Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 67: Armored Trains

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

my train is fight Listen to Lions Led by Donkeys: https://soundcloud.com/user-798629330 and subscribe to their patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 YOU ALREADY SENT US ANTHRAX so please don't bother in the future thanks

Yeah, I've heard of trains. Oh, I got to start my local recording. Fuck. God damn it, Liam. I withdraw my. Yeah, Liam. Off the stage. You're the giant. Oh, yeah, that's me. Well, ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, non-binary pals. Your favorite. Yay, Liam podcast. I was going to drink a fifth of bourbon on this show because I thanks for the money. I don't I don't have any alcohol in the house except for some gin.

You don't you ever run in there somewhere? There is. I'm not going to drink that. I am not drinking alcohol this month. My concession here because I think if you drink alcohol during Ramadan, you get like fucking dunked directly into hell. I I'm just not drinking because it's 11 a.m. where I live. Cowardice. Yeah.

Okay. Well, I guess here we are. Welcome to. Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosnick. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go. I am Alice school. Well, Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him and to all the commenters saying how great I am

in the last YouTube video. Thanks a bunch. Appreciate you. We have a guest. And to those of you who still complain, I'm coming for you. I have to quickly undo that. Hmm. I guessed.

Hello. Hello. I'm Joseph Cassavian. My pronouns are he and him. Are you going by Joseph now? If my agent's asking, yes. Joey K. Joey K.

Joseph Cassavian, host of the podcast Lions led by Donkeys, author of the Hooligans of Canada. Thank you for being a better intro than I am. I don't do this for a living. All right. All right. So now Joe, you, you were a tanker, right? You did tank stuff.

I did do tank stuff. Yes. No, no. I just want to pitch this to you. What if your tank were a tanker? You were a tanker. You were a tanker. You were a tanker.

You were a tanker. You were a tanker. You were a tanker. You were a tanker. I just want to pitch this to you. What if your tank were a lot less maneuverable? That is a really low bar. Because especially as someone who is an M one,

they're not very mobile because they destroy most roads that they're on because they're fucking huge. And to make that less mobile seems less than ideal. What if you could only go in two directions? Yes. Sometimes only one really. What if I was steam powered? I feel like this makes me very easy to murder.

Now, what if your tank accelerated very slowly and also decelerated very slowly? It would just be a tank, bros. Actually, the Abrams is pretty fucking agile for all of its flaws. It gets going really fast. I mean, it does have a jet engine in it. But I feel like at that point you just have a very heavily armed and heavy armored battering ram.

Now, what if your tank ran on coal? I'm going to say about a fan of this one. Because as a lower raking person, I would 100 percent be shoveling that shit. And this sounds terrible. Today we're going to talk about armored trains. Hell yes. Yes.

If our two podcasts had a child. Yes. Our beautiful podcast, some. Lines led by problems. We're all very proud of our beautiful, large sun lines led by problems. Seen on the screen in front of us, this is an armored train which Winston Churchill was on,

which you can see had a slight derailment. And it's now being pulled out by a regular train. Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill on it when it happened. So it's unfortunate that it only was a slight derailment. Yeah, exactly. I just was thinking that he has a way of making everything around him fuck up like this.

So it's like very on brand. Not just touch, but for mass casualty events. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The murder touch. Can anyone do here do a Churchill voice? No. Okay. I'm too sober for that.

I can do Kennedy. Yeah, what if JFK was on this train? So Churchill wrote, nothing looks more formidable and impressive than an armored train, and nothing is in fact more vulnerable and helpless. It was only necessary to blow up a bridge of culvert to leave the monster stranded far from home and help at the mercy of the enemy.

Yeah, but it's armored. You can hang out there for weeks. Yeah, that's a train. You just go to the buffet, Kyle. Congratulations. You're now just a pillbox. This is really just a mobile pillbox when you think about it. Well, we'll get to that.

But first we have to do the goddamn news. God, I love that picture. You've ever seen the movie Death in Venice? Giuliani's house got raided. I have no idea why or what happened because I was busy putting the slides together. Probably because if there's many crimes. I would guess. Allegedly, yeah.

This picture is just the meme of what if you bust and she keeps sucking. They took all his shit, all his electronic devices, one cell phone, one iPad, one laptop. They left after about 45 minutes. Was this the FBI? Yes, they also executed a search warrant at the Washington area home. I'm literally just reading the news. Why are you going to say?

It was close to Giuliani. Don't say who is married to and law partners with former top Washington D.C. for a prosecutor. Just did you know what represented Ukrainian oligarch? I'm not even going to try it. But I'll be true. Fertash itself is a subject of a federal indictment of the United States. Are you saying that while he was accusing Hunter Biden of Ukraine related crimes,

he was doing Ukraine related crimes. We all do a little bit of Ukraine recrated related crimes. An oligarch to catch an oligarch. The only thing that can stop the Ukrainian crime is another Ukrainian crime. Yes. It's a tweet from December 22nd. Giuliani, I want to remind you, guys, went to law school and was a lawyer and in fact worked for the center district of New York,

the same people now prosecuting him. They want to seize my emails. No reason. No wrongdoing. Attorney client privilege question work. It's not like I understand that because of my parents, I didn't go to law school. But no. As someone who regrettably did all I can say is that like, I don't know what's going on

with Giuliani. He's been like this for a good decade at least. If you're going to tell someone, hey, I did a crime, tell your priest. Rudy Giuliani is like the best example of forgetting all the shit you learned in law school who isn't me. I think what they wanted to do is they probably want to seize Giuliani's emails so that they can pass so they could say they have them and then pass off Hillary Clinton's emails as his.

That's the deep state at work right there. Yeah, you're going to find an email that's like, Yo, should we do Benghazi signed Rudy? I mean, what is the possibility here? And I've heard this before. What if he was always a dog shit lawyer and he just has no idea? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is very funny. The idea that like the mob prosecutions in New York only required like a dumber than average guy who wasn't a very good lawyer to carry them off. You mean Rudy Giuliani? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but he did also fuck his cousin. What?

Lots of people fucked their cousins. I ain't stuck with those guys. This is the hill we're dying on. It's cousin fucking. I feel a lot more pushed back at the cousin fucking than I expected. Yeah. They were all cool. I didn't know it was a Hapsburg podcast.

Yeah, we all follow Edward Hapsburg on Twitter. God's children in the dark. Great. Great. Okay. In other news. In other news. Yes.

Turg's man. Turg's man. Oh shit, it's my mentions. The Turk lusts in his heart for Vienna and also now calling Joe Biden a dog of a piece of shit in his mentions. Yeah. Yeah. You're on the right track.

You're on the wrong. Erdogan also said he's going to recognize America's genocide of Native Americans. Oh shit. As if the two were equal. It's interesting because I'm in a master's program right now for the history of genocides and I happen to be Armenian. And I also am very currently in a class about the Native American genocides. Like the idea that he's going to recognize the Native American genocide.

One, great. Two, not the same because recognizing the Armenian genocide is literally illegal in Turkey. While I am in school learning about the Native American genocide at a school that's like down the street from Liam. So not equal here. A Jew in fact. It's a Jewish university. Yeah.

We'll get you. We'll get you. And much like the great conspiracy theories that like as Aries and Turks have about Armenians, I joined forces with Jews to become more powerful. That's right. And we're happy to have you. It's not the Jewish-Armenian space laser. Hell yeah.

We only bring more cologne. That's fine. We are not known as a good-smelling people. You know, I have to admit, I was very skeptical that Joe Biden was going to recognize the Armenian genocide after a hundred and six years, especially because like Obama said he was going to do it and didn't. But you know, it's like that onion thing is like the worst fucking guy, you know, makes a good point.

Like, I guess you can slap an I in at the end of your last name, Biden, but I'm still not inviting you over for dinner. Joe Bidenian. You know, he introduced himself to a fucking table full of Greek diplomats with, hi, I'm Joe Bidenopoulos once, so he will do it. He will do that. God damn it, dude. He will fully call himself Joe Biden.

Is that enough? I have to share a first name with him. God damn you, assimilation. Joseph Robinette. Yeah, Joseph Robinette. That's you. That's you. Yeah.

Legally changing my first name to Armin. Does that make us the Secret Service? Yeah, that's right. Mr. President, get down. Oh, no. I hope I have a sweet nickname. I know all the presidents have really weird nicknames when it comes to code words. Fuck ass.

Fuck ass is in the White House. Oh, if you guys see the movie, fuck ass is down. The guy just like mustering into the slave. Fuck ass is in the executive present. Oh, yeah, that's honestly best nickname I've ever had. I did have ass for the longest time as a nickname when I was in the military because like I have ass right in the middle of my last name and soldiers are perpetually children.

So like it's ass. God damn it. I don't even want to hear it. Rosniak. Hello. Imagine having a funny name. I can't relate. Especially if the people out there learn my full name.

Hmm. Your true name. Your word of power. Personally, I'm just I'm pissed that my initials just did like act like fucking Kathy. I kind of like that. My initial spell L J S L A. And now I invite your comments to be your fancy boy.

Yeah. Double barreled last name with two middle names because my parents knew they were going to have one kid and really wanted to make it count. All right. I think that was Mad X 34. Talks mad. Talks mad. So today we're going to talk about armored trains.

But first we have to ask what is armored trains? It's a train. It's it's when you take trains, but you armor them. Yes. Okay. That was light. Yeah. We're going to talk about next week.

We're going to talk about a couple kinds. One is like the armored train, which is sort of like a tank on rails. Right. The other one is railroad guns. That's big guns on rails. Right. And then the third one we're going to talk about is everything that doesn't fit into those categories.

Right. Nice. So you got like railroad guns down here. These were used by the French and WW one. Here we see a bunch of Estonians have commandeered Toby the tram and are pointing guns out of it. Yeah. It's cool.

I love I love a murder caboose. Yes. I'm kind of sad that like, you know, America sucks in infrastructure. But if there's like one thing we would do is give these the cops and we haven't done it. Yeah. One of these rolls up outside your house and it's like police fucking and it's got like the autism breast cancer awareness thing.

A fucking armored train just rolls up with a 150 millimeter anti-tank gun and blows your dog up. Also shooting you pamphlets about, I don't know, stand up to cancer. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just hanging out in my compound with my many wives watching the ACF build a railroad line towards me. Like, oh, that's not good. It's going to be really bad when they finish that. The Waco siege as extended vacation Bible school.

Why are they putting a flamethrower at the front of it? They set up a bunch of camps for navies outside my house. I'm going to be really screwed when the ATF shows up in a month and a half. I touch a full group to my pistol and the ATF train bussing through my. Some guy is out there. Like if the armored bulldozers, the Israelis used to knock over Palestinian towns, but doing that to put up signals. They also occasionally run people over with those.

I want to think about the opposite end of this. Now that I've mentioned the ATF, which is, okay, we can all agree on the ACF having armored trains, but is an armored train licensable by the by the ATF? Is that like any other destructive device? Do you have to get a tax stamp for your armored train? It's just one. It's just the one that you got to put it in the boiler. Yeah.

I'm a class one railroad and also I have a concealed carry license. I wouldn't really call it concealed. I mean, technically like that, the killdozer guy, right? That was like, he made his own weird tank, but also all of the guns were totally legal. So if you build an armored train and just use like hunting rifles out of it, it's technically like a tree stand. Are you then not violating potentially state law about shooting, about hunting from a moving vehicle?

I'm assuming we put this train in Texas and we're good. All right. We're hog hunting from trains. In that case, you can just switch out for an AR 15 because it might be the 30 to 50 fucking federal hog guy. I think you might be governed under the the AAR at that point, as opposed to any kind of federal rules or state rules. You're just like being sort of, you see outside the Navi camps, which they're constructing

towards you. You see a bunch of guys in different blue windbreakers yelling at each other because they're not sure whether you're the ACS problem, the Department of Transportation's problem. Yeah. Department of fuck ass. Alice, you put this slide in. Please tell me what's going on. It's Dracine's.

This is a free bonus slide. Dracine is a little, it's a darling little tank on rails. It's adorable. We literally just did the thing we threatened Joe with in the first slide. We put a tiny little tank on rails. It's technically, some of these are self-propelled. Some of them are just, you have to have a big fucking steam locomotive behind it. They're pushing it.

Come on, little buddy. Come on, little buddy. Most of what these are used for, it turns out, is escorting armored trains. So if you're running an armored train down line, you run one of these in front of it and one of these behind it. And that way, if somebody tries to blow up the railroad line or whatever. The blocker cars. Yes.

Literally, yes. Those guys hanging out at the top can just jump out and chase after them. This, this looks like a, if you were a tank crewman, which granted this is like World War One. So being in a tank crew already sounds miserable. Like, and you've pissed off. So I'm like, oh, you're going in the fucking mini tank train. Fuck you.

I'm just, I'm just going around the tracks like this guy right here. Just going exterminate, exterminate. And what is the one on the top left? It's just like a cup. Yeah. It's a bathtub. It's just guys being dudes. It's like a tea cup ride in rails.

It's got a machine gun, but none of those guys are in uniform. They're just like hanging out. That's just like me and the boys after COVID. We're all going to put on a bowl of hats and like go ride an armed bathtub around. For security's sake, we should jam as many people as possible in here. If you can't fall over, it's not armored. You will simply hide behind your friend. It looks goofy until you do a drive by.

All right. So I thought we'd start with a basic breakdown. The pros and cons of armored train. Okay. Let's start with the pros. Looks super dope. Looks cool. Looks cool as hell.

Definitely looks cool. Heavy armor. That's good. Protects you from getting blown up. Many guns. Gun big, many, many of gun. You can just carry as much ammunition as you want. You can just like hold it back and forth.

You just throw it in the back. You don't have to worry about losing. Well, I guess you do have to worry about having your tracks blown off, but not the same way as the tank. Not the same way. Worst case scenario, it breaks and it's a pill box. That's the worst case scenario. We'll get to that.

No shortage of crewmen. That's for sure. Oh yeah. Yeah. There's lots of people being used to run these things. It's like a big, it's like a land battleship, you know. And about as useful. Cons.

I'm taking that to mean extremely. It accelerates slowly. It stops even more slowly. So if you see something wrong with the track ahead, not good. This is largely before like stabilized guns, right? So you kind of like shoot on the move with this thing. I think you can. It's just like you can, but you just kind of hit stuff.

Not accurately. Yeah. You don't miss. You simply suppress. You can't, you can't really switch the tracks without stopping, right? So if you know that the switch is aligned wrong, you got to stop the armored train. Someone's got to get out, throw the switch, get back on. You keep going, right?

Most of them required coal. Even worse than the coal is most of them, you know, that since the steam engine needs lots and lots of water, which sometimes is easy enough to procure. Sometimes it's very, very difficult, especially since they're very heavy. The steam locomotive is using up more water than usual. So a lot of times they really limits the range. You also need a crap load of men to operate these things, right? So, you know, it doesn't operate.

These things don't work very well, except in very controlled conditions, which, you know, not really a war thing. We're known for its very, very ease of control. Yes. Nevertheless, they gave it a shot for a long time. I like this one. This is a Russian one we're going to talk about later. You can see here, the two guns.

And then you can see here's 17 and a half kilovolt overhead electric wire, which I guess they're shooting through. Absolutely no problems here. Nice. Yeah. I mean, they slap all these guns and armor on it. And I assume they didn't do anything differently to the engine or the braking capacity in any way.

So it's like, no, no, we're going to make it heavier in every way possible. Dimitri, when you say we shoot through electricity line, we make outside of train electric. No one can touch. They're slowed down method as the Grand Theft Auto. They simply put the turrets in the direction of where they need to just fire repeatedly until it slows down. God, that takes me back.

I'm thinking they aim the turret too high up and they accidentally swing into the wire. Oh, a hundred percent. I did that in the tank and I didn't need it for power. Like you just can't fucking see out of the optics for shit. So I guess we sort of start seeing armored trains at first in the Civil War, right? The American Civil War. The War of Northern Aggression.

The War of Northern Aggression. Oh, my fucking soul hurt. OK, so, you know, railroads are the main supply lines for the Union Army, right? The Confederate Army also had railroads, but they were all of different gauges in the south and they're all inoperable with each other. So the supply lines in the south are really fucked up, right? Good.

Yeah. Owned. Tail of the type there. The supply lines in the south are really fucked up. Yes. Well, the thing is all the supplies were in the north. You know, that's another issue. Well, you can go and send like irregular forces of cavalry up north to go and get them,

but then the downside is all of those guys get demobilized and become terrorists. Yes. And then they get shot. I don't know if that's a downside for the south, but... So, nevertheless, the Union and Confederate armies tried to go beyond logistics and actually use the railroad for active fighting, right? Just pulling up on a siding way down there. So I think this guy here is the first railroad gun ever built.

So you got this 32 pounder brook naval rifle, which is, you know, a cannon, right? On this big wooden frame on wheels, right? Looking good as hell. Yeah. Well, it's the Confederates, though. So you got... I retract this. Looking bad as hell.

No, he looks bad as hell. Yeah. Yeah. This actually sucks. Looks bad. I don't know anything about this, except it looks like... Kind of like a hole. Just a hole indicated apparently fires there.

It looks like old wooden playground equipment. Yeah. I like how the guy apparently looks like he's sitting in like a camp chair next to it. Yeah. Sorry, Tim. We can't play no more. Daddy's got a fire and some yanks. You've got to be comfy.

Daddy's got to go do a sleigh table. I've got like an occasional table for my mint julep here. Yeah. That was the Confederate one. The Union also came up with their own railroad gun. This was called the dictator, right? Jesus Christ, boys. Man, how come the other one looks way cool?

Just slap a fucking mortar on tracks. No, we don't need any armor. We're good. We're good. Yeah. Final car, best car. We'll draft the replacements. We don't give a shit.

It's a 13-inch siege mortar on a flat car, a really short flat car. The first time they fired it, it broke the flat car. Oh, Jesus. Yes. That's the kind of ingenuity I come to expect. So they put it on a stronger flat car, or I don't know if it's a stronger flat car. I think it just might be a shorter flat car. And then it worked fine.

It looks like it's on a mine cart. I love it. Honestly, yeah. Did any of these, like, change the course of the war in any, like, appreciable way? Not really. I mean, this one, sort of. This is the most successful one, was the Union's railroad battery, right? You can see it's sort of like it's a pillbox on wheels, right?

So the most crucial link in the Union's supply lines to the north was the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad, which today is the northeast corridor, right? In 1861, it was this sort of disjointed system involving a ferry crossing on the Susquehanna River. You had to take trains through the streets of Baltimore, one car at a time with teams of horses, which was kind of risky because there's a lot of Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore. Oh, yeah. There was a slave state throughout the war. Didn't Lincoln almost get assassinated in Baltimore when he finally got him in DC?

Yeah. They had to take him through at night under, like, you know, just secretly because, you know, there was so much risk that someone would just, you know, pop him off, right? You know, they wasn't full of consent. Oh, OK. I mean, he was not a bad-looking man. So we will track you down and suck you off. Just a secret service, 19th century or today threat profile for somebody trying to pin

the president down and suck him off. Taken would have been a lot weirder. We have a tactically ascertain he intends to do Felatio to POTUS. Boy, howdy. This one's a doozy. It'll suck the soul off. Yeah. Am I right?

I'm just getting drilled with a four before. The Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore was, of course, a common point of, like, you know, casual sabotage, right? Casual sabotage. Yeah. Recreational sabotage. Recreational sabotage and Confederate sympathizers would also try and, you know, pick off railroad workers, fixing the tracks at a distance of the rifles.

That's rude. That is very rude. Yeah. So the solution was Baldwin locomotive works came to the rescue with a modified baggage car with armor plating, right? And they put a 24 pound howitzer in there and 50 ports for riflemen around the car, right? Imagine the fucking hearing damage you get from firing a 24 pound cannon in a baggage

car that's had a bunch of sheet metal like. On the bright side, they always suffer at once, baby. Yeah. Exactly, right? Yeah, guys, every time you fire. One thing you might note about the railroad battery is in itself is very, very armored and it has this very flamboyant civil war era locomotive pushing it. With a spot catcher.

Yeah. Conspicuously unarmored. So, you know, this thing is essentially for intimidation more than anything else, right? But it worked pretty good. They were able to keep the railroad under a better state of repair once they had this thing around to sort of protect railroad workers, right? Yeah, you don't want to snipe at the guys fucking straightening rails or whatever. If this thing can come running down things, you might just get, you know, 24 pounds worth

of shot and you would probably feel so good. I got to imagine the conductor and the in the train pushing. It's like, wait, I have to do what? Why don't I get in the armor? Yeah, exactly. Generally speaking, that is a solid, solid gothic pointed arch cab right there. I'm sure it made it. The last use of gothic arches in battle until warhammer 40 K also like if if you're a train

engineer at this point, everything in your training and your life experience has been if there's a massive explosion in front of you, that's a good time to jump off the train. Yes, and you just have to keep going because no, it might not be the boiler. It's just it's the giant cannon that they're firing off in front of you. Yeah. So they the Confederates did manage to capture this in 1864 and they destroyed it because they're past cases. Yeah, they're haters.

This was one of two problems on the Union supply lines north of the Mason Dixon line. The other one, of course, being the Camden and Amboy Railroad, who colluded with the state of New Jersey to charge excessive transit duties on Union shipments heading south in order to keep New Jersey taxes low. Now, Jersey really hasn't changed, has it? I know, right? A hilariously corrupt boy. I just wanted to shove in my favorite quote on the state of New Jersey from Charles Sumner.

New Jersey is the valley of humiliation through which all travelers north and south from the city of New York to the city of Washington must pass. And the monopoly, like a Pollyon, claims them all as subjects saying, for all that country is mine and I am the prince and God of it. We love it when senators would make a classical illusion. And then they got beaten, beaten with a cane, right? Yes. Not for this, though.

I'm starting to think that may have been less to do with his his abolitionism and more to do with the fact that he kept referencing stuff like a Pollyon. I'm not beating him because of a stance on slavery and beating him because I don't like him. He's just annoying. So after the Civil War, armored trains are used a couple of times in the Boer War, which we mentioned in the first slide, this is when Churchill got to get his shit rocked.

One of the times. One of the times. Unfortunately, it's like the one time you're kind of cheering for the Boers. Like, why couldn't you have killed Churchill? When I use in the early 1900s, this in 1912 was the Bull Moose Express, right? I'm sure that's good. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, it's very progressive, right? Sure. Yeah.

Oh, crap. So this is during the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek strike of 1912. You know, this is a West Virginia minor strike before Blair Mountain, but part of the Cold Wars, you know, the miners at mines near the Paint Creek demanded compensation equal to other mines in the area to be allowed to shop at places other than the company store and a couple of other things. Communism.

Those ungrateful hillbillies. I was about to say hillbilly communists. The management refused. The miners went on strike. The management then started evicting miners and their families from rented houses. And they started bringing in scabs using a train called the Bull Moose Express. This is right. Yeah, this is right when Roosevelt started the progressive party.

So, you know. And this was literally just like slapping like a Black Lives Matter sticker on the side of the Paveway bomb, right? Yeah. So this this was a train made out of an armor plated locomotive, a passenger car and a box car with two door gunners. It seems a bit unnecessary. Yeah, I'm a strike break.

Yeah, I'm a strike breaker. What do you do? I'm a door gunner. I'm a door gunner. You have a helicopter? No, it's a train. If you could still get away with this, there would just be a line of rail around like the Tesla factory. And when these would just be circling at 24 seven. Can we sell?

Can we design and sell steam train door gunner patches? Oh, I hope so. These these these door gunners were from the Baldwin Felts Detective Agency, sponsored by, you know, the mine owners and members of the local progressive party. Wouldn't even spring for the Pinkerton's budget cuts. They spent all the money on the door gunner. Yeah, well, Baldwin Felts kind of specialized in mine strikes.

Oh, God. All the miners were holed up in these camps with their families. You know, beatings and shootings were common in these tent cities. Mostly on the part of management, right? And after another series of escalations, you know, Mother Jones showed up, recruited a whole bunch more miners into the strike. She she started a liberal news magazine. I I mean, eventually it became liberal.

Oh, man. So I know a three thousand man March descended on Charleston, West Virginia, where the men read a formal declaration of war to Governor Glaskock. Right. Governor what? Governor Glaskock. OK. Yeah. Said this is West Virginia.

You get some weird names. So over the next several months, starting in September, there were a few declarations of martial law, then revocations of that declaration. The governor forcibly disarmed both the miners and management while the strike continued to grow and the tent city got bigger and bigger. Now, as much as, you know, the disarming sort of lower tensions a bit, strikers were forbidden to congregate. They were subject to military trials.

And after a long winter hold up in tents, the miners wound up in a scuffle with the Baldwin Fells detectives at a town called Mucklow. And that left at least one casualty. Well, West Virginia sure knows how to name them. Yeah. So in retaliation, the next day, with the sheriff's blessing, the Bull Moose Special rolled slowly through the tent city with just the machine guns blaze in the whole way. Oh, it's a war crimes machine.

Yeah, that's a war crime machine. The only infrastructure we can build. So incredibly, only one man was killed, a miner named Cesco Estep. The that sounds like somebody made up a name to me. And he was he was a miner living in a house next to the encampment. He was on strike, but, you know, I don't know. I don't think he was a leader or anything. And, you know, after this, they reimposed martial law.

They arrest Mother Jones, a whole bunch of other stupid stuff happens, which doesn't not a lot of productive stuff happens from this particular strike, unfortunately, but the miners did learn a tactic which was to rip up the tracks after the train passed. Nice. Well, so much for that investment. Yeah, yeah, it works. It works once.

Of course, one time. So it began a long tradition of stopping armored trains. Yeah, which is apparently very easy to do. Yes. So now we move on to WW one. This shit looks like it's had a fallout. It's this is the war that didn't have the Nazis in it, right? Thank you, Ross.

Yes, just to clarify the war wars. I mean, to a fair, a lot of the Nazis were still in it. They just weren't Nazis yet. Yeah, that's true. Is that does that's a U.S. And is that a Navy? That isn't there's a Navy railroad gun. Yes, the Navy was just fucking around in the first one.

Like, yeah, I'm just going to I'm just going to buy a bunch of fucking blimps and also a railroad gun, I guess. Is it because it's like a repurposed like naval cannon? Yes. The Nazis did that in the dying days of World War Two. Yes, I was experimental was putting naval cannons on tanks. It didn't go great. No, I could imagine that turns out you can't do that.

This is the U.S. Navy Mark One Railway Mount, they call it. Again, built by the Baldwin locomotive works. We did it. This was actually a relatively simple theory of operation here, which is, you know, basically you take the gun out, you aim it, you fire it a couple of times. And if someone like, you know, sees your position,

you just withdraw the gun into a railroad tunnel. Oh, OK. And there's no tunnels around conveniently for you. Oh, well, you don't use it there. Oh, you use something else. It seems quite limited. Yeah. Well, it worked pretty well in France. You know, but one of the things about World War One is that there's not

too many armored trains in use in this war, which you'd think because it was the earlier war, it would have more of them. But the doctrine wasn't really developed yet. They hadn't gotten there. Yeah. You know, Austria, Hungary tried to fight Italians with them. That's about it. Successfully or not really. Famously, the two most competent sides of that war.

Yeah. General Luigi Cadorna, brains genius. Time for a fifteenth battle of the Asonzo. They really turn in a corner. Highly recommend the lines led by Donkey's episode on same. Oh, yeah, we actually just released the first the two on Conrad van Hotsendorf, because of fucking Bora. You can see one of these guns. It's at the US Navy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Actually, back when I was in high school and I was on the rowing team, I would go past this on the Anacostia River every day. It's a threat. You stay on the fucking river. Yeah, exactly. Water gun meat land gun. And then this is an Austro-Hungarian armored train here that I don't know anything about.

Not a boy. Yeah. You can tell it's a great piece of technology when it has that many fucking angles. Yes. It's like a lot of this camouflage for the railroad. It's a lot like the tank that the German Empire tried to build. And I think they end up making like three of them total. And they're like, this fucking sucks. Let's just steal the British one.

Speaking of stealing. Mm hmm. We're going to. So there was one political faction in Europe in the early 1900s who really, really, really liked armored trains. Who could that have been? That was the Bolsheviks. So can I please get more of the East is red?

Oh, fuck, I don't have the fuck. Where's the where do I have the East is red? That comes later. Ah, East is red. Do I have it on the T or I have it on the E East is red. OK. Thank you. The Red Army operated no fewer than 110 armored trains

throughout the Russian Revolution and the Civil War. Some of them were even standardized, but the vast majority were sort of improvised by workers and naval engineers. Me and the boys have formed ourselves into a commune. We've killed all of our officers, and then we've just started welding sheet metal onto stuff. And then we're just going to drive it down the tracks of the capitalists. Now, I have a serious question here, which is, given that this is

an improvised mobile weapon of war with a mount with mounted cruise-served weapons on it that's like designed expediently by people who are not necessarily part of an organized military force. Are these technicals? I think it's got too much armor to be a technical. It's not a high looks. Yeah. The train just rolls past you with like a one plumbing on one of the box.

So you're like, what the fuck? I don't think it's supposed to be there. I'm just so happy these communes existed because finally one that I'd fit in with. So another thing is in Moscow during the early part of the revolution, the Bolsheviks had a fleet of armored trams. How? Yes. Both as both as personnel carriers, but they had a couple that were small artillery platforms.

How? Yes. Give me an armored tram. Oh, yeah. He rings the little bell twice in order to signal it's time to fire. They do. Building sassages gets torn clean off. In 50 years, when we finish our tram system here in Hawaii, I hope one of them is armored just in case. Yeah, that's the the tourist repellent. So the the Bolsheviks sort of come up with

a doctrine for how to use these things, right? They have the heavy armored train and the light armored train, right? So the heavy armored train sort of stayed behind the lines, offering artillery support for the light armored train. And that would go ahead and engage the enemy directly. You know, you just sort of steam off and start shooting at people. Then theoretically, you would come back because it's very funny that these guys are sort of prefiguring

a lot of World War Two, like early armor tactics without tanks. Yeah. No, we have they're just like, we've got a cavalry tank and we've got like an artillery tank. But also they're both trains. Yes. Well, I'm sure a lot of these guys are World War One veterans as well. So like they definitely they probably would have seen something similar. I don't know. Like it seems like they'd work really well because, you know,

purposely designed anti tank weapons aren't really a thing other than like shitty anti tank rifles. Tunk of air. Yeah. Yeah. So like unless someone just trains a field piece directly on the train, it's going to fuck some shit up. So a common theme starts to emerge here, which is abusive railroad equipment. No, not to build our armor trades. No, no. No, even even just use them, right?

So a good example is on September 12, 1918, in the city called Simbersk. So the in order to clear the way for armored train number one, which was also named the Minsk Communist in honor of comrade Lenin. Was that its full name? Yes. They had communists not given to brevity. And I don't know how to name that so much. Yeah, like this is the kind of thing that leads you to an order of battle

with like the three hundred and fifty second guards, separate infantry, special purpose, detachment, battalion regiment. That's also somehow independent. Yes, they wanted to send this armored train across a mile long bridge across the River Volga, right? But they wanted to check for mines beforehand. So what they did is they found another they found just a regular steam locomotive. They built they they they, you know, they built up the fire.

They built up ahead of steam. Some guy got on the train, opened the throttle and then got off. It's a drone. It's a it's an it's an unmanned railroad vehicle. Tactically ghost riding the whip. Yes. And then and then they just sort of let it go and it disappeared into the distance. And they're like, all right, it's good to send the armored train over the bridge. Oh, OK.

What about the steam locomotive? Yeah, that's somebody else's problem. That's someone else's problem. Yeah. And they went across the bridge and they started shooting people. And so the the Komach People's Army. I don't know who that is.

I don't probably like one of the Greens. Just like a bunch of rowdy boys making some kind of a point. Yeah, they were forced to abandon the city to the Red Army. And meanwhile, I don't know, 75 miles away, that that locomotive was just kept going. I hear it's still going today. Yeah. If you're riding the rails, you may see.

So a major problem with armored trains becomes apparent apparent during a revolution is that the enemy could just go behind you and wreck the tracks so you couldn't retreat. And at that point, you know, the armored train would be captured and then the opposing side would have the of our armored train, right? And the result of which was these things change side constantly. This thing and repainting duck season, rabbit season, season, communism season.

Yeah, actually, they had all the dead bodies and replacing them. The bulk of the armor is actually just paint. You know, it rolls in. You know, it rolls in and it rolls in after like it's eight or nine changes. And it's like, wow, this is a real landlord special now. We use it against the we'll use it against the Chinese to really offend Mao. So one such train was this called the Zamorets, right?

Oh, yeah. In fact, I think that's worthy ever. So this was built in 1916 by the the czarists, right? In Odessa, right? And they use it as an anti air platform against Austria, Hungary. For what little air power there was. It was captured by the Red Army in 1918. They sent it to Ukraine to fuck up some nationalists. But I was derailed by artillery fire.

They had to sort of like tow it back. They fixed it up and then Tratsky sent them down, sent it down to put down something called the Czech Legion in Chelyabinsk, which is like a really they have sort of a complicated role in this whole. Yeah, the Czech Legion is one of the weirdest stories of the revolution. And honestly, one of my favorites. There are so many fucking weird stories about the Russian Revolution. I genuinely. Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God. They they were just chaos room. Yeah, they were just trying to get the Vladivostok, right? It's just trying to get home after doing my sort of Allied intervention. And it's gone horribly wrong. Yeah. And and they they they were mad that, you know, it was taken so long. And, you know, eventually they got feisty and started capturing railroad equipment to get over the Vladivostok, whether the whether the Bolsheviks liked it or not.

I am going home with all the energy of a drunk Liam at five in the morning. No, no, no, that's Roz, baby. That's Roz, two fifteen a.m. All sleep wherever he will not. This was to clear that he is going to sleep in his own bed right after he vomits off the side of a bridge. The Anabasis of the Czech Legion, where they just did like they're driving this fucking train

across country and kicking like fleeing Zara's off of it is. I think they fought everybody and every side of the war at some point. I'll just try to get home. Yes, they took this along with several other trains. They're they're moving in multiple trains, right? And they're sort of, you know, they they they took possession of this this train. And then they start hauling ass down the trans-Siberian railroad. They're following the retreating white army and pursued by the Red Army.

Not a great place to be. But you're wondering how I got here. Like saying that to a guy with a microphone in your face as you're dodging like rifle fire. They start picking up more armored train cars as they go. The train keeps getting longer and longer on the train. Passamari. They also steal a train car full of czarist gold at some point.

The Czech version of Indiana Jones. No ticket. So at some point, they get it. They get as far as Manchuria and they get captured by some Japanese backed troops of some kind. What the fuck? My man, you went the wrong way. Czech fucking is the other way.

Yeah. Well, the idea was they were going to Vladivostok so they can go around and come back because they don't want to go back through the Red Army. Genius. They did. Czechs like, wait, are these guys fucking Japanese? Where are we? Steve, you told me you told me you were going.

Are we even fucking Russia anymore? I know I shouldn't have trusted you. I must have taken a wrong turn back at a mile post. I don't know, four thousand nine hundred and five. They get off of the Tokyo Underground. Like, what in the fuck? You guys know how to get to Vladivostok. Through some clever diplomacy, they managed to get the train back.

And you see, I crushed my fingers when we made the deal. And they set back off of Vladivostok and they traded it to the White Army for safe passage the hell out of there. Then the White Army, you know, they're run out of Vladivostok by the by the Reds and they flee into China with the train where it winds up in possession of the the Fanksion Army, which I don't know exactly what that. This is another war happening in China. Local warlords just get the train warlord and it winds up changing

possession another three or four times in China and then finally winds up captured by the Japanese and it disappeared. To some Japanese officer in Manchuria, like, what the fuck do you want me to do with a seven mile long armored train full of like Czech guys, old stuff? I thought a very confused guy named Pator in the back. Still drunk. See it himself or sir. You just put me in one of those zeros. I'll go get those bastards.

Like Bob, but I got it. He's just trying to find everybody. Yeah, he just rolls with it. Just swears allegiance to the emperor of Japan, whoever gives him food and beer at that present moment. I'll be loyal to whoever you want. I just want to stay in the train. Yeah, there's 15 cars of Pilsner, Urquil and 23 cars of empty bottles

that are hard days and cigarette butts everywhere. The Japanese guy just waiting through two inches of stale pills. What the fuck? We're taking the security deposit. Now, there was another problem that was sort of learned during this period, which is that it turns out steam locomotives are not very not are pretty conspicuous, right?

You know, so especially on to the invention of airplanes. It was really easy to spot them from the air. So, you know, people started experimenting with stealth locomotives. Oh, yeah. So this is a Chinese stealth locomotive. You can see the smokestack is diverted and it goes down under the train. And this looks like a train to me. Yeah. Well, you can't the smoke goes under the train, though.

And then you can see this is a trash can where someone lives and shoots a machine gun out of it. Oscar, the grouch is actually the most decorated member of the Chinese army at this point. It would just attach an HVAC system to this fucking steam train here. OK, but when the smoke just immediately rise back up as it's being as a train is pushing through it. Yes.

The Polish also experimented with this. Here's a Polish stealth locomotive. You can see the stack goes up and down and exits out the front, right? Crazy strong. Yeah. So, you know, there's there's some problems here. Number one is a smoke screen that you can't fucking see where you're driving. You don't need to.

It's a straight line. It already has no windows. My favorite detail about all of these things is whenever we see something particularly fucked, there's always a bunch of guys in great coats standing around looking at it like, you've seen this shit. So, OK, so there's a couple of problems with trying to do this to a steam locomotive, right? Number one is the firebox, you know, where the fire is requires some draft to keep the fire going, right?

Usually the smokestack helps with the draft and that keeps the fire going. Once you impede it, there's less fire and then the thing doesn't have as much power, right? Just tossing lit cigarettes in there, trying to get the burn more. It's stealth because it's moving so slowly. Another problem is there's very hot cinders, which are being blown up like right into here at high velocity and they just smash into the top of the pipe. So that falls apart pretty quickly. And then another problem, of course, is that smoke rises.

So, you know, once it gets down to the ground and it floats back up, you know, and it sort of chokes everyone out who's on the locomotive and gets in their faces, right? So good. So this this didn't work very well. There's one experiment that was done in Britain for a stealth locomotive down here. You see, he's got three smokestacks. The idea being that then the smoke disperses more quickly. It doesn't work.

Oh, yeah. So stealth steam locomotive doesn't doesn't work. It's just imagining like an F117, but like on a bunch of train wheels. The B2 stealth bomber sleep to the tracks. So after World War One and after, you know, the the so the Russian Civil War, the only people who were fielding armored trains were Poland and the USSR who had just, you know, finished doing the Polish-Soviet war, right? People are going to be very mad at us about this stuff.

Yes. Yeah, that's right. Can Nazis were literally Nazis. Can't imagine why. Oh, no. So Poland had fielded more than 50 armored trains during the Polish-Soviet war and the Soviets have landed their own armored trains. You know, the reasoning being that, you know, the change of gauge would, I guess, prevent the enemy from capturing the train, which was not the case.

The train still just got captured. But you can just take the take the railroad that it's on. Yes. Was there a train on train combat? Because that'd be fucking rad. Oh, we're going to get to that. It's like a monitor in Merrimack. Oh, except without the the maneuvering in circles and firing. It's like, oh, we missed. OK, I guess we'll see you next week. Bye.

Listen, we got one shot at this per week. If you miss them again, you have to ride the little tank. We're putting you in the fucking teacup. So then World War Two happens, right? You know, Germany invades Poland and Hitler reasoned, of course, that the only way to stop a good guy with an armored train is a bad guy with an armored train. So most of the Nazi armored trains were just ways to deliver men and tanks to the front lines, but a lot of them had like anti-aircraft guns.

They had howitzers and stuff like that. Some of the trains had like. It's like an anti-partisan thing, right? You it's same as the same as the Confederacy. You want to stop a guy just taking a shot at your train with a rifle. And the train version of a presence patrol and an MRAP. Yes. Some of the trains had some armored command posts, but probably the only faceoff between two armored trains

happened near the Ukrainian city of Kavl, Oval, I don't know, in World War Two. When the Soviet train, the Ilya Moromets, which we saw earlier, that was the one with like lots and lots of guns, the big, long one, finally managed to, you know, they used they used their guns and a rocket launcher on board to derail and cripple the Nazi train. Adolf Hitler in 1944. Oh, suck it, Nazis. They derailed and killed Adolf Hitler.

Yes. Who was who was a train? Train. Very bad. They never made that into an Indiana Jones form. I just I'm picturing a train with like Hitler's face on the front of it. Yeah, what if YouTube content creators made a Thomas the Tank engine? Now, of course, the most famous Nazi railroad thing was the Schwerwer Gustav, right? Again, the Schwerwer Gustav.

And this is a railroad gun in the loosest sense. Yeah, heavy Gustav. Yes. So thick Gustav. Yes. El Grande Gustav. This is the largest gun ever fired in combat. It's like I forget how big it is. Big, very big. It needed four tracks. Yes.

So, you know, this is an ordinary sort of an ordinary railroad gun, right? You know, you can haul it around easily, pop it somewhere. You fire off a few rounds. You know, sometimes if it's really big, you might need some stabilizers on it. But otherwise, you know, it's not a big deal. You can move it around, get a few rounds off, move it in a tunnel. If someone starts looking at you funny. But the Schwerwer Gustav required two parallel railroad tracks, right?

Which were installed specifically for the gun. It had to be transferred to purpose. Yeah, it had to be transported in parts and assembled in the field. The gun is looking at the little fucking Ikea manual for this. It's like, I need a fucking Allen key. It could the gun couldn't rotate. The tracks were curved, and that's how you angled the gun. Jesus.

Now, the purpose of this gun was to destroy the Maginot line, right? A lot of you could just go around if you wanted to. Yeah, they hadn't finished the gun when the Nazis realized they could just go around. I want a railroad gun, be able to railroad gun at home. So it was just sitting around for the early part of the war until the Nazis figured out they could use it to siege the city of Sevastopol, right, which they did. So in order to put this thing together, they needed four railroad tracks. Two of them were for the gun.

Two of them were for the cranes that put the gun together. It took five weeks to put it together with 4,000 men. This all. All of them looking like the little Ikea guy frowning. It arrived on a 25 car train. Only one car was required for the manual. They needed a 500 man crew to fire it. You've created a less efficient battleship.

Congratulations. This could fire a shell 37 kilometers, right? So in 1942, they finally deployed it. And over the course of June 5th to June 17th, it fired 48 rounds at Sevastopol and then the barrel war out. Yeah, but on the other hand, I bet all of those 48 rounds fucking countered. Do you hear one of those coming over in your life? Oh, dear, I'm just firing a train car size shell at some.

So, you know, the barrel was worn out from firing 250 rounds in testing. So they disassembled the gun. They moved it to outside of Leningrad where they were planning to use it again. They put it back together with another brand new four track railroad. And then that attack was canceled. This is a jobs program. Yes. Now, when the Nazis retreated from the Soviet Union, they took the gun with them

since they realized the USSR was the only other country crazy enough to try and use it. Just as a giant fuck you, they would use it to shell Berlin. Yeah. Hey, guys, look what we found in the trash. They also built a second identical gun called the Dora, and that was briefly deployed outside of Stalingrad. Stalingerd. Stalingerd. They never fired it.

What's this? So that's that's one end. That's the big that's the big guns. For when your industrial capacity like outstrips your reason. Yes, but only like kind of because the metallurgy sucked so bad that the barrel wore out. Yeah, we can make this thing and you can fire it once once. I don't recommend it, but we could build it.

Well, 48 times. Now, let's look at the other end. Oh, boy. Yeah. The little guy looks like something that you would like go and put your kids on. Yes, it's just a little guy. Just a little guy. This is the Romney Hyde and Dim Church Railway in Kent. It's Britain Rail.

Yes. No. This is this is what's called a minimum gauge railway. Some rich race car drivers came up with it and like the teens or 20s or something. It's adorable. It's adorable. Yeah, it's a little little it's like a big model train set. Right. I just wish they'd use the drag race trains. They got a 13 mile main line is still around, actually. It's sort of a transportation system, but also sort of, you know,

it's a big model train, right? And it runs, you know, it's just inland along the coast, right? And coincidentally, it also ran near a secret military installation at a town called Dengue. I think it's probably just Dengue, Dengue, whatever it's called. And so thus, the War Department took it over in World War Two. So, of course, here's the miniature. Here's the miniature armored train. Yes, yes.

This is the most operator looking shit I've ever seen. This high speed low drag motherfucker in the Brody helmet. I love this so much. And if he stood all the way up like his entire upper body, you would be sitting out of this train. So it this armored train patrol the line and dutifully defended it. Dad, what did you do in the wall? Well, let's just say this is this is this is the this is the most

dad's army thing I can think of. But the Royal Majesty's train corps. Yes. So I started with the section on the model train. The model train line was actually used for practical purposes in the war, though, at home, they gave me a medal, but it's like at scale. So it's like a little one scale. They they use this line to haul materials to

where they were constructing what was called the Pluto. The pipeline under the ocean. The idea was they would use it to supply fuel to the allies after D-Day. We should do a D-Day episode because there's so much weird engineering. Oh, yeah. And then here's here's another one. Here's of course, the tiny little railroad was never attacked because the Nazis were too overawed by it. I was about to say I don't want to fucking die.

I don't want to because they didn't get attacked because they couldn't find them because it's sweet camouflage job. I don't know. Yeah. With all of its distinct shapes and colors that you're not supposed to do for camouflage. So this is this is the urban armoured train used by the Slovakian resistance against the SS. Maybe I've catastrophically understood the concept of a resistance, but like if you're just wheeling an armoured train out.

Hey, assholes. I think you might not be a resistance anymore. You might be like, I don't even know what to call that, partisans. Yeah, I feel like a partisan is like a guerrilla group that hides in the woods and sabotage the trains that rule their own train out. I think you're just an army at that point. We've all become Czech. So this is obvious.

It's very aesthetically pleasing, I think, for an armoured train. I had a typical armoured train career. It made it to combat at first in October of 1944. It fired off a few rounds. It broke down. It was towed into a tunnel and abandoned. The crew of 71 went out and sort of fought, you know, as partisans against the SS and managed to repeal, repel the 18th SS division.

And the whole time, just mad that they don't get to use that cold train. I know, right? That would be the biggest fucking let down. I spent all this time building and painting this motherfucker. Look at this helmet I'm wearing. God damn it. Just a bunch of guys wearing like American style train engineer caps. Yeah. Yeah.

Being told stories of their grandfathers being trapped in a train fighting the Japanese, the whites and the Reds. So, you know, after World War Two, of course, they realized this stuff is, you know, these armored trains, they're ludicrous, right? And we can't use these, right? And it went away forever, right? Obviously. No.

Welcome to Cuba. The good kind of Cuba or the the capitalist kind of Cuba. The capitalist kind of Cuba. This is the train blindado. Right, which is Spanish for armored train. Well, doesn't it says on the 10? Yes, the Spanish for train is train is endlessly amusing to me. So in 1958, Cuba had more miles of railroad per square mile than any country in the world.

It was all closely integrated with the American Railroad Network via a series of railroad ferries that went to Key West and not Key West at that point. I think the overseas railroad had washed out by then. I don't know, it's probably somewhere in Florida. You could get a one ticket ride from New York City to Havana. You know, there's lots of trains, there's lots of freight trains that they sort of just brought the freight train over to Cuba. You know, there's lots of stuff like that, right, on the boat.

But in 1958, Cuba was also having a revolution, right? Because Batista suck, bad guy. So one of the final battles of the revolution was the Battle of Santa Clara, right, in in 1950, in December, 1958. And this guy, the guy from the T-shirt, right? Shaguevara. Oh yeah, I've heard of him from T-shirts. The T-shirt guy, he arrived in Santa Clara with about 300 soldiers on the 28th of December. And Batista's forces arrived in the train blindado from Havana.

They had 373 men, they had arms, they had ammunition, they had provisions to hold out for two months. And they stopped the train at the foot of a hill called Loma de Capiro. And which just happened to be where Shaguevara kept his guerrilla forces, right? And they're going to besiege him in the armored train. In the armored train, I guess. And, you know, they set up a command post down there, right? So the biggest problem with the train blindado was that it wasn't actually armored.

It's a train semi-blindado. These are these are as best as I can tell, ordinary 40 foot boxcars. I think they were built in Detroit in probably the 1920s. Based on the boxcar ends, their Hutchins ends. Now, the second problem with the train blindado was that it was a train, right? So about three days after the train shows up, Shaguevara sent 18 guerrillas to go attack the train. The officers on board the train decided, oh, we better move the train to somewhere that's not right next to where Shaguevara is, right?

So they start moving the train away. But Shaguevara anticipated this and he got some of the guys from the local agricultural school to grab a bulldozer and rip up the track on either side of the train. Well, do it. That's how you get yourself on a T-shirt. Is that kind of thinking? So the train derailed and the guerrillas just started hitting you with Molotov cocktails

until all the soldiers were like, it's too fucking hot in here. And they got out and they surrendered. How many Molotov cocktails would you have to have thrown at you before you surrender? I think my answer is lower than one. Yeah, I can put up with a lot of bullshit. Yeah, but the issue was they had been putting up a lot of with a lot of bullshit from Batista. Yeah, but I'm getting paid by the government, man. I'm paid to put up with bullshit.

That's fine. So my answer is 40 Molotovs. So I'm going to preemptively surrender. Yeah, they basically they came out, they surrendered and they're like, yeah, fighting for Batista socks, guys. You know, they were all like, oh, we're sick of fighting fellow Cubans. And this was like the final turning point in the revolution. You know, you know, Batista fled Cuba about 12 hours after this train was captured.

It's like, oh, shit, my fucking train. Oh, no, my right. Oh, no, my train. And of course, now it's a national monument in Cuba. You can go here if you don't live in the USA. We can go. We just got to jump through a bunch of hurdles. It's got a cool, like sort of concrete sculpture in there. Reminds me of those like Yugoslav war memorials, where they just put a bunch

of concrete in a fucked up shape. Oh, yeah, they got like they got the bulldozer memorialized too. Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Big concrete plinth. So, you know, that was that was Cuba. Meanwhile, up north, we have the white train. Oh, I know about this.

Oh, yeah. So there's there's some problems with nuclear weapons. Yeah, they can destroy all life on Earth, which is fine, whatever. And Biflin about that whole thing. Nasek Liam has logged on. One of the problems with nuclear weapons, though, is you have to move them around sometimes. Like, for instance, right after you build them, right?

So the Department of Defense created this called the white train for this purpose, right? You have these heavily heavily armored cars to transport nuclear weapons, you know, from the the the the Pamtex plant in Amarillo to wherever they need to go. You know, you got this this old US Army troop carrier here up front, you know, where the people who are guarding the train sort of live, right? Then you have these white cars. These are all full of nuclear weapons. The Department of Energy, guys, the National Nuclear Security

Administration, who guard these are, as you would expect, psychos. Oh, yeah, I can't blame them. They kind of have to be. No, 100 percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, I they've replaced these with trucks for reasons that we'll get into. Yeah. And those trucks are like unmarked. But my favorite thing about them is the National Nuclear Security

Administration has a little like advice for law enforcement page on this. And it's like, if you encounter one of these vehicles, like in under attack or in distress, right, do not approach it without like authorization from the Department of Energy in Washington, who will provide you with a sign counter sign, if you don't have this or you use the sign incorrectly, the advice is to take cover. I like how they like the DOE has has created, I guess, I mean, they're kind of cops, right, kind of the kind of cops, kind of troops, like a branch of cops.

So psychotic, they have to like keep other cops at bay. It's funny, I only know this agency exists, because like when you get out of the US Army, you go to all these job bears and shit, you kind of have no choice. And these guys recruit so fucking hardcore because like, well, you're in a use of never being home. Would you like to do that in a truck? Would you like to like be in miserable conditions, but, on the other hand, have the opportunity to drive around with a

Mark 19 just all the time? It's like, well, kind of. And I don't even think they get paid very well either, which is like, but you just live in fucking constant. You know, like the Southwest driving in circles. A salute to the brave men and women of the NNSA. So, you know, they, you know, usually at each end of the train, they would have this, the armored caboose.

You know, and this has like ports for shooting rifles out at the top and everything, right? So, you know, they started using this in 1951. And the issue with using it was it was very conspicuous, right? You know, you didn't know when it was going to run. But if someone spotted it, they knew where it was going. People would come out and protest, right? Yeah. And those are relatively organized anti-nuclear movement in the US at this time.

So, people would just do that. They would have someone watching the railroads. Yeah, you could just show up and, you know, you could you could block the track somewhere and, you know, the train would have to stop. And then you could, you know, I guess yell at the engineer who can't do anything because he's, you know, being held hostage by new caps. Doe psychos, like handcuff yourself to the locomotive or something. Yeah.

So, you know, the nuclear shipments were late all the time. The railroads complained because they couldn't move their trains, because it was being blocked by protesters. I mean, that is the point of the protesting, right? You make it so inconvenient. That's a success story for the left, even if it's like being done on a kind of like weird level. The DOE's first idea was like, OK, what we're going to do is going to paint

the cars different colors. Right. We're going to paint this one in a trans flag. Yes. They painted some of them brown. They painted some of them green. They painted some of them blue. And they're like, well, no one will be able to tell what kind of train this is

because it's different colors, despite the fact that just ignore the two cars full of like bus cars. Yeah. And I've never seen a train car that looks like this before anywhere. These are very noticeable if you know what you're looking for. And and then finally, when, you know, that didn't that wasn't enough stealth. They discontinued the train in 1987. And now they, you know, they ship the they ship the nukes in trucks.

I think they do still have some like box cars that they can use to ship the nukes. But that's like they're sort of in regular freight trains now. I don't know how they guard those. Yeah, the the safeguard transporter. It's got a it's got a tilt sensor in it. So if the trailer goes like out of alignment too much, it just floods the whole thing with fast expanding foam, which I really appreciate. So yeah, that was but we tried some other things after this

because it was the Cold War and everyone was insane. So let's talk about ballistic missile trains. Hell, yeah. Yes. OK, so one of the advantages of like a ICBM submarine, right? You don't know where it is. Except there are some places where you do know where a submarine is not going to be. Which is land, right?

So the enemy has a full twenty nine percent of earth where they don't have to look. And we want to eliminate the strategic advantage. Give me a typhoon class with railroad wheels. Give me a land nuclear ICBM submarine, right? Or as as seen in the documentary GoldenEye. Yes. Also known as a train, right? This is a very, I think, Soviet idea, which is why it's natural.

The Americans came up with it in 1950. Just imagining imagining the Soviet response to a bunch of protesters have tried to block the path of our train. I think it just keeps the train going. Eight. So, you know, the Americans started this first in the 1950s. They did some weight tests for a Minuteman missile launcher car on the Union Pacific. Nothing came of it until the 1980s, though, right?

When they they deployed or attempted to deploy the Peacekeeper rail garrison, right? So that's this right here. Observe 007, an ordinary boxcar. Rocket fall up, Mr. Bond. If you press this button, the Peacekeeper missile rises from within and is off to Moscow within mere minutes. Fantastic. Yes.

This is a number of absurd second strike capability systems that were sort of developed in the late 1980s. The original idea here was that the nuclear missile would travel around in this boxcar in ordinary freight trains. Just sort of. Hey, what are you hauling? Yeah, a bunch of aggregate and also a nuclear missile. Nothing.

What's up? You can check every car except that one. Yes. Well, you can't check it. There's no door. So and, you know, these would these would travel around disguised as boxcars in ordinary freight trains and could be, you know, sort of at any point, you know, they could get the train to stop and they could launch the missile if they needed to.

Right. And I guess at some point, someone strategic air command who had, you know, shipped something by rail in the past realized that's a terrible idea. Well, I mean, just having a bunch of loose, unaccounted for ICBMs that you've put in fucking self driving mode like a Tesla. Yeah. And then you've had like you've had like, you know, I mean, if you've ever shipped

anything by rail, the stuff gets handled pretty roughly. Which I don't know is if that's good for a nuclear weapon. I think about the thing that used to be stenciled on old British nuclear weapons, which was handle like eggs. So the idea then was they were going to have dedicated missile trains carrying the nuclear missile boxcar around and a few cars or personnel and equipment and they'd be roaming the United States Rail network all the time, just sort of at random, right?

Hey, what do you feel like going today? St. Louis. Yes. And then and then there was, you know, they constructed one prototype car, which is, of course, completely indistinguishable from an ordinary boxcar, except it has twice as many wheels and it has no door and it's much larger than an ordinary boxcar and it's in its own special train. Indistinguishable, indistinguishable, very stealthy.

Indistinguishable. Yeah. So this project was canceled because the Cold War ended and they put the prototype on display at the National Museum of the US Air Force. Where it sits to this day. Man, you really just have like an armed forces museum just as like all the dumb shit we did doesn't really like come off Imperial War Museum greatest museum. Yes. Oh, it's great. Yeah.

But the Soviets also built their own nuclear missile train. But they actually deployed theirs. The RT-23 Molodets. Please tell me it just rode around with a missile out of the top like that. Oh, that'd be amazing. I don't that. You know, we didn't consider when we built the missile system, what would happen if the train reached a tunnel?

No, it's like riding with the top down, you know, you just like you let the missile get some air exactly like the cannons in the fucking electrical line from earlier. Oh, we'll get to that. Everything. Oh, no. OK, so it's a big big stupid stupid missile and a big stupid train designed to vaguely resemble a Russian refrigerator car, right? It's still pretty conspicuous emphasis on vague. That's fine. It doesn't it doesn't need to be inconspicuous because like you can

just be like everyone who looks at this is witnessing a state secret. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the the unique feature of this car is that most of the Soviet Union's railroads were electrified, right? Which is what this thing is for here. Oh, boy. The idea was before you launch the missile, this thing would rise out of the car.

And you can see here it tilt sideways. It shorts the catenary wire so that the current runs through the car and out to the other end, thereby giving the missile enough room to, you know, rise up and launch. I think theoretically, without damaging the catenary, but I have no idea. Yeah, because that's going to be important. I have a working railroad after you just started a nuclear war. That's my that's what I'm thinking, especially if this is second strike capability. I don't know that you're going to have functioning overhead electric systems.

You see, when you fire ICBM through a wire, it becomes electric nuclear bomb, much worse. Also, so they could fit the missile in the car. This nose cone up here on the missile is inflatable. Hold on, I'm just going to pump my ICBM. I knew Nike stole that idea from someone. ICBM Air Max. And, you know, it's also a nerve because why not? You know, you need 10 bucks.

One when you want to kill people, you want to kill absolutely fucking everybody, I guess. How do we avoid a nuclear war? How do we get on this timeline? Yeah. Oh, my God. All the other timelines were not alive in it. Also, you'll listen to the live live by Donkeys episode on Broken Arrows. Yes. Thank you again for being better at plugging my podcast than I am.

Yeah. So the typical Consys was three locomotives, 17 rail cars, including a camouflage tank car. The the launching system, which is three cars, they had a command post car, communication system car. They had a diesel generator car. Then they had the pantry car, a dining car, the buffet car on my fucking nuclear train. Yes. And then they had two separate sleeping cars, one for officers and one for enlisted personnel got to maintain those privileges of rank. Yes.

All these rail cars were camouflages, either refrigerator cars or passenger cars. And 36 of these missiles were deployed until 2005. Two of them, I'm sorry. Let me see that one coming. Yeah, I don't know how many trains there were, but, you know, the missile trains were running around until 2005. That's incredible. Today, there's one on display at the Russian Railway Museum in St. Petersburg.

It's like, hey, remember when we could have killed everybody? And we still can. But remember when we could have? Supposedly, there's a new version of this in development right now. Oh, yeah. Crazy Russians. Listen, you got to get a modernized nuclear stockpile. You never know what might happen.

If you if you don't modernize the nuclear stockpile, the nuclear Armageddon won't be in the cards anymore. If you're not having a panic attack about nuclear exchange, you're not paying attention. Yes. But back to armored trains, regular ones. Let's let's get into some cursed Balkan situations here. I think someone just pulled a tank into it. Yeah, yes.

So in the Croatian War of Independence in 1992, this the the Serbians deployed the Krojina Express. Oh, my God. God, God is a Serb. God is also a train. Yeah, we are the most psychotic people in a in a civil war full of like. Oh, God. What is it about civil wars with the Russian civil wars like this?

The Yugoslav wars were like this. It's just a time for weird dudes to come to the fore. Yes, I can't wait for the American Civil War to. Yeah, I'm going to buy a gigantic leather coat and have a bunch of people hacked to death with sabers. I'm going to stay over here. That makes sense. Where I am.

Yeah, back in the Kingdom of Hawaii again. That's right. So. A bunch of Serbian railway workers decided to help, you know, put down the Croatians, right, by building an armored train, right? And this sort of starts out as a bunch of flat cars with sandbags, with some metal baneling over it. Eventually, they get some real armor on it.

I was going to say, I want to know what that turret is off of. But it's it's not a turn. It is an entire M 18 Hellcat tank destroyer. Holy shit. It just has plating around it. It was incredible. I guess that saves like moving the turret in the towering. Where the fuck did they get a whole hellcat at?

Don't worry, we got these laying around from World War Two. Enjoy some fucking Yale guy just kicks this out of the back of a C 130. He was just like, yep, have fun because we got this in a museum. So this was it was my, you know, this is just very typical armored train tactics. You know, get in, get some rounds off, get out, repeat is modified, you know, several times. So, you know, it eventually became three cars with heavy machine guns, missile launchers and anti-aircraft cannons and some mortars.

And of course, the aforementioned Hellcat. There were also three additional unarmored cars on the front of the train to detonate mines in case they were there. You're not standing. We've taken away the little the little tank that you have to ride in. Now, if you piss somebody off, you have to ride up front in the mine detonation car. So an example of one engagement it was in the train provided support during the

struggle for Skabernja Skabernja Skabernja Skabernja Skabernja Skabernja. So thankfully, Serbian stuff is notoriously easy to pronounce correctly. Yes. Where the unit was involved in an attempt to destroy an ammunition dump in Zadar by pushing a wagon loaded with three thousand six hundred and fifty kilograms of explosives and five tons of shrapnel. Right. Through

through the back of the Zadar railway line, the detonator would be a landmine attached to the wagon's bumper. The plan was to let the wagon roll down from the village in the den towards the target in the outskirts of Zadar. They just they just went to the top of the hill. Some weird pink panther shit. I kind of went to the top of the hill. They uncoupled the car and let it roll down towards the target.

And then it finishes with the results of this mission, if any, remain unknown. There's there's a video on YouTube, you can see, of a bunch of Croatian dudes in the same war, incidentally, on top of a mountain with a sea mine, like a naval mine that they that they just fucking kicked down the mountain towards the surface, just gets on the radio like, yes, yes, coming down now. And it's just fucking rolls down the mountain and blows up. And it's just like war is fucking stupid. I'm this seems very similar to the Red Army

thing where they let the locomotive go and it just disappeared. There they let the car full of explosives go and it just disappeared. Let the train take the strain. I think the missing trains all move together to join a runaway train colony somewhere. Yeah. A Velka brother, Ivan. There's just there's just this ghost train of heavily armed ghost train roaming the Balkan Railroad Network.

But on the 28th day, when the moon is at its highest, a ghost train will roll down the tracks and not detonate properly. Oh, it drives by. They can be a fucker. Hardbass just starts fucking out of nowhere. Oh, no, it's no way or train. Yeah, I have to launch my fucking train. Just launch it and you just hit

your boys, go away. Some say if you if you stay very quiet on Serbs, Miss, you'll hear the music. So that was one of the last uses of a properly armored armored train in combat. Since then, I think this is the most recent armored train in existence. VWXX 800. VWXX 800. Yes, looking armored as hell.

Oh, yeah, it's a new armored caboose the Navy ordered. It's even got a porch like a proper caboose. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So this is for shipments of spent nuclear fuel from aircraft carriers and submarines. You know, so that stuff still is going by train. I guess people aren't motivated to protest anymore. But spent, right? Like, what are you going to do about it?

Turn it into the fleet of uranium. I like the do not hump on it. I'm going to hump the radiation. Oh, God, not a good idea. Well, the directions unclear stuck my dick in a raw uranium. Girls call me the Hulk, because I'm really angry at my dick. He's glowing green. I see a doctor about this.

And on that day, his prostate grew through three sizes too big. This is this is similar to the to the the white train. There'd be a big nuclear fuel flask ahead of this. And then I guess the cryptic the psychotic DOE police live in here. And of course, I'm not sure if they're even cops. I'm not sure if they can arrest you. I think they just have to kill you. Yeah, yeah, fucking train commissars.

And of course, this thing is intended to only move in like very secretive, unpredictable shipments along secret routes. Here they are. Well, I guess I guess you can't move the shipyards and you can't move the spent fuel processing facility can't move the railroads either. What I like is that, you know, they've clearly selected these lines to try and avoid major metro areas. Couldn't quite get around Cleveland, though.

That's all it's going to make it any worse. All goes to the crumbling, leaking fucking nuclear facility in Washington. What's up, guys? Yeah. But yeah, since then, fuck over Buffalo. Pretty good there, too. It's better. Yeah. Buffalo seems to just get around Albany, though.

Kansas City. Uh huh. Well, I mean, since then, not so many armored trains in combat. I guess the Ukrainians have them again now. Uh, Suka, I'm kind of a shock being see like one somehow surface in the Syrian Civil Wars since they were rolling out like cannons from the 1800s. Yeah, I don't know.

Does Syria have much in the way of railroads is my question. Probably not. There's no, that the Damascus railroad was actually, I think, I think, I think when the big partition happened, they actually used that as a border. Um, I think it's the only border in the world which is defined along a railroad right of way. I like this guy's ZU-232, just like he's just chilling.

Casey needs to shoot down some passenger airliners. Well, I'm, you know, I'm thinking if you're you're just going along in the train or in the outdoors, I mean, it's cold is the only thing, though. So it's probably kind of miserable. Yeah, that's true. That's what I assume that was uniform in the region. Is this a technical? Yes. Yeah.

I'm not a pickup truck. I'm going to say no. I feel like a big Soviet diesel locomotive with a flat car is spiritually. Yeah, only cold as we are. That's fair. I'll give you that much. Alpha-Adeen plumbing. Yes. It's like some maintenance away contractor.

They show up in like the Loram rail grinding train. What if we learn from talking about armored trains? They're neat. Yeah, they're cool. They're a good idea. Yeah, they're they're a good idea if you want to be cold or a bad idea, if you want to win your war. But what if you if you want to be cool while winning your war? You should just have a couple of them.

Hmm. Yeah, that's sure you win at least one battle with the armored train. Take them off the track and just like make conga line tanks. It would be absolutely ridiculous and pointless, but it'd be rad as fuck. Yeah, all of my tanks are coupled together. Yes, I've a tank train. That'd be cool. Like a road train for tanks. Yes. That'd be awesome. That'd be terrible.

And I would not want to be anywhere near it because if you killed so many people on accident, just all of the jet exhaust just melting the tank behind them. I heard a story once and I'm going to I'm going to take us off the rails of this for the last time before we do so. I had a story from a guy who was like in in the US Army in Germany back in the back in the 80s and there was a guy they had a tank column and which they were driving on a public road and a guy in a Mercedes tried to tailgate them. He tried to tailgate in the Abrams and it melted the front of his car.

I've heard that I've heard that exact same story and I've seen cars pull up like I never deployed in a tank. I was always dismounted because my life is unfortunate. And I've when you pull like tanks out of motor pools and stuff, you drive them on normal roads like right by parking lots. And I never saw any paint bubble, but I've heard that story so many times. Maybe it's just like received wisdom that it happened. Maybe. Yeah.

The fact that it's a Mercedes, too, is like just a bit more of a like fuck you to like fancy Germans. I don't know. Yeah. I figure you ought to like paint something on the back of the tank that says like keep back 50 feet, keep back 50 feet or your or your car will be burned. In like 70 languages for anywhere we might be fighting. You have like a front ground guide and a rear ground guide. And that's like mostly so the driver who can't see anything doesn't run into stuff.

But also, you know, keeps cars away. But yeah, I've I've been hearing that story since probably 2006. I went to basic training. All right. Well, we have a section on this pod called Safety Third. Sent in by one Ash Ketchum. Ah, yes. So hello, Justin, Alice, Liam and the Activate Windows logo. Didn't say hi to Joe canceled.

I was about to say. This is Armenian erasure. It's probably sent in by a Turk. Hi, Justin, Alice, Liam and the Activate Windows logo. Arthur Turk did nothing wrong. And if he did, Joe deserved it. Yeah. And we'll do it again.

My safety third comes courtesy of my brother, who is COS or controller of site safety for Network Rail in the UK. Looking after the OLE overhead electric lines for the East Coast main line. Yeah, he's got to move him out of the way if you want to fire an ICBM. I could share. I could share the horror story of an overhead line hanging by a single thread of wire next to a computer platform or reinforce it, reinforce Gareth Dennis's point about how to avoid a toilet being flushed on you as it passes at 100 miles

an hour. But this safety third involves a recurring character from your podcast. Animal viscera. Returning champion animal viscera. Yes, the people's chair. Thank you. My brother's team are repeatedly called out to the lines north of Newcastle, which goes through a tunnel with low clearance. Because of this, the gap between the wire and the tunnel roof is very small.

Every time a pigeon lands on these wires and wanders into the tunnel, there's a bang, some feathers fly and a pigeon corpse with a terminally shocked expression either welds itself to the wire or falls on the track. Pigeons always look shocked anyway, though. Yes. Sometimes this can damage the wire or equipment and needs to be sorted. After then, after they're done, my brother's crew have to dispose of the pigeon fricassee. Yeah, I got my pigeon shovel.

Yes. They do they do this by then throwing them onto the neighboring tracks of the metro system metro system owned by a different company and therefore not their problem. Privatization is great. Couple months back, there was a new guy on my brother's crew. He had come from he had come from the metro company. Upon hearing of the plan for disposing of exploded and fried pigeon corpses,

he exclaimed that the metro train operators and maintenance people had been wondering for years why their section of track had so many dead pigeons on it and incurred much expensive downtime trying to fix it. The lesson here is littering is cool. Yes. Yeah, the moral here, I don't know something about cleaning up your own mess or similar. No, it's littering is cool and works. Littering is cool and gives people lots of overtime.

Be a job crater, throw shit out your window. Yes. Onto railway lines. Anyways, keep up the great work on the podcast. Say safe and Ramadan Mubarak to Alice. Oh, thank you. We're good safety. Third, that's a good safety.

Third, sure, but sweet. Explode the pigeons, everything you want from this. Exactly. Seen here is Pikachu about to recreate this incident. Anyway, that was safety. Third. Did you want the drop or I I guess I don't know why not? I'm not sure if you want the drop afterwards, too.

I I think it's at this point that we do do that. I thought we had established at this point that we didn't do that. I thought we did it. Yeah, you're out. Give you this. Our next episode will be on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster. That's right. We're like the Tacoma Bridge Disaster because we have Joe here.

Joe, thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me again. It's always great. And I have to say there were significantly less goats this time though the Soviet National Anthem still did make an appearance. So who got that going for us? All right, commercials, commercial.

Listen to Lions Lab by Donkeys by the Hooligans of Kandahar and read that. Make sure it's the one by Joe Cossabian and not by the other guy who just stole your entire fucking book. Cold Cossabian sideways. Yeah, we found like two more and the legal department of my of my publisher is like, why the fuck didn't you tell us about these sooner? I'm like, I found all of them yesterday because I was I was vanity searching myself on Amazon.

Yeah, I found this book The Troublemakers of Mazar-e-Sharif. I wanted to see if I finally outsold Ronan Farrow's book and I didn't. And I found out that like eight people have been stealing my book. I mean, this is clearly what you've got to do is you've got to steal Ronan Farrow's book. It's a winning strategy. That's coming for you, Ronan. The moral of the story is you should vanity search yourself more. Yeah, all the time.

I'm going to drive an armored train to Ronan Farrow's house. The Steel's manuscript. I'm sending out the navies right now. I want to see fan art of an ATF armored train. Oh, God, so careful. It's just a giant like World War One train with the tanks, with the tanks, but with like a Blue Lives Matter thing. It's got like a bunch of guys in the windbreakers wearing like the classic

90s federal agent fit of dad hat aviators mustache hanging off of it. Oh, I hate it so much. Punisher scoffed the train busting through it. All right. Well, everybody, I think we did a podcast. We did. Yeah, I was casted. All right. Well, I'd successfully cast it. Todd has been casted. All right. OK.

I'm going to do something while I still can. Pleasure as always, guys. Yes. All right. Bye. Bye. All right.