Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 17: The Atmospheric Railway

Episode Date: February 20, 2020

Today @oldmananders0n, @aliceavizandum, and  @donoteat01  talk about the succ, and various ways succ has been applied to railway traction in the past, present, and future, and also elon musk can suck it here be the slides: https://youtu.be/JaRVy31lTlQ here is the patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod here is @bigmoodenergy's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlfGQZD9OW4 slide 1: pipe By Rosser1954 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80604884 slide 2: locomotive By Victor H. Rawstron (1919-1997), photographer - The Cooper Collection of U.S. Railroad History (Uploader's private collection and the image's rightsholder); BMLRR.com (Uploader's domain & website)., GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17271331 slide 4: dalkey By Illustrated London News - Illustrated London News, 6 January 1844, page 16, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60822048 slide 5: croydon By not credited - Illustration in "The Pictorial Times", Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1892927 slide 6: south devon By Geof Sheppard - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3693263 slide 7: By Unknown - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Oxyman using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4543867 slide 8: beach pneumatic By Unknown photographer - New York Historical Society, Bildnummer 70265, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39604103 slide 11: By Gunawan Kartapranata - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11340341

I need to move this over so I can see that. Yes, I am recording. Okay. In that case, I'm going to start the podcast. Hmm. And explain why we're looking at this tube. Yes. So hello and welcome to Well, there's your problem. The podcast about engineering disasters with slides. Potentially sponsored by the Bloomberg Foundation. We don't know yet. He still hasn't contributed to the Patreon. Give us your fucking money, Mike. Yeah. Fingers crossed. Give us your money. We'll say nice things about you if you give us your money. The only way to deal with us, Bernie Bros, is just to just pay us the money. Pay us the money.

Got to buy us off. Yeah. So I'm Justin Razniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. That's me. I am Alice Corvo Kelly. My pronouns are she and her. I'm also on a podcast called Trash Future. It's very good. You should listen to that. And I'm sorry I have been so slow at captioning the previous episodes on YouTube. It's a lot of work and the APT one is two hours long. Yeah, I just I'll get it done eventually. Inshallah. If we had that Bloomberg money, we could hire someone to do it quicker. Yeah, we could get an intern. We should get an intern to do that. Give us your money, Mike.

Oh, that's a good idea. Give us your money, Mike. Uh, last, I am Liam Anderson. I am at Old Man Anderson on Twitter. My pronouns are he, him. And I am back from my girls weekend, Jesus Christ. And I am ready to talk about engineering failures. But on a personal note, I would like to wish Megan Burke a happy birthday and also that no one can ever ask me for shit again. I'm retired. You did you fulfilled all of your like futile obligations in Maryland? Yes. Yes. Baltimore is a great city. Absolutely. Very dear and dear to my heart just because almost more than Philly just an entire like trash heap come to life. I love it. You can also I suppose say go birds and mean the Ravens.

No, fuck the Ravens. Listen, I like your Pennsylvania is 50 miles north of Baltimore. I had to deal with Ravens fans as a kid. I fucking hate Ravens fans. You can't I'm not going to hear about how Ray Lewis is actually a good guy. Go to hell. You know, I only said that just to irritate you, right? Yeah, I know. I know what you're doing. So tell me about the tube. We're looking at a rather ugly looking cast iron pipe. Oh, I think it's pretty. You think it's pretty? This was the thing that Grover sunken to like tap into the municipal sewer, right? Yeah. Sure. Why not? No, today we're going to talk about really a wide variety of things which all sort of fit into the concept of the atmospheric railway.

And and and one thing I want to I want to note before we begin is a disclaimer. So a lot of people like go into comments and they accuse us of just cribbing from the Wikipedia page, right? Fucking assholes. We don't do that. We don't do. I didn't even I don't bother to read the Wikipedia page. Just make this shit up as I go along. Yeah. And it's like, you know, sometimes Wikipedia is a good place to start for research. But like, you know, a lot of people said that about a Quebec bridge episode. And I was like, fuck you. Fuck you. Fucking. Yeah. Fuck you. Spent a long time on that shit. How dare you accuse me of doing research? I just do drinking and I get Justin to do the research. Exactly. Thank you, Beast of burden. This is called division of labor.

One of the things about the atmospheric railway is that the best source of information on this subject really is the Wikipedia page. There's not a lot of information online. Look, you got to like look for rare books if you want to find, you know, like dive into like a bunch of leather bound volumes and like have to fucking pass a library use check like Call of Cthulhu. Yeah, I have to like, I have to like go into the restricted section of library Harry Potter to find more more read another book. The only the only actual diagrams of atmospheric railways are in the Vatican secret archives for some reason. Right up there with the Holocaust. Yeah. Yeah. The real the real the real trick to getting into the Vatican secret archives is the only

security measure is a guy explaining to you that secret just means private rather than secret in the modern sense for an hour. And once you listen to that guy, you're in. Yeah, I can sit through that. I don't care. I'm not doing anything. It sounds more pleasant than the Vatican Museum. That place is a trash heap. It's just full of there's too many people in there. I feel like this is a thing of like the Sistine Chapel at the end and like there's so many fucking people in there. It's like you can't appreciate anything. I just wanted to see the School of Athens. That was the only thing I wanted to see. And it was like right at the end. And I was like, wow, I suffered through all of that shit. Just so I could look at this one painting that I kind of like that. That's the

one with the philosophers talking and walking, right? Like yes, they use in memes for like smart conversations. Yeah, but we have a School of Athens here in South Philly. Yeah, there is a South Philly School of Athens. I feel like this is a problem with all holy sites, though. Like yeah, if you look at the Ganges or what we talked about Mecca previously is just there's too many people. It's too crowded. You know what's next? I went on birthright sorry in advance. Obviously, the Western Wall is like Bob and you know, there's security everywhere and everyone's real mad at you for taking a picture on your cell phone because it's sad. I think God's pissed or whatever. Even though it doesn't say anywhere in the Torah that I can't take a picture

with my cell phone. It says you can't push a button. That's like the ultra orthodox figured this out. You can't do work and you have that weird like elevator. Oh, I love the Sabbath mode. Yeah. Yeah, it's why they have the oven setting for when you like program it in advance because you can set a machine to do work for you ahead of the Sabbath, but not do work yourself on the Sabbath, right? Anyway, I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to take pictures for my Catholic girlfriend. Suck it, mom. And it was not crowded at all. I walked I breezed right into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and walked around for like the 20 minutes I had and no one, you know, yelled at me about taking a picture on my cell phone. What year was it? What time of year was

it though? Because if you go at Easter, summer. Well, but when in summer, because if it's Easter, you're gonna have to push a bunch of Greek dudes out of the way with like your elbows. Yeah, that's what I do on a daily basis anyway. I'm just like, give me your live heroes, get the fuck out of my way. I'm trying to go to work now that I could canceled again. Yeah, offensive teams coordinator against the Greek diaspora. Yeah. Sorry, folks. Cyprus is not yours. Yeah, it's past. It's past. So we will have a future podcast with that will focus on inner faith dialogue. But oh, yeah. Oh, we're serious motherfuckers. In the meantime, we need to address the issue at hand, which is this big fucking tube. Yeah. Why are we looking at this tube with some

why are we looking at the suck tube with some dirt in it? So to think about, you know, steam locomotives, right, such as this one on the screen, which has a lot of JPEG confreshing. Yeah, buddy. Look at all those pixels. Look at the pixels. They build character. So there's some problems with steam locomotives, right? You can you can use them for like making silent movies where they fall into a like a ravine, but you can only do that once. Yeah. But like, OK, so your steam locomotive, right? There's not necessarily a lot of grip on the wheels, you know, steel on steel, right? So you can't climb hills too well. The size of the wheels limits the speed it can go, as well as some of the mechanical features like the side rods. It has the whole this big heavy

boiler around this full of water, has the whole around all the fuel in the tender guy with a shovel has to hold that guy around to. And then either union rep, the dual union reps, the sort of loading gauge, which is the maximum size of the vehicle limits the size of the engine. So that limits power, right? So you can't just have like a mile long boiler. The the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad experimented with engines with very long articulated boilers. Oh, that's so cool. Oh, bendy boilers. Yeah, it didn't work very well, as you as you might expect. They really did try the why don't they just make the whole train out of the boiler? Perhaps them for creativity. He did not work. So what if you take this whole engine? And when I

say engine, I mean the boiler and then like, you know, the the parts that convert that energy and a mechanical energy. What if you take that off the rails, right? And literally or metaphorically? Literally. So your train doesn't move because there's no engine. But wait, you have a little bit of you have something to propel it otherwise, right? So if you take the engine off the train itself, the engine can be as big as you want. You can have lighter and faster and generally like more nimble trains, right? And today we do this through electric traction, right? Like third rail or overhead lines or something like that. Still still witchcraft. It's sin against like the original design of having a big locomotive with a big dumb engine on it.

Obviously, we're all going to hell. Oh, to God, bud. Yeah, we don't understand electric traction. We yeah, we don't respect it at all. Stop being a coward. Put the engine in the train. Yes. So the Victorians, though, didn't have electricity, right? At least the early ones. Yeah, they were they were too busy like covering up table legs and like doing silences and shit. Like making weird pornography that survives to this day for some reason. So you can go look at some lithographs of like, oh, just weird shit. An ankle. One single ankle. Just turned up in the woods, you know. So since the Victorians didn't have electricity, they couldn't have a third rail or an overhead line. So they tried something a little bit different,

which was the atmospheric railway. Now, there are some early developments for an idea like this in 1824, which is like the basic idea of, you know, you have like a tube, right? This is a cross section I'm doing. And then you have a train inside the tube, right? I put a I put a T on it for the train. But this is lowercase T for tube. Incredibly, there's time. Yeah, of course, you can do this with like a tunnel with, I guess, no air in it, because they already thought that if you went over 35 miles an hour, everybody would just like explode. Shake out of the mountains. Yeah, as you do. Yeah, sure. So the idea was you'd create a vacuum with the steam engine in the tube, stationary steam engine,

and that would draw the train through the tube, right? This is an early idea. There wasn't you couldn't really the technology did not exist at the time to do that, right? No, what you could do what you could do is you could still have this idea of having a stationary power source that's pulling a train through a tunnel. You just use a really long rope, which is what the Glasgow subway did until like 1970. Yes. And that's what that that's cable cars in San Francisco to and all over America and Europe. Cable hold systems were pretty common. Yeah, it's a stupid idea, but it's a hell of a lot more practical than this. Yes. But so, you know, this this early idea was by a man named Valence, and I can't find out any other

information about it behind this, right? But the principle of operation here is the air pressure difference moves the vehicle. Yeah, just it sucks it like we're not joking. When we do the suck jokes, it just goes because they understand vacuum quite well, because it's relatively easy to create with the technology they have available to them. Yes. They just it just I guess you each passenger gets like an individual fishbowl helmet. Yeah. Yeah, all right, everyone get on the suck. Yes, there's problems with like having a really big tube, right? That's expensive. It's hard to maintain. We'll get to like big tubes later. So they came up with the new idea, right? Which is instead of having a big tube with the train inside, what if we have the train

outside the tube, again, capital T for train, and then there's a small tube underneath, right? And then in any of the wheels, any of the rails like this, and then that's the small tube. And then, and then you just have like a piston that comes down from the train, right, and is in that tube. And then you can alter the air pressure in the small tube. And then that will move the train, right? It seems seems sensible, I suppose. Right. So this is like something which is difficult with modern materials, just because you're maintaining this very long me in the next sentence. Very you're maintaining this very, very long like miles long valve in order to keep the vacuum, right? So but, you know, the Victorians are like,

no, we can probably do this. Yeah. Yeah, we have six guys with hammers, and we're gonna we're gonna fucking make this vacuum that goes for like up and down valleys and shit. Yeah, great. So there was Jacob and Joseph Samuda, right? They were shipbuilders by trade, right? And they came up with a system in 1841 for an atmospheric railway, right, using this concept of the small tube with the piston in it, right, which is what this big diagram is. And I'm going to explain this. The 19th century when you could just like have like a side hustle when you were a ship, right? But you could also in your spare time, just invent a railway. You can't do that these days. You can't be like an Uber driver who like in their spare time, just invent a maglev.

No, that attitude in the Victoria air in the Victorian era, like anyone who could do like a nice looking in like diagram with like cross hatching was like taken seriously. Yeah, it's the same thing with like any other professional engineering, we you know, we can think of that one. But like, you could just be a doctor just by like saying you were it rules, we should go back to that. Yeah, I mean, well, you know, that would definitely delegitimize the professional managerial class for Dr. Anderson, Dr. Rosniak and Dr. Coldwell Kelly, like unseen here, Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. The first stop prototype was designed by two guys, one of whom designed wings and one of whom designed bomb racks.

And they've been cars for 60 years. Yeah. Well, I'll raise you another one, which is that a doctor invented the chainsaw. Did you know? Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. That makes surgery a lot more effective. Yes, because it's very effective at sawing bone. And so it was just like a hand cranked chain with a bunch of saw blades on it. And people just upscaled that when they needed to cut down trees. It's great. So what I'm saying is bring back that kind of interdisciplinary innovation you get when nobody has to have any qualifications to do anything. All right. Give me your arm. We're going to test this. Give me some skin, man. Just accidentally get out this dude's whole fucking

wrist. It's fine. It's fine. It'll puff out. All right. So let's talk about the Samuta system for the atmospheric railway. Okay. So this is kind of a Looney Tunes sort of system, right? All right. So you have this continuous vacuum tube, which is this pipe here, right? It's like a smaller outline here. Those are like these reinforcing two higgies here. Okay. So on top is this two inch groove, right? Which is open. This is your continuous valve, right? Is it just Victorian manufacturing that it looks so uneven? Like it looks like something you've stripped all of the paint off, but then like there's some plastic where you think there's metal and it just blisters? Well, you got to remember it's 180 years old.

It's doing its best, Alice. Yeah. In order to seal this valve when the train is not there, you have an iron plated leather flap. So in the middle where there's this different crosshatching is the leather, right? That sounds safe. Yeah, I like that. I like that. Yeah. This was opened and closed by a series of wheels which are on the train, right? And the train, that sort of assembly is all of this up here, right? Uh-huh. So it opens the flap as it goes past and then closes it behind it. Yes. Nice. And in the course of doing that, you keep the big tube airtight-ish? Yeah. I mean, you're going to have a little bit of leakage, but like it's not enough that it's a very long vacuum tube. So, you know, you can probably handle that small amount.

That'll be fine. It's a lot of suck, yeah. There's a lot of suck there, yeah. So what you don't want to do is put your hand in this. No. Oh, no, I should not do that. So this is about to get pretty weird in a second. So, you know, the piston inside the tube is drawn forward by atmospheric pressure, you know, so this whole assembly is on like a special locomotive at the front of the train, but like really it's just the piston inside the pipe. You can't really see how the piston is oriented here, but like it has the whole thing is the size of the inside of the pipe. I'm raising my hand here to indicate that I have a question. There's that. That means no controls to speak of, right? Like you just... You have brakes.

Ah, okay. Brakes are able to hold the train. Against this like vacuum force. Yeah. That's a shame. I was envisioning this when you said loony tunes. I was envisioning this is just like once you're on, once you're on, once it's sucking, and you know, once you keep sucking, you are getting to the next station regardless, so long as the vacuum holds. So the loose end of this iron-plated leather flap, like right around here, I need to switch colors at this point, Jesus. Okay, so let's go with blue. So the loose end here, right about there, this is covered in a mixture of beeswax and tallow. Tallow is animal fat, right? Yeah, the thing they used to make McDonald's fries good with, and now they're not

anymore. God damn beings. Anyway, I blame Bloomberg for this somehow. That's not gonna help us get a sponsorship. Well, that's the thing. If he gets us the sponsorship, we will stop talking shit about his like jihad against big gulps or whatever. You're gonna have to use that bleep function now. Oh yeah, so sorry to suggest that Mike Bloomberg is with Jeffrey Epstein on Jeffrey Epstein's plane doing. We like to have fun here. So, all right, so this gets weirder, right? So I believe, so there's a copper heating element, right, which is 10 feet long on the locomotive, right, which I believe is what this thing is, right? And the idea is the mixture of beeswax and tallow is solid at normal atmospheric temperature, but if you heat it a couple degrees

up, it melts, right? Oh, so the idea is this heating element melts the tallow before the wheel picks up the thing, right? So then when it puts it back down afterwards, it reseals and maintains the vacuum, right? So this railroad, you're telling me that it's, I assume basically silent because there's no engine anywhere near you, but it smells amazing. Yeah, you just have like, I guess, like a kind of like barbecue vibe off of it, maybe with some like honey mixed in. You're just like somebody's like cooking ribs up front. It's a giant deep fat fryer railroad, yeah. And of course, the other thing is, you know, we don't have electricity. This is not an electric heating element. This is this heating element is being run off a stove or something, right? Jesus.

Yeah. There's just a guy up front in the cab who's only controls are a break and a stove on which you can like, I don't know, make pancakes or something. He's making burgers up there up front. He's serving to the passengers. The first diamond car powered train. It's like a combined like cafe car power unit. That's wonderful. Well, listen, the fat draining off the grill is what's keeping this train running. You guys better keep eating. You don't need we don't go. So this whole this whole assembly is covered by I believe this is the weather flap here, right? So all of that is all of that covers the actual valve and everything that keeps the weather out. That means the, you know, stuff doesn't get soaking wet. And you don't get you don't get crap in the

tube because that's a big two inch like opening into which like people can throw stuff, stuff can fall in, they can get leaves in there, whatever. Yeah. So as complex as the system is, it's still less complex than the steam locomotive, right? You know, it's as complex and goofier ways, but you aren't having you're having to maintain the fire on a stove instead of an enormous boiler boiler that can just fucking explode. Yes. All of the pressure, all of the pressurized vessel is well away from like people unless you put your hand in it, which again, do not put your hand in the atmospheric railway. Please keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times. This now that we understand this system, at least a little bit better.

Let's let's talk about the first installation, which was the Dahlke Atmospheric Railway, right? This is 1892, right? It's designed by Jacob Samuta because his brother died. Yeah. F. Yeah. F. So it ran from what is now called... Oh, God. Done. I'm not gonna help you. Is it done like air? Dunlara. Dunlara. Look, this is, I don't know. I don't know. You do adjust that. All right. To Dahlke, right? Yeah. So I want to fuck with you there by just being like, actually, it's pronounced like Dahlke. Yeah. No, it's actually pronounced Dukane. The one thing about this podcast is, so a lot of times when Liam and I are in a car driving somewhere, of course, we listen to Lions led by Donkeys. Very good podcast. Very podcast.

And the host frequently grossly mispronounces a word and they just gloss over it and keep going. It's like entirely opposite energy that we do, which is we dwell on it for 10 minutes. Yeah. To be fair, in your defense, Dunlara is one of those towns which like Irish people find difficult to pronounce. People say that it's like, because the anglicized pronunciation, which like half of people use is Dunleary. But if you want to try and pronounce it in Irish, you can either do like Dunlara, which is probably the closest thing to a consensus, or you can just fucking say some fucking syllables. You can say fucking anything. Dunlara.

Let's toss it for more letters. Who gives a fuck? Yeah. This is what happens when your language is so brutally repressed by the English that like four guys have to reinvent it in 1929. It's not ideal. Just want to say try up to Sinn Féin. Anyway, so and the other thing is, of course, when this railroad was built, this was called Kingstown. Yes. We fixed that by making it unpronounceable. Yes. Yeah. Now no one can talk about it. All right. So this was an atmospheric railway, and it ran uphill to Dahlke, which is where the pumping station was, somewhere around here. The idea was you ran the pump, it started operating about five minutes before the train left,

and they created 15 inches of vacuum that's referring to inches of mercury, which is an old pressure measurement, which is still used in a few fields. Yeah. We cannot not be archaic and like obscure in what was then Britain. So what they did is they used atmospheric power going uphill, and going downhill, they just used gravity. They just shove them. Yeah, just shove them. Yeah, it'll roll downhill, it's fine. Yeah. So you get sucked upwards, uphill towards Dahlke and towards, I guess, the activate windows notification, the unsung co-star of a podcast. Somebody said that we should introduce it. I have a license. I just don't know how to use it.

Oh, boy. You just, you take the numbers and you type them in the little prompt, because it's easy. You might have to register for like live or something, it's fine. I don't know where to get the number from. I just, I had a license for the old computer, which is now like the hard drive of the new computer. And like, I don't know. I'm not sure that it works that whatever. Anyway, so we switched motherboards to Microsoft hates that shit. Yeah. So there's 2400 yards of pneumatic pipe, right? It ended 560 yards short of the Dahlke station, right? So that led to a couple problems, right? Only a third of a mile, that's fine. Yeah. Yeah.

Sometimes the train would undershoot the platform. Just runs to a stop on air is the funniest thing I can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Just start, just start blowing on a sail. But no, what they, what actually happened is that then the passengers had to get off and push. Oh, man. There was one incident where the pneumatic locomotive was accidentally uncoupled from the train. Oh, good. So literally, which is just like a cabin with a stove in it and a guy. It wasn't even enclosed. It was just a platform with a stove on it and a guy and a guy and it shot off at high speed. You know, that the claim is that it made the full journey in about 75

seconds, just over two miles and 75 seconds. That's not bad. Well, that would probably make it the first railway vehicle to exceed 100 miles per hour. You know, that beats that beats up. Just this fucking raft with a terrified man. Like I say, you don't get this kind of innovation anymore, you know? You know, the guy in like a top hat and with like, you know, trying to fucking make some toast or something. He's the first person to be going over land. As the trains coming apart around him. I'm going to be carrying that mental image around for a while.

As I said, this is a Looney Tunes system. I feel like this is this is one of the like harmless fun ones we do. Unless your next slide is and it killed 500 people somehow. This one feels much like more like a pilot cleanser. So how many people did it kill? It didn't kill anyone. So actually, this system, unlike the next ones we're going to talk about, was actually very successful. Wow. It operated for about 10 years, pretty much flawlessly, apart from terrifying one man. Yeah. Apart from putting the fear of God into one person, yes. And inadvertently setting a land speed record that would hold for, I guess, like 50 years. At least, yeah. I mean, the first team locomotive to hit 100 miles an hour,

depending if you're American, you say New York Central 999. If you're British, you say you say City of Truro. If you believe in social records, you say absolutely. Oh, fuck that. No, there was a guy with a stopwatch he had prepared in advance. They had the mileposts. It was City of Truro when not hearing arguments on this one. All right. So anyway, after that 999 did it, yeah, what happened? Yeah. Jesus. I will give it to City of Truro because I don't like the New York Central. New York City can go fuck itself anyway. That's true. An anti-New York podcast. So anyway, they replaced the system with conventional

steam locomotives in 1855 when they figured out how to make steam locomotives bigger. Yeah. Take all the fun out of it. Why don't you? There was a similar system to this installed on the Parish to Saint Germain line that operated until 1860. I didn't even want to try. I didn't even want to try. Why don't they just show the thing away? They're French. Every French word has like 100 million letters that you don't need. Meanwhile, here at Valla-Kinwood. Yes, I was going to say. And me with my Irish ancestry on the one side standing here in Dunelaire, which has five consonants that aren't pronounced.

I have my house is built on sand on this one. Language was a mistake. That's true. Yes. Why did we try to build a tower to penetrate God itself? That was the original engineering disaster right there. That's a hell of a bonus episode. That'll be a bonus episode. Tower of Babel. I thought it was pronounced Babel for years and years. I thought it was like the Tower of Babel. Like rhymes with bagel. I believe I have heard it pronounced that way though. Tower of Babybell. Hey, that's that's my old stomping grounds. My commute used to be into school from Beckinham Junction Station on there to West Dulloch.

Yeah, this is this is this is personal for me. Local content. Yes, very local. Yes. And I'd like to also draw your attention up there to the the museum next to Dulloch Park. I'd like you to attempt to like pronounce the name of that museum. What this guy up here? Yeah, this guy right here. Horny man. Horny man. The Horny Man Museum. Oh, yes. Yeah. The Horny Man Museum. Love a Horny Man Museum. So, folks, look at the success of this railway in Ireland and they said, all right, we should apply this technology in, you know, in England, right? Because we're the colonizers.

We should have the good stuff, right? So this is the London and Croydon Railway, right? Connecting two towns with London, big city Croydon at that time, like a small town south of London that's now just like a suburb of it. Yes. And they ran atmospheric operation between Croydon and Forest Hill. So Croydon is down here. Forest Hill is up here, right? Yep. Also where I where I grew up, like before my parents moved to Bromley, I grew up for like the first couple of years of my life in Forest Hill. No memories of it one way or the other. So cannot help you on this one. Okay. I don't remember the atmospheric railway either. So they were gonna, you know, they were like, okay, this is a great way to run trains. We should

we should build, they started by building large, elaborate pumping stations like this guy here. Oh, they love that shit. Oh, my fucking fucking Victorians. Yeah, the big Gothic tower is smokestack. Love it. Love it. Love it. Have you seen like the like Basil Jet sewage pumping stations? Oh, yeah, built like this. Yes. No, less, less. It's annoying. It's, it's so fucking like, like, uh, civic architecture. This is the Cathedral. We think that it's very fancy to have like our secular, secular building that we pump the shit water through. No, Tweet, fuck off. No, I like the, I like the Cathedral of shit. I think it's a good thing. It really shows that we live in a society. So yeah, if you look at the plan, it just like folds it into a big Joker face for some reason.

So the first test run of this system was November 1st, 1846, right? All right. So the train hit 52 miles an hour. That's pretty good. Yeah. For 1846, that's very good. And, and silently too. Like, silent noise, smelling amazing. Uh, yes, just fucking gliding through South London. That is spelling like a McDonald's hallway. Oh, man, I would love that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, fucking that, that kind of glory did not return to penge until Wimpy Burger started closing in the 70s. But do you know about Wimpy Burger? Wimpy Burger is like the last, I think it's actually American in origin, but we think of it as a British brand because it's so terrible. It's called Wimpy Burger. Yeah, it's called Wimpy Burger. And it like if you Google,

like if you Google image of Wimpy Burger, you will see the inside. They keep, I think there's still a couple left still running. It is the most depressing food experience you will have in your life. I highly recommend it. First live show is happening in one, if we can find one. Yeah, God, it's depressing. Brown floor, lots of linoleum. So they opened this railway, January 16th of, I believe, 1847, right? And at 11 a.m. that day, a crankshaft broke on one of the stationary engines it cried in. Oh, good. Whoops. Maybe you shouldn't have installed it under a fucking flying buttress then. They still had another engine that was running, though, but then at 7 20 p.m. that day, the other engine broke also.

Yeah, you have to like get in, try to get in under like a gothic vaulted ceiling with a wrench now. So the issue, of course, they put the line out of service till February 10th, you know, so the first day didn't go so well. Now, the problem here, of course, is not so much with the atmospheric system itself. It was the bad engines. But as they brought the system back into service, they discovered other problems. So summer of 1846. Okay, so maybe it was, I'm screwing up my dates here. Dates are important. Anyway, summer of 1846 was a very hot summer, right? And the London and Croydon railway did not install weather flaps on their pipes, right? Did they spend the weather flap money on constructing a fucking bell free for their

stationary engine? Yeah, I mean, you got to put the bell somewhere to indicate when the train is arriving or departing or getting married. Yeah, it has to have fucking gables and has to have like all of this ornamentation. It's very nice, Alice. We should have good public architecture, right? If it's if it's so nice, why do you only have a chalk drawing of it? Like why South London actually kind of mostly pretty decent at preserving Victorian public architecture. Apparently, nobody had any like sentimental attachment to this bitch, because it was just like bulldozed immediately. It's probably bombed by the Nazis. Or it's a wimpy burger now. Yeah, possibly. So it's a weather spurs. It's four different Starbuckses. So the the the ambient

heat from just the high temperatures melted the tallow mixture without, you know, the heating element, right? It's got a smell so good. Yeah, made it difficult to hold a vacuum. Yeah, but made all of like South London and Pange and all of that smell amazing, like permanently, not just when there's a train coming through. Oh, yeah. That's probably why they rebuilt the wimpy burger there to get that feeling. So another another problem and depending on what source you go by this either happened or didn't happen. But there was the problem of rats. Flash image of Pete Buttigieg here. So you have to actually do that, you realize. Yeah, I have to do that on the I'll edit it in. The rats got in the pipes, they wanted to eat the

tallow. And then, you know, there's a bunch of rats in the pipe, and then they turn the vacuum pumps on. And they all got sucked out or they all got like annihilated and turned into viscera when the train went by. Otherwise, gruesomely murdered. Oh, no. The guy who has to like stand at the end of the vacuum. Clean out the rat smoothie. Yeah. And the guy who cleans out the rat viscera. That's the only guy who should have his own special union is the guy who has to like bolt the cover off and have a fucking stream of rats and rat parts jet out like a fucking fountain. Oh, just pressurizing it ahead of the train. The idea of you get on this nice quiet train with no noise to mask any of this. And you set off with in your stovepipe hat with your best

girl on your arm and it sets off from the station with the noise of a hundred rats just being crunched. Oh, be in my rat smoothie. How do you keep a vacuum in a pipe that is mostly rat bloods by this point? You said this may not have happened. I choose to believe. I know deeply in my heart several things like that will never be rebutted by any amount of historical evidence. I know the Trump P tape is real. I know Jesse Smollett did nothing wrong. And I know this week hundreds of rats a second effective. Yeah. The rat annihilates it. Alberta's got nothing on this thing. That means you could only run this in the province of Alberta. The rats. Yeah. Yeah.

Fills up with pigeons instead. Beavers or something. We're Canadian animals we get in there. Like raccoons somehow a small moose. Yeah. Yeah. That was just get wedged and you can't keep vacuum pressure. Yeah. All right. So those are the summer problems in the winter. Oh Jesus fuck. Different problem. In the winter, of course, you know, it rained, right? Then also got cold, which meant the rain froze in the leather, which caused it to crash. Tube full of frozen rat bloods. Yes. And that meant, you know, this leather flap no longer worked especially well to hold the seal because it all cracked and nasty. It didn't work so good, right? So, you know, they abandoned atmospheric operation after the first year. Cowards. It was like, okay.

You're suggesting that they didn't have enough time to work the kinks out of the machine for killing rats? Yes. Yes. Maybe they could have installed the one thing that made the other two systems that we mentioned previously work, but they didn't do that. Their plan was to extend the system, but it didn't happen. Is there a coward? I see Crystal Palace has its own like branch line there. And this being the 18, well, the mid 19th century, I assume this was also a big deal for like the Great Exhibition thing where you had like all of Empire coming to show off its new bullshit. And meanwhile, Britain brings to the the exhibition a train that like arrives spewing rat blood. Try after the Empire. Oh, no, actually, this branch line, I don't think existed at the

time. What I did to do this diagram is I just clicked on Forest Hill, right? And then the overgrown line showed up. And as I said, it's probably sufficient. Yeah, we will talk about Crystal Palace later, though. Anyway, so this this installation failed pretty miserably, which means we should talk about the next installation where we get to talk about our favorite guy is in Bard Kingdom, Brunel. Oh, mix response there. We were an ambivalent podcast Brunel. Yeah, we were Brunel Agnostic. Brunel Gage. Brunel Gage. Brunel Gage. Yes. So there was this guy named Isambard Kingdom Brunel. His father was Mark Brunel, who of course played for the Washington NFL franchise. Stick to sports. Stick into sports. Isambard Kingdom

Brunel had a railway. He called the Great Western Railway, right? Everything they did was big and dumb, right? Yes. Just like every fucking other thing he did, the Seven Bridge, Brunel Gage, the fucking like all iron, I forget what it's called, SS fucking whatever, dumb ship. The Great Eastern. Yeah, the dumb fucking Great Eastern. The biggest ship in the world from the day it was built to the day it was scrapped, and then they didn't build a bigger one for like another 20, 30 years. Yeah, because building a ship that big with the technology of the time or 30 years later was dumb. Isambard Kingdom Brunel is the Elon Musk of his day. I'll fucking die on that. No, Isambard Kingdom Brunel actually got shit done.

I suppose the Seven Bridge is still up. I'll give him that much. Yeah, and the Great Western Railway is still there. What else did Brunel do? The two of the three boats are gone, but one's still there. But Box Tunnel. Box Tunnel's still there. Yeah. The Great Western Railway right was built to Brunel Gage. So modern railroads are four feet, eight and a half inches between rails. Brunel Gage was often not valid for viewers in Ireland. Yes. Or Queensland, which for some reason uses Irish Gage. As you do. Yeah. Well, here in here in Philadelphia, we use Pennsylvania Trailing Gage for the subway, or excuse me, for the L and for the trawlers. Yeah, exactly. It's not a subway. It's not a subway. I'm so sick of having to explain this to people. It's called an L

because it's elevated. Yeah. Sorry. Brunel Gage, instead of being four feet, eight and a half inches between the rails, is seven feet and a quarter inch between the rails. Yeah, kind of railway megalomania. Like the Nazis tried to do this shit, too, of having like a double gauge railroad. There was ten foot, I believe. Just five. And they never actually built any. No. But something about wanting a big train, like bigger than is necessary or practical. Yeah. It attracts that kind of megalomania, I guess. Well, Brunel Gage had the advantage that it was much smoother at high speeds, right? High speeds, of course, were like 50, 60 miles an hour. Great Western Railway was built from London to Bristol, right? With Brunel Gage. Now, by 1844, it had been extended

to Exeter, which is up here, right? That's how you pronounce that, right? Yes. Yes. Lovely town, nice cathedral, good university, all that. Very boring. And then the next logical extension was from Exeter to Plymouth, right? Yes. And this was called the South Devon Railway. The terrain was not especially great, right? There's steep grades and sharp corners required to build this railroad. You know, sharp corners for seven foot gauge, of course. Now, Brunel visited the Dahlke Railway in Ireland and he was like, oh, this seems like a good idea. I don't use this. Apparently not on the one day where they just fired a terrified man down. He's probably be way into that. I can go a lot faster. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. The new Brunel railway system, it transports one terrified

person per hour. Yeah. So he's like, okay, atmospheric propulsion is a good idea because atmospheric propulsion means, you know, you can run the trains faster, you can use bigger engines, you can have less fuel consumption, you can have all these great ideas. One of the advantages that was thought at the time was an atmospheric railway train cannot derail. Sure. Why not? Because the piston is stuck in the tube. You have an extra point of thing. Yeah, I get that. Which means you can run it on tighter corners. We missed out on such a great Baroque railway disaster by the fact that this didn't work. I feel like if it had, we would be talking about the fucking Dawlish Warren Great train derailment where this fucking guy decided, oh, we can just

do maximum speed and just send a passenger train fucking hurtling into the fucking ocean. This is the first passenger train to make it to the other side of the English Channel. By accident. Of a train. All right. So, Pranel was like, we'll use atmospheric propulsion here too. And he also proceeded to fuck it up. Of course. How dare you? As was his want. Yes. The first section that was installed was from Exeter down to Teagmouth. Teagmouth. Okay. Yeah, Teagmouth. Thank you for pronouncing that. So I'm saving me some embarrassment there. And then that was later extended on to Newton Abbot, right? Stupid names in Devon, but, you know. This is much a longer installation of atmospheric

railway than had been tried before. This is about 20 miles in total, right? And Jacob Simuda designed the Dawky Railway. He was contracted to maintain the system, right? They came up with a bunch of clever mechanical devices for like switches and grade crossings, right? So this is like actually the first railway with protected grade crossings with gates that would come down when the train would buy, but also like flaps that would cover the pipe so that people could bring a wagon across. Oh, God, imagine that braking and your wagon just gets fucking the suck. Just get a bunch of like rat viscera just spewed out of your wagon. Yeah. The whole horse is sucked in through the torch gap. It's like fucking bifid dolphin every level crossing.

So this is opened in stages from September 13th, 1847 to March 2nd, 1848. And then Iran trains at very high speeds with this system. That's 64 miles an hour. What year was this again? 1847. Oh, God damn. Yeah. Jesus. They ran trains at very high speeds when the system was running. Because once again, the rest of the time there was a horse stuck in there and you got to send in a guy with a brush. You got to sweep that for like the other 18 miles of track. But once again, they decided we're going to skip the weather flaps. Oh, of course. Right. So had the same problems as the London and Croydon. The leather froze and cracked in the winter and dried out and stiffed in the summer. There's a couple of things here. You'll notice on this map that

Exeter is next to a big river called the X. And there's a very salty river. There's a lot of, like you can see there's a lot of mud. There's a lot of dirt. And even still today, the sea wall at D'Orlish. It's a beautiful railway. If you want to visit, I highly recommend it. But that rail line, modernized as it is, gets fucking destroyed and fully compromised to a permanent end about once a year when a big storm rolls through and it just washes the whole thing into the ocean. So I'm imagining that, but with for an open tube filled with horse guts. Yes. And I'm not picturing it doing so well on the reliability front. Also, is that a town called Chudley? If you look, yeah, if you look like, yeah, at home of the chuts. The fine chuts.

Samuta, who has the maintenance contract recommends to the board, he's like, put it in a weather flap. Put a weather flap on, you'll be fine. And they're like, nah, we're not going to pay for that. So Bernil tries to correct the problem by, you know, getting crews to go in and dump a bunch of whale oil on the weather flap to, you know, so he's just like oiling a big like 20 mile long thing of leather. Well, this didn't work. You don't say, you know, the weather flap was the thing they should have done and they decided not to do that. And then since they hadn't installed a telegraph system, that meant that the big stationary steam engines that were in big buildings like this guy here, which is now apparently a

garden center, that they have to pump to a timetable as opposed to pumping to the actual location of the train. So the train was running late. This is a big steam engine, too. You can't just start and stop them, right? You've got to quite literally warm up the engine, right? This is a huge fucking stationary steam engine, which occupied a whole building and generated 65 horsepower. I mean, it makes it makes a lot more sense if you know that the precursors to locomotive driven railways were just a tramway where you have a single horse pull a cart down some rails. But Jesus Christ, we have a whole building. It's like having 65 horses, which is the same number of horses that were stuck at the end of the night last month.

That's what the horsepower measures. Oh, God. This was this was an early innovation in the thing that makes railways still terrifying to me the rail that kills you instantly if you touch it. We wouldn't we wouldn't do that again until until electricity, really. This is the law of conservation of horses. Yeah, you you feed the horse into a closed system. Oh, God, imagine if this is the one that takes the three of us out. This is definitely one of our dumber episodes. Look, no one can say that we just read the Wikipedia page, because the Wikipedia page

isn't a one paragraph summary of the facts and a seven scroll deep monologue about horse. Oh, God. So you can do this building, this giant building with the 65 horsepower engine in it. It wound up consuming about three times more coal than expected than about just over the amount of coal that they would consume with regular steam locomotives, right? Oh, cool. Okay. So by August of 1848, Brunel was like, we should just use regular steam locomotives, guys.

I love the idea that we're having to do all of this really marginal stuff to try to end climate change now, because we're just content to tinker around the edges and we can be like, oh, you can have a hybrid vehicle or you can have a high mileage internal combustion engine. And back in the day, you could just be like, yeah, I'm going to I'm going to run this steam engine all day 24 seven to pump air into a tube that just leaks right back out to generate 65 horsepower for nothing. Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. So beautiful. Shortly after Brunel recommends the systems should be abandoned. Simuda comes into a shareholders meeting and he just fucking lays into him for not properly maintaining anything or not allowing him to maintain anything.

And well, they decided to abandon the system anyway. And in your place, it was steam trains. He got us like 12 angry men moment and it didn't like help at all. Yeah. Sucks. No, it didn't suck. That was the problem. This is the end of the sucking. Yes. But this was not the end of atmospheric traction, right? It would take a while, though, to come back. So after this, there were a couple of systems where they sort of tried the system I mentioned earlier, which is a whole big train powered by air pressure that runs in a big tube, right? So this is the Crystal Palace pneumatic railway. This is 1864. So they didn't like come to the the grace exhibition just behind this wave of rap guns. But instead, you just like shot. Yeah, you just shot the train through the tunnel

like a big fucking like cork through a bottle. Great. Yes. The wave of rat blood comes behind it rather than in front. The world's shittiest awake. Yeah. That's that's how that's smart. That's how you don't terrify the passengers because they can't see the giant, you know, tsunami of rat blood behind you. That's actually how all modern subway trains work. That's why they don't let you look out of the back. Yes. So this was a half mile pneumatic railway. It ran from one end of Crystal Palace Park to the other. It's not a long way. Yeah. It was the demonstrator line. There's almost no traces of it left today. There's not a lot of information on it. There's no trace of fucking of the Crystal Palace left because that shit burned

down. The football club is still around. Well, depending on how you define around. Yeah. But yeah, there's no there's no Crystal Palace. There's no nothing. They got rid of everything because they saw this. There's a big there's a big antenna in Crystal Palace Park. And that's it. Love a big antenna. I think it's like the second highest freestanding one in Europe. Damn. It's big. It's big. I'll give it that. It's not quite as cool as the like the the rat train though. And then I do like that little flap too. Oh, that's adorable around. Oh, this. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So then the next the next attempt of this is something called beach pneumatic transit in New York City, right? That takes you to the beach. Fine. Yeah. It went about 300 feet. Uh-huh.

This was to demonstrate both new tunneling methods for a New York City subway system and pneumatic propulsion of trains, right? This was 1870 well before any actual subways were dug. There were only a couple of elevated trains at that point. They were all steam hauled. So, you know, it took you through the tunnel, a whopping 300 feet out and then 300 feet back. It's adorable, though. It's so cute. It was supposed to be a larger project, but Boss Tweed at Tammany Hall killed that project. We love some old-fashioned corruption. Yes. So it was built entirely in secret. So after it had been demonstrated to the public in 1870, finally permission was granted by the

city for expansion in 1873, but immediately the bottom fell out of the stock market, right? It was closed and abandoned. Oh, I do like the back in the day. You could just be like, yeah, we built a railway in secret. Can you approve more railway? I like that they had like big, like Greco-Roman statues. Yes, like that. Yeah. Plus, the train just looks like there's barrel. You know, I really like that. I like the wooden siding on there. Oh, yeah. And then it was, so it was closed, abandoned, right? They rediscovered it in 1912. Huh. While they were excavating the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit Broadway line, right? And the whole thing was basically within the site that's currently occupied by City Hall Station on the NRW trains today.

They tapped into this vacuum line and just like the wave of rats just came at them. Close it up, close it back up, close it back up, close it back up. That's fine. What's the worst of the rat passes you buy? Then you've got a nice new tunnel. And that's how they built City Hall Station. What about the real rats above ground, my right fellas? Oh, got them. Mayor Bloomberg sponsored our podcast. So anyway, there's a rumor that there's a small portion still intact, that if you find the right manhole you can get into, the remnants of the system are not very extensive. That's not like in Ghostbusters 2. That documentary we love. Yes. I would like to put out for discussion the idea that once a year,

Mike Bloomberg has the manhole open for him and goes and sits on the tiny train that carries him 25 feet and then comes back up and is like, hmm, yes. I mean, the one thing that like Mayor Bloomberg did was he was a regular subway rider. DiBlasio doesn't do that. Now I've said something positive about Bloomberg. Give us your money. Give us your money. Shouldn't have said that. So both this and the Crystal Palace Railway operated on the same principle. It's a big railroad car in a manic tube. Neither of them works well enough for commercial operation. Atmospheric propulsion becomes a solution in search of a problem after third rail and overhead electrification is developed, right?

Yeah, just kind of a novelty. This is not the this is not the last application of vacuums to, you know, rail transportation, right? Which means we have to talk about the vacuum tube train. Oh, that's a thick drawing. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I really like this one. So all right. So Robert Goddard, who is a was a famous rocket scientist, right? He wrote a short story when he was in college called The High Speed Bet 1904. It was published in 1909 in Scientific American along with the editorial critique, which was called The Limit of Rapid Transit, right? And this is the first recorded conception of the idea of a vacuum tube train. So here, what is this thing, right? What's the thing that's going on here? So when you have a

train, right, any kind of train, even an atmospheric railway, you have a lot to overcome in terms of forces to operate at very high speeds, right? You know, there's wheel where there's there's, you know, the amount of power you can supply to the motors. But at some point, the biggest factor is air resistance, right? Right. Yeah, which is which is why we love those, like the metro line or those Soviet diesel locomotives that are just like a big brick that have absolutely no aerodynamics to them at all. It's not like a fully loaded, like a big long manifest freight train going 80 miles an hour with like 200 cars, which are all different shapes. It's the biggest fuck you to aerodynamics. Yeah, you just look at the wind tunnel schematics of that. And it's just all red.

Yeah. The idea with the vacuum tube train is that, you know, air resistance is the biggest problem. What if you got rid of the air? That's also a fuck you to aerodynamics, but in a different way. You just like, well, we just lop off the first two syllables and now it's just dynamics. What now, motherfucker? This is actually like something I don't understand. If there's no air, why is this streamlined? Why is it not just a blunt end? Yeah, why can't you run a like Soviet TEM through this? Yeah. So a vacuum tube train is usually or a vac train if you want to be, you know, one of the cool, a cool term. Yeah. Usually a magnetic levitate magnetic levitation train or a maglev train that runs in a vacuum tube at very high speed, right?

But a maglev train in atmosphere is already very high speed, right? Yes. Like you can take the maglev in Shanghai and it gets you from one place to another like 200 miles an hour, right? I think that one tops out at like 250 or something like that. The Japanese one they're developing right now tops out at like 300 something. So the vacuum tube train was developed at the Research and Development Corporation in the 1970s, or that's what they really did sort of. Yeah, Rand. They took time out of like making up punch cards for Robert McNamara to say that the Vietnam War was going well to do what if we just sucked all of the air out of a big tunnel? Yeah, they finally they did some, they did some suck. Yeah. So there have been many proposals for this over the years, some of which

got a whole bunch of traction actually. So what we're looking at here is a render for what was going to be called Swiss Metro, right? Which is the idea they were going to dig vacuum tube tunnels from like major Swiss cities between each other and they'd go, you know, you'd have this fast ass train. Given the sun, I want to know what the Swiss know that we don't, that they're just like, oh, we have to dig all of these tunnels under our country for some reason. Don't ask any questions. Because they have mountains. It's always mountains is the thing. It's definitely the mountains and not like the same thing that led to every Swiss apartment building having to have a bunker until like last year. Yeah, no, I'm not I'm not worried about this at all. It's because it's because all

the Swiss have guns. They're all terrified of each other secretly. That's true. Although they have the they have the Chris Rock kind of gun control, where after the like first kind of mass shooting, they kept letting you have the gun at home, but they strictly controlled the bullets. I was that idea. I was like that idea. Yeah. So so like if you do national service, which almost all Swiss men do, you get your SG 552 at home in a closet, but you get one sealed can of ammunition. And then I guess you get the order to open that as the Germans roll over the border again. You know, you know, if the Germans rolled over the border here, I would be pretty unhappy. Definitely. Yeah, I too would be pretty unhappy. Sure. Not again, motherfuckers.

So other ideas are have been pretty outlandish for how to use these vacuum tube trains. Like one idea which got a documentary on a show called Extreme Engineering in like the early 2000s was, you know, let's have a submerged floating tunnel under the Atlantic Ocean from New York to London. Right. If we if we can do England to Northern Ireland, why not? I mean, you would also need like some kind of floating doohickey for that, because otherwise you're you're just trying to anchor foundations into a seabed made exclusively of bombs. Yeah, no, this is fine. In each case, we'll just like send train after train into like a flooded tunnel that goes nowhere. Yeah, I'm sending in more trains. So the idea is, you know, you would build this

long submerged floating tunnel and you would send large, you know, trains at a high frequency and, you know, using vacuum tube maglevs, you can top out at 10, 15,000 miles an hour. Oh, cool. And that gets you and that gets you and to end in about 45 minutes, right? Your acceleration is your top speed is limited by passenger comfort at that point. You know, you can't accelerate too fast or everyone's going to, you know, fucking hurl. Become, yeah. Or worse, we have moved in the realm of like fucking around with with pressure and railways from we kill a bunch of rats and like turn we liquefy the rats to we liquefy the passengers. And you just like open the doors at the other end. There's just like this mulch of commuters.

Efficiency. We fulfill the Victorian prophecy of, you know, high speed sucking the air out of your lungs. Finally. These ideas are outlandish. They're not they're not impossible. They can be done with modern engineering. It would take a lot of money and a lot of effort. Which we can't even muster up to like stop all of us from broiling to death, but we're going to do it for like the sake of a 45 minute commute from London to New York. Sure. I mean, the thing is, you got to do something about air travel, eventually. Sure. Yeah, it's called boats. It's called boats. I do like boats. It's more practical than this. Yeah. Like fucking like, I don't know. Any of the like long haul, like electric mostly gliders covered in solar panels, planes that

people have like been fucking around with. I don't know. I think there should be the I think we should just do the vacuum tube train. This is my I think it's a good idea. I think we should do it. Yes. No, no, no, no, bring bring back bring back flying boats. I want an electric flying boat and I want to land in New York Harbor. That would also be cool. Yeah. Right. It'll be cool as hell. The thing is we have that we have this wild idea for vacuum tube trains, which you know is technically feasible, although it's a long time in the future. And then we have this guy who shows up named Elon Musk. Oh, let's take the let's take the vacuum tube train and make it dumber and worse. Yes. Of course. Yes. Let's make the energy sword from Halo for some reason. Yeah. That is the vibe I

get off of this concept art. It's so like bungee circa like 2000. So Elon Musk's atmospheric railway is, you know, the hyperloop, right? And the hyperloop, the idea is rather than doing a full vacuum, we have slightly less than a full vacuum, right? And in order to compensate for that, the front of the vehicle is a big air compressor turbine, right? Ah, cool. That funnels the air into a tiny pipe that then exhausts out the back. And then there's other other factors here, like instead of having a big train, yeah, there's a tiny pod, right? Of course. To encourage like independence and innovation. Whomst among us has not wanted to be in the middle parts of a running jet engine. Oh, it'd make your commute exciting. Yeah. With like eight people. The other idea is

that, you know, you run these pods at like ridiculous frequencies, like once every 30 seconds through your mostly evacuated tube. And despite these very high frequencies, the capacity is still absurdly low, like much lower than any rail line, because the pods are so small, as described by Mr. Elon Musk. If you wanted a hyperloop system that had the same capacity as like a subway train with a thousand people in each train that arrives every five minutes, you need a pod arriving every two and a half seconds. But it's this is the thing we've come back to Mecca or the Ganges or the Western Wall again of there being too many people and it being too crowded. All the goddamn time. I mean, the thing is also this doesn't have a weather flap,

which means it's doomed to failure. This is true. Yes. Like how are you going to protect all of the tallow? The other thing is these pods are also optionally supposed to be able to take as opposed to eight passengers, they can take one automobile. You can drive your Tesla model model Grimes into the thing, right? Yes. And like you can you can I guess drive back out from the one on ramp, along with everybody else who like drove their Tesla off 2.6 seconds before you. Oh, that's that's different. That's the that's the regular loop, not the hyperloop. Oh, you feel okay. I'm behind the loops. Yeah, this the regular loop came after the hyperloop, right? Of course. Yeah, no, it's very confusing. It's like the franchise. It's like the horror

movie franchise cube. There's this cube and then there's cube to hypercube. God. I think there was also cube three, which I think they had the like, I think they just called it cubed. I guess that's clever. I like it. Yeah. So this system is proclaimed to be cheaper, the constructed high speed rail, which it clearly is not. It's Elon Musk claimed it would be cheaper to buy a ticket for the hyperloop than high speed rail, which it clearly is not because of basic capacity constraints. This concept has found a whole shitload of investment capital, that's a lot of private companies pursuing the idea. Listen, once again, listen to trash future for an understanding of why our financial system works this way. But suffice it to say we have

like, I don't know, maybe a year at most before the bill comes due and all of this and it's going to be interesting. We now have the wonderful situation where governments are giving money to study hyperloop seriously. I believe just in Missouri recently, they just released several million dollars in tax credits for a potential hyperloop that would go from fucking stupid. No other pressing issues in Missouri. Obviously no. The main thing they want is a hyperloop from Kansas City to St. Louis. Of course, of course. I'm just looking here at like list of US territories by educational attainment and finding Missouri down here in like the mid to bottom tier and being like, yeah, you could build like, I don't know, maybe some schools or something, or you could

like have your hyperloop. You get like six guys with shovels and like a weekend. Yeah, yeah. And you could like shave probably two or three hours off the existing M-track train that runs between St. Louis and Kansas City. But you know, what do I know? But those six guys with shovels aren't cool, is the thing. And Elon Musk is cool. And if you don't think he's cool, you're, you know, a nerd. And we can't convince Elon Musk to pick up a shovel and do any work, obviously. God knows, no. Yeah, so we got government agencies doing studies in the hyperloop. And of course, this entire thing is a grift and sort of, you know, a way to prevent investment into any actual public transportation that works. You know, because Elon Musk wants

to sell more cars. Yeah, hyperloop is dumb. I will go into this in more detail at some point, I'm sure. Do you have a whole video going into? No, that's about the regular loop. Alpha Fox. We cannot keep our loops. There's there's the regular loop and the hyperloop. The hyperloop is the one that runs in a vacuum ish. The regular loop is the one that moves cars under cities. I can't keep these ideas straight. Yes, here's something which is surprising, though, which is the original atmospheric railway concept has come back. So this is something called AeroMovell. This is a modern atmospheric railway system that came out of Brazil. I can't get any good information as to how exactly it works because the website was entirely in

Portuguese. And also, it looked like it came out of like 1998. We're going to get a bunch of YouTube comments featuring the word Caralho now. So looking forward to that, I'm assuming the like the concrete bit underneath of the train and the rail that it's riding on contains the tube. Yes. And you can also see like this ducting here, which I also assume assisted in some way. This is installed in only a couple of locations, which, you know, I believe this one is this one is at a theme park in Jakarta in Indonesia. But this is a this is a modern atmospheric railway that exists. I guess I guess it's a lot easier when you have continuous, more or less uninterruptible ways of generating that power and doing that, that work to create the vacuum than the building

full of horse carts. Yes. You can use like, I don't know, nuclear power or any number of things. I guess it's not that weird now. It's just inefficient, which I guess you don't mind for the novelty on a theme park thing. I think there's also one that's an airport people mover. Why is it always airports and theme parks where you like do these fucking novel things? Glasgow Airport is getting individual people moving pods after having cancelled a railway link because it was too expensive. Is that like the fucking PRT in Heathrow? Yes. Yeah, yeah, they're going to put in they were going to put in a tram line and then they decided they were going to stop the tram line halfway. Don't fuck that. That's crazy. You have to get

the tram to Paisley, which is the nearest city south of Glasgow and then change to a PRT that takes you in your personal little private wanky pod to the airport. Because I think it's the largest airport in the UK that you can only reach by road right now. Oh my God. I know it sucks so bad. It's got a decent bus there. But like we almost invested in the rail link and to the point where there is train simulated train simulated DLC of it because they made it as driver training and then they cancelled it. Oh my God. So cool. Just build a fucking train. Build, build, rebuild the Glasgow Airport rail link. So we came full circle. There's still an atmospheric railway in operation. There's a new modern atmospheric railway. And if you want to learn

more about it, learn Portuguese. Yeah, I'm going to learn Portuguese. We have to conduct a rat audit of this system. We need to determine the extent of their rat problem. We need to see if there's an Indonesian guy who has to sweep all of the rats out and give him our support. And the guy who wipes down the rat guts. Yeah. That's really a good protein. I don't know what your problem is. That's an engineering success. You know, you can just squeeze the rat with your hands. Yeah, but this is more theatrical and therefore better. I feel like it might start biting me. You just get two big plates. It's easy. Yeah. Welcome to the hydraulic press channel. Yeah. Instantly kicked off of YouTube for their rat episode.

And before they could even release the horse one. We came full circle. Next episode, we'll have to be about the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster. I guess, does anyone have any commercials? No, I did mine up front. Very nice. You can follow me on the Twitter at Do Not Eat O2 because I was tragically killed recently. This is from beyond the grave camp. I also want to say a shout out to BigMoodEnergy on Twitter who was doing a YouTube series called The Failure and Success of Great American Transit, which is a city skyline series sort of like mine, which is talking about real life urban issues. She's focusing primarily on public transportation. It's very good.

She just released the first episode. Everyone should go check it out if you enjoy the stuff I do. Also, the stuff I do is still going on. I've gotten a whole bunch. Did she model that lion? Oh, my God. I need to do something about it. I'm not looking forward to it. I'm close enough to where I'm going to have all the models in game probably by the end of next week. I hope. Oh, some good. Well, there's your problem news. Our art for our forthcoming shirt, which you'll be able to wear on your human body is done. We have only to bully Justin and to talking to the human printing guy. Please. Yes. Yeah. And then hopefully we will have a shirt for you to like cover your nakedness with. Yes. It's very good. We're very excited for it. You

can finally, you can finally cover your shame. Yeah. You won't keep getting kicked out of restaurants now for not wearing a shirt because you'll have a shirt. Yes. It is a joke that will only make sense to you if you subscribe to the Patreon. So you should do that too. Do you know what I'm about to say? Yes. Just drive to the Patreon and listen to the van episode. Then you'll want to buy a shirt. I'll just add what the hell we're talking about. Maybe. Yes, it's true. Yeah. And then, you know, and if you don't want to, if you don't want a shirt, you can, you can cut the sleeves off and then it's actually what I'm going to do. That's what I'm going to do. That's kind of, that's kind of appropriate. Yeah, exactly. It's scumbag season, but sure. Yeah. It pairs so well

with like, oh, I don't know. Well, an Eagles cap for one. Go birds. But also like cargo shorts. I do not wear cargo shorts. I just wear gym shorts. I wear basketball shorts, despite not being very athletic. I'm an expert on this. What's the shoe situation like with that shirt? Do you think? I'm more experienced right now, because I'm a class trader. Wear boat shoes. Yeah, leave me alone. How come they make boat shoes with no train shoes? And how come you drive on the parkway and you park in the driveway? What's the deal with airline food? These, these questions and more should be answered in the future bonus episode.

Okay. Well, goodbye. Awkward silence. We probably want to actually do that bonus episode. All right, so having done that, I believe we were all, we were all done with doing podcasting, right? Yes, permanently. Okay. That's it. 17 episodes. We nailed it. Yeah. Bye, everyone, forever.