Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 171: The Morpeth Curve

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

a speed-restricted curve in the middle of a high speed main line? what could possibly go wrong DONATE TO LUTHERAN SETTLEMENT HOUSE: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1J0GSDKBO4TLV/ref=hz_ls_biz_ex check out our TOUR (new dates added!): April 29: New York City https://sonyhall.com/events/well-theres-your-problem/?id=18162 April 30: Somerville Mass (SOLD OUT!) https://artsatthearmory.org/events/bill-blumenreich-presents-well-theres-your-problem-podcast-2/ May 1: Somerville Mass  (SOLD OUT!) https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/wtyp/ May 2: New York City (SOLD OUT!) https://www.ticketweb.com/event/well-theres-your-problem-sony-hall-tickets/13918973 May 3: Washington DC https://www.unionstagepresents.com/shows/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ May 4: Philadelphia, PA https://concerts.livenation.com/well-theres-your-problem-podcast-philadelphia-pennsylvania-05-04-2025/event/0200615211C27E44 see gareth on RAILNATTER: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

more path for more problems. More path for more problems. It's not funny, but I am gonna do it again and you're gonna have to react to it again. Yeah, I was about to say, yeah. Nova, tell us about, what's been fucking you up today, if you can share it. Are you alright sharing? Yeah, so, I have moved house, it's done, there are some problems with the new place, in the form of like, mold and

stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, this is the thing, what I tried to do is I tried to spend more money to rent a nicer place for a year, just kinda push the boats out things, so I'm not gonna have to worry about it, spend a year here, then I can start stressing about something. Bzzzt. It's the union.

Yeah, I forgot that I live here, and so what I got instead was like a regular leashed flat, but expensive. And in the course of cutting up boxes for recycling, because when you move you have a lot of boxes, I managed to, like, if you can see here, slice... RILEY Oh, not the cardboard cut! ALICE Oh, damn it! RILEY Damn it, very bad. ALICE...take this finger off. And that was fine, except today, cause no food in the house, we got Uber Eats in, and the guy's like, hey can you come up, cause I don't feel like walking down to your flat.

And I'm like, yeah sure, whatever, cause I'm a friend of the workers. Open the door, bend my finger too far, blood everywhere. I can't. What if my new neighbors comes down and is making conversation and I'm dripping blood on people's Amazon packages and all that shit. And I'm like, yeah, no, it's great. That's fucking metal, buddy. You gotta show dominance when you move in.

That's true. That is true. I've bled on this place twice, I've been here less than a week, and one thing I will say is, because the decor is very landlord, because it's a rental, a lot of white carpets, and you haven't bled until you've bled on a white carpet that you don't own. That's gonna be an awkward sort of... ROGER They bring furniture to you, by the way? Did they bring back some furniture?

They're doing that when I get back from the live show. So like the Tuesday, I'm probably going to have a bed back because what they did was I rented a two bed. And the day before I moved in, the landlord's like, hey, we took half the furniture out because we were trying to sell it at the same time as rent it, and we had the furniture there to advertise it, so I had to get kind of legal on them. And so now they're sort of like, response to that as well, we'll put one of the beds back in, so... ALICE We'll give you half a bed.

LIAM Yeah. ALICE Yeah. LIAM Give you the front half of the bed. We're not gonna tell you what half of this is exactly. I'm gonna have to get back to them with, okay, where's the other one, and, yeah, like, why is there so much fucking mold in here. So yeah, it's great, it's been going great. I hope that the collection of toxic mold spores currently piloting my body are still

good at podcasting. WILL Well if your flu game was anything to go by for the last episode of The Rise... ALICE Yeah, we're gonna be fine, we're in fine. WILL Fingers crossed, yeah. WILL That was a fun episode. People have enjoyed that, the Tom episode. That's gone down, that seems to have gone down very well. ALICE One other thing I will note is, because of the new mixer, I have fader slides, I have

to mix the drops down myself, manually, so if you want the news to fade out, I have to do... Like that. Oh. You have like a lever with a really nice smooth motion. It is really smooth. But if I bring it back up too quickly... So I have to remember to turn the thing off.

Oh, god, yeah. It's like, it's going to be a whole thing. That is some mental effort, yeah. Yeah. I did some volunteer work at Fairfax County Public Access Television when I was in high school, and I got to run the camera switcher, and it had a transition lever, letting you transition between two different inputs.

ALICE I've got one of those too. SEAN That lever was so smooth. It was incredible. ALICE Nice. I know, but I'm expecting you to lift up the box with like, with the lever. This is how I'm scared. This is how I'm scared. This is how I'm scared. This is the lever. ALICE No, I'm not moving this fucking thing. This is how scared it is, the lever.

No, I'm not touching this. I installed it, I got it working well enough. There is theoretically a kind of a multi-track thing that I can do so that you guys hear a process recording, and what's recorded isn't, but I don't want to do that. That's too much work. Fair enough. So, we just go with this and see how it works. Should we do a sync point? Yes. I don't wanna do that, that's too much work. So um. ALICE Fair enough. ALICE We just go with this and see how it works.

Should we do a sync point? JUSTIN Yes. Yeah, I was gonna, I was waiting for a break in the conversation to mention that. ALICE Sorry. Sorry. JUSTIN We're gonna do three, two, one, mark. That's three, two, one, mark. Okay.

Hello. And welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. And PowerPoint. Which, in and of itself, is a disaster. With slides. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, okay go.

I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now, my pronouns are she and her, yay Liam. Yay Liam, hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him and fuck Microsoft. With us is a hard fourth co I don't know what you are, man. possibly eighth co host. Yeah, my name is Gareth Dennis. My pronouns are he and him. Nice. Also, if I sound different this episode, it's because I have a new mixer, which I hope to God is working. There will be some adventures with the drops if I try and get them to work. METE Oh yeah, and actually, in front of us right now I have to do this bit, because I've created something.

ALICE Yeah, it's a beautiful cottage. 3500 PCM. It's got a new extension. METE Yeah, and someone has put some train in a garden. Thomas comes to breakfast type situation. Exactly, yeah. I really appreciate the free high-viz, high-viz vests, where there's some sort of viz. They're like a little boob tube, crop top type situation. Yeah, that's quite cunty. It is quite cunty. It is.

Yeah. They're like the cops with the old fashioned bobby hat, and hat? And the little, cunty, sort of boob tube type hives? Yeah, it's... ALICE Do they still make those? Please say yes. I badly need to see an actual retro-reflective crest that stops at the tits. ALICE So here's the thing, I have been searching for one of these for years. I have a BR Vintage gilet, but I desperately want the BR Vintage crop top.

And I have yet to successfully find one. My hope continues. Getting like beach body ready with British Red. Yeah, exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The dad bod hangs out underneath the boob tube. It's beautiful. I quite like that just the guy in a t-shirt stood on the side of a Mark III coach in the

right of shot here. ALICE I don't even know if that's a t-shirt, I think that might predate t-shirts, that might be a man in shirt sleeve order, you know? With a hairline they don't make in this country anymore. SEAN Just imagining all these guys, they just cut off the sleeves of orange t-shirts and turn them into tank tops. Exactly.

Is the house supposed to look like this? No. No, it's not supposed to have these in it. Those are an unnecessary and indeed unwanted addition. This man is standing on the side of a train, isn't he? Oh, that's very bad. Yes. And the train's also really mucky.

Yeah, it's done some like, you know, landscaping is what it's done. Yeah, the garden is a different shape to what the garden was before as well. I like this picture, it's quite funny to me. Oh yeah. And we're going to explain why this has happened. But first, we have announcements. We do. We do have announcements, announcements, annouuuuouncements.

Oh yeah, what was the song we decided last time? Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh. I don't remember, that one's stored on the old mixer. People think it was just me making those noises, but no, it was a complex program. We still are on tour, next year. We've sold a lot of tickets. ALICE We need to sell more. Please.

ALICE Weirdly, the place where we need to sell more is New York City. Which I understand there's a lot of... ALICE NEW YORK CITY! ALICE New York City! But I understand that there's a lot of people in New York City, and some of them aren't coming to the live shows. Which they should do, they should buy tickets now, the link's in the description.

JUSTIN Yes, we have uh, Sony Hall, we still have tickets available for the April 29th show there. ALICE Sony Hall, are we allowed to call ourselves Broadway performers after that? JUSTIN I'm going to anyway. ALICE No. Those are two different answers. ALICE Broadway performer, plane crash survivor, other qualities.

It was formerly a Broadway theatre, but it is no longer. Did they move it? Did they pick it up and move it? Deconsecrate it! Deconsecrating the Broadway theatre? They take the secondary relic of Judy Garland out of it? It is essentially a deconsecration situation, yeah. Fuck! To the best of my knowledge.

Can I describe myself? Because you're not doing musical theatre there, it's not a Broadway theatre. What if I do a song? What if I put a song in the show? If we hire Lin-Manuel Miranda to make Well There's Your Problem, the musical. Do some raps about the... LIAM The 66 Days of Sodom tour, the hip hopper on ice, yes. Uh, Roz, you can sing the... what's the opera?

ALICE We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show.

We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show. We'll begin the show, we'll begin each show with a mandatory singing of the national anthem. I think that'd be very funny to Dale. So, that's New York, how's the Fillmore looking? Has it been filled more?

It has been filled more, but keep filling it, we need you to keep filling it. You still gotta keep filling the Fillmore, yeah. There's still a lot of tickets there. Unfortunately, both Somerville shows sold out because, I don't know, people in New England are freaks. ALICE & LIAM Yeah. I was gonna say that. It's just, you give them something to do in summer, and in the depths of a New England

winter they'll pay for anything, you know? What we're selling them is a warm evening indoors, you know? Some hope. There is also still tickets available in Washington DC. Yeah, federal surveillance agents, please make your way to the historic, I forget the name of the theater. It's not a historic theater, it was Trolley Car Barn. And we're gonna get, I assume, some sort of in-depth building tour.

Yeah, if you're in the marine barracks that are adjacent to it, buy some tickets, cause it's right there. I'll see if I can get crayons in the bar menu. Just a little martini with a crayon sticking out of it. SEAN It's like what Applebee's did to the Mountain Dew martini, with the frozen buffalo wild wings. They have a Dorito... what's that called?

Garnish. ALICE Mmhm. Yeah, we'll be seizing people on the door to make sure they don't have any charms with them. It will be marine safe, you know, like some movies have an autism friendly screening of stuff, this will be a marine friendly show. JUSTIN It will be very marine friendly, if you are a marine, we will not discriminate.

SEAN I found a recipe for a Cheetos Mountain Dew Mule. ALICE Oh, god. That's not marines, that's not Marines, that's Cavalry Scout. That's... Yeah, I am a diseased human being, hold up. More smiles with every bite dot com. I look forward to playing every possible military town, I look forward to playing Virginia Beach. Fort Bragg! And we just get the seals in.

Yeah. Hopefully they don't say anything about starting a conk, whatever. Step one, a slice of lime dusted with crushed Cheetos to garnish. You're dangerously close to revealing our secret Langley show, Fort Meade, Fort Belvoir, and you know, nowhere else. Yeah. Oh yeah. I do like the idea of them hustling us through the, whatever, Pentagon Burger King.

Yeah. You can't offer anything. We got you onion rings, That's all you get. Yeah. East Coast tour is happening by tickets, especially in Philadelphia, because again, we need to fill more seats in the film are you bought enough tickets that it's early to say, but another tour will probably follow in a different geographical location. ALICE This is the thing, if you can't make it to

the East Coast, but you still want to see us, then your ability to like- SEAN Stop emailing me! ALICE Well yeah, that too, but your ability to either travel to it or encourage people who are local to buy tickets will directly impact our likelihood of coming to your location. So, you know, put your thumb on the scales there, please. Because I want to see more of these United States, you know? Yeah. Never better time to go to Duluth, Minnesota. I think there have been better times, given the news about the shit that's happening to

trans women in Minnesota lately. That's Minneapolis. They're not as friendly there. Okay. Well, either way, if anybody tries to get Minnesota nice with me, I'm gonna try and get Tom to do security for me. Just get, like, choked slammed onto some light rail tracks, you know? Yeah. Alright.

That was the announcements. You forgot my announcement! Oh, you got an announcement! You do! You do have an announcement. You buy toys! You do! Oh, you buy toys! Asshole! Sorry.

Hey, so, I know that I just called one of my colleagues an asshole on the air, but have you considered donating toys? So, the place I work, Lutheran Settlement House, I am in charge of the- oh god. I don't know if I'm in charge, but they tell me that I'm in charge of the toy drive. You're like a boy king. Yeah, yeah. Oh god. Oh God, I don't know if I'm in charge, but they tell me that I'm in charge of the toy drive. You're like a boy king. Yeah, yeah. Oh God.

I with my trusted advisors, I'm sure we'll never do anything to me. So yeah, I work at a place that does domestic violence counseling that works with the homeless population that works with families in crisis. And we need your help. The same as we do every year. We have, we are undertaking the largest, how would I say this toy distribution system we've ever done. We're really proud of it. So please donate that. And a second list, if you hate children, but love old people, we are also collecting donations for our pantry and our senior center so that we can, which

is where I do spend a lot of my time in the senior center helping my beloved seniors not get phone scammed and listening to them just complain at each other. It's amazing. I love old people. That is all of their time. Avoiding scams. Yeah. And they're just like, Oh, well, you like.

My favorite thing is it's gotten out that I'm pretty good with technology. And they're just like, we will fix your phone. And I'm just the most cracked thing you've ever seen. I'm just like, I need you to take this and chuck it into the Delaware. I'm talking about. No, no, because your phone's mostly in one piece. Well, that's true. No, I just have. I've never seen. I have other I have other old people problems with my phone. I know I've seen your

high vis keyboard with your low vis back. It just doesn't make any sense. Rod. Oh my God. This is a new thing that we're going to discuss every episode. Isn't it? How stressed you are by Ross's phone. You guys, well, Nova also, I think, as a walking tech bane herself, with your hard drives, they made it. They survived. They made the trip. I was gonna say, they're still inside the case of you. I very carefully wrapped that case.

Can you write a crystal disk mark for me? I don't know what any of those words mean. I get you. Listen, I took this computer, I wrapped it very gently in bubble wrap, I put it in the back of a hire car, and I very kindly got it driven over to the new place. I unplugged it, I re-plugged it, it's all good, it's fine, it works, so no dramas, please, do not... Like, everything is... Okay, make some noises, right?

But that's fine, so do I, It's called getting old, you know? Well, we're not in the business of shaming my computer for whatever she does, you know? But that's those are her choices. There's only one loser who has RGB on his computer and that is me. So I have I have hell RGB on the new mixer. It's not optional. Looks like a limited amount of RGB on my desktop. Do you have Trump was in court and his lawyer had a Republic of Gamers laptop with the RGB on it? Yes. Just add the judge.

When we got my wife's engagement ring designed, thank you patrons, they used Razor gaming laptops to run CAD. I mean, makes sense. They used Razer gaming laptops to run CAD. The woman, the designer, takes out this colossal gaming laptop and slams it down on the desk, and I'm just like, ah wow, yeah. This is for Leo. So, we should, we've derailed ourselves spectacularly, we've not even reached the... Where's someone's garden?

Yeah. We're still in the garden, we need to escape the garden and talk about the dog gone news. The dog gone news. The dog gone news. The gosh darn news. There we go. Sorry, Devon, you don't have to edit the car in again this time, thanks. Do you think the last time it was very funny?

I have to fade that down manually, this time, thanks for doing it last time, it was very funny. I have to do... I have to fade that down manually, by the way, I hope you realize. Let's talk about Matt Gaetz. Mm. The sort of, uh, highly pompadour'd man with a penchant for Venmo-ing underage girls. Maybe he was just buying them McDonald's, you know? SEAN Yeah! With the little Venmo notes that say like, for being my cool friend.

Or whatever. Yeah, so he was Trump's first pick for Attorney General to trigger the libs, and also to get out ahead of this like congressional ethics investigation, which was looking into the Venmo-ing. And then the Venmo stuff leaked again, and he has now taken his name out of consideration for attorney general because like everybody in Congress hated him, even the MAGA people hated him. So...

I was about to say, it was like really well known this guy was like an insane sex pest. Yeah, we knew that. A while ago. Yeah. Just kind of this backcombed nonce was like, y'know, really in consideration for the job of like, y'know, America's senior chief legal officer. He has a very square head. He looks so wrong.

They all look like freaks, dude. Yeah, for real. I know that I also look weird, but like... Different kinds of weird. I come from a family of square heads, but this guy... this guy's a square head. The backcombing is really not doing him any favors and I don't know why he does that, y'know. RILEY As a man with an enormous forehead, and an

enormous chin, I've made different decisions about what I would do with my head. ALICE He has, like, a hairline, like a staple. It's remarkable. RILEY Yeah, it's just... Hup, hup. Yep. RILEY Yeah. Nons. Nons. Yeah, it's just... Ho, ho, yep. Yeah, nonce. Like a soccer goal. Yeah. Mm.

Like a square bracket, it's really quite something. It looks like a parody of a Republican congressperson. Mm, yeah, I feel increasingly, and I've been thinking this too about Nancy Mace, the um, uh, what a vile, yeah, yeah, yeah, the representative who's like going all in on transphobia, that I feel like more and more I'm living in a world that has been illustrated by Garth Ennis. Because all of these motherfuckers look like preacher characters. It's like unnerving at this point.

And I know it's a case of, like, they look like the thing because the thing is drawn and written in imitation of people like them, but still. You know, this stuff was supposed to be exaggerated, right? JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Yes. ALICE Awful. JUSTIN I mean, the other thing is, I'm wondering exactly how this is gonna go over with the MAGA crowd, you know, since, or especially the Q crowd...

ALICE It's the steal! This is the steal! We are starting the steal, right now. LIAM Yes, we gotta do it! We don't have much time! ALICE It's not only Gates, right, the nominee for Secretary of Defense is this guy, Pete Hegseth, who Trump knows from... LIAM Also a sex fest.

ALICE Yeah, also a sex fest. Like, allegedly full on rapist. But who Trump recognizes from being a part-time host on Fox and Friends. And who was like, I don't know, like an infantry captain or something. And whose deal is like, we're going to take women out of combat roles and we're going to de-wokeify the military. And the whole Natsaq and ghoul establishment is like, well, obviously the rapes are fine, but I object to his policy of, like, not knowing what he's doing in a managerial sense. Y'know?

And so, y'know, fingers crossed for the steal. Shoutout to America's horrifying, blood-drenched genocidal institutions, because, y'know, disrupting them in this way is somehow worse. I still can't believe she fucking lost. JUSTIN LAUGHS. JUSTIN Speaking of genocidal institutions... Yep. ALICE Yeah, it's formal now.

A rest of this map. JUSTIN Going to hell. The International Criminal Court, I almost said the Interstate Commerce Commission. The International Criminal Court. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau.

The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau.

The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. The better business bureau. many from Cheltenham High School. ALICE Well, while you were cheering, go Israel, or go Palestine, I was cheering, go Robert Mueller and the rule of law. International humanitarian law has come good, sort of. And they've issued three arrest warrants. One for Netanyahu, one for Yoav Galant, and then one for Mahavad-Daev, who

is not, like, officially dead. The other two Hamas guys they were gonna charge are officially dead, which kind of limits their ability to, y'know, charge them with anything. RILEY Oh, that's... that's quitter's talk. You can do a cadaver sign-on. I mean, this is... RILEY Like, putting some... RILEY...this is historical precedent. RILEY...scooping the remains of a guy who was killed in an airstrike that blew up three hospitals and collateral damage into the box in The

Hague, to be like... JUSTIN Yeah, I'd make a joke about collecting body parts into bags and putting them on the chair, but... ALICE Seen it multiple times. JUSTIN Yeah, I've seen too many pictures of that. I mean... ALICE Yeah, well, I mean, listen, inshallah, you know, someday Benjamin Netanyahu's body parts are gonna get scooped into something, but for the moment, the sort of implications of

this are that, so every state that's party to the International Criminal Court statute is obliged to arrest him and Galant if they like, you know, enter their states. Um, the U.S. is not a party to the ICC, so he can go to, he can go to the U.S., he can go to Russia, but like anywhere in the European Union or in the UK, and like we've seen different states have different approaches, but like ultimately the, the line is, you know, we don't like it, but we're gonna have to go along with it. Right.

Because it's like, didn't Keir Starmer say, nah, I'm not going to arrest him. He didn't go that far. He just kind of prevaricated. The line here is, I'm not going to deal in hypotheticals, which is bullshit. He is a lawyer. He was a human rights lawyer. He knows better. But yeah, that's, that's the line pathetic as it is.

He can only triangulate. He is only capable of that now. Yeah, it was interesting seeing, it has implications for, it makes it that much harder for the UK to continue to justify selling arms to Israel. It makes that much more difficult. I mean, I say much more difficult. Marginally more difficult. They will still do it.

So that's something. difficult, marginally more difficult, they will still do it. Barrazing, at the very least. Exactly. So that's something. Yeah, it's kind of like, all of this IHL stuff has been, I say this as somewhat of an interest in the law, you see a lot of legal people be like, well, it's not nothing, right? And it's like, well, that's true. But when you look at the actual facts on the ground of what Israel is doing, and has done for a year plus at this point, not to mention decades before this, it's grossly inadequate.

And of course the ICC has no way of enforcing this, and it can have none. Mason- The genocide is still happening. And it's only getting more and more dire for people in Palestine right now. Yeah. And I think the thing is, right, the US is very clear that it has no interest in using the ICC except as a means of disciplining its enemies when it's convenient. And the fact that the ICC has now taken action against the US ally is important in itself. We will see what comes of this in the long run. But don't look to this to have any kind of, like, gross effect on the genocide, or even

on Israel necessarily, I think this is one of the ones where you have to look at it as a long game. And the sort of punishment such as it is, is you don't get to go shopping in, like, Paris anymore. Which... JUSTIN I was gonna say, I mean, if he's making a state visit to one of the few countries he's still allowed to go to, they better do a lot of maintenance on whatever plane he's going on, because that's gonna be a real short list of alternate airports if there's a problem. ALICE and LIAM Yeah. Yeah. You're looking at like... LIAM Has 11 gathered immediately arrested, yeah.

ALICE Yeah. Well I mean, true, don't say they've enforced them. RILEY Yeah, it's a good job, Israel has a free and unmolested supply chain for these things right now. Wouldn't it be a shame if their supply of Boeing components was not able to reach a port? ALICE No, no, no. Keep them on the Boeing parts and give him all the newest ones. What is he?

Midair on the way to DC, a little red triangle appears on one of the passenger hatches, y'know? What is the Israeli state aircraft? Um, so they have one. It's a 747, I think. It has a stupid name, like the Wing of Zion or something. Oh, you're fucking kidding me. You need two wings. Yeah, it is the Wing of Zion.

It is a Boeing 767, and it belongs to the Israeli Air Force. Technically I guess, depending on how you count it, it's the Israeli Air Force plane that's done either the most or fewest war crimes. So, you know. Yeah. See, that's the problem there. They got one of the good Boeings. Yeah, that's a shame.

That's a real shame. I think, listen, we just gotta get in there and we gotta sort of like, you know, if you're looking at trying to change the system from within, you get a job at Boeing, you work your way up to the kind of international government procurement side, and you try as hard as you can to get them a brand new plane, you really sell that to them. It's American made. If you're making spare parts for a 767, isn't that like Spirit Aero Systems or something? I don't understand the supply chain here.

Yeah, I don't think any of us do, I think that's on purpose. That's a good point, yeah. Yep. Oh, jeez. Well, I mean, listen, we're not gonna see them in The Hague, I do think it would be funny if you had some kind of paperwork mix up, and Matt Gaetz ends up in The Hague, and Benjamin Netanyahu ends up in, like, federal pedophile lockup. In like, segregation wing.

In like, some federal correctional institution. I think that would be funny. JUSTIN Speaking of people who should go to the Hague... I have one further news item. They're still fundraising. They're still fucking fundraising. They're fucking fundraising. I have never replied in anger to a fundraising text before, but I did reply in anger to this

one. Which was asking me to sign a thank you card for Kamala Harris. Oh my god. For an amazing campaign. Oh my god. Nope. That's, that's, that's... It's unreal.

Beyond insulting. Jesus Christ. I... I don't know what I wanna say. No. I just wanna reply. You wanna say some things that maybe we can't say, and I think I've already talked about... I'm touching the limit of that with some of the Netanyahu stuff, to be honest. We'll let Devon make a judgement on that. It's... it's difficult to go through an election like that, and then they have the goddamn,

they have the gall to ask you to sign a thank you card. What, but like, I halfway understand soliciting donations because they're badly in debt because they were raising no money, but like, what does the thank you card do? Like, what is- I don't know. Okay. Okay. I somehow wound up on the Trump fundraising list as well.

They also asked me to sign a thank you card. For what? He doesn't know how to read. No, if I really wanted to thank Trump I would send him a burger. Yes. That's it. This is the saddest thing about it, is, aside from all the other things, a perfectly good fast food job passes Donald Trump's life by again, you know?

He's not gonna get to do it, he has to be president for another four years instead of being a line cook. He was born to be a winning contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race, and, unfortunately, fate has pushed him. I'm right, I'm right and you know it! JUSTIN Oh boy. ALICE Would not be the first MAGA drag queen, I'll say in that. JUSTIN Nah. would not be the first MAGA drag queen, I'm saying that. JUSTIN It's about to say, it'd be interesting to see how Trump is reincarnated in the cycle

of Samsara. ALICE This is... I'm... mm. LIAM I know. I know. JUSTIN Everything's miserable. ALICE We live in hell, still.

JUSTIN We live in hell. We live in hell. ALICE I'm gonna talk about the Sarah McBride stuff in, like, next episode when it's had a chance to develop a bit, because I got some talking to do about that. ALICE Wait, is she that... SEAN Oh, she's the first trans congressperson who was endorsed by AIPAC, and AIPAC fundraised for her, and then when she got into office was predictably like the target of

oh we're gonna ban her from all the bathroom shit. And her response was rank cowardice, like, oh I don't even need to piss, actually. But ever. It's fine. Yeah, a lot of stuff rubbed me the wrong way about that, too. Yeah. This is a distraction from the economy or whatever, and it's, what the fuck is this, it's your bathroom!

Like if you can't fight for yourself in a very personal... SEAN How are you gonna fight for us? ALICE Yeah, exactly. Like, it's just shameful. It's absolutely shameful. But, y'know, what other kind of representation were trans people gonna get out of someone who was gonna go to the US Congress, y'know? Like you can always hope we were gonna get someone like, you know, Rashida Slavitt or whatever.

But, you know, few people are as lucky. So... I mean, she's from Delaware, she's there to represent one building in Wilmington. Yeah, I mean, she was Biden's fucking protege! Like genuinely. Which is one of the reasons why Biden is like unusually woke on trans stuff. It's why he's like Mr. At least three genders. And it's like, well, what a fucking legacy you set her up with, man.

You know, we fucking tried to be president until you're 86, lose, you know, drop out and retire widely hated and then hand her the most hostile Congress in like living memory. Mistakes were made. It's like, Jesus Christ, if God sent me a mentor like that I would assume he was punishing me. Yeah. Yeah. I'll buy that.

At that point you're actively the opposite of a mentor, you're more like a kind of enemy. Y'know? What's the word for you believe God exists and you hate him? Calf? Dosotheism? Or Mesotheism? Yeah. God exists and you hate him. Oh, do-sotheism. Or miss-otheism. Anyway. Um, that was the goddamn news.

Ooh. We have to talk about Trains. It's a Trains episode, and folks, they've given me the reins on this one. I'm so sorry. The reins to the trains. The reins to the trains. The reins to the trains. The reins to the trains. The reins to the trains. the reins on this one. I'm so sorry. The reins and trains. The reins and trains. The reins and trains. The trains.

Mainly on the planes. So we have to talk about, in fact not the trains, but this time, the tracks, the railway alignment. What are railways? Well railways are formed of straights, in certain joke here. I was gonna say, I'm not sure that's always true, I've seen some of the Pride liveries. RILEY Well, quite. Yeah, so, you know, railways, ideally, the ideal railway is a straight one, right? But sometimes a thing is in the way. ALICE So we did an episode on that.

RILEY Yes, exactly. Sometimes a thing is in the way and therefore you need to do something different, which is, yeah, you have the high line, you have the airline, or you put a curve in it. Next slide please. Nova, this is a picture I took on the East Coast mainline, and it very nicely makes and proves your point about what the railway environment is and the fact that it's gross. It's this color, this is the color you were talking about. NARESH Yeah, it looks like an accumulation of a lot of sort dust, like mud, dirt... ALICE That's a C toilet roll in those F23 sleepers

there. This is like three minutes past four in the morning. ALICE Direct drab toilets? ALICE To be fair, this was not anymore, but this was before we banned them. This is one of those things that was like, alarmingly recent, like interracial marriage in America. You know?

You look it up and you're like, wait a second, that's too late a year for that, you know? ALICE Yeah, exactly. Well, the poo and the flushing was absolutely during my time of being on track, for example, right, when I took this photo. This is a curve. Look, it's a curve. It's bendy. The railway's bendy. We've put a bend in it. We I took this photo, this is a curve. Look, it's a curve. It's bendy. The railway's bendy. We've put a bend in it. We've linked up two straights with a curve.

ALICE This is why you don't want the, like, high-vis crop top, is you want something with as much coverage as possible that's gonna, you know, repel water as well. RILEY You particularly want a collar that you can flip up. The train goes around the corner. Angler momentum from the poo flings it over to you. Yeah, poo shot. Yeah. If you see some Brock and Spectre coming from an oncoming train, that's when to look away. There's one for the real heads. Anyway, right.

So yeah, curves. Here's a curve. And next, so this is a curve. They exist and you'll notice something funny about this curve, which is that one of the rails is higher up than the other rail. It's canted. Yeah, we're going to talk about cant. Next picture please.

Next slide. The categorical imperative that we do. Yeah. Yes. So here's a nice picture of, there's such vibes from this picture. This picture makes me very happy. It's a lovely Class 86 hauling a list of very weird coaches at probably like 95 miles an hour up the West Coast mainline. Just put any old shit on the back of here.

Yeah, there's like a GUV, like a genuine utility van, there's probably a brake van, there's another genuine utility van. It's possibly a post train this one. Anyway, it's all GUV, a genuine utility van, there's probably a brake van, there's another genuine utility van. It's possibly a post train this one, anyway, it's all kinds of shonky. You'll see that it looks like it's falling over. It looks like someone slightly tipped it over. It's because it's on a canted curve. I guess that's what a camber is?

Yeah, well it's a bit like a... So people often go, well you know when you have a race car, or even just a normal car, and you go around a curve and the road is banked, you have bankings on those old race car tracks. It's a similar thing. And if we go next slide please. So in the United States we call this a super elevation, and in most places you're not allowed to do it because the freight trains don't like it.

You just have a bunch of open coal wagons that are now dumping coal out of the side. RILEY Exactly. So, and there's another episode, actually, you know what, rail matters are the place to go where we get into the deep lore of exactly why and how you apply Kant and how much and so on, because, good god, I can talk about it for too long, and I'm not gonna bore all of the hogs with this stuff. The hogs are like, no, do it, do it, please, but no, no, I'm not gonna do that. Another time time maybe.

ALICE FULLY HIT THE TRUMP, THEY WANT ME TO DO IT, SHOULD I DO IT? LIAM I'M GONNA TALK A BAD CANT, I'M GONNA TALK A BAD CANT. Anyway, right, so, next slide please. Oh yeah, we've done the next slide. No, not next slide. Can you believe this slide? That's fine, we're on this slide. So, the reason we tip the train over is because when a train goes round a curve, you get an outward force from curvature. That's kind of obvious. Train goes around a curve, it wants to fall off the other way. So we tip the tracks up to kind of tip it inwards to kind of cancel out that outward force. So we're kind of balancing outwards and inwards forces. So yeah, this is an engineering bit. We're not going to go into any detail. Forces,

what we can do to a little bit of detail. A little bit. We can get into a bit of detail because we're going to talk about, next slide please, Newton's second law. F equals ma. Force equals a mass times acceleration. Uh huh. And therefore acceleration equals force over mass. Exactly. You can rearrange that to mean that you can convert... so if you've got forces going inwards and outwards, and the mass is the mass of your train, then the useful thing you can do is go, well, if I've got an acceleration in and an acceleration out, I can therefore ignore the mass of the train, which makes my calculations a lot easier. So that means...

ALICE I'm still beaming from rearranging a very simple equation like I got a good grade in podcasting. I think that is possible to achieve. It's really nice when you can derive a lot of complex information out of an equation that you learned in high school. Yes! Well that's kind of why it's fun to show people who did this and thought, why the fuck am I learning Newton's second law?

This is useless to me. Well, we're about to explain why it isn't, which is designing railways. So the useful thing about doing this rearrangement is that we can, next slide please, take our forces and we can, next slide please, turn them into accelerations. So we have outwards an acceleration and an inwards acceleration. I think I've accidentally left animations in this one. So Ross, if you click forwards twice, there we go. And there we go. There are some equations, you don't need to know them, but outwards acceleration, anyone who's a real nerd will know that that's the equation for rotational acceleration. It's the speed over the radius, speed squared over the radius. The inwards acceleration-

No, it's clearly a formula for generating the French month of August. Out? Out? Out? Out? There's a cute name for Parisians who stay in the city in August when everybody else goes on holiday, which is Auxia. Like Augustinians, if you like. I like that.

That's fun. That's nice. So, outwards acceleration is that. And then also to get the inwards acceleration from tipping your train over deliberately, it's basically a component of the acceleration due to gravity. So that's what that equation is. And that relates to the cant, which is as Ross said, superelevation, which we represent with an E. And then it's over the... Also the track gauge makes a difference. So if you've got a really wide track gauge, you have to tip the track over more to make the same result. So if you have narrow gauge, you don't have

to tip it up as much and you get the same result. Anyway, it doesn't really matter a huge amount in this situation. You can make those two things equal to each other because if you've tipped the train up enough that the inwards acceleration is equal to the outwards acceleration and they cancel each other out, you can make those two things equal to each other, do a load more formula scrambling and you get next slide please, which is on my mug, which I'm currently holding up to camera that none of you can see. Look, it's a mug that says E plus D equals 11.82 V squared over R. Because that's the Kant equation, and that's what makes us make a railway do the shapes that it does. Hooray!

Yes, this is the Kant equation. It's so cool to have a profession that you can reduce to like as a fundamental equation and everything else is built around it, you know? It is! I like this, which is why I put it on the mug. All the rest is calm and everything else is built around it, you know? ALICE It is, I like this. Which is why I put it on a mug. ALICE All the rest is commentary, go ahead and study it. ALICE Yeah, I put it on a mug because I like it so much.

Yeah, so this is basically, like, the amount that you lift one rail above the other determines how fast a train can go around a curve, basically, for a given radius and such and such and such. And if you've got things like, well, acceleration due to gravity is a constant, the track gauge is a constant, and also the conversion from like meters to kilometers is a constant, then you can smoosh all those together and you get the 11.82 number. Will you pot smoosh it together? Is that the technical term? That's the official term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so when we build a railway we don't apply equally bream count So we don't tip the tracks up so much that they equal that we cancel out the average acceleration because that's bad for a variety of reasons

Including as as you said earlier freight like freight goes slower than passenger stuff So you might be an effigy for like if you stop there it tips over Yeah well I mean certainly does a lot of mess to the low rail and you get a lot of horrible shelling and you wreck your subgrade and you maybe split your sleepers and all sorts of bad things. And in fact, the next slide please is very useful because, well no, it's not, this is

all the stuff that then tells me... Another deficiency, if you're firing piss and shit out of the side and it's the side going upwards what you've created as a kind of toilet mortar. So these are the standards which allow us to understand how much cant we actually need to apply for a given railway. And this is very fiddly and this is obviously just like skimming the surface. This is about as complicated as cant, like philosophy. Table nine, transitions.

Cank. That's it. So, transitions. This is about... Length of transition fucking endless. Yeah, this is table 9 transitions. That's it. So, you don't need to know all this. Well, basically, this gets fiddly for all sorts of reasons, mostly because it impacts the amount of can you use and speeds and stuff. It's less about safety, certainly in the short term, and it's more about maintenance and

comfort and how quickly you have to replace materials and all this stuff. Much sooner that it results in really bad things happening. But if you get this really wrong, next slide please. Then the bad things can happen. Is that an ICE doing the bad thing? No, it's a Spanish, it's Renfe, it's the Santiago de Compostela, I think that's right, derailment. There are actually signaling reasons why this happened, but what it did was, it ended up throwing a train at way too high a speed around a very tight curve, and well, yeah, I should

have done a content warning. If you don't want trains smashing up, this is not the episode for you. ALICE Not loving the fuck this webcam in particular angle. this webcam in particular, Angle. Yeah, that webcam did not survive to tell any more tales. Yeah, this is bad, folks. So, a general rule of thumb, this will be useful, is that going around a curve, you can generally go around a curve about twice the design speed in a train. I wouldn't recommend trying this too often, but you can generally... Uncomfortable, frightening, but not lethal to webcams or passengers.

Yeah, so you can, exactly. So if you're below twice the design speed, the chances are you're doing alright. Obviously that varies on a lot of things, but that's a rough rule of thumb. Just half listening to that in my train driver orientation, being like, okay cool, gun it. Got it, got it. Yeah, okay, good, design speed plus a bit. Yeah no, the reason I say that is just to give an indication of like, we don't design curves on the edge of you might derail, we're designing them way below that, because obviously you're putting a lot of extra force into the rails if you drive this fast.

Yeah yeah yeah, exactly. So, we don't have to look at this horrible smash anymore, we're gonna look at something even more horrible. Next slide please. Ah! It's made of the mold that there is in Maya Flat. Like, this is what the country looks like from space, people don't tell you this. It looks like a scab. This picture looks like a greyscale scab, and rightly so, because of course we're looking

at a picture of Britain, and also Northern Ireland is attached as well. I'm sorry about that. The North of Ireland. Yeah. Yes. Sorry. Correct. The North of Ireland is also in this picture for some reason.

Yeah. So this is Britain. It's very soggy. It's very smelly. It's quite small and quite hilly. So if say it's the early 1800s and you're building a nascent railway network and you've decided that you think it's a good idea to link London to Scotland, Ross, can you John Madden London for me?

It's like here-ish, right? Here's your geography testing. Yeah. That's not bad. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. You're a little bit west.

You've hit like, kind of, I don't know, like, Stens or something. Yeah, you're a little bit into like, Thames. Yeah. Like here-ish. Yeah. Yeah. Like here. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. And now the bigger test.

Can you, can you circle Scotland, please? Yeah. Yeah. That's there. That's Scotland. More south. There's more. No, we have more territory than that.

We fought hard for that bloody territory. Hold on. Here ish as well. Yes. That's more for that bloody territory. Yes, that's more like it. Where did the mountains start? Yeah, basically. I like the fact that we have stolen a little bit of Northumberland there, which is very pleasing to me. So yeah, fuck you. Fuck you, Beric. We've got you back. I think y'all are going to do a better job with, you know, Newcastle than the English

can do. So you'll notice something about this. Get that Titanware metro. Oh exactly. That is pretty, I do quite like that. Although the old trains are going, which means that you go, the new trains don't let you sit at the front and pretend you're the driver, which makes me very sad. What?

Oh, bummer. I know, I know. Why do they take the next little show? Yeah, come to Britain. Yeah, do come, do that. So this map, by the way, is a topographical map. So it's showing where things are hilly and where things are not hilly. You'll notice on the east of England, if you're going from Scotland to London, the east side of England there is quite flat, whereas the west side of England isn't. And actually on the east side you can see there's quite a nice route. So if you want to create a fast link from London to Scotland, this is the obvious priority for the railway barons at the time.

Will Barron See, you see where you've drawn the overlap between your two Venn diagram circles of Scotland? You've inadvertently put a line right through the central belt. And so, roughly speaking, on the west side of that is Glasgow, on the east side of that is Edinburgh. Your two largest cities, conveniently. Edinburgh is the capital. And Glasgow isn't. Mason- The only urban economy that really works well outside of London is the Scottish central belt because it's a huge area connected by lots and lots of really good public transport. Will- I like to call it Megalopolis. ALICE Oh no, please don't call it that.

RILEY So, railway barons. They are wanting to build railways to connect major cities, and connecting London up to Edinburgh is an obvious main link. So we have to start talking about some guys. Next slide please. Here are our guys. We come upon a battle between a large guy, George Hudson, here on the left. ALICE We come upon a battle between this guy on

the left and his own waistcoat buttons. You know, believe me, I've been there. LIAM Yeah, same. ALICE And so it's the large guy on the left, George Hudson, and this twink on the right here, called Edmund Beckett. ALICE Can't really just say anything these days, can't you? No, he's not quite twink.

He's got too much side bone for a twink. He's wearing like a solid, like, vertical four inches of cravat. I know, it's incredible. It's taller than his head. Imagine a noise happening behind this guy and how he would turn round, you know? He's like Batman. Yeah, he's like George Clooney's Batman. I, uh-

Just look like, uh, what's the cat, the big cat that has, like, can turn all the way around? Do you mean an owl? Because there's already a cat. No, no, no, I mean the cat that does it, not an owl. It's like a serval or something. What? Oh, I don't- sorry. I'm looking, yeah. JUSTIN Sorry, the idea of us going cat and then something

like, you mean an owl? I like that. ALICE Yeah, could we go cat that can turn all the way around? JUSTIN Yeah, forget this podcast that we're doing, I need to know what this is you're referring to. ALICE Serval as a cat, yeah. I just don't know that they can turn the whole way around.

ALICE Cat writing reflexes? Cat that can turn head all the hallway around. Uh, cat writing reflexes? Cat that can turn a head all the way around. Okay. Um... Cats will tilt their heads and... One of the looks up, I'm just gonna quietly point out while no one's paying attention that actually the guy on the right here, Edmund Beckett, like, he's probably a horrible man, but kind of serving cunt actually a little bit here.

You love that phrase, don't you bud? I really do, yeah. I listen to too much Kill James Bond, that's the problem. So I think a lot about people who serve. ALICE Justin, do you mean a mage? Is it a... JUSTIN Ooh, maybe? ALICE A little Mexican wildcat?

This is a big African cat I'm thinking of. ALICE Oh, this is beautiful! JUSTIN Look at this, look at his eyes! Oh man. Hold that. No, this is the one. We are so fucking good at this. It's really good to do podcasting. All.

Way. Around. I love how all of us are desperately deploying our best. What are you thinking of? What do you I had to go back through Will Manekers tweets to figure out what this cat is. Oh, God damn it. No, no, we're not doing that right now. Get back. Get back.

We will listeners and viewers. We will conclude this discussion off of Mike and Devon will provide the results to you all so that we know. Thank you and Devon will provide the results to you all so that we know, thank you Devon, so that we know what the hell is Ross is talking about because at the moment none of us do. So the thing about these two boys, Hudson and Beckett, Hudson is known as kind of like the railway king. He'd overseen several railway companies to kind of form a network around, well, centered around York actually, the city that I am in, the Old York. He kind of, like this guy, was pretty vicious corporate operating wise in the way that early Victorians were, they were all maniacs. So he built a railway network and it included a link to the Scottish border.

He'd gone off that good snuff and branding. Yeah. Exactly. Like the things he was doing to his brain would make anyone a maniac in fairness. So it connected, his vast network connected to the North British railway, which went from Edinburgh to Berwick, which he had also part financed by the way. And southwards he had linked his railway to the Midland railway at Normanton, which meant that he had a London connection. He had built a railway, or part financed and made negotiations to get trains that could run from Edinburgh to London.

ALICE Weeping, because we don't know how to do this anymore it seems like. WILL Yes, well this is it. Beckett, meanwhile, in a flex that today's MPs still insist on pursuing, he was the richest guy in Doncaster, the northern city of Doncaster, and he was MP for the West Riding of Yorkshire. ALICE Resisting a cruel joke about Doncaster there. WILL There are so many cruel jokes about Doncaster. A place I have a soft spot for, but the centre of Doncaster is an absolute dump.

And it's dreadful. Sorry everyone in Doncaster, um... ALICE You deserve to suffer. WILL Yeah, this is the thing. And he was MP, so he was the richest guy in the city and it's MP. Normal, normal situation. He wanted a more direct route to London, that didn't faff about getting Wibbley and Derbyshire. Hudson, so he basically started putting forward some railway puzzles. He's like, fuck Derbyshire, fuck mine, fuck shoes, don't care, you know.

Derby, we'll come back to Derby in a second, because it clearly makes him angry. So he put forward a plan that was basically a straight line from Doncaster and York straight to London. He was one of the high speed rail diagrams guys. He would've been a poster. Kind of, yes. Because the thing, well we looked at Britain and it was flat on that side, so it makes some sense.

The only problem is, there's basically no population between York and Doncaster and London. We ignore Peterborough, whatever. No one cares about Peterborough. Going straight through Peterborough, straight line to London. Right. So Hudson was not happy about this because it would directly compete with his route that he just spent a lot of time and political effort creating. And as often happened with early railways in the 1830s and 40s, shenanigans ensued, including an episode where Beckett and Hudson like had a shouting match in Derby station where Beckett and Hudson had a shouting match in Derby Station, where

Beckett called Hudson a blackguard. ALICE But thems were fighting words back in the day. WILL Exactly. Calling someone a blackguard is like, is that, I mean, is it a slur? It might be a slur. I don't know. Is that a rate? I hope it's not a slur. ALICE That's based on my deep, deep understanding of this stuff, which is having watched Barry Lyndon, a film set in a different century. Yeah, no, actually set in the same century, so it's all good. Having watched Barry Lyndon, that's a dueling offense.

Yeah, exactly. Coles on a blackguard is like, ooh. So yeah, 1845, they were shouting at each other in Derby Station, which, you know, people always shout at each other at Derby Station, so it's something that's gone through the ages. Anyway, after much- ALICE Yeah, engaging and telling Jacob Rees-Mogg I'm engaging in Victorian values, having a fight in derby train station. RILEY Exactly. JUSTIN I found the cat. ALICE Tell us about this cat.

RILEY It's a serval, it has a very long neck. ALICE Yeah, that was our first guess. JUSTIN Serval cat. RILEY S-E-R-V-A-L. JUSTIN Oh, and its ears are the size of its head. I looked at it. Yeah. OK, that's a handsome little little. There's one that goes around Twitter every once in a while.

Where one of them is like turned all the way around, you know. I was. Hey, yeah, I like these animals. These are the. Oh, look at the. Here. Yeah. I just get some big ears. You get some. I imagine just a little bit larger than an ordinary

cat, probably more violent as well. Very, very expressive face. That's a cat that will tear your throat straight out of your neck, yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Sure, one of these to milkshake can be like, look at your, uh, you know, look at your compatriots and feel a day.

I believe milkshake could make friends with a serval. I think Milkshake could make friends with basically anyone except Pizza Boy. Yeah. Oh, I'm friends with Milkshake. Aw. That cat is basically a dog. We are blessed to have him. So having shouted at each other in Derby Station, these two boys did much wrangling and a significant

amount of outright bribery and corruption. But Beckett wins. The rich MP from Doncaster wins and manages to get his straight line to London approved in parliament. And this would be called the Great Northern Railway. Next slide please. Which meant that we had the makings of our East Coast route. So if we hop forwards again, you can see that route.

And it looks, okay, it doesn't look quite as straight as you might imagine, but the bottom half of it is pretty much straight. It's a straight line from London to basically Peterborough, and then it's another straight line from Peterborough to Doncaster. It's that bit, the Great Northern Railway bit, is really straight. And then from there... Of a flat-ish land, you get some nice seaside views. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's pretty flat.

And so, you'll see, generally, pretty flat. And okay, there are some kinks here and there once you get further north. ALICE Poor monsters. RILEY Well, exactly. Who am I to kink shame? So this was formed of several bits. So at the northern end, the Scottish bit was the North British Railway, which was Edinburgh to Berwick, that opened in 1846.

What eventually got its call was the North Eastern Railway, which was Edinburgh to Berwick. That opened in 1846. What eventually got us called the North Eastern Railway, which was built from lots of other bits of railway, the York and North Midlands and the York, Newcastle and Berwick Railway. Anyway, that was basically finished in 1847. And then Beckett's Great Northern Railway was finished in 1850. So you have what we call now the East Coast Mainline. So great, marvelous. Now one bit of the various kind of constituent companies and rackets that eventually formed the Northeastern Railway included a thing that was called the Newcastle and Berwick Railway. Here is, and next slide please, here is the notice of that thing opening. Look at that's all there, when they used to do all fonts and they've even accidentally rotated the word to sideways thing opening. Look, that's all their... when they used to do all fonts, and they've even accidentally

rotated the word to sideways. Why have they done that? I do not know. But they have. ALICE This is some great type work, you know? Got the little train on there. Nice. RILEY It is, it's nice.

And there's a train, yeah, there's a little train with a little guy. ALICE I like the difference in line weights on the N here. Oh yes, that is insane. ALICE Reminds me of the label on a pair of Levi's, you know? RILEY Yeah. So this railway, this bit, the Newcastle and Berwick Railways, this went from the Scottish border south to Newcastle.

This was like the linchpin in Hudson's plans, because it would allow him to link to the North British Railway, alongside his kind of emerging network in the northeast, and he would basically be able to control the whole lot. So this is the problem though, which is that the former Prime Minister Earl Grey, and his presumably webfooted son Viscount Hoek, did not want a railway intersecting their estate. ALICE Yeah, I mean, listen, if the train goes by, rattle your teacups, which you drink your kind of like, bergamot flavored tea out of. Mason- Exactly, which is not nice.

So they didn't want that happening. They thought it would, you know, like scare the pigeons or make their, you know, make all their cows give birth or whatever. I don't know. So further shenanigans ensued, including a, they basically created a new railway proposal that avoided their land conveniently. They called it the Northumberland Railway. And they got Isambard Kingdome Brunel to become the engineer of the railway. ALICE I guess once the engineers signed up to the thing.

RILEY Literally, they got the Musk slash Santiago Calatrava of his day to come along, and of course, what did he propose as the way that the trains would work on that railway? Atmospheric system! He proposed an atmospheric railway for that alternative. ALICE Investing heavily in bacon grease futures. A lot of horse viscera gone. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was... So a friend of the show, the atmospheric railway, was proposed by Brunel for this alternative railway. The trouble is, by the time both proposals were being considered in Parliament in 1845, Brunel's atmospheric railway had already proven itself as being complete shit. And so the Northumberland railway was rejected, and so Hudson had defeated the former Prime Minister and his weird little son.

So Hudson... Wins. ...throwing my teacup on the ground in anger. Exactly. Absolutely. This will not stand, simply. Oh my god, I'm going to have to deal with a little bit of noise every now and then. Yeah.

Yeah, I know, right. It had come at a cost, though. Here, next slide please. Because here is a map. And in the middle of this map, this is a very old map, this is like seventeen bullshit. Seventeen bullshit. Seventeen hundred and fuck you. old map, this is like, 17 bullshit. SEVENTEEN BULLSHIT. SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AND FUCK YOU. This is a county map, and in the middle of it is Morpeth.

Little Morpeth. They don't make names like Bedlingtonshire anymore. No, I know, right? It just says church. Hirehouse. You've already named all the things that can be named in Bredden. Hole on the Wall. That is true.

Not hole in the wall, hole on the wall. Yeah, it's when you get to places that are called things like Lost that you realize that we ran out of names for things, kind of quite early on. Actually, yeah, a lot of our names make absolutely no sense, they're just bollocks, so yeah, that's a fair point. Anyway, more of a town of Westward Ho. Don't miss the exclamation mark. Yeah, the exclamation mark is important. That's right, you have to put punctuation into your town names.

It's important. It's like an accent mark, you know? Yeah. Morpeth at the time was like a castle and a major market town, like a properly major market town actually. But the problem with it is that the terrain around it is very hilly and steep, and there's a river wrapped around one side of the town. So this is a problem.

And if we go to the next slide, please. To deal with this, to deal with Morpeth, Morpeth wanted to be connected to the railway. Fine. Originally it was going to be on a little branch line, which would link to the main Newcastle and Berwick railway route. But in drumming up local support for Hudson's railway, when he was competing with this like bullshit Northumberland railway atmospheric thing. Hudson had changed the main route to run through Morpeth. Next slide please. And you can see the problem with running through Morpeth is that all that steep hill stuff means that you need a lumping great 98 degree kink in your railway alignment. Which is... It's a kink. Once again, we are kink shaming. This is

a very kink shaming episode. So if I'm cancelled because of that I can only apologize. Next slide please. So you will see that this is a big kink and the original route shown here-ish would have kind of avoided this entirely. The thing is though at the time it doesn't really matter that much because trains weren't going that much above 30 miles an hour so a 90 degree kink isn't that much of a problem. So it's okay. You're going like 30 miles an hour, so a 90 degree kink isn't that much of a problem. So it's okay. You're going like 30 miles an hour, you're fine.

Yeah, you're fine. This is a high speed curve right here. Yeah, exactly. High speed 28 miles an hour, you have to slow down too. Exactly. So, next slide please. Blistering speeds, yes. You have to slightly pull back on a perfectly polished brass lever.

ZAC Oh, this is delightful. ALICE Look how happy all these... ZAC God saves the Queen, no fucking thanks. ALICE Yeah, I know, fuck those guys. ALICE Fascinating with this flag situation here, we have a pre-Northern Ireland Union flag I guess, with the red washed out, and a red ensign? And then a royal standard on the royal coach as well.

There's a lot going on here. ALICE All those people just begging to be blown up by a nail bomb. JUSTIN Yeah, well this is it. This is it. ALICE Really on some IRB supporting shit, you know? So yeah, the line opened in full on the 1st of July 1847 and everyone was very pleased with themselves. Until Hudson ended up in Dettors prison for fucking everyone around him over, partly in the aftermath of his battle with Beckett and kind of defeating or trying

to defeat the Great Northern Railway. So boo boohoo for George Hudson. His career is ruined. ALICE Maybe some of these guys would be a bit better off if we brought Dettor's prison back for a specific kind of guy. I kind of want to send Elon Musk to Dettor's prison. RILEY It feels like a... and it wasn't a nice experience. Musk will never go to prison, but if he actually did, he would go to prison in inverted commas and he would never stop. Debtors prison was horrible.

And I want that. I'm anti-prison, I accept having debtors prison. I want debtors prison. I'm not climate Stalin. Oil executives to the fucking Gulag immediately. They're just gonna put every college educated person in America in there instantly. Like you graduate and go straight to debtor's prison.

ALICE We gotta break rocks. We have to, so if we jump forward to a slide by twenty years, something went wrong. Someone has stabbed a train here. You were looking at a train that has been stabbed. Oh, that's gone poorly. Yeah. I was looking at the lack of cab. I didn't even notice this.

Yeah, so the cab is missing, but also someone has stabbed the train. I think it's important that we really emphasize how much that train has been stabbed. And so, Ross, do you want to read a date? On the 25th of March, 1877. Yeah. The up express from Edinburgh to London was making its way southwards. Um, and it went around the curve and it tipped over, it fell over. Um, and it was navigating its way through the curve.

The locomotive tipped over at a badly maintained joint. So it was like, it was going too fast around the curve. Very likely. We'll talk about that in a second. Hit a badly maintained joint went whoop and fell over and so yeah, whoops The train scattered, you know, the coaches behind I mean, it's a bit like the picture previously like those coaches are made of nothing. They're made of splinters and and paraffin and It's not good. So the train behind it's scattered. I have a question. I thought up was away from London. Or no.

Up is no, up is two lords. London is two lords. London is two lords. Yes. Up is two lords. Down is away from London. Yes. That is confusing.

So yeah, the train scatters, bits of it telescope behind it as it stops abruptly. Like the thing basically tips over and the train sort of rams into it from behind. So, I'm going to quote from the Board of Trade Report, because this is horrible. "...the passenger carriage, which had been the third vehicle in the train, dashed into the tender, lodged its leading wheels in the tank, and was completely destroyed, and one of its passengers was found dead in the tank of the tender, whilst another was jammed against the end of the tender, whilst another was jammed against the end of the tender. Eugh.

So, not so good. So all the mean sacks, i.e. passengers, they didn't do well in that first coach, so five passengers died, and Seventeen, I quote, complained of injury. ALICE Yeah, well you would. You know, you can complain all you want. You have to have a positive attitude. ALICE What are they expecting from that lousy 25 cents to live forever? Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So, next slide please. So the Board of Trade report suggested that it was poorly maintained track that was the culprit and that the train was not necessarily speeding. But I would say given the damage described in the report, it's really difficult to believe that this wasn't just because the train was actually going too fast through the curve. At this point, trains were getting a bit quicker. I can believe that this train was actually gunning it and had reached like 45, 50 miles

an hour and tipped over. I suspect strongly that's actually what the case was, but they didn't really have anything to prove it because it was 1877. But the report did make an internal switch. Yeah, 1877 CSI. Just some colonel with an incredibly wide moustache looking at it with a magnifying glass. Did they have speedometers? No, they didn't.

They had a poach that would measure... Well, they did two things. Either they had a guy with a stopwatch, or with a watch that he would count the time, or they had a dynamometer car. So they did. I think they did have quite primitive dynamometer cars, even in the 1870s, 1880s. Someone shout at me if I'm wrong about that.

But for the most part, they were just timing things with a watch. So we're going we're going we're we're still in Pennsylvania railroad mode here where they they didn't install speedometers until like the 50s. Correct. I severely doubt there were any speedometers on these trains. But again, someone else might be able to correct me on this. I'm not a steam train guy.

I'm not sure. Particularly steam trains from the 1870s. No one knows anything about those things. Yeah, quite. So the report made an interesting observation, which I'm going to read, which is it would obviously be better if a deviation line could be constructed to avoid the use of so sharp a curve on a main line traversed by the fastest trains between England and Scotland, and so long as this curve exists it is necessary to employ moderate speeds only in passing

round it. So, some foreshadowing there. So, um... We've identified a problem. We are now going to engage in one of the favourite British pastimes of doing, I imagine, fuck all about it. Passing the potato. Correct.

Correct. I'm seeing some foreshadowing here, which is very similar to a much more recent realm and very close to home. Yeah, quite. So nothing was learned, decades passed. Nova, you need to line something up for this next slide transition, actually. ALICE Do I? Oh god.

SEAN Because we're jumping forwards to nearly a century later. And nearly a century later, we have the USSR drop plays. ALICE Oh god. Oh god, fuck. Okay, I gotta add this shit immediately. SEAN You gotta find it. ALICE Oh fuck.

Customised smartpad, your road caster too will be placed into transfer mode. What does that mean? What does that mean? I can do this in my own way, which is slightly different, which is... Uh huh. There we go, it's not quite as good, if that's come through on the... Which it should have. Yeah, no, so yeah, it's BR.

We've got BR. It's a Centralator, we have British Rail. Everything was bigger and faster and busier and Next slide, please. We have trains that look like this It's a Delta Pistons, it's got an engine that has It's a trial Wow just the most bonkers engine design imaginable. Just totally nuts, but the noise it makes is beautiful. Just like a proper...

It's been a running thing that some people have noticed that whenever I see something that isn't a Deltic that looks kind of like one I go, oh, a Deltic! So when there actually is one I thought I would fuck them up by not saying it. LARSON Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. JUSTIN For those of you who are in audio only, we are looking at a Deltic. The thing that was unique about them is they used a opposed piston engine, where you had two cylinders facing each other in each, whatchamacallit, in each cylinder, and those cylinders were arranged in a triangle, driving three

crankshafts. Completely bonkers design. Absolutely nuts. Like the Greek letter delta. I guess strictly speaking you should call this a deltoid. Yeah. Yeah. But delta sounds cool.

It's a triangle. Deltoids are seething. Yeah. So this thing, with many pistons all firing at each other, makes a wonderful noise, and it has a very funny looking nose as well. And they're cool, I love these things. They had quite a short life in service, but actually they're great. They really sped trains up along the East Coast Main Line, actually.

And it meant that we were running trains really fast, at 100mph speeds, so we're going way faster than they were back in the 1870s. Ross? I like how it's just like, yeah, this is the really fast train. Did you streamline it? No, this is just a blunt end. Fuck it. Yeah, yeah. We will overcome the error.

We will not go around it. Yeah, when you hear the sound this thing makes, I wouldn't want to put streamlining on it either. So, yeah. Ross, could you do the honors please on the notes here? Oh. On the 7th of May, 1969. Nice. This plump beast of a deltic is hauling the Aberdeen Sleeper northwards, so we're going northwards this time. The train consisted of 11 coaches, it's a sleeper train, and they're all Mark 1s, which we've talked about before in previous episodes in relation to crashworthiness.

They're not good, I mean, they're absolutely rubbish by today's standards. But back then they weren't good, but they're also not that bad, but they're much better than everything that had gone before it. So anyway. ALICE Yeah, we made this one out of wood as opposed to paper. RILEY Yeah, exactly. Well this one, it was steel, it was steel.

There was steel instead of wood. There was steel instead of wood. So this thing was, like, okay, by the standards of the day. So, back in the 60s, kind of as it is today, really, route knowledge. So that's where a driver has to know where things are along the route, so they know where to brake, where to stop, where to... At what point they've passed the chat, when a signal's coming, they have to have all this knowledge in their head. This is why drivers are extremely skilled people because they have to basically teach themselves to have ADHD, which is an extremely challenging skill to do. So like, knowledge is very crucial.

I thought you could just have the army step in to run the train. Yeah. As the train, so this train is charging towards Morpeth on the down line. It passed, you know, it passes various kinds of key points for recognizing for the driver to go, right, I need to slow down now. And it was dark, but they're, you know, they're pretty evident. So one of these key points was Stammington signal box and there's a level crossing near it, both of which were illuminated. So as the train goes through the level crossing, signal Sierra 13 comes into view. And this was the marker for any train running under full speed to shut off power. So basically you start coasting before you then apply the

brakes a little bit later. So the line rises, it kind of, you get a slight start going up a hill after, after signal Sierra one three and the combination of having no power and the incline kind of starts slowing down the train quite nicely, right? So just before the summit of that incline was a kind of a gate box called Clifton Crossing. This thing wasn't lit. So the train reaches this gate box and there's a signal beyond it that comes into view, which is what is called Delta 15, which is where a driver would typically make their first actual brake application to start slowing the train down to about 60 miles an hour before then slowing down again to 40 miles an hour to go around Morpeth Curve. Morpeth Curve, that's the episode. So foreshadowing about this may

not go well, we've had a date. The driver of the train, Leslie Byers, reaches this signal, but didn't do anything. So the power had been shut off at signal Sierra 1-3, but after that, the driver stopped making inputs. And actually just as the train kind of passed that second signal, the second man in the train, because they still had those then, a guy called Clifford Graham, realizes the train was not slowing down quickly enough and like gets up to go across and basically apply the brake. This kind of triggers bars into going, oh fuck shit, oh yeah. Clocks back in and makes a full brake application. This was not enough.

Graham was thrown to the floor because of how sharp that braking was. Yeah, more of a curve with its speed restriction of 40, and a train approaching it at 80. Oh, that's not ideal. That's not ideal. What was I saying earlier about the design speed, and also how quickly you can get around a curve? Next slide please. This went poorly.

So, yeah. He rolled the dice. Sometimes you get a critical one on this one. Yeah, this did not... This was bad. This made a real mess. Yeah, the train derails horribly. Actually you can see

that these Mark 1 coaches have actually done remarkably well. Actually they've held together pretty well in this crash. They've broadly stayed in line, which is really important in derailment. Like as soon as you've got things like kinking and knocking in and like twisting and overriding each other is when the bad things happen. But in this case, for the most part, they... So actually if we go to the next slide, six people were killed by the way in this, and a further 21 were injured. If we go to the next slide... I was just going to remark on the big hook here.

This is a really big, big hook. That's a train-sized hook there. It's bigger than what we got in America. Yeah, you guys need to get yourselves a big hook. So the train mostly stayed in line, which is why the fatalities were so small, actually. The train was going north, actually the locomotive stayed on the tracks, like the deltic was fine. It was great.

ALICE Those things are unkillable. RILEY Yeah, it stayed on the track, because it was that bit heavier it actually stayed on the tracks, it had that much more force down into the wheels to keep it on the tracks. ALICE People don't even know this, but technically they don't even need rails. You can just point them in a direction and it makes its own. JUSTIN Exactly. ALICE The Canadians did that once. JUSTIN Yeah. So the Delta went round, and its coupler

stayed intact with the vehicle behind, which was like a brake van. Which it basically dragged along like a shopping bag, which was dragged on the floor. ALICE Just like, no, the rest of you are coming with me. RILEY Yeah. So the coupler behind that broke and then the train sort of scattered, but this kind of brake van was just dragged around to the point where it smashed into Morpeth Station around the other end of the curve. ALICE Jesus God.

RILEY And made a mess of that station as well. Yeah, so look at what had stayed on the rails, the lighter carriages had scattered behind it. And yeah, more for the station got bashed up by this kind of dragged brake van kind of being swung around like a mace. And yeah, no one is injured in the station, thankfully, because it was empty, because it was the middle of the night. So actually,

two guys having a fight on an opposing platform. Just getting wiped out by a brake van. Like an MP in a large... Doing old timey fisticuffs. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, this was bad. This was really bad. Next slide please. Oh sorry, I should have said next slide please twice. Because the first next slide please was the diagram showing what was going on. So you can see that the trains come around. It's come from the south here. In fact, Ross, you can jump was going on. So you can see that the trains come around. It's come from the South here.

In fact, Ros, you can jump out in this. So that it's come from the South. Um, it's, you can see it's gone round and there's a dark shape that's at the other end of the curve, which is the brake van being dragged around. Um, and then in front of that is, is, is our class 55 Delta happy as Larry sat on the rails like, Hey, Hey, it wasn't, I'm okay. Happy as Larry sat on the rails like, hey, hey, I'm okay. Chill. What you all fussing about? Big chill.

That's their problem, you know. Is a brake van at this point still crucial for braking, or is there like full train line air? No, it's still most, it's still important for brake. Like not quite in the same way, but it certainly applies, it's heavier and applies a lot of the braking force of the total thing. Yeah. I guess that makes sense why it would not have derailed as much.

Yeah, actually. That's a good point. And yeah, because it's being dangled around, but yeah, it sort of didn't just fly off immediately and break the coupler. Yeah, because the rotation is what snapped the couplers behind, because the vehicles then all overturned, snapping the couplers. So next slide, please. You may wondering, what happened? Why did this happen? Why was the driver going to you first? ALICE We've got the driving crooner to explain it to us. I hate you driving crooner. RILEY This is actually Leslie Bios, this is the driver

and he's using a hat to hide himself from the press here. SEAN It didn't work very well because the camera was in front of him. ALICE Yeah, you just stepped once to the right. Being publicly shamed got way easier when they invented, respectively, sunglasses, face masks, and hoodies. Yeah, and also the superinjunction. True. But you're kind of like leaving Crown Court paparazzi experience, you know?

Yes. Much improved by the fake mustache, the sunglasses, etc. etc. Things of this nature. Coming out of court wearing the Mr. Bits Acer. So, what had happened? So, Byers alleged that, immediately following him making that first break application. So far so good, he makes that first break application. Or rather, sorry, not the first, when he basically put the vehicle into neutral, his mind started to wander to a notice he'd been given when he was booking on that night, which had questioned why he had lost four minutes on a previous

service. It was the second notice that he'd received that month and it had stressed him out. In his words, he took them very seriously. His mind had wandered and he ditched the train. For better or worse, I don't think it's fair to... We have a kink in a railway and everything falls on the driver to not screw it up. But unfortunately the driver had the book thrown at him. He was fully blamed for this. ALICE This is also a lot of parallels to a certain derailment that occurred very close to home, about a

decade ago. Yeah. They always find the littlest guy who they care least about, and in this case, yeah, it's the driver. And you might say, well, he was the one who caused the fuck up, but no. Hudson, in, well, you know, this is WTYP, you know the deal, folks. Social murder. Yes.

Yeah. Drivers crash trains, but not as they choose to. Precisely. What did we learn from this? Well, we did actually learn some stuff from this. Next slide, please. Because we had already been installing this thing called automatic warning system around the rail network after a previous absolutely horrifying crash at Harrow-Wheelston.

Yeah. It wasn't actually related to safety, it was just part of a general engineering quest to have as many people exposed to as many annoying noises at work as possible, and that just happened to coincide with safety. Yes, so the thing that makes the da-da-da-da happen in your cab was it being installed, but it was mostly just for like stop signals and for like signals and for sometimes for ends of track and then things of this nature. ALICE The first generation AWS green light sound is a rather pleasing bell though, kind of trill.

WILL It is nice. It's nice. Actually, I have a bell. I don't have a bell. ALICE It's a kind of like equivalent of like a nice thumbs up, you know, a nice pass on the back. It is nice. And you know what's funny is there is this, so having done cab rides, particularly at speed under 25, there is this nice rhythm of the AWS doing its thing. Amazon web services and getting really confused. Yes. Do you know what's funny is I was listening to a podcast the other day and they didn't say Amazon web services. They were just saying AWS the whole time. And yes, all I could think of is the funny yellow magnet in the forefoot that I'm about to show you a picture of. So

these things that are on the screen right now are what are called Morpeth boards. The yellow text on the black is what they first looked like. And then we got rid of that and we decided that the Scottish people decided, hey, why don't we use a different shape, man? Why don't you make it a triangle? That's a Scottish person putting on a Scottish accent there for some reason. And yeah, so they went from, they decided to make it a triangle. And so kind of by the early 80s, we'd moved into this like the realm of the triangle. And so you have these things. So if you see these things out on the network, this Morpeth board, what it does is it goes, okay, if you're stepping down from like 30 miles or from like 100 miles an hour to 30 miles an hour, maybe it's a

good idea to pre-warn you that that's a thing and even to tie it into the AWS system. So if you go through that Morpeth board too fast, the AWS will apply the brakes. This is a good idea. This is actually a good idea. So you get a sign, you get a warning to the AWS that the driver has to respond to. And if there's no action taken, then the brakes. This is a good idea. This is actually a good idea. So you get a sign, you get a warning VAWS that the driver has to respond to. And if there's no action taken, then the brakes will be applied. So this is a good idea. We have more of the boards. Next slide, please. I can show you a picture of here is an AWS magnet, kind of quite a new one, but they kind of look mostly like this back in the day as well. So if you see this thing out on track, if you're in that Britain that they have, firstly apologies, secondly, you might see lots of these around. ALICE And throw them all up.

ROGER Often they've got funny iron filings on one bit, because they're basically just a big magnet. That is what they are. A big electromagnet that is activated and deactivated. And the next slide please. They activate... so here, Roz, can you circle the sunflower thing that's kind of sort of in the middle of the screen, but down a bit? That's cool, isn't it?

What a design. What a little visual language to establish. So this is the cab of an InCity 125, firstly, which is why it says in very sexy, sort of dyno print stuff, max speed 125 miles an hour. I like the 125 in a different size, but in case optimistically they ever needed to change it upwards. GARETH Yeah, I do like that. ALICE We still have rocket on the back.

GARETH We still have rocket on the back, actually. ALICE I also really really like the iPad in a sort of dangly case. GARETH Yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE That really... GARETH It ties it together. ALICE It's tautology. GARETH It is, yeah. ALICE I feel like, I often wondered when I was looking that really ties it together. It's tautology. Yeah.

I feel like I often wondered when I was looking at the kind of Soviet retrofuturism stuff, what it felt like to live in the kind of ruins of a failed state with a sort of capitalist superstructure built over it and be like, you can see the past and the present and the future all at once. And now I know. So, you know. Here is that picture. Yeah, exactly.

On the one hand, you've got the piece of paper in the plastic slip. On the other hand you have the iPad that's doing the driver advisory system, advising them when to break later and such, or coast and stuff to save fuel. So yeah, you get the little ding. One of the funny things about the Pennsylvania Railroad, GG1, is at least apocryphally they never figured out how fast they could go. There's one story that brought out, there was one test run, with ten heavyweight coaches, and they got to 160 miles an hour, and the engineer shut off the throttle and said, that's the top speed, I am not going faster. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH There is a curve approaching somewhere.

ALICE Top speed established by nerves. I also like, if you look forward to the cab lights and the radio, working as a train driver you get harrogate water in this country? Luxury. Unparalleled luxury. Smash the unions now. They've had it too good for too long. They get the fancy sparkling water.

Oh my god. You can look at that little faceted bottle, you know? I know, right. It's got, it's not like, crystal thing, but it's plastic and it's very very fancy. For ages that was like, that was like the bottled water of choice that was like dumped in the like, the kind of the guard spot on the back of the HST as well. If you took your bike up there you could steal some. It was always very useful. So yeah, that little sunflower dial would illuminate and de-illuminate based on whether the AWS had activated. And if you didn't, you basically get the bell and if you don't respond to it, the brakes will apply. This

is quite a good system and it genuinely made our railways much, much safer. A very, very good thing. Weirdly though, if we could jump to the next slide, the Morpeth boards were not applied at Morpeth. ALICE Oh, naturally. I love this fucking country so much. RILEY The reason why they weren't applied at Morpeth is because the engineers...

Well basically there was a stepping down of speed, So rather than it being like you're at 100, now you're at 40, it was, well, it dropped from 110 to 105 to 70 to 50 as the speeds ended up becoming, because we did some upgrade work on here for the HST. So the speeds gone up from, we've increased the count from like 110 to 150 millimeters. We can now go around the curve at 50 miles an hour safely. But that stepping down of speed meant that the standard said you don't need to put the thing that's called a Morpeth board at Morpeth. Which is fine, right? Sure, great, excellent. It didn't fall under the standard case for doing...

Morpeth board's officially called Advanced Warning Indicators. We don't need them here, that's definitely fine. ALICE I'm still distracted by, like, village names. We've got a Glororum. Choppington. Um. West Sleekburn. Uh huh.

Hebron, which is interesting stealing, stealing like, Palestinian valor there. Yeah, yeah. Just very... what a bizarre country we live in. What a strange place. Just odd. Just fucked vibes. So yeah, so here's how it looks today, by the way. This is...

Trenwell. I sure hope I do. Yep. I was about to mention that one. So you can see that the trains, either side of Morpeth, your trains are going at 110 miles an hour. This is a fast bit of railway. And then it isn't. For a bit. Because of the curve. So here's kind of- You're getting the kind of seeing a speed camera equivalent, you know? Yeah.

It's a speed trap. It's a speed trap. Yeah. This is how it looks today, and also how it looked in the 1980s, because we've done nothing since BR did everything. Yeah. So that's how it looks today. Next slide please.

Here is a diagram of Edinburgh Waverley Station. Ross, if you read the first line here, and we'll understand what date it is and why. 24th of June, 1984. So it's 1984. We're at Edinburgh Waverley Station. Well, actually we're not quite at Edinburgh Waverley Station. We're approaching Edinburgh Waverley Station in presumably a local train as a passenger at this point.

But driver Peter Allen was booked to take the Aberdeen to London sleeper south from Edinburgh late that evening. First though, he snuck in a cheeky one at a pub in Musselburgh near his home in Drem. So next slide please. Is it a crime to get drunk at work? He had one whiskey. He's not there yet. And next slide please. He also had a pint.

So, you know. Spoiler maker. Perfectly legitimate. So, you know. ALICE This is a Boilermaker. Perfectly legitimate. ROGER Shot and chaser. Fine. ALICE I had a city-wide special. ROGER So, he arrived... Actually, he didn't get a local train, sorry, he drove.

He arrived in his car at 21.35. He phoned his duty manager for this wee little bossy thing that was near the Good Steppe. This drive will get me sobered up. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, don't do that. I actually drive a little better when I'm buzzed. I'm a little more careful. So he phones his duty manager to say that he's arrived at 2143, And the time between him arriving at 2135 and him phoning his boss at 2143 gave him time to sneak in a cheeky nip.

Oh, so perfect. Next slide please. He got in a can of lager. A can of lager? Next slide please. Do we know it's this specific lager? It's in Scotland. It's gonna be Tennant's man. So you got in a can, and then you know what, step up a can of strong lager, which at the time would only have been Tennant's super.

So my boy is getting stuck in. So, um, Alan was seen in the car park- I'm being arrested in this beer, this looks delicious. We'll find it for you. Keep going. Come to Britain, come to Scotland, work'll do a live show, we will get you on some Buck Frost and some Tenant Super. JUSTIN Tenant Super is...

Wow. I drank quite a bit of it, not enough of it to be on, in fact, no, too much of it, while I was a student, and I probably only had about four cans in total, and that was enough. It's not a nice thing to consume, I'm going to be honest with you. But the factory is nice where it's made. It's a thing that, you know, you establish preference, you establish your priorities, what you want to receive from the alcohol, right? This is a...

Yeah, you drink a... Malt liquor brackets British. You drink a tenance and you're like, okay, I don't want to have a good beer, but I want to have a beer, and I want to like, relax, and it's gonna be a chill time. You drink a sort of a strong lager, like your Tenen's Super, and you're like, not only do I not want to drink a good beer, but I want to get wasted. And you will. Ah. RILEY It's a beer with purpose. So, having snuck these in before phoning the boss, in like the seven interceding minutes where he's presumably just sat in the car getting the tins in.

ALICE Oh, virulently shit vibes. Being in a parked car in Waverley Station car park, drinking a can of like, sort of like, cold but like, cooled by it being cold outside. Tenant Super. Oh. Yeah, by the way, you're in a car with no aircon. Yeah, yeah. Waverly, I've looked at Waverly before on Google Maps, you drive your car inside, like, the station?

You can do it. Settle cabs, then. Oh, I see. Okay. This was, this was, so, back in 1984, it was really really different. So you have to look at the old pictures and you could drive everywhere in the station back then. ALICE I mean, it's weirdly laid out now, but like...

MARK Yeah, it's like that scene where Michael Caine drives into St. Pancras and hops out of the car and jumps into a train heading northwards on the middle main line. It's kind of like that. Messed up. Again, bad vibes. ALICE Yeah, it's just like, okay, open the doors to the brake van, let me drive my car in there.

ALICE Yeah, we didn't innovate that much with the channel tunnel, you know? JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE So, presumably wibbling a little bit, Alan was seen in the car park by a colleague at about 21.55, and they also saw him climbing the steps to the footbridge that spans the station around that time as well. So, that's 21.55. JUSTIN Alright, I figured he would have pulled the car up right next to the locomotive and parked it at a jaunty angle, you know?

ROBBIE Yeah, yeah. So actually, Rod's... ALICE Having run down several passengers on the way up there. ROBBIE Stops to, like, drive the train. ALICE 20 different marks on this map for places he's stopped to piss on things. ALICE All TROY Or amongst us! RILEY So we can kind of track his journey here, because on this diagram you can see, Ross, kind of like, on the right hand side you can

see the bothy and the staff car park, and you sort of see the telephone, and there's like an arrow saying, telephoned from here 2143. ALICE Yeah, it's weird that he's seen in two places at once, because someone's been inexact about the time. Either that or one drunk man has phase transported down the length of platform deck. Good for him. Strong chance the person who called it in was also drunk.

All so true. It's true. This is Scotland in the early 80s. Of course they were drunk. So hey, I can say this as someone who was born in Edinburgh, I know what's going on there. ALICE I think having lived here for ten years allows me to co-sign that. WILL Yeah, exactly. So you can trace his little journey. So there's a little dotted line that you can jump on over the top of, Ross.

ALICE Not as wiggly as it should be. This shit was moving around like the Indiana Jones plane boat. WILL Exactly. And so he kind of makes his way along, and eventually finds his way to the footbridge. Anyone who knows the footbridge, okay, it's mostly the same as it is now. It comes out, if you go south from the footbridge, this is a fun thing. So this is the diagram from the report, right? From the report of something that's about to happen.

And on the screen you'll see that in the bottom left hand corner of the diagram they've picked out a load of little blocks and they've written the letters PH in them. ALICE PISCHER PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER.

RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER.

RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. RILEY PISCHER. before driving my train? ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING.

ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. ALICE AND LUCAS LAUGHING. out in the entrance that's directly opposite Fleshmarket, anyone who's run from like Sheems or wherever in Edinburgh, or is a student, or Newington or whatever, and you're running to get a train late because that's what you do, you will run down Fleshmarket Close to get straight out across into the footstep to run down Despletio Train.

ALICE I am picking up what you're putting down, I understand this very deeply. ALICE Oh yes. SID Oh, also Fleshmarket Close, again, Edinburgh, all of Edinburgh is like this, it is just Dunwall, sorry. RILEY Yeah, it really is, yeah. So there are a lot of pubs within very easy access of that entrance to the station. ALICE Why can't we have that in Philly? RILEY I have issues with substances, right?

ALICE Yeah, you and I both have it. RILEY And after driving to the station, and consuming two beers in my car, I think I would at most be able to do one more beer at one pub before getting in my train. ALICE Well this guy was built... I'm gonna be honest. ALICE I mean, this was basically the entrance interview for the Scottish Division of British Rail.

RILEY So how many units are we in at this point? So the whiskey, right? Two units for a whiskey, right? ALICE Yeah, give or take. If it's a strong pour, three. Yeah. And this is in Muscle Brus, so I'm gonna go for strong pour. So three units from the whiskey, two units from the tenons, two units from the other tenons, and then four units from the tenons? Super! Yeah, he's nearing, like, sort of... you get this from necking half a big bottle of vodka, for

instance. This would be your coat pocket size bottle of strong spirits. ALICE Get your bottle of Glens out, that's the stuff you're so... ZACH This is Louisville and Nashville Railroad in the 80s drinking. I mean, this is... ALICE The handshake between British Rail's Scotland region and the Louisville National.

ALICE Well what do you think about the Scottish people fucking emigrated out there, you know? It's the cultural traditions they brought with them. Good point. Good point. ALICE So Aaron Peter Allen was next seen walking along what was then Platform 11, about 45 or 50 minutes after he was previously spotted. ALICE We're also discounting the possibility that he had a hip flask as well. It could be, you know, I said several other things. He's got like a, it's got like a, uh, uh, uh, at the shake case with like a brand.

He was wearing one of those hard hats with a beer can on each side. He's got the, he's got the little tartan thermos flask. Like that's, it's all kids. thermos flask, you know, the little... ALICE You gotta camelback full of Everclear. ALICE Okay, the phrase camelback full of Everclear is gonna sit with me. SEAN It's just mine. ALICE At least you don't have to worry about ever cleaning that, you know, you're not getting any fucking mold in there.

SEAN I'm not, thank you. ALICE Remember the Supersoaker full of Canadian mist? Never had to clean that shit good way. ALICE So, despite his claim that he'd been wandering around the station, he was next seen at 2250, basically getting into the loco. And yeah, he hadn't been seen at all in the kind of the inceding hour or so. My boy was getting stuck in. Ooh, he was. Next slide, please. Let's leave Waverley Station and Peter Allen and his adventures, and talk about the train.

So this is, here's a Mark 1 coach. It's not, it's a model, folks. It's a model. ALICE It's a very fancy model, though. It's not even a model. It's a picture of a model. RILEY It's a picture model, it's true. ALICE Well actually, it's a picture of a model. It's a picture model, it's true. Actually, it's a digital representation of a picture.

Stop it! Stop it! Yeah. This is not a pipe. I know, damn, you're beaming to it, god damn it. These have been replaced, next slide please, these have been replaced by Mark III coaches. So, the Mark III sleeper coaches. And these, you know, I'm often down on the Mark IIIs these days because they're just

hopelessly outclassed by modern rolling stock. But in the 1980s, these were still really very, very good. They were very, very good coaches. They rode well, they were very strong, they're very safe. Good stuff. I've got to admit. You know, if you wanted to do a centrist shitlib thing, you could be like, you know, nationalized railway systems in a kind of like, in a microcosm, is your state of the art train

being driven by a guy who has had, like, six cans of lager and a couple of whiskeys. JUSTIN LAUGHS JUSTIN Again, I mean, do you want that? Or do you want people drinking a fifth of bourbon in the cab of a Louisville and Nashville train with 75 cars of chemicals. Oh geez. Good grief. So this train is formed of seven Mark 3s. It still had two Mark 1s, but they were the brake vans either end.

So we still, for some reason, we've got these at the time reasonably state of the art coaches. For some reason, that's just such Brit vibes, such BR vibes, you have the Mark 1 coaches either side. So next slide please, because this was being hauled by... it's a Class 47. The, oh look at this. ALICE It's the train that there is. RILEY Oh, I love this thing. This is, it's honestly the best fleet of locomotives Britain has ever built.

I love these things. This is 47452, that means nothing to anyone and it shouldn't, because if, for those who it does mean stuff too, shout out, hi, my people. Yeah, this is a beautifully simple, elegant, powerful, and gruff locomotive. You know, this thing is like from the 50s basically. It's a tank, and it's beautiful, and they're brilliant. ALICE It's a big rectangle with a motor in it. And we built a thousand of them. And we did everything.

We used to do things in this country. We really did. We really bloody did. Like honestly, I think it's about 850 actually, but like that's a shit ton of... just imagine all those lined up. That's a lot of locos. So in the small hours of the following day, so this thing set off from Edinburgh heading southwards on its way to London.

The train was approaching Morpeth from the north at nearly 90 miles an hour. Morpeth Curve had been recanted, its permissible speed had been lifted to 50 miles an hour. ALICE I'm just gonna let the sort of rocking motion of this train lull me into a sense of extreme awareness and professionalism along with all of this alcohol. Yes. Yep. Yep.

So you're a brand new Mark 3 sleeper coach. Having slept in those, they're quite nice. You're getting comfy, you're feeling that nice... Like the driver, but for different reasons, you're feeling a nice rocking sensation that's lulling you gently and pleasantly to sleep. The trouble is, the train is still at 90, and Morpeth Curve is getting closer and closer and closer. Next slide please. ALICE Oh.

Oh. Woo. Train on the ground. Train put on the ground. ALICE Yeah, as the train... LIAM That is not the way that train is supposed to be. ALICE No. So anyway, it's a very nice picture of Morpeth Curve here.

As the train entered the curve, the locomotive over... This time, it's not like the Delta got away with it, the 47 did not. The locomotive overturned and pulled its carriages with it. The train mostly stayed intact, as in like, the couplings kept the thing kind of in line, which again is good. That's one of the Mark I's that's in the foreground that's not crushed. Exactly. Yeah, you're right, it hasn't been obliterated, although you can see some damage at the vehicle

end. But yeah, mostly still intact. The other good thing about the brake van is it's just got people's shit in it, so it doesn't really matter. And a guard probably. Your luggage has been crushed into a cube. Yeah, but... Well apparently it hasn't, it looks fine.

Well no, it's doing okay, yeah. You've been crushed into a cube. Your luggage is fine. Or you're just goo. So the train stayed most intact. Property is what matters. It helped avoid too much mess. And combined with the strength of the Mark 3's meant that nobody was killed. Which when you see the next pictures, you might be surprised by.

There were 35 injuries of passengers and staff, it must be said. So if we go to the next slide, here's kind of what's going on. And you'll see that some... ALICE Oh, Jesus. This house in particular, and also this house in particular. RILEY The Train has quite literally fucked that house. It saw the bungalow, and much like me, who whenever I see a bungalow I become irrationally enraged and want to demolish it.

The Mark 3 coach had the same sensation and decided, fuck you in particular. And in it went and smashed up a bedroom and the half of this bungalow and also smashed up the front of the, its friend behind, smashed into a slightly stronger two-story building behind. But yeah, this is quite a good picture because it shows a couple of things. It shows freshly, the locomotive is hidden behind a tree, but you can kind of see it kind of two thirds into the, into the show. You can kind of see it's, it's, it's front and it's back. You can see that Mark one coach Nova that you, you pointed out rightly and the Mark three behind it, that the train's broken behind that. But you can also see that those coaches have stayed mostly in a line, which has helped with energy dissipation, because all of them are kind of breaking together as they dig

into the ballast and stuff, or the bungalow. ALICE What is a bungalow if not more ballast? Anything past trackside is ballast. Engrave that in 50 foot high lenses. ZACH Yeah, that's about to say, equivalent to the spaceship guys you would call this litho breaking. Yeah, bungalow breaking. That's exactly what's happening.

Well no, you need like a Latin term for bungalow. The fact that, yeah, the fact the train has stayed largely in line is a very good thing for the safety, as well as the fact that, okay, the one that's hit the two story house has bent a bit, but most of them have stayed intact. ALICE If it's gone through part of that two-storey house, that does technically make the two-storey house a drogue. WILL Yeah, that is. It is a drogue house. ALICE Kind of a sea anchor.

WILL Yeah, that's it. And then the back of the train is still most intact, so that's fine. So no one killed, which is really good. Next slide, please. Because we have to look at more pictures of our house being smashed to bits because it's extremely funny. So here's another picture, the first one there you can see that the train smearing through the garden, smashing into the front bedroom of the two story house and obliterating the bungalow, rip the bungalow. And then the next picture you can see the Mark III that's had the most bashing. And it stayed pretty well intact, except that it's been bent by the metaphorical knee of the big house. The next picture is a rather unhappy house owner whose bungalow has been demolished by

a Mark III. ALICE I don't know why you're unhappy. You're gonna get a shitload of money out of BR for this. I presume. JUSTIN This looks like a very long, suffering man. Yeah. I forget he's been through some stuff. Guy who has just put the last lick of paint on his perfect bungalow to retire into.

I have a feeling he will have moved somewhere without a railway after this. That's my suspicion. So, next slide please. Here is a diagram of what happened. So this time the train's coming from the other direction. So it's coming from the right hand side of the slide heading southwards, although it didn't manage to get facing south at this point because of a curve. You can see the train has gone everywhere and made a mess of me track, which is very rude. ALICE Yeah, many permanent way engineers would consider this to be an inconvenience.

RILEY Precisely. Or, a convenience, because we get some high speed, we get some brand new track installed, which is always a nice thing. Although one of the things that really annoys me is whenever we have climate change based smashing of our railways... ALICE Brand new tracks arisen in Bunkalo. RILEY I think that always annoys me with track washouts and stuff these days with climate change, because they're happening more and more, is they always seem to happen just after we've done a track renewal. So you've got this beautiful track with no ballast under it because a river's washed it out. I'm like, why can't they happen to knock a track and then we get a free renewal

off the back of it? Anyway, very annoyed by that. Always happening. So next slide, please. Because there's a diagram in the crash report that you remember the picture that I put up earlier of one rail raised above the other. Well, here you can see the cant, 150 millimeters. But you'll see they've added an extra bit to the diagram here, which is the wheel and axle. And you'll notice something about that, which is that it's doing something that if you just pay close attention here, you'll see it shouldn't be doing that, which is tipping way off the track. No, that's bad. That's a bad thing that has happened there. Which is why, yeah, the fact that the report includes this diagram, I quite enjoy this. You'll surmise that the wheel is not supposed to be doing that. This is when there is a lot of cant deficiency.

Yes, this is a significant amount of cant deficiency to the point of train leave track. Folks, you've heard of dual track drifting. This is one rail drifting. Yeah, this is doing the James Bond... the good James Bond film that isn't a James Bond film, where they two wheel a truck and dodge Stinger missiles in the process. Doing that but in a Class 47. Next slide please, because, anyway, after this, Morpeth boards were installed at Morpeth. You'll be glad to know.

ALICE It only took some, what, twenty years? RILEY Yeah, it only took them like twenty years, and another big mess, and several people's houses getting walloped. So job done, right? Problem solved. Next slide please. Because that's right, this is a four disaster episode. Because ten years later, on... Roz, please?

RILEY 27th of June, 1994. Yeah, an express parcels train hauled by another Class 47, which really didn't come well out of this. Yeah, named after a random North London suburb, and hauling one of those beautiful Royal Mail post vans. Yes, so it was hauling, presumably hauling a load of these post vans. I like this one for a variety of reasons. This picture, so Finsbury Park, this is named after the depot at Finsbury

Park. So the train crashed. So the Class 47 goes around the curve at 80 miles an hour and obviously it crashed horribly. Thankfully nobody was killed, but as his cab hit the dirt, the driver quite literally ate ballast and was pretty severely injured. So I would not like to be eating ballast. I actually have some ballast down in a bag next to me, because I'm a weirdo. But that stuff's the size of your fist, and I would not want one of those to hit me in the head at one mile an hour, let alone lots of them hitting me in the head at eighty miles an hour.

ALICE Yeah, it's sort of a dentally complex injury. You know? You gotta have a lot of... lot of Novacaine. Lot of Novakine. Lot of Novakine. ALICE Yeah. So, I want to... It's sort of weird, is it hauntology or is it just fun livery stuff? This train hit the dirt so hard that it was de-livre-y'd.

ALICE Yeah, they took the intercity livery off it and it went back to blue. It's got the British Rail blue underneath it. Because this should be black, but it's just taken that off. ALICE It's stripped it right back, yeah, quite something. So, yeah, like, the depot people being like, oh shit, we're supposed to take that down to the... Ah, they're gonna see that we just painted over the previous one.

You're supposed to take it down to the... Ah, damn it. ALICE I mean, the paint guy realising he's in trouble, but not the most trouble of anyone that day, is probably like, organizationally interesting. So, you know, the Morthmouth boards have been fitted, so how did this happen? Next slide please. Well, okay, so the previous three incidents all had published official reports, which

means that we, yes, it's the WTYP Yellow with some reports over it. People laughed at me in the privatization episode, because I did loads of these, and people were like, God, he really likes putting reports onto the yellow. And I was like, it's the WTYP yellow. I'm trying to be thematic. It's a good color. Three reports. It is nice.

Three nice reports telling us lots of things about what happened. Really nice and detailed. Even the 1877 one's actually a pretty good report actually in its detail. So you'd think there's going to be another one, right? Next slide please. It's 1994. No. Wrong.

Early privatization days. Everything's 1994. No. Wrong. Early privatisation days. Everything's a free for all. Who needs to learn stuff? We don't need to do a railway, we just need to, you know, do nothing at all. It's not called move fast and learn things. Yeah, exactly. So, next slide please.

Because at the time, these chucklefucks had taken over the railing spectra and were in charge of writing crash reports. What is this logo even meant to convey? This is the health and safety executive. time, these chucklefucks had taken over the railing spectra and were in charge of writing crash reports. ALICE What is this logo even meant to convey? This is like a fountain pen. This is the Health and Safety Executive. NICHOLAS Oh, it's like a ballast from As of the Gathering. ALICE Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the Health and Safety Executive are, if you want to understand regulatory capture, they are what an organization to realize, to kind of understand as a case study in that. So they were supposedly, at this point, with privatization, early privatization, they are what an organization to realize, to understand as a case study in that. So they were supposedly at this point with early privatization, they were in charge of writing crash reports, which they either just didn't do, or they did do them and they didn't publish them. At some point we'll do the Tesco Tunnel Collapse.

I'm convincing everyone on here to do the Tesco Tunnel Collapse. So lobby your local WTYP co-host to make that happen. Do not lobby me. And I will talk more about this, but suffice to say they have this responsibility stripped from them after a series of horrible incidents and big failures in industry learning. So we have no idea why that post train crashed. SID So just vibes. Just felt like it. MARK So we learned nothing from that. So yeah, that's, and that is a weird end to the story of the Morpeth Curve, which by the way is still there, and I've got a couple of friends who when they go through it they

send me a picture saying, yeah, I got through okay. So yeah, it's kind of a running gag that the Morpeth Curve is a scary thing. ALICE And again, to be clear, this exists because of Earl Grey and his fail sons. ROGER Correct, yes. Literally Earl Grey and his fail sons. ALICE ALICE Correct, yes. Literally Earl Grey and his fail-sons. ALICE And still killing people today.

ALICE Still murdering people. ALICE Not for a while. ALICE What a mixed legacy. A shitload of train crashes, but tea. ALICE Yeah, quite nice tea. Yeah, exactly. Tea that Picard likes. So, did we... I know I've talked a lot here, did we learn anything from any of this? ALICE Well it seems like British Rail didn't, and

it certainly seems like... ALICE No, they don't like the word. ALICE Well it seems like British Rail didn't, and it certainly seems like it. SEAN No, it didn't like the work. ALICE Well, BR did, because BR did Morpeth boards eventually. They did Morpeth boards, and then they eventually decided to install them at Morpeth, so we got there eventually. But have we actually fixed the problem?

No. The curve is still there. Still there, 50 miles an hour. It's a really obvious slowdown between 100 hundred mile an hour plus bits of railway. It's very strange. Yeah, but there we go. That's Morpeth. Morpeth curve.

It's just this universal, like there are lots of railroads in the world that have these like really like tight curves in between high speed segments and they go wrong all the time. And I mean, I say all the time. I mean, they have a crash every couple couple decades, but that's still too much. Yeah, like, you know what, just don't have the... get rid of the king. I know I'm getting... Hold on a second. Yeah, no, I'm sorry.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's... ALICE Is it just too overbuilt and too established a right of way that now you'd have to do some insane purchasing to change the shape of it

at all? SEAN You'd need a new viaduct over the river, which would be quite expensive. Other than that it would be cheap, because the land is fairly cheap and it's more... it's not humble, it's fine. You'd have some very unhappy landowners, but you know... ALICE Do it now, Strike, while the iron's hot. While the iron's turned on Treasury and away from DFT. MARK Yeah, we can just get stuck in, yeah. Except

that we need the money from Treasury to build the bridge to go over the river, so we're screwed on that front. ALICE Just get Louis Hay to go to Rachel Reeves, like, I have a way to take the heat off you, and all it's gonna require is the cost of one viaduct. I literally have a bridge to sell you. Yeah, well of course my approach to getting rid of this kink is actually not to get rid of it at all, is actually build HS2 on the other side of the country, even though it's the bendier side. Build the HS2 base tunnels that get you from where it ought to finish in Manchester under the current plans, to where it really ought to finish, which is

Glasgow. So do that, and then you don't need to worry about this curve because every train will stop at Morpeth. So they'll all be slowing down anyway to do that and things will be much safer as a result. But there we go. ALICE So you really put Morpeth on the map as well, for more than just this? MARK Yeah, yes. Hooray Morpeth. Yeah, because you know what's ironic is that they shouted and screamed to get the railway and actually what it did was wreck Morpeth as a market town because the railway just meant everyone left Morpeth. So maybe they shouldn't have had the railway go for them.

That's local government for you. No God, no Mary. Yeah, there you go. Exactly. Thank you, Lin. You're welcome. So, Roz, I'll give it back to you. Thanks for, thanks all of you for listening to Morpeth Chat.

Yeah, I hope we can really put Morpeth on the map, y'know, I think this is gonna be a global center for commerce pretty soon. Check this shit out, Morpeth more problems. See, after a couple of hours of derangement, that hits different. It does, it does hit different. You're right. Yeah, exactly. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. Ross, what are we looking at here? What's going on? Hello, Ross, November, Liam, and Gareth. here. What's going on? Hello. Roz, November, Liam and Gareth. Actually nailed it. Yeah. Now milkshakes here. Nah, F. Until very recently I was one of the sorry few tasked with producing

entire mice to various soup like homogenates in under 30 seconds. Let's go! It's all the old favourites with atmospheric railways, soup like homogenates, it's all the hits today. While in vivo research is a whole disaster on its own, this story comes from the bench work side of the lab. The reason that we need from time to time to make soup from rodents is that it grants us easier access to the smallest parts of the rodents, the molecules. It is much easier to extract redacted target molecule from membrane-less homogenous soup than it is to take it from complex and fiddly organs. Though the tissue homogenizer does most of the work perfectly well, it leaves some microscopic pieces of organs floating around, which can greeble your data in ways that bother corporate

customers. I hate that sentence though. There is, however, a second machine which can be deployed to remove these contaminants, and convert a batch of soup-like homogenate into crystal clear lysate in just about thirty minutes. ALICE & LIAM Cocktail strainer. ALICE Uh huh. JUSTIN That machine is called... the Ultra-Centrifuge.

ALICE I take it back, that's the coolest thing I've ever fucking heard in my life. Searching that on Google immediately. SEAN Your bog standard off the shelf ultra centrifuge can run you nearly $100,000. ALICE Looks like an old timey washing machine costs, as you say, infinity dollars. I just want to throw stuff in here, see what happens.

RILEY I googled it, and the first result is, an introduction to ultra-centrifugation. From Beckham and Coulter. Thank you, Beckham and Coulter. ALICE It generates acceleration as high as one million G, or nine thousand,800 kilometers a second. What? Your bog standard off-the-shelf ultra-centrifuge can run you nearly $100,000, and is capable

of accelerating samples to angular velocities on that same order of magnitude. ALICE I know here a thing in the hazards section which I'm gonna keep to myself assuming that the thing is about this. MIGUEL Oh yes, okay, okay, yep, ditto. We redone. JUSTIN The force applied to these samples maxes out at 150,000 times the force of gravity on Earth, and readily compresses any particulates in your homogenate into an easy to discard pellet.

The subject of today's story is a shorter benchtop model, the rotor of which is about head height for anyone sitting at a bench, and the same room." ALICE Okay. I'm regretting having read the first sentence of the Hazard section, now. JUSTIN On an unspecified day, at an unremarked upon time, a co-worker of mine loaded a rotor, Image B. Filled with samples into the machine and started a run. Now one quirk about the Ultra-Centrifuge is that it screams when it's working normally.

Same. I mean, yeah, yeah. Since the instantaneous linear velocity of the rotor passes through the full range of human hearing on its way to a hundred thousand revolutions per minute. At no point since my co-worker started the run and promptly left the lab did it make any of the correct noises. Oh, I leave the room. Immediately the ultra-centrifuge started to groan and to rattle before going into emergency

shut off. I called this co-worker over since the samples are usually time sensitive and she took the rotor to confirm that she had balanced the samples correctly. I did not notice when she came back since I was busy with my own work but a few minutes later I heard the Ultra-Centrifuge kick back up to 5,000 rpm without issue. The rattling started slowly. It jittered before it jostled and it bumped before it banged. But the growl was sudden. Who had a cool.

The growl is always sudden. Whatever beast they locked in there to spin the samples was unhappy. And after a few thousand more RPM tolerating the mismatch samples, it demanded justice. But not before trying to reach its target speed of one hundred thousand RPM for some reason. Brock. Oh, I don't like this, I don't like this.

Like an industry novel- like an industry novice and a general dumbass. I approached the machine to shut it down manually. ALICE Yeah, just pop the lid, see what happens. LIAM Ugh. Power cycling. ALICE By standing to approach the machine, which should sound poised to fracture at any second, I had moved my abdomen into the danger zone where it would spew debris at any point if the machine fractured from stress. And each step widened the arc I occupied.

Earlier I mentioned the Ultra-Centrifuge's strength in terms of relative forces and angular velocity. The instantaneous linear velocity at this stage approaches 300 miles an hour. Luckily, this model comes equipped with an easily accessed main power switch, and it applies an emergency brake if power is disrupted while the rotor is in motion. When it finally settled down, I paused my work and decided to take lunch early." ALICE Yeah, just almost getting shot with a 300 mile an hour drosser of rat viscera? The sentence both Gareth and I were sort of dancing around reads as follows, the tremendous

rotational kinetic energy of the rotor in an operating ultra-centrifuge makes the catastrophic failure of a spinning rotor a serious concern as it can explode spectacularly. ALICE and LIAM Bring your friends over, watch the rotor explode. It's a spectacle. JUSTIN Just... wild. JUSTIN I cannot say how close the machine came to thoroughly homogenizing a slice of my torso, but I do know any internal damage was covered by our service contract with the manufacturer." Just like breaking bad and trying to do science for crime, but you're like setting up one of these in front of the bulletproof glass at a bank.

They're like, you're not gonna get through this, are you sure? Vrrrrm. Just give me a minute. When the technician was servicing the machine I asked him privately to hide the calibration menu before he left, since I'm pretty sure this is how my co-worker bypassed the emergency shutdown instead of balancing the samples correctly. There probably would have been a failure in the motor of the bearings before any shit really hit the fan, but suffice to say this experience left me with a healthy appreciation for microgram precision balancing and the value of my own life. ALICE Yeah, tracks.

ALICE I will note that one of the main guys in the development of the Ultra Centrifuge was apparently called Dr. Jesse Wakefield Beams, and I note down here, physicist named Dr. Beams didn't even work with lasers. Waste my fucking time. LIAM Yeah, absolute waste. Yep. JUSTIN Sorry this one ran a little long. It didn't run a little long, you should have seen some of the ones that came in recently. Hopefully it gets paired with a short, bloodless disaster.

Respectfully or otherwise, another Biosciences twink. Fantastic. Thank you. That was a great safety third. That was beautiful. Yeah, thank you, thank you Bioscience twink. Yes, that was lovely. I'm delighted to learn about the Ultra-Centrifuge.

Yeah, that's now... I now have several tabs open after the Ultra-Centrifuge, which are going to keep me entertained for a couple more hours. I have several new fears as well. Me too. Like, an Ultra-Centrifuge exploding in, like, a nearby county. Yeah. Yeah.

I... One of the things about moving is that I have my back to a window now, I gotta change that, get behind as solid of a wall as I can. ALICE Understood. RILEY You get that ledge plate up. No, you're quick. Yeah. SEAN Exactly.

Sort of explosive reactive armor, homogenated rodent flies through the window at 5,000 miles an hour. Oh God. It's funny. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Listen to Rail NASA. She said from across the room.

Thank you to Rail NASA. Thank you, distant noble. Yeah, listen to Rail NASA. Buy my book as well, actually, please. Thanks everyone who did. I had a very cool launch event last night in our timeline, which was really fun, in Haussmann's in London, which have lots of copies of the book there if you're struggling to find anyone else. Haussmann's near Kings Cross, great.

It was lovely. We ended up talking about gender in the context of Tech Bros. It was interesting. It was a great chat. So yeah, buy the book and also listen to Kill James Bond, listen to Ten Thousand Losses, listen to No Gods No Mirrors. All the podcasts. All the podcasts.

The smorgasbord of year based entertainment for your enjoyment. And buy tickets for the Fillmore in Philadelphia. To do that. Or the first New York show. Or DC. Pretty please. Buy toys for the children. Buy toys for the children.

Buy toys for the children. Bye everybody. Bye everyone. Bye bye.