Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 47: Ashtabula Horror

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

why doesn't anyone listen to the experts they hire patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod Merch : https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzUfAnhRjmw

Yeah, well, it kind of deflates that while I can just deafen myself. No. No, you can't. All right. Just giving my nice mic a handy. I feel like Howard Stern. I don't really like it other than we're both Jewish boys. We've got Liam in the studio here to ride the Sebian.

Hey, that's right. Oh my god. Joe, you know, I was reading about how... There's this thing called phrenology. Joe Rogan just nods along sagely. You put Joe Rogan and Howard Stern in the same room together. I like to think that all how he would be able to just kick his ass. But I know this should...

All he did, all Joe Rogan ever did was host Fear Factor, right? Like, that's why he's so popular. He's also an MMA guy. Play a real sport. Play football. Pick up a football. Never listened to the Joe Rogan podcast. I just...

Although... Is it good? No, I don't know. I've never listened to it. I listened to like two minutes of the Elon Musk one and then I had to be taken down because I started to frankly, we do Google searches for putting revolver in one's own mouth. Much more complicated than it used to be. In addition to buysnews.com, get at me, Spotify wants to give me a quarter of a million dollars

to do this dumb bullshit. Get at me there, too. They'll give you a quarter to do this dumb bullshit. No, they have to give me excuse. You two can do whatever the hell you want. This podcast is now Liam and the Liamettes. Why do I have to throw this baton? What am I doing?

Why is it on fire? Yo, fire batons are fucked up, dude. Like I remember my neighbor used to do fire baton and it was a shit because she was the perfect kid and I was always just waiting for her to burn down her parents rancher and they never sort of did that. It was always a bummer. God damn it. I know, buddy.

Yeah, I know, right? All right. So we are, the Zencaster is going, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So everybody is going? Yeah.

We got everything. I'm recording. All right. Is the... Oh, shit. Let me fire up. I'll do acidate. Sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm good now. And three adults do a podcast. Probably not. Let's find out. No, no, almost certainly no. All right.

Well, if we're here since we got a time limit, welcome to where... Welcome to... Welcome to where I am. I've been drinking since 9 a.m. I am just the dross there. I can not kill you, bitch. We're ready to be the fire chiefs of a small town in Ohio. I know, right?

Welcome to... Rocky river getaways. Welcome to... Welcome to There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters. It has slides. I understand some people are having difficulty finding the slides. If you're listening audio only, they're in the description.

You nincompoops. Anyway, I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. I am Alice Kordwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns once again, truly are she and her. Not a bit.

My name is Liam Anderson. No, my pronouns are he and him, and we have shirts now and a sticker. Holy shit, we have merch. We have merch, ladies, gentlemen and non-binary pals. Give us all your goddamn money. All of it. Every last goddamn die. Make your parents kill your roommate.

Take their money by our merch, please. Listen, Liam needs your help against the five over ones, but in order to do it, he needs the number on your credit card, the three numbers on the back. Well, there's welcome to There's Your Problem live from the state correctional facility and now we can send us the last four digits to your social security number. That's also a good idea. For verification, you know, maybe a photocopy or a passport,

maybe your actual passport. Actually, just give us your passports. Yeah, just give us your passport. Ignore my ignore my Saudi bin Laden badge. Anyway, so what you're looking at in this slide is a, I believe, in the time period, they would have called this a conflagration. Is it conflagration? You remember some fire.

Yeah, well, this is not supposed to it's a fire. Fire. That's that's a good Maryland shit. Why are people I like the people in foreground who are just trudging away from the fire? Yeah, well, you just were just like, let's fuck it go. This is the worst fucking day. No, I wanted to go to the oldie ball. No, what they did was they internalized the share zone post that's like you can just leave anything seen of a disaster.

You can just walk out if you're fast enough, just go home. Now, there there's supposed to be a bridge here. But there's on the ground that that's a bad bridge. Yeah, there's some fire on where the bridge is. Yeah, there's some fire below where the bridge used to be. And that's on account of a train went over it and the bridge collapsed and then caught fire. Oh, boy. Yeah. So today we're talking about the ash tabula horror.

They had a such cool way of naming these things in the 19th century. Like, I was about to say, yeah, for a regular train crash to be like the ash tabula horror horror. Yeah, that's like horror blood coming out of the locomotive firebox kind of vibe. Oh, yeah, you got like the big skull face on the front of the locomotive. Yeah, like so. So you two have seen final destination. Well, and then the rails turned red with blood. But there's like you're trying to try to sell a scary story as you're

creating over a bridge by cold box light. That's right. That's better than that's better than turning red with rust. I will say that. Yeah, the blood lubricates. We've been over this with horsefisher blood contains iron. So I don't you you don't you don't want the you don't want the rails lubricated. That's a bad it's a bad sign. That's how you get slippery.

It makes you go faster. Look, build things out of more rigid, more strong things and lubricate the rails of railroads constantly. Oh, you're going to like this episode, Alice. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Fuck, no, that's still all of them. That's Halloween.

Damn it. Where's my fucking news? Thank you. There, there's your goddamn news. There we go. There we go. This is a big car crash at the Bahrain Grand Prix, right? It's Bahrain, the most ethical Grand Prix in the season. I don't know.

I think back to a strong contender now for most ethical. Did they do Baku this year? I don't know. I don't know either. Well, anyway, this happened. Yeah, Ronette, Roman, is it Roman? Yeah, Romain Grosjean. Yeah, he crashed and the car exploded in a fireball

and he walked away. Totally unhurt. And safety systems just work as we learned in like Pinier. Yeah, yeah, it sheared the front half off of the car. Like if you look at it, it has physically had lost half of its length, the front half, like right where the dude's legs are. And no, he's fine.

Yeah, he's fine. Yeah, exactly. So a testament to the safety of modern race cars compared to, you know, our Group B episode available on our Patreon. That's right. Yeah, I was reading. I was reading Professor Sid Watkins book. He was the the in-house surgeon for Formula One for a long time. And like he just kind of writes it up like, yeah, in the old days,

I tried to set up a medical car and told them to pick up all the empty beer cans from the floor of the medical centre. And they just told me to go fuck myself. So things have changed somewhat since the seventies and all for the better. Yeah, it's better to say, hey, I'm Sid Watkins. This is my Glenn. Hello, I'm Sid Watkins and this is Jackass.

Oh, my God. We got two. We got two car related newses today. Yeah, what's been pissing you off the Svartagraz? Oh, my God, this has been incredible. I've never seen someone get dunked on so hard on Twitter. This is the main this is the main guy of Twitter today. A man has learned how to use the traffic visualization software VisSim and demonstrated how the Las Vegas loop will work.

And it looks like a like a taxi stand at like a second rate Indian airport. He does he think this is going to work well? I I mean, if you look at the animation, it's it's incredible just how chaotic it is and how it looks like it just vehicles cracking into each other chaotic and like 17 pedestrians die in the simulation. I know, right?

I was just amazed that like there are there seems to be a minority of people who are like, well, he did it in VisSim. It must work in real life. And this is sort of an intersection of, you know, our traffic engineering episode and the loop episode. These these software like VisSim is basically designed. So after you do the hard design work, you can go in and sort of justify it. Post facto and say, look how well it'll work,

because you can just adjust the parameters until it looks like it's working well. You build it in real life and it's shit. I will say I will say the Elon Musk fans are are basically shitting their pants over this. And it's just like, oh, you're just Elon haters. And it's like, this shit just doesn't isn't going to work. Like I, too, could play along with VisSim long enough to make it look good. And I wouldn't murder pedestrians in the process.

That's a, well, there's your problem. Promise I saw a guy on Twitter who had the most fascinating bio, which was I like Elon Musk and Bernie get over it. And I'm just like, OK, sir. What are your politics? Explanation. Oh, yeah. I guess he's also one guy in denial. This guy specifically was being shitty to or one of the guys he tagged

was being shitty to friend of the pod. Gareth Dennis just want to say we love Gareth Dennis and he's right about HS to fuck you. That's right. Exactly. I just I was just fascinated. The amount of effort people were going into to dunk on this guy. You see eight hundred and three quote tweets down here at the bottom. And I looked through a bunch of them. Every single one was just people dunking on the guy.

Not even you know, things are bad when you can't even get the quote tweets that are just like some guy in a suit with his real name going like, interesting. I'll link the video in the description so you can see just how ludicrous this this simulation is. It's it's it's just look, it works if you turn clipping for pedestrians off. Why didn't anyone think of that? Vision Zero would be so easy, then, if you just turn no clip on. I don't know what the cheat code for that is.

Anyway, now to the subject of three of us trying to come up with a punchline for that. And then it's just fucking depressing. It's so depressing to watch these people. They think that my arguments against murdering 17 pedestrians at a visit are just anti Elon hate. Like, listen, I love apartheid emerald mining as much as the next guy. PayPal is a good and useful service.

I'd like, dude, I don't I just I don't understand why our entire existence has to be reduced to, like, fandom and standard culture. Look, the most relatable thing I just criticize Elon Musk. Like, yeah, I'm sure the guy would be fun to have one beer with, maybe. I also think George W. Bush would be fun to have one beer with. Maybe a better guy. That's for sure. You're just going to take all the keys.

Yeah. Yeah. Bush is probably better. Drinking on molding your personalities around your favorite celebrities. Look, the only the most relatable thing that Elon Musk ever did was when he got his PayPal money, he got like hair plugs, right? And he will block you for pointing that shit out. If you sent him the photo of him balding with a hairline halfway up his head, kind of like mine, he will block you even though it's the only good thing he's ever done was fixing that.

Yeah, but you're pretty and I like you and you help me make money. But also for yes, right? So before I was really so does Elon, since we like work through PayPal. Well, as it goes, yeah. Well, they kicked Elon out of PayPal because he was fucking up so fast. Oh, they're also owned by PayPal. Yeah, I just I this fucking stand culture and everyone's just like, man, the Kardashians went to a private island, lol, Elon, you're so rad.

And I'm just like this. Listen, listen, again, it will be good with Elon Musk goes to Mars. And hopefully we can just cut the calm link when he's halfway up there. So yeah, that is the goddamn news. Car continues to be bad. This is the most petrifying bridge I've ever seen in my life. I do not like any of this. Oh, yeah, it's fine. It's fine, baby.

Yeah, early railroad infrastructure was a little lightly built. Yeah, lightweight, more good. Yeah, exactly. So I thought we'd start with some context for early railroad engineering, right? So let's let's let's start. Start real basic. What? What? Why is it called? Why is the profession called civil engineering?

Because you don't have to salute anybody. Oh, well, sometimes. Yeah, civil engineering was to distinguish it from military engineering, right? And sort of in the early American Republic, sort of the antebellum era, where, you know, you were building some of the early railroads, your typical career track, if you were you were going to go work for the railroad was as an engineer, you would first go to West Point, right? You'd get your military education there, you'd get your commission.

And then you'd you would serve as an officer for six months, and then you would resign and then you would go work for the railroad, which is much more much more profitable. The noble American tradition of like exploiting the military to gain a quick education, you know, from that day to this, it's still a thing. And God bless it. Yeah, I went to work for the private sector, because I'm not a moron. So, you know, then then, all right.

So a lot of these early railroads, they're sort of based on canal practices to start start with, right? So we put the locomotive through a series of locks to change its change of elevation. Hey, hey, up she rises. You're not you're not so wrong there. What? Yeah, so you would you would have basically flat track that would where the train would be hauled by a locomotive.

And then every once in a while, you'd get to an inclined plane, right? Where you would have ropes hauling the train up and down a steep hill and then you'd attach it to a locomotive. You'd keep going flat for a while. Yeah, Roz and I actually saw parts of this out near where were we, Johnstown and Columbia. It was Galatson. Galatson, thank you.

Yeah. One of the the main line of public works, inclined planes. Yeah, it was it was a hell of a climb. It was not pleasant. Yeah. Spoilers for Franklin 13, which will be coming out after Franklin 12, which will be coming out at some point. Yeah, so as your locomotives get more powerful, they start to say, hey, maybe we can just get rid of these inclined planes. Maybe the train can just go up the hill, right?

So, you know, this leads to by the 1850s, we started to see the trunk lines being built. And so we have, for instance, here's the to start out with, you had four major eastern trunk lines, right? So you had the Pennsylvania Railroad. It went from Philadelphia. It went over the Allegheny's winding route to Pittsburgh, right? That's where it ended to start out with.

You had the Baltimore and Ohio and went from Baltimore sort of winding through West Virginia and Virginia. Well, West Virginia was just Virginia when this was built. It went out to meet the Ohio River at Wheeling. The main thing was to hit the Ohio River or the Great Lakes. Just load stuff onto paddle boats or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Or, you know, more likely canal boats or really sail boats, even at that point.

You know, so you had the Erie as well. It went from Jersey City. It went through the Southern Tier in New York to a port called Dunkirk, right? The New York, the New York Central, which went sort of north along the Hudson River and went through Albany's connected. The Utica, a bunch of other places went to Buffalo, right? So, you know, these were mostly interest state railroads. You know, and again, they is to reach, especially the grain trade out West, which

they didn't quite get initially because the Erie Canal really monopolized that to start out with an entirely different future where you have canal barons instead of railroad barons. Oh, yeah. Well, the canals were mostly publicly owned. Mostly. And so they had to be destroyed, which we'll get into. The publicly owned railroads were a disaster. I don't know if I can get into that. That's a little complex as to just how badly these these publicly owned railroads

were run. Well, I guess the main thing is they were open access, right? So if you had, if you had your own locomotive, you could run it on the railroad. But that's in Germany and cap grinning bullmeme here. Yeah. A lot of people did not have their own locomotives. So instead they had their own horse and that screwed up any fast services. So initially, like your charters for these railroads really didn't allow them to own anything outside of certain rights of way or certain states, right?

So in order to expand West from, say, Pittsburgh or Wheeling or any of these places, rather than being able to own track outright, you need this sort of big complex network of holding companies, leases and, you know, sort of private capital from the owner of the railroad and, you know, some of the major stockholders, which sort of tenuously held collections of nominally independent railroads into a vaguely coherent system, right? You know, and these associated railroads are owned by shady individuals. They have crappy finances.

They have badly maintained physical plants. Are you suggesting that there's some corruption involved here, Ross? In a twirling mustache like dystopia with Elon Musk's. This is the side that didn't run the apartheid Emerald Mine. People are mad at me on Twitter. So I just want to say while we're here, suck a dick. And also, like, I just I do love reading about like the Alphabet soup era and just like, yeah, nothing worked and everyone's corrupt.

And the stock certs didn't work and the rails fell apart. But like, look, look at the holding companies. Look how many of them there are. Well, the thing is, like the thing is that like trains appeal to someone with a mind for like collecting a lot of minutiae. And the more minutiae, the better. And so you have all of these cool companies and they have cool liveries and you can just remember all of them that rocks.

And everything was a locomotive was repainted black and I no longer likes boxcar red. Yeah, I know. Right now, this is sort of as Liam said, the sort of Alphabet soup era of railroading and sort of the antebellum period. Right. If you read a history of railroads from this era, the author just sort of throws they like mentioned these various railroads and they just throw acronyms at you for like, you know, paragraphs and paragraphs. And you have no idea what he's talking about because you need,

you know, four railroads to go from two between two major cities, which are 100 miles apart. Right. So, you know, we're going to talk about one such railroad today, which is the Lakeshore and Michigan Southern Railroad, which itself was a collection of dozens of other railroads. So in the 1840s, after these trunk lines have been completed, men aspired to a singular and noble but now unattainable goal, which was building a railroad from Cleveland, Ohio to Buffalo, New York.

JFK voice, you know, we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We choose to go to Buffalo in this decade and do the other things. That's some guys just like a fucking buffalo. Got a lot to go there. All right. So how do we get a railroad from Buffalo to Cleveland? Which is more inhospitable to human life, the Earth's moon or Buffalo? I've been to Buffalo. I didn't die.

I've never been to the moon. Yeah. So all right. So we need four railroads to do this, right? Number one is the Buffalo and State Line Railroad. OK, so this was chartered in 1849. And to start out, it built the line from Dunkirk to the Pennsylvania State Line, right? Then the rest of the railroad opened in 1852.

One month later than the first section that went from Dunkirk to Buffalo. This was built to six foot Erie gauge, right? That's what the green railroads I'm going to put down our Erie gauge. I guess the Erie here should also be green. Now, from here, we have to charter another railroad. This is in the state of this is in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Erie and Northeast Railroad, right? Yeah. So get off the first train, change to this train.

Yeah. Well, no, because this is also built to Erie gauge, going from Erie to the town of Northeast and to the New York State Line right here. OK, that was chartered 1842, open January 1852. Also six foot Erie gauge. Now, to go further, we have to I'm switching to blue now. Hey, Ross. Yeah. Do you want to or I can make the point that

was was standard gauge around at this time or is it somewhat important that the Erie gauge was sort of existing in its own ecosystem thereby making I don't know if that's important right now in the history, but interoperability not being possible because standard versus Erie. Oh, that's a major, major, major thing, which we'll get to in the next slide. Just how important these these next these gauges are, right? So one of the things you do as a town if you want to preserve your access to commerce

is you mandate a gauge change in your town. We'll get to that. And Erie was one such town which mandated that, right? So from here, the Franklin Canal Company, which was chartered to build a canal somewhere down here ish, right? Actually, instead built a railroad from Erie to it's technically in spec. We have built like, fuck you, it's it's fine.

Yeah. State, what do you care? Go on, it lives out here anyway. And this was if I were a right wing hack, this is where I would do the I actually identify as a canal joke. So this was built from Erie, Pennsylvania to the Ohio State Line at four foot ten inch Ohio gauge, right? And from there, a fourth railroad was chartered. The Cleveland, Painesville and Ash to Bula Railroad.

This is the one we're going to talk about most today to go from Cleveland to the Pennsylvania State Line, right? Also four foot ten inch Ohio gauge, right? So by 1852, this impossible task, linking Cleveland with Buffalo was achieved with with only four railroads and only one break of gauge. All right. So where do we go from here? What is a break of gauge?

What is a break of gauge? Track gauge is the distance between the rails, right? So we see here, this is dual gauge track, which is built to seven foot Brunel gauge and four foot eight and a half inch standard gauge, right? That we see in this one slide. So the distance between the rails, you know, basically. Forces you some rolling stock, as opposed to others like railroads

can't interoperate if they're different gauges or they sort of can. But you need really complex equipment to do so, right? Which is why today in the United States and Europe and most of the world, we have the nice, even standard gauge. And it's why Russia doesn't is because it's terrified of being invaded by railroad. We talked about this on a previous episode. Yes. And that's again, nice, even four foot eight and a half inches,

very sensible measurement, right? Yeah. Well, well, only we had Brunel gauge. We thought that Brunel gauge, one of these megalomaniac projects where you just like, what if what if we built the train at 18 feet wide? Yeah, exactly. What if every trade car was a railway car? So any antebellum period before the Civil War, they were many, many railroad gauges, right? So in the south, you build the five foot, the airy built the six foot

some, the B&O was standard gauge, four foot eight and a half inches. The Pennsylvania Railroad was four foot nine inches. Most of Ohio was four foot ten inches and they were half a dozen other gauges. And you might ask, well, why don't we standardize on one? And, you know, one of the things is no one knows which one is best yet. The other one's local politics, right? So towns wanted to commerce associated with break of gauge, right? That's when you have to unload everyone from one passenger car

and load them on the next one, maybe we'll stop and get a bite to eat. You got to transfer all the freight. You got to do a whole bunch of bullshits. So you're so you're breezewooding them. Mm hmm. Nice. Seen here exactly what it is. Yeah, everyone looks very relaxed and like they're about to buy something. Yes, exactly.

This kind of looks like the massacre of the innocents, actually. I was about to say, yeah. So. OK, so these towns, since they had a lot of influence in railroad charters, they would mandate certain railroads, use certain gauges and make sure that none of the railroads that came into town were using the same one. So in a good example, this is the town of Erie, Pennsylvania, where things got a little out of hand at some point.

Oh, boy, I love to hear about when things get a little out of hand. Yes. So I got to talk about the Erie gauge war. OK. So December 7th, 1853, right? Date, infamous in history. The citizens in the town of Erie here of this nefarious plot by the Erie and Northeast Railroad and the Buffalo and State Line Railroads, that's the line from Erie to Buffalo, right?

To convert their railroads from Erie gauge to Ohio gauge, right? But then the trains will be able to just blast straight through and nobody will stop to buy our crap. Yeah, exactly. Right. There was there was real concern that the the peanut salesman in Erie would be out of a job. I feel my family selling people this crap. So the mayor of Erie swears in 150 special police constables.

Oh, boy. And he leads them in destroying railroad track and infrastructure behind the railroad crews who are switched in the gauge. I mean, of the things that an 1850s mayor could swear in like a mob of angry townsfolk to do, this is among the less evil. Yeah. Just some light vandalism. Yeah, seven miles away in the town of Harbour Creek, the townsfolk's actually tore down a railroad bridge.

Yeah, that's what they invented. Haba Frey's. Yeah. So on December 27th, the train a railroad officials arrives at the town of Harbour Creek, where this this conflict was still raging. And one of these railroad officials decides they need to shoot into the crowd, assembled to protest the gauge change. Classic Pinkerton shits. I know, I mean, oh, my goodness, they got a they got a day.

I he didn't actually hit anyone who's probably with like, I don't know, some also classic Pinkerton. Yeah, it probably some like puny, like 1850s, like elaborately engraved pistol of some kind. You know, every one round a minute. After the shot rings out, the engineer of the train is like, we got to get the fuck out of here. He goes for the child down on the train.

He's here to look like or the bad part of town. Just the GTA music starts. The doctor just takes one of those whatever eight foot rifles they use during the revolution. You can't even fucking aim it. I'll show you a fucking drive by. Yeah, we've all played Red Dead Redemption.

Yeah, despite this, the crowd managed to force its way onto the train. At least four or five people go fast enough. Yeah, at this point, but once once they were on, they were only four or five of them, they're like, oh, what do we do now? Kind of takes the fight out of the whole angry mob thing. I know, right? When suddenly you don't have the angry mob to back you up anymore, you're suddenly feeling a little little bit a little bit lonely.

And the train, the train just hightailed it for the New York state line. Where New York state police, I don't know what the equivalent was back then. They go on the train and they they take the stowaways off and they deport you back to Pennsylvania. Might even still been the original New York state police complete with the like fascist uniforms. Who knows? God damn New Yorkers. Oh, no, we could come and invade Philly and drive your real estate prices up.

But when you guys want to stow aboard a train, listen, I am sympathetic to the trade hijackers. I want to ride. So by February 1st, 1854, the conflicts kind of settled down. They finally settle. They finally managed to change the gauges of the railroad. But random violence and property damage attributed to gauge resentment continues for years.

Anti-train action. The local Presbyterian Church actually split into two congregations based on pro-iri gauge and pro-Ohio gauge factions. To be fair, find anyone who loves anything as much as Presbyterian congregations love splitting. And a local pro-Ohio gauge newspaper in Erie had its offices burned to the ground. I will point out like Scotland has the the O.G.

Presbyterians and of them there was a split with them, which created the Free Church of Scotland. And then there was a split from that, which created an even smaller Free Church of Scotland, the real Free Church of Scotland. Yeah, called the We Freeze. And Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dem politician, used to be a member and he was banned from his church for something like for life.

His church of like 20 years because he had been to the funeral of a friend of his who was a Protestant. I mean, like the wrong kind of Protestant. And so, like, yeah, the absolute psycho shit. Yes, but it's fucking insane. Here's the thing. The Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula, the Franklin Canal Company, the area in northeast and the Buffalo and Stateline

railroads were finally all the same gauge and now form something that kind of looked like a unified system if you know, kind of squinted at it, right on the bright side is that on the state line, you could actually get off at the liquor store and then you could leave three hundred dollars for with a bunch of weird gins. No one's ever heard of. Yeah, and you don't have to like hustle onto a different train. No, you can stop at the nice wall across the street.

If anything, it's actually increased the amount of commerce. Exactly. And you can run 20 minutes late to your friend's wedding because you just had to stop for a cup of coffee. Even though you knew we were late, you got in the shower 20 minutes late because you like annoying your friend for no good fucking reason. Roz. Yes.

So this this this system of railroads was now nominally aligned with the New York Central Railroad, as opposed to the Erie Railroad, right? And as such, trains can now travel from New York City to Cleveland and soon on to Chicago and points west with only one break of gauge. And that was at Buffalo. And they managed to sort of get rid of that. Through a wonderful thing called the compromise car. Radical centrism.

Yes. Right. So some gauges were close enough together. The railroads ran compromise cars. What you did was, you know, your normal railroad wheel. If we look at it in profile, you know, you got the flange and you got, you know, you got the tread that sits on the rail, right? Here's a rail.

Right. OK. So that's a normal railroad wheel. What do you do in the compromise car is because the gauges are close together. You might have a four foot ten inch gauge and four foot eight and a half inch gauge. You want a car that runs on both. What you do is you just extend this out. So now I can fit on. So like it, so like it RV.

With the slide. Yeah. OK. Exactly. Right. So you just have a deeper tread on the wheels. And what this did was it let the cars run on both gauges. And also the ride was terrible. Yeah, but it works on both equally poorly. Exactly. Compromise is what is what this is what democracy is about.

Right. Right. The lip. I personally, I personally believe every mile of track should have a different but similar gauge everywhere. To encourage like new ideas. Exactly. So I believe the train from Moscow to Helsinki actually still uses a system like this. Huh. That's how you gauge.

Yeah. And then standard gauge at the border. Huh. No. Finish gauge is what four foot eleven. Well, then probably then what happened is the Russians imposed that on them as a way of like extending a Russian punish. Punishing them for the winter war by making them take a dump. Yeah, exactly. So all right.

So this is an early passenger guy. This is an early Pullman sleeping car. This is what he calls sort of a cracker box car. Right. Before they got like the nice fancy clear story on top. This is just a very simple thing. Right. They they it's it's basically a box car frame that's been extended.

You know, I always thought because it was architecture, it was pronounced clarestory. No, it's a clear story. Clarestory like a like a like a fucking bit of a church, you know, I need to worry about my my my cholesterol. No, it's a clear story because it's a bunch of windows, but there's no floor there. It's like a story of the building, but you know, it's clear.

It's noticeably not spelled clear story. I know. Right. It's weird about that. So in these early cars, they're very bad in accidents. Right. Cars would telescope into each other. They were heated with coal or kerosene stoves. Right. And they would tip over and set fire to the wooden cars. Right. There was such a thing as self extinguishing stoves, but they didn't they didn't work that good.

And then they weren't commonly used anyway, but they expensive as well. Or just yes, you know, OK. How is it supposed to self extinguish? Yeah, that was my next question. I have no idea. Maybe it tips over and there's something that like when upright, it's fine. Yeah, it's going to be some kind of like bullshit device invented by a guy in a frot coat.

That's I believe an operating system, BSD. Yes. It's the best one. BSD stands for best system design. I would tell you the story of the guy I saw wearing the BSD T-shirt when I worked at the liquor store and I said nice BSD shirt. And he was so happy that his wife came up to him and said, see, honey, someone else knows what it is. All right. So now that we know about that, we need to talk about the

Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula railroads bridge. Talk about Painesville, baby. Ashtabula River. No, we're talking about Ashtabula, which I again, in my mispronunciation thing, thought was Ash Tabula. No. Listen, I'm just going to do the thing that you do where you mispronounce all of the names. It's just I do them for America. I see. I see. I love I love to go to Ash Tabula in Ohio.

No, Alice, you're being culturally insensitive because it's an Algonquin word. Oh, shit. Yeah, exactly. Ash Tabula is Algonquin for always enough fish to go around. Oh, it's nice. It reminds me of like the equivalent worst original name of a place, which is a Vorkuta, which is where they built one of the biggest gulags. And the reason I know that is because the name in Nenets means place teams with bears. Oh, God. Oh, I like it.

I like it a lot. All right. So. The Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula is this line right here. This is now, I think, CSX. I for a second, I thought you were going to say this is now condos. Oh, no, no, this is this is a current. Well, you can see there's a Walmart Supercenter over here. So the Ash Tabula River crossing is right here.

It has always crossed on a high bridge, right? This was originally like a wooden truss with stone arch abutments, right? Now, this railroad was owned by a man named Amasa Stone, right? Who also owned a contracting company, which constructed all the rail, the railroad and all its structures. His brother-in-law was a man named William Howie, right? Who invented the Howie truss. Do we collapse them and how?

Yes. And Amasa Stone had worked at his firm for a while. He built some large bridges in New England. A lot of them crossed the Connecticut River down the first three quarters of the 19th century bridge engineering was still fairly primitive, right? You don't you don't use a lot of math. You have a lot of rules of thumb, right? It's more of an art than a science.

Exactly, right? It's being made by a guy with like a really obscure but technically biblical name, Jabez, is going to build your bridge. Yeah. And Jedediah. Jedediah is going to build your fucking bridge. So the CP&A built this wooden truss in 1852. But Amasa decides we're going to we need to replace this bridge in 1863, right? And he has a radical idea, which is what if we make a Howie truss, but all in iron?

Make it more stronger. Good. Yeah, exactly, right? So let's look at a Howie truss. This is an example right here on this slide. So Howie trusses were developed by William Howie in 1840. This is designed specifically for a composite wood and iron design. It's very simple. It's very light. It's very easy to construct.

So you have a you have this top cord up here. This is in compression. You have a bottom cord that's in tension, right? So it sort of bows out this way and this sort of bows out this way when under load because the train runs through the middle of the truss, right? These are both made of wood. You have these diagonal braces. They're made of wood.

They're always in compression. The way you keep it that way is these iron tie rods, right? And these are always in tension. They're kept that way because there's some nuts on the end, which, yes. It also said wood butts into lugs. Wood butts into nuts. Yes, I have a drop for this. Oh, God.

Wait, do I have a drop for this? Do I put it under? Yeah, I have a drop for this. Will your mouth still remember the taste of the nuts? God. So you have these iron tension rods here. And what you do is once you build the bridge, you still have false work in place that's supporting it. You go get a big 1840s wrench and you tighten the thing up, right?

And you basically go until you hear the woodcreek and then you loosen it up a little bit and then you're good, right? Wait, what's false work? False work is like you have a sort of wooden trestle underneath the bridge as you're building it. You then you then remove at the end. Gotcha. Yeah. So and then at all the junctions

between intersections between all these members, there's these things called angle blocks. They're made of cast iron and, you know, you hold these wooden pieces together basically by friction alone, right? The wood, as Liam said, the wood butts into lugs, right? Which are cast on the side of the angle block. We'll see in a few slides how this works. And there's a bolt there to hold it in.

But, you know, it's kind of it's just there, right? I should have put something here. So. What do you mean? The boat, the boat in this case is that one member of the group projects who shows up and gets an A. Yeah. Exactly. That's the that's the that's doing a whole hell of a lot of work here. So there were such things as all iron howie trusses, but they were pretty rare, right?

You usually just. Yeah, you'd use something less materially intensive for an iron bridge, right? You know, a Pratt truss or a Warren truss. And these were not common until after like the 1880s. So you're just trying to flex if you build one of these all out of iron? No, you're not trying to flex because cast iron is very. Ha ha ha ha.

Thank you, right? Yeah. So the mass of stones, howie truss was going to be among the largest ever built, right? This is a hundred and fifty four foot clear span, seventy six feet above the surface of the Ash and it's going to be a record. We went over this with the Quebec City Bridge. Don't tell them that. The angered God again.

The other thing he did, which was unconventional, as well as building this all out of iron is rather than having the deck on the bottom cord, he was going to put the deck on the top cord of the truss, right? And so he was proposed. Because it kind of it just loads the bridge in a different way. Oh, OK, OK. Yeah, bad way. Yeah, well, you would still have some similar loading, but we'll sort of see how this affects how the bridge performs later on in the in the program.

So rather than use wooden beams on the bridge, a mass of stone said he would just use iron, cast iron, I beams, right? Cast iron is very good in compression, not so good in tension. During this time, you'd also have a wrought iron as a separate thing, which is very good in tension, not so good in compression. So your verticals would be wrought iron. Your diagonals would be cast iron, right? Otherwise, this is very similar construction to a wooden bridge.

We don't have like things like welding at this point. It's an iron bridge held together with carpentry techniques. Oh, good. That sounds safe. Yes. And one of the nice things, of course, is the iron was going to be provided by the Cleveland Rolling Mill, which was owned by a mass of stone's brother. Yes. 19th century corruption.

We know a guy who's going to get it to us for like half price. Friends and family. This is my this is my iron guy. I told you not to call me dad for the mom. Oh, so the dude's brother was called Andros, which again, with the names in this family. Oh, yeah, it's a wasn't he the boss in Star Fox? All right. Is that we need to introduce another guy?

Who's the good guy? Joseph Tomlinson, the third. OK. Yeah. So he's he's an English immigrant. He was a. Yeah, I know. OK, so maybe not that good. Is a prolific bridge in Lighthouse Builder. He's built he built like literally hundreds of bridges in

both Canada and the United States in this era. He was like a bitch. Yeah, he worked mostly in New England and New Brunswick, New Brunswick, Canada, right, constructed again, hundreds of bridges and he was plagued with bad clients. Listen, one client says you're an asshole, they're an asshole. All your clients say you're an asshole, you're the asshole. You know, that's the beautiful thing about engineering is you can be the asshole.

So long as you're right. Yeah, exactly. He was he was generally right, generally like, no, this wouldn't work. So, for instance, this is the first Grand Falls bridge in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, which he designed, right? I personally would call it the first grand stays up bridge, but go off. There's where you're wrong. So Tom Winston recommended to the

Grand Falls City Council, he's like, you need a suspension bridge for this. That's the only way we can do this span, which I'm not sure what the span is. It's something that I'm sure you could do with a single like Girder now, but back then you needed a suspension bridge. But the Grand Falls City Council was like, no, what you need to do is build a lenticular truss, right? To be fair, any excuse to say the word lenticular, which is very fun. Having the properties of a lens.

Yes, exactly. Which is what this thing is here. That's that's, you know, it does look like a lens, right? I think I think Brunel built a big lenticular truss that's very famous. I forget which one it is, though. So he's like, all right, yeah, I'll build a bridge. This might work. It's probably fine, right? He built the bridge and it almost immediately collapsed.

So, you know, OK, haven't haven't proved that this bridge would not work. He went back and said, you see, I told you, you needed the suspension bridge. And they built the suspension bridge in 1860 and that lasted 55 years, right? There you go. Yeah, so I told you so, Brunel. I told you so. He's just got a big 50 foot tall portrait of himself. And either giving the finger.

Yeah, exactly. Drive over one of his middle fingers. Really beautiful. Stoneman, I work, actually. Oh, yeah. So after this, after he moved, he moved out of New Brunswick. He moved to Cleveland. He found employment with the Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula Railroad. Oh, I sense tension.

Yeah, got it. Do you get it? Yes, because tension, tension, compression, buckling, various other things. So a mass of stone had this idea for this iron how we trust. And what he did is he started, he started out with a vague design for the whole thing, right? And then a mass of stone hired on Tomlinson and he handed him the plans for the Ashtabula Bridge and said, OK, you flesh this out, finish this. I got to go attend to my enormous railroad empire, right?

He doesn't have time to design the bridge himself because, again, he's overseeing this incredible, huge railroad empire that stretches from Cleveland to just outside of Cleveland. You missed it. But I accidentally opened it, too. It's on my girlfriend's laptop and Dancing Queen by 18s came on at full blast. And I was like, 15 seconds. I just had my entire life.

Good now. I'm good now. All right. So Tomlinson got to work and he immediately saw a whole bunch of problems with this bridge, right, the design, you know, first principles, problems, right? So. All right, what's wrong? This is this is sort of an elevation view of the part of the bridge, which is the problem, right? What's wrong with this?

And you might say. Oh, go ahead. I might say if I'm a mass of stone, nothing. Fuck you. Yes. Perfect. I drew this shit. It's it's a great bridge. Yes, I see the problem might be something called the dead load down here. The biggest load of bridge has to support is the bridge itself.

The quote dead load about great. There's a rant about extra extra credit for reading. Reading the notes, Liam. There's no. Yeah, right. So OK, I look at them. This is a perfectly fine wooden howie. Trust right. And you might say, OK, smart guy.

I've played Polly Bridge. That's right. And I know that if I build a bridge with the stronger material, it will be stronger. That's right. Right. I'm always saying this. I have finished literally half dozens of Polly Bridge levels. And so I'm pretty certain that if you just make everything out of girders,

it's going to be fine. Yes. But actually. No. Oh, my feelings. Yeah. So one of the things they do in games like Polly Bridge, they really exaggerate something called the live load, which is, you know, the weight of a vehicle crossing the bridge or something like that. But what bridges really have to contend with is the dead load. Yeah. Also, real bridges don't tend to have to like make cars do backflips

and get onto a hill higher on the other side. Yes, this is also true. So, you know, the biggest load, the bridge has a support is the dead load, which is the weight of the bridge itself, you know, the girders, the deck, so on and so forth. And you have a live load on top, which especially in modern, especially really big bridges is almost trivial. So yeah, games like Polly Bridge exaggerate the live load for more interesting gameplay, you know, and you have like, I don't know, like, yeah, what, a limousine on a flatbed trailer

that has like two other cars on top or whatever going across the bridge. But, you know, that's for interesting gameplay. In real life, it's boring, right? So your iron bridge here is to start out with much heavier than the wooden bridge. Therefore, it has to be much stronger to start out with just to hold itself up. Well, luckily, it is much stronger because it's made out of iron. Oh, boy. Yeah. So we don't have much in the way of math to do calculations on this at the time.

But Tom Linson took a look and he suspected something was wrong and a mass of stones was designed was too lightly constructed. So he came back with a more heavily built structure. He had extra iron reinforcing along the diagonals, right? And he had several other changes and stone looked at it and he's like, no, you've you've you've compromised my vision. I will not make these changes, right? We love client stone, we folks.

Yeah, exactly. So Tom Linson was like, well, I'm not going to build the bridge unless you make it safer. And so a mass of stone fired him, right? King, King. So the the CPN Railroad's chief engineer, Charles Collins, also took a look at the bridge. He's like, you know, I think Tom Linson's changes are a good idea, right?

And a mass of stone had him removed from the bridge construction project. I love this guy. Anybody who says that I cannot build my death bridge is fired. Love it. Then a mass of stone took time out of his busy schedule of monitoring trains of running up of running a 50 mile railroad to design the damn thing himself. And he removed Tom Linson's extra iron, right,

which leads us to the construction of the bridge, right? So he hired a contractor, Al Rogers, who was a carpenter, right, in 1865. Not so uncommon at the time, there weren't too many iron bridges. So that's basically all you have to go on his carpenters, right? Now, Tom Linson's original designs said that the bridge needed seven inches of camber, right? That means when the bridge was being built with the falsework underneath. I'm drawn lines here to sort of show, you know, the falsework that would have been under the bridge when it was being built.

This fault, falsework would be designed. So as it was being built, the center of the bridge would be seven inches above the horizontal, right? And then the idea was once the falsework was removed, the bridge would settle in. The abutments did drop a few inches, right? Okay. Yeah.

All right. Yeah. That was my that was because I kind of just pictured, you know, a mini Tacoma narrow or one where like a deck is seven inches higher than another. And I just didn't understand that. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, this is, this is, uh, yeah.

So they design it kind of hogbacked and then it would, you know, settle in the place, right? Okay. So, and this would improve like the, uh, the, this would mean that diagonals were under more compression than they would be. Otherwise it would make the bridge stronger, right? Sure. So the contractor, A.L. Rogers, he started construction of falsework under the assumption that the seven inch camber would be kept and a mass of stone said, no, that's dumb.

He said, that's way too much camber. My bridge is too strong for that. I want three and a half inches of camber, right? Awesome. And like the guy, the two previous guys who said no to him have just been instantly fired. They haven't got 86. Yeah. So, now the thing is at this point, the I-beams had already been ordered and delivered, right?

Okay. His brother has delivered the I-beams. So what they do is they get, they just shave down each end of the I-beam to compensate for the camber, right? Oh, awesome. So the wonderful thing back in this day is you could get huge structures like this built very, very quickly because I have no idea why. Probably no paperwork.

No oversight. Don't care how many people die doing it. If you try to unionize, the Pinkersons kill all of you. You don't even have a concept of unions yet. That won't be around until like 1877. That was when Philadelphia declared war on Pittsburgh because they had too much labor militancy. We fucked that one up.

Oh, yeah. So anyway, the bridge was rapidly completed, right? And the false work was removed and the bridge, which had been built at three and a half inches of camber, immediately sank five inches, right? Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. So that was two and a half inches below the horizontal.

And even a massive stone looked at it and was like, hmm, that's not good. I shouldn't have fired those guys. You told me about this exactly. We got to we got to jack the bridge. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they put a lift kit on the bridge. Oh, my gosh. You just play my summer car.

You just stack beer crates up under this bridge. Well, what they did is they put the false work back in and they jacked up the bridge. Oh, my gosh. Oh, Jesus Christ, man. And they realized, OK, we have to actually these I beams are now too short. But you can't really just make them longer, right? Yeah, you've already measured twice, cut once, but you've already cut. So yeah, exactly.

So what they do is they decide to use a lift kit shims. Oh, boy. Oh, no. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, no. This is what holds my basement TV up. Yeah, because if they if they increase the length of the I beams,

they need to require reordering iron for the whole bridge. So, you know, they put some shims in there. And, you know, this is 1863 reordering iron for the bridge might have taken four or five weeks. So literally, we're talking about wooden wedges here. There's a little iron wedges. Oh, OK. Well, that's not as bad. I was expecting to just be like, yeah, we just hammer them in there.

And it's yeah, it's fine. Yeah. So they go in, they put the shims in, right? The false work came back out and several of the diagonals, the diagonal I beam sections buckled, right? And I realized, OK, this is also bad. The false work was put back in. A massive stone decided, OK, maybe we do have to add more iron to the bridge.

So he added iron to the diagonals, right? But he also had the I beams rotated 90 degrees along their axis, since he thought they could carry more load that way. So what this did, right? So the I beam was shaped, you know, like this, like an I, right? Each end, it butts into the lug on the angle block, which is sort of shaped like this, right? Except a little bit tighter than that, right?

The stone said, we need to rotate this 90 degrees, right? Oh, boy. But they don't want to recast the angle blocks. So it would essentially be rebuilding the whole bridge. So what they did instead was at the end of, if you imagine, this is the I beam, right? At the end of the I beam, they just cut notches into the web. Oh, yeah. Now, each diagonal was made of a variable number of I beams, right?

So in the center, it'd be like five. At the ends, it'd be like two, right? Because you need the most strength in the center, right? So in addition to doing this, they also loosened up the vertical pre-stressed members so that the I beams were under less compression. Because obviously, they're buckling. You probably tighten it up a little bit too much. I don't think they had torque wrenches back then.

And if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with them. All right, hold on. I'll be right back. How are you doing, Liam? I'm good. Alice, how are you? I'm well. Thank you. I got done recording two episodes of Trash Future today.

So I've had kind of a triple header. Yeah, a triple header. I've had kind of a long, a long work time. Just thankful I don't have a stream this evening. That would be brutal. I'm glad hopefully we can finish this one out in a way that's... Oh, yeah. This is definitely the high note.

Goes, oh, yeah. That's right, Riley. That's right. I like to open a cider in your honor. I just have to get up. Oh, please. Yeah. See, in the United States, at least in Pennsylvania,

Alice, all our gas stations do not sell beer as a rule. Really? Yeah. So like in other states, they do. And Sheets, the greatest gas station known to mankind, most of those have beer. But there's only one Wawa that sells beer, which is yet another entry in the Sheets is better than Wawa to make.

So I'm drinking a Down East unfiltered double blend. Oh, very nice. Yeah. No, we were doing... I did a Trash Future about a terrible Netflix movie and a Britonology bonus episode with Spencer Confidential. Oh, that sounds horrible. I watched...

Yeah. It was like a solid four out of 10 movie. I watched Holiday, which I had been told would be charmingly bad, but it was just dreadful. An eternal Netflix mood. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Emma Roberts is... I'm sure very lovely and talented, but she sure as hell wasn't in this movie. Wow. Hey, buddy. How's it going? Sorry about that. I had to A, use the restroom, B, check on the chili.

All right. What would you put in the chili? What I put in the chili? Oh, it's a shitload of onion, a shitload of garlic, jalapeno, chipotle's in adobo. It is half ground beef, half ground pork. Tomatoes through a yingling in there as well. That sounds good as hell.

Oh, I should put a stout in there. I haven't been able to really eat shit lately, because one of my teeth just fucking collapsed. And because there's no dentists because of the COVID. So I'm just muscling through with ibuprofen right now, and I'm suffering. Oh, that's important to say. Yeah, you've got to subscribe to the Patreon

so I can get some dental care. That is about to say. Yeah, I was like, wow, you should probably see a dentist. And I remembered you were in the UK, and I was like, you may have to cross the border for that. The big book of British smiles is absolutely what's going on with me right now. That's going to be an issue when they do Brexit,

because we're not going to be able to go to where the dentists are. Yeah, I've got to time it. So it's in between the end of lockdown, which we're on here now again, so I can't do anything for it. I thought Boris was going to fix it. Yeah, I've got to time it. So precisely in between the end of lockdown and the start of Brexit,

I get somebody to yank this fucking thing out of my mouth and stop causing the absolute agony. It's going to be a great year for Britain. That's right. That's how I would define it, too. Yes. Anyway, so what are we all here for again? Oh, wait, hold on.

How did you get in there? Drugs and whores. The other thing I was going to mention is that because they loosened up the vertical members, they actually had to throw even more shims on the diagonals. This is a conspiracy by big shim. Yes, big shim. I think the point of a shim is to be small.

Not now. You know, big shim killed JFK, right? Alice, I've heard that, too. Yeah, he was going to close down the CIA shim office. All right, so they built the bridge. This is a picture of the bridge. We're an illustration of it, right? This is a photograph of the bridge.

Yeah, you can see these arch debatments at each end. You can see these old piers on the ends. Those are from the old bridge. And they built this new bridge. And they tested it, right? It's the old-timey testing. The way you tested a bridge back in the day, right, is you would find all the locomotives you could,

and he would run them all over the bridge at a low rate of speed. And the designer of the bridge had to stand in the middle of it, which sounds good in the 19th century. But as we now realize, this makes basically no difference to the load on the bridge. Yeah, so now this is... Okay, so the bridge performed satisfactorily and, in fact, performed fine for 11 years after it was built.

Well, time to end this episode. Thanks for coming to... Well, there's your problem, everybody. Exactly, nothing bad happened. But actually, now, one thing none of the resources I looked at mentioned, but I think it was worth mentioning, is sort of the context of railroading between about 1860 and 1880, right? It got significantly more based.

Yes. I think it's got heavy. Things got real heavy real quick, right? So this is... So this locomotive on the left. The general? The general, yes. Famously involved in a locomotive chase in the Civil War.

This was built in 1855 for the Western and Atlantic Railroad, which was, I honestly can't even tell you where Western and Atlantic is. The lost continent of Atlantis. It was linked to fucking San Francisco. I think it was somewhere like in... It was somewhere like almost south, but not quite. Is this a 440? It's got four guiding wheels.

It's got four driving wheels, no trailing wheels, right? This was about 23 tons, right? It's Atlantis of Chattanooga, by the way. Oh, okay. Well, one of those is Atlantic and the other one is Western. I guess. I guess so. Chattanooga.

Yeah. Nominally still in existence. It's just leased by CSX. That sounds about right. I think a lot of these charters still exist. You know, the new Texas high-speed rail thing that JR Japan Railways is trying to construct now. I think they're using a railroad charter from like the 1880s.

I just want to hear a lot of Texan dudes pronounce Shinkansen. Oh, God. Shinkansen. Shinkansen. Shinkansen. Shinkansen. Rhymes with Wisconsin. I took the Shinkansen.

I was always confused because it doesn't go to Kansas. So... Unless you're going to Arkansas, then it's the Shinkansaw. Yeah. The Shinkansaw. Low effort jokes, baby. That's Liam. I like that a lot.

Yeah, it's very good. So this one's 23 tons. Now, 18 years later, 1873, right? So this is another 440. You might think this looks very similar, right? Because of improvements in construction and just larger boilers and all this other stuff, this locomotive is much, much more powerful, right?

This is the Dayton built for the Virginia and Truckee railroad. And this is 78 tons. Oh, boy. Which is much more than 23 tons. Yeah, I have heard that. Yes. Just now from you, the 78 is a much, much larger number than 23. Yes.

So it's three times as much and then some. Now, the thing is, through this era, trains got a lot faster. You know, you had passenger trains that were holding a steady 40 or 50 or even 60 miles an hour, right? Yeah. And it needs that power to pull heavier wagons. Yeah, the passenger cars and freight cars also got bigger and heavier. Yeah, they're no longer made out of paper maché.

Yes. Well, no, they're still made of wood at this point. Stronger wood, but still wood. Yeah. 01:15:41,040 --> 01:15:42,560 Stronger wood, but still wood. Yeah. They're just more of them and that bigger.

More wood. Yeah. Embarrassingly, a lot of railroads hit their sort of final scheduled speed around this era. Like trains don't go much faster now than they did then. Bring it back. Yeah, some of them are even faster. Some of them were running faster schedules than what M-track can do right now. I think not this particular train.

I believe the M-track schedule between Buffalo and Cleveland is about one hour faster now than it was in 1873. Of such things a progress might. I know, right? So, as these more powerful, heavier locomotives became available, you know, bridges infrastructure were strengthened sometimes, right? And then other times here. Oh, boy.

So, other times. So, December 29th, 1876, right? So, the CP&A had been merged into the Lakeshore and Michigan Southern, right? A mass of stones railroad empire now stretched all the way from Chicago to Buffalo. Although, he had to retired from the general management in 1875 because of ill health. He was still on the board, right? At this point, there was a scheduled service called the Pacific Express, right? And this ran from New York and Boston to Chicago and St. Louis, right?

They certainly not on the Pacific. Oh, yeah. But at this point, there was a transcontinental railroad you could transfer to. So, there was at least that. So, they had like two sections of train. They'd combine it all beneath. They'd split again, and I have no idea where. So, this train left Erie, Pennsylvania at 5.01 pm, right?

On December 29th, 1876, heading to Chicago, right? This is an 11-car train, including a bunch of compromised cars. So, everyone's having a pretty rough ride, right? But it's to be expected, right? And there's a blizzard happening, right? So, there's 20 inches of snow on the ground. There's 54-mile-an-hour gusts. There's six-foot-deep snow drifts, right?

With the one locomotive, which was called the Socrates. Fuck them up, Socrates. Fuck them up, Socrates. Yeah. Unable to keep the train moving. So, they added a second locomotive, the Columbia. Yeah, Darryl Socrates' friend. Oh.

Yes. And so, they added that train, that locomotive of the train, after Buffalo to provide extra power. It was 16 degrees Fahrenheit. That's negative 9 degrees Celsius outside. Fuck that. Fuck getting a, like, barely heated wooden train through that. Oh, no.

You got a big kerosene stove. You're fine. You know, the way you solved this problem back then was just add more heat. Yeah. So, all right. It's, you know, sort of late the day. It's dark, you know, but, you know, everyone's still awake. They got candles going in a car, keeping it lit up.

You know, people are, you know, playing cards in the club car, so on and so forth, right? Smoking massive cigars. Oh, yeah. Just gigantic fucking cigars, like bigger than you've ever seen. This was a, there were some day coaches on this train, but most of the sleeper cars were, you know, a little more prestigious, you know, extra fare cars, right?

So anyway, they're approaching Ashtabula Station about 7.30 PM. They're an hour and 53 minutes behind schedule. And they have to cross the Ashtabula River to sort of glide into the station. Right. So, you know, the engineer shuts off the throttle. He indicates the crew on the second locomotive shut off the throttle, right? They're sort of coasting in about 15, 16 miles an hour. And the engineer of the first locomotive, Daniel McGuire,

feels the bridge sag underneath them. No, thank you. Suddenly feels like he's driving the train up as opposed to on the level. And he's like, oh, shit. Well, I mean, that's faster reactions than I would have had. I suddenly fling myself out of the locomotive off the edge of the bridge. I don't think that would have helped you. No, I died the faster way.

No, he, he, he lived because he slammed the throttle all the way open. Just wide open. Just, all right, we're going. We're going. We're getting off this bridge before something happens, right? Hell, yes. Yeah, exactly. So this immediately snaps the Lincoln Pin coupler between the first locomotive

and the second locomotive. Hell, not so much. Yeah, that's so good. So at this point, like the bridge collapses enough so that the tender of the Socrates is half hanging off the abutment. But because the train locomotive has enough power, just sort of drags it onto the bridge. Imagine the noise off of that.

I know, right? But then the bridge very slowly continues to collapse and brings the second locomotive down with it, as well as the cars on top of the bridge. And then the several cars behind it are drawn by the couplers over the edge and into the abyss. Oh boy. Yeah.

That's not so good. That's a good, no. So, you know, it plunges these cars into the frozen over, ashtabula river. Lots of people are instantly killed on impact. Lots of these wooden cars, they fell on top of other wooden cars and sort of collapsed them into a pancake. Some of the cars, you know, telescoped into each other.

Lots of people very gravely injured almost immediately. You know, maybe not killed outright, but they're very gravely injured. Well, the good news is that the finest of emergency medical services of the 1870s are going to be right on this, I'm sure. Yes, of course. The other thing is when you're in a train wreck in the 1800s, the crash is only part one.

Oh, yeah. You've got a sense of this now. Bar. Bar. You had all those kerosene stoves. And all of a sudden, everything's on fire like immediately. What's the big deal? You're on top of a river.

It's cold. Go out. Yeah, exactly. I've played Pokemon. I know how this works. All right. So it's sort of raging inferno begins almost immediately, right? Starts by the overturned stoves and the candles.

In fact, I believe a lot of the passenger cars did not initially catch fire, but one of them did. And that was enough to do it, right? The train was fully consumed in flames under 20 minutes. And Daniel McQuire driving Socrates, right? He keeps the throttle open. He screams into the next thing, the Ashtabula station. He starts just blowing the whistle the whole time.

He's ringing the bell and he yells out, hey, the bridge collapsed. Bridge, we collapsed. And then, you know, I have to get the old timey sort of alarm going throughout the town. Did you say the bridge re-collapsed like he was a pilot? He was from the West Country originally. The bridge re-collapsed.

The bridge re-becombed. Yeah. So, yeah, they get on. They get in trouble for laughing at the death. Yeah, they get the once again. He has like a parent on his shoulder. I was like, hundreds dead. He's like coughing from all the cold dust from the locomotive.

He's going to drop dead a black log at 30, but it's fine. Yeah, it's about to say. I mean, I don't know. It's like, if you brought a parrot into a coal mine, would it last longer than a canary? Ooh, that's a good question. Exactly. Yeah.

So, I think a canary can fly faster than a parrot. It's my hypothesis. We're learning so much tonight. Yeah, I'm not an ornithologist. If you are an ornithologist and one thing I've learned is that the YouTube comments contain all human knowledge, then write in. Yes. Yeah, it's as well as people insulting us because we're scared of pigs.

Well, that is within the sum of all human knowledge. This is true, yes. So, so he drives the locomotive to the station. He's ringing the bell. He's blowing the whistle. And he yells out to one of the people, the bridges collapsed, right? And, you know, they get the old timey alarm out, which means you go to every church and say, start ringing the bells.

All the townspeople congregate and, you know, they're like, oh crap, this fucking bullshit happened. We got to deal with this now, right? No, it's just like the guy said it would. It's 7.30 p.m. It's 16 degrees out. It's dark because it's December, right? They rush to the side of the wreck. The only way you could get down to the river was one single flight of narrow,

snow-covered stairs. Awesome. Right. Because if people go down there, they start trying to pull people from the wreck. They start trying to get people up the side of the ravine where the Ashtabula River is. The Ashtabula fire brigade arrives, right? We're saved. Ashtabula is bravest.

Well, it turns out the fire chief, G.W. Knapp, was an alcoholic. Well, I mean, I don't hold that against him. He was at that time drunk. And of course, 1870s alcoholic is on a whole nother level from what today we would consider alcoholic. He doesn't know where he fucking is. Yeah. Does anybody know where I am?

The fire brigade shows up. They bring their big steam-powered horse-drawn pump. And Knapp concludes, there's no use in fighting the fire. Just let it burn out. This is like the town drunk in a western level of drunk right now. Yeah. I mean, I doubt he could stand. He was relying on riding a horse to have some semblance of...

Being carried from the fire engine. The horse is making most decisions. The horse is the brains behind this operation. The horse is just out here like this fucking guy again. I'm not your wife. I'm not your wife. I know she has a face like a Clyde sale. It's 1876.

I am not your wife. Zettifer or whatever the hell. Yeah. So meanwhile, you know, there's still people audibly just screaming and moaning inside this burning wreck, right? Oh, that smells so good. Yeah, the folks climbing out of windows. Yeah, there's folks climbing out of windows.

They're getting stuck in those windows. They're burning to death in front of rescuers' eyes. You know, not dying of smoke inhalation. They're literally on fire. You got like a nasty, again, it's a nasty sort of 1870s train derailment. So there's arms, there's legs, heads everywhere, nasty stuff. Oh, yeah. Just getting sheared off by like all those sharp edges and shit.

Yeah. It's a blaster movie. Yeah, but it's not, it's more of a really bad splinter, really. Like a deadly splinter. You've been impaled by wood. Thank you, Ross. Yeah, I know, right? Real like Hurtgen Forest mortar bombardment vibes, you know?

Yeah, yeah. You know, the tweet going around today where the guy is like, I wish I could have grown up in the 1900s and have fought it for a done. And I'm just like, I don't think you want to have fought it for a done there. You probably would have died. Yeah, statistically, you would have been killed. This is my three inches of mud I died over. Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, the townsfolk kind of left their own devices and they form a bucket brigade while this fire engine just sat there, right? The firefighters themselves concentrated their efforts on pulling the wounded out of the wreck. Such a good, I imagine. Yeah. And they sort of set up a triage station in the engine house and on a ratty hotel next to the train station.

Because there was no hospital in the town of Ashtabula. Oh, I've actually been through Ashtabula, Ohio recently about a year ago. And I can tell you, it has not changed much. So, they had to once they pulled survivors out of the wreck, they had to drag them up the up the ravine. And then like a half a mile to the triage spot, right? They managed to pull all survivors from the burning wreck by 12 a.m. Right.

Not long after a bunch of thieves go in and they steal all the dead people stuff. Classic. I know, right? That's that good 19th century crime, baby. Yeah, exactly. That happened in the Blitz, too. It was an air raid warden's when notorious one woman woke up like unexpectedly regain consciousness to find a guy trying to pull the rings off of her fingers.

Good Lord. I should also point out while that guy was talking about wishing he was in the First World War, that the Royal Army Medical Corps used to be back renamed to rob all my comrades because they were notorious for just like anybody who was helpless enough to need their attentions would just have their pockets gone through. Good Lord. How do you take the go with the bad? Yeah.

All right. So around 1 a.m., a bunch of sergeants from Cleveland show up on an extra train, right? They dispatched a special train out because they had telegraphs back then. Thank God. So like the word got out relatively quickly that, oh my God, we had a horrible disaster in Ash Tabula. Send surgeons. So yeah, they show up.

Just like somebody is going to need like to hack off a bunch of arms and legs and stuff. Yeah, exactly. We need a guy who owns his own ether to do this. We need a tank car full of chloroform. It's key pumping. So this is sort of the aftermath, right? You can see here there's this sort of collection of railroad wheels and various iron ties that made up sort of the undercarriage of the railroad cars.

Not a lot of wood to be seen on account of it all burned up. So you just sort of trapped in this metal spaghetti if you somehow survived, which you didn't, of course. I don't think anyone was pulled out from under this still alive. You can see one of the locomotives over here. That's the Columbia, I would assume. Well, I don't think it could be any other locomotive. So in the aftermath, right, there's estimates of how many people died.

The range is like from 83 people. That's the official number to over 200 dead. It is impossible to know because so many people were essentially just cremated by this fire. Yeah, and other people were just separated in constituent parts. Yeah, we found four arms and two legs and half a torso. I mean, this could have been some kind of like... A rachnid human. Yeah, exactly, right?

Yeah, this is all, what the fuck? This carriage is all cryptids. Green Goblin, what are you doing here? Yeah, so there's no real good records of how many people were on board the train and the wreck investigators still turning up remains in mid-January, right? Eventually, the mayor has to station a guard at the wreck to stop people from looting the corpses, right? And a lot of the dead were never claimed. They were buried in a mass grave in Chestnut Grove Cemetery, right?

So the investigation, they didn't have a coroner in the town of Ashtabula. Just picturing a guy showing up in like a blue frot coat with like NTSB stenciled on the back in yellow. So it's, but it's in like a really fancy $1,800. Yeah, it's got like this Sarah thing. God, we should make that a shirt. And he's like, what's like a real fancy like 1870s turn? It would be like the National Bureau of...

National Bureau of like Transportation and Irishman Monitoring. Yeah, exactly. Well, that'd be the function. It would have a much grander name. Society for the interest of the dead. The Society for the Prevention of Railroad Catastrophes. I'm going to get on to our friend Matt Lobschanski about making a like 19th century NTSB shirt. So they had to convene a coroner's jury because there was no coroner.

Because there was no coroner. And so the Ashtabula coroner's... Yeah, the Ashtabula coroner's jury found that, you know, this bridge was poorly designed, poorly constructed, poorly inspected. The railroad used the wrong type of stoves in the cars. The fire chief was negligent in his decision to let his horse figure out whether he should fight the fire or not, right? What happened to that guy is what I want to know.

Did he at least get fired or what? I don't think so. I mean, I suppose in those days, if you had been, you could just walk to the next town over and be like, yeah, I'm the fire chief now. Did you believe this shit? The Ohio General Assembly also did an investigation. They settled on, yeah, this flawed design, flawed construction with construction errors coupled with poor inspection.

At this point, inspection was very, very informal on every railroad except the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was run by nerds. And soon to be run by Confederates, which is another story of Confederate nerds. Yeah, Confederate nerds. That was sort of post-Civil War, though. So then the Charles McDonald Commission, this was convened by the American Society of Civil Engineers or its predecessor organization, really narrowed down the problem, right? Which was a single miscast lug in the top angle block near the West End.

I'll talk about how this works in the next slide. Can you, when someone miscasts my lugs? Yes. Some of my least favorite shit. Now, a mass of stone conducted his own invest. Liam, you're very, very quiet right now. Yeah, you gotta fucking holla. Yeah, am I?

Yeah, am I really? Now you're better. Hold on. How's that? That's maximum. Yeah, fine. That's good. I mean, that's about as good as I can do.

Yeah, I'm having all sorts of technical issues today, for which I apologize. Listen, it'll never be as bad as the process. I'll set up. I'll set up. We love you, Dan. I'll send up. We did. I'm going to report you to HR.

Buddy, we are HR. It's just you and me getting drunk and fighting. I told you to have those expense reports on my desk. All right. Now you're too loud. Yeah, also, and that's how you both became the mic. That's how you both became fire chiefs. So cool.

A mass of stones. Yeah. A mass of stone and the Lakeshore and Michigan Southern Railroad conducted their own investigation of what happened. And they concluded, well, the train derailed and that caused the bridge to collapse, or maybe a tornado hit it. One of these two things, but the bridge was fine. Definitely fine and extremely safe.

I hate when there's like a tornado out of nowhere in Ohio. Especially near the lake. That's where they are really known for having tornadoes. Lake effect tornado, just the worst. In a blizzard, yeah. So here's the fun one. Did anyone suffer any consequences? Well, apart from the people who got like variously mangled.

Oh, yeah. The people who are rendered into their constituent atoms more effectively than any modern disaster can do. Obviously, they suffered consequences. It's incredible how these old railroad cars to just turn people into mush. Telescoping is not your friend. So the railroad paid out about $500,000 to victims and families of victims out of court, right?

Xboxes weren't even a thing yet. So you can't. Although with inflation, that's not bad. You can buy yourself a nice horse and carriage, kid. You could get a nice pocket watch. A nice pocket watch. Nice pocket watch. You could get a purse to lock it.

One of those stereograms or whatever it is. Yeah, stereoscopic glasses. You know, thousands of ball and a cup. Yeah, you get a whole bunch of hoops and sticks. There were no criminal charges filed, right? The railroads chief bridge engineer who was still Charles Collins, who, again, was prevented from constructing or being involved with the construction of this bridge.

He put a bullet through his brain the day after the bridge collapsed. Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, not so good. But he tried his best. And I mean, like, yeah. He's got fired for it. Well, fired from the bridge stuff, anyway.

Fired from the project, not fired from the railroad. Some people say he always knew this thing was going to collapse at some point. But I don't know if he was in a position where he could realistically do anything about it. Now, a mass of stone, of course, who I think has the most responsibility for this. This is just incredible. He never accepted responsibility for the disaster. But his reputation was ruined at this point, right?

Good. Oh, no. But he was still the richest man in Cleveland. So, yeah. Yeah, but he still lived in Cleveland. Yes. Well, richest man in Cleveland meant something different back then. I know.

Now it's just machine gun Kelly. Yeah, and he got himself involved in a whole bunch of weird financial schemes. I think he was one of the key financiers of the South Improvement Company, which is the first attempt to make standard oil a monopoly. Oh, cool. Yeah, that was like a whole scam involving the Pennsylvania Railroad, the New York Central Railroad, and Rockefeller, and Carnegie, and a whole bunch of other people, which fell apart immediately.

Oh, the Avengers. A league of extraordinarily wealthy gentlemen. So, you know, Massiston's reputation was ruined. So, he had to turn in desperation to a life of philanthropy. What he wound up doing was donating a shitload of money to Western Reserve College. To move it to Cleveland. And that, of course, became Case Western Reserve University. The Western Reserve, of course, is the Connecticut Western Reserve.

Yeah. And, you know, after this, he sort of, he suffered from depression. He went to Europe to try and, you know, carried himself out of it, and he came back. And then he had insomnia. He had really poor health. Then he put a bullet through his brain in 1883. Um, difficult to feel that bad about that guy, though. Yeah, I know, right?

Also, pre-20th century deaths don't count. Everyone was sad and drugged. Sad, drunk, had various diseases. Getting like, getting absolutely fucked up on 19th century diseases. Getting TB to own the lips. Getting egg. You have like 100 kinds of canned goods that can give you 150 kinds of diseases. You're eating ground beef, which may or may, which is about, I don't know, 10 to 20% Irish.

Yeah, I know, right? Well, they hadn't, Sinclair Lewis hadn't written the jungle yet, so no one knew about this shit. So that's awful. One of the things is, I don't think anyone really came up with a conclusive idea of what happened until the science got better to determine why this bridge came down, right? And it wasn't just poor construction. It would have stayed up a lot longer had there not had, had there been better science at the time. So we talked before about the angle blocks, right?

So this is the end angle block. We've got to focus on here, this connection right here. A couple of things are going on right here. So we have our angle block, and I apologize that all these diagrams look different, even though they're describing the same thing, because no one seems to have a clear idea of what the actual dimensions of this thing were. Once again, refer you back to the as built rant. Yeah, exactly.

They, they didn't have as built back then. So you can see you have the top cord up here that butts into the angle, the lug on the angle block. Now you can see that only two of the five I beams are in lugs, right? The other two are supposed to be continuous through each or other three, excuse me, are continuous from, because this is a center angle block. If you're at the center, you have a set of beams that goes two spans and another set of beams that goes two spans and they're offset, right? Except at the ends, right, where they all terminate, right?

In one angle block, and this is a problem. That's fine. It's fine. I would simply build the angle block well. Oh, oh yeah. Well, maybe if they did. So the problem here is this last section of track doesn't have anything transferring the compressive force of the top cord into the abutment, right?

It is all taken by the angle block, which is made of cast iron. Cast iron is very good in compression. I beam here, you know, this lug is only in compression. Because there isn't, this lug now has a moment force applied to it, as well as a shear force. So it's trying to sort of bend this way, right? Which means this side is in tension and this other side is in compression. So you start over a series of loading cycles to cause a microscopic fracture to form, which would eventually take out the angle block.

And of course, this is the 1870s and this whole bridge is very difficult to inspect because it's all underneath the actual deck of the bridge. And your non-Pennsylvania railroad inspections at this point as a guy in a top hat shows up, looks at the bridge and is like, well, it's still up. What's God damn right? Yeah, you probably didn't even have the money. My dad has instructed the bridge. Probably was not even a guy who could afford a top hat.

You probably weren't paying him that much, right? Oh, come on. Oh, maybe he's got one of the hats that Khairadeeb have, the first Shabbat hats. I always wanted one of those, but then I'd have to hate women and have nine kids. And I don't want to do that. I just always wanted one of the Shabbat hats. So, okay, so this problem could have probably kept going on for a very long time without causing a huge amount of problem.

And this is cast iron, right? So you need a very small fracture to, you need a very small crack to cause a total fracture, right? But there was more problems. Which is the way this thing was cast, right? So there wasn't a huge amount of understanding about how you needed to have slow cooling when casting cast iron, right? So when they found this broken angle block, what they found was there was a large void

inside the angle block right about here at the worst possible loading position for how they had designed how the I-beams work. This would be, again, trivial if there were a second I-beam on this side, right? This acts as a stress razor, right? So all of the tension is concentrated in this area, right? You know, right about here, which means I need a much smaller fracture to cause the total failure of this angle block, right? And you don't have like inspection methods that could detect this really for like 30,

40 years after this accident, right? You'd need X-rays or ultrasound or something to figure this out. I mean, one thing you could do is cast the thing properly. Obviously, they did not do that. So, yeah, this is just real design flaws from what's his face, a mass of stone caused and his brother's... Yeah, don't hire your dipshit brother. Yeah, exactly, right?

Don't hire your dipshit brother. So, again, the inspection methods, here's an untrained people to inspect the thing. So they might, you know, look at a small crack, even if they could see it, which they probably couldn't. And they say, yeah, it's probably fine. It's only a little crack, right? You know, so there was not much you could do about it. Except, again, if you cool this thing slowly, you know, one of the problems is if you just expose this to air, this lug cools a lot more quickly than the rest of the block,

which is why that air bubble forms, right? So, you know, this is a predictable problem if you have more knowledge than they had at the time, right? And then there were further exacerbating circumstances that particular day. There was another train that went over that bridge 30 minutes before and it was fine. But, you know, that day it was very cold. That makes cast iron more brittle and not less. So, you know, it means you need less of a crack to cause catastrophic failure.

You have snow on the bridge that's adding extra load, give you generally poor construction, didn't help, right? Yeah, because the diagonal braces are improperly fitted. You know, you have all these shims. There's evidence that the shims sort of fell out over time. Lots of engineers driving trains over the bridges reported hearing a bunch of snaps and pops as they drove their train over the bridge. That's terrific.

Yeah, indicating, you know, these members are crashing into each other, you know, moving around as the trains go over. So, this was the one train which, you know, finally did it. So, in the end, they replaced it with a wooden bridge on the same abutments. Cool. So, all of this was for nothing for the sake of avoiding doing like a four-month worth of iron work or listening to any of the people that you hire to tell you how to build a

bridge. Yes. Now, listen, I worked in Howie's office. I know how these bridges are built. And then, I think this was later replaced, this was replaced with a concrete arch bridge which stands till this day. Fine. Now covered in tree.

Oh, tree. Lots of tree. Tree good. A tree is bad for structures. Oh, true. Yeah. Okay, there's only two passenger trains a day that go over this. Oh, God, they're still using it?

Westbound Lakeshore Limited, Eastbound Lakeshore Limited. When I thought, when I said tree good, I thought they had like, this was like, fully overgrown. No, no, there's still four tracks on top. There's just also trees for some reason. Oh, okay, cool. I'm sure CSX is fine in its acting. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, that was the ash tabula horror. Much less spooky than the name would lead you to believe. Well, maybe you should listen to the people you hire to tell you to have professional opinions rather than just going ahead with your own fucking moronic idiocy. And then hiring your depth ship brother to provide the materials. I believe also there was some evidence that the I-beans which were supplied were undersized, like in terms of like the thickness of the material. I don't know if that would have affected the final outcome, but

my God. Yeah, I have hired my cousin the state's worst iron monger. So, but that means your costs are effectively zero. All the money stays in the family, except the pittance you pay the workers. Yeah, and then eventually you have to pay out some compensation, but that's years later. Exactly, right, future cost, future worth analysis means that's basically zero. Anyway, I took microeconomics. Anyway, so we have a section on this podcast called Safety Third.

I'm just using that as the safety third, even though it doesn't say a safety third, it says shake hands with danger. Well, yeah, I mean, that's that's been the standard for a while. I don't know why you had to explain that. I don't know. Sometimes I like to I like to explain things to the people. Just realized I was on the wrong the wrong Wi-Fi network this whole time, but I can't switch now. Plastic.

Yeah, I've been on acidity this whole time. Damn, Comcast strikes again. Bastards. All right, so anyway, today we have a safety third from a mine. Oh, no. Yes. Oh, boy. Yeah, that's why we have the msh logo up here because OSHA doesn't apply.

Underground. Yes, underground. I think actually OSHA might apply on tunnels, but not on the mines. I don't know what the definition is. I have no idea. Well, if they had to merge them, then they would have to be almsha, so. All right, so I was once. Oh, excuse me.

I once was a neutrino physicist. Okay. Like many neutrino experiments, the one I was working on was located underground in a mine to shield from cosmic rays. I know about these. These are cool as hell. They have to have these huge detectors that are incredibly sensitive.

01:55:15,440 --> 01:55:15,440 01:55:15,440 --> 01:55:21,840 In the United States, to work in an underground mine, mandatory training is required, 40 hours for us, even if you're not doing actual mining, right? 01:55:27,680 --> 01:55:33,760 While this training involves many long coffee breaks and ancient VHS videos of minors with strange accents, it also emphasized two things relevant for this story. The first is mine ventilation. Air moves through a mine, much like current through an electrical circuit.

You need to know where the air is coming from and where it is going. Because if there's a fire, you want to get fresh air as quickly as possible. Carbon monoxide is the biggest hazard because it preferentially bonds to your hemoglobulin instead of oxygen. If you breathe too much of it, you die. Oh, good. And so the second item is how to wear the self-rescuer. It is so named because you are only supposed to use it to rescue yourself into fresh air

and not, say, attempt to rescue downed comrades. Constantly a thing on ships, too. You hear about, like, oh, the fifth guy entered this confined space, but he brought the self-rescuer and then it ran out and he died. It's a fist-sized cartridge containing a few small pieces of metal. This size cartridge containing a chemical that converts poisonous carbon monoxide to relatively benign carbon dioxide, right? Once you break its seal, it starts working and once it has been used, it cannot be reused.

The training emphasizes that if you can smell smoke, there may be dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, which is odorless and invisible, and so you should don the self-rescuer. I was not personally present for the following events, but I heard about all of them and witnessed the consequences. One day, the evacuation alarm went off underground. My colleagues on shift hastened to the mine phone, which functions like a PA system or can, and it announced, which announced a fire in its location. Consulting the ventilation map, they found there was no way for them to get to an egress shaft

without passing through areas downwind of the fire. They started toward the nearest egress and, smelling smoke, they opened and donned their self-rescuers. They made their way to the egress shaft and, upon arriving, were promptly mocked by a large group of miners for wearing their self-rescuers. What are you, gay or something? After waiting in line, they got their turn to go to the surface. There, they were further criticized in the lamp room, which issues lamps and self-rescuers and

keeps track of who's underground for wasting the self-rescuers. They cost a few hundred dollars a piece. My God, a few hundred dollars. That's a lot of money. That's almost an Xbox. The colleague of Mayan, who referred me to the story that was in the shift league, tried to defend their actions. The subsequent argument was so exasperating that he refused to go underground ever again

and lodged formal complaints with both the mine operator and Emsha. This led to a general tension between us physicists and the miners. Not too long after, they started storing tires and broken down mining equipment in the refuge area nearest to our experiment. Just trying to kill these guys. This would be the place we'd go if we got trapped underground. It contained oxygen tanks and other supplies we'd need to survive if we couldn't get to the surface immediately.

A fire there would have been a disaster for us as the next nearest refuge was over half a mile walk away. Despite my boss raising as much of a fuss as he could, the junk remained in place. Thankfully, it never did catch on fire, or at least not while our experiment was still running. What's the opposite of a safety culture? I was about to say, yeah. No, they're doing practice. Fuck these P&C businesses.

Real working class people know that if there's a fire in a mine, you just die. Yeah, it's the most. The more you're killed in a workplace accident, the more of the collar you are. Yeah, the more the more communist you are. That's right. What did we learn? Scientists are gay nerds. Yeah, exactly.

You fucking nerd. Why don't you mine coal for a little bit? Yeah, why don't you mine coal and die in a preventive laxity? Yeah, exactly. Did Emtion do anything about this? I'm guessing not. No, okay. No, the junk stayed there, yeah.

Awesome. Good lord. All right, well, I don't even know how you could get like a lesson out of that at all. That's just dumb. Excellent story, all right. Having learned nothing, and I really basically made me a badly depressed. Yeah, no, I'm like Elizabeth Warren now. These working class people deserve nothing.

Anyway, so our next episode's on need to come a narrowest bridge disaster. Yeah, we're going to do it. We're finally going to do it. Um, I do have a commercial. Yes. Raising my mic like my hand just to... Oh yeah, that's true. You have a commercial, you have a commercial you got to do.

I do have a commercial. All right, so a friend of a friend has a podcast on 90s and 2000s kids media. It is called and you're watching. I've listened to a few episodes myself. They're pretty good. I understand that it's maybe not in the wheelhouse for this podcast, but I would suggest you go listen to it. It's it, like I said, it's pretty decent.

And we have shirts. We have shirt. More importantly, we have shit. We have shirts that you can buy and sticker with your money and a sticker. Now we'll have to get where you are getting more designs. We are working on shipping to Europe. Stop emailing me. Yeah, where's my fucking shirt?

Yeah, exactly. Uh, we're going to figure that out. I was terrified to discover recently that there are now podcasts, which review other podcasts. Oh, no. I know, right? This is not, this is not the union. Don't review us.

Do not review us. Do not review our podcast. Don't be aware of our existence. Yeah, exactly. I always figured we could have more of a union culture here in podcasting, which is basically don't criticize the other man's work. But here we are. Although open call.

Now, Sean KB, I know you're going to listen to this, hopefully to the end. And I just want to say the next time we come up to New York to visit where you and I are going to get in a boxing match, not because you've done anything wrong, but because that's just how you are. Yeah, you're going to fight Sean. You're going to fight any fodder, Sean. All right. I'm going to be anti-anti, I'm going to be anti-anti fodder.

I'm not just fodder. Yeah, no, I don't know. No, that means you're in the IDF. There are people on Twitter, you know who you are. Yeah, people keep saying it. Yeah, people accused me of being a Zionist, which they won't be fucked off. That's why your mic is so bad is because you broadcast from the inside of a Macaver tank. Here I am, somewhere in the Negev, wishing I were somewhere else.

You could you could just just tag me. If you're trying to fight, just tag me. I'd appreciate that as opposed to you specifically avoiding mentioning my name like I'm fucking Voldemort. I'm not. We can discuss that like adults. You dumb bitches. I still haven't been permanently canceled by anyone.

I mean, Liam's canceled because he's in the IDF. Alice is canceled because she's a cough. Yeah, a cop. Yeah, I am. I am free of sin still. Yeah, that's why you have a Twitter account still. That's a good point. Yeah, I'm canceled for let's wrap this up so I can drive back to Philly.

All right. Well, that's that's the episode. Find a reason to cancel me. Do you not find a reason to cancel him? No, you should probably do it. I'd be entertaining. Yeah. All right.

Anyway, I would enjoy being canceled. I think it'd be fun. I, you know, maybe we can get like a bunch of like really weird people mad at me. Maybe I can become, I don't know. I could become the main guy on Twitter for a day. That'd be fun, Roz. Yeah, I know, right? Anyway, that's the podcast.

Bye everybody. Bye. Well, feet is in. I know I turned. All right, I gotta go through. How do I close PDF? Yes.