Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 198: The Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern Merger

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

how is this even legal also sorry we recorded this the day right before the updated proposal was released. whoops! donate to help buy liam's coworker's grandson a mobility van: https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/ check out Public Rail Now: https://publicrailnow.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/

And I will start the podcast. Wow. Wow. Two great nations, two, two great peoples, two great houses. A liking and dignity. The last ones lived in harmony. And everything changed when you did Pacific attack. Yeah.

Oh, you are lying. Oh, Roz. We got to go see Big Boy do the horseshoe curve. That is a very, expensive ticketed event. Is it? Yes. Oh, now I know. How expensive is it? I don't remember. It's too much.

You know what? I think this is the official this is the official image for the merger and I just realized I think it's done with AI. Yeah, that tracks. Ross, it's 20 goddamn dollars, dude. Oh, it's sold out. Oh, it's sold out. Yeah, it's sold out though. Yeah, you're going to have to get that from a scalper.

All right. seat geek I'm just going to go down to the Market Street Bridge and watch when it comes out from under the art museum Oh, okay Yeah Well that's going to be impressive to look at Yeah, but yeah

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 uh november's dead i'm leum pronounce he him nova nova nova has novid unfortunately yeah yeah we have not killed and or she her that may happen

to her incidentally but it's not going to be our faults yeah no we're not allowed to do that no not the way this company is structured baby yeah uh hello my name is victoria scott i'm first who's talking right now my pronouns are she and her um all right so i'm also here To maintain the transgender woman quorum requires. Exactly. Yeah. If we do an episode without a trans person, the episode suck and we don't release them. Yeah, pretty much.

I'm not making that up. I'm not making that up. That's true. That's factual. I'm not making that up. So I don't love, I'm on the field, I'm on the thing for the horseshoe curve. And the header is feel the thunder. Wow.

Which is also incidentally what I say to my wife right before she kicks me. I put my hand under a thigh and I go feel this. I'm not done. I'm kidding. Now I'm done. I thought I'd gather us all today as a family to talk about something very difficult. Are we getting divorced? No, I, this is, this is for everyone out there.

Your uncle Pete, you know, he's always had some interesting proclivities. Your uncle Pete is marrying a horse. What? That's right. Pacific is merging with Norfolk Southern. Uncle Pete, no. Don't do that. The Pacific headquarters is being moved to

Animal Claw. I'm here. No, I don't even want to say I'm here to fuck the horse. I don't... Here to fuck Uncle Pete. That's what I'm here to do. I'm here to fuck Uncle Pete, baby. Here to talk about the merger, we invite Washington legend Mr. Hance. trying to fuck a horse, baby.

Let's do this. Yeah. All right. But yeah, that's right. The Great Big Rolling Railroad is about to get bigger. Uh-huh. And we're going to talk about what that means for the rest of us. Spoiler.

Mostly bad. Is this going to be more PSR bullshit I hate? A little bit, yeah. Is this going to be any more locomotives because I can't buy a new one anymore? Yeah, that's part of it. Are they going to bring back Big Boy? and then I'll just watch it go round and round and probably watch them put it on the ground at a horseshoe curve

somehow. Yeah, it's a propaganda tool. Yeah, I know. Yeah. But before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news. Yeah, comedy is legal again, man. The onion has not purchased for the moment, but least

the intellectual property of Info Wars. meaning they are going to be able to start publishing content on the Info Wars website this is I understand a stopgap measure until all the injunctions can get cleared so they can actually buy the thing outright it's very exciting Alex Jones has been has been onion mugged I think is the word the kids would say losing his fucking mind also I haven't seen because I make a habit of not doing anything related to Alex Jones.

I assume he's basically just like fissing his own ass and panic. Is that, am I on the track? Yeah. He's gotten so red, he's gotten outside the electromagnetic spectrum. He's in infrared now. Infrared. You can't see him. The funniest part of this is they brought in Tim Heidecker to do a bunch of the, like,

new shows and podcasts, like be kind of the face of Info Wars, which he, he's also publicly claimed he's going to make like, a home for transgender comedy, which specifically is comedy told by trans people not doing Chappelle bits, which is a real and crucial distinction. Right. Although I don't like them stepping on our turf as America's number one and the UK's number one trans-friendly podcast, because once again, when we don't have trans people on the show, it collapses like the Blues Brothers car.

Yeah, I can't believe that one guy did crowdwork at the expense of one of our listeners. That guy does suck, but the thing is, there are a bunch of people who are like, oh, you can't, this is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate about trans people and holding it's such a high standard.

And while this is somewhat true, I did also date that woman, basically. So I can't really, I, it's kind of like, yeah, it's fair,

actually. Stop working for defense contractors. Yeah, everyone, everyone, don't, don't build bombs. Listen to my episode on Bloodwork

Work podcast. No, but the funniest thing about this info wars merger Lease, whatever the hell thing is that it appears that Alex Jones is it in some state of inebriation where he is unaware that Tim Heidecker does parodies of real things and so kind of seemingly believed that he is actually a Satanist. It's hard to tell where the K-Fabe begins and ends with that guy. That's true, yeah, that's true. He is no matter what he claims to like actually believe at the end of the day, he is,

credibly owned and he is turning into a corncob, it's great. Yes, yes. I guess like he just filed some kind of emergency appeal like two hours ago. Fuck off, dude. Just take the L. You're going to have to take

the L on this one, yeah. They're selling Rainbow Onion InfoWords tote bags and my wife obviously was like, I have to get this incredible object to have. And we're trying to figure out like when the event horizon for can actually use this outside of the home will hit. Because right now not enough people are aware of this to be able to like publicly make that

joke and expect people to get it. But I'm hopeful. Yeah, yeah. This is one of the one of the first pieces of good news in a while. Yeah, I'm stoked also that there might be like a second transgender jobs program besides the rotating host spot on this podcast. Well, there's a problem make work program. Yeah. Boy, do we need it. Yeah, but that fucking rules.

I just, I do like, you know, obviously, we don't have it in the newsday, but the Voting Rights Act was gutted today, April 29th, shoot John Roberts with a gun. And I am, I am very happy, at least that Alex Jones is melting. I assume like some sort of witch. Gradually decomposing into chili. Ooh, Ben's Chili Bowl. We'll get a half smoke. Well, yo, we can eat a half smoke out of his shattered chest cavity.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, good idea. Mm, thank you. The one good thing about D.C. is Ben's chili ball because they closed all the fucking Armand's pizzas. I never went to Armand's pizza. How? Because I lived in the suburbs. Yeah, you're, yeah, well.

Yeah, the deep suburbs. I'm going to need some food recommendations for when I'm down there in mid-August for the, uh, why the fuck would you go to the grandfrey of America? Oh, right. Yeah. buck would you go to DC in August? Bring extra shirts, like six of them. You will sweat through them.

Large five gallon toad of water. That should last you about two hours. Two to three, yeah. Be conservative. Good luck. Yeah. Well, in other news. All right, we have an update on the...

Stop getting COVID. Yeah. Noven in her case. We have a update on Jacksonville's ultimate urban circulator. Oh, fuck yeah, dude. I'm sorry, just say 973 riders a month? 973 riders per month with a $1 million monthly operating subsidy. That's $1,000 per person.

That is over $1,000 per person subsidy. Oh, that fucking rules. Efficient autonomous vehicles, which the vehicles have never completed a look for that requiring a guy who will assistance. There's a guide that I can see it. Yes, because they need to intervene once every quarter of a mile. I have, I've got a question. Yeah, hit us with it. Why not just pick 973 people who need to use public transit and give them a voucher to a Craigslist Jeep charity. That would be roughly, that would be roughly the same cost, would it not? Yeah, but that's more

Oh, coming soon, phase one. The future is coming soon. Does I say June 2025? Where? Yeah, on the van. On the van, yeah. The vans cannot change lanes. They cannot pull into traffic.

They require human intervention every quarter mile. They require more people to operate than a normal transit vehicle. For those of you who did not listen to our ultimate urban circulator episode, you can go back and listen to that, but the gist is, that Jacksonville was going to go in hard on having the first autonomous shuttle system in downtown that they were eventually going to replace their old, inefficient, boring, dowdy, old automated, you know, elevated rail system with, you know, this is going to be autonomous, not automated, which is going to be better.

And it turns out, well, unlike the old technology, this one actually requires quite a bit of manual labor to run. Okay. I was just curious because I'm looking at that chart there, or the table at the top of the image. That 18,435 revenue miles, that works out to $54 per mile.

Wow. That fucks. That is so immense. It would be cheaper to build a train line and pull it up every single time somebody wants to take a ride somewhere, I think. Yeah, you just have like a continuous loop of track in front of you. Wallace and Grommet, the Penguin Thief episode,

just laying down rails directly in front of the train, pulling them back up from behind. Yes. Yeah, it would make more sense than this. Yeah, so this is the future right here. Imagine a driver intervening in the operation of an autonomous vehicle forever. How wonderfully absurd. The thing is,

I almost admire the Tesla strategy compared to this, because at least Tesla just lets the cars fucking run into stuff, you know? They're like, it's probably out of the shirt. It crashes a lot, but like, you know, at least they don't have somebody sitting there with their hands hovering over the wheel constantly. By, and I know there are, there's collateral damage,

but think of all the Tesla drivers it kills, and that's a net good. I saw a camo-wrapped cyber truck today, and I fucking just lost my show. What camouflage pattern was it, though? I don't know. It was just like, like, not a specific one, right? Just like bad green-blue army camo. Okay.

I was going to say, you could, you could tell, like, I feel like. Mossy Oak Cybertruck with just me spitting in the back. Real tree cyber truck does feel like an invention meant to kill me instantly Yeah It's my it's my it's my cyber truck that's painted to look like my mud jug I don't do the license mug jugs to us but I'm trying What is that it's a washable spitter dude it's like a oh i see i see Okay because that way i don't have to go out back you know and you don't have to

you don't have to ask for a little plastic cup yeah thank you i was telling that story and my co-worker got so nauseous, she threatened to kill me. Because I, because remember I had to get the little plastic, like, remember they gave me that sippy cup of that restaurant in Boston? Oh yeah, that was pretty funny. Yeah, fuck you. It's pretty funny. Well, you know, innovation is coming to Jacksonville. I'm sure they will have. Go Jacks. Yeah, integrated spitters in the bands soon enough. They'll be autonomous too. Autonomous Spitters

That is the whole point of Elon's Humanoid Robot Fiasco disaster shit $1,000 to ride the slow van Just give me a van Give me a van back I want a van again Give me a van I can do

I what do you know the damage I could do With a million With an M A million dollars You know how many vans I could buy With a million dollars Fuck dude And it would be nice

It would be nice fans It would be like the one That was the engine seized up and killed us almost. $54 a mile. That's incredible. That's worse than like a Veyron. Yeah, that's like a container ship.

Finally, we've gotten a program that achieved the... You have a thousand commuters of Veyron. You ever, you ever been to an airport and you see like the little Porsches racing around from gate to gate with all the Delta VIPs. No, I fly American, so. I fly United. I just see people's arms getting broke. Yeah. I fly American and the flight attendants are very nice to me.

And then they give me extra liquor, which is shout out American. Yeah. Because I ask nice and they're like, oh, you want four mini bottles? You go champ and I'm like, I think that Dallas is a nice airport actually. And then rental car return makes sense, actually. They're like, sir, you got to call them down. I used to connect through Salt Lake City when I lived in rural Idaho. Yeah, it's the worst airport in America in I think probably the worst state in America.

Just got nothing going for it. Anyway, I mean, natural beauty, but like ruined by Mormons and dirty soda kind of fucks. I don't know. No, it doesn't. Fuck that. You can't get an actual beer anywhere in the goddamn state from a tap. I do like, no, absolutely not. Ridiculous.

backwards. And high west whiskey. Roz, a dirty soda to answer your question that I heard. Yes. I heard the hesitation. Dirty soda is basically like a diet Coke or some sort of soda with like creamer in it. It's disgusting. It kind of fucks.

I don't know if I would enjoy that. You don't drink soda. You don't drink soda. No, I had two sodas when I went to visit EFA last weekend. Good for you. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. What did you drink Coke?

It was Sprite. Baffling. You are. Yeah, exactly. Well, I needed something and there was no alcohol in that household. Yeah. Okay. So WD.

40 and Coke float. Yeah. I've seen Archer. What? All right. Nothing. Moving on swiftly. All right.

All right. That was the goddamn news. And before. Before we continue, I have a real quick announcement to make, which is that, Once again, I am asking for your donations. My co-worker, Mary, who is a saint. Her grandson has a rare genetic illness and needs a mobility van. So we're raising money.

There's a donation match going on right now. I will send the link to Roz and we'll drop it in the video description or the Spotify or whatever description. Did you announce that on the previous episode too? No. Oh, okay. So yeah, we'll drop the link in this one. Someone's going to have to remind me. Yeah, I'll send you the link.

But yeah, I want to just take a minute to tell you that Mary rules. She has a rosary in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And I adore her very much. She is my work mom and I would die for her. And yeah, tell me about the railroad, man. This is so dear. Yes. So first we want to ask, what is the railroad?

Individual railroads collectively quote the railroad. Charters, land grants. Don't breed all. Off the bulletinness. I have things to say. Virginia and Truckee is like right outside of Reno, right? That's like where they laid the original connection, ish? Yeah.

Yeah, this is this lower. I don't know too much about this locomotive other than it was in multiple Disney films. It's, it's very, it's cute. I like it. I think it's happy to see me. I don't think that cow catcher's doing much work. Oh, no, that's, well, it'll take out a cow. The cows are smaller back then.

Now we have just A.G. enhanced cows. I call this one the Super Bowl. I'm pretty sure that's the Virginia of a Virginia city, which was like the original, like, big northern Nevada city before they ran the silver mine dry, and then everybody moved down to the valley in Reno. No,

road west there. Anyway, I used to live in Reno for a very brief period of time, and I didn't like it very much. It's a lot of interesting, like, if you're into how the railroads, like,

to what it is. It's a very place to live. I imagine. And you can shoot a man there just to watch him die. Hell yeah, brother. Yeah. Not much else to do, so. That's a good point. You can gamble. The thing is, is, like, I am not a gambling type because I have, like,

clinical anxiety. Me too, baby, and I go to the casino. So much people are worried about me. Actually, I don't. I go to the casino when I'm forced to, like, for a work event. Yes. But also like Reno casinos are pretty sad Cusrinos.

Thank you, Liam. You're welcome. We need Nova here. She would tell you off for that. But she's not. So when I'm talking about the railroad, right? There are, you know, there's railroads, right? Those are the different companies that own trains and tracks and so on.

but the railroad as a collective thing, that's just all of it, right? Now, your railroad typically started off as a company that was chartered by a state government, right? And this charter essentially said these were issued generally sort of back in like the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1840s when we were a little bit more liberal with what powers of the state we delegated to corporations. Incredibly somehow. Yeah. So I have a question, which may be a story for another time. Can you explain to me why Norfolk Southern and Uncle Pete survived and like the Pennsylvania Railroad,

which you taught me at one point had a larger budget than the government of the United States died besides like the Pennsylvania. Like, what is it about those two? Or is this just like a topic that we're just not going to get into today? Because it's fine. I just don't know. We're very much going to get in. So Union Pacific is the shambling corpse of the Southern Pacific. Okay, cool.

All right. Let me put on my fact hat. Let's do this. Yeah. Yeah. And the Norfolk Southern is, you know, just still the Norfolk and Western. They just, you know, they just had very high profit, you know, long haul cold drags their entire existence. Okay. Yeah, so the luck of the draw, geography to some extent. Yeah, anyway, so these

charters gave the railroad, you know, a right to build from point A to point B, sometimes via point C, and they delegated powers of the state to the railroad, things like eminent domain, right? They could they could do compulsory, you might call it compulsory purchase in Britain. You know, you could force people to sell you land, right? You had the authority to have your own police force, which they still have, which is accountable to the railroad. The railroad can shoot you.

And frequently they do. Yes. That's just one of the many ways the railroad can kill you, though. To be clear. They have immunity to certain local laws and taxes, right? Sometimes they have other special considerations. My favorite was always the Georgia, railroad and bank, which so long as it operated passenger trains, could operate a bank that was not

subject to any banking laws in the state of Georgia. Hell yeah, brother. That fuck. Yeah. I'm just imagining, like, we get, like, you know, railroad letters of mark in which you can do legalized train robbery by ramming your train, competing railroad train. I really want to see, like, how looney tunes can we get with this? I do want to draw a comparison real quick between, and we've covered this in the university episode, land grant universities and the railroad here, institutions with a lot of, how do I say this, managerial inertia.

Yes. And I also want to plug, I have to talk to Diane Moskowitz about it, that University two is coming because we've run out of ideas that are simply recycling old episodes. So the other thing on the land grant front, I was just going to say, I don't know if this is true for universities or not. With railroads, it was very much a, we have to, we should build a railroad through here and own as much land as we can around it, because by building the railroad through here, we theoretically will make the land valuable. Yes. Yes. And we do tracks that look like this. That was how you sort of funded the construction of the railroad was through government land. land grants, you were given one square mile plots of land in a checkerboard pattern surrounding

the railroad as you built it. And that was the incentive to keep building. And then the state also did other nice things for you, like send out the army to go take out those pesky Native Americans and things like that. And this is all. You can't forget that they would all send out the military to kill striking ward. This is true, yeah. And so this was all in exchange for eventually getting a railroad, which is going to provide some kind of public service, right? It's going to move people and goods.

And well, those are the two things that moves. And it's going to provide service to the communities along the line, you know, and to a certain extent, that's their end of the deal, right? You have on the railroad generally pretty strict and regimented roles for management and employees in a very hierarchical structure. You know, management employees are officers and enlisted men. You know, it is, it's very, very military in that sense. A big class of on two, I assume. Yeah.

Yeah. So the one thing I've always liked to, a way to think about it is the American Railroad is an organization. which is much closer to like the East India Company than it is to a modern corporation. That makes a lot of sense. They were also considered broadly to be like as powerful as state. Especially in like this era is like the railroad basically like especially the further you got the further you got from like the seat of power in D.C.

And like deeper into the west. It was basically like yeah, the railroad kind of runs things. Yeah. And that's still true in some places. What? Are you telling me the corporations have onto for American politics? Yeah, yeah. No, no, shut up.

I wouldn't want a badmouthed CSX in Clifton Forge, Virginia. Oh my God, they cut Roz into eight Rosbits. So. Rosbits coming soon to a snack store near you. So, so anyway, I guess we'll talk about some of the earliest, earliest incarnations here, you have, or a brief history of railroad mergers. So for a long time, we have what I always call the alphabet soup era, because there's so many railroad acronym names that you can't remember any of them, right?

You have like a billion tiny railroads from about 1865-ish onward. You know, there are, you know, you have a nowhere in East Armpit Pacific Railroad for every town in the Midwest, you know, there, there, they, there are so many railroads, it's hard to keep track of them or impossible to. For my understanding, this era of railroads kind of like AI today, where it was like, oh, yeah, we can spend money on this. It might be worth a trillion dollars tomorrow. Basically just like putting a building stuff for capital to go into.

It just so happens that like, unlike AI, you actually get a railroad at the end of building a railroad. This is true, yes. Yeah. Buying a new locomotive and suddenly graphics cards become unaffordable. So even these small railroads are like built, made of separate individual charters, right? You know, maybe I need six separate railroad charters

to build my railroad to the county seat, the next county over, right? They're built very rapidly and with no thought as to how they might interact with other railroads as like a railroad system. If you were lucky when you finished your railroad, you could then lease it to a bigger railroad who could operate it profitably, right? Oh, this does sound like a lot of modern American businesses. Yeah.

If you were unlucky, you just built 17 miles of track to a cow shed, you dunce. Oh. So, yeah, the brother could you spare a dime, as they said. And this is an era of destructive competition, right? The railroads are competing directly with each other, which is unusual in the broad scheme of history here. Sometimes they're on parallel tracks that are inside of each other, right? So they're both getting, in that case, like half of the traffic they might otherwise get. So you had to get creative to try and get all of that traffic onto your railroad as opposed to the other guys.

so you reduce your freight. Yeah, it's a race to the bottom. You reduce your freight rates. You offer rebates. You make friends with shippers, give them sweet deals, right? Whatever you have to do. Any real competition between railroads resulted in rates or fares being lowered to a completely unsustainable level. And then informal cartels had to be formed to bring those rates back up to the point where they could run the trains again.

Hell yeah. The most efficient system of allocating resources ever devised by humanity. Yes. That's just pee-pee-poo, yeah. Yeah. And these kinds of rate wars resulted in a lot of stupid railroads being built and a lot of smart railroads to fail. It was not a good system.

Well, luckily we learned our lesson from that. Mm-hmm. Yes, I got. So eventually we over time into like the early, early 1900s, we see these railroads start to consolidate into names we're more familiar with, right? You know, the mergers and acquisitions of all these tiny railroads into the bigger railroads of the early 20th century, these are largely unregulated. They're at the whims of whoever controlled whichever railroad. A lot of times they were like heavily leveraged and

completely unsustainable. But they did at least make remembering all the names. names easier. This is, this is peak. I just got my first, uh, Bachman like ready to run train set when I was 10, uh,

railroad era where it's like, oh cool, you have a union Pacific locomotive. You might recognize that one. And then a bunch of cars behind it, but some of these logos. And then you're like, oh,

this seems interesting. It's like the perfect era to be completely, uh, fixated by. Yes. Uh, like a really specific kind of like six, to 10 years. Yeah, I like all the pretty colors

on the box cars. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, they were still doing like competitive advertising too because it was still while it was, it was not as bad as like the air of predating it,

there was still a lot of like competing service. Imagine kind of like, like airlines, I guess, where it's like you, you probably take whatever, you know, flight is going to be the most convenient,

but they're still kind of buying for, like with you know when I go with like this carrier and like go a little bit longer because their points program is better or have better lounges or whatever so they're still they're trying to differentiate themselves from like a service perspective and like an ad perspective

so this is when you get all the really cool art oh yeah and and mostly with the passenger trains you were competing on amenities because that makes sense shaving time off was expensive I mean that's kind of yeah that's exactly where we are now

but yeah exactly what Victoria said I don't have it bad to that actually thought it did so another thing is it became much easier to operate a large centralized railroad since there were improvements in telegraph technology so you didn't need to have like a situation on the Pennsylvania railroad where each division of the railroad basically operated autonomously right or the New York central system which was just six railroads in the trench code. You know, once you could had better communication, you could coordinate everything better across

several thousand miles. And this leads to better service, more ability to maintain and improve infrastructure, lower freight rates and passenger fares, but there were still some serious inefficiencies with the system, which wouldn't

really come to light until that's right, I'm using this exact slide again, World War I. Give it up for World War I. Yeah, reduce me as recycle, baby. It's Passion Delon here, and I'm losing, which I guess makes me the Germans, which I don't want to be, so I withdraw that.

So, yeah, the Great War was a war. You know what they say? Gulciat decorum espropatraimori, right? That's it, right? Yeah, they meant it totally unironically. It's awesome. Kicks ass. I don't know what

Oh it's it's Latin for it is sweet and proper to die for one's country Oh I see okay It is uh It is quoted in a poem Uh It was relatively famous by Wilfred Owen About how that's the oldest lie in history

However Because World War I sucked so bad I only know this because my wife makes this joke Basically anytime war comes up You could you could die bleeding out in mud. Fascinating new ways. Yeah, yeah, bleeding out, covered in mud,

looking at your own intestines in the middle of no man's land. Doesn't that sound fun and glorious? You could go in a tank made by like Brnoe for some reason or Citron, which I don't even want to think about what reliability of French tanks looks like.

Really comfortable suspension. That's traveling. You're the French countryside with the orbs. Be like, damn, I can aim this gun so easily because it's self-levels. Look at this. Yeah. Going around a quarter on just three treads. So anyway, the Great War was a war between America and Germany and was thus fought in Belgium.

I'm going to say that every time. Anyway. A guy shoots another guy, the second international shits the bed. All of Europe goes to war over nothing. America gets dragged in, then this is a problem because now we have to send a lot of stuff to Europe. And all that stuff has to go on trains to the various port facilities in New York City. Hey, I'm funding the war effort here. Oh my God, it's, oh, Jesus, wept.

The biggest bottleneck in the country was the port of New York. So the trains came in to Jersey City to the various terminals. These are mostly passenger terminals. They were freight terminals over here as well. You know, the cars were stored in railroad yards, right? And as available, they put the cars onto car floats. That's a little barge you can put railroad cars on and floated them across the Hudson River,

where they were then sent across the street into a warehouse to be unloaded. And then after they were unloaded, the goods were brought back across the street on a little horse and cart that's called a dray and then they were put on the boats then of course you had to float the empty car back over and then the process repeats very very very inefficient that sounds terrible but i will say railroad barges are yes oh yeah of course we should bring those back because actually there's a model railroad guy who had does absolutely obscene h0 scale work that it's just like more realistic that I thought was attainable by like a human being. He has like a little barge like

scratch built train car barge set up awesome. That sounds awesome. I think it's boomer diorama. Ooh, they still got a car float in New York City. Really? They they they had used to have a but yeah it is it's boomer diorama. It's the SRI River Railway or sorry. But uh, but uh, sorry of course. It's really cool. He's his work is genuinely like the, that, the unattainable dream of what I wish to do with Milo railroad. But they used to have a bunch of this stuff from like, San Francisco and Oakland, too, and that's all, like, ripped out now. Oh, yeah.

Well, New York City, they still have the one car float that goes down to the South Brooklyn Army Terminal, or wherever it is right there. That's how they move all the retired subway equipment out by barge. Isn't that the plot of a metal pier solid? Probably. I'm doing a bit. It's not.

It probably is. You're trying to be funny, but I believe that it is now. So this process is time-consuming and inefficient, but exacerbated by the fact that the railroads refuse to use other railroads facilities, nor did they allow other railroads to use theirs, even if they had spare capacity. So while America is doing what it used to do best, which is spin-up insane, capacity for the war effort, all that stuff just went to New York City and sat outside of New York City in the yard and collected dust. Oh, good.

Eventually, Uncle Sam gets fed up with this, and on December 26, 1917, in accordance with the Army Appropriations Act, President Woodrow Wilson points at the railroads and says nationalized. Good. Yeah. Keep doing that, actually. The only one of the only halfway decent things he ever did, which he then immediately made sure to undo before leaving office because he sucked. Well, yeah. He was president. Well, yeah, of course he sucked. Well, he was also in the clan.

I thought there was Calvin Coolidge was in the clan. No, Wilson was in the club. No, Wilson. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. Yeah. So anyway, this proved to be a very good idea, nationalizing the railroads, not being in the clan.

I would say joining the clan is a bad idea. Don't do that. Do swallow a shotgun if you decide to do it, though, please. Well, you can also leave the clan. Yeah, okay. Yeah. All right. We have to open a path for de-radicalization.

God damn it. I hate when you're right. Fathers when you're right. So the centralized authority that managed these railroads was the U.S. the United States Railroad Administration, right? And they come in, they're very quickly able to correct most of the worst inefficiencies in the United States Railroad Network. They bring online these new, big, standardized steam locomotives for every railroad.

They're able to make use of excess capacity on underused railroad lines. You know, they're able to balance everything properly. it turns out if you put everything under one roof, it works a lot better. Imagine that. Yeah, the only big downside was that the war traffic, the amount of traffic required to support the war effort was so high that they were really deferring maintenance the whole time

just to make sure all the trains could run. But anyway, after the war, I mean, okay, the railroads were in pretty bad shape by that point because they got beat to shit. But there was a push by organized labor to keep the railroads nationalized. And there was actually some legal precedent to do so. They did not have to reprivatize the railroads.

But instead, Wilson and Congress determined that, eh, we could probably just have some better oversight by the Interstate Commerce Commission. That'll be good enough, right? And the government handed the keys back to private interests, in 1920. And the previous disorganization in the railroad network returned. But the bill that returned the railroads to private hands also gave the

Interstate Commerce Commission authority to approve or reject railroad mergers, right? And the commission decides to get a leg up on this with what was called the Ripley plan. Like from Alien? Yeah. No, like from Whalen Butney Railroad Corporation. Ripley's believe it or not, Railroad would be insane. No, I was named for Williams Zabina Ripley, who I think was a college professor at Columbia.

And he did phrenology as a hobby. God damn it. Yeah. Right. Fucking great. So the Ripley plan, the idea, was we're going to consolidate these several hundred small railroads into 21 large regional railroads, thus avoiding duplication of service, destructive competition. We're going to increase

the overall efficiency of the railroad network. We're going to talk about efficiency as a term in a bit. And this made a lot of sense, right? Because, okay, look at the railroad network in 1920. Why does Maine have three separate class one railroads? Great question. Why are there eight unique mainline railroads going across Iowa? You know, stuff like this. There's probably some efficiency to be eeked out here with some central planning. Probably everyone would make more money, too. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And so this plan was presented to the railroads, like, hey, we're going to try this managed consolidation. It worked really good in Britain where they had something very similar.

What do you think? And they were like, no, fuck you. Oh. Why? Because these railroads are as much as they are corporations. They are personal fiefdoms. Yeah, okay. That was kind of what I was saying.

All right. Yes, that makes sense. And also arms of the state. Right. So the previous disorganized operations. regime continued. This never came back to haunt anyone. The end of the episode, actually.

Thanks for listening. Hey, thanks for listening. Yeah, we'll see you. Don't forget to donate to Mary's Grinzahn. Okay, catch you the next one. Yes. All right, so let's talk about the theory of railroad mergers here. Very simple.

More railroad, more gooder. Bigger railroad is more efficient. Now, you've got to ask, what is efficiency, right? This is always a dangerous word. you got to always look into what people mean by that, right? Efficiency is always about one thing in terms of another thing. The another thing is usually money. This is how we get to like the ideal railroad is one which owns no track and runs no trains.

Right. That's very efficient. But essentially, the bigger railroad is more efficient. It's able to do more with less, you know, because there's more destinations to ship railroad cars. There's more routes to do so. It's easier to coordinate trains when they're all the same railroad. They're not like in a separate command structure in a different railroad. There's fewer transfers and interchanges between railroads.

There's fewer big terminals and they're more centralized. You have redundant routes are either repurposed like you might have, okay, there might have been two railroads that were competing with each other between city A and city B. well, if you consolidate them, then Railroad A becomes the passenger route. Railroad B becomes the freight route, you know, or sometimes you just abandon unnecessary routes. You know, and hopefully this all results in more income, which you can use for infrastructure improvements, right?

Hopefully, yeah. Good bit. I think railroads are famous for, yeah. The practice of railroad mergers. Muddy? Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I don't know.

Just mash the railroads together and do some cost-cutting or something. I don't give a shit. You guys want anything from the liquor store? Yeah. So here's a big chart that's often cited of railroad mergers in the latter half of the 20th century. This is by no means exhaustive. Because if you were going to do an exhaustive chart, it would be about eight times larger. It would be too small for people to see it on the screen.

So we're going to start with sort of by talking about the set of mergers from about here to here, right? Or actually, no, not that one. Never mind. Here. And this is sort of the first round of what were called mega mergers, right? happened in the 60s and early 70s, while most railroads were under a lot of financial duress due to competition with trucking and airlines and also a whole bunch of self-inflicted wounds, to be frank. Yeah, that whole bit about like, no, we're not going to accept your plan to become

more competitive and make more money because we like running these personal victims. It does seem like it could possibly have played a role in its collapse. I do love hating on. Eisenhower for everything, but the interstate highway system, but this is not entirely its fault. Yeah, yeah, no, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that the railroad's really fucked up, sort of in like the 50s and 60s. A great book, very hard to find, very out of print, is called To Hell and a Day Coach by, hold on, I got my copy right here. I have, you don't. This is like what I recorded with Be Gaye Sonday.

self-crimes with Nova. Peter Leah. We're talking about trying to make the hat work. Without getting up, she managed to put on a hat as we were recording. But that's a good contemporaneous account of how the railroads were fucking themselves over intentionally and, you know, crying about it afterwards. Too big to fail, et cetera. Yeah, exactly.

So, hold on. We're going to talk about this in the second. but I have to use the restroom. Didn't he just pee? I think he did. I did, yes, but I have to again. I had a lot of coffee today. Okay, well, I'll go get an energy drink

because I'm not like all, frankly. All right, Victoria, you got the reins, you got this. I'm doing the whole thing. I'm just taking over. Congratulations, see you. I can't, oh, we're on the next slide. I guess, oh, God, I grew up. the coal mining regions of West Virginia as a kid.

And I remember the last time I ever saw Chatsy's locomotive. And it's like one of the peak experiences of my childhood, which is a lot sadder when I say it like that. But God, what a livery. It is very interesting. Like I, this era of railroads where you kind of get this fucked up mergers, sort of living in the wreckage of what was once a great civilization, is kind of like peak railrooting in my mind, which is very funny because, like,

like when you're growing up with kid, all of the, you're millennial, which I am, all of the, uh, railroad, like model railroad stuff is targeted at boomers who grew up during the actual peak, but it was like 50s and 60s and they were still making money hand over fist before they started consolidating. Um, and so finding anything that was actually like Chessy system or like that BN, you know, Burlington Northern Green, uh, or like seaboard lines, very unusual CSX, which is the main carrier, uh, owned a lot of the lines by me. Um, It was very rare to find. Conrail was basically non-existent,

despite the fact they were my favorite, because when I was four years old, my cross-the-street neighbor who was a Conrail engineer, let me drive a, I think it was the GMUFO, I want to say, on like some short-haul local freight train. With a transformer on the, like a U-car, the depressing.

I'm back. Hey, I'm just relating the story of how I got to drive a Conrail. I think it was a new boat when I was like four years old. Oh. And how this whole like this, what most people regard is the nadir of like American railroading is what I have most of the stout before because I grew up and I saw Chessie's locomotive. They were really pretty. Oh yeah. Yeah.

They got to bring back Chessy system. The CSX heritage unit is terrible. It is. Well, you could do an entire. Well, there's your problem about it. Oh my God. It's a her. heritage unit. Here's all the ones I've seen and taken photographs of.

They are, but yeah, I just, I, uh, it was cool when trains used to be colors. I think kind of the boldest take I have. Yes, yes, I strongly agree. It's miserable looking at a freight train now. It's all brown. Yeah, well, the only thing that actually breaks it up is nowadays they've finally given up on for PD because that was like, I seem to remember it being less common when I was a kid. like cars used to get painted past more often, I think. You know what it was is the graffiti artists got smarter. They don't paint over the reporting marks. Well, the graffiti is like the main point of watching a freight counts to go by at the point because everything else is just gray and guilty.

Honestly, yeah, I love to see like some really great graffiti on a railroad car. I am a big graffiti on Rolling Stock. And it's just a free coat of paint for the railroad, you know? Yeah, what are you're about about? The fact that the thing is, I understand the fact that it is illegal is probably part of what makes graffiti artists want to go do it because it is like explicitly forbidden.

But it does feel like one of those things we should, we're just well past the point we just legalize it. Yeah, and I mean, there's a lot of graffiti artists who are foamers. I mean, it makes sense. Yeah. I just, I think we should legalize it

because then I would totally go do it, but I'm too scared of getting arrested to ever try as a current sense. Yeah. All right. So the first mega mergers of the 1970s, we sort of consolidate a couple of these railroads, a whole bunch of these railroads into a few really big ones, right? We got up here, we got the Norfolk and Western, which took over the Wabash and a few others. You had the family line system, which was the Seaboard Coast line and the Louisville and Nashville. they had a nasty habit of blowing up a town every couple months. Oh, well, nothing's changed.

No, every couple months, not every couple years. All right, yeah, fair enough. You had the Chessie system. That was the Chesapeake in Ohio and the Baltimore and Ohio and the western Maryland. Burlington Northern, which was, well, the... It was up here. Yes. The Burlington route, the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, I believe.

leave. Oh, that Louisville in Nashville is, that's what the all-in-end is, right? That thing, top, top center is looking pretty gray. Yeah, yeah, they look pretty gray coming out of the shops. You had the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe, which is just, you know, sort of big naturally. And, of course, yeah, you had the Union Pacific, which was just the Union Pacific. Right. You chose the, what is it, the DD40 or whatever? The DDA 40X, yeah. Yeah, the longest freight locomotive engine ever,

or locomotive ever developed because it's got two engines. Oh, yeah, yeah. I wrote a bus like that, but. A bus with two engines? Yeah, there's a, it was a, it was the twin coach, I think it was a faggle, faggle, I'm not sure how to pronounce that one. But it was a, they've got one in the SF Muni historic heritage fleet.

Ooh. They couldn't get, they couldn't get gas powered vehicles up the hills until they threw a second engine in it. I love this. Yeah. And of course, you had Conrail,

the Consolidated Railroad Corporation that was the government had to make to save rail service in the Northeast. You know, so through these mergers that were largely of necessity, the rationalized railroad network Ripley had dreamed of was forming, right? Norfolk and Western and family lines in the south, Chessie System and Conrail in the Northeast,

Union Pacific and the ATSF in the southwest, Burlington Northern, then the Northeast. It's a couple other large railroads that had resisted major mergers like the Southern Railway and the Southern Pacific. Those would go soon enough. all this took was extreme financial duress, lots of subsidized competition from the trucking industry, and finally the railroads had to stop squabbling and get together. And this was maybe good, made improved operational efficiencies, but woe to you if you worked at, you know, a maintenance shop that closed down or lived along a railroad that was, you know, deemed redundant. Like, yeah, like say all 2,300 miles of the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension, which...

Excuse me while I pour one out. You know, your new, more efficient competition from the Burlington Northern essentially killed that route outright. Well, that's also the Milwaukee Road couldn't figure out how to run a railroad road. That is also true, yeah. That was, that was, I would argue that is a classic case, one of the, one of the classic cases of a good railroad dying for stupid reasons. Yes. Well, they should have finished the electrification. You know, had they done that, I think they'd still be, well, that's a different episode. Yeah, but generally

speaking, this is an era of retrenchment, right? You know, you have these mainline railroads. They have extra tracks, you know, which they are not considered useful anymore. They're just a maintenance burden. So they'll take a four track main line to reduce the three or three to two or two to one, right because you have sophisticated new systems like centralized traffic control which you know allows a lot more trains to use a smaller number of tracks right um it becomes it's it's it's we like allow more throughput god forbid yeah you're don't worry we're never going to need that capacity again um you have um you don't have too many new locomotive or rolling stock purchases right you like to remanufacture old ones.

You have something called demarketing, right? Railroads start to aggressively shed traffic they thought wasn't profitable enough or which was difficult and complex to handle, right? So one of the first to go was livestock, right? Livestock trains all needed to be fast. They needed to stop every 33 hours so you could feed and water the cattle. right and that was like that was annoying you know that was the kind of freight that complained at you um gone is the less than carload freight to like terminals in major cities that was like you know

if you imagine like a a truck full of amazon packages today you know that would be handled in a box car back in the day you know you just have like 50 or 60 different consignments in one box car you brought to a freight house in a major city and then people would go in and sort it and take it out, put it on trucks for delivery. They got rid of that. You also got rid of like what I would call community oriented freight services, like, you know, stuff that goes to the freight house in a small town, you know, like if Farmer Brown in nowhere Iowa orders a new tractor, the Union Pacific delivers it on a flat car to the nowhere freight house. And he drives over there. in the pick-em-up truck with his son, Farmer Brown Jr.,

to go get the tractor, right? He drives the truck back, and his son drives the tractor back because he's 11 and basically an adult, right? Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. You know, and this is a great community service delivering the tractor straight to the town, right?

It doesn't make much money, so the railroad starts demarketing it, you know, and eventually they shut down the nowhere freight house, and Farmer Brown has to haul a trailer all the way to the county seat at East Armpit. Well, luckily, at this point, Farmer Brown probably killed himself because of general economic pressures on family-owned farm. So really, it was...

Yeah, that's true. That's true. You know, the market kind of was going away. It was getting demarcated either way, honestly. No matter how you look at it. I've been demarcated. Well, it might be worse than that. He has to go to a John Deere dealer halfway across the state

in, like, Dubuque or Davenport or another scary big city. with his lockdown John Deere DRM, which is bullshit nonsense. It's a tractor. Right to repair is important, assholes. Yes. So. I put away my soapbox. The mergers themselves did not save the railroad industry, nor was it just the retrenchment and the demarketing.

A really huge factor in what ultimately revitalized the railroad industry in this era was the one railroad expansion. built in the 70s and 80s. Powder River, right? Yeah, the Burlington Northern built a new line into the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to get to all the horrible brown coal that the EPA said was good. Which it does have a very low sulfur content.

I will give them that. Otherwise terrible for the environment. Yeah, but we need this. We found this out when we cleaned up the bunker oil they use that for global shipping. We need the sulfur. It's keeping out the sun. We're going to heat the earth too fast

if we don't put up our protective barrier of sulfur. Yeah. You've heard of the ozone, not getting ready for the sozone. Anyway, what that led to was about a billion huge long distance coal trains every day that, you know, went over everyone's railroad. You know, and jacked up everyone's revenue by a huge, Matt because they're real cheap to operate. They make a lot of money.

They don't complain to you. Yeah. When the Burlington Northern decided to build this thing, several members of the board resigned because of austerity brain. That. I was saying while you were gone, I grew up in like, when I really got in Ukraine, I was living in like whole country, West Virginia,

in like the like the Ohio River area. We're talking about Nitro or where we'd, talking. Oh, Nitra is on the Kana. Oh, you're right, you're right.

Yeah. But, yeah, and I remember, like, whenever there was something that came through that wasn't a coal train,

it was exciting. Ooh, yeah. It's like, ooh, different rolling stock instead of the same dusty,

and graffitied hop, like, uncovered hopers. Yeah, yeah, sometimes just. They are, I don't,

I don't remember what they were using. It's those ones that got the weird, like, round insects on the bottom. Oh, it's a Bethcon. Yeah.

Yeah. I saw like, Every single one of them, basically they had the CSX fleet at the time. So these early mergers, I would say not necessarily the reason why the railroads survived, but that was probably just something that was going to happen. But, you know, immediately folks were like, well, we can go further, which brings us to the mega mega merger, the first one that failed miserably. The Southern Pacific Santa Fe.

this was a disaster. And it left both railroads worse off, right? So in the mid-1980s, after we've really started the deregulation process with the Staggers Railroad Act, it looked like an even bigger combination of railroads was possible between the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific, right? These are two very different operations, right? The Santa Fe, the ATSF, got by with this sort of lean operations. that ran very fast freight trains of high-value goods on their very direct main line from Chicago to Los Angeles, whereas the Southern Pacific had access to every port and every

population center between New Orleans and Portland, Oregon. They had vast tracks of productive farmland, other real estate like that, big interests in industries along the line. And, you know, they took all this accumulated wealth and they just sat on it. They did fuck all with it. Oh, God, railroads love doing that. Yeah, that's their favorite thing to do. The ideal railroad is where you sit smog like on your massive board of rail lines and simply never use it for anything. Yeah, pretty much.

They were content to just run these really long, really slow trains through the desert. And, you know, they would show up when they show up. And the railroad barely broke even each year. So this is clearly a match made in heaven. Right. So they were so confident in the approval of this merger that the respective boards of directors on the railroads, you know, they created a new company, the Santa Fe Pacific Corporation, to acquire all of each railroad's assets, right? The railroads would be operated independently until the interstate commerce commission approved the merger. But the non-railroad assets, you know, expensive downtown real estate, fast tracks of Valley farmland, gold and silver mines, oil and gas production facilities, parking lots at Disneyland, all kinds of crap, the vast wealth that the railroads had built up. Are you serious about the parking lots of Disneyland?

Yes. Or is that a joke? Are you serious? Yeah. Holy shit. Jesus. Well, yeah, it's like how the Pennsylvania Railroad started Six Flags. Are you?

Really? Yeah, that was Am I the lucky, am I one of the lucky 10,000 today to learn that that's actually true? Yeah, I think they started. They might have bought it early on, but the Pennsylvania Railroad was intimately involved with the development of six flags over taxes. Wow, okay. Dad and, yeah, there's a whole bunch of like the Buckeye Pipeline, like there's a bunch.

There's a bunch of weird stuff in that portfolio. Conglomerates were wild. It was like the Redding owning all those, uh, Was it Australian movie theaters? Australian movie theaters, yes. Now that's the only part of the company left. So the vast wealth of railroads had built up over 130 years. That would be administered directly by the Santa Fe Pacific Corporation.

And as they awaited ICC approval for the merger, they even started painting their locomotives in this very fetching Cota chrome paint screen, they called it. Paint scream. Paint Scream, excuse me Paint Scheme No, I like paint scream A lot more Ross

It was called the Cota Crom scheme because it's Beautiful, dude It's the same colors that the Cota Crom film came in Of the box it came in Yeah Gorgeous, we gotta believe

Now that we have no EPA We should bring it back We should do that as a favor for me We can have whatever chemicals we want now Bring back Cota Chrome Kodak is free of the yoke of private equity and the British pension fund management now, they can do whatever they want.

Bring back Cote Chrome. You have to re-emerge it with Eastman. They are. They're Eastman. Eastman now has control of their own distribution again. Sorry, this is the, this is, this is now a film podcast. Oh, I thought Eastman had been fully separated. Okay. No, so there's Eastman Kodak and there's Alaris Kodak and Alaris Kodak

handled all the distribution, sales of consumers, and Alaris got bought by a private equity. firm, which decided they didn't want to actually make any products or sell anything. They just wanted to sit on IP. And so Eastman now is distributing their own film again, which means we might actually get new stuff for the first time in like, I don't know, a decade. It's actually, it's one of the very few things that America is not fully destroying at the current moment.

And so since we have stripped the copper out of the walls of the EPA, I think that we should bring back the dangerous chemicals to kill you. Who runs the big chemical plant in Kingsport then? I don't know. Eastman Kodak still exists. This is Eastman Chemical. Oh. I don't know if they're separate or not.

That might be just an unrelated guy named Eastman. No, no, it was the same company at one point. I'm not sure. I just follow this kind of stuff because for a while there, it looked like we were going to get screwed out of film forever. And now it looks like we won't. Private equity somehow managed to not destroy my favorite thing for a little bit longer.

So that's kind of nice. Okay, hold on. No, Eastman Chemical is now independent of Kodak. Okay. But, yeah, but presumably, okay, but presumably that there's someone who's got the, I don't know. Well, Eastman Kodak still makes film, though. Yeah. There is still a company called Eastman Kodak.

And there's a company called Kodak Alaris. It's like every single thing that went through, you know, bankruptcy in 2012. it is a convoluted mess of like shell corporation bullshit. All that matters is that they can still keep making film. Yes. I would bet you this picture was actually taken on a encodecrop too. Probably, yeah. That would be appropriate.

I should have looked up who did this photo. I got it off, got it off Wikipedia. I bet it's a Roger Puda. Certainly. Yeah. So the Interstate Commerce Commission staff recommended approving the merger since the railroads were both not doing especially well financially. The railroad press didn't like it, but they expected to go through.

Ronald Reagan is the president. Businesses everything, right? There's a lot of grumbling about the whole situation. It looks kind of stupid and bad. Well, except the paint scheme that looks great, which is why it stunned everyone on July 24, 1986. The ICC issued a ruling of fuck you, go home. And verbatim, actually.

It's wild. Refused even to hear an appeal. Damn, dude. And what followed... That's crazy. Yeah. What followed was a rather messy divorce where the Southern Pacific was stripped of all its assets and sold to the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad, where it gradually

ate that railroad from the inside out. Yeah. You know, exploded their fast freight business model. And the Santa Fe wound up with all of the Southern Pacific's non-railroad assets. You know, all of the land in the Central Valley, half of downtown San Francisco, you know, oil and gas, gold and silver reserves. Jesus. Wow. Exactly. And they quickly sold all those off for a quick buck, right?

This is also where Sprint Wireless comes from. Because Sprint was an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications. But they got spun off at this point and had to become a real phone company. And this is how a tremendous amount of land in California and the Southwest was liberated from the oppressive control of the railroad and all that land is now owned by other types of assholes instead. It's crazy to me that Scrooge McDuck was a real business model for like the first half of America's history.

Just like somewhere there's a swimming pool full of gold coins and this one company owns everything because there's some eccentric multi-billionaire whose assets can't even be listed We just happen to, you know, own a city because of a weird work of zoning. Weird technicality, right. So this one doesn't go through, but steps are taken to neuter and finally destroy the Interstate Commerce Commission, right? You know, there's still appetite for more consolidation.

You know, why do you need a Chessie system and the family lines? Why do you need a Southern Railway and a Norfolk and Western? why does Conrail exist at all? Because it wasn't the union by it, those motherfuckers. Conrail was cool as hell and we never should have broken it up and sold it. Yes. That should be like when you're, that's up there with the post, like the post office for me. Like that is one of the great American institutions and it's disbanding the severing of the line of prophecy.

We now exist in a doomed world. Yeah, I mean, the Northeast Rail Network would probably make a lot more sense if Conrail was still around. So after the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 deregulated the railroad industry, and when I see deregulate here, that's sort of a very specific thing. Before then, the Interstate Commerce Commission would set, you know, per mile freight rates for various different commodities the railroad transported. Like, okay, coal is this much for mile. you know, televisions is this much per mile, you know, washing machines is another amount per mile, you know, per unit or per unit of weight, right? Once they deregulated that, the railroads could set their own freight rates, which were generally lower than what the ICC wanted. because the ICC was trying to do it in terms of we need a balanced transportation system

and they also tended to set rates as like a percentage of the value of goods as opposed to the modern way which is the cost of transportation you know so deregulation is sort of it's not it's not as scary as it sounds uh there was a lot of stuff probably had to happen The other thing, though, as it made it much easier to start abandoning unprofitable branch lines, you know, it did give you some amount of leverage over the unions that you didn't have before because it was, you know, easier to just say, well, it's not profitable to do the service anymore. So we can just cut it by. But, yeah, deregulation in 1980.

I mean, it was, it happened. I mean, it's kind of like it feels sort of. akin to like, again, the airlines where it's like some good initially came out of it, but it immediately went shit because the minute you stop like threatening corporations with a gun with anything that resembles a public utility, they will destroy everything in sight. Yeah. And so they should just be nationalized to begin with. Like there's no, it doesn't make any sense to have a utility owned by private companies,

which is what a railroad is, what an airline is, all of these like basic building blocks of how our world is functions. Pico, I'm looking your way. Huh? So Pico, I'm looking your way. That's Philadelphia's energy company. Oh, yeah, yeah.

I mean, excellent. Well, that's like, if you ever want to get me like, you know, raw, raw, like, absolutely jingoistic about Seattle, get me going about Seattle City light. Because we were the, like, the first city in America to be like, hey, we shouldn't have competing electric companies for the same law. Why would we build a bunch?

Why would we each like allow all of these companies to carve out their own little fiefdoms with building dams to, you know, and granted, there are ecological problems with that. That is very much like a white people came in and, you know, destroyed a bunch of land that people were using a kind of situation. But at the very least, they were like, hey, what if we just built enough of these to serve the whole city and made it a public good instead of making it a private, you know, doing this bullshit. Anyway. I always thought it'd be I always enjoyed that era of electrification in cities

where it was like, yeah, we got six different competing electrical companies. They all use different voltages. Some of them are AC, some of them are DC. You have to buy proprietary appliances for your house. Yeah. Genuinely incredibly stupid. Seattle just happened out of it a little bit earlier

and we happen to have a lot of water. And we were able to build a bunch of dams. So we actually have pretty clean power. Just don't ask about what happens to fish or anybody who lived on that land. Yeah. I worry about that. That's a later problem.

Anyway, I just... Every telephone pole looks like an HR Geiger painting. Anyway, yeah, I just... I just wanted to throw that in about the... Also, at this point, it's worth noting that, like, all the passenger service, I feel like probably everybody listening knows this, but all the passenger service got pushed on the Amtrak, like, at this point, like a decade, two decades ago. Because they were like, that doesn't make the most money per minute of running an engine. So we're not going to do it. Yeah.

Because again, when it came to being a public service that people could actually use, they were like, fuck that. that goes up there with like delivering the farmer and his son the last mile tractor delivery right like that's that that isn't profitable that's not profitable yeah and you know I mean just because we gave them half the country

yeah um and we let them have their own police force balance sheet yeah well what have you done for us lately okay make M track whatever and now of course like their stranglehold on all of the actual trackage that we gave, let them have

that they own because of land grants that we gave them is why we can't fucking make passenger rail service worth a damn in the U.S. anywhere at all. Yes. I know you've got more about this. It's just, anyway. I still haven't recovered from my single interstate train trip six months ago.

I took the lake shore on Saturday and Sunday. actually that was quite nice and we got in seven minutes early oh yeah yeah wow um so demarketing and retrenchment had done their job at this point these these redundant lines had been removed all these unprofitable branch lines they'd been cut or spun off into tiny short lines which had different work rules so it was easier to run trains on there by by paying people less. Government had given the green light to all of it. It was time to double down.

Aiding in this was the complete destruction of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1995 and its replacement by the much more business-friendly surface transportation board. So, yeah, the Chessie system and family line systems become CSX, which doesn't stand for anything. It was a temper. Chessy system extreme. Chicken shit express.

Chicken shit express. Yeah. The Norfolk and Western and the Southern become the Norfolk Southern. Right? The Union Pacific eats the Southern Pacific

and the Denver and Rio Grande Western and that becomes the Union Pacific. But once again, Southern Pacific management manages to eke their way up into the upper echelons of the new railroad.

And the Union Pacific is the Southern Pacific, which is the, it's, it, mostly the Southern Pacific survives in spirit. This whole way is a horrible ghost. A specter is haunting American railroading. It's a specter of Southern Pacific. Yeah. The Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe, become the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. That's easy enough. But the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific

merger was a disaster that resulted in this years-long service meltdown that was nearly as bad as like the early Penn Central. Oh, hell yeah. They lost cars and entire trains. The yards were clogged with cars for unknown destinations. Everything slowed down again in accordance with Southern Pacific practices. is, you know, the whole place is being rotted from the inside out. That's another story. This is probably related, actually. So there's a, there's a couple of short lines that there's a couple of conglomerates that own basically every short line left in the U.S.

And I've noticed a lot of them tend to use. Oh, Genesee, Wyoming, yeah. Yeah, a lot of them tend to use like a Rio Grande. Patriot Rail. Oh, what a name. Well, there was, there was the Wheeling and Lake Erie out by me. That they owned a problem. Right.

Wheeling Lake Erie is, I don't know who owns them, but they do use the Rio Grande paint scheme. By any chance, did, did UP and Southern Pacific just sell off all the Rio Grande locomotives? And so a bunch of short lines got them, we're like, eh, paint's expensive. I'll change this now. The Wheeling and Lake Erie in particular, the reason they picked that paint scheme is because a bunch of Rio Grande guys went to work there. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, they just like it.

The first time I saw that as a kid, I was like, what the hell is going on? And then I read it. I was like, that still doesn't explain things, but okay. Conrail is split in half. Half of it goes to CSX, half it goes to Norfolk Southern. And this gets us roughly to where we are today, right? The pair of duopolis. You got CSX and Norfolk Southern in the east.

you got BNSF and Union Pacific in the West and I'm not going to talk about Kansas City, Canadian Pacific because that's too complicated. And you can't make us. So anyway, so it's 2026 now. It's 10 years since all this stuff, excuse me, 20 years, 30 years, I'm old, I'm old. You're old.

Yeah. It is 2026 though, Roz. I can confirm that for that. Yeah. So let's talk about some existential problems facing the modern railroad industry, right? Hang out, I'm going to go get a bottle. I'm going to go just get my entire bottle of whiskey. Yeah.

Well, don't forget to share. Problem one, I'm listening to these in no particular order. There's no locomotive builders anymore because of private equity. So what do they go? You cannot purchase a new locomotive anymore. Will they just like refurbish them or like how does that work? It's mostly refurbished stuff, yeah. So it's like a B-52.

We're just going to retrofit the airframes forever. Forever, yeah. Okay, pretty much. Fucking terrific. Good work, boys. No one wants to work anymore. Yeah. Well, I will say this is partially because of the EPA.

Recurring, recurring villain. And this is, okay, I spent a lot of time in the truck yelling about this with Scooter on Friday or Saturday. So as part of new clean diesel regulations, you know, there were several, there was a ramp up over the 21st century making diesel engines, non-road diesel engines cleaner. You know, it was like, okay, that's in terms of like particulate pollution and nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, stuff like that, right? and you ramped up every couple years to a new tier of cleanliness, you know, tier one, tier two,

tier three. All of those were achieved through sheer fuel efficiency, which everyone liked. Then we hit tier four. That was like 10 years ago now, which is when they had to bring out the big guns, right, to reduce particular emissions and so on and so forth. And there were two ways of doing that, which I refer to as, you know, you either drink the piss or huff the farts, right? Give me huffing the farts. You have such a way with words. Yeah. One option was you have something called diesel exhaust fluid, which is essentially urea.

Yeah, and you inject that into the engine in such a way that it reduces nitrogen oxides. They do this with trucking. A blue tech Mercedes, right? Like, that's the blue and the blue tech. Yeah, the blue juice. The railroads really didn't like this idea because they didn't want to set up a second distribution network for fuel. Yeah, God, that sounds like infrastructure.

Yeah, no. I can't fucking do that. So drinking the piss was off the table. They moved to huffing the farts, right? It's going to be method recapture. Please give me gas. Exhaust gas recirculation. Yeah.

So you take the diesel engine, right? The idea is we're going to reduce the heat of combustion in the diesel engine. And that reduces the amount of these criteria pollutants that form. Right. So you, but you can't like add like cold air or something in there because that's just going to add more air. That's going to heat everything up when the combustion occurs. so you take some of the exhaust from the engine and you recirculate it back into the cylinders, right? And that reduces the heat of combustion at the expense of horrible fuel efficiency and also destroying the engine block much quicker than it otherwise would.

You know, it's very bad for the engine. That's coughing the farts. Yeah. They again, also a thing that they do in cars and, um, it's, it's not a such of a problem that used to be,

obviously, but like when I had my, uh, my 80s supra, a common early mod people would do is like, get rid of the EGR. It kills the motor. Yeah.

Um, which obviously marginally worse than the environment, uh, but, you know, you know, I haven't, okay,

Roz, I, I just, I think Union Pacific needs to hire me. Well, you need to make. I have an idea. Let's hear it.

So what if instead of diesel locomotives, you put up a wire above the frack? And you electrified it, and then you put a train underneath it that was electric, and you just put up like a thing that connected to the wire? No, we forgot how to do that. Yeah, it can't be. I feel like I saw like a science video about this.

It was like, I fucking loved science or something back. on Reddit. This is a doable thing, right? We could do that. This is, this is wait, no, never mind. That's stupid. Let's do batteries instead. Yeah, batteries. I mean, the

thing about the EGR is that it also increases CO2 emissions. Yeah, well, luckily that's not a problem. Yeah, that's not a problem, yeah. So, you know, okay, we've introduced this requirement.

for clean diesels. I just check by Snowfall Index real quick. Oh, yeah, yeah, we're fine. Don't worry about it. Just at this point, we're past the tipping point. Just keep admitting it. Yeah, it's no big deal. Yeah, the net result of this was basically railroad stopped ordering more locomotives

because they're like, ah, we got enough anyway. We don't need to deal with this fancy liberal bullshit. You know, and I feel like the, you know, this is, there should have been a bigger, more holistic strategy here for environmental friendliness, which, would have, yeah, involved electrification, like every other goddamn country in the world. But fuck you, idiot. No, that's, we have sort of the general backwardness

and decrepitude of the United States Railroad Network. You know, basic improvements like electrification are not considered even for like the highest traffic parts of the railroad. Like, you know, the horrible grade out of Los Angeles heading towards like, what is it, Barstow or whatever. that would be an ideal spot for it because you could conserve so much energy from, you know, the

loaded trains coming down the grade helping to power the empty trains up. No, no, obviously we're not going to do that. That would have too much sense. I live right next to the Cascades. It's one of the most difficult passes in like the entire country.

Another another issue facing the railroads. I like that. that a lot. Thank you. I just, we used to have a solution to this. Anyway, go on. Put up some goddamn wires.

No, it's a bike trail now. Labor and safety, the railroads want none of either. Yeah, wasted, yeah, saves weight, dude. Yeah, exactly. You know, we did have that, you may remember there was a large nationwide

railroad strike that was imminent a couple years ago. Nice or not that Joe Biden, you son of a bitch. Yeah, luckily Joe Biden, the most pro-labor president in history, stepped in and gave the railroads basically everything, right? You know, safety is going wrong in like exotic ways, right? Derailments overall are down, but so are the number of trains. The railroad is running. So the number of derailments per train is actually going up, which is not good if you run the trains.

That rubble a little dirt on, it'll be fine. Yeah, exactly. This reminds me of like the U.S. loves doing shit like this, but they're like, actually, we're making really good progress because pedestrian fatalities were down last year on the way that America measures them, which is like... By road mile or whatever you... Fatalities per million vehicle miles travel. There we go, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which it only looks good because we drive such an insane fucking distance in this country that. If you look at it on like a per capita basis,

we're like worse than like Syria. Road safety. Anyway, just funny to me. Yeah. God, I want to look at real society. Another couple problems. You know, you've got decentralization of industry.

That's not great for railroads because a lot of times, you know, railroads are good at, you know, concentrating goods in one area, you know, as opposed to serving a bunch of distant, you know, areas, right? So it's much easier as a railroad to, you know, go to an area that has 35 factories as opposed to two.

But, you know, since we've decided to move industry either offshore or to the south, you know, where it's all going to be in a field somewhere 100 miles from everything, that is an issue. That's an industrial geography issue. We also have heavy public subsidies to trucking, airports. inland waterways, so on and so forth. And the railroads themselves are not interested in asking for public subsidies themselves for like infrastructure improvements because then they would have to do that. You have aging rolling stock, like the freight cars and so on and so forth,

especially if you're looking at stuff that's not like intermodal or containers. A lot of that stuff is getting up there in age. Now, the current regulation that the FRA has, the Federal Railroad Administration, is that you cannot operate a railroad car older than 50 years old in what's called interchange service. That is, you transfer it between railroads, right? A lot of stuff is about to hit that number. And it looks like they're actually, you know, rather than trying to step in and make it build new railroad cars, they're just going to say, okay, you can apply for a number. 10-year waiver. I thought it was supposed to,

I thought we were trying to build stuff again. What's more masculine than using a hammer to put together a train car? Come on. Building a railroad car, that sounds like some gay liberal shit. Finally, a factory job that is composed entirely of trans women

in the workforce. If somebody dollars who would be first lied to go work at the Great American Railcar factory. Yes. fucking there's some guys in a pickup truck trying to roll coal at you like you know I this is the new wow some some some some blue-haired railroad car worker it's called pull man

what are you doing you can't make the train cars woke they're making the free and train cars gay folks You also have a situation with the previous retrenchment and demarketing and so on and so forth. The chickens are coming home to roost, right? There's too few tracks for too many trains now. A lot of, you know, there's a lot of places you look at, you know, I think a good example is like the Pennsylvania main line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, where all of a sudden, you know, with the amount of traffic on the railroad these days, especially with intermodal and stuff, it's like, Hmm, you know, it might be good to have had all those four tracks. Nope, fuck you. You do have this large backlog of infrastructure investments that could be made,

and you have, you know, you could solve that problem by using all the money the railroad is making. Because we are at an era of record profits. Ooh, well, I'm sure they'll be getting past that. Those go to stock buybacks. Duh. Fuck you for thinking anything can ever be made better. We just got to fucking, oh, God. All these people, yeah, sorry, Devin.

I was trying to, yeah. Oh, man. Fuck. Yeah, I forget the exact number. I want to say over the past 10, 12 years, railroads have invested $100 million into $100 billion, excuse me. That's the type of money you're looking at for like nationwide high-speed railnest. network, or if not that nationwide average speed rail network, you know, they invested that much

money into stock buybacks, which- It's insane. It's insane how much money we are just flowing directly into rich people's pockets. Yeah, that's pretty much the equivalent of setting that money on fire. Yeah. Like it does all, it doesn't even do anything there. It just sits in there, like essentially it takes out of circulation. It's just like, hey, all this potential world we could do anything else with. Yeah, this is just so these people, like, feel better about themselves. And I guess, like, you know, the yacht industry is doing well. It's just, it's insane.

I wouldn't be surprised that the yacht industry is somehow doing really badly right now. I'm going to be honest. Billions love yachts. I was thinking, you know, it's a productive part of the economy. The thing is, it's got to be screwed somehow. You can buy a yacht. Meanwhile, Washington can't fucking build ferries anymore because all of it. of our shipyards are closing.

And nobody's got dry docks that they could build a car haul, like a row row ferry at anymore for any kind of reasonable price. Oh, God. It's been a huge problem. We're sending the ferry, uh, Florida, which feels like, I don't know. It feels like asking like

Mercedes Benz to build like, you know, United States fleet vehicles circa 1939, but you know, what do I know? We're going to take the third Reich. Hey, Philadelphia shipyards expanding. Yeah, we're getting a cruise terminal might already have it. Is that where they're going to build the

Trump-class battleship? Stop it. I don't know. No, they would build that probably in Newport News. That would have been a good goddamn news one. Trump fired the secretary of the Navy because he wanted a ship that was physically impossible to build in two years' time.

Look, if you can build a Liberty ship in three days. USS, we built this yesterday. Hell yeah. I wrote down private equity here. Private equity is like less of a problem that you might think, at least with the Class 1 railroads, the big ones, right? Some of the smaller railroads, though, you know, they are going crazy on those guys.

Looking into like any of the regional rail stuff, which is like a great way to want to kill yourself. Sorry, too dark? No, dark enough, but no, not too dark. Sorry, I've been a bad mood today. Dark like Norfolk Southern. Look at that. Thoroughbreds, baby.

Yeah. You have, this is always one that, like, fucks with my brain. There are chunks of the National Railroad Network that only exist because of M-Track. Like, the Santa Fe Transcontinental Railroad, the only train that uses a good chunk of that is the Southwest Chief. Really? It would not exist otherwise. They would have abandoned it. Like a whole transcontinental railroad.

You know, I think it was, oh, God. Richard Young said something along the lines of, you know, once you lose the passenger trains, you lose the railroad. You know, this attrition would be much more quick if M-Track did not exist. Got it. You also have precision scheduled railroading, you know, which is sort of, you know, it was supposed to be this model where we had lots of fast freight trains moving cars very quickly from one yard to another, you know, increasing what they call car velocity, which is just the average speed of each railroad car, right? and what you wound up with instead was every single train runs on the Southern Pacific model, really long, slow, miserable freight trains everywhere, right?

Yeah, this is why they have trains that don't fit in the yards. Exactly, exactly, and they get robbed. And that's part of the cost of doing business. And that's when the Union Pacific cops show up at your house to shoot you. And overall, this has all been in service of focus, on these insane, unsustainable operating ratios, right? The operating ratio is essentially how many cents per dollar are spent on running the railroad. And it used to be like a good operating ratio was 80 percent, right? For every dollar I take in, I spend 80 percent of it

on running the railroad, 80 cents. Now executives are aiming for under pressure from stockholders and so on and so forth. They're aiming for operating ratios of like 60 or 55%, which... That's insane. You should probably invest some of this money into the railroad, you know? No, no. But no, they are invested in stock buybacks, which is, again, setting the money on fire. Literally ripping the copper out of the vault.

Like, it's so... I think this is what makes, like, transportation drive me so insane. in like the present day is because it is so easy to be like, yeah, this money is being ripped out of this project, this public good, specifically to go to these guys,

and you can literally see the effect year over year on the infrastructure that everybody depends on for life to continue. Great. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of this could be solved with, you know, serious reform and a lot of spending,

like right now, you know, major infrastructure investments. industrial policy that rebuilds the locomotive industry, you know, refocus these sort of absurd non-road diesel regulations into like railroad electrification, right? You know, policies that put safety first, reforms the Railway Labor Act so that these labor agreements that the most pro-labor president in history, Joe Biden, put into place, could actually be enforced, right? probably some public subsidy for rail infrastructure,

especially if passenger trains are using it, as like a national program, not like little stupid projects everywhere, right? You know, reinvestment into what do you call the carload freight system, that's box cars, tank cars, flat cars, so on, everything that's not containers, right? So we don't have so many last mile truck deliveries and you can afford to build a new box car again.

which is currently a huge, huge issue. A new box car right now will likely not pay for itself over the 50-year life of the car. That's wild. Yeah. Have they tried using a substance other than gold to construct them? Yeah, right. Well, that's the problem.

They sold off the gold mines. We're all vertically integrated, and now we can't have anything. Yeah. We got to reband stock buy. You know, you need policies that deferred more kinds of freight to the railroad. There's a lot of work to be done that can bring the railroads back up the stuff, right? You know, we're constantly told that the American freight railroad is the best in the world. As, you know, they deliver every single car like a week late.

Then they blow up a town due to negligence. You know, these are these are fixable problems, right? that could be solved with a concerted effort by the government, you know, good, smart policies, so on and so forth, that would probably, it would leave everyone better off. Well, except us. We need them to blow up poundification length for episodes. Yeah, we got, we got back to content lines.

That would be a big issue, yeah. Get better, but not too much better, guys. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast. that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month,

and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. the money we raise through Patreon

goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month uh join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP Pod do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that back to the show what if there was a workaround though what if we could improve the railroad

instead by just making it really, really big. Uh-huh. Yeah. So we'll talk about the mega, mega, mega merger, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. The horse and Uncle Pete are getting together to form America's first transcontinental railroad. I am one of like Union Pacific's 15 blue sky followers and I keep getting posts from them about like, we, we assure you this is.

is a very popular thing that is going to benefit everybody in America. Fuck off. Don't you worry. We're not going to... Stop fucking horses. We're not going to degrade the service. It's going to be fantastic for everybody. It is very funny.

Their Blue Sky account has perfect PR speak. It feels kind of out of place. So, UD. Pacific, what do you feel about the Philadelphia Eagles draft picks? It's like a stray threads account made its way over to Blue Sky.

So this is interesting because it is one of the first, what you would call an end-to-end merger in several decades, end-to-end meaning Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern do not share very many overlapping routes. So, you know, there's not going to be too much in terms of like economies of scale here. There's not going to be like line abandonments to a large extent or like consolidating. maintenance facilities or so on and so forth. This is going to be, we're just taking two railroads and making them into one bigger railroad. Although there probably will be cutbacks in certain areas, especially, well, probably especially for management. We don't care about them.

No. This was announced July 29, 2025. It was approved by 99% of shareholders, something, $85 billion to acquire Norfolksted, yada, how who cares about money how does this affect the physical railroad its customers its employees us ultimately all right let's let's go look at what what might happen i thought i'd be generous see if there's any good things that might happen so that this is the good um so now we have one railroad that runs coast to coast interesting yeah it only took it only took like what 250 years on the dot.

That's time to disband the country. Never mind. It's done. It's done. We finished it. God, it'll be very funny if by the time this episode comes out, some interesting things have happened geopolitically. This means,

theoretically, if you're running a transcontinental freight train, you don't have to switch cars or switch locomotives or anything when you hit the Mississippi River, which is usually when that changeover happens today. Right? This is the big top line benefit that's being heavily marketed by Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern.

Yeah, on the Blue Sky account. To 15 people, including Victoria, for some reason. I wanted to get updates on when they were bringing out the Heritage Fleet stuff. Because Union Pacific still runs the big boy. And I want to see it. Oh, I got the schedule. Can you send that to me, please? Yeah, I'll do that.

Thank you. I don't think they're coming to Seattle. They're not yet. Not yet, yeah. Well, that'll be when the other mega merger happens. Well, we'll talk about that later. Hyper merger. Hyper merger.

They're going to start running out of letters soon. BNSF, UPS, UPS, D-7. CSX was hogging it by taking three letters. They have already established that the name of the merged railroad will be Union Pacific. They should just change it back to Southern Pacific. just doesn't look at a bit. Honestly, though, yeah. Well, the funny part is that...

What about Union Atlantic Pacific? If they're going to make you charged continental... Oh, they're never going to give up that branding. No, I know. I hate your propaganda. They're making all that money from those Bachman starter sets that you get... Yeah, exactly. Like 10-year-old kid to get hooked on trains.

Yeah, that's like the equivalent of the loyalty program for airlines, you know? That's where the real money is made. So, yeah, it's going to be a real... Transcontinental Railroad is going to be cool and stuff, right? Well, this is maybe less of a benefit than you might think. I mean, so like what what freight is going transcontinental? Anyone not anyone not much. Uh, chemicals maybe. I yeah, just like not very much of anything. I mean, that's that's the dirty secret here. Because what would you do have? You do have like, you know, certain like domestic intermodal trains that go like already

are scheduled to go very fast all the way across the country but those already have arrangements where when they're interchanged between railroads they try and do that as quickly as possible right so that doesn't change too much with one big

railroad right if you're shipping like... What if we had one big union join the IWW. And certainly if you're shipping stuff in from China on a ship, right? You're not going to have any real benefit from, you know, unloading in Los Angeles to get to, I don't know,

the big container terminal out in Harrisburg, right? Yeah, that was what I was thinking. I was like, I guess you could like deliver cars to Los Angeles and then ship them by train to New York, but why not just put it? the cars in New York. Just use the Panama Canal, yeah. At that point.

So what you're saying is this would make sense if we close down the Panama Canal. Oh, we don't give them ideas. Oh, God. Well, that might happen incidentally. Ross, how would you feel about another war? You love it, don't you? No, so your biggest winners actually are sort of in here, right? Right. If you're a shipper in like the Midwest or like Louisiana or somewhere, you know, East Texas, something like that, you know, because we no longer have to switch railroads in a complicated way, if you're shipping like a box car from, I don't know, Dayton to Topeka or like Nashville to Wichita or something like that.

But what do they even make it Dayton anymore? Like do they make it? I've been to Dayton and like it is. It is very much a Rust Belt city. You know, I bet they do make something there, but I can't think of what it is all the hand. I mean, they've got the really cool Air Force Museum. They could put the nuclear train back in service. Isn't Wright Patterson there? I mean, there's got to be something fucking around.

Malt product, well, I searched Dayton, Ohio factories, and I came up with Malt Products Corp. Dayton. Yeah, so I have a covered hopper full of Malt products. All right. All right. I like, yeah, I like all products. Yeah, I'm shipping it to Topeka, Kansas. Before, it wouldn't make a lot of sense because it would have to go up to Chicago

and get sorted in a yard and then get shipped over to the other railroad's yard and then get sorted again and then go down to Wichita. Now it can go directly, which means it's competitive with trucking, right? you know the the the the fact that the railroad requires you know classifying and reclassifying cars over and over again it costs time and money right and that's why even for large shipments that aren't that time sensitive uh sometimes it is still more economical to use you know 10 trucks as opposed to two train cars um okay so this is this is why you know uh this area of the country, you would likely see more freight mode shift towards rail if I'm being generous, right? Do they have the capacity to actually add more trains? Yeah, most likely. Okay.

A lot of these lines are not. So the blue sky account did not fully lie to be. Something could happen. Yes. All right. Maybe. Another potentially good thing is, you know, I would say Union Pacific is a little bit better at maintenance than Norfolk Southern is. But that's also a result of having newer infrastructure in general.

I was going to say that's an incredible statement after I've seen a bunch of their locomotives. Yeah. I have never seen so many graffiti-bombed locomotives that I have on the U.N. Pacific, like, freight yards. It's crazy. I don't even bothery painting them anymore. That's just extra paint. It's good for it. Stop's corrosion.

Another benefit is that finance journalists will stop referring to Norfolk Southern as just Norfolk. Norfolk. Yes. Those are different fucking things. Yeah, Norfolk is a town, not a railroad. Another potential benefit,

but I'm skeptical of this one. Okay, welcome to Chicago. Thank you. Yeah, it's beautiful. I love Chicago. So this is something

that happens in Chicago every day. This is the 47th street yard that Norfolk Southern owns, right? You can notice up here happened just recently. They demolished a whole neighborhood to expand this yard.

Jesus. Yeah, I know. You didn't think they could still pull that shit off. Nope, they have eminent domain powers. Which is insane. Oh, my God. Meanwhile, if you try to like put a rail line

through a cornfield somewhere that 10,000 people would use it per day. It has to get caught up, logged up in environmental review, and lawsuits for the rest of your life. And Norfolk Southern can just drop a bomb out of Chicago neighborhood and be like, yeah, we might use this. Yeah, fuck off. Oh, my God.

Theoretically, with a Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger, the need for facilities like this, where you have to nuke a neighborhood, that will be lessened. But we have to ask ourselves, okay, what actually happens in an intermodal yard like this one, right? Let's say I am shipping a container from Los Angeles to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is where the big container terminal for Philadelphia is. It goes on a BNSF train to Chicago, along with 19 other containers to the same destination in stacks of two on 10 well cars, right? These will need to get from BNSF's intermodal yard to Norfolk Southern's intermodal yard to be put on the train to Harrisburg. How do you do this? Presumably you just cuddled them between the two yards of another train. Now, that makes a lot of sense, right?

That would be a good way to do it. And you are wrong. It's stupid, dummy. Oh, man, I'm batting zero. Yeah. Instead, they do something called drayage. Oh, God, no. Yeah.

So, Dreage comes from the term Dre. A Dre is a shitty horse-drawn cart that brought goods from a ship to a warehouse, right? Modern Drey... Man, that's give me a strong-ass horse to pull an entire intermodal container. I had to explain this to my boss the other day.

I was like, she was like, why did truckers go bank him so much? I was like, all right, here we go. So modern-day Dreage is also very shitty. They don't use horses? No, no. I mean, they treat the people, worse than the horses. God damn it.

Step one. Okay. Here's how you do drayage. Step one, you find an undocumented immigrant, right? Step two, you tell them about this great rent-to-own scheme, right? If you pay us monthly, we'll pay you to drive this big rig for us, and when you pay it off, it's yours. Obviously, there's no equity involved, right? Yeah, it's vicious.

step three said undocumented immigrant drives the containers from one railroad yard to another railroad yard through residential neighborhoods full of kids and old ladies and stuff they do that for a few months you know we're transferring all these containers on trucks from one yard to another all using you know these undocumented dreads drivers right these drivers are also responsible for the fuel and the maintenance on the big rig. Are you fucking kidding me? No, this is like half my dad's bankruptcy clients were trade truckers.

Literally half. Step four, wait for the undocumented immigrant to fall behind on payments and you repossess the truck. And step five, if that guy complains about it, you call ice. And that's how you move containers around through Chicago neighborhoods

while paying the driver a negative wage. Yep. Oh, Jesus. You know, I really like burning. I really like to think

that I am pretty negatively polarized against America already. And no other information I can learn. Not enough, sweet girl. And I, it's not true. I could get, I get more upset.

Cool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, no, this is, this is, this is, this is a nasty business right here. So you're telling me. that this is, I mean, I guess

yeah, if you're paying the guy negative money, it's probably cheaper than if you actually had to use a train. The car is half a mile, yeah. Yeah. No, no, instead we got to, you know, and again, you're driving through like, neighborhoods full of kids and stuff, you know, you're, you're ruining everyone's day doing this.

So, theoretically, in a situation where Norfolk, Southern, and Union Pacific merge, this whole rigmarole could be avoided since trains could bypass Chicago. And this is one of the big selling points of the merger. We're going to stop rubber tire container transfers, right? And in practice, a lot of trains already bypass Chicago. You know, in terms of like a situation where you're sorting, you know,

containers onto different trains bound for different destinations. I mean, unless you, you know, you have to actually change practices. I feel like you need to make a conscious effort to get rid of this stuff. I don't know that it's necessarily going to be like, oh, well, we can run the train around Chicago. That doesn't necessarily mean they will, right? Right.

You know, there's plenty of services where, you know, trains are quickly handed off between railroads right now. You know, and I would imagine if you're opening up, you know, new container shipping lanes, like again to like i don't know uh Columbus to I don't know to buke um you know I you're still doing a lot of rubber tired transfers in Chicago um I feel like if they really wanted to they could end this practice now you could be normal and just have a local train shift stuff around you know what that's driven by a guy who's paid well and he's in a union right his wage is positive.

But I feel like this negative wage thing is a tough nut to crack. If you know, you're a rational investor, you know, you're like, do the most evil thing possible at all times to make money. I can't think of a way to crack this nut. But I am going to sound like a little bit like kind of transgender solid.

So, you know. Yeah, yeah, actually. yeah, there are certain things that need to be done to whoever came up with this business model. Genuinely, yeah, that would be a net benefit for humanity. They are not pleasant things. Nope.

Or the business of unpleasant things. That's our whole bad, man. But yeah, I mean, ultimately, I guess the positive benefit is, I don't think it's going to get rid of this practice. I think it will, you'll be able to, I don't know, you'll be able to ship an intermodal container

from Shreeport to Rona. or something more easily. But I think the horrible injustices will continue to happen. One guarantee in America. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I should have brought myself some alcohol for this episode. Jesus Christ,

this is bleaker that I thought it would be. All right, so let's go to the bad stuff. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, I'm going to. Oh. All right, all right.

All right. So folks, it's time to take off your leftist hat, which I assume is like some kind of like Russian hat through Hickey, right? Put on your hard hat and your PPE. The Ushanka, yeah. Put on your hard hat and your PPE. We're all chemical industry guys now. All right. I'm just your dad. Yeah, pretty much. That is the disclaimer. My dad works for American Chemistry Council, which has come out very hard against this merger. You guys, not you guys. Your dad's guys have a thing on their other web page. That's just. just rail merger. I will drop the link in the chat to wow, you guys are not again, not you guys, but your dad's guys are

serious. God damn. They are not happy about this. Yeah. Anyway, plastics make it possible. Yeah, all right, let's do it. So there are lots of captive shippers on the railroad network. These are people.

who make products that can't really be shipped in a practical way other than by rail, right? So if you make a chemical that melts your face off, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's like a crucial ingredient in like baby food or something, right? You want to ship that product to the baby food factory by rail rather than by a truck where you're going to have a face melting chemical spill due to a fender bender like every other month, right? Yeah. It is much better to ship very dangerous chemicals by rail as opposed to by truck because, you know, as much as we complain about, you know, the state of the railroad in terms

of like derailments and accidents and stuff like that. Literally everything is safer than being a like a car or a truck. Yeah, it's orders of magnitude safe. Yeah. We could do the helicopter collision with airplanes every day for the next year. It's still like not quite get to a number of road fatalities. We can just do the crush and crash or crash at crush every day. Yes. Oh, yeah.

Crash a crush. I always get it mixed up. But yeah, you can just do that every day. We'd still be safe with trucking. Yeah, yeah. So right now those shippers, you know, they have the illusion of choice, right? You know, you theoretically, if one railroad doesn't want to take your product, you can ask the other railroad, and they might do it. There's a lot of solidarity between these railroads, though.

But the consolidation here is going to give Union Pacific a lot of leverage against these captive shippers. They can increase freight rates. They can provide minimal service, right? They could demarket the service altogether. you know, because hazmat is expensive and complicated to ship, and railroads hate expensive and complicated, right? It makes the profit number sad. Number go down.

Yeah, and the profit number is synonymous with the public interest. But they already make so much money. Yeah, but they have to make more is the thing. More, more, more. I'm still not satisfied. I like your emperor palpitating impression. That was pretty great good. I was doing Tom Lairor.

Yeah. So we need to, you know, if the profit number ultimately because we have publicly traded companies, that is synonymous with the public interest. So, you know, in the interest of the profits, maybe, I don't know. maybe we will just have to accept, you know, the face melting chemical truck whacking into a school bus every once in a while. It's for the greater good, right? I can't even riff anymore.

You could literally cook an egg on me. I'm so mad at this point at the report. This one really got me. I don't know why. Every week, it's like something horrible happened explicitly for profit, and it always irritates me. But this one is just like, I am so mad. Yeah, you're taking a lot of psychic things.

Yeah, which is the last week first. I just genuinely, I, like, I could feel it. Come the radiating heat off my skin. Yeah, this is, this is one of that, but I don't speak for American Chemistry Council, but this has always been one of their, yeah, I guess, you know, okay, yeah, I speak. This is exactly what my dad would say.

No. I'm in my skin and I'm Dan Rosniak. Oh, shit. Oh, no. Yeah, no, it's, they, they've had a lot of frustrations with the railroad sort of being like, why do we have to ship all this hazmat exactly? It's like, because, because,

God and man, on the interstate. We killed millions of people and gave you two thirds of the land in the country. In exchange, you have to call dangerous things. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I mean, Jesus Christ.

Your civic duty, fuck faces. The deal. It's another bad thing You know Union Pacific hates M-Track I mean so does Norfolk Southern

So do you want I think Union Pacific is the only railroad That has like aggressively sought Private operators To take over M-Track service On the rails

Which has not worked That's the whole reason Amtrak exists Yeah Because that doesn't work Yeah Because these assholes Are too focused on making money

Yes. But if you have this huge consolidated railroad, it has a lot more leverage against regional transit authorities and, you know, things like that, they might want to come in and like run commuter trains on Union Pacific tracks. I don't think this is going to affect existing services, but they will have a lot more leeway to prevent like new commuter trains or regional trains or so on and so forth. Right. And they can also impose like onerous engineering requirements. for transit lines or other construction, paralleling the Union Pacific tracks, because they develop all the standards and they keep all the knowledge, because we don't like have really railroad engineering education in the United States. I mean, I think it's like a Penn State Altoona. Penn State Altoona and there's one out west. I don't, not Purdue. It's, I don't remember where it is.

So yeah, they keep all. that knowledge under lock and keys. So of course, you know, if you want to build a light rail next to the Union Pacific line, you need a two foot thick, 20 foot tall concrete crash barrier, right? And of course, bigger railroad, more leverage against workers in the unions, right? You guys pipe down or will make your facility redundant. That's what mergers are for, right? well I'm bad we didn't have like a the most pro labor president history right yeah yeah so we could have like future for this jackass fuck you dick bad yeah um I I mean since this is like an end-to-end merger you know

closure of redundant roots is probably gonna be pretty minimal but not absent closure of redundant facilities will also probably be minimal. You can still threaten people with it and you still will be losing jobs one way or another. And we lose a paint scheme. Everything's going to be armor

yellow. They're never repainting all that stuff. Come on. That's true. That costs money. There will be, there will still be the prancing horse running around the U.S. until the death of the U.S. much like the B.52. Yeah, that sounds about right.

I'm looking at up about the death of the U.S., not anything else. I kind of like the B-50, too. I kind of like the whole... She's going to sit here forever. Actually, Union Pacific usually repaints everything pretty quickly. Yeah, fuck up. I don't care. Yeah, there's like no...

That means you're going to put more to that stupid flag on it, though. Yeah, they're going to make the... I hate the American flag locomotive. It doesn't... One, it... From a graphic design perspective, it sucks. Yes. And two, I fucking hate seeing the American flag everywhere because of a blue-haired, miserable

communist. So, you know. Blue-haired miserable railroad car assembler. That's right. I worked at Pullwoman and I use a hammer and put together boxcars all day. And that's what I should change my experience.

The ugly. Okay. Oh, boy. This is going to result in a second round of mega, mega, mega mergers. Yeah. I'm pretty sure if this goes through CSX and BNSF. have to merge.

I know Warren Buffett doesn't want to do it. He has said so publicly, but he might have to. And that leads the inevitable, right? One big railroad in private hands. God damn. Or we could make it public. Yeah.

You know, and this results in a huge part of the nation's infrastructure. What is that British comedy sketch show where they do the bit about setting the pedophile of the space? And they're like, this is the one thing we didn't want to happen. That's how I feel about this. I think that was Mitchell Webb. This is the exact opposite outcome of what we wanted. Yeah.

This is the wario of havoc of working train system. Yeah, hit me with it, Rod. Hit me with the ugly. All right. So the inevitable is one big railroad in private hands, right? And it could be one big union in public hands. Exactly. Join the I will be there's there's with these railroads right even now,

but I'm sure even worse in the future. There's no accountability to the public. There's no accountability to like even like national interest. Like we don't have industrial policy in this country. So it's not like we can say it would be good if the railroads did this. It would be bad if they did that, you know, as a government. Even like a like a cynical sort of, you know, as a nation building thing or as like Like, I don't know.

I, you know, it's, it's all the whims of the shareholders. Who are freaks? Yeah, they're cravened as a group. I'm sure individually, they can want good things. Nope, execute them. As a group, shareholders are craven lunatics with a death wish. You know, it's who cares if these decisions result in a train blowing up my house? I want to see the returns.

And this is the thing. It's like that's the whole point of doing industrial regulation is so that you make it so that the cost of blowing up a town is actually noticeable. Yeah. You know, I mean, not to, not to, you know, put on my tanky hat too hard, but I do think that, you know, the model of occasionally you take some of these guys out back and shoot them that China has for their industrial accidents. Huh? You do understand why Stalin and Lenin just shiot everybody. You do. You really, you really begin to understand.

when you look at this because it's like yeah there are no consequences so like nobody every single person's individual interest is in blowing up the town except for the people that live there they have no recourse fuck you your house blew up what are you going to do about it? We're going to build a train yard over top of it how do you like that?

That smoldering ruin of your house that's ours now eminent domain bitch evident domain bitch yeah that's right damn it oh she's bad folks Thomas came to dinner with a tank car of sulfuric acid The fat controller laughed

We're going to take your house The fat controller laughed Too bad They ate this place So essentially With this merger It's a situation where there may be some minor benefits for some railroad shippers and customers

in some parts of the country and some benefits to shareholders which they won't notice because most of their money is an AI bullshit, right? And everything else gets... Yeah. Humanoid robots are the future. You know, if you're looking for returns right now,

you know, the railroad is not the place that is going to give you gangbusters money. this is a drop in the bucket in everyone's portfolio compared to, I don't know, some AI bullshit. Yeah. This will have some benefits to the shareholders and everything else gets worse and stupider. Great. Hooray. Yeah.

What else is new? I love the show. This place is hell. The show pumps me out so much, man. I just, I, you know. We got to kill these fucking people. I think I'm just going to walk into the Puget Sound when we finish recording this. I do like that we are on the side of the American Chemistry Council.

Of course, our fable brothers are Fable. Yeah, ACC is woken now. Making plastic, that's left this, baby. Yeah. Fuck off, damn. Oh, God damn it. Those blue-haired chemical industry guys. And the railroad car constructors.

So here's the real question. Will it happen? That is the big boy. I said, what'll happen to big boy? Hopefully they, I don't know. Run it on the main one. They're going to keep that as a propaganda. I know they are.

Yeah. It does work on me, unfortunately. When they do the Garfield image, like, you are not immune. This is what they're talking about for me specifically. I'm just sitting there like, I love this shit. Yeah, I'm going to go out to see it when it comes to Philly. Yeah, too. that schedule. Yeah, I will do so.

Thank you. So a few months ago now, the Surface Transportation Board rejected the merger proposal, but only on technical grounds. They wanted a longer report. You, fuck. Run that shit through Claude, baby.

Yeah. So they're going to give this another go in 2027, and I don't really see any reason why in the current political climate, they would reject the merger. There's no way this doesn't go. through. Especially since Donald John Trump

kicked the token liberal Robert E. Primus, he kicked him off the board last year. So there's two Republicans and one Democrat on there. This is supposed to be a nonpartisan or equally

partisan board, but there's two vacant seats. It's just oh my God, it's fucking railroads are such a great way to realize that like if if you want to improve anything the law is very clear that you cannot do that if you want to make shit worse it's fucking Calvin ball voting rights act yeah you got to spend the rest of your life and probably

die for it removing it uh shit yeah no problem oh yeah fuck you for even thinking things could ever be better uh anyway yeah god damn I do it over there, Victoria. The deck here is very definitely stacked in favor of Union Pacific. They were like really big Trump donors. And I don't know, they'll probably, probably let him get in the cab of the big boy when it comes east this summer. CEO of Union Pacific, Holbrodress.

I would. I will say. Oh, that guy has got one. I will say putting putting me in the cab of the big boy would work on me. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. I mean, like, we're all a human. It's like the opposite of when Trump got into Tesla, it's like everything's computer.

It's like the anti-everyth. This is what I want the interior of my new car to look like. I want a bunch of steam and knobs. Oh, they had to put a positive train control box in it. So there is computer on it. God damn it. We can't have anything. fucking iPad baby in the train cab

Jesus Christ So what can be done Oh people Yeah I know fucking people You heard me with a Or a gun or a

or a cannon or an anti-aircraft gun or some sort of I don't know howlbird or Pike or a Mace or No, no, no, no, no. Come on, man. We're just going to do nudge theory, you know? No, I'm not doing nudge theory. If we just offer some small business loans to people to start their own railroad for competition, the free market. Assuredly mean that the better world we all want would magically come into existence. Friks. Sorry, Devin. What's the alternative? Is there a future?

where this doesn't happen. You know, maybe, I don't know, Congress could block it or something. Who cares? Come on. Yeah, they're not going to do that. Yeah, I'm really positive that, like, they're going to burn political capital on, like, pissing off the railroads. Yeah.

They should. Fuckers. We're, like, well past the point where, you know, fiddling around the edge is going to have any real results in the public interest, right? The only real long-term solution is nationalizing the railroads, making them accountable to the public to the government, to someone, right? And this is a hard sell in the United States of America when all these railroads are making record profits and the only people really aware of the disorganization and the mismanagement are the folks in this increasingly sidelined part of the

economy where people do things and make stuff. The blue hairs, yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The blue hair is at Pull Woman. and the chemical plants. Woke DuPot was not a phrase I was ready to hear. I work at Woken Hoss. So I figured I would shout out the Public Rail Now campaign, which is organizing to try and make this hard sell to point out what is surprisingly obvious.

Our nation's railroad network is not in service to the public. It is serving a mob of investment. and shareholders who are incapable of rational or long-term decisions as a group, right? This is not hard to point out all the other infrastructure out there as public. Why not the railroads? God, a five-year plan would hit so good right now. Yeah. Jesus.

Plus, as noted before, there's an enormous amount of external problems to the industry that private ownership is not going to solve. So anyway, I'll leave a link to the campaign in the description. get involved you know are something just I don't know let's not be completely hopeless

you know oh boy out of boy Ross maybe maybe generative AI will make an app to fix the railroads

I don't know I think I learned too much this episode yeah I'm really bad now I didn't I didn't like this one Ross usually when you do a trains episode

I'm in for a good time What the hell was this, man? How can you do this to me? All right, you're, you are burdened with the knowledge that I have. Oh, my God. You must share this burden with me. I already, I consider myself, like, pretty aware of how bad everything is, especially with railroads.

It's always worse and stupider. I'm going to the shaped place. See y'all. Going to the shape store. Go to the Shave store, you want anything? Well, what did we learn? Fuck you, man. Yeah, seconded, actually.

We learned that America has always sucked, and it turns out that just better things aren't possible ever. Bring back the alphabet soup era. Oh, yeah, I could take over the block of trawling tracks. track, you know, and just that's my charter. The block of trolley track in my backyard. Call it the Ros and the Ross Pacific. The Ross and Ross Pacific?

Yeah, exactly. I like that. I fuck with that. Meanwhile, meanwhile, the thing that's really just like driving me insane is like they already, they're talking about taking dedicated trackage for the sounder out of the Washington State Rail Plan. Because they're like, well, it's kind of expensive. you know, we don't really want to, we don't really have the money. And it's like pittance compared to what these railroads make. And the whole reason we can't run more commuter rail to make it into like an actual regional rail service.

Plus, you know, Pacific won't fucking give more time to the regional rail. Oh, God. There's like actual problems in the city I live in that are caused directly by these assholes. And so they're just getting more money forever. I always, you've raised your hand in the Zencaster. What do you have to say? I have nothing good to say. Devin's already going to be mad at me.

It's just like the better things aren't possible shit where we're all holding hands and chanting better shit as impossible because we're Maddie Glacius now. It's just fucking exhausting. That's kind of all I have to say about this. Public real now, join the IWW.

Light these people on fucking John Roberts with the gun. Yeah, what else did we fucking learn? I don't know. I hate this place, man. All right. Give me safety third, I guess. Yeah, all right. But I'm battling.

Burner to burn. Shake hands with danger. Hello, Justin, Liam, Nova, and Gareth, even if he's not there. Chop liver? Yeah, right? Hello. I've been on like 25 episodes at this point. We're going through the old one.

Someone DM to me to be like, did you get my safety third? I sent it last year. I was like, I don't know, man. I'll look. I don't even think. I don't think this one's even that old. Well, I, I, Fuck you, Victoria.

You get nothing. If you ever message me and I don't respond, it's because I'm terrible at it. Put that out there from the public, the public domain, something knows. Same. A few years back,

I was a machinist apprentice at a workshop of a prestigious university in Germany. Uh-huh. Yeah. In these three years, I accumulated many stories

that would fit this segment, including overloading a freight elevator, and overwriting its software to use it, despite a computer voice warning that the weight limit had been exceeded. Yeah, fuck them. That same elevator getting stuck on a different occasion and catching fire and having to carry a 250-kilogram electric forklift up a flight of stairs by hand with three other guys,

because you guessed it, the freight elevator happened to be out of order due to being on fire. But that's not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is the disassembly of a lathe. Nova. The whole ordeal could fill several pages of its own, but I'll try and keep it short. Every now and then a work safety guy comes in to review

the safety features of the machines in the shop. The guy in question is known to be pedantic. So my maister was in a bad mood. Whenever this happened, we got 10. task with some. Arbites Bischoffens going to shman. Hold on. Arbites Bischoffens

Masha Mesh and not a real language. Sorry. A job creation measure to keep us out of the shop until the inspection was over. Oh, a bank work. I'm sorry. We didn't have a, we didn't, we didn't,

we didn't fight, fight them in the fields of Belgium. We want to speak German. We want, Dicket. In this case, we were to go to the basement where a big and very ancient lathe was located in one of the shop's additional machinery rooms. Why is that phrase it's scare quotes? That's alarming. Guys, this is the additional machinery room? The joke was always that the building had to be constructed around the lathe, but it turns out that was actually the case.

the machine was supposed to be scrapped because it failed a previous inspection. The disassembly processed included lifting off several components via a crane such as the headstock and they weighed several hundred kilograms each. Unfortunately, the only crane we had was not tall enough for the job. The solution to that problem was to put the crane on two liftings. shifting tables, jacking them up, and pulling it all backwards with the headstock dangling from it. Oh, my God. There was no better way to do this. Are you sure?

It's fine. I'm sure they thought about it really. They're German. You know? It's over-engineered. And there's two ashtrays at it. Yeah. This is actually the surface manual for a mid-90s seven series. It's just being read to us. There was just one issue. The crane was on rollers, as were the lifting tables. Imagine standing on an office chair while wearing roller blades.

That's about how stable the whole construction was. To keep everything in place, my coworker decided to jam a crowbar under the roll of the crane, which could have easily cost him a few fingers or his hand. had something decided to go south. It's also worth mentioning that all this took place in a small basement room without ventilation. While everything was covered in oil from the half-disassembled machine,

while my coworkers were both heavily smoking the entire time to cope with the stress of maybe losing a limb or two in this attempt of evading the eyes of the work safety inspector. Now, luckily, nobody got injured, and by some miracle, all of us still have all our limbs and we didn't even burn to death. I took pictures of the scene as it was unfolding

but to protect the identity of my co-workers and myself, I traced over it to obscure it. It's also worth noting that we listened to metal while doing this and Iron Maiden's Dance of Death blasted on full volume as I took these pictures, which I find too funny not to include.

That rolls. Yeah. If you enjoyed the story, maybe I'll do a follow up with how I found out that the safety housing of our circular saw doesn't actually stop any shrapnel in case the saw blade explodes. But that's a different story entirely. Regards a machinist.

Thank you a machinist. Thank you, a machinist. Wow. I love to build a rolling jenga power. It's all wheels now. That was safety third. right. We're going to shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Once again, donate to Mary's grandson for a new mobility van. Listen to transgirlie's mouth. I'm going to be on it. Yeah, I'm uploading that episode right after we do this. Oh. The Liam guest special.

Exciting. Yeah, we talked about how everything sucks. You may notice a theme in the shows I'm on lately. team's developing. Well, that's not fair. We also did talk about how Bob Lutz is a king and Dodd Piper's greatest car of built. That's a damn true.

Bye, everybody. Yeah, by everyone. Wow, what a great podcast, everyone. Fuck you. Oh.