Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 132: CSX Crazy 8s Runaway

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

self-driving trains were perfected in 2001 see Gareth at Railnatter: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzA-8fUrw2C5cRcP9gO5BwA 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  

Let's do a podcast. Hello, and welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Raznack. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. All right, go. I'm Alex Goldwakali. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Ye Liam. Ye Liam. Hi. My name is Liam Anderson. I'm the person who's talking right now. I again, left my mic stand at the beach. So I have to do this.

Sorry. So sorry. I guess I don't have to do that. I'm just I'm just used to it. I thought you didn't have a mic stand at the beach either. I thought I was brought in. I brought it to the beach. No, the problem on the bonuses at the mic stand didn't clamp into the desk.

Okay, so it's double useless then. Yes, yes. So I offer my headphone amp died, so I'm gonna write shit audio a very shitty email. If anyone's got recommendations for headphone amps, hit me up, and also we have a guest. Hello, my name is Garth Dennis. My pronouns are he and him. Love to have you back on Garth always.

Yes, returning returning champion guest. Oh, hello, lovely. Absolutely. You get out to me that the like the West Coast, the Avanti West Coast to like premier first class lounge. Okay, be nuts sandwiches in there. Yeah, this and peanuts. You know, like semi comfortable ceasing, you know, you can enjoy all of that as, you know, as someone who's been on the podcast like, I don't know, like a half dozen times right now. Yeah, yeah, probably about that much. Yeah.

Well, that's very exciting. No, it's always fun to be back. And who knows what chaos lies before us. Oh, this is a unique opening. Because what you see on the screen in front of you is a CSX SD40-2 locomotive. That hoggers it, it's heart for blood. And here's the thing. It is supposed to look like. That hoggers and it's heart for blood.

Here's the thing. It is supposed to look like, oh my God. Yeah, fuck. Ah, there's nothing wrong with it. It's fine. Yeah. Absolutely. No, I got whiskers.

What's with the whiskers? Which whiskers? It's got whiskers out of its snow cloud. Oh, those are, those are multiple unit cables, I think. Yeah, why there's so many in all, anyway, okay, fine. I don't know. Is the quadruple eight, is that a Nazi thing or is it not a Nazi thing? No, they just happen to have that many locomotives.

CSX has 8,800 and AC8 locomotives. It's a big railroad. Yeah, it's not that big. Oh, you know, sometimes you have different series so you don't have all the numbers there. Yeah, I was thinking like this would be like a class 88 or something, but I guess you don't, you don't really do classes.

Sort of, I mean, I know that CSX on over 100 SD 40 dash to at least. So, you know, someone just liked the number eight and thought, I can get, I can get the number eight on this locomotive a lot of times. Yes, exactly. So anyway, today we're going to talk about the CSX crazy eights incident of 2001. Who live in the incident? Yes, we are going to talk about one of the last and greatest runaway trains. Oh, yes, the grand finale, if you will.

But uh, first we have to do the God damn news. Oh, Jesus, I got the drops right. Good job, Alice. Thank you. A building in Davenport, Iowa has partially collapsed. And that's really sort of like strong use of the word partial considering it's like, it looks like a good bit of it is missing. Yeah. I would know that's much less than the third because the building is sort of sea shaped. There's a lot of building ahead. Oh, there's wings up here. Yeah. No, so this says this is the Davenport Hotel. You can see a historic image

of it here. It's back partition wall, the party wall collapsed. We'll speculate on what caused that in a moment. You know, a few people are presumably at least at time of recording still trapped in the wreckage. At least two people are unaccounted for. Previously, three people are unaccounted for, but the city and the owner and the structural engineer were basically like, once the building partially collapsed, they said, we have to tear this down instantly. Okay, maybe we should do some research and rescue. Maybe guys, they did like a solid 45 minutes

of search and rescue and they're like, we got to tear this building down. You need to do a little more than 45 minutes. It should take as long as it records us to do a podcast for you to do search and rescue at the ladies. Good grief. Also, but is this social housing or is it? It's, it's sort of, it's just apartments. I think relatively cheap apartments. So they tried to get this building demolished within like 24 hours of the collapse, despite people still being missing.

Someone was pulled out of the building alive and unharmed well after that headline. Protests erupted in Davenport because, you know, this is an insane idea to start demolition instantly before even attempting any recovery. You know, they left everyone's pets inside. It's just a pets and if it's not well off, then, I mean, you know, it's less important than people and pets, but property, if people have everything they own, wind out, And that's actually can be kind of life-reading. We send in the bulldozers, you know, over the Labrador retrievers, over, you know, and anything else. Yeah, this whole thing, I'm going to be honest. I haven't looked at the building. I'm not there in Davenport, Iowa. I've just seen pictures. This whole thing seems kind of fishy to me,

right? There's some politicians in the Quad City area who have ownership stakes in this building. The structural engineer said the whole building is imminently dangerous, the threat to the public, basically saying, you know, well, these old-fashioned steel and brick buildings, if one goes, the other goes, which is not necessarily my experience with these sorts of buildings. We'll get into that a bit. There's a question here of whether they just wanted the building to come down to cover up some mistakes they made during renovation, but the permit history sort of pretty much

lays bare just how badly maintained this building was. You know, and right now, some of the, I think the mayor at Davenport, some other folks who are basically talking to the media trying to gaslight everyone into thinking they never said they were going to instantly tear down the building, which is fantastic. That's a fascinating strategy. Oh, that's a fascinating strategy. Yeah. Don't think of it as bulldozing. Think of it as like extremely nice. Extremely nice.

It's such an rescue. Extremer, urban renewal. Yes. This kind of urbanism is actually illegal in like most jurisdictions. Yeah. And murder. I don't know. I was I was obsessing over this yesterday as I do with these sorts of things and sort

of armchairing the whole thing. You know, because as the great Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot just by looking. So, you know, you can, this is a very neglected and abused building, right? So it was a Davenport hotel built 1907, Wikipedia and most of the national historic register articles about it say it's a brick over steel frame building. I am unsure if that's referencing a fully steel frame building where the exterior walls are held up by the steel or one where there's an interior steel frame and the brick on the outside is load bearing. I lean towards the ladder because these walls seem very thick. It's Davenport 1907. You're not necessarily going to have curtain wall technology making it that far out

in the sticks. It burned down, but they fixed it in 1939, they converted it to apartments in 1985. You can sort of look on Google Maps and see on this partition wall, right? Because this is the wall that faces the lot next to it. It's not richly ornamented, it doesn't have all the accoutrements of the rest of the building,

because in 1907 people in Davenport were very optimistic and they figured, well, you know, this face is the property line and there's going to be, you know, by 1928 there's going to be a 50 store building there. Yeah, it's going to be America's second city. Yeah. It's going to be like six million. It's the third largest city in Iowa. I mean, there's still time for it to like be on the up.

The other one will rise again. Up high. The Empire of Chiropractic. I mean, listen, the the the Connette that rules sort of the Midwest has to has to be somewhere. It's going to have a summer capital. And I think, you know, strong possibility. Could be Davenport. Yeah.

So what you're seeing here is the picture from Street View of this partition wall in 2019. You can see it's had at some point at least 10 years prior, but probably more. It's had this sort of tan paint added. And you can see all of these to be honest, all these red splashes, right, especially up here, which is where the paint is pealed off. And this is why you don't paint brick. This is, this is, we've been over this before. We've talked about how you don't do this before.

What you, what you sort of see here is where the paint is pealed off. It's taken the hard face of the brick with it. Like, for instance, especially right around here, this sort of brick arch over this window frame has, it's a little hard to see with the scale of the image. But if you zoom in on Google Maps, it's got no mortar whatsoever. This brick arch is no longer holding up the window.

The window is holding up the brick arch. Yeah, it's like a pile of bricks now. Yes, I mean, it's sort of, this is one of those buildings where, back in the day, if I walked by a particularly badly crumbling building, I would usually test out and see if I could grab a brick out. Yes, you would.

Yeah, I did that pretty constantly. This is definitely one of those. Yeah, it is a brick out. Yeah, I did that pretty constantly. This is definitely one of those. Yeah, it is a free brick. And you know, if it just comes out, it wasn't holding anything up anyway. Let's get real. So, you know, this wall has decayed very significantly. The thing about paint here is moisture is able to get in underneath the paint. and once it's in underneath the paint, it can't expel itself or evaporate into the outside of the building. So I can only go two ways, which is either it goes down and infiltrates into more bricks and sort of pools at the bottom, or it pisses out onto the inside of the building, right? Which would account for lots of the mold problems, which

are happening, which were happening in the building. Lots of, you know, sort of general moisture leak problems. You can go through the permit history of this thing. And it's just, plumbing permit, plumbing permit, plumbing permit, plumbing permit, is clear that they were trying to find the source of the leak, not knowing that it was the whole damn wall doing it and not the plumbing. There's also a brand new roof on this building, apart over this area. What is that warrant to you still intact? I don't like the size of that HVAC unit on the roof. Yeah, I don't like that.

I don't like where the failure is occurred directly underneath it. That, to me, seems relevant. Harrison, interesting one. So here's the chiller. There's a stain on the roof, what remains of it, the brand new roof near the chiller. And that drains right to up here,

where we see the worst water damage. Hmm. Hmm. Wonder if that did something. You know, it's, it's a thing. Engineers have an instinct for seeing things that don't look good. And I would, if I saw that HVAC, that Chile unit pulling up on the back of a, you know, like a low loader and then someone saying, oh, yeah, we're putting on that roof. My response would be, no, you know, like a low loader and then someone saying, oh yeah, we're putting it on that roof.

My response would be, no, you know what, doing that. In the end, anyway, unrelated. You're allowed. I think that's what sort of doing the echo is that it's like, if you look at the waveform on the Zancaster, it's like a little bit. Try that. How's that? Is that better? Yeah, sounds good. Sorry. I, no, no, not your fault. I, I, I figure if I don't like intervene with all your quality stuff, Dev murders me, so.

Sorry, Devon, sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, between YouTube, you know, I want you to have your own reasons for murdering each other. And how sweet. Oh. So I will not that notably the part of the building directly underneath the

chiller is not the part that collapsed. Oh, you know, this is, this is all fashion steel framing in here. It's overbuilt to hell. It's not even like continuous like welded beams. It's like four angle sections that are riveted to a plate and stuff. Yeah, yeah, the good stuff. You know, so that's why I sort of,

I put the blame here again, I'm armchairing, but I'm putting the blame here on the brick wall collapsing and taking out everything up to the first column line. Be nice to have drawings of this building. Um, you know, main lesson here, do not paint your bricks. And if you must paint your bricks, use the special brick paint and have a bunch of like vents and shit and make it very permeable. Yes. Yeah. Well, in this case, just because it's load bearing brick, I do

not believe we poles holes would help. Like, weep holes? Kind of blood bull and shit is that, that's incredible. Here's a picture that was taken about two days before the collapse, they were doing some work on the brick at the lower stories, I believe. And you can see these huge chunks just fell off. Yeah, there's some other pictures I just got. Maybe I can bring one of them up

of some of the shoring they were doing during the work. And this is what I would call inadequate. You mean those full poles on holding the entire building up? Well, I, I, I don't know exactly what's going on here. You know, if, if this wall were supported, every story by the steel, maybe you could get away with this, um, but this is the worst one. Um, oh, there we go. Yes. I don't miss it. I was about to say, I think you need a little more than two toothpicks to handle that sort of bowing and bulging.

That's a mature, very building, currently collapsing. Seconds before disaster. Yes. Horr. Amazingly, this is a few days before disaster. The other fun thing is that this isn't direct view of Davenport City Hall. Yeah, exactly every single building inspector was walking by this multiple times a day. I'm sure. Oh my god. Yeah. Why was everyone not taking out of that building as soon as that was visible? I mean, what's your condition like that?

You're like, all right, everyone out of the building. You know, this is not. Yeah, bring your important documents, you know, because it's not an imminent emergency and emergency, but it's like, I wish you get everyone out of here. We should be doing work to stabilize the building. You know, it's kind of, it's, it's, it's, it's just sift the magic of, um, you know, there's a certain kind of property owner, right, who doesn't really want to put money in the building. Uh, so they just keep patching up small problems and awkward and bad ways, you know, forever.

It costs them more money in the long run. Yeah, it's bad business. It's like real start of being run. Yeah. Yeah. You know, lots of people wind up suffering for it. Yeah, the other thing here is kind of like, you know, so here it was like, we have a very big problem, which is this whole party wall went to shit over the past two decades or so.

And you just needed to deconstruct and rebuild it. I don't think you could have done much else. Given how far the brick had gone, you would have to do it in like one fell swoop. You got to do it. Get a lot of scaffolding up. I mean, you'd probably unfortunately because it's such a big job You're gonna a wind up having to kick people out of their apartments just because You can't have people living in a apartment with no wall

Sure, but then how do those people pay rent? How do those people then pay rent Ross? Did you just did you think about a good point? That's a good point Yeah, you know the one of your bras. You just have them promise to pay rent while they're not in the building, I guess. You know, so this is, you know, and again, they kept trying to patch this up by doing interior fixes to what I would say was probably fundamentally an exterior problem. Don't paint brick. The other thing here is, I think, you know, this is this looks like a very bad collapse, but given the size of the building, this is only relatively, I

wouldn't say relatively small chunk, but you could realistically say we should do a more thorough inspection to determine if there are parts of the building you can save rather than saying we need to demolish the whole thing and one sure they saved two out of the three wings yeah i think then you can't hide all of your mistakes this is true yeah i don't i don't think that this is i could certainly see ways in which parts of the building that are far from this collapse could be damaged. Every other porous animal being probably got a good solid yank from the old collapse. It's time to go to the airbrush. This is something where if you have everyone far away from the building already, you don't really lose anything from keeping it standing for a while while you try and ascertain

the condition and you don't have to go in there. You can use drones and stuff. Now, a lot of the first responders were reporting that I felt like the building was wobbling around while they were walking in there, which is certainly it could be doing that. That could also be psychosomatic. You know, but the engineer. The engineer. Yeah.

The top of the highway building. I don't think that the structural engineer here has done due diligence is what I'm saying. You know, at this point, you shouldn't necessarily be trying to act as rapidly as they are. I don't get why they're trying to move so quick.

And this is Davenport, Iowa. So if they tear this building down, they're going to wind up with, you know, a parking lot for 80 years, or maybe an Arby's with a drive-through or something, you know, you're. You're sort of like a great cougan of, you know, a you know, Con Pritzker after he dies there in the summer capsule. If we should be so lucky. But uh, yeah, I don't know. This whole thing seems kind of fishy to me and stuff has been happening very quickly for reasons that don't make sense.

And I don't think that it's totally unreasonable to like say, all right, let's get a drone in there. Let's look and see how stable the building actually is. Call up a steel fabricator, get some supports on the sides, some quick and dirty bracing. Maybe you could save parts of the building and save people's property and their documents and their family heirlooms, their birth certificates.

You don't mind you. Yeah, I heard it. You know, so much of it. Yeah. But more importantly, we should say the people we do should say, again, it should not take you less time than it takes us to do one of these. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the time for the centric podcast. Exactly. You know, really yes. Yeah, the, you know, the two people on account for is still a thing. Yeah, and I, you know, I guess all I can say is, you know, if you're a resident who lived here, get a second opinion from a structural engineer. If you can find one willing to do it. A structural engineer who owns their own drone, I guess.

Yeah, that's could be coming more and more common these days. Yeah, for like facade inspections and stuff. I mean, this is, you know, looking at those pictures, the brick bowing out, that would not play well like, well, let's say here in Philly where we have a facade inspection ordinance that would, you know, you would have, you would have a, a duty to immediately shut the building down if you saw something like that because that's just a crazy thing to see on a building But yeah, I think the main thing I would say about this though is don't paint the brick Just don't do it no

No, you know there is special paint that does work, but just it there's no reason to Yeah, I think I think it looks nice painted like I part from the big hole in it, but the big hole in it really detracts from the attractive. The big hole in it is a major issue with the building. Yeah, also it doesn't look like kill two people good. You know any ghost that like you know, Renaissance palace whatever you got a Versailles and the tour guide is like, oh yeah, due to fallen off of this like every day, like 500 people died to build this. You know, like, well, that kind of sucks, but like, I can see where they were coming from. It's like a sort of prestige national project thing. It was, you know, 500 years ago, whatever. Not so much a hotel and, well, now apartments in Davenport, Iowa, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. A whole thing, yeah. A whole thing, definitely. Like it shows signs of neglect, even on the good sides of the building, like the front, there's lots of like step cracks in the masonry. There's all kinds of other stuff. This is just straight up neglect is the thing.

Um, you know, and, and this is what you get. The kind of thing that used to be called urban decay. Yeah. I guess the other thing is, you know, again, there are buildings in like the Bronx that have come back from worse than this. So I don't know, I don't know. There's something fishy about the trying to tear it down as quick as possible.

He will ask me about all of the mysterious fires in Glasgow. Yeah. Or mysterious fires in the Bronx for that matter. The site, you see the smoke on the horizon, you know, like that's going to be student housing. I you're playing 1500 quit a month out with her, like any sort of like legal rental contract to live in a loft there six months time. Meanwhile in Davenport, you see the collapse, you like, yeah, that's going to be an Arby's with a drive through in the center town. Finally, just just what Dapulled to was native. Yes.

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I was always so, I was, I was always so, I was, I was always so, I was, I was always so, I was, I was always so, I was, I was always so, I was, We should have to say that. Yeah. In other news. Rick. That's had that one saved ever since you started talking about it. That's a little a little drop for fans of the YouTube zone. That's Monday's and Thursday's 9 p.m. UK time. Slop.tv slash trashy to podcast or Slop.delivery. So we got to talk about Las Embrita.

I love it. It's been far too long since we recorded. We got to talk about Las Embrita. Okay. Yeah. So what is Lasambrita. Okay. Yeah. So what is La Sambrita? In Los Angeles, there were some consultants. And they were contracted with the Los Angeles public transit authority or whatever it's called.

I forget exactly which agency. Oh, this is the whole thing. There are millions of astronauts. Yeah. They were contracted with LADOT, which is going to become important later. But it was this consultancy, Conquay Design Initiative, which is apparently a non-profit focused on design and community development. Is it because it looks like shit?

Well, I only trust the shellfish of the prophetate from the four prophets. You know who built a good bus shelter is Halliburton. Los Angeles has shitty bus stops. A lot of them are literally just a sign on a pole with no nothing. Like to the point that there's a guy who's been, he got profiled in the LA Times, it's been like a guerrilla, like installing benches of his own fabrication, which I think is incredible activism. But part of the reason why is because there is this process whereby in order to build a bus shelter, like a full-sized bus shelter, you got to go through the City Council and the LA City Council is, as any Angelenore tell you, one of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies

in the world. Then you've got to go through the, well, as I understand it, 10 city agencies. That's true. You've got to go through the Department of Public Works. You've going to go through the Bureau of Street Services, which is part of the Department of Public Works. You've got to go through the Department of City Planning, the Bureau of Engineering, the LAPD, the Bureau of Street Lising, nearby. There's a bureau of school. I think there's also a hard cap on bus shelters within Los Angeles proper for some reason. Yeah.

So there's just why is it. Good question. Demolishing another bus shelter. Yeah. It's just all in a truck with a with a trucky. Okay. Yeah. Like what?

No, not renewable resource. You can only move them around. You can't make new ones. We lost that technology. So this consultancy LADOT doesn't have anything to do with all of this really, which is another thing is that like none of this is overseen by the same people. LADOT runs the actual bus service. LADOT does this thing and then like the Bureau of Street Services constructs the bus

shelters. So what this consultancy is. There is nothing sheltering about this. It's a stick. This is a thing. It isn'ting about this. It's a stick. This is a thing. It isn't a bus shelter. It's specifically not. The idea is you put this up in lieu of a bus shelter because putting up a bus shelter

is too hard. And what this is, I am going to wipe myself on fire. I am going to be like this for this month. It gives you. It gives you a little bit of light at night. It's got a light in there. And it's got a tiny little there and it's a little shadow, it's a little sombrita. Something to be said by the way, about the way in which the

city of Los Angeles uses Spanish as a kind of cutesy way of obscuring its own decisions. Yeah, so the idea is it's a little like shade because it gets very hot, gets very sunny or sand to us. And the idea is you stand under it and you don't die of heatstroke as much. Yes. Which if they didn't install it parallel to the sun's rays, it might work for one person. They went through processives where like this was, you know, where the shade moved or it like unfolded and all of those were like too complicated.

And so instead what you get is out. Value engineer those out. Yeah. Value engineer those out. And what you get is the weird skateboard thing. Which by the way, each process type of this, I just invite you to look at this. Each process like of this costs $10,000. I am going to light myself on fire. Yeah, it looks like an IKEA serial packet clip. Just give me $10,000. Give me and rise $10,000. It will be the best goddamn bus shelter you ever saw in your fucking life.

It'll be made of gold. Go on Deepo and put one up. LA DOT do say though that if this takes off, which it won't, they're gonna drop the cost hopefully in mass production to about $2,000 per somebody. The comparison was like a proper bus shelter is like $50,000. But the thing about that is a bus shelter does something. It does something. It's a $10,000 stick. It's a stick. Yeah. It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't do anything. Like L.A.'s process for

building bus shelters is so inefficient that they tried to privatize it, right? They gave this company, JC DeSau, that owns a bunch of billboards. They let them construct bus shelters and the city would take a card of the revenue and they were going to build like 2,500 of them. They only built like about half of that, I think, just because it takes so long. So yeah, this one guy in like a Peruvian Balaklava who the LA Times profile in like 2018, who was just like installing like benches unilaterally, that guy was doing all the research.

And only because the stops are lit. Yeah, yeah, it's shine, it's the only bus are lit. Yeah, there's shine. She only got shelter. There's only one demographic. There's only one demographic for whom this is useful. And that is tall seven year olds. They're gonna lick it because the texture is interesting. They do claim there is a demographic angle to this because past of this was it was a D.I.

Initiative and that's why it was passed it was like so marked originally is because they are you know L.A. D.O.T. did a big thing about this they posted about it where they were like This is a like women led women empowering They tweeted they tweeted a picture with a woman stood underneath it I was sorry. I was sorry. They tweeted a picture with a woman still underneath it. I was surprised. Why was that?

I was baffled by that. Absolutely. The reason why is that this comes out of like the sort of the path to the birth of La Sombra Ritas is weird. And it comes out of this like policy paper that LADOT contracted this group for about how to make the buses more accessible to women, which is good, right? Like they weren't wrong when they identified that a lot of the bus service is like a disadvantageous women in ways like not having a lot of lights. You have to walk down a like creepy street in the middle of the night, or not having shade or not having seizing,

or like seizing that's designed for men, stuff like that, fine. Sure. What they got out of that was, we have spent $10,000 to create an inch of shadow at midday. Yes. I think that's maybe not great and it it has been roundly mocked and it deserves it.

And the other thing is this consultant team there like, well, we went on this extensive taxpayer funded vacation like Hamburg and London and Keto and Ecuador to study how the buses work there. And they come back and they do this thing. You know, it's kind of like, I don't, I don't, a lot of times I don't understand why these trips are necessary even when they are productive, but like, holy shit. Yeah, they, they claim that like, that's not specifically related. They went on all the trips as like a fact finding thing to decide what they do and then finding. Oh, you've got a key. Oh, you can see that's Google. You can just Google the word bus shelter. That's fine. It works.

Sky forever works in key. So on the guy right exactly. Exactly. Can you tell me about it? All right, great conversation. Cool. I saved $55,000 and hang up. Yeah. Then you could build five of these. And a lot of the new one. It's terrible. You know, and it's like, okay, you went to Keto, which has a bus rapid transit system.

And a lot of the stops are like air conditioned and they have like off-ward fair payments on and so forth. And clearly you learned nothing from that because you're not doing it. You just made a stick. Yeah. Like, oh, it that because you're not doing it. Just made a stick. Yeah. Like, it's like it's conditioning. It's shade, which I don't, it's not like air conditioning. I feel like the answer here is again, something that the Sissy has made impossible,

which is plant a tree. Do you know what's good at like providing shade? It's trees. They're really fucking good at that. But that's dangerous, the drivers. What you need is a breakaway post. Yeah, I was going to say, I wanted to talk very briefly about the Devon. We're already going along. It's fine.

We've got a hard stop. I'm starting railing that in like an hour. Yeah, they made that that that the stick is a breakaway stick. So these are probably strong enough that a guy leaning against it will snap it off There's a $10,000 right there. Are the tall seven year old or the tall seven year old while they're licking it They push it over. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah, the lights. Okay, I guess it doesn't illuminate very much, but it's a little bit of a... The thing about sticks is you can put a lamp

or a known technology. Yeah. Yeah. But that wouldn't provide any light. It only lights itself, but it only lights itself. It doesn't like the area. Yeah, because then you wouldn't be able to see the stick if it didn't light itself.

You know, you spend $10,000 on it. You might as well make it visible in the day. I'm the night. Now, what if the stick had bus information on it, where the light is? That might be incorrect. Wrong. Instead, you just have to have like perforated to, um, in an interesting pattern. In a way that might put light through.

Yeah. It provides even through. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. So, um, thank you to the consultant class. Once again, providing us with innovations.

We would never see otherwise. No, because they won't give us a grant. Give us the MacArthur Genius grant and we'll do better than this. Yeah. You can sponsor MPR. You can sponsor us, you motherfuckers. All right. That was the goddamn news. Okay. So before we start today's episode, this is also, it's CSX crazy eights because we have 88,888 subscribers. As several days ago. We need to subscribe button. I want my plaque. I want my goddamn plaque.

What number does the plaque have? Make some fake accounts and subscribe. Subscribe. God damn it. Yes. Give us the plaque. Give us the plaque. Make make accounts for relatives who are dead and have them subscribe. Yes. Yes. Yeah. For me, no for counting. No for you.

Come make sure. Subscribe. Register another account with a photo of you with a fake moustache on. Subscribe with that. Register another account with a photo of you with a fake moustache on, subscribe with that. Register another account with a fake bed, subscribe with that. Go into a graveyard and look at all the names and subscribe under them. Hello, also hold regular cars viewers who are excited for our podcast. I hope you're coming up for four more months.

You too, subscribe. Yes. Okay. So we have to talk about flat switching, right? Switching cars in a rail yard. Cool. So freight cars all have many destinations. So you set them all to a big train to a rail yard.

And the train is broken down into smaller trains. And those trains bring the cars to their destination. Sure, too. Usually a siding, right? There's two ways to do this. One is called the hump yard, right? They push the train over a hump. At the top of the hump, the cars are uncoupled. They coast down a hill in the various different tracks,

which are for trains going to different places. Yeah. It's like drifting and a little bit like playing pool, but also it allows you to stencil the words do not hump on railroad cars that you shouldn't do that. Yeah, which is very funny when seeing a nice relation. Correct. Yes, and you know, the hump is, you know, the push the car over the hump, but then the car is going too fast. So then it goes over something called a retarder which retards the speed. Hi, and that's the last time you can use that word. Yeah. Yeah, it's uh, I do like

I I always wanted to do an episode. I don't know if it would be a disaster or maybe we could get someone back on for it about smoke jumpers. Yeah, well, I'd love to do California wildfires and like wildland fire, fly things. Yes. Oh, me too. Yeah, great deal at some point. I, the, the, as the coolest job I've ever heard of is just like, hey, you see that bit of forest that's at the middle of nowhere and it's on fire?

That's cool parachute into it. Good luck. If you knew somebody who would be who would be like good to talk to us about California filed filed filed fires, file fires, yeah, and who is like gets a vibe. I'll reach out. Okay. So that's the one way to switch cars is humping them.

The other way is called flat switching, right? That's self, much less interesting. Which is where you just move the cars around with a locomotive, right? Because I want to fuck driving the cars. So, Ross, the French color for hush. When you're doing it,

when you're doing flat switching, speed is important, because free car spend most of their time in the rail yard. So this is a great place to reduce the amount of time that a car spends in transit on the way from its destination or on the way from its origin to its destination, right? It seems to be safe for two of the things like attached to both power and breaks the whole time is moving. It depends. It's also cheaper to build this for a flat switching yard

because you don't have to build the big pilot dirt to do the hump switching over. So now some of the some practices which they used to sort of expedite switching are now illegal or highly discouraged. So for example, what we're looking at here is something called polling, right? We've talked about this all these rub and railroad. I don't like this at all. Yeah.

No, thank you. We have a locomotive. We have a freight car on a different track. And we have a man with a stick. And a very bright hat.. And a very bright hat. Yes, a very bright hat. Probably searsucker. And...

Thank you, pardon. It's searsucker. That's what the railroad hats are made of. Oh, badly known. Yeah. Oh, here's the thing, right? Please subscribe to the patron because, because Ros and I need to go to the Derby and bring Alice and we all need to We're matching WTYP Searsucker. What are they called windbreakers?

I think the Kentucky Derby is decadent and depraved Also, I Okay, fine whatever So this is one of the ways you save time is through polling and that way you didn't need to move the locomotive onto another track. This poll is held in place entirely with pressure from the locomotive on the freight car. So incredibly stupid and dangerous. It worked most of the time, another time it's a kill deal. Now this is now illegal. Let's not be in common for decades and decades ago, right? But there are other practices which are killing you.

Yeah. The murder and the death. There's other things which sort of ex-weddite switching, which are less illegal and people still sort of do them, even though they're kind of dangerous, right? So we're talking about boarding and alighting from moving trains. We're talking about leaving the cab of a moving locomotive to throw a switch ahead of it. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we're talking about something which is still explicitly allowed like kicking cars, where rather than drive the train all the way up a yard track to drop a car off, you get the locomotive going up to like 10 miles an hour. Someone goes in front, un-couples the cars, you stop the locomotive, the cars coast into the siding. You know, that's- So you're basically ghosting the whip is what I'm understanding?

Yes, yes, you are. You're curling. Yeah, curling, yeah, it is curling. It is curling, because were you were you're curling It is calling us we're taking over again because sometimes you will have like a breakman riding the cars and setting the handbrakes Usually only on one car, but you know, this is still very common Now in order to expedite movement of train cars around the yard all these train cars have their air brakes cut out. They're just isolated and turned off. Safe. Yes.

And everything is done with hand brakes in the rail yard. And that's because in the yard, you have a short train, you have a heavy locomotive. The locomotive brakes are more than sufficient, right? You have a set of trap points side of the yard to make sure that if there is an air and train, you stop it before it gets onto the main line, right? What are, right? It depends.

Sorry, what are trap points? It's a set, it's like a switch, but it doesn't go anywhere. And it just ditches the train into the dirt if it tries to get some friction. Oh, okay, understood. Yeah, we, you can get the same effect by 3D printing a derailer like that one. We'll get this. Oh yeah, exactly. There was a set of track points, right? The trains go sleepy from the episode that recently where the trains went sleepy next to the swing bridge. You know, when you have very, you know, these cuts of cars are still very long.

You may have catch points, but you may have to overrun those in a normal yard movement. I don't think they, I don't think we really have catch points in the United States. I'm going to be honest. That's a shame. Yeah. I'm sure that wouldn't have any long term negative consequences or result in any instance. Oh, no, absolutely not. So let's look at one flat switching yard. This is the Stanley yard. Oh, now you're talking my language. And this is in Walbridge, Ohio, just south of Toledo.

It's over here near the Toledo Executive Airport, where you fly your private jet in to exclusive Toledo events I'm sure there are some The other Toledo executive. Yes, yeah, the universe. I know you can fly in for Wednesday, Maxion You can meet other car dealers Oh, yes, we both will have the same slate article. Yeah, I know right So this is this is a former New York Central Railroad yard

Oh, this is a very flat part of Ohio It used to have a hump. It doesn't anymore. In fact, I think it's completely closed now You know, but this has been closed and opened several times as the railroads have focused on different kinds of traffic because your traditional switching yard, that's really only useful for carload freight, that stuff that you drop off directly in industries is supposed to like containers or big unit trains, oil or coal or something like that. Yeah, which have their own cool terminals where you like do special shit with them like turn an entire call car upside down or whatever. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the funky cranes. It's so funny to me like turning the call car upside

down, shaking it until the call comes. Give me a fucking lunch money. No, the best ones are the the ones that are at that port sides and they have like an elevator that lifts the car up and then tips it over into the ship. And then they drop it back down, they just kick it out, it goes down a ramp, and it goes up like a ramp and then it comes down the other way, rolls back into the yard. It's great. They're really cool. I forget what they're called, but there's still one in operation, someone in the great way. I think all the elevators, I think the component, my local shout-out to Monk Bar Models, I'm pretty sure they've got one in one of their last cabinets. You can hook up into your double-oven, or be set, shout-out to Monk Bar Models.

Fun. So this was not like the biggest yard in the world. It's a good size yard. It's for American trains. It's very long. You've got your classification bowl. That's where you do the switching. You have a rival in departure tracks Where the actual trains are made up or they're broken down. You know, you got it's the whole thing, right? So good size rail yard for making big long freight trains And we'll talk about it. There's two were there two and not in that Yes, so this is too big on each other not quite figured out because these are both owned by CSX and I'm

not sure if this is part of the Stanley yard or if this is a separate yard called Walbridge yard. I can't get any I tried to find it out and I could not figure it out. Some serious railway real estate in any case. Oh, yeah, it's got like a whole town in between them So Now we need to talk about a locomotive The SD40-2 This is nice. It's one of the demonstrators GM yes, this is the most popular numerous locomotive ever built. It was built by the Electro mode of division of general motors starting in 1972. They built 3982 of them.

Almost every railroad rostered hundreds of these things. These got all over too. Like, then some of these elephant like Latvia. Yes, they there are SD 40-2 derived locomotives in Iran, in Turkey, in the former Yugoslavia, they're in Korea, they're in Israel, they're in Morocco, they're in Pakistan, they're in Peru, they cross all cultures and nationalities, they know no borders. And that's the great unified. Oh, yeah. So you're a wholeitarian. This is the train. Yes. This is it. Lannan walks around the world.

As does the SD40-2. Yeah. This is the most Lannanist vehicle. Could have been a Class 47 for fuck's sake. So SD means special duty, as opposed to general purpose locomotives, the GP ones, right? Oh, you learn something every day, literally, don't know that.

So, but really the difference, the main difference is this one has three axle trucks, whereas the GPs have two axles. And 40 is the model designation. Dash 2 refers to a bunch of electrical upgrades versus the standard SD40. It's got modular electronics. There's some upgrades to motors. There's all kinds of weird little things.

So like GM's other build, GM's sort of like other business where it's like, it's an SD40 block 2. Yeah. Yes. You got a 3000 horsepower 16 cylinder EMT 645 engine, that speed 65 miles an hour. It was originally designed as a road locomotive like you're pulling trains over

long distances, but they were eventually sort of downgraded to yard duty as they got old, right? But the nice thing about the SD40, a 40-2, is that even if for some reason, let's say your railroad has tiny clearances like in Britain, you can actually just put the whole thing in a meat grinder and then put it in a...

Oh. Oh. No, it's actually 59. Yeah, it's 59. You got a OG. I got catfished. I thought it was a classic C6, but no? Yeah, you can just put the original. I got a G. I got cash. I thought I thought it was a classic. You said, no, yeah, you can just put the whole thing in a meat grinder and then put it

in the sausage casing. He had a class 59. Right. It's all mechanically. Yeah, it's like train operating on the British Rail network. Incredible. You know, that's the good. It's a good minor hot dog.

Yeah, it's in the third in the spirit of EMD. No aerodynamics. Fuck you. It's shaped precisely to like meld within the arch of a Victorian railway bridge. It does not save. It actually is. Yes. Yeah.

It's like, yeah. Well, we precisely matched on to W6A, which is indeed the go anywhere engaged in in GB. And it's not big. We paid for the whole load engage we're going to use. So yeah, SD40-2 is very common everywhere in the world. Everyone loves them because they work so good. Let's go inside the cab.

Oh, that's a big class of 59 though because that's way more cramped than this. Yeah, you can't even take a picture in there. Oh my god Okay, here is Here here is it says nowhere in the top Don't just showing no He has a new baby god submarine that Garret lives in. There's an issue. Someone called the coast guard. Oh, Gully, no, the train has nowhere.

Yeah, it says says in the top. Okay, okay, here's a tour of this is a locomotive control stand. A lot of these modern locomotives for a while you had sort of This was replaced with like a controlled desk But actually a lot of real roads have been I like the big fucking like you know dustbought kind of like Fucking throwing switches and turning wheels and shit. There are real roads that are going back to this or at least they were for a while because this is actually more ergonomic. Really? Yeah, I thought this was the kind of thing of like of an era where you did this for 20 years and then every bone in your body just kind of like crumbled to dust, but

I like that. Yeah, a lot of the crew is preferred this. What? Why did I just ask? What cows burger? Oh, I was I was I was switching the audio input on my bootleg baseball stream We're about to get really I'm about to get really into cricket So I'll just have that in the background. I have like the fucking England Island test on in the back

Oh, I Island by 90 or however many it takes to win cricket Okay, that's not okay. Yeah, I only understand American sports Alice Oh, Ireland by 90 or however many it takes to win cricket. Okay, that's not how. Yeah, I only understand American sports, Alice. That's fine. So I'm hoping I get all these right. I'm gonna lead you on a brief tour of the unit. This is not, let's see how I do with the train sim knowledge.

Yeah, it's gonna say train sim knowledge. All right, over here is the train break. Yes. Yeah, yeah. This is the break for the whole train. And then this is the locomotive break. Yes, the locomotive of the independent break. Over here, well, you actually could read the label on that one. Yes, the reverse is the reverse.

I'll read the label, what is the small handle? So it's the reverse. The reverse. I'll read the label. What is the small handle? So it's the reverse. Yeah, over here is the throttle. Yeah, that's the throttle. Oh, sorry, I'll sell shop. Up here is. Um, oh, it's an opi downy. Horn. Yeah, horn. Yeah, horn. See, here's the button for this. You don't need to have a stage hole in like a British train though. So like, uh, no, that's that. Well, you got five times though.

I believe you can sort of, you can also sort of, uh, modulate as either. Yeah. Yeah, lights here. You got a whole bunch of bullshit. Yeah. Is that Lights here. You got a whole bunch of bullshit. Yeah. I want to say I'm not sure if down here is the alert or somewhere else. This is thing you got to push the button to prove to the locomotive you're alive and by not be this one other like not. So the dynamic break.

Yes. This is an important one. We had to talk about dynamic. I was saving it to the last, which made me think that it might have some relevance to our tail. Oh, yeah. Well, let's talk about how you use the dynamic break on an old-fashioned control stand like this.

So. Wigilet. Yeah. The dynamic break is used to turn the locomotive traction motors, which are the electric motors that actually turn the wheels into a generator, right? And they generate electricity. Easily waste that electricity. Oh yeah. But they generate the electricity to slow down the train, you know, they turn a kinetic energy into electrical energy. And then we put that into the wires that are above the train and then, and then, oh, no, no, you

just put them into a radiator. Yeah, so they go into the big radiator that's over here on the middle of the locomotive, right, and then it just gets burned off. You know, just just like Voyager's in the UK. Yes. Shout out to those shit trends. But they have, they have advantages over air breaks, which work on friction. They reduce wear on the wheels. They have your wear, you know, moving parts that wear around, right? They, uh, they don't work at every speed. They tend to work better at higher speeds. I believe on AC.

You look like one of those they work a lot better. You look like when they're like, if you're trying to break a little bit without stomping the whole way, you don't have the issue with air breaks, where if I want to back off on the breaks, I have to completely release as opposed to a partial release. They respond more quickly, pretty good when you're in mountains.

I just kind of like the analogy, it's kind of like engine breaking in a car, right? Yes. You know, they respond more quickly, pretty good when you're in mountains. And it's kind of like the analogy, it's kind of like engine braking in a car, right? Yeah, if you, it's kind of like that. So it's a fuel efficient way to, so particularly given today's modern railroad in the US, I guess the drivers are showing that to do, well, I actually, I don't know,

because the railroad companies don't give a shit about anything, so other than just making billions of money, they don't care. But it can be quite good for saving energy. If you want to save fuel, then use the dynamic break is good. Generally speaking you are encouraged to use the dynamic break as much as possible on the rail road. Of course now we have things like auto throttle and crap like that which is really screwing with how trains are being run, but that's a different story. So. Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting

topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Now how do you set up the dynamic break? How do you use it? Which is, you take, it's a, and train sim is a separate leave. I just use that. You take, just,

you move the mouse, you click it with the mouse, you drag it from one side to the other and you realize that it's not a very good model. And so I actually need to drag it up and down rather than side to side. And then it goes weirdly to the other side and then you miss the stop.

You put like, no, you like 30,000 people out. You put a throttle into idle. You put the lever into setup. You wait 10 seconds. Then you turn it to on. Now your throttle is your dynamic break. What? That's how they. Oh, yes, I can sort of see why that might be. Yeah, that works when you've

got big country like in the US in GB, you've missed your stop at that point. Yeah. So it's it's the dynamic break here, you know, you just use the throttle for the brake. Maximum throttle is now maximum brake. Not shade, right? So there's obviously no way this could lead to any confusion at any point. No, no. So anyway, it's May 15th 2001. Oh, no. God damn it. It's a bad try. It's 12.30 in. Oh, no. God damn it.

It's a bad try. It's 1230 in the afternoon in Stanley yard. It's 55 degrees Fahrenheit with light rain. Oh, right. Weather up day. Yes. And there's an unnamed engineer. Oh, that's relevant.

There is an unnamed engineer with 35 years experience and an unblemished record of perfectly safe operation. And some serious arm-tun. And some serious arm-tun. Yeah. experience and an unblemished record of perfectly safe operation. And some serious arm time as well, some serious arm time. Yeah. The growth of truck is 10. Yes. Yeah. He's moving a 47 car train from track K 12, where he'd just been classified to track D 10,

which is where I joined the rest is a part of a train that's going to somewhere, right? Track K12, but they've loaded the arc of the covenant out of the secret. No, that happened in the secret warehouse siding, and it got to the yard later. They don't load or unload anything in the yard. So anyway, that's important. So 22 of these cars were loaded, mostly with bullshit. Two of them had this fun thing called molten phenol, right? That sounds unpleasant. Yeah. A lot of sound of that. And that's flammable and it's pretty toxic. You know, it's basically a benzene with a hydroxide tech on it.

Oh, dang it. Yeah. You know, it has a flashpoint which is. It's the benzene you know and love, but with added hydroxide. Yes. Added hydroxide. So, you know, so CSX SD40-2, number 8888,

was facing forward and it was on the front of the train. The air hoses were disconnected as per usual in this kind of operation. Now, the conductor held back to determine when the train had passed a switch so they could shove back into D10. He's on his radio, radioing the engineer in a cab, and he's saying, eight cars, four cars, three cars, two cars, one car, clear. And he receives no response. And the train keeps going forward. So the conductor at this point is like fearing the worst that the engineer had out like a heart attack and passed out or so. So the conductor and the breakman after like alerting the yard in some fashion set off in a personal vehicle that chased down the train.

I don't know. It's a chase. I'll do what you've been given a pit maneuver. Like what's the. They're under the impression that it will not increase in speed. Train's gone slow enough that you could get on it. This will change questions answered by what's written on the t-shirt type situation here. Okay. Something else had happened though. Our unnamed

engineer had spotted a switch ahead of him that was misaligned, right? So in our case, it's like you got the switch here, there's a track, it branches off here, but this was set for going straight this way and he was coming the opposite direction from the diverging path. And oh, he's gonna run through the point. So, he'll run through the points and that's the... That's to rail the train.

No, no, it's safe, but to damage the points, it's not gonna stretch a bar or something. Yeah, it's expensive, you'll get yelled at. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the safe move here would be to stop the train, get out of the cab, throw the switch, get back in the train, proceed on your merry way, right? But he was going a little fast and the rails were slippery. So he didn't think he could...

He's not that dumb, right? Yeah, there's a bump which has a... There it is, there it is. There is a sander, right? I don't know about that. He probably could have used There is a standard. I don't know about that. He probably could have used that. I don't know if he could have that. I'm Monday morning course about this.

Yes, send me like, he's backseat driver much. So here's, he doesn't think he can stop the train in time, but he can slow it down. He can then get out of the cab, run to the switch, throw the switch, get back in the cab. This is old. And then I see what's going on here. And then he won't get yelled at. Or he'll get yelled at by a different for a different thing if anyone sees it. Yeah, but this is., if anyone sees it. Yeah, this is, you're not risk.

Yeah, exactly. And this, this is behavior is not encouraged, but it's not like super uncommon, especially in 2001. Oh, yes. Right. The story of the snowcans is so, yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know, clip through the cab. Yes. Round on the ground.

Yes. And our guy is like, all right, I'm going to turn on all the breaks I can. You know, he puts the throttle at idle, he puts the independent break and maximum. Finally, he sets up the dynamic breaks and he puts them at maximum, not shade. Right. Raising my hand for the question here. Yeah.

Does this locomotive have like a dead man's handle or like a vigilant? I was gonna ask something. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yes, but okay is disabled by the independent break. Okay. Yeah Cuz why would you need to push a button every minute when the train is breaking. It doesn't make sense. That's the reason why I think of McTrain. Yeah, yeah. So he leaves the cab at about eight miles an hour. He runs ahead, he throws the switch,

the train passes over the switch, but somehow he's unable to get back on the train. Oh, dear. Because the grab irons are slippery on the train. Oh dear. Cause the grad birens are slippery. The train has somehow accelerated. Oh, he's been eating barred popcorn and his hands are all slippery. Oh, what?

What? What? What? So he has dragged the longsass train. He has dragged alongside the train for about 80 feet and then falls off. Oh, there we go. Bruises.

Yeah, yeah, he gets some bruises and some scratches, but like he's fine, right? Time's still intact. Yeah, the points are fine, though, because points are fine. Yeah. I think it actually, I think it made it some way guys are happy. I think it actually hits some facing points not too far outside the yard. So he's like, okay, this is not good. That train is going faster. He finds the nearest guy and it's like, I need your radio. So the guy gives him this radio. The CSX 888 was underway with no crew. Because apparently, he just leaving. It on see a boy had put the dynamic break in setup mode.

Rather than on mode. So the train was now in notch eight full power. Oh, okay. I'm seeing I'm seeing a sort of conflict with maximum throttle and maximum break being the same control, but with another setting applied to well, well, economic earlier, that feels like an ergonomics conflict. This is a bit of a control issue here. Yeah. And he set the independent break to maximum. Yes. That's not, oh, that's not stopping the train. No, this is because it's just being overwhelmed by this is not the unstoppable force in the immovable object. The force is very stoppable. And the object is moving. Yeah. They're on the go. Yeah. So the independent break just gets like squished by the acceleration on like full like not

like. But the independent break being on is enough to disable the vigilance device. Yes. Oh. Perfect storm. That's so annoying. Oh my god. Like, I understand that that's unintentional, but like that such a like neat confluence of things all perfectly fucking each other over.

Someone, someone, she's not winning. Someone made an oops. fucking each other over someone someone some cheese model in it someone made an oops. Oh, I'm in a several oops this oopsie. All right.

So he ran us the yard. Uh, the yard crew. The yard crew talks the tower. The tower talks to dispatch. Dispatch sets up the tracks for the straightest path with the least traffic that they can, which is

down the Toledo branch towards Columbus, Ohio, right You have a couple of relatively big communities on this line. You've got Volin, Green You got Findley, which is about 40,000 people, right? Number of small towns that are like, what you'd call it, you have like, a grain elevator in a few houses. It runs through the center of all these, of course, right?

I see you've described this as a classic Ohio bullshit. Yes, I appreciate it. So now it's time to stop the train. Now they know what's happening. Attempt one. The breakman and conductor was still pursuing the train in a personal vehicle because they thought the engineer had died or becoming capacitated or something. But you have incapacitated himself. Yeah, like train. I fell over. So right around here, milepost four, they catch up with the train at a grade crossing, and the train's going 18 miles an hour. Now, that's a problem here, because I've seen that the blue line showing where the

train gets to continues. Yes, white along fur. Keeps going. Yes, the train's going 18 miles an hour, neither the make it on board. The train continues on its merry way, way, while the independent breaks are straining against 3,000 angry horses. It's making this horrible sound, but it's still accelerating. It's smell. Yeah, I'm also, I mean, the sort of the point of failure we've identified here is everyone who works on the railroad should be capable of at least a burst sprint of 80 miles an hour. Yeah. Yeah. You have to be like twice as fast as Usain Bolt. Or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, so this did not work. Dispatch has another idea, right? We get to this point. Oh, Naomi. Yeah. That lady, she's had some tikes. So there's a lot of problems at this point. Speed of the train is unknown. The exact position of the train is unknown.

Traffic is cleared south of the runaway. This batch is like, we're going to try and just ditch the train in a field somewhere. This was to achieve by way of something called the portable derailer, right? So they really tried to do it. They tried to do the anarchist thing. Yes. Yes. If you remember, there's been a number of people talking about, wow, you know, you could just 3D print a train derailer these days and you can rack up whatever body count you want. No, so I can just see why. For people in the north of England, you can go to Huddersfield and you can look at the leads end of Huddersfield platforms and you can see some of these that are automatically

kind of activated if a very light multiple unit going at very low speed happens to do the wrong thing. And that's about all they're good for or maybe a couple of wagons coupled together. Yeah. Anything much more than that. These will not work for anything much of a decent speed or a real train. It's my engineers input. There we are. I've done right. Unfortunately, CSX does not have access to like AC-130 gunships. No, they're not going to like blow out of their own track. Yeah, no, no. So your ability to like derail this remotely. Unless you could get out at the the main ones were team from heaven where they could come in fit a set of trap points in the time it takes for the train to reach them. But a challenge.

You got to do one of those temporary switches they use on trends, you know. Yeah. I mean, by the time you do that, you might as well just what you might as well just get a P way hammer and smack the one of the rails out and just do real thing that way. I was going to say get one of those like, dragging hooks that they used to use to like pull up railroads. Oh my God, yes.

Run that in front of it and just like entirely destroy the like, sleepers. The wolf, didn't the gem's called the wolf. Thanks so yeah. There's one of them in the UK somewhere, we nicked it and took it back. It's down south somewhere. Yeah, so. So what are the exhibitors like a sort of like strategic national reserve? There's one of them in the UK somewhere. We knicked it and took it back. It's down south somewhere.

So So museum exhibitors like a sort of like strategic national reserve. Yeah, so it's in the strategic national reserve inside box tunnel with all the steam look moose. So, so the portable D rail. Yeah, it's this hunk of metal. You know, it lifts the train up. It knocks it off the tracks. It shoves it just very slightly off the track. So theoretically, it's not that bad of a derailment that renders a car unable to move. These are used in yards and

on side tracks where it would not be good for a loose rolling car to foul a mainline and have a freight train whack into it, right? And as Gareth mentioned, big issue with these is they really only work at low speeds. And even then they sometimes don't work it. Make it strong. Make it out of titanium. You know, even if you have like a slow moving car, but it's very heavy and it has lots of momentum, it just knocks it out of the way, right? Yeah, you know, they're not, they don't like.

They ping at, well, what happened is they basically pinged away. So it'll kind of just get walloped and it'll just fly off and go through someone's shed. Uh, yeah. I wouldn't want one of these coming at me like through the air at like speed. I'll say that that would that would not be good. I would not enjoy that. I mean, saw it. No, you know, maybe you could 3d print one and cause really bad damage to someone shed. Uh, that's a good mood. So anyway, but this match is like, all right, what have we just used a bunch of them? Oh dear. So that's what they do.

It's a strong modifier, you know. So once the train, I give my train triple and yeah, I debuff the train by like one percent each time. I've got a hundred derails. It's going to be easy. Oh my god, that's the most asteroid gravity I've ever suggested. And here they go.

They're doing it. I'm very excited for Curve will space program 2 to get good. Once the train passes bowling green, it's in fields. I mean, it's difficult to find a good location because it's all fields and houses, right? You know, irritating development pattern when you're trying to derail a train. So they put a bunch of derails in a field and 8888 plows through all of the monskates. Hell yeah.

I'm just drawing these dozens of sheds in the process. Exactly. It lost or blood in its heart, Ross. A direct ballistic trajectory into a shed two and a half miles away. The shed getting like a sort of 18th century naval broadside. Oh, the railers. Yes. Oh no, railers. Yes. Oh, no, my lawnmower.

Into ribbons gradually building up speed. It's about one 35 PM at this point is going like 30 miles an hour or something. Um, but they've had a lot of time, which means the police are involved. Oh, they're gonna fix it. Yes. The video will be playing. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So among the people, so it was just how many wagons were behind this thing? Is it just the, it's not, is it just a light local or is it? 47 wagons, 22 loaded to with hazmat. Oh yeah, he did talk about the hazmat because we got the benzene with the funny hydroxyl. So among the people who are in pursuit of the train were of course the police and police have a tool they like to use It's called gum. That's a rifle. They just shoot things. Yeah, they like to they like to shoot things. Oh

Dog are not armed black child on it No, because you would have been able to radio the child and tell them to stop the train. No, the dog. Not the dog. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no with free railroads, which is like, we try to educate children about the dangers of grade crossings. And to do that, you are... Friend death. Yeah, it is trained there.

Yeah. Sometimes you have the kids, you bring them on passenger trains, and then you get to meet police officers and they get to, I don't know what police officers do when they meet kids. You don't, yeah. You do when they meet kids. Yeah, probably. Yeah, point blank range.

Yeah, maybe you can look at the cool gun. You know, so, but this meant there were a lot of cops in the area which luckily meant they could quickly deploy and block every railroad crossing in the area in front of the runaway train because of course no lights and no horn. Not a good com and exceeding track speed means, you know, train. Yeah, it is, it is a ghost train, except for the horn. Oh, I thought we were going like blues brothers, they were, they're stacking up blimmers in front of the train to try and slow it down.

I would have meant that would have been a hard day. No, they're just, they're just stopping people from crossing. Okay, fine. But why does this, this museum plimuth here in a very nice building, by the way? I quite like that. Why does that plymith have what appears to be like an old timey sort of rocket launcher stuck to the rear window? What's that?

I have no idea. I have no idea. I believe. And I'll do it. It just looks like it looks like we have a curved space program. It looks like Sputnik. They've attached Sputnik to the rear window. Yeah, but no, you're right. All of the shit had to be crombed, you know, you can't just go. No, it's quite nice. But before the

sort of era of tactical bullshit, whereas like, no, no, no, if you're going to have like copper equipment on there, we're going to crom it. Yes. Yeah, this thing has the bulletproof capabilities of tin foil. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But it looks nice. I imagine the body roll, like driving. Oh, yeah. I love the one the train, the one light, the one light, which is not aerodynamic. Also, I really, I'm one big fucking lipstick. So not so lipstick. Yeah, it is. It really is. So, honest. All right, so the state police want to know, okay, is there anything we can do to stop the train?

And CSX is like, yeah. CSX pulls them up and is like, yeah, the entire highway patrol is now engaged in the world's most fun and high stakes carnival game. Yeah. CSX says there's a red fuel cutoff button on the side of the locomotive near the fuel tank. If they could hit it, maybe that could stop the train. This is this is why cops need like rocket launches and M wraps and shit is so that they can just like, interdict this as like a hard target, you know, the NYPD would be firing rocket launches

at this. Yes. But so, yeah, the cops just roll up alongside the tracks and they just start shooting at the train. Um, the two ways I'm envisioning this happening, one, you like, you stage your cops and they get to shoot as it goes past them, which is already fun. Yeah. Or you get cops driving along side the thing, trying to which it sounds like even more fun. Yeah. The dog tag button. Yes. It was JD, JW pepper ass. Yes. Just stop the fucking. I think know this off hand. The reason why this didn't work and was futile is that that fuel cart of switch. It's a present hold. You have to like keep it pushed in. Oh, like no bullet is going to do. That's not how bullets work. So they thought it was the big red button here instead of the small red button up here. So.

It was a beautiful dream. It was a beautiful dream. It did not work. Like, yeah, I had to like fire my weapon in anger at a train at a train. Yeah. All of a sudden, you can do a lot worse. And I had to try to like one of your cooler days at work. So attempt four.

They're all going to pile washing machines up in front of it. Yeah. Dispatch tries to find a more effective derail like running it off the end of a siding. There was one at the whirlpool factory just north of Finland. You didn't just pull you didn't just pull washing machines from nowhere. No, no, no, it's whirlpool. They may wash machine, right? Yeah, yeah. I just thought you were like, what's something that's like commonly found like dumped around the place in Britain? Yeah, it's because they what is dumped everywhere in Britain?

Washing machines, stoves, microwaves. It's very white goods. Children. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was important. I wanted to stop it before Fendley, because there was a curve in Fendley, and the train is at all for speed, right?

So they're like, what if we'd derail it here? It's going to be ugly and nasty. But. Because it will literally demolish a washing machine factory. Because you can see the little curve that rose. You can probably, John Madden in there. You can see the little curve of the track going around into the factory, but there is a buffer here.

So you would only see, okay. And then there's another one over here, but that means the train goes into people's backyards. That's so good. That'd be a possible difficulty buffer there. Yeah. Yeah, it's so good. That'd be an impossible, difficult buffer there. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. My buffers would be, yeah.

Yeah, that's true. I'm not happy about that. So they're like, OK, we set the switch. We run the train off the end of the track. And they were about to do this when someone pointed out, there's molten phenol on that train. Whoops. Ah, yeah.

And famously molten phenol and washing machines result in a catastrophic, yeah, a feminine exclusion. So they're going to, the train's got about 50 miles an hour. They're about to barrel into downtown Fendley and it would reach the first curves in this journey. No one's quite certain what do you do now? It does make it through the town now.

Yeah, we have to talk about the restaurant named Dark Horse in the left hand side of the I might be good. I want to eat a Dark Horse restaurant next to the washing machine factory. There's an energy going on there. That's the Ohio dream. Exactly. Next, the washing machine factory and the mason jar factory down here. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Huh. Down the street, the mobile home community. Yes. And the credit union is fair. Things go really fast. So he's going high speed, but he makes it through fendly here, right? Crosses, crosses 20 roads without incident. Okay. In the meantime,

there's CSX, that really vindicates train death. Like no one knows how to run any of those crossings. Yeah. Yeah. They're all crawling with cops. Yeah. So in the meantime, there's the cops, I guess. No, no, there's another train, CSX Q636 heading northbound on the Toledo branch. And was just south of Dunkirk, Ohio, which is about here, right? Actually, maybe up here, it's a two track rail with, oh, yeah, it's a, is a freight line to track. No, this is all single track. But there is a passing, citing just out the Dunkirk, right? Oh, so we have a attempt. Five long enough.

This is pre precision schedule railroading. So the train might even potentially be short enough to fit in this. Yes, it fits in the siding. There we go. So train Q 636 took the took deciding just out the Dunkirk, the crew uncoupled the locomotive, which was another SD40-2, number 8392 right here. 888 pass them, going about 50 miles an hour.

Which must have been a fucking experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just no lights. Just making an horrible, horrible sound, break pads, white hot. I'll just smell by this point.

Oh my god. Runs it. Not anyway, this batched a line, the switch for the crew of 8392. They pulled forward. The switch was thrown again. The crew here was Jesse Nolton, was an engineer with thirty one years of service And Terry L. Forson who was a conductor with one years experience. Oh, can you fucking imagine that Hey man

It's like hey, we're doing some Apollo 13 issue up here I would now more game this out on a blackboard. Like they were now. Jean Kranz is here. He's wearing the waistcoat. You got to do this. Yeah. They were now going to pursue 8888.

Couple onto the train at high speed and slow the train with the locomotives dynamic. And they were going to do it going backwards. Now this is a very stupid and dangerous plan, right? If they run away crash into it, yeah, if it slowed down for some reason, they'd crash into it. If it was, you know, if it was hitting a slow curve at high speed, they would crash into it. But it was about eight miles down the line to the town of Kenton, which is down here. And the first really sharp curve on the route. And that curve is of course in the middle of downtown Kenton. Of course.

Yeah. Gross of the bay. Yeah. So by this time, the local news had been informed. There's helicopters chasing the train. There's police cars. There's folks chasing the train. There's police cars. There's folks on the ground. There's just some assholes who wanted to see a train,

train trash, you know, chasing the train. It was all like he wouldn't do that. Yeah, I would probably do that. Yeah, it was chaos and bad to modium. But that was mostly on the roads. They're about half a mile away from the track. Um, so they got this light locomotive, a single locomotive and hot pursuit backing up. They catch up with the runaway just north of Ketten.

They're going about 68 miles an hour, I want to say. And they couple onto the train. And that's an operation in and of itself. Like you're not really supposed to do that. Yeah, I know. Now that's not necessary. Yeah, I got to really match the speed there. Thank God we have automatic couplers here. You know, you don't have to, you know, you have a Lincoln can. That's the climb out. Yeah.

I'm just, yeah, I'm just analyzing some of the train shit here with like Bert Lancaster and like hanging over the thing and chaining them together. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me of reminds me of the movie executive decision where Steven Seagull tries to like get like a zip line from one airliner in flight to another What the shit? Oh, man, as you do. Yeah, it doesn't work out well for oh, oh, that's realistic. So they couple on just north of the curve The dynamic right the train screams through the city, but does not derail. By the time they're on the other end of the town, they're going about 11 miles an hour. And here, there was another local train that had been staged in front, you know, with the assumption that either they slowed the train down or derails.

And they come up to the front of the train when it's going about 11 miles an hour, they slow the train further and then a train master, who's just adjacent in like a pickup truck or something, jumps on, shuts down the train. And our long national nightmare was over. Oh, all right. Yes, that that's amazing. And our long national nightmare was over. Oh, right. Yes. That's amazing.

I love staging a train to try and like sort of bolt tackle it as well. Yes. Like it a whole local train and not a single locomotive either. It was the whole train. Now the whole train was one hopper car, but... How long was it like going for? It went 66 miles. Wow. There we are.

Beautiful. Yeah. Just on its own. Just on its own. Yeah. I mean, this, I guess, I don't know. Maybe you can do zero man cruise. It worked once. It worked. It's a zero man cruise. I worked once.

It's all autonomous trains. Let's go. It's not. It's not. It's not. I'm going to die. It's in a certain. You don't die. I did. Man, this is thing. 888 traveled 67 miles under power without a crew. No one was seriously injured. Unnamed engineer had some light scratches. Here's the thing. If you applied that to the standards we use for self-driving cars, that's a proof of concept. Yeah, you have to watch that. Yeah, it's actually doing a lot better.

Yeah. DSX 8888 was found to be in perfect working order, except there were no brake pads anymore. Yeah, that makes sense. That's the rest of it. The unnamed engineer remained unnamed. He was disciplined, but he kept this job. Ah, perfect. The iron rice bowl rides again, like jobs to life.

That's what we like to see, you know, CSX investigated whether bone headed moves, like stepping off the engine with the throttle and not shade were common at Stanley yard, but that investigation was kept internal. They investigated that like a sort of like hunt for red October. Yeah, cut that out. Get out the spray bottle. The federal railroad administration did an investigation. I said the engineer was at fault for being a bonehead, but there was no criminal violation there. And no civil penalties. I just like, it's not a federal crime to be an idiot.

Yes. Full consequences of this incident were a lot of stress for dispatchers, some really good local news coverage. A insanely happy car. Was this an ear of... Was this an ear... Oh, yeah, they're the helicopter drive I'm insanely happy. Yeah. Yeah. Was this an ear of, was this in the ear? Yeah, they're the helicopter. Oh, yeah. Amazing.

Yeah. They wrecked some brake pads and the guy guy yelled at. That's not nearly enough carnage for WTYP. I know, right. But we got 66 miles of mild chaos. They did. Yeah, eventually retire 8888. And a bunch of railroad museums tried to get a hold of it. But CSX rebuilt it into SD 40-3

number 40-389. Oh, this is because of the fact that there are no new locomotives being built in the US. Yes. Yes. Annoying. Yeah. Oh, the history destroyed. Yeah. It's not great.

Yeah. The cab looks slightly different. And I don't know. There's some environmental bullshit going on in there. And I don't know. I don't know. We sort of like panel be through texture. It looks like that.

I was about to say, don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don, I don't know, I don't know, I don, I don't know, I don, I don, I don't know, I don't know, I don, I don't know, I don, I don, I don, I don, I don, I don, I don, I don, I don, I don He is later nine years later. I say 20 20 10. Yeah Okay Um, so yeah That was the story of it is CSX crazy eights Incredible yes, a happy story. Yes, everyone is happy everyone is dead nothing bad happened It was just funny. It's very funny. This would never have happened if they still hummed fright. Exactly. Yeah, you probably would not have had this issue then. Well, actually, no, because you still have to, I'm not sure if it was, if they were, if the hump was in operation back then,

because they may have been, you still have the flat switch, the completed train from the classification yard to the departure yard, which is what they were doing. This would never have happened if you still pulled freight. Yeah, there you go. No, oh my god. I'm getting back safer. Yeah, I'm trying to work out whether I can double record. Welcome to tonight's rail now, everyone. It's always fun. I've literally delayed rail now, everyone. It's fun.

I've literally delayed rail ladder for recording. Thank you. Because I love you. Thank you. It's fun. It's a flexible form. It's my fault for making it live. We are close to the end here, because this is the last.

Oh, that's live. That's wicked. So what did we learn? Nothing. This is the last, that's life. Yeah, so what did we learn? Nothing. Oh, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don, don, don, don't, don, don, don, don't, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, don, I think we learned runaway trains actually harmless pretty funny actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but you do more of the statistical sample. Nothing bad can happen. Nothing bad's gonna happen. Yeah. Don't look at the previous episodes that I've been on this podcast. Don't don't don't look at that everyone. And wait, that one was harmless too.

And wait, that one was harmless too. Yeah, so 100% of the time it's fine to just have a runaway train. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just drop a, yeah, yeah, just a GG1 through the floor of your station and no one got hurt. It's fine. Not even property damn well, that one had property damage. This one didn't know. Yeah. Oh, not even a huge pile of Plymouth cop cars piled up underneath the train, which I'm

definitely just a third of it. Silence against the Blues Brothers has been approved. Yeah. Yeah. No, we were sick. I enjoyed that. Thanks. Thanks for that.

No, wait, we're not done. Oh, I thought I was getting away without taking psychic damage on this one. We got to do safety. Third, segment on this podcast. She can't. I'll safety. Third. Dear Ross.

No, I do not like this picture. Why is this? Wait, do you do your backroom? Do you? It's from the Stanley Power. Oh, yes. I do not a big hit. Rose, which happens.

It happens. It happens. It happens. Here, you will be pronouncing your own son. Yeah, it should be brought to the act for what I understand. Yeah. Yeah. I blame Ellis Island.

Anyway. I was also aware of that. But this is how the family name has been pronounced as long as I have been alive. So anyway, dear Ross, plus whatever comedic lunatics have gate crashed, this most serious podcast today. That's right, bitch. Okay. So gate crashing. We were invited.

Yes. Where I to call myself a process man, then I'd be telling you a lie, but the poor bastards do regularly visit me at my desk. I am an NMR spectrappist spectroscopist, spectr... I do agree, but... Yeah, you offer a spectroscope. Yes, exactly. And a spectroscope... Spectroscope, operas.

Yes. My current job involves determining what brown group Carl the Camus described off the inside of his reaction vessel today. Oh, that's gravy. Yeah. Wait a minute. It'd be a spectrometer. Wouldn't it rather spectroscopic? Yeah. Yeah. But the tale I wish to tell you is from several years before I sold my soul to the pharmaceutical

industry. Oh, it comes from a fish comes from a far fowler and more sinister place. Place where 40 hour weeks or scoff that we're extracting value from the youngest highest priority and more health and safety regulations are an easily circumvented nuisance. I'm speaking, of course, about academia. You this will be a simple story of misplaced enthusiasm and mediocre fire safety. But to me, it will always be the day I punched a pigeon in Zurich. Yeah, do do that. Do not join. I do not go into academia. You will be killed.

Do punch a pigeon. It's, it's practice. Our story begins at 8.30 in the evening on a bitterly clothed Monday in mid-January. The weekly group meeting has mercifully been short and only two and a half hours. And of course, these, the olive and zirch, I mean, these mandatory meetings are of course not work trademark and are therefore conveniently scheduled at 6 p.m. So they don't interfere with the 10 hours you're expected to spend chain to the fume hood and

When it's done, I immediately make a break for the bathrooms by the time I've done Everyone has vanished since you don't want to hang around in case the boss decides to ask you a casual question trademark being alone in these large dot corridors is actually eerie. Universities are quick to warn you about the dangers of working alone, since even a trivial accident can be I'm very serious if there's no one around to administer first aid. Not that they'll prevent your supervisor from putting you in that position, they'll just tell you it's dangerous. Don't do this. Wait, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no empty building. But it's also negative five degrees Celsius outside, which is 23 degrees Fahrenheit in freedom fractions. Yeah, and you're sandwiched into lap. Yeah, so, you know, not immediately lethal, but definitely hazardous without a prop with inappropriate clothing. So instead of heading,

yes, it's in the mountains, you know. So instead of heading straight for the fire exit, I do the bad thing and collect my code and bag from the office first. Ah, they always tell you not to do that. They always say that, yeah, like, everyone does it. Yeah. Feeling guilty about having gone against my fire training, I decided to leave via the fastest available route. And I look for a fire exit sign, and it points to a staircase I've never been down before. So this should be interesting. I follow the green stairs down several flights of stairs until I reach what I'm sure should be the ground level,

but the sign still points downwards. Oh, no. I go down a floor. The sign points down. That's what we've made rules on a certain dive. Yes. Yes. In the sub-basement, I finally find a solid metal door, The sign points. That's what we've made Ross on a sad diary. Yeah. Yeah.

In the subbasement, I finally find a solid metal door labeled emergency exit. I step out into a pitch black concrete corridor and the door slam shut heavily behind me. Oh. No, thank you. Using the light on my phone, I eventually locate a staircase up, which brings me out into an unlet inner courtyard with no obvious exit. Oh, you're in prison now. You got sent to the back rooms. Oh, dear.

I've followed the green signs until suddenly there aren't any. I doubled back and checked the last sign, then continue on until I see a sign pointing back the way I came. But it's in German, so what's happened here is they've done a sort of false thing where he's gone to a North-House gang that's gang that's just not house gang helpfully like German English. I start pacing around a courtyard more and more frantically equal parts afraid of freezing or burning to death. I mean, you're going to be worrying about starvation.

Yeah, exactly. Eventually, I decided to brave the concrete murder tunnels again and head for the nearest stairs down where upon the light from my torch awakens a pigeon that must have been sleeping down there. That's a good sign. Yeah, food. There's life. Yeah, you're gonna have to kill me that pigeon. The poor startled bird makes it be long for its only available exit, but the creature isn't for a very steep climb from the bottom of the stairwell and consequently, it's only at chest height by the time it reaches me. As the infernal sky red blooms out of the darkness,

fighter flight kicks in, and I swing my left fist in a backhand arc. Oh, nice instincts. Surprisingly, it actually connects, and the unfortunate avian bounces away into the darkness to my left. Now you have to eat it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fun. Unlike in video games, this Titanic battle does not immediately open the way to freedom.

The sub-basement doors are locked. I returned to the courtyard and eventually figured out that the mental ventilation shaft rising ominously out of the center of the yard is actually an enclosed staircase with a poorly let fire exit sign. I climb the stairs to solve a physics problem. Yeah, the robot floats down and gives you a portal gun. Yeah, I climb the stairs cross a small metal gantry to the edge of the pit and finally escape. Curseing Swiss architecture as I go. What were they doing in those corridors? Yeah.

Maybe it's part of the like mandatory Swiss like fallout shells of bullshit. I mean, I'm like, do a tribute to Half Life One down there. I mean, I'm assuming this is a half and and and and Zurich's are like, who knows, could be anything. It could tap into sun. You could like get it. Like you could like walk down a corridor and get hit by a particle. I mean, I guess you could say, yeah, you go down.

You go down and you're like, you keep going down and down and like, why is this? What's this donut looking structure above my head? Oh, he's no clip looking structure above my head? He's no clip out of the, you know, what's like, don't forget of the trade. Yes. I really can't see old no clip outside the front door to the building. I find another PhD student from our group. It tells me the fire is, as I suspected, small, but genuine.

A third PhD student had decided to go back to the chemistry lab to do some more work at 8.30 p.m. and then they set the lithium cabinet on fire. That would be privacy. Yeah. Yeah. What are the lessons learned? Don't work alone. Yeah. Don't set the fucking lithium cabinet on fire. Don't do it. Set the C the fucking lithium cabinet on fire, man. Don't do it.

Set the season cabinet on fire. Instead, don't do a PhD with a workaholic sociopath for a supervisor. No possible. That literally does. It doesn't exist. You will not get PhD otherwise.

Screw the fire code, fetch proper clothing before responding to a fire alarm. Don't trust the fire exit signs. Don't trust with architects. And don't trust anyone who tells you dirt, butyl lithium is a safe chemical for anything. Yours. Okay.

I'm going to accept yourself Jason born your way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Particularly for you, Zyri. Yeah. Yours begrudgingly, mag res polar bear. Thank you. Thank you, mag res polar bear. That was a home to yes.

Yeah, congrats on making it out of the back rooms. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, well, that was safety. Third. Shake hands. Shake hands. Shake hands. Yeah. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Well, that was safety third

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yes, if you're listening to this now, I rail that will be starting in one minute except you're not because it's recording and I don't know What it's coming out so thank you for listening to rail that recent No, I've got I've got a minute and a half. cease gun and two. Yeah What else I think that's it. That's all the Yeah, your relatives up for the YouTube Love you guys, love you De. Love you too. Love you, Devin. Thanks, everyone. I care. Bye, bye.

Yeah. That was a podcast.