Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 40: Urban Freight Rail & Industrial Sprawl

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

lawd help me but it's time to go back to tha old me follow uday on twitter: https://twitter.com/A320Lga slides: https://youtu.be/F1y-2CUetwM 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'm Justin Rosniak and I tweeted about housing policy. Yeah, that was your, this is going to be your downfall. Exactly. Hello, all the worst people on Twitter. We might not know what we're talking about, but I can promise you Matt fucking Iglesias doesn't either. I worked in a public housing authority. No, it doesn't count because he just said housing and urban development.

Or the one check did. It doesn't matter. I didn't get any more because I had direct deposit, right? So yeah, it doesn't matter. No, it doesn't matter. Knowledge of housing policy weakens the body, clouds the mind, corrodes the soul, right? Yes. Yes.

And the thing is, I said Matt Iglesias was wrong about the ability of the federal government to just ignore zoning law, which I now know to be technically wrong, but which I believe is morally right. Yeah. Because, you know, OK, reality warps itself around Matt Iglesias' statements, right? If Matt said the ocean was blue, we'd immediately revert to a pre-homeric conception of color and start referring to the wine dark sea, right? But this is my theory.

I will defend my statement. The federal government can just build public housing, right? And I know that, like, OK, public housing authorities are apparently locally controlled though they use federal money. But the thing is they use federal money. And the other thing is the federal government can just do what it wants, right? It can do anything it fucking wants to. The ATF building in Washington, DC, like they had a nice new zoning code there and they

were like, you know, all right, fuck you. What we want is a 50 foot setback and we also want like blast barriers and we want like all kinds of garbage and they got it, right? The embassy in London, they said, look, we know you have all these regulations. They said to another government, we know you have all these regulations. We want, you know, a hundred foot setback. We want a blast wall and the city and London was like, no, no, you can't do that. And then they were like, yeah, we also want a moat.

Yeah, and now we have a moat, you know, you know what happened? They managed to talk him down to half a moat, right? And like the federal government can just do whatever it wants to the built environment. Like the federal government radically altered the built environment of Atlanta under General William Tecumseh Sherman, and he never asked for a permit. The fed can just do shit. I don't know why there's like 20 hours of dunks on here on Twitter using acronyms. I don't understand.

This is bizarre. All right. That's my rant. I'm done. As with Alice's tweet, of which we do not make reference to a few years ago or a few months ago, we regret to inform you that we are forced to agree with Roz. Also, I'm not fucking taking like dunks from a guy who literally earnestly believes that different countries have different safety rules and that's OK.

I'm simply not. I'm sorry. Like that's a disqualifying fucking statement to me. So I know Uday is is now just here for the ride, sorry, but but I want to absolutely go on record as saying when the worst people I know and when the worst people I know are all agreeing with Madaglacius, maybe we're doing something right. Also, I regret to inform you that I am going to go ahead and make a Roz stinks. Well, there's your problem t-shirt that will be misspelled.

We will absolutely the day we get t-shirts is the IY merch. Yeah. Sorry about disappearing for the first like four minutes of this. And also, because I won't have the the Zencastre file, Roz, you're going to have to edit out or mute the first like four and a half minutes of me swearing at nothing fun. That's fine. That's I do a lot of editing on the show.

You can tell because of the production values. Yes, Roz, you as he turns out, you can get Montreche yeast online. So I will be making anger juice. The official beverage of well, there's your problem. Fine. It was the WTYP IPA. Shout out to that guy. Yeah, he made a beer that I absolutely want to try. So yeah, it's about to say send us beer.

We like beer. OK, so anyway, now that I've ranted about the concept of housing policy, which I believe should not exist, I can't believe I missed that. I, you know, I think in a more in a better world, like housing policy would just be locked in a dungeon that you would need, like, like just just like a set of like 73 keys to get into. And at the bottom, there would be there would be just a a series of dusty tomes, you know, in like hazmat bags.

They all just say like build house. Yes, do not eat. But anyway, we're now now we're here. Enough of that bullshit. Enough of that bullshit news. OK, so we need to talk about what we're talking about today. Well, we need to first do introductions. Hi, I'm Justin Rosnick.

I'm the person who's talking right now. Hi, I'm Alice school. Well, Kelly, I'm the person who is talking right now unless her internet cut sounds again, she and her, by the way. Hi, I am Liam Anderson, pronounce or he him. Shout out to those of the YouTube comment section for getting your shit under control this week. I'm very proud of you.

It's only been two days and we have a guest. Yeah, we have a guest. Hello, guest. Hello, I am with a Schultz. I am the guest. I say he and him pronouns. Tell us about yourself today. Why are you here? Why don't you try? What are you, a cop?

Well, I like trains and I tweet about them. No. A lot. Wait, no, Liam, we like trains here. No, we don't. Not anymore. I'm swinging a lot, baby. Yes, I was at the housing politics discussion, so we're not friends anymore. Look, we like you.

There's some people who have opinions on housing policy we like. There's others whose columns we will be reading as safety third. Yeah, we will be. I also just want to say that, like, one specific guy who I take issue with was just like, can't you engage and say anything other than socialism? And we said no. And he was like, this is the problem.

And it's just like, I don't fucking care about you, bud. If you're like, you're not going to get a meaningful discussion on Twitter anyway. You know what you think. I'm not interested in what you think. You could absolutely suck my ass. And if you have to edit that out, go ahead. But that guy in particular can suck my ass.

I was talking to a friend of mine late. I think it was November of last year. And she was talking about how she got back in contact with one of her old roommates who had become like a California housing Yimbi person and had just gone from like bog standard leftist to like serious yang gang person. Oh, interesting.

And I was like, this is this is a corrosive. I have since then tried to eradicate knowledge of housing policy from my repertoire of knowledge. Yeah, it's like it's an informational hazard. Yes, I will say look forward to our housing policy bonus episode, which is just me taking the most antagonistic positions I can for three hours. It's like a video of like two of us independently knocking down walls with hammers.

Bay Area Zoning Codes as a whole are in a Cognito Hazard S.C.P. Yes, I couldn't remember the S.C.P. term. I think the thing to do with housing policy is read all about it in like books. Sorry, people have written and then just never talk about it until, you know, it's a non Twitter discussion. No, it's bad off Twitter, too. It is bad.

Yeah, but if you're talking with like an academic, it can be a bit more. No, no, no. OK, well, we all disagree. Yeah, let's do trains. I haven't had too many unpleasant interactions about it offline. Except, of course, when Liam and I were yimped out of our apartment, but that's a different story. No, that's fine, dude.

That's the density is the ideal in all situations. And it's good to build shitty new housing because density for students who are being ripped off in buildings that will fall down just as soon as the tax abatement's over, but who gives a shit because density, density, density. Thank God, Philadelphia doesn't have an excess housing stock or anything. That should be a bonus episode, one of these days. All right, but back to the subject. We're not going to talk about residential zoning today.

We're going to talk about industrial zoning and zoning. Yeah, and we're going to talk about trains in cities. So all right, if you're in the city today, you know, there's a lot of problem with road traffic, right? Well, yes, I do, Roz. Yeah, as it turns out. And one problem with only there were an easier way. One problem is more attention is, you know, truck deliveries, right,

especially in the pandemic. No, we recorded this episode the first time the pandemic hadn't even happened. It's not going to be it's they're going to get bored of trucks and they'll go into drones and then everybody's just going to be getting showered with like burning quadcopter wreckage all the time. So, you know, everyone's ordering like a single banana off of Amazon, right? And that's clogging up roads from the suburban distribution warehouse to the city, right? And I get my treats.

How will society survive if I cannot get my treats? You know, well, we're going to discuss an alternative way for you to get your treats. Yeah, yeah. So there's we had a sophisticated freight package delivery system, which didn't rely on trucks for a very long time. And it's been almost completely abandoned, right? We're going to talk about. Well, I guess this particular show has been expanded to talk about

not only urban rail freight, but also like sort of industrial policy, right? But we're going to talk about both of those things and, you know, also how that's affected unionization rates. I think that that's another important thing to talk about. Yeah, it's kind of kind of unfocused. But, you know, we're going to have a nice discussion about it. Yeah, fuck you. We're not doing a disaster this week. We're going collegial.

It's a long rolling slow disaster. Ah, OK, it's like the SEPTA one. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, that episode was only forty four minutes. Jesus, what happened to us before we follow him? So this is this is St. John's Park Terminal in New York City. And we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a bit.

But first we have to do the goddamn news. So this this Jericho painting that you've brought before us here. The raft of the Medusa. So a bunch of there's there's a bunch of Trump parade, boat parades, I think yesterday. Yes, it is day before Labor Day. Today is Labor Day. And they were they were like, what's it called?

They they they had some problems with the thing that you want to do when you have a bunch of extremely unqualified boaters is to just cram a bunch of them into the same space and like do a bunch of close maneuvering. Yeah, that's what you want to do famously. And so that's the ideal. Yeah, you end up with, as we see here,

a nice lady, I hope, being swamped by the wake of a larger boat. And that is, you know, that's capitalism for you. You know, if you didn't want to your boat to get flooded, you should have worked harder and gotten a nicer boat. Yes. I mean, it's it's it's been I used to spend a lot of time on boats and like. It's astonishing how bad these people are at boats.

My counterpoint to that is something that a guy said to me on Twitter today, actually, which was happening a lot, I'd say. Yeah, which was how many boats does Joe Biden have? And he's fucking got me there, you know. How many boats does Joe Biden or maybe one? If he owns a boat, maybe he doesn't own a boat. I saw a picture of a man in a kayak with a Joe Biden sign.

OK, so he's got at least one boat, but still. Yes. I actually so I was at the Jersey Shore this weekend was my friend's birthday, belated birthday, and we saw, you know, the some of the Trump boat prey. But it was great because there were these, you know, big dumb idiot asses with their boats creating wake and specifically at a no wake zone because, of course, because the world revolves around you and you're the only person to have ever lived on this planet

with eight billion other people. And just there was a small boat, also Trump behind them. And they just swamped the fuck out of it. It was like you deserve this. Both of you deserve to suffer. And I'm glad that you are. But you're right. None of these people seemingly know how big their boats are

or what to do with them other than to be antagonistic little bitches. And it's all it is also Trump's fault directly for encouraging them to do this, right? Like they did this once sort of of their own accord. And then he was like the big, beautiful boats, the boaters. And then just since then, they've just taken that as presidential sanction to like go and sink a couple of their own boats. It's it's pretty funny.

Oh, yeah. It's extremely fun. Yeah. Good Lord, you're in a big boat parade. Do we still have a new day? What? Oh, yeah, you are here. OK. Yeah, I kept hearing some using the photo quite carefully. My favorite thing, my favorite thing about this photo is that the flag. If you if you John Madden up the flag on the right, the rightmost one.

It appears to be. Oh, this one. Yeah, it appears to be a flag which has a photo of the American flag as part of that flag. I I imagine it's from a store called I'm familiar with these people. It's like a F nation, obviously American as fuck. And they sell all sorts of patriotic things with the websites currently broken at the moment.

So yeah, it's absolutely like got this from like Grunstile. This is just. Yeah, absolutely. So I feel like the most America as fuck nation is the United States of America. Well, I would think you'd be right about that. Yeah, I love to log on to chudgear.com to get some voting supplies. Chud. Yeah, we're reclaiming the slur chud. All right. In additional news. Oh, Colorado, never change.

This is wild. This is Colorado is like now sort of. Becoming my ideal weather situation, which is is either, you know, about 80 degrees and sunny or it's a blizzard. Hmm. Right. Except the sun is now like through a thick haze of forest fire smoke. No, that's the problem. You got some disadvantages with this as it turns out.

I didn't think this through. So luckily, we have a case study here. This is the you know, that game Club Penguin. Yes, there is the whole fire and ice part where you'd play that game and like, I guess, through fire and ice to each other. So this map looks like. Yeah. Yeah, this is just a sip. This is a sip five extreme weather map.

What we have what we have done by performing anthropogenic climate change is make the world into Club Penguin. The floor is lava or ice. My favorite detail, this is not related to these fires because it's like everything's on fire. But my favorite detail is that the El Dorado fire in California, which is currently burned like 7000 acres, started by an errant to gender reveal munition.

Oh, my God, that's what we should have had as the news. Yeah, I wish I could have found a picture to gender reveal wildfires. Now. Oh, yeah, that's true. It's literally not even the first time this has happened. They had a smoke grenade that was going to like blast. I'm pretty certain highly customogenic pink or blue smoke to indicate the the I guess, a shame gender of this child. And they just toss a bunch and try.

Yeah. And now now your house burns down. It's going to kill like, you know, I don't know, 112 people and then the child is going to turn out to be trans. Yeah, there's a decent chance it's not even an accurate smoke grenade, which is the thing that you want to worry about in this situation. Good Lord. You got to wonder with a long term air quality impact of all these fires. Well, it's a good thing we're not having a respiratory pandemic, right?

I'm wondering when it's finally going to happen in the Pine Barrens. Oh, God, it's coming. But one of these days, there's going to be a big Pine Barrens wildfire and we will be dead. They'll find that Spetsnaz guy from season two of The Sopranos. The Jersey Devil. Yes, we kill the Jersey Devil. Jersey Devil has been killed.

Just like this is now a podcast tracking the untimely demises of various cryptids. We haven't talked about it in a while. Yeah, Mothman's Habitat critically threatened. You know, the Mothman, the Jersey Devil died in a wildfire. I don't know, the bunny man got hit by a train. I grew up in that place. Yeah, I mean, definitely the forest fires are going to get big for it also and or Sasquatch. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

I don't know. It'll be like an earthquake that'll like beach the Loch Ness monster. All right, P. The one Lake Champlain will be interesting. Oh, yeah. The Champi can never die. Champi gets hit by a ferry. I told you, I just told you no. No, I used to be fascinated with that thing.

Well, they're all real folks. It's true. All right. So on to the end of the news, the goddamn news. Did you forget that that was the only those are the only two news items? No, I have a preview of the next slide. So I know what I'm talking about. Theoretically. Ah, that's how PowerPoint works. Where's my preview of the next slide?

Well, you could open the slides on Google Drive. I'm never going to do that. Look. A nice split screen thing. I have the slides open on one side and I have this open on the other side. That's a premium podcasting. Yeah. All right. All the one little laptop. I thought it'd be useful to start with a brief explainer about how freight trains work, right?

Well, you load a bunch of shit onto the train and then you drive the train somewhere and you take the shit off the train. And then it goes to the people's houses. Yes, if you if you play transport fever, too, that's how you think it would work. Yeah, I just I I load a bunch of oil onto a train so that I can unload it and load it back onto a plane. And then I fly that oil plane across to a different town. And you have strong penalties for, you know, the amount of time it takes

to deliver it, because as we all know, oil goes bad real quick. We've got to put it in the plane. Yeah. Highly time sensitive crude. Yes. Yes, that was a thing that Boeing investigated was flying oil from like Canadian wells to refineries. And then they realized, oh, no, this is an insanely stupid idea to just fly around with a bunch of crude oil in the back of this fucking Boeing. Did the Japanese do that in World War Two?

Oh, shit, maybe it was a refined product that were flying around. But I really remember reading something about flying tankers. Awesome. That that sounds like the crude oil is one of the most incredibly dangerous substances in the world, like far more than any refined fuel. Yeah, I can't imagine that. My God. Yeah. All right.

So so the way a lot of freight gets moved. On a train, right? So you'll have like a company that makes stuff, right? And they will load some like box cars, flat cars or whatever with their stuff, right? And then the short little train, the local train will come by and pick up those cars, right? And they'll pick it up. They'll bring it to a big railroad yard like this one over here, right?

And there the cars get shuffled around based on their destination, right? So some cars might go on a train that goes directly to another yard. Some cars might go on a different train that goes to another yard, and then they get shifted around in the next yard. And you can use all of the cool little like shunting locomotives to break trains apart and move them together and stuff. Yes, or you have something called a hump yard where they take the whole the hump yard.

You take the whole train, you shove it over a hump. The cars coast down the hump because you uncouple them one by one as they go over the top. And you have a guy in a tower with a bunch of levers to switch the cars into the right track. Just playing extremely slow, extremely heavy pinball that rules. Yes, yes. Yes. Now they use a computer, which is boring, but it used to be a guy with levers.

He used to ride the cars down into the project, modernity, embrace tradition and bring back the hump yard. Shit. Well, I'm just well, they still they still have them. Yeah. They're trying to get rid of them. They haven't quite managed it yet. Big government overreach once again. Yeah. I just like the idea of like if a guy rides each car down, there's just a line of guys

waiting to get on each car. Yeah, what you have to do is go into the bus again. Congratulations. And then you've got to run back up after you've spotted one like a ski lift. Yeah. Yeah. Frantically going back to the top of the line to shut more cars. We'll jump it over. If you got one big train that goes from one

rail yard to another rail yard, that's called a manifest train, right? And that's just a whole bunch of different kinds of train cars. That's as opposed to a unit train where there's one kind of train car for the whole train. You need to move like a large amount of, say, coal or aggregate or oil, right? Yeah. Sometimes you combine a couple of trains into like you'll have a unit. So there's like a CSX train that goes by me a lot, which is combined. It's got a unit of Tropicana oranges. Then there's a manifest in the middle.

And then there's a unit at the end of garbage from New York City. Do not mix those up. Yes. No, you don't want to do that. Oh, the garbage juice. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man, it really smells when it's like park near the Skogul River Trail. It's really bad. Just putting a bunch like a bag of garbage into a juicer.

Yeah. So on the way back, this process is reversed. So you'll put some cars into a siding for a local train. That'll bring it to a series of different industrial customers. They'll spot the cars on a siding and some people will come out and take the stuff out. Right. That's how your freight train works. Straight forward. Yes.

But there's not like it's not like how it works in transport fever or transport tycoon or literally any train game that's ever existed. That's just what about the the shunting missions, the shunting missions in train simulator, which are my favorite. Oh, that's that's different. That's a simulator, not a game. Ah, OK, I see. That's serious stuff for serious people.

Wait, can I can I bitch about how Railway Empire just in place of a rail yard uses a big magic warehouse that trains just disappear into? Yes, I think I think this is what Jay and I played two days ago. And it's like, yeah, like the cars just appear and disappear. That was the same in Railroad Tycoon. Oh, that's awful. Yeah. God forbid you have to worry about empties. Give me my rail yard.

Empty is East, empty is West. I need to send you that video for one of the one of the Trash Future Streams. Yes, please. You're going to come on sometime, by the way, you and Liam. That would be fun. Oh, yeah, that'd be fun. All right. So anyway, so we usually associate this with, you know, big freight trains that go out, you know, they go around the big to fast, fully loaded manifest freight train gone 80 miles an hour is the biggest fuck you to aerodynamics

in the world. But it used to be you get these trains much closer into urban areas. Now, here's a good example. So the London Underground used to have freight trains on it, right? Oh, yeah. So this is just underneath the Smithfield Market, right? This is a great Western Railway tank locomotive, taking some freight cars on the low London Underground. These are all full of meat, and they just deliver it right in there

in order to get the meat to the market. You don't need a truck, or in this point case, it'd be a horse and cart, right? Hey, and it comes pre-smoked, right? Yes. Got that nice, nice, like anthracite kind of taste on it. I looked into grilling with coal once. Apparently, it'll give you cancer instantly. It's good, though. That's a good question.

I'll have to try it, but I'll have cancer at the end of it. Yeah, so this this was on the on the circle line in London. They would have freight trains or goods trains because it's Britain. Yeah, it's not freight. We actually call them motorized rollingums. Fucking bet you. Pip, pip, cheerio. And load all of these meats onto the goods wagon.

There was sort of a mix of companies running trains on the circle line in particular. I don't think there were any on the subsurface tube lines. One of the fun things is you're mixing freight trains or goods trains with rapid transit trains, right? Which is a problem because, of course, in England, goods trains don't have continuous brakes. Don't need them. Don't need them.

Extra weight. Yeah. You have a guy turn to brakes in locomotive. You have a guy turn to brakes in the brake van. What do you need brakes in the middle for? Do you want to go fast or not? There is at least one American freight that has similar practice. Actually, one of the ones in New York City,

this weird little offline terminal operation at Williamsburg, the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, which does discharge all the air brakes on the cars they were getting in Greenville or wherever in New Jersey and then use only locomotive brakes for all the shunting work on the waterfront. Good. No slowing down. Not ever. All gas, no brakes. It was like it on time.

Got the regulations, I think. You have to pay people extra if you if you had air brakes or something like that. You just open the operators manual and the first thing it says is no brakes. And the second thing it says is the only notch is eight. 100 percent throttle. On time performance or literally death. Just careening off the end of a car float pier.

Into the into the East River. All right, so that this service, this sort of service was discontinued in the 1960s. You know, they replaced it with trucks. But of course, over there, it's called lorries. Motorized Rollingham's. Yes. Make it up fucking names at this point.

Yes. Free buses. So good. Stop it. I mean, there was the post bus, which was just a van full of post and also passengers. They still have those in Switzerland, which they're rock. They still have them in their normal way. I really think they are really good. Yeah, I love the LLV to double as a taxi.

Yeah, exactly. I want to I want to I want to get an Uber, but it's a grumman LLV. Oh, we should get the podcast in LLV. Oh, shit. Well, I got to start retiring first. Well, they're all catching on fire. So that's right up our alley. Yeah. So. Now, if it's not like trains on rapid transit tracks

and stuff like this, this is 10th Avenue in New York City, also known as Death Avenue. Yeah. So they would they there were a pair of tracks that ran down 10th Avenue, right, where they would deliver freight cars, mostly again, full of meat, actually, because it went to the meatpacking district. Was the meat made of the stuff it runs over or?

Yeah, that's called efficiency. Yes. I feel like we are once again back to back to our Bettenwa from the Atmospheric Railway, horse viscera. They use the horse to proceed the train to get people out of the way. You had this guy, he's a 10th Avenue cowboy, right? And he just tries to warn kids out of the way

so they don't get mulched by the big train coming down, right? 10th Avenue cowboy sounds like an old timey slur. Oh, it sure does. Yeah. What's crazy, these trains were not moving quickly. Like this is not something where you were like barreling down 10th Avenue at like 40 miles per hour. These trains are going 10.

So it's this baby shit. No, 40. It has to get there on time. Why not? That was that was, I believe, Syracuse, where they they did just barrel down the street. Good. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is why they built the High Line, as you can see in the background.

Yes. High Line, of course, still there. So this went to St. John's Park Terminal, which was the first slide in this presentation. You know, this is this is also this is somewhat dangerous because, again, kids just kept getting killed by this thing. Get out of the way of the big train. They showed me. The bodice proposal.

There's a little bit of freight that was also held handled by the Manhattan Elves, apparently. You know, it's sort of similar. Did they did they try and jam freight in the subway? Oh, yeah, the South Brooklyn Railway used to have freight rights to run freight trains to the 4th Avenue subway between 36 and 59th Street. So they could get between their customers

on the West End and Sea Beach Lines. Oh, that's awesome. Oh, my God. The street trackage under the F Line. You just you just you just sit sitting there at the subway platform and suddenly like a 80 car freight train barrels through hell. Yeah. In front of coal, you just get a breathing pure coal dust.

Coal was coal and also ash, I believe, were definitely big commodities for them. Oh, I remember that from a fuck Fred Francis Scott Fitzgerald novel with the giant eyes. The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby Sheeps. Yeah, yeah. That's where they tried to ship a whale once,

but it didn't fit through one of the tunnels, so they could not ship the whale. Just shears off the side of the whale. No, the whale was dead. They were taking to Coney Island to display at the aquarium. What the fuck? The dead whale, they were taking the dead whale to display. Why didn't they think about

the 20s must have been just the weirdest fucking time. Yeah, kids, kids, let's go to Coney Island. We can see Westinghouse electric use of fucking elephant to death. They tried to ship a whale to Coney Island. You know, the number one like attraction in Coney Island was for a while was horses diving off of a high board into like a pool of water. And it just you can see first of all, you can see photos of this is a horse at a 90 degree angle, like going straight down with a dude riding

it, and it's just like, no, no, don't like this. And you got a lot of dead horses. Why are you shipping the whale by rail? You know where you get whales, the ocean. You know what's next to Coney Island, the ocean put it on a barge. My God. Yeah. That's what they ended up doing when they figured it couldn't fit through. That was their second option.

They just like this was run by one of Roz's ancestors. So they were just like train first. Everything else is like a backup plan to the train. All right. So this is a picture of the Chicago L actually in 1973. You can see here is this kind of locomotives called a steeple cab and is delivering coal just on rapid transit lines. I think some of the spurs that they used to deliver the colon

are still visible even today. Yeah, awesome. You're still there because I think they use them for maintenance away equipment. Oh, even better. That that steeple cab reminds me very strongly of and I talked about this the last time you recorded this episode, I'm going to do it again. You can't stop me.

The Sacramento Northern, my favorite train simulator DLC. Oh, yeah. Just doing inter oven freight with a bunch of steeple cab locomotives. Yeah, that was one of the things they did in Chicago on the Elves. You know, it wasn't just coal they delivered. They took away. They brought in construction materials, took away construction debris. They also, you know, they brought in like lumber.

They brought in all this crap, you know, just you take in mob concrete and you take out mob snitches. Yes, exactly. You know, they would go in the belly of the whale just for the the effect. Ship out of the block of concrete full of Jimmy Hoffa. This is actually a picture of the last train passing Burwin Station in 1973. This is the last commercial ship.

Oh, they dressed it up nice on the El. Oh, yeah. Well, since you mentioned the Sacramento Northern, here's the Sacramento Northern. See, this is the advantage of not having the slide preview. Yeah, each slide is a delightful surprise to me. So there's also a system of delivering freight called the interurban, right? Interurbans were mostly passenger systems. They were like big, fast trolleys that went long distance, right?

But a lot of interurbans also handled carload freight, like this steeple cab locomotive here, driving down the street in Oakland with three big boxcars full of stuff. Mm, they're like whatever racist products you needed. Yeah, exactly. I strengthen the racism factor. A lot of these a lot of these interurban lines would have even a limited amount of door to door service.

They would have these special kind of trains called freight motors, right? Which is sort of like a trolley, but it's for freight. You know, and they would go, they would pull up in front of a business and people come and unload boxes and then it would go to the next spot, right? This is the best kind of mail rail. Fuck a traveling post office. Give me a locomotive that pulls up to my fucking house. And a guy like says, yeah, your mail's in one of these boxcars.

Go crazy. Yeah. And it's all electric, too. That's the other thing. It 100 percent electric. Zero carbon kind of. Well, it's probably powered by hydropower. A lot of stuff was hydropower until 1960s, actually. Yeah, especially in the last. So one of the things is like the people got sick of freight trains in the streets.

Losers, haters and blizzards. Yeah. Well, after cars, they really got sick of America really has gotten soft. Yeah. Sometimes your child just got mangled by a freight train. It's not a big deal. We can have another one. Exactly. This has better visibility for children, but emergency rations with legs.

This steeple cab. This steeple cab has better visibility than a modern Ford pickup truck. Yeah. Yeah, it's more visible to you in the cool orange. Yes. But but also you can see over the hood if you're going to get a child. It's got a towel. Yes. What else do you need?

Also, you very frequently had someone riding on that front board there. Yeah, I want people. Oh, yes, you could watch the child get crushed under the locomotive like that's seen in Austin Powers. Gorky. My job is to be the most traumatized person in the Oakland area. But a lot of people didn't like having freight trains in the streets, right? No, it's yeah, I know.

So there are places like here in Philadelphia. We had some anti interurban legislature passed or those in Pennsylvania in general, should mandated something called Pennsylvania trolley gauge so they couldn't bring freight cars onto the trolley system, right? We have that to this day. Pennsylvania trolley gauge, I think, is five foot two and a quarter inches. Whereas everything else in the country runs on four foot eight and a half.

You like nice, even measurements, you know, you got you got to pull you got to push the rails apart. Yes, that's way easier than just saying, no, you can't like you can't not approving freight traffic on a line that's way easier to change the gauge. Eventually, you get to these big, specialized freight systems, right? Like the 10th Avenue freight line was so dangerous that eventually the city wanted the city wanted to rip it up. So they built the high line, as you mentioned earlier.

Now, you can see here, sort of the terminal of this line, the new St. John's Park terminal. It was nice as the old one. Yeah, they just tore down a bunch of it. Like really recently, I found this out like two weeks ago. I don't know. But, you know, you bring in these freight trains full of crap that New Yorkers wanted and you unload of Gabagool over there.

Gabagool, yeah. Although notably not the shit train that comes out of New York. It does not go in despite the fact that. Well, yeah, they they they come in, they unload the Gabagool and then they put in the A. I'm walking here and then. And then they forget about it. This was this hot. The High Line was done as part of the same project,

the West Side Improvement that gave New York Riverside Park and, you know, the Henry Hudson and Ramos has, of course, played a big role in all of it. Awesome. I'm sure that means it was, you know, there's no issues to investigate here. Oh, yeah, there were plenty of. I mean, one thing they should do is they should still have the guy on the horse in front of the train, like just in general,

but especially here, just have a guy riding a horse down the track. No, that would be the thing. You take the modern High Line Park, right? You just put the trains back on it. Yes. And you have, you know, a guy in a horse proceed and then it just mows down all the tourists. Yeah, you've got to get off the fucking bench or you will be crushed by a freight train full of Gabagool.

The High Line Park, I think, is one of the most unpleasant places I have been to in New York City. It is just so goddamn full of people. Oh, my God. Which, like, and I know that that sounds, you know, kind of ridiculous, just considering how crammed up New York is. But like, there are places in Philly you can go and you probably won't see another human being. And then you go to the High Line, you're like, ah, a park.

This will be fun. And it's fucking not. It's just absolutely 900 million Brooklynites who are like, why isn't the Subway very good? I was told when I moved here that the subway would be good. And it's like, OK, so here's what we got to talk about. We got to talk about the fur maintenance and also fucking shut up. You live in a city. We haven't talked about it.

But truly, they are all walking here. Yes. Yeah, they are because the subway doesn't work. No, you don't do very much walking on the High Line because there's too many goddamn people. That time it tried to kill me. Oh, yes. Yes, that's true. Yeah, you tripped over the try to assassinate me. Yeah. What one of the strange like validation transitions got to you?

Oh, no, it was like the little there. There's like that little chain that prevents you from stepping on the vegetation and Liam over it. And I must die menace. Yes. Yes, yes, no, I wasn't. New day. I saw a photo of like a marine doing like they were doing an urban exercise like for Fleet Week in San Diego.

And they had like taken over part of the like Boardwalk, I guess. And literally captured this this guy, the photographer captured this marine in the perfect moment of like airborne trying to get over one of those fucking chains and just eating shit. They are the worst. There are so many people so you can't even, you know, be embarrassed in peace. It's just like people underestimate them. I do not have a loosely strong chain

like like shin level. Don't do it. Yeah. Or ankle level anywhere between there. It will absolutely murder you. You don't need concertino wire. What do you need? Is this a shin level chain? Yeah, I just put some up from like a bistro owner who's like, oh, I think they'll look nice. And then no. Shake hands for danger.

So I feel like this is kind of the pinnacle of urban carload rail freight, right? You know, because it was just like, all right, we're going to build this elevated structure to get trucks and trains off the street. And we're going to have trains that just punch through buildings. And like, you know, we can just drop the freight off where we have to do it. And no one's going to have to deal with it on street level, right? Yeah, trains that punch through buildings on purpose rather than by accident, like that one on Jack. Yes.

What we'll talk about later. So other than this, this is mostly like big industrial freight. If you were getting packages. We had these things. We use this picture in the beer episode. Yeah. We talked about PBR. Yeah. Blended thirty three one. So we had these things called less than carload freight terminals, right?

So what you see here is a bunch of boxcars on a bunch of sidings, right? And all these hall what's called less than carload freight, right? So, you know, it's like boxes of bananas and racism and sex dildos. Yes. Yes. Well, now Grimy, the fucking buildings are. Oh, yeah. They still this is a thing. This is a thing in Glasgow, still. You can see which tenements are like pre and post air quality laws

because some of the new ones are like yellow and the old ones are now power washed, but still gray. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why they had to deliver so much coal on the L was because a lot of buildings had either coal heating or coal electricity generating on the generated on the premises. Looks great. No problems here. I know, right? Everything's black.

Just black. Maybe they sign clean. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. So what do you do at these less than carload freight terminals is where you might have a big distribution warehouse or the bunch of trucks coming in. Now you'd have a bunch of trains come in, right? They would spot the boxcars on these sidings rather than having

like a platform for each row of boxcars. What you did is all the boxcars were 40 feet long, so you would just put some bridge plates in between each set of boxcars and you could either transfer freight from the boxcars into the warehouse and ship them out on tiny trucks or sometimes you're even, you know, transferring freight from one boxcar to another based on the destination, right? So, you know, this is a very space efficient way to bring an assload of freight into a city, right?

Yeah, labor intensive, though, right? Oh, yeah, extremely. And cards and, well, your hands. There is very little automation. Yeah, you couldn't really get a forklift into any of these. All of that attitude before palletization, even. They didn't even really have standard pallets back then. Cool.

This was handled by a company called the Railway Express Agency, which was an amalgamation of a bunch of earlier companies which had handled express freight, which mostly traveled on passenger trains and sometimes fast freight trains. The Railway Express Agency was the UPS of its day. Fun fact, one of the predecessor companies of the Railway Express Agency, which I believe was formed by an active Congress mandating the various express companies merged together.

One of the predecessor companies was American Express. Huh. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Way back in the like pony express days. Yeah, they just they just decided, well, you know, we have a pretty good credit card business. I don't even know what they had at the time. We'll just let the same as Wells Fargo. And then at some point you decide, oh, hey, well, we're moving all of this money around by stagecoach anyway.

Why don't we just start buying banks and then you have a bank? That'll do it. Yeah. Yeah. Widely regarded as a huge mistake at the time. But unfortunate that banking exists should be handled by the post office. Anyway, yeah, not least because it makes you have to model the various banks of the United States. I know, right? Well, I got both of them now. It's done.

This is this is a fun one. This is the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which still exists, actually. Is this a brutalism? It isn't because this is well before brutalism. It doesn't look the same without the vegetation. I know. It's something that most were inspired by. Yeah, because you can see the way that this is another urban freight terminal.

They bring in the boxcars full of crap, right? They take the crap out of the boxcar. And since it's a multi-story warehouse, they have an overhead crane up here. And then you can see each of these galleries on the side of the building, right? And they're all staggered so this big crane can deliver freight to any level of the building just arbitrarily at any point. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. That guy must have had a fun job.

Bonkers like those giant like the I always picture that, you know, the big ladders and libraries just like on a grander scale, just zipping around all day. That guy and the like hump yard guy have the good jobs in this episode. And the guy who has to ride the horse in front of the train, then it gets mulched by the train, has the bad one. Yeah, hopefully he does not get mulched. The horse, you know, noble sacrifice, but we went through.

We went through 14 horses this week. We're down to that's not bad. Great efficiency, Jim. Now let's do a bunch of cocaine and drink soda with cocaine and Cody. Did I I got to take my radium drops? Where was was the pooper scooper behind the horse or behind the train? No, there just wasn't a pooper scooper. No, you just get you just get what you get

because that's that's good fertilizer. Stop crying. You live in a city. It's got to fight those cobblestones. Were there any municipal pooper scoopers? There must have been. Oh, I mean, I don't think scoop is the word. Just a little like brushing it out of the way. Yeah, municipal garbage services invented in 1870s Paris.

So after that, probably when was DSNY founded? 1890s or something. Yeah, so probably like there was a good like 20, 30 years when it was just like now. I know they were like there were like articles published in like the teens and twenties, which was like by 1950, New York will be buried 50 feet under horsemen. Oh, no. That is prior to DSNY's founding in 1881. It was like street cleaning was done by the Street Cleaning Bureau of the NYPD,

which is why it was so bad was because you just left it to the cops. And so this like was just stuck in like a like a layer of like ash and horse shit and so on. I'm just sitting here. Do not let your cops be garbage, man. It's too important a job to entrust to them. I'm just here in Philadelphia thinking, damn, it'd be nice to have street street sweeping. Yeah, here we are, the goddamn dark ages. So, you know, so this is an example of early multi-story industry, right?

Well, not even early multi-story industry, because I guess early multi-story industry is something like what's it? Lowell, Massachusetts or somewhere like that, but yeah. Which is something we don't do anymore and we'll get to that in a second. But I also want to do another fun one, which is the Central Railroad in New Jersey Bronx Terminal. Oh, it's a round bomb. Yes. This is this. Welcome to the Thunderdome.

Don't train into one train leaves. That's just the description of a small rail yard. Then, slightly later, a second train leaves. Sorry. No, the truck amphitheater in the middle. Yeah. You have a foot there. Oh, yeah, they stage mock truck battles.

No, no, no, it's like you're doing like truck, leta strata in there. Yeah, a good truck chastain. Senator's populous, truckulous, rum and a salt pod. Sinatra's populous, truckasaurus, Maximus. Truckasaurus, truckasaurus. I badly want Sinatra's populous, truckasaurus on a shirt. Well, we would get there 15 years later. Yeah.

So someone, someone give us an SPQR, but with truckasaurus. All right. So. So, yeah, they what they did, this is an example of a freight terminal, which didn't even have like a real connection to the mainline freight network. Instead of that, they brought cars in on a boat, right? The boat with dock over here. You can sort of see this big wooden truss bridge over here that connected to a boat and then they take the cars out.

They would spot them around this tiny little warehouse right here, unload the freight. And then they had a couple of sidings back here where they could more directly unload the freight onto trucks for local delivery, you know, as opposed to having to truck them in from farther away, right? And it also had a second siding that crossed a street here. And then it went to what's it? I used to know what this was, some kind of big factory. So, yeah, this is a funny one.

Sucking factory, the dick sucking factory. Yes, they delivered the dicks to be suck. So what one of the fun things about this is because it's such a small terminal, they had absurdly complex track work. There's a famous section, which is right here where this this little diesel locomotive, which is one of the first diesel locomotives ever built, lived in an engine house over here. And you can see there's a whole bunch of tracks that converge right here. Well, the way they did that was rather than have a track crossing a track during the switch,

um, they would just swap out this piece of turnout here for a piece of tracks that went this way whenever they needed to store the locomotive at the end of the day. I can hear Gareth Dennis wincing. We're doing two train episodes in a row, folks. That's right. You paid to see it, possibly, possibly. Yeah, it makes you feel better. The next page of the next page on episode is going to be me

complaining about sports for three and a half hours, baby. Get ready for that. Yeah, I mean, I know that they do have a track crossing a switch like just above this one. That's fine. That is a piece of work right there. You know, like we can have one, but, you know, two is too far. Excessive. Yeah. Well, I think this part, they actually have to move the rails.

So they tried to avoid that. Because you're actually you're actually trying to cross the movable points there. This is this is rail goal, you know. Yeah, you can see that wooden bridge I mentioned before over here, right? You can see the freight terminal over here. This is how they got the trains over there. He's on a barge. Yeah, train boat. Yes, like an airboat, but train.

Every railroad in New York has like a little navy of ferries and tugboats and these barges. And then there's another sort of barge called a lighter, which is, you know, something you you load your freight onto. And then New Jersey side and bring across to piers and New York that don't have train tracks. Or you can also put them on a what's it called a pier float, which is one of these car floats.

But instead of having a middle track, it has a middle platform. You can just bring the cars to. Some wherever on the harbor and unload them onto the barge and then unload the things from the barge onto a pier or something. So the lesson here is that like Donald Trump has some boats. Joe Biden has one kayak, but they're both outnumbered by the might of our next president. Every New York municipal railroad.

Imagine the New York Central going to war have an naval battle with the Pennsylvania. Oh, shit. That's that's that's alternative history I need. Yeah. They get a bunch of they get a bunch of boxcars with like heavy machine guns in them. Is that a technical? Yes. Yeah. Listen to our bonus episode.

We did with the guys with hell of a way to die about technicals. I wonder if that will be out by the time we release that this. Well, it's coming soon, folks. So, yeah, there's no track leading to this freight terminal. So they brought in the trains on the barge and this this solves the problem, which is still exists today. There's no real track connection between New Jersey and New York City. Right.

If you wanted to do that one, if you wanted to do that, you either had to I mean, you could they tried bringing trains through Penn Station. It didn't work. The real way to do it is trains not like it or what? Well, the track profile in Penn is not very conducive to long and heavy freight trains, especially in the East River tunnels. It's a very sort of sharply V shaped,

you know, descend and then ascent into Queens. And that's not good for things like slack action and long freight trains. Also, the tunnels themselves are not on the Hudson River side, at least, are not secured to bedrock. They sort of are floating in the mud of the Hudson. So if you run a long, heavy freight train through them, you get some ugly vibrations that you may or may not want in a, you know, mud floating tunnel.

They did, however, run what were called flexi vans which are basically a variety of shipping container in the 60s and 70s through those tunnels. I don't know whether they just carried mail or something else. And actually just finally found a photo of one of them today coming through Harold and her locking in Queens, which is sort of the other end of Penn Station from the New Jersey side or the tunnels lead to Penn Station, I should say.

But so in so far as like, you know, little containers count as freight trains, they did have those. I have heard a story that they tried to run a test coal train through Penn Station in World War Two. It broke a knuckle about halfway through. So the back half of the train just fell away and it rolled down and then rolled back through the station the other way and then rolled back the other way.

Kept doing that two or three times. It's fine. Yeah, exactly. And then it finally stopped and they were able to get it out. But yeah, it's it's very difficult to bring a freight train through that particular tunnel. So the other way to do it is you go 65 miles north to Poughkeepsie. You cross the bridge there and then you come down. Since then, the Poughkeepsie Bridge has been turned into a rail trail.

So today you go 120 miles up to Selkirk, which is just near Albany. And then you come 120 miles down. Yeah, this is fine. This is fine. I'm sure it's fine. Yeah, it's it's it's great to go 240 miles to go two miles because you cannot build a bridge. Imposable.

That became illegal after they built the Hellgate Bridge. And then in New York, they just was like, no, no more bridges. No more bridges. Impossible. Well, yeah, because Robert Moses was in charge and he he hated trains. The worst of his crimes. Yes. Oh, yeah, that's it. That's the worst. Robert Moses is worst prejudice.

Definitely not the racism. The racism against trains. Yeah, it's races against trains. His race is against Jews. He was races against the irony is never really lost on my. It's incredible how much he hated Jewish people, considering he was Jewish. Yeah, which like I'm sympathetic to.

But he can sell like I'm not I'm not in charge of city planning. So. My God. All right, as a result of this, there is actually still one car float service operating in New York City. We'll get to that. Some other places were even worse than the Brock's Terminal. This is in Baltimore. And they would have these rubber tired switchers.

That's the coolest car I've ever seen. Yes. I so badly want one. I love it. Dude is going to figure out how to put a knuckle coupler on his big pick up truck. Yes, yes. At that point, it's basically a track, but still more talk, please. I mean, there are track, track mobiles exist today,

but these are a lot cooler. And actually what I should have put here is one of the souped up trackers they used initially, which which are even even wilder. They look like something out of some kind of like wacky races thing. Well, this looks like like a prop from the movie Brazil, which used a lot of the like weird British designs. All that light truck and stuff. I'm actually going to Google this for a second.

If you just search Brazil truck, you'll just get Brazilian trucks. But yeah, no, I think there was like a short like no, it was like a scaffold commander or something. I'm badly miss. I'm mangling that name. Boy, this is where we all have to. This is where we all tie Google stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's a scammer commander.

Yeah, they used a bunch of like because Britain in in like the 60s and the 70s just was like fucking going wild with trucks. And just like, yeah, fuck it, we'll make one of three wheels. Don't give a shit, make one that's a train. You made a reliant, Robin, a truck. Yeah, no, they literally had a three a a scammer scarab, which Oh, God, I'm going to put a photo of this

in the the Discord chat for you all to look at. And this is this is just for us. This is like a room joke, I guess. But check out this fucking truck. Oh, Jesus. Isn't that just the cutest thing you've seen in your life? I do really like that. Oh, yeah, he has a very aesthetic to it.

Yeah, it is like it's well named. It's very beatilish, you know, I found the one I was looking for. Yes, yeah, that's cool. You want to drive that thing around? I use this to move trains. This is an older one right here. Just do a tractable, do a tractable. You would definitely win the tractor pull with that thing.

Yeah. It's also just such a testament to how little rolling resistance there is on a train that you can just pull freight cars around with one of these old tractors. Hmm. Yeah. And it wasn't just this is this is mostly in Baltimore, where they use these switchers, it wasn't just New York City, where they had elevated freight. This is one in Philadelphia. This is the Frankfurt Grocery Company, a distribution warehouse.

Right. Still there. Still actually used as a distribution warehouse. Has a bunch of truck bays on the first floor, but also has this mysterious parade doors on the second floor. What's going on here? Ghost train. Ghost train. Yes. You notice there's an abutment over here.

The trains used to come in, they'd spot box cars, refrigerator cars full of food on the second floor. They'd sort it, they, you know, sort them. They'd put them into trucks for delivery to local grocery stores, right? As opposed to truck and everything in now, this big they had a whole dedicated right away that went directly to this warehouse. One of the problem was it was all downgrade. It was downhill the whole way.

Yeah. So sometime in the seventies, some kids decided to play. Some kids decided to play a prank. Good prank. Let let let one of the box cars loose in the yard by the Sears warehouse and popped out the other end of the warehouse. So all right. This is a lot about car load freight in cities, like in terms of how we, you know, used. We use trains to deliver a lot of the freight that we now deliver with trucks.

Get a lot of trucks off the road. We've kind of gotten rid of this. Now, one of the things when the first time we did this, I put this at the front of the podcast, but now I'm putting in the middle. Another set of innovations that used to exist, but really don't anymore, are like specialized freight delivery systems. So like in London, they had this thing called mail rail. I love mail rail so much.

It's a tourist attraction now you can or you could before covid, like pay to ride in one of the mail carriages up front. You have to like duck so you don't scrape your head on the tunnel. Low bridge. Everybody down. Yeah. So this this runs under, I think it runs between Mount Pleasant, which is the Royal Mail's big sourcing office in central London. And it used it saves you traffic. You know, you can get mail from one end of London to the other in 10 minutes.

Say when it would take, you know, an hour driving. And it also like ties in with this whole network of like subterranean London, which is extremely cool. So like there's a bunch of like buried tunnels from like World War Two down there. There's like a continuity of government shit. You know, you name it. And so this is the tip of the iceberg, but it's a really fascinating one. It's like a really extensive system, too.

They shut it down after a couple of post offices relocated. And they're like, well, it's more economical to use lorries now, not trucks, lorries. And so they stopped using it, which is incredibly dumb, in my opinion. But what do I know? Yeah. And it really is like, I know this is going to sound perverse, given what we're looking at, but it is smaller than it looks. My God.

It is genuinely like a miniature railroad that you ride on that was just like meant for conveying mail. I think that's fantastic. I guess they had to fit two of them in a normal tube tunnel. So, you know, I got to keep them small. You know, I said systems like the Chicago Tunnel Company. They had about 60 miles of tunnels under Chicago streets to, you know, deliver various crap from one building to another.

Big department stores need the crap delivered directly to their basements. Yeah, every street in the loop has one of these tunnels underneath it. And a lot of it was used to, you know, deliver stuff like coal for heating. Coal ash from the heating you did. It's very odd, very odd. Mobsnitches. Yeah. Wait, why would you be delivering the mobsnitch? Retrieving the mobsnitch?

No, you're delivering it. You know why. He's wearing a wire. Johnny Sack got to meet with you. And so you go to the sit down by getting into a tiny little fucking tunnel train. What's the most annoying way to die? That's got to be pretty far off there. Yeah, getting fucking garotted like Luca Brazzi, but like it's by a guy who's sitting behind you on one of these.

I think what they have here, you see, this is like a sort of steak flat car here, right? And it's actually carrying two smaller carts on wheels here, which they would have just taken out and then wheeled into a building. Awesome. Yeah. And all these tunnels are still there. The tracks aren't. They use them for utilities now. In 1992, someone board through the wrong wall

in a basement somewhere and the entire Chicago River came through that borehole. Oh, and then it wasn't someone boring through. It was like a barge got loose like we talked about on a previous episode. And it like knocked through part of an embankment and the river was just like, yep, extra river now. Yeah. And then every race, every building is now flooded. My favorite thing is reading about this,

like the delay of extremely Chicago municipal politics of the time when it is flooding and when the guy whose barge hits it says it's flooding and a bunch of other people say it's flooding and the mayor going, I think still a daily at this point is going, no, it's not fine. Don't worry about it. Oh, I like that. I like that approach. Well, his constituents aren't exactly going to have an opinion on that

because they're dead. Chicago politics, folks. So what happened to all of these nice freight systems we had? General Moses. Yes, a lot of people want to get trains off the streets because they kept, you know, running over kids. Who gives a shit sentimentality? Yeah.

You know, it also runs over a lot of kids trucks. Yes. So I mean, I refuse to do any math to work out whether it's more kids, but also I don't care. Yeah. This is big decline in the railroad industry. Also deregulation, which meant freight railroads could set their own rates as opposed to have regulated rates. This is supposedly so railroads can compete with trucks. But in reality, the railroads just decided to seed whole markets to the trucking companies.

Capitalism breeds innovation, God damn it. Yes. A lot of urban customers were rendered obsolete, like coal dealerships, especially, you know, because coal, coal dealerships, you know, you'd pay to bring the coal in, you'd pay to bring the coal ash out. Yeah, you don't really need a lot of that anymore, which is probably a good thing. Yes, this is true. Yes. And I mean, that's my my professional managerial class take celebrating a bunch of workers losing their source of employment.

There's a bunch of coal miners really pissed off right now. Yeah. Really, the fundamental story here, though, is of who pays for infrastructure. And now it's FedEx. Yeah. Yeah, except also they don't. Like trucks, as we've established, cars don't damage roads, trucks do. And it's not like FedEx is paying to maintain the roads, right? And that was that sort of the crux of the issue, you know,

especially as you say, after deregulation, there was very little incentive, given, you know, these sort of hidden subsidies for trucks for, you know, railroads to keep competing in a lot of these markets. Yeah, because you can just jam ass load to these big ass trucks down any street with impunity and you're not paying for maintenance on there. And like trucks do the vast majority of damage to our road infrastructure. As we sort of mentioned in the Solange Tunnel episode. And and so now we're sort of stuck with this status quo, where trucks

make every delivery everywhere, constantly. And like big trucks, bigger trucks than we need in a lot of cases. You know, because America never embraced the van, the only good mode of road transport. And one of the things about trucks is, you know, they are, you know, pretty space inefficient, right? Hmm. I put this slide here. I didn't think I did. You start seeing these these big big distribution centers pop up.

So this is actually one that's currently being planned in Northeast Philly. This is actually on the site of the former bud car company factory. Yeah. Back where they made the streamlined trains. Now they're going to build a, I think, UPS distribution facility. Awesome, we can have a bunch of people to reenact our last safety third and get crushed by like barbells. Yeah. But also now getting covered. Are those ponds on that site? And if so, why?

So the first thing I thought was they were remnants of the golf course, which is currently there. Yeah, you can play full home fucking city. I know, right? We used to make trains. Then it was a golf course. Now it's going to be. John Truck Park, your banana trucks in trucks out.

I've never fully understood how these things work, because it's like you bring a fifty three foot truck in and then another fifty three foot truck goes out. I mean, it's like it's cross talking like you bring in, I don't know, your shipping container of imported goods from, I don't know, choose a country, India. And it's all a bunch of, I don't know, hammers. And then, you know, you have tracks going to your distribution centers

in Chicago, Milwaukee, Rochester and Syracuse. And each one of them needs a quarter of the shipment of hammers, but then they also need the rest of the tracks to be filled up with other sorts of things for those destinations. So what you do is you break up the inbound loads and in resort them into, you know, loads that are, you know, more mixed for the delivery. You're doing the same process as slide two, just all over again,

much less efficient and much more space. Yeah. And because we know we got God forbid, we build a multi-story warehouse these days. Yeah. Or like, you know, maybe move a lot of these shipments in like one big unit, as opposed to a bunch of trucks. Yeah. What if we took a bunch of truck trailers and put them together like they do in in Scans Navy, where you can have like a B trailer behind your main trailer.

And then we put, we kept adding trailers until you had everything you needed. You put a really powerful truck at the front of it. And then you had some kind of like permanent road for it. Hmm. Oh, the New York throughway. Yes. Turnpike doubles. Those are like, I just enjoy seeing those because they're so ridiculous. Yeah. I think there's triples in some parts of the country,

but they're smaller trailers. They're not the full 53 footers. Yeah, they let you do triples out West. I know that much. Yeah. I am reliably informed by American truck simulator that in Montana, I mean, excuse me, in Nevada, there are no laws. So yes, there's no laws in Montana either. There's like huge swaths of the country with no laws.

I don't understand why these areas. Well, that's probably why they're so big on Blue Lives Matter, because there are no laws that police enforce. So they never have to deal with them. Yeah. So probably the only good way to be a cop is like to be a cop in a place with no like population and when no one ever goes through. Oh, yeah, you're just a guy who gets to wear a cool hat then.

Yeah, exactly. Oral cops are the fucking worst, man. Can't confirm because you just get the opportunity to take out your failing marriage on somebody just passing through. And you really need them to know how bad that marriage is failing. You run the speed trap on like Route 11. Yeah. So, yeah, you know, all these trucks have to come in and like these

these facilities produce assloads of truck trips every day. They're really bad on local roads. This is a nice chart of how much damage various vehicles due to roads. Just saw the bottom line. Yeah. This is from Street for the benefit of the the audio only listener. The chart begins with nine tonne big rig and ends with that man on a freakishly heavy bicycle, which you describe as way 350 pounds.

Yeah, like I'm curious. I'm curious what the like freakishly heavy bicycle weighs in this equation. Right. I think it's probably between 50 and 75 pounds. Jesus. I know that I know the bike share bikes here in Philly. The regular ones weigh 50 pounds and the electric ones weigh 54 pounds. Hmm. So you just got to have the other like 296 from somewhere, which I'm getting there and I can do point zero zero zero zero six.

Percent of the damage of an average Alice. Yeah, that's right. This chart like your roadwear is proportional to the fourth power of the weight on each tire. Right. As I mentioned in the Selenque Tunnel episode, so your average car here is one right. It's four thousand pounds. So your nine tonne big rig does as much damage to the road as four hundred and ten cars.

Hmm. This is why when you design bridges and roads, you design for trucks. You ignore cars. Everything else is seasoning. Yes. So so why people say, well, why don't these bicyclists pay like taxes? Why isn't there a road fee for bicyclists? Why don't they have license plates?

There is. It's point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero six percent. You have to mail them a penny at the end of the year. And that's only if you own the freakishly heavy bicycle. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my cast iron bicycle arrived. Yeah. You could use it as part of like an estate tax when you die. You know, you are like four cents of road damage off it up.

You have to you what you could do is you could cheat. You could get a bicycle with extra like a wide tire and then you're doing nothing. Or three axels or something. Just yeah, a fat man on a freakishly wide tricycle is the most efficient. It is the most efficient method of transport in terms of road wear alone. You will never do anywhere to the road if you just did. If you just if everyone just did bicycles, right?

It would never it would. You could have laid asphalt in like 1000 B.C. And it would still be fine, except for damage from trees. The tree always wins. It's impressive. Yeah. This this is this is something else you learn in engineering, as well as everything leaks, is the tree always wins. Unless you cut it down.

It's only one language they understand. Mm hmm. You need to be forceful with these things. Introduce some Dutch Elm disease. Fuck you. All right. So it gave me this nice graph, which describes what we're going to talk about here. Other factors that have increased the amount of trucking as opposed to trains

is suburbanization of industry, right? You know, yeah, you have a big industrial park with all of the factories. And now on the plus side, you're not across the street from a paper mill. But on the other hand, all of the shit goes to like one place, which then like destroys the area around it. It's also worth knowing that these sorts of industrial parks were not really a thing before trucks. You needed the sort of, you know,

flexibility and where you can go that a truck affords to create these things. Railroads encouraged much more sort of corridor based, generally multi-story industrial development. One one criticism I will make of the boxcar. Very wide turning circle. Mm hmm. Yes. Although if you have a smaller boxcar, it's a smaller turning circle. Yeah, bring back the 40 foot back car.

Yeah, 40 footers were good for that kind of thing. It's also worth noting here that, you know, obviously there was more than just trucks pushing industry to the suburbs. You know, there was and I'm sure the others will have more to say on this. But there were absolutely no factors, which we may have talked about previously in connection with one Robert Moses leading to the suburbanization of America in particular. There's absolutely no no politics going on here.

There's only one red line on this slide. Yeah, yeah. You know, so it starts suburbanizing industry. A lot of light industry moves out of the suburbs, which is always the interesting one because the heavy industry tend to have enough fixed infrastructure that it kind of stayed where it was. That's why, you know, not a lot of light metal shops in Philadelphia, but there was until recently a major oil refinery.

Difficult to gentrify that. This is true. Yes. Well, they're going to turn it into a distribution center. But yeah, you know, you go out to the suburbs, you relocate your light industry, these nice stylish white boxes, you know, like one story white boxes, you get a bunch of trucks coming in. You know, sometimes it's good to get heavy industry out of the city. Heavy industry tended not to be the one that moved.

It was light industry. And the other thing is like you move industry out to the suburbs. It's you start to get a more suburban workforce and they become homeowners. They become, you know, they drive to work as opposed to they start buying boats. Yes, and putting flags on the boats. And most of them stay afloat. What you do is you create boomers. Yes. Yeah.

You make it a bunch of money. Do you think why do I need a union? Yeah, that's it's organized in the suburbs, you know, for all the, you know, social reasons that are talked about in connection with the suburbs in general. Yeah, it's like, oh, you have like two neighbors at best. You know, yeah, like you have, I don't know, some white collar guy. And then like Carl, who works for a different industry than you do.

Like, you know, you're not talking to your co-workers like off hours ever. Yeah. These sorts of plants were also important in so far as they sort of provided redundancy for, you know, larger plants in cities. So, you know, if there was some strike at your your big, you know, main production facility, you'd have a backup source of, of, you know, production. And it was also helpful as a bargaining chip, you know, you can, you can threaten workers at a unionized plant with a runaway shop.

So moving their jobs somewhere else, if you have other sort of duplicate production facilities, decentralized across a country or a region or whatever it is. And that was especially important in just, you know, talking about, you know, labor politics in the auto industry after 1930s and stuff like that. Yeah. And one of the most interesting things I think you gave me was, of course, this chart here, manufacturing activity in Chicago versus the metropolitan area, right? And you can sort of see, you have this one line, which is

manufacturing jobs in Chicago going down. And you have this other line, manufacturing jobs in the suburbs, which is, of course, generally going up. Right. And of course, we go to the next slide. And you can sort of see the, like the total number of manufacturing jobs in this Midwestern, you know, Rust Belt region. Oh, shit.

Hasn't declined that much since 1950. To be here, this chart only goes like 1997 or something. So I'm sure there's been changes since then. NAFTA, baby. Yeah. For the sake of full disclosure, I copied all this data by hand from old PDFs of census documents. So thank you for your service. Yes. Thank you for your service.

You can't see me, but I'm saluting. I'm saluting, but I'm saluting in the fucked up British way, where it's like palm out. Interesting. But like even in 1997, the jobs in the suburbs were increasing. There's still like an upward trend there. Yeah. Yeah. One of these things about like, Trump's going to bring manufacturing jobs back to make manufacturing jobs never went away.

They just dispersed the suburbs, the Sunbelt. The yeah, things like this. Yes. And then lastly, Mexico, your big, your big rural industry. Yeah. What do you got? We got Nissan in Canton, Mississippi up here. And GM in Spring Hill, Tennessee. These are plants in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Didn't one of these just vote to unionize like recently? I'm not thinking. Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm misremembering, but I'm certain there was one in Tennessee. I don't know if it was Nissan. There was a long unionization push at the VW plant. And I think Chattanooga, that was successful. No, it wasn't. They tried for years. Yeah.

Yeah. I think they tried twice, actually. Yes. I believe so. Yeah. I thought there was one where like VW was even like, yeah, I think a union is not a bad idea. Even like the management was like, yeah, that's probably fine. Yeah. And there's like, no, not going to happen. Like politicians intervened. Yeah.

Well, you know, the German labor relations system is a lot less adversarial, well, you know, generalizing, of course, then in the U.S. So, you know, the German. I don't like that. Yeah. The German system of selling out. Yeah, I am the union man. I. I build Zithpanzer tank.

Yeah, but it's fine because the workers have a seat on the board of the factory that builds the Panzer tanks. This is true. Yes. Well, it's called National Socialism, right? But yeah, so you move all this shit way out into the middle of nowhere and it's suddenly like, you know, cost of living is cheap, cost of land is cheap. You can have the facilities that are cheap to run next to a nine lean highway.

Yeah, you can also design it however you want to because you're literally working with farm fields, which is I don't know if you're an industrial engineer is nice. Oh, yeah, you can just eat up a shitload of land. Yeah. Yeah. One of the sort of more obscure, but in my opinion, interesting drivers of the whole serverization, realisation industry trend is the advent of electrified production lines. Because before electrification, you had to like run everything in the factory

off of this seriously interconnected, like not conveyor belts, but, you know, belts and chains and whatever overhead belt systems. Yeah, exactly. You'd have a if you put things too far from each other, you know, you would lose significant amounts of energy with distance. So it made sense to stack things on top of each other and put things as close together as possible. But that whole equation changed when, you know, you have electricity

and you just put a motor and everything and put them at nice, straight line and produce that way. You heard it here first, folks. Factorio is bad. Fuck electricity. Society has progressed beyond the need for electricity. Yes. Yeah, reject modernity and break tradition.

Yes, right. Yeah, so you get these massive sprawling facilities way out in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, again, you get the sort of atomisation of the workforce, because, you know, they all they're all now homeowners, right? You know, they're they have a car, they have a lawn, they have a house. You know, they have a bunch of excess money. Why do I need a union? And, you know, one of the things is, of course, when these industries

decide eventually to go overseas, there's going to be no organisation to oppose that. Correct. But Trump said he was going to stop that. Yep. Yes. That's what's going to happen. That's that's what Trump does is do what he says he will. Yeah, I'm not off. Sure. Manufacturing. No, no, no.

That would be that would be rude to the people who would be unethical. Who he cares about. Yes, exactly. I love to know what the Chinese working class are doing right now. Oh, you should watch a documentary called American Factory, which is very much about Fuzhou, which is a Chinese glass company for automotive glass, buys a factory in Michigan and takes it over.

It used to be a GM, I think. And you just like at the whole time you're watching this thing, you're watching these Chinese workers who are just being immiserated and these American workers who are just being immiserated. And you'll put you want to like push them together and be like now kiss, but with like class consciousness. All right, this is part where I stuck the podcast together and I don't I lost my train of thought, but we have a train here on the slide.

Oh, boy. So tenorization, right? This is another thing which sort of affected why there's so many trucks in urban areas is like a lot of freight now moves in big shipping containers, not inherently bad. But, you know, every shipping container trip is a truck trip on each end, right? Exceptions with the limit, which you will talk about, I think. Yes. Also had the advantage of not

doing the thing that you do to a union that you can't destroy, making the longshoremen irrelevant by transforming it from a mass job into something that requires a few highly technical, highly skilled employees who still have a very powerful union. But now they're the union of guys who like operate cranes and stuff rather than a union of like six thousand mob affiliates or like pulling nitroglycerin on and off a phrase of giant fucking hooks

all the time. Right. Yeah. And they're like, you know, the containerization, I think, is a very mixed bag. A lot of people think this is like the way of the future. You know, this is the way we're going to ship everything. I think that there's good and bad with it. A lot of the bad is union like destroying unions, which is obviously good for a lot of other people.

That's very profitable. It's also the whole capital of ability thing before containers, you know, and obviously there are multiple sizes argument. And I personally am, you know, in the middle. I'm a carload. I think we should go back to only carloads. Well, for freight, for freight rail, sure. But for international sea trade, this made things a lot, you know,

cheaper to ship and less exploding. Yeah, exactly. And you see that you now can trade profitably with, you know, kind of anywhere. And again, as you say, a double edged sword, you can have the same container port. And I mean the same identical container port in pretty much anywhere in the world with the oceanography permitting. Yeah. Yeah.

And then, of course, those containers can just be picked up and plopped on a train or a track or a barge even to be moved inland. It's a it's a very flexible and efficient system from from, you know, just a sort of 30,000 feet logistic standpoint. It obviously has ramifications for, you know, labor power and, you know, the organization of the world economy, which is, you know, a whole nuanced and complicated episode in them itself.

But it did make trade a lot easier. One of the things I think is a problem in the United States, especially with containers as for rail freight, which we'll get into later is this thing called the well car. Right. Which means. You can never, ever, ever deliver a container directly to a customer using a train. Yeah.

But we will get into that later. And of course, another big problem is, OK, so we deliver containers a lot of times to something called an inland port. And in order to get the container to its final destination, you use. You use trucks and that's a service called Drage. And Drage has some of the most incredibly exploitive labor practices anywhere. But you are you are you are getting people to pay you to work.

Is it like least rent to own big rig schemes? And hold on, that'll be we'll have to do an episode on that because it's it's some of the grossest shit I've ever heard of. Yeah, yeah. Also, judging on life. Yeah. And it's just that, yeah. There's a good book. If you're any, you know, you or listeners are interested in getting the goods. It was put up, I think, Cornell's Labor Relations School.

And it's a bit dated now, but it's a really interesting in depth look into labor politics in the sort of port ecosystem in Southern California. Oh, I read it summer. Good stuff. I that seems like a good idea by the by the book. All right. By the book. Yes. I am not affiliated with this, but in any way, this is just, you know,

I'm not anybody from putting this book. So the result of this whole, like, suburbanization, realization of industry, a lot of industry is sort of abandoned, you know, a rail service where they had to stay in the city. A lot of industrial buildings were repurposed for either offices or residential use or coffee shops or coffee. Yeah, coffee shops, you know, brewery, you know, you got like all this kind of crap. Right. You know, you can see like

here's a series of buildings. This is in Brooklyn somewhere, I believe. You can see clearly these are all designed or the railroad to come in and spots of cars. And they're using it for truck parking. That's impressive. Yeah. And Bushwick, mind you, has some of the worst air quality issues in the city. Oh, yeah. Largely, thanks to the amount of truck traffic in the area.

The trains are obviously diesel polluters as well. But you can haul each like each individual train car of which you can, you know, you can help together many to make a full train. That's three to four trucks. That's how trains work. Yeah. So. Use the attached stuff to the fucking end. Why are you making the train longer? Oh, my God. It's like a birthday.

Why don't they do that with trucks? Oh, because you take out 75 traffic lights, right? Only positive thing you can see over here is Manhattan beer distributors, which gets all the beer in New York City. He comes in on trains. Yeah, if you buy that's a real. Yeah, if you buy beer in New York City. Don't worry about your carbon footprint.

Now, you are supporting the rail industry. Yes. Yeah. Just please do not buy dark fruit cider. Yeah, the local freight road in New York has been termed the pizza and beer railroad because it carries so much flour and so much beer. I like that. That makes me happy.

That's good. But yeah, you got train guys. Train is good as it turns out. Who knew? Yeah. We did. God damn it. But yeah, it's like the railroads can concentrate on unit trains, intermole containers. They want to bring down that operating ratio

because, you know, long distance halls make the most money. And we'll definitely talk about that when we eventually do the Penn Central episode. You know, because they want to bring down. They want to bring down the operating ratio, which is what railroads use instead of a profit margin because the profit margin for a railroad is like 20 percent. But the operating ratio is 80 percent.

You know, they want to make they want to make the investors happy, right? And railroads are very bad at providing carload freight service in general, especially with a lot of the implementation of PSR that currently exists. Yeah. And PSR for the record is when you use computer to do train. Yes. Yeah. It's also I would disagree with the assessment that PSR is always bad for carload freight, but for another time, given that we've now been podcasting for two hours.

Yes, I guess we got to move through this quick. Yes, please. I'm sorry. All right. All right. All right. So yeah, I should just go to the next slide. I got a lot of notes on here. So I guess we're going to sort of talk about how is this being handled in Europe, right? Yeah, I know. All right.

Europe, Europe. Yes. Or Europa. Or Europa. Yes. If you know what I mean. So Europe. Or Europe. Yes. So all right.

So there's such a thing as national freight policy in Europe, like the Germans will say, if you got a bunch of shit coming into your industry, your commercial business, you have to use trains. There's a thing called Swiss split, which I believe Ude knows about. Yeah, it's basically imagine if you replace the drainage part of an intermodal container's Germany or journey. So taking the container from the intermodal terminal where it comes off of the train or the boat to the warehouse

where it gets parked at a truck dock. Imagine if you replace that part of the journey with the train. So instead of loading the container onto a truck and intermodal terminal, you load it onto a different type of train that has these specialized flat cars where you can actually unload the container on the flat car, which is what you're seeing this photo here. And this is from an IKEA warehouse in Basel in Switzerland.

In Switzerland, they trucks have to pay a lot more to drive around than in the US, which makes the sort of thing more economical. Yeah, the Swiss the Swiss psychotic hatred for like automotive road transport is extremely funny to me. Especially since like parts of it and like they're absolutely no resemblance to a motor sport in Switzerland banned. No reason. Fuck you.

Having an exhaust like a hundred and five years ago or whatever. Yeah. And that's like that's a pretense they use. Having an exhaust on your car that is like two decibels too loud and the limit is set absurdly low and they will measure it. Go to jail. Go to fucking prison. I do. I do like the idea, though, of just some asshole following you around with a decibel meter. Yes, literally. Yes, nine, nine, nine.

Fuck you. Drive around, drive around with unusual number plates and our gal and see what fucking happens. There will be a guy in a silly hat with a decibel meter along in seconds to take you to fucking prison. Give us our gold bag. Does he have to read you your rights in four languages? In Switzerland, it doesn't matter.

You're going to disappear to a black site. So you think you're right since Switzerland? No, you don't know. You have broken the social contract and you feel be shot at dawn. Yeah, we have this like rescript here on parchment that says if you're suspected of being Albanian, I can stab you with a fucking halberd. They do make you deliver shit by train.

I think that's good. The contrast. Land of contrast. Land of contrast. You know, because they have like a national policy on delivering freight, which, of course, we don't have in the United States. It's just, yeah, maybe medical is right. The federal government really can't do anything. But the federal government can do anything it wants to.

They have the nuclear weapons. Look, how many how many nukes does fucking Nebraska have? Not for hollow alto doesn't want to build affordable housing. What you do is you station a bunch of artillery in the big military battalions to Steve Jobs have. Yes, just start dropping flyers that show pictures of Grasny after the Chechen war and say, this is what will happen to you if you don't build affordable housing.

I feel very strongly that this is the kind of thing that is getting you suspended from Twitter on YouTube. All right, let's start to finish this up here. So there is still some major roles that freight rail plays in cities in the United States. Like this is the garbage, the garbage train. Yeah, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage, garbage. Fucking garbage.

Yes, you can see the green garbage train here. There's some of the blue garbage train back here. There's also an orange garbage train. I know this is that island. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, I've seen all I was thinking it was like separating your recyclables a bit on scale like paper and plastic. No, yeah, no, there's a recycled glass company

that sends stuff by rail out of New York. There is a decent number of scrapyards. There's a lot of construction demolition debris that comes out of especially Long Island. It's like getting trash out of New York is a very big business. I think Boston used to have a garbage train, but they don't anymore. They have the incinerator train on Cape Cod. Yeah, we just we we just watched the Red Sox.

There's a good story about a Philadelphia garbage barge, which I believe should be an episode at some point. Try the the the the the world spanning garbage barge voyage. Um, but yeah, this brings New York City's garbage to a landfill in Virginia. Oh, for fresh kills. No, that's too far out. Yeah, and it brings the and then it brings oranges back up north. Again, do not mix up these trains.

Yeah. And then they have they still have a car float operation, you know, and this is how they get the beer into New York City. This is how they get the pizza in the New York City. The world's smallest and shittiest aircraft carrier. Yeah. But, you know, everything else, like if you want to get stuff in New York City and you don't want to put it on this barge, which is pretty expensive

to operate compared to a normal railroad, you know, you're sending it 240 miles to Selkirk and back. Yeah. And a bridge. Selkirk is fine if you're coming from the West, because, you know, you're just coming across the old New York Central main line and then you're just going south. It's terrible, though, if you're coming from the south, because then you're going all the way up and all the way back down.

Yeah. And the other thing is like we talked a lot about New York City in this episode, because New York City seems to have the biggest problems. Yeah. But fundamentally, like most cities in the United States are bringing in all of their shit on trucks. And they just haven't acknowledged that this is a problem yet. They're like, maybe they don't need to bring in everything on trucks. It's, you know. Or if stuff is coming in on rail, it's like, you know,

it's a unit grain train to your local grain pier or coal train to your power plant. Or newsprint to your newspaper printer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not necessarily the stuff that's actually going into, like, you know, directly into the city itself. And a lot of that stuff is now being handled at these distribution centers, which then truck into the city, even if they may themselves be rail-served. Yeah. One interesting thing, which is

certain to develop is, you know, maybe multi-story industry and distribution centers are coming back. So this is this is being built. This is the south road. Yeah. They can get the cool crane job back. Yes. So this is like, you know, it's a multi-story distribution center. You can see they're going to have a rail spur back here. You get a bunch of vans down here in this parking lot.

You got this big ramp. I'm curious. I'm curious why in the rental they used flat front, like, cab over engine trucks. Oh, because it's interesting. To give very European, very, like, futuristic and probably uneconomical. It's probably because they just decided to grab whatever they could off of the Google warehouse. Yeah. Now, I will say interesting thing. In North Jersey, there was a brief

experiment where Scania, a big European truck manufacturer, tried to market trucks in the United States. Most of them were sold in North Jersey, and there are a couple that are still running. They're weird because they're like scant. They're Scanias, but they're not cab overs. They're like regular tractor trailers. Yeah, they built a couple of like engine forward ones that like it's and sold them in Europe.

So I think it's like a Scania 117 or something. Yeah. Yeah, I saw one once. I was like, holy shit, that's a Scania in the United States. What the fuck? When you mix up your Euro truck and your American trucks, emulated DLCs. Yeah. This is something they do in Japan a lot, but this will be the first time we see it in the United States.

Really, what's needed here is just a big shift in the way we think about freight and freight policy in this country. You know, we could stop ordering fucking same day delivery treats. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, we could we could make rail costs like sort of competitive enough that they would be incentivized to, once again, deliver that stuff quickly. I mean, you know, you used to be able to order something off this year's catalog

and have it delivered to your local freight station. It wasn't the fastest thing ever, but, you know. You could order a rifle and kill the president with that shit. Or you could order a whole house and kill the president with it. I think a lot of it, too, is that Amazon does do at least to my knowledge. I don't know if they still do it, but the like take your time delivery, whatever they call it.

But I mean, like, I think that that's we're so accustomed to stuff like Amazon Prime where like if it comes, you know, in more than two days, it's just I can't believe it's taking so long. But perhaps, you know, we're going to have to get back to free shipping on all orders. Some of it just comes, you know, which dot com mechanism where it gets there when it gets there. Yeah. You get the thing three months later when you've forgotten about it.

That's a nice treat. So you still get the abortion rush. But the thing is like the railroads don't deliver shit on time. Like they just don't do it. Maybe they should do it. Well, maybe they maybe they should consider doing that. I think the consensus is if you do PSR right, reliability really does go up.

But, you know, you need to implement it well and not just use PSR as an excuse to, you know, do all the other like rate increases and minimal operations changes that you had been wanting to. Anyway, is this once again a case of railroads taking deregulation as an excuse to try to get out of the railroad business? That thing that they do and apparently hate doing. Yes. It's very funny that people get so sentimental about trains when the people who actually like at an organizational level

are responsible for them seem to fucking despise them. Yeah, some of that seems to be changing. I mean, at least, you know, Canadian National, for example, talks a big talk. And to a certain extent has actually done a really, you know, good job at growing their freight business. They I think and now I'm going to start sounding like some sort of consultant or something. They they really try to be like logistics providers

and integrated into your supply chain in a real way by, you know, really working with ports. I mean, Prince Rupert is sort of the classic example of this. They supported the development of a sort of a greenfield port in, you know, the Northwestern Canadian coast. And it's been very successful and it's all goes by rail. So there are railroads out there that are trying and there is creativity in the industry. But when you're paying for literally everything you do

and the competition is paying for almost nothing that they do, it's hard. And if you compound that with the general sort of managerial conservatism of railroads and the really poor performance metrics they use, you get a well, you know, a disinvestment mentality, a lot of railroads. And they pay property taxes. Yes, lots of them here. What you got to do is incorporate your railroad as a church.

Yes. There's real there's your solution. Yes. Make some heritage units. And then it'll be really a church. Yeah. No, I believe it'll be relic units. This is the true F nine. You need to that would probably expand the employee base finally outside of existing, you know, railroad employees and their friends. Like, well, you can join the join the church of the dash nine.

All right. So I guess that's the solution to urban logistics problems is. Turn the railroad evangelism railroad evangelism. Yeah. Join the church. All right. So we have a section in this podcast called Safety Third. Because Madaglasius is mad at us online. Yeah, because he fucked around, he will now find out. Yes. In the first one of me reading his April 24th,

twenty thirteen column after the scene here, Savar factory collapse in Bangladesh, entitled Different places have different safety rules and that's OK. And I want to point out, incidentally, that this is top and tailed by an update that's like, see here for further, more appropriate thoughts and ended with a correction. So this is the true, like, Iglesias quality that we've come to expect. And it's four paragraphs long.

I'm going to blast straight through it. It's very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now turn to outsource a lot of factory explosion risk to places like Bangladesh, where eighty seven people just died in a building collapse. This kind of consideration leads Eric Loomis, who, as a parenthetical on my part, has now sadly gone insane and turned liberal, to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety,

by which he does not mean that Bangladesh levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States. I think that's wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different and indeed lower workplace safety standards than the United States. Come on, dude.

I think you wrote this like the day after it happened. Of course, he fucking did. The reason is that while having a safe job is good, brains, Matt and coming here, money is also good. No, money is bad. Money is bad. We want to get rid of money. That's why we do socialism.

Jobs that are unusually dangerous in the contemporary United States. That's primarily fishing, logging and trucking. Pay a premium over other working class occupations precisely because trucking does not pay a premium does not trucking. We talked about rage. They there are just trucking jobs where you have to pay to work because people are reluctant to risk death or maiming at work. Yes. And in a free society, it's good

that different people are able to make different choices on the risk reward spectrum. Fuck you. It is a good day to die to feed myself. There are also some good reasons to want to avoid a world of unlimited choice and see this as a sphere in which collective action is appropriate. But that still leaves us with the question of which collective should make the collective choice. Not one that Matt Iglesias is part of, please.

Bangladesh is a lot poorer than the United States. Really? Why? There are very good reasons for Bangladeshi people to make different choices in this regard than Americans. That's true, whether you're talking about an individual calculus or a collective calculus, safety rules that are appropriate for the United States would be unnecessarily immiserating in much poorer Bangladesh.

No, they wouldn't die. They wouldn't have died if the safety rules were there. They would not have died. They would be alive today. This was like seven years ago. Rules that are appropriate in Bangladesh would be far too flimsy for the richer and more risk averse United States. Split the difference and you'll get rules that are appropriate for nobody.

The current system of letting different countries have different rules is working fine. That's why 90 fucking people are dead, Matt. American jobs have gotten much safer over the past 20 years. And Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer. And I wanted to read different places have different safety rules. And that's OK by friend of the show, Matt Iglesias, because I think it is in a lot of ways sort of the antithesis

of everything that we're trying to do on this show. Yeah. So we don't know the ins and outs of technical federalism, but at least we're not advocating for 90 fucking people to die out of convenience. Yeah, because it's entirely appropriate for them to make that personal choice. The moral high ground, you should you should probably just call it a day, Matt. I love to make I love to make a personal risk reward choice based on like the calculation of Matt Iglesias,

a man who has never faced a risk in his fucking life. But to say, yeah, what do you think the riskiest job Matt Iglesias ever had? I don't know. Quote squeezing us on Twitter. I know that he's he's probably done something riskier than that, but not my much. This fucking asshole, man. My God. Why does he think you can talk to anyone about anything ever again? Because no one's ever told him that he's wrong before.

It's the same fucking thing with Barry Weiss, man, is by the time anyone had sort of been like, no, you're full of shit. They were 29 and owned a house and just like buried into the establishment, like fucking deer ticks and like we have this entire class of columnists who we will never be able to get rid of. Just writing fucking four paragraphs about the latest tragedy and being like, well, I don't think we should do more regulation. I don't understand.

You look at a picture like this and like this crumbled reinforced concrete and you're like, yeah, it's probably whatever. Listen, it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different and indeed lower workplace safety standards in the United States, 90 cents a day as opposed to 50 cents a day. That's progress. Yeah. Yeah, Lord. Oh, thank you. Fuck you, Matt.

Has medically is he has ever used power tools? No, this is this is a real question. Madaglasius is a power tool. Also, he signed the letter critical of cancel culture that noted luminary. Fuck, I wish it worked. Yeah, canceled, you fucking piece of shit. Hi, welcome to there's your problem, the podcast

because wildly out of its way to address all the grievances it has. Yes, that's right. We are a thin skinned podcast and I love that about us. Do not talk to us, Madaglasius. Do not do it. We will remind you of this column that you wrote until the end of the fucking earth. Society has progressed beyond the need for Madaglasius. All right.

So next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Let's go make make different choices on the risk reward spectrum. Oh, my God. Why do you need the gender dial so there's no risk? Anyone got any commercials before we go? Listen to listen to Trash Future. Well, thank you podcast.

Also, listen to all there's your problem. Follow a day on Twitter. Yes, what's your app again? It's 320 LGA. Yeah, there you go. All right. I like planes, too, in case that wasn't clear. Plains.

Oh, my God. On this podcast. Yes. Follow Madaglasius and berate him. Yeah, you cannot be banned from Twitter for your comments on here. And so it is not against the YouTube term of service to say remind Madaglasius that he wrote in 2013 that Bangladeshi factory workers being crushed to death were making a different choice on the risk reward spectrum.

Can we put in for this slide the picture of Laura Farquaad saying some of you may die, but that is a choice I am willing to make. All right. That's a fucking podcast. Yeah, it was about to say. I just want to say before we go, vote Jescarain for Senate September 15. If you are in Delaware and you are a registered Democrat, or maybe it's an open primary, I have no idea.

I don't know. Just go to a polling place and start berating them until you can vote. Yeah, commit some voter fraud. I don't care. Do not commit. Yeah, please don't do that. Yeah, and then what else? So I am open to host a panel in late September for the World Transformed Conference

about what a Green New Deal would look like for cities in in Britain. Actually, I don't know why they got me an American for it. But here I am. We're going to use city skyline. I feel so snubbed. Yeah, we're going to use city skylines to demonstrate how you know, the Green New Deal may visually affect cities or physically. We're going to have several speakers there.

I will put some details for that in the description. I believe it's September 25th. So, you know, come register. Also, there's other sessions. It's a month long conference, which is already underway. So, you know, if you want to see other sort of general left wing things, you know, you want to sit in for some lectures? Hey, you know, show up. All right.

There's your podcast. Yes. We've done it. All right. Can I go to that now, please? Yes, we made it. I am now going to lie face down on the floor. I'm going to go eat. That was wise. Maybe wise. Yeah.

All right. Thank you guys. Yeah. Thanks for coming on today. You're welcome. I'm glad I got to talk about some freight trains. Oh, yeah. Bye, everybody. And just to be with you guys about housing policy again. Thank you.

Well, if it is in, I have a lot. That's for Donya. How do I turn this off?