Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 186: The Quintinshill Wreck(s)

Episode Date: October 8, 2025

War is bad folks Support Groove for Good at Lutheran Settlement House: https://givebutter.com/grooveforgood2025/team-wtyp/liammcanderson Help James get necessary surgery: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/james-needs-surgery-urgently Follow Gareth: https://bsky.app/profile/garethdennis.uk Check out Railnatter: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This is a totally anonymous podcast by people who you don't know who they are. You don't know what the subject are is? You don't know what the subject are. Yeah, you actually don't. It do be like that. So here's the same. The podcast is no longer released on traditional channels. It's just like we put a cassette tape in an envelope and we mail it anonymously to several

reporters who will then leak kind of... You know what they say, the revolution will not be televised. What time is it? We're only an hour late starting recording. It's fine. Yeah, I was about to say. That wasn't what I was getting at. What I was getting at was I was referencing a nice little film called One Battle

After Another, which I highly recommend people see. Noted. Yeah, we're gonna have to do a sync point here. All right, I'm gonna do three, two, one, Mark, three, two, one, Mark. Okay, and I guess we're podcasting, yeah. Fantastic. For the first time in a minute. So, well, you know, it's been a while since we recorded because we've all been preparing

for our debut at the Riyadh Comedy Festival. Yeah, doing some crowd work at the Riyadh crowd festival. I would like to thank His Royal Highness, Milhammed bin Solomon, for inviting us. actually, we have a special bonus episode soon about how the line is good, actually. It's tough doing crowdwork in Riyadh because you're going from the front rows back and you're like, so what do you do? Oh, Prince? Okay, what about Prince? Right, sure. Um, what, anything funny about your family? Oh, you're your cousin like Boneswater journalist? Uh, I, I mean, I guess. I've heard that one before.

Oh, crack. So here's the thing. Everyone listening, it's me, but also it's Victoria, and we're on a podcast together, and that's extremely dangerous because we are, of course, sworn mortal enemies. So, yeah. My pronouns are she and her, just to be clear. It hasn't changed. We're not updating them. No, there's a way we introduced the podcast. I know there is. I know, but I was peeking behind you. You've gone out of line. I know. Well, it's getting me back into shape. It's fine. You're out of the border.

This whole system is out of order. Score one for me. It's disaster. We've lost that one variable has gone, has changed, and everything is upside down. The only solution is... We're going like sort of primary school where we're doing like a good guest host points and you know, whichever one of you has the most at the end of the episode has a sticker. And now Victoria has one and Gareth doesn't have any.

Oh. The only solution is to trans ros. That's the only possible solution we have to. fix the start of the podcast. No, we're not doing that. Adjust it. Make sure your own gender is securely fitted before adjusting anyone else's. Exactly.

Hey, whoa. Yeah, well. If the gender comes down from the ceiling, pictures of your own, yours is securely. Oh, dear. Yep. Yep, yep. Make an emergency gender descent to 10,000 genders. It's what Joe Biden was trying to do before the fucking anti-woke deep state stopped him.

It's about to say, hello, everyone, and welcome to, well, there's your problem. It's 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'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her. Nay, Liam. Liam. Liam is unfortunately not with us today because he has been dragged, kicking and streaming. Confined. Yeah. Confined to Disney World. My God. This is inhumane. Particularly for the mass transit they have down there, you know. Yeah. Also the mosquitoes. Free the Disney World one. And by one, I mean, Liam. Yeah. But we do have our new temporary co-host, Victoria.

Hello, my name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her. Thank you for having me, as always. Yeah, I'll be annoying all of your guests. You don't have to say thank you for having me. You work here now. Yeah, you work here now. Yeah, we're paying you.

No, I, whenever I have like full-time employment, I email my boss every day and I say, thank you so much for the job again today, sir. We're also not your boss. It's a collective. I honestly thought Ross was my boss. now. I thought I was going to be emailing him every day. I don't think he wants that responsibility.

Yeah, no, I don't think any of us want that responsibility. I don't understand how this podcast is set up in a legal sense. How many years in? It's sort of like by ancient custom, you know? It's like Gorman Gust. It's built on top of itself. And if it hasn't been fallen down yet, then it's part of the podcast since time immemorial. A very great man.

who I worked with in my previous engineering job said something to me, which is the less I know, the happier I am. Oh, also I'm here. Yes, we also have. It's Garth today. Yeah, hello. My name's Garth, I'm a guest. You are not being paid to be here.

I'm not being paid to be here. My pronouns are he and him. And yeah, no, it's a delight to be here. As I said in a pre-recording segment that might be chopped, yeah, Mortal Enemy. Victoria Scott is on the podcast. What's actually fun is that Victoria and Nova and I all had a very important business lunch in Glasgow not too long ago, which is an absolute unbelievable delight. I had such fun, such a nice time.

But obviously, you know, Victoria and I are mortal enemies. Yeah, now the gloves are off because we're competing because now, Victoria, you're going to rack up some numbers that don't count like I did. Which means that our score against each other remains, I think possibly you're still winning in terms of guest appearances on the Well, There's Your Problem podcast. I think we're officially entering the era in which these don't count as guest appearances because I'm just here. Exactly. I just have to come in rep cars, which is too bad because I just got found out that S.DOT's ripping out a bus lane that I really liked using.

So I'm pretty pissed at them. Just the general concept of personal automobiles today. So I think we're going to have to, I may have to yield and say train good. Yes. They'll get you. We see here before us a picture of train being good. Yeah, what we see on the screen in front of us is a wooden passenger coach, which is completely burnt out.

Some other people spraying water on various other pieces of railway equipment, which are also extremely on fire. Today, we're going to talk about the Quentin's Hill Rail Disaster. Although before we do that, actually before even the goddamn news, I do have to mention two things, which is, Liam's, Liam's thing. This is at the Lutheran Settlement House. There are Dance Away Domestic Violence event. That's October 16th.

The link is in the description. Give them some money. Yeah, give them some money. Give money to them or, you know, I don't know, you'd even attend the thing, I suppose. Hell yeah. The other thing is from one of our, you know, colleague, poddial. Podcasts. Podcasting is Praxis. James from there has an extremely simple surgery that the NHS is just not able to do because they're so backed up. There's a fundraiser for that so he can get that done and over with. It's like pretty, pretty debilitating the skin condition he's got right now. So, you know, if you want to donate to that, that's probably, that's a probably good. thing to do. I'll put a link to that in the description as well. You know, so much for socialized

health care, huh? Yeah, well, the labor and force of getting rid of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out to Jamie. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. So with that, let's do the goddamn news. when I put in the kairon and then I get to see the reaction. Yeah. So the, somehow, still, Secretary of Defense, Pete Heggseth has gone, what I can only describe as warfighter mode, he has gathered together. He made everyone go to Quantico. Yeah, it's kind of like, he's at the stage of like drunk at work where you start pulling

people in for like really like maudlin or like self-aggrandizing conversations, which is exactly what this was. Because when he started calling in like every general from like every kind of far flung fucking command, there was some sort of like consternation about this. I admit to also thinking, is this going to be a kind of like bath party purge? And it wasn't. What it was going to be was just kind of lecturing the troops about how deep. EEI is bad, how they're all fat, how too many of them have beards, and that wokeness is no longer allowed. I was surprised at how stupid it was, I'm gonna be honest.

I was also like, I didn't think Pete would bring everyone down to Quantico, there's only one bar in that town. It's a shithole. I've been to Quantico, man. That's where the coup is being planned immediately following that speech. Because like, not to, not to kind of like, you know, lionize the U.S. US Armed Forces, but it was interesting seeing the absolute silence in that room that prevailed whenever he tried to land one of his big lines about, you know, fucking around and finding

out or whatever. The brass was not amused by this. No. He ended on a big flourish about, you know, sort of like being like, we are the war department, and he got like a woo from two of his staffers and dead, cold silence. They could just coo him. They could just coo the government. Why aren't they doing that?

I am, like, they could just... You can't say that. Here's the thing. In my admittedly limited experience of American military officers, they really do take the whole constitutional actor part seriously. Like, as much as Trump wants him to be, Mark Millie, not a liberal, right? Not a lib, at least not in that sense, right? No.

guy exactly. And what this is doing is we're cascading down. We're going to less and less woke officers and calling them woke, which is funny. And I don't know. I don't know what would happen in a situation where, I mean, for my money, Trump is already so flagrantly unconstitutional in his actions that you would be perfectly justified in cooing him and, you know, doing some kind of like, fuck knows, like, I almost said Rally to restore sanity, but I think it's probably good if you're a military officer that the bar is a little bit higher than that. But yeah, no, I, I don't know, I don't, I don't want to predict anything. It's just, this is, this is a really comically dangerous thing to do if you are the regime, is to get all of your officers in one place, really try and make them feel

bad. And then immediately shut down the government so that they don't get paid for several months. Yeah. It'd just be like, point one, you are fat, woke and gay. Point two, no paycheck this month or indefinitely. Point three, we've brought out the president, this aged, like, senile rapist paedophile to be like, to tell a bunch of, like, extremely technocratic Navy officers that they should bring back battleships because he saw victory at sea.

That was a good one. I enjoyed that very much. Oh, yes. That was glorious. It's like they're confusing the army with the cops. The cops are better armed than the army, sure. But the cops are all slovenly gets without any, like, whereas the army are, like, you know, they're like, Nate might disagree with this, but like the army are basically quite

well organized and could easily just make these people disappear. Well, not make them disappear. You can't say that. Like, you know, am I organizing this direction? I'm in the UK, it's fine. The very least, the officers have the head on their shoulders. Generally speaking. Yeah.

I'm calling my lawyer to figure out what bits I can make about this currently. One moment. Yeah. If you want to think about like the deep state or about the blob, right? Like what these guys want is to maintain American power, to maintain American empire, such as it is, right? And much like the money, the Hegsa thing is a real indication that Donald Trump is going to try and touch that, you know?

And it's been interesting. It's been watching Trump sort of like tack more sort of like Natsakh on Ukraine and be like, oh, well, you know, they can sort of like get back all of Ukraine or, you know, NATO should shoot down Russian jets that overfly their airspace or whatever. And it's like, you always wonder whether it's Trump sort of believing the thing the last person to speak to him, said, or you always wonder at what point they take him into the big room from network, and then for some reason, he just seems to keep forgetting that, if they do.

It's not good enough. If he's loving battleships, like, battleships were last, an effective tool of war in, like, before the First World War. So the last time they were an effective tool of war was before they were built. Like, I think the last time there's a bit of battle on this, like, naval nerd, the last time there was a decisive battle on the sea won by a battleship was like 1910 or something. Like, like, like, then it was aircraft carrier, you know, then it was cruisers, then it was aircraft carriers, then it was like, oh, no, then subs.

Like this, what is he on about? And it's very funny. But the funny, as you say, he's fom, he's fucking with the thing that you're not allowed to fuck with, which is like the military-industrial complex. It'll get angry at him. Yes. Yeah. I mean, if you think about what Trump said besides the, you know, we should have battleships,

this stealth ship doesn't look aesthetic to me. One of the things was just openly being like, yeah, we're going to deploy more like American troops domestically because we're fighting a war from within. And it's like, if you kind of take your head out of your hands when you're sort of like not being called fat and woke and actually listen to that, I think that's, might be the kind of thing that's more likely to make you go. Maybe I should have a quiet word at the one bar in Quantico with some kind of like-minded officers.

The other thing about this is, if you want to talk about kind of like military liberalism, combat liberalism in the Maoist sense, but, you know, reading combat as an adjective rather than a verb, if those guys don't do it, then sometimes a lot of mid-ranking officers do, and you've been seeing the posting about like American Napoleon, right? You need like an artillery major or colonel from like Puerto Rico to just really go for. Puerto Rico, yeah. I mean, you know, the other option here is, you know, I guess Trump's mad at the littoral combat ships because they don't look good.

Maybe he is going to develop a river navy because he wants to fight our internal enemies, right? We need a battle ship. You saw Border Patrol driving up and down the Chicago River, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, we need something that fits up the Chicago River. goes up to Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to go off the Mississippi River, it's got a fit in the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, you know? Oh, done you shit.

Like, uh, yeah, that's gonna be so fucking stupid. Oh my God, yeah, Monitor 2 versus Merrimack 2. That's gonna be amazing. Oh, my God. Incredible. USS forums monitor. Yeah. The thing that's really wild to me is like...

$10. They're... He's gotten what he's... gotten what he wanted and like he's managed to find the people in the military who are willing to drone strike like fishing vessels off the coast of Venezuela for no reason they they're like they're 90% of the way to consolidating all of their power and they just need to make it the final like 10 feet to the to the goal line and at the at the at the five yard line they're like actually you're still too woke and we we're going to like we're going to purge you if you think as much about like

hiring any... It's... Women? I don't know. He went around about raising canes. There's no point in, like, trying to dissect it. Yeah, well, it's just chaos and anarchy. Trump would, like, say, like, Douglas MacArthur was woke.

If Douglas McArthur was a guy who was in the military right now. It's like, he would... It's one of his funniest qualities is his, like, reflexive contempt for the military. I still think about the, I'm not going to go to the, like, war cemetery because those guys are suckers. I don't know. I don't want to cross posts, but like I was just finished to just finish this to the last week's or the most recent TF bonus episode

and Hussein made a really good point, which is that these guys, like, they're addicted. It's politics by posting. And the trouble with that is that at some, you've got to do the next post. And so you are going to, you will shoot into flames, whatever power you've won.

The trouble is that you then get swept aside and the next, like, you know, Musk, we've seen it happen to Musk. He has been swept aside. And, you know, something else takes his place. So, yeah. Hey, but today he's worth $500 billion. Yes.

Well, yeah. I mean, I think the thing is, if you look at like, sort of the precedence from Trump's first term, right? You can see kind of like Millie and the other joint chiefs of stuff being extremely unprepared for Trump, which I think, like, potentially still are, but also very, very hesitant, right? That's why I mentioned the kind of constitutionality thing. And I think having this idea that it was fatal that anything kind of come out in public, right? Because you have to maintain sort of like trust in the institutions. And I think it correctly judging that if you sort of have a

kind of open fracture in civil military relations from the military side, you don't come back from that, right? And I genuinely think the question is, can Donald Trump and Pete Heggseth post themselves into a situation where that becomes the lesser of two evils. And Trump just gets, you know, goes out, you know, Noden Gem style. I don't know. I genuinely do not know. Love living here. Mr. President, please inspect the back of our, please inspect the rear compartment of

our very cool M113. Yeah. Personnel Carrier. Don't want, Victoria, it's absolutely got awful over here as well. We might not be quite as far in the fascism, but Labor are desperate to take us there. So, oh boy. I've been trying, I've been trying to persuade Victoria, among others, not that there's really any feasible way to do this, but to like lifeboat into this country as it gets significantly

worse. And I'm just like, if anyone's got any suggestions for places where it's, it's not bad. I guess Mexico, we could go to Mexico, see the Mexican Navy squash the beef. Yeah, I don't know. Oh, Amla's gone now. So yeah, we're good. We're good. Yeah.

I think we're actually good. Yeah. I've, you know, apparently scooters back and good graces down there somehow. Shit, okay, yeah. Maybe it's time for us to go to Mexico. Yeah, well, no one else can sell them railroad cars. Mexico City Live Show. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that would actually be sick, though. In other news. Oh, shit, can't laugh at this. This is actually bad. No, no one's dead. It's okay. We can laugh again. Eric Adams finally got the 9-11 he always wanted.

He was mayor of New York City during a kind of transcendent disaster as a block of public housing's gas riser exploded, hurting no one, which amazing work. Incredible. It doesn't even look like there was like a significant amount of damage to the building. Like I think this was like, you know, there was a garbage shoot here and then probably, you know, the gas and the plumbing riser. I don't actually have any idea what happened here because I was doing slides when it happened and I was like, I don't want to think about this.

As far as I know, there was just, there was some kind of explosion in either the like garbage shoot or the gas riser and it just blew off the side of the building, but it's fine. No one hurt, let alone, let alone died, you know? So if they really built these buildings, you know? Well, you know, there's a lot of bricks on the ground. I mean, it's fortunate no one was walking down there. I'm not saying, I'm not falling for that one. Yeah, no one of the building would have gotten got by this.

This is actually an impressive success from a, you know, building standpoint. I can't comment too much on it because I don't know exactly what happened. Other than, damn, New York City Public Housing is pretty well built. I think that's our kind of like, our takeaway here is you can build the buildings, pretty good, especially out of brick. Oh, yeah. Well, this is, this is a mostly steel framed building. This has got, you know, it's, it's got like, I don't know, one or two, maybe three wives of brick as a facade, probably on the lower end of that. So, you know, it's all, it's all like steel frame in there. And then I guess whatever, this entire like shoot area here, you know, where the riser was,

I hope that New York City recovers and, you know, filled the gas or whatever and just, it all blew out at once, but path of least resistance was outwards. Yes. That's what I was thinking. Yeah, it's been a well-directed explosion. Yeah, cricky. Yeah, you wouldn't mind. If this happened, like, somewhere like in the middle with the elevator shafts, well, probably

it would have been stronger construction to start out with, but, you know, you might have had a different outcome. Yeah, so a public housing building exploded in New York, but no one was hurt, so it's good question mark. I mean, that's like a bad thing to happen. That shouldn't happen. Yeah, I guess. But we finally had the like, the good 9-11, not in the sense of it being a good thing,

but in the sense of it being kind of- In the words of Eric Adams, it truly was New York's 9-11. Yeah. The good 9-11. Oh, you just mean 9-11? Well, this is the thing about New York. You could see. I can't put that.

From every, every day, you could see anything from like, one of our public housing towers exploding to a person celebrating a new business that's opened. I don't wanna get to Eric Adams here, otherwise I'll switch into mayor mode, you know? Oh, well, that was the goddamn news. Let's ask a question. is the Caledonian main line. That's a good question to ask, Ross. Yes.

So we've done a lot, we've done quite a few episodes on the East Coast mainline when I was around in the past. And this is the other one. This is the top end of what is now known as the West Coast mainline. But it was built by a separate railway company called the Caledonian Railway who wanted to connect the already emerging railway network in the middle of Scotland and the Scottish Central Belt, kind of Edinburgh, Glasgow, that area. Nova's home, among other places. With that they're England that they have and connect up to the railways being built by

the LNWR, by the Midland Railway, and others. Very, very bad idea. You don't want to connect Scotland to England because then you get things like people like me moving to Scotland and ruining it for everyone else. I think that's quite nice. Scottish people move out of Scotland. Yeah, this is it. I mean, yeah, you simultaneously do a brain drain on Scotland and also you fit a solid like quarter of Glasgow with the most annoying accents you've ever heard in your life. And I include myself in that. I remember distinctly when I was at uni, because I went to uni in Glasgow, hearing many instances

of the Glasgow uni accent. And I remember hearing, legit, a girl behind me going, oh yeah, I was in Bali, to And it took me a second to process that she meant like Indonesia rather than the brain. And I was like, we, someone should like detonate something in this vicinity right now. We would deserve it. So the official opinion. This is, this is a consequence of the Caledonia around. The official opinion of Well, there's your problem, podcast is entirely closed borders

and ethno-states. No one should be allowed to move anywhere. Correct. Yes. complete ethno state you can clip that and posted on Twitter posted on blue sky

I'm my new job and I've already fucking canceled Jesus Christ I know well this is it good good grief yeah so so if listeners cast in mind back to the to the Morpeth episode where we talked about the various battles

of George Hudson and his mates to get a railway across the Scottish border but on the east well the Caledonian Railway was competing with that on the West and did so over the East Coast mainline was fairly flat near the coast. Tricky, but not too tricky.

The Caladone Railway was built over several extremely large hills including the very high summit of Beetuk, which you can see just about in the middle of the slide. In fact, Roz is highlighting underneath it, marvellously. Meaningless railway is quite wibbly. It's also worth noting

that the East Coast mainline is very, very pretty. you go by the sea it's a nice journey you can look out of the window and have a nice time whereas the West Coast main line no disrespect to the scenery

but it does it's bad bad it's not you're not seeing a lot of there's one suit once you're north of Lockerbie there ain't much good on apart from the forest

tenants tea the wooded tenant's tea that you can see from the train is about the only highlight on the way north yeah it's pretty it's pretty bleat

anyone who's right everyone in the comments YouTube comments Buckwild for that, please, because people should know about it. Anyway, weevy, wibbley. But it goes from Glasgow, we went from Glasgow and Edinburgh

southwards with a funny old triangle junction at Carstairs, which has been recently remodeled-ish. Worked on that, actually, for a bit, and then didn't. Down to Carlisle Citadel Station. Citadel Station is the name of the big station at Carlyle.

Ross, does that cover the question? Yeah, very, very wibly. And 80 years later, some genius would put tilting trains on it and cause a podcaster to get more motion sick than she had ever been in her life. Well, you did the APT episode, so everyone knows all about that. It's a smooth, too relaxing fire. As an episode, actually.

As an episode, yeah. Yeah, that's an episode right there. Anyway, right, so that is the main line, the first mainline of the Caledonia Railway. That's what that is. Yeah, and this is, they start building it in the 1830s. They finish it in stages in like the 1840s. And this is during like a pretty early era of railroad technology, railway technology, excuse me, it's Britain.

So, you know, but it's, it becomes very busy, very quickly, which means we need, we need methods. Yeah, stand-up comedians going south. Uni-student students going on. So we need methods to prevent the trains from running into each other. Yeah, Glasgow at the time and absolutely, oh, sorry, I was going to say Glasgow at the time, an extremely important imperial port, only gets more so actually.

Yeah, absolutely. Second city of the empire. Birmingham found dead in Miami Beach, if you ask me. Birmingham's just northern London. It's where the engineers come from too. So, you know. And quite a lot of the generals with blood on their hands during the height of empire.

Yeah. Sorry Scottish nationalists, but it's true. Yeah, so, yeah, a major undertaking, extremely complex, challenge, a bit of engineering, and instantly under capacity for the amount of traffic, yeah. Yeah, and so, you know... Well, I hope they solved that problem at some point in the ensuing century.

May that two centuries of not resolving that problem. Yeah. So one of the bigger problems on these busy railroads, especially early on, was like, how do you keep trains from crashing into each other? Because trains don't stop very quickly, especially before you have, you know, air brakes or vacuum brakes or something. Or any brakes.

Any breaks at all, yeah. General aviation rules, see in the void, you know, like, just look out the front. Yeah, everyone remember, it took until the 1890s before, the 1890s, that is, everyone, before all trains had to have breaks. So yeah. Yes. Just like, it just does, we were doing speed. Well, we haven't done the RMR.

I'm a real disaster on this podcast, and we will get there because that's an important one. That's an important one, yes. So one of the first ways to stop trains from running into each other is timetables. I was going to add a picture of a timetable there, and I couldn't find one, or an employee timetable, excuse me. That's a beautiful piece of text. I love it. I'm holding a New Jersey Transit New York Division employee schedule. in my hands right now that I was given by a friend of the podcast.

I'm waving it in front of the camera, which is switched off for the sake of Nova's bandwidth. There you go, listeners, enjoy that. Everyone can imagine that in your head. Just imagine. Just imagine. You're getting, you're getting a homeopathic picture of an employee timetable. I am, I swear to God, I am right in the alternative medicine bonus episode. There's a vague notion of a timetable.

The idea of a timetable is that trains will pass through this location, and, you know, I'm at this time. That means especially if they have a single track railroad, you know, people driving the trains, they know when they have to take a siding and wait for another train to pass or they know, you know, when they are able to proceed, right? And this is all time-based and it's all also based on the idea that, you know, if another train is late, ah, too bad, you still got to wait for it to go by. It's very primitive, but it works if you don't have things like, you know, the telegraph or, you know.

They still do a kind of radio-enabled version of this. Quite a few lines in Scotland. Yeah, yeah. Because the Alaska Railroad is like almost all single track. Yeah, and then you have a slightly more advanced version of that, which is train orders, right, where because there are telegraph stations or something like that, you wind up. picking up train orders that are physically written down by someone to tell you what to do with the train. So we see here a man leaning out of a caboose to pick up the train order from a big

loop next to the track because you could pick it up without stopping. Then you have a fun thing. That seems like an excellent way to get your entire like hand and arm. It's just a little loop. It's fine. You're supposed to do it at 15 miles an hour, but lots of people didn't. and do it a 15 miles an hour. Goink. Yeah. You got some bruises, but it was fine. Yeah, tokens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tokens are a fun one where, you know, if you have a section of track that you know is limited to, only one train at a time, there is one physical token you have to carry from one end to the other to give you permission to use that section of the line. And these weren't necessarily physical. There's, I know that like, as far as I know part of one of SEPT's trolley lines, the 101, which is now called something else, still uses a token system, but it's a button you press, you reach out of the cab and press a button on the track.

We have, Scotland has multiple lines that still use tokens. They're called RETB's Radio Electric token block signalled sections. The West Highland line is one, far north lines another. They work very well on lines that are mostly single track. It's a very sensible way to keep it operating. The test track. I like this, but only if the token is extremely like physically elaborate, you know? Like it has to be kind of like very aesthetic. On one of the test tracks that I work that I now work on, we still have a token to access it. And it is literally a cast, it's like a proper iron staff that's been, it's like that way

way rust gets when it's like rusty but so handworn that the rust is like a completely impervious kind of layer of like material and this thing is probably 140 years old it's great i'm imagining like a big challenge coin yeah some of them are like that some of them are like a staff others are like literally like a disc thing yeah it depends on like some of them have a machine to dispense them some of them are just like slipped that oh it's the wonderful world of tokens Having to play a gotcha game before you're allowed to proceed down the track. Yeah, yeah, yeah, connect four. That's it, yeah.

The main problem with these is if someone loses the token, the lines out of surface forever. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, you have to literally have to dig it up and build a new one. Yeah. But eventually, we discovered technology, which allows us to build signals, right? Woo! And that lets you just relay commands, download. line, go stop, slow down, so on and so forth. And that's what you really need to run a lot of

trains on one line. It's worth saying, it's worth saying that the railways employed light speed technology fairly early on, like from the 1830s, the first use of, in fact, the first use of commercial electronics was at Houston Station down the Camden incline to get to basically start this is back in the day when you still had like powered steam inclines rather than locomotives in various bits of the railway and into Houston Station was one of those examples. And to set that basically to set trains off up and down that, the initial railway operated using a, it's in the book actually, I talk about this. They used, the first commercial use of electronics was a signal system which got ripped out like two years later for various stupid reasons.

But so we did have signals, you know, in various ways, the signaling was, we started out pretty well. And basically so that the modern tech industry can blame the railways for creating it because we were the ones who started off with commercial electronics, sorry. Yeah, yeah, you know, that's unfortunate, but it is difficult to, it is difficult to do signals without having a zero or a one. It's true. Yeah. It's true.

Of course, the majority of signals were not worked with commercial electronics. They were worked with, like the one here you'll see, cables and immensely, Well, I'll tell you what, we'll get there. We'll get there. I was about to say, we'll get there immediately. Hooray. The signal box. What is the signal box?

If only there was some way to, like, signal this in advance. Nice. I'm easily entertained. What can I say? Hey, listeners, you know this about me. Come on now. So you have a place where a bunch of trains are coming through, right? Okay.

I'm listening. They can go a lot of different directions. Okay. Different directions. Obviously, you can't change directions from inside the train, so you need a man to sit in a room where he can see what's happening and pull a bunch of levers to change the tracks so the train can go where it needs to go. Person in box cannot steer a train in cab.

These frames. Oh yeah, I love a big lever frame. Because, like, some of the, the beautiful, beautiful pieces of, like, mechanical engineering and a lot of them have, like, physical interlocks on them to make sure that you can't, you know, perfectly 9-11, one train into another, yes, most of the time. Exactly, no, I was going to say, going underneath. It's a lot of kind of, like, mechanical complexity. It's very perfect.

Yeah, I should have put a picture up. Maybe I'll throw Devin a picture of what underneath one of these looks like. Because, yeah, even a signal box of the size of the one at Quintasil here, but particularly, Okay, let's take, I don't know, Shrewsbury, which has the largest mechanically interlocked signaling layout in the world. You go to the, so the top bit with the window is where you have the levers, it's where the signal stands, so they can look out and see whoever they might be. And underneath, in the brick bit is where all the interlocking is. Now, when we talk about interlocking, so often people talk about interlocking. In the U.S. interlocking is often an interchangeable word for like railway junctions and track layout.

But interlocking specifically refers to the way that bits of metal interlock to prevent or enable certain types of behavior of your signal, of your railway track layout. And the way that things will switch, your turnouts, whatever you want to call them, will move to allow trains to be protected from hitting each other. Because ultimately, the purpose of a signaling system, it's purpose number one, make trains not hit each other. And so that interlocking became fairly quickly, became more and more developed to the point where we now have solid-state interlocking, which it's doing the same job as the enormous thing

of mechanical hoopleys, which the picture will appear on screen. And it's doing that job, but in a solid-state hard drive. And in fact, the interlocking, again, influenced the design of early computers because of the way that interlocking worked is a series of logic gates. It is a series of physically represented logic gates, which is fun. Oh, yeah. And like the way these guys worked is, well, I guess hopefully there'll be a picture on screen, but if I recall correctly, there's just a bunch of cables that go into trenches

that go out into the tracks to, like, you know, physically move the switches. You know, it's not like this, this lever is not an abstraction. No, you are physically creating mechanics. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And for example, in hot weather, you'd have challenges from the fact that you'd have the cables expanding by potentially quite substantial distances, metal expands. And so those cables, you ended up having to have quite complex pulley systems to enable to kind of deal with the increasing and decreasing lengths of those cables in varying

weather conditions. And what the interlocking is doing underneath those levers. So there are different ways to manage this. And in early days, you didn't have the complex interlocking. you relied on the training of the signal to, you know, with, as Ross is about to tell us, with some potential additional physical aids. But in the early days, it was just the signal had to know what levers they could and could not pull in what sequences.

And sometimes they were, as you've seen in the picture here, sometimes they're painted different colors to help them to know which ones related to which other ones. And as that became obviously not huge, you know, as you had more and more complex systems, you, that moved from being entirely manual to being mechanically interlocked, where you had these metal kind of teeth and gears that would engage with each other, then that moved into a situation, but again, still with physically manual, those were basically stopping the levers from being pulled. And then you move into later years, you move into electromechanical, where the lever is just a little, it still looks a bit like this, but it's a little one, and then it

powers relays, and then the relays do the interlocking, and then again, you've moved to the modern era with all on the computer. Yes, yes. Everything eventually becomes going on the computer. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one thing to pay attention to here is this wooden block, right, or a collar. And this is there to indicate to the signaller that there is a train in this location. This lever cannot physically be moved as a result of the block. It's in place of a model of, it's in place of that interlocking that I've a picture has appeared on. It's in place of that. So it's a more primitive version of that as a both an agent.

a memoir to the signal saying, hey, fuckhead, but also, as you say, in theory, to physically stop that lever from being pulled, or returned to one of the other. That's so perfectly physical as well. Like you're not, I say this in total confidence, not looking at the number of slides we have left. You're not defeating that as a system, right? Like, well, as long as you're using it. Yeah.

As long as it say mandated by the company. or... And you follow that, man. Has anyone seen the one caller for the thing? And meanwhile, it is like the doorstop in the waiting room downstairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an ashtray. It's a makeshift ashtray, yeah.

I had to give it to one guy in place of a token. I didn't have it. So another thing to mention here, maybe this is less relevant. I wanted to mention it anyway. We talked about timetabled operations. well, what is an extra or a special train, right? And so... Oh, I mean, it's basically whatever I feel like.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, any train, which is not part of the regular timetable, which is not part of routine operations, is going to be an extra or a special, right? I think in the UK they call it special. In the United States, we'd call it an extra. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's something that appears as a VAR as VAR on real-time trains. Yeah. Yeah, it's a change, an additional service running on top of the working timetable, yeah, in the UK. Yeah. So like, and you're... Why is the Thomas the Tank Engine 1-25? Why does it look like that?

Why? Well, firstly, because the Reverend Audrey's illustrator could not do a very good rail alphabet for stars. That's the main problem there. My real question with this guy is... Like, they replace- It's a she, actually. I think the Institute 1-25 is a she character. So we're misgendering the class 43 off the bat.

They had to replace the cabs on these relatively frequently, right? Because they were made a fiberglass. Those faces got smashed up to fuck. So yeah, wait a minute, facial, FFS. Well, no matter. It's more of a kind of horrifying like war hound type situation where it's like, I, you know, I sexually identify as an attack train, and my face just gets stoved in routinely in the course of my work, and they just replace your face.

Is it, is it the face, or is it like, this personality change each time? The Intercity 1-25 is arguably non-binary in the sense that it comprises, that it is a set comprised of, like, Pitt and Emma. So, I mixed, mixed gender train sets? Yeah. Well, is it Pip, yeah, that's a good point, is it Pipas Philip or? So, yeah. I thought it's my train headmates.

So it's just, well, yeah. I guess so. Or do they function in the way of those extremely Siamese twins of, of like, when they're like, have two heads and two organ sets, is it that situation? Yeah, this is, I don't know, I don't, you're sort of being welded to, um, to also that should be conjoined twins. I definitely not, I don't know, it's definitely not Simon's twins anymore, is it? I'm cancelled, it's conjoined twins, isn't it?

We're sending, we're sending Pip and Emma to, to Mexico. Yeah, exactly. Some kind of cat dog situation. Well, I'm thinking of like, you have like permanently coupled train sets, but like, all that, We've seen like Annie and Claribel have faces, so I'm imagining a situation where you're six or seven permanently coupled coaches in the, the middle five have never seen the sun. Jesus, that's terrifying.

It's appalling, isn't it? I'm on the Thomas the Tank Engine wiki, right? Let's go queen, let's go queen. The detail here that I want to note is that it identifies both of these, you know, these trains as being active, I guess, in both England and the island of soda. And the island of soda, the flag that they've used for that is just the trans flag. So I don't know if that's intentional or not. Island of soda flag.

Hmm. That's, holy shit. It's like, it's like potentially a better than the trans. I know that, I know your hatred of the trans flag at Nova. It's potentially better. Yeah. Old guy making the band-aes floating in a swimming pool. Yeah, sure enough.

I just want it on record that I have no problem with the trans flag. I think the trans flag is absolutely fine. You're really trying to get those points back, aren't you? It's more visually, the Isle of Soda's flag is more visually interesting because it breaks up the, it's not like monoblock colors, it's like they're sort of like different Yeah, it's quite nice. But it is the trans flag in a lot of places. It absolutely is.

Yeah, I... It's also somehow inadvertently kind of the rail now. of orange and white. So, interesting. That's very interesting. Maybe I planned that all along. Learning so much. Although there's like a yellow and white version as well. I mean, they could just turn that into pink and then it absolutely is that, like. That's the, that's the South Soda Rese. It's a seed, like a Cyprus situation, like, like, oh, I was thinking of Vietnam. Soda has a native language that's dying out. What the fuck? There's So much to, okay, I'm not going to, I'm not going to slide track.

Well, no, the Reverend Audrey wrote that book, The Isle of Sordor. It's, Ile of Sodor, it's history and people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In my head, there's been a civil, a secession in a civil war. I'm, yeah, I'm going to get on that wiki and add a few extra pages, I reckon. It's not a real English novel, English fantasy series unless you built the whole. backstory, right? If it doesn't have extensive...

Oh, yeah, guy who has never been diagnosed with any form of neurodivergents, just painstakingly doing a bunch of world. Yeah, no, no, that's the Silmarian, but for Thomas the Tank. The Archipelago series is a series using Transport Fever 2 to represent... Oh, wait, sorry, that's...

Yeah, sorry. Anyway, so... Sorry, Ross. We've got sidetrack talking about FFS for HSTs. Yeah, HRTs for HSTs, there we go. You can't use that word. That's supposed to stay on fucking 4chan. So these...

It's like looking at a bunch of old railroad acronyms. It's just like, why is there a T, T, T, T, T. So this is... We're talking about specials and extras. They're trains that don't appear on the timetable. They run as necessary. they may not be like special, you know, an empty coal train could be a special, or it could be like an excursion or a private charter train full of VIPs or a troop train, for instance, right?

Well, I think I'll train just special, Ross, actually. So, you know, I think, you know, yes, and thanks to precision scheduled railroading here in the United States, we agree. Because we've completely done away with schedules nearly every single train. on the rails today is an extra or a special. You can never really tell what an extra is thinking. Yes, exactly. You know, these, in the United States, they were indicated by these white flags up here

on the locomotive. In the UK, the signals were more complicated, or the lamp codes. You can see here, Edward has four lamps, indicating that he is hauling the royal train which had its own special code. Yeah,

crikey. Oh, fuck off. I hate this stupid country. I don't know much about lamp codes because it's a steam train thing and I don't know anything about steam trains. But that is okay, fine, yeah.

Nowadays we do it in head code. Well, not nowadays. In the BR years, it was head codes. The good news is. Yeah. Good news is we can't afford a royal train anymore. I mean, of all the reasons why we don't have one, that's my least favorite, but we just don't now because we can't afford

it. Yeah. Oh, dear. But anyway, we just can't afford railways at the moment. That's basically we've decided we can't afford railways anymore, so we're doing away with them. You can't afford anything anymore. It's going to have to do with that. It's because of work. Yeah, exactly. Everyone's going to have to live in like a hut pretty soon. Yeah. I have to go back to, you know, traditional like long houses. And we deserve it as well. Yeah. But yeah, so you have some amount of a predictable schedule if you're in the signal box but if one of these extra trains or these special train shows up you just got to deal with it right send it along as best you can so anyway now we have to talk about coach construction in the 19th and 20th

century it's the crashworthiness slide deck again for me oh no way it's not why why you always I'm talking about crashworthiness on my absence. Yeah. They are very pretty. I'm not, I'm not interested in crashworthiness. Look at this, look at this mock Tudor situation we're dealing with here. And the cleristria as well. It's lovely.

It's a very nice looking car. They are, yeah, that, I mean, so that first one is a, oh, actually, you have to correct me, that one, first one looks like an L&R Teak coach, actually. Made out of teak? Yeah, they teak line them. We're deep into the, like, Vicki 3 extracts. economy thing where we're pulling teak out of like Borneo and sending it to Britain in order

to make it into the... Yeah, Nova, seriously, the equivalent of the the Azumas that you get if you go, I mean, you pretty much always take the West Coast Mainline, but if you happen to go to Edinburgh, go down the east and got in one of the Azumas, the equivalent to those, the crack north-south expresses on the East Coast Mainline were a beautiful Garter Blue Streamland A4 Pacific with a bunch, with like 15 or not quite. like 14 of these things behind, these teak L&R coaches. I don't know whether this specifically is why I can't quite see the picture.

I think about railways and people getting like really romantic. Yeah, that is like you get that train. You're supposed to be like and, you know, someone is kind of like seeing you off the platform and it's like very tragic and you're, you know, you're crying and stuff. I'm still doing that, but the trains have gotten worse. So the railways need to return to my level of aesthetics. Meanwhile, when I visited Glasgow and we got on a Scott Rail train and Nova was like, this thing's a piece of shit. I fucking hate it.

I was like, they come every 25 minutes. Wow, you can just get on the train and go. What a concept. Yeah, we're running for a train. And I was like, oh, my God, if we miss this, when's the next one? Because I was like, I don't know if we're going to make this. And she's like, oh, God, it's like 25 minutes. I was like, are you fucking kidding me?

This should be the last one for the month. Yeah. 15 minutes trains to Mulgai. It was only between the two largest cities and like, you know, the region. And so I was like, yeah, this should be the last one for the day. Oh, yeah. Edinburgh, Glasgow, yeah, get the nice express over. They're not bad.

But there's also four railways for Edinburgh, Glasgow. So if you really want to, you can just get one of the slower ones and enjoy looking at sheep for an additional 20 minutes and go via like Bathgate. It's all good. Anyway, we digress. We're looking at trains, crashworthiness, wood or steel, ROS, materials, and train car construction. Let's go. It's been, it's, it's, it's, in the, in the late 19, 30th, 20th century,

it was for a long time considered impossible to build a steel railroad car because there's no give to steel so it will shake itself apart, right? And to a certain extent, that's kind of like a, yeah, might as well be putting people into a blender, are you insane? That's partly a track thing, because early days of the modern railway, we built our track form to be rigid. We took the Nova School of Engineering, and it was rigid as hell. Yes.

And so it was more rigid. And then only kind of later did we learn that actually you can build a track system that's resilience, which means kind of it has some give to it. And the design of vehicles kind of followed that a little bit. It wasn't entirely the train people who had the epiphany. It was a little bit of a, we made our track to be less, you know, we, we, we, we, We spread it on more, you know, more sleepers, more ties, and it became a bit more resilient.

And so then an epiphany could come along thanks to, in this case, the Interboro Rapid Transit Company. Yes. So the Interboro Rapid Transit Company built one steel car, and it worked fine. It was a little bit heavy, so they couldn't really use it in service. But it didn't shake itself apart. The Pennsylvania Railroad followed this. everyone realized, wait, you can build a steel passenger car, right?

Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, it's fine. Nothing bad's going to happen. This big revolution didn't come until around 1903 and, you know, passing. Also when battleships were useful. Okay, noted. Yes, yes. Back when you could also build those out of TV.

But you did still have to use a lot of steel. And, you know, passenger cars last a long time. So throughout the First World War, which is about the, era that we're talking about, there's still a lot of wooden coaches rolling around, right? Yeah, but coach has a four-year shelf life, which is not uncommon. I mean, you're not going to complain. They look beautiful. They seem to be fine.

Like, yeah. Another question is, okay, are you using vacuum or Westinghouse air brakes? In Britain specifically, there was, for a long time, a question of whether you use vacuum brakes or air brakes, and those are, essentially, they work in reverse to each other. You know, air brake keeps pressure on to keep the brakes off, and the vacuum break keeps a vacuum to keep the brakes off. Which I was like the idea of, because it fails safe, right? It fails safe, which is good.

But I always like vacuum, even though technically it's a more primitive system. Don't put the diagram of the valve cock up again. Yeah, exactly. And a vacuum is also interesting because of, it's very easy to have a vacuum brake system when you have a huge, pressurized steam vessel at the front of the train, because you can use a Venturi device to create that vacuum very easily, very cheaply. I would love to use something called a Venturi device. I'm using so few named devices.

I know. Not enough devices. they put all the devices into the computer it's such a disappointment this is not really a factor in this accident but at the time you are going through a period where it was not clear which brake system they were going to adopt in Britain so a lot of cars were equipped with either one system of the other or some had both or some had a pass-through

where it was like, okay, we can use this car with an airbrake train, but it doesn't have air brakes, but it does have an air brake pipe, but it can work with vacuum brakes. Yes. Love it. Yeah, what if we just never standardized anything? Eventually, eventually vacuum brakes became standard, and then in the 70s, everything was converted over to air brakes. Yeah.

Thank you to the Mark two coach. And what else, Ross? What other things? Tell us about other variations in design at this time. More. I need more. Hold on. This is embarrassing. I have to use the restroom again. This is something. My digestion is not happy with something I ate earlier. I think it's genuinely the latest thing of COVID going around. I will explain and we can cut this or leave it in depending. Part of the reason why it's been so difficult to record

podcasts is I have been sick as a dog lately. I had like I had like three days back to back where I just was like useless. I was still working. I was doing my best to like work through it. But like I was genuinely sort of like concerned about my health at that point. And yeah, I don't know whether it was like COVID or like something like anything else viral or what, but like it was it was very much like the kind of ideal girlfriend in the sense that it kept like absolutely knocking me down on the floor.

then any time I tried to get up, just it hit me again. And so I'm still kind of not really, not really rid of it. I'm still, I, like, I feel, I still don't feel great. And it's just like, yeah, real, real bad. And I know that's been going around. What's really good is that the NHS have been allowed, indeed, funded to continue to keep the information on their COVID page up to date with the latest symptoms for the latest variant.

Oh, wait a minute. I'm just getting a message here on my ear. Oh, no, they haven't. No, it's still. from about four years ago. Your government still thinks COVID's real? No, they don't actually, unfortunately. Well, sort of just about, but it doesn't, they don't think you should do anything,

you know. Yeah. Just don't worry about it, which I guess fair enough, but it's very difficult to not worry about it when you're sort of like, spending day three of lying exclusively on your side and sort of like fairly bad. Yeah. It's being like, uh, at what point do I sort of like go to the hospital about this? I mean, I still have like, nasty and just regular fatigue.

that I just never felt before I got COVID that I definitely feel now just like utter fatigue it's not just from the toddler like this happened well before the toddler arrived that I just had fatigue and I felt I just couldn't do and still can't do half the stuff and it manifests for me as

my brain is much more chaotic from the ADHD because when I'm tired I'm more manic by quite a dramatic level so yeah it's um yeah thanks thanks for keeping us all up today I've had that um yeah so I've had And basically, I always get like, whenever I get any, any, like, sick at all, I always get, like, this huge, like, post-viral fatigue things.

Yeah. Walking feels like walking under water. It's, like, it's, like, painful, but it's, it's also, like, kind of, kind of frightening and also really kind of, like, debilitating. And I, but I don't know that that sort of, like, is something that originated with COVID, in the sense that, and this is also partly why I kind of get mad at, like, long COVID as a thing. is because I got really sick in like 2019, early 2019, and it was just kind of like downstream of that, and I genuinely think what happened was I just got like a bad flu, and I got unlucky and got long flu or something,

because you can get long anything, you know, and it's just like, it was this kind of thing. It's nasties up your insides and you can have this like mess of like really, really, like difficult to pin down post-viral symptoms that just get thrown into the same basket as like chronic fatigue syndrome, right? or it's just like, or anything like that, where it's like, this is, this is mental woman problems, right? And for a while, people kind of were like, you know, long COVID, maybe this is a thing. Maybe it's the first one of those things that we're going to recognize. And then, of course,

they didn't, which they wouldn't have a going to. And now long COVID is also in the government cannot. Yeah, the government is not allowed to acknowledge that chronic conditions exist because then they'd have to think about actually doing some research into understanding what they are. And chronic conditions often are primarily a woman, like they're often women's health questions as you know, as we, yeah, and therefore they often get pushed into the, well, women, things, a woman there. So, yeah. Also the kind of the economic considerations of being like, well, we have to cut benefits. And a key part of that is refusing to acknowledge that people can be sick in a way that prevents them from working for long periods or even indefinitely, right?

and we have to kind of trim all of the fat off of that, you know, which is, of course, I'm just checking in on the scale of workforce long-term sickness. Those numbers, just double check. Ooh. Ooh, okay. Yeah. That seems like a good idea economically to just ignore that problem. Yeah, just what to do is to just ignore it, not engage with it.

Cool. It's crazy that you can genuinely make that worse by defunding a bunch of stuff. Interesting. Like you sort of stop spending money. you stop investing on anything that might make people's lives better and that might make them you know healthier and for some reason you're surprised when they they get and stay sick do you know what's a really good icing on that cake is to also make everything so obviously shit that everyone has like a really like is like 40% despair on any given date it's really

good extra icing on top of that cake and the one thing about specifically like post-viral stuff I will say is that like the people don't understand they're like kind of psychological or like, even psychiatric aspects of it, but like, you can get so, like, depressed in a way that even if you were a kind of like habitual depression habit, feels so alien and so out of proportion, uh, and, and feels much more like, kind of idiopathic, physically, you know? It's like, yeah, real bad, real bad. We can cut all of that, but that's some context as to why I've been struggling a bit

at work. Oh, I'm bad. Well, we love you, Nova, and I'm sorry you've been struggling. Well, thank you. I didn't hear any of that, but I don't mean to complain. I feel bad when I do. I can definitely say the last round of COVID definitely left me with some problems. My God.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. It's fine. We'll just cut all of that because I feel bad for complaint. That's a good time to complain. Devin, you get editors veto on that.

Yeah. So trains, part of front of the else, you're in this, you're in this beautiful train, you're experiencing yearning, right? Yeah. You're sort of like, but you also need to be able to see stuff, because maybe it's And there's basically two choices for you. Do you have electric lighting or do you have pinch gas, right? Ouch. Sorry, couldn't resist it. Yeah, I think I've had some of that the last few days. It's part of why I've been feeling about it. Pinch me and I pass wind? That's gross.

I don't like that. Yeah, just like the entire train being like pulling finger. So Carl Friedrich could Julius Pinch develop this proprietary gas, right? It's distilled from Naphtha. Back when you could just do that. People would just be having a name, I've developed a gas. Yeah, yeah, proprietary gas. Oh yeah, me too.

Yeah. It's... The degree in in inorganic chemistry, I could develop a proprietary gas from Stuttgart. It's distilled from Naphtha, which is, you know, like white gas or can't fuel or something like that, which can be compressed very easily, which meant that you could have a relatively small container slung underneath the railroad car, full of this

compressed gas, and you could run gas lamps off of that for, like, days at a time. It did not need to be refueled off. Have a question. Have a question. We've talked about fractional distillation and stuff before. And from this, I remember, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Naptha, Naphther's a pretty like a high octane hydrocar, right? Like it's got a-

It's higher up on the distillation column, yeah. Yeah, so it's got a lot of kind of like volatile, it's got a lot of energy kicking around, which we make it good for this. Oh, yeah, I mean, it's great for lighting. It made a very light, a very, very bright, very smokeless flame. You know, it, it worked really good for what it was, but the thing is what it was was gaslighting, and it was being used in wooden cars. No, it wasn't.

Oh, that's fine, though. That's definitely fine. No, in fact, it isn't. And everyone knows it isn't. If you don't derail, nothing bad happens. In fact, interestingly, one of the properties of these particular lamps and their associated gas was they were much better at, you know, the flame kept going when there were bumps or there was, you know, some kind of jolt or something like that as opposed to, like that. as opposed to like earlier oil lamps. So these flames liked to keep going, regardless of shocks.

That's also probably fine. They're literally being gaslight. You have like a constant even supply of fuel, which you can then sort of like slowly adjust to make people feel like they're going insane. So again, this is an obvious safety hazard, but there wasn't really another way to do it until electricity came along, right?

I'm not very familiar with, like, early British practices here. I know that in the United States, early electrically lit cars, they attached the dynamo to one of the axles, and then they had a big lead acid battery underneath, and, you know, the dynamo would charge the battery. Everything was dangerous back then. The dynamo would charge the battery, which would run the electric lights, and if the train stopped for too long, well, it got dark.

Yeah, not a similar. We had dynamos, but also we would have an electric feed from the, from the cab. Certainly once we move to diesel, diesel and diesel electric, we'd have an electric feed through the, through the train from the locomotive, even, even early on. But with steam, it was dynamo and lead acid battery, similar just as the UK, probably because we were inheriting a lot of those designs from the Pullman Railcar Company. That would make sense. Yeah.

I don't know if you could fit a large enough alternator on the steam locomotive, the power whole train. You might need a second steam locomotive for that, which weirdly is how a lot of Amtrak trains work just with their second diesel locomotive devoted to head-end power. But yeah, so a lot of these advances, you know, they made, train cars got a lot safer very rapidly in like the early 1900s, 1910s. They were steel, they had better breaks, they had electric lighting, a derailment wasn't quite the death sentence that it used to be, right? And because these cars were, I mean, they're expensive up front, but they're more durable, they have lower lifetime maintenance costs, it did behoove the railways to move to them

relatively quick. Yep. But then, then an event happened. In order to understand the Quentin Cell Rail disaster, we must first explain the causes of the First World War, yes. Beginning with sort of like wounded nationalisms all over Europe in all sorts of different ways, which then play out in the form of like, a guy, guy shoots another guy, the second international shits the bed.

I use this exact identical slide. Yeah, that's crucial. Yeah. The last time we discussed this. All of Europe goes to war over essentially nothing, Britain gets dragged in. And what does that mean for the railways? Lots and lots of traffic, right? Yeah, you gotta move all of these troops around, you gotta move all of this newfangled

sort of like various devices. Devices and whizjigs, things, you have whatchumacolets, you have man in material, right? It's paramount to send as many boys over there as quickly as possible so they could all immediately die in a money ditch fighting for control of 10 feet of a French pig farm. And this required a lot of railway equipment to be pressed into service, including stuff that was obsolete or no longer suitable for civilian service, right? You know. You also have to remember that you're running the railways with, I mean, like railway work is like a reserved occupation, so you're not conscripting people,

but you can't necessarily stop them from volunteering. And it also means that you're not getting new intake anymore because all of the, you know, 17 or 18-year-olds who might have been going to work on the railways are now going to die fighting for control of 10 feet for French. Yes, yeah, it's very difficult to recruit people. Surprising amount of women wind up working on the railways. I know that, like, World War II is supposed to be,

oh, that's when the women were in the workforce. No, World War I as well, it also happened. Yeah, very much. There's a reason why the interwar years were big for suffrage, right? Because a lot of women had got a taste of doing stuff, and we're like, wait, what? This is fine. Like, why can't, I want to do this stuff again? Why can't, why can I do this stuff?

I like working on the train. I like getting various forms of chemical warfare weapons, like stuff smoohing up my face and skin and hands and hair. It's all good. Fosgene, delicious. Wonderful. So your railways are dealing with like normal traffic, but also troop traffic.

Like there's a lot of troop trains, special troop trains that are being, you know, to move as many of, you know, Britain's best and brightest to go get murdered. And, of course, all the material needed for the war effort. You know, so all these lines suddenly get very, very, very crowded. And you're having to do, you know, like a lot of,

exotic signaling to get trains around each other. Yeah, that's, wait a minute. So it was an extremely saturated rail network having to do increasingly bizarre things to its operating regime and timetable to satisfy the demand. That couldn't possibly happen today. Thank goodness for that. That is not something we can, you know, consider these days. Well, actually, the joke there is that that's precise what we're doing on our

rail and network currently because we're doing extremely bizarre things operationally and to our timetable to squeeze as many trains in as possible and without actually doing any infrastructure work. So yeah, I don't know. I guess we never learn lessons. No, no, we learn nothing. Well, you know, I'd rather have that problem than a car shortage, which is what's happening over here. But that's a different episode. Although incidentally, also what we're about to talk about now. Actually, though, yeah, no, we do have to talk to. about card toys. Yeah.

So they don't have enough cars to run everything with modern rolling stocks. So I think it's useful here to look at our contestants today, which you're about to meet at Clinton's show, in the red corner. Oh, dear. I tell you, actually, so you've got, annotate, everyone, Google some of these, some of this rolling stock, because it's so key to see, we'll get there, but. like Ros will get there, but I really want you to understand how knackered the coaches of

player one are in this situation. I was trying to find some pictures and I couldn't find any good ones unfortunately. So this is on the morning of the 22nd of May 1915. This is outside of Quentin Sill, which is just barely, you know, it's a little bit north of Carlisle, right? And there's several trains which want to get through

this set of sidings we'll show that in the next slide um but so all right we have a local train which has uh these are caledonian railway relatively modern coaches there's there's two coaches a brake van and a milk van right you have a troop train special which has oh boy a bunch of great central railway um really old really terrible cars um this is what uh third class Last passenger cars. Yes, mostly third. So, no, you got some, you got some composites too. So I don't know, maybe they put the officers in those.

Composite means something different in Britain than it does in the United States. A composite car here means it's a, it got a steel frame, but a wood body. Composite in Britain is, it has first and third classes in it. Correctamundo. Yeah, all of these guys are all wood. So, yeah, we got composite break. Third class, third class, third class, third class, composite, third, third, third, third, third, third, third,

composite, composite. Caravan truck. I don't know what that is. So I've put in the group chat and what the coach looks like. And I want everyone to just go in and look at the DM, our group DM, and have a look at the picture. And that's what the troop chain is made of. That is a three axle piece of.

That's a barn. That's a barn with some wheels on. Yeah, this is not like the pictures that Roz put up earlier give people a false impression of how more than this, this kit is. That's what it looks like. That's a conservatory that's been erected without planning permission. I thought, I thought I was, okay, I don't, I don't like this at all. Those are those three, there was, those six wheel coaches I always assumed were like children's

drawings, okay, as opposed to a real thing that again. That is what the troop train was made of. It was made of what was that like, like just a bit of like 20 of these fuckers, all sellotaped together. Yeah, no, I, in long train, many troops. Yes. And squeezed in like the chickens that ultimately occupied most of these things when they ended up in fields. Yes. And presumably feeling pretty good about the prospects of going from Scotland to France to

Yeah, you're in Leaf. You've just congregated in Leaf and you're getting onto this thing, which is a GCR coach, which has no business being up in Edinburgh in the first place. Like, what the hell is it doing up there? Um, uh, secondly, it looks- There's no nationalism strikes again. Get that, get that, get that, get that Edward Watkins ship back to south of the border. Anyway, how did they go around curves? Uh, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

They had a lot of play in the axles. Hold on. Yeah, they had a lot of play. I know, you look at it and you're like, Why is it got the extra wheel? What does it need it for? The thing's 15 feet long. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. What the fuck are they doing? Like, this is bad. But because it's GCR, like this is a GCR coach, which means it is, this thing was built like in the turn of the century. This was very late 1800s, if not early 1900s, because the GCR had only existed. These were built new for the GCR, and the GCR had only existed from the late 1890s.

So, yeah, this is, I mean, as you say, these things are, they're old, they're definitely old, but they're more importantly, they are, it's a situation where they've been made obsolete by new technologies and new design approaches to Rollingstock, a bit like the pictures we showed earlier. Anyway, sorry, Ross, I've been railed this, but only because I think it's really important that people see what this fucking thing looks like. I didn't actually know it was a six wheel coach. I, again, I had, I, I always suspected those things weren't real. Victoria, I mean, what, you know about coach builders in the sense of the traditional description of that. How would you describe what you can see as that, that, would you get on that vehicle? I mean, it's third class, so I assume it's kind of the equivalent of like a Spirit Airlines flight. In which case, I just don't ask questions.

I just kind of get on and I'm like, sure, whatever. That's probably fine. Especially in 1915, you're like, you've been, you've been simmered in a broth of of like a class anxiety your whole life. You're like, of course you don't ask questions. Presumably, at some point, I would have thought about the fact that there was an enormous compressed gas cylinder directly under my ass that likes to explode and ignite and burn for hours.

Kind of like I do every time I get in a Tesla from an Uber call where I'm like, huh, I hope this doesn't go wrong. I just don't think about it. It's a skill that you learn as an American. It's actually a remarkable. Yeah, it's a remarkably similar experience to getting in a cyber truck, I suppose. Yeah, it's a good point. It's just don't think about it.

I think one of the interesting things about this train is that the, you know, it's a troop special, but the Caledonian Railway is still like, okay, we've got, we got the caravan, the two caravan trucks, which I assume are some kind of like express freight cars. The open scenery truck, I don't know what that is. I assume I don't know the troops could have like go get a breath of fresh air and then two cars of fish Remember that these didn't have corridors between them

So when you're in one coach you were stuck in one coach That's true yeah So the only people in the open scenery truck Are the people unlucky enough to have been Because this train was going from Leith to Liverpool Right So they're the only people they were unlucky enough I believe I mean catch from wrong that

They're the people lucky enough To be put in an open coach From Leith to Liverpool But notably, they don't have lights, so they don't have a compressed gas tank sitting directly under their asses. That's a very good point. So really, perhaps that was the true first class. Those would have been the lucky ones, right? You could actually at least have a dart on the way there too.

Filling the words, thrown clear of the rack, you know. Then there's express passenger train, which is also going to be involved. This is a normal, you know, civilian train, you know, breakbank, or, you know, Composite sleeping saloon, not a coach, it's a saloon, composite cars, third class, third class, brake third, break, third, break composite, so on and so forth. So, yeah, this is, you know, we have a wide variety of equipment coming through. Some of these got 12 wheels. That's a lot of wheels. That's a lot of wheels.

So, yeah, this, oh, that's because they are, they have three axle bogeys. so they got two sets of three axle pokies there's so uh so yeah i said midland railway earlier actually the expresses were not midland railway there were of course the equivalent of what are now the west coast uh kind of um virgin trains west coast or whatever it is now what is it avanti which are the ellen w r so london and northwestern railway which is basically they were the crack north south like they're basically the london up to glasgow kind of crack expresses the fancy train for fancy people and the fancy train for fancy people with three axle bogeys.

Lots of sleeping cars. Yeah, look at them. I'm happy. Yeah, everyone's gonna wake up fresh in Glasgow, fully rested, you know, have a nice day. The podcasters of their day were on this. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I do a radio show.

I do a wireless, I do a wireless broadcast. I do a show on a wireless. Got to come to trade in the morning, hey? Gosh, well, that seems to be a problem. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 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. Uh, join at patreon.com forward slash W-T-Y-P-P-Pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So let's look at the tracks around Quentin's Hill. Oh, yeah.

Oh, oh, oh, oh shit, it's my slides. Yes. Uh, okay, okay, okay. So this is Quittance Hill. It's really important. So Quentin's Hill is just kind of a little bit north of the Scottish Hill. border. So if anyone who doesn't know the geography of the UK, the Scottish border runs in a kind of a weird diagonal direction from like Carlisle kind of northeasterly towards

Berwick. The Carlisle end is further south. The UK is a very weird shape or Britain as an island is a very weird shape. The border is north of Carlisle by like 10 miles or so. And then after Carlisle, the railway gets increasingly weavy and windy as it heads towards Beech Summit. But it's fairly flat and straight at the just across. the border, which is where Quintons Hill is in the sense that Quintons Hill is nothing. It was a local farm that was called Quintons Hill, and that, I think even at the point of this accident had mostly gone, the buildings have been swept away. Certainly today, there's absolutely no remnants of that farm.

The only way that Quentin Hill is remembered is from this bit of, is the fact the railways kept the name alive. So in any case, this was the location of a Sigma box. We talked about those a minute ago in 1880. It was built in 1880. As capacity was increased along with Caledonian Railway. basically additional signal blocks allowing you to have more trains running between those signals so you have more signal boxes means you can run more trains at the time and there was

also a trailing crossover so that's just a crossover that um in the trailing direction so you had to if you wanted to go by it a big sense in the diagram which I'm going to show you a second and yeah so traffic increased um massively um so on this railway so loops were put in either side of the main line. So you have the main lines that the up and the down main. And in 1903, these two loop lines were put in, the up loop and the down loop. They were installed in 1903.

And the signal box was flattened and a new one was put in basically the same spot, but just with an extra track width away. And the Caled in a real way. One more track, bro. Just one more track. Just one more track will do it. Yeah, well, in this case, it was classic. You know, people talk about, you know,

if only we were had the profligate days of the, the early railways well no the railways have always been cheap because the californ railway absolutely cheaped out here and built the loops between two bridges so they didn't have to rebuild those bridges so the loops are pretty short like they're only 500 meters long which is long like even for the uk is kind of uselessly short today and even back then is not actually that long but you know i suppose long enough anyway this is kind of all besides the point other than the fact that yeah the railways have always been we've always been cheap skates when it comes to building railroads in the UK.

Next slide, please. Because what I'm going to do from that map, which is a little after the time period we're talking about, is explode out and show you it in true GD diagram, scribbly form. So I've kind of blown this up. This is what I'm here for. Yeah.

So I just want to point this out before we go. If you look on various sources, this, this switch. The crossover. The crossover is in like five different places depending on the source. Yeah, and I don't know why that is because the crossover, back in yon day, well, firstly, the crossover was there before the loops were there. So why would the signal box be anywhere other than where the crossover is?

It doesn't make any sense. You're not going to put the signal box where the guy has to keep warm, more than just a very short walk from the crossover where the signaler and the fitter will be going out and the plate layer will be going out to hit the crossover. crossover to make it work. So it doesn't make any sense. You're not going to, and you're not going to run the cables longer than they need to. So the signal box is going to be next to the crossover. And this and the signal box is from map. So the crossover is right next to it. So why do all the diagrams put it in weird places? So I've correct. So this is the best diagram now on the internet for what we're about to describe. We are right and everyone else is wrong. And dumb and stupid. Let's put that on the record as well. That has always been true. That has always been true. So on the left hand side here, you've got the lines. going up to Glasgow and the right-hand side, I'm sure the lines go down to, well, sorry, I should say that on, the line they'd go down to Glasgow. Yeah, no way. Yeah. You're doing Scottish supremacy here.

I know. Yeah, it should be the other end. It's the like weird kind of thing I kind of liked about British Royal Parliens that like you go up to London and down from London. Yeah. Yeah, up to London down from London, down towards the, down towards the frozen south, north. sorry, which is technically correct given that the, the planet is an orange shape. So technically going south is going uphill on average.

But anyway, um, so Carlisle in one direction, class going to the other. And kind of here you have Quentin's Hill in its funny little corner, kind of like, well, like 12 miles or something, 10 miles. It's not very far north of Carlisle, like, like a few minutes north of Carlisle. And at the bottom, you have the down loop at the top, you have the up loop. So in schematic form, track layout look like this. And the, the uploop. serve southbound trains and the down loop serve northbound trains.

Worth saying for everyone's benefit, the track on the left-hand side goes north. The track on the right-hand side goes south in G.B. World, mostly, unless it's bi-directional. Yeah, exactly. Drive on the left. So, next slide, please. So this is our sequence of events. Ross, I don't know whether you want to,

I can run through this, but just chip in, or do you want to run through this? How do you want to roll with this? I think you run, you can run through. and I'll chip in every once in a while. Perfect. So this is the, oh,

that means that all the people have to listen to my weird voice again. Sorry everyone. You've survived without me for so long when I'm back. I'm so sorry. You know. They're whooping.

They're cheering. Everyone's saying. I hope so. There's signs in the background. There's some. Right. So here we go. Well, actually,

what'll happen is, and it's the thing that always makes me feel happy is that Devin will say, Devin will be saying, here he goes. We're all getting excited. We're whooping and we're cheering. Thanks,

for your con words. So, right. So it's early morning. Oh, actually, Ross, you need to read a date because we've not read a date yet. No, we did. It's the morning of the 22nd of May 1915. There we go.

At least you're outdoors in May on your way from Leith to Liverpool. Yeah, can you imagine if it was like, oh, craik. Yeah. The thing is, if it was like January, then the gas lamps that we're about to talk about in some more detail would have immediately snuffed out, you'd hope.

anyway, but also everyone would have instantly frozen to death for reasons that will become clear momentarily. So right, I'll shut up. No, I won't. I'll be clear about what I'm saying. 5am. It's early the morning and a Carlisle Goods train has arrived and it's arrived and the signal in the signal box has gone, ah, yeah, right, okay. I'm going to pop that train into the down loop. Fine.

Okay, I've done that. Next slide, please. So there's the train, partner to the downloop, mine in its own business. Ney bother. next slide please 6.20 a.m. A local train arrives going from Carlisle to BITIC. It rises 620

in the morning and the signal it goes, signal says okay, next slide please. Signal it goes, okay, park up. Thing is you've, I should tell you what, Ross, you explain what's Hanukkah. So why is the train, why is that local train stopped here? Why is it being held

at a signal? And what happens? What happens? One of the things if you work on the railroad, excuse me, Railway, this is Britain. Oh, no, we were still, we call things railroad still, it's fine. If you work in these places, it's actually very convenient to get to your job via train sometimes, right? But sometimes the schedule of the railroad doesn't match up with the schedule of the railroad being your employment, right? So the signal men on duty in the box

was supposed to get off work at 6 o'clock in the morning, right? That was George Meekin. But he had a deal with the next guy, right? Who was James Tinley. He would stay on duty in extra 30 minutes so that Tinley could take the local train in and just walk over the signal box.

They'd change shifts. And then I believe Meekin would then take the local train out, because one of them lived further up towards Glasgow and the other one lived in Carlisle or further down towards Carlisle. So this was a very convenient arrangement for both. What could go wrong? And I'm seeing the whole for want of a nail. The kingdom was lost sort of lay out before me here. And so it was, the company was fairly strict about like, okay, you can't stay on duty later. You can't have this arrangement.

But what would happen is Meekin would just, you know, do the trains for the extra 30 minutes and would fudge the records so that it looked like he left 30 minutes earlier and Tinley showed up 30 minutes earlier, right? And the thing is, shift changes are usually pretty safety critical, right? You know, especially for, well, yeah, stuff like trains, you know, where you don't want to be in a position where you've lost track of what's happening. And that's adding.

Don't remind me. If anyone's read my write up on the lap I went to, a lot of the kind of disaster of that, I'll put a link in the description. A lot of the disaster of that was downstream of information not being, being lost. on a shift change. It happens. Yeah, the way that they were coordinating this, too, from what I read was that Meekin would basically take a second log

on a sheet of scrap paper and just kind of write down like whatever the hell else he was doing for the next half hour. And then Tinley would come in and be like, okay, I'm going to copy all this down to the official guidebook in my handwriting. Yep. Cool, cool, really cool.

No potential for loss of data whatsoever. So on top of all this, Let's add in some corporate shenanigans as well, because you might ask yourself, what's this? Well, tell you what, let's go to the next slide, please, Ros. Because this train gets shunted back, or not shunted, it reverses itself back onto the up main. It's pulled back onto the up main. Next slide, please. Where it is held, that is right, facing into the direction of oncoming traffic.

Now, you might ask yourself, why the fuck have they done this? That's fine. Just pop that there. It's probably fine. Don't worry about it. So this requires a little bit of explanation. So at this time of day, there were three passenger trains that would come through from Carlisle northwards. Two overnight sleeping car expresses that we've talked about, one of them, from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh, they would depart Carlisle at 5.50 a.m. and 6.05 a.m. when they're on time.

now they were followed by this local train that we see on our screen now in bright yellow it would depart from Carlisle it was advertised in the timetable it departing at 610 but it normally left at 617 if the sleepers ran late so those expresses if they were yeah if they were if they were running late then the local service would not be held back to depart from Carlisle after them because corporate shenanigans approaching precedence would then need to be given to the departure of the Expresses, which were run by a rival company, in this case, the L&WR. So that's the Caledonia Railway getting upset that its local service would be deprioritized versus the LNWR services. Also, if that local train was then late,

it would cause knock-on delays to a Moffat to Glasgow and Edinburgh commuter service, which it connected to at B-TIC, which is kind of B-TIC. We actually, Ros scribbled under it earlier. B-TIC's halfway up the line. So basically, if one or other of the... the sleeper trains were running late, the stopping train would depart, it's advertised of 610, and then it would be shunted at one of the various stations or signal boxes to allow the sleepers to overtake it later on now.

The problem is that train would normally go and park in the down loop, but there's a big fucking train in the down loop at the moment, isn't there? There's a big old goods train. Oh, so what would happen is that actually, if that was occupied, then it would be shunted via the trailing crossover on to the up mainline.

Now, this might see mental, see also Nova's reaction a minute ago when I explained this happening, but actually this was allowed by the rules. Like, it's fine. It's like, it's not dangerous because there is various safety processes in place and a professional signal to make sure

that it is all fine and good and safe, right? Right, right. Right. And this just goes to show a lot of people think they don't have room for a model railroad. And no, the answer is you can have an incredibly small model railroad with a very simple track layout and just make the operations insanely complex for no reason.

Just do it with that in like T-gauge, you know? Yeah. So next slide, please. And the train sits there. Just sits there for a long, long time. quite a while now actually so the train sat there

with it actually it sits there for a long time but first first another train is coming along in the direction of our local train but that's fine because it's expected it's a flow of

this is the Navy gang it's those fucking battleships get involved again it's the flow of empties from the major fueling flow of coal from Scapa flow and where a lot of the Navy

sits down to South Wales or from South Wales where all the coal is is. So they'd be a regular train. Normally this would be done by boats at this time. But unfortunately, those coal boats kept getting hit by mines and sunk by ships and shit. Yeah. Yeah, the fucking U-boats and shit like that.

So they were like, well, the railway, I'll have to pick up the slack. And so just chuck more traffic onto the railway. That's fine. So along comes the empties. The first special. This is the first of our special. So here's the empty. Cold train arrives.

And so it arrives at just a couple of minutes after the train had halted, waiting for instructions. Next slide, please. And it rolls in and sits and occupies the uploop. So there it sits, happy as Larry. Our local train still sitting, doing not very much. Yeah. This looks great. This looks like a great idea.

In the signal box, presumably your second guy is getting in and, you know, getting the tea on and like copying. out all of the, like, scrap paper movements. Somehow, he's doing that, and he's also reading the newspaper to hear what's happening in the war. Yeah, he's locked himself into the toilet, he's flipped to the back pages, he's seen if he, you know, he's just getting busy before he starts his shift, you know, things to see if the secretary of war is called the troops gay yet. Yeah, exactly.

In 1950, quite possibly, Kitchener lining up like Hayd and French and being like, you're all low homosexuals. 1915 page 3 girl. Oh my God. Look at that ankle. So we have, now we have three trains just sat at Quentin's Hill in the middle of butt fuck nowhere

in the Scottish borders. Reaver territory. Yeah, so, okay, so far things are fine. Signler paying some attention because the first of our expresses arrives. 638. So we're still, there's a bit of time past. This express passes through.

completely fine on the down main, whizzing northwards, happy as Larry, rate at 6.308. Fantastic, if you were a foamer, just seeing this insane meat on this stupid siding. Just the amount of stuff. It's just all the train. Yeah, and it's like, why is that local train just there in the face and the rock? What's going? What is this happening? Okay.

What's going on? So, and about the same time, next slide, please. the fireman of the local train as are theoretically the rules if a train's been sat for more than five minutes then the fireman oh this is there's a rule for this by the way

it's called 55 that's it this is important this will be important the fireman goes oh I better go and speak to the signal to work out why the fuck I'm still sat here facing into traffic

this doesn't feel good so yeah fireman has to go to the signal box to ensure that the train's presence was noted by the signal you went to the signal box Yeah, he's still here. You left me on rides.

Yeah, I know you just got off this train, but I have to come here and say that I'm here. Yeah. Yeah, how does that? It's like not reassuring. It's like, you got off this train and you've, what's, what's happening with it? What's going on? And so, yeah, he went to the single, if that's Ross, yeah, you, you take these words. What are going on?

He's supposed to go in there and say, hey, the train is here. I'm just here to make sure in compliance with the rules that you, You are aware of the train is here, and that also that you put, that wooden block we talked about earlier, the safety collar in place, you know, to ensure- Get the hell out of here. We're trying to figure out which troops are woke. Yeah, no, you're reading the newspaper to figure out how woke our troops are, you know, and everyone's kind of like, yeah, this is routine, this doesn't matter.

So, you know, and a fireman just, you know, goes in there, the crew of the other two trains are also in there, if I recall correctly. They're all talking about war news. Everyone's just in having a nice chat. Well, yeah. And then they'd be like, I hear the Royal Flying Corps of Wokes. Do you want to be on the footplate of horrible 1915 British steam locomotive, or do you want to be in the nice, warm signal box where there's tea?

Hey, I'll have you know that this. Pretending I'm not autistic. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have you know, I mean, yes. But also, I'll have you know that those, the locomotives involved here are all absolutely gorgeous. They are so stunning. It's like the peak of like steam locomotive design.

They are, uh, go, you can everyone can Google that the, the Caledonian Railway locomotives involved here are all stunners. It's quite something. This is still well before you had like enclosed cabs or anything like that. Yeah, it's cold. It's May, but it's, it's 5 a.m. in May, 15 Britain. It's fucking, it's like one degree. Uh, your fingers, your dick, your nose have all fallen off.

Like, it's cold. The front of you is incredibly hot from the locomotive and the... Oh, yeah, that's true. So your ass has fallen off. Yeah, okay, right. Right, so... So everyone's in the single black. ...tasting like a 7-Eleven hot dog.

Yeah. Well, if you're the farmer, and I suppose you were, weren't you? You're shoveling, yeah. But if you're stood still not shoveling, you're going to rapidly cool down. So a few minutes later, our farm waddles back to the locomotive of the local train. and so that's that's 4 that's 646 one minute passes and next slide please and a troop train is offered forwards towards carlyle so that's one minute after the fireman gets back into the cab of the locomotive local train and the signaler offers forwards the troop train basically provides the right signal to say it's to the previous signaler it goes sorry to the previous signal box one One further north says, yep, on he comes, that's fine. Yep.

Yep. Yeah, we got space. It's fine. Yep. Next slide, please. And we wait. And next slide, please. Two minutes later, at 649, the Leith to Liverpool troop train, heading southwards

at speed on the up main. Hundreds of woke troops heading at high velocity towards your location. And the result of this is, yeah, the next slide, please. This is not good, that, no, that's gone poorly. That's, yeah, it's not all three trains. So that's not three, that's one, two, three, four trains in a piled up heap across four tracks of the main north-south railway in and out of Scotland. That's about probably the most trains you can pile up here, right?

I don't, I don't think there could be like a situation where you maxed out, right? wreck more trains that can't happen. No, yeah, exactly. So next slide, please. Oh, shit. One minute later, the 6.50, at 6.50, the second North Bend Express train heading northwards at speed also arrives at Quentin's Hill. And, well, Ros.

Well, in the words of Denzel, they were a wreck on a wreck. Oh, God. And, yeah, next slide, please. And is he mewing? I am so glad that I'm not. The only person who saw that stupid movie enough times that had changed my brain inspired. Oh, it's a great movie.

It's so good. Also, Chris Pine has exceptional cheatposts, doesn't he? I think he is legit mewing here. Yeah. Yeah, he's mewing in the sense of M.Uing. That's right. There's two locomotives on this strand. Sorry, next slide, please.

So that's one, two, three, four, or five trains. Yeah, it's Spillikins, folks. This is not good. Did I mention that this is all on fire? Oh, because of the gaslighting. Yeah. Yeah. And because of the being made of wood.

Yeah. So if we, and just to round it off, so that all that happens at six, three minutes later, next slide, please. the signal is sent from the signal box to stop all trains so that was three minutes I would imagine of not great vibes in that signal box

and being like no I'm reading about Gallipoli you know yeah so this is this is so much on fire like this is real this is really really on fire yeah

Ross, I hope that was a reasonable explanation what the fuck happened here because to get five trains in a pile is, well, this is it, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I think you have to go through that sequence to really understand how the fuck you put five trains through each other.

Yeah, this is a difficult feat, but it was accomplished in Victorian, or excuse me, not Victorian, it was after Victorian. Edwardian. Edwardian, yeah, very much in Wardian, yeah. Yeah. We did it.

We did it, folks. Yeah, I wonder if this is the record for most trains involved in one collision. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. It is the deadliest train accident in British history. Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, okay, everyone in the YouTube comments, get cracking.

Tell us, is this the rail crash with the most trains involved? Because good God, if there's one with more trains involved, we will do it within the next five episodes. Did any of you ever play burnout? Yeah, crash mode. Yeah. That's what this is, but with trains. Oh my God, yes. There's just like a rolling multi-million dollar ticker on the bottom of the screen inside the signal box the entire time until they send the stop signal.

It's like... Oh, God, I love that game. It's like old timey, like the flip, not flipboards, like just the old counters, you know? It like rings a bell every time. It's a little guy choking it out. like pound shilling and pence. Yeah. And because of currency valuation, the high score is like six pounds. Yeah, six. Like you translate that out. That's 11 billion pounds today. So, uh, you've absolutely just laser pointed me with like, I've just now immediately

sent my brain back to burnout too, which I spent more hours I care to remember. Googling, Googling backwards compatibility. No, the way you do it is you get to PCSX2 and You just get the ISOs. You need to know a really cool girl who's got the ISOs for a bunch of... I don't have those. Sony, it's not me. It's some other cool girl. Some other cool person who's, yeah.

I respect copyright law. Yeah. So I appreciate that another. We did get you to admit that you're cool and fine. Oh. Yeah, that's the long-term project that is this podcast to restore my self-esteem to something resembling a healthy baseline is succeeding. Yeah.

Well, there's John. We got her. So yeah, what's happening? So if we turn to Scotland, what's going on? What's going on in the Scottish borders on this fine morning? During shift in tone. Oh, no, this has gone quite poorly, actually. You can see this train is very much on fire.

Here's some empty coal wagons. They're also on fire because they're made of wood. Bad things are also happening over here. You're getting like functionally shell splinters from wood, right? would, right? Like your, and glass as well. So, by far, the train that came off the worst was the troop train, right? Every single car on it instantly caught fire, except for the six cars on the rear end, which detached and through the magic of vacuum brakes, rolled away. Problem is those cars, those cars were the ones that were full of like baggage and fish.

So, well, I mean, fuck. Yeah. Jesus, okay, so we saved two cars of fish from being smoked, effectively. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. We may have killed a couple of hundred people, but we did prevent the creation of a bunch of like Arbroath smokies. Yeah.

So, yeah, all these cars were lit with the pinch gas, and those cans had been recently filled. Oh. So there was no hope of extinguishing the fire at all. it burned until the following day. Jeez. And I mean, because this is in the middle of nowhere, right? Yes. Fucking miles from anywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's like a fire company in the nearest town, which is Gretna, but they don't have like, you know, there's no fire hydrants, there's no anything like that. There's no way to get by the maddening water. Yeah.

So, you know, they try to rescue people from the burning cars, and it's nasty. You know, if you could get out really quick, quickly, maybe we're fine. If you got, like, injured, you got trapped in the car really quickly. There was a lot of, like, field amputations and things like that. There was a lot of, you know, I mean, everyone was armed, so some people chose to just, just end it. Just like, no, I'm not

burning to death. And there were also reports of officers who survived the crash just walking down the train and doing mercy killings. Um, in fairness, if you're a, if you're a sort of like British infantry officer of 1915, shooting your own men is a real core competency. You know, you're not something else out of the feeling prepared to do that. That's why they give you the revolver, you know? Yes. They don't give you it. The revolver is private purchase, but that's why you purchase the revolver is normally you're

expecting to shoot some of your own men who are, you know, recalcitrant rather than, you know, burning the death, but it makes no odds, you know? It's a skill transfer, you know. But it's a mercy killing. It's good. I think we can be a pro-mercy-killing podcast. I don't think that'll cause any controversy for us. Yeah.

Well, you know, we haven't caused any controversy in this episode so far. May as well. Clip that one, put it on Blue Sky. Let's see how it goes. So, yeah, so packed troop train all on the fire. Everyone is shooting everyone else. It's like the song. Barely needed the encouragement at that point.

You're just like, if you're sort of like, you know, second lieutenant and the sort of like the Subaltern and the Territorial Force in 1915, you're like you're one sort of mustache twitch away from doing that anyway. Yeah, I mean, one of the things you gotta remember is that all these, all these kids on the train, they were gonna, you know, go to France and get impaled on a bayonet covered in shit and then die as sepsis, you know, four weeks later. So I don't know, this might have been a better way to go out. Yeah, I mean, it really is the case that, I mean, I know you're about to talk about the numbers

here, which are, spoiler, large, but in terms of, like, the grand scheme of things for the First World War, nothing, just like, oh, yeah, it's like, it's sort of like quiet morning's work in like one sector of the Western Front, you know? Yeah, just staggering. So, go on, Ross, what we're talking about, let's put some numbers on this, on the school board. In this one railway accident, 226 people were killed, about. 226 people. We don't actually know the full number. Two hundred and fifteen of them were members of the seventh battalion Royal Scots who were on the troop train.

So you effectively you knock a company off that battalion. Royal Scots by the way kept existing until options for change. So exists until 2006 and now it doesn't. RIP. I'm sure great great legacy of that particular element of the British Army, I'm sure. No skeletons in that closet. There were 246 people who were injured. The vast majority of the dead and wounded were on the troop train. The newer steel coaches of the Express and even the local train.

I think the local train might have had one wooden coach. I'm not sure. They were largely up to the task of surviving an impact, and they didn't just instantly catch fire. because most of them had electric lighting. So, you're sort of like you're on your commuter train up to Glasgow where you're going to record your wireless program, gosh, well, that's your problem. And you're opening a newspaper reading about the woke troops.

And you see here and feel 200 of said woke troops slam into the back of your train, instantly obliterating a good, like, you know, a quarter of them. And then the rest of them burning to death while their own officers shoot them. And you're just sort of like, ruffling your paper, like, that's... Bloody countries coming to. I'm just still thinking about the vibe shift in that signal box. You know, you've got all the lads in their team. Just like a great time with the boys, and all of a sudden it just really goes wrong.

Yeah. Just the feeling of anxiety that I have all the time of like, you're in so much trouble, made very real for like a half dozen guys at once. And the fact that it's sequential trains, like it just keeps getting worse, like the first one gets your attention and then the second one fucking hit. That was, at that point, I would be like, 9-11. At that point, I would be like, okay, I'm gonna throw myself on a machinery and tell the other guy to throw the levers, so the machine kills me.

I'm kind of, I'm kind of going down and asking one of the officers if you can like, you know, spare an extra bullet at that point, you know? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. It's not, yeah, it is, it is not great. Yeah, I mean, you just look up and see just burning carnage and then another train slams through it all. Yeah, good work, Lance, good work. Yeah.

TRIP, so we can't necessarily blame that. We'll get there. We can't really fully blame the signalers. Now, there was a pretty big investigator, two was separate investigations immediately. There was coroner's inquest, which said, you know,

there's gross negligence on the part of the two signalmen and also the firemen of the local train. There was a board of trade inquest that said there's, you know, negligence in the procedure, but also a lack of modern safety equipment. If you had track circuits, rather than manual signaling, this would not, this could not have happened.

You know, and there were, you know, just sort of general deficiencies in the process of, you know, moving trains safely through this area. There, you know, there was all, it was found, I believe that they simply didn't use the wooden blocks to interlock the signals. Yeah, the absolutely rudimentary sort of protection equipment was not used. But, yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, the incident response, you might, you know, earlier we were talking about the fact that local train was put facing traffic. Like, that was a kind of a standard move. Like, in the last sort of, you know, in the six months before the accident, that happened

20, 21 times. Sorry, the local train had been shunted at Quintons Hill, Quintons Hill, 21 times. And four of those had been shunted onto the upline without incident. So it wasn't a completely unusual kind of move to use. it was unusual, you know, it was, it was definitely not ideal, but it wasn't, it wasn't totally unheard of. And it was, you know, seen as safe within the working practice if they'd put the little wooden cock ring on the top of the, the kind of the signal lever. Yeah, so yeah, there was, there was nothing particularly wrong about what they were doing, although it was weird. It could

have, it could have been done more safely, obviously, you know. It's also, you know, I, I, I don't know exactly if there were any improvements to procedures that happened after this. You know, because they did try and sort of pin it on the two signal men and the firemen. It did not stick. You know, this was

a disaster that could have been prevented by new more automated technology that simply would not be able to make this mistake. Yeah, and also on a line with extreme traffic through there, and a problem that we are still played with today, had we instead four-tracked north from Carlisle and

up until further up the line, maybe even as far as Lockerbie, you'd have resolved an enormous number of problems we have today with capacity on that line, but you would absolutely have solved this problem because you'd have just overtaken the look, you know, the expresses would have just overtaken the local trade. So, yeah, but that would cost money. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or say if the competition between private enterprises, you know, on the railway, two different private railway companies hadn't resulted in an obviously stupid method of working. If they just held the train, the local train and allowed the expresses through, then that would have also completely prevented this incident. Like,

that's one of the key root causes for me. The capacity issue is one thing. But the fact that it was the competition between the railway companies, meaning that they held, they didn't hold the local train and they raced local forwards, 10 miles for it to just end up having to stop and get overtaken anyway just so that they could give preference to their own versus competing companies rail services overline that you know by the way remember over the railway that was theirs and so you know that was used extensively by just obvious conflict between the way that the train operating uh the the sorry the railway companies were competing with each other it's just daft so for me that that's the that's the really nasty nasty bit of this

is that this wouldn't have happened, and they're not being competing. Interesting as well, so the two, the two signals got convicted of, I think it's like, culpable homicide, which is like Scott's Law manslaughter, right? Got out after a year in prison and both went back to work on the railway, which suggests a couple of things in terms of this not being a kind of career-ending piece of misconduct. One, I guess, is that, you know, there were a lot of fuel, sort of of those, but also that, like, someone in that railway has got to believe that it is not exclusively on sort of, like, not primarily your fault to give you your job back.

Yes. And also, everyone got killed in the war, so, you know. Well, also, yeah, like, I guess you're, sort of, like, short of, sort of, like, railwaymen. Yeah, it's, you know, it's like, ah, he only killed 225 people are. So that's not that many all things considered. Just give him his job back. It's fine. Yeah, I mean, you kill 200 people in sort of slightly different geographic circumstances,

and they give you a DSO, you know? Exactly. Being in jail, a good career move. Yeah, in 1915, sort of like, in sort of like country and continents, a wash in killing. I can see how this kind of like, you know, briefly horrifies people, and then the song happens a year later so you know whatever exactly yeah yeah it just blows the scale of this out of the water i mean there are two other um two other elements uh involved in this incident that i want to talk about and that is number 140 and number 48 um of the californian railway which were the two

trains at the front of the um the two california railway trains at the front of the express um because of course the california railway asked for its locomoters to be connected to the L and W.R train, anyway, stupid railway system. Anyway, those two local, by the way, that locomotive, it's in the, in the DMs. Go and have a look at that locomotive, how beautiful they are. Those two locomotives that careered into the wreckage

a minute after the first crash, both repaired and returned to traffic pretty rapidly as well. So in true railway crash style, if that loco is fine, you're running it again. But the picture, you have to lose all the blood off of it. Yeah, exactly. And they're going to replace the,

they're going to replace the face on the front. But, you know. Yeah, well, we've got a process for that. It's fine. The face on the front is looking very traumatized. Yeah, if people want a sense of this sort of scale, when I talk about the song, which was like almost a year later, the first battle for some stuff, the, like, British casualties like killed.

First day, like one day, 19,240. So this is sort of a footnote, you know? Yeah. It's, it's diving. I like observing this in the sense that like this is a society and sort of like about to be up to its knees in sort of like mechanized slaughter. And I don't know. I always like doing this podcast because we can get kind of holistic with it, not just in the sense of like, you know, oh, why was the railway built there? But also why was the kind of investigation?

Why was the aftermath as it was. Well, because this was something that happened in a profoundly sick society. It's, you know? Very, very much, very little value on human life at that time of, you know, our existence as humanity. Yeah. We, we are sending tens of thousands of young men to their deaths for, we don't know. Yeah.

I mean, it really, it reminds me of Palestine in the sense of there is something so obviously monstrous being done here that it kind of like. overshadows everything else and also in so doing that it kind of like throws into really sharp relief why it's sort of like you know it's sort of like it overrules any claims to sort of like valuing human life but it also shows how stuff like this can happen you know just by by virtue of this is a society in the grips of industrialization that is sort of like in the process of losing much of its humanity to it you know yeah yes which is a good thing to talk about a

timely thing to talk about in the sort of like 200th anniversary of the railways as well is, you know, that's, that's part of what the story of the railways in this country is. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, 295 years of modern railways this year, yeah. It's, yeah, pertinent to think of the ways in which the movement of people, the railways dehumanized us as much as it was part of the machinery of a broader war that absolutely dehumanized us, particularly the first war, a reminder to everyone. purposeless, completely purposeless. There were no particular bad guys or good guys.

There was just everyone shooting everyone else. Yeah. But it did give us some real bad guys a couple of decades later, so... It's okay. Maybe that's... What's... I don't think that's a good thing. Yeah.

Is it a dawner who has the line about, like, you know, all this kind of like, civilizational kind of rationalism leads inevitably to madness, right? Anyway, I just, I wanted to kind of like tie that together because I, you know, this podcast is a good opportunity to do that. I like doing it. Yeah, well, you know, luckily, you know, super intelligent AI, you know, Brock is going to save us and return us our humanity very soon. I'm pretty sure.

So yeah, ultimately, you know, the dead whose remains survive the blaze because a lot of people were completely incinerated, buried with military honors in a mass grave in Rosebank Cemetery in Edinburgh. Got this nice big mind. It's really kind of a nonsense to say that you gave your life, you gave your life for your country when your country has sort of like killed you negligently, you know? Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this gets me on to another thing. I mean, yeah. The one thing, the one thing, I spend a lot of time in the former year, you know. Yugoslavia and the one thing that always strikes me particularly about is the war memorials in which there are plenty in the former Yugoslavia. And those ones, I mean, admitted in the first war, as we said, there were no particular bad guys. The second war they were. And the thing

that always strikes me with war memorials is how much in the UK we never talk about who we were fighting. We always just say our brave boys who arbitrarily just died and gave their lives this country for, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Whereas the Yugoslav, well, War memorials absolutely point out, fuck the fascists. We were murdering the fuck out of those guys, and it's great that we did that. And actually, it's really good that you remember that we did that, that we should keep doing that.

And these guys who died doing that are absolutely heroes. I kind of feel like there's a sickness in our country that we have not healed from in relation to the fact that are there any war memorials in Britain that mention who we were fighting? I'm not sure there are. I'm not sure. There are. It's sort of like our culture of like institutional remembrance is one of the First World War,

much more than it is one of the second. It's when we decided what a kind of a war memorial should look like. And the kind of form of words to use and things like the Senate stuff. And I, on the one hand, I appreciate a lot of that because a lot of it was born of very authentic, very experienced kind of horror of this stuff. My favorite war memorial in London is the Royal Artillery Memorial because it was grotesquely unpopular at the time because people wanted something like the senator. In particular, the royal family and sort of like patrons and stuff wanted a very, very clean,

very neoclassical thing that allowed that kind of like vacancy. And the officers of the Royal Artillery who had been, you know, had been a technical arm and who had been, you know, slightly more working class thing, and they didn't go to cavalry regiments said, no, we want you to put a howitzer on the top of it, which is what they did. And it's an ugly thing. It's an ugly object. And I like it for that. But yeah, I think that a lot of it has been kind of turned into this really kind of vacant thing. It's a whited sepulco. It's what a cenotaph is, right? Like, it's, and the thing that really broke me. You weren't your fucking poppy, mate. Well, the thing that really fucking broke me was when I saw

all those, the Royal British Legion, putting those kids in like future soldier t-shirts and giving them big plastic poppies to wave around. Yep, sick country. We are a sick country with real problems. It started earlier than with, what's his face, Boris Johnson. Yeah, no, for real. Well, nasty, nasty, nasty, sort of like, addendum to it, you know? I think that if I'm going to say one last thing on this point, it's incredible that it was the worst rail accident in British history and it is just utterly disappears into the horror.

This really reinforces your point of it, but it's just the fact that, you know, we've dedicated an episode to the worst rail disaster, you know, one of the worst rail disaster that we will ever cover on, you know, on this podcast and it's, it was just at the time and even now barely remembered, you know, probably had a lot. less impact on the way railways were run than anything else of a comparable magnitude is because there's war on, you know, shit happens. Yep, 100%, 100%. Yeah, what did we learn? I would say almost deliberately nothing. Don't start World War I. That's what we learned.

Yeah. Don't start World War I. If you're in, what international are we on now? Oh, Christ, don't ask you that. I don't even know what party I'm in now. Yeah, exactly, exactly. At least one. Don't let the workers of the world engage in World War III.

Yeah. Always use a cock ring. Mm-hmm. Definitely. Please do. Definitely. Don't get in the three-axle carriage. I...

Don't get in one of those. didn't know those were real. If your train car looks suspiciously like a coffin with a large propane canister taped to the underside of your seat, perhaps re-book. If it looks like a child's drawing of a railroad coach, don't get in it. Ross, in a way, you're right in that they don't exist anymore because all of them were turned into charred splinters. Yeah, well, that's how, that's how you dispose of a wooden railroad car, you burn it.

It's hacking apart with axes and set fire to it, yeah. Yeah. You don't even have to do the first part. You just put some gasoline on. Yeah, like the US with most of it streetcars. Yes. Just burn it. Same in the UK, to be fair.

Just burn them. They're made of wood. You can just burn them. That's fine. Cricy. Yeah. Just for like a really brief point of levity, just because, like, wow.

I did go to San Francisco relatively recently for the historic running of the SF Railway. And I am eternally jealous of, like, previous eras foamers because I got to ride in, like, a actual wooden street car. It was one of the Milan cars. And it was just, it's just, I'm so jealous. That looks like it was so much fun. Your car is, like, made out of a tree.

It was great. I don't know. There was something very, very innocent about it that I really enjoyed. I'm sorry, I'm desperately trying to make the episode more fun again. They got a nice historic streetcar program out there. Yeah, I got to make it out there one of these days. It was genuinely great. But yeah, I just was like, wow, I can't imagine what it would have been like to go train

spot like 50 years ago. Sure, it'd be a lot harder to like get the estrogen. But then once you're over that hump, like I'm probably break even at that point. Well, you know, based on strength of trains. The problem is back then people were like, you know, it was a lot better in like 1870. Grass is always greener. It turns out Quentin's Hill in 1915 is also a great place to train spot

because there's a lot of trains going through there. Yeah. All at once. All at once. How do you fit five trains on four tracks? Don't. Don't do that. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Shake hands with danger. Greetings, beloved pod.

hosts. Even though... What? Yeah. What the hell is happening here? Even though one of you has my dead name and I get slapped by it every time I listen. I'm sorry your dead name is November, but you have to admit it's improbable. Yeah, that's that...

That was not likely. I'm writing to you as I listen to the caving disasters pod, and it reminded me of repressed memory from my first job with the late lamented National Park Service. RIP, that's off. For the sake of pseudo-ananimity, I will not name the park. What was that sorry, Rose? Did I say that again? Anonymity.

Anonymity? I don't remember. There's too many whys in that word. I will not name the park what is one of the U.S. national parks that features a show cave, which I gave tours up, as well as a number of smaller wild caves, which are close to the public, but our cave scientists used for research. Cave scientists. It's interesting emphasis you put on the words cave scientists.

There was strange, troubling people. They're like cavemen who are scientists, right? That's how that works. He collects data. Cave he test hypothesis. Cave men? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I'm gonna offend a bunch of those guys you showed up in the Kiko commercials. Anyway. So my role was an astronomy interpretive intern, which is basically I teach people about the night sky at the park. Seems like a weird job to do inside a cave, to be honest, but... Yeah, well, you know. Well, occasionally, I'd be drafted to give tours of the show cave, which was fully lit and an easy walking path.

I had some trepidations upon first going into the cave, but soon came to love the cave and its unique environment. Love the cave. Learn to love the cave. I love the cave. One day... What dad used to tell me until I left home. One day when I walked into the office, our cave biologist was there and threw a helmet

at me and said, you're coming with me today. I'm not getting in the cave. I'm not getting in the... I'm especially not getting in the non-show cave. That's part of their culture. I understand that a cave scientist inviting you to their cave is a huge honor in their culture, however, I will not be partaking. while we got kidded out i was briefed on our mission for the day replace a data logger in one of the

wild research caves in the park we then drove to the trailhead and began the two-mile hike to the cave location upon arriving to where the biologist said the cave was i was incredibly confused as i did not see a cave she directed my attention to a spot on the ground and i I noticed a rusty grate covering a small hole in the ground. No. The entirety. This is great. So there's a cave north of England that, which is deep in the heart of Yorkshire

Caving Territory, which is covered by a classic British steel bin lid. I've been in that cave and it is pretty much as described here. Yeah, love that shit. The entirety of the cave and entrance was no more than about one meter in diameter and appeared to disappear straight down into the cold, dark earth. The metal grate, as seen in the provided diagram, covered about half the opening, leaving a small hole for us to enter. At this point, the biologist pulled out a diagram of the earth's cavity we were about to enter, as the second cave technician began tying ropes to the

metal grate and tossing them down the hole. Upon reviewing the diagram, my first thoughts were what the fuck? And are you fucking serious? Though my mouth said, uh, cool. The data logger, the data logger we were to switch out was at the end of a 900 meter long passage that varied from roughly one to one and a half meters toll, which would require crawling on our hands and knees for almost a kilometer with the narrow squeeze at the end, about half a meter to finally reach the logger. This alone was to give... Oh, I hate all of this. This alone was to give a reasonable person cause for alarm, but that passage was about 20 meters beneath our feet. I really want to know what data is on there. Yep, it's cold and dark. Yeah, yeah, it's cave. My questions about the

ropes tied to the grate were soon answered as I was informed that the way to get to that passage was down a 60 degree downward slope with the grate, which the grate was half covering. My brain said, what the actual fuck? And my mouth said, oh, that's okay. And it got worse. You got a real brain mouth problem going on. Yeah, no. This is sometimes, sometimes, like, I, you know, sometimes it's okay to say, no, I don't want to do this thing. This down. downward shaft was even narrower than the passage we were going to crawl through, averaging about 0.4 to 0.6 meters in diameter. For context, I am 6 foot 4 inches and at the time weighed about 240 pounds with broad shoulders. I was assured that I would be fine. It was not,

in fact, fine. The biologists went down the hole first. I was to follow second with the cave technician bringing up the rear. I sat on the ground, I thrust my legs into the abyss. To get down the dirty, rocky shaft. I had to put my arms at my side, legs straight, and wiggle my body like a worm. Christ. Slowly inching down the jagged rocks. About 10 meters down the shaft, I suddenly couldn't go any further. I'm getting secondhand claustrophobia. Let me get one of those fucking Royal Scots officers in right now with a Webley. Yeah. So when I used to do caving, I used to do it with a massive chunky, like lead acid battery and an old caving lamp.

And the standard thing that would happen is that the knacket old belt that that was on around my like caving suit would usually roll to the side and get snarled on a rock with my arms above my head and with me having absolutely no way to adjust it. And you'd kind of just have to in a similar pretty sounding situation to this. And you'd basically have to bum shuffle to kind of get this thing, this battery to wiggle around unless you could just about squeeze your arm down to your side. So this kind of sounds, I like the sign of this. This is good.

This is my dirty secret that everyone now knows on WTOP is that I was once a caver. I'm done it for a while now. Yeah. I also, what's more terrifying is probably the state of that battery. Did somebody make you do it at gunpoint or like, was it was it coerced? No, I mean, yes, in the sense that my father forced me to do it, I suppose. But no other sense that, no, I love doing it. It was good fun.

It was freezing cold and filthy. and absolutely horrible, but then so is living in Britain. So, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, Britain is just a large open-air cave. Yeah, pretty much exactly, yeah, quite. So, no, I was good fun. I used to find a picture of me with a bit next to the bin lid about to go in the big hole. Because, yeah, anyway. My broad shoulders had fully found themselves wedged into the rock,

and I was unable to continue further down, nor really turned myself to try and unwedge. yelled to the experience cave, caver above and below me for advice. And they told me to just try and get unstuck. Oh. No. Shoot me. Shoot me. No.

What a great idea. I didn't think about that. Anyway, after about 10 minutes of struggling with Michael Mruvitz, I was able to free my arms enough to grab the rope and begin slowly inching myself up the rope and finally reach the point where I could use my legs to really kick myself out of the cave, thus ending my career as a professional caver. I let the tech go down and waited under a tree near the entrance for an hour or so, as these two expertly made their way through the cave to do their job. When we all returned to the office, another ranger noticed the

helmet and money clothes and an ashen thousand yards stare on my face and asked, did the cave biologist, take you to fat man's misery. She does that to everyone. Oh my god, this woman is an evil fucking sadist. Can I say something? I don't even need to. You know what it's gonna be. Yeah.

It was at that point, I really questioned if that was a training opportunity or just a sadistic hazing ritual for all the New Rangers. Either way. It's like, yeah, I got a job at this national park, and one of the cave biologists is like measuring my, like, a hip size with a tape measure and licking her lips. Either way, I have never and never will set foot in a wild cave again. Fuck that shit. Yeah, for real.

Stay the fuck out of the caves. They weren't meant for us. Thanks by. Have a great day from Kaz. Thank you, Kaz. Thank you, Cass. I've enjoyed that very much. Although,

I'll put an asterisk on the fuck that shit. Because, yeah, I don't know. I'm a psychopath and I do quite enjoy that sort of fun. As she was describing, this is the way I realized that I'm more of a sadist than I realized when I'm like, I was like licking my lips and rubbing my hands together. As she was describing getting stuck in the cave.

I was like, yes, make me have claustrophobia. Force it into me. Make it. Yeah. When I'm in, when I'm in Britain, in a couple weeks, you're gonna, you're gonna force me in the cave. Oh, God. Live show from The Caves.

The Caves. You're gonna Shizzlehurst. Yeah. Hello. Maybe we could, we could drive you up to a show cave and I could take you down into, into one of the various strange. I'm grabbing the wheel and veering the car into traffic if you try, like. Go to, go to Lurray Caverns and have a...

a show at the stalagmite organ. White Scar Caves is very lovely. I can hardly recommend. It's the only cave I've been in is Luray Caverns. That's pretty definitely a show cave. I will say that much. Well, this is a cave agnostic line up of WTIP hosts. It was about to say.

Just don't take me to fat man's misery. I have enough of that all that. No, that was Safety Thirke. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Railnatter.

Oh, thanks, no. You should watch it. It's good. You should buy, you should buy, you tell you what you could do, is you should go on to Victoria Scott's website. By Victoria's book. Forget my book.

You should go to Victoria Scott's website And you should get hold of we deserve this. You should get hold of Victoria's books, Victoria, well, Victoria's book, Victoria's projects. You should fund anything that, but you should subscribe to Victoria's projects. Which includes this podcast now, so, like, subscribe to the Patreon. I'd like to plug the show I'm currently on. Subscribe to the Patreon, but also listen to the trust of someone who listened to, like,

three hours of this and is like, nah, I'm probably not going to subscribe for the Patreon. It's a fact, it's a fact, you should give your money to trans women because I get one third of that. You're doing a kind of Comprador economy thing on us, yeah, no. It's, what could be more trans than to be like, yeah, fund me, it subsidizes two cis men as well. thanks nobody but yeah no real natural on wednesdays apart from for the last or at time of recording the last two weeks because i have been burned out and having a mental

health crisis so yeah but rail lateral return and it's going to be fun because the next one at time of recording is going to be on the ridiculous history of tilting trains and how america's now running the advanced passenger train up the northeast corridor which is kind of funny. Oh, yeah, that'll be good. And theoretically, Gareth and I have an episode that. We do.

God, let's record that. Yeah, we got to actually record that one, yeah. I'm going to try and get Gareth to take coach, Bill. You know, no, EMU's garbage. It's over. No, in America, you need coaches. Anyway.

Oh, not bombshell. No, thanks so much for having me. I just don't know if it weren't. Yeah, well, you probably did, didn't you, Victoria, let's be honest. I want the who's line is in any way, Drew Carey count at the end. The tally of all my points. It's being pinged up on screen right now by Devin's.

How many points are you got versus any points I got? I'm calling this one a draw. I'm sorry. It's where I'm right. Well, there's your problem where the points are made up and we describe the horrors of war. It's been so, this is an important moment because Victoria and I are both on W2IP together, which is extremely fun. Let's do this again, actually. Who knows what episode would end up on together?

I have to find some event with cars that killed 240 people like kind of keep parody, and I'm not sure how to do that. Oh, I mean, they kill or seriously maimed 30,000 a year in the UK, and I think that's how many is a day in the US. Oh, wow, this is it. Oh, yeah, that actually would be great. Shit, all right, I'm on it. All right.

Well, I think that will. was a podcast, folks. Beautiful. All right. Well, bye everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye.