systems They'd both go into emergency brakes automatically Fuck yeah

I'm just like they like each other too much. They just stopped to hang out, you know There was one instance in australia, which is so far the only place that commonly uses ecp on freight trains But only on certain iron ore trains Uh in australia, they had a virtual train split, right? Which is the system lost communication with the back of the train It automatically applied emergency brakes And then when the engineer went back to set handbrakes while the problem was resolved The ecp system regained contact with the back of the train

Released the brakes and went merrily on its way for 200 kilometers without anyone in it all right What you just You just stranded an australian man in the middle of like the northern territory or whatever with like It'll take a while till anyone even knows this happened Yeah, I was gonna say you did like the fucking what's that one like American bomber that just got lost in the fucking sahara you put that man in a nightmare survival scenario on his own railroad

Um, yeah, the other problem is this required every car to be equipped with batteries, which of course caught fire um Yeah, I mean the thing is I was I was originally gonna try and move the Cars of vinyl chloride, but then I had to charge my samsung galaxy s7 Yeah, oh, I see you you also watched that video Yeah, yeah, um, yeah, yeah, it's basically like in cards increasingly a dankpots fan channel. Yes. Yeah So this obama era mandate for these ecp brakes would have only applied to high hazard flammable unit trains, right? um

and that is A train that carries one kind of cargo a unit train And that's you know, you're a little like a boutique chemical company that only makes like fluorides or whatever um Like a train coming from them with like full cars of like the nastiest shit in the world is a high hazard unit train Uh, no, it is not no Damn, uh, okay. Oh, it's like a minimum length here of like 30 cars or something. I want to say Um, it's like two genders of these trains. You have your your fracking oil boom train

It's a whole crude oil train and then you got your iowa ethanol bomb train Uh, it's all corn Yeah, those are the two genders of class three flammable unit trains so I think you occasionally get petroleum gas and um, if the war in ukraine keeps going you might see a lot more natural gas by rail um one propane unit train in montana that bridges the pipeline But i'm not aware speaking of shipping bombs by rail, you know

Yeah We still do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean bombs are heavy. I wouldn't want to fly them around No A lot of this is like theoretically and I retire the b52 to introduce my bomb train I reinvent the nuclear triad by rail anymore. Uh, they took that away from us. I know Oh, no shame Yeah, the peacekeeper wasn't it the strategic oil There was the like when they actually just moved the warheads around from amarillo. Uh, yeah, the the the white train

Yeah Is that is that the missile train or is that the fema concentration camp train? Uh, it's the that's just all also cars is the third secret Very obvious nuclear bomb train. Yes. Yes. Yes protesters could easily identify and uh Make a mockery by blocking the track Oh Nice, yeah Yeah, so

If you have a lot of cars that are in you know, sort of captive service, right? They they are they run as a big unit back and forth between terminal a and terminal b forever applying Uh, ecp breaks to those cars and locomotives is easy And that's why some of the big conveyor belt style iron ore operations in australia And I think also kebek actually have started using ecp because it's it's relatively easy to do there A lot of the test trains were coal trains Uh in the us

Yeah Yeah, because you just bring that down to lambert's point unload it and then go back up to the mine You know, you're literally going in a loop um that So that means you're not applying the system to too many cars The problem comes when you want this braking system on all the hazmat trains or even just key trains As uh ns 32 n was right?

Uh pretty much every train Yes, uh in certain parts of the country like houston has like over, you know, 130 trains a day 110 of them have at least five high Like level hazmat cars many of them many more so Yeah, and the idea is to give all of these all of this rolling stock these new fancy fucking like wi-fi brakes or whatever But some of them still have the oily rag bearings

Thankfully, those are gone. Those are gone. Yeah from normal trains okay, yeah so You have significant complications now, which is that ecp is sort of an all or nothing system If you want the benefit to the train every car on the train must have the system installed um Theoretically an ecp car could be controlled through a conventional air brake signal Not all the systems are engineered for that and again, you lose all the benefits here

so You you sort of have a battery on the thing you already have and you've just gone. Yeah, it's the future now Hybrid hybrid shut up. Yeah. Yeah, literally. Yeah, everything's gonna have batteries forever. I We're gonna rare earth missiles. Don't worry about it. Yeah So I love cadmium You have maybe two possible solutions if you want an ecp mandate, which is either run hazmat in separate trains Or upgrade the entire 1.7 million car strong us railroad fleet

It's not just the u.s. It had to be canada and mexico too. Yes, you would also need to get canada in mexico um Neither of those are very easy options you know and I guess for option one we've spoken at length in an earlier episode the about the railroads obsession with productivity They want to run fewer and longer trains, but this is at least allowed them to set very low freight rates They still charge an arm and a leg for hazmat, but not to the extent that they used to have to right But once you have to treat hazmat

especially on to different brakes brake systems the expense of shipping by rail goes up and Rail customers are already mad at low quality of service and inconsistency and the fees and the charges A lot of hazmat shippers would probably say to hell with this and start Shipping all their horrible death chemicals on trucks, which are because they don't look Yeah, those those are inherently more accident prone And on top of that from the other end Now you have like, you know several thousand small rail car owners like farmer co-op and

randoms town, iowa that now can't afford to Upgrade their probably 40 year old hopper cars that they don't want to spend all that money on and Now you've just utterly thrashed freight transportation in the united states Yeah How to push the one button that destroys freight transport by train and like Maybe you could do it with like a lot of federal money and do it in like five or ten years, but

You're basically any car that's older than 30 years That car is getting chopped up and instead of getting upgraded. You're just building another thousand rail cars Yeah new deal sort of money and like expensive state power and everything In pursuit of like a pretty marginal benefit that also maybe just doesn't work. Yeah Sometimes projects your train Right. Yeah, you're not even getting the good version of ecp. Like if we had like digital automatic couplers, you know This would work a lot better. You're getting the the bargain bin You know

garbage Bastery to it and call it good Sort of and my my shitty wi-fi router and you know, who knows how many of those You know, think of like you just it's like you've now turned every freight car into a printer It's now you have all these people who don't work with electronics and now they have to also make sure all this other shit works and at the same time you're trying to cut as many of those laborers as possible and Now you have to hire a lot more people who know how to work on that stuff. It's just nightmare. Yeah, like

And like not even a nightmare and like any of the any of the ways that like upgrading technology usually is just like a totally unforced arrow which Cool, I mean, I I think I speak for all of us when I say that this this podcast is strongly like pro fud pro 1911 pro 45 Yeah, yeah, unapologetically. Yes Yeah, and so we we you know carry that idea. That's why ideally bsd technology future Yeah I found the one thing though It's the same thing that's trying to upgrade this this microphone or the soundboard is like no

I found one thing that works right. I will use it until I am 9 000 years old I will I will never abandon the procaster. I will teach my children to use this microphone Uh, and and their children and their children's children, you know, um, I believe he went to the fucking bathroom A lot of engineering majors and stuff like that will learn this through school eventually. Hopefully sometimes Sometimes, you know, we figured out the best solution to a problem But like Outsiders to an industry. It's really hard to have the nuance

To have any idea what the fuck is going on. I mean just in general I feel like there's a lot of sort of like places where technology has plateaued and that's not to say that there's no new interesting Developments coming because of course there are there's a ton of shit I'm interested in there are so many like current implementations of things where it feels like there is a Generational shift waiting to happen that hasn't and just everything is like Well, this is like a I'll buy that a solved technology, you know, your smartphone is as good as it's going to get until someone invents the next thing You know Fucking and I feel this way about a lot of stuff. The reason why I went to

1911 stairs because I think firearms were like basically there Uh, and you know, like it's nothing really crazy is going on the firearms anymore No, I'm like a sort of a personal level even all the way up to sort of like, you know The air force of the navy fucking around with rail guns or like directed energy weapons or whatever and it's like No, that's decades away and even then it may not like be worth it like It feels like we're at sort of like dead ends of things I'll buy that and you know, it's one of those things where like you need to like Have something that like completely shifts the thing and like changes everything, but we just haven't had that yet

I don't know what it's going to be exactly. What are the most technology? I got talking about guns because I was bored Uh, and like the technology is kind of an excuse to ignore the very real human problem. Oh, yeah Yeah, like you're not dealing with the actual structural issue You're just kind of trying to throw a solution at a problem without You know considering that, you know, there's better ways to just do it what with what we have now Mm-hmm. That just take a different attitude. Like, yeah Hey, so not to not to not to divert too much, but I'm fucking hungry. Can we wrap this up?

Yeah, all right, let me just sum up here in 2070 every locomotive looks like Everyone looks like a Glock by a 1911 because it's the best one we figured it out both wars by a 1911 so um You know, uh, I think we mentioned, you know, who really pays for this technology It's mostly going to be shippers because railroads have sort of gotten out of the business of owning railroad cars You know, they're owned by like union tank car or rail box or individual businesses They're sometimes by short lines to like make a buy a rail car

They make a they make a buck by leasing out these uh, this rolling stock, right? Um, be like rail car landlords. We can do that. We could buy one rail car for oh, yeah, that's a that's like a big thing I mean, uh, you look at like the um, the arkansas and oklahoma railroad is a short line in Arkansas and oklahoma the a ok. Yeah, and they um They own like thousands of box cars and they don't use any of them. They just lease them out um All right. It was arc mountain. Yeah um, you know and the the installing the system

I think I I read a study from booze island hamilton that said it would be about four thousand dollars a car Which when you're dealing with we can buy a we can buy the salisbury beach private car. I just need Uh, they won't tell me how much it is a bunch of nazis poa Well, I just to install the thing is four thousand dollars a car And that means you're also retraining every mechanic and carman on the railroad Setting up a whole logistics system to get parts supplied so on and so forth I'm sure new york air brake and wab tech are watering at this out mouth

Their mouth is watering at this opportunity, but you know, absolutely You know, we would also have this long period of transition Because even when the railroads were bullish on ecp, they thought it would take 10 years at minimum to install all this stuff During this period huge portions of the railcar fleet would be straight up incompatible with each other And it would cause sort of chaos and pandemonium on the railroads that we haven't seen since World war one um So that's sort of the case against ecp here

um Oh, the other thing is what I thought would be, you know, if you did ecp on the entire railroad network You you have absurd situations like the strassberg railroad would have to put ecp on their steam locomotives Yeah, just because they do have an interchange freight service, um, I mean ship British steam locomotives have to have aws So yeah, let's do it have to wire in a little box into into the thing But sort of yeah a case against ecp, you know, the technology underperformed in real life conditions. It was unreliable It would be very expensive and time-consuming to effectively implement and well Maybe if it works as advertised, it would improve safety on the railroad

It's as likely to reduce the safety of the transportation system as a whole Going to hazmat mode shift the trucking And we need to let it cook a bit. Yeah It's not ready. This is not a mature technology Um, I think the only places where it is used Are those big iron ore trains we mentioned earlier. I think some of the newest chinese ice speed trains have it Um, and I think there are it's on a handful of emu's in japan and europe, but like those are way easier Engineering problems than you know, a hundred car freight trains

Yeah, and just easier problems in general. There's just less Physical work involved less failure points. It's all it doesn't have to come apart all the time Like you move remove a lot of the failure modes. Yeah And in the meantime, you know, railroads have widely adopted something called distributed power, right? That's when you have a locomotive in the front of the train. You have one at the back of the train A lot of times you have one in the middle of the train Um, and that means and these are all controlled by radio and what this means is When I apply conventional air brakes, right?

Um, that brake signal is now propagating from three locations on the train So even if it's You know, uh, one and a half or two mile long train And you're still looking at, you know, three or four seconds for that brake signal to propagate Which is it as good as instant? but pretty close um

So it's measured in a couple of seconds not even double digits for the whole train to really start feeling any of this So it's not bad Yeah, so the very expensive way to theoretically gain a very Very marginal improvement of safety Uh, and also just totally fuck american railroading. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, screw everything up real bad. Well, it's that fun here Yeah Um, all right, that was ecp Uh, talk a bit about the cleanup process. You can see both those tracks are back. Um

Yeah, that's most important thing things still going. Yeah, just bury those by the side of the things call it good, you know Yeah, exactly. Just put up thankfully. We don't do that much anymore Not that much much Class two and three smaller railroads the little bastards get away with a lot There was like this period during the bush era where uh, they the bush administration started realizing they were putting these tiny railroads out of business and uh, they were like, oh god, we have to stop doing this Because kind of like rolling back to the ecp thing where it's like, oh all this freight's going to start shifting to something that they can't handle it like and uh, so like

A lot of class twos and threes just kind of get away with this shit and uh They're scary sometimes Well, one I was worked on a lot of like That my railroad had took back from they leased it out and took it back because they started running crude oil on it and uh, they got utterly terrified of lock maga and ticking a uh southwest town and uh near uh the uh uh permian basin and uh, they spent like 300 million dollars rebuilding the entire

250 mile long section of track like That was crazy Just found a each oil train makes a million dollars. So Found basically a corduroy road of derailed tanker cars underneath the roadbed Um, so Norfolk southern is responsible for the cost to clean up Uh, your soil was heavily contaminated not just by the vinyl chloride, but all the other nasty chemicals on the train um

The railroad is already nasty soil as we've established. Yeah, the railroad partially reopened on february 9th Um They've been screwing people over over the like compensation and stuff like making people go back to their houses to get documentation to prove that Offer of like $25,000 to the town. Yeah. Yeah, that was embarrassing They had a they had a town meeting where they like refused to have an executive shop because they thought someone was going to shoot them Which justifiable understandable. Yeah, that's uh They uh, I would be worried about that too

After blowing up their town. Yeah Um You know, I guess we mentioned a lot about remediation contractors and stuff like that before um, you know Well, you got various government agencies doing soil testing air quality testing water testing so and so forth. Um It seems like all most of the tests you're coming up pretty clean except right near the site um They've been trucking all the contaminated soil off site

uh, which Has resulted in the trucks crashed. Yeah, one of them crashed a couple days ago. That's fun. That's what happens when you use trucks I mean, I don't know. It might perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with that. Yeah. Yeah I don't know. Maybe maybe they should have put it on a train You know, you know, then they just would have done to a lot of soil on the next time down the road really intelligent They're cheap bastards They call it hulture the vulture for a reason Um, they've also done some tests on the uh deceased pets

no sign of Chemically induced death Which is weird Yeah, maybe they just did that I think that's probably points to the tests being inadequate, but I don't know. Maybe they just like One funny thing about uh fish that die from stuff like this Norfolk southern put a corn on a soybean train on the ground in like Atlanta earlier this year or like last year And uh, you wouldn't think of soybeans as hazmat

But to fish it killed the bone in a fish have a fish have one hit point like Yeah, like they are Fish kind of just perish with the miners fishing boats to their waters Because they can't do the soy face. They just rip their face open trying to soy face It's a shame after the last episode uh, one of the last ones that came out, you know Deer don't get you know knocked out like this too, but uh Yeah, if we just But it's like uh the good like a lot of people don't realize just how utterly weak big vulnerable fish are to like anything

No, I go with weak go with weak weak And I don't respect that they must fear the strong mammals Norfolk southern the weak should fear the strong But on the side of every tank car, you know The deer with like chronic wasting disease hand like taking uh, like chemical weapons to the face and like living through it You know, maybe everything's just gonna cancel itself out and it's gonna be fine Maybe I'm not scared anymore

Maybe it's just like everything is gonna be whatever it always was and it's just gonna be like this And it's gonna be like every apocalypse trying to get through the door at the same time. You know, yeah No, we killed all the deer and they like filled into the cold air of a supervolcano and stuffed it from a rock Should have shot the deer. Yeah All right, that brings us to sort of to conclude here philosophical issues Which I think this is

Everyone's a conservationist until they get the estimates. Yeah um You know, which The real issue here is car maintenance, right? These railroads have been cutting back on inspections Instructing employees to inspect faster reducing the beyond of people to do so um Apparently not calibrating defect detectors properly um, and what do you do about it because the american railroad industry is sort of

second only to the catholic church in terms of institutional momentum You elect one argentinian man and don't ask what he did in the deathly wall Yeah, like one of the things about railroads like we didn't have to do EISs for a lot of shit We could just do things like that other companies can't even think of doing like it was Pretty shocking how much the railroad can just do without any oversight at all uh, like Most people just don't realize that like everything from having their own police officers

Uh to I mean like yeah, it's crazy Just like just like expanding a right of way with like No study, uh, just like build it build it and they will come dude. Don't worry about it. Shut up I just let's let's get the get the rails on the ground before the drawings are even done Oil companies are jealous of this level of institutional power That's the kind of thing like a lot of people don't realize like ExxonMobil doesn't have this kind of power Which is insane

Yeah, and and sort of the result of it is like Norfolk Southern can do an east palestine and get away with it Much like how they gassed Graniteville, South Carolina in 2005 Or how they covered Farragut, Tennessee with sulfuric acid in 2020. This is apparently not that bad Yeah, no, I'm sorry. That's molten sulfur my fault Uh, it's not too bad They also gassed, uh, Palisbury, New Jersey just across the river from us in 2015 with vinyl chloride You know, so

These companies see no punishment and I don't know how you would punish them Nationalize them and then and then bring frank furnace back to the dead execute them. God. Yeah, the fear of God Yeah, link The regulatory state needs to have the power to put the fear of God into them And they have the money they can fix their problems They just need to be threatened with a very very big club Debuting my new bit railroad Stalin

That was just Stalin really liked Railroad so Motherfucker built them everywhere even in city streets Arctic Circle Yeah, this is uh, this is sort of you know, uh You have to regulate these companies Uh, like they are You know that like they have the 19th century problems that they have which is why

Just nationalize them Just oh, yeah, that's that's that's the only like long-term solution here I think that a lot of the regulation The the regulatory state is just not Capable of taking on these companies. I I don't I don't think it's doable. I think this is uh They serve the shareholders above all else and what better way to fix it than to make the public the shareholders Yeah, mm-hmm as you as you put here in the notes 19th century problems require 19th century solutions. Yes, that's right The other thing I was going to mention earlier. I forgot to mention earlier

It's like, um, you know the the one regulation I could see that would really You know have a positive effect that is practical to implement is a federal two-man crew rule And I believe that that got very close to that Uh, yeah, I mean that that is that is maybe the one positive note to end on there is at least we will Get a federal two-man crew rule and we won't have a situation where you know union pacific or Bns at bnsf or someone like that they put a train on the ground and it's about to explode And the engineer has to call up the ground-based expediter and he'll be like, oh, yeah, I'll be there in two hours done couple of cars

Um Oh, yeah, like when I was getting the van out, yeah, we had like at corporate We had all sorts of like info sessions about all this stuff. I mean they were hyping the hell out of single-man crews because of positive train control like that was The goal like that was why the railroad I worked at got it done first and uh Like ahead of the government mandated schedule that had been rescheduled like five times, but uh, you know like they

They had that they just yeah, it's just crazy They need to be saved from themselves Because the incentives that they have right now just push them towards the bolivian. Yeah By ecp breaks. That was another thing designed to facilitate single-man crews Um that that and auto throttle those were like the three technologies auto throttle is yeah That would be a whole other episode Yeah, I mean, I know of deriemens that were caused by all of the train control software just doing the stupidest stuff And you know, those ones barely made the news like one of them was like was like five cars of molten asphalt dumped into a river in iowa

Because the front look Stomped and the back look them out of kept on pushing and they just kind of like a model train Just like shoved the cars up and like just into a river The computer knows best The computer knows all the thinking sand knows everything knows where it is Because it knows where it's not the where it's not is on the tracks All right, well, what did we learn nothing absolutely nothing Well, we have a segment on this podcast called safety third

Hello Justin Alice and yay Liam No guests No, no, yes. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah, uh band from the podcast Um Silenced it's been the edit of sullen the guy just redacted out of With the dangerous world of stagehands coming up a few times as well as the inefficiencies of American railroading

I thought I'd finally write in to tell you all about the the weird period of my life Where those two things intersect my time as a carpenter and a rigger for the circus crossover episode. Yeah I lived in a four by seven room on a train car with 13 other people in similar rooms We would be parked in random rail yards at the on the edges of towns and taken to work each day in a bus They got on the cheap because they got flooded out in hurricane Katrina The highlight of the job Was the one or two days a week you spent as the lowest priority freight train

Seeing a completely different side of america than I ever did from the bus and the truck tours later The uh entire thing was funded by a snow cone and light up crap pyramid scheme The crew were unionized under a metal workers local in st. Louis Script was still a thing that existed in this world. There were all the inherent dangers of trained large animals Who weren't treated that bad, but I don't know if I have an nda as I signed in this nda I signed into what 2011 is still valid. So I probably shouldn't be this specific um

I will say that tigers can piss like laser beams What a perfect sentence amongst us, you know My first he has met right. Yeah, I think a tiger is has man I gotta put a cp brakes on the circus train Yeah On the 100 year old sleeper cars. Yeah My first load in we got a surprise osha inspection which we failed miserably Lots of the crew were eastern european acrobats who defected in the 80s

There's more of the general unsafe and weird work environment than I could possibly fit into the one safety third submission Man, imagine defecting thinking. I'm going to america, you know, it's gonna have freedom It's gonna have like, you know, I can drive my corvette to the grocery store. Yeah, and then you end up in a fucking 100 year old train car Being pissed on by a tiger. This is an upgrade. Which is apparently like a laser beam. Yeah However, I think my funniest incident related to workplace safety I had was later in my career when I moved beyond the world of the redacted brother circus To the classy high-end world of pretentious french-canadian circus

Five thousand years of french-canadian history See Canada before communism So I'm gonna be thinking that like genuinely it sounds like nothing has changed since like the like stories of the 30s like Oh, yeah, nothing has changed well I'll keep shanyan in mind our show had an upcoming gap of a few months

And a chinese vulture capital firm who owned a large portion of the company needed a tax write-off They proposed plugging the gap in our schedule with a four-month resident residency in a temporary arena in sanya in china Huh between signing the contracts and opening night was 88 days Put a pin in that number for later Days before the production crew was supposed to arrive on site the concrete slab had yet to be poured Well, we were when we finally arrived on site the still in some places visibly wet concrete was ready for us to go Despite the objections from much of the carpentry Carpentry crew about the ability of uncured concrete floor to hold our incredibly heaving moving set pieces

We laid down our show floor and after just a few days of shows the area underneath our massive set pieces had been shifting Making them incredibly difficult to move and absolutely destroying our fancy stage decking Upon pulling a few of the floor decks We discovered that not only had the concrete shrunk like we said it would But the stage decks were dripping in water in the trap like in the tropical Heinen island climate Um, yeah After hours of listening to my supervisor repeatedly cursing the lord in that lyrical way they do up in kebek

As he fetally shoved shims under our decks He said at least He said at least in tabernacle I can't imagine a more out-of-place place place for someone from kobek to be in like southern china In like some resort city like Like grift town in southern china like how could you be more out of place? What the fuck that was the the only 307 times the tabernacle was set on that island Yeah

He said it was good enough and we went back to doing shows for empty crowds for three months as the mold grew and grew underneath The sinus infection that got infection I got when we finally loaded out made for what was by far the worst international flight i've been on And would repeat every subsequent week We moved the show until i quit before participating in a pr campaign for mbs in vision 2030 Oh my god, what i mean i know in a broader sense capitalism is a psychist right like I didn't realize it was that much on the front lines of it, you know Now remember how i mentioned the number 88 the show's pr people thought it was an impressive feat to have gone from nothing to a venue in 88 days

So they had begun inadvertently using nazi code to promote our show on social media Every aspect of this is like oh, yeah Is that they hired us to like do a show in a dispute on like the paracel islands like disputed between china and japan They like reclaimed land to build the stage on it after that we're going to neon like fucking Most circuses cannot be this like geopolitical Surely what i mean what i'm talking about a clown show god damn What the fuck is this then the nbs part that's just thrown in there

I quit because i didn't want to meet mbs Oh god, yeah, I wouldn't want to either yeah Please keep up the great work and special thanks to alice for helping me accept that i could live How i always wanted without having to do voice training From may oh hell, yeah Oh, sweet. Yeah. Do i do i have a clown drop? I don't think i do sorry

RIP to the circus train. Actually, there's still one left The straight shows train, but i don't think they have the crew on board anymore. It's just all the trailers and crap Very funny to see hpp8s Pull that like couldn't pull anything pulling the circus train. Yeah last photo can hold one tiger Yeah, exactly one tiger and two elephants And we'll slip. Yeah Like the sand is on it's just fucking going Well, I put the elephant they had the elephant drive the train so it ballasts it and gets more grip

It might be on to something there. Yeah, don't tell alistram that It's it's like, you know, no man one elephant crew rule. Mm-hmm Ultimate labor-saving device elephants don't unionize alice. I don't think they do. Yeah, you can pay them peanuts Our next episode is on Chernobyl does anyone have any commercials before we go i'm so hungry, dude Sorry, I don't it's a commercial for being hungry. Yeah If the people want more brian, why can't they find more brian? Uh, four foot and a half on twitter, uh I sometimes I talk a little bit about freight rail stuff usually, uh And then, you know, sometimes I help alan fisher make videos

Uh, and that I don't get anything to plug really. Yeah. Hell yeah. Thanks so much for coming on Yeah, thank you for coming on. This was good Yeah, I had a lot of fun All right, and we have a patreon. We have a bonus episode once a month ideally sometimes you can you can get it You can pay for us. Uh Thanks. Bye. Yeah a few descent Another podcast that will piss steven off. Yes