Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 197: The Illinois Central Electric Wreck

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

Incidentally, I'm on the IC electric wreck diet sorry for crunchy audio, aoife couldn't use her normal recording setup follow aoife on bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/aoife.bsky.social check out the FOIA Bakery: https://thefoiabakery.org/ 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/

Uh, hello 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. Hi, I'm November Kelly. My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAllenerson. My pronouns are he. I'm the person who's talking right now. I love that. I love that for me. My pronouns are he have. I probably already said it.

Victoria, go. Hello, my name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her. I am also talking right now. And we have a guest. We do. We have a guest. Hi, I'm the guest.

My name is Ifa Fahyhi. My pronouns are she, her. And I am just about to finish talking. All right. All right. We've successfully introduced the podcast. Well, job well done, everybody. Go home. Yeah, exactly.

What you see on the screen here is a train, which is partially inside of another train. Oh, is it supposed to look like that? No, it is not supposed to look like that. Son of a pitch. What we're going to talk about today is the 1972 Illinois Central. electric system wreck. And this is, yeah, and November is unfortunately not here today because she is all podcasted out.

Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Yeah, RIP. Yeah. The good news is we don't have to split the money with her anymore. So, you know, RIP or whatever, but. I really enjoy how in this image, this appears to be an actual clash of eras and that we have kind of like the old school would appear to be New York Central

passenger cars in the left and then like the modern commuter by levels on the right. Those are not modern. They just still exist. Yeah, this is definitely a clash of the errors and one of them won out. And that's why we have safety specifications.

Yeah. So, but before we can do that, we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, fuck, we don't have the drops. Oh, shit. This is, this is what we've been reduced to. So. Fucking stupid. Could you imagine somebody who trying out this show for the first time on this episode?

Fuck them. So, the Finnish DJ Derrude made a surprise visit to Courtney Kardashian's Camp Push at Coachella this year, and it was subsequently destroyed in a sandstorm. What the goddamn shit is a Camp Push. I guess it's a wellness retreat for VIPs. No, these people. Well, they were by the sandstorm. Good.

Fucking good. I don't, listen, I went to. Warped Tour a lot as a kid. I was talking to my wife about this yesterday. I went to Warped Tour a lot as a kid, if you could tell by everything about me. And, you know, just like, and then people pay like $8,000 or million to go to Coachella. I do not understand this. I don't understand sorting my nuts off in the Coachella Valley to see Justin Bieber play Baby. I don't fucking get it.

Apparently he played Beauty and a Beat, which, don't get me wrong, is a Bob, but it's not worth $8,000 million. That just means you don't have enough money. You probably would think it was worth that much money if you had whatever amount of money makes. It allows you to go to the vaginal rejuvenation spa or whatever. Oh, dude. My vagina, first of all. How dare you? It's $7,000 for premium.

Jesus Christ, is it actually $7,000? That's what it appears to be. But that might be stub hub pricing. Resale prices. Oh, $1,300 for VIP. Uh, but resell was still too much money. Yeah, it's too much money. Who played Coachella?

I don't even know who played Coachella. I think the most I ever paid for tickets to a show was like $130 to get decent tickets to see Rush. I, I, I, I have paid good money to see Taylor Swift. I'm not going to reveal how much money I have played to take, to pay to see Taylor Swift. But relax, folks, it's a lot. I'm, I'm using your Patreon money unwisely. I thought, I thought you saw Taylor Swift for free at the mall, at the Walmart. and Winwood. First of all, it was the Walmart in, oh, not with Sanoming. Why I'm missing

Pennsylvania. Why I'm missing. And also, uh, there was a band called Ross at Coachella, ROZ. What? Yeah. Yeah. All right. I'm going to speak to the lawyer about this one. Yeah, you got it. You got it. Uh, Sabrina Carpenter was there. Uh, I have never heard of any of these fucking people. Turn style I like. Uh, Fat Boy Slim and Devo and David Byrne. Okay, I could fuck with three of these people. Oh, I got to see David Byrne live recently. That guy's still got it.

Yeah, no, I paid a lot of money to see Taylor Swift. I got floor tickets for the Red Tour, and that absolutely fucked. By all accounts, she does know how to put on a good show. She absolutely does. I love my climate-destroying princess. Well Fuck you rich people Yeah fuck you rich people

You were you were destroyed by a sandstorm anyway In other news Do do do do Do do do do All right We got to talk about the chop parking garage collapse This is a terrible fucking idea But this is a confusing

It's a terrible project and it's a confusing disaster. I guess the background here. Okay, so we have the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, or is the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania, I forget. It's chop. When I saw this come up in the news, I immediately thought Capitol Hill occupied autonomous zone, because that was the chop.

I don't remember what the actual thing was, but I was just like, why is this? The Chaz. That would also be a place A parking garage would collapse to be fair Yes So the Children's Hospital wanted to build a new parking garage

And they decided the best place for this parking garage Was one mile from the hospital campus The idea here being God forbid you should have to take public transit Yeah rather than taking regional rail to the train station, which is inside the hospital complex. Penn can pay for it. They just don't want to. Yeah. You would drive to this parking garage one mile away from the hospital down I-76,

the worst highway in America. And you would then park in the garage, and then you would take a shuttle bus to the hospital. Mm-hmm. That's that okay. I'm not exaggerating too much when I say that pretty much everyone was against this idea. It is, it was a very bad idea. The neighborhood was against it. A lot of the hospital staff were against it.

The urbanists all hated it because it was just like, well, we're going to, you know, we're going to put this garage in an underpourable. privileged neighborhood and let them deal with, I don't know, six or seven thousand extra cars a day, which is also a lot of cars to put on I-76, which was the main access for this garage, right? But it did let you avoid taking regional rail because instead you could go drive on the highway that backs up at 3 a.m. on a Sunday. Yep. Yeah, I will say, having stepped foot into Philly for the first time of my life like three weeks ago.

shockingly car-brained. I really thought it would be more transit-tilled. And it is like... Stupid. Like, Roz picked me up from our hotel out by the airport after I got stranded there when TSA decided not to show up to work. Which is there right, as they should. But I got stuck there to layover and as we were driving, there's just, there's cars like parked in the median everywhere. It's like... The streets are chaos and there are so many cars.

Yep. Yep. It's Philly Shrug because we don't we can't do anything. We can't do anything. Well, you know, we just throw up our hands or poop our pants. Every row house is 15 feet wide and a good third of those row houses. The occupants have 15 cars all with jersey plates. Yeah. A bunch of motherfuckers. Look, South Philly could be burned down to the ground tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost except a couple of Italian restaurants I kind of like.

I also have. I mean, the whole Italian market, I mean, there's nice things down there. Come on. Name five. No, go. You really are a work-tuer kind of person, huh? There's, um, shit, I mean, the Italian market, you have. That's one.

Yeah, you have, uh, what's the big library down there? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that became the, uh, the high school for performing arts. though. Oh, yes, it did. Yeah. Corinne's sorority little graduated from, I want to say. I don't know.

One of the three bowling alleys in Philadelphia is also down there. Oh, South Bowl, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So why do you guys only have three bowling alleys? Because they're all in the suburbs. We have North Bowl and Lucky Strike, if that's even still open and South Bowl. You got, oh, you got Ray's happy birthday bar. Okay, I will concede you raise happy birthday bar.

You got all of Paschunk Avenue. Not surely not all of it. Well, not all of it. No, I mean, well, you know, I guess the Simeon Foundation is in Southwest. Well, you can't have the, that's on a technicality at best. It's on your side of the river, motherfucker. How many are we at now? I think that's five.

You've got the bowling alley. Yeah, you can have the ball. All right, fine. I can see defeat. Yeah. Nukes. Nukes South Philly. what if we find one virtuous man in South?

Not doable. So there's a lot of things here that confuse me. There's a reputable firm that designed this and built it. This is all built with union labor, of course. What we sort of saw happen, there was a video, is this top slab here in the under construction garage failed and fell, and then it fell down several stories just in the sort of pancake fashion

down here behind the Chiron this segment over here buckled outwards. Yeah, yeah, it's a little unclear what caused this failure. I can't even speculate because I have no idea. I will say these sorts of precast parking garages generally are pretty bad

in terms of like construction quality. That's not even. even like on the design firm or like, you know, the labor, it's just like. Is this just a freak accident? I don't know what else to say. Like, is that it? Yeah, because usually the stuff people cheap out on is like grout and like drainage and waterproofing. Usually the problems those things cause don't show up until like 20 years of road salt and water intrusion and heavy cyclical moving loads, take a toll on the structure, the freeze thaw, so on and so forth. And this is.

a pancake-style collapse on a brand-new structure. I don't know. I have no idea what happened here. And yeah, this killed three people. One man was dead, confirmed dead immediately. And then they had to actually demolish this whole thing because it was too unstable to recover the other two bodies. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. So that's pretty bad. You know, and again, I, We don't know what happened yet. You know, the only thing you can really say about it is this was a bad project. And a lot of people are saying, you know, okay, this is an opportunity for chop to cancel this. But we also got to remember, you know, three union iron workers are dead here.

This is not a great way to get a project canceled. This is very, very unpleasant. They're going to build the Ironworker Memorial Parking Garage now. Is that what you're suggesting? Oh, God. That would be, that would, yeah, yeah, I don't know. So this is, I don't know, it's depressing and also confusing. Nasty work, yeah.

Nasty work, yeah. So I, I don't know. The whole situation was crazy the whole time. There was so much, you know, opposition to this project, and now here we are. I haven't seen many new precast. if any, new precast parking garages in northeastern Illinois. I kind of figured that was like an 80s thing. It's still one of the more popular ways to do it.

I just think there's just less precast garages in general, you know, because there has been a lot of progress in like reducing parking minimums in a lot of places. But yeah, I mean, you know, big institutional people like, you know, hospitals like M-Track still builds a lot of them like commuter railroads so on and so forth um you know you know that's for like parking rides but yeah these these precast garages are all kind of i i i have done structural work on these and they are you know they're all shit but they're only shit in ways that shows up 20 years later not during construction i don't understand what happened here i right yeah they just normally held together by gravity or is there like some sort of like tying that needs to happen

to make them structurally stable um oh god i mean it's mostly it's mostly like uh um how do you say it um stuff like you know that there there's you know i can't think of the connections offhand i i just wonder like a pancake is if i'm trying to imagine that's same i'm trying to figure out how this happens that's that's where i'm like really confused. I don't know. I guess none of us are going into parking garage design in the future.

No, I'm past that. I'm past that phase in my life. I don't think it's going to be a growth industry anymore yet. And it's either Lockheed Martin or parking garage design. Yeah. So yeah, speaking of confusing and depressing. Ugh.

All right, here's our Iran War update. What the fuck is going on? What are we doing, man? What are we doing? We're winning. What I don't understand is like we had the JCPOA, and then they were just like, nope, we're not going to do that. We're just going to shit in our hands instead.

Absolutely fucking baffling. I mean, I'm not surprised given this administration, but it's just a, they said, totally baffling, like, what are we doing here? Yeah, because like last week, and that's why we missed an episode, I just straight up lost a day when Trump was threatening to basically nuke Iran. Oh, same. Yeah.

Yeah. He posted on truth social at like five in the morning, Eastern time, like, oh, I'm going to wipe out a great civilization if they don't make a deal and they're not going to, so I guess I'll just destroy him. Yeah, that was a long fucking day. Yeah. I want to believe this. Well, somebody just killed please. Thank you, Devin.

I barely know what's been what's going on because I've been only I'm giving all of my news from Red Note mostly because I'm obsessed with Chinese lesbians. But... I'm saluting so hard I pass out. It's interesting

like seeing there's like Chinese people can travel to Iran. Easy, easy, Easy, lemon squeezy. And it's interesting to hear them talk about, like, their perception of what's going on there. They're like, yeah, there's more boats in the Gulf than they say there are. They just all have, like, their transmiss turned off. Actually, the Iranian forces are leading boats through.

There's, like, boats getting through, but they're, like, the United States doesn't have any control of what ships make it through and aren't stopping ships that are making it through. So it sounds like... My dad was telling me about this, yeah. It sounds like the United States. I mean, it's incredible because the United States is like, you know what? We still have the straight clothes. It doesn't sound like, it's like, it's like listening to like the local lunatics say that they're going to close down the target or the 7-Eleven or something.

And everyone's just like, yeah, okay, sure, buddy. Please step away from the front door. We have customers. Like, it's, it's, it's, I can't imagine how, no offense to anyone. I mean, you have to take someone with Nuke seriously. But how do you take these people seriously? It's like, it's legitimately like negotiating with someone who's just like on a different plane of existence from you. There's like no point.

Yeah, yeah. I was, I was watching the ABC Nightly News with David Muir. Shout out Daddy David. And there was an ad came on for like 83% of Americans support voter ID. in the fact that we don't have one it leaves us alone in the civilized world their words not mine don't don't get mad at me uh and i was just like i don't debate these people i want to throw i want to throw hands at them like i don't it's like what we're going to get to in the next news saying it's like just shut the fuck up nobody cares yeah yeah and and the the current strategy for anyone who's been

completely living under iraq since like you iraq is iraq is over here um but you know the uh since Iran has blockaded the strait of Hormuz, that's where all the oil goes through, except for certain ships. The idea is the United States is now going to blockade the straight of Hormuz to make sure none of those boats go through. I guess we haven't gotten the boats over there. They're pretty slow because we got rid of all our fast boats

and replaced them with fast boats that rust if they're exposed to sea water. Yeah. They're happening. The Gerald Ford shitters still out. Yeah. Shitters fall. Look, I gotta use the ship's head. You know, if it had a ship's head, this would not be a problem.

The thing I heard about that is everyone's like, oh, well, you know, it's a new toilet technology, yada, yada, yada. And then... How do you have enough? We've had flushed toilets for like 200 years, more than that. They got fancy Japanese toilets. Oh, yeah. They have vacuumed. toilets now, low-flow vacuum

toilets, but the theory is... It sucks the shit out of your ass. Yeah, basically. They're on like the longest deployment anyone's ever been on outside of like World War II or something. And so the theory is, is that all of the sailors are pissed off and just

are like flushing like shoes and clothes down the toilet. I also don't know, I mean, like this is, in the grand scheme of things, this is obviously not like the most relevant part of this since you know thousands of people are dead. But it was kind of funny that they, Iran is just firing $30,000,

uh, what are they should head drones and managed to take out one of the, uh, the Boeing, uh, what is it, 707, uh,

the big radar plane. The big dome. Yeah, the radar dome plane of which we have like 15 and Boeing doesn't make spare parts for them anymore. Uh, because they just left it sitting on a runway somewhere inside of Arabia. You're a fucking idiot.

It was a $300 million airplane that got got by like an off-the-shelf Chinese drone, which I just thought was funny. Did you guys see the big news about all these things getting shot up? Is that like all of the like radar and sensor technologies and systems and stuff like that use rare earth minerals? And so like there's like this whole thing which is like Russia controls most of the tungsten supply in the world. And China controls almost the entire, like controls, like, certain rare earth minerals, they control 100% of and other rare earth minerals. They control, like, 60 to 80% of.

And so, like, the cost of all these things are getting blown up is based on the cost that took to manufacture them based on our constrained rare earth mineral supply over, like, you know, three decades or whatever. And so, you know, the Republicans are like, oh, yeah, we're going to, you know, we just need to authorize, you know, 30 billion dollars to replace all this stuff. Except, like, there's like the money, like Russia and China will not sell us these things for love nor money. So there's like actually, not just like, there's like no dollar amount that can replace these things, which is actually pretty base. But if you do, depending how you feel about the United States of America.

The entire problem with this crisis is just that like we, our administration fundamentally, it is so blinded by the capitalist model of the world, but they do not think that like materials come from somewhere. Like this is the problem with the oil. It's the problem with rare earth minerals. It's the problem with like the way that wars are fought and like getting the ships over there. I'm convinced they just forgot that like physical reality. dictates what you can and cannot have.

You cannot just throw more money at a problem. I think Marx had a word for this. It was commodity fetishism. That is, yes, exactly. Well, the craziest thing about all of this is that they're like the most anti-free trade people on the planet. And then they're like, wait, no, that was about everyone else, not about us.

You have to give us what we want to buy. I am merely a small being, right. You could develop these rare earth mineral mines and other stuff in the United States, but you would have to, you know, you'd have to start building industries that are less profitable than financial products. And that's a bad ROI. So, you know, you should literally, yeah, probably invest all that into hedge funds instead. This is the problem that like EV manufacturers have, right? It's like, you know, there's a, there have been issues where it's like, I mean,

both China does this as well, where it's like, you know, a lot of the like lithium in the world comes from extremely unethical mining practices in extremely impoverished countries. Oh, does it. And there are other places you could get. this stuff from or you could just, you know, mine it more ethically instead of using like child slaves, but nobody wants to spend the money on that because then the economic argument for it evaporates. Yep. I don't know. It's just, it's insane because it's like I, you know, on the other show I do, we talk about like

auto industry bullshit and seeing people be like, well, we just should just ban Chinese cars to the American market and we'll just keep making gas cars because that's what consumers want. And it's like, where do you people think oil like comes? from. Like, what, do you think Venezuela is going to like overnight subsidize American consumption of all oil products? Well, the whole thing is that the United States is the world's largest oil producer in the world, except the oil we produce. It's shit. We don't have, it's garbage. We don't have refineries that can process it. So they're like, keep American oil in America. And it's like, we don't have refineries. They have to ship it somewhere else to make it into gas. I love to run my F to.

250 off heavy crude. That'll show those cyclists. Drink, Charlie. I'm doing my pickup truck with chapstick. So I hate that because that's what the Canadians want. I was originally going to throw in a slide about that and explain how well if you, you can to some extent put American crude through our refineries. It just means you don't get any diesel out.

Well, that's good news for our nascent trucking industry. That doesn't exist. Yeah. Diesel fuel in Seattle is already like $8 a gallon. Yeah. So. But yeah, the situation's fucked. Yeah, another thing that Chinese are lapping us on, by the way,

I've been getting so much Chinese propaganda on Red Note. It's amazing. I could also go on a rant about, do you guys know about the ban on cotton from China that the United States has? Because it's from one of like the huge. with like human rights violations, which it isn't. I watched an entire 16-part series from China about why the economic reasons

why the United States is claiming there are huge rights violations. Fascinating. Discussion for another time. The podcast just got in a lot of trouble. China built the world's largest cracking tower for oil in the world so they can like process. And they did this before this all happened, of course, because it's something that takes like a decade to plan.

But it's like twice or it's like four times as big as like any cracking power in the United States. And so it allows you to like refine stuff like get like more of these like fractional like products of the oil out from like marginal oil sources, which is especially important for China because they want to produce like polyester and stuff like that. But it is amazing like when you look at it like, oh, how big is the biggest cracking tower in the United States? It was built in 1975 and hasn't been upgraded since. Like, really? That's the problem is we don't need cracking towers. We need the backwards of that, which is an alkalation unit. Oh, so like what the Germans were doing.

They're World War II with coal gasification and stuff like that. And the biggest one, I think it was the biggest one. Certainly one of the biggest ones blew up in 2019 in Philadelphia. Yes, did. Oh, yeah. You're welcome, America. Revolutionary, Pennsylvania has our backs.

It's us. Vanguard of the Revolution. How old was that thing that blew up? If I had to guess just knowing anything about the United States, it was like 45 years old and had its design life expanded twice over. Well, yeah, because that was, I think, the biggest refinery that was designed mostly for domestic crude. So everything in there was old. but yeah you have to go back to our episode on that that has better information than i can come up

with offhand right here i'm not an oil industry expert i'm probably at the you know the worst part of the dunning kruger curve here i'm going to be honest but all right well i'll go check out that episode yeah yeah i literally the only the only uh refinery i know about is the one in Houston and I think that was for overseas supply. But I couldn't tell you because that was outside of the scope of that episode. Yeah. Well, anyway, I guess we're now at a stalemate rather than total errone victory. Yeah.

You know, because we have our own placade in theory maybe in a few weeks when the ships arrive. There's no preparation for this at all. Eretical stalemate? Yeah. That doesn't sound great for us. Yeah. News. Boodoo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Dib-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo.

So our vice president, J.D. Giz Dick Vance, question the Pope's authority on spiritual matters. Can't do that asshole. He is notably a Catholic convert. a likely thing for a Catholic convert to do. I actually don't like this piece of theology. Too bad. Yeah, it sucks. I have a question, okay?

I am not Catholic. Are you not? I was raised Orthodox. All of these guys hate the Pope. Why don't they just become Orthodox? Orthodoxy's whole thing is that, like, no, the Pope is woke. they've been doing that for like 700 years well they got up

you know they're trying to I don't know they're trying to invade the Catholic Church so they can like I don't know they're trying to do entryism but you know I don't know if you're going to be able to outweigh the opinions of like all of South America like if this is like a some sort of like Civ 5 game where if you overtake the headquarters

you get all their followers well I think they threatened the ambassador from the Vatican. They did some Avignon papacy weird shit. Yeah. They did mention that. And then the ambassador from the Vatican immediately got on the phone to the Pope

and was like, yeah, bro, maybe don't come here for the 4th of July. And so then the Pope sends out a message to like being like, ah, I'm so sorry. I'd love to make it for your 250th birthday. When we've been a country? Yeah, it sounds right, right. But I have to be on a small island in the Mediterranean for the anniversary of something that actually happens the week afterwards.

So it's like deliberately designed which is great because, for, you know, all of the normal reasons is great. But yeah, I mean that I feel bad for the Pope. He's never going to be able to see a White Sox game again. No, they're going to block back. As a Sox fan, you should, that's a blessing. That's just saying. Going to a socks game is less enjoyable than going to like a minor league game because the socks are run like a minor league club.

Like their entire idea of how to get people into the ballpark is like we have cheap parking and weird food, except you care about the players, which makes it so much worse because it is owned by Jerry Rinesdorf who fundamentally hates the fans. So if anything Yeah but it's something doing Pope Hat day So like Oh that you see this That did seem kind of fun Yeah My favorite part about this whole thing is

Did you guys see Trump's rant About the Pope's brother? Yes Your brother is cooler than you Yes I thought it's like His brother wasn't in line to be the Pope He's not a fucking priest

He does not by the Catholic Church Like my favorite part about this is that like his brother is like the most guy from Joliet possibly have like if you're like oh he's like if you're trying to imagine what a white guy from Joliet Illinois would be like it's exactly the Pope's brother so it's extremely funny to have the president being like I like this white guy from Joliet more than the Pope which is you know one of depending on your view one of the most powerful people on the planet so really just some guy some guy from Joliet not

Not even the greatest Catholic from Joliet, who was, of course, Joliet Jake Blues. But I think, I think J.D. Vance sub-tweeted the Pope today about the Augustine principle of just war. And this was just after Pope Leo, who was a distinguished Augustine scholar and former prior general of the Order of. St. Augustine was returning from Mass at the Basilica of St. Augustine at a Naba, Algeria, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, where he visited the site where Augustine of Hippo died during a siege by the Vandals. We really need Nova here for this because I feel like she'd have some insane Catholic Lord of Romano.

I think Nova, but yeah, I wish Nova was here. But yeah, it's the ongoing feud between the United States government and the Vatican. Well, it's really dumb. It's not really a feud. It's just the United States government saying stupid things while the Pope says Pope things. Right. Exactly. He's the Pope.

This is kind of the whole bit, actually. Are they surprised the Pope is a peacnick? I forget. Was St. Augustine the one who got really mad that other people were having fun? like being trans women then turned that into his whole thing? No. I don't

I don't know very much about saying He was hedonistic as a kid and then became very pious, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He never mastered Greek, which I always laugh at. I always remember there's some guy who's very important to Catholicism who was like really mad about the fact that there were transmen

around him having fun. I think Augustine was much more he did fucking a lot of oh my God, original sin crap. I want to say it was a very ascetic order. I might be thinking of the wrong

saint. I don't know. I was an alter boy for long enough that I'm allowed to no longer know anything about Christianity as a religion. I'm not a Catholic convert so I don't remember any of this stuff. Yeah.

I mean, the other thing, too, is like in orthodoxy, like the Catholic approach to saints and borders on idolatrous. Like going to a Catholic church for the first time and seeing like the big statue of the Virgin Mary, I was like, hey, wait a second. I think we had it. I think we split over this. Unironically,

you get back here. You get back here. The earliest schism in the church was over Marian worship. And my take is that anyone, who's anti-Marion, which includes all Protestants, isn't like for something to be a real religion. It's not very feminist. They have to worship either the sun or a fertility goddess. And sex of Christianity that don't worship the Virgin Mary are not real religions because the Virgin Mary is the fertility goddess of Christianity.

Good enough. We'll take it. Yeah, I'll take it. Sure. So at any rate, I support the Pope. I also think stupid wars are dumb and bad. I don't know what to say anything more that Pope Leo hasn't already said. He's got to excommunicate J.D. Vance already. Now. Now.

American schism. American anti-Pope. Is it going to be, do you think they're just going to make Vance the anti-Pope? Or are they going to pick some like anti-W? They can't pick the Hans. They're going to pick those. We're living in a dumbest time. It would be really funny to have,

it'd be really funny to have Chicago and Pope and Ohio and anti-Pope. That feels spiritually correct. Cincinnati suburbs, Pope. I'm going to say, like, the most, like, anti-Chicago place you could be is, like, Phoenix or, like, Houston, Houston, anti-po. Oh, what's that? There's a Catholic cult compound down in Florida, I want to say. Yes, yes.

Oh, Florida, anti-Pope. Florida anti-Pope spiritually makes the most sense. I was going to say the most anti-Pope. The most anti-Chicago place I can think of is. Pick a, pick a, pick a place about 40 miles outside of Chicago with an average income of over $200,000 per household. And there's your most anti-Chicago place I can think of in the U.S. Plainfield.

Honestly, I think the beautiful part about Florida is it might be the only place in the country that's flatter than Chicago. So it's kind of like, you know, like, you know, a mere image situation. Like if you're going to like, like it's like mega Chicago or something like that. So I think we're on. Chicago. Yeah, bizarre Chicago. Well, to be fair, bizarre Chicago probably has mountains.

Yes. Yeah, it's like. Seattleite antipope. Interesting. Oh, I can't stand Seattle. That place, I mean, listen, no offense. Excuse me. The entire city smells like.

I'm holding down the Seattle office. Yeah, I know, but the thing is the entire city smells like mold. It's so damp there, and there are hills. And there are hills. I mean, it is, it was like hailing as you joined the call, so I can't really say it much about the dampness thing. It smells like a fresh, you know, forest, like a rainy winter day. It's lovely. Rainy and winter don't go together in my book, but, you know, to do you know.

Well, you better get used to it because. I think that's going to be the future for a lot of America. Yeah. Someone said that climate change is going to give Chicago a Pacific Northwest climate, and I've never been more upset in my life. Oh, God. Isn't it like negative 20 for, I mean, I grew up in the Midwest. It's like those winters were not fun.

It's kind of nice to never shovel snow again. That's why I live in an apartment. Problems. Fair enough. I suppose that's fair. Well, speaking of Chicago, that was the goddamn news. But up but up and but up, but up, but up, but up, but up, okay. First, we must ask, what is Chicago?

My spiritual homeland, non-Boston division, unfortunately. Really? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. My mother's mother's parents were both born in Chicago, Illinois. Do you know whereabouts?

No, I have no, I have no fucking idea. I looked up my great, great, great-grandfather where you move when he moved to the city, I've moved to the United States from the Netherlands, another very flat place. Turns out that he lived exactly one and a half miles east of me at the exact same. address north, which means that I live at the exact same latitude as my ancestor did in 1880 somehow. I checked and it's like less than five feet off. That's crazy. That's crazy. I was just wondering if we had a similar connection. Maybe your family's like we could like create like a triangle situation or something. But you know, you'll have to do some research and get back to me.

Um, yes Chicago, uh, my kind of town Chicago is. Look, it's the Sears Tower. Look, it's the L. Oh, so I just realized Zifa's in this picture. Doxing. Yeah. All right. I don't know if you want.

Yeah. I don't know if you want that blurred out or something. So is Jim. I'm like 25 pixels tall there. I think I'll be done. Yeah, that's true. Um, So it's got the Chicago River that flows backwards. It's got a big hole. I just like having an excuse to put my vacation pictures on.

I know you do. We did an entire bonus episode on I had a good time on vacation. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Can we do that actually? That would be fun. That was the dining car episode. I shot slides on my most recent vacations. I made all my friends sit through.

You've done two of these. Oh yeah, that's true. Here's the creepy underground station, Millennium Station, that IFA took me to on the underground tour of Chicago. I made you walk for like three miles underground. And at the end of it, you were like, you were acting like you're on a death march. I had, I was like, oh, we've been walking for probably two hours straight. That was kind of, that's a fair warning.

If you ever come to Chicago and I'm like, hey, let me show you something cool. I will take you to a place that barely has cell service and no way of seeing. seeing the sky and wandering you around in circles for two hours. Yeah. And we discovered an engine block. That's true. I have a photo of June with that. For a Mercedes truck, I believe.

Oh, do not threaten me with a good time. I should have been fantastic. I should have included my, my, yeah, I, Chicago fucks. I love Chicago. I don't love my aunt. I've paid that very clear, but go bears. Yeah, this was after a hard day of food service on the Swift stream. So I was very tired and hung over.

And shout out to Dono if they're listening. Dono was at my wedding. You met them. I placed you two at the podcasters table. Ah. The podcast or containment zone? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.

I like the staley of that's still open. Ooh, the bar. I liked the burger place that you took me to, Iifa. That was good. Oh, we went to the Billy Goat, I think. Oh, no, you're talking about, we went to Rodhot Ranch, I think. That place is the best burger in Chicago. Inflation's out of control, so it's kind of expensive now.

It's $8.50 for a double cheeseburger with fries. You motherfuckers. Oh, my God. Oh my God. Okay, that's a valid reason to hate Seattle right there, actually. Also, Philadelphia, dude. It's just like, oh, yeah. I mean, you can get a $5 burger at a, oh, what's it called?

Unfortunately, it's down in South Philly, and I can't remember the name of it, but it is a $5.00 burger at a box. There's a sixth thing, you know, I'm mad that I had to. Also, a really important thing about Red Hot Ranch, there is a gay man that works the register there. This place is unbelievably popular, but somehow. how, if you are a queer that goes there, well, if you mention you know me, A, you will be delighted. I was striking about telling my nurse that I should fill out a hippo release for him so she could tell this guy they knew me. But I talked to this guy so much, and he gives

me relationship advice. Most, like, last year, he was like, notice that your ex only contacts you when Mercury is in retrograde. And I was like, there's no way this is true. And I looked it up. And it was like this person for like over a year had only been messaging me when Mercury was in retrograde. I was like, how does the cashier at this local counter service burger place know this about me? So not only are the burgers inexpensive and delicious, but the personal service there is unbelievable because you are not getting that from anyone that isn't maybe your hairdresser. Yeah, admittedly, admittedly, I've never been to Dix and nobody's ever giving me relationship advice from behind the counter.

I want a cheap hamburger. I want a hamburger. Yeah, hamburger sounds good right now, yeah. And then we must ask, okay, what is the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad? The Illinois Central, the Illinois Central, that song. Yes, City of Orleans. That song I like, yeah. Yes.

Do you remember we were on the ferry, to Newfoundland and that guy was doing that horrible cover of, uh, of city of New Orleans. We were both shit face drunk trying to get to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. So you know I've been like a, uh, uh, fomer since I was a child, right? Uh, and so I've studied many like mtH catalogs and the like growing up. Yeah.

I just was struck with the realization like a bolt of lightning that the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad logo is a cross section of a rail. just now? Oh shit, it is. Oh boy. I never really. I just thought it was a weird eye, my whole life. Well, they called them eye sections for nothing.

I'm losing my mind. It just hit me. I'm sorry. This is why we need to bring back the Illinois Central. First of all, the Death Stars. What a, what a train. I'm sure they painted those trains all black entirely. because they don't show sit on them.

But with a big orange eye, like, of the railroad, of like a rail cross-section item, what a look. It looks good, yeah. So the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad was a merger of the Illinois Central, which is a railroad from Chicago to New Orleans, and the Gulf Mobile and Ohio Railroad, which is a railroad from New Orleans to Chicago. Wait, what?

Yeah. I kind of came back in and I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? Admittedly, it takes much longer. It's a much less direct route than the Illinois Central route to Chicago. Yes. If anything, it might make more sense to call it the Illinois Central and Atlantic, with how far the other railroad goes out of the way. Yes.

This happened in 1972 in the Bay. beginning of the mega merger era, which you know, that's a merger, mega merger, mega merger, mega chanting, mega merger, mega merger, okay, I'm done. So they got this sort of flat, very straight route. It's very fast. The city of New Orleans did the whole run from Chicago to New Orleans in daylight hours,

which M track still can't match. Can you fucking imagine. Yeah. That would be so cool. Oh, return with a V, but only for this fucking train. I just want to go to New Orleans. I just want to go to New Orleans. I just want to go to New Orleans.

And they make it fucking impossible. I'm not flying spirit. I just want to go to New Orleans. They handled merchandise that needed to go faster than a Mississippi barge could do. The Illinois Central also operated many commuter trains out of Chicago. I'm going to say Illinois Central a lot in this podcast when what I mean is Illinois Central Gulf, because the trains all still said Illinois Central. on them.

And now, even though the names changed back, now all the trains say Illinois Central Gulf on them. I deliberately, when we were in our underground tour of Chicago, took you past a bar, a wall that said Illinois Central Golf building this way, but not sure you remember because you're kind of haggard at that point. Oh, yeah, I was a little bit haggard on that walk. He's a haggard man. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, just like Merle. Oh, yeah. Oh, my dad loves Merle Haggard, man. Sorry. Burt just made his appearance. So, this is some

pictures I got from a website called hickscarworks.blogspot.com. To make a very long story short here, commuter trains used to be big business for the Illinois Central, and there was a hell of a lot of demand for them, right? They were, especially in the 1800s, faster than streetcar or the L.

The Illinois Central operated lots of commuter trains out of their great central station in what is now Millennium Park. And I mean, this is like a billion trains a day. There were so many goddamn trains. They were on very tight headways. They all operated with these cute little 442 Forney locomotives, right, with these very light wooden passenger cars. I'm horny for 40s.

Put it on a shirt. Put it on a shirt. There's still one at IRM you can ride if you're that horny for him. I am horny for it, dude. The track was all at grade with, you know, railroad crossings. Still had high-level platforms, though, because they weren't that backwards. And all this cut off the city from its waterfront,

covered everything along Michigan Avenue where all the big buildings facing the park are now with soot and ashes because they were running so goddamn many of these trains right and eventually the city of Chicago tries to do something about this

which was namely okay we are going to collaborate with the railroad to grade separate these tracks remove the railroad crossings right but also we're going to ban steam locomotives from the waterfront entirely. It's too bad that like nobody from Florida ever took any notes on how other states do things.

They have to reinvent it all from first principles. Yes. So, uh, this results in, this compels the railroad to electrify, right? By 1926. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I stole this from the Discord and I, I, um, I forget where it's from it, apparently.

This is from the South Chicago branch, which never got properly grade separated to this day. Good. Yeah. By 1926, we get the IC Electric, right, along with some limited local Illinois Central Electric Freight Service. Very limited. They tried to avoid electrifying that for a long time.

But this was combined with the Chicago South Shore and South Bend, which did a lot of electric freight service. We'll talk about that in the next slide. The long distance trains in and out of Chicago were moved to the new central station at the south end of Grant Park so they could still remain steam powered, right? They didn't want to commit to the bit too much. And so this is very, very, very high density commuter rail. Right. The ridership on these things I would describe as stupid, right? A hundred thousand, 120,000 riders a day in 1940s. Jesus, okay.

Yeah, that's a, that's a quarter of a Washington metro or about one and a half Marta's or half a metropolitan line in London. And these are electric trains running on 1500 volt DC overhead line. They ran every 10 minutes all day, even more at rush hour. And that's on every branch. You can see here. Hold on. Let me switch the pen color.

You get in there, John Madden. Yeah. Here's Chicago. Here's the loop. Well, the loop's a little bit smaller. But, you know, the central station's about here. And then all this over here, that's the South Chicago branch. This is the main line.

I don't know what this branch. is called, probably the Blue Island branch. You got it, baby. Damn, all I had to do was read the label. But yeah, this is the whole, this is the whole Illinois Central Electric System. I believe there was also briefly a branch here at Homewood that went to a horse race track. But that closed down and they closed down the branch line. This is a four-track main line.

It's got local and express service. It has fairgated stations. It has unified fares so you can get through easily. The ticketing's easy. You can have rapid boarding of train. And it was a really great system. But then in the 1940s, the city started to build freeways, right? Ooh.

Yeah. And like you made Bert leave by mentioning that. Thank you. Damn. Oh, Bert. Not a fan of freeways. Bert, friend to the urbanist. Yeah.

Call him an urbanist. Erbertist. Yeah, you beat me to it. Now, like in many cities, these freeways contain provisions for rapid transit. But unlike many cities, in Chicago, they actually built said rapid transit. So what's now the red line? Hold on. the red line here in the middle of 94 um okay the Dan Brian for those the Dan Brian yeah they opened that up parallel to the uh I see electric and one of the big

markets that this served was um intra-city ridership right people who are going from a station in the city to another station in the city well now they could take the L in the middle of the freeway, and that was faster and cheaper. Is that the same design principles that got us the L at Perceptor running in the middle of 905, or is this different? So what actually ended up happening here is originally, so they built, I think, the Dan Ryan into Stevenson. Stevenson is 57, I think.

That's the one that goes southwest at the same time. And they originally planned to build the L down the Stevenson, which, doesn't have any trains whatsoever except at the time mayor daily the old mail daily not the new mayor daily was like basically called oh god the call was I want to say like Nixon or someone like that I wasn't Nixon I forget who it was whatever president called near dealing is like congratulations you got the funding to build your your train line down you know the highway and there was like no no the high is wrong, it should go down 94 instead.

And the thing about 94 or the Dan Ryan is that it is both in the catchment of the Rock Island, the Illinois Central, and what is the south side main line, which is the current green line for the CTA. So the, this, this, this expansion. And the thing about it is, is that instead of having like the green line, and the Illinois Central had stops like, you know, every quarter mile to half mile. And

the red line which ended up being called the Dan Ryan line at the time, has a stop like every mile and a half or something. And so you could get, you can't even do this anymore because of course the state of good repair is not quite there yet. But you could get from like 95th Street

to the loop in like 15 minutes, which is, first of all, probably about 30 minutes faster than you could get there from any of these other modes of transit. And so it just killed all of them. And it wasn't even supposed to be built there in the first place. It was supposed to go down to Stevenson.

So I don't know. I'll let Roz answered the question about how it compares to Philly. But that's some background on how the rub line even got built in the first place, because it's actually totally unnecessary based on where transit was in the city to begin with. Yeah, the L, the L here in Philly only got relocated a little bit. bit. They never had like the idea we're going to completely relocate it into the median of 95. There's just one station like that when they rebuilt Spring Garden. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. This was like fully new construction.

Yeah. It's just, it's like two blocks to four blocks from, so like a quarter mile to half a mile from the existing green line or the south side main line. And so it's, but like that's where all of the actual like retail and housing and stuff was. And so the red line was designed to just be like for bus transfers. And what it meant was that it was like the worst possible scenario because the north side trains were routed onto the south side mainline, but the south side mainline also lost college ridership overnight. But it had just enough ridership and just enough ties to the community that they could couldn't outright close it.

So basically for like 50 years after this happened, the CTA was running mostly empty trains over like these branches, the Green Line branches, and just like, you know, hemorrhaging money. Another, in addition to the highway, you know, taking away riders in the first place, just the way that the highway designers designed the, you know, subways actually killed them even worse. Yeah, yeah. But the main thing here is that, you know, when the red line opens up, all of a sudden people who are taking the IC electric within the city, they all switch to the red line.

It's cheaper. The train comes more frequently. So the Illinois Central is like, okay, we're going to close a bunch of stations and we're going to focus on suburban commuters, right? especially during rush hour. And to further concentrate on the suburban market, they increase their fares, while obviously the L is still cheap.

Ridership craters even further, and the railroad starts to lose money on this operation. So it goes. Another thing I was just going to briefly mention. No, I know you like these locomotives, Victoria. God. This is my return with the V. Yeah.

I would rip up the bicycle trail. I have apologized to all the cyclists to listen to the show, but rip up the Paloos to Cascades Rail Trail. Replace it with rails yet again, and let me run these things. Please. There's still one that runs at the Illinois Railway Museum. A little Joe?

Yeah. Yeah. Really? Yeah, I mean, it even uses the same electrification because the Illinois Railway Museum is electrified at 1,500 volts. But they use trial wire instead of intergraph. I think it's, I think it's actually 600 volts, so it's a little depower. Do they under depot? They underpower everything?

Yeah. Well. Also, these things ran at like crazy voltage because the Milwaukee Road ran and had their own power network for them. Well, this is a South Shore little Joe. did run at 1500 votes. Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I didn't even, I wasn't sure if there was, I know there were two in the U.S. I didn't remember that the South Shore Line still had theirs.

That's awesome. Well, or the museum still had it. The museum has one, yeah. The one extant Milwaukee road copy is sitting in a fucking parking lot uncovered outside the, I kid you not, Montana Prison Museum. It's the grimest shit. It's in like Anaconda, Montana. or close to it.

You can see the like smoke stack from the smelter that turned into the entire town into a super fun site. It's anyway. Victoria, have you ever, are you familiar with the story of like Burlington,

northern going over the books of the Milwaukee Road when they acquired the Pacific extension and then learning that actually they had been like triple counting the expenses for the Pacific extension. It was by far the most profitable line that the Milwaukee Road had. I didn't know this. I'm going to go bash my head against a concrete wall for an hour. Thank you. I appreciate this. It's so maddening. And God, here's the other thing about your thing about bike trails. It's called rail banking. It's not, they're only bike trails until the people

take power and we kick all the dentists off these things. things and replace them with good, clean, electrified freight. Yep, yep. We're going to bring back the Washington Old Dominion. We're going to bring back electric rail to Quaker Town and Reading. This is the next project for my freelance Hokewam Rainier and Tacoma model railroad is I have to do an HRT livery little Joe so I can re-industrialize America with electric railroads.

Hell yeah. We need to bring back the interurbans. I think bring back the Skoky Valley route. My take is that high-speed... Amtrak should build a high-speed line to Madison, and they should do it by getting rid of the North Shore Channel Trail and just, you know, look at the North Shore dentists, man. Seattle feels like it's independently rediscovering the concept of interurbanes with the one-line,

which is now basically an inner-urban despite being a light rail system. Since it now runs connected from federal way to Linwood, all the way over to a fork in, like, Renton. No, not Renton. Redmond, that's a town I'm thinking of. Which means that the one line is actually, like, the second longest light rail line in America. Wow.

It's like the, I think it's the yellow line in L.A. that's like 57 miles long or something. We're like a second place. It's almost an inner urban. America's such a beautiful kind. country. It takes a mind unparalleled in the rest of the world to come up with ideas like this. Like a light rail train that functions as an interurban, yeah. Here's what you got to do is you have to, as a gag, rebuild the entire Chicago, Aurora and Elgin

in half a day and open it in the middle of rush hour just to continue service on one July 3rd. Hell yeah. That'll be another episode. But. Oh, please have me on for that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a fun one.

My grandma was one of the people that got stranded too. Anyways, that's another day. Yeah. Yeah. So the South Shore line also ran on some of these lines and still does to this day. There was a bizarre and complex non-compete agreement with the Illinois Central. that let them run into central station is like, okay, you can't pick up passengers going this way at these times and this way at these other times to make sure you're not competing with our local commuter trains. And funnily enough, despite the fact that both lines are owned by the government today, that non-compete our agreement is still in place.

Outstanding work, Lance. Oh, my God. I was about to say it would make so much more sense if we just centrally owned these things and then didn't make these weird. rules. But no, you know, it would make even more sense. It would be to centrally own these things and keep all the weird rules. Yes. I know the scariest part about all of this is that Indiana is the same state in this partnership, which knowing anything else about Indiana will make you go, that's not surely, that's not possible. And it is. They just opened a new branch. I know. I feel the past five years,

don't feel real to me. I don't know what to say. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. I was going to say, the only time I've ever been to Chicago, I was actually in Gary, Indiana. So I don't know. They seemed like the same place to me. I bought a $3,000 on the prelude there. Gary, Indiana is one of the like four real cities in this country, and I firmly believe that. Name for Albert Gary of Judiciary fame. Uh-huh. Actually, it is crazy that every single person named Gary is actually named after Gary Indiana. It is wild how they all do that. Like SpongeBob's Snail.

Yeah. Yeah. It's true. That means get Gary Indiana exists in the SpongeBob universe and also the Pokemon universe because, you know, Gary Ash's rival. Oh, yeah. Gary is maybe the one-wheel city in all universes. Is Gary, Indiana in the Conto region? Why not? didn't they have a region that represents America

I don't know Oh I don't know I don't know I don't know anything about Pokemon No Let me play that That was satanic Oh okay That's what you get

That's what you get when you do Orthodox In this episode Getting Pokemon lore wrong is going to be One thing that makes people The most mad No I think it's definitely going to be the China thing Pikachu, Snorlax,

Charzard, yeah, Bulbassore. Long ago, the four, the four nations lived in harmony. Anyway,

so I just put this, I put this in here because I know Victoria likes the, the little Joe's. Thank you, I do. It's true.

Now we have to talk about railway signaling. Oh boy. Here we go. Oh, yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ, Roz. A lot of my friends play this game.

I really need to try it. Oh, it's great. It'll ruin your life, especially when you start doing multiplayer. What is automatic block signaling? So, back in the day, I'm talking like 1850s, 1840s, before telegraphs,

you controlled train movements, movements with fixed and strict timetables, right? You know, wait for this train here. Don't leave this station before this happens. Leave it this, so on and so forth, right? Because there's no way to communicate long distances except by the train, which you are, you know, so that doesn't help you, right?

Then they invent this thing called the telegraph and you can control trains with paper train orders that you send ahead to a telegraph station that you as the dispatcher can now tell a train to do something else, wait here, proceed somewhere else, whatever you need to do to ensure the smooth movement of train traffic, right? The telegraph office receives the train order. They printed, well, it's probably transcribed by hand, right? And then as the train goes through the station, there's a big hoop, and the engineer or the fireman puts their arm through the hoop that picks up the train order. Then you read it, and it says, stop immediately, and then you panic, right?

Cool. Got it. Yeah. Then we get manual signals. Signals are at this point. They're like semaphores. They got an arm that goes up or down to show what the train is supposed to. to do, right? This is controlled by a man in a signal box. This is labor intensive. This is also

prone to error. Error. Excuse me. Era. Era. Hey, dad. Then eventually we get better electricity. We have these, these, you know, various concepts. We get something called the automatic block signal, which is one of the simplest modern signaling systems, right? How does this work? So there's a low voltage in the track, in the rails, right? And the area between each signal is a separate block, right? There's insulators at each signal. In between the two rails, somewhere in that block is a relay, right? when there's no train in the block, that relay is powered, right?

It's, I think relay is closed when they're powered, right? Which turns the signal green. Okay. Right. So railroad wheels are solid pieces of metal. So when a train comes along, right, pretend this is the train, right? here. Look, there's the locomotive, there's a smokestack, there's some cars. Anyway, that's the train. It shorts that circuit, which depowers the relay, opens it back up, and this signal

becomes red, indicating the block is occupied, right? Now, when you have overhead electric power. This gets a little bit more complicated. That's not in the scope of this podcast. I don't want to think about that. This also lights up the signal behind it in, hold on, somewhere back here, it would be yellow that indicates to the train following the block after the next block is occupied. You should slow down and be prepared to stop, right? So automatic block signaling is the closest thing to what you might find in various popular tycoon games like transport tycoon or transport fever or like even factorial or whatever. It works really good if trains only do the stuff you expect them to do. But if the trains have never done anything unexpected.

Yeah. Thank God for that. Yeah, exactly. end the episode. All right. Well, that was nice and informative. It's a great system. If the trains do something weird, problems can occur.

And trains frequently do weird things either intentionally or unintentionally, right? Maybe you're switching cars on some industrial sightings. Maybe you're switching cars at the station. Maybe the dispatcher gives you permission to do something weird. Maybe you overrun a station. You know, you go beyond where you're supposed to. Now you have to back up. Hold that thought.

Oh, no. Maybe the train breaks down. Maybe the signals break down. Maybe you crashed into a car at a grade crossing and it fucked everything up. You know, all this sort of stuff can happen, right? That's why we have technologies like centralized traffic control where there's a human in the loop. We have radio communications. So dispatch and the engineer and the conductor can be in contact at all times.

And like precision schedule of railrooting solves this by just putting all of the cars on one train, so you don't have to worry about. Yeah, there's only a train. It's just like a game of snake. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. We run... Just don't park your train anywhere overnight unattended.

We run one 300 car commuter train each day, each way. Hop in, hop off. What's the problem? So anyway... Now you're thinking with Metra. Yeah. So automatic block signaling is thus largely relegated to those few areas where train traffic is very predictable and flows in one direction. Like, for instance, a high-density subway-style commuter railroad like the Illinois Central Electric District.

Oh, boy. That's not foreshadowing at all. No. The other thing is, automatic signals. are what we call permissive, right? Their most restrictive aspect, and when I say aspect, I mean, that's one of the several lights

or combinations of lights a signal can display to convey information, right? So like red is stop, yellow is slowed down, green is go, right? But an automatic block signal can only display as its most restrictive aspect, restricting, right? which means you proceed at 10 miles an hour from this spot. Because as long as you can stop within sight distance of the next train, A, you may as well creep up on them, you know?

This is distinct from what's called an absolute or a home signal, right? Those are before interlockings or like single track sections where trains can go both ways. If you pass the signal when it's set it, red at danger, right, you might crash and die. And those are still... I don't want to do that. Yeah.

Those are still usually controlled by a man in an interlocking tower or centralized traffic control. Oh, like in Zahick. But the automatic block signal, even if it's red, yeah, you can just creep by that. It's fine. Don't worry. And so automatic... Ross, is this like what we have to do at Zoo interlocking in Philly?

Zoo interlocking would be controlled by home signals. And the Northeast Corridor, I think with, so they have a much more complex. Of course, they don't. Why not even ask? Computer control system. Yeah. Yeah. What is automatic civil speed enforcement system or something like that?

I don't know. Oh, got it. Okay. Yeah, no. Like that, that's, it gets mad at you for going too fast and all kinds of crap. Anyway, well, I will get to that in a second. automatic signals are differentiated from home signals because they have a big number board on them, right?

And this is all United States practice, of course. We still have these. We still have red signals that you can pass. Neat. I don't know what they do overseas. I'm sure if Gareth was here, he'd be having a connipion right now. But it's not.

So fuck up. Yeah. Hi, Gareth. Hope you're well. All right. I've returned. Hi, Victoria. Hello.

Hello. So, let's talk about another thing. Oh, my wife and also home. This is the heavyweight coach. Wow, this is still in yellow. Hold on. The heavyweight coach.

Ooh, ketchup and mustard. Delicious. Yeah. Mm, good. Well, it is, well, no, it's Chicago. I got to get rid of the ketchup. Yeah, I got to get rid of the ketchup. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, hold on, hold on. Extremely inappropriate to do you in front of me. Yeah, hold on. Let me, there's the relish. I can tell the difference. You could have just told me as relish the entire time. Oh, shit. Well, I...

All right, this is... This is... I'm going to switch to yellow, just because I forgot is your Chicago-themed podcast. So, the heavy, weight coach is a sort of broad tax monic text tex. It's a big category of railroad cars. They all share most of the same characteristics, right? The heavyweight is the first kind of all steel railroad coach. A feat previously thought impossible until George Gibbs just went and did

it, right? CRGG1 episode for more details. Subscribe to our Patreon. The heavyweight is built on a simple frame of two eye beams underneath the car, right? Above which there's a sort of frame where there is a cast-in-place concrete floor. What? Yes. Hell yeah, there is.

This is the kind of train you need big Liz for. Yeah. This is obviously, it's pretty solid and pretty heavy, right? The walls are pretty thick-gauge steel. They got riveted reinforcements. They're at these square windows. They're operable, of course. Single hung.

Yeah. The roof has something called a clear story, right? In a lot of railroad enthusiasts circles, they have corrupted this to clerestory, which is not what it is. It's from the word clear story that comes from cathedrals. The clear story is the second row of windows above the nave.

It's a clear story because it's an extra story of the cathedral, there's no floor, it's clear. It lets the light in. Anyway, same concept here. It lets light and air in. All these windows are operable. That way, you still get ventilation, even if you don't want to open your window

and be blasted in the face with smoke and steam and high speed air. We don't. That's the best part of Benjointed train rides. It's just getting all the smells. Hmm. The roof is made of steel. It's covered in a material called

car cement, which is just sort of this very thick tar, right? I think even thicker than like normal building roofing. Now this car we're looking at here, let me remove some of this mustard. In Seattle, the cars are covered with cream cheese.

This is a simple car that only has heating. Some cars would have enormous bunkers underneath that you would stock full of giant ice cubes. What? Like two ton ice cubes. And you would have a fan and the fan would blow cooled air around the car. That slaps.

Later cars were even fitted with air conditioning, but they didn't use the word air conditioning. They called the machine an ice engine. Oh, I'm stealing that. That's awesome. I call my landlord like the ice engines acting up again. Yeah, the ice engines, bro. I'm just like, what the goddamn shit are you talking about?

The ice engine. You know, the ice engine. No, you're crazy. A lot of times these modifications, these cars were retrofitted with the ice engine, so the ventilation didn't fit in the car, so they would cover up the clear story, and they would add just an arched roof there, right, in one go,

and put the ventilation ducts there, because you don't need the clear story now that you have air conditioning, right? Sure. And this explains evangelical churches. Yes. Well, yeah, exactly. You don't need the clear story in the church. The car converts to Mormonism.

Yeah. You have to, that's why you can put a church in a storefront now. Yeah. Yeah. So this was also done on some un-air-conditioned cars because the clear stories tended to leak like a sieve. You know, these cars might have had a coal stove, but usually the heating was just a direct steam pipe

from the locomotive. And, of course, the toilet empties directly onto the tracks. Good. Yeah. Save his weight. Yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. Every time I take a shit, the train can go a little faster.

And the thing about heavyweight cars Trying to do a top speed run and just making everyone drink a shit ton of mural acts That's why we Like Amtrak so slow now Even though they got rid of the cement floors for their cars They have to carry everyone's shit around Exactly exactly To 79 miles an hour

The thing about Heavyweight cars is of course they're heavy Right and this is intentional A heavier car has more inertia and therefore gives a smoother ride. Or so the thinking went. That does make sense. I mean, I've been old families.

Cushy suspension is for cowards. Just make it heavier, right? As a result, nearly all but the lightest heavyweight cars had, as this car does, six-wheel trucks. And so these cars were mostly built about between 1900 and 1940-ish, Some of them lasted a very long time, including a very small number that made it onto M-Track on the Valpo dummy, which was the Chicago. God, that's insane to imagine. Yeah, yeah, it was the Chicago to Valparaiso commuter train.

They also predate all modern crash safety regulations. Yeah, it doesn't matter. It's the floors in a fucking concrete. Who gives a shit? It's like crash testing a building. office building, yeah. Yeah, the sheer heft of the car is what's going to protect you, right?

As we've learned earlier in this episode, concrete structures never fail. Yes. So there's no reason to test them. The model of this podcast might as well be. Concrete structures never fail. Yeah. See, Nova's not here because I feel like this is the perfect chance to bring back, make it more rigid.

Yeah. Oh, they did. The secret is they didn't use pre-cats. concrete to build these cars. Otherwise, that would have been a problem. Yeah, no, this is cast in place. They built the frame and then they poured the concrete in. Jesus fucking Christ. So, we'll talk about the Illinois Central Electric Multiple Units. These were built from 1924 to 1926. I couldn't find too much info about the, well, actually, I did find a lot of info about them, but it was about half an hour before recording.

So what are you going to do? These pictures are gorgeous. Oh, I love these. I'm a sucker for any heavyweight electric multiple unit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, these are great. These are commuter trains. They're on the lighter side of heavyweight, right?

They don't have air conditioning. They barely have heating. Well, no, they have heating at Chicago. What am I saying? They're about 72 feet long. That's on the shorter side. So they're able to get away with four-wheel trucks as opposed to six-wheel, right? They were built as pairs.

One car had powered axles. The following car did not have powered axles. They run on 1,500-volt DC electricity from overhead wires. They have a small operator's cab in the front. which also doubled as the vestibule. So if the car wasn't the leading car, that would just be open for anyone to walk into and the controls were folded away.

Similar to like the SEPTA silver liner fours are, that sort of concept lasted a long time. They were, of course, not fitted with speedometers. No, gentlemen's a speedometer. Yeah, no, you're supposed to, use your judgment, you know, we die like men here. Likewise, because they operated almost entirely an automatic block signal territory, and they were very old, they were not equipped with radios.

Oh, dear. Okay. Any special orders had to be relayed at a station with a paper train order that was then telegraphed. Come on, man. Oh, my God. Okay. That's seriously, like, it, this, this, this,

accident happened like what, 19792? Yes. I mean, at some point, the radio's got pretty cheap. We put a man on the mood at this point. Like, radios were not that expensive. Certainly we could have thrown one in at like some point. Like just like the Fisher Price,

you know, Child's first radio. Are you saying a railroad should have made a capital investment? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Stupid. I was advocating for here.

Just checking. 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. 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 um yeah i just wrote it i'm i'm i'm a sucker for these sorts of heavyweight electrical multiple units i think these guys look great um you know like most of the sort of equipment it ran they ran well after they were functionally obsolete um because they have those uh straight geared electric dc motors they just keep ticking forever. There's still one that operates at the Illinois Railway Museum.

Damn, I need to go to Illinois. You should look at photos of the South Shore, which until they got their current EMU design, they ran these cars, which means up to the 80s, or 90s they were running cars, not the 90s. It was pretty late though. They were running cars like this.

And apparently they were in extremely bad condition. Can't have shocked. Yeah. Well, I think SEPTIC kept running the Pennsylvania Railroad MP54s until like the mid-80s. Then they donated one to Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, and it immediately fell apart like the Blues Brothers car. That's what the horizons are doing for Amtrak right now. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm not allowed to talk about that.

Anyway. But yeah, these things got really tired after a while. So the IC Electric was going to be modernized. That's a killer magazine design. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's another return, return two with a V. That style of graphic design. Yeah, I mean, Railway Age doesn't even have a print edition anymore.

I don't think. So anyway, there's this thing developed in, I want to say, the late 60s, the Chicago's South suburban mass transit district, which is sort of the city is like, you know, these commuter trains are pretty tired. we should probably do some modernization because we think the commuter train that arrives every three minutes might be essential to the city functioning. Don't worry about that. Don't worry about that. Yeah. So the Illinois Central Electric is still in private hands, but this is one of the few that sees some actual modernization, right, on the public dime, though, right?

you learned some of the limits of municipalism because a lot of cities tried to sort of regulate the railroads into modernizing and the railroads just pulled out. Shit their pants and protest. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly. It seemed wise to attempt to throw the railroad

some cash for modernization. So the Chicago's South Suburban Mass Transit District was formed so they could maybe get rid of these tired old, I see electric cars and replaced them with something new, something better, higher capacity, faster, more comfortable. But of course, still oriented towards those suburban commuters rather than the old, you know, intra-city ridership, the people who were going from one part of the city to another, right? Which, uh, enter the horrible Frankenstein monster that is the highliner.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Die, die, die, my friend. It looks fucking great. And everything about it is wrong and designed to facilitate worse service. Now, how so? We have to talk about the gallery car.

Oh, we sure do. Oh, yes. What is the gallery car? And I think we've discussed this before. An upskirt is paradise. Yeah. So the gallery car is an ingenious way to have a double-deck railroad car, which the conductor only needs to make one pass-through to collect tickets.

And by ingenious, I mean stupid. There is a normal two-by-two C. configuration downstairs. Upstairs, there are the two galleries, right, which have one seat, an aisle, a big hole, an aisle, and one seat. Yep. Fuck you. This means...

If you've ever ridden these in the winter, this is the thing that, like, they seem bad enough, but imagine being... there's a staircase on one side and in the winter you are covered in salt and or someone else's covered in salt. And if they get off in an intermediate station, they have to step over probably 30 people's knees because they're sitting perpendicular to the aisle. And so if you've ever wanted to get the bottom of someone's shoes on your like knees as they try to like squeeze past, this is the perfect opportunity to do so. Oh, that's right. You got the ones with the longitudinal seating up there. I rode I rode VRE. It was all perpendicular. Yeah. Well, that's because they respect the human

there, except you have to imagine when these were built, they were built with longitudinal seating, which gives them like a stated capacity of like 172 seats, which is you're not fitting a 172 people sitting in one of these things. I remember, I remember riding VRE on the 25,000 passenger ridership day. and I think I was on the 444, which was the most crowded train. And yeah, it was all standees downstairs, and people were standing on the winder staircases. It was awful. It was so bad.

Yeah, you can still get that experience. Just go to, like, you know, in the winter or whenever Amtrak decides to send someone into the switch room and have them fall on an irreplaceable piece of electronics because they're doing upgrades in the middle of rush hour. You can get that experience by going to Union Station, just trying to get on one of the first, like, three trains out of the station after everything's been backed up for two hours. It's incredible. Highly recommended. You should plan a trip here in January or February so you can experience it.

Yes. Yeah, no, that's a good idea. Visit Chicago in January or February, folks. Oh, yes. Yeah. I like men. So access to the car is from doors in the middle of the car, right? The galleries don't extend the full way down.

Here is a vestibule over here, above which is the air conditioning unit. So there are four, count them, four horrible winder staircases that you use to access the upstairs. They're a lot of fun if you're 16, right? Then you get older and you get wider. Yeah. And they're terrible and scary, especially on bad track or even just going over switches. You have a crazy food fight in one of these, though. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Strategic position at all. The main purpose of these cars is to eat. increase the number of passengers you can carry on a single train while saving on labor costs, right? Because again, a true double-deck train would require the conductor to make two passes on each car, which means you need more conductors, and that eats into the profits. It also means you can use fewer cars per train, and I can't remember how I learned this, or if it's true or not, but I believe Chicago Union Station, for a long time, they charged railroads by the coach. So this was

advantageous for a cash-strapped railroad, like say the Rock Island line to switch to gallery cars because it's like, look, there's less coaches. Can you stand on the second level? Yes. Yeah, if you're like five, six. Okay, so I would be crouching the entire way.

I can't stand on the second level. Which makes the stepping over knees thing harder because you're like crouched and trying to like high step over other people's knees. And since it's longitudinal, there's nowhere for people's like knees to go when they turn because there's someone next to them.

And on top of that, the space for your feet when it's longitudinal seating, it's like maybe 13 inches deep. So it's like most of someone's foot is going to take up that space. It's one of the most designs that's ever been. Yes. I would agree. I would agree.

One of the thing, I used to take these back from high school and one of the things, there were about four or five of us who would take the commuter train back from high school out of Alexandria Union Station. We like to sit in the last four seats at the end of the car. Oh, perfect teenager seating, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. And the fun thing was, you know, each time the conductor came by, you just climb over the hole and switch seats. I'm sure he loved that. Do you put over under the luggage rack? It's over the luggage wrap.

Okay, that makes more sense. Yeah. Under would be pretty funny. I don't think I could have, even back then I couldn't have fit. And I was like, I was like, you know, swole back then. Swole. Yeah. I don't believe that.

Yeah. He was swall. I do. He was swall. Beefy ross. Yeah, exactly. New show lore. Yeah, I was rowing.

Yeah. So yeah, where was that? You were being swole. Yeah, exactly. So the first gallery cars were built for the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, also known as the cheap and nothing wasted. Carboarded no wheels, baby. Yeah. Other railroads in the Chicago area soon adopted them.

Some were even built for long distance trains. They had like restaurant, well not, they had like cafe cars. They had parlor cars built to this design. You know, you could go to exotic locations such as Minneapolis or Green Bay or Valparaiso or Davenport or Clinton, Iowa, right? Ashland was famously the 400s, which are for the Chicago Northwestern trains that ran these as long-distance cars. The first one that they ran it on was the one that went to Ashland,

Wisconsin, which is, if you don't know where Ashland, Wisconsin is, it's because it's in the middle of nowhere on Lake Superior. And like the advertising for us amazing, but the real reason it existed is because the railroads really did not want to be running long distance trains at this point. And the Chicago and Northwestern, being cheap, was like, pretty soon, we're going to get rid of all of our long distance trains. And then we could just shove as many seats in these things as we want. But they had like, The long distance configuration had like pedestal seats that could like squivel. And I want Amtrak to bring that back so bad. Oh, yeah.

These also made it out west on the Southern Pacific on the Peninsula commute. That's now Cal Train, right? I love how these things look with the big Fairbanks Morse Trainmaster. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's like the last really design. diesel locomotive. You know, it looks so good.

They all got cut up for submarine parts. God damn it. Yeah, except for one in Montreal. When you tell me these things, I'm like, ooh, maybe somewhere. Maybe they like got rehomed to like Brazil or something. You know, they got rehomed as submarine parts.

You'll have nothing like in Victoria. There is one at Expo Rail in Montreal. It's the last one. So the Highliner was based on the gallery card design for reasons, right? Keep in mind the Illinois Central Electric was still a fairgated system, right? You paid for the fair like you pay for the fair on the subway. You go through a turnstile, right? Yeah.

So there was not really this need for strict ticket collection. Oh, okay, yeah, sure. Yeah, but I guess they thought maybe we'll go cheaper in the future and planned for service to be crappier. You fuckers. This eventually proved to be correct. Double deck cars also increased well times at stations, right? You're sitting there for longer. It may be only 10 or 20 seconds, but when you're making so many stops, that adds up, right?

because people need to climb and descend the horrible stairs, right? There's also only one door as well, as you pointed out, whereas the previous cars had two or three doors. Yes, yeah, they had doors at each end. And this is bad on a system that even while it's on its decline is running on two or three minute headways at the peak, right? Now, despite all this, they are more modern, they are more comfortable, they don't have wicker seats or any of that crap and they are faster.

Right. So these high liners, look at how good they look. So cool looking. Oh, my God. Sure, this episode may be leading to the death of, I don't know, dozens of people, but my God, for that style, was it worth it? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, yeah, it might be.

So the highliners, they were built by the St. Louis Car Company in 1971. I think this was their last mainline passenger car they ever built. They built some subway trains after that. They used a construction method, which we've seen before, which is multiple competing methods of corrosion resistance, which all cancel out. The highliner's body is made of cordon steel, right? That's weathering steel.

The kind of steel that when it rusts, that rusts, that rusts, forms a protective outer coating. You know, it looks really rusty, but that rust is preventing more rust from happening, right? Uh-huh. It looks really, I think it looks very good architecturally sometimes. On a train, that doesn't, it doesn't look very good. There are a lot of apartments like that in Seattle now.

Yeah. I disagree about them looking good, but, you know. Well, I'm sure they've been used in like some kind of like horrible five over one type thing. That is exactly the one I'm envisioning, yes. The quarter of 23rd and union, no, whatever, yes. There's an apartment building there that is a five over one that is like wavy sheet metal that is rusted to an even brown and it does not look good. Yeah. That has to be galvanized steel or something. They're not using court and steel on a five-o-one. It costs way too much money. Oh, right. Yeah. Okay. The, the platonic ideal of cordon steel being used

for something is like a pedestrian bridge in the middle of nowhere or something. Yeah, or like some kind of really heavily architectonic, like almost brutalist but made in metal, just like aggressive huge cube of rust that you live in. Live in cube. We love you, Q. We love you. You'll eat the bug. You'll live in the cube.

Yeah, live in a cube. Yeah, but it's a big cube of rust. Anyway, so this looks terrible on a railroad car, right? So, of course, the Illinois Central, by this time they're the Illinois Central Gulf, they took this weathering steel and put a rather fetching paint scheme on the car, right? This is not a factor in the disaster, but it did mean if any of the paint flaked off, it immediately caused turbo rust in that location. Oh, good.

Yeah. Yeah. This does come into, this does come into effect. 30 years after, I think it's like 2000. In 2004, they inspected the cars and realized that every single one of them was structurally deficient. So. Yeah. That's a story for, that's a story for a different day, except.

God, I hate my sick paint job totals my car. I can't wait until we start finding out what vinyl wraps are doing to the paint they're protecting underneath them. Oh, absolutely. No, like putting a vinyl wrap on your cyber truck, you pull it off like six months later and it's Swiss cheese underneath. It's just a carbon fiber vinyl wrap on your cyber truck. You know, if you think about it, the Highliner is the cyber truck of the 70s. Yeah, but this actually looks good. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

That's true. It looks so good. If they had painted the cyber truck like this, it would look good too. I have seen every single flavor wrap, paint job, like, theme done to a cyber truck. I have never seen one that didn't look like ass. No, they all agree. There's a gray camo one that drives around my neighborhood sometimes. And I just want to get an RPG and just blast my little heart out.

I should be clear. I want to blast the guy driving it. myself. They're everywhere in Seattle and they look as pathetic as the day they came out. To compare this train to a cyber truck is really besmirching the train's honor. You know what? I was wrong for that. I'm learning every day and trying to do better.

That's okay. I will say though, you have two strikes at which point we will detonate the call. You've shit-talk Seattle and you've set the cyber truck looks cool. So that's- The bob call are getting tighter, you guys? Oh, uh-oh, uh-oh, uh-oh. Look, look, this is, this is why I invited EFA on, who I believe in a previous life, uh, blocked me, but also DM me to threaten to fight me? Uh, you threatened to fight me and I DM'd you my address and was like, show the fuck up

if you're real about it. Very good. I didn't know I didn't know who you were. You could have been a serial killer for all I know. I was yeah I literally it took me I it took me probably till 2,024 like I mean I had been following your YouTube account for a while I took me till you also like changed got like banned several times on Twitter so it also took me a while to figure out that you and this other Twitter account were the same thing and then I was like oh you're also the podcast person so I was just

literally just sending my address to random people and being like, show up if you're real about it. I'm more sane now. Average pre-transition behavior. Yeah, well, you know, what can you do? No, that is not a statement of judgment. That's just like, I recognize the self in that story. So another thing to note about these cars is they are, the front is painted black. Nice.

Yeah. Very snappy. Can't possibly cause any problems. Not going to cause any problems, obviously. There's no cars to hit on the Illinois Central. It's great separated. Exactly, yeah. Well, except the Chicago branch.

So for a good amount of time, these cars ran in parallel with the old Illinois Central multiple units, but they were faster. They had better acceleration, which ironically meant they often were assigned to local trains where that acceleration made more of a difference. You know, because you got to start and stop so often.

Yeah, also, like, you give express commuters the crappy trains because, like, those are the ones you need for, like, extra service. And someone that needs to get from, like, university park to downtown in, like, 35 minutes isn't going to suddenly decide to drive if they're not getting one of the new trains. Like, they're on that train. Yes.

Yeah. Also, speaking of starting and stopping, I have to use the restroom. You motherfucker. All right. Well, I'm still here, but my wife is trying to use a sous vide that a friend of mine gave me. Oh, nice. And it turns out it makes a ton of beeping noises. Less good.

If you hear that in the background, it's not a bomb. It's just a suvete. It's the bomb collar getting tighter. Yeah, I was trying to cover. Babe, it's okay. I'll dispute myself while you make dinner. It doesn't matter. It does not matter.

I promise it does not matter. We don't care. Liamson doesn't matter. This is going to be the first episode you guys have ever recorded where sound quality absolutely matters. Well, it hasn't mattered yet. I will just, I can just turn down the gain on my mic and that would probably solve it. Probably. What are you going to do?

With me. Devin, just as a note, at 153.48, I am turning down the gain on my mic, so the suveed isn't as audible. Oh, that has to be a bigger pain. The ass than editing out the fucking. That's what I'm saying. Is it? Probably. I don't know, man.

Well, then Devin, at 154.01, I've given up on that, and I'm turning the game back up. Hey, quick, let's all just change the gain on our mic right now. And just break into Ross's house. Get really loud for no fucking reason. I'm sorry. I was trying to, I was trying to make it. easier. I didn't, I don't know. I'm back. What did I miss?

Oh, we're all changing the game on our microphones to fuck with your editor. Oh, I was trying to make, I was trying to make the sousvied quieter in the background because it's making a lot of noise. You know, the worst part is I also changed my gain earlier in the episode. Oh my God. I hate you people. Devin, I'm so sorry.

Sorry, Devin. I was just trying to get the suvita sound out of it. Oh my god. It should be back at the exact same point. It was at before. I understand there's sound quality in your episodes now. Yeah. And people get mad at us.

And I'm just like, we are an aggressively DIY podcast. Normally, my wife, normally, like, we record a little earlier, and so my wife doesn't make you dinner with what sounds to be like the popcorn popper of Sue Ead machines. Ooh. I mean, I can eat. I have a question. Is a suveed plugged into a GFCI outlet? Because you might want to try that based on the descriptions of the noise that you're giving.

Is it plugged into a GFCI outlet, babe? I'm going to put the pot in the bed through. Okay, sure. So the answer is, you know. Take that. Oh, yeah. Did that tone, God damn. Did that answer that for you?

Yeah, the answer is no. All right. I think the only GFCI outlet in my house is in the bathroom. The kitchen's supposed to have. Yeah, you should have one. I live in an apartment. She doesn't have a garage. Yeah, I've got a parking spot.

Bathroom it is? I don't want to have dinner from the bathroom. Yes, you do. Have you seen those like airplane cooking videos? It's delicious. Yeah. Oh, God, those things make me sick every time. I'm saying my

apartment doesn't have any GFCI outlet So that should be Those those in glass houses Oh I cannot relate Motherfuckers Glass would be far too expensive For my landlord To repair this building with

So So anyway Now we're going to have a brief aside About couplers Oh hell yeah Yeah And how four is transferred through the underframe of a railroad car.

So most common in the United States is this, the knuckle coupler or the Janney coupler, right? You know, you whack two trains into each other, they couple together, right? The coupler pocket here, there's a big, who do you call it? Big steel construction back there. transfers all the force through the underside of the railroad car to the next railroad car, so on and so forth, down the line, right? That's the most common one.

Other couplers are only used and specialized applications like high-density commuter train service. Oh. Yeah. So here is a Tomlinson coupler. Yeah. Yeah. This is a very early type of automatic coupler, right? A Janney coupler just hooks the two cars together and then a guy has to come and connect up the air hoses. And if applicable, the multiple unit hoses that are the, that's the ones that, you know, let you control other locomotives from one locomotive, you know, all kinds of crap. Steam lines if it's a passenger train, stuff like that. the Tomlinson coupler does all that crap automatically, right? Which is great if you're the Illinois Central and you want to do bizarre things with trains all day long, right? It saves a lot of labor when you brought a rush hour 10 car train in and you want to turn it into a four car train and a six car train.

or I have five, two-car trains. I want to turn into a 10-car train really quickly, right? Now, these are early enough. They were installed on the old heavyweight cars. They were also installed on the new highliners, right? They had different mounting hardware, though. That's going to become relevant later. another thing couplers are supposed to do today there's a lot more structural systems to prevent this but in 1926

it was just the couplers and the collision posts which are the two big beams that rise sort of vertically up right here um the idea is these couplers are supposed to prevent climbing right right where one goes over the other yeah climbing is when two cars hit each other with some amount of force, one car starts to try and ride up on top of the other one. Sexy. That can lead. We're ready for that one, were we? It's so tired.

This can lead to something called telescoping, where the one car simply slides, into and through the other car and murders everyone inside. No, no. It sounded cool right up until that last day. Yeah. You know what?

It is so funny. I'm going to laugh and cry. I don't get them to fuck about these people. They're already dead. I'm not. They just, they did the 50th anniversary ceremony a couple years ago.

A lot of these people who were involved in this accident are still alive. Whoops. Yeah. My mom. My mom would have. school down there and was like, oh, that was the year I graduated high school. And I was like, damn, all right. That means that's older, but how about that? But yeah, it's a recent past.

Yeah. Yeah. So today we have things like, well, you can see just barely in this photo, something called an anti-climer. This is essentially just a hardened piece of steel, which has these ridges on it and the idea is if one car tries to start to climb on the other one the other car also has an anti-climor they lock into place famously did not work on the Washington metro several times oh yeah um you know and then you have now lots of more durable crash structures and stuff like that right um in 1926 it was based on the coupler being really really heavy and durable and it was mounted to a really heavy and durable frame with a really heavy and durable collision posts, right? This is just make it more rigid.

Nova! We saved spot for you. Yeah. All right. So it's October 30th, 1972 in the morning rush hour. Oh, shit. Oh, no. Train 416 was a local train made of new high. liners on the South Chicago branch, or it originated from the South Chicago branch. At this point, it's on the main line, right? And in Illinois' central parlance, the local trains were called expresses and the expresses were called specials.

Sure. But the expresses were, sometimes very local and some specials were less special than others. None of the trains had the same stopping pattern. It was chaos. It's great. It's amazing. Unlike many local express commuter rail operations which separate those two classes of train on the separate tracks, the IC Electric simply ran any train where it would fit. So just before 7.30 a.m., train 416 approaches the 27th Street Station, which is here, right?

and blows right past it. Oh, no. Totally bins it. Completely overshoots the platform. It's a very small platform, to be fair. You know, goes all the way past, where are the hell of the mouse go? Can't see it because it's yellow.

I'm going to switch to relish. Right here, this is Signal 3-3.10. So, yeah, these new highliners, they had some oomph to them, right? Apparently, the engineer was also new to the schedule, didn't quite break in time. Plus, the 27th Street station was a flag stop, right? If you were a passenger who wanted to get off there, you had to notify the conductor, who then had to notify the engineer, hey, some asshole wants to stop here. So it's quite possible the engineer forgot and applied the brakes too late.

at any way, at any rate, they were now well past the station into, fully into the next signal block. Now, you should also note the position of Signal 3-3.10 here, which is notably right behind an overhead pedestrian bridge. Oh, dear. This is a gantry signal, so it's suspended over the tracks right behind the overhead pedestrian bridge. There is also a very slight curve behind the platform. This is all going to become relevant in a moment. Now, in a situation where a train overran the platform so bad, it was in the next signal block, the rulebook for the Illinois Central said, continue to the next station.

This railroad runs two to three minute headways. There's no time to back up. this one guy would have had to hoof it from the next station a whopping four blocks away at 23rd Street. Oh my God. Yeah. It's a 10 minute walk. Yeah, that's 10 minutes right there.

Get me on this trade or off this trade. I don't actually care which anymore. Failing that to re-enter a signal block required a flagman to walk down the track and display a red flag indicating for other trains to stop short of the next signal. Ideally, you'd also get permission from the dispatcher, but half the trains on this railroad didn't have radios.

Say, that doesn't matter. So what they do is not that. They're going to give this one passenger a break. They're also going to stay on schedule. It's time to back up and they're going to do it fast. the conductor heads to the center vestibule of the last car. He opens the door so he can look out behind the train. He can't go in the rear operators cab because there's no functioning intercom there.

But he can access the intercom from the middle of the train. The way he communicates with the engineer is not actually like a separate intercom. It is the full like train intercom. the passengers hear all of this. And that's still how it works to this day in Chicago. It's incredible. And so he's going to guide the train back to the platform. I do really love the idea of doing this SpongeBob.

You're good. You're good. You're good. You're good. With like an entire ass commuter train. That is what they have to do. Not on the high level platforms. Well, actually sometimes so.

they have certain platforms on this line today, it's supposed to be all high level, but they have like a few platforms that are literally just long enough for the door, and they have like a little staircase up, this platform that's maybe 10 feet long. And so they have the conductor hang out and do that for the drivers to this day, for some of the flag stops. It's absolutely unhinged. Wow. Now there's an additional crew member on this train called the collector, right? He's not a full conductor, but he still collects fares, right? He could have walked back and flagged the track. He was not instructed to do so. Furthermore, the Illinois Central at this point had gotten so loosey-goosey with the rules that many train crews were not provided with flags.

Why? What? Why? Oh, Lucy-goosey, you explain this. Yeah, no one gives a shit. You want to flag the track? Welcome to chaos rail! Yep, yeah, no. Find a passenger with a red shirt and ask if you can borrow it. Oh, God. This is for railroad business. I'm sorry, ma'am.

The railroad demands you go tits out currently. Yeah, I was about saying. I'm commandeering this. Tits out the railroad safety, baby. In the meantime. Train 720, made of those old heavyweight Pullman MUs, right, the multiple units, they're approaching 27th Street. The engineer sees a green signal and proceeds at maximum track speed.

The engineer sees a yellow signal and proceeds at maximum track speed. The engineer sees a yellow signal, which suddenly turns into a green signal. Oh, boy. and proceeds at maximum track speed. Hell yes. Now he sees another yellow signal. At this point, he was expecting another train ahead of him. 416 probably made that flag stop.

So he set the air brakes to slow the train to what he estimated was 40 miles an hour. Again, there's no speedometer. This was considered normal on the IC electric. Speed restrictions were kind of just suggestions. Just be prepared. to stop within eyesight of another train, which in fairness, under normal conditions, these cars could do pretty easily. Now, at the same time, train 718, also made of the heavyweight cars, was on a parallel track heading the same direction. You know, they're going about the same

speed right next to each other, slowly passing. So our engineer in train 720, is approaching the 27th Street station on track three at about 40 miles an hour, he doesn't see a train at the platform. There is some kind of small, dark shape ahead, though. Hard to tell what it is, really, and might be a trick of the light. It's going to be like 80 people, man. Four to six car lengths from the platform. Oh, no.

As was estimated by the engineer, he realized, oh, fuck, that's a train. he shuts off power, he hits the emergency brakes, he runs back into the passenger compartment to tell everyone to brace for impact. This is a quote from Roseland, Chicago, 1972. Thatsubstack.com Mrs. Mary Brooks, 19 of 8412 South Exchange Street, was riding on the single-decked old train.

I was riding in the front of the front of the, The first car, when we approached McCormick Place, she tells Lou Palmer or Edmund J. Rooney. I think those are both reporters, but his Unclear Witch. The engineer came out. He's a real nice man and told us to get down that the train was going to crash. Then he hit the floor, and then the train crashed. You all right? That's what it says on the table.

Hard to argue with her account there. Yeah. I like how she took some times. to be like, you know, he's such a nice man. He's such a man. That was the most Midwestern shit. You can tell this happened in Chicago. I have to say that, you know,

him telling us the train was going to crash was totally out of character, but him. Normally he just drove the train, like a normal man. Very few crashes. Just seconds before Impact, the conductor of 416 spotted 720 incoming.

He warned the engineer over the intercom and in front of the passengers, that the crash was imminent, and then he jumped out of the open door off the train. Fucking Jesus Christ. Aren't conductors supposed to go down with the train? No. No, that's ships. Yeah.

I don't think conductors are supposed to go down with the ship, either. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Mind your business. Except the conductor of the orchestra on the Titanic, obviously. I don't think he was obligated to do that. Yeah, no, he wasn't obligated to do that, yeah. of our personal decision.

So, Wham. Bam, thank you, ma'am. Yes. The first car of train 720, that's the old heavyweights, the first thing that happens, these old heavyweight cars

are not firmly attached to the trucks. That's the assemblies that carry the wheels, right? They're attached by gravity. So it immediately detaches from the forward power truck, right? The ancient coupler mounting was bent downwards by the impact. So there was nothing to stop the car climbing, right? It overran the underframe of the last car of train 416. Now there's no forward power

truck. There's not really very much underframe electrical equipment to absorb any of the energy of this impact. The only thing that absorbs the energy of this car is the frame, the superstructure, the furnishings and the people inside the last car of train 416. Oh, I don't have a lot of faith in my... Which, of course, it's just a cement slab. Yes. Yeah, just big, big concrete block coming at you at 40 miles an hour. No, thanks.

Estimated 40 miles an hour, no speedometer. It's like someone launching a jersey barrier at you. I do not have much space in my ability to catch a jersey barrier. No. I'm just imagining that being like a new form of paintball or something. Oh my God. So this heavyweight car proceeds on down through the new lightweight car in the process veering to the right and sidest wiping drain 718 on the next track, which absorbed the impact and didn't even derail. no one actually noticed until it got to like the next station.

Well, the people in the car noticed, but... Right. God damn. So, roughly half of the last car of 416 was completely destroyed. It was telescoped. You know, the car slid into the other car. And the first car of train 720 remained remarkably intact. there were not very many injuries or fatalities in there.

So, but on the other car, yeah, this looks pretty ugly. Oh, my God. Not so good. Yeah. See, even if you're on like the upper deck, you got screwed. This was a very bad accident. This is why Calhran ropes off the front of all of their cab cars when running in reverse. They do that?

Don't they still do that? They did it after like that 2004 crash where that guy was texting and ran into a freight train. Oh. Interesting. I didn't know that. I don't know. I used to like riding in the front of the VRE train in the gallery car. Oh.

Writing in the front of a of a Highlander 2 on the Metro Electric is so cool because it's basically a dead straight shot. So you like look down it and you're looking like literally as far as the I can see it's like you can see like 25 miles straight. Wow. It's pretty cool. And it's also very quiet. I'm like, you know, riding on one of those trains that's getting pushed around by an F40BH, which sounds like you're riding on a cement level or something like that. Not to like put too much lovety in this, but I will say that like the passenger who flagged for this stuff, that's like my ultimate social anxiety nightmare. Yeah. I need to get off here and the train's like, oh, I guess we can back up for you.

We don't want to make you walk the extra four blocks. And then you kill dozens of people. Because you ask for one thing. You did. This is how my mind works. I'm not going to lie. See, I would just be like, I asked them to do that. But I'm just, I'm just, you can ask for anything.

If the professionals choose to do it and it gets everyone killed, that's kind of on them. That's like, I'm just like, no, this is my fault now. It's like being a passenger of an airplane and being like, hey, I bet you can't do a barrel. And then like they do like a control descent into terrain. Like the pilot shouldn't. But that happens all the time. Pilots love doing that. I dated a pilot.

The main thing I learned is you should never say, bet you can't do this because they will 100% take you up on that. Parall roll. Dual loop. That's why Rise doesn't fly. Oh, I don't. He absolutely has to. Yeah, that's true.

So the rescue and recovery operations were ugly, but more successful than they might have other. otherwise been since the trains wrecked at a station built to serve the Michael Rees Hospital. Oh, well. Yeah. What a happy accident, I guess. And there was also the Mercy Hospital only a few blocks away. So there were just fuck tons of doctors and nurses on the scene immediately.

Yeah, they were there before the firefighters. Yeah. I bet they're wetting their pants at this. Just like, oh, yeah, I get to be a full. fucking doctor. Oh! The accident also happens in full sight of the Lakeshore Expressway.

Motorists stop their cars to run all the way across a railroad yard to help. That fucks. That rules. Yeah. This quickly becomes a scene with too many first responders. Never mind. The police show up and they have to set up

a cord in line, right? So there's a lot of people in these cars that are like horrifically mangled in all kinds of nasty ways, you know, the screaming, sobbing, horrific injuries, whole nine yards. It's not good in there. It takes about, I said five hours in the notes, six hours to get all the survivors out from the twisted metal and wreckage. Those folks who were unfortunate enough to be injured in the old Illinois Central heavyweight coach had to wait for the course. car that their car was inside of to be emptied of remains before rescuers could get to them.

Oh, no thanks. You can see actually in the first image in the slideshow, let me go back here. I don't know if I want to go back. You can see here they had to prop up the car with railroad ties to keep it from falling further. Jesus Christ So in this accident 45 people died

and 320 people were injured Ouch Wow that's that's fucked up looking Yeah yeah this was one of the worst Railroad accidents in American history Not the worst by a long shot But it's up there Yeah I think it looks great

which is like 15 miles away from here was like not even 15 miles maybe like 10 was like this one was like the only other accident in the Chicago area that was worse and that's why trains have to go 79 miles an hour now oh yeah well that was Naperville not not LaGrange or was that same difference yeah it is some Chicago suburb so um this leads to the question okay Why did this happen? I was not able to find too much information about the lawsuits and so on that happened afterwards. But the NTSB does go into a lot of detail as to why this happened.

So we have to go back to the rulebook, right? Here's a brief quiz that you might be given as an Illinois Central Gulf engineer, like a locomotive engineer. what does a green signal mean? Proceed at maximum speed, full throttle. Yeah, proceed at maximum track speed. What does a yellow signal mean? Do you don't do the same thing?

Proceed at maximum track speed. I'm not looking at the notes, by the way. I'm just... What does a red signal mean? If you say proceed at maximum... Please be... No, that one is obviously stop. We all know that one, yeah, that stop.

And then proceed maximum track speed or actual stop? What does a red signal with the number board mean? Go at that speed, maybe? Proceed at maximum track speed. What the fuck. These are real answers given to, these are real answers to real questions given by real Illinois Central engineers and conductors. The IC electric was operated in an extremely sort of loosey-goosey way.

They got away with it for decades because the trains could stop so quickly. the line was so flat and straight, the signals were generally reliable, so on and so forth, right? The rulebook explicitly stated a flagman had to be used for this kind of backing maneuver, and also that this sort of backing maneuver was not recommended. The railroad had not provided flags for said flagman. The rules said train 720 should have been operating at restricted speed following a yellow signal. this was routinely ignored and the train was not equipped with a speedometer.

The rule said a lot of things and how the railroad operated in practice was an entirely separate situation. Who is to blame here? Everybody. No, it's the fucking management. I was going to say the guy who asked for the flag stop, obviously. Yeah, honestly.

So it's the prerogative of the management. to ensure the employees follow safety rules by instituting programs like training and retraining, examination, so on and so forth. The NTSB found that Illinois Central Management often just shuffled employees through exams. You know, if they failed an exam, they just gave them a stern talking to and then passed them. Right. It's like working for UPS. Hey, you'd be nice.

There was little knowledge on the railroad of the formal operating rules and even people who knew the rules frequently skirted them. To a large extent, running an operation like the IC Electric with trains with two or three minute headways required skirting the rules to keep the schedule. This is how yellow and red signals became more like guidelines. It was also found that if old heavyweight cars had been equipped with radios, dispatch could have intervened to stop the train sooner. There were also issues with the car design. The train was too sexy. It was therefore.

It was too hot. It distracted the other train engineers. It looked too good. All right. The front of the highliner is painted black, right? It's got two small headlights, obviously not illuminated on the back, right? and there are two very, very small marker lights here, which are also quite dim. The marker lights would be lit up in red if this was the rear or the train.

And so this combined with an overcast sky and several visual obstructions, including the pedestrian bridge, which obscured the red signal, made it very difficult for the operator of train 720 to do. discern the presence of train 416 from very far away, you know, especially because he was not expecting a train to be there. There was also some more complex stuff with cheap welds on the two collision posts, which I don't want to get too far into because probably wouldn't have, the wreck wouldn't have gotten, would have still been about as bad if they had welded that, probably.

I feel like a concrete train hitting you at 40 miles an hour is not something that the collision posts could have fixed. Yeah, yeah, and those um future, future orders of this train, they fixed those welds. Um, but, you know, that, that, that was another outcome, but the big outcome was, yeah, they painted the front of the train orange. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they made the marker lights big,

and there were no more accidents ever again yeah man eventually METRA takes over and they put big chevrons on there is this

is this the first design related fatality on a railroad can we blame them painting the train black for the problem here just because it looked cool that's a good question. I'm going to say there must have been earlier ones, but I can't think of any offhand. Me neither.

There's got to be one that, like, has happened because they just made the train too sexy. Yeah, the train was too sexy. I ran right into it. This is, this is the first, the first train that's caused by modernism? Yeah. Yeah. As it turns out. And yeah, the highliners kept running for decades and decades

until they were replaced by the Highliner 2, which I don't think looks as good. No. No, it doesn't. No, it does not. Still a gallery car because they did, in fact, get rid of the Fairgate's. I gotta go to Chicago. I got to ride a Metro.

Chicago Fox. Yeah. You can, in fact, ride a highliner at Illinois Railroad Museum. You have to drive to the Illinois Railroad Museum. It is in Union, Illinois, which is on the path of the future Metro served Rockford line. However, they did not put a stop at Union for some reason, which I think is a huge mistake. That's a big mistake right there. Yeah.

You can go to Belvedere, if you feel like it. And you can, they had built a cafe car, which is just a gallery car that they took the second level out of and then boarded up all the windows. And that is now, and so you can ride in one of the world's most first cars starting, who knows, a couple of years. Great opportunity to experience the wonders of railroading. you two could ride at a gallery car something you can still just do is the world's largest heritage railroad you can ride they did a study and they found that if you ride like the Burlington Northern line

you get statistically significant amounts of diesel exhaust to like a level that's significant enough that it will likely cause cancer at some point. So that is the beauty of railroading that you're missing. Right. It's about the smells. That works for me. It's okay. It's okay.

Battery trains will fix this. I'm sure Metro will get that battery powered F40 at some point. Shut up. So what did we learn? Turn. Yeah. Don't make the train too sexy. Yeah, otherwise.

Apparently you can't make the train too sexy. Yeah, otherwise, someone's going to ram right into it. This is why... I'm here to fuck the trade. They call it telescoping, Liam. Oh, God. I wasn't going to make the joke. I didn't want to do that.

I have no respect for the dead. We all know this. We can get all that the comments anyway Yeah, that's true That's true You can have non-fatal telescoping We just didn't in this episode Friends call it for Todd

I think the moral of the story is Train stations should be close together And you should just walk back Don't back up the train Yeah, you should just walk back four blocks I guess yeah No we're gonna put We're gonna put this all on one guy

Yeah It was trying to get to work. That Victoria told him you should absolutely make them back up the train. Your social anxiety should rule your life because someday it might save it. Yeah, exactly. That's what I learned.

I wonder if the guy... I think you're right. If the guy that was getting off, do you think he was in the last car and was one of the victims? Because, like, if so, you know, I think like being alive after like 300 people got injured and like I don't know whatever number of skills it would be brutal regardless but like if you died it I think he'd be fine like maybe I probably wasn't one of his last thoughts like his last thought probably was not

I did this it probably last thought was probably just holy shit well that's coming up fast he was in the he was in the second the last car and was like wow that's a rough stop and then you know, got off the train without even looking back. Yeah, well, have a good day, guys. Thanks. Yeah. Didn't even notice. Then he got to his workplace at the hospital and then had to come back. Oh, fuck.

My briefcase. All right. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Burner. Shake hands with Dan. danger. Hello, Roz, November, yay, Liam,

Victoria, Devin, and activate Windows. And we had a guess, fuckface. Yeah. I'm just happy, I'm just happy I've mentioned

in a safety third email. That's a, that's a promotion for me. For the ease of discussing this story, my pronouns are he and him. Today I offer you a story from the world

of biological science. Due to the size of my specific sector of the industry, giving you much detail on what we do would make this safety third installment instantly identifiable. So all I can tell you is that my company handles some fairly nasty viruses and diseases in the course of our work. All right, so you work in Wuhan. Yeah. No. I personally... That's the China comment that's going to get us all in trouble. My kind of comments are That's the one, yeah.

Lab leak theory, let's do it. This is, yeah, no, this is, so we have, we have ideological balance now. I just want to say that I have been getting, to tie this all into Chicago, too. I, like I said, I've been messaging Chinese lesbians on Redmondo, and their pickup lines are incredible. And someone who messaged me, she's like older than me even, but she messages me and she goes, hey, have you ever thought about coming to Wuhan? You know, it's called the Chicago of China, which is, in fact, true.

So there is the ideological tie between this and, or the, not ideal, this and the rest of the episode. Why do all these Chinese lesbians keep going to Chicago? Just causing a drain. I mean, I wish they would. It's hard to get the visa. Anyway, I personally don't do any of that. I'm the receptionist, document controller, and unofficial on-site IT person, among other things.

Do the amorphous nature of my responsibilities, I'm often the first person people come to when something strange is happening in the building or to the equipment outside of restricted labs. I only have a marketing BA in parentheses here, boo. Boo. But I'm also autistic, ADHD, and have enough transmasculine audacity to figure out whatever random nonsense might be going on.

One day one of my coworkers came to ask me about the low O2 sensor in our freezer room going off constantly. This O2 sensor's job is to catch if our nitrogen freezers decide to try to assassinate the whole building. The sensor had been going off regularly over the last day and people had been checking the number, seeing that it wasn't technically at a dangerously low level of oxygen, and then turning off the alarm. Oh, yeah. This protocol sounds risky, but we have it in place

because the sensor's range is set on the high side, and sometimes the harmless amount of off-gassing from when the nitrogen system refills the freezers with fresh liquid can set off the sensor. This sounds like a familiar... What's the word?

Normal drift or whatever it is. It's a building full of biologists. I think we can trust them to know when oxygen levels are dangerous. Yes. When is a professional ever made a mistake? Attached is a picture of the freezer style in question. These are roughly three, three feet tall. However, the off setting only works for around 15 to 20 minutes

and the alarm will start sounding again. if the oxygen level doesn't rise to within the set range or the sensor. My coworker was getting concerned that the alarm kept coming back on, and since the manager, who she normally would have asked first about the issue, wasn't in the office that fateful day. She came to me instead, figuring that if I didn't know how to solve the issue, I'd at least know who to contact next.

I followed her back to check on what was going on with our nitrogen freezers. found one of the freezers with the lid propped a couple inches open and fog streaming out onto the floor. Surprisingly, that isn't what off-gassing from the nitrogen refilling process looks like. Now, given that the department in charge of that freezer had just moved off-site to a new building a week ago, no one else who'd know what to do would be around for at least an hour, and this was a problem now. So I decided to handle it myself. By having my co-worker stand outside of the room and supervise as I went in with a ruler and started smacking the ice build up on the lid.

Oh, yeah. So I could close the lid or at the very least reduce the flow of nitrogen gas into the building so we'd be safe until it could get properly fixed. I took regular breaks from chipping at the ice and only breathed with my face pointed upwards away from the freezer. Well, they're writing this email, so we know they didn't die. Now, yes, this was stupid.

I shouldn't have done that, probably. But in my defense, nobody else had a plan, and I'm not going to ask another person to do my stupid idea for me. Hell yeah. Eventually, this semi-worked and left me only mildly dizzy. The freezer was significantly more closed, and now there were some people in the building

who were actually paid enough to actually look at the problem. Our regulations manager, who was back from a meeting, stood guard over the freezer until maintenance could come in and look at the damn thing. He didn't know what to do. either. But he at least didn't want it unmonitor or one of his subordinates standing over it in his stead. It turns out the problem was a few vials falling to the bottom of the freezer

underneath the pullout racks, which propped the lid open. This was not a big deal. You just use a pool dip net to fish them out. Picked is such a pool dip net. One problem, though, was, where's the net? It's not in its normal spot right next to the nitrogen freezers. Well, remember how I said the department in charge of the freezer moved buildings recently. In the midst of moving, one of them erroneously grabbed the pool net, realizing their mistake, they left it in their car to take back to us later. then proceeded to bring it home and leave it at their home instead.

Oopsie. Oopsie doodle. Luckily, they lived nearby and it was quicker to just retrieve the net from their house instead of buying a new one. Maintenance fished out all the vials. Only I and the regulation manager ended up exposed at all, and both of us only ended up mildly dizzy afterwards. And we haven't had a repeat incident since.

The moral of the story, don't dismiss a safety alarm, even if a safety system is overactive and sets off when there's no real danger, especially if there's fog pouring out onto the floor from the dangerous gas machine. That's a pretty good moral. That's a pretty good moral. I bet they didn't have much of a rat problem after that, though. No. Oh. accidentally fumigating my own building yeah

anyway love the podcast November your voice sounds fantastic and hope you have a good day I'll just go fuck myself yeah well I mean with November not being here I'm November Kelly my pronounza she here

and I don't know what that accent is Liam it's real bad bad I'm really right yeah this is like two different hate crimes at once Oh, no. Oh, well, what are you going to do? I'll be shot for this, I assume. I mean, you're from Philadelphia.

What can we expect? This is our... Wow, okay. I'm the cradle of democracy, dick, and your dad's from Boston. I mean, what... Really, it's just an inevitability at that point. This is our most... Our most cancelable episode, yeah.

No one is not. Oh, yeah, well. Look, we had to leave Israel as good, actually, on the cutting. room floor. It would be incredible if your most cancelable episodes somehow didn't have Nova on it. It seems implausible to me. It sure does. All right.

Let's add in this. I got to go to back. That was safety third. But our burn-na-r-shake hands with danger. Our next episode, if we aren't canceled, we'll be on Chernobyl. Does anybody not have any commercials before we go? I have a commercial, which is if you like Chicago stuff, I run a nonprofit named the FOIA bakery where we use FOIA to fully politicians mostly so that they do the right thing instead

of the wrong thing. That fucking rolls. You can find it at the FOIA bakery.com. Foya spelled F-O-I-A. Oh, I said dot com, didn't I? It's the FOIABacery.org. Ooh. Yeah.

It gives us some gravitas. Yeah. We have filed, I don't know the number off the top of my head. It's like over 1,400 FOIAs in the past four years, I think, and like one like 30 lawsuits against the city. So, oh yeah. It's a lot of fun. And if you want to get involved or if you want to check out any of the work we're doing,

please drop by the website or find us other places. I don't know. Google it. You'll probably find us. I have two quick things. One, the Washington State Rail Plan is open for public comment, and they dropped a bunch of their initiatives to give the Sounder, which is, again, the name of our local commuter rail, dedicated trackage here, which is the only hope we really have of having any kind of like sustainable intercity connection for the area because BNSF runs 90% of the trackage. it's totally attainable. I think that we should ask them for it.

There is an urbanist story that I will also provide a link to that kind of goes into the full road of defense of this plan, but it's very easy to ask for. It's open until April 24th. If you live in Washington and would like, you know, regional rail to be more than just kind of like

a twice daily commuter thing. You should definitely consider leaving a comment. The other thing is listen to TranGurleismo if you are into cars. Yeah. It's a good podcast. I've been listening. Listen to it.

Thank you. Yeah. All right. You got to listen to the various podcasts. Nova's got a new podcast. It's a... Be gay self-d-d-d-d-d- I was on that before I was on this one.

Yeah. It's an episode about Nancy Drew, we did. I critiqued the fact they didn't give her a sexy Mustang. Fair enough. You know what else? Folks, it is Playpril, which means it's time to plug an Australian podcast. Bonta Vista.

Go listen to that. If you're interested in Bonta Vista, I was on there once. It's a good podcast. Okay. All right. Good night, everybody. Good night, everyone.

Good night. Bye. Devin's not going to like this one.