Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 56: The Vulcan Bridge

Episode Date: February 17, 2021

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That's right, that the cops called Chris at like 11 at night to be like, hey, we heard your wife was like posting about us. I like that we have Tom Sexton and Tom from TV. I had Terrence. That's yes, we have. Three days or two of everyone. Every group I'm in with Tom, he has the true Billy's main account and then his own account. Ah, and he goes back and forth on the two as if they're too different.

Yeah, imagine, imagine using your own podcast's Twitter account as a second Twitter account. I got plausible deniability for any cancelable offense I'm committing in the game. It was Terrence. All right. Is everyone, everyone gone? We got the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everyone sees the screen. Yeah, I should probably get the drops that's gone poorly. Yeah, you should probably do that. That's what I should do. OK, I've got the stream pulled up. Oh, man, it's a good thing I didn't fucking play that as the news drop. Good Lord. Oh, no, was it? Oh, that's the bond theme song, so it's fine. Fine. What I thought it was was this.

Sounds like some pedophile shit. Also, now I got to fucking stop this person. How do I stop this? Stop doing this. Fuck. There. Jesus. Wind up with the highest production quality podcast. Yeah, that's very, very high production quality here.

I'm well, there's your problem. You guys are already doing better than us. Yeah, I'm fine. I'm finally ready to fucking record an episode of the podcast that I do. Every week, I'm not getting any better at this. Yes. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, which has slides, which is of itself a disaster. Yes. I'm Justin Rosnick.

I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK. Oh, he and him. I mean, you're getting fancy. I'm Alice Coldwell Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Liam. Yeah, Liam.

Someone said they liked that. So my pronouns are he and him. Guests. Yes. I'm Karen Teray, pronouns he and him as well. I'm Tom Sexton, and I'm he and him as well. OK, that's right. We have we have the Trilbullies on. We're having a good time.

That's right. Most relaxing voices in podcast. Oh, oh, my God. The Natch Young. So what you see on the screen in front of you is a suspension bridge. Yeah, a lot of it's broken. Why didn't they build it to be more rigid? That's right. I've been saying this.

I think if you can make that pillar on the bottom left that much more rigid, none of this would have happened. That's right. See, the problem is it's like canted over because of not being rigid enough. Now, what you would notice is the flexible parts of the bridge are still standing. It's the rigid parts that fell down. More rigid. That's why we said more rigid. You never listen.

So this is I hate to out my co-host here, but Tom Sexton is death, like deathly afraid of bridges. Whatever the phobia is for bridges, I've seen him have multiple panic attacks going over bridges. Interestingly, like driving over like like interstate bridges. I hate that. Like, so these are good with. Oh, those are fine.

Yeah, like I would like operate, you know, I'd like operate heavy machinery and like, you know, ride a unicycle across that thing. I got a case of pontifobia. Yeah, yeah. That's when you're afraid of the pope. No, that's. Oh, man. So, you know, normally on a podcast like this,

normally we do like really big disasters. And this is just like a little footbridge that fell down. But this footbridge falling down caused an international incident. Oh, we're going to talk about the Vulcan Bridge. Very cool name, I have to say, right off the top. Very great name. Yeah, kind of kind of grandiose for such a modest bridge. But yeah, you kind of think that they should be going over like lava or something

or the bridge itself should be spitting flames at the tracks behind it. Yeah, it's just a guy with like a bad laugh on it in the middle. And you can get past him. I love the idea that the toll operator just has a flamethrower. Like trying to skip the toll he's ready for. We joke. We joke, but I guarantee you a guy with a chainsaw probably patrols this thing several times a day.

Oh, yes. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. Yeah, I got the right button this time. Ray. I like that you have a CSX. Oh, because it says do not hump. Yes. You heard of do not eat.

Now get ready for do not eat after dark. Do not have a man. No, the man episode was caught in the MTA Croton Harman yard for the Metro North Railroad. Ah, vanging his girlfriend on company time, drawing overtime. A dude's rock class hero. Yes, something to be.

Although this is not the only instance of things like this happening because just this very week, a Royal Navy officer on a ballistic missile submarine got done for like making porno on the submarine base. I don't know if she actually did on the submarine, which would have been cool. But like, yeah, no, she had a fucking like private snap and stuff and was just like opposing and stuff.

I'm like doing sex stuff on the naval base, which to me is cool. And winter time in the Navy, you make your own fun. You know what I mean? I figure I thought it was someone bringing someone else in to do porno. And I was like, that seems like a lot of work. But I guess if you already live on the base, then what's the big deal? What's the big deal? I don't know.

Like, is it worse to bring someone in to make the porno or to like make the porno with your co-workers? It's worse to bring someone in, right? Because, well, I guess you have to talk about power structures and all that. Yeah, do you have exploits? There are like rank imbalance there. Yeah, exactly.

But like for that, that's a great sentence. You watch it on this, right? The Natsek fuck is like two lanyards in the ID cards are like bumping against each other. Oh, baby, you get real kicking. Tie him up with their lanyard. Hell, yeah. All right, that's that's that's the ever the sex life of everyone

inside the beltway. Yeah, inside the beltway in more ways than one. That's right. Oh, yeah. It's like CSXC. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. I have a question, Justin.

Where were these people having sex? Were they on top of the train in the train? Just in the train rail yard? They were in the train yard. I don't know, I don't know much more else because I didn't actually read the article. You'd want to be in a cab because it's February, man. You'd want to be in a heated.

Yeah, I don't need to be. But they're like those Metro North trains with like the really tiny cab. I mean, people people fucking like airplane bathrooms. Yeah, if you can fucking. Maybe that's like part of the allure. And on the other hand, if you're doing it outside, it reminds me of like this apocryphal story

about Winston Churchill when he was prime minister in the 60s. Got told, yeah, you know, this one, the cabinet secretary tells him, yeah, one of your ministers was caught having sex with a guardsman in St. James's Park last night and Churchill in a sort of very Churchillian way is supposed to have gone last night. The coldest night of the year makes you proud to be British. Apparently, this guy did it a lot.

They observed him doing it at least three times. What, the train guy? Yeah, he took at least one time. He took a three hour lunch. Cool. So in lay in that pipe also, yeah. And he's a gourmand, which so, I mean, ladies, get at this guy also. How fucking perverse are railroad cops to be like,

we observe the suspect in a coiter style situation. Yes, we have been to the compact to the railroad storage. What does that even mean? Subsequent times. We we also further observe the suspect because we had to go back because they're fucking nasty. Nasty little piss pigs. We had to watch this guy fuck three times. I don't know why it has to be news.

You could just tell the guy, hey, just don't don't fuck in the railroad yard. Yeah, there's an OSHA regulation against this. Well, apparently, he brought her in three times on at least. That's my cake. Only observed five days on during sex. He was observed bringing her in. He was a 25 year vet. So that I really appreciate that this was just doing this ready to risk at all.

Brought her in three times, but they only observed him kissing and having intimate contact once. So handy, right? Like, that's what it means. So he was doing this gets everyone horny, man. Maybe she was just really into the trains and she was like, yeah, you got to take me to see the trains. And then also fuck me. Like, yeah, if you take me to the Grotten Yard or Grotten Yard,

I'll give you a handy man. It's like, this is the best deal I've ever heard in my fucking life. Let's go. All right. I only had one news today. Yeah, we stretch that out. Yeah, that's the tea. It's speaking.

OK. So we're here. Yes, thank you. Here we're we're in the Appalachian Mountains, right? Beautiful. Gorgeous, baby. Yes, the only place I'll ever feel at home, man. That and the what? Oh, God.

Oh, they're very old. They're like four hundred eighty million years old. The second oldest in the world, apparently. And then voting gets their own interest for four hundred eighty million years. It's just a bunch of dinosaurs being being like no regulation. We, too, will get black, black, long if we feel like it. Dinosaur resignedly voting for the meteor. Bunch of bunch of Democrat dinosaurs from up north being like,

man, those dinosaurs are stupid. Why don't they vote again? Why do they always vote against their own interests? And then you get some fucking Amy McConnell's not even McConnell. What's her fucking name? We're great. And the grass sore talking about how actually she will embrace the meteor. J.D. Vansesaurus.

God. See, we're going to find common ground with meteor. So the mountains were once as tall as like the rackies or the Alps. They were worn down over time by wind since they're very old. They have, you know, good stuff like coal in there, right? Oh, yeah. And there's lots of cracking open like a kinder again. There you go. Yes.

Let's go toy inside. It's just it's got like no, no, it's all excavated. It's got a coal. Coal is the opposite of a toy. Coal is literally a toy. We established that at Christmas. Yeah, that's right, dude. That's right.

The plastic has to stress is more energy dense than some fucking coal. You're right. You're right. I'll just go fuck myself. There are many. Wow, this photo came out really low res. Oh, that's good. Oh, this is part of the the unfortunate pixel deficit in West Virginia. There's quite a bit of it, trust me.

Yeah. So what one river that goes through the Appalachians is the Tug Fork, right, is a fork of the Big Sandy River. It's also what that guy was doing in the train yard. Tug. For where we live, Justin is the headwaters of the Big Sandy River. So we're all tied together, baby.

All starts right there. Very imaginatively named the Big Sandy River. I really like this place called Dismal. It's just as advertised. So this river goes through this river, marks the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. You know, sort of this relatively flat route through the mountains. So, you know, so in the late 1800s,

it was the ideal spot for a railroad, right? Yeah, that railroad was the Norfolk and Western. Oh. What's wrong with the north and the western aside from this, like, fucking sawlack on the bottom left? Oh, yeah, the the the sandworm here devouring all the industry. Yeah, the coal must flow, I guess. Yes, this is actually how it's a little known fact.

But if you'll look at the giant Dune monster from Dune. Yeah, Dune from the movie Dune. Right. That's actually the first prototype of the Norfolk and Western. They ended up with these small, quote, locomotives, but their prototypes were actually giant, mile long sandworms. Not many people know that. See, they thought the big sandy river was sandy enough for the sandworm,

but it's mostly mountain. All right. All right. So the Norfolk and Western started out as the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, which is a merger of several railroads that have been blown to smithereens in the Civil War. What do the notes say, Roz? What?

What do the notes say, Roz? It says blown to shit. I can say that. This is the PG-13 version. Oh, all right. Oh, beans, juicy, that's your problem. Yeah, well, there's your problem. We don't need that explicit tag anymore.

This is the clean version, baby. So so I stretched a whopping 408 miles from Norfolk, Virginia to Bristol, Virginia, which is over here. Passing through Petersburg and Lynchburg, right? And the president was this guy named William Mann right up here. Right. This is a man.

It's spelled like fucking Mahoney. It's bad. It might be Mahoney. It's bad. I don't. Well, isn't Vince McMahon also spelled Mahoney? He's McMahon. Yeah, but I don't know that E on the end there is. The guy from Jack's Mannequin is Andrew McMahon.

Listen, I'm never going to get a railroad baron's name right on General Princip or just because I don't respect them. Yeah, all right. Well, Billy Mahoney here. Yeah, Billy Mahoney. Classic antebellum railroad guy, right? Oh, no. He was educated at Virginia military.

I just had a horrible fucking idea, which is the class emojis, higher, more Irish railroad barons. Hokey, hokey, hokey. Hi, down with tech. VMI. Yes. So, yeah, so he was a V me. He was briefly an officer in the United States Army.

I think it was the army. I don't know which one it was. Then he did what all railroad barons do and resign his commission at the first available opportunity and go work as an engineer for the railroad, right? Sort of a engineer in the in the building stuff sense, not in the driving the train sense, right now. So then the Civil War broke out and he was like, OK,

I'm a Confederate now. So he became all right. Looks like an exciting new rebrand. Yes, exactly. Goes to fight for the Confederacy. And then afterwards he lost, of course, and went back to working for the railroad, right? How do you be a railroad guy and pick the losing side?

Like one of the reasons why the US one was having fucking ten times the length of railroad track? Like, how? Why? You're probably hubris because you went to VMI. And therefore, yeah, one of the first human beings ever born. I mean, let's say nothing, putting an Irishman in charge.

But anyway, yeah, it's really drunk. Hey, after work, yes, don't listen. Not probably. Don't belittle my people. Billy Mahoney, Battle is Pennsylvania, doesn't know which way is up. Look at that beer. Does that beer tell you the man knew which way was up?

No, it does not. That beer tells you my guy had a serious drinking problem. So he went back to work for the railroad after the war. He later had sort of a change of heart. And he read the led the read adjustment party in Virginia, had some kind of complex political motivations. But the gist of it was we're going to we're going to do a reconstruction. We're going to have total complete equality for blacks and whites.

We're going to repeal the poll tax. We're going to fund integrated education, lots of other nice things like that. And we're going to make West Virginia pay for it. This rules a bit of a question mark down in this car. Like this is good, I think. Well, the read adjustment party was remarkably successfully was elected the Senate on this platform in 1881. And, you know, there's a sort of this multi racial, multi party,

populist left wing coalition that was winning seats in Virginia. Which is got him with a cancer gun. Yeah, exactly. The the 1880s CIA. In 1880s, it was the cirrhosis gun. But yeah, it's like a fucking surround. And it just comes into this guy.

It takes 20 picker tins to poison a man. But once we poison a man, we do it right. Four horse carts laid down with a giant syphilis gun. Looking like a judge. Yeah, like a syphilis galley gun. You can give so many people syphilis for this thing. So. So a bunch of conservative Democrats managed to get themselves elected in the

1890s. And, you know, after seeing the horrors that the readjusters had wrought on Virginia, I mean, I believe Danville, Virginia, had a majority black city council as a result of some of the readjuster reforms. They they these these Democrats come in and they immediately pass the harshest Jim Crow laws imaginable. Democrats sure this doesn't happen again. Yeah. Hey, listen, we're compromising with the KKK. We see you.

We hear you. You're valid. Jim Crow. So one of the things that propelled these readjusters into office was the panic of 1873, right, which Oh, hell, yeah, was is a, you know, an economic crisis that hit the South, particularly hard because all all southern businesses, enterprises, whatever, immediately just got bought up by Northern creditors, which included Mahoney's AMO Railroad, right?

So the Northern creditors swooped in. They bought it. It was bought by E.W. Clark and Company, who appointed this guy, Clarence Howard Clark, who is a don't trust to go with three first names. Yeah, it's a big real estate developer. It's a big real estate developer in West Philadelphia, right where I am. Actually, Clark Park, which is down the street from me, is named after him.

They put him on the board of directors. They put Frederick J. Kimball as the first vice president. They renamed the railroad the Norfolk and Western, and they just operated this as a southern extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad, right, by way of the Shenandoah Valley Railroad here, which met the AMO main line at a place called Big Lick. OK, there was a there was a salt lick there in the Roanoke River. All the animals would come and lick it. Big lick.

Yes. There's a place called Licking Hole Creek. So we got one here called Big Bone Lick. I kind of envy the US, right, because all of your, like, rude place names are so straightforward, right? Like, whereas ours are just like, I come from a small village called Upper Twaffles Bottom or something like that. Like, it's just so pathetic compared to the directness of somewhere like

Climax or Intercourse or Big Lick, right? Don't you guys have multiple group lanes? Yes, although that's like descriptive, right? That's not like it's not a coincidence. It's just that's literally not. Yeah, it said it was a red light district, and then it got changed to like grope lane afterwards. Oh, good. Yeah.

Yeah, well, that's your imagination, Alice. But if you see a grope lane or a grope street in a British town, that's why it's because it used to be grope cunt. So so eventually they got sick of calling it Big Lick. They renamed the city Roanoke, once it got big enough to be a city. Oh, wait, can someone censor me in the edit when I say the C word? Because my mom will listen to the podcast. Censor me also. Yeah.

In fact, do you use the censor beep that I have that just didn't censor anything the last time I tried to use it? Yeah, my mom, my mom, although it's a proper place name, raised me not to use the B word or the C word. Like I'll say them sometimes in passing and I'll just get like not the C word, right, but the but the B word, the mean name for a lady. And my mom will just stare at me and I can feel her pick apart my soul. Like don't like you were the one complaining earlier

that I was keeping this to G rated. Yeah, but I didn't write it in the notes. That's the difference. Also, like what PG 13 movie lets you say cunt in it? You could say shit in PG 13 movies. Don't you get shit but like one fuck and nothing stronger? You get two shits, I think. Oh, two shits in a fuck.

Yeah, ask me about my Costco membership. OK, so these these Pennsylvania railroad guys have come in starting effort to extend the railroad across the Appalachians to the bustling city of Cincinnati, right, all the way over here. And the route they chose was along the Tug Fork River, right? You know, this go up from Big Lake along the Tug Fork. Tug Fork, yes. The Cincinnati.

That's a lot of Cincinnati, baby. Union town. They they, you know, this was a pretty important freight and passenger corridor for southern Virginia. You know, it hits all the population centers. They ran these streamlined express passenger trains called things like the Pocahontas and the Powhatan Arrow. They go from Norfolk to Cincinnati behind these big, nice

J-class steam locomotives, right? They are nice. They had you could you get a train from Roanoke direct to New York City back then by way of Harris, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. You know, that's a whole Shenandoah Valley had direct rail service, you know, straight to New York City. They don't have that anymore. And they had very, very, very heavy freight traffic,

which meant that for most of the early 20th century, they found it worth their while to electrify part of their railroad along the tug fork, right? But, you know, this is all sort of all this has passed into history now. All this has passed into history. And of course, the real reason you build this railroad is coal, right? You know, their main line ran through very rich coal fields owned by a consortium owned by the Norfolk and Western

called the Pocahontas Land Corporation, right? Just big fans of Disney movies, I guess. Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, maybe I had some Massachusetts involvement, I don't know. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm making my Elizabeth Warren joke. I'm not going to dignify it with a response. Well, slow on the uptake there.

Yeah, I was like, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. Yeah, so this is a big, big operation. Here's like, here is this is their terminal in Roanoke, demolished. Here's the one now. Ah, faking a lot, probably. Here's the one in Roanoke. It's now the Winston Link Museum.

Winston Link did a lot of good photographs of the Norfolk and Western back in the day. He is this pioneering photography technique called using a shitload of flash bulbs. To be fair, they look great. Yeah. Oh, I got to say this doesn't take this doesn't say taken before explosion. Oh, yeah.

You know, I did a bunch of a series of photos of the the far southern part of the Norfolk and Western. I think it's called the Ashbury branch. This this photo is called Maude, Bows, the Virginia creeper. When do you think this was taken? Seventy two. Two weeks, I'll say fifty four. Fifty six.

Huh. Wow, Tom. Yeah. Tom has an eye. I'm going to I'm going to just be honest with you. I have a Winston link picture from Welch, West Virginia was taken in fifty one. So I was just shoot from the hip there based on that. Yeah, based on the style of their clothes and their hats. Yeah, I see what you're saying, Tom.

Mr. and Mrs. Ben Pope, watch the last steam powered passenger train because Norfolk and Western just kept these steam locomotives until they would not run anymore. That's sad until you realize they're looking at a guy getting a handy in the cab of that. That's his last. That's his last run in the service. Yeah, that's right. Was it the Norfolk and Western that retired

their steam after they retired their electrics? Or is it someone else? They that that electrified portion on the tug for once they did a realignment. They said, well, we don't need these electric trains anymore because we have enough room on the tracks. So they tore down the wires and went back to steam. Cool. Just like, what are we going to do?

Run out of coal? That was the idea. Yeah. Wow. This is an interesting photo. This is a good one. Hot shot eastbound because you see the steam train. You see the the drive-in movie theater with the plane. You see the cars.

Right. It has nine eleven vibes, honestly. This is a second plane has struck the steam engine. The second train has hit the parking lot. Man, doing nine eleven to a train would be if nothing else, a more impressive feat of like aviation. Train wins. Train wins. I think train beats plane.

Yeah, this is what you did back in the day. You went to watch nine eleven with your sweetie, baby. Yeah, you went out for a mouted. Yeah. You had a girl's neck at a make out point. Yeah. Yeah. You both like inhaled a bunch of leaded gasoline fumes. Yeah, then you killed nine kids.

You were both you were both drunk. College tuition was two hundred dollars for four years. Which I find it pretty brazen tradition. Then you get sent off to Korea and you route her from under a smoking lamp twice a day. Meanwhile, she's fucking your cousin. I think it's cool, though, that like this was like the promise of America for all of those kids and what they ended up doing

was buying a bunch of like VFW baseball caps when they got back. Is live until 90 and just wear a big like Korean war veteran cap everywhere. It's cool. Yeah, just made at the Dairy Queen every morning. Yeah. Well, you've got to just try to play transport fever, too. Bidstreet is out. I had to go. I had to turn off my I had to go offline on steam

because you keep getting notifications. Yeah, and steam notifications. This was kind of fun, because they also put they did a parody of this photo on The Simpsons. Yeah, I don't remember what episode this is. Oh, it's the one where Homa trashes the car for the insurance. Right. Here's their big station in Cincinnati.

This is still around. Got so many trains a day. Go here. Oh, I've seen that. I think it's a there's a casino there by there now. They got they got this whole big Cincinnati Union terminal and the Cardinal comes through three times a week. By that point, that's almost worse than just having nothing.

You know, like having a face. Yeah, I mean, this vestigial train station still. Just pure nostalgia. Perhaps that's why they got into casino gaming. Let's give a little shot in the arm, you know, in between times. That's definitely that's definitely a way to revitalize the city is casinos. Works every time. Yeah.

God, when are we going to do an episode about Atlantic city just in general? Oh, it's funny. You ask that, Alice. That is that's my next bonus episode. I'm pretty sure. Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. Am I going to have to watch Boardwalk Empire for this? If you want, the entire stream will be or the entire podcast will be listening to the band's cover of Atlantic City.

Well, Ross and I get drunk at the foreground. Yeah. But, you know, the main thing that was driving revenue to this railroad was coal. So we got to talk about what is coal. Oh, well, that's it. It's some rocks that you can burn it and you get a lot of to burn from it. Yeah, yeah, it's a spicy rock. It keeps the lights on.

I know that, buddy. That's my way of life. I'm just going to be honest with you. I'm actually the only, I guess, the only male member of my family, I should say, that hasn't spent a day underground, and it's something they never let me forget. Let me tell you. Nice boy. All right. So you get you get kinds of coal.

You got anthracite coal. That's the hard stuff you got by Thomas Cole. That's the not hard stuff. And to get all of this stuff, unless you want to dig the whole fucking mountainside open like they do in Germany, you have to go underground to get it, which I like, I wouldn't make fun of you for that. I can be underground when I'm dead, you know, I'm going to get in a notch up plenty of days of being underground when I'm just fucking living there.

Yeah, it's not a free life. I'm especially envious of just God bless you. God bless you for doing it. But no, no, thank you. Speaking of speaking of being underground, Tom and I were joking about this just the other day. So there's like a whole obviously a whole culture around coal mining and everything. But like they culture, a culture.

Yes, exactly. But people will put bumper stickers on the back of the decals on the back of their truck. And the favorite one is features a coal miner crawling on his hands and knees towards a woman with her leg spread open and underneath it says a coal miner's job is never done. So that's coal miners famously good at eating pussy. Apparently that's the message there.

So you ask what coal means, it has a few different meanings. For that, what's that? What's the other one that's got like the woman like from the like the mud flaps, but she's got a pickaxe and a helmet on that says something about dig and lower or something like that. I think that's cool. Yeah, I mean, every industry has them. Like in oil country, they've got the one with the oil rig going between the woman's legs.

And it says the deeper I go, the wetter she gets. So I mean, it's it's like the load of horny guys. It's like the guy fucking in the field. Not fucking anyone for 12 months at a time, making more money. You've ever had your whole fucking life. And then the only thing to spend it on is shitty beer and cope straight. Alice, you've got to be making some weird decal scale. Yeah, we're going to get some like horny podcasting details.

You know, we just need podcast microphone between the girls' legs. The life of an editor, the life of podcast editor is not an easy one. OK, so you got anthracite coal. This is like it burns fairly clean. So it was used a lot for home heating. Then you got bituminous coal, which is, you know, less pure, pure, you know, there's stuff like sulfur in there as a lower heating value per unit weight produces a lot of smoke, but it's easier to mine than anthracite.

Anthracite's always been very expensive, you know, and then comparatively expensive. You can see here, this is a trophy. The Potsville Maroons awarded themselves in 1925, which is made of anthracite coal. Well, that's cool. Yes, we talked about this one, actually, about this team on the football bonus episode. All of you hated.

Oh, I wasn't. And this before the merger. Oh, yeah, this was this was way before the merger. Yeah. Yeah, this was that they were suspended from the league, but still won basically, and they wouldn't give them a trophy. So they gave themselves a trophy. Yeah, they were suspended for they were suspended from the league for a thing another team was allowed to do with no issue

because they hate they hate they hate the working class is why. Yes. Oh, crap. Just want to point out, anthracite coal is mind and your part of the world, I believe, Justin. Oh, yeah, yeah. We don't have it down here in Kentucky. We mine by two minutes cold down here.

And earlier, we were talking about the tug fork. So the tug fork divides West Virginia and Kentucky. There's a town on the tug fork called Williamson. Is it Williamsburg or Williamson, Tom? I think Williamson, Williamson. Well, I mean, Williamson to honor the heritage of coal, they built an entire house out of by two minutes coal. And over the years, it's just, you know, gradually like worn and melted down.

It looks like absolute shit. I was about to say, that seems like the wrong material he is for home building. So he's in the fire in the house and they're dying instantly. Yeah. No coincidence. This is the only town I've ever huffed gasoline in. All right. So the bitumen is called in particular was along the Norfolk and Western main line. This stuff was used for everything.

It was used for used in steamships, steel mills, locomotives, power plants, so on and so forth. A lot of it was exported at a big terminal called Lambert's Point in Norfolk. Right. Norfolk Southern still has a big coal terminal out here. So shown here with more colors than it's actually ever been perceived in in real life. Oh, yes. It's it's gray. Very gray and depressing. You can go to the Google Street View for some reason, the Google Street View car. Went in white and it came out black.

But they went on the employees only road through the terminal. Hell, yes. Yeah, they just decided to do that. So I like the idea that it's just like bras behind the wheel and being like, no, baby, we're getting in. Getting red teamed by the Google Street Maps car is so fucking good to me. So OK, so there's lots of coal mines spring up along the N and W's main line, along with coal mines on branches. Most of them are owned by the Pocahontas Land Corporation.

These coal mines need workers. So small towns spring up next to the railroad and the Tug Fork. One of these towns was Vulcan. Good industrial name for a company town. Yes, pretty good. West Virginia has a good naming heritage. They also have a town called Nitro Nitro. I was just going to say Nitro. Yeah.

And their their high school mascots, the invaders. And there there are travels, the Pocahontas. Now, imagine being the Pocahontas and going up against the Nitro invaders. OK, so this is the town of Vulcan, right? Most of it is across the railroad tracks from the Tug Fork and from the road, which is in Kentucky, but Vulcan is in West Virginia, right? There were three ways in and out of the town, right? There's sort of a crappy dirt trail that goes over the mountain, right?

There was a private service road for the Norfolk and Western that went along the railroad tracks. It was very narrow. And then there was a bridge to Kentucky, right? Across the Tug Fork, I think just about around here, the old bridge, right? There was a wooden deck suspension bridge that was built by the coal company, right? And we saw a picture of that earlier.

Most people get in and out of town regularly would use the bridge to Kentucky, right? Kids got the school bus there. Once the railroad got rid of the town's train station, it was really the only practical way in and out of town, right? Now, there are some problems here because you had to cross the railroad, right, to get to the bridge. And in this sort of era up to the 1950s, 60s, you know, there's a lot of railroads out there that had, you know, reasonably high speeds

for the sake of moving freight and passengers promptly, right? You know, trains were doing 50, 60 miles an hour on a lot of railroads. But the N and W was not one of those railroads. So we've moved from shaking hands with danger to shaking hands with danger in a different with the other hand. Yes. Yes. So since there's a steep grade eastbound, you had these long coal trains that would go slow down

about seven or eight miles an hour, right? The the electric trains they used to have could do a whopping 15 miles an hour. But, you know, after they did the curve straightening, they got rid of the electric trains and is perfectly fine to run coal at eight miles an hour because it's been sitting in a mountain for a couple of million years. It's not going to go bad. Got a nice shelf life. Yeah.

So in these trains would frequently stop and block the railroad crossing into Vulcan, and, you know, they just stopped there for hours at a time, right? So, you know, kids would have to climb under or through the coal cars to get to the bus. There was a cemetery in town and sometimes funeral processions were blocked by a train and the whole deceased between the railroad cars. Sometimes the train would start up unexpectedly

and like there'd be some kids trying to get through the train. Well, and, you know, they just fall off and lose an arm. I group rates on funerals, you know, you can you can. Yeah, that's the worst part. Getting getting killed. Yeah, getting killed at the funeral for by getting killed by a train at the funeral for my son, who was also killed by a train. Yes. Well, you know, it's a good, good, good, good place to get

in the funeral home business, though. So long as it's on the other side of the fucking bridge. You know, so, you know, this is this is annoying if you lived in Vulcan. And this is, you know, not a particularly rich or poor town. Everyone's working in the mines and making miners wages. And but that becomes a problem in like the 60s, 70s and 80s. When the Appalachian coal industry started employing fewer people and declining in general, right?

Yeah, because they didn't learn how to code because coding hadn't been invented yet. Right. Exactly. Right. You had to I don't know what the 1960s version of learn to code is. Cobalt, baby. It was I found a story in an old newspaper in our town, White'sburg. Um, the Appalachian Regional Commission came in to teach former coal miners how to operate elevators so they could be elevator. Oh, growth industry.

Let's teach them to get chimney sweeps next. That's also like the most commissi-brained idea to be like, well, you go up in an elevator all day anyway. Why don't you do it so wrong? Yeah, similar to my recession proof. This guy that they interviewed will always need elevators. Though this guy that they interviewed was like, well, the only elevator in my town is push buttons.

So it wouldn't make much of a sense. Oh, shit, Lord. I don't know. I still they still have service elevators that are push button, but still have operators. The guy sits there on a milk crate all day. Yeah. Hey, man, I retired doing that.

It's paid good enough. Yeah, you got to get the you got to have to like, my TF, my trashy colleague, Milo has this bit about how in the Soviet Union, because they had to have full employment all the time. They just hire a guy to watch the escalators on the metro, not do anything. Just like sitting in a little booth and like, even if something goes wrong with the escalator, he doesn't do anything. He just he does his job is just to watch it.

I think it's cool to just do that instead of coal mining. I was a parking booth attendant one time and, you know, you just like give people a card and then like stamp it when they come back and collect like 40 cents from them. Nobody, nobody has like four. You know what I mean? It's just like one of those jobs that the the the rates never kept up from like 60s. So it's like, yeah.

One of the interesting things about the decline of the Appalachian call industry is, of course, it happens during a period where the amount of coal we mine goes up a lot. Like there is there's a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of coal being extracted, but this industry was still collapsing and what's happening, right? And some of that is, you know, home heating goes to fuel oil or electric heating or gas heating. So you don't have as much demand for stuff like anthracite.

Coal industry gets more heavy equipment. So fewer people are employed to extract the same amount of coal. A lot of heavy industry gets off short steel mills and stuff like that that needs coal to operate railroad switch diesel locomotives. Lots of power generation switches over to, you know, do stuff like nuclear power, but the coal production is still going up. And that's because they didn't so much switch away from coal as they switched where it was being mined.

They're using Powder River Basin coal from Wyoming. Right. And this is this is an interesting one because, you know, if you look at like the 1940s through like the 1980s, there's lots and lots of pollution because everything's, you know, everything's being heated with coal, stuff like that. Here's Pittsburgh on a bright summer day in the 1940s. Oh, gorgeous. Yeah. Breathe it in. Paris of Appalachia.

Yeah. Great city, baby. So they, you know, you got coal dust everywhere. It causes disease. It blots out the sky. It makes the buildings turn black. Very unpleasant by the 1950s. Even even people with political power start taking notice. Because you build this nice, like fucking sandstone building.

And the next thing you know, it looks like a rotted tooth. It shouldn't look like something out of Lord of the Rings after just a few days. The same thing happened to Glasgow, right? Once we switched from coal heating, like we had all of these tenement buildings, like like mass tracked housing. And it like you can see where it's been gentrified because people have just gone over it with a power washer. And now it's sandstone colored again, as opposed to just being black.

And so you got a you got a series of clean air acts passed, regulating certain pollutants and dispense with the worst of the smoke, ideally without dramatically affecting business. After the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire in 1969, there's this whole brand new federal agency signed into existence by none other than Richard Milhouse Nixon, the Environmental Protection Agency, which gave, you know, environmental regulatory for environmental regulatory enforcement,

a little bit of teeth, right? Among the things they went after the most strongly was sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, right? That's the chemicals that make acid rain. Some acid rain bearings have been sour about it since. Yes. So and this is a problem if you're mining in Appalachia, right? Because Appalachia by two minutes coal is very high in sulfur

and anthracite coal is too expensive to burn for power. And, you know, at this point, there's not so many new coal power plants being built, at least through like the 50s and 60s. We started we started ramping that back up later. And so the growth market was all like by two minutes coal exports. You know, coal power plants could be retrofitted with stack scrubbers. And many of them were, but that was very expensive.

You know, people were really getting gung-ho in like the 50s, 60s, 70s about nuclear power, right? All right, I know, right? Here's the first commercial nuclear reactor being delivered to Pittsburgh. The steam train. I mean, like you kind of see where it's coming from, right? They're both pressure vessels is basically the same thing. These are both steam engines, kind of.

This is true. Yes. Well, I mean, the nuclear reactor is like the equivalent to the firebox on the steam locomotive. Yeah. They're both cute. That is true. This episode of Thomas the Tankin. It looks like a cute Dalek that just like fell over. Yeah, it looks like when you call those like little space bear things.

Oh, Tata grades. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's what it looks like. You know, so that a lot of nuclear power plants get built on the east coast. This is the shipping port plan again. There's stuff like Three Mile Island, Indian Point, the Tennessee Valley Authority builds like a bazillion of them in the West and Midwest. They have a different idea, which is. Low sulfur coal.

I want to be our new true billy's like podcast cover. So the Powder River Basin is in Easter, Eastern Wyoming, right? The Powder River drains it. It contains huge quantities of what's called subbyteminous coal. And it is shit. It's garbage. Absolutely like terrible dirt coal, right? You have to burn a lot of it to get the same heating value as regular coal. It's not quite as bad as the stuff they use in Germany.

Oh, like the stuff they mine, the stuff they mine in Germany and then burn in Poland so that Germany can say they're clean. Have you seen the emissions map of the EU for this year? It's fucking wild because it's like totally white, apart from Poland, which is red. You know, other stuff is it's it's low heating values located in these inconvenient bowl shaped formations, right? This coal was almost entirely worthless until sulfur regulations came around because for all its fall

for all its faults, it contains almost no sulfur. So rather than invest in stuff like stack scrubbers or anthracite mining or maybe moving away from coal entirely, power companies decide, well, let's use this shit garbage coal. So what you're telling me is once again, big government overreach, stifling innovation is responsible for the current coal power thing. I know for all that, for all of us, for all of this podcast being nominally a socialist one, we do complain about the government a lot.

And you live in capitalism. Interesting. And yet you podcast on an iPhone. Oh, yes. That's what I'm using right now. All right. So, you know, this this this shit garbage coal becomes very popular, the Berlin Burlington Northern Railroad built the first new main line in 60 years to serve these mines. Suddenly, you know, garbage powder river basin coal was plentiful and supplying electricity from California to Ohio.

And of course, best of all, there's no there's not a big union culture in Wyoming. So, you know, you can pay people less. All mines are brand new. You're not dealing with old like Victorian equipment. And, you know, no canaries in my home. Yeah. And even if you're paying people like 10 bucks an hour, you know, it's Wyoming, they live like kings on 10 acres. So all this leads to disinvestment in Appalachia, right?

So, you know, the infrastructure required to maintain the population which worked in the coal industry. They weren't they stuff was not getting maintained for them, right? So, for instance, passenger railroads, the passenger trains were discontinued on this route entirely on May 1st, 1971, which is the day M track started. The mines are laying off workers living in a place like Vulcan gets tougher. And finally, in 1975.

The old creaky wooden bridge, which had missing planks at this point was largely swept away in a storm, right? So this left the people of Vulcan with no legal way out of their town save for fording the tug fork. Oh, that's just exceptional. It seems fine. But put a snorkel on the truck. It's fine.

Mm hmm. How deep is the tug fork at this point? I don't think it's that deep. I believe it's it is affordable. It's fine. You wouldn't you would not want to do that if like, I don't know. Maybe you're trying to maybe you're buying like a sofa or something. Or trying to get your kid to catch a school bus.

Yeah. Yeah. Just fucking strapping the water wings on them. Like, all right, so good to hit school. Just pushing him down with an inner tube. Yeah. Well, the other thing, too, is I don't know if you all know this or not, but much of our waterways and our beloved Appalachia are not how to put this delicately.

Neither potable nor navigable. Oh, fun stuff. So that means they're useless. I mean, if I can't drink it and it's too shallow to sort of, you know, it or two. Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you may as well fill them in then. Not entirely useless.

You can dump pollutants and toxins in it. That's that's totally that's a good place to put them. That is true option. That's true. It's got to go somewhere, you know, that's right. So the Norfolk and Western, you know, they still own this access road along the railroad tracks and they are entirely unsympathetic, right? They put gates on the service road so people can't use it

and they ban commercial vehicles, which had previously used the road from using it. And that meant that the town's grocery store shut down and a bunch of kids who, you know, drove to school just dropped out, right? Ambulances couldn't make it into the town anymore. It was not a good situation, right? I mean, that's that's a problem if you're trying to like get your limbs hacked off by a coal train anyway.

Oh, yeah, call the ambulance before you cross the railroad. Yeah, that's right. Just in case if the ambulance on the way to save your lives has to cock the wagon and float. So this guy, this guy who lives in Vulcan named John Robinette decides I'm going to do something about this. We're going to get this bridge fixed. So he appointed himself the mayor of Vulcan.

OK, had not had a mayor till this point. Somebody's got to step up. Appalachian Stalinism, big fan of this already. Yeah. So he was he was the bartender at what was now the town's only business. The Shenandoah bar. He was also a notary public and a former carnival barger. That's my uncle.

That's my uncle, Donald, essentially. When you say former, like, was he like an unfrocked carny? Like, did they kick him out? They pull his credentials. He got he got drummed out of the circus. Yeah. Oh, my God. Dishonorable discharge from the carnival.

They threw them they threw him out of the circus train. So he takes it upon himself to get the damn bridge fixed. So the New York Times reported December 16th, 1978. Mr. Robinette said, so I up and appointed myself mayor and set out to get us a bridge, you know, because there was Miss Holly, 74 years old, having to hire herself a boy to go fetch a few sticks of furniture and haul them back against the law and haul it on back against the law on private property, railroad property, right?

He goes out. He complains to the county. He complains to legislators in Kentucky and West Virginia. Complains to the feds to anyone who will listen that, you know, people are stuck in the town, right? And no one does anything, right? Kentucky wanted West Virginia to pay for the bridge. West Virginia wanted Kentucky to pay for the bridge.

The feds wanted West Virginia and Kentucky to work it out between the two of them, and they didn't want to pay for the bridge. And he was sort of strongly implied that the best course of action for everyone involved was to just abandon the town. Right. OK. That's funny, because that's like just kind of like like the federal policy for Appalachian general right now. That is. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, we should just empty it out, you know, just learn to code.

I think it was Rand Paul's like everybody should just move out to Wyoming, right? There were literally bureaucrats in the 70s with the Appalachian Regional Commission who said, yeah, no, we need to build the highways bigger so people can get out of here. That does that does not inspire confidence. Yeah. So in 1976, one year after the bridge and washed out, Robinette decided to go for broke. He contacted the foreign aid office of the Union of Soviet Socialists.

Oh, my God, dear Mr. Brezhnev. Oh, I like your eyebrows. I'm sorry to say the great state of West Virginia. What's funny? What's funny is this this might not be so good. Like there was like a communist newspaper called the big sandy new era that was published out of like the tug fork area, like in the 20s. So maybe there's just an extension of their proud communist heritage.

Maybe so. Yeah, exactly. Genuinely, it's so funny that we found an unironic case of like, Mr. Brezhnev, please liberate my people who are suffering from the capitalism. Please, please send one red army formation to West Virginia to build this bridge. So as the New York Times reported, so Mr. Robinette decided to ask the Soviet Union to build Vulcan a bridge. He wrote Leonid Brezhnev twice.

He sent the letter by registered mail. I wrote you, but you still ain't cool. Imagine being the postal inspector, opening that letter to read it. Because of course, it's going to the Soviet Union and being just being like, maybe we should get these people a bridge. Like, sir, we're going to have a real ugly PR incident. So, Mr. Mr. Brezhnev did not reply. But Walker, Yonah Andronov, who was a writer for

Literature Nova Gazeta, which was a weekly, a weekly formerly a literature magazine. Now it was sort of a new sort of a hippie-dippy newspaper in Moscow, right? He got wind of the story. And so he wound up traveling down to Vulcan at Mr. Robinette's invitation. Right. So we had a Soviet journalist come down to report on the horrible, horrible conditions of what capitalism had wrought on this

West Virginia town, right? Mr. Andronov recalls being approached by a vociferous stranger who wanted to know whether he was a card-carrying communist. Yes. And he said, yes. Yeah, fucking shouts. Yeah. And that's how the first DSA chapter got started. That's actually kind of the point, man.

But Vulcan West Virginia chapters, chapter one. The fucking Twitter wire was the two hands shaking over a busted bridge. Yeah. Now, Yonah had done some. He covered a couple of events in the area before he had covered a united mind, worker strike at one point. And some guys tried to beat him up. And then the FBI guy who was sent to tail him ended up having to say.

The FBI guy having to be like, no, no, no, but you can't beat him up. That's our job. Yeah, just because we're chilled, Martin Luther King, Junior, doesn't mean we can't miss it. R.I.P. Jabuki's original account. So somehow the press at large got found out about this story, the story, right? And so headlines, quote, from Morgantown to Moscow, unquote.

Oh, boy. Talked about the town's predicament and Robinette's, you know, Robinette's gimmick paid off, right? The West Virginia legislature was highly embarrassed and announced the good day of the day that Andronov showed up that the Vulcan Bridge would be rebuilt at the state's expense. In the American system, there are four centers of power and each serves as a check on the other.

The legislative, the judiciary, the executive and the Soviet Union. That's why everything is falling apart, because you don't have the fourth one any more. It's so true. It's true, man. We'd have those $1,400 checks tomorrow with Soviet Union. They'd be $2,000 checks. Where's my money, Joey? Where's my money, Joey?

Oh, Jill Biden bought her husband treats and she was wearing a scrunchie and I'm just like, that's nice. Is it a $2,000 scrunchie? Like my $2,000. Where's my fucking money? You should try and write a post in about it. See if you can't get some of that old glamour, like, come back. Listen, I've got I've got one of those Russia whispers, but like, I'd stay the fuck away from it.

But that guy will have to be poisoned. I don't need that in my life. I'm perfectly happy here. He's no Brezhnev, which is not saying a lot, but he's no Brezhnev. So there are some folks in the town who are suspicious of Robinette's methods, but they were not that effective. Right. Oh, it worked.

What's the problem? Yeah, the gift towards in the mail. The state intended to send out bids later that year in summer of 1978, but no one seriously believed the bridge would be built until the first concrete was poured. Andronov said Andronov said he'd personally keep his spokes in Moscow updated on the progress of the bridge and said if the state didn't finish it, the USSR would.

OK, I have to say something here. This is a lot of bluster for just this. You know, I mean, like. Like the five of us or however maybe we got hit in the five of us and the extra Tom could like build this in an afternoon. I do like the idea, though, of this guy having like one of the red telephones to like, yeah, I mean, like, like from like a spike, they're still not building it, sir.

And just send again, like, whatever. A fucking Andronov comes in overhead. And a bunch of like paratroopers come down to the bridge, recording the tearing. I mean, like, I guess it's I guess it's a good thing that they had this Soviet journalist there, because, like, if nothing else, you have to rebuild the bridge just to take the weight of all of the FBI agents to follow the guy around.

I do sort of also like the idea of like the Soviets, like, testing, testing the bridge by dropping my air, dropping a tank on it. It looks good to me, comrade, as like the bridge collapses yet again. So that works as a pontoon bridge. Yeah. Oh, then I got to use the restroom. I'll be right back. God damn it. Go before we leave.

He just he never does this. Yeah, I mean, he always does this. Like, you know, there are people in the comments who are like, does Ross have like a serious bladder issue we should know about? And no, he doesn't. He just drinks a lot of beer. Well, good Lord. I keep refreshing my Twitter and the tweet that like,

you know how sometimes it doesn't really refresh? Praying for the guy who'd maybe drink a can of minute made lemonade in high school after giving him head, so I wouldn't get pregnant. Real American heroes. Ah, we live in the absolute most idiotic country on earth. So not only have you like had then had presumably awful sex, but you've had to drink a fucking shitload of awful. I kind of like minute made lemonade.

I use it as a mixer quite a bit McDonald's here. That's the only place that has it. And it's all about Coca-Cola. Yeah. Because why shouldn't your juice be owned by the cocaine death squad company? People got very mad at us on the the the Kursk episode for saying that the the Pepsi thing was true.

I saw that. And apparently it's a myth. Yeah, cry more, frankly. I cry cry more is is my response to a lot of these commentators. Oh, also, just for the cut, I was going to have to edit this out, but no, I see where they were coming from. I don't know why I was sniffing so much, man. I don't know.

I get yelled at a lot of the times for like my mic quality. And I'm just like, you know, my mouth noises. Well, I make mouth noises because it bothers people. But that's what that's what talking is. Yeah, but like the wrong kind of mouth noises. Oh, like that. Yeah, that's fantastic. My misophonia.

Sorry to the few commentators who have already told me about their misophonia. My bad in advance. Just just just beat me out there, too, I guess. So here's John Robinette. Looking good. Standing in front of the bridge being built. Yeah, this guy has never been sober. You know, it sucks about this, too.

What about like, you know, how Democrats are all just like, I was thinking about this and sort of about the seam of how there was this weird sort of blue maga shit. And the like build back better at how we actually should because America has always been great and we should have fried in our country. And this and that. I'm like, if it takes this guy imploring to like the greatest enemy of the United States at that time, please build me a bridge.

So someone actually does something. How the fuck could you be proud of that? And I just I'm really tired. I've been thinking about this on the drive home all day today about how frustrated I am, especially with Democrats refusal to acknowledge that America ever has any problems. I'm like, when they do, it's in this weird, sweeping, grandiose language that I hate. Yeah, like, it's a more perfect union or whatever.

They think they have to be Lincoln to talk about this stuff. Right. And they all, as opposed to just like, do what you say you're going to do and send people to $1,400 checks. I'm literally just like we said, a thousand dollar checks and you'll get those eight hundred dollar checks. The next hundred dollar check will be in your mailbox tomorrow and you will have those four hundred dollars. Exactly. It's a poor you negotiating against.

And you know what? Thank black women for. Yeah. It's just so frustrating to see like the math is like Trump gave you a hundred of the Democrats gave you fourteen hundred. So enjoy losing the House in twenty twenty two. Like because you're negotiating against no one. It's just it's that sort of insane shit that really bothers me. And I just like I said, I was just a thought that that sort of didn't

leave my head about how frustrated I am, especially like with, you know, talking on this podcast about like infrastructure and sort of cutting corners and that sort of thing. Yeah. Thing which always pays off is always cool, has no consequences downstream. Right. It's like I, you know, in Philly, we have a Pennsylvania, certainly our share of rotting infrastructure. It's just so goddamn depressing to look at. And I just, you know, green new deal being whatever,

Nazi, Communist, Socialist, Anarchist, Nonsense or not. Like it would be tight to get new bridges and to get new trains and to have jobs involved in creating those. And like the Democrats, bullshit, nonsense, condescending towards people in like Kentucky and people in central Pennsylvania, where they're just like, oh, well, you just need to learn new skills. And it's like, or, or, or I'd hear me out. We electrify out to Pittsburgh and we take everyone

who can like hold a shovel and we say, all right, motherfuckers, here's $40 an hour, go stand in that field for hours. It's not like it's not like these skills are outdated, right? Just because you don't like, we shouldn't be mining coal anymore. It doesn't mean that the stuff that makes you good at mining coal isn't useful for others. So it just appears to be doing exactly. Well, it's been confused that like folks who say we can't have like trains

in rural parts of America because of whatever bullshit raisin while they're like, you know, these parts of America are basically big spaghetti bowls of railroad tracks. You know what I've always thought is someone who knows how to like operate heavy machinery and work for a long amount of time in awful conditions. That guy's never going to like have any transferable skills. So you should probably like learn to code. You're never going to need that, right?

You're never going to need someone who knows how to fucking drive a giant fucking excavator, right? Yeah. What they've done here with all the railroads is turn them into walking trails. They're called rail to trails. It's like they do this in Europe, too. Do that here. You know, it'd be nice if they did like only one or two like that. But when you're taking huge quantities of like former rail infrastructure and just like, well, this is for walking now, I think it's kind of dumb.

Well, listen, I'm hearing everything you're saying, and I want you all to know that I'll be notifying our friends in Beijing. President Xi, people yearn for freedom. So anyway, the state starts building this bridge. This incredible whopping one lane, two hundred foot long bridge cost about one point six million dollars. Then in December, nineteen seventy nine, something happened. Oh, boy.

A very strange thing happened. Yes. Oh, boy. Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Well, podcast favorite Soviet Afghan war. We keep coming back to it because it's the funniest, grimmest and most revealing war in modern history. We would be living in a communist utopia if the Soviet Union had not done this. I'm slowly starting to be convinced of it.

Brezhnev on his deathbed tells them, hey, build that guy's bridge and the guy mishears him and he's like, what, invade Afghanistan? Well, OK. So we talked about the Soviet Afghan war a couple of times on this podcast. We mentioned the last episode. One of the things that happened is the United States boycott at the Moscow Olympics and there was a general and popular boycott in the USA of Soviet goods. Right. Now, the Vulcan Bridge had made national news.

And even though the Soviets weren't building it, people thought it was Soviet. The Soviets liked it or whatever. Yeah. So I mean, that's really just sort of saying the quiet part loud was being like, this thing does a public good, so therefore it's communist. Yes. Yeah. So residents of the town of Vulcan started getting bomb threats around the country because of their Soviet.

What are you going to fucking do? Are you going to get carried over the half built bridge? One bar. And some of the residents of Vulcan offered to blow it up themselves. Pure ideology. Oh, man, every resident, every resident of Vulcan demands to be like Vladimir Komarov just buried in an open casket, just a burnt husk of himself. You know, some of this is a coal mining town, so it's not hard to get a hold of dynamite.

You know, these aren't idle threats. John Robinette himself was actually forced to move two miles down the road to Edgerton to get away from his angry neighbor. So I say he was deposed as mayor of Vulcan and the pod just stopped already. It's hard out here in these streets. Nevertheless, the bridge was finished, right, and it still stands to this day. John Robinette, Yonah Andronov and a few state highway officials opened the bridge with a vodka toast on July 4th, 1980.

Imagine being the fucking Kentucky highway official who has to like do shots of vodka with a Soviet journalist in this self-proclaimed. Hey, Yonah, you're all right, man. No, Andronov, who was on hand to help inaugurate the bridge, said, let them fight over Afghanistan. We'll drink to the new bridge when I go back to Moscow. They'll be a part of me here in West Virginia over the tug fork. Oh, I mean, that's actually a pretty pointed criticism

of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for a Soviet journalist, but fucking Jesus. So anyway, the bridge is still there. Norfolk and Western is now Norfolk Southern. They still run the coal trains. They still block the only way in and out of the town. But I believe they are now legally required to split the train if they have to stop it there for a long period of time. Yes, the Soviets.

The back. And you know, there's always be a bridge there now. Yeah. And of course, West Virginia and Kentucky learned their lesson about fixing people's bridges. Thank God it never happened to get our next slide. You know, what would be hilarious is if like if like Robinette was like one of those KGB guys from the Americans that just like affected a perfect Appalachian accent.

So. Well, actually, you know, the thing is this this exact same shit is not happening just down the river in Nolan. Yeah, there's another bridge is the only way in and out of town, which you can't really use any more because it broke. So, you know, oh, thank God, they can still go to Vulcan. President Xi, save us. Well, that's that's the story. Good Lord. And what lessons can we learn from this?

Always get the Soviet Union to do your civil engineering projects because they stay up. Yes. Did the was the Mothman ever rumored to make an appearance before the this fight? He was busy in the Soviet Union doing the Dyatlov Pass incident. Oh, OK. Yeah. Better say, Mothman is engaged. Oh, fuck, we should have put we should have put the Dyatlov Pass incident in the news next time. Yeah.

It's interesting, you know, it's like as a historian, you say, what if, you know, what would have happened instead? And it is an interesting hypothetical to consider if the Soviet Union had invaded West Virginia instead of Afghanistan, like West Virginia and Mujahideen fighters. Yeah, I was going to say, what one is this sort of mountainous, inhospitable terrain? The other one is Afghanistan. Yeah, I mean, one of opioids in both.

West Virginia tribesmen. Local tribal leaders, yeah. Going to have an Appalachian Shura. That's what this has been. This has been an Appalachian Shura. Yeah. That was what the Hatfield McCoy war was, I mean. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Yes, we do. And we like to introduce it with a drop called Shake Hands with Danger, which I never have queued up on time.

OK. Today's Safety Third is from High Rise Construction. Yes. Oh, no. Oh, yes. Can I ask one thing real quick before you start? Yes. Are those wheels on a porta potty? Yes. It's fine. They've got brakes. I see brakes. OK, keep going. This is the porta potty just rolls away with you in it.

She dropped 13 stories to your death. Dear Roz, Alice and Liam. That's me. Yeah. Yeah, Liam. I have I have for you here a Safety Third, which is so blatantly wrong and yet very widespread throughout the construction industry. This Safety Third is, frankly, a time bomb. And eventually, there is going to be a catastrophic incident which causes major loss of life with this system.

I love how so many of these we're getting have just been obviously copy pasted to both us and the OSHA anonymous report form. And we're the only ones reading them. I am talking here about the Doka SKE series climbing framework system. It is by far one of the pinnacles of danger in the building construction industry and features a wonderful combination of high pressure hydraulics, large amounts of stored combustible materials,

inadequate means of egress, tall heights and inadequate fire suppression. It is also used everywhere in the world of high rise building construction. It seems fine. To begin, to begin, what does the Doka SKE series climbing framework system do? Well, in a nutshell, this is a climbing work platform. You can see this guy here that allows concrete workers to build the concrete core of a high rise building.

The concrete core of the high rise building contains all the building services of a building, right? Water, electrical, communication, elevators, so on and so forth. Also, the primary means of lateral load resistance for the building. You know, so that's what keeps the building stiff when the wind tries to blow. No, Richard, good. No, yes. Now, I will be changing details about the site to protect myself,

a lowly intern at the time and the guilty. But let's just say this new tower I worked on is going up somewhere on the west side of Midtown, Manhattan, and we'll top out at roughly a thousand feet above the foundation. Construction phasing was as follows. Concrete core of the building constructed by the Doka Climber would build one story of core wall per week, then jump itself up at the end of the week from the wall that had built the previous week to the wall that it would build.

The next one climbs up the thing it builds. Yeah, OK, yeah, the core walls of the building were divided into three non-nearconnected cells as shown in the attached diagram, which I forgot to put on. It looks something like this. OK, right. Yeah, that's easy. The construction of the steel superstructure on the outside of the building and the floors that span across the cells of the core wall lagged behind the climbing system, right?

So they're putting up a core with this guy. The rest of the building followed a couple of five floors below. Um. The so. From the floor, T minus five, top minus five, there was no infrastructure other than the staircase from the Doka Climber, which we'll cover later, providing services to the climbing, scaffold and form work, right? So there's no electrical umbilical cord.

There's no hard wire communications and there's no standpipe to the top of the building, right? So you can't fight a fire up there other than some CO2 fire extinguishers, right? I just don't have a fire. Yeah, I mean, well, you think you're pouring concrete. There was the fire load up there, right? And well, there were two plywood shanties airing a crew mess hall in offices for project management.

The part of the form work that touched the concrete was a plywood and petrochemical sheet made of God's God knows what flame of material. The walkways, the workers walked around while managing the poor and vibrating the wall were all made of wooden planks. The every day there were piles of plywood and planks that one always needs in construction. They were just lying around. The whole outside of the climber was covered in combustible blue safety netting. The kind of safety netting you want.

You know, let me get combustible safety now. And of course, there was occasional wild spill of hot hydraulic fluid from when the hydraulic system that repels the danger machine up leaks. Did they call this the danger machine? No, it's propels this danger machine up the building leak. No. I need to I need to format the I need to start going through. Yeah, what are you going to do is you're going to send us better written safety

thirds. No, we do not judge your safety thirds. I guess except when we do. But I promise not to judge your safety thirds from here on out. I'll try and fix them. OK, yeah, back to the actual recording. But all this pales in comparison to the last bit of danger. Remember when I said there was no electrical umbilical cord to provide power to this whole thing?

Well, you still need electrical power to operate your power tools, lights, the office in the shanties. And most importantly, you need electric power to operate the hydraulic pumps so the whole scaffold could go up. How do you do this without an electrical line direct to the main? No, big diesel generator. My idea is better. So there's a big diesel storage tank on top of the shack.

The plywood shack, which and again, there's no no standpipe connection. Moreover, there was a scantily enforced no smoking policy on the platform. And as a result, you would find cigarette butts all over the place because the workers did not want to go down five flights of stairs, wait for the man lift to take them down to ground level and walk off the site because it would take half an hour to take a smoke. Hey, not not with our former coal miners running the lift. Well, that's right.

I that must have been like that must be a common occurrence. You got to bring people up for the smoke break. Now, with the stage set for a rip roaring fire, we must now ask, how the fuck do you get off this thing? Well, there's two ways. Ring owned power shoes. Yeah, the first way is the service staircase. The way the crew typically goes in and out of the climber.

This is your typical scaffold staircase, except that it was not supported from the bottom, but instead from the top. The staircase hung from the top of the climber down five stories all the way to the T minus five level and only in cell one. And those aren't connected. So there's no way. OK. Yeah. So if someone would work in a cell two or three, they would first have to go all the way up to the top

where there were no interior cell walls in order to get down to the service staircase and sell a lot diesel tank is on fire. Step one, climb to roof. You see, I climb up towards the tank, which is on fire and then climb down. Seem sign. Now, the staircase being a scaffold staircase is rickety as all fucking hell. Wherever there was more than three people on the staircase,

which is five stories tall, the staircase would shake and vibrate from side to side. The staircase had a little posted sign, which was regularly ignored, which said that not more than five people at a time were to be using it, even though you could not see all the way up to the top of the stairs from the bottom and it would be your guess as to how many people were actually on the stairs. Considering that at any one time, there could have been anywhere in the neighborhood of 70 people on that platform. If everyone started running for the stairs at once,

it is not exactly unimaginable. The weight of all the workers might shear off the pins, holding the stair tower in place and send a stair tower full of construction workers following 50 floors there on time. Oh, Jesus Christ. Though not as scary as this seems, it was also fun to walk. Though not as scary as this, though, please for my own safety. It was also fun to walk to the stair to walk to the stair tower

from the last finished piece of floor, spanning cells across a rickety gang plank, which at least had rails and looked down an elevator shaft all the way to the bedrock below. No, thank you. This is this is the same principle I have with the like not being underground thing. I don't want to be up there, man. Don't don't make me do that. You can't pay me enough to go up the thing. I stopped working on high rises for a reason.

Yeah, I'm podcasting instead, which is a smart move. I got into podcasts, but very much, much safer. Very few workplace injuries, which can occur while podcasting. On the other hand, I don't know who I would file workers comp to. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Second and safer option was to clamber over the mass of the tower crane over to the mast of the tower crane, which is in cell number two. Find some way to get on to a misaligned platform

like the one shown in the attached image. I didn't attach that one because I was confused. This is what happens when we add the safety thirds ten minutes before we start saying I need to start going in and editing this. And while trying not to miss your step, climb onto the tower crane that runs through a hole in the floor of the climber. Climb onto the ship ladder types, stairs on the crane and use the crane to make your way down to earth.

OK, so just do a fucking platform level, then. Yes. Unfortunately, it will likely take the blood of incident innocent construction workers, firefighters and people getting crushed. Or it is a construction workers. We will let them use the S. Slur. This is this is part of the French foreign legion. This is just an extension of Liam's feud with Antifata. Sean, I'll get you Sean.

I'll get you. And people getting crushed and or burned by falling debris to force changes to this climbing scaffold system. To any engineers out there, make sure you always have a stand pipe that makes it all the way to the top of your high rise. During every phase of construction, always store as little combustible material as possible and look out for foreseeable misuse. Now, just to leave this one on a slightly lighter note,

one might ask if there's no plumbing out here, how does everyone poop? Oh, no. And the answer is you use this crane, liftable portage on. Oh, no. Yeah, I've taken some danger shits in my life, but like hanging an air off of like a crane mounted. What's the party? Have you seen the?

Is that going to bring it down to the surface for cleaning, but they don't realize someone's. Have you seen the toilets on the fourth rail bridge? Yes. Yes. You got tagged in that quarter of it. I get lots. Yeah, just no, I don't want to work at heights and I especially don't want to like shit at heights.

Although, I guess working at heights would take care of that part for me because I would just look down and just like, oh, yeah, no, I don't have to worry about this anymore. It's like that classic picture of those guys having lunch on the beam just in there. I hate that shit. Now, imagine, imagine poop. Yeah, all of those guys are just like they're fucking min-maxing this shit, that sandwich at one end, shitting out of the other.

Just like purged just so on the beam. I imagine it would be fairly easy because you'd be so terrified. You just shit yourself constantly. Imagine working at ground level. That's where you got to wear the heart out. Yes. Oh, God. I hate that. It feels so bad.

Walked on the head by a turd. It's more of a like clonker of splash. Oh, it's a splash. You know, it's a splash. It depends on it depends on what they had for lunch. Thanks, Ross. I got I got a question at that. Hot this shit.

Is it like throwing a penny off the Empire State building that old urban legend? What did you say? It's kind of like a question to your hand. I imagine the terminal velocity of a turd depends on the size and shape of it. All right, someone's got someone in the comments has got to know because the comments section knows everything,

except how not to bug me for breathing wrong. So if you if you know, get in touch. Yes. Speaking of which. Oh, next episode is on the common areas bridges. Yeah. Mm hmm.

And I think we have we have we have a wonderful new way to get in touch with us. Liam, what the hell is our P.O. box? Oh, fuck, hold on. Put it on the screen in post, I guess. Yes. OK. Well, just fucking John Madden it over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

I'm waiting on messenger to learn to write to. Mess it. Shut up. Whatever it is also how you. What? What? Oh. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I just put it at the discord. Oh, Christ. So someone said that. OK. Well, there's your problem podcast. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one nine one oh six P.O. box four zero one seven eight.

Yes. You can send us things in the mail now. Yes. They will not reach me. Yeah. Send them on. So. Send your goodies.

Send fucking like hard hat stickers and pins and stuff. And for that matter, that's how you contact the true ability workers party. I don't send any bombs because of our communists bridges. We'll go. We'll go. We'll go drive down to Whitesburg and deliver the precious cargo. Yes. We're going to be in Kentucky next month.

Maybe. That's a good one. Yeah. Well, Alice. Yeah. Two thirds of a two thirds of a conference. Oh, yeah. Come visit us.

Gang. Oh, yeah. That'd be fun. Tom and Terris, do you have commercials before we go? Um, check us out on Patreon. Um, we are on there as true ability workers party. You can find us on there. Um, and sound cloud, iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, all the, all the good places.

Hell yeah. We also have a patron. You can give us money for that. Uh, I keep meaning to do the next page for an episode. I will get on that now. Uh, what else? What else? What else?

Uh, my oral history of dip and snooze either Thursday or Friday this week. Yeah. And we also have an email because people were complaining at us how to submit safety thirds. The way you do that is by emailing us at WTYP pod at gmail.com. I very rarely check my DM. So I will not say it. Yes. And also if you email us, uh, Liam's probably answering it.

Please make your safety thirds legible to Justin when he's doing it in the 10 minutes before we start recording. Yes. So, you know, punchy. All right. I think that was a podcast. It was a podcast. Sounded like a podcast.

All right. Um, I guess that's the end. Bye everybody. I will stop my recording. Comrade Brezhnev, please liberate us. Yes.