Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 24: Kings Cross Fire

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Today we talk about escalators. The Slides: https://youtu.be/ciF1p_GMrmw The Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod image credits: met steam loco By Hammersfan - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79896458 tube train By SPSmiler - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=400148 reno-type escalator stolen from https://www.flickr.com/photos/63151554@N00/8772641035 macys wooden escalator By Xiaphias, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16078738 greenford escalator By Billy Hicks - Taken by myself using digital camera., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1128884

The two elements that we need for the podcast. Yes, it's true. It is a visual. There is a visual aspect in an audio aspect as it turns out. Yeah. So we're on some full spectrum shit, right? Like, if you don't get every possible sense triggered by this podcast at the same time, you're feeling this podcast in like the sense of balance, your proprioception or whatever.

Now in smell of vision. Yeah, I was going to say smell of vision. God damn. All right. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. And also we do jokes. The jokes are going to be there.

State that. We make jokes. We make jokes. Yes, jokes happen. We make jokes. We do. We say a bunch of dumb bullshit that is not like strictly relevant to the issue at hand. Yes. You don't like that.

Just just tune out now. Yeah, because like I feel like people were not aware of this. And I don't know how twenty three episodes in one of which featured us talking about putting out an ammonium nitrate fire with calm that like we're we're not being entirely straight laced here, right? This is not just it's not just the engineering, right? There's some there's some humor involved, we might say. There are, in fact, some funnies that we do.

Yeah, spoofs, goofs. Yes, but a satire parody in a video game. Yes. So I'm Justin Rosniak. And the person who's talking right now, I have the engineering degree so I can talk about engineering stuff. My pronouns are he and him. That's not a comedy degree, though. So I am Alice Caldwell.

Kelly, I have most of a law degree, which may as well be a comedy degree. My pronouns are she and her. I go to Clown Law School. Oh, buddy. Honk, honk. I studied anvil law at Acme University. Oh, that's a good school. Oh, yeah, go to baby. After they hand you the diploma,

the dean hits you over the head with a big wooden mallet and your teeth fall out like piano keys. Lastly, I am Liam Anderson. I am sometimes a guy who gets real mad at you when you're stupid in our YouTube comment section. I, too, have degrees. I have an economics degree and a mathematics degree from Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey.

My pronouns are he and him. Sounded very professional. I went to Rutgers, so my entire education is a fucking joke. I don't know, guys, I'm feeling kind of inadequate that we're doing the degree thing with me, just the undergraduate here. I feel like the podcast apprentice. You, you, you podcasted before any of us

were even interested in podcasts. I'm really just here on your coattails, so thanks for the money. All right. So what we're looking at in front of us appears to be the remnants of several escalators which look to have been on fire. Yeah. Oh, dear. They're not supposed to have been on fire. But today we're going to talk about the Kings Cross Fire.

That's the Kings Cross St. Pancras Tube Station that caught fire when one of the escalators just decided today was its day to catch fire. Oh, is this not a Harry Potter related thing? No, it was doing the tears and rain speech and decided that today was the it was time to die. Yes. Yeah.

But before we do that, we need to go to our news segment. Oh, we got the goddamn news. The goddamn news. So our first piece of news today is fucking people that happened. Yeah. So there's there's a lot of people who are, you know, they're they're very stupid, sympathetic to the Corona virus's cause.

I can't say I blame them. Yeah, they're all accelerationists. They're all Maoist, third worldists. I have been rooting for for the extinction of the human species for a long time because it's not eco fascism. If you just hope everybody dies. Yes. So it needed that gloss of like American nationalism to stop you from joining them.

So so these these folks are going at the state capitals. Today, they did it in Harrisburg. Oh, they sure fucking did. Making us proud, baby. Yeah, to to complain about how this lockdown is preventing the spread of our God Covid-19 and his mission to his mission to destroy and annihilate the human race.

These people are possessed by the New York's worm, right? Like there's no other explanation. There's there's some fucking cordyceps bullshit happening here. It's sort of sort of like, you know, Werner Herzog just, you know, a gas that the madness situation right here. I can't I can't imagine, you know, as much as quarantine has stuck just like thinking you're that fucking special for any of this.

Just being like, oh, I want to get a haircut. It's like, bitch, no one's fucking looking at you. You get that again. Wear a hat on your zoom call or whatever. You don't know all of the reasons for wanting to go outside. Like there was a guy who wore his like his fucking like garrison cap to show that he was in army and like was talking on the news about how he needed to be out of the house

in order to get like lawn care supplies. And it's like, it's so weird because the prepper fetishists, you know, on and on and on for years about how I could survive 10 years in this bunker. And then, you know, after a few weeks, it's like, but I need a haircut. And it's just like I imagine being so fucking comfortable and you're like one and a half billion years of human evolution that you fucking think this is an acceptable way to fuck it.

First, first lies your lawn with your baker bucket. One just 100 percent of these people either own a landscaping company or employ the services of a landscaping company, right? Yeah, but they don't they don't do any of the work themselves because we've been seeing them in the very expensive late model trucks outside state capitals. There's no market for a small pick up. Thanks for nothing, Don.

No Tacomas anymore. But like they're all there and they're late model and huge all there in their late model F one fifties or immaculate. Like they've got the fucking like cherry red on there. The paint work is not dinged at all. It's got the T.R.D. package and they've never been off road. The truck beds have never seen a fucking a moat of dirt. I'm here for it.

I've developed a theory. Go off, OK. Here's my theory. Landscaping companies are the Patreon of Chudland. It's a you mean that it's a very inefficient machine that just divides some income into three pieces. No, I mean, everyone's passing money around between each other's landscaping companies and then like the the little Patreon fee is just the pittance you pay the day laborers.

But not even that. The Patreon fee is like the the Ford ship, right? That's your that their cut is what you pay for your like immaculate for. You have an F 250 that you've never used to haul anything a day in your fucking life. And I say this as a guy who likes trucks and has no reason to cover again. That said, if anyone is selling a truck, yeah, of course, please hit me up. Just just fucking wait like two weeks. There'll be a bunch of them on the market.

One previous owner will be like how every fucking apartment listed in Philly right now. That was a dark joke when you get it. Two weeks from now. Never been a better time to pick up. Yes, you harvest her with a dump bed. My girlfriend, God bless her soul, has to always put up with me being like, yeah, I'm going to buy a truck or like God help me.

I'm going to buy another van. And just like I always see the like little flicker of just like genuine happiness that I'm excited about this like ridiculous thing. And then her very quickly coming back to earth and being like, we have to like save money to buy stuff. But I'm just like, what if we bought two trucks? Yeah, what if what if you build the whole house out of the van? Aha, if you're listening.

The house with the house of many van. I stack vans. I just can't imagine thinking so fucking special for wanting to get a haircut that you're willing to endanger other people's lives. Which is all these people need to serve you. Robins, you're not used to doing anything by yourself and you view service workers as disposable MPDs. It if if I don't if I don't call the manager on somebody, I will die.

And as such, it is essential for me to be able to go to Baskin Robbins and demand the secret second flavor. It's been 10 minutes. This podcast is over. Really appreciate you listening. Again, we're not allowed to make jokes or be funny or do anything interesting. So we're going to cut it here and we'll take what a 30 second minute of silence, right, moment of silence to honor all the dead people.

OK, yeah, sounds, sounds dignified. God damn it. Mm hmm. Very dignified. Very dignified. That's our sign off. This is a fucking seat for the animal house for the whole store now. All right.

All right. All right. So every time these people go out and protest, the quarantine is going to get four months longer, which is frustrating. In their shadow. There are four months anyway, under the next. Yeah, yeah, under the next like being a supply teacher, right? You just got to be like, it's your own time.

You're wasting it because I'm going to see if this class about you. Yeah, I brought a book. I don't I don't give a shit. I brought a novel from home. I'm just going to sit here and read it while you do this. All right, on to the next piece of news. All right. So oil prices were negative today, right?

They'll pay you to take. They will pay you to take barrels of oil, right? Yeah, West Texas intermediate crude down to at time of recording negative 40 cents per barrel. I'm seeing how much the fuck drum is. And so yeah, Ross, we could get a bunch of like. Yeah, I mean, there is a place I forget where it is. I think it's like West Pennsylvania, where you can.

It's like a distribution hub where you can bring your own drum and they'll just fill her up with with crude oil. So fucking yeah, go for it if you want. Yes. But like I pretty soon they're going to have to start doing what the Scottish natural gas refineries have been doing since I think the start of last year, where you just do flaring and you just burn it off at the refinery.

Yes. Yeah. And everybody everybody around it is like, huh, why do my eyes and lungs hurt constantly in the midst of a fucking pandemic coronavirus? All of all of Texas is going to look like a Varna Herzog film, which is pretty pretty dope, actually. Yeah. Lessons of Darkness is a cool movie. It's just amazing.

They can't like comprehend or reducing production. You know, or they have to keep it running full tilt all the time. You know, no matter what. I mean, this is the thing with the natural gas thing. You the tendency is to be like, well, and they just turn it off. But the problem is if you do that, you have to cap the wells and especially with deep wells, there's a lot of like there's a lot of pressure. And you just kind of you junk the entire rig, which to me

a sane person sounds like classic win win. Yes, you're in the oil industry and you're determined to keep this ball rolling for as long as you can. You want to resist that as long as possible. And so you just make West Texas look like it's been hit by the fucking Balrog. Yeah. Am I am I is that the right token? I don't know. I've never read the ball hog. So I mean, the thing here is, you know, although it's bad that, you know,

we have to keep pumping the goo that's going to kill everyone out of the ground or it'll or we won't be able to do that anymore. Now is a great time to go down to your local crude oil dealer and scoop it in there. Yeah. Buy some crude oil and we'll give you money to take it. You know, I just just come come back with barrels and barrels. I wrote down some suggestions of what you can do with it. Just burn it in your yard.

Right. You could put it in your basement. You could put it in your backyard. You could shove it under your bed, put it in your walls. Maybe a couple of barrels over the drop ceiling at work, put it under your desk. You know, so so excited to murder the entire podcast audience with hydrogen sulfide emissions. You could stick you could probably fit a bunch of barrels in your garage. You could fit in your crawl space.

If you want to carry them upstairs, you can put them in the attic. You could buy a vacant lot. You could probably store some barrels there, right? That's if you want to keep the barrels of oil. If you if you're like, I'm just going to take the cash now rather than selling it later at a higher price, you know, and just get rid of it. You know, you could probably drive to New Jersey, Meadowlands and just dump them in the hack and sack river.

Right. You could toss a few barrels onto a passing train. You know, just be creative. I mean, like think about this. Think about it this way. All of the schools empty. That's valuable storage space. We've got a like we can finesse this shit. If you are a cash strapped State Department of Education or a school district, just think about all of that real estate that you have available

to turn into a big floating roof tank. Right. Yes. You could you fill all the classrooms with it, fill the gymnasium with it. That's got a lot of space. Yeah, those are just vertical space, right? You stick a couple in the teacher's lounge. You could, you know, the possibilities are truly endless by now. Um, but by now, be paid.

Anyway, the the third piece of news I have today is the third piece of news is that our comment section is still full of trash. Well, that's not so good. All you people are terrible and we hate you. Come on, God damn it. Yeah, that's why we just we are telling you to like store barrels of oil, which has this tendency to evaporate.

H2S and odorless gas that kills you at like no concentration whatsoever. Yeah, we're just we're very into that because of your comments, because of your words and deeds, we are trying to like turn the hydrocarbons loose on you. I like this guy who says if you want to be a comedian, start another channel. Right. We started this one. We did. I actually I did start another channel. Yes, that's true. It's true that doesn't really answer the the problem of like all the people who are like,

where's Franklin? Why are you defrauding us by like making us give you your money? It's kind of like both of you have seen the draft. Yeah, I mean, I will concede that Franklin episode 11 is a cryptid at this point, but the cryptids are cool. So don't don't be a dick about it. Yes, everyone who are you people who say we shouldn't do jokes are just terrible people. You shouldn't you shouldn't do that. Hates freedom.

Yeah, let us get our jokes off. Let us do and say things in bad taste when it's clearly to like cope with or provide you with some kind of leftist analysis or just being done. Our tone wasn't what they wanted. That was another criticism for the Grenfell fire. Yeah, I feel like like obviously we don't want to we don't want to harp on this too much on the one hand. We don't want to be the podcast that spends the first 20 minutes talking about our bad reviews. But on the other hand, if you have left a comment that's been critical in any way,

Liam is going to fly to your house and punch you in the face. It's true. It's true. It's true. Welcome to Goon Squad, baby. On the Goon Squad, he is the Goon Squad. Yes. So anyway, if you comment on this shame on you, no one should comment on anything. Anyway, keep that shit to yourself. Exactly.

All right. So it is now time to get back to our subject. Right. And we need some class. We need some context. Yes. Talk about trains. All right. So let's talk about the London Underground. Right. Yay.

Yay. All right. Yay. So this is one of the first largely underground urban rapid transit systems, right? The Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863. Yeah. Rules. Very, very early, very steampunk shit. Yes. It wasn't even steampunk. It was just regular. It was regular.

Everything was steam. It was regular. But back then, you could just like so much stuff required big brass gears that it wasn't even aesthetic. You would try to like stick some gears onto something to make it look cool. And they would just inadvertently start doing like an analytical engine. Extremely normy like type punk, you know, it's basically like hot topic. Yeah. You laugh because I'm different. I laugh because you're all the same. Yeah. They're trying to really like freak people out. I got this big steam locomotive and a Ramon shirt.

I'm counter cultural. All right. So the Metropolitan Railway opened as right. It was a full sized railroad, right? And it ran steam trains in short tunnels and in open cuts, right? Such as this steam locomotive here seen running in 2000 and something 2019. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So these were these were called these are now called the subsurface lines in London, right? They're that's the district line, the circle line, the Metropolitan line, the Hammersmith

and City line, formerly the East London line, which is now the overground. And these all used to be different railroad companies. Yes. Which is which is why I forget which station, but like that as an obscure piece of rail history, there's one where one side of the platform still has diamond roundels instead of the like the London Transport one, because it was it was I think Hammersmith Railway and they had a different thing. So they just kept it. I think it was the Metropolitan Railway still had like its own identity well into the underground

era. Like they still stuck Metropolitan Railway crests onto like regular tube rolling stock for a long time. That rolls. Oh, that rolls. One of the like, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of dislike. Yeah. There's a lot of dislike about privatization, but I do occasionally like having extremely like dueling company identities. That's why New York is so great, because there's some like cars work on each other's lines.

Yeah, no, they don't do that. That's that's the joke. Jokes on this podcast. People don't want jokes. Oh, shit. Right. Oh, my bad. Sorry, viewers. I'm sorry. I made a joke. I will immediately chastise myself. You're not to perform like self-flagellation now. Yeah. May I call her? May I call her? May I maximum call her? Yeah. Hit yourself over the head with the tablet.

I'll give a shit. Go find yourselves. Anyway, so, you know, since these are full-size railroads, basically anything that runs on the main line in Britain also fits on the subsurface underground lines, right? And to this end, as we mentioned on the last episode, a lot of underground lines were used to deliver goods until like the 1960s. That's still a steam power, right? And this caused some problems, right? Full-size steam trains create a lot of smoke and steam. That's fine. It's good for you. Yeah. It's just, yeah.

It's character. That smoke needed to be ventilated, right? So that's why- No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. It's fine. That's why most stations were in open cuts, where it was less likely people would choke to death, right? Lay them. That's not character building. The funniest thing is that the earliest underground carriages were just open. They're just like, I love to think about that.

They should bring those back. I want open subway cars. I want to open subway cars. Yeah, we're just going to stand on this black car. Yeah, why not? You know, and another problem was that building full-size rail infrastructure for a specialized purpose like rapid transit was expensive. But in the late 1800s, a solution was found, which was- Cable cars?

Uh, initially. Initially, yes. But actually, I don't think there was ever a cable hauled underground train. There were cable hauled- Well, in Glasgow, there was. Yes, that Glasgow subway is cable hauled for a long, long, long time. Mm-hmm. But not in London. London, they did. They chose something different, right? They got electric trains.

Right? The way of the future. Yes. So, and electric trains means you can run the trains entirely underground because there's no smoke and steam, right? You can make the trains smaller, right? And you can do a whole bunch of extra stuff, right? And that led to the invention of what became called the deep-level tubes, right?

Yeah, just going much further underground. This is a surprise tool that will help us later when the Luftwaffe starts bombing London. Yes. So, the City of South London Railway builds the first deep-level tubes in 1890. They wore 10-foot-2-inches diameter cylindrical tunnels. They ran electric trains through them from Stockwell to King William Street. That's here at the current monument station. That's a fair distance considering, and that's quite a claustrophobic tunnel. Like, the tube now you can still get a little bit of anxiety, right?

Yeah, not a huge fan. And with 1890s standards of both electricity and tunnel digging? That's fucking everywhere. Of course, of course. I assume the voltage probably varied from 300 volts to 1600 volts or something ridiculous like that. Based on how many horses were on the treadmill. Look, there's always going to be some horse-related injury with railroads. Either you get a vacuum tube full of horse, or you just get a treadmill full of them, okay?

The horse was feisty today. We got there a little thicker. And so, the King William Street station now disused. The tunnels were abandoned. That tunnel goes all the way under the Thames. It's abandoned. I'm sure that nobody has ever done any urban exploration with that. I think they were used as a bunker during the Blitz. All of London is like this massive subterranean warrens and stuff going from Ministry of Defense bunkers and government tunnels to mail rail, which we talked about on the last episode, to like, you can just kind of stuff everything together and route everything around everything

until it's all just in one giant fankle. It's great. These tunnels were later enlarged to 11 foot 8 inches. They became part of the northern line. So, your advantage is of deep-level tube construction, right? You got smaller tunnels, which means you're cheap to build. Deeper construction means there's fewer obstacles. You don't got to worry about building foundations or stuff like that, right? But there's your Balrog. I'm finally getting my token sorted out as we dig too greedily and too deep, right? Yeah, we're going down in the mines of Moria. Yeah.

One of those shitty thousand feet of second elevators that Alice hates so much. Yeah, to a certain extent, you can tunnel under buildings rather than confining yourself to existing rights away. That's another advantage, right? But a big disadvantage is that you have stations which are deeper underground, right? Which means people can't comfortably walk up the stairs to the surface to get out of the station. They get real tired, right? Why don't you just get a better class of passenger? Well, you know, I mean, maybe if we hadn't invented something, every single person who takes the underground would now be like, I don't know, the new Soviet man, just incredibly fit.

Yeah, like calves, just like fucking pantalopes. Exactly. Incidentally, one of the, well, like my favorite details about London is that like, because these stations are so deep, they need these huge ventilation shafts, which are just studded through the middle of London, but they're all camouflaged. So, you have like a row of Georgian houses and one of them will just be like entirely hollow set dressing because it's just a round and big chimney at rules. It's always something I thought was weird because I know New York City has those too. Yeah. Philadelphia does not have those. No, we just have the big old stacks in the middle

of Market Street. Fuck it. That's cool. I mean, yeah. I always liked the LA oil wells too. I was about to say the LA oil, Derek's, another fine piece of concealed urban infrastructure. Plus, of course, now the 5G towers that are turning all the frogs gay and giving everybody COVID. That is true. I forgot about that. Yes. Oh, we should have put that in the news thing. People have been burning those down in the UK. Which is like, I like the energy price. Wouldn't that just release more coronavirus into the atmosphere? You would think, but maybe they're like doing Chernobyl shit and then like nobly taking that

burden onto themselves to free the populace. Oh, hard to divide. Yeah, but like that's the energy that I want of setting things on fire. But the problem is that you're doing it in order to like burn down the phone mask that serves the nearby hospital because you think it's making you gay. And it's like, well, okay. I maybe wouldn't do that. So since there's deep level stations, you either need a bunch of elevators, right? Which is annoying to build or a new technology, very new technology in 1890, the escalator.

Oh, you just fucking found, you just found the most sinister photo you could have an escalator. There's a reason I picked this photo. We'll get to it in a minute. Right. So escalators are one of those things which seem relatively modern and which are not. Right. Relatively Potter. Well, relatively modern compared to like pyramids or something. This is an ancient Sumerian escalator. Yeah. So the first successful escalator was patented by Jesse Reno in 1892. It was exhibited. It was exhibited as an attraction in Coney Island, right?

Why does all of the weird shit in this world just seem to start in Coney Island? Because it's a wonderful place. That's true. I love to think about the time when Theodore Roosevelt as commissioner tried to enforce the law's closing saloons in New York on Sundays. And New Yorkers just fucking went to Coney Island because the NYPD didn't have jurisdiction. So, you know, this was an attraction on Coney Island. So escalator land was a real thing. Just riding escalators in circles for like an hour. Don't pay good money to do it.

Yeah. I mean, at least you can like you can content yourself with the fact that like you're not you can drink as much as you like while you're doing this because the NYPD can't touch you. You're in the free state of Coney Island like the Warriors. There are no rules there. You see some of the rides in Coney Island back in the day. They didn't give a fuck. Yeah. I mean, they didn't they just have like horses jumping off of like platforms into like pools of water and just immediately dying. Yeah. They shove a horse off of a platform into a sippy cup. Yeah. You could watch Thomas Edison, the Elon Musk of his day tried to electrocute an elephant.

Yes. You could go on like a giant like room full of spinny platforms and be thrust into a wall at 15 miles an hour. Yeah. That is the branding that I want from an amusement park is just to be like, Hey, you want to fucking die? You go on the first looping roller coaster and it might snap your neck. It might not. We don't know. Yeah. Wonderful place. This is the future that NCAPS want is Coney Island like 1893 is very nice. It's very good brewery. Yes. So the first practical installations of this the escalator were by Otis Elevator in 1899. Right. Getting getting some antitrust violations in early by cornering the market and moving people

in the Z axis. Yes. Yes. They're they're moving they're moving people on multiple axes now. It's this is they have horizontal and vertical monopoly integration. This is this is an example of a Renault type escalator, right? The first type of escalator. The last of these in public use were on the tee in Boston in 1994. They were they were sorry, 1994. 1994. Yes. Yeah, welcome to Boston, bud. And the the Smithsonian almost got one. But they realized it'd be too expensive to disassemble and then reinstall. So they're just like, Oh, not gonna bother. So no more. And the Renault type escalator is just a series of like inclined wooden slats on a belt. And they couldn't do the same

kind of slopes that modern escalators can. You're not kidding. It already looks fucking deadly. It's like a ski lift. You've got to like, you're fucking like ski boots into this thing. This this this image is in the from the subbasement of the Strawbridge and Clothier department store in Philadelphia from 1996. This was this is this. I don't know if it's still there. If it is still there, this is the last Renault type escalator in existence. Do some urban exploration. Find out both what is in those abandoned early deep level tube tunnels and find out if this is still there. We could honestly probably just ask them. Oh, yeah, if you work at the Enquirer, please tell us if there's a Renault type escalator in your base.

No, fuck this shit. We're doing direct action. Listeners, get a hoodie and a face mask and like go out after dark and find out if this is still there. Yeah. I stole this image from Flickr user me squirrel. The link's in the description because I don't know if I'm allowed to use this. So they probably like they're probably dead. They probably got killed by this clearly haunted escalator. Yeah, just it just reversed halfway through and just started rolling freely. Yeah, this is like Christine, but an escalator form. Because the fucking red eyes, it's really like it's something. But after after the Renault type escalator, pretty quickly we get the more modern type of escalator we're all familiar with, right? With like horizontal steps

that go up a fixed incline, right? Thus paving the way for like my favorite Mitch Hedberg joke. No, no. An escalator can never break. It can only become stairs. Yes, this is true. It's in the way you tell them. So what makes escalators good? Well, I mean, they're just stairs. Yeah, that's that's the big one, right? You get to like you don't have to like cram into a confined space like an elevator that can just stop. That's two things. What makes it especially? You don't have to wait. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, you read the notes. Thank you. Yeah, you're just ruining my my here I am trying to employ the Socratic method. And you just ruin it.

It can be said that the escalator is a superior mode of transportation. Can it not? No, you can also there's there's like this isn't in the notes because I did I did the fucking reading. You have like variable speed in that if you feel able or want to you can walk up it or just stand and then spend the next hundred years bickering about which side to do that on. Yes. But you stand on the right like the sign says. Yeah, this is true. Although some places are trying to get rid of that because there's a slightly higher capacity of everyone stands. Huh? I mean, sure. Why not? That's that seems rational to me. But also it's like a deeply held article of faith for me that you stand on the right and walk on the

left. Yes. So yeah, I don't know. I agree with that methodology. But so yeah, the big thing is that there's very high capacity and you don't have to wait around like you do with an elevator. Unless it's a pattern after which we'll get into some other time because those things scare the fuck out of me. I want to use one of those one day. That sounds like it sounds fun as hell. Yeah, it just sounds like a way to fucking die as far as I'm concerned. Also true. Hey, you win some, you lose some. But because they have a very high capacity, they're ideal for moving a whole lot of people over a long vertical distance, like say a deep level tube station, right? And the like the deep level tubes have long escalators like a pitch to the really steep

angle too. Yes. I think Angel might be the station with the longest one, but don't quote me on that one. Angel is the longest in the world, I believe. Huh? But once I won't get corrected by the comments section. That's still well, they'll find a way. Unless there's one in like Kiev that might be longer, I'm not sure. No, I'm just thinking about in terms of in terms of the tube, I believe Angel is like it takes like fucking three minutes to just stand there. And like, yeah, it's it's scary. You can like especially because you if you're going down it, you just look down, there's like it goes on to like a terminal like Vista. It's great. I know that the longest in the United States is at the Whedon Metro station on the Washington Metro. So one of my friends and I

rode the metro all the way out there one day just to take the escalator to see to see what it was like to ride the longest escalator. Yeah, the escalator name for Will Whedon. Yes. Will Whedon. So there are some problems with escalators though, right? Number one is there's a lot of there's a lot of moving parts in an escalator. It's a very complicated machine, right? There's lots of places or stuff to get wedged in, you know, like along the sides, you know, and anywhere. And, you know, occasionally, you know, someone gets stuck in the wrong way in the grades at the end and it just eats them. Yeah, all like the entire great at the end collapses like that one video from China a couple of years ago where it just like sucks in a kid.

Oh, yeah. This is what it can happen to. That's cool. It can happen. That's frustrating. But, you know, tie your fucking shoes. Some of you may die. Yeah. Yeah, I just like think about it in terms of like airline crashes, right? Like how long would you have to get an escalator to die in an escalator accident? Yeah, exactly. Like something like 900 years back and forth on the same escalator. Yeah, that meantime between failure is probably pretty good. Yeah. And unless it's on the Washington Metro, in which case every escalator is going to die. And I say that. Yeah, you're going to die. The Washington Metro, for some reason, just has like a bunch of knife blades at the end of each escalator. The whole thing is a metaphor, really. Washington Metro is a disaster, Eric. That would

be a good episode. Washington Metro. Just a metro. You could all get my opinions on DC. It's the worst city in the world. Yeah, 11 years running. They still haven't restored automatic train operation. I mean, I've only got one source of experience about the Washington Metro and it's Fallout 3. But I feel like that makes me an expert. Yes. Got a lot of got a lot of ghouls down there. So now the thing about early escalators is they were made of wood, right? I see that. Nice very aesthetic kind of like fucked up old ass wood. It is. And this is one of the irritating things. I couldn't find any images of an all wood escalator. So I had to get two separate images, showing an escalator with wooden treads, right?

And then an escalator that the rest of it was made of wood. This one is in the Macy's flagship store in New York City. You can see that. Those are still there as far as I know. Those are still there. But the treads, well, the treads are made of wood. The actual steps are made of metal. Yeah, that's easy. The end is there. Although one of the steps on the one on the left is also made of metal because they've just been repairing them as like the wood ruts. It's fun. So it has this kind of like filled tooth look. This one was replaced in 2014. So this is now a metal escalator. I mentioned what this is later on in the notes. I don't remember right now. But yeah, so early escalators are made of wood.

Saves weight, saves construction cost. You know, wood is good. Yeah, it's a known material. It's fine. It's well known also for its fire resistance, as I recall. It depends. Like heavy wood construction is extremely fire resistant. It doesn't burn at Charles. I forgot I wasn't allowed to make jokes anymore. That's true. You're canceled. Yeah, for making jokes. No jokes on this comedy engineering podcast. I want to make sure everyone knows where we are, right? We need to do some. You want to have us late to late and orient ourselves. Yes. So thank you. Thank you. I'm here all week because I can't go anywhere else because of the quarantine. Go get a haircut.

Doing some lawn. We are up here at Kings Cross St. Pancras. What we're concerning ourselves with is this blue line, the Piccadilly line, right? So the Kings Cross station on the Piccadilly line opened 15th of December 1906, right? This is a deep-level tube line. This is a big busy interchange station, right? As you can see, there's several lines here. There's the Victoria line. There's the Northern line. Represent. You have the Hammersmith and City, the Circle line, the Metropolitan line. There's also two mainline passenger terminals there, Kings Cross station, St. Pancras station, right? And also, of course, the Hogwarts Express, right? Am I correct in saying Kings Cross is the busiest station on any given day or is that not correct?

Yeah. I think so. I used to commute into Victoria. So Kings Cross is where all of the trains that don't come into Houston, into London come in. And it's always packed. It's always busy. Yeah. I was there actually. I went to Europe with my dad. You're beautiful. No, I went to Europe. It was because my ex-girlfriend broke up with me rather than be proposed to, so I had to take my dad. That is a thing that is true. So anyway, it was great fun. No one got arrested. We didn't cause an international incident. But I was in Kings Cross and the ceiling is that weird textured thing.

And I just kind of kept looking up and I was like, I've never seen a ceiling before. I am a dumb American and I was genuinely entranced by the fucking thing. People are like, are Americans really that stupid? Yes. Yeah, I promise you we are. Those big Victorian like glass and wrought iron station roofs are cool. They kept the one at Glasgow Queen Street even as they fucking demolished the entire Brutalist 70s station frontage. And I took my picture at Platform, whatever the Harry Potter raid another book. Yeah. Platform nine and three-quarter genders. Platform two genders only. Yeah, no, you can, you know, you can totally

change into an animal by magic, but two more than two genders. No, that's crazy. No, the apology's potion is actually deeply, deeply shameful. Yeah, that's not candid at all in the fucking books that you can just do it. You can just fucking do it. You just have to get the hair. Just the dumbest. We've said it in the comments when people misgender Alice and shit like that. It's just all transphobes are just the dumbest fucking people on the planet. It's just I cannot imagine like shitting your pants because someone's like, I'm a woman. Just imagine people do every day, every day, people wake up and decide to do that shit.

We're not monetized, so I can say it. Trying to keep up with your supply of apologies. Potion is too expensive. You refer to HRT, yeah. It's Easter dial, but they have it over the counter at Rolls. You can just fucking get Easter dial, you know, magic Easter dial and wizard in Russia. Oh God, but there is a wizard in Russia, isn't there? Because she did the like world like world magic schools and they were all different kinds of racist. And the Russian one was like, magicovska. And it's like, yeah, okay, cool.

And like there's one for all of the United States. He's like, not everyone's a fucking Boston Brahmin. Yeah, we're really sorry that you're, we're really sorry you're not speaking German there. I mean, just imagine that she'd gone in the other direction and there's one for the whole of North America, but it's in like Dubuque. Did she do one for all of Africa as well? Yes, yeah, she did. Africa, well known as a relatively small continent with no different cultures or anything. Like the Japanese one is just called like, like a really fucked up clumsy machine translation Japanese for magic place. It's just gonna get real aggressive,

just because like anime titties academy. Yeah, I mean, this is the woman who named only explicitly Asian character Cho Chang, right? Like the Irish one is only good at blowing stuff up. I have some grievances. Yeah, this is not so good. Alice, when we're done this, I'll send you the the am I the asshole for having a Harry Potter wedding? Oh, fuck off. Oh my God, you are just so you know, you are you are an asshole. Read another book. I can give you some recommendations. Maybe we'll start a well there's your problem book club. The first book is gonna be William Faulkner, because I only read things by dead white men. But at least that's not transphobic. Yeah, but book one is Faulkner. Book two is like pevsner and book three is the Quran.

Right. Yeah, you're gonna round the education. All right. All right. So anyway, back back to the subject matter. I'm sure we'll do it again. Yeah. So why don't you just talk about the subject of the podcast instead of going off on dawn? If we recall what we were talking about, we were talking about Kings Cross St. Pancras, right? So I don't recall that escalators were installed for the first time in 1939, right? These were a type referred to as what were they doing before that it was opened in 1906. I used to walk up the stairs. Yeah, they just they had the cantaloupe thighs that exactly. But then like too too much like they put too much soy in the water and like the 1920s or something. And so they just had to be like, oh, my legs are telling me that soy boys

won the war. That's the first one. Yeah, it's just a bunch of like Prussian infantry chads getting annihilated by like French French versions with them with a fucking machine gun. Oh, squadron of Paul Joseph Watson's making that face. Just getting mowed down by the French. I so badly want someone to make and reply to the Twitter account with like the Virgin Walk Guy, but with like the blue coat and the red pants. So the escalators were installed in 1939. It was a type referred to as MH. This is as a series of escalators that started with M, right? And this was designed for, you know, this is a rise of 72 or excuse me, 17.2 meters at 30 degrees, right?

It's not too bad. 1939 escalator, that means it's made of wood. All right, cool. It's fun. Further orientation, right? This is King's Cross. That's certainly King's Cross. And St. Pancras, which everybody's like, oh, it's so pretty. But like the actual brick bit of it that you see there, that's just the hotel now. You may recognize St. Pancras as the building that was used for the exterior shots of King's Cross in Harry Potter 2, Harry Potter Harder. Because you've got to preserve... Somehow they got a parking space for the Ford Anglia right here. You got to preserve the romance because King's Cross is like an uglier color of brick and it's

just like two big sheds with a nice roof. Yeah, it's not that great looking of a building. Yeah, you've also got to keep, if you want to annotate the British Library and the Crick Institute on the left hand side out of the shot because they're both hideous modernist piles. Ignore that. I really hate the British Library. There's an additional pair of platforms for King's Cross over here, right? This was called... The Harry Potter Shop at Platform 9 and 3. What the fuck off? Anyway, there's another pair of platforms over here we'll talk about in a bit. This was the commuter train platforms originally called King's Cross Midland City.

This was then later King's Cross Thameslink. Now they've moved the platforms over. They're like underneath St. Pancras now. Yeah, it's been 10 years since I've been at King's Cross. I wonder if it's still the red light district that it used to be where I got almost run over crossing the street by a drunk driver and it's loud all the time. That's cool. Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, everywhere that's just outside of a train station is a disaster show in my experience. That's true. Xerox is the worst. I don't know. Hey, what's up? What's the worst area outside of a railway station just like to be in to just

exist in? Because I'm still arguing Xerox where they have the semi-legalized prostitution and extremely tolerated aggressive drug dealing. Not to get all nimby. I spent a week in Xerox train station when I was a teenager and it was perfectly fine. Really? Yeah. That was the time my dad decided to send me to Europe with three days of heads up that I went to Europe for a summer. Sure. All right, you're going. Oh, get on the plane. You know how you plan for your summer to try to impress a girl? Hell no. Get on the plane. You'll leave in three days. Well, I'm glad you weren't offered heroin as often as I was. I don't know what about me

like gave me that impression. I feel like as the podcast is pre-eminent recovering heroin addict, probably don't do it, folks, although it's a land of contrast. Oh, it's the best feeling you've ever experienced and then your life comes crashing down around you. Great. Full time. Okay. Now, we've got an idea of what above ground looks like. Let's look at, again, more scanned documents that let you know that's how it's official. So these are going to be charts. We can have charts again. No charts, only diagrams. So this is Houston Road right here, right? Houston Road right here. Here's King's Cross. Here is St. Pancras. Where is Platform 9 and three-quarters?

And then three-quarters of the way up my ass. Right here is the ticket hall, right? Let's zoom in further. All right. So. Enhance. Enhance, yes. Again, ticket hall, perimeter subway here. When they say subway in London, that means a pedestrian subway, not like a train subway, right? Yeah, it's going to be like a little sort of creepy piss-smelling tunnel that you walk through. So then you have the Piccadilly line escalators here, the Victoria line escalators here. Those both go down to separate sets of platforms. Then you have some stairs that go to various places, right? Okay. Various of locations. Yes. But the main thing is ticket hall is here. That is where the action will occur, right? It's one big room divided by

ticket barriers with a curved ceiling and it's just got these big entrances of escalators coming in. Now, of course, we're in 3D, right? So all underground stations, especially big transfer stations, this is just a rat's warrant of tunnels, right? As soon as you start building anything in London below street level, it just, it eldritch runes start appearing on plans and it just starts creating extra corridors where you didn't want them and infuriating angles. Yes. Just sudden house of leaves situation. All right. So right here is where ticketing happens. You can see here's the fare gates that brings you into fare control so you can just get on the trains, right? So your oldest stuff, your oldest thing, you got the metropolitan line and the circle

line up here. So I guess that's, I don't think Hammersmith and City existed at this point. The metropolitan line, you got the circle line up here, right? That's the oldest, right? Then you have the, oh wait, you got a switch, right? Then you have the northern line. The deepest one is the second oldest, right? And then they decided after that they were going to try and jam another line between that and the ticket hall. They built the Piccadilly line, right? That's horrible. It's like three intersecting, like, just, oh, that's... Oh, yeah. After that, they found a tiny bit of space. So in the 60s, they jammed the Victoria line in that tiny extra bit of space they found. Right, yeah. That's efficient. All right. So one of the things, these are all very high traffic

escalators, right? As a consequence of the various, like, the Tube Transport for London, playing fucking mini Metro and just linking a bunch of their lines through one thing. Yeah, exactly. It's like, find any little gap. We'll stick like 17 trains through it. Yeah. A vision safe. High traffic escalators, of course. As we mentioned, there's a lot of places for debris to get stuck. So high traffic escalators tend to build up a lot of debris, right? People drop stuff and it gets wedged under the side, under the stairs, and it's like newspapers, cigarettes, dust, hair, rat shit, yeah, general nastiness, rat themselves, yeah. Yeah. Horse somehow. Yeah, exactly. Someone tried to bring their horse, it got stuck under the grate.

It just gets in the moat. And they're just like, oh. Damn, there goes another one. Horses, unfortunately, very disposable. Yeah, no. So escalators also require a lot of flammable lubricant to keep running properly because they're big complicated machines with a lot of moving parts. Right. So the M series of escalators, including the MH series, were known to catch fire every once in a while, right? Shit happens, yeah. That's like a tolerated fault. Is it like it does that? Yeah, sometimes stuff just catches fire. Yeah. Not a huge fail. Unless you get a huge deal. And they never caught fire in a serious capacity until a fire at Paddington on the Bakerloo line in 1944 that destroyed the escalators entirely, right? So that was one time. One time it was not

good. 1944, there's a war on. One time, yeah, exactly. There's tolerance there. Yeah. You can't be like expecting the maintenance to be at full thing, you know. It didn't kill anyone, so it's fine. Yeah. I mean, practically everything in 1944 killed a bunch of people. So this is like way down the list of problems. Yes. So after that incident, a bunch of water fog equipment was installed on a lot of escalators, right? That was both to occasionally extinguish fires if needed, but also to get rid of some of the fluffies that built up around the mechanisms, right? Gross, gross, gross, gross, gross. Yeah, lots of fluffies. It's an enormous long belt just covered in like, oh. Yeah, no, thank you. It just looks like a fucking sheepskin coat

under there. It just feels like a movie theater flow. Why are you doing this? Why are you continuing this thing? So the main cause of fire on these escalators was discarded cigarettes and matches, right? God damn it. This continued even after smoking was banned on the underground because, you know, people lit their cigarettes on the way out of the station. I hate everybody. Yeah. Learn to vape. We're once again, well, vaping wasn't invented yet. It was a primitive society. Then learn to dip, which is cool. Oh, God, but imagine that track just covered in dip. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. It just rolls down. It just gets collected at the bottom. Exactly. Oh, God, okay. Yeah, so cigarettes, cigarettes are wild because they're the worst

thing. It's like insanely funny to me how bad cigarettes are for like, both every aspect of your body and the body of everyone around you, but also like, for like structural reasons, like, they just start fires in perverse ways and times and places. Yeah, that's cool. Chaos is good. Yeah, they're the dang Joker, right? It's a cigarette wearing Joker maker. Yeah, never mind. Oh, God. All right, so we got more and more complicated images here, right? Yeah. Well, this one over here, where's my mouse? There we are. Oh, boy. This guy over here is the same diagram we were looking at before. But now I have an additional one with lots of lots of additional information, photocopier burn. Yes. That's how you know it's

official. It's official. Yeah. Once again, we're getting the supply teacher vibe, right? You put that on a big gray overhead projector. They hand you the exam and it has so much photocopier burn, you can't read it. Uh-huh. Yeah, that happened to me probably about, you know, 30, 45% of exams at Drexel. You just couldn't actually read what the hell you were trying to... I can't be arsed, so don't bother fucking asking. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I too played that game. What does this say? I don't know. Fuck you. So, now let's talk about the incident, the fire, right? Wednesday, April, Wednesday, the 18th of November, 1987. This is Wednesday, April, November. Yeah, exactly, right? It's the 18th of November, 1987. I'm not running for president. I can make mistakes.

All right, so this is around 7.30 p.m. It's near the end of the evening rush hour, right? Mm-hmm. And a passenger traveling up escalator four, that's this guy here. Yeah. This guy here, because there's two images here, so those are the same escalator. Anyway, he noticed on the way up escalator four, he noticed that it was on fire a little bit, right? Oh, that's not so good. Yeah, it's not good. So, he reported that to the booking clerk, right? Yeah, and it's like the, your escalator is slightly aflame. Yeah, it's on fire a little bit. You should do something about that. Yeah, I had a, he's like, I could have had a really good pun on the word, a light here, but like... I figured you should even do something about this.

Yeah. No, this is actually his fault, is because he was a poster. He like had the 1987 equivalent of a podcast, which is where you just like, called in on an early touch tone phone, and you just like, did jokes. And so, he was doing his pun on the word, a light, and it's two meanings in relation to a train station fire. And the guy was just like, looking at him and like, not dealing with a fire. It wrapped, it raptured, yes. Around the same time, another passenger who was coming up the escalator, or maybe at the bottom of the escalator and recall, sees the fire and hits the emergency stop button, tells everyone

to get off the escalator because it was on fire. It's a bad thing to be on things that are on fire, right? Yeah, reasonable, very reasonable. So, the station inspector goes out to investigate, he saw there's about a four-inch flame halfway up the escalator, right? That's not good. It's not like, especially serious since, you know, it's big heavy wood is not going to burn too quickly, right? Yeah, it's just burning some of the shit under it. Like, it's burning like, old depth. He goes to call headquarters, and the headquarters called the fire brigade, but the thing is, his radio doesn't work underground. Of course, we're not on the surface is the thing that's easy to forget. We're still underground.

He has to go walk outside to use his radio, because that's a normal thing for someone who works in an underground railroad to have to do is have to go above ground to use his radio. The thing which was still a problem in 2005, when the bombings happened, in that case, it wasn't the tube staff, but it was the emergency services, police and fire brigade radios wouldn't work in the deep level tubes. It's very cool. Good lord. Yeah. All right, so they stop the other two escalators in this escalator bank that goes down to the Piccadilly line, right? You know, these guys, and that's also how you get back up from the northern line. You can see there's another bank of escalators there. So, at about 736, the leading railman,

I'm not sure what that position means. Sounds important. Yeah. Let's just assume like big track guy. Yes. Yeah. It probably has a hat. Yes. Maybe hi vis. Very official hat. Maybe he doesn't have hi vis. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. He blocks off the Piccadilly line escalators with some tape and a skip. They're blocked. If you're American, you don't know what a skip is. It's basically a small dumpster. Yeah. A small open top dumpster. Yes. That's so British. Just to be like, yeah, I just threw the dumpster in front of it. I threw the dumpster in front of it. It's fine.

You know, what you want to do when you have a fire is you want to like conceal the fire from view and make it harder for people to access. Yeah. So it will stop people from using the escalator that's on fire. I suppose. I mean, I guess London commuters absolutely would tear through a thing of tape that says, do not cross this because it's on fire and just be on the escalator. Yeah, we'll deal. We'll grit your teeth and bear it, you know. It's on fire. As you're burning to that. Yeah. By far not the worst thing that can happen to you on that same commute. We got through the blitz. We'll get through this burning escalator. Yeah. All right. So the London Fire Brigade dispatched four pump trucks and a ladder truck to the scene,

right? Okay. What do they need the ladder for? I mean, it's not ladders go up. This is the opposite of up. It's down. I assume it has extra fire equipment on it. You know, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's like, you know, they dispatch any old thing to any old disaster, you know. Fire fighters are hitching for an excuse to use the equipment. Further to the Viant Dam thing where we talk about cop cars being cool. I think firefighters are the like, they're far better than cops for A, not murdering people so often, but B, actually knowing how cool it is that you get to drive a big truck that makes loud noises and has flashing lights around. But they're always itching to

like break down a door or break a window or something. They love doing that shit. Yeah. I do not blame them. They're like, you know, it's like firefighters, they're like Labradors, right? Even when they break down your door, you can't be too mad at them because they're just so happy to be there. Hey, guys. Play fetch with your local firefighters. So the station inspector, the relief station inspector goes underneath escalator four in a stairwell. It's underneath it, right? With a CO2 fire extinguisher, which I don't understand why

you'd give people a CO2 fire extinguisher in a confined space. That sounds like a major suffocation hazard, but I'm not the one underground. So, you know, I mean, yeah, they clearly haven't seen all of the like marine safety YouTube videos where it's like the guy dies in the confined hole. And his friend is like, holy shit, my friends in that hole climbs in and dies. His friend shows up and is like, ha, two of my friends are in that hole, goes in the hole, dies, rints and repeat until eventually somebody's like, ha, there's a big pile of corpses in there. Maybe I should not go in the hole. Yeah. Well, you just go until the hole's filled up. Problem solved. So he's down there with the CO2 fire extinguisher, but he can't get close enough to extinguish the

fire. You also forgot about the water fog equipment, right? Reasonable. I mean, this being England, it's probably buried in like 600 pages of documentation and like the switch for it is like kind of it's behind like a bunch of binders and somebody's like grotesque coffee cup that's full of like eight different kinds of mold. And like people forgetting stuff is like a really common thing that happens actually. Yeah. People forget shit all the time. Yeah, you need to do the boring training thing. So you remember the thing is the thing. Or alternatively don't and just like hide it behind a bunch of like it's behind like the work microwave or whatever. And you're like.

So at 742 or excuse me shortly before 742, the Piccadilly line and northern line trains are ordered not to stop at King's Cross. But you know that this doesn't get through in time for the trains to actually not stop, right? So there's still trains on the platforms here and here, which are still stopped stopping and dropping off passengers, right? And they're all just feeding more people into this burning station. They're all being directed up to the Victoria line escalators here, right? And the Victoria line trains are also still they're still stopping, right? So, you know, they're dropping off passengers, they're still leaving the station, they're still going through this ticket hall to get out, you know? So

around 742, there's a general evacuation, right? The staff and, you know, everyone in the station is told, you know, get the fuck out. This thing is on fire, right? It's a lot of people who are in the public restrooms. And, you know, a certain amount of the staff at the there was a currency exchange right here. They don't get the message, right? Yes. Well, you're going to need them again. So they don't get the word, they stay around. Meanwhile, there's still passengers coming up these escalators here while these escalators are on fire, or at least escalate at a quarter. Breath time. This is the problem with the tube, right, is that it's so overstressed, especially by 1987, that there's so little give in it that you get a blockage anywhere,

and it just gets instantly filled shoulder to shoulder with people. So why the bombings were so bad was that they came in like stages, I believe. And so like people would have their journey disrupted because one station was closed, pile up in another one, and then that one would get attacked. And it's just like it's so it's so easy a thing to exploit for like someone who is minded to or even just a totally natural phenomenon. So that's cool. That's that's safety. Yes. At 743, the fire brigade shows up, right? They go down escalator four to assess the situation. Temporary sub officer Bell, I don't know his first name, says there's temporary sub officer, clearly. Yeah. So it's just a weird, weird choice to name him that, but you know,

nominative determinism and all that. True. There's a fire about the size of a large cardboard box, right? And a large boulder the size of a small boulder. Yes. Absolutely. Me and my there's a bunch of smoke in the escalator shaft, right? Oh, good. Is that where the smoke is supposed to be? Yes. And the smoke is going up because that's the way smoke goes, right? So never mind that. The fire brigade was unable to find the fire hydrant, right? The fire hydrant was right here. Because of the infuriating like Byzantine rat nest design of the thing, because it's like the chaos ruins have been activated.

And so it's just they couldn't find it because this area was under renovation. And as a result, there was a temporary hoarding, you know, a temporary construction wall, blocking off that area where the fire hydrant was. You know what I love to do when I'm doing construction is to block the fire hydrant. Yes. Yeah, I've heard that's the smartest thing to do. Yeah. Less space, less things to be on fire. Am I right? It's the same philosophy as the skip, right? You can't just have people if people know there's a fire, they're going to go towards the fire hydrant. And so you got to like you got to conceal that shit.

It's okay. We turned off the fire mechanic while we're doing these renovations. We'll turn it back on later. It's not, you know, we cheat a little bit here. We don't cheat so much to do renovations while having the game paused. So around this time, 743, the last Piccadilly line train stops. Let's have passengers, the northern line trains keep making stops though, right? Sure. That's not great still. So 745 is when the flash over happens. Oh, boy. Yeah. All right. So flash over, right? What is that? It's when you don't remember to touch the outside of the door of the house that's burning before you open it. Yes. Yeah. All right. So in a fire, right, especially in a confined but ventilated

space, you know, stuff gets hot, right? From the fire, which creates heat. Yeah. Just just make sure this is on the level of your spicy rocks. So as the stuff gets hot, the stuff starts to break down and emit gases, right? Some of which are flammable, right? The molecules in the stuff start to break down. The lighter molecules go up in the air, they become gases, right? This is called paralysis, right? Stuff is decomposing from heat, but it's not burning, right? Never seen in World War Two, there were wood gas-powered cars and trucks, right? With the big comical tank on the top, right? Yeah, this is the coolest hell. Yeah, especially in Germany, where they had big fuel shortages. Not cool as hell. Yeah, no, not

cool as hell, actually. They had big fuel shortages during the war because fascists are incompetent. Yeah, sounds about right. Yes. So the same concept here. Well, that's heating wood to create wood gas, which you can then feed into an internal combustion engine. This is heating a whole lot of stuff to create a whole lot of stuff gas. Yeah, stuff gas. Yes, stuff gas, exactly. And eventually, the stuff gas reaches a certain concentration with the air. You get an air fuel mixture, much like you would in an internal combustion engine, right? Much like you would in the hold of a liberty ship filled with ammonium nitrate. And at that point, this gas can rapidly and explosively ignite, right? So this is the... It can do the bad thing. It does the bad thing.

Yeah, we don't want that. Suddenly, you go from having not a lot of fire to having very much quite a lot of fire. Foosh.jpg. Yes, very quickly. So this is the most dangerous situation in firefighting, and that's something that all firefighters are trained to recognize and avoid, because this is not a situation you want to be in. No, you don't want to open the door to the house and have the thing do the thing. Yes. So with that in mind, why didn't... We're not impugning these firefighters, even though I did just call them labradors earlier. Clearly, they knew what they were doing. So why did this happen, and why did they not avoid it? So, I mean, well, one of the things they showed up very close to it actually happening,

and they had all of what, three or four minutes? You just get out of the truck and then just die instantly. Cool. Yes. But one of the things that happened pretty much instantly is an enormous flame leaped out of the escalator shaft. Keep in mind, there's still people evacuating from these escalators through the ticket hall. It completely consumes the escalators, spreads along the roof or ceiling of the ticket hall, and the whole place was engulfed in flames in seconds, right? Yeah. And the temperature in there just is not survivable. Right. 100,000 million degrees, yes. Yeah. Approximately one pizza roll inside. Yes. So, at this point, they sort of abandoned efforts to try and evacuate passengers to the surface,

and everyone gets off on Victoria Line trains. And at least a few folks were evacuated to the exit via the Midland City platforms. There was a tunnel that went out there, which was the only other real exit from the station, from the platforms. That was the like the addendum to King's Cross that you were talking about earlier, right? Yes. Yeah. But 31 people were killed in this area, and 100 injured, right? Very rapidly. Yeah. All the passengers were clear of the station by 755, who hadn't died, but the firefighters were, you know, they were there late. They were down in the tube station, well past midnight. Because it's just, it's just like aside from completely destroying the escalators, you now have a massive fire, right? Yes. Everything was on fire.

And it's underground. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Everything's on fire. It's underground. You also have a fuck ton of like casualties crammed into one room, which is approximately one pizza roll degrees. Yes. And this also has like fucking no oxygen in it, because the fires just consumed that. Yeah, everyone's got to get, you know, get suited up in like scuba gear. And also their flame retardant clothing was made of plastic. Yeah, I mean, like if you've seen, like if you look up British firefighters in like the 80s and 90s, it is real fireman Sam stuff. It's like, it's a glorified plastic helmet and a plastic coat and like plastic yellow pants. That's not what you want in a fire. No, the state of material science is not so great. You

would have been better off with the like heavy retro like waxed leather jacket and stuff. I don't understand why, you know, material science said we should use this, but experience says this melts into my skin. Yeah, I don't understand it either. Sound off in the comments, fire experts, please, because like I don't, it's perverse. I mean, I guess the idea is that it's like it's hard wearing and it's reflective, maybe, but like it doesn't know. It's not makes sense. So the fire was not contained and extinguished until 1.46 in the morning. But it was a very rapid event. Almost everyone who was killed was killed like instantly, right? One body was so badly burned, it was not identified until 2004.

Jesus. And I mean, this is like not to come back to the tube bombings again, but like, I feel like this has to be super traumatic for for firefighters and ambulance staff and everyone, because you have these a ton of bodies, extremely fucked up bodies and injured people like horrifically injured people who you're trying to move out of a very confined, dark, airless space. And you're just doing that over and over and over again until like one in the morning is that's some seriously traumatic shit. Yeah, it's not good. At least one of the firefighters said they couldn't bring themselves to ride the tube again for like decades afterwards. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. I mean, like thinking about the number of times I've been in tube stations where it's been

shoulder to shoulder packed. You just kind of think about that and you just go, oh, well, no, I don't like this anymore. Do not do not feel real about it. So here are some pictures. This is what was left of one of the escalators. Jesus. All of the steps, all of that hardwood is just gone. Yeah, all the steps are gone. You just got like sort of a bear track there. This is the top of the escalators. You can see it's gone from like, you know, it looks like a cave. Yeah, burned out cave. It's like you can see it's worse on the ceiling because that's where the like the heat's been the most intense. All the fire came out this way. Yeah.

All right. So one of the things which was very confusing, though, was how this fire got as bad as it was so quickly, right? Because no one... Gotta do some detective work. No one thought a fire that was the size of a cardboard box could suddenly become as huge as it was. Raging in front of, yeah. Yeah, raging in front of. Flash overs are one thing, but they didn't expect a flash over would happen that quickly and from that small of a fire, right? No, some weird shit going on here that like... This is kind of the answer to the question I posed earlier of why wasn't this avoidable was even if you hadn't like just got there, right?

If it's something that you're not aware can even happen, really. If it's some kind of like outside context problem, then you're never gonna be able to do anything with it. Yeah, since this was 1987, they had computers, right? Right. So. Very faltering yay because we have mixed emotions about computers. Yeah. No one blames ya. Imagine, this is a picture of my posting rig. This is what the inside of all of our brains look like complete with the four guys in suits. Yes.

It's like, yeah, this is how I decide what to tweet is it just goes round six real to real. Yeah, no one could believe the scale of the flash over. It was completely unprecedented. There'd been many escalator fires on the underground, but none which acted like this one, right? So they pretty quickly determine the cause of the fire was passenger dropped a match on the escalator, which ignited some grease, you know, which was exacerbated by a bunch of fluffies acting like wicks. Yeah, gross. But who liked cigarettes with a match still? Yeah, when I smoked, I always used a match. I could never quite get I could never quite figure out bicks. I mean, I guess like the same reason I never used a Zippo was like the taste of like

lighter fluid like still though, but there's some retro shit to use a match. I work with what I have, Alice. I guess so. But then I like you have the much more rational option of dip, which would of course just drown the fire instantly. Thank you. I think so too. Yeah, with the lesson, the lesson from this is that Britain needs to embrace dip. I know it's an adult spit, but you should be spitting in this very specific context. Yeah, do do do not spit except into an escalator. You may save a life you save, maybe your own. So expert witnesses couldn't agree on what caused the flash over, right? Was it was it off gassing from the wood? Was it the 20 layers of paint on the ceiling? Was it something else?

Right. Deferred maintenance much? Just paint over the paint over the paint over the paint times 20. Well, you can't say they didn't keep it painted. That's true. The paint guy was like on top of it. Yeah. So they did a computer simulation at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, right? Also known as Harwell Labs to determine what the hell happened, right? And this is the late 80s, so computer simulations are like cool and new and exciting, right? Yeah. And the computer simulation revealed a phenomenon which had not previously been known

about called the trench effect, right? Named for John French effect. The fact that it happened in a trench is coincidental. Yes. So fast moving gases, right, tend to adhere to surfaces. That's called the Coanda effect, right? Yeah. That's also the reason why your shower curtain blows inwards. I didn't know that. It's genuinely true. It's, yeah. I learned something today. Now, those same gases when involved in a fire increase in heat and eventually flash over, right? Causing the huge, sudden and sustained jet of flame, which didn't go off the ticket hall, right? Yeah. You just have a fucking guy with a flamethrower, essentially. Yeah. So those two well understood phenomena combined to create the big flash over that happened, right? Now,

a lot of experts thought the results of the simulation didn't seem right. You know, they thought this is all screwed up and can't do that. So they commissioned... This idea being that you have essentially a big chimney, right? That funnels, but not just the escalators themselves, but the belt under the escalators, like a confined space that kind of like channels a flame upwards. Yeah. It's on an angle, which is weird, you know? So they commissioned a one-third scale model of the escalator to test the theory, and it did exactly what the computer model said it would. Huh. You know, the same thing happened all over again.

Oh, to be somebody who makes the little like one-third scale models of like escalators and stuff, that sounds nice. Well, it's not that little, though, it's the thing. Still a big thing. It's like, I don't know, it's like probably still a two-story stall. No fun on this podcast. Oh, right. Shit. Yeah. And then some further investigation, you know, said that the London Underground took a very cavalier attitude towards fire risks, and, you know, staff should be better trained in handling fires and evacuate stations earlier, right? So a lot of the senior management resigns, smoking bans were more strictly enforced after this point, and wooden escalators were slowly

removed from service. The last one was replaced in 2014. Jesus. You were right about slowly. Yeah, no kidding. That's, hmm. And so, I'm sure it was like a tourist attraction, so I'm sure people did the thing where, which you did in Washington, where you just code to ride the wooden escalator before they take it out of service. Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, there's still, I think there's still a big wooden escalator installation in Britain in the time, pedestrian tunnel, if I'm not mistaken. I believe that that's correct, although we, of course, don't live over there. So, Alice, field trip, buddy. Yeah, that's right.

All right. The last one is, the last one was at Greenford Station, which I don't even know where that is, like, Ealing, maybe? That was the one I showed earlier, though. Ah, okay. So, after this, a few stations were enlarged to improve capacity and decrease evacuation times. You know, again, this is a few as budget allows, of course. Yeah, of course, because this was deep into Thatcher years. Oh, yeah. So, you're just like, you can't have anything. Yeah. Yes. No. And a lot of fire codes for underground stations, new underground stations were tightened up, right? You just, you just open the fire code and it's just like, when the steam locomotive

throws off sparks and you're just like, but that's the story of the King's Cross fire. What can we learn from this? Other than read another book. Yes. Spit only into escalators. And only if you have a fat wad at the back on your mouth. Yeah. Yeah. Don't light up on a wooden escalator. No, don't do that. Don't light up underground at all, please. I am so fucking sick of people smoking on SEPTA. Mm hmm. Please, please paint. I mean, please clean instead of paint. Yes. If you can be like, I can cover up this layer of dirt with a 20th layer of paint. Don't do that. Wooden escalators are still kind of cool. Yeah. Casanostas still terrifying. Yes.

When there's a fire stay far away, let the professionals deal with it. Don't embark on like a long complicated pun when you're trying to explain the location of a fire. Don't do like a really dense sort of a piece of word play. As much as you love your bits. Just simply convey the information that the thing is on fire. And then do bits afterwards. One thing I didn't look into, which I probably should have is one thing a lot of transit advocates complain about a lot is the high cost of creating modern rapid transit infrastructure, right? And one of the big limiting factors is fire codes because they require so many exits and things need to be really big,

at least strange stuff like say, if you ever taken the Silver Line in Boston, there's these enormous, palatial, gigantic stations for a station that sees one bus every 15 minutes. That rules. That's partially due to fire codes. And I don't know if this was one of the incidents that really inspired extremely strict fire codes for underground stations, but I'm sure it was. Yeah, well, I'm glad I'm glad somebody are pricing underground rail learn trauma, even if the London Underground didn't. Yeah. Well, it does mean you spend like a couple billion dollars on one station. Whenever getting the Navy Yard extension, just give up. Yeah, exactly. Well,

look, maybe maybe in like 30 years time, when the American political situation has totally changed, people will treat it like the Moscow Metro now. And they'll be like, man, it was a failed impossible system, but it produced these beautiful subway stations. Yeah, because everyone will be living in dirt hobbles in the subway station. Look, beautiful in comparison. Yeah, God. Anyway, next episode, we're doing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Yeah, I once again, I have to like look in the captions to determine whether or not I'm capitalizing bridge. So I never remember whether the name of the bridge is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge or whether it's just a bridge disaster that happened at Tacoma Narrows.

Well, it was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge on account of going over to come back and change all the captions. Yeah, thank you. All right. Does anyone have commercials before we go? Listen to Trash Future. We have a podcast that's available wherever podcasts are podcasted. We're getting very into Twitch streaming, too. So subscribe to our Twitch at twitch.tv slash Trash Future podcast. And Justin, we've had you on briefly a couple of times to like talk about stuff. We'd like to have you back at some point and we can do like trains or something. Oh, trains would be fun. Yes. We should do it. Twitch stream, that'd be fun. That would be fun. Yeah, it's a good idea. We could do Sacramento.

Yeah. Oh, god. Franklin 11 coming out soon. The draft is up for Patreons. I got to record some of the narration or all of the narration, but it will be up soon, hopefully by the end of this week. But I got to edit this first. But, you know, once this goes up on YouTube, you'll know I'm finished editing it. So it will leave me with nothing else to do but the Franklin 11 anyway. Yeah. Well, what's Franklin 12? That's going to be like blind rage is what it is. No, we're going to do we're going to talk about racism and genocide and Thomas Oostek Walters architecture. And Steven Gerard.

Biggie of racism. Can I finally get my Franklin County Sheriff patch or something? Um, oh, that's that's an episode I'll have to do when Franklin Franklin County becomes Franklin City. They haven't talked too much about municipal divisions yet. Ah, shit. You just you just added another episode I got to do. At least this one shouldn't have a lot to model. Oh, yeah, that's true. I just, you know, I have to say there were there were some lines. They're not there now. Yeah, you can you even can use the city skylines like actual tool for this and just draw a big blob that's like is now a neighborhood. Yes, it was like in one of the Philadelphia neighborhoods, Northern Liberties was once a

separate city and was like the third largest city in the United States. As of the 1719 census. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in fact, like the Brooklyn thing is what allows New Yorkers to I'm telling this story for a third time on the same episode. Go to Coney Island to get drunk on a Sunday. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Do not do not comment. Do not comment. We are not interested in your comments. Do not like, do not subscribe. Do not interact with us in any way. No, do not perceive us. Yes. Do not be aware of the existence of this podcast. No parasocial relationships. No parasocial relationships. No. Still do continue to vote on trade madness though.

Did the Atlantic coastline win at least? I believe so. Honestly, I actually didn't check the results. Yeah, the New York Central fucking lost. Oh, happy day. Oh, it's beautiful. All right. Bye everybody. Bye, everyone. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, yeah. It's not over yet, but the ACL is cruising. Oh, yeah. All right. I'm done recording. Goodnight, everyone.