Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 15: The Advanced Passenger Train

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

In this video, @aliceavizandum, @oldmananders0n, @donoteat01 and guest @rilaah take a butcher's at the ill-fated Advanced Passenger John. The referenced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP001LboM4Q& The slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G77GkxZrxIs

Well, we while we wait for Liam to figure out if his mic is working. Yes. Slag. Oh, Liam, you slag. You dirty boss. You are cheeky, Liam. Oh, yeah. You cheeky fucker. Why don't we just turn into the cock destroyers there? God, I love those women.

I'm being John from fake taxi. Oh, yeah. Yeah, fake, fake taxi is something. Justin, do you know about fake taxi? I'm aware of fake taxi. Yes. This has to go in if we talk about fake taxi. Yeah, it's one of one of Britain's only cultural exports, I guess. Yeah, this is cool.

Britannia now is just different kinds of fake taxi. Where is that? Again, a man who looks like he's from the Burnley Secret Service. Although I think most I'm pretty sure mostly the fake taxi drives around South Wales. Yeah, be like a bridge end secret service. Yes. Yeah. Now. Yes. But what I like about the fake taxi most is that, like,

it's got such a strange set of layers of storytelling. For example, if I was to drive a taxi on a movie set as part of a movie, is that a fake taxi? Because it might be a real taxi that was built to be a taxi. It's a simulacrum. But obviously calling it simulacrum taxi is going to be a bit like. But then. But then why call it fake taxi? Because in the fictive world, because it's accessible, because it's accessible,

because you don't want to have to, like, preface everything of, like, a lady getting it in every hole with a thing from Baudrillard. OK, maybe you don't. But what I'm talking about fake taxi is that, like, if the movie Taxi Driver isn't called fake taxi drivers, it's just called taxi driver. Isn't every Uber basically a fake taxi because they're unlicensed? Yeah, I would suggest that the French movie series Taxi is far closer to being a fake taxi than taxi driver

because it has a self-conscious, like, awareness of its own narrative. But OK, but the thing is, the way fake taxi goes is that there's some attractive woman is standing beside some country road near Bridge End. Yeah. And she gets into the car and then it transpires that she can't or won't pay the fare or she knows John and then they go and do some dogging. And so if you were to call it fake taxi, it would make sense in the fictive world of fake taxi if that John just bought a taxi and he was never really intending to take any one anywhere at all.

He was just using it to hope to find, like, impiccunious women. That would be a fake, fake taxi. See, this is why, you know, I don't support the fake taxi. I don't think it's a real transportation system that we should rely on. I prefer the bang bus. Oh, yes. Running running a train. Goods, fake taxi.

Bad. Yes. Speaking of trains, speaking of trains. Oh, let's let's let's call. Let's call Liam some more British slurs while he figures stuff out. Well, let's make some. Let's make some up. He won't know the difference. By the way, I fancy dad.

Yeah, I'm recording now. I'm allowed to say all of these because I have a shire pass. When you live here for when you live here for more than eight years, the government sends you a shire pass and it says you're allowed to do cockney rhyming slang. Right, so let's let's have a butchers hook at this. What is what is the rhyming slang for a train? I'm going to Google this.

Hold on. Yeah. Ignore my mechanical keyboard. Cockney rhyming slang. There must certainly be one train. Alan rain and or John Wayne, John Wayne. Oh, getting on the John, getting on the John. Right. Let's let's have a butchers at this. John, let's have a butchers at this.

John and give a little chat on the windshield. See, that's weird because John also works in Philadelphia, but for different reasons. Yeah, it's you have like a vowel shift. So you have a John with the W. This is true. Yes. But isn't that just a guy, not a train? No, no, John. No, it can be a thing.

It can be a thing. John can be anything. Huh. Be like a descriptor that you add to a thing. So I'm going to say, get me a cup of that John coffee. No, give me that coffee, John. Oh, so I'm that coffee. It's it's a it's a metacintactic variable

is what you've identified. Yeah, you say, give me that John. Yeah. Or you say, give me that coffee, John, both of which refer to the cup of coffee. The thing which I'm still not over is the southern thing of calling every soda or like every carbonated drink a Coke. No, that's deranged.

Yeah, it's a mind fuck. It's a mind fuck. Absolutely animal brained to be like looking at a bottle of Pepsi and be like, yeah, pass me that Coke. But what about like a what about sparkling water? Oh, is a sparkling water a Coke? I don't we don't have any Southerners.

It depends on how sharp the bubbles are. So I see we're still on that, huh? Right. Have you ever been not on that? No, no, I have not. In fact, I have I have a very nice bottle of bad while waiting for me at home. I'm currently in the trash huger studio

where I have had to have a San Pellegrino because that's all they have at the nearby Tescos. How do you do stuff? Oh, no. OK, the nearby Tescos is not it's not a nice shop, but they do have a rack of sandwiches with some San Pellegrino beside it. Every Tesco has that.

My Tesco has that. I don't think that that wasn't it was not ever thus, though. No, it has gotten considerably nicer in the last five years. I went to the grocery store this morning and they ran out of cheddar cheese. An outrage, an actual outrage. Meanwhile, meanwhile,

you've just got two British people on your podcast for the first for the second time and we're just like, oh, bloody Tescos in it. I bet this feels very satisfying to Alice to not to not to not be the only. I guess I can't say I'm a British person, but all of my references are very merged. This podcast with trash future.

Yes, exactly. Well, there's your trash. OK, I think we should probably start the podcast, though. Yes, it's time because I've been recording for 13 minutes. Terrific. OK, and then we just do introductions. So someone was telling us not to do the introductions anymore. And I'm like, we're going to do the opposite of that. It's probably pretty actually extended the introduction.

Yes, this is all the introduction. My pronouns were this entire exchange. You have to say the whole thing every time. I'm just running out to get more beer cans to make the beer can noise, because that's an essential component of the program. I'm just being really inconvenient by this point. Oh, man. Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem,

a podcast that takes a long time to get going. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he, him. That's it. That's that's all you had. OK. I've done too much already. Alice called while Kelly. Yeah, my pronouns are she and her. No one can know that I was trying to learn

Cockney rhyming slang earlier and calling Liam slurs. And I'm also on a podcast called Trash Future, from which I bring a guest, Riley Quinn. Hi, it's me, Riley. You may remember me from the bonus episode or from Trash Future. My pronouns are also he and him. And I think I might have raised this question in a previous episode that got deleted by computer gremlins.

But I wonder why we say both. Why we say both he and him? Because usually one person you wouldn't be like, my pronouns are he and her. What would be very confusing? Yeah, I think it's because if you have like one of the nonstandard ones, like Z and Sir, then it lets you know how it like works as a part of grammar.

Got you. OK. Yeah. Fair enough. You don't see that as often anymore. It's unfashionable now. Went out of style. It's like twenty three skidoo. Yeah. My pronouns are twenty three skidoo. I'm Joe Biden, at least three. That's the third gender.

Last, I am Liam Anderson. I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. Thanks to everyone who's enjoyed the van episode. And I really had fun making that as well as I made the mistake of searching our podcast. And people do not like it on Reddit, but fuck them. So continue. Don't we have a subreddit or something now?

Never go on Reddit as far as. Yeah, never go on Reddit. But yeah, they were just like, these three are annoying. And it's like, well, I don't know what to do about that. Don't listen to it, I guess. Hey, fuck you, too, buddy. Exactly. Suck a dick.

Hey, I'm podcasting over here. Oh, my pronouns are he, him, and I didn't say that. Oh, oh, right. Yeah, you need to say that. All right. So today you can see in front of you. We're we're having a butchers at this, John Wayne. Enjoying this call on the windshield in it. I guess I suppose people should should know that I spent my entire adult life in Britain, I just have a disappointing accent.

It's that's me with Scottish accents. But yeah, so you can see this very high tech streamlined train in front of you. You notice it's rotting and a siding. I can tell it's high tech at the stage. Yeah, I just assumed that it was just British. Like it just has that glare of grime over it that everything gets here. That is true. This looks like every train that doesn't go to or from London. Yes. Yeah.

Like this just this could this could still very well be in service on one of the like the rail lines that goes from like Manchester to South Wales. And and you know, it very well could have been if events hadn't intervened. They were going to talk about the British Rail advanced passenger train. Oh, that sounds like some some like 80s or early 90s shit. It was supposed to be earlier than that. Yeah, back it up. We're about to get into it, right?

But first, let's sort of talk about the main corridors on the British Railroad Network, right? So what we're going to talk about here is is what's called. The West Coast Main Line, right? You see it's in it's in Black. Left Coast, West Coast. Correct. It is. It is it is among my elite.

It is among, honestly, like my least favorite lines, because it takes a very long time to get anywhere. Plus, it leaves from Houston Station in London, which sucks. Yeah, love love to be on one end of this, just way out at it and have like getting to London takes six hours with two stops because the train explodes. And it gets you to a station that no one uses and no one likes. It's awesome. Everyone hates that one right beside the one that is very nice.

Naturally, crucially, not that one. So yeah, so the West Coast Main Line goes from London to Glasgow. And it's, you know, as opposed to the East Coast Main Line, which is in blue on the other side here. You know, the West Coast Main Line is the slower one, right? It has a lot of mixed traffic. It winds around a lot. It's about three hundred ninety nine miles long.

If you're American, it's sort of a similar length to the Northeast Corridor between Washington, D.C. and Boston. And it only links the five biggest cities in the UK by population. Much like the Northeast Corridor, London, Birmingham, yeah, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow, each like not as big as London, but like Glasgow is a million people give or take. And whereas like York on this diagram, like it's it's it's labeled like a city, but York is like only a city

because of some technical medieval like jurisprudence because it has a cathedral. It's a town. Yeah. It has a big church and a nice railway museum and nothing else. I've been there. Yeah. It's a town of some thousands of people down there. Yes. I like your. All right. So back in the day in the steam era, right, there was a lot of competition between the private railroads

that operated these lines, right? There's this thing called the race to the north, right? Between a train called the Coronation Scott, which is here, right? And looking very sexy and streamlined and the Flying Scotsman here. Flying Scotsman was the name of the train. There's also a locomotive called the Flying Scotsman, which is not this one. This is a Grizzly A4 same class as the Mallard, which is the fastest steam locomotive, right? Allegedly, allegedly, the fastest.

Allegedly, allegedly, yes. And there's some some apocryphal, some apocryphal stories. The Pennsylvania Railroad T ones hitting one hundred and fifty miles an hour. But they did not equip their locomotives with speedometers because they were cheap. So we have we have a game of like railway empire or something or like railroad tycoon going on here between two to steam locomotive companies. At its best, the Coronation Scott schedule from London to Glasgow was six hours and 30 minutes on the West Coast main line.

Wow, it hasn't got much better, has it? We're my goodness, no. For comparison, that's the same schedule that the the Amtrak Acela makes between Washington, D.C. and Boston. So this train is faster than America's fastest train today. Oh, I'm so glad that like Britain, a dismal country where we do everything wrong is still outclassing America because your railroads are so bad. Yeah, they're pretty brutal.

It's it's very funny that a train where an integral component is a guy with a shovel is able to outclass your best train. That's because you never invented like all the advanced steam locomotive functions we had in the United States. No automatic stokers. No, I'm not a super heating. I don't think we we managed to get rid of the guy with the shovel. I mean, he was still there to sort of shove the coal around in the firebox,

but he didn't actually have to shovel it in. It sounds like you're trying to automate someone's job away. Elon Musk. Oh, yeah. If we were doing fully automated luxury communism. The Elon. It was the Elon Musk of his day, like invented the like up that the working manless steam engine. I hate when I have to get my Prius repaired

because the guy with the shovel just shoveling batteries into it just like falls down from exhaustion. Now, that was back in the day. Eventually, we get to the 1950s, right? The 1955 modernization plan after British Rail nationalizes all the railroads. Mm hmm. So, you know, you had the Beeching Acts, of course, where a lot of lines were cut. And then there was sort of the half-assed

implementation of the second half of the Beeching Acts, which was massive investment in the railroads, railways, which still existed. Right. And again, this was this was not done as thoroughly because it cost money. That sure looks thorough. I don't know you're talking about. So there's a bunch of a bunch of stuff that happened during modernization, right? They got rid of the steam locomotives, a lot of them prematurely,

which meant they had to order a lot of diesel locomotives really quickly. They were still building them. They were still building the star class locomotives right up until British Rail decided, yeah, just just scrap these as you finished building them. Exactly. So because they needed to order so many diesel locomotives so quickly, they bought them from like 17 different manufacturers to 45 different designs, about half of which worked.

Yeah, just that efficiency we love to see. Yeah, it was like, well, you know, we can make a diesel locomotive as a man with a hammer and a shed and like, all right, let's 400 of them. But they also sort of renewed rolling stock, right? They electrified a lot of lines, including the West Coast main line, which you can see here. They increased speeds to 110 miles an hour on the West Coast main line. They modernized some stations. That's why, you know, Houston Arch was demolished because they said, well,

you know, we need to prove the railway is modern. We should demolish this Greco-Roman edifice and put up a glass cube. And that's why everyone loves the Houston station now. Yeah, because everyone gets to go to Houston Station and then turn to the person they're with and say, is it about my cube? Oh, have you seen the shit they're trying to do with with Gardinor? Your station has been crushed into a cube. The shit they're trying to do with Gardinor in Paris,

where they're turning it into like a sort of like monument to transport and the abstract that's also a mall. Well, that's because every train station is a mall now with a sort of ancillary vestigial railway use. Not Houston. Houston defies all all even just their pretensions to being anything but a place that gives you the finger at least at least a mall tries to be accommodating. It was like the train, the station that the train we're talking about today

originates in is a hateful place. Like it is it's built in order to create crowd crush for some reason. The only places you can go by like a water before you get on your train. The queue goes out into the very narrow area that all of the platforms go from. And all of the ceilings are for some reason like two meters high. It's kind of like Penn Station. Modernism works. It's very bad. It's London's Penn Station.

It's horrifying. And enough about the station out of me. So after modernization, after they electrified the West Coast main line, which took up until like, I think the early 70s, late 60s, you could get from London to Glasgow in five hours on certain limited stop trains. They're improving the schedule, right? Of course, in practice, it still takes like eight, but it always did. Yeah, unless you want to like really, you know, pay out the wazoo for the fast train.

Yeah. And even then, like one of the things that we're going to be talking about today is trying to build something without spending any money on the infrastructure underneath it. And that's always what British railways have been like. You'll get these like nice fast trains and then the signals just break because they're made out of like old cheese wire. Now, around this time, the same era, the Japanese had just deployed the Shinkansen right in 1964.

Now, the Shinkansen sort of sets off an international panic, right? Because, you know, it had only been 15 years earlier that we were bombing the shit out of Japan, right? And now they suddenly had high speed trains out of nowhere. Well, you can build fast tracks real good when your whole country has been leveled, I imagine. I mean, all of Europe had been leveled, too, and they didn't build fast tracks. Part of them did.

Well, no, because the other high speed trains were reactions to this, right? So, of course, the French deploy the TGV 001, the test train, right? Yes, they start. That is a sexy booklet. That is orange. Yeah, it looks cool as hell. This was the first one was gas turbine powered. Got that.

Yeah. So they started testing it in 1972, full service in 1981 after they switched from gas turbine power to electric power. This is one of the reasons why there was a wide deployment of nuclear power in France. France. Liam's going to yell at me. France. Was because to power the new TGV system. In testing this gas turbine train hit 190 miles an hour. So, I mean, obviously, they didn't want to do the German route of just being

like having the extremely fast train just powered by essentially a guy shoveling coal into the back of it, but with more steps. Yeah, it's just he's he's shoveling coal into into a furnace way back instead of actually on the train. It's also there's also a reaction in America, right? The Lyndon Johnson passed the High Speed Ground Transportation Act, which produced this depressing thing called the Metroliner. Love it. Oh, I love it.

I like this. Oh, my goodness. Did they know what a wind tunnel was? Well, the funny thing is the basic car body for this is is the Amfleet car that Amtrak uses today. In fact, some of these are still in use as cab cars. They're 60 years old. I'm just picturing this giant fucking wedge of like aluminum, aluminium, if you prefer, just hitting air however many miles an hour.

Yeah, I've been on it. I've been on it doing that. Is this as good as that would like lead you to believe? Well, it's very heavy so you don't notice. So this this train hit one hundred and sixty four miles an hour once. That's more than zero times that as it was going through Princeton Junction, the wind blew out all the windows on a commuter train on the next track. They should just let them keep doing that. That's awesome. Yeah, we just have open air cars now.

Yeah, you like open vestibules. Now you're going to get them by force. Yeah, this is what seems like it should be the Soviet answer. Just yes, we build it very, very heavy and very fast. And it is it aerodynamic? No. They're about to get to that. Oh, good. Well, this was by far the most successful thing to come out of the High Speed Ground Transportation Act,

because the Pennsylvania Railroad Commission, this you can see, we got the old Pennsylvania Railroad Keystone on this. By the time these were delivered, it was Penn Central and those when the misery started. We'll do an episode on that at some point. But the New York Central Railroad also tried to get some of that sweet, sweet grant money and they invented this. Yeah.

Oh, I like this one. OK. All right. Yo, what's up? You know, OK, this puts me in mind, as I'm sure you know, Justin, this puts me in mind of that show Super Train. Yeah, this was the train from Super Train. Yes, of course. So it's the M497 Black Beetle. There's a video of this going on YouTube.

Hell of a name. Right. And they they used it for exactly one test run where it hit 170 or 174 miles an hour or so on shitty jointed rail in Ohio. Jesus, you know, the rumors, of course, were that, you know, it got air on railroad crossings. This is a jet engine off a B 36. The the liver, I guess, or am I misremembering?

I don't know my aircraft well. It's the one with the jet engines, but also the propellers. Sixth chart and four burnin. Yes. Oh, it's so funny. That's incredible. Important to note that not to be outdone. The Soviets also made one. Of course. Yeah, that's that's awesome.

Do they have the jet engine on backwards? I think that's just how they designed the fairings. Yeah, that would be very funny. Yeah, it can do one hundred and ninety miles an hour one way. The other way, it's just a guy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's it's jet engine one way. The guy with the shovel the other way, but it's because of imperialism. Oh, look at look at the fucking just like regular

Yegorov coach that they built around. That's beautiful. Yeah, I really like that. And also imagine imagine sitting in that when the jet engine turns on. Well, yeah, the the the New York Central car is the same. That's a but rail diesel car. You know, think of it like a nicer pacer, right? We should put jet engines on paces. That's the only logical conclusion from this.

We actually will do a little tangent into paces in a second. Oh, no. Oh, yes. So while while, you know, the French are being very serious and the Americans are doing publicity stunts in Britain, of course, we have to talk about the British Rail Research Division, right? Look at all that high future right there. This is so Britain. This is what the venture compound

would look like if it had been funded by British Rail. Oh, I can do you fucking shaggs. The world of tomorrow. What it reminds me just of like is the thing about Britain also and one of the many things about this sceptre dial is that like we feel this need to really label the shit out of everything. And so like, for example, British gas isn't just British gas. It's British gas looking after your world.

Or, you know, I don't like that. Thames water bringing you water. Like it's just it's all very over done. And this speaks to a previous era in Britain where they just put the name on the thing. Yeah, research a slag. Oh, it's your fucking research department. All right. So the British Rail Research Division primarily came from the staff of the the previous London, Midland and Scotland Railway.

That's the ones who ran the Coronation Scotland before. Their scientific research laboratory, right? This MF said research. Yeah, yes, I did say research. Research is worse than an Agilis last time. Look, I can't say words. OK, we forgive you. You know, you know, the worst thing is that in the in the notes,

you have research spelled correctly and then you call it a laboratory. Well. All right. Look, I'm a dumb person. This is a dumb person podcast. All right. So again, this is one of the few well funded railway research centers to ever exist that are able to conduct what we call basic research, right?

Basic research is like research that may not have any immediately applicable commercial applications, right? They can just do research for the hell of it, see if it goes anywhere. Right. So, you know, this is and what I'm showing here is the I think called Old Darby Test Track. This isn't the main facility because I couldn't find any free photos of it. I'm sure it looks exactly like this, possibly a bigger. Yeah. And also, it probably had, you know, less modern

and catenary equipment, you know? So, you know, but think, you know, lots of guys in white coats and they got beakers and chemicals, you know, that's that sort of operation. One of their first big projects was to study something called hunting oscillation, right? That's where as trains get faster, the wheels start to wobble, right? They start to hunt for equilibrium on the rail, right? Do they start to become more unstable as they go faster?

And for that, they hired a guy named Alan Wiccan, who was a former aerospace engineer, and he determined this was to be. This was something similar to aero elastic fluttering on an airplane, right? Alan Wiccan, is he like doing spells in his off hours? Probably. That's that's what engineering is, because it's close to Alan Wiccan. That's the joke, right? Oh, I see. I see.

That wasn't that. No, it wasn't. No, my joke was that he was a wick. Whatever, good enough because his name is Wiccan. And so it sounds like Wiccan. Yeah, he's getting naked and, you know, doing a spell of binding on what? Ted Heath would have been PM at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Summer is the coming in. No, he did the spell wrong and created the pacer.

Oh, no. Motherfucker. No, so he that that led to the development of what was called the high speed freight vehicle, which they tested at speeds up to 140 miles an hour. And that later became the frame of the pacer, which notably did not have a maximum speed of 140 miles an hour. No, but it did ride slightly better than than it otherwise would have. I love to take a train in like a repurposed coal car. That's awesome to me. Yes.

So this guy was serving the left hand path clearly. He was a dark mage. Yes. Meanwhile, British rails do in marketing studies and like, hmm, higher speed trains might allow them to compete with road transportation, right? Which was also nationalized. We nationalized a bunch of truck companies into British roads. Oh, God. Did we? We did. We did. You can you can look it up.

You can see they had a very nice livery and everything. I thought that was only for a brief period of time, though. It was for a brief period. But that period was enough investment to between that and the construction of motorways, which also started around this time to provide trucks that like did the logistics stuff that you now couldn't do because all of the branch lines had been closed. Oh, well, that that sounds really productive.

Yeah, because because Britain's is Britain's a small country. So you can have a truck that just goes and replicates the route of that branch line instead of like moving everything by rail to one place and then getting the truck to do the last little bit of distance. So it kind of works at the cost of fun stuff like trains. And instead, you get dumb stuff like trucks. Yes. I mean, anti-truck podcast. Ignore my two thousand hours of your trucks in place if that isn't real.

All right. So this sort of leads to the development of the advanced passenger train program. So British Rail didn't want to invest in new main lines, especially after they closed all those branch lines. And they didn't have the money to actually do the investment part. They said they were going to do. So they want to get the most out of their existing infrastructure. So they sort of introduce a new concept of the active building train.

Right. There were passive tilting trains before, but they were they had a bunch of problems. And you know, they tended like sway on their own at low speeds, just randomly. Oh, that's good. That's that's relaxing. I like to do that. Yeah. So the idea behind tilting train is you can go around corners that exist currently at higher speeds while still maintaining passenger comfort, right?

I mean, you can go very fast on most railways, but you exceed passenger comfort tolerances, right? Yeah. Instead of just telling passengers to sack up and like because I absolutely would get the like Delta called 1960s serviced from London to Glasgow that is just flooring the whole way through on the basis that well, we've done the studies and we know it won't derail,

but you will feel like you're going to die for like four hours. That's not that big a deal. Yeah, I'd write it just to ride behind a Delta. Those are cool. Like those opposed distant opposed piston engines. Yeah, I felt dumb when I found out that Delta just means having the form of the letter Delta because I was like, why is it called that for years? And I never thought to look it up.

And then they're like, oh, I'm an idiot. OK, well, you know how the cylinders were arranged in the engine, right? Yeah, it's a triangle. Yeah, and it's it's it's weird. It's cool as hell. We'll have we'll talk about the Delta later, I guess. Every triangle is a love triangle when you love triangles. Except we can't we can't talk about the Delta because it's an engineering success.

Damn. Yeah, that that that will be episode two of Well, There Isn't Your Problem after the Elton 11. Yeah, exactly. So so the advanced passenger train would be the first active tilt train, right? And they were going to achieve nine degrees of tilt. That's what their data told them that they could they should go for. That's more than what's allowed for by a conventional super elevation, super elevation, being when you raise one side of the rail up a couple inches to

a you know, it's the same as banking, I guess. So when you say active tilt, you mean that it like the car moves to an angle like how? How does it do that? Hydraulics. Oh, I see nothing with this going wrong ever. So OK, for this next bit, we have to do something annoying because I don't want to get a copyright strike, but I still want to play this. So if you're listening, what you should do is go down and look at the link in the description.

Oh, my God, which I'm going to put. And we're going to and then you can watch this video and then we'll be back afterwards momentarily and we'll talk about it, right? Yeah, although when when you do come back, we're going to have to reintroduce ourselves and do the pronoun. Yes. I forgot what my joke answer was, so thank you for that. OK, anyway, let's let's let's roll the clip that you're going to have to roll yourself manually.

You are the grandstay, which is a lot of success. How do I make this go? Oh, boy. Oh, there we are. All right. Everyone hear it? No, I cannot. No. This is fine. I like seeing it. Yeah, I can see the very ugly train. I'm going to I'm going to play the super train theme music over it. I'm just going to like rattle my desk so I can get the full effect.

Oh, cool. Switchboard train, switchboard, sweet. The music is excellent. That's that's the only thing which is frustrating. They had some dubstep, I guess. Yes. Like when they still gave train drivers. Oh, yes. And like absolutely no hives, but you get a you get a little cap

that's very neat. Personally, I like all of the colored buttons. It looks like the Death Star and the early Star Wars movies. And until yes. And one of the things when I knew I had become an adult was when when I knew I knew I had become an adult when I realized that that's just not how every sort of large machine worked. Yeah, you don't get a lot of colored buttons.

No, it's a shame. Yeah, it's a real shame. Cry and shame. Hmm. So you're still watching this train, huh? Well, no, no, it's over. That's I should I should get that as a drop for when I do when I stream train simulation. How do I go to the next slide?

What? All right. So now what do you do? You just want to have like the people who watch you on Twitch be able to do that as an emote? Yes. Yes. I want them to be able to be like still watching the train. All right. So all right, we're back.

And I hope you all appreciate the video that I haven't been able to include because I don't want to get a copyright strike. All right. So we can see here the APT. E. Right. It's the advanced passenger train experimental. So this was the first design not designed to carry passengers. It's just a test platform, right?

Yeah. And it looks like someone has stretched a welding mask. I mean, that's kind of what they did. No, I hate when I do this. I lay the heaven stuff enough on the other podcast. So this was built in 1972 off of, you know, they sort of they were working off of the high speed freight vehicle, you know, and they eventually lengthened it, they added bogies and they those are the those are the wheel assemblies. And, you know, it has, of course, a face only a mother can love.

The small window here is made out of the super reinforced glass, the same stuff they used on the Concorde, you know, in order to withstand a kid throwing a rock at it at 150 miles an hour, which which our kids absolutely would do. Well, it's surprising how much of railway design is based on withstanding kids that are on rocks at trains. Quite a bit, as it's said. Well, like kids in like 1972 are today's boomers. So, yeah, I think I think that definitely would have been the mindset.

It's throwing rocks at trains on the basis that later they're going to want to get a ute. Rack off me, fucking hypothetical ute, Bill. Yeah, just just just throwing rocks at trains with the understanding that they're like awful, lefty kids would be triggered by this in some years. I can't I can't vote against I can't vote against funding railways, but I can certainly throw rocks at them yet. So did this actually work? Like if you hooked a rock at this thing going 150 miles an hour,

it would just like bounce off. I assume so. I don't know if it ever got hit by a rock. But so this was largely designed by aerospace engineers, right? It had sort of a space frame off a helicopter, and then there was a cosmetic skin over that. And it was powered by four 300 horsepower Rolls-Royce gas turbine engines with a fifth for auxiliary power for lights and stuff. And then one feature, which the research team did,

you know, because they thought it was a test platform, you know, we don't have to worry so much. There was a single seat in the cab, right in there. Oh, boy, fatal slip. One seat in the cab and there's a jump seat behind it, right? So it was immediately after its first test run, it was immediately blackballed by the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen for the suggestion that one man crews were OK, even on a test train.

Yes, we we stan us. Just just to be like, yeah, well, fuck you, if you don't have the 16 different seats for the 16 people that we require to operate, to operate one train. They ran it once on a test run, right? And they brought it back and it was put in a siding, right? And that would happen to it. No locomotive crew would touch the would touch the train.

Because they weren't scabs. Yeah, exactly. They just inflated a big scabby the rat next to the site. And so the design team was pretty relieved about this. The APT design team, which was headed by, I believe, headed by Alan Wiccan, who we talked about earlier, because they're like, OK, we do need some more time to make modifications. Let's let's, you know, let's let's worry about that now, right?

Instead of testing the train everywhere, you know, note the man in the white coat here, showing that it's scientific. White coats in a mullet. Doesn't have a frock, so we can't take it seriously. The Kohl shoveler retrained. Yeah. Now you are as a white coat and look at the board. You know, I can't see in enough detail, but somehow I know in my bones that that man has a moustache.

Yeah, that's legal. It's just like kind of a droopy one, too. Yeah. Well, yeah, everyone in Britain in the 1970s looked like a swinger. Like the entire the entire country was a key party. So everyone looks so weird. Yeah, that's also why they went on strike, because you don't want to like narrow the polycule. Yeah, that's true.

All right. So the issue was that now they had this prototype test train, right? Which was on a siding across the main line from the shed where they could work on it and no one would move the train. I love labor organization so much, you guys. You think it's ironic, but I'm really not being at all like that. I'm 100 percent sincere. That is the kind of dumb guy energy that we're going to need to displace capital. So they eventually found a manager who said,

all right, I'll help you move the train. They moved it in the dead of night. The scap scap scap scap scap scap that guy moved it across the main line in the dead of night into the workshop. And the result next day was a one day complete shutdown of British rail. Which dwarf the cost of which dwarf the entire budget of the entire APT program over its lifetime. Oh, that's beautiful.

You'll fuck around and find out, though. Belissima, kissing my fingertips. Oh, that's so satisfying. You know, you know the thing, right? Whenever French workers are just like, oh, you know, we'll go on strike and the firefighters will like, we'll set ourselves on fire and then fistfight the riot cops. Every time there's a bunch of British people who are like,

why doesn't our protest culture look like that? It used to. This is press ask to go back. This is what we could have had. We could have had a one day strike because they didn't put in two chairs. Have a one day strike because a guy moved a train. An injury to one is an injury to all. It's just that one and all are the same thing here.

The injury in this case is like you like crack your shin on a coffee table kind of thing. It hurts. So anyway, this is a test platform, right? Never ran in passenger service. It hit 152.3 miles an hour on the 10th of August, 1975, between Swindon and Redding. Two places where you don't want to go either to or from. Yes. Other than causing a one day strike,

it was very successful at its job of being a test platform for the concept of a tilting train, an active tilting train. And another thing is over its lifetime, it covered 23,500 miles in testing. Now, you compare that to the TGV 001, which covered, I think, 200,000 miles in testing. You know, so maybe they didn't test this as thoroughly as they should have. But again, we're operating on a shoestring budget. Yeah, a shoestring budget in a slapstick country.

Yes. Whereas it's just like, yeah, moving, taking the boot off of my train results in like major industrial action. Yeah, it's it's very interesting that that that we had to what basically get every single person involved in this is the three stooges. Like you can't actually see it, but this guy is about to get hit. I'm pointing with my finger at the computer.

Justin, can you highlight the man with your laser pointer? Yeah. So this guy, this guy here, he's about to get hit in the nuts from Curley, who's actually hiding just under the wheel here, Justin, if you can illustrate the trajectory for me. Curley is actually going to flick an olive pit and it's going to go directly into his nuts and you can see the shadow coming out from underneath the train under the nose here. Yeah, exactly. And this is, well, this is interesting.

This is the kind of protest culture we do need to get back. Like, for example, when we're carrying our placards, we should be carrying them on long two by fours over our shoulders. And then we can say, what do we want? And then we can say to turn the country to turn left and we all turn left and then everyone gets knocked unconscious in a perfect line stretching across the country. And that's the kind of solidarity we need to get back.

Guy is solidarity unionism. Guy is business unionism. I'm here for slapstick unionism. I feel like Scabby the Rat is the first step towards that city on the hill. Just having a giant inflatable rats that you bring to places. Staring at you at the face. Yeah, all seven of them. To shame them, yes.

Near Washington Square in Philly, just in a nice little line. Oh, it's a polycule. Imagining you're waking up one day and you need to get to work and you find out that like Network Southeast is on strike because someone moved a train in in like fucking where was this? This is. Somewhere in the north of England, I think they moved a train 150 feet. Yeah.

Anyway, generally successful test platform. Now you have to talk about the prototype, right? So the original order was they were going to they were going to order 10 trains for sort of prototype revenue service on the West Coast main line by 1976, right? The project had started in like 1968, I think, if I remember correctly, right? So there's there's a lot of unconventional design on what's on this train beyond the fact of the tilts. OK, so they switch it

to electric power because the West Coast main line was electrified, you know, and the energy crisis was happening. So, you know, gas was expensive, which caused some problems because the West Coast main line's catenary system, that's the overhead electric wires, was not a modern system. Of course not. That costs money. Yeah, it was it was the older kind before we had constant tension catenary. It's actually the same kind that's used on the Northeast corridor today.

So this older system produced large oscillations in the wires if a train ran at over 120 miles an hour, right? Oh, good. So that meant if you had the the pantograph, pantograph is that bit on top of the train that goes up like this and contacts the wire, right? If the pantograph was on both ends of the train, like, you know, this front car was the locomotive, right? It would create also the front

pantograph would create oscillations that would, you know, wave down the catenary, right? And then it would destroy the pantograph on the the trailing locomotive, right? They should have just run with that, to be honest. Die, die, die. Like a single use train. Yeah, you just you run it once and the like the back pantograph explodes, you like replace it when you want to you change it out when you want to go back in the opposite direction.

You know, that that's how you're going to get conservatives to start loving trains is you just make a single use so it triggers the greens. Yeah, you get a you get a single train ride out of it only and you get an explosion. One solution to this, which was proposed, would be to run a cable the full length of the train to the front, right? And run the real graph. And then, you know, I read about this, then you can run twenty two thousand volts, the full length of the train, right?

Oh, Jesus Christ. You know, people people got very nervous about having a twenty two thousand volt cable just under where the passengers were, for some reason, to which I say this is the crisis in masculinity that we're experiencing. They were all triggered. They were all cucked, they were all owned and they should have done that. We used to fill lamps full of like gas to like make sure people could see. Why not? Yeah, getting on the train used to almost guarantee give you cancer.

And now they're like, oh, no, I'm going to get electrocuted to death. Well, luckily masculinity won out because that's standard practice now. So their solution was, OK, OK, since we don't want to trigger anyone, we're going to put the power car in the middle right here. You can see this car with no windows in it, right? Oh, good. Which to be clear, is full of transformers and gigantic engines, right? Well, one thing they did is they slung the transformer on the bottom underneath the car to lower the center of gravity.

And then all the traction motors are mounted higher than they usually would to reduce the amount of unsprung weight and therefore reduce the amount of wear on the track, right? Right. So that's that's a new unconventional design, extremely unconventional. In fact, what else do they do? Everything's made of aluminum. Well, hold up a second. This so the power car, that's just to be clear, that is full of like

stuff that does engineering to make the train go. And in order to like, so if you want to get from this car here, I'm doing at least maybe do the thing with my finger. Assuming you're saying, yeah. And you want to go back here? Yes. Yes. You have to walk through a little like gangway, I'm assuming. Oh, we'll get to that. Oh, please. So actually, that's the next thing I was going to say. Well, OK. Oh, there was a passageway.

Passengers and crew were not allowed in it in normal operation, or at least the the the the crew that, you know, other than like, you know, qualified engineering personnel or whatever, you know. So. The like passenger service crew, I guess. Yeah, exactly. What they what they did was they had two entirely full, fully separate trains on each end of the two power cars, right? Because an ordinary train would run with two power cars, two full sets.

So there were two restaurant cars, there were two first class cabins. There's two of everything. There were two crews required to run this one train. Oh, this is fine. I mean, this was made as life very happy, at least. Yes. Yeah, to be to be fair, like that's excellent for workers. They're they're compensating for the test train. Yeah. Yeah.

You fucked around and moving that shit a hundred and fifty feet. Now it's time to hire two crews per train. But you won't do that shit again. Plus, plus any time we want, we get to get our union brother currently to go and replace one of the transformers with an organ. Just blasting through crew station at one hundred and fifty miles an hour, playing a warlet so with a double effect on it. So the slapstick labor movement is this episode's Pennsylvania Secret Service.

Absolutely. So another thing is because they didn't want to update the signaling system for this, they needed a special braking system because the design speed was one hundred and fifty five miles an hour and they needed to stop in the same distance of the train going eighty miles an hour could. So they designed what we're called hydrokinetic brakes. That sounds like a cell. You just have a bunch of pressurized water in there.

Basically, yeah, you have like a turbine. Oh, good. Another engine. Yeah. Well, this is by many engine trade. No, it's the reverse of that because it's like a water turbine that sort of sloshes water around in that turbine housing and that, you know, converts the energy of the train's motion into the motion of the water and also heat. Justin, may I ask you a question? Yes.

It seems as though this train is trying to solve a relatively simple problem, but is doing it in the most over complicated solving sort of solving problems that create new problems way possible? Is that what's going on here? Yes. Yeah, that seems to be a theme. OK, good. Just wanted to be sure we were on the same page. So another problem with it going one hundred fifty five miles an hour as the

design speed is that is too fast for the driver to read signals and speed limits. Right. And just get better drivers. Just like. Oh, God, I bet they did something incredibly stupid for that as well. Like put every single one. We've created Robo driver. We have implanted a bunch of 1970s electronics into his eyes. No, Alice, Alice, Alice, that is far too reasonable. Based on what they've done so far with this train, I'm imagining what they've done is like, but you know, those they've created an effect where they have

like like a kilometer long signal and then they just do one very long signal on it. So you have a whole kilometer to register and interpret it. Just just gigantic long thin signs up and down the track. Yeah, you just make the speed limit signs bigger. You just get a mile tall speed limit sign. You can just see it coming. This was actually the only investment in fixed infrastructure. They really did to accommodate the train is that they installed radio

transponders at the side of the tracks. And then there was a little 1970s display in the cab, which would tell you the speed limit and the signal aspects. Yeah, it wasn't like a flip thing like you have an airport displays, but it was close. It was like a rotating diet that had like numbers on it. Yeah, it made like a little mechanical ding noise when it when it changed. Yes, it is just beautiful, beautiful engineering. That they think it was a 1970s LCD, but I'm not sure.

Hmm, that they stole this off of the TGV, though. The Belize signaling system, which the French had invented for that. We just kind of stole this was actually something which I mentioned before the Pennsylvania Railroad, too cheap to install speedometers. But they did install cab signals on their locomotives, even like the steam locomotives, you know, so you got this that's handy. Yeah, you have like this contrast between incredibly high tech machinery for like the 1940s and just now you don't need a speedometer.

But the only downside is that you you have cab signaling. That's very good. But you have to use it to read the Pennsylvania Railroad's incomprehensible signals. It's like, why is this why is this line? Why is it diagonal now? Vertical is clear. Diagonal is approach.

Horizontal is stop. This is not hard, Alice. It's pretty hard. Not that hard, Alice. It's pretty hard when you start complicating it with like approach slow and approach medium. OK, I don't understand any of those now. All right.

So then they installed some systems to ensure that if the tilt system failed, it didn't fail in the upright position. That was the problem they had with the test train is sometimes the tilt system would fail while it was tilted nine degrees in one way, which is not good if you're going around a curve, which is the opposite way. Yeah, I remember reading about them having to drive it back at like three miles an hour because the tilt system kept failing in the direction that you didn't want it to.

And and so we just like slump over to. It's going to take a nap. So another thing is I believe these were the first all aluminum cars in Britain. And of course, it's designed largely by ex aerospace engineers, largely in an aerospace fashion, right? These this being the 1970s, some of these aerospace engineers being British would have worked on the comet. I believe so. Well, you can see that has large square windows, which as we know,

nothing bad happens. Oh, that's true. Yeah. So the initial idea was they would buy 10 trains, 10 of these prototype trains, and, you know, they'd run that in regular service for a while, work all of the bugs out. And then this would be followed by something called the APTS. The S stands for squadron. That would be like a 50, 60 train order. This is the APTP for prototype, right?

Now, they probably were they going to name them after like Air Force squadrons? Because they did that with the Delta X. They named them after army regiments. So that would make sense. It would make sense. You get like a named train that's like six one seven squadron or something. I kind of like that. I do like that. Yeah. But but now we have to talk about British Rail Engineering Limited.

Well, note this US standard light rail vehicle sitting outside the the the the old Braille factory, because apparently they were going to use this on the Manchester tramway and they imported it from America. And they realized it was just a shit of a car in Britain as it was in America. Doesn't work in San Francisco. Doesn't work in Boston. Doesn't work in Manchester.

God, if everything about this picture is so sad, why does the crane have, by my count, three miscellaneous tops hanging off it? Sometimes it gets cold. Why? Why is there a Nissan Micra? Why? Why is there a bike shed with one bike? It's just it looks like Britain to me. Yeah, there's so you just breathe it in off of this image. Yeah. So British Rail Engineering Limited,

they were based in a big workshop in Derby, right? This is where they built the or they built the experimental train here and the prototype trains here, right? And British Rail Engineering very much kept alive the historic man in a shed lineage of British engineering, right? For sure. This is 20 guys, all named Stan, who have like collectively about 50 pencils stuck behind each ear because they keep putting them up there and then forgetting them.

Oh, yeah, every every single one of them has a troubled marriage. They're they're given these plans for the APTP, right, which is designed by aerospace engineers. So so they just do you remember that old, old meme where it's the guy just staring and it's like, are you a wizard? I feel like that's how these plans got received. They had to learn a lot of new techniques like aluminum welding. If you ever weld aluminum, it's a pain in the ass.

Right. And they had to and one of the things is it was a tradition. You know, a lot of times the shop floor would kind of, you know, they'd make alterations to designs based on previous experience. Yeah, because Stan knows that it's one RCH over where it should be. And so he'll just plain that down. Exactly. So, you know, they did. They made a lot of modifications to design of their own abolition and never really told the design team.

Darn, it's fine. Again, it's fine. This is more workerism. Yes, absolutely. We're not allowing ourselves to be managed. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, fuck a professional managerial class that's trying to get me to learn how to weld aluminum. I think you say they did it on their own abolition there. Yeah. Yeah, OK.

That's that's that's not as funny as a neck. I tried. Yeah, I don't know. I don't fall in there, bud. All right, fine. Why is everything in this picture gray, including the plants? Why do you think? Because it's in Britain. You live there.

That's your country. Look, it's just it's more of an existential question. Yeah, it's it's when you see it all at once like this, you know. Yeah, you don't need the outside view. You don't need to see it in the round. Just just the fact of the rust and the micro and the fact that also like this is also clearly a bit of trade, a bit of track where like they haven't been tending to like you can see even

there's some distance like disused below the fence there. Like there's a disused something. It just it feels like a society in decline. Yeah. See the you see the windows that have been boarded up with blue back here. And if the other problem is the car is still clearly functional. So it's not as though this is a place that's been abandoned. This is what a working place looks like.

This is not a place of honor. No great. Well, no, we're commemorating some great deeds. Well, let's commemorate the great deeds. That's true. Yeah, we are commemorating them building this space age piece of technology with a bunch of like Yorkshiremen wearing overalls. Oh, speaking of I just remembered you remember how I talked about in the 737

episode how Boeing made one train and it was crap. Yeah, it was this. It was this one here. Yeah, it was this right here. Although we got yelled at for that being a PRT erasure. That's not a fucking train. It's PRT. No, they also manufactured a a a subway car for the Chicago L for Chicago.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, which was actually OK, I think. Thanks, Jeremy, for teaching me about that. Yes. So anyway, the the the the situation here is you have a bunch of guys in a shed with hammers trying to build the most advanced passenger train in the world. Did they do it also? Just as it also additionally, the most advanced passenger train in the world that has like multiple different interacting fluid systems and engines in the middle of it, a twenty four thousand volt cable down the floor.

I cannot I cannot emphasize to you how many have the twenty four thousand volt cable. That was the whole reason for the power. Yeah, I forgot about that. They had something even we're just like, oh, yeah, by the way, don't forget there's a hydraulic braking system. Yeah, you're going to have to add a turbine to this as well. Don't worry about it, though, if you get it wrong, it just accordions into like a like a like a like a foot long sandwich of steel.

My favorite my favorite detail of the gulf between design and outcome in this train is something that I learned from the train simulated DLC of it, which is, I think, seriously, very good value for money because it models all of the dismal sort of like horrifying cracked plastic aspects. And my favorite part of this is this is this is documented to this is backed up is that above the little 1970s LED that tells you what the speed was. There was just the maximum speed of one hundred and twenty five miles an hour dimo taped onto the dashboard. Love it.

And that, yes, that's that's the single greatest parts of this thing for me. There's just a guy. Yeah, a guy just taped that on. I believe the intention was they would eventually remove it once they worked all the bugs out and it could go as fast as it was supposed to go. We'll get to that in a second. Still in alpha. This is supposed to be the beta train, the alpha train we looked at before. Oh, whatever, man. Basically, still an alpha steam early access, really.

But as a result of all these problems, it took a long time to build the train. And then stuff got worse. So the APT P project, right, was moved from research, the Research Department of British Rail to the Chief Mechanical and Electrical Engineering Department, right? Oh, we're going to do some more workerism. We've taken it away from lab coats and given it to. Well, the thing is, lots of British Rail engineers thought

the APT was a waste of time and resources, right? A fancy lab coat train. Yeah, exactly. You know, there's a bunch of aerospace engineers trying to muscle in on railway engineering territories. Those bastards. So as a result, the APT team was hated by everyone else at CM and EE, right? You know, there's there's stories of them being forced to,

like, since since the office bathrooms were outside the APT offices and in one of like the railway engineering offices, essentially, they were forced to use the bathroom on the other side of the building. Only Britain could invent a kind of racism against train engineers. I like that really low level hazing. Yeah, it was a racism by train engineers against aerospace engineers. Yeah.

So the project delays start to stack up and the rest of. Yeah, because they had to run across the fucking building every time they wanted. Yes. And then the rest of British rail wants an alternative to the advanced passenger train, right? So which leads us to, of course, the inner city one to five. Oh, God. Oh, it was fun watching this get eulogized by first on their like retirement round of it. Where it went up and down the country and everyone like commemorated it

and said how nice it was instead of remembering it as it should be as the fucking murderous assassin of the of the delightful innocent APT. Aren't they still in use? Yes, yes. But this one train company retired them and because that was the last time they were going to use it on, I think the East Coast Main Line. OK, they made a whole thing of it. But yeah, they're still in use.

You can still see them in like Wales, I think on the Midland Main Line, too. So I thought it was like the actual last run. I didn't know it was a fake last run. No, no, no, no, no. They made it they made it up like that. But yeah, no, it's it's not the last one. So wow, a private company lied for publicity. Who would have thought it?

So all right. So the inner city one to five. So the class 55 deltics, which we mentioned earlier, they were very fast, but they were also showing their age by this time, right? And the advanced passenger train turned out since it was electric, they weren't going to be able to replace them with that. It's ironic that the deltics were also made by aerospace engineers. Like maybe there's a lesson there about letting plain guys design trains

is that they're actually quite good at it. Sometimes once you let them work the kinks out sometimes. Yeah, once once you work the bugs out. Anyway, the British Rail Board wanted something to replace them quickly, right? So they basically say to, you know, the the CM and the department, look, give us your dumbest, give us the dumbest and fastest thing you can. Oh, hell yeah. I love that shit. This is replacing your like beautiful, long in the works hypercar,

your Bugatti or whatever, with like a Shelby Cobra. Yes. I'm sorry. Why are you saying this is a Shelby Cobra? Why are you going to fight? I'm not saying this is a bad thing. And I will take your ass for daring to insult America. To be clear. Look at us. We're VW group. And we can spend more money than anyone building a car.

Aren't we so special? Yeah, yeah, McLaren did it for fucking cheaper. OK, before before before it gets to Ford versus Ferrari, to be clear, I do think that the idea of just stick a gigantic bunch of diesel engines in something and like throw it down the track is very good. It's very funny. I just I just would prefer the finicky European style has eight different kinds of hydraulics in it.

I don't know why I'm insulting you, considering I drive a German car, but there you are. Yeah, yeah, they'll get you like that. The inner city one to five or the class forty three, right? You know, it's it's a regular locomotive that's streamlined on one end as diesel engines ran. It used conventional mark three coaches, right? So they can be used on any train.

It hit a hundred and forty three miles per hour in June of 1973, right, which is three years before the the the APT was scheduled to be delivered. And it could regularly achieve one hundred and twenty five miles an hour in regular service, right? Yeah, and British Rail loved this because it was a PR coup. Like you saw all of the adverts that they made, they made one where they painted up a Delta in police livery and had it pull over the the one to five for speeding.

Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Anyway, this was this was great for British Rail because they could finally try to like shake off the kind of reputation of being like this moribund slow failure because they had this train that was actually quite fast. It was very fast. It was very good. It could be used anywhere in the system. So, you know, when they were doing track work

and you were diverted onto the settle in Carlisle, you know, you didn't have to be hauled by like a tiny Schoner engine for 60 miles. Hmm. It had very light axle loading, so it had higher top speeds and better acceleration. And therefore faster schedules, even on slow railways, right? And it was a massive and absurd success. It was great. It's a great train. It's very, very good.

And I think it's the world's fastest diesel locomotive to this day. Yes, because only Britain would produce something that that combination of stupidity, yes, where you have to have to have something extremely fast, but also it's just a diesel. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, give us the dumbest and fastest thing you have. Oh, OK. So wait, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. So a bunch of guys in a shed received some plans for this.

Yeah. And then they just kind of played some jazz and invented their own plans and built it in a shed. Yes. And it has all of those many interlocking, bizarre sounding systems like the the water brakes and the middle engine car. This did not have those. Oh, right. OK, sorry. This just worked like a regular train, got you. Except it's going very fast.

Doesn't tell. Yeah, doesn't do anything like that. Sorry. Yeah, I was I was momentarily confused. No, this just has a big diesel engine and go fast. This is just a it's just a this is just a train that goes fast. It's a muscle train. It's a muscle train. Yeah. So right now, so we are we are awaiting the the very strange train. So, yes. Meanwhile, once the inner city one to five is put in service,

the APTP was still said to be three years away, right? Any day now. Give us Half Life Three. OK, yes. As a result, British Rail decides to cut the APT order from 10 train sets to three, right? Meaning that even once they were delivered, it wouldn't be like a regular service train. It would still be kind of an experimental thing, right?

So bastards. Yeah. So anyway, they want it. They want it delivered in 1976. Well, the first one was delivered in 1979. That's so bad. Is that Glasgow Central? I think it is. Yeah. I think it might be. This is real pixelated.

It's just, man, that is that is one late 70s looking train. I kind of like it. I really like it. Yeah, I think I think I think it's a sexy train. I'm not saying that in the bad way. It just it looks like it is a white shoes ass fucking disco blazer ass train. Like, I know I've used key party already, but this is a train that comes to your house

and just instinctively puts its keys in a glass bowl and then is like, oh, oh, oh, just dinner. OK, and then puts them in a normal bowl. Yeah, this is a train. This is a train that has like not only has been made into a Jell-O-Bold, you can be served a Jell-O-Bold on it. In two cars, but like it's a main dish for some reason. All right. So the first train set was completed in May of 1979.

In testing, they set a speed record of 162.2 miles an hour, right, which would not be bested in Britain until H.S. One was completed. Mm hmm. Yeah. So it works. It works excellently. OK, so now I'm going to say that bit I said earlier, the guys in the shed just reinterpreting a design they were given with a bunch of complex interacting systems. And they were just like, yeah, I'm going to kind of go my own way with this.

And actually, it worked well. It worked pretty well. Some of the time, 60 percent of the time, it works all the time. Yes, this is the most British outcome. Is that you give a bunch of like incredibly complicated plans to Stan and his mate, and they work it out and they build it. And it sort of works. That that is the most British outcome. OK.

So now, shortly after this, the APT team, which was sort of its own unit inside the chief mechanical and electrical engineering department, were completely disbanded. Oh, and the responsibility was spread out entire over the entire CM and EE department, right? Which hated this. Yeah. So they hated it. Yeah. And, you know, all the aerospace engineers are now interacting

with angry railway engineers instead of their own team. Cool. There's extensive testing for a while. And the engineering staff solve a lot of problems with the train, which, you know, were happening. And the first official run in service with passengers was on the 7th of December, 1981, from Glasgow to London, right? And they had been trailing this for years, right? They'd been advertising that they were they were going to bring in

this super fast train by 1976, right? Almost. Only five years late. So the British Rail invited the press board, which is a terrible decision. You should never invite the British press anywhere. Yeah. You are only allowed to look at the train from the outside. I was allowed to ride the train.

Yeah. If you if you've ever even seen a tabloid, you should not be on this train. Yeah. Taki came on. Taki came on and he kept on. He kept on saying, yes, I bet this will run on time. What we need is we need the like comical union thugs from earlier. Just like a muscle, a bunch of journalists of this and throw them onto the platform. What? Just what?

Just like a broadsheet journalist comes on about to be all snarky and then just pow gets hit with the seltzer. Yes, just right in the kisser. Just just right right right from right from up from a lapel flower. Just bam, seltzer. So this this first run, they achieve it in just an absurd time, right? Four hours and 15 minutes compared to the normal five hours. You can't do that now. Yeah. Barely.

Barely. Barely. If you get the expensive train, I understand you can. But but instead of focusing on how quick the train got to its destination, the press focused instead on how the the tilt system made him feel seasick. Oh, poor baby. Is it like the extremely fast train? And then and then one of the stewardesses, you know, said the solution, you know, to your seasickness was like,

just stand with your feet apart, right? Extremely practical woman. Yeah. And the press really latched on to that, too. She's fucking right, though. I mean, like, oh, is poor baby having trouble writing his racist articles? Who's a good journalist? The British Rail engineers countered by saying the press and, you know, they just they boozed up too much because the British Rail was giving him free alcohol, right?

True. 100 percent true. Believe it instinctively. Yeah, they're they're bringing you on a high speed train. They're giving you free booze. And you're like, all you can think of is is is writing mean things about them. I don't understand. Yeah. Wow. What what what this train, you know, the tilt system feels a lot like the room spinning.

Don't don't know what's up with this. This tilt system is the scariest thing that's ever happened. The only thing I could imagine that would be scarier would be if a bunch of people spoonerized my name or the name of one of my colleagues in the future. Anyway, we were just getting into Carlisle when I was on my seventh martini when. You know, this this seems like a poor decision on British Rail's part, but you have to understand the British man of the early 1980s. If there wasn't an open bar available at a place,

we'd just begin to wreck it physically with his hands on the on the way on the return trip the next day, one of the cars got stuck in a tilted position, right? Sure. We'll never hear the end of that. This is fine. Just just lean, just lean. It's it's the train prefigured little pump. She's doing a gangsta lean. Yeah, it's we are we are we are on the express service to Molly via Percocet. You know, one of the problems with this train was they were they were they

debuted it early earlier than a lot of the folks doing the tests said they should have. And that meant they debuted in the middle of December, right? I said December 1981, right, which was a particularly aggressively cold winter. And you're running it all the way up to Glasgow, too. I live for the record in Glasgow. It is currently the end of January and it's freezing cold here. I hate it. It's terrible. Subscribe to the Patreon so I can move somewhere nice.

So two days two days after the first incident where one of the cars got stuck, the hydrokinetic braking system froze on an in service train, just froze solid. And it had to end its run early, right? Another problem was that the speed was limited to 125 miles an hour or into the sticker they put in there. Yeah, it's a load bearing sticker. It's jet of the 155 miles an hour because, you know, it's it has a tilting function, but it's still operating in mixed traffic, right?

You know, it's still going to get stuck behind a freight train or something. Yeah, just just just to drive through it. That's fine. You just go just ram it. It's it's only hauling like several thousand tons of coal. And then they also found out after they debuted the trains, let's say one train got a car stuck in the tilting position inward towards the other track and another train coming the other way also had a car stuck in the tilting position also inward, right?

These two trains would hit each other if they passed in certain places on the network. It's fine. Added elements of danger makes it that much more fun. It tilted slightly out of the dynamic envelope, which was not something it should have done, right? So there was there was a risk of trains wrecking into each other if the tilt mechanism got stuck. Oh, Jesus. Oh, wait, what?

So they'd like that the corner would just be like hanging over the train going the other direction. It would just fucking clip. Yes. Yeah, just. Oh, fuck. Yeah, just peel two cars open like the 11 foot 8 bridge. Oh, no. Oh, shit. And this is the bit where we remember it was just assembled by a bunch of guys who were eyeballing the measurements.

Yeah, measure twice, cut once. Yeah. Now, British Rail wanted some good publicity for the train, you know, early on, so they hired the guy from Blue Peter, which I guess is a children's show. OK. Yes. It is. It's a children's show where like you that like presenters would do stuff to learn about the world. So like they, I don't know, they go on the like marines like a salt course or something or, you know, things like that.

And yeah, so they hired they hired Peter Purves. Peter Purves, I don't live in your country. Look, British TV in the 80s was bad for sex criminals, but it wasn't that. OK, well, I thought it was just the politicians who did that. Oh, it was everyone. Yeah. Justin, not familiar with the life and times of Jimmy Savile. Oh, my. So I don't have this footage, unfortunately,

because I don't want to get copyright strikes. If you go to there's a guy with the YouTube channel called Mustard also has a video on this train, which is much shorter than this one. If you go to my Twitch and follow me on Twitch, my follow notification is the video from this because it's by now public domain. Purves said, move, it's quiet and an altogether delightful experience. It's smooth, it's quiet and an altogether delightful experience. But as he was saying that the tableware on the table in front of him

in the restaurant car was visibly rattling and you could hear it. It was on the audio, right? Which is something which is strange to me as an American because every train does that here. That's a train. That's just what a train does. And like also, of course, there's going to be a difference in what a boom mic for a TV crew records than what you notice with your fragile human ears.

Well, you can like see like the coffee was going to spill out of the coffee cup is the thing. Oh, well, that's fine, though. That's character built anyway. They got enough bad publicity from the British press that the trains were removed from service at the end of the month. They lasted in service for all of all of like 30 or 40 days. Oh, fucking, fucking, I hate the British press. I hate them so much.

They just the enemy of anything that might be interesting in this country. All right. So here's here's an example of like this is from fucking private. I did just smug. Private eyes always sucked smug fucking public school dickheads. These are the same. These are the same people that always like reacted with irrational anger. Any time they saw Mark Fisher write anything. So it is unsurprising to me that they they didn't like this thing

that attempted to invent the future because it's trying to be smart, right? And the like the part of the British public school psychosis is that you have to hide any talent or innovation under a bushel for fear of vicious bullying. And you can either get good at bullying or you can get good at hiding or both. But you cannot ever do anything new. And the only people who are allowed to do anything new or seem smart are the people who can point to the educational credentials that they have.

Yes. And British Rail was a bunch of guys named Stan who were all wearing overalls. And as such, was always going to be a hate figure for these pricks. So, yeah, in our case, of course, they're either say, welcome to the APT, stopping for repairs at Penrith Brew, Glasgow, Penrith Brew. And then, you know, waiter, have you seen my sausage roll? Yes, sir. It's in the tilt mechanism. It's in the way they tell them.

Doesn't even make doesn't even make sense. It's in the tilt mechanism. How would the sausage roll get in the tilt mechanism? No, because the sausage, it's like a sausage that is rolling. I stuck my dick in the tilt mechanism. Excuse me, conductor. The tilt mechanism, it would be it would be funnier if we just gave it to Zoomers and it would just be like the tilt mechanism.

This tilt mechanism full of beans. All right. So now British Rail goes into damage control mode, right? The most dangerous part of any story. So they hire some consultants to restructure the project. And they said, you know, maybe this part where you disbanded the whole APT team was a bad idea. The CM and E had so thoroughly balkanized the team that no one could work together on anything

to solve any problem on the train. They were all just, you know, hurling Balkan YouTube comments at each other. Yeah, they had given each of the like engineers a different Balkan citizenship assigned at random. And they were just like overcome by like blood feuds immediately. There's also an investigation of the tilting mechanism, right? Why were riders feeling seasick on these trains? They're cowards. Drunks.

Partially and partially. But the other problem was there was a delayed reaction to the tilt system, right? So it started tilting only slightly after it came into the curve, which they figured out how to solve real easy. They just moved the sensors up one car. About that, right? That was real easy, right? But the other problem was it turned out the tilt system worked too well.

It completely canceled out any feeling of changing directions. I mean, that's that's cool. I love to like go on a space flight from Glasgow to London. So there was no sort of sensation of turning that you felt, you know, physically, but you could see that you were turning out the window, right? Just just remove the windows problem solved. Well, I found out something simpler. If you just reduce the tilt slightly, it completely eliminated seasickness.

Oh, we just flipped the seasickness switch to off. Yes. OK. Why do we even have this switch? And why does it have an arm? So, you know, that was that was a trivially easy solution. But while investigating this, they learned something new, right? So they found out that the last study that produced data on lateral forces on trains, you know, which is what we call camp deficiency, right?

That's that's when I try to speak cockney. The whole and this was the study that the whole project was based on, you know, the fundamental assumptions that study was conducted in 1949 with a tank engine on a branch line in North Wales. OK, all all of the information that this high tech train was based on was essentially recorded by Thomas, the tank engine. And so they conducted a new study with with, you know, better equipment. In 1983, and that suggested instead of the nine degrees of tilt,

which they had engineered this train around, they could have gotten away with six degrees, right? I think they should have gone up. Go more, go to 20 and six degrees as well within the margin where you can tilt the track instead of the train, which is a lot less complicated than than this. And you can use your dumb muscle car, which you've already decided to build. Yeah, you can do donuts on the West Coast main line. So at this point, at this point, we have what, like, 14 different interacting. You know what this is?

This is the American spending four million dollars design, designing a pen that writes in space and the Russians sending using a pencil. Yes, that's both in the same country. To be fair, that never happened. That's true. I get welcome to Britain. We are truly, truly. And I mean, this is not just as a cliche, a land of contrasts. The British Rail, always a socialist institution,

so ruthlessly committed to dialectics that it was constantly at war with itself to try to produce some hoped for synthesis. The last days of the APT, right? It looks so sad. I mean, there's kind of a sad ending. I mean, problems with the trains were slowly corrected. And the trains actually found their way into regular service on the West Coast main line as relief trains, right?

In 1984, you're done. Muscle car breaks down and you get this. Yeah, exactly. You get you get your fancy European, you know, mid-engine car. That's so backwards. Actually, probably the only mid-engine train ever built. That's that's good, though. It gives you like a good sense of gravity.

It's fine. But the thing is that although they had worked out most of the bugs and these turned these few train sets turned out to be fairly reliable in the end, the damage was done, right? The press were still hounding British Rail to take them out of service. And British Rail relented in 1985. Cowards. The trains were stored. Two were scrapped.

One is preserved at the museum in crew. And that's it. That's that's so sad. It's not quite it. Oh, almost. OK, go on. Almost it. So, you know, the legacy of the APTP is we usually think this is a dumb and embarrassing project, so the failure of management as opposed to engineering. And no one gave it a chance, right?

Yeah, I don't agree that it's dumb or embarrassing. I I want to save the reputation of this weird, idiosyncratic train that was never allowed to be a success because the British press hates the concept of joy. Uh, it just just like everything that wants to keep this country dismal and uninventive and parochial one ounce. British Rail let themselves be bullied. They never should have been. And I think the thing that is worst of all is the lack of sentimentality, right?

Like when when they pulled this, it was just gone. We talked about the Star Class locomotives that were the ones that British Rail were building at the very end of steam locomotives. Those they preserved, they preserved those impeccably. They called the last one they made Evening Star. They gave it a special name and like a special send off and everything. And with this, it just didn't bother. It was like this shameful sort of rejects.

And that's that's really sad. And I I I find myself identifying with the dumb train because I take Estrogen and it has done this to my brain and now I'm crying. Yeah, well, that's the thing because Britain is a country that just that lives permanently in its own past, which is why the thing that was trying to be new, yes, brutally mocked and murdered for being new. Even if, as I sort of had mentioned earlier, it was kind of funny how it was conceived and massively overengineered and stuff.

But what they hated was the fact that it was pretending above its station as opposed to literally. Yeah, as opposed to just having the right kind of nostalgia for the age of steam and Britain was great or whatever. Because basically ever since like 1950, Britain has largely accepted that it's an idea whose time long ago came and that that anything that is British should fit this narrative that this is a decaying and declining society.

And we don't and new things are not worthwhile here. Yeah, we are we are an entire country built on that. You know, nothing valued is here thing. Yeah, Britain was Britain essentially has to be seen as a museum that got a renovation in the early 2000s and became mostly gift shop and now has largely fallen into disrepair. So Riley, Riley, I'm going to I'm going to do this one. The one time where I'm actually right on a podcast

that does not overlap 100 percent with Trash Future just to frustrate people who only listen to one and not the other is this hauntology. Yes, it is. Awesome. Finally, we got there in the end. And in fact, what this is, this is a direct comparison between hauntology and nostalgia, as hauntology is the opposite of nostalgia. Hauntology is I'm going to massively over simplify this for the purposes

of the fact that we're an hour and 40 minutes into this podcast. But hauntology is basically the ghosts of lost futures. So if you think about OK, think about this, the all of the tram tracks that used to exist in American cities, which heralded this potential future of free or near free, very accessible public transportation for everyone that were ripped up to make way for these atomizing, awful, polluting cars. The little remnants of the tram tracks that you can still see

are hauntological because you are there is this there was this future that you can and you can see the ghost of it that is now gone. Whereas nostalgia is so it is it is projecting what could have been. Whereas nostalgia is like imagining what never was. You're imagining that the these that the steam train that we love because it's from when Britain was good was this wonderful thing that everyone loved that was uncontroversially great. And then we have to deal with and then the sort of slagging off

of the time we actually tried to be inventive is and then remembering, you know, that we could have had faster, better trains, even though this one was admittedly quite silly, is it illustrates that dynamic. Yeah, it does get a little sillier, you know. OK, so. Oh, yeah, I forgot. This is a disaster podcast. One of the things we got to remember about, you know, the the APT is not given a chance.

Now, we asked the question, were there any contemporary projects that were? In which case, we have to go where this podcast always goes. To Canada. So this was the light, rapid, comfortable, which was via rails project to build a tilting train. Canada, Canada's name. Well, because it had to work in French as well. Yeah, to be a little rapid, they're comfortable.

Yes. So this this way in between Quebec City and Windsor, it achieved 130 miles an hour. It had all the same problems as the APT in that, you know, the tilting mechanism got stuck. There's a lot of bad press. It broke down a lot when it first entered service and they fixed all those problems. The Canadian press, the Canadian press, so you can just ignore them. Well, what are they going to do?

Write something in the Toronto Bay about how they're all they're all owned by the Irving's anyway. Yeah. Oh, I stabbed a raccoon to death in my backyard. And it made me think that this train isn't so good. Whatever, dude. Yeah, I said, Canadian Jolly and Mum. So the, you know, these were these problems were all eventually solved. And the the LRCs remained in service until 2003.

And, you know, after they were taken out of service, I don't believe you can achieve the same speeds on the via rail corridor anymore. Just because they still they don't use the locomotives. They still use the passenger cars because, you know, every via rail corridor train is this sort of Frankenstein of like 12 different car designs. It's it's it's absurd. I love to get the one car that tilts still.

So the and the other thing is that the the APT power car basically what they did was they gave it a cab and they called it the class ninety one, I think. I think so. It's it's an intercity two to five to me. But yeah, they gave it a cab and then they also made a DVT a driving van frail so you could have one at both ends and then not have like a power car in the middle anymore. And this was like having a slightly better muscle car, I guess.

Yeah, but it's essentially it's a lot of the same technology as from the APTP. It still has, like, for instance, the body mounted traction motors. So, you know, that reduces the unsprung weight. You know, they they they adapted a lot of the technology from the APT to build this just this is the electric muscle car, as opposed to the diesel one. And then, of course, the thing is what makes it worse, I guess, bring it back around to the ontology. You know, it goes to the lost futures.

Well, British rail sold the patents to the tilting train mechanism to Fiat. Oh, Jesus. Fiat Ferrafiaro, the Pendelino. Yeah, it always reminds me of the canyoneiro. You know, so they bought the APT patents. They came up with their own tilting train and then they sold it back to the British to run on the West Coast main line. Yeah, in the form of virgin trains, mostly, which like no longer exists because we took away their license

because they were terrible out of you. And the and the trip and this has managed to make the trip from Glasgow to London in three hours and fifty five minutes. Right. Bitch, when? Never. They did it once in 2006, I believe. I don't believe that for a second. That no, still three minutes slower than the APTP managed in 1984. Yeah, because Richard Branson needed to take that extra three minutes

to line his own pockets. You know, it's you know, it's really funny about the Pendelino. Well, I think it makes me feel sick. That is genuinely true. I like last time I got a train from between London and Glasgow, I was I was like looking out the window and I was getting genuinely nauseous on one of these. Oh, God. Yeah, it rolls.

And that run with the APTP, that was the record run, which stands to this day, included being stopped at the signal for five minutes because the signal broke. That really is just that's a perfect synesticate, a perfect thing of the part standing in for the whole for how the APTP went. It's just you try to you build this beautiful, weird, stupid train and you throw it into this infrastructure

that is just held together with like tape and it's and it still works better than anything we have now. Yeah, like, like I'm looking at the styling of the Pendelino, which is like, oh, it's very modern, it's very aerospace and it looks like a car with the big like headlight clusters. And I'm like, no, I preferred the disco blazer train. Yes, give me that back. Give me the thing that was just like a wedge.

It feels more honest somehow. Yeah, the APT looks very, very good. And this looks like it looks like a car. It looks like it looks closer to the Nissan micro parked outside British rail engineering limited. It looks like it looks like an appliance. Yeah. Yeah. I just look at this and I think of manuals.

Yep. But that's the story of APT and and how try as we might. We can't do as good as a bunch of guys with hammers in a shed at British rail engineering limited. Yes, this is a sort of backhanded tribute to heroic actions of Stan, who keeps losing pencils and who made the fastest passenger train in Britain.

So that's the episode. And of course, next week, we will be doing the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse. We're doing it this far. Yeah, we're doing it, of course. Yeah. Now, for some reason, we're going to nail it this time. Oh, yeah. Well, some of the same hunting

oscillation forces were at work on this one. So that's a good tie. Hey, huh. Anyway, I like it when you do those sort of the through lines. It's very good. Yes. Yeah. There's actually. Well, there's your problem actually has an alternate reality game.

Yeah, go back and through all of the old episodes, listen to 15 hours of podcast to find it. It's actually an alternate reality game where we concentrate all the fans in one structure and it falls down. I'm the parody. It's the ARG is take every take the first letter of every sentence. Liam has said on the show and then unscramble the letters. And you'll find a secret message that leads you to a hidden bonus episode. Thank you, fuckers.

Most of the letters. You know, I be sure to drink your. No, he's talking about oval malty and the delicious Swiss beverage. Oh, Riley, you didn't even get to talk about the rest of Shabbat and this one. Can I come back on and talk about the rest of which is my shirt? Yes, excellent. There's no engineering disaster that's ever happened with it. It's just a really good train.

That's fine. We'll find we'll find a Swiss. It's got like if you're just going to say briefly what I like about it is that it it applies the it applies from like the the entire Angadine Valley, my favorite route and the route in the Angadine goes like through like like I get you get on it like Lanquard if you're going from Zurich, which is like this like tiny town, but then it winds through this beautiful river valley that goes through like clusters and Davos and Samurits and stuff, but they just has these panoramic windows because they the Swiss train designers knew

that you wanted to look out the windows and see the majesty and they fucking let you like the reverse the Adirondack where they took out the big dumb car. So you're going through beautiful northern New York, right? Upstate New York and there's all these mountains and beautiful fall colors. And you're looking at it through an Amfleet car window the size of the postage stamp. The railroad car and the railroad experience as like a cipher for talking about joy and why the forces of capital hate joy and don't want us to have it.

All right, I have to pee. So does anyone have any commercials before we go? Listen to Trash Future. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Check that out. Give it a go. Why not? Follow Liam on Twitter. What do you have to lose?

I guess continue to get real mad about shit that doesn't matter. And then, I don't know, continue to be gross and transphobic in our YouTube comments, because that's because that's fucking lovely. I love that. Don't fucking do that. And yeah, check out, check out Justin's other channel, Do Not Eat, or follow him on Twitter at Do Not Eat. Whoa, we got it. Yeah, when I did it.

And the next episode of Franklin is coming soon. He promises. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, where's the new Franklin Justin through that? Then you can go pee. All right, excellent. I've been I've been I've been summoned by the fans to ask you in person. When's Franklin? You're on the other side of the Atlantic.

Leave us alone. Cut his mic. Cut his mic. Pennsylvania has Castle Doctor, right? Like, yeah, it's true. Good thing we're all like some mace. Oh, well, thank you all very much for having me on. I had a lovely time talking about Trash today. We're looking back on for some Swiss content, for sure. Yes, yes.

So many we can find an engineering disaster that happened in Switzerland. You can't. You can't do a bonus episode about how good Switzerland breaks there and everyone has guns. I'm pretty certain the Air Force, the U.S. Air Force flew a plane into like a cable car one day. They did do that. Yes. There we go. That's the Switzerland episode. Oh, my American American imperialism strikes again. All right. So I guess that's the episode.

Why everyone? Bye. All right. Man, I really deflate so I might do your commercial for you. But say, all right, I'm going to stop recording and use the restroom.