Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 143: Corredor Interoceánico

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

in a rare move, we cover a disaster before it happens see Gareth at Railnatter: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzA-8fUrw2C5cRcP9gO5BwA follow Scooter on the bird site: https://twitter.com/Angryscooter77 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 in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Hello, and welcome to will there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides that sometimes we have to record multiple times I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the first news talking right now my pronouns are he and him. Okay, go I am I was called what Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are she and her. Yeah Liam. Fuck you I love you so much. Hi, I'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are she and her. Ye Liam. Fuck you. Yeah, fuck you too, buddy. I love you so much. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. I'm the one who's real mad at my insurance company today. Oscar Health, if you're listening, I implore your CEO to...

You fuckers, $303 a month and for what? Bullshit, nothingness. Fucking horrible. Fucking horrible people absolutely terrible Why do I even have to have health insurance just fucking Medicare for all so I don't have to deal with this bullshit What what what's Medicare for Obama? What's what's your pronouns he and him? Oh, we we we have two guests this time. Yeah

Yes, who are you? What are your pronouns? What are you doing here? Who gas? Yes. Who are you? What are your pronouns? What are you doing here? I'll show I start. My name is Gathens. My pronouns are he and him.

And I am here to make it really expensive for us all to be assassinated. That's for right. This is the episode that gets us all killed. The podcast that kills you instantly. The podcast that kills all of its hosts instantly. I have a family. This is hosts instantly. I have a family. This is my disclaimer. I have a family.

Yeah. Don't kill me. I kind of, you could probably kill me with like pretty low repercussions, but you know, please don't. I'm just toast. I have the same problem. I'm not even going to announce myself. I know what's coming next. Now, I'm fine.

Um, I, my name is angry scooter. My real name is redacted. Um, my pronouns are not and responsible for this. Um, but also that's, that's not a pronoun, Jokey, that you literally have to like redact your pronouns. Because they're identifiable. For those for for the right, the few liberals out get mad at say them. It's just I know what's coming. It won't matter at the end of this. Do you have a, do you have a disclaimer first before we start before we forget the disclaimer already? I'm so the disclaimer. The disclaimer is that you don't represent anyone. Uh, yeah, you're not saying anything to anyone about anything.

It's in the notes. It's in the notes. It's scooter for the love of God. Do not forget to say, I am not here representing anyone, including the former company or companies I have worked for. My opinions are of my own and not of anyone else's that I know. Uh, I am not responsible for the deaths of the people in this podcast. They were all solid state of mind.

And lastly, that legitimately and the actual one that I was an individual on a trip helping some people some stuff happens. There were miscommunications. It happens. It just got real fucking. We're not going to talk too much about the fucking part, but in a place where the journalism's kind of fucking I'm gonna talk about the fucking part, but that's that's my problem That's the thing that gets me assassinated. I'm not gonna talk about the fucking stuff. No, no, no, there we go

Yeah, what you see on the screen in front of you is a meme from film super troopers Right moving. Yep. Yeah. Right. Moving. Yeah. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about.

That's my boss grabbing me to do what's about to happen. It's pretty strong. What we're going to talk about is Amla's other pet railroad project. The corridor, intero, shianico del Ismo de Tehuantepec. Between your pronunciations, the drops that I have queued up, Liam's sort of general disrespect for all nations and peoples. We already have enough reason for Amlo to have all three of us assassinated and not lose a wink of sleep over it.

I was about to say the pronunciation, Sibnak got better the second or third time I've had to say that. I have a child. I'm just saying. Yeah, you do. I feel like period on a reminder is honestly a good idea. Just like, yeah, please, please do not kill Garath Dennis, friend of the show. This is an absolute disaster incoming and I have a child. Yeah. People will die. I have

Yes. But before we talk about that, we have to talk about the again. Okay, yeah. So, Garith and I have just finished recording an hour and change of trash future and then 20 minutes and change of this podcast where we just talked about this. So yeah, let's do more of that. We have fucked HS2, HS2, the UK's allegedly prestige rail project that was allegedly going to take you from London, all the way to Manchester on a very high speed train. And now it's probably not going to do any verb in that sentence anymore, or anything nouns, probably some of the prepositions. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'm so angry about this. I mean, this has been an inevitability for at least two years. The conservative government in it, as it's evolved

into becoming just a, like, basically, a right-wing internet memes, it was never going to deliver this. So, you know, two years ago, we had the integrated rail plan, which was basically a bullshit where they used to hit the fact that they cancelled, like, 25% of the project. They've now cancelled, actually more than that. About 40% of the project, they've cancelled another 20% of the project today. Biolintense purposes, this means that HS2 overall is now dead. They've left the thing from London, Houston, up to their own cousin street. They are building, and in fact, yeah, Alice and I have already talked about this extensively

for like 50 minutes. Alone, Houston itself is also being built deliberately small. It's all right, okay, sorry. Table stakes that the Tories have canceled this. What has surprised even me, I thought I was, you know, angry and cynical enough that they would nothing surprise many more about this, but they have, they are essentially proposing to, and intend to get rid of all the safeguarding of the roots.

So they're not just cancelling it, but they're ensuring that it can never be built. They are, getting rid of all the safeguarding. They are selling off the land. They are basically sacking everyone. They're destroying ages to limited in organization, and they're also building London used, London used in where they, you know, a huge amount of land purchased construction currently on the way, they're going to basically build flats on half of it, but without providing any passive revision to build platforms underneath to make sure that that station can never be big enough to build the rest of HS2. This is

fucking pure spiced, oh sorry, this is spiced. Yeah, it's it's pure evil. It's absolutely. You're a real reprehensible. It's not quite pure. The thing that's pure evil is all the transphobia that's that they've been popping out of the CPC. But yes, this is really bad. This is like the only long term thinking Britain

has managed to muster in the last 15 years. And obviously it's gone. And obviously it's gone. Well, they've long term thought about how to fuck you over. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Credit where credit still to think about all the money they're going to save and what wonderful projects they're going to use it on like building the tram line that already exists to Manchester Airport.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also more lanes on most of ways or not even the M6 is widened with the money for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and 70 road projects and Like a smattering of public transfer projects that as Ross says have already been built. Yeah, this is this is this is like fucking amateur shit This is quite I'm very angry about this everyone actually this is a problem because this how angry I am about this, everyone. Actually, this is a problem because this, how angry I am about this, is possibly an alibi and a justification for me. I'm just going to say, I'm sound of mind, I'm healthy, I have a child, I have no intentions of like, yeah, you're worried about the mechs. It's the British rail that's gone get you. No, they can't because we can't do anything in this country. Yeah, if you went and you like lay down on the tracks, it was absolutely voluntarily and not with several Mexican,

like external special forces personnel around you, waiting to get hit by a train, just nothing would happen because there's no trains anymore. We have experience or there's not mine. There, but this will allow for a real long-term investment in Britain's future by saving enough money to provide every

person in Great Britain with one British rail sandwich. Delicious. We're all getting the sort of mandatory plowmins. Yeah. But yeah, this is one of the most short-sighted things I've seen in infrastructure. And that's saying something because I live in the United States. Don't worry, we're going to get this in a few years. It's coming with AMTRAC. Oh yeah.

Yeah, if you want more on this, there is a trash beach coming out very soon where Alice and I and friends come very hungry about this. Yeah. Some of the guys see. You can also go listen to some railnaster about this. Yeah, they make 60 episodes of railnaster.naps are gonna just be about this. So yeah Just me holding down the square button for an entire hour. Yeah, yeah Man after my own heart

It in other news Yeah, yeah brain shook hands with brain. Yeah, that joke was even funnier the second time. Yeah, we had to redo this. This is actually this is actually good because now the role zombies we can't be. Yeah, it's true. You're not zombies. You're not zombies. This is the American American emergency alert system that went off. Oh, yeah, that's true. I know I'm still actually a human. It's leaving Rosenthal.

Yeah, but you're the ones that lost your brain. So who, you know, it's the. The big. Oh, you see, American. I don't suffer from insanity. I enjoy every moment of it. So president Joe Brandon activated the big Microsoft vaccine chip button in the Oval Office.

The torment access. Yes. Yeah. And so every American with a phone that was on got the like a presidential alert that like shit's going down. Yeah. And it is zombified, everybody. It's amplified everyone.

And the 5G. I'll tell you what, I was smart. I went to the grocery store, stocked up on brains beforehand. I mean, I didn't have to wander the streets. I told my, I just told my broker. I said, my whole portfolio put it in brains and brain futures. I'm rich. I'm the richest zombie. I'm a lot of people. You're like an early crypto adopter, you know? Yes. Exactly. Yeah. I made diversify just now crypto adopter, you know? Yes, exactly. Yeah, I made diversify just now, I think, you know, there is a brain bubble.

Let's get real, but. There's some Welsh gags in here because they have a beer called brains. So yeah, for all of it. Well, script writers get going. And also, these two try your beer, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah. And also, let these do try your beer, you know? Oh yeah. Yeah.

And that was the guy, Dan News. We're holding it together. Oh, shout out to Devon, of course, who has made a little pop happen and said hello to you all. Devon, this is hell. We can only apologize. Yeah, this is going to be, what we've delivered is a sort of bundle of threads, which Devon is going to have

to like, like sew together into a biotapistry of podcast. Yes. Okay, so you can see there's already some annotations here from the first run through with this podcast. John Madden. Hooray. Yes.

Yeah. We're going to talk about what is the ferrocadille Eastmoder Tuantepec. You're also inflicting this dreadful p-way all the time. We're going to talk about what is the ferrocadyle Eastmoder to want to pack. You also inflicted this dreadful p-way. That's the pronunciation didn't make me want to just die. That was pretty good. Sorry, sorry, the ferrocarril Eastmoder to want to pack. Yeah, exactly. I don't know how to pronounce it, nothing.

Anyway. The to want to pack isthmus railroad. Yeah, and you can see on the screen here, there's some track here, which, not missing one of its fundamental ingredients. You're missing an ingredient here. You need to tell me that you can't just dump a railroad on the ground and expect it to just kind of settle, you know? Yeah, they've just missed a bit. They've just missed the red, when you accidentally like spilled drops of flour

or some egg on your recipe, they've just kind of done that on like one of the major ingredients off the railway. We'll get to why they are doing that in a couple of slides, but it's exactly what you think is all I can say. Yeah. So this is actually a fairly old railroad.

It was built in 1894, then rebuilt in 1907. This is sort of part of a project to we're going to build a railroad across the narrowest part of the Isthmus from Selena Cruz down here on the Pacific to Kolatsik, Kolalkas, which is up here on the Atlantic in the Gulf of Mexico, right? Yeah, it's like a fun sort of dream of Mexican internal colonialism, right? Like ever since the Pofidriato, like, you know, before the Panama Canal even is like, you know,

Mexico is going to take control of all of the trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific by building a railroad that goes through Verta Cruz, Newoacaca. And you just load all your stuff onto one port, put it on a train, take it off at the other port. The fact that this goes through like very indigenous areas of Mexico, the fact that this is like very bad terrain, you know, these are just challenges in the sort of great romantic struggle of the Mexican people for, you know, modernization. Yeah. Once again, we see that train can be problematic, folks. Train cancelled. So train cancelled. Oh no. The big issue with this theory, which lovely to tell you about A just now.

Yeah. The big issue with this theory, which remains today, of course, is that it turns out taking things off a ship and putting them on a train and then taking them off the train and putting them back on a ship is pretty inefficient compared to just rounding the ship straight through, right? Yeah. Which is laserized Teddy Roosevelt appears on screen, you know? Exactly. So, you know, the Panama Canal just ate this thing's lunch in 1914. Yeah. There's just basically no reason for it. Continue to eat its lunch in 2023. It's just like overflow capacity for it. Oh, wait. If only they'd invented the box by this point.

Yeah, it gets a little weirder when you invent the box and you invent oil refineries. Yes, that's where things get weird. So, um, this is used extensively for moving supplies during the Mexican revolution, but afterwards freight traffic sort of drops off. Um, they still run passenger trains on it under the National, the Mexico, which is the nationalized railroad in Mexico until it was privatized in the 90s.

I missed the Ani-A to AMA, but then again, everyone does, and that's why Amlo is on his sort of railroad thing. Yep. And then after that, the corridor was not used very much or freight afraid for any reason at all. Essentially falls into disrepair over 30 years.

I think there's like a southern portion that was operating in a northern portion that was operating, but the middle was gone. You have to mention who was operating it. It's the evil orange empire. The evil orange empire, genocene Wyoming. Yeah, the only worst thing that can happen to it then nature itself. It sort of like becomes a line that brings

oil products to a plastic factory and then brings the plastic pellets back to the port. And yet a trace of the false self. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Trace of the true self remains the false self. Yes. So then they elect this guy named Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, right? Yeah, it was better than the other guy. Yeah. And the other other guy. And the other other guy. He's big on this stuff like domestic development, control of natural resources, development development of industry they elect him in 2018 Amlowe is what you might call an idiosyncratic

He does a lot of stuff Yeah, it's the phrasing of people. I know he's he's Mexico's Trump but a liberal which is a I know he's he's Mexico's Trump but a liberal, which is a scary statement when you think about it. The rich people hate them unless they're uber rich than they love them. The poor people love them unless they're uber poor than they hate them. It's a very it's a very odd situation from somebody from the dumbest country on the planet. And it's only made even worse by the structure he was elected in too with previous leaders. Things are pretty... No, it's like the long legacy of pre and like all the other stuff is working. You can kind of get a lot done by fear for better and worse.

Yeah, but you also have the like, no one will tell you no. Yeah, no one will tell you no. And Amlose getting the like, well, let's do the best thing we can do. And everybody's like, yes, sir, we have no idea how. And it just keeps happening. Yeah, let's let's let's embark on together. Let's embark on these two big train projects, because he likes trains.

He's a train guy. You know, I respect that. Pretty cool support. Two big train projects, Tren Maya, which is handed entirely to the army. And then this one, the trans-Oceanico, which is handed to the Navy. The Navy, of course.

Yeah, because sports. Yeah, it's The Navy, of course. Yeah, because sports. Yeah, because you're a busy delivering trend. Yeah, competent institutions of the Mexican state after 20 years of drug war, army and Navy, and that's it. That is goddamn depressing. Yeah, well, if you didn't like it, you shouldn't have funded hundreds of millions

of dollars of drug war. I didn't try it. They are. They are. Do they have an army Navy football game down there? Do you think there would be? Definitely a sock game. Almost.

They did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're with the Air Force delivery. The Mexican Air Force doesn't really exist. Air Force does like F-86s. Yeah.

It doesn't even have that. It has like one propeller plane that they like occasionally wheel out to try and like bomb some like Like drug lords compound. It's purely like a counterincense Yeah, no during the Mexico day parade they brought in a bunch of ones to the airport and they were all stuff that I saw in my history books on the Cold War And they had smoke machines and stuff. I think it was there only four, but they had them. I was, were they up or were they like on floats? Oh no, they flew. Wow. I saw pictures of them after I was on my way to Canada. I, I didn't think there was enough 100 mile now tape in the world, but okay. Um, yeah. So congratulations to the Mexican Air Force

for existing. Um, so I, even ask what railroad are they delivering then? That's the good question. Yeah, they're doing the like Mexico City like suburban rail. Everyone runs the P.O. Yeah, it's pretty, I mean, we'll get there. Pretty much what it is is turning into is it is the answer to the Pamol Canal Railway. It's they're building two massive ports, which we'll get, you know, we'll get to, but they're building two massive ports. And then this also unlike the Pamol Canal Railway connects

to the the United States Canada Rail Network. So you can take stuff and send it north instead of putting it back on the boat and sending it, which does make sense. It's a genius idea. It does make sense. Yes. And tell you get into why it's going to carry and why where it goes, I guess, is the way to put it. Rolls, can you do me a favor and press the letter E? E on your keyboard. Oh, I see. Why is there a plane like a World War II aircraft? I assertive.

So no, that's the airport that you have to get to code to callco and... In Milan? In Milan. Yeah, that's the only airport in that area. And no, Selena Cruz does not have a little plane. Damn. I love to get on the boat at salty cross.

Mm. So, one of the things which I feel safe doing this. Yeah. When you think about projects that are designed for like, I don't know, climate resistance and national independence stuff like that, you think, you know, this would be something that's facilitating clean energy or like, you know, sun, stuff.

No, this is mostly a petroleum development project. When it comes right down to it, of course, there's a lot of oil refineries. There's, there's at least two oil refineries. There's a big plastic plant on here. One of the big parts of the project that's seen the most resistance is they want to put 10 industrial parks along the line, which presumably would tap into all those oil products that you can easily get from your clients. We're just going to clear a bunch of jungle in order to do this.

In a long fine tradition of Mexican and not exclusively Mexican tradition of levelling up, which is like, we're going to take all of your like grass headdresses off of you and now you work in an oil refinery that is poisoning all of your land. And that's modernity, you know, you're welcome. You can become an on-braid-day process. Yeah, yeah. So, but a lot of this is just gonna be for local traffic from those big industrial parts,

which are gonna go out to either the port or they're gonna go north to the United States, or they're gonna go north to other bigger manufacturing sites in Mexico, you know, Monterey, places like that, world heavy industry is. And so this is sort of the economic development plan, right? You need to get the oil to the cheese factory to make the cheese oil. Oh, yeah.

Cheese oil. You're going to have to make that government cheese. Um, that was a Monterey Jack reference. Sorry, I just didn't know it was very good. Uh, I see. I, I, I, okay, I, I get it now. Shit, I wish I had gotten the joke earlier. Okay.

That went, that went completely over my head. That was like a cheese wheel rolled down a hill and off a ramp. Oh, I'm so cheese now. And possibly also megs. We're gonna get so hungry, buddy. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

This episode is gonna go on for a long time. I can feel it in my bones. I will. So don't worry, we will resort to camp. We should start speeding up in the mountain I'll ask you go through soon. No, I hope not the next two are a lot easier just Yeah, exactly so we'll scooter. I don't know if you can speak on this or not But you mentioned that passenger service is a component of this came onto the project fairly late

We'll get there. Yeah, okay, so but this was started in 2019 We'll get there. We'll get there. I promise. But this was started in 2019, design speed of 45 miles an hour, 60 miles an hour for passenger trains. They were also going to... No. Sorry.

I should also say part of the point of this also is it has to be done by next year or else because Amla is going to be out of office. Six years. It's a six year term, I think. And yeah, if you, these are his two big projects, a train Maya and this. And if they're not both done, then he's going to look like a piece of shit and he doesn't look like a piece of shit.

So it's very important that he's done. Well, there is a third, the Mexican, Mexico City airport, which got canceled and moved, and it's not looking looking that was like a richly Indian itto's thing, wasn't it? It was, but with the cancellation, it's really clogged up Mexico city. And it's it's not looking great. So it's even more important that these get done. Also very funny that incidentally, aviation security in Mexico done by the Navy. also very funny that incidentally aviation security in Mexico done by the Navy. Remember what I said about competent institutions.

Oh, Bob. Times in later. Yeah. So it's not just the Esmas railway that's being built as part of this. There's a line that goes further east over here to the Tabasco border. There's a line down here that's supposed to go out into Chiapas and eventually link up with the very badly maintained Guatemalan railway network, but they've been making noises about fixing that up and converting it to standard gauge. Yeah, try, try, yeah, go ahead, try to run a railroad through Chiapas set records for the most blown up track, you know.

You got to, got to have one of those indigenous on railways for that section. You know, you have to sort of, yeah, got to, we got to, we got to make a deal. You got to, you got to bring out, got to bring out a deals am low for that one. Just a two day of deals. Yeah. Yeah. So going down to Marcos comes on checks all your tickets, you know, and this is, this is not trend Maya, but it's supposed to connect with trend Maya somewhere in Tabasco.

We'll get to that later. But, uh, yeah. So now this is a relatively recent picture of the railway. I like all the guys going like, oh, uh, maybe we shouldn't have run a train on bear-ass naked track. Yeah. Yeah, nice new concrete ties, which are now useless because the wheel has just taken a groove out of the middle. Well, we'll show some before pictures. So this is the sort of railway it is. You can see the two rails here going through this. Technically a railway isn't going through this lovely market.

Beautiful. You know, I love Mexico. I genuinely do. I love to visit and get a lot get assassinated. Let's. Yeah, truly. I really want to go to Mexico City. But again, the problem is I don't want to get like a sort of kidnapped black bag thrown into a, well, okay, I don't know about by the Mexican government.

Yeah, Alice, you have to. Yeah. Yeah, it's glamorous. Please. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's glamorous. Please. So this is one of the parts that was bypassed, but you know, the state of the track and areas that are not bypassed is also pretty. Yeah. Ooh. Yeah. That picture's scary, because this is something I've seen with my own two eyes recently.

This isn't, I mean, this is where I get a bit. This doesn't look, I mean, you can, it's not, the road crossing is not great, there is no clear flange way there, that's not. But the ballast detract there for the speeds we're talking about, which are, I'm gonna be honest, trundly, that's not too bad. Like the ballast looks all right there. I do think I'm like,

sometimes you take it easy on this, you can like, I would say that 45 miles an hour for freight is taking it easy, but then I suppose North America does life differently on this one, right? I see. I mean, one of the big things that they've seen to have difficulty with in Mexico is weed control on railroads. Yes.

Was that drugs joke? Yeah. But this is where I have the drop from clear and present danger for this. Oh, see, senior. One of the drops that gets me assassinated. And you kind of deserve it. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, I know.

Oh, not more smashed up. He way. So this is where we get into why all of that matters. So what they have done because this was a, oh, yeah, we'll build you a freight railroad. Oh, wait, we have to build pass on your train too. Oh no. Um, they brought placer in from Germany and pretty much pulled all of their support staff in to help assist them building a railroad through the jungle from scratch. And, um, but they also have to run the train. Yeah, they're still like these. Yeah, there's still a couple trains that they did. There is

space for them to just build the track next to it. Why? Why did they just run the existing track and then build the new track next to it? There's so much space here. Because there's a level of no one expected this to go. One and two, the people that were working on it, there's a level of incompetence, like an extreme measure. Like, yeah, you just, you would just the cheap thing to do here is to leave the existing track right where they are. Don't even rip them up after us, just leave them as they are and lay the new track next to it.

This is, you know, when you talk about the mileage is here, the cost of replacing an existing track is far more than just lay a new track three or four meters next to it. That's fine. And if there are constraints, if there are areas where the constraints are tight, they're okay, then you plan to replace it. But we're talking about such huge distances here that for the most part, just leave the existing tracks there. And then when you move over to the new rails, just leave the existing track where it is. And you know, maybe in the future, they can turn into double track railway, even if they, you know, for shits and gales.

Well, no, they got to do it now this year. Really? I'm really injured because of the presidency. I'm really enjoying these sleepers on the top right that look like they were put in, like, when there was still an emperor of Max. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Those ones look like a 1700s tramway tie. It looks like they got pulled out for the sunken ship. Yeah, that's what most of this railroad was though. You got to remember that and yeah, because they didn't run across, you know, they didn't want to go through when they didn't have the traffic to support it. And but as soon as that gateway was open, it was send it, send it now. So you get into this section where you have sections of cordwood and then concrete ties, like literally transitioning in that picture. I wish I had more, but

people with cell phones in the center of this railway where this is common, they're like two megapixel flip phones. Oh, yeah. So like, if we all wanted to go blind, I could have put them in, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there seems to be a scary 11 pixels. There seems to have been several of these accidents where that they've had a, you know,

a revenue freight train go over this unbalisted brand new concrete tie right away and just rack it and just instantly pull it around. I should also say because this is a big national project and because people take interest in it, it has a PR budget, it has a very senior people attached to it, both politically and within the Navy, all of whom have staked their reputations this, all the way up to Amlo. And so the official line on this is that this is, I believe now 90% completed. Yes.

At thus, you know, sending trains through, because this is what 90% completed looks like. And yeah. Yeah. A lot of the sources that I read at least in English language media We're saying it was 90% completed like in May. Oh, you can find them in Spanish too Does not like press releases does not seem to be the case Reputation or risk is it suppose a good kick in the ass, but

Yeah, yeah, well exactly. And I like, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I they cleared out, it's just they were told to clear out. You will, you will finish the rails and leave. Yeah, there is a train like actively barreling towards you. You did, you know, more like, no, no, no, more of the train is coming, whether you like it or not, don't tell me it's not ready. Yeah, cool. Okay. This is a railroad that's operated on a need to know basis. that's operated on a need to know basis. Oh God.

Yo, secret do not look. So the one thing about this that I've heard from others is that it has never really been a plan for any of this. So it's more of a you handle this, I'll handle this, I'll handle this. Freight train runs on, you know, the fifth, hey, send it. Oh, no one told me. No one told me. No one told hey, send it. Oh, no one told me.

No, I mean, just for fever when I'm like building a new track and I forget that there's a train halfway along the one I'm deleting and then I can't delete the track under it. Correct. And it's a whole big thing. Yeah, okay, okay, that's, yeah, okay, yeah, okay, enough, fair enough. We've all been there. Yeah, exactly. So, and then there's another problem that has slowed down the track program. And at this point, I'm going to walk downstairs and totally ignore the conversation from here on out. Yeah, just about for a minute as we go to the next slide. So, um, yeah, I mentioned before this part of Southern Mexico is both

dirt poor, very indigenous, at times very radically, political, uh, mentioned Chiapas and the Zapatistas a little bit. So yeah, there are a lot of people who are not positively disposed to sort of big, let's say national imperial projects of building a shitload of industrial parks and a train, assuming those things even worked just over this land. Yeah, you've had a lot of active protests against this. The industrial parks especially because you are taking a lot of land, the proceeds from these industrial projects are not going to be equally distributed in a way they probably should. you know, there's gonna be probably a lot of environmental damage and again, a lot of this is gonna be

used to facilitate fossil fuel infrastructure expansion. So you know, this is kind of... as much as we're pro-trained. Sometimes, you know, maybe you should go about a project in a different way. Just don't do internal imperialism with the train. Yeah, exactly. There's at least one protest where folks are pretty extensively beaten up for protesting a new industrial park. There's at least one person who may have been murdered in connection with protesting the distribution resources.

You're a Mexico classic of being like, hey, you were supposed to pay a bunch of money to this town to essentially for Eminent Domain, where has it all gone two weeks later found dead and garbage dumps? Sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, again, something for all of us to look forward to.

And yeah, it's. there has a fail like this is this is also like kind of stress enough I have a child. Local local and state police, you know, in Mexico, perfectly capable of doing that kind of thing. But it's also not something that's helped by dumping a bunch of the Mexican Navy and Marines on top of this. Yeah. Marine to like, again, chiefly sort of responsible for the drug war, which has seen a lot of like government perpetrated extrajudicial killings to the, yeah. So this is not something in which they're necessarily going to be shy about the use of force to, like, keep stuff out of the headlines.

Yeah, they're pretty good at using intimidating tactics and they don't hesitate to use them. So, you know, this has just been forged through. Anyone who doesn't like it can sit down and shut up. Yeah, and or be disappeared, right? Yeah, absolutely. And lots of time for like, I'm noticing here, to like, yeah, I have a look at the ports in Quetzalco, so like, seven of crews and like, walk around and get photographed. And you know, shake hands to a lot of admirals and be like, this is 90% done, you know, cool.

Yeah, now, with that in mind for all the background on this project, let's get to some background before we get into the ordeal. I can't believe we're gonna get killed. Yeah, I enjoy to get killed. I enjoy not being killed. Oh, hey, I'm back. Hi. Hey, you didn't miss anything.

We didn't say anything. It's my slide, even. It's wonderful. It's the thing I know. Not about, I don't know anything about the last slide. Nothing. No, I haven't heard about it. Anyway, so when you, when you have a bunch of people that aren't super excited for the train to come through when it's a freight train,

and they've been starved of their Amtrak for years, they're the equivalent of Amtrak for years. Yeah, that any a dam I. What do you do? You go, well, we'll give you one. You want one? We'll do it. The government will do you a passenger train.

And so all of a sudden, there's a part of the project, but they never thought it would happen. Let's do a passenger train. We'll get there. So we're at the point of why I'm here. So what you see is the private car, the American private car. These are Amtrak certified cars that can run between point-to-point on Amtrak, can run with an Amtrak train or run as a charter. They have an insane inspection schedule way above what a normal commuter railroad would operate to to an extent. The costs are ridiculous. The the subtext is ridiculous, but that's all because of at the end of the day, you're on a train full revenue passengers that if your private car has some silly Jerry rig that causes it to go sideways, you're taking 300 paying passengers with you.

Yeah, it's a fun sort of like work of American libertarianism that you can just get your own train car if you have enough money. Yeah, it's cool. I bet it is cool. Well, it stems from the days, like you see the Illinois Central car in the corner. It stems from the days where the railroads would have their own private cars, the business cars, that they would just slap on the back of their own. That's the way the railroad can't just be like

walking around because some anarchists are gonna try and stab him with a shot of steel file. This is when I'll lay down to division chiefs. You could have a guy that's like a superintendent that has his own car to go over the division. You just slap it on the back of a freight train and the Canadian national still does that and it's cool as hell when they do it.

But in most of the time now, you only have a business train or you run a couple cars as part of a geometry train, but they still exist. And there's a lot of preservation groups that have them in the United States, like the 261 cars there in the right-hand corner or the URHS that has the 20th century limited in the left-hand corner. I put all this stuff in like one slide so we weren't here for seven hours. Oh, we're going to be here for seven hours. Well, I'm trying. And then there's like Georgia 300 in the right hand. That's what Obama used. He's the last president to use it, but it's it's main that one is like set up for whistlestop tours

So which after January Six I don't think wherever I have again, but you see about that. Yeah, big F big F because I was going to be involved with the one So big F. Oh well But these are not just for rich assholes, although they can be for rich assholes. Oh, yeah, right. Some, some people on them, Liam tried buying one at one point or looked at one. Not that one. Yeah, when we got drunk on power from my podcast money, anyone but that one. I really want to WTYP train to exist now. That would be absolutely sensational. Our budget did not stretch to like handcart.

But when you look at these, you go, oh, that would be nice to really show off with. And where we get to why I'm here is next slide, please. I work with them. That's my job. That's unfortunately been my job since I got into the career field. Do I like it? No, I hate fucking trains at this point. But it just, I started. So my first job was working at the company that Mitch McConnell's largest donor owns, largest former donor. He's dead now, Reston P. Spryon. But he has a tourist

railroad, but also did the private car. So you see like the golden goose on the one side, and then the shitty little, you know, rust buckets on one, you're like, man, I want to get to that. I was wrong. I was fucking wrong. So, so I worked, I worked for Ringling Brothers at one point. I worked for the circus, trained for a minute. I worked for Amtrak, I'm an engineer, conductor, but mainly my job has always been managing passenger car mechanical and operations. So in this picture, you see pretty much everything I've done the last like four years with a company redacted. I don't care if you can see it. But the company I worked for is owned by one guy, just a guy. And he goes to the auction, he goes to auctions, he goes to deal with people he's worked with in the past. And he's just gotten lucky a few times too. So at one point we

owned Amtrak's ocean view and it went to Western Maryland, scenic railway ran behind a steam engine, now Canadian National owns it. We bought the first three am fleets from Amtrak to be sold that were able to be operational. For all of you screaming on the side of your computer, that Amtrak should never have sold them. Well, they all had a heavy derailment damage and could never have been re-Amtrak certified. So you were like dealers and dealers in and refurbishes of

and leases and leases of secondhand rail cars. Pretty much like go ahead and get us to hammer until I look nice again. Yeah, the second hand markets like mostly cars from the 20s up, but we're getting into like a turning point we're like back in the 70s through 90s. They were selling cars like crazy because of pin central. I know you're familiar with that because of pin central and Amtrak and then the in the

90s game, you know, finally, I mean, all the Amfleets delivered, the Super Liars delivered. Well, we're getting we're 30 years removed from that and we're now getting into the next big like stuff's 2-day-I'm old to be running. So we're going to buy new. Well, where's all the old stuff go? So, so we are like the first group to really like catch that that wasn't a donation or something. But so that's that's what we do is mainly operate and lease these cars.

We sell them sometimes. We sold them once recently. We'll get there. And then we also help operate the polar express, which real quick is the most profitable thing in railroading that isn't running a freight train. Yeah, print money with that. And oh, boy, do they fucking got it. What the hell is the polar Express? So in the 2000s, Warner Brothers made a movie based off a book called the polar Express where a kid gets kidnapped by a conductor, goes on a magical mystical ride where he drifts a train across a lake and meets Santa and then almost

gets thrown off the top of the train by a hobo. That's the way I remember of it. Also, the conductor threatens to throw him off the train in motion because he plays this ticket. Yeah. So, so they made this movie. It's very, very 3D animated. And this is the one with the like fuck looking Tom Hanks. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Tom Hanks movie. Yeah. Tom Hanks also has a child. Anyway, so. So the one concept of this is Tom Hanks is assasinated by the Mexican gum. Oh, I would feel bad. Yeah. Imagine the, imagine the chat, Hanks of log.

God damn it. So anyway, the polar express, the reason it prints so much goddamn money is you can watch the movie and then you can take your kid on it and do it. And they sing, they dance, they do all kinds of shit. Well, when you sell $40 a ticket for a shitty coach seat inside a shitty car, it's about to fall apart. You make a lot of goddamn money doing that, all of December.

The polar express that I know somebody that works on in St. Louis makes like millions a year and runs from this year, we'll be running from like November 15th or so through the first week in January. Every fucking day. Yeah, this is the way the UK Heritage Rail sector survives as well, right? It's two things.

It's Thomas Trains where they put plastic bases on the lookers and it's running the Christmas trains where you put Santa special on your hair to drill away. It literally pays for everything, particularly the Christmas ones, exactly. They pay for everything. People want their mince pie and they want the fat janitor playing for Santa Claus to touch their children. That's like every money for it.

Fucking set this man. Every fucking rar row, the hair to Dredro in the United States does this. Every single one. The polar expresses license. I'm probably going to get sued for just using their name outside of something they've okayed. It's, it's really good though.

Like they do a good job with it. It railroad dependent. But like when they have their hands in it, they approve everything. So it's like well done. If you have kids, Gareth, you should, you should try to do one of those. A Gareth has children, has a child. But like, so that's not a fascinator. That's what like the space is. It's like trying to get through the first eight months of the year and then doing polar express. And then heritage passenger cars make money and it's my job to keep heritage passenger cars running or keep them safe. And that's the

the brunt of my story is that Canadian national cars going across northern Ohio and I have been chasing it all night. So I made a snowman with a family and we put the railroad vest on and made a little look like he was working. So sweet. So, sweet. So, that's my job. It's making sure these things say safe when they're moving, making sure they are safe and working when they're not.

It's my entire career. Cool. So, that's like why I am here today as an expert. The other reason I'm here is next slide please. This ass right? I was actually on a logo. Yeah. Let's drag someone else down. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's quite a hazard. He was actually the thing is he's the first person I was messaging about all this because just by chance he had been online and we were talking and he's like seriously. And there had been a stream where I almost dropped the business was happening way before it was happening. And Jay was the one that was messaging me going, shut up, shut up, shut up. So I actually on this, on the endeavor to make these cars work, met up with them on the way out to Mexico.

We're a agent of the Mexican government question mark. Just asking questions. It doesn't question. Is that someone wearing a great to Manchester passenger transport authority vest in the background there? Yeah, they get around, you know? It's a, it's a muni, but it's, but it's a boat tram from blackpool. Oh nice Yeah, so yeah, we may use question. Yeah, they're questions. Yeah Yeah, they used to run in Philly, but they gave it to San Francisco

Bastards cowards has been driven by Munkunion Jay drug me like 14 blocks to throw me on it while I had all my luggage on my way to Mexico. And it was fun. So I just had to do that shout out because if it wasn't for Jay, I wouldn't be here on podcast. So there you go everyone. Amlo. Yeah, just FYI, you know, one of those Tom Hanks and Jay that now added to the ranks of fair. Yes. Yes. These bullets are really adding up. Yeah. Right. We're going to make a, we're going to make a, we're going to make a spend at least a whole

dollar to assassinate all of us. So next, next slide. Here's, here's where the ordeal begins. Oh, okay. So, so, so you, we could have deleted the Mexico part of this and just talked about the shitty trains that America tends to buy and then have no idea what the fuck to do with it. And this is definitely one of them. Probably these ones.

This is actually Talgue. This is very Talgue because it is a Talgue. I'll do it. What? It's Spanish train. They have fun tilting and they have like one axle that's a weird triangle mounted thing and it's kind of cool But they they they export their trains around they they they yeah Why this is like a renfait thing that you've just like bought. Okay. Yeah, there's actually a long history at tailgoes in America

Yeah, since the 50s. They tilt they have the cool passive tilting thing. It is cool They tilt so you can get higher speeds and then oopsie daisy with it. But so these are the Amtrak series six Togos. These were the ones that Amtrak they were wavered because they don't pass crash standards in the United States. So they were FRA would let them run under exemptions. And then Amtrak did a noopsy, doopsy in Oregon and ran one clean off a bridge. And that happens to the best of us. Sometimes you buy like a European sports car,

it's got like weird suspension, you think it's cool, you give a special like thing because you think it's cool and then you drive it into a trade. You know, same thing on roads. Long story short, they had opened up a new bypass to get M-track off of some freight tracks, the port defiance bypass, and because they cheaped out on it, there was a section where to get on a bridge to go over a freeway, it went from 80 miles an

hour down to 30 miles an hour for one curve, and then it went back up to 80 miles an hour, and the engineer on the very first revenue trip on that new line, forgot to reduce speed. Wait, did this happen like five years ago? Yeah, it was essentially getting small and stale. I remember this. I know. Oh, dear. It's a whole nother episode.

Yes. Yeah, and it's sad because we knew a lot of people on it, just like a lot of those types of accidents when it's in the industry. But so because that amtrak gets a little skittish, but then they order new, or new equipment's coming and the waivers like not worth trying to keep up with. And these things were clapped out with the tilting system and everything being operated like air doors and electric opening doors, nothing's mechanical. It stopped making sense because you have to take these apart.

Fixed train sets don't make sense. Fixed train sets do not make sense in the United States. I'm glad you caveat today because that's a lot of sense if you've run more than one train a day. Listen to me in the United States, but especially Tago who you're going to be in the first fight break out in the UN. Until recently, Tago was holding cars hostage from L.A. Metro. So they weren't doing too hot either.

So there wasn't a lot of reason to try and rebuild these. So I am track parked them and then went, you know what? aren't doing too hot either. So there wasn't a lot of reason to try and rebuild these. So Amtrak parked them and then went, you know what? Now and put them up for auction. And my company just happened to be the people that bid on both sets, because Amtrak owns two organones, two, et cetera, et cetera, or the transit agency up there, I'm too honestly drunk to remember all the details. But so we bought two sets to scrap and get parts out of for like heritage cars because they're really nice interiors. The people that's the only thing they ever talk about is how beautiful the interiors

of these train cars are. A cafe car are really nice. Yeah, they were built by bistro car. You got to call it. You get shot if you don't. Yeah. Oh, that's the joke. The real joke is I'm not going to get shot by any buy from a foreign government.

I'm going to get shot by a phomer after this. A rail fan is going to blow me away with a shotgun for saying the town goes with a bistro car. Yeah, we're not calling it a B-Street Car. But so these cars were clapped out, but very nice. So we took the nice parts that were still there and saved them. But you still got to get rid of a whole train set. And the other reason we're aware is the company is one of the few

that can that can work out like doing stuff with Amtrak as a charter train. There's a scrapyard five miles away and I feel very comfortable talking about this because there's like three thousand farmers around us filming it. So it's not like it was kept secret. So we took it to the scrapyard and they brought it in and it's a scrapyard. It's not hard to figure out. They bring the train in. the image on the side, I made for my boss explain how they were going to take the cars apart. Tougos pull in, they take the big sheer, they cut them all down, flip them on their sides. Tougos go here, they go,

and then Tougo no go no more. And then you get money on one side, and then all the plastics and stuff goes and gets burnt in the incinerator like three blocks away. So these train sets were still train sets when the administrators of this project started getting serious and they called every transit agency in the United States. Amtrak went, yeah, we don't got anything, but we just sold some to this company. Amtrak went, yeah, we don't got anything, but we just sold some to this company. We were there. We donated the B-stroke car to Washington transportation museum, Oregon transportation museum.

Yeah, it's like the Northeast Railway Museum. It's if you go next slide, you can see this process play out. Yeah, actually. Yeah. How does the country of 330 million people not have 10 pass from your cars between them? It's well, you call it the economy is a shabble. Yeah. So, so we don't have to museum and I'm no, no, no, it's in Washington, not DC, Washington state. Washington state, yeah. Northeast railing.

I was like, while all the farmers were watching you went through and broke all the windows. Yes, I did. It's actually on camera. I just can't find the thing. The conductor actually came back right before we parked him and was like, what have you been doing? I'm like, here, take the hammer, throw it through that door. And he's like, what?

I'm like, good, it's going to the scrapper. Have fun. We smashed every window, every like, I am going to get so shot by one of the West coast farmers. We smashed all of these ornate glass shelves in these cars. It was, it was so great. That's day in my cars. It was, it was so great. That's day in my life. But anyways, so.

The fomors are getting you before any, any other potential authorities might. Yeah, so go back to slide. Anyway, go back to slide. Well, that's the thing. It's getting scrapped anyway. Why should I care? Well, apparently I should have cared.

So we took one of these cars, and it's the one that the shears on because we had to pull a big chunk out. Not important. But it's saying there we're getting it ready to put on a truck. The owner of the company is there and he gets a phone call and it's an Amtrak government affairs number. He recognizes and he goes, oh boy, I'll be back. And he walks like 50 feet away from me. And as they're picking up the last car that's getting shredded and put it on the conveyor belt

to go into the big box that says burst, he looks at me with like plates as eyes, like anime eyes terrified. And goes, no, we don't have those anymore. Yeah. She just went into the shredded like I'm literally going into the straightaway sensation.

And it was it was the the ambassador of the United States calling to the commerce ambassador calling to be like, Hey, do you still have those train sets? Mexico wants to buy them from. As a small business man, I think he died on the spot. I'm understandable. So so we're like, no, we don't, but we know people and the industry small, we can make

it work. And so so we make it work. Next slide, please, because again, there is a lot. I just country 30 million people not have 10 passenger cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So every, economists, it's a sample.

Every commuter agency has not a single car to spare. If they do, it's something that's not available. Amtrak, don't not even go in there. That's a whole another episode. I actually probably being done by the armchair urbanist right now. And then you go to Heritage Railroads. And remember when I said polar makes millions?

Yeah. To one year of polar can make enough to justify not selling the car. So there isn't anyone, but we're stupid. And we know people that have cars. So they pretty much lay out that they want newer cars to match something similar to what, excuse me, what they might get from someone else. And we're like, well, the newest thing we got, 70s.

They go, what? Or like, yeah, but Amtrak still uses these today, like literally across from where ours are parked and they go, what? And so you have to, there's this whole tour they go on with like a bunch of the project administrators to learn what that in the United States, we are still using stuff that's 50 plus years old on the national network and on, on like commuter trains, it's even older than that sometimes.

And they're still in Canada. He should be around. So there's a point where we're in St. Louis with the administrators that are taking this back to the, the people in the, in Mexico city. that are taking this back to the people in Mexico City. And we literally are standing, putting them on an Amtrak train just so they can ride one. And three Ampliates are on the front of it brand new.

And they just go, no way, no way. It's like, yeah, yeah, they just rebuilt those too. And that's the reality. So next slide, please. Yes. What had happened was, oh And that's the reality. So next slide, please. Yes. What had happened was, oh, that's it. You can't call Siemens and be like,

hey, I want to pass in your train in a year when they just got all of the orders for all of the trains in the North America. It was a five year wait. And they, Oh, well, see that's familiar to me. You got to like make sure you really want the trains. Yeah, but like you explain how you enjoyed planes in your childhood and a train's in your childhood.

How do you do the fun trip where you get to wave at the people and look like you're the hero when in five years you're not even allowed to be in government anymore. That don't work. That's a real problem. But we're not really interested in the business of government that hands over stuff to its successor governments. Yeah, but these assholes, you know, we are fucking not.

Nope. These couple assholes, but these cars and know a guy that has the newest version of this type of car that was an absolute disaster. Uh, why don't we talk to them and, and they're brokers and, and they can broker a journey. Anything else we need? And oh, God, what am I doing? What have we done?

Let's, let's, let's hinge this national prestige project on this one American kind of. We're going to, we're going to literally, literally, let's, let's, let's hinge this national prestige project on this one American kind of, we're going to, we're going to literally, literally, let's, let's, let's hinge this national prestige project on this one American kind of, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to literally, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's hinge this national prestige project on this one American. We're gonna, we're gonna literally just like a recipe for success, baby. On literally these two assholes. On two guys, sorry, excuse me. On two dudes.

On two dudes, yeah. And so that's what they had to do because the next option is don't deliver a train. Yeah, I was about to say you have no other options. You want North American equipment? It was literally this or wait. And waiting is not an option.

So next slide please. So on the right is me. I, a friend made an emoji of me that's used a lot and they made it kind of racist but fits here. Yeah, with great cultural sensitivity. Yes. Oh, kill it to get shrugged up for this one. That's true.

I need to go to Mexico. Yes. Yes, that's the thing. So there is February 15th is when the first call comes. It is like three weeks ago when this train runs. And between that, it is all just talking. There is never anything figured out until July. So. I love, I love government. Yeah. Government. Very efficient. Uh, uh, uh, there is a, there is a broker that has to be in Mexico that gets involved because we're not, I'm not, me as a guy cannot

sell something to a government, right? Me, if I was selling the Air Force, the seat for the F-35, I cannot sell the Air Force to the seat. I can't sell government's things, big companies that have bonds that have legal, they have to sell things. So we have to sell these to a broker who then has to sell it to Mexico. Fine. That means we don't have to worry about once it's there. The broker can handle it. So we just start rearing things up and then it's well, the deadline's October 15. What? Oh, yeah. And Amlo wants to do a train trip before that. What? Yeah. So the way you send stuff to code the Colcos from America from the United States is instead of running it through the country where the government has nationalized a section

of ferozer and really pissed off ferozer by doing so, where there's a chance it might not make it because Northern Mexico is the part that everyone's racist about, like me and the picture. I'm sorry, it made sense at the time. But you send it by the boat. And the boat's cool as hell. This is the one that leaves her a mobile right? Yeah, mobile to coach callcoast. Am I close? That's a cool boat. It's a nice, the fact that it connects

up to the tracks and the trains run off like that. It's cool. It's cool. It's it's double back or two. Oh, yeah, they put cars underneath of it. It's really cool. I don't like that. You got to export them somehow. I guess so. Um, well, it's all of our junk cars. They don't send that. Well, you got to export them somehow. I guess so. Well, it's all of our junk cars. They don't send them good stuff. There's nothing new down there. Nothing new at all. You send it to the boat. And this is what this podcast could have been about instead or this episode, sorry,

instead of just this deal is next slide, please. Oh, here we go. To get it to the boat. I have a child. No, we're not there. Yeah, we're not of that one. See, see, see TV. For this, this is how you get killed by the class ones in the United States.

Oh, okay. Okay. So the queuing up like that scene in airplane, where it's like Norfolk Southern at the front, uh, the Mexican government behind them, ferroce behind them. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So, to get things across the United States, to get train cars across the United States,

you ship them on the class ones. They're the only ones that really have the network to go from, say, Maryland or from St. Louis to Mobile. The problem is, is in the United States, the class one railroads haven't exactly kept up with the times when it comes to passenger car movements. And when you're just shipping these as a single car, crews treat them like a box or a grain hopper.

You can't hurt the grain. You can't hurt a tanker full of like edible oils. So they kick the ever-loving shit out hurt the grain. You can't hurt a tanker full of edible oils. So they kick the ever loving shit out of them. These things, you've been painstakingly restoring. Correct. And are worth seven times as much as what's in that oil tanker unless it's an oil tanker. But so if you want insurance on it, you send a guy and the guy has to know's not up against one of the train cars

that's gonna hurt it. Cause like tank cars have a coupler that doesn't jive well with the part you walk through, the diaphragm and the buffer on that for passenger cars. And you can read that. Clean off. That's, did your British terms don't count here.

Um, but yeah, you, you, you, like, you can't have that because they'll rip that right off the top of the, above the coupler. Um, sometimes the car, you know, train gets stopped in a dumb place because PSR did a dumb thing. And now the car is sitting in the middle of like the worst neighborhood in Kentucky and get shot at by a couple of broskies or graffiti. And when you have a car that's like already been done up for the delivery, you can't really risk it getting graffiti. So you send an asshole in a truck just to go yard to yard. Yeah, there's the asshole, there's the truck. No. Just chase the thing. To chase the thing in case it gets stuck somewhere, but to mainly go yard to yard and be like,

hi, so that's my car on the back of that train. And for the love of God, if you don't, if you don't put it on the next train out of this yard, the Mexican Marines are gonna come in through that door and shoot you between the eyes for screwing up Amelow's first trip. I said that three times in this and was not working because that car, if you notice the date, it's 825 and 826. One, to go from Ashland to Wakecross in one day is impossible. There's three yards in

between the two. I did it. I did it because I was nice to the train crews. And also I'll tell you that. Sorry. A second. You genuinely, you should have asked the Mexicans for some Marines. You know, just get a couple of them on board. Yeah, that's score. Yes. Yeah, that's called an invasion. We're not allowed to do that. I think you should have facilitated a Mexican invasion of the United States. See how wrong the sense is like. They did it in call of juicy, right? I don't see why you can't have Mexican special forces operate in the US.

But it seemed like it was because of like Alcatala or whatever. It's fine. Okay. Yeah. I, maybe, but insurance doesn't allow me to put anyone on the train car. So at the end of the day, like, yeah, they can stand there with it, but they can't be inside of it. So, um, so like, it, it looks a lot worse

to have a couple of humvees with Mexicans in the back, sorry, pick up trucks with Mexicans in the back chasing alongside of it. Um, that would go poorly. But there's two things I got to talk about on this. So one, the thing in the middle, I have almost put on cars, but you have to put a big sign that says, do not hump on them because they might just put it over the hump because that's what they do.

Jesus, imagine humping one of these fucking things. You see a dog car and you're like, yeah, I'm going to hump that. So so again, we could do a whole episode on this. I should humping one of these fucking things. You see a dog car and you're like, yep, I'm gonna hump that. So, so again, we could do a whole episode on this. In Cincinnati, they humped two Abrams tanks into a dog car. Oh my God. Oh my God.

That's fucking crazy. Okay, that in 2015. Also in Cincinnati, they hump hump the nuclear train once So I paid for the whole hump. I'm gonna use it This is like the guys on the guy that pulls the pins is told to pull the pins Sometimes you just get in the groove and it it's like, huh, whoa, oh, no, oh, oh, oh, shit. Oh, I've been in the air.

So it happens. I can't blame them because again, they don't know. It's a, it's on the freight railroad. Why is it not treated like a freight car? You know, and that's, I can't blame them because if I was just some guy working on the freight railroad, you know what I'd be doing? Yep. Bye. Yeah.

I'm just thinking like while back, they were thinking about using old Virginia railway express cars to do troop transfers between bases in Virginia. And I'm sure they put them over the hump. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Just like what they did it. I mean, they did it. They did it. So that happened with the B 52 trainer once. They put

it, they, they didn't put over the hump, but they, they were kicking cars in a yard, which is a lit leak, which is legal in some yards. And they kicked a fucking tank car into it and made one of the guys riding inside the guard car next to it, eat his own door. Oh, wow. It's, it happened. That's why you're not allowed to ride these things anymore. The other reason you ride, you, you follow these is sometimes they might pull the, well, if I put on this train that goes in this direction, it might get there faster because trains tend to go faster between point to point.

And if those changes happen, you have to get to the yard that's not expecting this. And most of the time they're not expecting it anyway. You have to get that yard, go in, be like, hey, please God don't let that go north. Why are you laying that go north? Why did it leave the yard going north? Stop that train. That happened during this move. Um, the problem is, is when you're doing your job right, this move. The problem is, when you're doing your job right,

this shit moves pretty well. For the benefit of listening, of course, Mexico famously south of the United States America. Yeah, that is usually south, yeah. Yeah, that might be important. I hope, I can't expect anything from anyone. But if you're doing your job right. Not these fucking listeners, on the way.

I can't say that, I'm a guest. Yeah, no, go in, go in. See, I told you, I told you, But if you're doing your job right not these fucking listeners on the way that's the cancer that my guest No go in go in I told you I told you this is how I get shot. It's not going to be a government Listeners, I love you. Hello. Hello. You're all very nice to me when I appear on this podcast. I love you all really. I'm just I'm just doing a bit I have a child So so the other thing that happens is the cars move on time, right? You don't get much sleep because you have to keep up with them and the train doesn't have intersections and shit and goes in a straight line usually to its next destination. Not a, you know, going on the highway and having slides and shit.

So you get really tired. If, again, if things are going well. And I did that on this trip, getting the dome down there, get to Wakecross, Georgia, which has, there's like seven ways the train can leave there. So there's tracks everywhere.

And I'm stopped and there's a train block in the road, just sitting there. It happens. Wakecross has overpasses, but that's how I got to CSX to go talk to someone. And I was literally listening to this podcast, the East Palestine episode, and fell asleep. And damn, I thought we were more entertaining than that. As like my third listen, I'm sorry, it's that I drive a lot. That wasn't the problem. What happened was as I woke up and the episode was still playing

because it's a three hour long episode. Yeah, we do that. And I nodded right, I nod right off and the train had left. No, no. So, uh, but then another train came, but by the time somebody, because Wakeross has a certain drug problem, by the time the next train had come and start blowing its horn, that woke me up kind of.

They had someone called the cops, been like this truck sent in the middle of the road, and park, and the guy slumped over. So the CSX cop comes out and knocks on my window. Well, when you do this, again, sketchy neighborhoods, graffiti, rocks, other shotguns, so you're supposed to, you know, sometimes you take your own, let's personal safety into your own hands and you keep a gun in the truck with you handy when you're in a unknown area. And I was dozy and cop knocked on my window and I reached for it.

I'm responsible, damn it, with my firearms. So I keep it out of a place somebody else could find it, but I was going for it. And he just was like, dude, you okay? And I'm like, yeah, I'm good. I fell asleep. I've been up like 20 hours and he's like, oh, shit. Yeah, you work for the railroad, right? For obvious reasons on the truck. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I work on the railroad. And he's like, okay, well, let me just check your stuff. Just make sure we're kosher. And of course, like, as I'm reaching for the rest of the paperwork for the truck, it's like, hide that, push that away.

Don't look, don't look. Don't worry about the other way. There's my license. Thank you officer. By, yeah, if he's listening to that today, dude, I'm sorry, but you almost ate it because I was an idiot. But it's, that's just what you do. Because like I was, at one point I was the reason I even had it to where that could have happened

I was in Richmond, Virginia parked behind a movie theater Looking at my car because there had been a bunch of people around it and a bunch of of people that are homeless and like I Don't know what's going to happen. I don't know who might have something they stole or whatever I know this sounds horrible, but it has happened. So like, you do this stuff to make sure like your hours and hours and hours of work doesn't like get, you know, Thanos snapped out by some dude being a dick. Sometimes you gotta do it. I'd known people that have done a lot worse chasing these cars. So, you know, it's not something that anyone can do.

You just wanted to make that point, because I'm sure everyone listening that's, that's a rail fan's like, ooh, that sounds like a cool job. It's not. It's no stop. Stop it. You don't know. So anyway, so as, as the, as the train went further south at one point, I pulled over ahead of it because we were about to go south of the border. Next slide, please. Yes.

We'll have a shot. Wait. No, no, look, look, look. Yep. Right. Here, if you've been on i95 between North Carolina and South Carolina. South of the border! Look at South of the border! You're miserable there! Do you remember that? I do! It was horrible! That's okay. The train car was also miserable thing. That the scooter I don't think you talked about like this particular car. I don't know if you can was also miserable thing. That's a scooter. I don't think you talked about like this particular car. I don't know if you can talk about it, but. Yeah, I can talk about that. It's America's Dome Car because for some reason,

everybody in this damn country is ridden on it at some point. Sorry, every Fomer in this damn country is ridden on it at this point. And they all act like they owned it at one point. And the reality is in the last 20 years, three people have owned that car, one of which leased it out everywhere. It's called, it was called the Stampede Pass. It's now just a numberless, nameless, soulless car. But it was on 6'11, it was on 7'65, it's been on like every train excursion in the United States. Before that, it was owned by a private

owner and since now, we're not going to talk about because he got busted for really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really fucked things. But it's a dome car. It's double decker in the center. It's got pretty much a panoramic view up top, but it's also a giant greenhouse. Oh, it's not so much. It gets hot in something, Mexico, I understand. Yeah, I'll get there. Um, the, uh, that upper level has an air conditioner pretty much dedicated to it and still doesn't help too much when it's like 100 degrees out. Um, these cars are ex, when they were built, we're extremely rare in today's times, currently the few there on the market don't have any windows.

And they bought this. Because someone ran up down there with a hammer, smash them all. Yeah, I saw what we would do there. And they bought this not because they're particularly interested in it, but because it was what you had on hand. Yes, so what they bought to do the corridors, I guess I should mention this earlier, but we got a lot to cover. What they bought to do the corridors was the two Amphlet coaches

we had. And then six SPV 2000s, which I left out of here because there's not really great pictures of them in an ownership there. And um, but the SPV 2000s was like an Amfleet 1.5 used the same shell, um, and then had motors under it, had the motors removed because they sucked, and we're just turned into coaches. That was going to be the, the, the two trains that ran point to point, then they bought two locomotives, F-59s, former, uh, go transit locomotives.

This car was bought to be for officials, for tours, for maybe a VIP car if they could find another funny story. You can't get one in three months. That's a piece of shit. So they bought this and it essentially has become the officers and AMO's private car, which is fine. You need that when you're doing a presidential train once. Yes.

To give you an idea that the curved glass there in the very corner, right hand corner, that has like a six month lead and costs like 10 grand just by itself. Ooh. So when it's like, I want a dome car and it's not like ready to go, you just kind of have to wait and spend a lot of money.

This one cost a lot of money. But. Oh, nothing's too good. But, you know. Well, well, well, you will get there. So while this is in motion, the broker of the railroad has been working to help with the freight side of things. And we're

trying to get cars there for this first ride across the corridor where we are doing this so that we can get equipment that's more standard for a hair railroad. The Ampliates don't really jive right now. They're better for interseys trains. This dome car we didn't want to go off the locomotives, they're big, ugly, you know, commuter rail engines. Like it just didn't make sense to keep any of this. So we're like fine, we'll sell it to you. Yeah, because they're like, well, we want this done by like now. Yeah, and we don't really have a reason to like dig into it because it's like they want to do train Maya, but like sensible.

Yeah, it's like it's their money, you know? Yeah, it's like it's that money, you know, like, yeah, right. When we got into this, it was train Maya, but sensible. Like, like, we'll use North American stuff. It's going to run with freight railroads, you know, it made sense when you're looking at with the minimal information you have for this, for the time before everything start gearing up for this trip that's coming up. And while the domes in motion on sway to mobile, next slide, please. Oh, I hate the liver. I, yeah, I don't like it very much.

Yeah. I like this. I like the Stim Blue line. I like the woman on the other bright just for no reason. The old, all the like trend Maya stuff is like super like PR smoothed down. It's got like a fancy logo and stuff. I guess this one does too, but it's just like a knotted rope. But like this is like so classic like, you know, vote for Amno project thing.

It's going to be a slapper woman. I like the other top and the dark red you can see. Intero Sianico is like very poorly-canned. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's the opposite. Oh, it's the OSF fallen over, yes. Yeah, they got to the camera. This is happening right there.

This is the freight locomotives that were delivered. These are progress rail reject SD 70Ms that are fine. The broker got them cheap, got them sold cheap and Amelow's out there because they painted this in like two days. I know what I got. I'm sorry, the whatever the company that does the transfers, they're rolling it at this point. They're pleased with themselves. Very. And so they're like come, come see the, come see the freight engines for your new train and Amelow goes down and

meets up with all the people and like at the end of the day, he talks to the administrators. We talk to him goes. I'll see you on the 16th of September. Mind you, those pictures were from August 25th. Remember? Yeah. Yeah. And we've seen what all of the tracks look like. Yeah. And we've established what it takes to get equipment there and like get it ready. You know, you got millions of dollars, lots of time and the railroads beat the shit out of it. And he's talking here too, also to the Navy, a scene here. So the Navy to the broker to the administrators to to everyone and it's we're going on a ride on the 16th and everybody goes Okay

Well, we already saw that we already saw it attached to a tank card in the barge to something to it too or I Are we allowed to talk about that? We'll get there. Okay. We'll get there. Oh, go on. So, so they have their, their, their locomot, their first locomotive and now they have to paint three more before the event.

They also have to get our, our junk and we're, we're going as fast as we can. So next slide, please. That's me. That's me. That's me. That's me. We find out we have to get everything there. Get it on the, the dome goes on the boat with just for the last sailing because the boat

takes five days. And we get, we get the notification that they have no idea how any of this works because the am fleets have shown up and they're looking at them going, what's? How is trained? What is trained? Is this like, not of the, yeah, it's a philosophical question. It's all A B people. So that is kind of the thought, right? It's be like, well, where the fuck do you put the rudder?

Yeah, exactly. So we're working training with the Mexican boat. Yes. 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. viscera. This is just like a truck with bigger, right? Right. And of course, all the administrators are showing up staring at this and going, well, this is a piece of crap. I thought we were getting new trains because no one has told anyone anything. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, my

father's by second hand. And don't tell anyone. The people that that inspected it have just been like, yeah, it's good enough. Get it down, that inspected it have just been like, yeah, it's good enough, get it down here. And now everyone above them is like, what the fuck is this piece of shit? So wait, so, so some, some, some fucking like Mexican Navy captain, like looks around the thing is like it kicks the tires, which is, you know, steel goes,

ow, and goes, okay, yeah, fine, good, send it, gets to, gets to Mexico and then his boss, some admiral is like, you told me that we were going to get like shiny new trains. I can, can neither conform nor deny that that is what happens. Okay, okay. Yeah. Can you just go to a train dealership and pick some up? Like you're sort of your admiral wants something that still has like the stickers on it. He wants to peel the plastic film off the like

entertainment center. Yeah. I can neither confirm nor deny anything about that statement. Okay, I've just been this is all me by the way. I've just been, this is all me, by the way, I've been putting together stuff from reading the press releases about various parts of the corridor. Well, the farmers have done a good job of taking pictures of what they've been doing too. If you're interested, you can find it.

It's you can see what happened. I can neither confirm nor deny it, but there are a lot of pictures of people being like, look at our new train. Why are all the seats taken out of it already? So I put on my dress whites to go and see my new second hand train, you know, if I haven't seen it, it's new to me. That's a good point. Next slide, please. So we go to me. That's a good point. That's good point. Next slide, please. So we go to Mexico.

And this is where it becomes. This is me. I went to Mexico only me. Yeah. That's right. As a trip to help out my, my friends and compadres that have to learn how to do a train. And I will say that the people there, the people that are doing this care, they are good people. I wanted to, I want to work with them some

more. They really want to do a good job with this. It's literally like the thing that's going to make these towns able to work together again, because there's just no money in this area. There's no, the only thing there is is oil imports. So being able to like have a train and be able to go into like people, well, this was going to bring families together. One of the people I worked with was like, I've never left this city and I want to go to New York City. I was like, I understand that. But I've never left this city. I haven't even gone in inward. I haven't gone to Mexico City with this train. I'll

be able to go see my country. And it's like, okay. That's what trains can do. This is why it's true. Yeah. Literally why I do my day job. This is why we're going to uncancellate HS2 and ram it through ourselves. But your Patreon dominance, right? Yeah. Exactly. We'll be the private sponsor. The problem that comes with this is it's not them running it.

It's people in Mexico City. And so it has to go. The particular Mexico City have typically already been to Mexico City. So it's kind of lost its lust of all them. Right. And there's no reason to come down here because why would you go there? It's not, it's not the resort part of Mexico. That's trained Maya.

This is two ports. Everyone there either has a job or his poor. It's not glamorous. Plus, you can do some internal racism, which is fun. Right. And that's why it was like, oh, well, we'll get to the passenger train. We'll get to the path. Oh, shit, we still have to do the passenger train. Okay. So the, the, we get I, I, I get down there. Um, and it's the anywhere around the railroad is a police state. There are hundreds of military people with guns as pictured, just standing around

because to keep their reasoning, it makes sense is to keep the crime out of the rail yard. They sing guard cars with these trains because they have to, but they're trying to bring up the area so people want to come to this port and work and want to put their businesses and the support structure for your oil and plastics industry has to be there as well as the trains. Yeah, it's like, you see this in any oil place, you know, I grew up near Aberdeen, which is like the UK's kind of oil capital. And most of Aberdeen became just like the low level industry of all of the support infrastructure. So, you know, all the various companies and stuff making shit to do, to collect oil, to ship oil, to turn oil into other stuff.

There's a huge amount of, you know, it's not just the ports, not just the supply chain. It's all the other stuff that builds up around it. You have to establish like state dominance and state capacity to do that if you're not, you know, the zapatistas, this in itself is like, they're not only doing this because they enjoy like standing around with guns, although also that, you know. Yeah. Well, and this is where you get into the problems because, yeah, to get a hotel bigger than a holiday end to come into your town, you need

it to be safe, but also you don't know how to... Well, no, no, to say they like crack down whenever any of the like drug wars made it to like any of the tourist areas, like somebody gets killed on the beach in like Monterey or whatever, and the next thing you know the town is like a military base for two years. Right, and that's what's going on here. But the problem is to ramp ramp up a Military infrastructure in places like this while it's already other places you have to bring people in from the local Area and when you're in a poor area Those people are the most the highest paid people in the area. So they're very loyal to the structure around them

So when it goes it goes if guy me says, do it, you're doing it. End of story. And there is inland. Oh, fucking hell. What am I thinking of then? It was a, it might have been cancun. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, so it's a company town that navies the company. Sure. But, uh, yeah, exactly. Navy and Pemex are the only two companies in this town. Um, so I, I show up, I get down there, I meet with our contacts that with the broker and there's two British guys in the same van as me. And they're there to work on a different train that we had heard was going to train Maya. For shadowing. But they got their own thing.

They have to go to the port. I have to go to the rail yard. So I go to the rail yard. And I run into some of the guys that the mechanics they brought out to verify our stuff was good. And they just won't talk to me. They won't, I don't know, lick a Spanish, but they just kind of like look at me and are like,

uh oh, you know, I'm like, what? And they're, they won't tell me. So I walk around and start looking for our equipment and I find it. And this, this am fleet that we had done all as all the seats missing, but I'm staring at it at the end and it left and it was level. Oh, what a sush.

Scooter, I just want to say this, I just want to say this, that you've showed me this photo before and I've never looked at it this big before and looking at it makes me dizzy. Yeah, they italicized you, I'm pleased. Correct. Yeah.

And so, so I finally get a translator and later on, and dude, you need to quit your job. If you're listening to this, you really need to quit your job. I find out he was hired the day of to be my translator. He knows nothing about trains, but he knows that no one else knows anything about trains and he's telling me that.

And I start doing this, so what have they done? And he goes, I don't know, but let's go talk to the guy in charge. The guy in charge is super cool. I really wish he'd reach out if he has any issues. I definitely see why he hasn't, because we walk around this car and because they decided not to buy a generator car

and because the timeline won't slow down because we're taking a train ride this week, end of story, and it has to look good. It's a press event. They have to get power on this thing. I'd normally, you specifically told them to buy a generator car, right? To buy a generator, we literally had it in a proposal.

And it was turned down because the locomotive has a generator in it. Yeah, but what happens when you have to locomotive? So we're going to find out what happens. Next slide, please. So this is a normal Amphly somewhere in the United States. It doesn't really matter. All it matters is that to explain how these work, this is a pioneer true truck. So the bearings inside, the discs, the discs are on the inside because it's a bud disc brake car. On the outside, there's TbUs, which is the braking. Yeah, right. So that all adds a lot of braking force for going above 120 mile an hour, up to 120 mile an hour. The cars are built to tilt and level in track that's uneven or rough. So that's the right

where your pointer is. That's the airbag pointed out. That actually does the most of the suspension work for the car. But as a backup, there are mechanical springs inside that and then on the car body. Yeah, primary, secondary suspension. Correct. The airbags will eventually inflate off the air brake system. If not, they're run off the main reservoir coming straight from the locomotive, it also runs the bathrooms on these cars, fun little fact. So normally, got you. Yeah, normally that little top there, right there, that when the car is properly leveled now that's the equalizer the tab on the airbrake Wait, that tab that time yet normally when that car is deflated the that top part that's attached to the bolster of the the truck frame

Will be sitting right where it is. That's what it's supposed to look like. When a car tilts, it'll be at one side. If it's in on level track, it'll be a little off, but it's supposed to be in the middle or just under the middle if the airbag's non-flated. The car we were looking at on the other hand, looks like next slide. Oh, dear. This is not the scary one.

Oh, wait. Okay. Oh, what? This is the one that shows something's not right. But they've also painted everything. And in an air system, vents exist, rubber exists. You're not supposed to paint the wheels so you can identify cracks if one starts to form. Oh, God. They've literally just been through with like a can of spray paint. No, no, it's worse. They they watched it with like a paint gun, like a airless paint gun you'd use for your house.

So scourge, can I just check that the my knowledge of the the mechanicals of these isn't great. It's not your damper that's on the outside. You called it an equalizer that they've bent the bar off right. It's not your damper is it? It's's it's it's yeah, it's it's an equal and here it's it's called the equalizer. There's other names. I might even be getting that wrong because the amp leats are even weirder, but essentially, yeah, it keeps the the the truck in line with the car. Okay. It's got rubber pads on it. It keeps it from like spinning out essentially. Right. So it doesn't look at your downpour. Yeah. Yeah. Why we couldn't make all frames the same. I don't know. It's not supposed to be something like that.

I can neither confirm nor deny when that happened. But I'm not, I'm, I ain't good, but that is okay. The Amphlete's trucks can take some some screwiness, right? What's not okay is the fact that the airbag is not inflated in this picture. No. Oh. Next slide, please. So that's so it's just. Oh, beautiful, beautiful. Oh, no, I didn't know like, you know, like where that's gone.

So there's not a good picture of it, but what has happened is there has been a generator hung under a car that's supposed to tilt to get them pound. Okay. So that El President-Tay Straying can run. And I got violently ill the night after I found this because I could not stop thinking about this. This car was not freshly rebuilt and it never would have had a chance to be.

Amtrak did not freshly rebuild it. This is riding on a bunch of parts that have just kind of been yellowing it since 2016. Um, and no one knew. No one called. I appreciate that you can't answer this, but I was the Mexican Navy trying to assassinate Amlo on purpose here. I can deny only that statement. Oh, okay. Good. I don't think so. I really, again, I said it earlier, just no one knows. No one, no one understands how this works and no one cares. No one that can care, can care because it has to go. It has to go. Big Soviet Union vibes, big Nadellion catastrophe if it don't go Nadellion's going to beat you out back with his own fist Um, and that's what everyone's afraid of especially when you have in 16s around in 16s and M4s all around you from people They're local that are like it has to go it gets real nerve-racking

Sometimes I feel like these deadlines are a little overblown. I think people could probably do things a bit late and still save most of their face. Correct. And that's a nice, delivered America. You could have also saved the broker or anyone could have saved face by going, hey, hi. So if I do this, will it work? And we go, no, they're like, okay, well, how bad could it be? And it's like bad clear issues, clearance issues. I mean, if you go 60 and you hit one of these curves, you could roll the car. I just said, you're Ellen. This thing, this thing will flange climb. Super easy. This, the wheel rail interface will have been screwed by this. You will, this will flange climb. Super easy. The wheel rail interface will have been screwed

by this. You will just, this is even at low speed. This thing will, all the hunting will not be properly damped in vehicle rotation. This is horrible. This is so horrible. any speed. Yeah. Thanks, Ralph. Well, luckily, it was safe at one speed. Um, zero fan. Close. Um, but so next slide, please. Oh, like close to zero. I'll tell you that right now. So on the left is what we're worried about. That's this is one 88. Boy of it. Yeah. This is this is a shot from one 88 when it went off the site. Obviously, as a high speed derailment where it rolled the rail because it's going too fast in a curve. But this could have happened. This could have happened where the car climbed and went over with the God damn president of the of the country. I almost said over the United States. Fuck me.

Well, Mexico is a United States, you know? Yeah, the guy that's the president of the Mexican United States on the fucking train. Yeah. And I am in the country. And that's my car. That's sort of awkward to be like, yeah, I just sold the sort of, I sold JFK the murder limo. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So we're there. I am there dealing with the reality of like, this is bad, man, and everything else becomes minor. But you also find out that the people running the train have never ran train. I was explaining how the air breaks worked on a fundamental level,

not like this car's air breaks work this way. Unlike, you do this in the locomotive and it stops because no one has touched a train before. Wow. Because the support staff working this are the support staff for the Navy, not for the, there's a civilian railroad, and then there's the Navy. And because this is the passenger train, this is still the Navy. The civilian side is still working on it, but, you know, they're hand picking who does what? Oh, dear.

And most of those people have worked on a boat because they're similar to trains. Um, and they're made of metal. They, um, we, we, metal. They have the same time mover. Like it's they have similar ideas, but the big problem is we think the left hand picture is the real problem. But the big problem is that there is something else that everybody has been being told about and trained on.

Yeah, there's a yellow nose. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's a old friend in the art. What if they don't eat a loa again? Is where the amphlete is sitting and there is something seen in the rail yard that we're just not paying attention to

because I have been told that's going somewhere else, that's for something else, whatever, until this point. But- Don't worry about it. Exactly, don't worry about it. It's not your project, your project's saying in there. And it's shit. We hate it.

And you need to help us fix it. And it's like, I'll train you, but I sold, you know, I sent it in the timeline provided because I, you know, you want to do this event. Okay, cool. That's fine. Um, I killed a car for you. Yeah. And then after all that, they modify a bunch of your ship very badly, allegedly. And I can either confirm nor deny that they did that. Um, someone did someone broke into, someone got onto the barge, right, with a rib boat and like welded a generator under the underside of your car and then snuck off into the dead of night and then when the Mexicans got it off the barge, it was like that.

Yeah, actually, actually, I like that. That's a good story. You should do an episode about that. Um, anyway, um, next slide, please. So this is the next day. This is, this is the dome arrives off the boat. And the dome has not been turned on yet. And I had been saying up until this point, we, the generator on the dome, it has a little generator

that private cars use that could backfeed and help power these cars. You just might not be able to put a by in one and it's, well, we don't know how many people are coming. Amelow's invited a lot of people. Oh my gosh. Mostly dignitaries too. So like, we're going to like scrub international politics if we don't run this.

Cool. It fucking, excuse me. Have you done a test run yet with cars? No. So, so these are all bug cars mind you. But built the Amphlates, but built the dome. And on the left is the meme I made that night. Yeah. But don't break. that night. Yeah. But don't break. You make a meme to process this trauma. I made a name to send a besquiggle house. And yes. Yes.

And it's like, it's a nice. This is why. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm in that group of guys with the hard hats right there. I'm down there just hoping and praying screaming into the void. Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah. The hotel was on the beach. I literally debated walking out just into the ocean. They're sorry into the Gulf and just seeing how far I can make it before it goes black. Um, there's like 40 feet. Uh, anyway. So the dome arrives. We go to power it up and just power the dome up and it's so far

so good. And you turn on one of the 480 volt, which is like the power that these cars run on, 480 volts. It's the kind of voltage where if you lick it, you die, but you die, if you like touch it, your arm gets blown off and then you die very slowly. Oh, you're that good. You're like Mexican railroad first aid. Well, we'll get there.

Oh, there's none of that there. I thought you know. Yeah. But we get to turn on. Just thrust to that phrase. Yeah. We go to turn on the HVAC system and it's got a 30 second delay and what it is is I am standing in the electrical cabinet inside of it. It's like a little room that you know all the breakers so that when you

unwire it you can get to everything right. It's a little room on the end of the car. I'm standing in it with like six of that. The project guys are the guys I have to know how run this blocking me in and when it shipped, it worked. All the lights come on, everything's okay. You turn the big 480 breaker on, you turn the HVAC system on. There's a 30 second delay timed in. So like if the car gets turned on and off and on and off,

it doesn't blow up the compressor by like starting it hard a few times, right? There's that delay and then cop boom. There's a 480 arc inside the cabinet. I am standing in. Oh my god. And the contactor that runs this ejects itself out of the panel that is bolted into. And then all of the wires where the boom happens catches on fire. But no, but L shake hands with me. With me standing in a like one foot square room with my arm. I burned the shit out of my arm. Obviously you hit the main breaker and you kill it real quick and then you go get the fuck out of my way. To all the guys that have been blocking me in who just stood there.

And then I am in such a panic because all of guys with guns around me are attending on this car working in three days that my brain goes, you know what? I don't know what actually happened. Turn it back on. Because panic, adrenaline, stupidity. And it was they have these cannon plugs that are like the helicopter can't like what's in airplanes. There's a lot of these where you plug them together and you screw them down. So tight.

The car had been hit so hard somewhere in its transit, probably once it arrived at the port that that plug had been broken off at the wiring, and you can't see it. It's one of those things you don't inspect these things. They're like meant to take a hit, right? But it's also a 70-year-old car in a 40-year-old electrical panel. So it had shattered that plug and it arc to each other, and then all that wiring caught on. plug and it arc to to to each other. And then all that wiring caught on it's it's fireproof wiring, but the plug is not it's plastic. And then there's a team. And it created a mix. But anyway, the point of this is is I'm about to screw over the president's train ride because no, no HVAC in the dome car. So things get real. And then in September.

In September. In the green house. And the hottest September in recorded history. At the same point. Until next year. One of the project administrators also shows up to the yard. One of the people that everyone listens to. And it's like, I'm mad.

Do this. And they do it because they're mad and they don't realize it was a euphemism. So I get hidden in an electrical cabinet for like 20 minutes because it turns out, it turns out that he's really mad about the whole situation. So that happens.

You have the life flashing before your eyes a few times moments, and then he leaves. And we go to link up the cars and it can backfeed from the car and it's like, okay, cool. You've got one amp fleet, use the one with the generator. I don't care. Bye. Yeah.

I'm gonna go back to the hotel. I'll be back tomorrow. Oh, the train's leaving tomorrow. What? The train's leaving tomorrow. It, the train's leaving tomorrow. It's going to Salina Cruz, the trips from Salina Cruz to Coates, Colcos. Oh my God.

Uh oh. It's gonna, it's gonna run. So you don't have any time to work. So again, the track that we've seen. Yeah, you, you don't have any time to work on it. Well, work on Salina Cruz. Okay, here's what I'll do. I'll fly there.

I'll go to the hotel, I'll fly there after picking up a bunch of parts. I'll fly there. I'll see you guys there. I'm advised to leave as soon as I get back to the hotel, fly there, after picking up a bunch of parts, I'll fly there, I'll see you guys there. I'm advised to leave, as soon as I get back to the hotel, I'm advised to leave by a lot of people. Yeah. Because it's now beyond anything I can do.

And it's not a good look for anyone involved. So I leave, and I have given them everything they needed to know. I spent the entire time working with people that had worked with me on what each car needed, how you started up, how you need to leave it. And if you get through this without assassinating Amlo. Right. And I'm like, whatever you do, just the car tilting to the sides one thing, I'm banking on the fact that 15 year old airbag will do its job. And, and I'm more worried about them getting there and the thing not running and them getting, you know, shick and 300 miles away from where they live.

Yeah, although somebody getting, you know, shot somebody again redact live. Yeah, somebody getting shot. Somebody getting redacted. Yeah, I can't, I'm more worried about them than I am me because at the end of the day, I haven't done anything other than deliver a shitty product that I didn't deliver shitty. Yeah, so I'm plus you're an American, you know, a day which does help us.

Right, and at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's not gonna help you guys when you get shot. Like, right. Yeah, there was never a situation where I personally was told something bad is going to happen to you if this happens, but there was just this, this, this air of if this doesn't go, we're all dead. And that statement translated half of it. If some admiral like fucking does, will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest that's not gonna make you feel any better that he didn't actually say.

So you take this guy and shoot him. Like, yeah, I was about to say that exact thing, yeah. But like, you know, again, no one ever did that. They were just keeping me away from this situation, even though it was my name and my work on the line. Yeah. And it's generally, generally, I don't think anyone is like advising you to leave

unless somebody in a position to get shit to happen is saying some things at a volume and with an intonation that might make some things happen. Right. So I left. I'd next playing out next playing out of the country. I went to Canada actually, but not because this I had other job. But so they run the train and next slide, please.

That's it. And it ran and that's top photo is them running the line with no one knowing that it was running. Uh, and let you know, why it opened. Yeah, do you remember why I said that the track, you know, it gets worse, Gareth. Look, look at it.

Yes, you did say that and sweat more sweat came off my body. So that train is empty. No one's on it. Other than the managers, like the civilian managers, the powers off and they go for it. They'd run it at speed that they can. And there are there are videos where I am on a plane going, oh my god, because there's no body in it, so there's no weight. But things are not... Oh, this thing is gonna be lively. Yeah. The one car that's not great is a bouncing.

It's having a time. Oh, me. But, but, so they get to the line of careers, they fix the air conditioner, thank God. They put a swamp air conditioner up in the dome, which is, it's like, you know, portable air conditioner to help. And it did. And then Sunday is when the event, they're a day late, they postponed it because of Amlose schedule. Sunday, they run the train. And there's four reasons why I'm here

having this and not hiding in a cave somewhere in New Mexico. Um, he didn't kill Amlo being the first one. Correct. Woo. Yeah. The, the, the, the Saddam Hussein hole. Yeah. Yeah, we're all, we, all of us are going to be, you know, exactly.

We're in all kind of a digger on Saddam Hussein holes. Oh, man. I had a child. There that's a child. I just don't want to. You're going to have to take a on Saddam Hussein holes. Oh man, I had a child. Yeah, that's a child. I just don't want to. You're going to have to dig a second Saddam Hussein hole. I'm going, I'm going, like, what, what, you dig it for me? Like I don't want to do the work. It's like stackable Saddam Hussein.

Yeah. Yeah. This tosses a shallow grave. Like, don't be just dig that far. It might happen. That's fine. I don't care. So first thing is it makes it across the railroad empty.

No problems. A couple of bumps I've been told, but like nothing that's like, oh, this is gonna go really poor. Like, but there's no weight on the train because nobody's on it. But I am very lucky that the people I had talked to had told, like, told everyone like, this is what we need to do. This is what the guy that knows the cars that we talked to

said to do and they did it. Did everything except speed, but they couldn't go fast because there were so many God damn people out celebrating the train because this is like the biggest thing that's ever happened in most of these towns. And the president of the country is coming through hanging out the door waving at all of us. It's, you know, the reason Kennedy did the things in the limo.

Um, it was really enjoying those Dutch doors in the videos. He was like, you know, he, he is that car the way it's supposed to be used. Exactly, not in the dome in the Dutch door. Exactly. And he, I mean, it, it because of so many people, they couldn't speed up even when it was good track. And so they ran it at like, I think a max of 25 in one spot,

you know, freedom units because I don't remember their numbers. But. So the love of his people saved Amlo then. Correct. And again, but don't fucking break. And the picture on the right shows it. I didn't realize when we ran the trip that the Amphletes were built to have 12 inches of canter.

Wow. At extreme. The hell. They're not, they don't like it. They really don't like it. And if it was doing that kind of lane, it would have the generator way hit the rail and broken off the rail, the train, but because it wasn't because they were going slow because the amphletes built to take the weight, it worked out by like the skin of our teeth. I don't like this. I don't like it either, but, but it can do it. Because, but, oh my god, Bud, Bud never should have died. We should have nationalized Bud and just sacrificed a couple of shot wellers to the guys every year.

This is like the American version of how like the most resilient spacecraft is still a Soyuz because they built it to work and it just still keeps working. Exactly. Even like as you pull out more and more jenga blocks underneath it and it still kind of keeps on going. This is the American version of that. As you have something that was produced in the salad, and it still kind of keeps on going. This is the American version of that, is you have something that was produced in the salad days, and it just kind of like,

eh, against every possible fucking tolerance. It still kind of works. Exactly. And you got to remember, too, is the bug cars were designed, were designed and built with like every possible safety measure in them. On top of the fact, they shot welder these things together, which gives you like infinity cancer, but like it's a big stainless brick.

You can't you can't hurt it. So and you, you know, you worry about it. The thing falling off would have done the damage, but at least like I, I have said this a lot in my career and a lot, especially in this. I told a lot of people down there. I told higher up people. I told my, my boss, I've told my friends, I am a hundred percent okay with being wrong when I'm being negative. I want to be wrong. I want to be the asshole. I want to look stupid because if I look stupid when I'm being negative, it means things worked out. And in this circumstance, I might not have been wrong to be like, Hey, this is going to be a problem, but I was wrong that it would have been. It worked. It's about to say we did not put the fucking thing on. It's a dead. Yeah. This could have been a lot worse though. This could have been, you

know, two green twoingos killed our president by giving us shitty train cars, which would have been the narrative, but it wasn't. And it's all because this stuff is well designed, well built, was built to last forever in the 70s, still runs for that reason. Isn't museum pieces, isn't carbon steel cart. You see where I'm going with this?

Isn't a fiberglass nose piece of, yeah. Yep, yeah, wait a minute. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. 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, pick up trucks, or pick up trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Uh, join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that back to the show. Yeah. So, so instead of that, the narrative now is going to be five gringos humiliating our president and our Navy and must be hunted down and killed with the dogs. Yeah.

I don't want to be. I don't want to go to Mexico. I think that that that boat has sailed I legitimately think that you you all have like Don't have to worry. There is going to be something I'm not worried that's coming maybe for a bit I think maybe for like a year or so. I'm not gonna go to Mexico Especially because again, I would have to fly to Mexico pretty much and that that's put puts you under the jurisdiction of the Navy, the guys who, oh, right. Yeah, I've just been kind of suggesting a, you know, dangerously

violent and competent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I really, so in Mexico City, it's not as bad either. In Mexico, say there's adults, people have been there, people have been doing this for a while that understand that like you don't just do, it's in these smaller towns where it's like, you know, I mean, this is the toll phase. Absolutely. Well, just, just you wait till we get to the real baffling part that the reason you are here, sir, is the most like, oh, I'm not the asshole in this at all moment.

Oh, yeah. This is a thing. In this intermission period, the travel advice here is, maybe don't go to like, Chiapas or like, Wahaka for a bit, and especially don't go to like, small southern towns where this is the only game in town.

All right, we're back. Just don't be the, don't be the reason they'd be mad. Now don't go down there and like get in a bar fight with a couple of Navy captain. I'm lost to do. I mean, it'd be way easier to assassinate me and Garuth because like, at least like the Mexican government has a good reason not to assassinate Americans. Nobody gives a shit about British people.

And you know, not really so, but yeah, still kind of a rough realization to realize that I'm going to get shot at like the, I keep saying Takariyagoku because it's to me the funniest thing. Uh, I can neither confirm nor deny that, but you know, I think this isn't journalism, this isn't going to take off. I think the thing that's going to take off is one something happens. Yeah, as well, part of this. We have a curious kind of reach on this podcast. Don't remind me. Don't remind me. It's like quite a lot of East Coast journalists listen to this podcast. Don't remind me. Don't remind me. It's like quite a lot of, he's got his journalist listen to this podcast.

It has a way of getting away from us, I think. So, we're all gonna die. I meant, Lee is going to lose my chance at a career, and that's okay, I hate trains. That's fine, I will be found like face dead in a thing of Chalupa's. So like, face dead. That's not too bad.

Yeah. We died. I died doing what I loved, eating Chalupa's. Yeah. All right. Can we move on, please? Let's go. All right.

So here's what's left. Oh, now he wants to go. After an hour and a half, two and a half hours. Listen. All right. Come on. Come on. Come on, Gary still has his segment. That's got hurt.

So this is what's left. It's it's the locomotives and the SPVs. That's that's the part of our our section that was supposed to go between the two ports and be the train that interacts with the North American rail system, AAR standards. And yeah, we, contract still on. Cool. Contracts still on and, you know, we're going to deliver what we've promised.

And I can't wait to see what they're going to weld to this. Hey, Liam and I have been in these cars. Maybe, you know, giant Mexican flag for patriotism sticking out the top. Yeah, hey, Liam and I have been in these cars Giant Mexican flag for patriotism sticking out the top well They're gonna paint like have they painted these cuz I remember my first ever appearance on this on this fine podcast And I remember what happens when you paint paint stainless steel well, no, no, that's when you paint stainless steel. Well, no, no, that's when you, no, that's when you paint Corten. This is, this is, this will be fine. Okay, good. Fine. That's, that's really good. Don't pay Corten steel, everyone. Yeah, they'll be okay. They'll be okay. It's,

it's, they're good units. They, I mean, they sucked in the United States, but what it is, they sucked because they, they were the replacement for the RDC as a coach car. They're Amphlete 1.5s. They'll be fine. Um, the problem comes from our little surprise guest. Next slide. Yes. Oh, surprise guest. Is it the Pope? So the broker So the broker went to Frick and London and bought some other train sets that are being retired, not to London to like fucking pens and this is a GWR. Oh, yeah, he's a good London, but yeah, he got these and kept saying they were for train Maya and the news took picked it up as they're going to train Maya, which is pretty much grade separated, not running with the AAR freight profile. And then maybe the end of the tell us this. Yes. Rottro raggy. What's that? Oh, shit, who let this in here?

What are you doing? It's lost. So now it's in a really hard part. Oops, thanks. Again, if you don't see the slides, this is an IHS-2. It's a British IHS-2. I don't know what it's. Why have you done this? When I just he it's a British I just he I don't yeah no it's what it's why have you done this when I first saw the pictures that this was happening I I made a noise I have I didn't know I make

Saying it was it was kind of like it was like a short horror is how I described the noise I got I got Mexican still listen to the great heck episode talking about these things. Specifically about this, the day this showed up being like, oh my God, it's going to get blasted by a G. It's gonna get blasted by a car. Yeah. Quite a few people at work for Pemex know the Joe Glandrovo Defendo

now, and I find it funny. It's fun. Um, I'm different. Anyway. So, yeah, these, these are, these are happening. And these are happening on the same railroad that's running oil trains that's running container trains that's running big ugly GE locomotives. It's running big ugly SD70 ACA East. And next slide, please. See the

little one? See the little guy? Oh, the little guy, little guy right here. Oh, Jesus. Just a little birthday boy. This is a train that was designed to be as light as possible by a bunch of short sleeve shirt wearing British rail engineers in the 1960s. I was like, you said shirt wear it with the same. Yeah, short sleeve shirt. Yeah, I'm painting it. I'm painting an image for our fine new bunch. You need a bunch of guys and quilts and no shirts.

It's pretty hot. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. Yes. We need a bunch of like the fucking, what's the word? What's the what's the's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage.

It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage.

It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage.

It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. It's a lot of garbage. I'm just basically exactly what I look like when I go to work actually. But like in the 70s version where you spent like the past 30 years smoking, you did just kind of like everything is much more dismal. Yeah. I was a lot more like in my blood. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I think. Yeah. If you're a microplastics, though, so kind of swing. They're also true. Yeah. Yeah. They had invented asthma. That's good. Yeah. Yeah.

I made this slide to compare like the types of wrecks, but there was a oopsie daisy and I forgot to put the other two, my bad. But I just want to point out that the HSE is as tall as the window band of the Amphlates, one, and two, it disappears behind the oil tankers. Yeah. This is again, I'll just reinforce the point. Designed to be light so that it could achieve high speeds, and 25 miles an hour

in existing braking distances. So this thing is light. And also, what they've done is they've painted over with a shiny new livery ice cream, also very poorly-curned with a, you know, like, gobbiana de maigre or not. We'll get there. And what they've done is they've painted over the big yellow,

divers face of it, which means what you have in the sort of view from this is you have the experience of a child in front of a Ford Raptor in the dark wearing all black. wearing old black. So, so I want, I want you to, the point this was going to make is like when an amfleet smacks a train at 60 mile an hour, it tends to just kind of like, like the people inside it get turned to glue, but it tends to not deform. Yeah, you just hammer out the like, uh, dance on the soul. It's good. There's, there's, there's not crash management in it per se, but like, but don't break. So it tends to

be like it glances off. It does things where, and this is on the American freight rail system, it tends to just move. Uh, certain extent, you gotta have it, you know, maintain integrity when it wax into the CSX locom extent, you got to have it, you know, maintain integrity when it wax into the CSX locomotive, like you're seeing here, you know, locomotives completely wrecked, but the train car, the passenger car is largely intact. People in there didn't have a good time, but, you know, they're soothed.

But the people in that car didn't have a good time. In the front, the rear, they were a little wacky, but they were fine. And in 1a8, that's the car on the bottom one. It rolled over and it's fine. It just outsteed a little. There's the point I'm trying to make going into what's coming is that they deform in ways that you wouldn't expect

like the one actually soda canned, but like you really have to try and break these things for them to break And that's great when you have a network with a bunch of grade crossings with cars when you have Issues where like the two we sold one got smacked by a backhoe and I put it back in service. I, me, a guy, not Amtrak. So, you know, it's, they're fixable one, but even more so that like they're hard to get to the point you have to do real work to unscrew them. And three, they're a lot safer because of it.

You have a lot more survivable space, right? You have a lot of laps in, you know, and turn you into, you may be turned to mushroom G forces, but you won't be turned to mush from the car actually failing, which is at least one aspect there, which is better than the other one,

where the car fails, and then you get compressed into a sort of sardine can. I think the best way I've ever heard put and then we'll move on is it's a lot better to everything just goes blank all of a sudden from getting smacked versus getting shredded and bleeding out. And that's always been my thought with the American freight rail system. Yeah, I'd much rather just be like, ouch instead of, oh no, you know, but next slide, please. And at this point, I'm not the expert, but I can see something that's about to happen. I don't know the huge amount to say about this slide, but I'm going to just point out a few, hey, ever a, maybe you want to point out a few things. So these a rise. Maybe you want to point out a few things. So these on screen right now is some Mark III coaches designed in 1968. It's introduced

in the early 70s. I will say very safe coaches through their lifespan from when they're introduced right there, they're through into the 80s. And indeed, in some of the big rail crashes out in the UK in the 90s that these were involved and they performed really well. Since then though, they, you know, through the 90s a little crash worthiness stand is introduced and everything else got a lot safer these did not. So by modern measures, but also they're safe when they're running in amongst rolling stock that is the same size as it. Yeah, anyway, so it's over.

So you might have a couple of things to say about this, and then I'll get my teeth sunk into this. Yeah, so what the hell are we talking about here? What we're looking at is one of these Mark III coaches, and it is coupled to a regular American Fred car. This is a covered hopper that might be carrying. It looks like a shorter one, so that could be cement or something

like that, something really, really bulky and heavy. And that, you know, just if it were to whack into that at high speed or even at medium speed, you're going to have some problems. It looks like it looks a bit like someone has mixed two different like model railways. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like, well, ironically one is oh oh and this one is real H.O. Yeah, this is this is sort of the the American freight car is very large. It's a very large thing It's very heavy. It has a lot of momentum. It's extra high again on top of this. Yeah. High alone.

It's just a quick question. Do we run our freight cars bigger than other countries? Or are they standardized? Only India and Russia have larger ones. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Thank you.

Yeah. The AAR style freight car is one of the biggest in the world. Depending on the standardized Britain couldn't use them because we have a tiny Victorian loading gauge. Yeah, loading gauge. Wheel. Yeah, Britain has the smallest loading gauge. That's the other thing.

Yeah. At for the listeners, the loading gauge is sort of just the size of car that will fit through bridges and tunnels and so on and so forth. Yeah, they'd like dimensions of the thing. Yeah. And in the United States, it's the plate system. You get plate A through like G. Yeah, that doesn't have anything to attract.

It's like small. Yeah. Yeah, it's very important to distinguish the fact that track gauge, which is the distance between the inside face of the running rails and loading gauge, are essentially entirely unrelated, which is why when people talk about the great central railway in the UK and try and make out, no, sorry, when they talk about Broadgage and Brunelles Broadgage and say that would have magically made Railway better if we'd adopted that. I tell them they're idiots because as you can see, this is standard gauge. Just shut the fuck up.

This is a standard gauge railway, the same track age and two very different loading. Well, you know, it's actually based on Roman cart paths. Yeah, had we not built a bunch of like tiny Victorian bridges and stuff, we could get the quick fix of doubling the capacity of the East Coast mainline by putting double-decker carriages on that. Can't do it because of victory. No, but it also have to widen the six foot because we have a really narrow six foot. The distance between the tracks is really narrow in the UK as well. Yeah, we'd have to rebuild our entire railway system.

Anyway, maybe let's talk about that. Let's hope on to the Let's, let's, Rose, if you fit, let's hop on to the next slide, go for it. They refit this with the knuckle, Kapler. No, it does have that does look. Okay. That does to me look like the Johnny Kapler that is standard on the, the interestingly only on the non-HST coaches. So these are the Mark III's that were built as as local hole coaches, not not the HST ones because the HST ones decided draw bar sort of to a permanent draw bar because

they were a fixed formation. I'm going to use the phrase hanging on by a thread of bringing this into the yard when they did it. It was I wouldn't move a train in a mile an hour of the way that came into that rail yard. So they just they just hooked this on to some freight cars and then moved it with the arm and then put a chain around it. How does it just change? Because the couple just chained up. The couple on the.

Yeah. The couple on the US freight car there is I mean presumably halfway up the height of the coupler of the. It's like right at the tip. It's I wish I had the picture that I can see in my head. it's like right at the tip. It's, I wish I had the, the picture that I can see in my head. It's like right at the tip. It's close enough to where they were like touching, but they chained it to each other just to yeah. It's a real bad man. It's real bad. They're nice and rusty too. Oh, dear. Right, okay. Go on, Rose. Next slide. Let's talk about it at the HST.

Yeah, we'll talk about the HST a bit. Why is there a monster here? Why is there a master here? Why is there a master here? Well, I'll tell you what, Ross, I'm going to explain what the HST, I'm going to say what is an HST, and I'm going to do that for 30 seconds, and then Ross can explain why a master 3-2-3 is on this screen right now. The in city 125 introduced in the mid-70s in the UK. It was a fantastic trainer, and there's what they originally looked

like, they repaint to do a car there, that's the Kenneth Grange. They looked great, they were a massive transformation of Britain's rail network. Admittedly they're part of the reason why railways are kind of so screwed now, because they worked too well, so they meant that we stopped bothering to let far railways, and also we were just like, we don't need any new high-speed lines either, because these things kind of work. But they did. They were brilliant. They were comfortable. They were worse. Okay, we're going to put the power cards one side. There were two power cards at each end, by the way. Two diesel power cars with a bunch of these Mart 3 coaches in Queen. When I say Mart 3 coach, British Rail, and we went through this actually for the, for the, for the previous episode, so everyone should know, British Rail

Mart 1, Mart 2, Mart 3, and Mart 4 coaches were all British Rail built coaches. We have Mart 5s now, but they're built by CAF and they're not very good at all. So, Mart 3 coaches, as I say, they were really, they're, the Mart 3 coaches very good, they're not very good at all. So, my three coaches, as I say, they were really, the my three coaches were very good, they rode very well, they were spacious, they were comfortable, they were most critically air-conditioned, which I think is the thing that really made a difference to people traveling around, you know,

big transformation and comfort. So, they were great, they were successful, they traveled 125 miles and now it's 200 kilometers an hour. Thanks to this train, Britain had, and embedded itself as having the highest average speeds of passenger trains for a time in the world, but certainly in quite a lot of the world, thanks to the fact that it meant that we could get a load of other reasonably fast trains that then sped up local services as well.

So this was a good train and a great success, but also you'll note that I'm using quite 1970s here. This is not a new train. There was a lot of wars in that statement. Yes, because we, until far too recently, we're still running these as front line 125 mile an hour into city services. And yes, there are a series of problems with these. And as Ross is about to do in this bit related to Master 3223, objective factors in front of the front bullies is an example of a thing that was not very good on them. Because when an entity 1, 2, 5 gets snazzy with a Master 323 from some absolute who's decided to commit suicide on a level crossing. Well, Ross, next slide please. Yeah, the bad things happen after the nerve.

Yes. I'm going to slightly come to the defence of the train here because actually the train was upright and safe and actually, okay, some damage to the front paracarbit, but would have been much safer except that then hit some redundant S&C and went everywhere. And you can see this is not good. This was not going full speed. This is a train going about 100 miles an hour. Bad things have happened to you. What's S&C? Sorry, points, switches and crossings. Okay, using my nanaancature. Yes, you can see the points that it hit. So the train was running upright and in line and would have just continued, you know, losing energy running in the ballast,

it would have probably safely come to stop without killing all the people it killed, had it not hit this redundant SNC that was located far too close to level crossing and should have been removed and made safe years before. I lecture on this to particularly a good example of switch on all the levels in your CAD you dopes when doing design. Anyway, right, okay, I'm going to go to the next slide so we can talk about crashworthiness. Here is a reasonably modern train cab. This is what it looks like. On the left you can see there is a fiberglass thing that makes it look pretty.

On the right is the actual rail vehicle. And you can see there's a load of stuff going on here. There is protective, sort of steel, very carefully, steel reinforced, Hab framework, tech driver, there is energy absorbing, sort of crumple metal that you can see in the kind of the black there is sort of metal that's designed to kind of crumple in a very carefully designed way to absorb a maximum amount of energy up to certain levels You know, you're right right right the first time the ones that Yeah, yeah, you can see at the front there. There's the ribbed thing is called an anti-climer

So that there means that if you've got a low speed collision with another train So that there means that if you've got a low speed collision with another train, the final last shatters and sort of the trains lock into each other, so it stops them overriding each other and telescoping. Sorry, the couple of absorbs a lot of energy as well. This is a design, this is designed to absorb energy, there's a load of, there's lots of FIET kind of finite element analysis to make sure, and testing, physical testing to make sure this thing is the driver in a collision with another trainer, a kind of lower speeds or with like a, a, a, a, a, to a level crossing all this sort of stuff.

And next slide please. Here is a conveniently, boss sectioned HST. What if you just had all of the fiberglass and none of the steel? Correct. The HST cap. See, so much weight. Yeah, it saves weight. Well, I mean, literally, yes, that much of it.

But also, we didn't care about the drivers. They were in unions. So, this is a big door now, so you can leave. Exactly. So, yeah, you can see. We've lasted this convenient hole for you. Yeah, so in the previous slide, you had a, you know, the cab fiberglass had been removed,

so you can see this protective structure underneath. As you can see here, we've just, very conveniently, not used CGI, in fact, we've used some coal wagons to cut a cross section in the HST cap here, and you can see what the crash structure is formed of. It's formed of a an upturned bathtub, and that's it. This is just a fiberglass cover sat on top of basically a flatbed car onto which the engine is also strapped. There is no protection for the drive at all. So that's the left hand side. That was one of the Paddington rail crashes, one of the crash on the approach to Paddington. On the right-hand side is the recent Parliament derailment. The kind of cylinder shape that you can see in the middle of screen buried under some trees

and on fire is the remains of an HST paracar. The driver was killed in this image because the cab structure, taking what's known as the desk with it so that's the desk that has all the controls for the train, was simply just basically removed in the impact of this had with the ground. The cab structure just simply fell off at speed and essentially totally disintegrated, leaving just the flatbed bit, and then you can see the back wall of the cab there, that white at the end, on the right hand side of the,

that's the back of the inside of the cab. In fact, you can see it's the same as the back of the inside of the cab on the left hand side. You can sort of see it's the same thing. And then just the battered remains to the engine. This is, there is no crash weatherness to this vehicle. It's hopeless. By modern standards, absolutely hopeless. To be fair, by any standards, when this thing was introduced, it had no crash weariness. So that's the cap. So as you can imagine, that's the bit that's going

to collide with a big brain. Yeah. Such a thing might happen. Or it doesn't go well. Like stalled on the tracks or, you know, farm vehicle, the ground, if, you know, just a cart, a horse, a truck full of animals. Amel's. Amel's. Amel's. Amel's. A tanker truck, a tanker truck would be very likely.

Yeah, one of those Pemis double tankers. This right of way. That'll be fine. Yeah. This right of way has very few protected crossings, but quite a lot of unprotected cross. Yes. Yeah.

So not great. What about the, so that's the driver total? What about the passengers? Let's go to the next slide. Oh, they're all over the Dune 2 again. Oh, I was right. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

So these, this is the Mark III coach. Now there are reasons why these Mark III coaches ended up being bent completely over the collisions that were involved were very high-speed collision We're talking 125 miles an hour these at 45 miles an hour They will actually perform really well and even with a big nasty American-sized locomotive the mark 3 coaches will actually perform remarkably well. You will be surprised how well they will perform. However, they are old and they, as I say, lack any modern crashworthiness standard. So these are steel monocot coaches, but they are also over 50 years, these are five-year-old coaches. They're okay, not all of them were built 55 years ago, but the design of these is five years old now.

And you can see that if you get the forces wrong, they are just, they can just, they're completely disintegrated and you lose any predict. So let's pop onto the next slide. I assume this G here is for good. All the people were good in here, right? Let's go with say yes. Okay. What is it actually?

It's the coach number actually. It's just the coach, the coach destination for the investigates and for the most. I thought this was two different coaches and I was like, why is the G on that other one? No, no, no, it's the same one. It's a whole not so bad knife. Okay, coach completely folded it over. Yeah. Yeah. So this is often nerve again, this in this picture that we're looking at. And this is a good picture to kind of talk about everything that isn't good on these coaches. So firstly, this

coach has rolled over and had a boat, which is the name of what the US, you call the trucks, the thing that the wheels are attached to, that has flown off it and landed through it. It doesn't look very happy, as you can see. This is, so we're going to start from the ends and work our way in. The first thing we're going to talk about is it's passage of vehicle integrity. As you can see, in the previous images, there wasn't any left. In this one, it's not as bad. So the windows have all shattered or most of them have shattered, which isn't good because people fly out of them. But the the actual vehicle has not been too badly compromised other than in the middle where there is a five and a half ton bogey in it. Or five and a half ton truck. So that's that first thing is that these these are fine if they crash in line, but as soon as there's some thing that spreads them around.

Things don't go so well. So, the first thing is passion of vehicle integrity. They don't have modern sort of collision energy management as in they don't distribute energy through the coach like modern trains do, so a lot of forces get randomly. The reason you have collision energy management partly is to reduce how much the acceleration to people in the train experience in a crash, but also it's so that the energy is distributed in a controlled, predictable way so that you don't get weird buckling, so that a bit like the picture

of the front of the cab earlier, the front of the train has bits of metal that are designed to crumple. They're designed to kind of do the thing that happens if you crush a lure rolling your hand. You know, like anything cardboard, it sort of brushes in a funny sort of crumpled up shape and that absorbs anything. This doesn't have that. So that's one thing. The next thing that's really quite bad with these is bogey retention, is the truck retention. These things, basically you can just lift them off the trucks and there is nothing holding the truck to the vehicle, which is why this one, as you can see, doesn't have any left. There's no arc on the other end.

Like two, five and a half ton, like things with like wheeled burgers at the end. Exactly. So these things, they disappear off. They exactly, as you say, become five and a half ton projectiles. Now, once again, in what these are gonna be used for, lower speeds, that's not gonna happen.

They're gonna stay in one piece. But if they get hit, if you hit them with a lump hammer, i.e. a big G locomotive, there's a lot of energy being flung around. So yes, the bogey fly off as projectiles. And we've already talked about players, the couplers on these are crap. They have absolutely no resistance

in either the vertical or a twisting plane, so they just break immediately. The thing you always want to happen with a train crash, okay, look at this, some academic debate on this, but I think the majority of the, if you're going to do a cup of review on it, I think the evidence is that you want your train to stay in one piece, because it's the more likely to say, I'll probably, it's less likely to spread out and do the thing that happened here after nerve it. You want it to keep staying light, so couplers need to be strong, and the couplers on these coaches are not strong. The last problem with these, they don't have anti-climbers, which is the thing with the little ribs, but they're okay, so fine, so

quite a lot of trains don't have that. But the other thing, the last thing of these is, they are, as I said, decades old, And in the Carman collision, or indeed, if you speak to any poor fucker, has to maintain these things, they're still running by the way in Scotland, sorry, Alice. They are absolutely riddled with rust. They are so rusty because they're steel. And they've been running for decades in Britain, which is the Britain is the country equivalent, the geographical equivalent of a

wet sponge you've left on the side of your kitchen sink. Like it's so wet here. It's now that's it's it's cold and wet. Now we're sending them to the part of Mexico, which is hot and wet, which is going to be even better, I assume. Yes, these are going to rust away like an Austin Allegro. It's going to be magical. They are just not so so all of that like as I said in the 70s 80s and 90s, particularly in the 80s and 90s when they did have a few heavy collisions, they performed really pretty damn well, but they were still in reasonably good condition at that point. They are very much not anymore. So yeah, next slide please. Oh, we just played a really nice, go, yeah, go on it. Yeah, and next slide please. Oh, so we just We just put on a good look. Nice go. Yeah, the girls on it. Yeah, has the girls on it. Yeah, it has I'm gonna hand back to Scooter to talk about how

The everything of I've just said is definitely not a problem probably Well, I mean, so you kept saying that like these are these will be fine if they like Bump something and stay together. But like, American rail system doesn't work that way. Yes. Um, it sounds, the way it sounds to me is like, it's, and then the reason, yeah, you're exactly because again, in, in the UK, we actually do have, um, complete signaling systems that are too effective and tech. In fact, the reason that these reason that these HSTs crashed in the 90s on the Great Western Metin Line into London

was because they'd isolated these safety systems for various stupid reasons. So we actually do have good debt of systems that stop big collisions happening generally. So yes, those don't exist on this line. I don't know what the signaling arrangements are on here or if there are any. Have you ever seen the movie Under Sie to dark territory, that's what's about

to happen here. I was using this right in me with watching it for an episode of another pod. That's right. Go and watch. Yes. So, um, yeah, at some point I will. I've been saving it. I am extremely excited for that episode. It's one of my favorite bad movies with another disaster train in it, the Colorado Railcar Marverville train cars. Oh, that's another episode. Yeah, we wanted to do that. Point point, point being is like stuff hangs off the side of loads all the time.

So it sounds like, you know, one, you get a big heavy oopsie that bonks these that's just going to explode. The thing that concerns me the most is running in dark territory. Like, yeah, you might have not even a passenger train on passenger train, although watching an amp-thleek go through one of these would be an interesting interesting. Go through is the correct way to describe how that would go, but like one of these phrase things more than telescoping. Well, yeah, yes. Well, the content, the one that's scared, the one that like you get the waking nightmares about is the container train, you know, hitting that SD70 and then a bunch of objects get loose and go for this. And even if they don't hit, you know, all it takes to the container drain, relaying over. And there are sightings, but it's not good railroad. There's also been

landslides through this railroad. Um, yes, that's the thing that scares me. So the picture that I showed you of the, of from Carmen, the, the Stunhaven crash, the, the, the kind of the green one, a few slides back, um, of the remains of the, yeah, this one. And that wasn't, uh, I was actually a, a failed drainage system that washed out onto the track one. And that wasn't, uh, I was actually a failed drainage system that washed out onto the track, but to all intents and purposes, it kind of, they could, if the effect was a landslide. And that's what I'm thinking is, is actually the threat because they will, yeah, will not perform well under the circumstances, frankly. There's that. And then

there's also the, the, the, the, again, the PIMX tanker, double tanker truck in the, the guy driving his, you know, 1980, whatever, anything, just sitting out there, not knowing that this thing's about to come through at 60 mile an hour and just launching it in one of these rough track scenarios where anything that the grade can the track can essentially do anything because it's not set properly and now the trains going to do anything because it ain't set up for this. Also these are designed for much these you know the okay relatively speaking. Things have got a bit bad recently because of modern at in very comm is net real modernization, but generally our track quality is pretty damn good, hey, and perhaps not compared to our mainland European colleagues, but certainly compared to the US, I do say our track quality.

Oh, you guys. Outside of the assailant, you know, in the Northeast Corridor, track quality is really good. And that's what these were designed to ride on. Yeah. And then I guess the last thing I want to bring up is, is there, is there a parts of availability for these like not use parts? There is not. No, because we are, well, there are loads of them insideings.

So actually, yes, there is, there are loads of parts going around. But for the power cars, you know, these things are actually the good thing about these is that they are in a point where obsolescence wasn't such a thing because everything is like an electro mechanical or just raw mechanical. So there's nothing, there's no like, so actually the things that replace these on these goes mainline, we're nerding it out now and this won't take long, sorry everyone, sorry for listening. Actually you all love this, the hogs love this, it's fine. They've already been here for like three hours, Garrett, it does stop. The things that replaced these, the Class 91s and Mark IVs, the 2 to 5 sets,

were built in the late 80s and early 90s and actually have been away, been outlived by some of these, have a lot of big, you know, it's like all the PCBs are printed on like a centimeter thick PCB and all the electronics looks like three times too big because it was when you had all the electronics but it was all the electronics. So actually those have become more obsolescent than the kit in this, which is all like, it's just a diesel engine and it's all really monkey electrical, sorry, mechanical or just electro mechanical stuff.

Fair enough. Anyway, I don't grasp. Like, with, say the Amphletes, for instance, like there's only one stream of parts and mainly through a company called Wobtech, which there's another episode. But like there's this evil company based in Pennsylvania called Wobtech, where you can get most of it.

But you get into some of the heritage cars, especially the domes and stuff. And you can get it made, but not in any kind of reasonable timeline, where it sounds like you can pillage the other train sets, but is there like an actual production still? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no rail yard, with no one on it, that train sets down. I don't even know if there's a supply of the five or glass cabs left anymore.

So there used to be a pile of them in the various depots, because they'd get hit by like a really bad bird strike or something that would shout out the nose and you just swap the cab nose out. The idea of that in the United States is impossible, man. You hit up a bird, it's one of these locomotives,

it explodes on our side. Okay, well that doesn't make me feel any better. So it's pretty much like there's spent, there was this huge thing in the beginning where they were worried about spending the people's money on something that wasn't going to work or be easy to keep running. And it sounds like it's.

Oh dear. Yeah. Sounds like they did both of those things it sounds like because it was available it was there and there's one more thing I promise is I don't understand why everyone that in Britain that sees these things goes like oh it's so great they made the United States that are the North America. Because it is a stupid fucking country filled with nostalgia. Morals.

Everybody that's involved, including the 125 group, is like, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened. The 125s will run forever in Mexico. And it's like, what? They'll run for a couple of weeks, maybe. Yeah, until they like wipe out and kill everybody. The first power, the first operational power car of these has been in the National Rail Museum in New York for four years. They're like, I cannot like stay, I cannot overemphasize the extent to which these are heritage museum pieces. Right. Where are museum pieces are just because they're outdated, but they're built to last forever. Like they, like again, the dome, like, you could hit the dome

with a one of the battleships. I would question which one would win. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is a question I've been having as I've been watching this developing is where the fuck is the railway press? Like, you know, this is it's a word I saw us. L.A. Press like you know it's this is it's a word I saw us. Yeah, I'm kind of like okay. Uh if you're like Trains magazine or you're like railway age or you're someone and you look at this and you say holy shit They're sending HSTs to Mexico Should you be saying wow? They're sending HSTs to Mexico or should you be saying?

Are they doing that why are they doing that? Are they running it in mixed traffic with freight trains? Holy crap. Have they built the Abuela Killer? I can tell you what that is because, certainly for the UK, really press, the backlash I got when I criticized these trains after Carmen was absolutely enormous. People wrote articles, they shouted at me,

they screamed at me, They sent me little emails Like telling me to politely withdraw what I'd said People absolutely lost their fucking minds and it's just because they see they grew up with these trains They saw them as modern when they were kids and they believe that the that they are the fucking they they they came out of that they were Unsheath Like like by you know believe that they are the fucking, that they came out that they were unsheathed, like by, I'm gonna say a little blasphemy, so maybe I won't, but anyway, that's just, they came out of God's anus, that's what they think.

And Christian blasphemy don't worry, Alice, I'm not there, I know who to share that. I've got this HSD with a delivery I've drawn on it of the profit Mohammed. I know why the railing press in the UK has just gone, oh look, that's nice. They're never going to run there. It's not fantastic. They can have a come for you ride the nurse on our plastic crap we have here. Shut the cup. Uh-huh. Well, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, yeah, it's about saying like here like Trains magazine is written like a small number

of articles about the interocianico and the trend Maya. And most of us just like, oh, wow, look, they have these Chinese locomotives of this model number. Or oh, look, they've brought in the HSTs or oh, look, this is the first Amphletes in Mexico. No one's actually ever substantially reported on this project, like at all, like in a way that maybe you would be critical of it in any fashion from the railroad aspect. This is gonna be the first running government,

like nationalized railroad in Mexico in years, and no one has said anything about it in the United States, which like they giz themselves over L. Chepe, anytime it's brought up or the tequila train, they're just like, oh my God, it's the best ever. And you're like, one thing we've experienced a lot. And why I know that it's, I'm not worried about the government in Mexico.

They don't scare me compared to the Fomars because the second we released, we were sending the dome down there, everybody's like, it's gone forever. They scrapped all the cars down there. That place is a shit hole. It wrote it off. And it's like, okay, even if, even if it goes poorly, that happened

because in the after NDM, they had no reason to keep the cars, right? And that happened in the United States. After Amtrak and didn't need cars, they scrapped a lot. What you got out of it was the leftovers. Yeah, it's not like Mexico can't run a railroad because like some inherent Mexicanness, it's because of the same reasons that like any of our countries also routinely fuck up those things. It's like the opposite problem of what's happening with HS2. They want to run it, but they want to run it now, not in five years when it's designed and built and ready. It's they want to go in the next

couple of hours. You can like trains too much and you can like trains too little. And what you want is a kind of medial ear, you want like a middle way. You like trains just enough, but you like them when they're practical. Exactly, so next slide please. But I'm just saying you should be able to look with your eyes and say, there is a problem here that could potentially kill

a lot of people, and I think it's your duty as the railroad press, you know, because maybe to say something, to say something that's not something you should be able to see with your eyes. I know your area of expertise, right? Yeah, I know. And just real quick, can you, can you line the top of that tank car? Like, oh, yeah.

Same high. Yeah. You know, even it's, okay, God forbid that they never have a head on to head on. Cool. Great. If that thing leans too much, it's just going to go right down head height of the cars. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to see the picture of like a, has anyone seen a picture of a, of a high caliber bullet going through an egg in an extreme slow motion? Yeah, just, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna say anything more, I'm just gonna leave that image in people's minds. Yeah, I think that that maybe should be the takeaway from this podcast is this thing is going to kill someone. It's not a matter of if it's when. Not in the bright line fun way of like going through

the bowling alley. It's going to be the like somebody just riding the train is going to eat it because the train is not set up to run there. Yeah. Yeah. Next slide, please. God.

And we're 60 days away from it. Oh my God. 60 days away and the thing we haven't talked about is the last way I think. I don't know what I want to going there because it's dumbest. Why? What do you want? What are you doing? Give it to us. So, so, oh, we're about to crack three hours. Do it. Yep. So this is a they they delivered this thing a couple years ago for the Pueblo to Chalula Torres Strain, which ran for the Mexican National Railway

Museum, the Chalula, which is sort of touristy area, right? That line shut down after like two years. They had two of these diesel electrical multiple units from a company called Voslo, and it was made in Germany. This one at least I believe has a stronger crash structure. It does because it's a track. It's meant to hit like some Germans fucking Mercedes on his way back from the precision machine parts, machine parts, machine machining factory, right? Like yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You smell it.. Oh, staff for that. I believe these things are. They were machining. I believe I believe these these same things run

on the what is it? Is it Manchester that has a link? Yes. Yeah, I was going to say I think these are very similar to it's to to Metro link. Yeah. Yeah. These are these are trams. So they're not built from mainline crash work like they might have crash work. They're better than the HSTs in terms of low speed crashworthiness at the cabin, but these are not designed for mainline crashworthiness. They are designed as trams, exactly as I said.

They're designed to collide with each other and with roads. But there's like one now. This was designed as a tram train. I'm sorry, I keep trying to jump in, but it's important that there's only one of these. It's, it's, it was imminent domain from that because they weren't using it effectively. I don't really know how it played out, but like they got it. They put it in the livery and have been like pudcing it because there's just two other

right of ways as part of this quarter, the one to train Maya, and then another shorter one. And it's the, I go back to again, no one knows what's going on. There's no plan. I don't, they might use this to go port to port, but they might use it to just shuttle people. So the way genuine is to go to use this look, this, this, this bitter rolling stock would be there was a say a non freight little branch or, or a very low freight little branch that connected to another town. This would actually be fantastic for that. It's a little shuttle that ran back and forth.

It would work quite nicely in that situation. Running it on the main corridor amongst the fights. I believe what most recent news I have heard is this is supposed to shuttle you from koatsuko out to the to the trend Maya station somewhere in the back. It's still a corridor with lots of crossings, but okay, that's lots of crossings, lots of fray. So we're such a big deep things, a tram train and it can cope with it, but the freight, yes, bad.

It should not be running amongst heavy rail. Yeah. And again, there's only one. There's not like a fleet of these. So like what when it breaks, what do you do? Oh, you just, that's it. I, there's only one. There's there's not like a fleet of these. So like what when it breaks, what do you do? Oh, you just that's it. I think they're my. I haven't seen the other. I'm not sure. No one knows. That's the thing. There's no press about no one knows. Yeah, no knows. This has been another problem with both this and trend. Maya is no one knows. Everyone just

does stenography for press releases. My God. Yeah. So sometimes you can maybe look at Google maps of it updates at the right time and see where something has happened. But this is also why this episode was pruned to do now, because again, I don't mind being wrong. I don't mind this working. But the reality is, is this could just like done, as soon as they start in two months.

This could murder a lot of the reality without saying anything like, yeah, this is something is coming. But the question is, do they just, did they just blow a lot of money? Or is this actually, are they going to do what the initial plan was and run with a bunch of cars built for the North American system and just run very few times, where we go in all in. And the mad dash right now is all in. Next slide. So the name had to be updated, knowing what we know now. knowing what we know now. And names had to be removed. And it's just, this is where we are.

There's a lot of people that are losing sleep over this, including down there up here, on this podcast. And then there's a lot of people there like, yay, trains. And trains not always good Yeah, that's not how many just he's of the actual bro over we don't know I know there was a great sign I know two have made it. I believe they brought yeah two two whole sets There's a lot more that we're bought so you just don't know for what?

They oh god, oh god. Oh god. This is where it is. They're both going to run at some point. Hopefully not next to each other. The drone footage of them passing each other's going to live in my brain forever. And, uh, you know, there's a lot of very things they're smart people that think this is the coolest thing ever. And it's just, it's not. It's right. I am glad to have been a part of it

and delivered what I can and hopefully can finish. Please, please, please let us deliver the rest. I don't like my job, but I still need it. But like at the end of the day, the stuff I've worked on, I have no issues with, especially now, like the trip was ran and it worked. I know once it gets there, it's North American train stuff. Like you can get the parts, you can run it on the mainline and oopsie daisy. And it happens like every three days on AM track. I'm not concerned. The concern is the oh god, what else is there? And you know, it's

And you know, what I've learned especially today is that it's a lot worse than I thought it was. Yeah. It just keeps getting worse. Yeah, we can keep digging. It's not because people that know what they're doing haven't said anything. So. No. It's because all of those people have been assassinated by the Mexican Navy. I have a child. They'll send you to Mexico City.

They'll give you a promotion so you're out of your hair. I just want to see the museums by some like silver jewelry or something. You know, try the food. Please. Try the food big time. Yeah. I am so hungry and want to be Mexican. I have a half-finished stir fry downstairs. I'm definitely going downstairs and I believe for this hugely appreciate Mexican cinema. I particularly enjoyed the work. It's not going to save you.

Yeah. Yeah. I know. They're going to be too focused on their own shit. I hope I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One hope. And when they when they have way look killer finally runs when they bought the way, the blalock or five thousand finally goes down the corridor and just wipes out

every city through there right after the, you know, right after the oil train tip tops over, they won't give a shit about this podcast anymore. Oh, hell yeah. That's bad. And that statement right there is why, when I'm in here again going, can I, anybody want a real expert? You know why, what happened? Yeah.

I'm not sure WTYP promise. That's right. Yeah, it's exactly. So the first disaster we've done before it happened. Yeah, good for us. Public service. All right, what did we learn? A whole bunch of shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We know too much. Yeah, I would say that I know too much person I personally never sign anything you did you didn't see anything I have to go have to go and get ourselves gotten by the men and black memory Yes, yeah, so we were segmented on this podcast called safety

At a 50% chance that She can't be a Sassin and I don't want to be a sad I don't want to be a Sassin dear milkshake pizza boy and others okay, that was pretty good. Yeah, we'll give them that okay Okay, okay, yeah, all right the pizza boy had to go back to his home planet. Roll low originally. Yeah. Yeah. milkshakes still here though. In my senior year of high school, I took a capstone project, engineering class at the Redactedville Career Center.

It was a well-run vocation school with an award-winning safety conscious faculty, but they didn't count on my friend, Jesse Kogaski. Oh, refer to as J-Dog. Yeah, J-Dog, Jamal Kogasheg, whatever that guy's name was. Jamal Koshogi, Jamal Koshogi. Yeah, a man who I have since described as walking Oshavialation.

God bless. Jesse is a passionate, motivated, creative, but he is in his own words terminally stupid. Oh, I mean, listen. Yep. That's what we are for doing this after the podcast. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

So we're all going to be assassinated, which is a shame. I like to be alive. One day after school had ended and most people who left the building, Jesse and I were still hard at work. I was staying late, frantically finishing the report from my engineering project, a strategy that prepared me all too well for engineering school. Jesse! It was a good engineering school.

It's bad idea. I'm dead. Jesse had just successfully demonstrated a wood gas stove that he built from scratch and was disassembling it. Now, unlike a normal wood fire, wood gas stoves pre-heat the firewood, causing it to release gases, which are then burned. This reduces soot emissions, but these stoves require a gas pilot light to heat the wood and start through action. The propane pilot light on Jesse's stove was connected to the tank, with a flexible rubber tube and a daisy chain of adapters that he bought on Amazon, C figure one.

Ooh, okay, okay. Yeah, propane flow is this way for some reason. Now perhaps if he consulted a reputable seller of propane and propane accessories, C figure two, this story would have ended differently. At approximately four, figure two. This story would have ended differently at approximately 4.45 pm in the afternoon, as I was frantically, that's different from the normal way that he goes. Yeah. As I was frantically typing up the conclusion of my report, I heard a loud hissing sound and saw Jesse and our teacher

standing in a cloud of expanding white vapor. I began to smell gas and I grabbed my bag and rushed out of the room. The teacher man, yeah, exactly. Don't go in to come find space. And if you are in the confined space, get out. Leave. Yeah. To break the bricks, if you will. Yes. The teacher managed to get the tank of leaking gas into a plastic bin and dragged it outside while I waited anxiously next to a fire alarm. Once the bottle of gas was outside,

I relaxed a little and returned to work in an adjacent room that didn't smell of gas. Our teacher set up fans to ventilate the space as the remaining propane vented harmlessly to the atmosphere. There's an asterisk here. We'll get to that later. Apparently Jesse had decided to unscrew adapter two,

sure, before removing the propane tank from adapter one. See figure three. Oh, yeah, that would do it. Yeah. If you had just unscrewed the tank, the automatic valve would have closed and the tank would have been sealed, but by just removing adapter two,

Jesse had removed the only barrier to the release of a pressurized gas, see figure four. Yeah. Oh, cool. Well, that gas. See, figure four. Yeah. Oh, cool. Well, it was only a deal, right? Yeah. Well, it was only a pound of propane. Our classroom only had one exit and no windows.

Yes. Wow, it sounds like a Drexel University situation. Yeah, you deserve, sorry, it's a garden classroom. Oh, yeah, it's the garden level, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't see any plants down there. Anyway. So if I had been soldering instead of typing up a report, this could have been

significantly more serious. I thought that would be the end of Jesse's misadventures with gas, but I was wrong. Oh no! One night, when we were watching a movie together at his house, he often fought fry a couple parogies for my friend and I. We enjoyed them thoroughly and returned to our movie. At that time, as if inspired by a six cents, Hugh shakans with danger, riff. Oh, I got a 50% chance. Yeah. Yeah. I asked Jesse in the most condescending tone, humanly possible. Did you remember to turn off the stove?

You're like, wow, I'm really enjoying the taste of these like propane made parrots. This parrots has doesn't have any of the kind of like gasoline sort of texture of like your non-propeying grill. Did you remember to turn this over? As he went into the kitchen, the double check, I began to feel guilty for distrusting him. Don't feel guilty. That's called crew resource management.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, never be different to someone just because they're more experienced in making the parogue in Yeah, that feeling was immediately Vindicated when he informed me that he had left the skillet a frying oil unattended on a hot burn Yeah Yeah, now Jesse is attending art school and as of yet hasn't managed to poison her in cinema in himself while developing film Wait, is he the guy you burn the Glasgow School of Art done twice?

Yeah, yeah, Muriel Gray, he has pseudonymized. I mean while I'm trudging through my undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering, I hope to work in process safety and interest to which I credit to this podcast and the US Chemical Safety Board. The classes are tough, but the model trains make it a lot better. Sincerely, reacted. No redacted, right? Yeah, it's greenhouse gas emission was comparable to burning a quart of gasoline. Oh, yep. Yep. Yeah, that will do it. Yeah.

Folks, remember to handle pressurized gases safely. I know since we're shooting up. Yes. Yeah. Well, that was safety. Third. So our next episode is on Chernobyl, assuming that nothing happens to any of us. We are all of sound mind and body. nothing happens to any of us. We are all of sound mind and body. Yes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I want to reiterate that it's the fomors that are going to kill us for talking about their jujuts.

Yeah. I mean, listen, the Mexican Navy wasn't going to do it until the last cease and your throw. Yeah. Really cheap. That's good. We did it. Does anyone have commercials before we go? Yeah, Garath has a podcast called Railnasser.

You should go on with us. Oh, thanks, Alice. Alice has a podcast. I'm Devon. I'll shout out to Devon. I am so sorry. We're all sorry, Devon. We're all so sorry.

This is like, editor of sadism to be like, yeah, this is the most critical episode to edit we've ever done. So as we don't get killed, also it's 14,000 years. Yes. Yeah, you should listen to Devon and Alex and Alex podcast. Okay, James Bond. Good listen to that. It's very you. The latest season is very good. I'm enjoying it very much. Oh, thank you so much.

I listen to it when my little one is attached to me sleeping because she cannot sleep without being attached to me on a carrier. It's very sweet. I had to get that last reminder and dinging. We are on the channel. 100,000 subscribers. Please like, subscribe. Yeah, smash, smash the subscribe. What if you haven't done that?

I'm doing how have you listened to three hours of this and not subscribed to the channel? I'm doing a big stupid YouTube gamer face right now. You can't see that though. But yeah, yeah, just give us give us the plaque. Give us the plaque. I'm sick of going over to Alan Fisher's apartment and seeing his plaque when I don't have one. It's messed up. We would have to pay to get like two other plaques made and I'm still going to do it. I'm going to pay whatever they tell me to. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, subscribe to the podcast so I can have a status symbol. Anyway, this has been fun. Thanks so much for inviting me on as the the kind of the the additional body can. Yeah, of course. And scuba, thanks for telling us this absolutely insane story.

Yeah, I was about to say I hope you get, I hope we manage to sell the film rights. Yeah, no kidding. I just hope I'm allowed to finish the project and have a job after this. But yeah, what's the worst thing that can happen? You cause an international incident. Okay. Yeah, what's the worst thing that can happen you cause an international incident? Okay Right time already got close What's another well, I think that was a podcast Yeah, all right. Good night everyone. Good night everyone. All right