Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 203: The Wreck of Amtrak 188

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

get out the vote for our boy josh shapiro! check out railnatter (and trainsatlantic): https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennis https://www.youtube.com/@Trainsatlantic 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/

Yeah, I just want to point out while we're on the subject of Zencastor going or not going, I I are we not going we are going no no no it's about Zencastor corporate because uh oh god the yeah so so we have uh so my brother-in-law is a is a man named Zach Act we all know Zach um and he was entered he joined with a Zencastor pilot program to do like AI stuff training machine learning And he was like, brother, I can't do this anymore. No amount of money is worth it. Not for any moral reason, but because it sucked that bad. Yeah.

He was like, I don't, he's like, you know, like I'm not an AI Dumer or whatever, but like this is fucking unusable. That sounds about right. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work good. Even if you didn't care. Even if you thought like, oh, you know, whatever, I love the future. I'm super on board with this.

There's no reason to be suspicious about Sam Altman and Elon Musk. trying to invent God, right? There's no reason to disbelieve Jensen Huang. I issue. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. That's my problem too, right? Is it like, and we've had requests for an AI episode and like, brother, I will write it

as soon as I know where to fucking start. It's all bad. Yeah, yeah. The thing is basically, do we want to hold Ed Zitrin hostage for like four hours? You know? Four hours, yeah. Is the AI episode?

Yeah, I'm not opposed to all many people hostage. Also, like, it's not kind of like, it's not, I don't think you've got long to wait before the disaster will finish as well. So you've not got long to wait until like there's a reasonably good bookend on the story. Like, I don't think it's going to be a single dramatic hit to end it in the way of the Tasnit Crash. But I think there will be a moment not too far away when we'll be able to go, oh, that's kind of fizzle out, hasn't it? Like that's it, right. I was talking to someone, I was talking to a friend of mine, they were talking to my friend Maggie, who I know this is the show. hello, Margaret.

And I and they were talking, and they were like, oh, like, I don't know about the, like, ecological impacts and stuff like that. And I was trying to, like, in my role as a social worker, there's people who are really like, oh, we need to integrate AI, which is like, A, how, B, Y, right? Yeah. A. Y. Yeah. That's another thing. It's a third thing.

Fuck you. And I was just like, like, there's no, like, I'm not even what I would consider like an AI. doomer, but I'm just like, there's no use case for like 99% of people, right? Like no meaningful use case. Because like the internet made sense. It was always on constant communication. And we know that sucks. We just like, yeah, it revolutionized the world.

And I know that like machine learning and AI can do that to a point. Right. But like, they're not like AI. I don't think it's ever going to be good enough to be like, oh, okay, I want to like book a flight, blah, you know, the classic use case, which is like booking a flight, like you can't possibly fucking do that yourself. Yeah, yeah, that just, it will send you eggs. Like, it will send you eggs.

You know what AI would remember to do? AI would remember to do a sync point in the recording before two minutes in. Oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. All right. Does that say, three, two, on the mark? Wait, one second. Are your bomb collars also getting tighter?

Oh, yeah, of course, but I just attributed that to like external factors. No, but you put on the bomb? What? No. It's, yeah, it's called horizontal management. I want to be like in this with you guys. It's a, it's a co-op. We all have bomb collars and any of us can trigger them at any time.

IWW is not ready for this one, boys. Some really intense. Yeah. This is radical accountability. Or a union shop, but it's just like mutually assured destruction. All right. Three, two, one, Mark. Close enough. Amazing. Wow, that was a bit of a delay.

That was too bad, actually, from Nova's end, yeah. Yeah. If it gets really bad, just turn off the cameras besides you, Justin. Yeah. I just want to know, I don't understand. No, shut up, I'm talking. God damn it. Go ahead. I'm fucking with you, go ahead.

Here's the thing about the AI guys who are all really scared of their AIs. Mm-hmm. The data center has a breaker box. Just go in there, turn it off. It's like, spreads it with a mold or something. Right. Yeah, exactly. I don't understand.

I'm just lacking in knowledge, right? It's just like, oh, like the hugging face incident, right? Where they were like, um, oh, it like mutated into this and that. It's like, but you guys are the ones who designed the guardrails. Yep. Like it's just software. Do you not know? It's just software.

Right. Do you not know enough to like put in. in guardrails and say, like, it's one thing if you explicitly lay out, do not do these things, right? And then it goes ahead and does those things. And I understand that, like, there are scary implications because AI, like, will, in some occasions just ignore its prompts, right? That is scary.

I'm not disputing that. But this, like, they seem like almost horny for the end of the world in a really weird way. Oh, yeah. It's like 50% that and 50% like the scary stories make people not actually, like, not pay attention to the fact that it's just, as with the, the rest of the. rest of the tech industry, it's a way to bypass plagiarism law, right? And, and reduce and send staff to the global south. Because if you only have to have prompt artists rather than actual people,

they can all be in Manila, right? Yeah, it's, it's, yeah. That's great. Good. Yeah, I just don't, I'm really at a loss when they're just like, oh, you know, I, it's the scariest thing and it's going to kill us all. Please, please 10,4 billion dollars. So we've had bad, like, what does that?

Doesn't mean fucking sense. Yeah, yeah. We've had bad software for, forever. though. Like we've had software that has killed people forever. We've had like a bad app. Like still makes my phone hot enough that it might burn like set fire to the battery. Like we can do shit like that is around already. Like it's not it's just other shit. It's just more shit software. We don't need AI to make bad software. No. Exactly. Humans can do it. We also don't need AI to like fry our own brains because we had perfectly good social media for this.

Exactly. I. This is this. This is this. that we had Vine. Why don't we have Vine anymore? I miss Vine. Because of Twitter, you know who Mrs. Vine is my wife. Jesus Christ. You know what, listener? You're the listener.

You're old. And the reason why you're old is because all of the podcasts that you listen to, hi, it's, well, that's your problem, by the way, are now mostly about getting old and people complaining about getting old. And I like to appreciate, you know, that's the service I like to provide to you. I was talking. I don't understand it that much, but my wife, my wife is really in the vines. Brother, I, look, I understand technology really well.

And then she'll say shit to me that I'm just like, what the fuck are you fucking about? Just like, oh, yeah. Also, if you wanted this episode to start briskly or be on topic, right, A, we don't really do that here. And B, I needed some time off, not because I was taking time off work. I had to go to Brighton to get my, like, consult for Barsum surgery. shout out to Boston surgery. Incidentally, small plug up top. If you want to read about that,

I'm writing about that on my Patreon. I bet you didn't know I have a Patreon, but I do. And you can subscribe to it and I'll make these fuckers but a link in the description. But that kind of threw me off. It's just here.

Thank you. It's well worth reading. It's good. Yeah. I mean, it's going to look like beef beery. I don't know. Thank you. But yeah, no, it's so.

Jesus, what? That's a. I'm a little cis boy and I'm always learning. Yeah. Yeah. I love you guys. I just all, it threw me off the schedule for a couple of weeks, but I'm back and I missed everyone and I really missed recording the podcast.

Speaking of podcasts. I said, hold on. Oh, yeah, fuck you, man. What did you do? It sounds like you just took a chunk out of like a heel of bread. I did. The next energy drink. I was tricking.

I mean, that's not allowed to have a succulent beverage on this, on this, of all podcasts. The podcast that had to drop 25 minutes from the beer episode because we were literally too incoherent to edit it. But anyway. I was also here. I was drinking four luck. All right. I couldn't record last week.

And would you like to know why? Why? You don't know where I was? Why? Where was where I was? I was in Mao Schwitz. Oh, that's right. That Disney episode is fucking coming.

That Disney episode is fucking coming, Liam, I was talking earlier about Disney World and I was like, well, that's his wife's culture, right? And I respect that very deeply because it's not my thing. But, you know, I respect the level of earnestness. And then you come in and you're like, yeah, my wife's interests are ridiculous. And I'm not positions to sort of judge that, you know. Let's talk about Disney World.

Okay. So I No, shut up. So God invented South Florida for reasons beyond me or Central Florida. And what happened was I have to go there and then what happens is I go on the Guardians of the Galaxy

Cosmic Rewind roller coaster. And there's an eight year old who won't stop fucking screaming about how excited he is to see the guardians, his best friends, even though they're fucking fictional characters unlike me who lives in your phone and your computer.

And he just will not. He's like, I don't know why they pick this music. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. You're eight. You don't understand a goddamn thing about fuck. Shut up.

Anyway, you may now continue the episode. I fucking hate Disney World, dude. But you married into it. And welcome to... Yeah, I know. It's my worst flaw as a human being right up there with being a francophile. Hello, and welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about injuncule. Disaster's with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's speaking right now.

I am once again battling the worst internet in the world. And my pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. I have that sweet, sweet, redacted company, two gig internet. We don't need five gig internet. My pronouns are he and him.

And we have a guest. You do have a guest. That guess is me. It's Gareth Dennis, my friend's he and him, and I've missed this so much. Look, it's the, it's the, it's that line. I don't know what this form of the podcast is, but it's that one again. And I've missed it so much. This one I would describe as the Gareth Liam Intimacy Hour, you know, the one where you two kind of flirt for a bit. I think the fans really enjoy it. I love that, man, so much. We're fucking. We're fucking. I don't have any poetry with me today, but, well, not any that's legally broadcastable.

Liam, I will email you that. Thank you. Thank you, brother. I, um, what, oh, I was watching Jeopardy last night. I, I can actually feel the, the tendon in Roz's neck get tense. Oh, God. That's where you're going with that sentence, okay? Yeah, I can, I can, I can, I can, uh, psychically visit Roz in his apartment and I can see him.

They made us, they made us watch. Wheel of Fortune reruns in the jury duty waiting room on Monday. What? Did you also get the red-headed man with a very thick Northeast Philly accent who's trying to be polite? I think it's asked the same question 35 times. You can sort of see the mask slip a little bit. Oh, yeah, actually. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like that guy. So I was watching Jeopardy. And Charge of the Light Brigade was one of the answers, as was the hunt for Red October. and I've never been more in my goddamn element. You know, this podcast turned into a senior center rec room

so slowly I almost didn't notice. I work with old people. That's my job outside of this. I am a social worker for olds. So what you see on the screen in front of you is a place we've been before on this podcast, Frankfurt Junction in Philadelphia. And you see a train,

but this train has done some alarming things. Maneuvering. There's a locomotive over here. There's a car turned on its side. There's another two cards turned on its side. There's one that's perpendicular to the tracks. And there's one which is a squished coat can.

Yeah, sort of turned into a... This evokes to me one of my favorite pieces of sort of pilot to air traffic control communication, which is the sentence, oh, you want to be specific and make it a runway, huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This is this is M-Track 188. This is the 2015 derailment at Frankfurt Junction. And speaking of airlines, I do think, you know, this is one I've wanted to do for a long time, but I felt like, you know, got to be kind of sensitive about it just because a lot of the people involved, they're still alive. But also I think it's illustrative of, well, let's say you're watching a program like mentor pilot or air crash investigations. or something like that.

You know, and you think about the sort of professionalism and grace that comes with some of these airline crash investigations, things like how the main goal is to eliminate sources of human error, to identify the procedures and structural factors, which led up to an accident to avoid placing blame on like one individual unless it's like very, very, very extremely warranted to do so. And that's how that works in the airline industry. But today we're going to see how that works

on the railroad. Oh. I'm getting the sense that they did a guy flight style. Welcome to the Josh Shapiro, you motherfucker grievance hour. Actually, yeah. Yeah, that'll...

And if you're like one of those guys who's like, yeah, the engineer, you know, he did all... He was his fault. This is not the podcast for you. Yeah, blah. Yeah, it's worth of somewhere that has graphics. Yeah.

For everyone who's joining this from the UK, this is pertinent for the fact that the RIAB have just released the interim report for the crash at Bedford, which the media have just gone, it was the driver, what did it, driver error, driver error,

and the industry is kind of looking to go, well, what a tragedy, what a shame. I feel for that guy's widow, and yes, this is going to be relevant, folks.

Yes, but first we have to do the goddamn news. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I still haven't updated the box. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D.

We could do the actual covering for my mistakes. Yeah. That's what the bomb callers are for. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We could do a wide variety of depressing news stories, but I figured, okay, let's, let's do a...

Like I guess this is also a depressing news story, but it's also got some, what you call it? Shaden Freud. It's also got like, we're sticking to sports here. We've got a, we've got it all transit news. Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. So if you remember our episode about the ultimate urban circulator in Jacksonville, Florida. Yeah, the van. I do. I assume that well. The autonomous vans.

So, uh, oh, it's shutting down. Oh. The JTA, Jacksonville Transit Authority, CEO,

uh, Nathaniel Ford sort of bet the farm on these autonomous shuttles to replace the Jacksonville Skyway, which is an actual automatic transit system, right? It turned out to be a pretty bad bet. There was no ridership, very slow trip times, very, very, very, very expensive software licensing. It was autonomous some of the time, but the route required, you know, the driver to take control to, you know, merge across six lanes to take a left turn. You know, so that's...

The way of the future. The way of the future. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, when can we get an autonomous car that can do a proper Jersey slide? You know? But Nat Ford has left Jacksonville Transportation Authority earlier this year

so he can go fuck up Dallas Dart, right? So JTA is now completely broke cutting Skyway service, cutting a central bus service, and turning off the autonomous capabilities of the ultimate urban circulator and possibly ending the service altogether. Well, it looks like my work here is done.

Oh, God. Yep, incredible. This is what we always said would happen, folks. Why do they keep doing this? Why does it let... It's a minibus. with a bunch of extra expensive shit on it, that then has software that then expires.

It's a minibus that has a server rack that takes up the place of four seats. What? It's fine, it's fine. Just sitting on the bus and the guy next to me is clawed and is a server rack. That's fine.

This is my emotional support server rack, which is actually how it works in my house, but. So, HomeLab, baby. In other news. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

We got to, when I get around to the university part, whatever, Drexel, it's just going to be Drexel for like four hours, dude. Drexel University has was, yeah.

Yeah, Drexel University has shut down the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia. Fuck. Oh, one of our oldest museums. Incredible.

It's woke. It was woke the whole time and gay. I guess it was woke. Dinosaurs are woke, you know? That's why Noah didn't bring them on the ark. I had a Hebrew school teacher who, I think I told this story before. His name was Larry. And before anyone gets mad at me, he served in the IDF.

I did not. Happy October 7th, by the way. And, and he was like, We unreservedly condemn the remarks of et cetera, et cetera, yeah, sure. Whatever, man. Nothing matters anymore. I'm playing with house money.

And so he was like, no, no, God put dinosaur fossils on the earth to confuse Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the ancestors. And he was, and then he moved back to Israel and I'm pretty sure did unit 8200 shit. And he- Jesus. Jesus, what was fucking like, how many guys are in unit 8200? Is it named after the fucking roster? Like, every fucking time I hear about a guy, it's like he was in a unit 80, 200. What's a unit 80, 200? It's like the Israeli, like, uh, spooops shit and hacking thing.

It's like, if you're gay and Palestinian, they hack into your phones to blackmail you, right? Yeah, it's Israeli NSA, basically. Yeah. Okay. So he, when I was 18, and. already going to college at my, at Drexel, God, I hate this school. He was like, hey, I tried to maybe kind of recruit me to join like Israeli intelligence, maybe, question mark.

It was all very strange. And I talked to my mom about it. She was like, absolutely under no fucking circumstances, are you going to Israel? And then I went on birthright, sorry, but that was- You got tapped on the shoulder by Israeli intelligence. I'm a smart guy. No, I mean, yeah, I don't doubt it. But, like, I feel like that would have led to-

Who knows? might still be. Don't sit at one like podcast, discourse, fucking podcast, I am not Israeli intelligence. I, I, I just it was weird that I never saw you

at any of the seminars, you know? The big cabal meetings. I always sit next to, you know, I always sit next to the Blackstone guy, you know, and Josh Harris. You don't spend enough time grooming children to be in Israeli intelligence,

let's be honest. No, I don't like talking to kids, They freaked me out. They worked their fingers on everything. And you told this guy that he was like, actually, never mind. You know what? It's fine. We don't need you.

Takes these backsies. Takes these backsies, yeah. So anyway, Drexel University is now two for two on museums they've affiliated with and then shut down. It's the machine that destroys museums. It's, you know, the public system is what it does. the press, fuck, the purpose of Drexel University is to shut down museums. Thank you. Pretty much, yeah.

Not even wrong. It was Academy of Natural Sciences is our, you know, natural history museum. The, the, they got the dinosaur skeletons there. They got the other, I never actually went. I feel bad about that now. I did. It was beautiful. It's a museum.

It's a school. It's a school that's capable of, it's a school well known for running itself well. The other one they took out was the Atwater Kent, which was the Philadelphia City History Museum. Yes. Yeah, they killed Atwater Kent. I thought that was Penn. Jesus Christ. No, that was Drexel.

Are you fucked, dude? I fucking hate this school. It's terrible. It's awful. If you name your university after something that sounds like it's a brand of like a whole hardware tools. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

No, no, he was, uh, Drexel was a banker. Drexel Morgan and company. That Morgan being JP Morgan. Huh. Oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah, well known for not being a piece of shit. Oh, wait a second. Wait, wait a second, yeah.

So I think there's now like some kind of movement to get the museum to reopen by having the academy disaffiliate with Drexel. Because I think the idea was they were going to close the museum, but keep like all the research parts of it going. Now that's not going to happen. Also, they're trying to sell the building. Yep. You know, there's a whole collection, right? Do I have that right? I would assume they would have to, yeah.

City Council almost tried to do something that didn't happen. Mary Sherell Parker is nowhere to be found. That's crazy, dude. I can't believe that. Yeah, who would have a thought. So much did a podcast about that. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's, it is, yeah, this is, this is another, another beloved cultural

institution that Drexley University has just decided, nah, don't need that. Business school. Business. Business. Business. Business. Business. Business.

Maybe they could do a museum of business. You know, they could put like the big whiteboard that says, you know. It's a profound. No, no. We had the Philadelphia commercial museum. It was demolished by University of Pennsylvania. Oh, that was a pen did get that one, did they? Okay.

Yeah. Oh, kind of also has a nasty habit of keeping bones belonging to children in their basement. That's true. Oh, okay. The commercial museum was, that was a word that was, that that's a phrase that we would now call a convention center. But, you know. Oh, 3,400, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that was the goddamn news, I think. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry.

All right. So first we must ask, what is Frankfurt Junction? Sure. Yeah, what is Frankfurt Junction? What is Frankfurt Junction? Okay, okay. The purpose of a junction is what it does. What it does?

What it does? What a shah-jou? Oh, dude, I can go for a hot roastby sandwich right now. That would be pretty nice. That sounds incredible. Frankfurt Junction is this thing over here. It is the second Titus curve on the northeast corridor. The first one is the curves leading into the Stamford station.

Frankfurt Junction is in North Philadelphia, right? It is limited to 50 miles an hour on otherwise very straight and very high speed stretches of track. Wait a second. That sounds familiar. I know. A high speed line on the east of the country with a 50 mile an hour bend in it. Wait a minute. This is the Morpeth episode again.

This is Aramorpeth. This is your morphist, yeah. Much later in the future. Why is it there? So the Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad was incorporated to build a railroad from Philadelphia to Trenton. Unexpected, I know. It made it into Trenton pretty easily,

but entering Philadelphia from the north was a challenge, right? Residents protested the plan to build a whole new railroad down city streets and into Center City, because that's a weird 1820s idea and this is the modern age of 1839. Yeah, this is the future. We're supposed to have the trains run on the street and kill my horse.

Yeah. Yeah, no, you're not supposed to do that. That was the thing. Turn it into viscerate. Turn them all into viscero. Thus, the Philadelphia and Trenton went down this way, right, to what is now Kensington High School

for the creative and performing arts, which is right next to the Berksson. station on the Frankfurt L, right, to this big, big wooden terminal here. Now, the Frankfurt L wouldn't exist until 1922, which was, you know, 90 years in the future. So alternative methods were needed to get passengers the last three miles to Center City and to other railroad connections, right? I've had longer waits for the Vancey West Coast. Some corporate machinations, which aren't super important, happen over the next 30 years.

Everything in the city winds up controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was time to unite the Pennsylvania Railroad main line that came into Broad Street Station with the Philadelphia and Trenton Main Line by means of something called the Connecting Railroad. I sure hope it do. The official motto, I sure hope it do. Yeah. Rather than brute. force its way through the city,

the Pennsylvania Railroad's connecting railroad would skirt around the edges. Like so, going that way. That's more useful for people who are not doing this audio only. Scurts around the edges of the city cross the Schuylkill River on this thing back here,

the connecting railroad bridge. You're back. And join the main line at a location we now call zoo interlocking. It's called zoo interlocking. locking because that's where the Philadelphia Zoo is. It's true.

I walked up there. It's nice. Yeah. And so again, the connecting railroad splits off from the previous main line at Frankfurt at appropriately Frankfurt Junction. This is not designed for high speed trains, right? It's designed for 1860s trains. And so the speed limit became a nuisance fairly early on, right?

Plans to straighten the curve here with a viaduct over Erie Avenue. were so well advanced in the 1930s, you can actually still see it in the property lines, right? You can see where the railroad bought property. Here's an angled warehouse that shouldn't be angled like that. Here's a driveway. This, I think, is the Bachman Model Train Factory. This is a later edition.

When on my city builder or my scale model, right, I fuck up the rotation of something. I didn't fuck up the rotation of something. It's because of a sort of arcane, like, railroad right-of-way thing. Yes, exactly. That's how that works, yeah. Mm-hmm. But yeah, there was a plan to straighten out this curve a long time ago.

They got surprisingly well advanced, and then it just did not happen, right? So this sudden, tight curve in a section of otherwise high-speed track is with us to this day. Just to kind of turn and over to care. Yeah, sure. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, if you want to know, like, open railway map's really good for people. If people want to go and see what the fuck is all going on there,

go to Open Railway Map, it's got all the old lines there. It makes a lot of sense. Like, it's basically, you know, you've got two railroads meeting and then, annoyingly, that just the cord that was kind of, you know, the secondary cord between them ends up becoming the mainline. This is a fairly common occurrence. But now it's the, it's the curve zone. We have to do it very briefly.

I'm not going to, we've done this already, right? We've done this already. We've gone into We've gone into the detail of curves And why trains go around the mid For the more steps of right in great detail Let me do that again Back to any of the previous episodes

Click Like go back to those pages Mm-hmm Look around you Yeah exactly Look Look around you What are curves

When a train goes around a curve When a train goes around a curve It is There is an outward acceleration It goes around the curve Which is the square of its speed Over the radius of the curve it's going around, right? That gives an outwards acceleration.

There we go. Now we've done this like previously with Morpeth. Can we do this again in like a fun way with like a cool Ferrari or something where it's like, oh God, like outrun or something? Ooh, that could be yes, yes is the answer to that. Nova, that's exactly what we can do. We choose to or choose not to balance out that

that hour's acceleration with an inwards acceleration by leaning the train over by lifting up the one rail over the other through the curve. And that allows us to eke a bit more speed out of existing tight curves, like the curve at Frankfurt Junction. It will be super elevated to get that 50 miles an hour because it is very tight. And we achieve that by dangling the center of mass away from the center of vehicle, which means we get some component of the acceleration due to gravity laterally from the super elevation or can't.

What did you call me? Et cetera, jokes of this nature. I'm sure I've made one of the times we've explained this previously. Almost undoubtedly. almost undoubtedly. And so you can have these two, and this allows you to then calculate, right? Okay, how fast can go through the curve?

But the thing that's important here is that there is a safe speed to go around a curve. And that different, that the safe speed that we put in the design standards is usually like two to three times lower than the speed that a train can actually like blast its way through a curve without actually falling over. So to go to actually tip a train over through a curve,

you have to be going really damn fast. For example, next slide please, like at Morpeth. Like at Morpeth, yeah. And you can see here, a scene that looks perhaps familiar to the one that we saw from an aerial show earlier. In this case, though, it's a guy with a small high-vis bib stood on the side of an upturn Mark 3 coach that's tried to eat a bungaloo.

Yeah, you're sort of like high-vis cropped up looking at this guy's new cool garden ornament. Yeah, exactly. I wore one of these in Washington, D.C. for the live show. So that's what one of those is, to which I hand back, capably two rods. Yes. So, you know, it's important to remember.

Trains can't always go around a curve. But there's also things that are supposed to prevent you from messing up there. Is that a fucking taking of Pelham one, two, three? This is so meta-textual. I'm about to explain all the ways that railway safety systems stop you from taking a Pelham 1, 2, 3, right? Okay. This is railway safety systems that prevent trains from doing things that they shouldn't do, right?

Now, you're driving your car 75 miles an hour and a 35, right? Yes. And you see a sign with flashing lights and chevrons that says curve 15 miles an hour. You still have plenty of time to slow down to 45 miles an hour to make that turn. I knew this episode. I feel a little target. I got a lot of you. I've been in a car with Liam.

I once was driving my wife somewhere, and I wouldn't cross a double yellow line, which would have been an illegal turn. And she said, I'm sorry, you will drive 40. I've seen you drive 40 over the speed limit, but you won't make a turn on yellow. And I was like, yes, yes. There's no people on the highway. They're all cars. They're, they're, they're not humans.

This is a fascinating insight into American psychology. I'm the king of the highway, I believe, is what you want. And if you see a yellow light, you have plenty of time to speed up and tear through the intersection at 112 miles an hour. Hell yeah, right? I think one of the most fascinating things about this podcast, right? And I think this is a tribute to you, Liam, is that you can come onto this podcast and go, I love speeding, and I was nearly in the like Israeli intelligence, and people still love you.

Thank you. And they're right to do it. I have worked hard to maintain my cult of personality, and I will not apologize for saying. So, trains do not respond to throttle and break inputs like cars do. They don't respond that quickly. As such, railway signals and speed limits have to be strictly obeyed. Since locomotive engineers don't have freedom like drivers do, there are safety interlocks to prevent them from speeding or running red lights.

Okay, well, that sounds like a restriction of my freedom, but yeah, go on, King. Just the we can't drive 55 bumper sticker on a train? On a trade, yeah. The oldest and simplest of these is automatic train stop, right? And automatic train stop was developed in the late 1800s in conjunction with air brakes, And signaling systems... Crazy timing that when they invented it, the guy who wrote Automatic was thinking of an automaton.

Yes. Yes, it's like there was some cultural exchange. Hmm. Weird. This is a very basic mechanical system in the 1800s, at least. If a signal was set to danger, that is to say it was red, which means you can't pass, right? Okay, well, listen, I'm trying,

all right. Oh, God. I'm sorry, Nova. Yes, so am I. A mechanical arm would raise up. When the train passed that arm, the arm would catch onto a lever

on board the train that would open the brake valve and stop the train, right? Or sometimes you'd have an arm that would lower from a gantry and that would smash a glass tube which is attached to the air brake system. that would vent all the air and stop the train, right?

It's entirely mechanical and save for wear and tear on the levers and, of course, replacing the glass tubes, this is entirely fail safe, right? This was implemented very early on in the New York City subway. This is presumably why they're meddling with, this is presumably what they're meddling with in taking of Pelham, 1, 2, 3 when you're down by the track. Yeah, they get out under the train and replace the glass tube with a stronger tube. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But these systems are later supplemented with automatic train control. That's ATC.

Not to be confused with the one that we had in GB that we introduced in 1905, 1906 or something, which is the GDBR had, which was also called ATC, automatic train control, and was basically the same design as British as like AWS is, which is with the magnet underneath. So that was 1906, yeah, that that was introduced on GDN. So we had that real early, and that was for signals and speed control. Yeah. So this tech has been around a while.

Yeah. In the United States, I don't think we get automatic train control until like the 1950s with like early electronics, you know, relays, stuff like that. ATC systems were usually used in conjunction with like cab signals. So you have a little indicator in the cab of the train to show what the next signal is going to be. the associated speed limit, so on and so forth. And ATC can and will override throttle inputs and apply brakes if a train is in overspeed

or, you know, for the layman speeding, right? And this is why in taking of Pelham, one, two, three, the train stops before South Ferry. ATS is overridden, but ATC steps in, stops the train when it enters the lower speed limit zones around South Ferry, right? So like a super fail-safe. Am I getting that right?

Well, this is the more sophisticated system. ATS is supposed to be the dumb, stupid system. Okay. This is an overlay to that that enforces speed limits, but it's not always installed everywhere. It's a little bit more expensive and difficult to implement. So a lot of times it's only installed where it's really needed. We'll get to that in the minute.

This system works well enough for telling trains what not to do, but we can go further into something called positive train control, right? And positive train control, PTC, that's when we take the systems above, turn them upside down, right? Rather than telling trains what they can't do, we explicitly tell trains what they can do and limit the actions accordingly. Yeah, these trains have had it too good for too long. Now they better not assume they can do anything. Yeah, yeah. Oh, you have to go to train jail.

Yeah, this would make the railway series a lot more boring. I'm a prison abolitionist, but for trains. This is the system that stops you from being able to take a Pelham one, two, three in the first place, right? This relies on a lot of modern electronics and horror horrors computers to run, right? Yeah. I find a computer extremely useful. I find the computer indispensable. That's the one. Thank you. Nova, of course you know the exact call.

So essentially there's a brain box onboard the train that can receive commands either from, you know, track side infrastructure, like signals, like little boxes with radios in them, like all that sort of stuff, or just on the radio overall. And it says you can run this train from this location to this location at this speed. And if you do anything else, you'll have hell to pay. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. But what if, what if you, what if there's like a diehard 4.0 type situation where the hackers who have kidnapped John McLean's daughter, hack into that and tell the train do a, taking a pal on one, two, three. Is that a good day to die hard? Yeah.

Is that the one I'm thinking of? Yeah. That's the, maybe the fifth one, yeah. Oh, whatever. I lost track of this subtitles. Free or die hard. That's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I believe you can just cut it out in the circuit breaker on the locomotive. Oh, okay, well, that's less fun. That's less compelling to me. Yeah, that's a little bit, a little bit. You don't need a laptop to do that. It's like that. It's a, you know, it's a bunch of code coming down, you know. It's like, no, you got to pull a circuit breaker.

You're fine. So these types of systems, like positive train control systems, they're common in Europe. You know, I want to say European train control systems. system is like that. I want to say basically everything is like... In the United States, we've had problems with it. And to understand that, we need to deviate for a second to talk about the chats worth derailment.

I can't imagine why we've derailed and then also we've had problems. Yeah. Those are my jokes. Oh, no. Oh, dear. Is that fire? Oh, that's a lot of fire. No, this is, this is well after the accident occurs.

That's, uh, those are fire trucks with lights. Oh, my bad. I have a very small. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. In 2008, a MetroLink train. MetroLink is the Los Angeles commuter rail agency.

A MetroLink train whacked into a freight train because the engineer was texting while driving. Don't do that, folks. Yeah, don't do that. But what if the text is really interesting? It's not. All right. What? Well, we'll figure that out when we finally do an episode on Chatsworth.

This is the mini episode on Chatsworth. That killed 20. 25 people. The reaction error was very swift. The Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 sailed through Congress and was signed by none other than President W. W. himself, right?

Is this going to be like Priya, where it's like one of the weirdly good things that W. did? Well, Nixon started the EPA. Things are weird. And legal services. This is complicated, right? Okay, okay. So among other things, it mandated.

They call it Justin Neo-Liberal Rosniak. Yeah. It mandated that the vast majority of the American Railroad Network be covered by some kind of positive train control system by 2015. It did not provide any funding for the same. Ah, okay. Yeah. Is this the one you were talking to me about where they just kept kicking the can down the road, right?

Yes. Okay. Thank you. So the result here was that the implementation of the population of the of positive train control by the freight railroads was extremely cheap and also sometimes kind of horrifying, right? It's all GPS based rather than having a bunch of infrastructure installed next to the rails, right?

It's not, because it's GPS based, it's not accurate enough to even tell what track a train is on when there's two or more parallel tracks. Oh, that's like axle counters aren't that expensive. You don't, they're not that expensive. It's not, oh, it's not. They wind up needing several extensions to the deadline, and even today coverage is a bit spotty. And a lot of time, positive train control on the freight railroads exists,

and if you're the engineer, it can make angry beefs at you, but it doesn't really have any control authority because the freight trains are too damn long and too poorly made up. and if there's a sudden uncommanded break application that can cause the derailment you're trying to prevent. Positive train suggestion. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's, yeah, go back to the Precision Schedule Railroading episode on that. Yeah.

So, M-Track and some northeastern commuter railroads develop a system called the Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System. That's ACEs, right? I like the wording back from the acronym. I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It uses conventional blindside equipment, you know, signals, you know, little radio transmitters, little, all the normal stuff, all the stuff they would use in Europe, right? All the stuff they would use in a more civilized railroading environment, right? It works really good. You know, it'll all but drive the train for you. It's not quite up to the scale of like what the Germans use on high speed lines where it's like you get on the high speed line, advance the throttle, the full, the whole, the signal system drives the train. train for you. But it's close, right? It's expensive. The equipment was expensive to install. It took a long time to install. There was no funding for it. They had to dip into their own

funding for this whole thing because, God forbid, not even the government will fund the government. Yeah. That's very stupid. Hearing an eagle screech, you know. Yeah. Come find out why our health care isn't free, et cetera. Did the Houthis ever find out why you don't have free health care? And God. This was one of the things about the PTC man. There's a couple things with the PTC mandate, you know. It don't make sense. Yeah.

The other thing that doesn't make sense is how we couldn't just wipe the Houthis off the face of the earth that we were so committed to it. Like, we have, we have Minuteman missiles. Like, what are we doing? I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying, do you want to close the Bapa-O-Mandab with fucking Fallout? I don't even care. Is this a plowshare situation again? I don't even care.

Anymore. Newk. Nuk everybody. So when you say Israeli intelligence turned you down? I, I, well, what I'm gonna do is a reverse USS Liberty C. Okay, now here's my diagram. Sure, sure. All right, yeah, yeah.

Is that any of the, is it a specific? Is it a epidemic? I'm doing it? Yes. Probably. Oh, fuck. Look, I, I have, I have, I have good word from the entire

news media that the worst anti-Semites are all Jewish, so, you know. Yeah, and they're all in the green policy as well. Yeah, they're only green party. That's it. That's true. My team sucks so much, man. You know, everybody's team does. There were a few railroads that were trying to do good faith efforts to install this

PTC system. A big one was, you know, SEPTA, southeastern Pennsylvania, transportation. authority that we have here in Philadelphia, who easily made the deadline, got absolutely no brownie points for it, almost went bankrupt. Jesus. That's up to baby. Let it ride.

But for Amtrak, the biggest issue was with radio spectrums, right? That's for the next slide. Here we go. Okay. Thank God for today's XKCD, because I wouldn't know how to describe this otherwise. I'm not a radio guy. I'm going to give it a go here. Positive train control requires radio communication between the computers on the trains

and the computers in the wayside signal equipment so they can go beep and boop at each other. Yeah, computers love to do that. Yeah, exactly. In order so that a beep is not confused with a boop, this needs to be relatively high fidelity, right? Ideally, it ought to be able to be transmitted fairly long distance. so you avoid more, you know, line-side wires and cables, stuff that's going to clutter up the railroad right-of-way, right? Hmm. You also need multiple channels of radio so different trains, beeps and boops don't get crossed, right?

Yes. And that requires space on the electromagnetic spectrum. Mm-hmm. And that space is regulated and allocated by the Federal Communications Commission, right? Yep. You have to buy space on the electromagnetic spectrum to use it. You can't just say, I'm going to transmit on this frequency. It's like, no, if you're going to use that, especially for any kind of industrial purpose, like the railroad,

you have to buy that piece of spectrum. No one else is allowed to use it. Right. Yeah. This is a fascinating way where you can do something. The pirate radio episode. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, this is one of the coolest things. that you can do in the privacy of your own home that will actually really annoy the federal government and cause you to get your door kicked down is just transmit stuff on like bands you're not supposed to. Yes. So this turns out not to be a huge problem for the freight railroads who simply bought random frequencies on the secondary market, since they didn't have a huge amount of traffic density.

Like there was not, they don't run that many trains in any given location except that. You expect to be tuning into your local sort of news station, it hasn't been bought up by Clear Channel yet, and instead they got gazumped by Norfolk Southern, and all you're hearing is haunts, beeps. Yeah, exactly, exactly. A bunch of nays and whinnies. So they were also only installing PTC where they absolutely had to, and they were generally slow walking the process, right? M-Track had high traffic density, relied on wayside instruments rather than GPS.

They were making a good faith effort to install positive train control quickly. Thus, they required multiple channels, generally a lot of space on the spectrum for ASIS to work properly, right? I wasn't expecting access to the spectrum to be a problem for railroads, given the people who are interested in them. Oh, my God. Booh. Why is my bum collar beeping? Oh, that's Gareth, actually. I don't know if I do that.

Relatively early on, it was determined the best location for positive train control was on the spectrum somewhere around 218 to 222 megahhertz. That's where I am. That's a lot of autism. God damn.

The spectrum is determined in megahertz, right? Or in hertz, that's the frequency. right? As we go down, it's higher frequency. Yeah, there's also Avis, which isn't as good, but they do try harder. Yeah, yeah. I like to hear the sound of me almost getting fired, whip past my head, you know? We can't do that. We've lost the technology.

The problem with this area of the spectrum is that this is also a good area for a lot of other things, most notably terrestrial broadcast television, right? I don't remember that. 218 to 222 megahertz was right above Channel 13. But there was a suspicious, underused gap in the spectrum there for interactive video and data services, right? What the hell is that?

Porn. It's porn. It's porn. Yeah, it's porn. It's porn. Well, it was that and some other stuff. No, it's porn. Shut up. we're here in the podcast industry doing internet radio. Interactive video and data services was the opposite. It was radio internet. Oh, C-Fax.

Yeah. The big use case for this was supposed to be interactive radio and television. Like you're watching QVC, you see some horrible new salad spinner or something like that. You can use your TV remote to buy the thing on the spot before you think better of it. Press the red button. Yeah. I mean, I've enjoyed Gareth and I both having the sort of British person when CFax is mentioned reaction. Meanwhile, you're just stuck with consumerism.

Yeah, man. Yeah. This was sort of the main use case, and no one was using this by 2011 when M-Track came to the FCC to ask about this frequency band, as well as another band at 220 megahertz that was up for auction soon. And M-Track goes to the FCC, and they say, hey, you're the government, we're the government, Obama's in charge. I know that you know that ain't nobody is using this shit. So could you just give it to us, right?

Spot us one. A buddy, pal. It's in the public interest. Come on. And, you know, they even pitched the idea that these frequencies could be permanently allocated to positive train control nationwide as a public good. You know, what with the unfunded mandate and all that's, you know, you, you could really make a case for just give it to us.

Yeah. Yeah. Understandably, yeah. And like save, you know, like make the whole railroad safer and crucially run better, more efficient, you know, which is good for the economy. And so the FCC says, fuck you, buy it from Verizon or Clearchat or someone. God dare, I hate the cover. And because Amtrak doesn't have the money to do so, we're talking about.

we're talking about $500 million per megahertz. Why? This, because that's like Channel 14 right there. Oh, think of all the stuff on Channel 14. Oh, yeah, but can you imagine Amtrak TV? Oh, that'd be pretty good. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we had to disband it because the foamers were getting a little out of hand trying to fuck the TVs. What are you going to do, right? It's not as bad trying to fucking digital TV as a cathode rate tube. I'll say that. Less dangerous. Oh. The C.R.T stands for cock and ball torture. Imagine the feeling you get of touching a CRT screen, but for your dick. But with my dog, no.

All your hair stands up, but like down there. Do you think it, yeah. My cubes are just straight as an arrow. Yeah. So anyway, we're talking about 500. 500 million dollars per megahertz. This significantly delays the installation and most notably the activation of the advanced civil aces. Yeah, asses, whatever.

However you want to say it, it's fine. My ass is not activated. Yes. Throw that ass in a Cases in a circle? They wind up cobbling together a full megahertz over the course of about four years, meaning they can finally start the final parts of AIS installation in 2014. In the meantime, we're modernizing the Northeast Corridor, specifically the regional trains, with the Siemens ACS 64, the M-Track City Sprinter 64, also known as the last good locomotive delivered in America.

Looks to me like a big chunky old Nokia mobile phone. Yeah. That's how you know it's good. Exactly. And these things are ordered during a brief period of optimism for M-Track, around 20. when the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was passed and promised to bring high-speed rail to all corners of the country. They lied to us. They lied to us.

Well, what happened was when these Republican governors were presented with funds for high-speed rail, they said, can we use it for highways? And the DOT said, no, you can't. That's not in the law. And they said, well, have your money back. Hooray. We got to kill so many fucking people, man. So many people have to die. All of the high-speed rail funding went into the Northeast Corridor and California high-speed rail.

Is this a little related to the way I have a question? Is this related at all to the North Carolina? Didn't North Carolina take a bunch of Amtrak money and set up some stuff, or is that not related to this? Good question. I don't know offhand. I know that like the big notable funding rejections were Ohio and Wisconsin. John Kisick, you son of a whore. And Florida.

Sink it. Sink it and take me with it. You are throwing good money after bad at that point if you're spending money in Florida. Let's be honest. Yeah, well, no, they managed to get it built privately and now it's gone bankrupt. It's a mall you have to fly to. Isn't that exciting? Yeah.

Dickheads. So the M-Track City Sprinter promised to bring M-Track into the 21st century, finally aligning it with international best practices with essentially off-the-shelf European-style equipment. Now, they're still pulling 40-year-old Amfleets, and the previous AEM-7 was also basically off-the-shelf European equipment. But, you know, that's details, right? The Americans who want to live in a slightly more European-style America are going to get to do that. Yeah, exactly.

But these are replacing the AEM sevens, you know, the toasters, the meatballs, and the HHP8s, which were lemons. They were bad. Very bad locomotives on all Northeast regional Keystone and long distance trains on the Northeast Corridor. I don't know what else you can say about them. These are good locomotives. They perform as advertised. They pretty much worked out of the box, all skills we've since lost. but coupled with infrastructure improvements, including the installation of ASIS on the entire Northeast Corridor,

the ACS-64 would provide Northeast Regional Service that was faster, more reliable, safer than ever. The locomotive started being delivered in 2014, but ACE's installation would take a little longer for full installation, testing, and certification. Again, largely because difficulties in acquiring the radio spectrum, right? God damn it. Yeah. So they're still running on the old system, which brings us to May 12th, 2015. Oh, go to date.

On train 188 from Washington, D.C. to New York City, right? This train leaves 30th Street Station at 9.10 p.m. Just over two-thirds of the way to New York City on time, right? You have one-year-old locomotive 601 on the head end with engineer Brandon Bostion. right here. We should talk about him for a second. Interesting to talk about a like a named individual because that's not typically something we tend to do.

So he studied to become an accountant. He hated that. He signed on to M-Track as a conductor, eventually promoted to locomotive engineer. I love that for him. Yeah. By all accounts, he's someone who was very meticulous about his job.

He was an experienced railroader. He cared deeply about safety. was an actual railroad enthusiast as well as it being his job. And what's more, he was a poster. Yes. He was pathological about safety. He was, he posted on an old stuffy forum,

you had to pay money to join. We all know it. That's right. No, no. Train orders.com. Oh, okay. God damn, you can't do this to me. You can't reach wrong after Ben Ghazi?

So there were some alarmingly prescient posts from him over there. I had to look these up in a New York Post article that really tried to dig into his posting history that was like, man, who crashed train, interested in safety? Mysterious, yeah. I know, right? But he was not like an old school guy. He's generally, he was generally pretty critical of railroad safety, the safety culture that had developed among. railroad employees, especially the culture of silence around like minor operational irregularities and so forth.

You know, it's the 21st century. Why is it still the Wild West out here on the railroad? Does that track have like a kind of a near-miss thing, you know, like the normal, how you report something where something terrible could have happened and didn't? You, there is now an FRA near-miss hotline, but it's very new. I don't know exactly when they put it. in. But yeah, that's that sort of thing is

relatively new to the railroad. And not like culturally embraced, I would imagine that either. No. No. I'm kind of getting a man off my own heart feeling about this guy. I'm going to be honest at you. He's posting. Yeah. He doesn't like the old school hierarchy

of the railroads. This all seems familiar to me. Yeah, lots of posts pointing out how railroads have in many instances had like 80 or 90 years to implement basic safety infrastructure, just haven't done that, leading to accidents like Chatsworth, which could have been prevented, you know,

not with PTC, but with like automatic train stop would have prevented that, right? Yep. Yeah. And generally, you know, these posts are very critical of how much can go wrong on the railroad

due to simple human error where even a safety conscious and experienced engineer could cause, you know, could do a simple human error, how so few examples, existing systems designed to prevent said human error from occurring were, you know, they, they were not installed over vast swaths the United States Railroad Network,

including, of course, the Northeast Corridor. These sort of complaints, yeah, they should be familiar to anyone who listens to this podcast. The vast majority of safety problems on the railroad can be fixed with technology from before when my grandfather was born, right? And everything old is so again. Yeah, railroads have simply sat on. their hands that whole time.

I'm not saying he's railroad Serpico trying to change the culture from the inside. But as some of us should know, speaking out in public about these safety issues can come back to bite you. Huh. Not really. Yeah.

He is one step close to being railroad Serpico on account of having a cool hat. That's true. That is true. You also could have other factors working against you there on the job like Brandon is one of the first openly gay engineers, I want to say. Oh, wow.

Certainly, certainly like a trailblazer and that sort. He, he, I know he went out to, what you call it, we went out to San Francisco to support gay marriage. I'm not super familiar with that aspect. Oh, Folsom Street, just dress as a locomotive, literally running a train on someone. Yeah, I got you. This is, this is a difficult position to be in an industry, which is, to this day, still run by sort of traditional toxic masculinity types of guys, right?

Yeah. Old school boys. It's like one of about every interest in the world now, every specific one, is like 50% chud, 50% queer. That's true. Like that that is what the railroad definitely feels like right now is, you know, okay, is someone interested in trains? Well, you know, there's some kind of, some kind of, you know, they got. some kind of gender going on or they're Hitler. So we're sat here.

We've just had a date read to us, which is a horrifying portent. But at this point, we're kind of rooting for this guy, right? Yeah, we're definitely rooting for this guy, yeah. So he's bringing the train north out of 30th Street Station. Excuse me. He's bringing the train.

Yeah, he's bringing the train north out of 30th Street Station. He goes through zoo interlocking, which I asked someone today, on the secret discord, wait, is the northeast corridor north, south, or east-west? Apparently, it changes at zoo interlocking. So he's going north from 30th Street Station. Then he's going east from zoo interlocking, right? You have a secret discord? Yes, you're, Nova, I think you're in.

I don't pay a lot of attention. Bleep that, bleep that. It's very, you all know how difficult it is to sketch. schedule things with me. So it goes east over the Schuylkill River. He hears some radio chatter about kids throwing rocks at trains. Yeah. Classic class time.

It's always sunny, right, yeah. And we got to talk about kids throwing rocks at trains. This is a less common occurrence than it once was now that kids have social media, right? but it's very difficult to prevent kids from throwing rocks at trains because rocks are readily available and so are trains, right? And it's fun. It's a safe and legal thrill. It is, yeah, I can't argue with that.

If a rock hits in a bad enough place, it can cause serious damage or even injury. This was a bad enough problem in like the 1960s and 70s, you know, the peak years of atmospheric lead that commuter railroads, especially in the Northeast, installed these things generally referred to as ghetto bars. Oh, that's not racially charged at a town. Oh, dear.

Yeah. On the windshields of locomotives, right? They're just steel bars that prevent the rock from getting to the windshield. Make the train look like a police riot van. Pretty much, pretty much, yeah. I mean, there's some, the M-Track E-Ciss. had some particularly aggressive ones. You might ask, was this only a problem in urban areas?

No. Well, actually, the rocks specifically were in urban areas because in rural areas, the kids all had 22s. I was going to say, yeah. Eventually, both these problems were solved by making every window on every train bulletproof. Jesus Christ, you're not a real country. You're a collection of 300 million sociopaths.

With GTIs and guns. But a big enough rock can still cause some damage, especially on an older train, such as the type SEPTA runs. I know not with what weapons, train war three will be fought, but train war four will be fought with rocks because rocks are more effective than guns.

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do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that back to the show so in this case hold on i need to i need to make an alteration to this this news image because this comes i forget where this comes from but they have the delaware river down here i just want to point out the uh the scoicle They've deleted the scookle. Yeah, exactly. Says way. Here's the scoicle. The Philadelphia Super Lajara.

It's just messing with the scoicle. No great loss. I'll tell you that right now. I enjoyed cycling on the scoicle. It was lovely. Did you enjoy cycling in the river, Gareth? Is that a thing that you did? Okay, okay, okay.

Point, Julie acknowledged and taken. So in this case, a septa train was passing underneath the Diamond Street Bridge, right? And someone threw a rock at it in such a way the rock broke through the windshield, possibly injured the locomotive engineer. Jesus. Yep.

Yeah. Brandon Boston hears this chatter on the radio. He knows he's coming up on the scene quick, so he's got to do a couple things here. When the engineer was hit by the rock, he put the train into emergency, right? having put the train into emergency on track one, this triggers a few things. Number one is that someone has to go out and do a visual inspection of the train

before they can start it moving again. This is again, this all happens very quickly. But Brandon Bostian's got to do a few things. He's got a radio back that he's hot on two. He is passing the train at about 80 miles, 70 miles an hour. Excuse me. This is a 70 mile an hour section, right? Just blow remaining windows out.

Yeah, he's got a, he's got to hit the horn really hard to warn personnel who may be on the track or near the track that there is another train coming through, right? He has to, you know, and obviously look out for personnel. I mean, there's not much you can do other than lay on the horn, but you will be worried about hitting personnel on the track in this sort of situation. Maybe personally getting hit by a second rock, I don't know, right? the newspaper president a second rock yeah so you know you're certainly in a spot where um you know even if personnel are not on the tracks uh you want to make sure they're warned because a train coming by at 80 miles an hour right next to them is going to startle them right you don't want you don't want to cause an injury that way so you know there's suddenly a lot more workload here

than there would be otherwise right right so this is done what time of year is this again this This is May. So it's 9pm. It's probably dark. It gets dark. It's dark. Yeah, it's dark. Yeah, it's dark.

It is. Yeah. We know, we only get like a few days of light after nine o'clock here in Philly. Like maybe like four. Oh, is Glasgow. Yeah. So yeah. So I'm just thinking that, you know, if you're the driver, sorry, the engineer of this local, our guy, you know,

Brandon is sat there. He's going to be peering through that window trying to just, you know, Even though there's nothing to do that, it doesn't stop you from just wanting to make sure that the line in front of you is clear of personnel. Exactly. That's going to be occupying a lot of his, a lot of his, yeah, it's going to be occupying a lot of his sort of,

kind of mental capacity. I'm not experienced as to the sort of cognitive division of labor for a train driver, right? I am experienced in identifying the cognitive division of labor for a poster, right? And as a poster, I know that when some shit like this happens, any type of shit that affects your workday, you, a portion of your brain is thinking,

what is the post I'm going to make about this later when I'm off work, right? That's not a judgment. That is not a judgment. That is not a judgment. Right. Yeah. You can't help it.

It's just in there, you know? So anyway, the radio broadcast continues until he's well past North Philadelphia station up here, right? North Philadelphia is going to be important later. It always is. Go else. He never gets like a reply to, uh, to, to, to hot on two, but whatever.

He makes it through fine, but he's still like distracted, right? He never gets a reply at all? Yeah. Oh, Jesus. Okay. Well, there was, there were two trains passing that one train at the same time. So it was a whole, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff. There's a couple other mitigating factors.

Like he was normally in a Sela engineer, um, you know, he was qualified on the ACS 64, uh, but this was not his normal run. And this was because his train coming in was delayed. He was put on a different train going back to New York. But yeah, it's important to have situational awareness when you're driving the train, right? Never heard of it. No, no, I'm very rarely aware of the situation. I know.

That's a goddamn truth. Jesus Christ. Now, this can be assisted by landmarks or even a general vibe, right? around Frankfurt Junction, it was like so. If you're traveling east, before the curve, the railroad has frequent underpasses and overpasses, right, and was surrounded by various dilapidated brick industrial buildings. After the curve, the railroad had frequent overpasses and underpasses and was surrounded by various dilapidated brick industrial buildings.

Yeah. I've done this to the railroad. I can confirm. Yes. Both north and south of it, very, very similar. Yeah. And the one guy who hates, was it Dick Anderson, that he had the graffiti? Oh, Richard, yeah, Richard Anderson, that's what's his name.

What's his name's, uh, car storage. Yeah, yeah. I would say, you know, jokingly that this is the other one reason to be an architect to chud, but the problem is that you'd still have the same homogeneity. So it would be like, yeah, in this case, the railroad has frequent overpasses and underpasses and is surrounded by various chudded out buildings. Yeah, pretty much. Yep.

So if you're going eastward, right, towards the curve, the speed limits 80 miles an hour, and the speed limit on the curve is 50, and the speed limit past the curve is 110, right? A train traveling 80 miles an hour would likely make it through Frankfurt Junction, albeit very uncomfortably. Everybody gets thrown to the side, somebody spills their drink. It'll be like that time, there was one train that went through the Elizabeth S curve at 100 miles an hour. And that guy got-G-Forces, you don't want to experience, right. That guy got super fired.

So you would make it through very uncomfortably. So M-Track and predecessor railroads had only elected to install automatic train control that would slow the train on the westward tracks, right, on the inside. Boston, however, had become distracted. And he believed himself to be past the curve. He began advancing the throttle. The train speed crept up to 85, 90, 95, 100, 1005. Oh, boy. He sees the curve coming, snaps back into focus, hits the emergency break, and...

It goes out as a face-up or apex, right? At 9.24 p.m., the locomotive leaves the curve at about 102 miles an hour. Fuck. The locomotive stays. upright. Well built. The first... I'll give them that. Yeah. The first coach, business class, wraps itself around a big heavy catenary pole. Right? Um, the catenary poles, uh, modern catenary poles are designed to break away. These catenary poles are over 100 years old and are big girders embedded in concrete. They do not. They are the ones they would be...

School of Engineering. Yeah. These would be landmarks in fallout in Fallout Philadelphia. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. You know, they'll still be here a thousand years from now.

At Ross's basement, nook. The business class car wraps itself around a catenary pole, takes it out partially, and continues to travel down the tracks

having been folded into a sort of pancake sort of situation. Right? Jesus Christ. The second coach is the quiet car. It falls on its side, comes to rest in a siding over here. Car three and four both turn over, a little bit less violently, right? Car five is completely jackknifed.

Car six and seven derail. They remain on the track. This is a very nasty violent derailment, very high speed, over very quickly at least. one of the small blessings here is that usually in this yard here the interchange yard with Conrail there's a lot more tank cars full of molten phenol oh Jesus that's for the big scary advanced six chemical plant in Briseburg apparently it was a slow week in your city it was a slow week at the plant that that week so uh so it was uh kind of uh it was emptier than it Usually, small mercies, I guess.

Yeah, lots of injuries here that take a long time to recover from, you know, blunt force trauma, organ displacement, like there. Yeah, real nasty. Ask a stupid question, maybe, but what's the kind of crashworthiness on these amphilets like in general? I don't think they ever expect to, well, I'll tell you what. The thing is, it's turn, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's actually extremely strong. They just turn the content. They're just designed

such that in a crash like this you go in and hose down the contents before returning it to ZERN. Yeah. Yeah. This is squishy. Except the business class car. The business class one had some absolutely spectacular yeah, I was going to say that had some seriously spectacular force involved. But all the others you can see are in pretty good Nick.

There's two things I want to say from looking at it from crash weather's perspective. One is like the overturning strength of these. The strength these vehicles is very good. But what that means is there is no collision energy management. So the people inside these trains are being submitted to some very undamped extreme forces, which is not good. Another thing that helps, though, in this situation is the fact that other than those

that suffered extreme forces, well, only one, car one, the couplers remained intact. So again, that really helps with managing the forces through the train. It helps with decelerating as much of the train as safely as possible. So actually in this situation, the crash where there's those budcars of those Amfleet, should I say, is really, like, is helpful. But there is no energy absorption. So yeah, there's a lot of extreme accelerations and decelerations for the humans inside it. Like a bifur dolphin, but on land. How exciting.

You got, you, you got survivable space, but you don't have, you don't necessarily have, you don't survival G forces. Yeah, I don't want to be the metal zone. Steel frame cars where it's like, yeah, car looks fine, you know? Concrete floors, baby. Yeah.

Yeah, but they're like the meatbag inside is not in as good shape. Yeah, it's... And like, yeah, like even in the case, so, so you know, spinning this back to the Bedford crash, the recentish Bedford crash in the UK, which was at 50 mile an hour collision

between two trains, a stationary one and a moving one. Even with all the, both of those trains are pretty modern, even with a 50 mile an hour end on collision, which is pretty favorable conditions with modern trains and a lot of collision energy management, those forces were still enough to cause a lot of very serious injuries. You know, 100 people with pretty serious injuries. So, yeah, if you think about the extremity of force going on here.

Yeah. Yeah, this is not something that was, I would say, they didn't design for crash energy management back in, 1970, whatever, when these cars were built. Same cars were still using now. They're good. Yep. Yeah. Well, nobody's building any new ones.

Yeah, that's true. Run it back, folks. There's a lot of horrible stories out of this wreck. There's also one fun one that was published in The Inquirer about assistant conductor, Thomas O'Brien, who was in Car 7, whose first reaction after the wreck, you know, he survived almost without a scratch, he got the wind knocked out of them. And he was like, okay, so like, I'm invincible, right?

Yeah. That would also be my logic. There is nothing wrong with that. And then he was like, oh, shit, where's my hat? Because if he doesn't have a hat, he cannot project authority and competence as a conductor. Lion. That's just flatly correct. This man is a lion.

Yes, absolutely. So he finds his hat. He evacuates the last four cars. And anyone who is unable to, like, walk out for the first responders, he marks with a glow stick because it is dark out. That's good, that's good thinking. This is aligned to my interests, which is more positions should have snappy uniforms that project authority and competence because it's a safety factor.

Yeah, it is a safety thing. Yeah. Another big worry here was that, you know, you got the 25-kilvolt overhead wires. They could still be live. They weren't because I think the way that everything got pulled down, de-energize them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This did hamper rescue efforts because you had to treat them like they were live. And so, well, here's that business class car.

Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Oh, dear. Yeah. Yeah. You notice it's the little, it's done the twist. Amphlets only do this when they're very distressed. Yeah.

I mean, I've seen. Yeah, I've seen plane crashes where the fuselage has been more together, you know? Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, this thing got really ripped to shreds. It's surprising as many people survived in there as they did. Another, I mean, yes, this one has completely disintegrated. And in some ways, the severity of the destruction of this vehicle is partly because of its rigidity and its lack of energy absorbing means that when it does go, it goes spectacularly. But there is another feature on here that I want to give in its favor,

which is the truck or in normal English the bogey at least one of them and possibly the other one still attached that is otherwise a five ton plus projectile that causes a lot of damage when it flies around it and at high energy collision like this and as you can see still attached so that is you know even in death this car was trying to save the others you know yeah because that could have easily flown off and impacted another railroad car yeah well yeah god the fucking molten phenol

yeah well god yeah anyone who's more familiar with British, and I'm watching, hello to the British weirdos, I can only apologize. Watching this, like, this looks like Aftanervate aftermath, right? That's probably the thing that it looks very similar to. And unfortunately, our Mark 3 coaches just sneeze their bogeys off at the slightest hint of a, of a derail. And there are pictures from that same crash. Those photos from Ufftonnerve it, and indeed in any of the major HST Mark 3 crashes of which there are plenty in the late 90s, early 2000s, where the bogeys come off and they just cablamo into coaches and cause severe damage and kill people.

So yeah, the fact that it's held on to that bogey, that truck is, is again a point in its favor. I'm not saying make it more rigid is the right approach, Nova May. But there are pouncing. Yes. I think the catenary pole was a big contributor here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So when the dust settled, seven people were dead, and eighth would die in hospital. 46 people were critically injured. They were 245 passengers and eight crew on the train in total. Boston himself survived the incident, but with a hell of a concussion, which results in the most controversial issue of the wreck.

He does not remember anything between North Philadelphia Station and the site of the wreck. Yeah, I mean, I don't blame him. You don't need to have the concussion to have that. You can have an entirely kind of psychogenic amnesia, you know? One of the things which causes difficulty in the investigation is that when he regains consciousness, his first instinct is, of course, to get his phone out of his bag, turn it on, turn off airplane mode, and call 911. Yes, sweetie. Hang on.

Hi, Red. Hi, Ren. Hi. Listeners, he did not have the car key on him. Oh, okay. We're keeping all with this in, I assume. I'm going to be executed. Okay.

Good run, lads. Good run, lads. Yep. It's been lovely. I put it in my butt. Ah, okay. You got to stop doing those stuff. Not in general.

You know, I'm not going to sort of suggest that to you, but like stuff you need. Yeah. So, yeah, he gets his phone out of his bag and turns it on and turns off airplane mode, because everyone in the railroad is really paranoid about cell phones now. And he calls 911. By that point, the incident had been called in multiple times. He walked down the train. He eventually lets passenger borrow his cell phone to call someone.

Eventually, he winds up the triage station. I'm guessing this is going to, like, fuck up whatever investigation they want to do to find out, hey, when was your phone on last? Right? Because, hey, taking a sort of like 100 mile an hour, you know, train derailment to the face is not great for your decision making. Yes. First responders get to the scene pretty quickly.

They're confused as to how to access the site. Eventually they get in, set up a triage site, start cutting trap people out of the railroad cars, something like 200 people are taken to area hospitals. You know, some people are pretty severely injured. Some people, well, we'll see one of the injury reports later. Oh, no. Well, no, that's one of the funny ones. Oh, okay.

Sure. The very next day, the GOP-controlled House Transportation Committee votes to gut M-Track funding. And they're also all absolutely indignant at the thought that chronic underfunding of America's chronically underfunded National Passenger Railroad may have caused this disaster or that increasing levels of underfunding might. Did I say increasing levels of underfunding? That is correct. Increasing levels of underfunding, yeah. These increasing levels of underfunding might lead to more such disasters in the future. Luckily, this was a committee vote that didn't go anywhere, but the symbolism was noted there. You know, so this is, this is, well, yeah, no one cared anyway.

So we'll talk about the investigation here a bit. There's a lot of stuff that comes out quickly that was wrong. One of the big ones was, was this the second rock? No, it was not. No, it's just shit being flung everywhere by a train no longer on the train. tracks. Yeah, yeah. The FBI quickly determines it's not terrorism. The NTSB comes in. After a few interviews, you know, looking at the site, looking at everything, they determined this was due to a loss of situational awareness precipitated by the radio call and subsequent actions that the radio call required.

The black box on the train indicated smooth acceleration, as you would normally command up to 110 miles an hour, as would be expected for the route eastward of Frankfurt Junction, with an emergency break application just short of the curve. Question. Why is that, and I know the answer to this, and I know, you know, why it can't be like this, which is money, but why can't there be two guys in there, you know, so that maybe when one of them has to do a bunch of stuff working the radio, the other one, can be like focused on the track like you do on a plane, maybe on a large aircraft. I mean, so this is, there's a complicated, like, history of union rules about that.

Mm. Although this is a point that the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainman brings up later is why do freight trains have two people in the cab and passenger trains only have one? Oh, because passengers value a valued way less than freight. Yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the story of second manning and the demise of second manning in in gb under british rail is in and of itself its own story yeah uh it's a good question and and and it was one that was sort of the unions gave it up on the premise of um you know changes to to to their bargaining powers but better salaries

and it's it's no one comes clean out of that story it doubles the price of the of the running costs inside that cab but you know as you know as you say that there are obvious benefits from doing it i mean I have a horrible liberal opinion here, which is that I'm very glad that unionized train drivers make good money, right? And so, you know, they're accurately valued in that way. I would sooner that there maybe be twice as many people making decent money, you know, and things be safer. But what can you do? Well, certainly if you don't have a positive train control, a fully active controlling system in the train. Like I can accept that you have it.

You can bring the efficiency of a single person in that cab if you have a fully protective, much higher level of risk reduction signaling system, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the one of the things about one person portraying operations is you expect that, yeah, you have a lot of fail safes and redundancies. Although one of the things, you know, here in the United States

is it's like, okay, if I'm on the Northeast corridor, you know, I have the advantage of, civil speed enforcement system, and that's fine. One person per cab, sure, we got so many fail safes. But if I'm on the California Zephyr and I'm out in like dark territory, I still got one guy in the cab. Yeah, you can write a rule for that, Ross. So it's not hard.

I can do it right now, which is, is there active ACS-E-S on the train? Bullion, yes, single person in cab. No, two people in cab. Did it? I did it, folks. It's a bit complicated standard, and I'm right now. God damn. Faster than Claude could do it even.

So what I'm hearing is we should mandate this and then not fund it. Oh, yes. This loves that shit, yeah. So this is, in the end, a brain fart, right? Yeah. One which could have been entirely prevented if the AIS system, which was already installed, was active. but if ifs and butts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Which sort of, if you go back to contemporary articles on this incident, there's a common theme which I'd sum up as, hey, look at this dumbass. He heard something on the radio and forgot where he was. What a chucklehead, right? Or as equally as commonly.

That's interesting. That's interesting. I'm going to call you on the phone right now I'm going to need you to read me the numbers on top of this locomotive. Yeah. Or equally as commonly disbelief that a loss of situational awareness could have even occurred, right? Early is cool. I'm going to call you on the phone right now and have you described to me what was on three slides back.

Early reporting indicated Brandon Bastian was on his cell phone. And that's something that never quite left the public consciousness. No, it didn't. There's a narrative of negligence that never quite gets stamped out. And this has ramifications in the criminal proceedings, right? You might ask the criminal proceedings. That was going to be my question, yeah. Yep.

Yes, of course, because this must have been deliberate. But we'll get to that later. Oh, yes, yes, because the poster's folly. Yeah. So we'll talk about the big civil lawsuit, right? Now, the M-Track Reform and Accountability Act of 1997 limits M-Track's liability to $200 million per incident, right? The torts were reformed. Ah, damn, yeah.

Some threats to the constitutionality of this limit end up bending the rule. M-Track settles for $265 million in October. of 2016 to be split among 125 victims and the victims families with more money. I knew offhand how much an airline would get, you know, sort of get done for for killing, like seven, killing eight people. Yeah, less. I might gut feeling is less, actually. The thing I was going to say was...

So I just, I just searched. Yeah, go on. Airline eight dead settlement. And it was $15 million. Jesus. That's nothing. That sounds about right. Okay.

And even Boeing in the one of the 737 max lawsuits was 28 million that killed a combined 346 people. Jesus Christ. That's nothing. That's nothing. How is Boeing losing money? Like they're playing with house money. How are they tanking?

Yeah, exactly. The other thing I'm thinking here is 265 million pays for that paying for, like, like 600 kilohertz of bandwidth for PTC. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think what it's almost gonna end up factually paying for here is a lot of lawyers. Like, you know, you can, you can do some sort of like client maths here and go 125 million victims, $260 million. Everybody got $2 million.

No, I'm back. No, they did not. No, they did not receive that much money. They received many, many, many, many dollars less than that. Yeah, good grief. The federal government has sent you a sympathy card, and your lawyer is buying a house. Your lawyer is buying the Baltimore Orioles.

Yes. That's the guy. I'm not making that up. Peter Angelos, the lawyer who handled Maryland's part of the tobacco settlement, bought the Baltimore fucking Orioles with the money. Jesus. Yep.

Nope, there you go, Nova. Well, that's, I would say that's closure on that particular point. Why did I drop out of law school to do this instead? I could have been buying the Baltimore Orioles. I don't know what an Oriole is. I'm pretty certain it's the thing that goes around the nipple, but I could be buying it. Well, that's the Baltimore areola's much less possible.

Well, that's not much more popular, but. I don't know. Maybe that'll be the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, T-girl baseball team. I'm sorry. Anyway. We do dignity well on this show, yeah. So anyway, as I said,

threats to the constitutionality of the limit and up bending the rule, M-Track sells for $265 million in October 2016 to be split among 125 victims and the victim's families with more money available to anyone else who files suit. against M-Track.

This was not enough for some folks, though. Somebody's got to go to prison, right? Someone has to fucking pay for this. And I think we've gotten through how this is a deep systemic issue, which has roots in railroad safety culture, lack of investment, FCC being bastards. The thing is, I'm not opposed to some of those people going to prison. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. A long string of events which culminated in one man having a brain fart and crashing a train. But what if none of that mattered? What if we fart was the crime? Criminal charges against Brandon Bostion were prepared. And Philadelphia District Attorney, Seth Williams, does one of the very few decent things he ever did

and decides not to press charges. Thanks, Seth, a piece of shit. In case you wondering why I'd say he's a piece of shit, he was indicted on 23 counts, count on 23, of bribery extortion and fraud. Huh. Well, that was a piece of shit. At least, at least didn't feel the need or the viability of just torturing this poor guy even more. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it goes, this was a clear case, a human error. This is clearly like, there's no criminal thing here. No malice, no deliberate actions that could be proven. And the lawyers for the family is involved in the incident. I'm not, they get really angry. I'm not sure exactly what happens here.

It sounds like some strings were pulled. Three days after that announcement, no charges would be pressed. Hold on, I lost my place here. On May 12, 2017, municipal court judge Marsha Nefield orders prosecutors to file involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment charges against Boston.

Needless. Seth Williams, wipes his hands of the matter and pawns off the case to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro. I've heard of this guy. Boom! Boom! Keep back. Why whenever this guy comes up, do I keep seeing a diagram of a person with a bunch of stab wounds?

With a bunch of 27 stab wounds in the back of the head. That's a great way to commit suicide. You know? Yeah. Yeah. You know? So this guy, Brandon Boste, he's like one of the few guys with the foresight to see how bad railroad safety culture has become. He was meticulous at his job. He loved his job. He had a perfect

safety record. He was talking about how to make the railroad safer, pointing out the flaws. He had a pretty serious boo-boo that was entirely preventable by the better safety culture that he was always talking about. There's no motive here. The train wasn't even late. There was no reason to go faster. There's no evidence to be found. Pennsylvania Attorney General, Josh Shapiro decides, yeah, this is the guy who needs to be made an example of. This is a fucking guy. It's time. The only thing Josh Shapiro cares more about than Josh Shapiro's career is his quote,

and I'm quoting here deliberately, faith, because it's real fucking weird for a Jewish guy as a Jewish guy to talk about your faith using the word faith. Oh, I believe in my, well, then you wouldn't fucking believe in this, dickhead. Yeah. He also, he also was kind of served with the IDF, but that's, that's a different. So anyway, Dickhead. Folks, it's time to go after the lowest guy on the totem pole. Yeah, that guy's had

too good for too long. Yeah, exactly. Bostin was looking at 200 counts of reckless endangerment, eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, and one count of causing a catastrophe. You know, when I said that they were going to do flight to a guy,

I don't, like, Jesus Christ. So he's basically, looking at infinity years in prison. And in flight, Denzel Washington did something wrong. Yeah, it's the plane upside down. Yeah, it's not supposed to go that way around. It's supposed to go the other way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Philadelphia Municipal Court judge Thomas Garrett dismissed all counts against Boston after a four-hour preliminary hearing. I know that's like, you know, very quick as far as the sort of wheels of justice go, you know. But like, that's, even, just accepting the sort of time

leading up to it of some of the most severe kind of anxiety I can imagine four hours of this shit just to get like laughed out of court basically now I'm sure it stops there though

I'm sure the humiliation ritual stops there fucking sure yeah this was a travesty a breach of justice so gratuitous so vile so completely against the interests of the public of decent Godfure folk everywhere. Suck my dick, Josh.

The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office appealed the ruling just a few months later on February 6th, 2018, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Kathleen Streeter Lewis reinstated all criminal charges against Boston. I thought to get

persecuted like this, you had to have like done something, you know? Maybe that's a naive, sort of liberal thing. In fact, it is a naive liberal belief on my part, but like Jesus fucking Christ. would an innocent man be acquitted of all charges? There was a second trial.

Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott dismissed all charges. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Oh, we just keep doing this shit again. No. This low life, this scumbag. Some kind of double indemnity shit happening? No, no, no.

You have to understand this low life, this scumbag who delivered and with malice of forethought, murdered eight people by his own hand, must be brought to justice for God in America and apple pie and motherhood. So help us God, the Attorney General's office appealed again. And they were doing disclosure, right?

They weren't like holding back some fucking text message that he had sent being like drinking and driving right now. Fuck these passengers. It comes up, right? It was purely just like, like, loss of situational awareness, and they went to the fucking mattresses against this guy for no reason. For no reason whatsoever.

We're surely running out of judges. We've had municipal court judges. We've had common pleas court judges. This, am I blind, right? This guy is white, right? Like, I'm looking at it. Like, I'm not being flippant about that. I'm just like, this is...

The middle here, yeah. This is an unusual level of stacking. the deck of if the superior justice system. So goddamn bad. For something that's not racial, you know, that's not racist. On May 14th, 2020, Superior Court Judge Victor Stabil reinstated the charges on Boston. For whatever reason, this case takes a long time to go to trial.

I think because this is the first one where it was going to be a jury trial, right? And the state offers him a really scummy plea deal, right, to the extent that, look, if you just accepted you, personally, you caused the accident, yourself, you, yes, you, you and you alone, you won't see any jail time. If you admit it, as long as you admit it, you did it. They don't even fucking believe that he did it. What are we doing here? Otherwise, so fucking evil.

Otherwise, you get infinity years in prison. Suck my dick, Josh Shapiro. That's what Bastian said. He was like, no. Hell, yes, my fucking boy. Hell, yes, always say no to the NDA or the fucking plea deal, absolutely. It was some doing. Like, that's...

I don't know. Would an innocent man be acquitted twice? And, yeah, so it's like a week-long trial, and a jury acquitted him after about an hour of deliberations. Yeah, it took about the time that, like, about half the time we did to go, this is bullshit. Yeah. So the American jury system, more efficient than, well, there's your problem. Well, what are you going to do? Marginal.

After having done jury duty on Monday, I, this is the first time I was on a criminal. I was not impaneled, but I was selected for a criminal case. And holy fuck, that, that process. Oh, my God. Anyway. Our justice system, well, there's your problem. Episode Infinity Forever, the American justice system. Oh, I will write.

I will write you a trial by jury episode right now. Oh, my God. Well, you know, I was prepared to take all the instructions from the judge and put everything out of my head and so on and so forth and not look things up. And then on the way out of the courthouse, I looked up, what's the sentence for a felony, unlawful possession of a firearm? And it was like 10 years. I was like, we're going to give that guy 10 years?

Did he kill someone? No. Then what's the fucking problem? Well, I don't know what his previous charges were because this was a repeat offense. like a repeat offender thing, but I'm like, you know, Albert Spear only got 20. Yeah, that guy didn't even have an unregistered firearm. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, anyway, that's a different, that's a different story.

But yeah, a judge acquitted Brandon Bostean after about an hour of deliberations on March 4th, 22, Brandon Bosteon was finally a free man. Justin, can you go back and read me the original date again, right? like of when this happened. It was May 14th, 2015, I want to say. May 12th, May 12th, 2015. So you lose, what, seven years of your life to this. Like, you're not, you're not like just traumatized, right, physically and mentally.

You are a professional defendant for almost a decade on to have. Pentahook's thinking, am I going to go to prison for the rest of my life? And then you don't, and they just kick you loose, and you're supposed to go and just, what, just live? Thanks, Governor Josh Shapiro. You piece of shit. Seven years of no relationships that can be viable, you know, trashing relationships that he already had. Yeah. Why would anyone do this for a living?

Don't worry, precision schedule railroad is making sure that within the decade, no one will do this for a living. Yeah. Oh, good. Yeah. So, anyway. What are the improvements following this wreck? They turn their asses on. AIS was turned on in December of 2015.

Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Let's all talk. All right, yeah. The NTSB said some bullshit about seatbelts on trains. What? That went nowhere. Nobody would never fucking wear.

Shut up about seatbelts on trains. Just shut up about it. It's not a thing. BLET said we need two men in the cab of passenger trains, which is fair. That also went nowhere. Of course. Yeah, without PTC, there should be second manning in trains.

Just do it anyway. Stimulate the fucking economy, you know? It's the same as the uniforms thing. It's good for the kind of dignity of the office, you know? The only thing, yeah. We've got to just, we've got to buy non-existent GPUs to put in non-existent warehouses for $3.5 trillion. Yeah, this is my thing about, like, why I should be dictator, right, is if we're going to have

these sort of inefficiencies based on kind of like hypothetical benefits, they should at least be centered in a human person who's walking around and can have like a life, you know? Yes. Agreed. They call her GPU Stalin. Yeah, but this is the thing. I don't, I don't subscribe to this idea that everybody's job has to be 100% necessary, right? I'm a podcast.

It's like, fucking God, I don't, right? But like, I just feel like if, you know, every kind of economic system has a huge amount of waste built into it. It's just that, you know, we live in the one that's kind of dedicated it to, you know, living in the Hamptons or buying a super yacht or buying the Baltimore ariolas or whatever when it could instead, and also a bunch of GPUs that might maybe create God someday, which it won't, right? I would prefer to live in the one where a bunch of that kind of inefficiency, that waste, if you like, went to providing people who, you know, deserve it by virtue of being alive, unlike the GPUs, had, like, you know, dignity and safety

and security and a good quality of life, right? Is it 100% necessary to have a second guy in the train? No, not necessarily, but like it fucking, you know, it's a good thing to do, I think. So why the fuck we can't see that? Right. Exactly. Yeah, and to do all of that would cost like a small fraction on what we are currently spending on Jensen Huang's leather jackets.

Yes, precisely. That's such a fucking critical tale. Jesus. Yeah, but stuff about geese that are gold Nova, so, you know. I missed doing this podcast, but you know who else missed doing this podcast is the forehead vein I have that will one day kill me. Yeah. So, like I said, Ross's neck tendon. I know what's going on.

Locomotive. Locomotive 601 becomes a parched owner. Oh, it's tough. The Am fleets are, yeah. The Amfleets are scrapped by a friend of the podcast. Scooter. Hi, scooter. Hi, scooter.

He said that, you know, usually these cars come and clean, but cafe car didn't. Yeah. Brandon Boston did not get his job back, and I have no idea what he's doing now. I mean, I don't want to know. Good, yeah, exactly. I don't know whether he's like fucking, like, on a shrimp boat and Alaska. I don't know whether he's at the live shows. I don't know whether he's wandering the fucking earth.

Like, it doesn't matter. We shouldn't know. I'm glad we don't. Yeah, I hope he's doing is doing well. Yes, Jesus Christ. I hope he's, I hope he is as well as could possibly be expected after this shitty, horrendous run of awful luck that he himself warned was possible. Yeah, exactly.

You know, like the fucking, the Amfleet is not the only. machine here that is built so rigidly that it stays intact and just crushes somebody on the inside, you know? Yes. Yes. Yeah. And anecdotally, I just say this as a longtime frequent regional rail rider. They moved business class to the rear of the train after this accident.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Okay, sure. Yeah. No, I've seen Cassandra Crossing. You're supposed to make business class the sacrificial part of the train. Welcome. It's, listen, when I get the train down to London, I always get the quiet car, and the reason

why I do is because I want to be part of the crumple zone, you know? Like, I want to get killed instantly if it comes to that. L'elda-do-bee, baby. Mmm. I want to get someone, someone's fucking folding bicycle has got to go through my skull at like 500 miles an hour, otherwise I'm not going. If it, yep. If I ain't fled, I ain't going.

So, uh, well, what do we learn? Fuck Josh Shapiro forever and ever, and I'd be voting for you, motherfucker. Yeah. This is something that Sam found in the NTSB docket among the injuries. I mean, some of them were horrific, but this is just a funny one. Ask me about my life. Yeah, injury description.

I'm suing Amtrak for being attached to the fucking wheel of Samsara. Yeah. Well, I mean, fair enough. You know, it's. What did we learn? I think the first thing I would say is, you know, it's good to have automatic train control systems, right? Yeah.

Most of us cannot spend 12 years meditating in a Tibetan monastery, so we never, ever have a brain fart ever again. No. And if you do that, you risk escaping the cycle of samsara, in which case you cannot become a locomotive engineer. Yeah, because you don't have any desires. including the desire to get the train to the station on time.

Oh my God, that would be so bad. So having some automated systems to back you off is necessary. This is a railroad replacement service because the existing services driver has developed Buddha nature. We're all very proud of him, but we are also a little confused. We found him in the cab, levitating an inch and a half above the seat. Yeah, this is like, to have, To kind of spin this back across to the other side of the Atlantic,

you know, we're talking about the Atlantic and talking about trains. Someone should do a podcast about that. But the Bedford crash, I keep coming back to this because there are lots of commonalities, right. The RRRB of just the real accident investigation brands, you know, R&TSB just published this interim report. There's loads of stuff that's not done. They haven't looked at fatigue records.

They haven't looked at training. They haven't looked at all the second, the kind of the kind of contributing factors. But they have said, and it has been quote. Now that driver error is the cause. I will always fight the fact that driver error does not exist as a cause. Yes. And it's amazing the extent to which that there is within the press, including the railway press, but certainly the broader press,

how little curiosity there is about, well, wait a minute, the signal that the guy, the driver passed, that Sean passed, the signal was not protected with TPWS, right? Which is that, so there are two main signaling protection systems in the UK in GB, should I say there's AWS, which is the 50s one, which is the big magnet. And there's TPWS, which is the one that looks like a toast rack that has two parts that is more sophisticated. And it's the one that can actually actively apply the brakes in a much broader range of circumstances.

Now, TPPWS was rolled out at extreme high speed. It's a big engineering success, actually, in the aftermath of crashes in the 90s, instead of the more expansive PTC equivalent, which is ETCS as now, was automatic train protection. Very little of that got rolled out because it was seen as too expensive. So we went for TPPWS. Now, we rolled out TPPWS very quickly

and we got rid of 95% of risk. The thing is about getting rid of 95% of risk is that once you've done that, you've got the 5% of risk becomes 100% of the risk. So what we call an auto signal, this is just like a repeater that says there's a signal ahead and it says that

and then there's another signal behind that. So it's not saying there's a junction. It's not saying turn this way. that way it's just saying there's a signal further ahead, splitting up the block, right? We didn't use TPPWS to protect those because they were low risk. But once you get rid of the 95%, they do become higher risk. And then if you increase the amount of traffic by three or four times,

the risk increases further. And so rather than continuing to roll TPPWS out, we stopped. So we're like, you know, it's not just the US that is fucked up with the way that you do or do not roll out good signaling. TPPS, we stopped rolling out. We said, oh, jobs done. we should have kept going. We should have been protecting these auto signals.

And what angers me isn't, yes, that's kind of a given because Britain's a stupid dump run by treasury. But what is frustrating is the lack of curiosity, including from the railway press, about why that didn't happen. And rather than going, well, it's tragedy, driver error. Yeah. There are so many parallels, right? You know, there are so many parallels to this. Like the curiosity of it's just a guy rather than no, let's look at the systemic issues

underneath. It shouldn't be down to just some folks doing a podcast to be the ones who are some of the loudest voices about this. Have they tried criminally prosecuting the driver, though? Oh, God. Well, the driver is highly dead on the Bedford crash is the thing. Yeah, he's, he's gone very dead in the crash. He is extremely killed in the collision. So they, I mean, they might try, but no, they haven't. Yeah. So, but the thing is, it'll still be, well, it's a tragedy that it's driver error. The RIAB are actually very good at going for underlying factors. So, you know, there will, the final report will be very good, I think, on that front. But in the meantime, it's, you know, as you talked about earlier with the mobile

phone thing, the public consciousness gets settled on those first stories, right? And driver error is the message that's been kicked around. People, it's too, it'll be too long. It's still a year, it'll be a year before the final report comes out, by which point everyone else will have moved on. Yes. God damn. Yeah. Sorry to be it's, it's, it's, you know, we're still doing, we're still in the situation. I mean, the thing is, we've, we've talked about plenty of cases of, like, actual, like, recklessness and misconducts and stuff, right? We've talked about, like, showing up to work drunk, right? And even that's... Yeah. Yeah, the Morpeth drunk guy. He drank so much. That's bad. He shouldn't have done that. Even that doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? And, like,

to have, you know, someone who is, as far as I'm concerned, completely blameless, right? Just, you know, be unlucky enough to fall victim. Yeah. Just. Yeah. He was as much of a passenger in this situation as everyone who is in the train behind him. This is absolutely a failure of the system around him, 100%. Yeah.

You know, that's where I wanted to put in the second thing we learned. You can love the trains, but the trains don't love you back. No, they do not. No, they do not. Yeah. It's true. But, you know, that's, exactly. Exactly.

That's how you achieve train Buddha nature, you know? That's true. That's true. So what did the Buddhists say to the hot dog bender? Give me, make me one with everything. One with everything, yes. No, I won't tell the joke. Sorry, Liam.

Sorry, sorry. My third thing is, please only throw rocks at the sides of trains. throw it at a cargo wagon that just has like nothing in it because they don't have hobos anymore so like this is the problem we used to have open auto racks there are no walls on the side you just see the cars you can throw rocks through the windows of the cars yeah you know but target practice you know we don't have that anymore so this is you know what happened to the america i love exactly i want to throw uh i want to throw five rocks through the windows of like 19, 69 Mustangs.

You know? Sweet Land of Liberty of the icing. And fuck Josh Shapiro. And fuck Josh Shapiro. Yeah, fuck Josh. Yeah, that guy, that guy, I don't like that guy. I like their previous governor. I never trust a prosecutor because they all build their careers on shit like this.

You know, it might not be this exactly, but it's, you know, I, when I was in law school, when I was in law school, I wanted to be a prosecutor because I don't know, I'm a bad person. And, you know, it took me a long time to sort of reckon with the fact that actually, no, I don't. In large part, because it's a terrible career, you know, that is built off of the bones of things like this, you know? And, okay, sure, you might be able to get some good out of it. But in practice, I kind of think not, really. It does feel like there must have been some, like, prosecutor madness happening here. Like, I've never lost a case.

I've never lost a single fucking case. We're going to nail this guy's dick to the floor. Yeah. And it does just happen. You can you can just make an enemy out of somebody who wants to make his career on you being in prison forever for no reason. And or some girl now because, you know, feminism and or, you know, even a non-binary person because trans rights. And yeah, it just, it's a miserable system. Yes.

Well, we have a, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Thirteen. I don't want to do it now. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. The real, the real monster here was the American criminal justice system. The real monster is Josh fucking Shapiro, dude. Yeah, as embodied here by Josh Shapiro, yeah. Hello, activate Windows and Devon.

All right. Fuck you. Die. I live in the North. where we still have winters sometimes. And as the Pennsylvania contingent of this podcast knows, living in the north means that your year... Oh, we exist now? Because you didn't say hi? Because you didn't say hi?

Living in the north means that your year consists of only two seasons, winter and roadwork season. Yeah, I think I remember John Snow saying this in Game of Thrones. Almost winter, winter still winter construction. road work it lasts like 10 years in that universe just 10 years of road work that's going to suck that god damn you ever driven the m8 into glasco that's what it feels like road work season is that wonderful time of year when traffic cones bloom in the potholes the air is filled with the sounds of reversing alarms and jackhammers and the skid loaders

frolic in the reduced speed zones. Now, for reasons I don't fully understand, my town's public works department seemingly never quite figures out its road work season until sometime in late July. ADHD procrastination is real. You see all those ads on Twitter about it, you know? It's true, yeah, take some ad, or all see what happens.

This results in a lot of haphazard projects started too late that the road crews are rushing to finish before the frost sets in. Oh shit, I was joking, but maybe. Our story today features one such project from years past, a bridge replacement on a creek near my house. It was the middle of October and road work season was drawing to a close. Happy birthday to me.

The construction crew on the bridge had completed the abutment and the girders to span the river, and we're working on rebuilding the road at Ely. end of the site. I was working as a line cook at the time, and as I started chopping onions for soup, I could feel my phone begin to start to go ballistic in my pocket. When I finally checked my messages, I found I had received the following in a span of several minutes. Number A, an alert from the power company that there was a utility outage in my area. Number B, an alert from the internet company that there was a utility outage in my area. Number C, my name, neighbor complaining about a gas smell in the local board gang group chat.

And number D, and a vague but urgent message from my town's emergency alert notice for residents to evacuate my neighborhood. That's good, right? Oh, no. As I was staring at my phone trying to figure out what the hell was happening, I received a message from my roommate. Hey, the construction workers fucked up and hit a gas main. I'm going to go hang out downtown until everything blows up.

over. See attached video. These fucking denguses. Let's see if I can get this to play. Oh, no. We shall see. We have had bad luck with this before. Portrait mode as well, huh?

You ambassador, you spoil us. Oh, come on. Come on. Go, go, go. You got it. You got it. You got it. You got it.

That's the gas main going there. Oh, dear. Is it better that it's visible? I don't think that's, I don't, there's no audio, but there is audio, but only I can hear it. It's a horrible wishing sound. I know, it's so crazy out there. Don't light up. Yeah, in the rush to complete the reconstruction, the road crew had managed to put a digger blade from one of NYSCG's.

NYS EG is New York State electrical gas, I'm going to guess. Electric and gas, okay. Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. I don't know if that's right. I just came up with that. They put a digger blade into one of their medium-pressure gas mains. Listen, I still haven't seen the movie yet. I think it's probably going to be good.

I like you, near it too. Firing a geyser of methane 300 feet into the sky. Oh, luckily no. Luckily, no one was hurt, and the evacuation was lifted several hours later. One of my neighbors complained that the police officers who had knocked on her door to tell her to run away from the explosive gas jet, less than a block from her house, had been horror of horrors, rude to her. Okay, I kind of low-key agree with this, though. It's the same as the like Amtrak hat thing.

It's like you're a public servant, man. You have to be a politeness robot. I don't care. If baristas can do emotional labor, you have to as well. That's true. You're not different just because you're tactical, you know? Oh, you got trauma at work. You know, who else gets trauma at work?

Nurses, fuck you. Be polite. Ah, but they have qualified. immunity though. Yeah. We should give baristas qualified

to be in I agree. Reaching for the baristas service weapon. That's enough flavor pumps. That's enough.

Put it back. Give us some barista safety thirds actually. WTOIP part of it. Yeah, honestly.

Also, while we're here, you get to, you get to cut the order off after a certain number of syllables. I think so.

Yeah. Yep. Sorry, you're not getting a triple pump of, I don't know how to do a complex Starbucks. As someone who gets like socially anxious, you know, to the point of worrying that I'm inconveniencing the barista all the time. Jesus, man. I think that, no, too many. It's true.

I can testify to that. Oh, I'm a gentle lover. Fuck off. Listen, you two have, have this, you know, later. My point is not enough people have social anxiety. And I know we're working on it. I know we're working on it, but it needs to happen faster. As I go to Starbucks, I order a drink off the menu.

Excuse me, I don't go to Starbucks because currently the union is calling for a boycott. What I do is I go to like cafe near or whatever, I walk in, I look at the board, I comprehend what I want. I look at the board again. I comprehend what I want a second time. I refine that in my head into a very, like, distinct and clear order, right? Then I go and look at the sandwiches for a bit to try and lower my heart rate, right? I pick up a sandwich I don't even want. I take that sandwich to the thing.

I very shyly push the sandwich over the thing. I recite the thing that I said. I get my coffee and I scurry away, right? That in itself is a level of imposition on a barista that they should be able to kill me if they want to. And it is incomprehensible to me. There are people who are just standing their ground, hands in the world. their pockets going, uh, 27 pumps of hazel nut. Fuck you.

Fuck, no, absolutely not. I mean, this is, all right, this is the coffee shop we open. It's going to be like, uh, how dare you enter my house of coffee? You enter one of those are your problems, house of coffee. They put the bomb collar on you, like minute one. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yes. You got to work with a barista looks like the head from Zardaws.

You know? The steam wand gives only evil. The bridge didn't quite finish in time for the end of the road work season and construction had to be resumed after the winter. The moral of the story here is, save yourself some trouble and call 8-1-1 before you dig. And if your house is going to blow up,

you can just leave just leave just take the bricks you don't have to wait for the cops to be rude to you yeah thanks for all the laughs and making me feel less crazy from an aspiring forester you can just go out and just start chopping down

trees I mean I don't recommend it but you can do free on disease this might be might be forestry conservation maybe maybe they're aspiring to be a Subaru you know you ever consider that good point yeah for five a sec hell

That was Safety Third. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Yeah.

Yes, for once I do. Yes. Justin Rosniak and me, the two of us, we have a new podcast. It's 7th. So just landed as of time of recording. Listen to Trains Atlantic. Welcome to Trains Atlantic. You can learn about exciting things like

the Bayshore Canadian Railroad or haunted train stations or nice whatever train station that Gareth and I have been to recently Oh yeah yeah yeah exactly That starts with the letter that start many train stations start with the letters Some start with numbers we're only doing the letters the numbers the numbers might start getting difficult once they get high up in the numbers well otherwise the podcast has to stop after 26 right so you know we can keep going yeah no it's listen to you listen to it wherever you like the usual places it's the usual model blah blah to a month

but also listen to all of nervous five podcasts you know i mentioned it at the start but like uh you know three hours ago but i'm doing a little patreon thing where i'm just writing about the process of getting surgery um so everything's going to going to be free on there eventually. It's just if you want to, you can pay me five bucks a month for it and you can read it a week early or whatever. It's really just a tip jar. But it's patreon.com

slash post-octobrist. You can find me on there. Listen to all the other podcasts. Listen to 10,000 losses. 10K losses. Yes. Yeah. Listen to to Real Natter, if you like, as well. We do this sort of thing. Things of this nature. Oh, yeah,

listen to Nova. Nova. Novel. I did a real net episode on the history of PFI, part one. That was a lot of fun. Listen to that. We called your major twink. If that sounds like your deal, are listening to it. I think by the time this has come out,

Jay and I will have done a big stream about Transport Fever 3 and why we don't like it. Oh, yeah. You don't like that? I was going to pick it up. Okay. No, no, no. I don't like it for esoteric reasons.

We count those. We count those when it comes to me not buying stuff. Yeah, important. I still don't have city. skylines too because you didn't like it right like you you don't know your own influence with me nah that's true that's true i don't know if that one's still bad or not i need to i need to open it back up okay uh skip that one go to the lego one it's fine oh that one sounds like it's gonna be fun yeah sounds like a podcast yeah that's a podcast i think so i think that was a podcast you don't have to go

home you can't stay here yes i am home shit