Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 39: Great Heck Rail Crash

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

in an unusual move today this podcast will talk about trains WATCH RAILNATTER WITH GARETH: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzA-8fUrw2C5cRcP9gO5BwA DA SLIDES: https://youtu.be/7ejyhTkMd6U DONATE TO BAIL FUNDS AND ETC AND PROVIDE THE RECEIPT TO US VIA TWITTER OR E-MAIL AND WE WILL SEND YOU THE BONUS EPISODES: https://www.phillybailfund.org/ https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory https://secure.actblue.com/donate/bail_funds_george_floyd https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019 E-MAIL IS IN THE CHANNEL ABOUT PAGE OR ALSO WE SAID IT IN THE VIDEO: DUBYA TEE WHY PEE POD AT GEE MAIL DOT COM!!! patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

I actually had a meme that I wanted to make, but I had to do it in audio form because I thought of this to get real mad at some born-again Christians when they tell us that the Jews killed Jesus. I was going to have the meme of SpongeBob saying, want to see me do it again. I was the part of the joke I didn't realize was there until after I made it in the Osprey episode about load-bearing Jews. I was like, well, whoever heard of that? Well, one of them founded Christianity.

Are we good? Are you ready? I think we're good. I think we're good to go on my Twitter timeline. It's the Anti-Defamation League telling me about things I already know. It's it's my mother. It's my mother calling me. Did you hear about this?

Yes, yes, I did. I did. My favorite thing is my mom discovering memes like 10 years after everybody else. And she's like, I found you a meme and I'm like, Bob, I love you so much, Bobby. Let's do this. Let's talk about trains fucking up. All right. Oh, Jesus.

Eating a cheesesteak. Sorry. The most Philadelphia podcast on the fucking internet. Would you get on the stake? Did you get to just get onions and probably one or what? I did onions in American, actually. What? You know, that's fine.

I'll buy it. The thing is, I mean, American is fine. Don't Americans find the real one is bad was when Scott Walker watched his face. I mean, like you ordered Swiss on a cheesesteak. Like what a fucking carry. Oh, my God. Didn't carry on like Brie or something. Was that like a meme?

The fuck has Brie? Who in the city carry any Brie cheese? I think I think carry did order Swiss. I forget what Walker ordered, but it was something stupid. Stupid. May have also been Swiss. I don't know. At least you could like make a case like, oh, yeah, I Swiss is my favorite

cheese from the great dairy state of Wisconsin. It's any kind of just shit it in his own hands. Also, I would like to take this moment to say on record that ketchup and mayonnaise on a cheesesteak are good and fine. And at Tom Payne in the who I know is going to be mad at me in the Twitter comments later, I'm sorry about your baseball team. OK, I'm sorry. Bryce Harper isn't working out.

Great guy. Great guy. I love that guy, but it's a real interesting sports opinions. All right. So you good? I've finished the whole thing in your mouth. Yeah, I just stopped the whole. I just get deep in that cheese and cheese.

Oh, all right. That was that was that squishing noises there. Now we're going to fit the cheesesteak in. Just like compressing it. Like exactly the buckle to hydraulic press channel. I just imagine you rolling it up really tightly and then inserting it kind of in a transverse manner into your mouth. Just kind of get it in and then it then it pops open once it's behind your teeth.

I am going to pop it, actually. That's a shame. Thanks for nothing, Gareth. Our guest has killed me. That's because you're the third now. He's already died of cheesesteak poisoning. Liam has now died of disgust. It's just me and Gareth.

I will tell you disgust is not an emotion. I feel very haunted. OK, I'm a disgusting piece of shit myself. Let me tell you if I'm saying, oh, that's disgusting. You have probably literally literally pooped on my clothes at some point, which happens, which happens. Stuff is tough.

It goes wrong. This is the UK podcast now. This is Alice and I. Yeah, that's right. I would give Lee a Scottish podcast, actually. Yeah, that's right. We've we've we've taken over from you. Money boys agree in just nine hundred times.

Oh, fuck, I should have a drop for that. Actually, I do have a drop for that. Yeah, so I'm scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Yeah, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, the podcast about engineering disasters with slides. There's all of us on the bagpipes right there. Yes, we are very talented. Well, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, podcast with bagpipes.

I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Alice Kofo Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Oh, I'm Liam Anderson. Oh, didn't see you there.

I'm the least good third of this podcast and my pronouns are he, him. I'm also the angriest third of this podcast, and I wanted to take this time to not apologize to anybody in the YouTube comments who got their feelings hurt, be mad at the people who designed your shitty bridges and structures and walkways and stuff. Don't be mad at me. I'm just a guy making jokes. I'm not the one who killed your family in Minneapolis.

I'm not the one that got the stars moved to Dallas and what they immediately won a cup. You're dumped. Oh, oh, oh, you drafted Carl Anthony Townsville number one. Oh, we're down. We're down real good. And Andrew, oh, no, I'm not responsible for your dumb sports decisions. I'm not the sum for your bad fucking bridges.

It's not my fault. OK, I love a fucking book. Go read a documentary for all I fucking care. I'm I will never, ever change my my demeanor on this podcast, except when I have to get very serious when we talk about like the failings of institutions, none of which I am responsible for personally as a Jewish person in control of the universe. Yes, me personally, no.

I love so much that the first five minutes of this podcast are what Liam gets instead of therapy. I listen, I see a psychiatrist. Because therapy, you might have to edit this for a lot of people is just validating your worst impulses for one hundred and fifty bucks an hour. Yeah, whereas you can like validate your worst impulses for a lot less than that with our Patreon. Yeah, two bucks a month.

And soon we'll have shirts. Roz, if you don't get the shirts printed soon, I'm going to buy a screen printer and do it myself. They will have spelling errors. They will say beating and lebelious things about you. But we're in America, so it doesn't matter. We have a guest. We have a guest today.

I was just waiting for the I was just waiting for that to be the next bonus episode on therapy. Hi, I'm Gareth Dennis. I'm a rail engineer and my pronouns are he and him. All right, we've done it. We've done introduction. We've only been recording for nine minutes. We don't want to talk about Gareth doing the Lord's work on each

S2 and the trenches. Oh, yeah, right. How goes the epic battle against XR? Oh, God. Well, did you see that they recently announced that they're not socialist? That was a really good one. Yeah, they did a Twitter and they said, oh, we condemn. We do not.

There was like, we condemn or we don't agree with this placard. And it was it was something fairly like a name saying with like, if you have a bit of socialism, there's a chance you might save the planet. And they're like, no, we condemn this. No. And what they did, Extinction Rebellion, what they said was, we have faith in the people, which is not socialism, and we think that we should like determine policy by sortition, which they use.

And this was their example to do jury service already, a thing that famously works very well. She has no inequalities. So the thing is, they saw like the Conservative Party has a tree in their logo and they're like, that's us. We're Tories. Yeah. It's like the last big thing that happened was Chris Packham, famous for well, something he he he got a court case, which he lost.

But the fact that he lost it is now being used by the government as precedent to support their like 4,000 miles of tarmac, stupid roadbuilding program. So that isn't practice. The opposite. It's bad. Awesome. We're doing the same thing in in Pennsylvania, where our traffic engineers just get people killed sort of as a hobby. And it's just like, or or and hear me out.

Bring back the fucking trolleys. So run the Pennsylvania more than once a day. I don't understand that. I want to go to Pittsburgh, like let me fucking go to Pittsburgh. Oh, also, our new Patreon tier, I think, is obviously we become donors and take over Amtrak from the inside. Yes. Yeah. OK. So cool. We're on the same boat.

Yeah. Let's talk about. We become a train company is what is what happens. And speaking of trains, what do you might see on the screen in front of you? Is a train, right? Yep. But it's kind of gotten well, smashed up in several ways. Is it supposed to look like that? I do see the guy on the right wearing a safety high vis, though. So this is fine.

Everything's going to plan. It's good point. I can't see his face, but just based on his body language, I just imagine him kind of like hands down at his sides, just totally defeated, looking around, like wondering when Ludge is wondering who's going to clean this up. Just like I just want my mediocre cold sausage. It's the posture of a man who is looking at those rails

and is like someone's going to have to like fucking replace those. See, I see, I don't want to set the tone too early, but I reckon that guy was just like a hedge trimmer guy. He seems to have like the like the the mask over his face. And he's looking down because he's just holding a hedge trimmer. And he's almost oblivious. That's sort of got to go to work. Got to do my job.

Yeah, his head just ain't trimming themselves, baby boys. Got to trim the heads, the hedges, derailment or no. No, but what we're going to talk about today is the great heck derailment of 2002, right? Yeah, Justin, what did you call the slides for this episode? I call the great heckenpupper. Yes. All right, you are. Ross, I would got to inform you, you were going to be shot at the conclusion.

Before we talk about this, we should talk about the goddamn news. Joe Kennedy, the third lost. Yes, yes. Ed Markey is taking the Democratic Party back into the left. Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry. Was that was that too soon? You know what the shitty thing about the Kennedy assassination was beyond sort of the death of innocents for an entire country?

Was that it was my dad's 17th birthday? Oh, and just ruined his party every so often. He'll bring up like that his birthday was ruined. He'll just be like, yeah, and he had the audacity to get himself killed. And I just like, I don't think that's not sure. One of the worst crimes the CIA has committed, ruining your dad's birthday. He doesn't get. Yeah, those bastards. Didn't your dad try and get like freedom of information

request about everything they had on him? And they just delivered like boxes and boxes and shit or something. No, it's a privacy act request. Oh, yeah. It was it was it was it was a big in. I the statute of limitations long since being expired. Yeah, my dad and actually I'm going to tell the story because my dad can't get mad at me because he's not a practicing lawyer anymore. So my dad many years ago

was at the White House protesting the United States and Vietnam. And there's a picture of him, which if I can find it, I will upload of him holding the NLF flag in front of the White House. Rules right before he got detained. All right, so RIP, the Kennedys. They ask you how you are. You just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine. You just can't get into it because they don't understand.

Maybe they'll take this opportunity to go somewhere other than Cape Cod. Oh, did you see the tweet? There was like a whole article that was like in getting owned. Joe Kennedy has liberated his family from a political legacy that have long been trying to escape. Have they, though? Have they? I was about to say you don't have to run for office.

Yeah, some of us go through that running from for office at all. Try trying to escape my political legacy. You ran for office for the occasion. Hey, hey, Roz is a fucking hypocrite here. You ran for office. I also won that office. Yes, I am a Democratic committee person just in the 26th ward. Kennedy, I think that expires this this year

because it's kind of a meaningless position. Congratulations on your precinct captaincy. I'm not that high up. I've got to start from the bottom, baby. Yeah. What you've got is you've got the like politics level one job from the Sims, where it's like a ballot stuffer. And I'm as good Max's.

Yeah, in other news. Gay train. Gay train. He's a gay train now. Yes. I don't know anything about this. Garrett told me to put this in there. Yeah, yeah, I told you to put this in. Yeah, lots of people who have opinions are very angry

because a train that was going to get stickered, new stickers put on it anyway, got new stickers put on it. They're they're a colorful and mean things to people who aren't right wing. So so, yeah. So like Pierce Morgan, like shout himself over this. That was that's always good. That's really Harley Brueh was the other one. Although she unusually she backed she backpedaled on this.

She was real quick, too. Yeah, she's normally kind of like one of these like right wing rabble rouses and like within a few minutes of like kind of like sticking her like finger in the hornet's nest of railway twister. She was like, well, I don't actually mind that the train is gay. I just think that it's, you know, is this a good use of resources and, you know, got owned some more? I mean, I was impressed by the back track because I kind of

like to imagine that she just like opened up Twitter after like three minutes of going to do whatever else. I just hundreds of comments from like communists who would be perfectly happy to have her head on a stake like just being like, don't insult the train. Don't insult the train. We know what you live. Don't insult the train. My favorite energy in this and for fear of being a bit too song is when the like fairly like middle of the road trains bars are like,

fuck you, LGBTQ plus rides are good. I'm like, yeah, you'd go totally like an Iraqi person stood on the end of a platform. Yeah, we got the people who stand way too close to level crossings with DSLRs. We got them on side. And the other thing is that they're the train operator. Avansi is doing a competition to name this gay train right now. So if you want, you can go onto their website and you can suggest a name for this train.

Yeah, yeah, I've been I've been pushing the idea of progress because, you know, reasons. But there are lots of nice ideas. It's been great. It's actually a positive thing. It's just like good news, but also making peers more angry is also good. So yeah, the name I suggested for the record was Roger Poozer, who was this American railroad photographer since, you know, gay and also, you know, railroads. Yes. I thought it was I thought it was a nice idea.

So we'll see what they decide. And in the meantime, here is to trickering the Libs, I suppose. Maybe they could maybe they could moderate their position and they could do another rap of the train that has like, I don't know, like the the Bush Camo cans with like, you know, the bright orange hunting train before this, these same trains were like because when Virgin Trains lost their their operating license, they were going to restick of these anyway,

and that just kind of was in limbo for a while. And so they were just plain white. So there literally was like a straight rights train for a while, but it was just beige. Yeah, full, full like white cis train just bouncing around. What's really so another good thing is these so these are these are Class 390 pendulinos, don't you know? And the nickname of these,

which is officially in my Encyclopedia of Railway chat, which is behind me on my bookshelf, they're called Bendy Dildos. Because these are these are tilting trains. So these were the successor to the APT. They're called Articulating Dildos. Gareth, please be serious, please. Yeah, as a technical point. Yeah. So yeah, Bendy Dildos got color.

Yeah. Nice. All right. So now that we've talked about trains, we have to talk about trains. It's really just sums up the podcast, doesn't it? Infinite loop, infinite loop, infinite loop. So now a couple of times on this podcast, we've talked about the West Coast main line, right? And that's the one that sort of goes out of London.

And then it goes to Birmingham and then it goes around. It goes to what, Liverpool or Manchester? Maybe it goes straight through. It goes up and then it goes to Glasgow, right? It is that curvy as well. Yes. So now, in addition to having a West Coast main line in England, in the United Kingdom, there is also an East Coast main line. Yeah, there's two coasts.

Yeah, there's two coasts. In fact, England, notably not landlocked, actually. Oh, no. It's kind of an island, actually. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. And so this one, this one is the good one. Yeah, this is like built with such ideas as straight lines. Yes. Yeah, it's revolutionary. Yeah, it's nice seeing York Slap Bang in the middle there.

I'm waving. Oh, yeah, this is the one I've been on as opposed to this one, which I haven't. I have, in fact, been at least as far as York. Anyway, so, yeah, the East Coast main line had this revolutionary concept of straight lines, but it also went through places where people don't live as opposed to West Coast main line. That's how you can do the straight lines. You don't have to join up all of these like medieval towns.

You can just be like, yeah, we're just going to bore through this mountain and like just go to York in a straight line. It's also, yeah, we got it. It's the flat bit, too. The East Coast is flat. That makes life kind of easier for me as an alignment designer. That's the less funny answer, I'll admit, but, you know, there are still tunnels and it does, you know, there are also famous curvy bits

like Morpeth, which is in and of itself another episode for you that you ought to do the Morpeth curve. Anyway, yeah. All right. So it's like a 90 degree bend in 125 mile an hour railway. It's exactly what I thought. Yes. And it's sprayed sleeper trains through the adjacent bungalows on successive occasions. It's, I mean, that sounds like the Northeast Corridor, North of New York City.

That's right. North of New Haven, really. It's kind of, it reminds me of the I think they call them they call them nail houses, but they're like guys who just will not sell and can't be made to like be compulsorily purchased. And so you just have like an enormous building site with one house in the middle of it that they can't touch. Yes. Yes. I love that. Just like dotting highways and shit around.

It's like, it'll ever take me alive, assholes. You cannot make this inconvenient enough for me to live in. I will stop doing it. Fuck you. That is, yeah, that is more than you can see on the map, actually. So you can see Newcastle, which is sort of three quarters of the way up. The next dot, you can see the 90 degrees, you can see it. So just so you can see it.

Yeah, that's it. The Morpeth curve. Huh. All right. But let's let's get this rolling here. OK, East Coast Main Line, built by the North British Railway, the North Eastern Railway, the Great Northern Railway that's different from the one in America. That was all consolidated into the London and North Eastern Railway in 1923, when they decided what if instead of having a whole bunch

of small railways, we consolidate them into four big ones, right? So yeah, it goes London to Edinburgh, via Peterborough, Doncaster, York, Newcastle, all these places, right? Yeah, all of which are much smaller. Yeah, you sound enthusiastic. All right. So it was on. This is generally faster than West Coast Main Line.

This is where the Mallard, this this this guy right here. That's at the speed record. What? What? No, it did hit the speed. What? No, it's the speed. No, no, no, no, you did. Nope. Yes. Give us this one. That's fair. The Liam Williams and T1 truther.

Teach the controversy. So yeah, it hit 125 miles an hour, halfway between Granham and Peterborough on July 3rd, 1938. It has historically been operated with locomotives optimized for sustained high speeds like the, you know, the Grizzly Pacific's here, the Flying Scotsman, the Deltax, stuff like that, right?

And in the 1980s, they fully electrified the line. And as a result, they needed a new fast electric train. It's smooth, quiet, and an altogether delightful experience. God, I love that thing so much. In fact, I love everything that's on screen right now. Yeah. So the guy in the brown jacket. Sorry, I'll shut up, Rose. Sorry. So we did it.

We did an advanced passenger train episode. And sort of the short version is British Rail decided to try and make a world class sort of TGV or Shinkansen equivalent advanced passenger train. They put too much stuff on it and it was a dismal failure not really due to the technology itself, but due to the sort of corrosive field of failure

that Britain emitted at that time. Yeah. Yeah. Which I think is only embodied perfectly by the fact that actually there was a spinoff that came out of it, which is this, the Intercity 225. But they called it the Intercity 225, even though it was nothing to do with the Intercity 125, which was the diesel thing that people probably remember. And just because the brand of APT was so toxic, they were like, no,

let's ditch that. We're not calling it that. What's what's good? OK, Intercity 225. Yeah, because the APT was driven by a power car that was like in the middle, right, which is what's up here, right? And then what they decided to do is, well, what if we put a cab on that? And boom, we had the class 91. Pretty much. So, yeah, the, you know, they they they took out all the tilting

garbage and all that and they made it run with conventional coaches. It's got some weird features it has. So on most trains, the traction motors, those are the actual electric motors that make the wheel spin are mounted on the axles on these. They're actually mounted on the body of the locomotive so that, you know, then you can you reduce your unsprung weight, which reduces track wear. There's it's got under slung transformers. The lower center of gravity, right?

But, you know, to a certain extent, like this. This locomotive is kind of, you know, it's it's a dumb brick that goes fast. Yeah, we called it a muscle car on the APT episode. Yeah. You put the large thing in the thing and hopefully it doesn't like it. Doesn't have to do anything too clever, unlike the APT, which tried to do a lot of clever things. It was. Yeah, it was like this thing was this thing was amazing.

And it was it pushed the boundaries, but also it very much was it's still a local. Yeah. No computer is happening here. The computer is, you know, made of meat. Boards in it. It's biodegradable. Yeah, they're printed on things that you could make like a riot shield out of. But yeah, so it was inner city two to five is supposed to go

two hundred twenty five kilometers an hour. Couldn't actually hit that speed because it didn't have cab signaling, which the APT did. And like literally an experimental stage with like dimo taped on speed. But yeah, it's it's pretty good, pretty good train right here. I like it. Another another feature of this. You can see it's streamlined on one end, sort of. It could also go backwards.

Do. OK. So happy to see you. Hey, guys, what's up? Hey, it's the back end of a class ninety one. What's really weird is that so I've been lucky enough to be inside of one of these when it's pumping the juice and making the moves and inside the cab, it's identical on both ends.

So you're actually in this cab on this blunt end, the number two cab, as they call it, it looks identical. It's got got like the tapered dash and everything so that, you know, unions. I love I love that it's called the number two cab. They work like we're number two. We're number two. Our first place is actually the first loser. He just didn't want to show off.

Yeah. So in addition, on these inner city two to five trains, at one end, there's a locomotive. At the other end, there isn't, right? So a lot of modern high speed trains, either there's a locomotive at each end or the power is sort of distributed through the whole train. Like you have a electric multiple unit. It has motors on all the wheels under the passenger cars and stuff like that.

On the inner city two to five, the locomotives at one end. And at the other end, we have this guy called a driving van trailer, right? Which is just like it's it's it's a van where they put baggage in there. And then, you know, there's a cab at one end, right? So it can, you know, it's a push pull thing. What if we weld a cab onto a caboose? Yes. And of course, you know, here in the United States, we would call this a cabbage.

A what? Cabbage. Yeah. Or why? Because it has a cab and it has baggage. Oh, and scab. Yes. Yeah. What an elegance and subtle naming system. That's American baby. Thinking that we were both overthinking that.

Yeah, I was thinking what why what I was thinking. Like I was doing the like GIF of like math equations coming out of my head and like this like brassica is like no sideways reference to what what what. Yeah, no, no. Cab, baggage, merch, coat. Yes. Then again, we're not really negotiating from a position of strength on this one, given that we just talked about the bendy dildo, you know.

Yeah, fair point. Yeah, maybe this is just something that's common to to railway people the world over. I mean, yeah, that that encyclopedia I talked about is an absolute that's a joy to behold. There is some absolute filth in there. It's good stuff. It's like it takes me back to primary school days, when the first thing you do when you get a dictionary, a foreign language dictionary is look up all the Rudy's.

Yes. All right. So now, Gareth has inserted many slides about crash worthiness here. No, but. Oh, God, yes, I did do this. So, oh, yeah, there's a picture at the end, which is what I do, where I apologize for the fact that I'm about to talk about what I technically don't do, which is trains, because technically I do track. But anyway, there's a train on its side. It's not good.

It's not supposed to do this. Yes, stop retweeting it. They only do this when they're very upset. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is this is a gray rig in 2007. This was the last time a high speed train did come off the tracks apart from a month ago, but we're going to gloss over that briefly. So, yeah, next slide.

So that there you are picture. OK, so we're going to very quickly go through crash worthiness. And OK, this is for the this is for Britain, but it kind of works everywhere else as well. So this is a Mark one coach. It's it's old. It's it's really old. And it's nice though. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's a proud.

So absolutely bloody thousands of these were built kind of in the 50s, 60s and early 70s, including a load of multiple units. So like trains that didn't have a low coat one end. And in the 1950s, they had like decent crash worthiness. So they were basically a flatbed truck that was long and then someone put a metal shed on it. And that figured for good crash worthiness in the 1950s because, yeah, you know, pig iron is good.

You're tougher than anything you run into. Exactly. Everything else was made of matchsticks. So it plowed through happy days. So if you go to the next picture, you'll see we're not so much. So this is 1988. This is Clapham. Which is where the there was kind of the beginning of the end for these. Well, I say that. But actually, they kind of managed to survive until 2010.

So not like good. Anyway, they're well past their used by date. And I kind of think, OK, they're all falling over. They don't look too bad. So if you go to the next picture. Not so much because what you can see here is everything that remains of two or three of the coaches. It's got poorly.

Yeah, full of commuters. So not not the best, not the best. So OK, Mark, one coach, crack. So then we come up with the mark two. There it is. And about 2000 of these were built until the kind of mid to late 70s. So from 1963 to the mid to late 70s, so still a pretty old design. But if the mark one was being built pretty much until the same time as well.

So this was, you know, OK, if we've got the next picture, some more smash. This is this is a college in 1988 as well. I don't know why the person decided that black and white would be edgier for this photo, but never mind. There are some mark twos in amongst here, but actually there aren't that many crashes where Mark twos got tested. So, yeah, we don't don't exactly know how. I mean, they're kind of all right, I suppose.

But I think fingers crossed. Obviously the best ones because they never crashed. Exactly. We've kind of got rid of almost all of them as well, I think now. And the kind of the oldest coach that we've got floating around now is. The mark three here is this was designed in 1968. So it's not that new. In fact, it's really old.

It's about a 50 year old design and about 850 of these were built until 1988. So they kind of last a bit longer and they were pretty good crash worthiness. So the previous one, the mark two is the first sort of all in one one piece thing that was like a toilet roll rather than, you know, a shed on top of a flatbed truck. And this one expanded on that. So it kind of has. So this picture is good for explaining crash worthiness. So crashworthiness, you want to have kind of crumple zones at each end.

So the bit were so that they are thanks Justin. So this is a point to put gesturing to the end. Yeah, and there we are. And that can get smush and it absorbs energy. And we call that collision energy management, which is where if the train hits something head on those bits smush and it absorbs lots of energy, which is good. So that was kind of they were OK, except those were quite rigid on this train. And a bit like the rigid joints versus pin joints.

In this situation, you don't want your train to be fully rigid and strong. So that nothing. Yes, you do make them stronger. Just make them stronger, making better. So that's fine. But you do turn the passengers into glue, into glue inside the coach, which is. You pay your fares and you take your chances. You can just use the you can still use the train again, though. People will reproduce themselves infinitely trains.

You have to put work into those. So. So. So these are OK when they kind of bump into something head on and stay on the track. But if you go to the next slide. Again, problems. So this is where and this is sort of a bit of a theme for today. I don't want to put any spoilers in. But this train was derailed by a Mazda, which the driver decided to commit suicide inside.

And in doing so killed six people on the train, including the driver. So as you can see from this picture and the next one, this is often nerve it in 2004, by the way. So the next picture, you can see that bad things have happened here. And these two pictures, one of them, the coach has folded in half. And the other one, it's been smashed to bits, probably by a bogey, which is one of the things that has the wheels attached to it that weigh quite a lot of tons. And these these two features.

So end on strength is one thing. But these two features refer to things like roll over strength. So how strong your train is when it's not going in the direction it's supposed to. And this is also impacted on on by couplings. So the things that connect the train together and how strong those are and how much those can survive in a crash kind of defines how much your train goes in all directions. And if it goes in all directions, these things can happen, which is which is bad, right?

Is if you're sat in the chair in the middle of coach G. Well, people, yeah, not great. You have all that in half. Yeah, you get folded in half. So so those aren't good. So in the past, people always used to say, oh, the mark three was really crash worthy. And people still try and say this now. But the thing is, it might have been crash worthy like 40 years ago.

But it is not crash worthy now because we have trains that are better than that now. In fact, the Bendy dildo that we are showing earlier is that that's a good it's pretty good crash worthiness. Anyway, so mark three bad. Now, then we get on to the mark four. Mark three bad mark for good. Mark three bad mark for good. The mark four is this it's pretty good.

It's this is the one that was developed entirely for the the in city two to five. So the train that was up top. This one's blue and red because privatisation happened. But yeah, 300 of these were built. So not that many, actually. And they were built until 1992. So still kind of old, but much newer than the mark threes. And if you go to the next slide.

Oh, yeah. So there's only there already been one derailment at Hatfield just north of London. But actually, these perform pretty the coaches perform pretty well. The couplers perform pretty well, so they kind of kept the training line. And actually, the bad stuff happened when one of the coaches hit an oily mast. But that's at the back there. We don't have that's that's not worried too much about that this point. And OK, we're a bit of trivia.

I hope I'm not going to spoil this bit of trivia for anyone else who's going to say it. But this local that you can see here is the same one that's involved in today's actual crash. So first local loaded. Yes, a train. Yes. So so yeah, if we go to the next one. The next slide, I think, yes, so we have so this is this is then the future ish. Actually, this is now quite an old train as well.

But you can see that the train has survived quite a lot better. It's much more robust. It's the rollover strength is better that this derailed at pretty high speeds. I think it's about 95 miles an hour that it came off. So pretty high speeds. Yeah. And also, you'll notice that the cab is in pretty decent shape despite having hit things. So generally trains, as they get newer, we understand how to disperse that energy better, which is good,

because then you don't either turn passengers into goo or fold them up. This is all too counterintuitive for me. I very much like the idea behind the Mark one of just make the thing stronger than the things around it. Like, yeah, easy peasy. That works. Everything else around it gets stronger, which is a little bit what happens at a great heck.

Actually, it's why you need to drive a sports utility train. You can get the higher ride height. Yeah, I don't know what the next slide actually is going to be, because how have we we've? Oh, yes. Yes. So this, yeah. So I wasn't going to talk. I'm not going to talk anything about this other than climate change made this happen.

But a lot of people that. So this was the mark. This was an in-city one to five with a bunch of Mark three coaches. Let's just say they did not perform well at all. Next slide. There is. So that's that's what it looked like in the olden days. That's that's Britain in the olden days of like a haze of like grime.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a very familiar side to anyone who has visited our hallow shores. And so, yeah, most people love this train and they go on about it a lot and they love it and it's great and everything. And yeah, you know, it did some good things, but also to 50 year old designer train. So you go to the next slide and see what 50 year old designs of train do when they hit things again.

Again, it's gone poorly. Yeah, it's not going well. So, you know, compared to modern stock, this this train performs absolutely awfully, a higher, even medium speed collisions. It's a train that shouldn't be on the track anymore, frankly. Yeah. OK, next next picture is more bendy coaches, I think. Yeah, it's not it's not gone well. That's really not going well.

So it's gone full can opener. Well, it's not good. And also, if you think of the driver, who's like at the blunt end of things, you go to the next picture, you can see what the inside of the face of a modern train looks like. There's a you can see the big girdery stuff. That's the crash structure that protects the driver sat in there, which is, you know, fair enough.

The time where you actually do want to just make it stronger because there's no crumple zone to crumple. Yeah, yes. That is a just make it really strong situation because, yes, there is no crumple zone and you kind of think you're like, actually, we can submit the driver to high Gs and they they probably won't turn into jelly. Yeah, and actually, this is kind of a kind of a fairly old train now. So actually, the crash structure on newer intercity trains, even more.

Anyway, I've gone on off of that crash structure. They get buffers that are now anti climbers as well. Yes, yes. So they stop. So in the past, you had to use to have the thing called telescoping, which is where particularly with Mark one coaches, the really strong bit would ride up over the other really strong bit. And then it would turn the shed that it was on that was on top of it into dust,

which is what happened to Clapham with. Yeah, so that's not good. So anti climbers are good. Yes. Yes. And as you can see, in the next picture, the Intercity 125 doesn't have that crash structure. Here is a slice of one that was created by a freight train. And there is no crash structure at all.

So not great. But they're a nice thick fiberglass and then nothing. Just absolutely nothing. So so the point of all that was basically to talk about crash workiness. So the the Intercity two to five, so that the class 91 and the DVT both have a pretty decent cab structure. I was going to put a video of that in the PowerPoint. But actually, I already broke your PowerPoint,

so it's a good job I didn't put a video in it. Right. I mean, the PowerPoint's still working. So yeah, it's fine. It's working. It's working. It just doesn't work on Google. Well, yeah. But that that was my fault. Anyway, next picture, I think. Yes.

OK, so here we can see there's like the pig iron steam train, which has actually a pretty decent crumple zone. It's just that it explodes if you go too fast. And then on the on the other side is the Intercity 125 with with Mark III coaches that aren't great and a cab structure that doesn't exist. Then you've got the the Intercity two to five that's here. That's looking very nice. And then you've got the modern replacement, which is OK,

it's a bit plasticky, but it's it's the future and stuff. And that has an excellent crash worthiness, apart from when it derailed really slowly near leads. And all the coaches went everywhere and we're still investigating that. And it's actually really scary. Move on. All right. You know, it's one of the things after they moved away from steam locomotives, a lot of crews, at least on American trains,

would refuse to run the diesel locomotive short hood forward. Because they wanted that they wanted that extra in front of them. Hmm. Yeah, I'm going to go grab an extra beer. I'll be right back. And then we'll talk about this. Get to look at some some lovely some lovely freight locomotives here. There they are with the big yeoman logo in the middle. Let's say. Yeah.

Yeah, because it's like you get this weird collection of liveries where bits of like freight rail freight become privatised and then reprivatised and then re reprivatised. So like it starts as what EWS in a nice red livery. Even before that, this is like in the pre like everyone says privatisation thinks of it as one big hit, right? And but actually bits of bits of private operation were happening

for years before, like even in the late 80s. So like Foster Yeoman, I think, were they were running around with British on British rail tracks, but with their own brains. I'm seeing Justin's bit here, aren't I? Well, yes, I'm back. I have this. All right. So we have to talk about what is the class 66, right? Yeah. OK.

So which one of these is it? We even took a break so you have a name that Pokemon thing. It's this one. Yes. Let's take a job. All right. So what we got to remember about the class 66 is it's an American locomotive. You're welcome. And how did an American locomotive wind up on Britain's and most of Europe's as their standard diesel freight locomotive?

Well, at least act on them. The war, they took our good locomotives. It doesn't look that old. Yeah, just Alan Dulles, like personally supervising, offloading a couple of dozen of these. These are our secret gladiotrains. I'll never expect this. Now that I think about it, when we talk about the Bologna train station bombing,

did anyone investigate the trains? I think they were all like just weird Italian bullshit. Probably. Italian trains are weird for a second on it, Roz. I know, right? Italian trains are great, actually, but they're weird. Yeah, that's fair. You get that nice.

What was it? The Italian early high speed train to set a bellow or something like that, which had like Italian restaurant curtains inside. Yes. So it's a company called Foster Yeoman, right? So Foster Yeoman was an aggregate company, right? They ran quarries and they ship racks to people, right? You want some racks?

We'll give you some racks. Welcome to Tony's Rock Depot. So they were the first company to run privately owned trains on the British Rail Network since nationalization, sometime in, I think, the mid to late 1980s, right? And they tended to run very long, you know, aggregate trains, gravel trains, right? And they needed something that for switching in their yard,

shunting, I guess you would call it over over there in Britain. They needed a heavy duty shunting locomotive, which didn't really exist in Britain, you know, because what they had were these Class 08s here. Yeah, that cool. Do not talk shit about my favorite shunting locomotive. It's a little baby. It's got the side rods.

They're just a steam train that someone poured diesel into the boiler of. Yes, they're awesome. This has about the same amount of horsepower as a minivan, about 350. Liam's Class 08s, Patriot on episode. It's got a nice torque as a cathedral. What? So zero torque is what I'm hearing. It accelerates sort of and very slowly.

So, you know, they had these guys for shunting and they were like, we need something a little more powerful than this. So they decided to go to America to ElectroMotive diesel or is ElectroMotive Division back then. Now it's ElectroMotive diesel. Well, now it basically doesn't exist. And they sent them an off the shelf off the shelf SW 1001. That's this guy down here, big American locomotive.

Well, small here, big over there and had 1100 horsepower. So it's equivalent to three of three of the Class 08s. Three of the Class 08s, same length and a bit. Oh, no, this is like probably twice as long. Yeah, still. Yeah. So it proved to be exceptionally capable and reliable, right? They liked them a lot. And so Foster Yeoman was like, you know, we'd love to get some of these

EMD based designs on our on our gravel trains that we run out on the main line, right? Because back then they were using these Class 56s over here. Which suck. They were kind of. Yeah, they were they were built in Soviet, Romania, which resulted in a few quality control issues. Sometimes the door comes off. It's fine. That happens.

They would go pop a lot. Yeah. I think it just relied on the colossal, disgruntled British workforce to just sort of set them straight again. And the rock moving industry needed to move faster than that, you know. Yeah, you need to have the train get hit with a wrench this number of times per mile. You got to deliver the racks before they go bad.

And from transport fever, too, is that the rocks need to be there on time. Yeah, the rocks, the rocks have a strict expiration date. What's that? What's that movie with the dog that has to go to Alaska to give the kids insulin or whatever? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the one you mean. It's those of the bee.

Yeah. Oh, boy. Oh, dear. I don't I only remember the name of the town, which was Noam. OK, I got this. All right, you guys know I'll do that. OK, sure. There was a problem with using off the shelf American equipment on British railways.

Um, other than Foster Yeoman's own yard. Oh, it was Balto. Oh, yes. So I like the idea of, you know, these these guys just running a la Balto like we will get these rocks to you on time, sir. Just like having a sick kid who needs 60 tons of brown. Blowing through all the crossings that are going to be lost now. We will make it on time, God damn it.

So there's a problem with getting off the shelf American locomotives to run on the mainline British rail network, which is that the loading gauge is different. Yes. Terrific. Thanks for that, guys. Yeah, it's fine. 80 percent of my day job. So yeah, I can confirm.

This was one of the Foster Yeoman locomotives after it was involved in a runaway and it hit a tunnel. And as you can see, the cab was unhappy. I need to I need this picture. Oh, my God, I did not realize this had happened. Yeah, I wonder where you get this picture from when I saw the slides. That's gauging in action. Amazing. That's fine. Now you can just run it back again.

It's been reboarded. I was about to say they have fixed the loading gauge. Yeah. We've made the driver a full three inches shorter. Yeah. Oh, that aspect ratio was not your friend. So what what Foster Yeoman did is they went to Electromotive Division and they said, could you take one of your SD 40 dash twos? That's this guy up here. And could you put it in a blender

and then could you put that in a sausage casing that fits our loading gauge? And they did that and they came up with the class 59, which is an SD 40 dash two sausage. Yeah, I need to be fair, still running is brilliant. Now, they called them the Red Death because when they started introducing them with like the red livery that the first ones came in, they just displaced a bunch of like

bizarre British like experiments that trains bosses were a fond of and became this kind of like uniform cargo thing. You're welcome. Twenty different trains with this fleet size of like 17 that were all developed in modernization in the fifties in a shambles. Yeah. Yeah. And all you needed was an SD 40 dash two. Yeah. Yeah, you're welcome. They saved you from yourselves.

It wasn't a happy time. So later on, they they took the same shell. They replaced the six forty five prime mover with a seven ten prime mover. That's seven hundred and ten cubic centimeters per cylinder. And that was the class 66, which looks identical otherwise. Very reliable. A lot of the crews hate them because they're loud. And they're hot as well.

The Associated Society, a locomotive engineers and firemen threaten to ban people ban their members from operating locomotives in summer back in 2007. But I guess they must have put in a window air conditioner or something because that labor action didn't happen. You got to put in the thing that they put in Soviet attack helicopter as well as just a little desk fan. We were we were on the porch at one point a couple of weeks ago,

and a guy drove by with his super sweet fan that he had hooked a window unit up to the back of. I was just like, ah, a man of genius and taste. Yeah, that's incredible. This is the shit I want. All right. So now we've talked a lot about trains. We have to talk about a car. Well, boo. Yeah. Is it a GTI? No. Oh, never mind.

It's a Defender, but not one of the cool ones. One to 90 with the wheel base. People are the worst people. I like a Land Rover. Yeah, we know. You could have bought a Land Cruiser. That would still work after six months. But you didn't.

No, give me give me the the British engineering the rest of the three weeks. And it just has a fucking shovel that you can fucking deploy out of the bottom with a lever to remember the Falklands. We remember that. It's not real Land Rover. If it doesn't have moss forming a large part of the structural members. Yes, the doors fall off for weight reduction, but not on purpose.

Oh, and pictures in that beautiful county blue. I even remember the name of the color shade. Wow. So that is. There was a man named Gary Hart. Driving a Land Rover Defender on the M62, which goes from whole to Liverpool. He was going towards whole. He was driving his Land Rover Defender with a trailer, which had a Renault Savannah on it. Why?

Oh, I had to I had to move his Renault Savannah. Actually, to be fair, I've always desperately wanted a Renault Savannah. What? How do you look at those two cars? And I'm like, yes, the one that I want. Do you know who I trust? It's the French, the French. Yeah, I know it's always going to smell like diesel. One seat will be missing for no reason.

Yeah, they're going to be a weird strike that goes on, right? I would have to like look it up in the manual. And I'd be like, oh, the fucking like bizarre, like idiosyncratic pneumatic suspension system has fucked up somehow. And just like one side of your car has like dropped to the 20 degree angle. I saw someone do that the other day outside the Fiddly Zoo in their in their Mercedes S class. The front part of the suspension had clearly just collapsed.

Yeah. And what had clearly happened before that is that he had lowered the Mercedes suspension, the incredibly delicate and complex self-leveling Mercedes suspension. I and I just thought, see, see, that's the Germans making everything needlessly technical and complex. You know, who wouldn't do that to you? The French. It doesn't work, but it's not the suspension. I don't make no gearboxes out of straw.

Oh, yeah. The the the the you you're up with the manual to page 97 because you've thrown around and just as fuck you pussy. Can I talk about how much I hate the new Defender, by the way? I like it. That's my problem. No, no. Look, the old Defender looks distinct, right? And it looks kind of like a Toyota Land Cruiser. But apart from that, it's got a distinct.

Yeah, right. It's got a distinct silhouette. The new Defender looks like everything. It looks like every car. Every car looks the same now, the same now. Yeah, it's going for that. It's going for that like Wrangler, new Bronco retro future bullshit. I hate all they did was they took the same car that everyone has

and they like squared off the back, but not fully because they're cowards. They like slightly rounded it off. It's shit. I hate it. I do like the goofy new rear glass panel. I think that that's that's not even the glass, whatever the metal on the side, because it just looks because, of course, that's the most Land Rover thing I can think of. It's just like I would put metal where it doesn't belong.

It was a glass where it doesn't belong. And maybe it'll leave you stranded in the Arctic and maybe it'll get you there. Fine. Who knows? That's the fun by a Land Rover, baby. By a Land Cruiser. And if you can get me a Toyota Helix. So you can mount a douchey machine gun on the back of it. No, I'll just steal one of the M twos. The Coast Guard's got laying around.

Oh, just a trailer with the Coast Guard dingy on the back. I didn't just I didn't steal this spray painted on the side. So Gary is your technical. We need a technical. It's also a boat. All right. So that's a feature episode. So Gary was driving his Land Rover Defendo Defender Land Rover Defendo. Change. I'm changing the name of the group.

Yeah, my old man's Land Rover Defendo. So, yes, he was driving the Land Rover Defender with the trailer, with the Renault Savannah. He was going westbound on eastbound, excuse me. He was going towards Hull on the M 62, right? And on February 28th, 2001, and near the town of Great Heck, he had an oopsie-doopsie. We don't want to have.

I'm sure he was fully awake, though, and he'd been doing nothing at all that could possibly have resulted in him not being fully awake. Ah, as you as it happens, no, he was driving at 6 12 in the morning, forty three minutes from before sunrise, and he had stayed up late the previous night talking to a woman he met on an online dating site in 2001.

Oh, boy, that's some dark, dramatic. Yeah, somebody is getting their ass literally cut off and fed to them. That is what's happening there. Good for him. Good for him. Dark, dark satanic dating sites. Yes. So he was driving at 6 12 of A.M. after having stayed up late and he dosed off thing. Yeah. Yeah. And he went off the M 62.

He went down the embankment and he kept going until the car landed on the tracks here on. And he missed he missed like a guardrail by like 30 feet. Like the start of the guardrail was like 30 feet past where he went off the most way. Yeah. And he landed on the tracks on the east coast main line. Right. Right. So I think he was gone.

Yeah. So it feels like this is a downhill story. Oh, now he's on the railroad. I'm not sure if he maybe was going the other way. I I can't tell anything because all y'all drive backwards. Yeah, we drive backwards and also like all of the names are made up. Like, yeah, right. Hack often nervous. It's written real. No. No. Not actually real.

So several countries that were forced to come together. That's putting a mile. So now once he got on the on the rail, once he was on the railway, he woke up, he tried to reverse off the railroad tracks. He realized he couldn't do it. The Land Rover Defender apparently does not have that much ground clearance. Just turn the def lock on. So he telephoned the emergency services and got out of the car.

And the 445 Newcastle, the King's Cross train, immediately plowed into the Land Rover after he got out at about 125 miles an hour. Well, it's the driving van trailer was going at the front of the train. So that hits first. It's very light. So of course, it climbs over the Land Rover and the Land Rover, half the Land Rover gets wedged underneath the train, carried along with it.

It derails the front bogey. You know, that's the front para wheels, front para axles. The momentum, of course, carries the train forward, regardless, largely along the tracks, right? Nothing, nothing too bad is happening yet, right? The driver is the worst thing literally would have just stayed entirely upright and fine. Two people have been badly frightened so far is what's happened.

And a guy is out half of the Land Rover. Yes, still at the front half. He was on the phone to the cops at the time, by the way. And like the like 999 operator was like, why is this guy just said fucking hell a couple of times? And it's like, oh, because the train has destroyed his car. Yes. All right.

So the driver hits the emergency brakes and then stuff starts to happen. All right. So when stuff starts to happen, as I mentioned, M 62 is up here. Train has gone this way, hits the car, continues to go southwards, right? Now, as it goes southwards, it eventually hits. You see this company here called Plasmore, right? That's unfairious. They make concrete.

Yeah, they make precast concrete, right? You know, that's whatever, precast concrete. You know, maybe it sounds like a she-raw villain. So have you ever done train travel in the United States? You'll know that like there's a lot of industrial customers on the side of like the Northeast Corridor. But usually what we do here is you have an extra track on the side that the freight trains use so that, you know, they can

they can maintain their track to their own shitty standards. And, you know, the main line trains can still go quickly. What they've figured out in other countries is that actually you can just use good switches everywhere. And you don't need as many tracks, right? Which is how the East Coast main line works, right? But as a result of this, of course, when the train continues down the track, the front bogey derailed, it hits the switch down here.

And then suddenly the driving van trailer is diverted sideways, right? And as we've talked about in terms of crash worthiness, ever since like the first like the Mark I coaches, we've been building to a head on collision, it takes us much longer to build to forces in weird directions. And to be honest, you basically can't build for them because it 125 miles an hour. You're talking about energies of like you're talking about gigajoules of energy that you have to dissipate. So big airbag or like all over the thing, it's fine.

Like that Russian explosive armor they put on tanks. It's just like preemptively destroys the Land Rover with an RPG. Yeah, just mounting phalanx systems on trains. I'm just thinking of the sound of the GTA tank firing motor power now. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, we're doing project Orion, but for trains. So yeah, so it's going down 125 miles an hour. It hits the switch is diverted sideways.

Now, this still might not have been so bad, except there was a coal train coming the opposite direction in about 60 miles an hour at the same time. Yeah, and what the what the drivers of the coal train describe or the surviving driver, I should say, is you're just like you're you're traveling along as normal and then you have a sideways like locomotive or in this case, driving van trailer, just filling the windscreen. Oh, no, no, thank you. Yeah, just just like coming towards you like a broad suddenly suddenly get a face

full of train. Yeah. So the train catches the switch. You can sort of see here how like there's flange marks on the ties where it hit. It got shoved over this way. This is in figure six here. Just rammed into a class 66 come in the opposite direction. There's a combined impact speed of one hundred and forty two miles an hour because the passenger train was going eighty eight miles an hour.

The coal train is going fifty four and one hundred and forty two miles an hour is not not a speed you want to come to a sudden stop. No, yeah. What do you get mildly? So, yeah, all hell breaks for it. Loose right into passenger cars pile up on top of each other. They overturned the driving van trailer is essentially destroyed, rendered into its constituent atoms. The coal train locomotive, the class 66 flies off its bogies,

winds up on a ditch next to the tracks. It's a train wreck, right? Literally, yeah, you can see I mean, yeah, the DVT. I don't know if there's any better word than utterly eviscerated. So the camp, we were talking about that cab structure, which it did have. Alice, you did point out cab structure is good, except that the entire cab structure essentially as a single piece was shot off the train by the collision with the 66 and landed elsewhere.

Hmm. Just inadvertently, you you've crafted a sort of ejection capsule that does not contain any of the stuff that you want to eject. It's about to say, yeah, it seems to have not quite protected the driver who, of course, died. Yeah, like, extremely. Yeah, it's real bad. And I mean, you can you can see it just like it. And perverse to say that it could have been worse, right?

But the way it kind of clips the side of the class 66. And it just like takes out a corner of it rather than like head on. I was about to say, this thing seems to have fared pretty well. The big old lump, I suppose. Yeah, the DVT, I mean, it's one of those things that DVT being as disintegrated as it was, absorbed a hell of a lot of energy out of the collision. So actually reduced the impact on the following coaches. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It's one of the things like as it so it's one of those things every so every whenever I do a design, I'm doing designs for trains passing with a closing speed of 250 miles an hour and in and, you know, a distance of 10 centimetres of, you know, like four inches is fine. That's fine. Trains pass each other with that clearance hundreds of times a day in the UK. And it's just like this pile of, you know,

happened all of the circumstances lining up in this one. It's just it's still, you know, I read this report again before this and I've known this accent very well and it doesn't make it any less like that everything just lined up. The position of that bridge as well. There was a bridge right over the point where they collided, which then did smashy on other coaches, roofs off and things as well. Just everything lined up wrong.

Bad. Yeah. A couple more pictures here. You can sort of see how, you know, the class 91 came down and you can see the driving van trailer is a pile of nothing. One of the coaches managed to go further than the driving van trailer. Yeah. Yeah, just kind of being it's like that fantasy of being thrown clear of the accident, right?

Yeah. Ricocheted out, actually. It like flung out. I think it did like a pirouette, essentially, and flew out of the wreckage. That's the one that was immediately behind the DVT. Jesus. So 10 people were killed basically instantly, including both drivers, the guard on the inner city 225,

the chef in the restaurant car got fucked up by commercial kitchen equipment. Oh, no. Jesus, no. No. Yeah. You don't want that stuff to be moving in high speed suddenly. Although interestingly, not because the the Coltrane had two drivers and one of them, one of them survived just by virtue of being on the opposite side of the cab, like that's why I mentioned the kind of the guy who survived was teaching the guy who died a new route.

It was his first day on the job. That's that. Yeah. If you want to, yeah, his so his son is now driving the same train, the same type of train. I didn't know that I would want to do that. I was just thinking that I was just like, I suppose that's very noble and the sort of like I had to say the show must go on because that sounds

dismissive, but I hope, you know, sort of what I'm getting at. Sort of, you know, all these things have to happen. But I just, yeah, I don't I don't think I would have the stomach to pull that off. Yeah. Yeah. All credit to Jimmy Dunne, who is currently driving Freightliner 66 is around. Yeah. Potentially on the same stretch of track. That's that's quite something.

And it's also, I think, possibly his wife or maybe the the the certainly the daughter-in-law of the driver of the class 66 is also driving trains. So, yeah, that's that's that's a lot more mental and physical fortitude, I think that I would ever have. My father drove a train and his father drove a train. His father drove a train before small industry. It is right now. Yeah.

Like that kind of like makes it worse in some ways, because just by virtue of, like, everybody knows everybody. That's really true. Like, so they were engineers. So they were engineers in this train. I know people are on this train and some of them with metal plates in their face. Some of them with, you know, like this was this was like so this for I didn't realize I didn't say that this is really close to where I live.

This is just south of York, right? This is, you know, about 50 miles, 60 miles south of York or something like that. And and so and York was like the York is basically the HQ of the East Coast Mainline. So everyone working in York now has some knowledge of or know someone who was or was on that train. There was the lead engineer for the electrification of the East Coast Mainline was in this train and he ended up being shot from one end of one of the coaches to the other in a different seat on the other side of the aisle facing the other way. Someone else who is an who is an engineer ended up in a field.

But also OK. And yeah, it's just. Yeah, you talk about the railway family and about like it really does feel this this one is like everyone knows someone who is involved in it. It's yeah. I think one of the things we sort of talk about on this show is is is the sort of I think. People is sort of the split seconds. You know, there's there's a certain tragedy, obviously, in the

you know, stuff like Paul where everything's over sort of in 20 minutes. But like when you're talking about differences between life and death, literally of several inches, those are the ones that I was just kind of hurt. Like just hard to talk about, right? Because you're just like I I feel like in all of these, someone's going to carry some survivors guilt. Like in this one, especially when you're talking about literally like

if I had been sitting over there. Yeah, it makes the randomness that much more obvious, doesn't it? Right, right, exactly. And that's just a very sort of cruel reality, just because like this guy was driving what he should not have been clearly. And like we talk about that sort of all the time. I mean, you know, I my my my girlfriend and her sister a couple of years ago, we had just started dating where, you know,

she she tells the story where she was leaving a parking garage in Atlantic City after having gotten dinner with her family. And she was going to pay with her card and the attendant, like in a good mood, apparently, that day waved her. There was a guy, don't worry about it. Like I like your card, like have a good day. And then seconds after that, she was taking a right onto a one way, which she was supposed to do, and this drunk driver coming the other way

slammed into them very nearly could have killed them. I mean, the guy was shitty drunk, you know, so special fuck you to the Atlantic City Police Department for not doing your jobs. And it's it's a matter of like the the the the coincidence that like had they paid for parking. That probably that event would just not have happened. I like all these little sort of the way things line up sort of perfectly or perfectly badly.

Always just I mean, it scares the shit out of me. It was one thing to be Bo Paul, where it's sort of just a matter of time. But then you get to these things where it appears to just sort of be sheer randomness. It's just it's utterly terrifying. It wouldn't have happened so early that it like it would have just you'd have had a very different, you know, that there had been a derailed upright train with no one dead. Yeah, had that been running on time.

You know, afraid of time and that's like minutes. Yeah, it's interesting not to skip ahead. But the driver, this this sexting guy. One of the things that he suddenly got out of jail for this was that he thought it was like it was fate, right? It happened for a reason. And it's very easy to kind of like to scoff at that, right? But I think that's the only way that you can like be that guy

and not go completely insane, right? Like, yeah. But like at the same time, and I understand that like everybody suffers in these sorts of things, it's kind of like that's that's real easy for you to say. Yeah. Well, he's he's still he gets he he gets to be around to say it, right? That's the thing. Yeah, exactly. And like that's that's all nice and good. But like, you know, I think this is sort of one of the things

that I was talking about actually earlier and sort of reflects it. It's like, when we talk about these tragedies, especially like Bhopal or even the bridge collapse, it's like you like in this case, you can be mad at that individual. We should also be mad at the fact that like this this guy was even sort of allowed to do that and like there weren't proper protections in place for it isn't people who are just trying to fucking go to work. Well, like we were talking about this when we were when we were

setting out to make this episode was what's the what's the structural issue here? What's the structural lesson to draw from this? Because we don't want to just say the thing that the newspaper. So it's just, you know, it's a one in a million accident. So for free. Probably not. Because sort of shit happens all the time. Yeah. Driving distracted all the time. Today, fucking literally today, we were I was driving home with my girlfriend

and she was going to make a left turn and this guy in a lifted F 150 because of course it is starts to pull left in front of her. And like, no, it wouldn't have been fatal, but like you because he was just on his way just wasn't paying any attention. And I'm like, you're driving a vehicle literally the size of like multiple sedans like this is this is insane. And like the fact that, you know, even with pickups, like the fact that you're fucking allowed to drive one of those where you can't see a toddler

over the hood is is is just bizarre. This is what we were saying is that like the it's not that there's no structural lesson here. It's that it's there is some ideology going on here, right? And the reason the reason why this is random, why this is a freak accident, right, is because the actual structural thing of we just kind of let any asshole just drive around in two tons of car. Yes. It is like that's so ingrained

that we're not going to confront that on your freedom. If you're not allowed to do it. Never mind the fact that it's not enshrined anywhere. You're not legally, you know, the second amendment for owning a car. So to retest like a couple of like decades before and be half awake and nobody's like, there's no enforcement mechanism to stop you. And you compare that with the like the level of training and the level of like oversight that's required to say drive a train, right?

And, you know, it's night and day. And I think that's that's the other lesson here. That's the other thing that I wanted to pick out of this is that like we talk a lot about about like about safety measures. I'm minded particularly of on the Lake Paneer episode. We talked about how safety measures in that case kind of just worked. This is kind of a corollary to that. And it's that it's risk management rather than risk elimination.

Right. Yes. Yes, we accept so much destruction and death from from people driving like 2000 people a year die in the UK on like as a result of a car crash and 25,000 get seriously injured every year. It's 30,000 a year in the United States. Yeah, they're not hitting about car bad is the thing. And I think that's that's sort of it.

Is it like, you know, and I understand that like I am I am a person who has driven like an asshole in the past. And I try to do that on roads where nobody is. But like, you know, I'm not going to excuse my own behavior here. I would say that like, you know, in Pennsylvania, you don't need as far as I know to like ever like pass another test when you get to be like, say 60 years old. And my dad, thank God, you know, sort of gave it up and realized that he shouldn't be driving.

But, you know, my mother's mother before she died sort of never did. And she was 92 years old. And it's just like your body physically cannot react fast enough to the things that are going to be happening to you. Like I can promise you they won't be. And we talk about, you know, old people on the road or whatever. But I think that's it. Is there sort of there's just no meaningful sort of way

to enforce this sort of thing because, you know, you're going to be all pre-kimed cops from Minority Report or whatever. But it's like, no, maybe we just shouldn't accept that like 30,000 people in the country need to die every year because we have to drive trucks fucking everywhere that it's as we have seen. The cops just kind of don't work. Yeah, I would say they didn't fucking do anything for my girlfriend. Like the firefighters did shout out to the firefighters.

Yes, like this is literally your one fucking job and you and you can't even be bothered to do that. Yeah, well, a DUI is what a misdemeanor in most states. Oh, it depends. There's I mean, I know people who had four DUIs and kept and then they were allowed to get their license back and like, I'm sorry. But after like DUI, DUI number three, like maybe you should just be legally prohibited from ever owning a car again.

Like, because clearly, you know, I understand addiction, whatever. But like, no, at some point, you're just an asshole. I mean, I haven't driven a car in five or six years now. Which you could, if you please, Joe. I know exactly like if I just got in a car, like no one could do anything about it. I tried to do that with you one time. And then what happened? I forgot which one was the gas pedal.

I mean, the other thing that I wanted to draw out of this, the like, I guess, safety management lesson is that the extent to which the railways did everything right and still sort of didn't matter. Exactly. Exactly. Like there is not really an identifiable failure on the railways part other than maybe like slightly older coaches than you would want. But even then, it's not having a fail like system on the train. Yeah. No, not having some kind of fucking

like railgun system mounted forward to absolutely atomize anything that gets on the track. Yes. Barring that. You know, what the fuck else were they going to do? It's interesting. So this is a question that I posed to when I do my lecturing. I say, like, I look after nerve it in this and you're like, well, what happened? What what could we do? What could the railway have done differently?

And when you're building a new railway line, for example, you don't put switches and crossing. So the thing that diverted the deity into the path of the freight train, you don't put those near bridges just in case. You don't put them near level crossings just in case. But that's like you can't go around the whole country and change that overnight. It's something that you manage, you mitigate those risks. But actually, the railway wasn't doing anything wrong.

You know, as you say, it's just it's just a horrible lining up of all the holes in the Swiss cheese, right? Hmm. And I guess the lesson is that there's always going to be that that the fucking like nature of entropy, this agent of chaos in the person of like a guy who's been up to late sexting is less driving is driving towards you in a Land Rover Defender to absolutely ruin your fucking day sometimes. And I need to finish the statistics here.

Fifty two severely injured, mostly in the first class cars near the front of the train. Eighty two people were sent to the hospital of ninety nine total passengers and crew. Like you said, how many eighty two of ninety nine were sent to the hospital. And the wreck had to be decontaminated before it was removed because of foot and mouth disease. I don't remember that. Don't feed cows to other cows. No. All right, Gareth has sent us more pictures.

OK, I did do that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't have anything to say with you. These are straight. These are at the interim report. So they're pictures that kind of show what's going on. He's got most of his Land Rover there, actually. I was about to say you got everything but the part that makes it go. The police, by the way, reconstructed it out of all of the various like atoms that it had been smashed into

in order to establish that there hadn't been like some kind of technical fault like with his brakes or something. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's yeah. I was about to say how did they do that? But yeah, that's right, because it is because the defence were like, oh, there was a fault with the brakes. Yeah. And so and so they had to do fucking like aircraft reconstruction on an SUV

that had just been absolutely destroyed. Would have gotten away with it. But he was driving his French car that probably has like wooden brakes or something like that, you know, wooden brakes with peanut oil. You can see this picture. You can see where the cars you can see where the defenders come off and you can see where the start of the proper barrier is.

It's absolutely bob on. You can just see it's like snicked it. It's just like knocked it, but not actually. Yeah, 30 feet, did you say? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. It gives you like a little shiver, huh? Yeah. And then, yeah, so 500 or 600 meters later,

you get this lot. They're just, yeah. Oh, my God, that's that's people's houses right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, I think I remember, like people got woken up to find the the class 66 locomotive just in their back garden. Um, yeah, they're they're they're

Petunia's absolutely eviscerated by the class. All right, this is mine now. Castle down. Yeah, talk about a garden railway. Yes, I don't know how I'm going to put it, but it's here. And they got a lot of free coal, right? Yeah, a bunch of free coal and a camping coach. Yeah, I mean, what can you say?

It's just such a mess, isn't it? Yeah, it is a mess. I'm sorry about like it has not gone well. No, it's just I mean, yeah, the force is involved. This thing happened in the best part of maybe three and a half seconds, like from the point of which the DVT was deflected to one side. So that like the whole thing happened in about the amount of time he takes to exhale a breath and there's just a load of steel in a pile.

Here's here's an interesting one. So after the M-track derailment at Frankfurt Junction in 2013, where again, it was mostly first or business class passengers who got the brunt of the accident. They started put the business class car in the back of the train. Tricky. Is that something which has happened? Have they done that over on your side? So the reason first class is at one end of the trains in the UK

coming out of King's Cross, which is the Terminus, you know, the Harry Potter station, the Terminus and East Coast Mainline is and people might correct me on this is because first class is closer to the to where you arrive on the platform. So you don't have to walk as far. Yeah. Which obviously doesn't work at the Edinburgh end. And also it gets screwed up when they do a loop-de-loop in Newcastle

sometimes when there's disruption. But broadly, that's the point. Oh, we just have to like make the class character of this explicit by just making the the lower paying passengers the crumple zone. All right, that's what Amtrak does. Yeah. That's what they've explicitly done. Maybe it's a wider thing then, because it isn't in Cassandra Crossing

that that famous railways smash film where all the first class passengers are the ones who go off the bridge, right? If you haven't watched that film, you really need to watch that film. Bert Langcaster is in it as a person from the World Health Organization. I mean, what more do you want? You got a first class car pretty beat up right here. And this is where you see this. So this this is the one that was at the front.

And this is where you see fair play to the coach. It's survived. I mean, that's that's a class 66. It's smashed against there and it's not done too badly out of it. Some of the glass is still intact. Yeah. Wow. Oh, yes, there's another picture from the from the switch where you can see the the flange lines adjusted.

I think you put that picture out and you can see. So actually, just at this point, if the freight train hadn't been coming, the train would have probably been deflected back into the back face in the right way again by the opposite track. And it probably would have continued rolling for another three, four hundred meters without anyone coming to harm. Yeah. Yeah. And that just didn't happen.

This happened instead. Yes. And you can see the 66 there in somebody's back garden with the cab like protruding out onto the line. I like the big white gate over the track heading into the precast place. So it's like, yeah, it's like people who have a really big gate in their garden and you know, like a tiny hedge that you can basically walk through with. Well, around it.

Exactly. I'm just here to discourage you. Don't don't drive a train in here. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I put this one in as well. So I don't want to be too morbid about this, but I think it's worth. We were talking about fire, fire crews earlier. I think you can see this one is just a guy, the guy at the bottom right hand corner. Just looks like and it looks like he's been consoled by the guy in the middle.

And so what was a train has been converted to basically a pile of twisted metal. And these people are the ones you have to come in and try and work out what's a human in amongst it. It's just. Yeah. Yep. So I'm good to us to these people. All right, so this is the slide where I was going to say we should have the discussion. We just had several slides ago. I fucked up the slide order.

I'm sorry. But yeah, that's my fault. I threw too many slides out of the report. I guess. But yeah, this is bad. What why do people think that having millions of people with two tons and no way of controlling it other than holding a round thing is a good idea? But it just feels like a bad idea to me.

Personal responsibility. Don't we love it, folks? I was about to say we all love personal responsibility. It works so good. Everyone is qualified to drive. Well, listen, that driver went to jail for I don't know. I think it was like five years. So, you know, justice justice was done and was seen to be done.

And everything is fine now. Yes, nothing bad will happen ever again. There's no way to like a sign blame to that one person. Yeah, I don't know. Probably get his license back by now. Problem was true. It's not even like a huge invasion of personal liberty would happen if we just tighten things up a bit, you know, like, I don't know,

a test every 10 years or maybe go go full Finland, right? And make it the Finns have the only sensible. No, you have to pass a series of rally special stages and this test. Hope you saw, buddy. Oh, wow, they don't have those anymore. So no one in Finland can drive anymore. That's a shame. These things are always dramatic.

What would be nice is if the if the news reported on car crashes in the same way they reported on train crashes, right? Yeah, although instead, you get the same thing happening in the opposite direction where you just get normalisation of stuff that should never be normalised happens with mass shootings, you know, where it just kind of becomes like weather. Yeah, yeah, and like it's, you know, the only thing that that happens is like it's like a blip on the radar, unless it's like whatever,

a 40 car pile up, and it's just like we shouldn't fucking get to a point where there are 40 car pile ups. Yeah. And I mean, I suppose, yeah, even as we acknowledge that like personal responsibility is kind of this fake thing anyway. And there's only really materialism and like random chance and so on and so forth. I should say. And generally speaking, a lot of car accidents happen because of people who know better choosing to disregard that best judgment.

Right. That's exactly right. And people who like think, OK, well, I know I'm tired, right? I know I'm too tired to drive, but I think I can probably get away with it. And I would say I think that's a mentality. I think I'll be fine. I'll be fine. Take this as a salutary lesson of, OK, yeah, maybe, but equally. But very much of if you're not. Yeah. Equally, equally, maybe not.

Equally, maybe you're watching this happen and, you know, you just have to deal with that. People have as I still have people who think that travelling by train and maybe this is even worse in the North America, right? Because yes, we're a person of flames and and invigorates a town that those programs are popular, right? But rail is still globally, even in North America, is still the safest way to travel on land.

Like by a long shot. Safer than walking, by the way. Yeah, a thousand times more. It's like it's like those are the numbers. You're like a thousand times more likely to to suffer something happened to you on the walk to the station than you are once you're in the train. Yeah, incidentally, one of my favourite little statistical things is that you can actually measure this.

Drunk walking is almost as dangerous as drunk driving for you. Yes, that sounds about right. It's true, though. Yeah. Yeah, no. But yeah, I kind of understand that. It's the same reason people get scared of flying. It's like because we have this idea of like personal responsibility and personal autonomy baked into like our society so deeply. You're just like, I don't want to give up that control. Like some faceless guy way up front who like,

yeah, OK, theoretically, I'm aware that he's like past a bunch of tests and like training and stuff. But like, is it on me? I can't vouch for all of that. So, you know, what the fuck, right? I guess the point is like, you know, cars murder more people than any other kind of transportation system out there. This is something which is not going to be fixed by like electric cars or something like that.

You know, what about autonomous cars? No, not real. No, autonomous cars are not real. No, no. You have me so much telling me that they are real. No, no, no, no. Autonomous cars are not real. No, free your mind, Gareth.

They're like birds. They're not real autonomous vehicles will solve our problems. Then we can have 75 cars in the pod. Seventy three cars going through an intersection all at once from four different directions, killing seventy three pedestrians each. Yeah, listen, if if you like driving on paved roads on rubber tires that much, get a bus working on it. I'd be nice.

Are you ready? Are you ready for the GTI limo bus? V maxing the metro line. All right, I put a slide in here for Gareth because I know you likes this. Oh, yeah, sorry, everyone. Yeah, this so this is going to be me saying this is what I'm supposed to do with my day job is this stuff, which is make this is the most beautiful

bit of railway track in the UK. Look at it. Where is this? This is this is just out of York. This is the first 125 mile an hour switch installed in the UK. It for the Soviet version back in the early eighties. And for me, it's like hope. It's like people even back then, when the Treasury was still a nutter and didn't spend money on anything and, you know, thatcher,

they had a bit of they could create nice things with a bit of, you know, foresight. You know, this is still doing exactly what it needs to. It's not it's not at capacity yet. It's great. But also this is making this stuff is my day job for anyone who's like, what the hell does that guy actually do? The concept of a hundred and twenty five mile an hour switch is mind boggling to me in America, where it's like we'll have like a hundred

and twenty five mile an hour railroad, but make you slow down for forty five miles an hour to switch tracks for some stupid reason. They're going to be a hundred and forty mile an hour turnouts on HS2. Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, those are all too bad. Too bad XR is going to get you first. So I guess I'm going to stand in front of the a stand in front of the tunnel boring machine.

No progress, no progress. Everything must remain the same. Wasn't there like whole like thing that they think they should just upgrade the West Coast main line, despite the fact that would require more construction and be more disruptive? Yeah, yeah, like we also did that and it cost like the best part of 15 billion quid and it and it and it's already full again. And it's you'd have to do that on the east coast main line here, too.

And also the middle main line, which is imaginatively the one in the middle of the east and west coast. All of those you'd have to upgrade them all and it would take probably 40 years. So just in time for like both of the coastal ones to sink into the fucking ocean. What's the difference between the midland main line and the great central main line? Oh, well, one was built by the Midland Railway Company. And the other was built by the actually wasn't built by the Great Central Railway because they didn't exist.

It was built by the something in Leicestershire and something or other and something or other joint line. There's not one of those railway companies that has about 20 words. The Great Central was was was built in the late 1800s, like the 1890s. It was all right. But then we ripped it up because, you know, Britain. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not a high speed.

It's not actually that people say it's a high speed line. It's a lot less straight than the east coast main line that we're seeing here in this picture. It's actually pretty weavy. But, you know, people, it's nostalgists. The people who shout about beaching and say, we want to reverse beaching, but they don't actually know what that means. Yeah. Oh, all right.

Yeah. So this talking is good because it means that we keep this slide up for a really long time and inflate down all of your viewers. All right. Enjoy that. Oh, look at that. Look at that. Look, look, look at the nice, look at the nice turnouts here. Yes.

You there's a footbridge that's right. So this photo, I took this on my phone right on the footbridge, which you can get to it's fine. It's publicly accessible. I'd recommend it. It's my happy place. You might see me there just like looking at trains alone. Yeah.

Do we do we approach you or are you kind of like a wild animal? Do you have any imagination in my lapel? No, it's safe. It's OK. I once had a nerd off. I went for a picnic there with some friends and there was another nerd who was like, every now and then we were just looking for trains with a two year old kid and the kid was waving and the guy would be like, in six minutes,

the train to, you know, Leeds is going to be going on that track. And we're like, OK, OK, thank you. Thanks, Bob. I felt how nerded and it actually felt good, weirdly. All right. What would this be? I'm now thinking like what kind of turnout would this be an H.O. scale? Like I'm thinking like this must be like 23 feet long in H.O. scale.

I 3D printed a two scale dub like H.O. turnout and not even 125 mile an hour one, like a 90 mile an hour one, which is the fastest that we have on the kind of the normal railway. And it's hilariously long. Like it was about I think it's about a meter and a half long. Wow. So sorry to everyone who buys like fine scale turnouts and they think they've got a really accurate one and it's about, you know, four inches long.

Nope. Guess again. All right. So on this show, we now have a segment called Safety Third. Oh, my. Where in our viewers send in stories about unsafe workplaces they've been in or unsafe situations, which they could not remedy through personal responsibility, right?

Because I hate my row. So what I've decided to include today is what are. What the person who submitted this called the FedEx squishing incident. OK. Oh, boy. So. This person decided to apply for a FedEx job because there was a large demand for labor right around Christmas time, right? And it's an overnight job so they could split a car with their mom, right?

And it was going to be $19 an hour bonus pay. So they showed up day one for onboarding and safety training, right? And the HR person who was doing safety training kept complaining. They were shoving three days of training into one session to make up for the Christmas rush, right? And they also didn't foresee consequences of that. Yeah. They also didn't tell anyone that they expected them come into work later

that day for work until after they did the training. So they did the training during the day and expected everyone to show up at midnight, right? Awesome. So night one, I showed up for my first real shift at midnight. The plant manager didn't know where to put me and the other new hires. So we went into a back room and told us which lines to go help out. I went to my assigned line with one other new hire that was in my training class.

The line manager complained that we were late. I was assigned to splitting the line. What that entailed was reading the boxes that came off the main sorting machine and putting the odd numbered boxes on one side of the belt and even numbered ones on the other side, right? My job was to be a small part in factorial. One of my co-workers said I was useless out of the blue. During the break, I had to go out and cry in my car from there coming.

FedEx had hazing. I was about to say, yeah, like joining the fucking Marines. Jesus Christ. Perse's been at the job for 34 minutes. Yeah. I'm just picturing like a guy in like the UPS Brown uniform doing full drill instructor shit. On our UPS unionized FedEx is not.

Yeah. So after break, I came back in. The sorting was done, so I was doing odd jobs till 10 a.m. I wasn't told that break was at the end of the shift and that staying to help the morning shift was optional until after I did that work for the morning shift managers. At least I was making 19 an hour bonus pay. Now night two, it was upstate New York, December.

It was below zero and any patch of exposed skin hurt well outside on the way to the guard post to the main facility. I slipped on a patch of ice and hurt my elbow. But I got in. I made it to my line on time, right? Every shift started with a stretch to avoid injury. But my line manager just half-assed it. There were fewer people on the shift than the night before.

There were also more packages than the night before. The manager refused to help and just stood there chatting with the manager from the next line over. When I asked if I could get more help, he said, you're the help. Cool. All employees were told they had the authority to stop the belt if they felt there or other safety was at risk. We had so many packages that I was getting buried at my post.

Packages that were falling off the line were surrounding me on the platform I was standing on, so I didn't have a clear line to the staircase I was supposed to use to get on and off the platform. On top of that, people were placing missorted packages from from other lines on the ground behind where I was standing on the platform, so I couldn't step off. Whenever the pile got too big for me to feel safe, stepping over in an emergency and there were still too many boxes

coming in for me to sort properly, I would stop the line to clear my workplace. My manager told me to stop stopping the line and get back to work. Oh, God, can you work under this pile of boxes? Yeah, like boxes of multi packed floppy disks and flipping, I don't know. Boys, is that Barbie set that we've got in the sketch there? Oh, that's a barbell set. Oh, right. I mean, what would you work? Night three, it started off just like night two.

We had even fewer employees on my line, but it was two nights before Christmas and we were behind, so there weren't any fewer boxes. My line manager wasn't letting me stop the line to clear my workplace. So I was only able to stand in one place. And during one or two breaks in the box flow, I was able to clear some not enough to get out the platform safely, but some boxes in case of an emergency. And guess what happened? And my emergency, let's see.

Oh, I'm going to see that coming. There's a side conveyor belt that dudes with little trucks load boxes that are too heavy to go on the main sorting machine onto your line to sort, right? So like this guy here, right? The conveyor belts had a lot of grip. That's the main belt here, which I think is one of these guys here, right? And so the main belt would drag boxes along,

even if only a part of the box was touching it. There were no guards preventing the boxer moving down the main belt until it was fully on. So we'd get boxes half hanging off the main belt pretty often. Oh, God, I didn't see where this is going. This time I got a home barbell set hanging off the line and two heavy tires and multiple boxes of dog food. I'm feeling really bad about ordering those barbells, tires and dog food.

And so they're right here. They got this barbell set here. They got dog food here and they got two tires right here coming down the conveyor belt. And then he got more dog food behind it. I couldn't step aside because of the boxes. At first, I thought I would be able to use my hip to add force to the box to help move it, but I just got pinched

between the weightlifting set being forced to be by the conveyor belt and another 200 pounds of other items and the chute to the side. To the side that odd numbered packages were supposed to be sorted down, right? The normal force from my body overcame the friction of the belt, but I couldn't move and I saw even more chewy.com boxes coming off the main line towards it. So I avoid it. Sometimes it's nice to know that capitalism has not advanced beyond the movie modern times. Is this literally like that?

That that that, you know, like the the old old timey mills where they had those weaving machines that would murder children constantly. Yeah, yeah, I get paid pretty well, but I am a cog. No, like literally. I am. This job will kill me, but I get paid pretty good. I've never heard a more perfect description of hell than this. So what do I do? I hit the big red stop line button makes sense, right?

No. After 30 seconds, I was told to turn the line back on before I could move the boxes out of the way. I couldn't lift any of the boxes properly from my pinched position. I forced the heaviest boxes out of the way and turn the line back on. Five minutes later, some other manager who was apparently above the line manager but below the plant manager came down, said she shot. She saw me on the tapes and was really disappointed in my performance.

She then went to show me the proper way to sort boxes, which is the same thing I was doing, except she was pushing everything to the odd side when she couldn't keep up with all the boxes because it's less work to carry all the wrongly sorted boxes from the end of the belt back to the beginning to resort. Then it is just slow down and sort it properly the first time, right? Awesome. During this time, she was constantly talking about kids these days

and how many young adults don't have any work ethic. Shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up. Oh, Jesus. She then asked me if I was in college. I said yes, and she said, oh, you'll only be here a few more days anyway. I wanted to make this a long term job, but if that was the attitude she was looking at me with and the company didn't care about safety, I didn't even want to stick around for the few more days.

Well, miss out on getting crushed by another barbell, sir. Yeah. And of course, after helping me for 10 minutes, she stuck around for half hour, watching me work and making small talk with my line manager and the manager from the next line over. When 6.30 a.m. rolled around and I went on break, I talked to the plant HR director and quit. Good for her. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God.

Yeah, join a union. Join a union. Stop ordering tires off of fucking Amazon. Don't order a tire off of Amazon. That's a bizarre concept to me. It's like you're going to order a pair of tires. You're going to order a pair of tires and they're going to shove it onto a conveyor belt and it's going to pin some helpless worker against.

Again, fucking barbell and a sack of dog food. Yeah. Good Lord. I thought people would have stopped using FedEx after Castaway. Getting killed under an avalanche of Wilson's. Rum ham. I'm sorry, rum ham. Oh, God. All right. Hell. So, yeah, stop ordering packages.

Don't order any packages, actually. Send us your safety thirds. Tell us about times when your life was in danger. OK, yeah. It's funny because like three quarters of them are like from chemistry people. It's all chemical lab stuff. That's promising. Not all of that mashed up animals.

Yeah. Yeah. She is the danger. All right. To the next episodes on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. Right. And remember, only will there's your problem reduces an entire workplace safety briefing to a soup like homogenous in 30 seconds. Order money. All right.

So then we have a commercials before we go. No, I'm all good. Listen to Trash Future. Yes, thank you. Listen to Trash Future. Yeah. They're also real matter on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. UK time. Yeah, listen to that. Yeah.

You can watch that, too. It's on YouTube. Yeah, there's pictures. It's definitely not a copycat format. And then I don't know. Watch my YouTube channel. Yes, go watch his YouTube channel. Yeah, what else? Is there anything else?

I don't know. There's anything else. Vote for Jessica Raine if you're in Delaware on September 15th. Yeah, do that. Don't have to tell you to vote for Ed Markey anymore. I was about to say, get fucked. Fucking Chinese out of here forever. Bullying works. All right.

Well, I think we're good. Bye, everybody. Yeah, good night, everyone. Good night, everyone.