Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 177: The Balvano Rail Disaster

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

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Is it going? Is it going? JUSTIN Yeah, it looks like it's going to me. It paid a visit. SEAN Hi, this is Justin in the edit. You may not recognize my voice because I'm being piloted by Liam. Some sort of Kermit situation. We regret to inform you that Roz has been murdered.

SEAN You've seized control of the radio stations. ALICE Ah, yes! Welcome to Radio Free Liam, baby! You've seized control of the radio stations. Ah yes, I've seized control. Welcome to Radio Free Liam, baby. We still have to do a sync point for Devon. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Alright. Okay, so, the way it works, one of us counts down three, two, one, mark, when you hear

Mark just clap, or snap, by a microphone, please. Or say, that's me. Yeah, or just scream. Just really, like, primal, like... Yeah. Make a big, please. Or say, that's me. Yeah, or just scream. Just really like, primal, like... Yeah. Make a big loud peak. Yes, we had that. Exactly.

Alright. Three, two, one, mark. Perfect. Alright, we did it. Okay, hang on. I mean, that was early, but that's okay. No, that's fine. I gotta, I just gotta shut down my torrents real quick, sorry.

It's just gonna be like, bullpuck, you know, and it's all good. Yeah, enough to... yeah. We just wanna avoid our skin being peeled off with flinting knives. Anarchism is about seeding torrents, and the more torrents you seed, the more anarchist you are. Mmhm. I know for a fact you're not assassin me right now. We do a bit of pyrton around these parts.

Information wants to be free, dickhead. Wait, when people know things, they're... wait, that's like, beneficial to society? What do you mean? Something boots, bootmaker. I don't know anything about anarchism, right? Like, in the same way I don't know anything about the Kansas City Chiefs, what do I learn about losers? SEAN What happens in anarchism is you get crushed

by the Soviets. SEAN Fuck you, man! Yes, yes, and then people get real mad at you for recording a podcast. People get real mad at me and the comments, because they're like, why is Liam an anarchist recording with two communists? And it's just like, because they're my pals. SEAN Because we're friends. Like, we're friends.

SEAN Yeah. We're not in the Spanish Civil because they're my pals. Because we're friends. Like, we're friends. We're not in the Spanish Civil War. Oh, but we will be. Yeah, in Marvel's A24 Civil War 2, it might get into kind of a factional situation, and I'm okay with that. So my favorite hypothetical thing to do, or thing to do with hypotheticals, is to say, like, Roz X who you got, so it's just like, Roz Tom from Ten Thousand Loss is who you got, the answer is obviously Tom, by the way.

Well of course, yeah. Well he's got the guns. Kind of, all due respect, Roz V Eddie one is kind of the other guy, but... I disagree, I think there's people that Roz could take. If you went like Roz Timothy Chalamet, right, like, that's the... You'll hear the dead French Canadian, right? That one. How tall is Timothée Chalamet?

He's like, wispy, you know? He's 5'10", so Roz, you got like two inches. I got two inches on him, yeah. I could definitely beat up Ben Shapiro. Oh, you can f*** Ben Shapiro. Hell yeah. I'm not gonna do that. Oh, that's an actual threat against a named person.

Sorry. Yeah, exactly. No, no, don't do that. Anyway. Welcome to a special Italian episode of Well, There's Your Problem. A podcast- Bon giorno. Bon giorno. A podcast about engineering disasters, with slides.

I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I was gonna do a whole bit in Italian, then I realized I don't speak Italian. My name is November Kelly, I'm the person speaking now, my pronouns are she and her, yay Liam. Avanti Liam. Viva Liam. She speaks the third most Italian.

I don't speak Italian. Exactly. Uh, beyond the new. Well, there's your problem. Should I tell Liam? My pronouns are he him? Fuck me. We have a guest. We've got a

a river there, Chee, if in case we haven't gotten the Inglorious Bastards references out of the way. I'm Mark Mark Heiss Huber. You probably know me as Heiss on the the interwebs and YouTube's and the things. And perhaps as Mark at Studio 346. Figure it out. I'm the same person. What is a brand? Who knows? And yeah, my pronouns are he him. Hi. Delighted to be on. Love your guys's pod. Yeah, we're glad to have you on.

This is going to be fun. Now, you see. Oh, do you want us to refer to you real quick as Mark or Heiss? Or is there no preference? Don't give a shit. But fun little aside, I was giving a breakman training to new trainees and our president of the museum at the time of the board couldn't get my attention. He was saying Mark, Mark or whatever. And he finally yells Heiss and he's in his forties.

Like he's not a young, you know, not like he watches my YouTube. And I was like, yeah? Oh, shit. So, either's fine. ALICE The kind of the we have people everywhere moment is... It's striking. ZACH Yeah.

Yeah. It's fine. JUSTIN So, what we have on the screen in front of us is a tunnel. This is a metaphor. Nothing wrong with it, looks fine. Absolutely perfect. Nothing wrong with the tunnel, nothing particularly wrong with it, you'll be happy to know in this episode there's...

It is about trains, but there's no derailment, no fire, no bombing, barely any property damage, no nothing. And it still kills 520 people. That's a lot of people to count. Jesus Christ. That's numbers on the board, and I'm looking at here, like, a functional tunnel, I'm looking at a hole. You're looking at a perfectly good hole, yeah.

It was made for me. Tunnels with trains inside don't bode well sometimes. It's fine. Yes. Today we're gonna talk about the worst disaster in Italian railroad history, which is the Belvano disaster. Everybody remember to be respectful of the great Italian people, nation, culture, etc. etc.

The gallant people of Italy. We're gonna fuck up so bad on that. JUSTIN Yeah. But, before we talk about that, we have to do the goddamn news. ALICE Oh, I have a bit of more breaking news, which is that Garrett Cole, the Yankees ace, has to have Tommy Dodd's surgery, and he's out for 2025. To a socks. that Garrett Cole, the Yankees ace, has to have Tommy Dodd's surgery, and he's out for 2025. Terrible.

ALICE I mean, can this also be the fault of ending DEI initiatives? POSSIBLY. LIAM Yeah, it stands for, don't elbow injure. ALICE They've got that on the wall of the doctor's office. It's just like, PSA, don't fuckin' do that to yourself, idiot. Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this, then don't do that.

Doctor, doctor, why is your fist inside my ass? Uh, I mean, listen. So DEI, I mean, the end of DEI has taken another victim here, as two boats have hit each other. Classic of the genre. A Portuguese flagged container carrier, a small one, crashed into a tanker, an American flagged tanker, I believe it's one of our few Jones Act compliant ones, which was at anchor. Just, you know, slammed right into the side at full speed, the tanker

exploded, a lot of damage to the container ship as well, a lot of injuries, I don't think anyone died. I think both these ships are write-offs. RILEY Yeah, well the front fell off. 80,000 tons of oil fell into the sea, cut fire, it's a bit of a giveaway. ALICE I think they're missing one crew member from the smaller Portuguese ship, which, by the way, was carrying a shitload of sodium cyanide. Which is... we don't know where that is at the moment, but we do know where all of the

jet fuel that the American was carrying is, because it's busy oxidizing, as you say. LIAM It's going up in the air, which is where it was gonna be anyway, so... It's not in an environment, it's been towed outside the environment. It's making its way towards the jets, which is where it wants to be, you know, it's sympathetic resonances, it's like a color-based diet, you know, it's like, you know, it has the energy that it wants to have. Anyway, so, I'm thinking that this is a really bad time to be a mariner if you're kind of like, boat sinking, boat on fire, also cyanide.

You know, that's a bad combination of things to be happening at once. SEAN Hey, you've got a caustic burden of the likes of which no one's ever seen before. Congratulations, here's eight dollars. JUSTIN I bet it's one of those situations where it's like the added sodium actually makes it harmless. Oh, just like- Thank God we're not on a chemistry podcast. This cyanide's only dangerous if you get the low sodium version.

Exactly, exactly. That's just regular H and HCN. I think that's the formula for fuck- A diet chemical burn. Diet chemical burn. Cost-ish. Cost-ish. Cost-ish. I feel like anything with a cyanide in it is gonna be probably pretty dangerous to cellular

respiration, but what do I know? Almonds, Nova. Almonds. I can quite confidently say I do not know. So this, uh, maybe people on Reddit can get mad at me for being confidently wrong again. But this happened in the North Sea, off the coast of Yorkshire, and, uh, coast of Yorkshire is now under a, like, maybe don't breathe the air kind of warning? Which, y'know, it's not great.

It's not like, y'know, sort of HF refinery spill type thing, but it's not great for you to be breathing any of this stuff in. JUSTIN I like how all the containers have puffed up like a lithium ion battery. ALICE Oh no, my shipment of lithium ion batteries! JUSTIN It's fine. It's fine. ALICE So, I mean, we don't know what the oil spill resulting from this is gonna be like, but obviously none'know, obviously none of it's good, right?

JUSTIN Yeah, it's still on fire at time of recording, I believe. ALICE Yeah, this happened pretty much like right before we started recording. Also the American tanker, like, was transporting jet fuel for the US military, which means this was an act of Portuguese anti-imperialist praxis. JUSTIN Yes. means, this was an act of Portuguese anti-imperialist praxis. But also... JUSTIN It was the special F-35 fuel, they're gonna have to spend two and a half billion dollars to make more of it.

SEAN I don't want to be talking about the F-35 anymore, because LaserPick will get mad at me. ALICE I think it's also crucial that this happened a couple of days after Hex has removed all of the woke stuff from the DOD's website, including a photo of the Enola Gay, because it had the word gay in the name. Oh, that's funny. This is what happens, you take away the wokeness and all of a sudden things like this start

happening. So the next US flag tanker you're on, you have to make sure and check that the bridge crew comprises a diverse mix of racial, ethnic, gender, and religious identities, okay? trans woman who is aromantic and indigenous, yeah. ALICE Yeah, so, we dunno, basically. But it feels like this is just part of a general illomined moment in any kind of transportation, right? Like, I know that's a statistical anomaly, but I think it's more fun to say that it's because of Trump.

So... Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean, y'know, the only thing we haven't seen, I mean, we have seen a big train wreck, we've seen a couple of them recently, but that's like, the normal amount of train wrecks. We haven't seen one involving an M-Trak train yet, so that's probably next up. Um. Mm. Well, I mean, I hope you're not touching the lathe.

SEAN I hope not either, I tried to get all the lathe touching in last episode. RILEY But, you know, that the United States is going to be sunk shortly, so that kind of fits in. ALICE Just throw the whole United States out into the ocean and sink it. RILEY Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yeah, that's what they're doing. She's on her way, unfortunately.

SS United States recently left the dock in Philly, toe-toed it all the way around to Mobile, Alabama, for asbestos abatement. They're going to sink it off the coast of Florida as an artificial reef. I didn't think it with the asbestos. The fish will get mesothelioma. Exactly. Dig that way to go, man. Yeah. I suppose it's better than it getting scrapped, but that's sad either way.

I was surprised it made it. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was rickety as being probably a little generous. I have a friend who used to be in the conservancy and quit and discussed, I think. And yeah, they were like, yeah, it's gonna sink. It didn't sink. I mean, it will sink, eventually, but that's the deliberate sinker. She's made of iron, sir. Yeah.

Oh, aluminum! Oh. Yeah. Is it really? Yeah, all things aluminum. I did not know that. I guess that would explain the speediness, but... Yeah, exactly.

At least with the name it doesn't feel Not a low person. Trained person over here. ALICE At least with the name it doesn't feel like a metaphor for great things. JUSTIN SS United States to be sunk off the coast of Florida. No way. No. Yeah. ALICE It's like after Trump got elected the first time

people started finding all those dead bald eagles. Real thing, by the way. I remember seeing the news story the day after it got inaugurated the first time, somebody just found a bald eagle face down in a swamp, and I'm like, what do you want from me? Like, cause... God has a peculiar sense of humor. It's difficult not to believe in omens at times like this, y'know? In other news...

Why is this memory a course of zip? In other news... Uh. Trump and JD Vance... Why is this memory a course zip? Yeah. Yeah. Trump and JD Vance got really mad at Zelensky for not wearing a suit. The thing is... Shut the fuck up! Okay, wow.

Jesus. Not you. Not you. I guess the thing is, irrespective of all of the JD Vance edits, that... Him leaving into it makes me wanna c*** myself, by the way. I kind of feel like the Russia gate libs have indicated here, in the sense that whether or not the piss tape is real, and Donald Trump is being remote controlled from Moscow with the promise of the piss tape being released, he wouldn't act any differently if he were, right?

This is like, 100% the same in outcomes, if not in process. Because the whole, like, sort of core assumptions of American foreign policy are just being demolished here. And all in Russia's favor, which is fun. JUSTIN You know, I figured this would end in some kind of brokered solution immediately, but now that it's happening I find myself very mad about it. ALICE They're actually too stupid to...

I mean, if it makes you feel any better, right? I had the similar kind of feeling from the opposite side with Syria, right? Where I was like, well, I know it might be bad, but, you know, Assad's gone, I'm gonna let myself hope for like a week, and then, you know, now obviously there are very good reasons to stop doing that. So, yeah, it just... ALICE People getting kidnapped in broad daylight. ALICE Yeah, it turns out even if you win you kind of still lose.

Which, uh... Mm. I did not support a... I wanna make that very fucking clear, but if I have to do that... No, I know, I know. Jesus Christ. I never ever commented on any of that shit, cause I knew I didn't understand it. Yeah. I... Listen.

At the risk of sounding like the guy in my neighborhood. Yeah, man. I mean, I listened. Imperialism is bad no matter what flag it happens to be wearing. You have Assad in your neighborhood? I don't have Assad. We don't know where he's like supposedly in Moscow, but like, I don't know if you're like, hey, a new optometrist just opened up around from me.

Guy looks weird as hell. Yeah. Yeah, sure. I do need a new optometrist, so we're gonna find out. It's like that guy they captured in the mid 2000s who had been the architect of a bunch of Rwandan war crimes. ALICE Oh, god. Yeah, well I mean, when they captured Ratko Mladic, he had been working as a tantric sex

coach. So like, the second career of the war criminal is, like, an interesting one, right? So... But yeah, no, so, obviously this is very very bad and infuriating, and I think you can even at this point do worse than to sympathize with, y'know, just live out, become like a NAFO kind of dog person. Yeah. Like, because they were kind of right.

Like, y'know. Oh, those comments are not gonna be kind to you, Nova. I know, but listen, the thing is, right, like, Russia started the fucking war, it's been a series of war crimes and crimes of aggression, and the US was obviously supporting Ukraine for cynical reasons, obviously there were bad elements in Ukraine they were supporting, but this is the... even within that internal logic this is one of the worst things you could do. This would be the thing you wanted to do if you wanted to cause Ukrainian 9-11.

Like, fucking... a bunch of Azov guys blow up the Capitol or something in like ten years time. JUSTIN Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, yeah, the Azov battalion's gonna have 9-11 us, they're also gonna shoot Zelensky. I mean, y'know, all this is... this is not a great outcome, guys. ALICE No. And the thing is, there was a kind of opportunity for a limited sellout here, if Trump and Vance had been smarter, but they're not. The guys that they are, and so, even in selling out Ukraine they had to do it in the stupidest

possible way that alienated the most people, and fucked with the US the most. JUSTIN I will say that if anyone has access to long rumored Ukrainian loose nukes, it's probably Azov Battalion. SEAN I mean, I- ALICE So you want to explain what's going on in your basement there, Ross? JUSTIN That's not mine. Ukrainian loose nukes, it's probably Azov Battalion. ALICE I mean, I- SEAN So you wanna explain what's going on in your basement there, Ross? RON That's not mine. ALICE Yes.

These belong to some Ukrainian guy on Twitter. SEAN I don't know, yeah, you guys don't even know, fuck you! ALICE I got these from my optometrist. SEAN I had to explain that Libya armed the IRA the other day to my wife, and that was- ALICE Gaddafi! Gaddafi was just doing shit. other day to my wife, and that was... She goes, Gadaffi! Gadaffi was just doing shit. I was like, oh my god, just a guy!

I was like, no, a man of many things! Yeah, so, I dunno. I've been infuriated by this, it's been making me feel crazy. And just everything since the fucking Vance speech in Munich, where he's like, you know, Europe is fucking woke and gay now so you can get fucked, I've just been like... I want- I always wanted the US empire to collapse, but not like this. Yeah. We would've preferred another white tale, but... Yeah.

Speaking of war crimes... Don't yell at me in the comments. JUSTIN In other news... ALICE It's Hitler time. It is now Hitler time. JUSTIN Yeah, we're doing Hitler stuff. The administration has pledged to start deporting students on foreign visas who support Palestine, which they call Supporting Hamas.

ALICE Yeah. It's flagrantly unconstitutional, but it remains to be seen if the courts will bother to stand up to that at all, and even if they do, who knows if they're gonna enforce it. There are specific green card protections, I mean I know I'm going full resistance, but like, come on now, dickheads. Yeah, this is Mahmoud Khalil. Also, fucking doing it like shalom, it's like, again, I've said it before, not in my fucking name. I might be Catholic now, I don't know, but, nah, still got the circumskision... circumskision.

Circumskism? ALICE We can't all become Catholic before we do the Catholicism bonus episode. They can't give us a total, like, across the board win before we fucking put the episode out. like, a cross-the-board win before we fucking put the episode up. Yeah. This is Mahmoud Khalil, he's a graduate student at Columbia University, they just sort of vanned him a couple days ago because he was doing negotiations at one of the big Palestine

encampments at Columbia. He had his student visa revoked, but he had a green card, and they're also like, oh well we're revoking your green card. ALICE That was the thing, it was clown shoe shit, because they showed up to be like, your student visa's revoked, and you're getting deported, but when he told them that he had a green card, they didn't really know what to do, because they didn't know that, which they're the government that you're kinda supposed to. And they're like, okay, sure, well I guess we're gonna revoke that and deport you too.

So like, this is, like I say, it is massively, massively illegal. One thing I will say is that at the moment it's still not normalized yet, to the point that it's scaring even like fucking lib, squishy libs like Jonathan Chait or whoever, so maybe that's gonna make a difference, I dunno. But I just... The thing about resist libs, right, and I've been saying this for a while, is that they're not wrong about Trump, that was never the problem, right? And when we said to, like, you know, not to vote for Harris, or Biden, or whatever, and I stand by those things,

it doesn't mean that they weren't right about Trump, it's just that they were the ones who are happy to lay the groundwork for him on this. This is something that, like, a democratic president might well have tried to do in a more legalized way. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, I could see that. I could definitely see if they had kept the war in Gaza at, you know, a more brisk pace as Biden seemed to want to do. They might be doing exactly the same thing. But it'd be like the kids in cages, right?

They weren't a problem when Biden was doing it. They were a problem when the cameras were running, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. But that's also not the reality we live in, so. We live in a reality where Trump is president, and they're not gonna fucking do... Columbia's response has been, I don't know, shameful, to say the least.

Strike. Strike. Strike your asses. You have to treat all of these institutions as your enemy, right? The university, whether that's the Republican party, the Democratic party, right, the kind of distinctions don't really matter at this point. JUSTIN Every institution is your enemy now. The FAA, the uh...

ALICE Oh! Oh! Oh! Except for the Vanguard party, we're gonna start any day now. Any day now we're gonna do it. Come on, be an anarchist, it's more fun! You gotta go protest everything. Go protest a Tesla dealership.

Go protest Amtrak, I don't care. Yeah, go do whatever you want to a Tesla dealership. I don't know if we have that in the news, but it is pretty funny to watch their stockpiles just boom. Check this shit out liberal and not just theirs, but also everybody else's with this tariff shit, which should have been a slide. A thousand points in a day, baby. Yeah.

Fucking amazing. So what, so my dad used to be a bankruptcy attorney before he retired and he did a lot of like, you know, small business bankruptcies. He did personal bankruptcies and he, he was always just like, Oh yeah, the economy's crashing. Oh, this is so fucking great. And that's like, I'm like, Oh yeah. I mean, it's, it's bad for like my, my savings. So I'm trying to buy a house, but also like, yeah, yeah, you want it. Yeah. I have a social worker, baby. I'm recession proof.

Yeah. I mean, I, I'm sort of, I, I mentioned this a bit in the last bit, but it's like, I love the collapse of the United States apart from the fact that a bunch of my friends live there, and also my country is entirely dependent on it. So, you know. JUSTIN And your state has already collapsed. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically. So... LIAM Sarkir!

He's not gonna... Sarkir! I thought not gonna... Sir Keer! I thought that he... Aw. Yeah, I dunno. I welcome the collapse, but I would encourage it to go further. You couldn't... Okay, well, you're seeing my dad on Saturday, so you two can just bro out over the accelerationism.

Wednesday, you're seeing him on Wednesday. But yeah, in the meantime this is obviously terrifying and is intended to terrify you, so the thing you should do is not be terrorized but to, y'know, fucking... Again, if your form of resistance is to do the pink pussy hat I think it's kinda pathetic but it's better than nothing. So, Christ. ALICE Also, she won't, because, uh, no, you know what, I'm not going to, because I want Nova to be admitted to the United States, pretty

please. ALICE Yes, yeah, thank you. ALICE Hello, DHS! D A H S Hello Customs and Border Protection, hello State Department, thanks for listening. Please approve my visa. SEAN Yeah, and that reminds me, I forgot to put in a slide about the tour, so pretend that's here.

That was the goddamn news. Why'd you say tour like that? Okay, so now the picture for the tour should be up. I don't steal that. No, stop. Oh, we gotta- oh yeah. I forgot to put it in. So, we are, we have tickets left in Philly, we have tickets left for the first night of New York,

please come buy those, please come see us. I believe some of the tickets in New York have gotten cheaper. Yes, yes, you're welcome. Through methods that are inscrutable to us. Exactly. I just approve those emails, I don't read them. Dictated but not read. Yeah.

I have one more announcement, actually, which is, I guess we could also put it in the video description. We have a website now! Really? Oh, yeah. It only took us, what, like four years? Yeah, exactly. I gotta set up your email addresses, so when it goes to Roz, well there's your problem,

it just bounces to Roz's gmail address. If anyone wants Roz's gmail address, or his cell phone number, you guys know where to find me. Oh god. We need to get a lay back on in a hurry so she can dox you again. Oh god. Alright, let's talk about the upside down train. Yeah, so- The what?

The upside down train. Let's talk about- It fully muscle-in. Yeah, so. The what? The upside down train. It's fully Mussolini'd itself? Okay. Okay, so. Okay, yeah, yeah. That's what we're into, visual guy. I am a hack. What do you want from me?

Low, hanging fruit. Much like Mussolini himself. Yeah. So, I guess weolini himself. Yeah. So I guess we'll start with some context. I did not mean fruit in a sexually derogatory sense. I just mean that he was stronger from a lamp post. Calling Mussolini like the EFLR is a great bet as well, because I'm not doing that. I can't do that. I will leave that to you. I am an ally.

See, caught my clenched fist here. All right, talk to me about this dead bitch. All right, this is Mussolini. Benito Mussolini. He was the fascist dictator of Italy. One thing people like to say about him is Say what you want about him, but at least he made the trains run on time. ALICE Not true. SEAN Not true. ALICE Myth. Famous myth. SEAN Yes.

You can go to the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions. ALICE I mean, one kind of thing is, even though this is a myth pre-war, one thing that really stops the trains from running on time is getting bombed a lot, and we were doing that, and he helped start the war, so... ALICE There were certain politically important luxury trains that started running on time better, and they put, y'know, fascist guards with fancy uniforms on them, and everyone loved them. You know, so, that was it. ALICE I feel like fancy uniforms was the main contribution

of Italy's fascism. ALICE Pretty much, yeah. That and, like, the futurism. ALICE Yeah, although even then, like, it's kind of... I mean, fascism's this, like, mix, this marriage between the revolutionary and the sentimental conservative, right? So, every time it gets pinned down on one it retreats into the other, and so you get the Arno Breaker, kind of, Nazi statues, but you also get the chocolate box kitsch

kind of, like, high-mast shit. So yeah, I dunno, not even that, maybe. Yeah. Mark, are you still there, or have you said anything in a while? I'm here, I had not much to contribute to previously, but, uh, mm. Yeah, do you have any actionable threats against any named persons? I do not have an actionable threat against any named persons. I do just wish that, you know, humans would look at other humans and other living things

and be like, yeah, that's important, I treat myself this way, maybe I should treat everyone else this way. And there seems to be a distinct lack of that. That's important. I treat myself this way, maybe I should treat everyone else this way. And there seems to be a distinct lack of that. ALICE Apparently empathy is a sin now, I don't know if you've heard. So... I don't wanna...

ZACH Apparently, I'm a very empathetic person, and listening to the politics section was a little challenging on my end, because it was very depressing. But, such is life these days, I guess. Here we are. ALICE Yeah, I'm sorry that we make all of our guests sit through a kind of mandatory 20 minute segment of us making actionable threats against naming persons.

JUSTIN It's fine. That's what I say, right? Before I do a shot of whiskey, it's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah, it is a wee bit hilarious that, I didn't know this about Mussolini, people will come to learn about me. People looking like, oh, you work in vintage train things and you're on YouTube talking about old trains. And I'm like, yeah, I'm an engineer. And I'm neurodivergent. I really like the train part. I didn't get the history part. So I did not know these statements about Mussolini, which is kind of fun and hilarious to learn. But yeah, no, no one in power has the charge of whether or not a train's on time. Like, yeah, they can they can approve like, oh, yes, comrade, our train will be on time. They can do that. And

that's great. But, you know, every other train, you know, like normal day to day operations. No, that's not going to happen. What do you think? Like, it's the same thing about, I dunno, prices of eggs. Anyway. ALICE I would say the closest to anything directly that someone did to make the train run on time, was that when Lennon was being covertly returned to St. Petersburg, he was disguised as the Stoker on the locomotive. And apparently he was very good at it.

ALICE Just realizing you're kind of missing the career you're really inspired for as you go back to like, Seas Power. JUSTIN Everyone would have preferred you being a fireman than what you did. ALICE I would not. No, I would not. But, you know. JUSTIN Well, you know...

SEAN I do like the idea that I thought I would be writing poetry after the war, but it's just leaded, and just like, when do I get to shovel more coal? So, yeah, they do fascism in Italy for a while, that leads to them getting into, of course, World War Two. ALICE Is that Monte Cassino? JUSTIN Yes. ALICE Ah, yeah.

That's arguably an Allied war crime, and certainly a strategic piece of futility. LIAM Wonder, yeah. But hey, we won the war, so... JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Yeah, well, Mark Clark, in particular, kind of forced the bombing of this very ancient monastery, destroyed a bunch of very very old manuscripts and art and stuff, because it was on top of a hill, the Germans were in it but they weren't really using it and they ended up fighting out of the craters and it was a whole fucking thing, it's just

disastrous all around. The whole Allied campaign in Italy is like, ego and stupidity, it's wild stuff. ALICE Yeah, we'll talk about some of that in a bit. Um, and I killed my great uncle who again was maybe killed by Germans. Although by that point, 300,000 Italians were fighting. It's not, it's not relevant. Yeah. This is Charlie. The war goes pretty poorly for Italy enough so that they, yeah. And once they surrendered, Hitler was like, Oh no, you don't.

And he invaded. ALICE We must defend the Gothic line, which went so well. ALICE It's a great combat mission game, though. JUSTIN They wind up being occupied in the north by the Axis, which included occupying themselves. ALICE The Italian Social Republic, which is the setting of Salò, the Pasolini movie.

Yeah yeah yeah. Social Republic, which is the setting of Salò, the Pasolini movie. Yeah. Yeah. And, y'know, the war essentially ended in southern Italy, relatively quickly, it was just like, okay, we're under Allied control now, whatever. Yeah, we're all doing like Godfather Part II shit, and... We're just like, Godfather Part I, whatever, Sicily's cool, right? It's a bunch of like, Michael Corleone's there, it's fine. Yeah, exactly.

Now, during Allied occupation the economy was all kinds of fucked up, right? If you're in a port city, something like Naples or Rome's... Rome's singular. Rome's. Rome's, yeah. That was only the one. Yeah. They captured Rome, but there was a bunch of, they didn't destroy the German 10th.

There was a bunch of, I don't know, mismanagement of the war, we'll say. Yeah, go on. So it's relatively easy to come by things like clothing and cigarettes, all kinds of stuff the American military was bringing in on Liberty ships and stuff. There wasn't much food. Food was harder to come by. In the countryside, the situation was reversed, right? Now, the problem there was that travel was pretty restricted, so the main way-

ALICE You gotta steal a bicycle. There's a whole thing about that. The main way of fixing- LIAM It's not how you ride a bicycle, my bad. JUSTIN Use the other appendage. It's fine. LIAM Yeah, I gotcha. I can't see me peddling, but I sure am. ALICE The main way of fixing this economic imbalance was to stow away on a freight train and go

barter out in the countryside, right? I was a thing in, like, early occupation Japan as well. Like people getting out of Tokyo to go back to their family, like, hometowns and stuff, and try and get, y'know, whatever they would harvest. It's a thing generally with trains, it's one of the darndest things, y'know, people bum around the country and bum a ride, whatever country it is, on trains when they can. I had somebody do so, and they decided to hop off at 50 miles an hour at the shop I used to work at for the BMSF, and he insisted that I don't call an ambulance,

but his, y'know, whatever bone is attached to the shin, I'm an engineer, not a medical person, being sticking out through his knee made me say, nah, no matter who you are, you need to go. You may need an ambulance. Yeah. We don't love to see an open fracture. Yeah, that was pretty gross. It was a fun time.

Folks, train hopping is dangerous. You can and will get turned to pasta sauce if you fuck up. Don't do it. We tell the train crew, we tell the goddamn train crew not to get on and off moving equipment. Don't fucking hitch a train, please, if I can say one thing in this episode. So, during this time in Italy, of course, the train service is actually pretty poor, but it's also Balkanized, right? There's some trains being dispatched by-

Shoes on the other foot, Italy tries to Italianize the Balkans and ends up Balkanizing Italy. Old country run the train like this. That's gone poorly. Yes, it's gone. Some of the trains are dispatched by the Italian state railways, and some are dispatched by the Allied command. There's not very much coordination, there's some pretty poor communication, passenger service is especially bad, so a lot of times no one actually knows what's running on which line with whose equipment and how and where.

Also the crane situation in Philly. Yeah. This just sounds like the railroad. Like literally, the amount of times I sent gifs of Led Zeppelin playing communication breakdown to my coworkers on a day to day basis when I work for the railroad. Yeah.

This is a day that ends in Y. ALICE Oh yeah. So now most of these trains were these wonderful things called Steam Locomotives. ALICE Fantastic. Beautiful. Great technology. JUSTIN We love these. And I have to say, you've picked a very very very specific, really really stupid one to

use for your diagram. But I'm here for it. You know what? I just realized a bunch of extra stuff on there. Yeah. Yeah, this is Andre Champlain's one or whoever his name is, right? Ha ha. This is a French chuchu with four cylinders. Much power and small space. Apparently, I don't know. It was it was a shitpost of a locomotive. But yes, it does make a good diagram, apparently. I don't know. It was a shitpost of a locomotive, but yes. It does make a good diagram though.

ALICE Yeah. So, what is a steam train? JUSTIN It's literally, we're doing the Simpsons bit of like, Le Grille. Locomotive Vapour. What the hell is that? BLAIR Dumpflock. ALICE Dumpflock. What is that? Yeah, it's a bomb on wheels. It's a bomb on wheels, Billy. I mean, it is James Watts invention taken to a horrifying final modern and quote unquote modern being like, you know, 1920 ish. Yeah. But yeah, steam train.

You have a steam engine, which is the bottom bit. And you've got the bomb, which is the top bit, the boiler. And, you know, you put all those things together and you can make lots of stuff move and they're really good at making lots of stuff move. Yeah. You make a fire. It boils some water. It makes the steam use the steam and rather than reuse it like a sensible marine kind of situation, you violently vomited out the stack,

which causes the fire to get real, real hot. And you get rid of all the fiery gases and all that stuff, which may or may not be important to the rest of this episode. Out the stack and you know, hopefully it goes out into the stratosphere and meets the jets like the jet fuel we talked about. But you know, maybe it doesn't. So yeah, it's fine. Yeah. There is an issue where you're making all this smoke and steam, but sometimes trains go in holes. So how do we compensate for that? JUSTIN Stupidly.

Yeah. ALICE Oh wow. I was really hoping that the answer would be invent electric locomotives, which eventually, but this is out. JUSTIN No, no, no, so not even eventually. This is the fun of this. OK, so we understood this intrinsically as the US very early, much earlier than this story takes place. Look up the Great Northern Railway of the US. We've done stories on my YouTube channel about it previously,

where they had electrified in the teens, the 1900s, you know, 100 years ago, plus, and they ran through the longest tunnel in the teens, the 1900s, you know, 100 years ago, plus and they ran through the longest tunnel in the US, which is seven miles. And they use the electric power just for that. But even before that tunnel existed, all those things, all that fun. But all these steam examples that you're showing on the slide are hilarious to me, except the cab for the cab for it's bad ass. I've seen everyone like everyone likes the cab forward. It did a video about it. Except the cab forward. The cab forward's badass, I've seen it. Everyone likes the cab forward, yeah. Did a video about it, it's kickass.

You could've used a worse cab forward, which we need not discuss, North Pacific Coast, number 21. So, as I interpret this, three solutions to the same problem. Problem is, if you're in a tunnel, everything is gonna get filled with choking steam and smoke, and that's not good, because people need to breathe air. So, solution number one. We do a fume hood type deal, and we just make you wear this in a tunnel. Yes.

Yeah, and so, the hilarious thing about this, anyone who's ever worked on a locomotive regardless of a steam locomotive will understand how terrible this is. This is it's like a gas mask. Southern Railway did this and I've been meaning to do a video for a long time on this. They plugged the gas mask into the main reservoir of the air system on the locomotive. So okay, it's air. It's air. Yes. But you're getting damp steam locomotive air compressor scuzzy disgusting milky air. I wouldn't...

But when I asked my friends, we literally all said, no, I would never put that on, I would rather just put a rag over my mouth and nose. That is disgusting. It's literally like, I want to read some ventilated air so I'm gonna hook up a big tube to the fan on the back of my computer. And just like, take a big inhale of that. Especially your computer, and the air is contained within. Oh, you're assuming it's not moist already.

Listen, there's some things going on in that case I don't care to account for. Oh. That's valid and fair, but the drip... Screw down your hard drives properly! The drip that comes out of the main reservoir looks like chocolate milk. Mmm! Tasty! So, just breathe the chocolate milk that is not chocolate, nor is it milk, it is steam cylinder oil.

Why are all the things that are worse for me so delicious looking? Why does lead taste so good? I had to try the mummy water. RON Yeah, there's still time, Ross. ALICE So, so, so that's one. Solution two, uh, second funniest to me, what if we put the steam in a tube, and we run that tube all the way, there will be blood style out the back of the thing, so it's not my problem anymore.

So this sort of thing kills draft, right? We talked about ejecting the steam with great velocity out the top of the smoke box, which is the front bit, which is not pressurized. That's where the gases and the steam mix. It goes out a literal rocket nozzle called the blast nozzle, which induces a normal shock wave inside the smoke box to suck those gases out quite violently. And putting it through a long tube reduces the effectiveness of that. So you don't get the same draft, which means this locomotive would steam like shit. It would not do well.

ALICE They did this for war locomotives, like, underneath sometimes. We've talked about it before, to hide steam clouds. ALICE The steam, like... ZACH They would've steamed like crap. They would've sucked to fire, they wouldn't have made steam, but like, if you gotta be sneaky you gotta be sneaky, but if you're trying to use a locomotive and like, I dunno, move some tonnage, which, well, I mean, no offense to my British friends here, you know, the Brits were not known for doing compared to what we did over here.

I mean, it's a smaller country. One thing we did do, right, freight trains. Yeah, smaller country, more dens. I love British trains, but I do love giving the Brits shit, too. You know, you would've been fine with that. Ah, who won the fucking war anyway? Without us you'd all be speaking German. Well, you know, it's the details.

Who's to search? Who's to search? Goes back to the politics section and you scratch your head and go, mmm. But anyway. And then solution number three, what if I'm in front of the big scary bomb, and the bomb is just doing its thing behind me and I don't have to worry about it? Exactly. And solution number three is actually fucking kickass.

I've seen that exact locomotive, it is a tragedy that there are not more of these because the Southern Pacific built several hundred like this. It's catford. Put the cab in front. They were extremely successful. They had 12 classes of although the AC nine was not kept forward. Whatever. They had what they called articulated console consolidations. AC and they were AC one through AC twelve. And they're fantastic. That engine is preserved in Sacramento, California. California State Railroad Museum. Amazing museum, if you can

go. Seen that. ALICE I have maybe a stupid question. RILEY It's just incredible. Yeah. ALICE My stupid question is, I see the coal working behind it. RILEY It's not coal. That's how. ALICE Not coal. RILEY Yeah. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN What? JUSTIN You're so British it hurts. ALICE I hear this so often.

JUSTIN How could it not burn coal? It's a steam train. ALICE If I was Swiss I would say where do you put the wood, right? If I was a Marine I would say where do you put the bayonet. This is just an essential characteristic to the thing. National stereotypes are hurtful facts. The better part of half of the engines in the US burned oil, fuel oil and the Southern Pacific being located, I don't know, damn Texas friend.

And all along the south and up into California, have large sources of oil to utilize. So they burn fuel oil. It is an oil burning locomotive and the firebox. I mean, the firebox is gargantuan. You can see it in there and they've got the oil burner and you get to see it. It's super neat. What a fantastic artifact. But, you know, they just plumbed everything to the cab, which is one of those hilarious little things about this kind of engine versus any other kind of engine where, yeah, you have to bring everything from the tender,

which is still behind up to where you can control it and then back to where it goes. So yeah, the oil comes from the tender from the bunker up to the cab where the firing valve is for the firemen, then to the burner. The water comes from the tender runs all the way. You know, I mean, this is a huge locomotive. This is bigger than anything they built in Britain by a factor of four. Well, size isn't everything. Well, it's true. It's how you use it. We know this and you guys have the speedy boys and we'll we'll we'll let that be.

But not not not to one trust is going to fix that. Oh, man, you guys are on my side, I love that. I love that. Yeah. Duck for dinner, anyway. Well, it's not as pressing. And, well, you know, again, beauty in the eye of the beholder. First, well, those are your problem episodes, but end in a fistfight.

He said this locomotive wasn't pretty, and I'm going to fly to Britain right now. Anyway. Tell me you're neurodivergent without. Anyway. It's like, what's the purpose of your visit? Combat. Yes. Somebody has to go down.

All in all, British trains, lovely. American trains, lovely. Very different purposes, very different things. All the stuff. Who cares? Whatever. Blah, blah, blah. Imagine plumbing 100 feet almost of water from the tender to the injector

that's in the engine to then plummet almost 100 feet back to where it needs to go into the boiler. A little stupid. Lots of extra work, lots of extra rework, which is why these things were not common. The Southern Pacific having the ridiculous amount of tunnels that they had. It made sense. They made a ton of these. They used them all the time.

Amazing locomotives. And it's a shame we only have the one. But the one we have is one of the last and one of the best. And it is truly an engineering marvel. And we're very thankful to have it for reasons that we will learn about very shortly from Justin. ALICE What can we say other than restore it and run it on the main line? JUSTIN Exactly!

Well, SP, there's details there, but who cares. ALICE But like, if I'm doing all of this, this is exhausting, can't we just electrify the thing? LIAM No, shut up. ALICE Okay. JUSTIN So, y'know, most people do that. String the wire! And they say that.

Roz? Yes. You know how much wire you'd have to string? You know how much maintenance that would cause? You know how many meth heads we have in the US that would steal the wire? Well, you know, these are problems. It's called Keynesianism, what you do is you string the wire, that requires a bunch of wire stringers, and then you station a railroad cop every ten meters, like a presidential

motorcade's coming through, to just, like, shoot anybody who tries to steal the wire. That's jobs, and then pretty soon everybody's either working as a wire stringer or a railroad cop, and nobody's left to steal the copper. JUSTIN Yeah, I like this plan. It's a good plan. SEAN Well there's your to steal the copper. Yeah, I like this plan. It's a good plan. Well there's your problem make-work program. And they say Leninists don't know how to organize an economy. I mean, uh, y'know.

It's central planning at its finest. When I was at the BNSF we had three cops for the Northwest Division, three for the Northwest Division, which is a small division. And when I worked at Transit we had overhead overhead contact systems stolen all of it, like several miles worth, it's fine. And you know, several miles worth in Transit versus the, I dunno, 32,000 miles of just that one railroad. Details.

You get the idea. ALICE I mean, this is kind of like, it reflects a fundamental inadequacy of the American criminal, right, because it shows a lack of ambition, right? Steal the wires, whatever, fine. Show me, like, if you're telling me that, you know, a steam locomotive is safe because it's harder to steal, you need a better class of thief, right? Start stealing steam locomotives. Yeah!

And then running it on the main line. Of course. Like, the general? Uh, many options for that, including an episode three quarter show where we talked about the CB stealing South Korean locomotives, which was hilarious, but another story for another time. So my understanding with running steam locomotives in tunnel, in the tunnel is that you're not, you're not supposed to open the firebox because the flames all shoot out at you.

Is that a thing or is that like something I made up that that depends on the draft for all my viewers drink? That's the fun. Everything depends. Everything is situational. Nothing's black and white. Everything's kind of gray, right? So if you've got a good head of steam, you're working hard. You're working the engine hard and it's ejecting shit out the stack. It's going to draft everything in. I mean, that point of context, when you put in the snow shovel

size shovel to put coal in the back corners, when you're working hard, it is trying to rip that shovel out of your hands like somebody pulling you away from a car that's going to hit you. Like it is a crazy amount of force from the air. So no, it's not going to blow back. If you've got that draft, if you don't that air pressure back down the stack. Oh man, it'll blow flames out the cab six feet. I mean, to touch the tender and beyond. Oh my God. It's that. That's not a fun time. So I mean, what I'm hearing is make sure you got enough power.

And the other one, of course, don't stall. Yeah, don't don't do that. That's that's not great. And ideally, you know, like just in case because power is variable. Train's running slow. The draft is variable. You fire before you go in and then you hope that the fire is going to take you all the way through typically. But there you go. You never know. And that the fire's gonna take you all the way through.

Typically. But, ehhh. You never know. That's like, root knowledge, right? Like, I have to fire the thing this much in order to get through this tunnel, which I know is this long beforehand. Exactly. Sure, yeah.

And that's- Not always possible, because it's not an ideal world, and I dunno, maybe the same guys who came and stole all of the copper wire have lengthened the tunnel by ten feet, or like- Yeah. Well, conversely, stolen part of the tunnel. Me and my gang of tunnels- Tunnel thieves. Me and my gang of tunnel thieves have removed about ten feet of the mountain.

Oh no, Henry! Sorry. Somebody stole my tunnel, now it's just a fucking normal round. They daylighted the tunnel. Does that happen all the time? It's fine. Alright, so yeah, that's steam locomotives in tunnels. Now sometimes you also do something fun, which is, what if you operate two steam locomotives

on the front of the train? Roam into each other. Yeah. So that is an intrinsically fun time of, everyone always asks, are there controls for that? Like, how do you talk to the other engineer? And it's a lot of, I feel with my butt what I must do. Oh yeah, like rally directions, yeah. Right, like it's literally the road engine, which is the engine in the back, which the engine, the train is typically designated with in the U.S.

So in this case, it'd be extra four seventy five because four seventy five is in the back. Is this Yowie or Yuri? That's the real question. Yeah. Mm hmm. Got to think about those things. That engine is going to work. It work. It's not soft. It's going to work as hard as it can. Balls to the wall, everything.

And then the helper is going to try and stay out of its way. Basically, like pull hard enough that you're pulling away and you're and you're maintaining whatever speed you need to maintain. Because any time you're doing a bang, bang, bang, between the two of them, you shoot yourself in the foot. And you'll feel it. If the engineers are not in sync, the train will not orgasm. It's very true.

ALICE Okay, so it's Yowie, then. Okay, right. We've settled the question. ZACH Fowlick! ALICE Just doing some feminism and wondering why the lack of Yonic sort of steam-like organisms. It's like, no one has designed a pressure vessel that way, but I think that's telling. Hoop stress. It's easy to make it look like a dick.

You can tell the male dominance in the railroad industry. It's fine. Do you also use whistle codes for this, or is it, y'know? ZACH Every railroad is unfortunately different, because of course they are. Because that's just the way they wanna be. We do out in the West, very much so. JUSTIN Okay. So we also have to talk about coal. ALICE Coal. Coal. I've heard of this.

JUSTIN Yes. ALICE You love it. If you don't have a bunch of petroleum just coming out of the ground in Texas or wherever, you have to use this. Solidified dinosaur. Yeah. The OG spicy rock. Solidified dinosaur food, right?

Yeah, it's not actually dinosaurs, yeah. It's all like, sort of dead plant material and stuff that go up, like... It got crushed before bacteria developed that could break down, and I forget which plant part... Yeah, it's one of the most effective carbon sinks. Yes. Until you burn it. That's its natural problem.

Yeah, well then you're destroying the thing, and the carbon comes back out, and that's a whole problem for everybody. But like... LIAM Well, what we clearly have to do is make more coal. ALICE Yup, start crushing up more plants. LIAM Yeah, real quick. ALICE But yeah, this is... LIAM We're on a timeline here, let's go.

ALICE This is one of the most effective carbon sequestration things ever devised, which we incidentally use to make trains go fast sometimes. Right. Coal burning's a huge part of railway stuff, particularly over in your land, Nova. They're actually freaking out that they've stopped mining the Welsh coal, and it'll be the end of the railway, and that actually one of my good friends is helping you guys convert things to burn the liquid diet, which you'll figure out, hopefully. ALICE Burn the liquid diet is such a hell of a phrase.

ALICE So much better than, y'know, in the windiest fucking country on earth, being like, where are we gonna get electricity, to turn a turbine of some kind, I dunno, it's a mystery to me. RILEY Yeah, what are you gonna do? I mean, it's as if anybody has the technology to split the atom, y'know? Or anything like that, yeah. Nuclear? I think we call it nuclear over here.

It's pronounced nu-killer. Despite the impression that you get living here six months out of the year, the sun does shine on the United Kingdom, so you can also use that, maybe. And then you just... ALICE God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark. ALICE You shouldn't trust them under the kind of, like, shadow of all the solar panels, either, but the point is you can build a lot of them, and then you can put all that beautiful copper wire up, give everybody a job as a railroad cop, and then pretty soon you don't

have to burn the Jurassic Swamp. But it's not burning coal! Do you not burn coal over there? Isn't that the way it works? But, yeah. Y'know, isn't the Welsh coal anthracite? I believe so. I don't know what it is, and I doubt it's anthracite, because there's this whole debate

in railroad things. You have the grades of coal for the uninitiated, you have lignite down near the bottom, you have semi-betuminous, you have betuminous, and then you have anthracite at the top. And easy way to tell for the uninitiated again, how shiny is it? Anthracite is like, it's darn near a polished ridiculous substance. ALICE So I'm looking here on Google, I could buy a ton of very shiny looking Welsh anthracite for 648 quid, Jesus Christ.

STAN Is it really anthracite? I'm surprised by that. SID So I'm told. STAN Our locomotives over here are typically designed to burn bituminous coal, and the anthracite-burning engines had weird fireboxes that were very very thick, that's why you have a camelback locomotive where the cab'ss in front because the firebox had to be so dummy thick that it could prop up of me to a smaller amount of anthracite that's because as far as I know that's because the they didn't burn the actual mined

anthracite they burned the spoils the comb you know I would not be surprised by that I'm not an anthracite expert because the anthracite is too expensive to burn in a locomotive you use that for like home heating or building heating because it burns so clean that does sound like the the railroad that I know so yeah so yeah our engines are usually designed to burn bituminous bituminous is a lesser grade it's got a lot of bunch of crap in it but coal as we'll see in this So our our engines are usually designed to burn bituminous. Bituminous is a lesser grade. It's got a lot of bunch of crap in it. But coal, as we'll see in this episode,

coal is so dependent on the grade, the quality of what it is, even in those ranges. I've had bituminous that we've burned in our locomotive that burns great. Makes a bunch of ash, but burns great. It's fine. I've had the same grade of coal. It was bituminous coal that we burned in the locomotive, and it had so much oil content in it that it plugged all the way every single fluent tube in the locomotive. Two hundred and three fucking flus and tubes, including the big

five and a half inch ones, were plugged solid with this weird, cakey, greasy, disgusting coal particulate. And we saw they're trying to fire it up the one day and it's like it got to 7 psi. We've got the blower which drafts the fire with a steam draft open as far as it goes. And it wouldn't make more than 7 psi. We shut it off. We go and look later when it cooled down. It's like the tube sheet looks like a blackboard. It looks like it, like something in a classroom. It doesn't look like it has tubes because it was just covered in this shit.

And it was just junk garbage, still bituminous, but just junk garbage. So sometimes you get good coal. Sometimes you get bad coal. It makes a huge difference. Yeah. And, and, and during the war the Italians used German bituminous coal. Not the lignite they're famous with mining, you know, with the big bucket wheel excavators that tear through a whole village.

You know, this is a higher grade bituminous coal. But during the Allied occupation, of course, they couldn't use German coal. So they use a lower grade American bituminous coal, which was shipped over on Liberty ships, probably from like West Virginia or somewhere. Well, from Norfolk, Virginia or Baltimore, Maryland. But the coal originated from West Virginia. And it was found just in general to have poorer steaming quality than the German coal, and it created a lot more smoke, and this didn't really bother Allied command, like, it's not like they're about to go out and buy the better coal from Germany right now.

ALICE Yeah, fuck em. SHOVELE HARDY, BITCH. ALICE Yeah, and you're also, you're occupying a formerly fascist country and all these guys were shooting at you five minutes ago. It's like, fucking, I don't care about your passenger service. Right. Figuring it out. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So, let's talk about the Battapaglia to Metaponto Railway. Hell yeah. I'm looking at all of these names on the thing, just soaking them all in, these beautiful language. Oh yeah. I do not speak third best Italian, so I'm gonna struggle with that. Alright, Roz, you're up, you love Italy.

I do love Italy, Italy's fantastic. This goes down here, Bad Paglia, right, and it goes and it goes and it starts getting into some mountains, reaches this place called Belvano, this is like a really tiny town that's off the beaten tourist path, y'know, and it's also weird, because it was entirely rebuilt in 1980 when the earthquake knocked it down. It looks like a tiny Italian traditional village, but it's all board-formed concrete. Yeah, brutalist Italy. ALICE This is like southern Italy, right, because

I see Bari over there on the east, okay. JUSTIN Yes. Naples is like right up here. ALICE We're sort of like, at about ankle level of boot. JUSTIN Yeah. Yeah, down there. You mean to tell me that a train, having to do a squiggly left and right, also probably

has to do a squiggly up and down, and the train don't like it. ALICE Oh yeah. So it goes through, at this point at Belvano, the Galleria della Armi. I believe that's just the army tunnel, right? I don't know why it's called that. It wasn't built for the army, to my knowledge. ALICE No, it's not army, because army in Italian is... Hasito? Is it Hasito?

One of those. So, it's like the arms gallery, I suspect. In the sense of weapons. Welcome to Weapons Tunnel. JUSTIN Welcome to Weapons Tunnel. Anyway, the Weapons Tunnel, it makes a few curves in its route, then the route goes over here to Potenza, right? Potenza is home to the longest escalator complex in Europe.

Yeah. Not at the time. ALICE. Oh good. Escalator land! Oh, it literally is. ALICE. When we say escalator complex, what do we mean exactly?

Like... JUSTIN. So, part of the old section of the town is on a hill, the new section of the town is on a hill, there's a valley in between, and there's a covered escalator that goes down the entire hill and crosses a road and then goes up the other side. So rather than being a temple to the stair god like Dubrovnik, they, you know, weaponized the stairs. ALICE Yeah, shit.

That's so cool. RILEY It's fun. ALICE And then from Patensia it goes somewhere. ALICE A vision of myself falling down every single fucking escalator step. Being carried up to the other side and then falling back down every other escalator step. RILEY Gary's mod. Ragdoll sounds intensifying. ALICE I feel like I'm making those all the time.

Being in your thirties. Yeah. Thirties are great, it's only injury. Then it goes down here to Meta Ponto, right? That's a squiggly ass alignment. Oh yeah. And this was, this is one of those lines, I don't know too much about it, what I, well it's sort of, it looks like to me is this thing was old when it was new.

ALICE Yeah, the tracks. JUSTIN You know, definitely a very squiggly line. You know, not electrified, obviously. Maximum grade is 2.6%. STAN That is stout for a choo-choo. ALICE Yeah, I mean, also, as much as the fascists kind of like, boasted about trying to remedy it as of every other political tendency in Italy, there's this really stark, like, north-south

divide, particularly in, like, poverty as well, so this is kind of a backwater, and it's, like, in, like, you know, towards the kind of ankle end. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff here that has not been really well modernized. I mean, I would say the Italian rail network is in better shape than, let's say, the US rail network. At least for passenger service, but... Passenger service in the US is depressing. Yeah.

Uh, yeah. But this is still a very curvy route, they have electrified. They electrified it in 1994. Curvy Italian route. Interesting. New girl like that one's? Server number? This was still a very popular route, it served a bunch of major population centers, but it

only had one real passenger train each week. You could catch the train on Wednesdays. Hey, one a week is worse than Amtrak. You're talking a lot of shit, but Amtrak at least does that. Yeah. So, anyway, let's meet the players today. The players? In the red corner.

Do the locomotives from this exist? Uh, let's meet the players today. The players. Yeah. In the red corner. Yeah. Do the locomotives from this exist? This is one number ahead of the locomotive involved. Okay, sister engine. The next one off the production line. I love the cunti... Sorry, I probably shouldn't call them cunti.

I love the stylishly Italian cutout silhouette standees there. That's very cool. They're very non-American. They're very skinny. It is funny that it's a Decapod. I can't even do an Italian accent if I tried. We heard it to parody Daddy Germany with a 210O, and so we made this, and it's not quite a class 52. But, you know, it's fun.

Yeah, but it's it's it's got cleaner lines because, you know, it's Italian. Yeah, that looks like it'll go as fast as a Ferrari. We've built our trades just like we had for sure. We build our trades and we build our cars functional and basically not running or beautiful and not running. Yeah, it's fine. So, Jesus, this is an FS480. It is a 210A Decapod.

This was designed for the Branagh Pass line, which had just become part of Italy instead of Austria, owing to World War I. All the weights on drivers. Only victory. Weights on drivers, you have something to help you through the curves. I mean, it looks spindly to me, but I mean, it's not an American train. This is this is really big for Italy. Not big for here. Big for Italy.

Yeah. Yeah. I would I would wager a bet that my cute little narrow gauge choo choo that I deal with all the time over here in the States weighs more than this thing. Oh, we might be able to look that up even. Yeah, I bet we can. We can wager my bet and I can owe somebody money within the context of this episode. The FS 480 weighs...

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait is... Do we use long tons or short tons? I forget. We use short tons because long tons are metric tons. Oh, I see. 92.9 short tons. I forget. We use short tons because long tons are metric tons. Oh, I see. 92.9 short tons. 92.9 short tons. Is it just for the engine or the engine? That's just for the engine.

The tender is 57.4. They're like the same. That's hilarious. I want to say 91 is like 94 short tons. She's right there for 91 at narrow gauge, three foot gauge locomotive in the US, the biggest of the narrow gauge, biggest of the three foot gauge. But, you know, it's still very small and presumably much smaller driver

and all that stuff, you know, less power, whoever cares. Not the same size as this thing. Yeah. Yeah. So these guys, four times the power. It's fine. Yeah. These guys were built in 1923, but they were rendered redundant on the Brenner Pass fairly shortly after they were built because they electrified that whole line in 1930. So they moved them to Sicily and then they moved them back to the mainland to work the Battapaglia

to Metapanto railway. The one you can see here, this is at Pia Charza which is the Italian State Railway Museum. It's incredible. You should go visit. I have been there. I have seen this locomotive. Great location right there on the ocean, you know, you can see Vesuvius and everything. Also the museum's huge and really well done. All the railway works, buildings are really well preserved. Gotta put that on my list. The railways of that region are so neat and then they're preserved so well. I spent a lot of time at a railway museum just a couple doors down in Slovenia recently,

and it was so freaking cool, and so lovely how tied in the history is to the present day there. What I liked was that the railway museum had a train station attached to it, so I could... It was with my parents in Italy last year. My brother had never been before. ALICE What, was this when you went rogue? JUSTIN This is when I went rogue, yeah, because they were like, we're going to the Vatican today.

And I was like, I ain't been to the Vatican, I don't care. So I woke up early and took the high-speed train down to Naples, specifically to go to this railroad museum. ALICE To hell with Jesus, trains. JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. ALICE Trains. ALICE Vibes. He said.

JUSTIN The problem with St. Peter's is it's so big it's not impressive. Catholicism is coming, I promise. This is the problem with getting conservation estimates. Yeah, exactly. You end up with a new build and it's kind of too much, you know, and it's... It's fine. It's fine. Alright, it's great you go into like, oh this looks like some kind of early Christian basilica,

no some Renaissance asshole redid it in 1620. You piece of shit. Some Renaissance asshole. Listen, listen, if you didn't want that to happen, blame the Protestants, they shouldn't have started the Reformation, there wouldn't have been a Counter-Reformation if it's all good. That's a good point, yeah. That's a good point, yes. It's all Martin Luther's fault.

Look at history, kids, it's fun. And this other guy, this is an FS-476. It is an 010-0. I was gonna say, is that an 010-0? It looks like it. Yeah, boy. Raising my hand here to ask, why would you do that? Why?

Why would you? Why is this the way that it is? Yeah. So ride quality is not important. No. So this is so stupid. I mean, all the weights on drivers, that is very important in some contexts. I did a I did a video maybe a year ago now about wheel arrangements, and I talked about

all of the popular ones. Wheel arrangements are a big deal for steam engines. You have lead wheels, you have driving wheels, you have trailing wheels, maybe you have multiple sets of lead wheels. Why do you do these things? And it's generally because you need the engine to perform a certain task, which is why steam engines kind of went out of favor. Diesel engine, which is a box that just does a do is so much better than,

oh, I need that exact tool. I don't need a 10 millimeter wrench. I need a hammer. The diesel's hammer versus a specific sized wrench for an application. And I know 10. It means, hey, you're probably shunting. You're probably in the yard. You probably you're not going fast. You're probably in the yard. You probably you're not going fast

You need all your weight being adhesive And if you go more than 20 mile an hour through a curve Your crew is going to hate everything about existence. So, you know, yeah time I'm a little bit confused as to what these were originally designed for because I think this might be one of those situations you know, like the British like to do, like, 0-6-0's, and 0-8-0's for mainline service. ALICE It's normal when we do it. JUSTIN Well, that's cause your track is so much better. ALICE That's right.

I can hear Gareth, like, pumping his fist in celebration, that's right. So, uh, yeah, I mean, the British equivalent of a 440 was an 060, y'know. And they had no slop between the laterals on the drivers, so they couldn't move back and forth, and they could go faster without being incredibly stupid. And they didn't have to be incredibly stupid, because they were pulling, uh, chex notes, almost nothing. ALICE So this was actually an Austrian locomotive, and quite a few of them were seized as war reparations after World War I. ZACH Oh, that means it's a wiener.

ALICE Yes. I'm reading here about the FS-476, their poor writing qualities and huge mass led some Milanese crews to nickname them after an icebreaker. Not shocked. The lead truck has a point, ladies and gentlemen. Not exaggerating it. You watch an O blank O do anything, it fucks the track. ALICE This needs to haul like three wagons full of beautiful vegetables.

The nicest San Marzano tomatoes you've ever seen in your life, not a single blemish on any of them. ZACH If I could get my San Marzano tomatoes delivered via this Oteno, that would be all I had by. ALICE And then you eat the tomatoes, that gives you the energy to go out and fix the rails, which is absolutely devastated. JUSTIN Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't, it's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So, the other thing this train is gonna have today is an unusual amount of freight cars. ALICE Oh, a shitload of San Marzanos. JUSTIN 47 cars of... well, they'd be empties, because they're heading into the countryside to pick up the San Marzanos.

RILEY They're gonna make a lot of pizzas later. ALICE Oh, yeah. Delicious. JUSTIN Exactly. Well, the interesting thing is, there is actually, because of things we'll discuss later, there were going to be quite a lot of black olives on the train coming back. That is Italy.wav.

Yeah. So yeah, this is an unusual amount of freight cars for this route owing to the sharp curves and the steep grades. And of course they have north of 500 stowaways on board. Oh yeah, of course. JUSTIN You know, we always talk about the people tonnage. You have tonnage, and then you add people, and like a person's not super heavy, one of them.

ALICE One of them will have to pay for those. JUSTIN But you add a lot of them. They do add up, especially if they're American. ALICE It's Justin's measurement of an extremely fat man on a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that guy and his 15 brothers have all rolled their bicycles directly into the goods yard. RILEY I'd like to think that in 1944 Italy they're probably not that level, but still... ALICE Just indulge me in a little whimsy, y'know?

JUSTIN Yeah, whimsy's allowed, it's fine. SEAN These are all the people who would later come to America and become Italian Americans. JUSTIN Oh, well, then you should have a look. Sorry, Jersey. SEAN Yep. Just a bunch of fat guys drinking Pironis. No Shiran.

ALICE Hell yeah. Yep. Just a bunch of fat guys drinking Pironis. No Shiran. Hell yeah. Have we failed at respecting the noble culture and people of Italy? I... I think we've failed at respecting the people of America, but I think that's fine. It's like, task failed successfully. You can't appreciate Italy without appreciating the contrast, which is what makes it great. You know, you go to Rome or you go to Florence and you see the most beautiful architecture, the most beautiful streets, the cities, everything.

And you see up there on this gorgeous building, on this beautiful street, on a balcony is a fat shirtless guy and his boxers drinking a peroni. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and it's like this is the life I've been to Croatia couple times my family's from Yeah, yeah five o'clock somewhere doesn't apply in Europe. I'm pretty sure at least in Europe It is probably 8 a.m. in Croatia or Italy or wherever and they're having beers. It's what happens. So train 8017 was made up in the yard at Naples on the night of March 1st 1944 and it started the next day for Potenza. Initially it was hauled by an electric locomotive, but

at Batapaglia the wires ran out, and the power was swapped for the two steam locomotives on the previous slide. ALICE Oh boy. ZACH Oh, meth heads stole the wires, so we gotta use our steam engine the rest of the way. ALICE So just a fair mark to that. JUSTIN You mean Nazis? ALICE Yeah, I feel like the only meth heads in like 1945, ethyl, like, in the Waffen SS.

L-L-Legally, they would be Nazis, yes, because they did distribute meth. That is that, that is that whole thing. It is amazing to me that, you know, in American roadway culture, we electrify, I don't know, the place where you can breathe, or can't breathe, rather, the tunnel. That's what's electrified. And you know, they electrified what was close's what's electrified. And, you know, they electrified what was close and convenient, but maybe that's, you know, the easy thing. And we'll not make it... It's a classic decision making management strategy, right? You do the easy part first,

and then you never have to do the hard part, cause you just don't bother. And nothing bad will happen from it, right? Nothing bad can ever happen. Right. So, on the lead locomotive, which was the 480, were Espitito Senatore and Luigi Ronga. Right? Did you just put this in so you would get to say some Italian names? Yeah, that's funny. Yeah.

So yeah. Espitito Senatore is a fantastic name. That's a really good name, apparently. The fast senator. Apparently he was a very good engineer, had a good reputation, he was like, you know, consummate professional. And then on the second locomotive were Matteo Gigliano and Rosario Barbaro. Oh, OK.

Uh-huh. Yeah. I don't think you've got as Hans on to said, you need to let me hear the music in it. I don't think you've got enough music in these names. Gileano, Gileano, OK. Rosario Barbaro. Yeah. All right. I can hear music in it.

So they were engineer and firemen respectively, anyway. It's slow going, right? This is a 520 ton train, with several additional tons worth of stowaways on board. ALICE Yeah, not to mention the bicycles. The freakishly heavy bicycle thieves. JUSTIN As they're traveling away from Naples, there are a few times the railroad cops show up and they start trying to throw people off. There's so many damn people on the train that they can't manage it, and people keep, y'know,

picking the train up at various stations they stop at. Because this is Europe, the freight trains stop at stations. I don't know what they do there. They eat at coffee. It's in the play. Yeah, Matteo Giuliani puts the fucking, what do you call it, the mocha pot on, and Rosario Barbaro goes back and eats a couple of olives off of the wagons. Oh, there's your next K28 cooking show.

See if you can put a mocha pot in on the... Roger, we will do that. That feels like an interesting way to bomb your own canap. Next time I cook on a K28 we will do that. Small pressure vessel. Big pressure vessel. Yes, por que no los dos. Yes, si.

This is a 520 ton train. Yes. Ah yes, Italy. Italy, yeah. That is five cars in the US. Yes. Five. Five.

Christ. So, this thing is slow as all hell, even on the flat portion of the route. It takes the whole day to reach this crucial piece of infrastructure on the line. Have we found the hole? It's Weapons Tunnel. Weapons Tunnel, near the town of Bolvano. Is it actually Weapons Tunnel? It's not a weapon, I, it's a weapons tunnel? Yeah, I mean, it's like arms, weapons, like...

Christ. So the army tunnel is a monster, right? It curves through its entire length, it has a 1.3% grade, has absolutely no ventilation. Oh, terrific. Well, you know, you don't want that in the tunnel, as we talked about. This gives me anxiety. Me too. Even in its later years, when it was run by diesel locomotives, the crews complained about

dense smoke in there. For context, the two tunnels I'm aware of that I've experienced with in the US, Moffett Tunnel, Stevens Pass Tunnel, the two longest in the US, like five and something or six and something, change miles in a seven mile tunnel. They have gigantic fans. They're ridiculous. The biggest fans you've ever seen that clear the tunnel. The instant train goes in and it still smells like exhaust. If you go in a couple hours later, oh, yeah, it's, it's a whole thing. Yeah. This one's about a mile and a third long. Um, which isn't like especially long.

It's a lot for a steam engine with zero ventilation. Yeah. You know, so this is a nightmare with not one, but two steam locomotives in it, right? Oh boy. Double the belching. Just after midnight, they arrive at the Bolvano station. This is just an isolated building and platform that's about three kilometers away from the town, because the town is way up on a hill, and the railroad's way down in a valley.

ALICE And the stationmaster, you can hear him falling down all the escalator steps. RILEY Yeah. Yeah. You can hear him falling down all the escalator steps. Yeah Little spot near the tunnel because important for railroad and fuck the people. Yeah Well, the station master is actually pretty suspicious of setting a train this long through the tunnel Especially with this many stowaways, but he can't do anything because this train was ordered by Allied command He's it's out of his jurisdiction. This train has to go." RILEY Yeah, bosses said yes, therefore train go.

That sounds a lot like modern day railroading, and has resulted in modern day railroading. Check the news. ALICE Being out of a stationmaster's jurisdiction is fun conceptually, because it just plays into old cop movie tropes, y'know, like giving you a badge and your gun. You badge your weirdly accurate pocket watch and your gun. Yes. So, the train makes a brief stop right after midnight.

They put on some coffee. You put on some coffee, yeah, they put on, I dunno, a record or something. I dunno what Italians do. Smoke. They're smoking, yeah, that's true. Paint? Well, really. Have a good glass of olive oil.

As you do. In Italy. Having a glass of, like, Cinzano or, like, Liwancelli or something. Have some Grappa. Oh, yeah, that's a lot of Grappa. Rule G's in, no no, Rule G is, uh, don't drink on the job. And it's a very American thing. They don't have Rule G is don't drink on the job. And it's a very American thing. They don't have rule G in Italy.

No, I would not imagine they do. They're the opposite of that. Rule G, drink on the job. And at 1250 a.m. they set off towards the tunnel. It's just about a mile away. They go through two more short tunnels, and over a bridge to get there, so they don't pick up very much speed.

They're going fifteen to twenty kilometers an hour. ALICE I mean, I feel like for this to be safe, the, like, route leading into the tunnel needs to look like the euthanasia coast. You know? JUSTIN Yeah, well, the problem is then, y'know, going the opposite direction, you'd have to go up the euthanasia coaster. No one's ever figured that one out.

I guess that makes sense. You'd have to have a switch for that, you know. Euthanasia coaster or not, you know. Uphill downhill. So they go in the tunnel, and as they enter the tunnel, the wheels turn slower and slower, the chuffs get farther and farther apart, there are wet rails that reduce the traction, the sanders on board can't compensate, that's the thing that puts the sand between the wheel and the rail, gives you more traction.

Finally, with only a few cars sticking out the end of the tunnel, the train stalls. Uh oh. stalls. Oh, the air becomes thick with smoke and the oil lamps illuminating the locomotive cabs went out. That's bad, right? Yeah. So the joy of this, the joy of this is that a coal burning locomotive is a it's a promise based on the principle that the locomotive is going to keep doing whatever the fuck it's been doing recently.

So stomping up the hill, big grade, double headed, big train, bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump like working its ass off. That means the fire is being drafted really, really, really fucking hard and it stops bump bump bump bump bump bump into the tunnel slowly slows down and stops. bump bump bump bump into the tunnel slowly slows down and stops. That means that fire, which had been combusting probably perfectly, if not a little heavily, maybe a little bit more carbon, no longer has the suction of oxygen because the blast nozzle, the rocket nozzle that we talked about is no longer supplying any of the air through the smoke box means the fires no longer getting

anything, which means you would go from a perfectly clean stack or maybe a slightly hazy stack into, hey, I'm stomping up the grid. I need a big fire, big violent crappy coal, crappy coal fire. All of the smoke is now going everywhere and not just out the stack. Yeah. So it gets really dark. That makes sense. Is that why this slide is just black? It's fine. Except for our friend, the activate Windows logo.

Well, I decided, you know, rather than look for a photo, it'd be funny to just leave this one black. Also, I couldn't find another photo. That's good. I like that. Yeah, there we go. Sometimes laziness, you to creative decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. So, as we said, drafting the fire is not good. The locomotives are no longer producing power. The whole thing is a big mess right now.

So in the first locomotive, the fireman, Luigi Ranga, he's searching for air, and he doesn't find any. He tried leaning out of the locomotive and was completely overcome by smoke, and fell out. Jesus. And miraculously he fell out into the only area where there was breathable air, which was the horrible drainage ditch next to the tracks. Ah yes, the chocolate milk factory. Yeah.

Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho You shut the throttle, you stop not even working up this kind of grade for this long. Just, you know, working up a steeper grade, but shorter time. Shut off black smoke rolls in the cab.

And I always joke to them like open the blower or I will make it an oil burner figured out and to be in a double hitter and to go up this hill in a tunnel, stall out, have the rip and rage war and crazy fire, and you jump out the window for air. So believable. Anyone who's fired a coal burner will know they're awful in many ways. So he lays there in the ditch unconscious and injured,

but alive for several hours. Christ better than the alternative, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. Engineer engineer Esposito Senator, I was not so lucky. He was found slumped in his chair with the throttle and reverser, both at full forward. Yeah. The the amount of oh, yeah, the crew died or the crew passed or, you know, um, when unconscious in a tunnel, significant in murdering history.

Yeah. In the second locomotive, a different scene played out, right? Matteo Giuliano threw the reverser backwards and passed out before he could reopen the throttle. I think this was, you know, in the United States, you have a big lever that's the reverser backwards and passed out before he could reopen the throttle. I think this was, you know, in the United States you have a big lever that's the reverser, right? Easy to throw it back real quick. This is Europe.

I think they had a screw reverser and you got to turn that a whole lot. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Screw reverse is great for running one direction. You have infinite positions it could be in because it's a screw, not individual notches. But changing directions is very hard, very, very hard. And you have to really crank the thing.

And it's not a simple, easy thing to crank either, depending on the size of the engine. And so what you've told us is the front engine was pointed one way and had its reverse pointed that way and the rear engine had it the other way like they were trying to bunch up the cars and trying to restart on the hill and they were both fighting each other. At this point, yeah. So at least one of the sources I looked at said, okay, if Giuliano had managed to reopen the

throttle the train probably would have started moving backwards. I mean the front locomotive would have gone into an insane wheel slip scenario. Which it probably did anyway. But yeah. Guy who was most concerned about the track at this point was just like... Yeah, we're worried about the locomotives, not the 520 people. Yeah. I mean, Allied Command might have been. Well, yeah, details. It would probably be true. I doubt it would go to a wheel slip.

It just depends on it probably stopped stuck centered, which is when one of the valves or one of the pistons is at dead center, which means you're only getting force out of one side. Steam engines usually only a two cylinder thing. And so when one of the cylinders is at one end, a clocked 90 degrees opposite such that one can be in the middle of the stroke while the other one is at either end. So typically you have both strokes of power. When one is at the end, you only have one. And that's almost always where they stop, because guess what?

That's where the power output gets the least. Right. Which is why it was hilarious that you used the SNCF four cylinder engine as your piece of reference. I didn't even think about that god damn it, but anyway yeah Yeah, so it she probably stopped dead center and said wide open throttle That's putting all of the force on one piston the other pistons getting Bupkis ah damn godspeed. You know like it probably sat there and went Okay, I'm not gonna move fuck you. Yeah, the fuck are you?

Italian engine Both Matteo Giuliano and Rosaria Barbaro also passed out in the cab Back on a freight train. No one knew anything was going on because nearly everyone was asleep Yeah, or we in the morning because nearly everyone was asleep. I forgot it was at night. Yeah. Or, wee in the morning. And the vast majority of them quickly became much more asleep. I mean, small mercies, right? I mean, of the ways to go, yeah, but also, oh my god.

My grandfather died quietly in his sleep, along with his passengers, who also died quietly in their sleep. Yes. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Roberto Masulo was the rear brakeman. This train had two braking systems on it.

The cars at the front had air brakes, and the cars in the back had manual hand brakes, so they needed a brakeman and a van at the back had manual, you know, hand brakes, right? So they needed a brakeman and, you know, a van at the back, right? Now he saw the train stall, he waited a few minutes for it to restart or reverse back. Then after that didn't happen after a while, he decided to go up to the train, figure out what's going on. He got a few meters in the tunnel, realized how bad it was in there, and he got the fuck out. Smart man. Makes sense. He ran all the way back to the Bolvano station, through the two smaller but still smoke-filled

tunnels in pitch darkness. Jesus. Wow. It took him nearly an hour. Yeah, that makes sense. Fucking... Good for him. Here's the hero of the story.

Hard to call it a marathon, yeah. Yeah, that guy didn't have to deal with smoke in the original marathon, y'know? And he was running with good news. Yeah. True. When he got there he exclaimed to the station master, they're all dead in there, all dead. And then immediately collapsed. Oh, so there's a marathon. Yeah. Talf. You're doing this in like 1940s, like, railroad

worker boots as well? Yeah. And this is, y'know, it's a single track line, the closest place they can dispatch a rescue train from was Salerno, right, which is all the way back at basically the start of the run. Um, y'know, they telegraph back, get a rescue train up here. That train arrived very early in the morning, like five o'clock, and they pulled the train out of the tunnel, shut the throttles, and took stock of the damages. They also managed to get Luigi Ranga out of the tunnel as well. He lived.

Jesus Christ. His instinct to jump out the cab was a good one. Turned out that was a good one, yeah. And yeah, if you're on YouTube, you don't want to look at a whole bunch of dead bodies, look away from the screen now. Jesus Christ. Well, they're pretty low resolution. They're low res dead bodies, but it is a large pile.

That's great. Yeah. The official figures are 517 dead and 90 injured from partial asphyxiation. We're never gonna actually know the actual number of survivors, since quite a few of the Stowaways fled the scene when the authorities showed up. ALICE I'm amazed as many people survived as they did, you know. JUSTIN That's crazy.

JUSTIN The last four cars of the train were stopped outside of the tunnel. ALICE Ah. JUSTIN Yeah. The bodies were piled up beside the tracks for identification, most were never identified and were buried in a mass grave in Bolvano's cemetery. ALICE I mean, it's wartime, y'know? Like, nobody gives a fuck.

ZACH This is one I've never heard of this one before. I've heard of a lot of railroad disasters, but they're typically more like, oh, the railroad did this, and then the train died, or the train got hit by an avalanche, or natural weather, or whatever, but, y you know, outside of wartime, this one being in wartime and and being the way it is, this is one of the worst railway disasters in history. Yes. Obviously, Italy's worst. But this is one of the worst. Like it's it's in the top, you know, X amount.

Yeah, I mean, certainly probably the worst freight train disaster in history, because usually you don't have that many passengers on a freight train. Yeah. The two engineers and the firemen were given funerals, Luigi Ranga actually lived to tell the tale and returned to railroad work. Massacrist. Yeah, back in those days it was all professions, you know, like, what are you gonna do, get another job?

Right. One of the engineers was going out with a large sum of money from the railway drivers collective in Naples to purchase a huge consignment of black olives for the return trip. Oh boy. And that was discovered by one of his colleagues during the identification of the bodies, and I believe he went out to go purchase all the black olives with that. So that errand was completed. I mean, that's Union Solidarity.

Complete basic errand at all costs, but also, crucially, do not, like, rob somebody who you find a giant stack of bank notes on. JUSTIN Yeah. So then we get to the blame game. Some people blame the stationmaster, who didn't have the authority to stop the train, for not stopping the train. Some people blame the brakeman, because he applied the brakes when it seemed appropriate to do so.

ALICE To flawless pieces of logic. JUSTIN I think, uh, I think even if, y'know, the brakes were applied in the van at the end of the train, that would have not stopped it from moving backwards if they really needed to. RILEY One car worth of handbrakes, you you do real quick algebra even including the multiplication of leverage Yeah, one one car with the brakes does not get you a whole stalled train the train was overloaded yes Lots of people blamed Allied command for putting together this huge ass train and running it through the tunnel with bad coal well tunnel with bad coal. Well, the, the, uh, the huge ass train is allied commands.

The bad coal is also allied command, but in separate instances, right? Like it's not the same sort of thing and you get bad coal, you get bad coal and who knows what the pressure gauge readings were. Yeah, exactly. Um, the investigation here was very brief and inconclusive. Allied command actually ran some test trains through the tunnel with the crews that had respirators on them and found out that, huh, this coal that works fine in the big American locomotives isn't working in these smaller European locomotives.

Engines are designed for the kind of coal that they're designed for. Hence my earlier story of 491 and coal was perfectly good. Perfectly good BTU. Plugging the entire fucking thing up. Yep. But rather than get better coal, they slapped the weight limit on the line and banned doubleheading. Ah. Well bam. Bandit. There she be. Dodged. They slapped the weight limit on the line, and banned double heading. Ah. Wabam!

Bandit. There she be. Done. Then they added a mandatory waiting period of one hour between trains, to allow the smoke to clear out of the tunnel, sort of. Did they at least employ a local to wave a fan at the tunnel during that hour? No. Wow.

I think they did station guards at each end for this purpose, though. Good enough. Yeah. Well, they could wait for service rifles. One small step to the primarily railroad cop-based economy. Yeah. There were no... Oh, go ahead.

The other, fun, y'know, solution to this. Why do mechanical engineers exist in this day and age? Mechanical engineering's so easy. Tunnels, they compute the amount of cubic feet per minute that must be evacuated from a tunnel. Like when I went to work in transit, everybody who is a mechanical engineer, except me, because I was stupid and did signals instead, everybody was just figuring out how do you get all of the air out of the tunnel as fast as you can. So- I saw this movie Tenet about that.

Yeah, one little Italian boy with a, you know, paper whatever. Not so much. Yeah. There's a reason that there's jobs for that. Oh god, I knew someone who was working in... I forget if it was on this podcast or not, they mentioned this anecdote, working in the ventilation tunnel for, I think, the Holland Tunnel, and they asked, while they were doing some inspection in there, what happens if there's a fire and the ventilation system kicks on? And the other guy was like, well, we die.

Yeah. Just say it out. Yeah. Yeah, there's a reason there's this whole, whole like thing. It's a national thing that, you know, hopefully continues to exist. Screams in agony vaguely in Washington, D.C.. So yeah, National Fire Prevention Act. What if it became the nothing? What if it was nothing? The Nothing Protection Act.

That one. There's nothing good that they do there. They don't try to prevent fires, or, y'know, prevent people from dying this way, with flames. And it's on fire. ALICE Fire, have you considered that fire protection is woke? Oh, yeah. RILEY Oh, sounds pretty gay to me, so we should probably be- ALICE Well, I mean, when you don't have it, you go to sleep, so, uh, yeah.

So who's it said? Damn. Didn't think of that. Yeah. Hard to argue. At any rate, there were no further accidents in the army tunnel. Problem solved, everyone! Yep.

This situation remained until, y'know, diesel trains hit the line in the 1950s, they were able to up the tonnage then. Finally real modernization arrived in 1994, and they put some fancy tilting electric trains on the line. RILEY Are you saying that diesel trains are not modern? How dare you. ALICE It was a fifty year interlude, and now thankfully it's over and they have a real train on there. ZACH Our real trains only trains with electric overhead

wires. ALICE Yeah, I'm thinking about becoming like a... ZACH I'm being triggered by this. JUSTIN Here is my argument. Diesel trains... ALICE Real trains, mental disorders. ZACH Oh, that's even worse. Alright, I follow the mental disorders camp. I'll call

diesel trains modern when they build another one in the United States. Well, I mean, they built most of them in the US, but what was the what was the last big order like 2019 or something? Yeah, the GE evolution series has not been a while and Caterpillar has been on the struggle bus trying to figure out tier four emissions. So we have we have we have no modern trains anymore. It's over. It's done. Yeah, you're really good at making locomotives and then all of a sudden they weren't private equity happened. Yep.

So, what did we learn? Fans. Uh, war is hell. War is hell. You can never find it. Can you say anything anti-steam engine I'm blocking your podcast? Uh oh. Don't ride on a freight train.

Yeah, don't ride on the freight train. Yes, the exhaust gas is from Choo Choo's whatever variety are bad. ALICE Just in a more human sense, you can be killed at any time by something of which you have no comprehension, like a bug in the gears of a complicated machine. TORRES Yes. ZACH And perhaps, maybe, have some more empathy for everyone that you know and everyone that you don't know.

It's important. We're all humans, we're all living things, whether or not we're humans, we're all living things, we all care about each other, and maybe we should all respect that a little bit more. ALICE And steam locomotives are bullshit. ALICE Fuck you, eat shame, die, you whiny bitch. We respect living things. ALICE I love to defeat empathy. bit. We respect living things.

I love to defeat empathy. We love living things, except for those whiny bitches that do not like steam locomotives. Who can eat shit and die? Look, the clear answer here is that, you know, these Italians should've bought, you know, nice big steam locomotives for this, as opposed to whatever this is. Should've put a K28 in there. God. K28 was a wee bit smaller, but a wee bit wider, wouldn't fit through the tunnel. Ah, damn.

Well, that's fine, easy, solution. Like, it doesn't fit in the tunnel. Nobody dies in the tunnel. Yeah, that's true. I mean, K28s of the Grand Locomotives, one of the best designs, Alco had it figured out. They've got really nice suspension designs that I could talk about for way too long for this podcast. But anyway, they're fantastic. There's a reason they're called the sports models, and it is easy to suss out.

So. Alright. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. Dear November, Roz, Liam, and Gareth. Nope. Nope. No.

If there is a guest, no there isn't. Fuck you. See, I don't even need to say anything. I don't even need to say anything, because the person who wrote the safety third is on my side. May I say, first of all, rest in paradise milkshake. What a guy. Oh.

Oh. Yeah. This is a story about the one true enemy of solar workers. No, it's not roofers. I'm talking about the wind. A few months into my solar installing life, I was working on an office building in the northeast. It was the tallest building around, with no protection from wind gusts coming across a big body of water a few miles away. It was a flat, membrane roof, in February,

covered in ice, with no lip on the roof edge between you and a three story drop into the parking lot below. There was one portable, penetrator style tie-off point, and about ten workers. I assume that's when there's something you stick in a roof and then that's where everyone ties the fall protection system on. ALICE I see, okay, sure. I was thinking of something else. JUSTIN Yeah.

And about ten workers, I'll let you guess how useful that was. When we started the job, the first task was to set up a guardrail system made out of 2x4s set in plastic bases and weighed down with sandbags. ALICE Oh, that sounds safe as hell. JUSTIN In order to build this, you had to walk practically to the edge of the slippery roof carrying lumber or 60 pound sandbags, then assemble all the pieces. ALICE Getting killed assembling the guard rails is a great bit. JUSTIN Yeah. Whenever we left the job for the day, the wind would blow the guard rails

over, sometimes actually ripping out the screws and disassembling the pieces. To solve this problem our foreman had us assemble and disassemble the guardrail every day when we arrived and left the job. ALICE There's gotta be an easier way to do that. Fuck if I know what it is. JUSTIN Yeah, it's called have a fucking parapet on your building. Architects, put a parapet on your fucking building. People gotta work on that roof.

Um. Um, again, think slippery roof and then add more solar racking underfoot every day as time goes on. One day we got up on a roof and quickly realized we were standing in the middle of 40 mile an hour gusts of wind and still had to build the fucking safety system. Jesus. A couple hours of back and forth with the foreman and a few absolutely fucking knots and we were out of there. We left all our guardrail equipment strapped or weighed down in the middle of the roof

as per usual before we left. Less than an hour later I got a call from the foreman asking if I could come back and help him out. Me and another guy that were still nearby went back. It turned out that the guardrail posts and bases were blowing off the roof into the parking lots below, and it only barely missed a lot of parked cars. So we went up with more ratchet straps. That solves every problem, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. If it moves and it shouldn't, etc. etc.

So long as you say, that shouldn't go anywhere. Yeah. Sl's for extra power. The wind had gotten worse. We literally had to crouch down to move around so the wind wouldn't blow us off the building. As we were praying and strapping everything behind an HVAC unit, our foreman told us we had to go help another job as soon as we were done. Now when I say this next one was a doozy, my god. We went to a job that this company had finished almost a year prior, it was a new library,

with a nice modern architectural twist. The solar array on a roof extended over the edge of the roof and had then kicked upward into the direction of the wind. ALICE Oh, I see that. Very stylish. JUSTIN Yes. The solar panels were bolted through their aluminum frames onto rails running parallel to the face of the building.

The uplift from the 50-60mph gusts was tearing the aluminum frames away from the bolts and had blown two or three of the solar panels over the top of the building and into the parking lot behind it, while the library was full of old folks for senior day. ALICE Oh no. ALICE Less stylish. JUSTIN You may see in the photo there is a slightly lower section of the roof at the front of the building where the two planes of the solar array meet. That's down here.

Uh, hold on. We got up on a roof, threw a hatch, crouched down onto that lower lip of the roof, moved down to the front left corner of the building where the panels were blowing away, and every time there was a big gust of wind we ducked under the panels, as if it would protect us from a 50 pound, 3 and a half foot by 6 foot flying sheet of tempered glass and metal. ALICE Yeah, horrible way to get killed to just get fucking crash bandicooted by a giant solar panel. JUSTIN Then my foreman proceeded with his plan, throwing the hook of our biggest ratchet

strap into the wind to try and get it over the panels, then fishing it underneath the array with a makeshift crook made out of taped together plastic reflective stakes and some 6 gauge wire. ALICE. Jesus Christ. Okay. Sure. JUSTIN.

I watched him do this for about 15 minutes, all while the lips of the solar panels were bouncing in the wind. He was using the ratchet strap we used to tie down pallets on our flatbed, and the wind was blowing it right back at him. In a moment of frustration, I watched my coworker, who's not a small guy, try to climb out on top of the solar panels, hanging over the left of the building to try and help him out. That wasn't the loudest I'd ever yelled at someone in the workplace, but it was close. Eventually, I went to go get some longer, heavier ropes and we got a couple of panels, secure-ish, and got the fuck out. ALICE It was bad enough that the Cishet 50-something

building manager, thank you for your service to me, a com- am I allowed to say that word? ALICE I'll read it. A commie dyke, hell yeah. Yeah. On my way out. We found out later that the engineer who signed off on the design hadn't looked at the prints that closely. Go figure. Tracks. You'll be shocked to know I don't do solar anymore, though I still miss it in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. Thanks for listening and putting together such a great show, and hey, if any of your listeners are lefty electricians, do yourself a favor and google the Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers.

ALICE You can't read this one either. And cheers queers. And cheers to you. RILEY Yes. This is why I stopped working on roofs too, I mean, y'know. Don't get up on the roof, never let them make you get up on the roof. Don't get up on a roof, it's a bad idea. And again, design your buildings with...

Give me some parapets. I like some parapets on a roof, y'know. Maybe y'know, three or four feet. One time I was in a building where it was like, twelve feet, that was great. ALICE Maybe design buildings to think about people who work on them as well as people who are gonna, like, live or work in them, you know? JUSTIN Yes. Maintenance?

ALICE Just a thought. Yeah. JUSTIN What, maintenance? What's that? ALICE It's, you know, the thing that you have to do to make sure that the solar panel doesn't just randomly kill a senior in the parking lot. JUSTIN That's when you hire an engineer to look at something, and they write a report,

and then you throw it in a filing cabinet. KATE Yeah, I didn't think engineers were important. ALICE And then it shows up, like, photocopy a burn to hell in an episode of Well There's Your Problem, like, twenty years later. LIAM Exactly. ALICE But once you're welcome. Yeah. I've got my own filing cabinet full of things where engineers were told to not, that should

be an episode of this podcast. But I'm just gonna appreciate being a guest and letting you know that engineers are important. Listen to them, comma, dumbasses. Good idea. Yes. I would also recommend that if they give you a report and say do something, you should probably do that. ALICE Do that thing, yeah. RILEY Yeah, do that. ALICE What did we learn?

ALICE War is hell. RILEY Solar panels are hell. ALICE Malad is still the greatest steam locomotive ever devised. RILEY Fake and gay, how dare you, Nova. Ballad is still the greatest steam locomotive ever devised by the hand of man. How dare you, Nova. Gay and all surreal. Alright, that was Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, does anyone have any commercials before we go? Christ on a bike. Sorry. The concept of Christ on a bike, the worst of all possible worlds. Freakishly heavy Christ are- He's so fat, he's got this thing now. ALICE Trying to describe the Crystal Redentor above Rio de Janeiro in engineering.

Oh god. SEAN Excuse me, very fat Christ on a freakishly heavy bicycle. ALICE Uh huh. The notes say don't forget to mention the worstst of All Possible Worlds, which is a great podcast, not sure... Yes, well, I was on it recently, but I copied this from the last podcast where I also mentioned I was on it.

Well, I guess they just get a free endorsement, so listen to the Worst of All Possible Worlds, really is a good podcast. Listen to No Gods No Mayors, also Trashy, Chirp, Kill James Bond. Mark, I believe you should have several commercials. Uh, yeah. What's up guys, this is Heiss. Please check me out on YouTube, Heiss, H-Y-C-E, and that is my YouTube. And yes, we do talk about trains.

So if you wanna learn more about train things, check me out on YouTube. H.Y.C.E. Heist. Find the bluebird with the engineer's hat. That is me misspelling something for my entire existence as well. Century of Steam Studio 346. I'm the president of Studio 346. We're making a train video game bit by bit. It's going to take a little bit more time. It's not coming out this year, but hopefully maybe shrugs next year.

Hopefully screams. I heard, I heard every time someone asks you when you come out, when it's going to come out, you delay it by a week. Oh, it's really bad. You know, I'm trying to pull a page out of Gabe Newell's book and that seems reasonable. The point of it is we love this. I know that my fellow friend Tom Coletti aka Wings and Strings, the they, the them, the amazing. I have yet to meet a human who is as smart in every single possible, fastable way than the way Tom is.

Tom is a part of the team, and they've been on the podcast before here. Yes. Multiple time guest. They were the reason why I am now here, which very much appreciate you guys, including me. It's been fun to talk about trains. I like to talk too much.

So you're going to have to edit a ton of me out, but you'll figure it out. You guys are professionals. Um, I am really excited for century esteem. I am also putting my full throated endorsement on this project. You should, if you, if you're listening to the podcast and you like trains, go, go, go get excited about this. Um, I'm excited. I'm excited to finally see a dev log with polling.

Give me that polling. Come on. OK. All right. You know, we're actually talking about we are literally talking about polling. The other day, we're like, we go to bed. We have not we have not talked about polling since the since the trailer. And we're like, do we show it? We save it for later. Like, we know it works. I will. I will say that Justin said that.

And maybe we'll get some traction either way. This two through 46 century esteem. We're talking about train things. We love it. We care about it so much. We're trying to give you all of the experiences. Sands, the dying and a tunnel from the inhalation. But we're going gonna give you everything up to that point, where you can feel every little piece of a locomotive along the way,

and we really truly believe and love in it with all of our hearts, and that's the hill we will die on. So please check it out. ALICE It looks beautiful, which is my problem, it should be set somewhere horrible in Britain instead, have you considered that maybe? Like, some kind of industrial hellscape, that'd be cool. Uh, no, sorry, we're trying to have an escape from this fuckshit that is this universe that

we live in right now? But what if I like the misery? Well then you're fucked in the head, but thanks for having me.