Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 69 (nice): THE CRASH AT CRUSH

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

this is the one where we talk about beer and also bibi's wawa order Slides: https://youtu.be/mn4W9LT1cI4 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

I hate Mondays, man. Well, it's when we podcast, though. It's when we're all paying out of our friends. I know what day it is. Looks like someone's got a case of the Mondays, but it's me and Liam, and we're both homicidely angry. Why? Yeah, yeah.

Well, OK. There's your problem. You can blow off some steam through the process of podcasting. Oh, look at all. Look at all that pixel. All right, that's terrific. Well, welcome to Episode 69. Episode 69.

It's the sex number. We were going to do our comments, but then Ross was not apparently interested in reading two hours worth of mean comments for some reason. That's some future day. For some reason, Ross does not thrive on conflict, like Liam and I did. I think what I'm going to do when we do the YouTube comments

episode is have my dad come on. I'm going to make my dad guest or that. You can read some of them. We're going to get your dad to beat up our comments. Yeah. Yeah. Old man Anderson with his limited range of motion and his oft advertised inability to see good anymore. No, it's consequence of how much his knee and his back hurts.

It's going to fucking wreck you. It's going to happen. Well, we're going to do the dad's episode. We should do the dad's episode. I I do not look forward to trying to teach my dad how to use my podcast. Except episode 70 out children. And it's about dads.

It's just gross. I actually thought at one point that like an episode 100, we get everyone who's ever been on this podcast to just like do a roast. And then I thought that my self esteem would be too inflicted would be too afflicted and I would just cry. Like, I don't need to hear like the YouTube comments don't really set me off like they used to, but like every so often you get one. Like there was one today where the guy was with some asshole was just like,

oh, well, you know, is introducing their gender pronouns like a joke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, no, dude, fucking cry about it. And then you'll have to bleep this, put a and leave the fucking room a big that's a fucking mood. I'm in today. Let's do a podcast. Let's do a podcast.

Welcome to Well, there's your problem, a podcast where with actual threats, which does not have actionable threats because I edit them out. Howard, Howard, I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. I am Alice called Rockerley. I am the person talking now and noticeably not making actionable threats

against named person. I didn't do it against a named person. I said some guy in our YouTube comment section. Yeah, our podcast has been described as actionable. And my pronouns are she and her. I don't think it's actionable. I told a person to I'm not saying I'm going to we're going to have two separate bleeps.

Anyway, doing the sober for the first time in a while. It's me, your boy, Liam Anderson. Hi, I am. Hi, Alice. Yeah, Liam. It's interesting that we get more actionable threats when you're sober than otherwise. The Bruins choked away an entirely winnable game one on Saturday.

Game two is in an hour and 15 minutes of Stone Cold sober. Let's fuck it. Do this. All right. Did you say your pronouns? They're he, him. Did I not say that? I know you missed that. You could talk about the Bruins.

All right, this fucking hockey team has ruined my life. My pronouns are go and Bruins. Yeah, suck it. Every Quebecois comment that we have, all 12 of you. Every Quebecois comment that we have is like some kind of severe masochist given how many Quebecois jokes we make. I just hate the Habs, man. It's not a real division this year.

Mitch Marner is not your boy. Fuck you. Fuck you and fuck you dumb country that you won't let me into anymore. And we open the border, Justin. Real with the border, Justin. I can't do that. Oh, oh, wrong, Justin. I will address my complaints to what I can only assume is the regional

manager of the Tim Hortons. Yes. All right. So what do you see on the screen are two trains? I do not see that. I see a workshop test. It they didn't look like my parents fighting. They did not have very many pixels back then. No, just the one and we all had to share it.

Yes, exactly. These are two trains approaching each other at a rapid rate of speed. You may notice they are on the same track. It's a physics textbook problem. Yeah, this is a this is an interesting one because it is not an accident. It was deliberate and then caused an accident. OK. Today, we're going to talk about the condom breaking, the crash at crush.

Damn. So we're going to miss there for a minute. The crash at the crush. Yeah, the crash, the crash, the crash, the crash. America number one. Yes. It's it's crush, Texas, population 40,000 for one day. The first we have to do the god damn news. Yes. All right.

So since I figured I figured we're an interfaith podcast, we have all the Abrahamic faiths here. Yeah, we could probably we could we could probably hash out this Israel Palestine thing in about 10 minutes, right? I could. Yeah. Yeah, we. Oh, God, dude. I. Oh, boy. Yeah, it's I actually kind of wanted to talk about it for a minute.

Just I posted on Twitter that I that I don't get into Israel Palestine discourse for my health, which is basically true. Now, I've notably been accused of being a Zionist by some teenage freaks. So I just wanted to say that my my genuine and literal position on Israel Palestine is that Israel is absolutely a genocidal apartheid state. And I feel like as a Jewish person, although it's sort of a you know, it's sort of hard just to square the circle. But as a Jewish person, not super cool with atrocities being committed in my name,

which they are, it is anti-Semitic to conflate Jews in Israel. But when the Israeli government themselves say, oh, it's a safe place to live for Jews, but then goes goes ahead and does a genocide. I can't be quiet about that. So like I said, on Twitter, the only legitimate and actual solution is for the United States to cut aid and for one country called country. And they speak a conlang called language, they have a currency called currency. And everyone has equal rights.

And then if you do a settlement, you you get kicked off and you have to go live in the Negev for 40 years. Yeah, one state solution, but the state is administered by and named Washington football team. Yes. I have to have Snyder now. We found a way to make Israel worse. I was thinking what they really need to do is to bring in someone to run this this this this country.

Holy shit, just let us do it. We'll be the triumvirate. Well, actually, yeah, we could probably do it. But I was thinking what they what they need to do is they need to bring in set just the most incredibly heinous people who hate every other nationality and race to run the country. I think they need to bring back British mandatory Palestine. Sounds like a mandate to me, fuck it.

Let's go. Yeah, I was. Oh, yes, Seamus, the the Haganah freedom fighter just pops up because he heard someone was shooting at the British. Seamus is Jewish now. Things are very confusing for him and his family. They were to keep up, but he's not sure why. The moment they see, you know, the limies coming over the horizon and their Land Rovers and their khakis, you know, we want peace.

We're a uniform. We're a uniform. Yeah, exactly. The Israelis and the Palestinians will learn to work together to overthrow the monarchist menace. That's right. That's right. It's like releasing a mongoose to like, you know, solve a snake problem, right? You have a larger problem now. I do. I do want to say that if any single fucking person,

any single fucking person in the YouTube comments, Twitter, so tweets or comments, some dumbasses, I in a shit. I will. I am not dealing with your idiotic fucking bullshit today. And to those specific teenagers, you know who you are, because you can't stop hate listening. Love you too. But I shut the fuck up. Go go touch grass.

And I have to bleep a lot of this. Good. Yeah, just a two minute long bleep. I'm sober, man. This is this is the roughest I've been in a while. So if folks don't know what recently occurred, best is I can tell us there was this kid from Cheltenham Township, right? Oh, God, I do want to know his his Wawa order.

I. OK, so this is my this is my theory about Netanyahu is I don't think he ever went to a Wawa because I don't think Wawa was in Cheltenham by 1960 or whatever. Maybe not. I think you figure he's familiar, right? Like he like it was like side cut of right. He went to a while once and was like, this is the kind of decadence that interfaith relations.

I mean, he isn't what he's in these. They have Wawa's in DC now. It's entirely plausible that he at least went for old time's sake. Can we write to Netanyahu and I would just prefer not to. Can you do it amidst all of the like series of pages and pages of actionable threats? We just go, yo, you ever been to a Wawa? What's your Wawa order?

What is what is Wawa order, baby? I don't know. I guess Netanyahu, he had a bad election result and decided, well, we've got to start bombing. Do a genocide in Gaza. He's also been like, I think he's been convicted of corruption, but he can't actively be impeached so long as he keeps kind of like holding on to his his limited immunity

from like being in power as the prime minister. Jesus, fuck. Ah, yes, the only democracy in the Middle East. Yes, you know, at least sort of at some point, you'd rather just take the mask off, right? And then you just at least have like the honesty of someone like MBS, brutally murdering people in broad daylight as opposed to hiding behind it between, no, we're definitely not doing a genocide, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Yeah, but then you'd lose out on your ability to do sort of like upbeat videos of Israelis on the beach. I've been to Tel Aviv. It's fine culture. Do you think do you think if he did go mask off? I've heard he has a strong Philadelphia accent when he speaks English. Please, no. No, I've never I've never actually heard him speak.

So, you know, the bombs down there on on Cheltenham Ave. Down Cheltenham Ave. Yeah, from the creek to down the shore. Palestine will be no more. Yeah. Just him hammered a Kenan's and Wildwood just like ordering nukes like I ran for some reason. The Israeli Air Force being like, why have we hired all of these ex Philadelphia PD guys?

That guy is just wearing an Eagles jersey over his flight jacket. All right. So anyway, now that we've solved the Israel Palestine crisis, I do want to make us a triumph or something. I'll put just put us in charge. I do want to say I have worked on controlled demolitions before. If for some reason you believe that an hour is adequate time to evacuate a 13 story building, you are wrong. Yeah, I know, but it's not the point.

The point is the humiliation and so on. So it's all free Palestine. Yeah, free Palestine. Although, once again, we won't have a Palestine or an Israel. We'll have one country and it's called country. Now, Washington football team, Washington football team, piece of the Middle East in our time as Dan Snyder bring unifies everyone and they all become Eagles fans.

But they all still have to pay $20 for parking at Dome of the Rock sub raisin. Yes. That sounds about right. OK. In other news. Stop tagging us. We are aware. We are aware. Thanks to you guys. We do know. Yeah, this is the thing, right?

You guys are simultaneously the bane of our fucking lives, but also the best intelligence agency any podcast has. Yes, there is not a beam that cracks anywhere that we are not made aware of it. And this is very useful the first time we are made aware of it. Yes. There were there were many people tagging us in the story about a very large beam cracking.

They call this a crack. I would say this is pretty more. This is more substantial than a crack here or something that this this entire member has sheared in half, well, not in half, but off on the interstate 40 bridge in Memphis, which I understand is a major truck crossing of the Mississippi River. So this thing is completely shut down and probably will be for the foreseeable future. And also, river traffic is shut down underneath it, which is hilarious.

You don't want to drop a bridge on somebody's boat. And I was about to say, yeah, I mean, I hope. Gee, it's a good thing our supply chains are very robust and capable of responding to shocks as it's all the news recently. It's called the plenty of time system. Yes. Yeah, as opposed to just a type of logistics, it's bloody of type logistics. And the slogan is just don't worry about it. Also, shout out to our discord, who just tagged me drunk for no reason at all.

We have a discord. Yeah, we have a. Yeah, we do. We're kidding. I I OK. Somebody send me the link to the discord. Al, I think you're I think you're a mod. I thought you were a mod on the discord. Did you really not worry? No, I really didn't know we had a discord.

We have a thriving discord where the one rule is if you do anything that pisses us off, you get banned. Yes, it's called it's called the duchy of grand Liam. It actually works pretty well. I've only had to ban ever like 25 people. Also, if you're listening to this, become a patron. So you two can join the duchy of grand Liam and stop fucking emailing me about a Patreon RSS feed.

We're working on it. Yes, this is my area of grievances. It's it's it's structure. It's important to keep Liam's email free because he needs that space for all the emails I'm sending him. Yes, demanding international shipping. Union paid by email him. OK. All right. OK.

Now we've done the aftershow logistics in the middle of the show. I was about to say that W2YP board meeting. Yeah, yes. We we need to we need to, you know, be transparent for the shareholders. I will say someone said I forget who and I forget where that they admired the comically adversarial relationship we have with our fans, which is absolutely true because I'll get like some of the nicest DMs and messages and questions free stuff to the box.

Yeah, that's really sweet. And obviously we appreciate that. I've you know, some of my favorite follows on Twitter. Just shout out Zorek, shout out Tom Payne. And then sometimes I check Twitter and I'm just like, I've been in this podcast and I've been in all of you to the wolves. Turning this whole podcast around. Yes. Yeah.

So stop tagging us. Do not ever provide valid criticism of us. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Criticize us. Do not tell us anything bad. Do not perceive us with us in any way. No, these live shows are going to be a hoot.

It's just us with our backs to the audience for two hours talking amongst ourselves, but never loud enough to hear. It's a series of stage whispers. We're doing Aladdin mass. My grandmother was so pissed off when they got rid of that. She stopped going to church. All I can say is if you want your religion to contain a certain amount of like language you don't understand,

which yeah, why wouldn't you? Islam right there. Also, Judaism, if you want to get weird enough. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, they brought back the Latin mass. They did. Yeah. You can do Aladdin mass now. It's not required, but you can do it.

Is it like is it with it? Is it in communion or is it some weird set of a kid as shit? I don't want to be a part of. No, no, this they brought back. It was under what's his face? Ratsinger. Oh, Nazi Pope. Yeah. Yeah. The Nazi Pope. He decided we you can do Latin masses now,

because I think they were explicitly banned for a while. That's not to be confused with other Nazi. Well, Pius XII. That's all right. The Nazi Pope, right? Yeah. Well, I can't defame them. I'm in America, though. You know, they had the one to punch,

which is they brought back the Latin mass and then they redid the translation of the the the the vulgar mass or whatever you call it. But the Lord is with you and with your spirit. And with your spirit, yeah, and that got everyone mad out of here. I think that was strategic. Oh, there's a guy, a lady bit about that. That's pretty funny where he like goes to a church and looks around

and is like, you're all saying it wrong. What am I doing here? Looks like the Protestants putting extra bits on the end of the law. Just just just just tacking it on. Yeah, we it was good enough. It's fine. Leave it. Anyway, so yeah, the I-40 bridge has a crack in it on account of bringing back the Latin mass.

That's right. That makes sense to me. And that's the unfortunate station on our route to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Anyway, that's the news. The stations of the crossbeam. Very funny. Thank you. I feel like I'm dying. All right.

So we need to start by talking about public relations and railroad public relations to start out with. We were hostile. Yeah. All right. So in sort of the early days of American railroading, I'm talking like 18, you know, up until like the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, well, really even up until 1910, right?

Railroad public relations consisted of not having public relations. Yeah. Tell nobody anything ever. Never tell anyone anything. Yes. Yeah. Never talk to the media. Don't think about the media. Public opinion is irrelevant. Journalists are hacks and charlatans.

What you got to do is maintain good relationships with public officials and politicians, right? That's it. Never think about public opinion ever. Um, this rules question mark. All right. It worked pretty good for a while. But he started to have some issues as the media got more influential. Because now I won't disagree with them that 1800s journalists were hacks and charlatans.

Forever the main war was. But yeah, yeah, that's not a good look. We threw a small orphan under a train to prove how deadly the trains are. Did this, did the rise of this have anything to do with like the ash to Bula horror or is this sort of just cool to that? That's a good example of one of those. Because a lot of these, as these railroad, as trains got bigger and faster, you know, railroad accidents got worse, right?

Uniruses were falling out of bodies. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it was it was to the extent that even though objectively safety standards are getting better because of improved journalism technology like the Telegraph. News was getting out about railroad accidents more often since more people were working on working on the railroad. It was easier to find someone, you know, to interview.

The lame is that ever was you hear about more plane crashes now than you used to or whatever. You find someone to interview who would air the company's dirty laundry, right? You know, and, you know, with the Telegraph, this news reaches newspapers all over the country, right? So, you know, at some point, the railroads start to get fed up and they think, well, we need to have public relations, right? Or just buy the newspapers ourselves.

They also did that. Oh, yeah, the Sheldon Adelson. That that was really that was more of a that was more of a 20th century thing, though. Hmm. The first solution, you know, the the earliest PR was as simple as issuing a press release, right? They hadn't thought to do this before. Um, he tried to ask them when a train is going to be in a place and they're like, why do you want to know?

Why do what? Yeah, fuck you. Pull a derringer on you. Yeah, yeah, we publish the timetable. You want to see it so bad, tough guy? You want to see it so bad, tough guy? Running, running a railroad used to be a lot more like a criminal enterprise. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's, you know, you had the powers to eminent domain. You had you had special protections for that ordinary businesses couldn't have,

you know, running a railroad in the 1800s sounds like a pretty great gig. The only issue is when, if you were in a really big railroad, like Pennsylvania Railroad, which kept killing its presidents. Like on purpose or like weak, weak on purpose. The job would kill you. They assassinated them. Got it. Train slowly going through Dealey Plaza. Collapse of the Roman Empire.

You kill the Emperor and then and then your president of the Pennsylvania. It's the year of four Pennsylvania Railroad presidents. Yeah, you have to install the centurion's loyalty. Oh, yeah. Edgar Thompson shot by Tom Scott, who was shot by Alexander Cassett. No. No, it was just it was such a stressful and high, high, high intensity job that it just started it.

People people had like, you know, their bodies broke down. Well, you have no more management, I think. Yes. Well, you know, that's an effective bureaucracy right there. I mean, it's like exert equal pressure on the top and the bottom. Yes. So, you know, one of the the effect of the railroad issuing a press release after like an accident or something was extremely positive for their reputation,

right, because reporters who wanted to they wanted to be accurate and they were also lazy, right. They would often just reprint details from the press release. And nothing has ever changed since. Yeah, nothing has changed since. Yes, stenographers to power is the expression. You just get the thing and you write the thing. Yes.

You know, it's the beginning of access journalism, which of course is, you know, if you want insider info, you have to say nice things about the people you're reporting on. Yeah, exactly. I see you rap before you fraud. It's it's it's a common complaint about modern political coverage. But yeah, in the private sector, it's a billion times worse. You know, you have whole whole sectors of industry

that never have negative news come out about them. Yeah, I'm just freeze you out if you try. Exactly. Yeah. And unless you're unless you're in like a major like you never see negative coverage of anything in like a trade publication, right? I'm trying to think of like it's not a real it's a only tangentially related industry.

And I'm trying to think of the last time I saw negative news about mining other than when it kills like 50 workers. And even then. Yeah, exactly. That's all be done by local news. For more, look at our print media episode. Exactly. It was nice when we had one of those, but we don't.

Yeah, many moons ago. At least we have Buzzfeed listicles down. Thank God. Which dead miner are you? Tag your friends down below. Yeah. Yeah, everyone. The try guys try mining anthracite.

Everyone everyone everyone thinks they're going to get John Henry and they actually get like, I don't know, who's a lesson. A guy crushed on the beam. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, this this allows the company to control the narrative without seeming like, you know, it was seeming like it's in charge of the media. There are more extreme examples of this now, like say the Irving Corporation,

which operates in the province of New Brunswick in Canada and also owns all the newspapers in New Brunswick, Canada. Oh, they sure do except for one, I think. But, you know, to sort of show how this works, there's an early example after the really large strikes on the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1870s, which is probably one of the closest the closest the country ever got to a general strike. How I'm right. How I never lived it, but how I longed to go back.

The railroad started stockpiling arms and ammunition to use against their employees at their headquarters at Broad Street Station. Right. Just normal, normal capitalists. Something like 5,000 rifles, I think we're in the attic. That seems a bit excessive. And so I think about it a couple of decades later, word got out to journalists that the Pennsylvania Railroad had

an armory in the attic of Broad Street Station, you know, for use against potential striking employees. The the Railroad's PR guy named Ivy Lee, he issued a press release saying that these are not to use against our employees. These are for defense of the passengers against. Don't worry about that. Both men, you know how he is and he defused that situation pretty well. We were just like, yeah, no, they've got 5,000 rifles for,

no, no, something's probably a good idea. It's probably a good idea, you know. Which I had 5,000 rifles. At these prices, you'd be crazy not to have 5,000 rifles. The Pennsylvania Railroad's strong supporter of the Second Amendment. Yeah, they're doing it like an open carry audit, you know. Am I being detained? Am I being detained?

Am I being detained? They have their own police department, so yeah. Railroad public relations were for a long time and still are, still is really about keeping bad things out of the news and minimizing, you know, the Railroad's culpability and public opinion. But there was also a time when Railroad PR included getting the Railroad in the news for good and cool things. This is because you had to transport passengers,

a thing which we don't do anymore, right? Yes. That's a big part of it. So, with that, we have to talk about the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad. They say rail at railway here. Mm, fancy. Yeah. This is the line.

This is the line. This is the line that runs a beautiful Palika bracket seats free from Hannibal to Chicago Hills. Yes. I want to make some middle of noise. Yeah. Yes. All right.

That's beautiful. The Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad went to Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. Right? 00:29:23,200 --> 00:29:27,760 Unlike other railroads which certainly went to the Pacific, I then went to. I then didn't do that. I didn't do that. The Frisco, most famously.

There we go. I got us struggling to remember. Yeah, the St. Louis, San Francisco Railway, I don't think went to either of those places. Most of the way there, maybe. Yeah. At least the Pennsylvania operated in Pennsylvania. Yes.

The Texas and Pacific was another one. I don't think it made it out of Texas. The Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad, also known as the Katie. Yeah. You know, I never heard that song. She took the Katie, left me a mule to ride. Right? Oh, I forget who that's by.

Anyway, it was part, it was originally part of the Union Pacific, sort of branched down south from the main line out in Nebraska. And, you know, it went down to Tulsa, Dallas, Waco, Austin, San Antonio. I think there was a branch to Galveston, possibly to Houston. I'm not sure because Houston kind of didn't exist yet. Eventually got merged back into the Union Pacific, but that was in the 1980s. This railroad lasted a long time. Sometimes you even still see some of their cars running around, which is always nice.

So, you know, this railroad had a surplus of old locomotives in 1893, right? And also a lack of business owing to the panic of 1893, right? Which capitalism is very stable. It had something to do with Argentinian and South African land deals, I think. Oh, some fantastic accents on both sides of that land deal. I used to know about all the panics of the 19th century, but I've long since forgotten since I'm not in undergrad anymore. Jerk van de Klerk trying to buy a bunch of land in Pasagonia and inadvertently

destroying the fucking global economy. It resulted in a run on gold. In America, it was on the gold standard at this point, which caused further problems in the economy, including the collapse of the ongoing railroad bubble. I thought crypto guys, like, I thought that didn't happen when we were on the gold standard because of the gold standard. Uh, wrong. No, you see, gold isn't deflationary enough.

So, uh, and railroads at this point were pretty overextended, right? Even railroads that were thought to be fairly financially secure, like, uh, the richest railroad at that time was probably the Reading because of its anthracite fields. In the panic of 1893, it completely collapsed when into receivership. But there were also like a whole lot of railroads that went, you know, from nowhere to East armpit. Ah, famous East armpit.

Yes. I too have been to Joplin, Missouri. And, and they had no real reason to exist. So, you know, their finances weren't very good. They were like super leveraged, you know, they started, you know, once there was a little bit of financial problems anywhere in the economy, they went, you know, they just collapsed, right? And sometimes they were consolidated into larger railroad. Sometimes, you know, they, they just disappeared a lot of time, you know, and a lot of times

the bigger railroad would also be in reorganization. They'd replace all the, all the people with, uh, guys from the bank, you know, which is always a great way for a railroad to be managed. And, uh, you know, anyway, my point here is the gold standard is stupid. Fiat currency is good. Now we're going to get some complaints on that, but I have a degree in economics and can confirm. Wait until we do an episode on cryptocurrency. And I just say, no, this is stupid.

Fiat currency is good. It should be under control of a government. I'm sorry. People, you know, child porn and drugs. How are you going to buy your drugs? And you can't buy a Tesla with Bitcoin anymore. So. No, it's now the only things that it's useful for buying illegal stuff.

Come back down to earth, folks. Anyway, the Katie is hurting from the panic. And they also, before the panic, they just bought a bunch of new locomotives. So they have some surplus old locomotives. So one guy has an idea. This is William, William George crush. No, it's not. Yes, it is.

Yeah. William George. They just let you keep that name, huh? William George. Yeah, my name is Charles train accidents. My name is my name is Bob wreck of the old 97. You're just looking, looking at a guy's resume. And it's like, oh, this guy's name is bad job Q work wreck.

It's like, yeah, no, that's, that sounds like it's, it's very funny, but it actually means in the language of my country, a terrible employee who will destroy your company. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm John chase Maryland accident. So William George crush was a passenger agent for the Katie, right? And or here he's passenger traffic manager. I can't figure. I'm not sure exactly what his position was in the company, but it's basically like sort of a general, he's somewhere between general manager of passenger traffic.

You know, he's sort of coordinating all the passenger trains on the system. He might be somewhere lower than that. I don't know. He's, he's definitely higher than like, you know, a station master though, right? I mean, look at how nice the tires and it's going to be so great. That probably is. Yeah. Uh, he was also a good friend of PT Barnum.

I am not shocked by that statement. Yeah. Cool guys hanging out. Cool guys hanging out. Yeah. Doing cool guys stuff. So he had an idea. What if we could deal with this locomotive surplus and drum up some business for the railroad at the same time?

We're going to do this new thing called the publicity stunt. Right. And in this case, the publicity stunt. And I wish we still had these because it doesn't feel like we get any good ones anymore. Not on purpose. No. Yeah. The publicity stunt was they were going to crash two trains into each other for a live audience.

Dude's rock. Fucking jeans. Rock. Now, funnily enough, in 1893, this was not a new idea. Or it was kind of a new idea, but a couple of railroads tried it before the Katie did, right? Um, and several would do it after this incident as well. I think there was a, yes, there was a railroad in. They didn't stop doing these until the thirties.

Just like it's, it's still a good idea. It's still a good idea. You guys don't know the one remembers what happened last time. No one remembers what happened last time, pardon me. But this was, this was going to be the biggest one done yet in 1893. I think it had only been tried a couple of times before. At least one was, there was some railroad in Ohio who did it. Um, this is not the one that's on film.

If you look through YouTube, there's a, there's a fair number of, there's a couple of old timey trains running into each other on YouTube. I don't think this is any one of those though. I don't think this one got filmed because it was 1893. Um, no, you had one guy with a camera taking a perfectly timed shot with three pixels in it. We'll, we'll talk about him in a second. All right. So this was going to be the biggest staged railroad crash in history as of 1893.

And it was going to be called the crash at crush. Crush, uh, uh, named for William George. Just fully taking a sort of like monster truck sort of approach here. Yes. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. The municipal arena at crush Texas. Um, okay. So what, what, what kind of locomotive are we looking at here?

Um, that we're about to send to its doom. Um, so the, the, the Katie was trying to get rid of some of its old, like 1870s era, four, four rows, right? There's four guiding wheels, four driving wheels, zero trailing wheels, right? Classic American locomotive. It's got all the brass fittings. It's got all the big smoke catcher, the big, the big, yeah, the spark raster. Yeah.

It's got a nice wooden cab. You know, it's got all the accoutrements. Um, this is Virginia and truckie number 22, the Inyo, uh, back. This is either coal or wood fired. Um, you know, it has a fairly small boiler, about 75 PSI. You know, these, these things were built to be lightweight, easy to navigate bad track. Um, and they were much smaller than the, uh, the locomotives that were, that came after them. Right?

Huh. You think of these things as being bigger, or at least I do, but then I don't know anything about these. Oh, now there's, these are, these, these guys are, are not so big compared to, I, I, I, there's, there's a couple of good photos of like the world's Colombian exhibition. Uh, where they had, or no, it was a later, there's the 39 world's fair. They had some of these really old locomotives compared to the newer steam locomotives of the day. And they're just like, they're just like puny little things compared to the new ones.

We've run two toy trains into each other, but they are both like live pressure vessels. Yes. Perfect. I think this wasn't, uh, one of the, one of the things that led them to try this is because they thought, you know, these are, these are not, not big, uh, these are not super modern, high pressure boilers. These are, these are old, old things. Yeah. And when steam, when there's like steam contained in a smaller thing,

that makes it less dangerous, I assume. Well, I mean, a 75 PSI boiler is not 125 PSI boiler, right? Sure. That's just math. I mean, that's math right there. Yeah. I'm waiting for Liam to get back because I don't want to confuse him by being on another slide. This is like already this seems like the safest thing you can possibly do. 00:40:44,960 --> 00:40:47,360 How was this intended?

Like I want to get inside the thought process here. How was this intended to make people go, I want to take that railroad? Um, I don't know. Okay. Sure. Yeah. Here, I'm going to grab another beer and then I will attempt to answer that question.

Oh God. Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Okay. Hi everybody. How's it going? It's me, your friend, Alice. I woke up directly, I overslept and so by about half an hour, and I woke up just in time to record this podcast. So I will now be reading out a list of comments, which I believe were unfavorable to me, and I'm conducting a series of threats against their authors. I'm back.

Oh, good timing. Okay. What are you drinking? I have a Yards Filthy Unfiltered Hazy IPA, which I think I may have mentioned earlier. That's too, that's too many names. Like I, all real ale bros in the UK do this too, where like you'll buy a bottle of a bottle of beer or whatever, and it will be like called like something like the cantankerous hobgoblin IPA or whatever.

And you just, I just get those and I'm just like, oh, go fuck yourself, dude. I don't, I don't like this as much as their regular IPA, I gotta say. I think this may also have less alcohol in it. Stop making IPAs. I'm waving, I'm like the communist propaganda thing with the skeleton waving a big banner, but the banner says stop making IPAs. There's too much hops around here. Well, this one, this one tastes kind of like a fruit juice from all the hops,

as opposed to the other one that tastes kind of like a beer. That's my, that's my, my criticism of Hazy IPAs is I think a lot of them, a lot of them days just don't, they don't taste like beer. Yeah, it's the same thing with wine is like you have cheap wine. You can cover up a lot of faults by just adding cheap oak barrels and just have an oak taste. Same with hops. Yeah, because it does feel like the Hazy IPA fat is an excuse to make beer that isn't that good. You know, because I, you know, sometimes you want a nice some,

I like a beer I can see through, you know. Sure. Yeah. And I mean, if you want a beer that you don't want to see through, there's nothing wrong with going super old school and just having like a stout, you know, have a porcelain. This is true. Yeah, but nice stout, nice porter.

Have nice stout and ages. I was going to start getting back into them over the winter and then I just didn't do that. Just kept buying the same four beers over and over again. I think we got Liam back. Yeah, sorry, I had a fair admit of gastrointestinal distress. Oh, do you need to stop recording the podcast? No, I had my diarrhea and now I'm good. Very nice.

Congratulations for getting back on the horse. So it's. Thank you. All right, we're doing great with this podcast. All right. Well, none of us are chewing anything. I'm interrupting you a lot less. So by all of the metrics that make people complain,

my butthole literally feels like it's on fire. All right. So where were we? Where was I? We were through IPAs. We're talking about, well, yeah, but we're also talking about this locomotive. It's a 440. You know, this is the kind of locomotive they're trying to crash into another locomotive.

Very similar to it. Oh, I think this one is a little heavier than the one that they were that they actually wrecked. Right. Now, so this is an older locomotive, lower pressure boiler. There are still some risks here and that risk is a boiler explosion. Right. So here in Spagasi. Yes, this locomotive has turned into Cthulhu going to a boiler explosion.

So ordinarily, like the steam locomotive works by generating steam, which goes in the cylinders and the cylinders, move a piston. The piston is, you know, moves the wheels through a series of rods. Right. All boilers have a maximum pressure. That maximum pressure is theoretically regulated by a safety valve. The safety valve will pop when the boiler pressure is too high, let off excess steam.

Right. You know, you may, if you go watch a steam locomotive in action, sometimes you may see a big plume of steam coming out the top that's not coming out of the smokestack. That's coming out the safety valve because they're running it. You know, I guess they're free steaming at that point. Right. They're producing more steam than they can use. Right.

So that prevents the boiler from going over pressure and doing bad stuff. Right. Because if the pressure is too high, the boiler explodes. Sure. And shoots all of the tubing on the inside out to make tally-a-tally. Yes. Because this is a fire tube boiler, which means there's a big, big, just, you know, just a big chunk of water in there with poops running through it that all the heat goes through.

Right. Both the opposite of water tube boiler, which is much harder to explode, but also more difficult to construct. So, anyway, there's some, there's a couple of ways you can cause a boiler explosion. Right. That take none to harm. Where you, yeah, exactly. Where you overwhelm the safety valve and cause a situation where, you know,

it can't vent pressure quickly enough. The most common one is that you're operating the locomotive. You're just driving along and you realize, oh, there is, you forget to add water to the boiler for a while. Right. What this means is that the firebox, which is this bit back here, that's where the fire is, starts to heat up too much. And then the crown sheet, because the firebox doesn't reach the full height of the boiler,

the crown sheet starts to become weaker owing to the heat from the fire. And as a result, it eventually fails. And if it fails, then the boiler itself is exposed to atmospheric pressure. Right. Which means all the water in here, which is held at a temperature higher than the normal boiling point owing to pressure, flash vaporizes into steam and then blows up. Right. And it'll blow out the front, but also it blows out the back into the cab.

Yeah. Which is not ideal if you are sitting in the cab. No, no, I would simply survive this. Some people have. All right, thank you. All right, thank you. Thank you, but I'm billed different. Yep.

This was one time, this has occurred a couple decades ago at the Gettysburg Railroad. Yes, it did. Yeah, that's a whole episode. I know some people, I know a friend of the pod, Tom Coletti wanted to come on for at some point. Luckily, that was a Canadian locomotive, which has this incredible feature where two of the stay bolts in the firebox are weaker than the rest of them. So rather than the boiler exploding, it just blows out two bolts. Oh, those some fuck.

What's the word? Fusible plugs? Or am I confusing that with something else? I have no idea. Not important. Not important. Go on anyway. Because they're rivets, not bolts.

But anyway, so that's the most common way a boiler explosion happens is crown sheet exposure and then you don't do anything about it, right? Put water in your thing. Make sure the water's above the crown sheet. The other reason a boiler explosion might happen is from corrosion weakening the boiler or from impacts. Now, what kind of impacts are we talking about? Like crashing the train into something.

Yes. Well, good thing that's not going to happen here. Yeah, what kind of idiot would do that? Who didn't listen to our podcast about it? Kind of absolutely dipshit. Would just crash stuff into other stuff. I see you never played burnout paradise. Oh, god.

Now that fucking takes me back. If you could get, well, burnout paradise had like the crash mode sucked in that one. It did. It was very good. That's very good. Yeah, bring back the like the crash junction mode from previous. And let me use a train. Let me use a train.

You heard him developers. New train sim DLC, crash mode. Yes. I want a good crash mode in there. I was always disgusting in roller coaster and tight kid where I would just make a crash on purpose. But the marketing result from this incredible. Yes, being intentionally crashed two roller coasters together. So, right.

Boiler explosions, especially on later steam locomotives that had a higher pressure boiler. Usually pretty catastrophic, right? They'd usually just kill the crew instantly. They would often, you know, hurl parts of the locomotive like half a mile away. And we're talking like big parts of the locomotive, like, you know, that one ton of smoke box lands on someone's car, right? You know, this is just sort of an inherent issue with the fire to boiler. You got to treat it with respect.

Now, one of the things is these boilers were generally built well enough that they usually did not explode in impacts, right? It's comfortable. They could explode, but they usually did not. They did pretty heavily. Had a good time because they had a lot of impacts back then. Yeah, they've ran trains into each other a lot back in the day. Bunk.

That exact noise, too, actually. Welcome to Crush, Texas. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right. The Temporarius Sissy in the state. Yes. Everything is fleeting in the end, Alice.

Welcome to Crush, Texas. All flesh is grass. So, Crush had a simple idea. I'm William George Crush. We're going to crash these two trains into each other. We're not going to charge admission. What they did charge was two dollars to get on an excursion train that would bring you to Crush and then bring you back from anywhere in Texas.

OK. Yeah. So, the tickets were two dollars. That's still not like even then. That's not a lot of money. I think it was a couple articles quoted that as adjusted for inflation. That's $60 today. I mean, that's, you know, you'd feel spending that, but not.

It's not like they made it worth your while. It's, you know, one day excursion to the town of Crush, Texas. And they did build a town, right? Back on railroads could just do that. Yeah. This is built, this is 14 miles north of Waco, Texas, right? And George Crush went to his friends and borrowed everything he could, right? So, he got some rides and attractions from the Chicago exhibition,

brought them down to Crush. He got a big tent from his friend P.T. Barnum and set up a big restaurant in there, right? They built a whole separate track for the two trains. They were going to crash into each other. There was no chance of a runaway. Safety first. Safety first, yeah. You know, so they set up grand stands.

They had two telegraph offices. They set up a whole temporary system of plumbing, right? Look at how much more efficient things are now that these days, you simply have to hold up your phone, tell people to like, share, and subscribe. This would be fucking great if they had phones back then and could have taken a video of this. Welcome to the Beyond the Press hydraulic press channel, second channel. So much great YouTube content out of this. What's up, YouTube?

Massive trade crash in the background, bodies scattered around. Yeah, you have to have the YouTube thumbnail where it's like a picture of George Crush in the front. What the fuck? And like the the actual text is like, killed 500 people. Open parentheses, serious, all caps, close parentheses. Yeah, George Crush has had to post like a notes app apology. Oh yeah, to all my fans, friends and followers. George Crush turns his Twitter picture to just a flat black.

He starts doing boxing for some reason. So they set up, they set up, they built a huge temporary train station for all the excursion trains. They brought in, they brought in a crap load of ice for makeshift air conditioning. The rules. Yeah, crush taxes was for one day a real place, right? And the stunt, the stunt was an overwhelming success, right? They wound up bringing in more than 40 excursion trains full of paying guests to crush Texas. And something like 40,000 people wound up there to see the to see the collision.

Yeah, and everything they can buy is from the railroad. Yeah, you're making bank off of the concessions. Oh, yeah. That's where the real money is. Jerry Jones, man. Yeah, $2 ticket, but $10 beer. And they only have Shiner Bach. And Dr. Pepper, the national soda of Texas.

So at Crush, Texas was the largest city in Texas for one day. That day was September 15th, 1896. Oh, there's a date. There's a date, yeah. Oh, boy. So they brought two old locomotives. These were two Baldwin 440s from the 1870s made in beautiful Philadelphia. And these are number 1001 and 999.

One of them was red and the other one was green. Look how that mass occurred, my boy. Is that is that like a hammer painted on the tender of the one on the right? And there's something on the one on the left. Looks like it. Yeah, I don't know what's on the other one. Ah, hammer and sickle. Hammer and sickle, yeah.

Yeah, Crush was secretly a communist. Both approached each other slowly and met on the track in front of the assembled crowd before the collision, right? One source said it was like a, you know, a handshake before dueling, right? Hey, touch, touch gloves. And then the train referee is like, I want a good clean fight. Each train consisted of the locomotive, the tender and six boxcars. And the boxcars were covered in advertisements for local businesses.

Love it. It's like those diner mats. Yeah, well, at least they didn't do the thing that seems obvious, which is like, oh, we filled these boxcars full of like kerosene and lamp oil. That would be pretty funny. The trains were held together with large chains in addition to the normal couplers to ensure that when the train crashed, the boxcars didn't wander too far from the tracks. You know, that'd be pretty bad if it just sort of rolled into the crowd.

And William Crush had gone and talked to several engineers from the Katie and they had said, listen, there's no way there could be a boiler explosion in this accident. You know, the impact is just not large enough. I've had experience with these locomotives and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? When the event occurred, they had some issues, right? The main issue was that twice the number of guests attended than what was anticipated. Oh, boy. Oh, no.

Yeah. So the public was supposed to be contained 200 yards from the track, right? But according to the amount of people, they couldn't maintain security cordon. A lot of people were about 100 yards from the track. They had 300 policemen trying to press this whole crowd back, right? And they just couldn't do it. Yeah, railroad cops being like, wait a second, these aren't strikers. I don't know how to deal with this. I don't know how to deal with this.

You have to have them shoot them. You can't, you can't like, you know. I can't break one of their legs. Yeah, we got to, we got to, these are paying, these are paying customers. We had to treat them with a modicum of respect, which was a mistake. No, maximum violence towards the crowd at all times. We will get to that. So the trains were supposed to go at 4 p.m.

And because the crowd was uncontained, they didn't, right? And so, you know, they're waiting, they're waiting, trying to push the crowd back. Crowds getting unruly. They want to see the crash. They're all drunk off their asses because it's the 19th century. Right, they're barely standing up. I am sure like half of them are drunk off their asses, and the other half are in some kind of temperance movement.

No, Gary Nation, you bitch. Yeah, but like a temperance movement that allows for like the liberal use of cocaine. Yes. We didn't know what it did back then. It's fine. Yeah, just administering myself some cocaine eye drops. Cocaine atomized, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, since it's Texas, it's probably a lot of Germans. So yeah, they probably aren't pretty, pretty fucking hammered. 19th century club drugs. Dusting my big fucking curly sausage on a stick. With cocaine. And then looking over my shoulder at a guy who's just drunk and being like, this fucking idiot, you got to get on my level. Yeah, my girlfriend saw you across the room and we really dug your vial.

You win for this or what? Meet with my frolin. Yeah. So at 5 p.m., they were an hour late on the collision. William George Crush rode up on his big white horse. Is this a literal horse or is it a literal fucking horse? No, it's a literal horse. He was conducting the event from a big horse.

I hope it gets liquefied. No, that's animal cruelty. But and he decided he gets liquefied. All right, fucking, we'll do it live. Oh, no. Gave the order to let the trains go. Right. Now, by this point, they've backed up one and a half miles in each

direction, right? And each end of the track was at the top of a hill, right? They were to come down a hill and then wreck into each other. Just fully doing beam and G dot drive shit. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it used to be. It used to be you could it used to be you could just do beam and G stuff in real life. The fucking government made that illegal.

God damn police government, yeah. So all right. Now, the way this is going to work, the crews of the two trains had two jobs. They set the throttle. Their second job was to tie down the whistle. Awesome. So it was just on the whistle the whole way. That's obnoxious.

I can do that first and then do the throttle, but go off. Well, I guess you could do it either way. Yeah. Would you want to hear yourself think I would think? Yeah. And then and then after four revolutions of the wheels, they jumped off the train, right? And these two trains raced towards each other. Now, the railroad had also installed torpedoes on the track for dramatic effect, right?

And the torpedo is a little explosive that you mount to the track. And the idea is that if there's some kind of emergency ahead on the line, a train rolls over the torpedo, it blows up. You get the crew's attention. They stop the train. In this case, they're using it for dramatic effect. Again, dudes rock. Yeah.

Every kind of like pyrotechnical thing that we have in our arsenal as a 19th century railroads, we're going to fire off 5,000 rifles at once just for fun. Yeah, exactly. You know, I'm sure there are like some guys on the sidelines just shooting off guns, maybe some cannon. That'd be cool. And so the route. So, you know, the trains are coming towards each other.

The whistles are blaring again. They're running over torpedoes, right? And they were each going about 45 miles an hour when they collided, right? For a combined impact speed of 90 miles an hour. 1896, too. Yes. So, depending on who you believe, this was either a few years after or a few years before the first train hit 100 miles an hour ever.

We're not getting into this. We already had the Israel-Palestine thing. Yeah, I know the real debate. Was it New York Central 999 or was it City of Truro? You already know the answer. Next. Well, this was the one thing we didn't want to happen.

Oh, God. So, these two trains wrecked into each other, combined impact speed 90 miles an hour. No one had done 90 miles an hour before or confirmed. And aside from that atmospheric railway guy, one Irishman. One Irishman had done 90 miles an hour. Yeah. And these boilers subject to an accident well beyond any anticipated force they could have withstood.

Rather than, you know, sort of the expected, the trains, you know, sort of they hit each other. They like bend upwards and then, you know, the boilers stay intact. They just telescoped right into each other. Uh-oh. And both of them violently exploded, right? Hell yeah. Like a plate of spaghetti.

Yes. And it sent shrapnel and large pieces of locomotive directly into the crowd. Lot of shrapnel too, because like, aside from everything being made of metal, and like not even welds, it's all riveted, right? Yes. Well, you had a big boiler explosion in the middle of the crowd. You have panic and mayhem afterwards, right? The crowd turned and ran.

But by the time you turn and ran, the damage had been done. You know, so amazingly, despite this boiler explosion happening, only three people were killed, right? Um, I think one of them was a teenager who had a giant wrecking hook smash him right in the face. A few other people were killed by miscellaneous shrapnel. Several dozen people were injured. Notably, the man who took this picture, Jarvis Joe Dean of Waco, had a bolt smash directly into his eye.

No, thank you. Which he had a little eye trauma on this show lately. Yes, that's what I was about to say. And he lost that eye. Oh, really? Yeah, shockingly enough. But he survived. Good for you, my spurs.

So this, this was all over in seconds. You know, three dead, several dozen wounded. So the crowd turned around again and ran to gather souvenirs from the destroyed trains. Okay, 19th century Americans were built different. I'll give them that much. This is my one like return to tradition thing is like, you've just seen a guy get decapitated by a hook. You've seen some final destination shit all around you.

People are like losing eyes and limbs and stuff. And you're like, I'm going to get a souvenir. Shit. Yes. The 10. On each train, like the locomotives are completely destroyed. And five of the six boxcars were destroyed on each train. The crowd ran up to them and just started grabbing a piece of wood and shit like that.

And they were just, what do you even want with a piece of wood? It's just been like tangentially involved in a horrible disaster. Hey, man, they had to son of Sam was and all that shit. People are fucked up, man. People are fucking gross. I love the idea of like hanging that like piece of wood, what's what's clearly like human blood on it in your living room above your man. It'll be like, you know, your great grandpappy.

Wrapped that piece of wood out of a breathing man's chest. Grandpappy left him to die. Yes, he did. Because there ain't no winners. The crash of crush son. Yeah. So that the 10 destroyed boxcars were picked clean in minutes while the injured and dead were carried off.

Shoot or shoot, baby. I'm going to get some free boards. I'm going to get some free boards. You know how much that shit costs right now? Yeah, they weren't just thinking ahead. This was back in the 19th century when it was good, too. So yeah, everyone who wasn't injured or dead took the excursion trains back home with a hell of a story.

Hell yeah. A bunch of time travelers trying to pick clean the like low background radiation steel. I would I would time travel back to this event. If if I if I had a time machine, this would definitely be. But yeah, well, I would I would simply stand where the shrapnel doesn't go. Maybe also just put on some safety glasses unlike our guy last week. It's a good point.

01:08:29,680 --> 01:08:32,240 Just handing the photographer some safety glasses. Yep. Wear this. Don't ask where it came from. The future. All right. So you might think that this was a bad thing. Hmm.

I might. I won't, though, because I I could picture this being a huge success. No, it's a dude's rock, white boy, summer and so on and so on. Yeah. The candy went on for a while after this. So I'm going to assume it didn't bankrupt them because there weren't any laws back then. That's what I say. I'm wondering who took this photograph.

Now that I think about it, was this the guy who just lost an eye is like, well, I'm still dedication to the craft, baby. You only need one to look down if you find it. Yeah. So in the aftermath of this incident, right? OK, three dead, several dozen wounded. William George Crush was, of course, immediately fired from the Katie, right? Oh, no, he wasn't.

Yeah, he was. Oh, lay him stupid. The railroad settled individually with the victims. Some of them got cash awards up to ten thousand dollars. I'll get a lifetime free passes. Back when that was legal. That's not legal. Free passes are illegal since the Hepburn Act.

Because the railroads kept giving them preferred shippers. It was seen as a corrupt practice. But the event itself made worldwide headlines. You know, it was the biggest news event since whatever the last big news event was. I don't know what it was in 1893. Hey, I think in 1893, you just said it. Probably that. Yeah.

Yeah, fucking plus EV Ferguson. Mm. Wasn't that pre-Civil War? No. No. No, plus EV Ferguson was 1896. And you said 96? Yeah, this is 1893.

Ah, fuck. OK. This is also before the main, because otherwise we're going to say the main. Oh, it's 1898. Yeah. News in 1893. Ivory Coast becomes a French colon, that would be it. You just get a spinning newspaper with that on it.

That sounds kind of boring. Um. OK. We'll just we'll just we'll just make some news up so you can be happy, Roz. Thank you. SS Neuronic sinks without a trace. Future episode, maybe. Probably something about Napoleon III.

Grover Cleveland is sworn in. Again. They finished construction at the Salt Lake Temple. Even worse. Yeah. That's a weird looking building, by the way. Yeah. So contrary to what might be expected, suddenly everyone everywhere knew about the Missouri,

Kansas and Texas railroad, and it brought them a whole bunch of business and investment. Hell, yes. Because people suddenly knew about this railroad they didn't know about before. So upon seeing how much positive publicity this fatal publicity stunt had brought the railroad, Fresh was quietly rehired the following day. Yes, my boy. Pretty my boy crush. Hashtag three crush.

Yeah. Like Scott Jaffelin. Even kind of sounds like a YouTuber. Like official real crush has been rehired. I'm sorry. I'm sorry about my heated railroading moment. Real Dutch has been rehired by the Casey railroad. Scott Jaffelin, who was in the area at the time, wrote a march about it.

I loved writing marches about shit in the 19th century. I've composed something on the sousaphone for this. Entirely fucking normal behavior. And what's his name? What was his nickname? That was his name was Crush Ross. No, I was Joe. Yeah, I was Joe Dean.

Oh, I was Joe. One eyed Joe Dean. One month later, he put an ad in the Waco newspaper. Having gotten all the loose screws and other hardware out of my head, I'm now ready for all photographic business. Good for you, man. It's funny when you realize that he's not talking about like medical screws, like fucking getting a plate in your head.

He means the shit that came off of a locomotive. I just have a safety valve embedded in my face every time I speak whistles. Yeah, I've got a spark arrestor just like hanging out of me. Yeah, out of my ear. All right. Did anyone learn their lesson from this? Probably not. No.

No, God, no. Railroads kept doing stage collisions for audience into the 1930s. Bring them back. Yeah, bring them back. This is eventually supplanted by the demolition derby, of course. And today, railroads mainly crash trains accidentally. Yes, if you want to see two trains crash into each other, you've got to have inside information now.

Yes, exactly. I mean, I've never seen a train crash. I've never seen a train crash into another train. Bring it back. Bring it back. Exactly. Well, just run a couple of alcoves into each other. The railroads have a lot of surplus power right now.

I think it may be time to bring back stage train crashes. We've seen that the ingredients for this are surplus locomotives and economic crisis. So the next bubble, the next crash, we will all be writing to various railroads, various class one railroads, asking that they bring this back. You know, M-Tracks, M-Tracks is going to be retiring the Ocellas soon.

Yeah, you could get a 300,000. We get like a public campaign. The secretary bootage edge. Sorry, we keep calling you Pete Butcher. Please crash to Ocellas directly into each other at V-Max. At 150 miles an hour each. Yeah, 300 mile per hour combined impact speed. Let's go.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And like the technology now is such that you can put a bunch of dummies and a bunch of cameras in the trains. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. It's that way you could say it's scientific. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like when Boeing crashed that plane into some... The 727, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I like how for a long time the FAA would not release the interior footage of that because like, no, it's too horrifying. It's like... Shut up and do it to us. Yeah, give me the footage.

Give me the footage fucking Verna Hertz or give me the grizzly man type. I want to see the thing. So, yeah, I overall resounding success, except three people who died. Advertising is a fantastic field. Advertising, you know, I want to do this sort of thing for a living. Yeah. I don't think we've learned...

We've learned nothing from this except that train crashes are cool. We should do... Stand further back, I guess. Yeah, just let the... You wouldn't even have to do that now. You would just need some of the NASCAR fencing. Yeah. Yeah.

We've got the fencing from Robot Wars, the like Lexan barrier. Yeah. Yeah, so... All right. I think we can confidently say that we've learned nothing from this podcast. What's the level? It's a loss because we're trying to do it again. Yeah, I just want to do this thing.

Yeah, if anything, this episode has made us dumber. Yes, and has made you the listener dumber as well. Well, that's what you pay us for. If you pay us, you should pay us. This is what I have to say. Give us your money. Give us your money. Give us your money so we can release a cathedral episode,

hopefully within the month of May. Raz. Look, it should be done by Wednesday. We'll record them. Thank you, Raz. Bonus episodes. Bonus episodes. We have them.

All right. We also have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. God damn it. It's the wrong one. I switched the. That's the wrong one. All right. That's the right one.

I switched the drop's position thinking I would remember. And then I remembered that I had to remember something, but because I only remember that I had to remember something, I remember the inverse of what I had to remember. My brain hurts now. All right, good day. I've been an avid follower of your podcast since about the time it got its own channel.

How the hell you're only at 41,000 subscribers is beyond my understanding. We're being shadow banned. I'm always saying this. Give me the plaque. Give me the plaque. Give me the 50,000 subscribers. We're being shadow banned.

I don't think we get one for 50,000. I think we get one for 100. God damn it. Yeah, you got to get 100,000. Give me half a plaque. Give me a plaque. You saw one in half. Well, I have obfuscated this story slightly.

Holy shit, you really need to keep this one anonymous. We're not getting a guy NJP'd because of our podcast. Yeah, I was about to say. This is an osprey story. I think you should decide how much background on that nonsense to give your listeners first, but down there where I sarcastically describe it as a paragon of quality and reliability,

please remind them of the sarcasm in case they're new here. We have a whole ass osprey episode. The episode first, then circle back to this. With hell of a way to die. It's a great time. Yes. We'll wait. That said, here goes.

I'm not sure I was supposed to read this part. Oops. Well, there's no identifying information, so I think we're fine. This story takes place years ago at a large show and tell deal that is occasionally held by the government to get various groups together

and show off their new toys and research projects. I love Deep State Con. At this point in time, the V-22 Osprey was just emerging from the R&D phase as regarded as something akin to the ninth wonder of the world. It was, alas, not yet the paragon of quality and reliability that it became in the following years.

That's sarcasm as the man mentioned above. Mm-hmm. As the person mentioned above. Keep this anonymous. All right. Doing very well. I'm not sure who decided to pair their experimental hardware

with our experimental hardware at this show, but I'm sure they won't make that mistake again. Oh, good. But actually, the military rotates project managers for these sorts of things around every few years, so that just when someone's getting good at their job, they get sent off to be bad at something else.

Who thought that was a good idea? Anyway. The military. The military rolls. Yes. Keep this picture of the Osprey in your mind. It has a fold-down ramp at the back for two dozen passengers

to get out in a hurry when it's time for war stuff. That's the ramp back here, right? At the front of this space is an opening to the cockpit, which has several more seats for the flight crew and is situated somewhat lower down than the cargo area. So I guess this must go up and then goes down. The project that was being demoed here

was a motorcycle-sized ground reconnaissance vehicle. It was powered by an internal combustion engine driving a hydraulic pump, and the wheels were run off of 3,000 PSI hydraulic motors. Right? So this is like a hydraulic drive system, right? So the engine is driving a pump and then there's pipes that go down to hydraulic motors

by the wheels. This person was testing Johnny V, essentially. Yeah, this was used on a couple... I only know it really from use in locomotives because it's an alternative to diesel-electric traction as diesel-hydraulic. It lets you do hub motors like it's an electric system, except instead it uses high-pressure oil.

Cool. Yeah. So yeah, this sort of system is not renowned for efficiency. So there was a big radiator slash heat exchanger for the copious weight heat on top of this vehicle with a very powerful fan blowing air upwards through it. On a reconnaissance vehicle. On a reconnaissance vehicle.

You have a very large heat signature on your reconnaissance vehicle. Okay, fine, whatever. Listen, we only fight like guys... Guys who don't own shoes. Guys who don't own shoes, yeah. So this is probably fine, right? The heat exchanger had the low-pressure return side

of the hydraulic system plumbed through it, which was only 100 or so PSI, so it didn't have to be as strongly built as it would have to be to handle the 3000 PSI high side. This will become important momentarily. At this stage in the program, the vehicle was being controlled by an operator with a laptop and joystick,

who is standing inconspicuously away from the crowd of VIPs gathered around the back of the Osprey to watch. Joystick makes it sound like he's got like an old Amiga thing, you know? Probably. Probably is that. I kind of like when the military use Xbox controllers for this. There was a radio link to the vehicle, which, it turned out, shared one of the same problems as many other remote control systems.

If the comms link was lost, the vehicle kept doing whatever the last command it received told it to do. Yeah, this is Johnny V. We've made Johnny V, okay. This is not so bad in a field where there are no conductive obstacles to get in the way of the signal, right? It's a prototype we'll fix that later. Yeah, instead of a fail-safe, it's a fail comedy. It's a fail-to-file laughing emoji.

Oh, I like that house. During the important demo, important demo is capitalized. The vehicle was remotely driven into the back of the engine turning, pilots on board, Osprey. Right as it goes up the ramp, the fuselage gets in the way of the signal and communication is lost. Now the vehicle is rolling forward towards the open hatch to the pit where the pilot's on. Oh my God.

Out of control. Did I mention the gas tank? It has a gas tank and a hot exhaust system. We've inadvertently created a robot that hijacks an Osprey. Fortunately, there was a big red emergency stop push button on the vehicle. And the non-trivially ranked officer, watching this from the seats inside, was able to reach it before hundreds of pounds of vehicle and gasoline fell onto the pilots. Oh, no.

Unfortunately, the button was on top of the vehicle and he had to reach across the heat exchanger to hit it. Remember when I mentioned this was a one-off prototype? The system hadn't really been dialed in yet. The fastest way to stop the wheels was to lower the hydraulic pressure in a hurry, right? The problem was the only other place to send the high-pressure fluid was into the low-pressure side of the system, right? The one meant for like 100 PSI instead of 3,000 PSI.

When this happened, the entire heat exchanger blew open and the still-running fan blew gallons of hot, hot oil upwards right across the outstretched arm of the vehicle. Right across the outstretched arm of the heroic officer. And they say being a general isn't dangerous. Yes. And yet, you may find yourself being blasted with hydraulic fluid by a deranged Johnny Five attempting to murder the flight crew of an osprey. I understand the burns were not enough to require skin graft.

The flight crew. It works. The flight crew were saved this time. Parenthetically, the inside of the osprey was also now fully lubricated. Think about cleaning off all the inside of a cargo plane. Yeah, busted on the inside of this osprey. And somehow they gave us more money later. The United States military is the most dude's rock organization on the face of the fucking earth.

Maybe it was a good thing. They move project managers around so frequently. That's the best safety third we've ever had. That was a really good one. It was really, really good. It had to be better than that from now on, folks. Yeah, this is the bar. This is the bar.

It's trying to. Listen, all you all defense contractors who listen to this program, and you're not a good, you have bad politics if you don't send us your safety thirds. That's right. That is right. Give a grove a third. I want to hear all your defense contracting stories. That's right.

Get yourself in trouble because I need to hear more about these. Exactly. I want to see what the fucking the fucking reconnaissance vehicle looked like, you know. Yeah, I'd love to know what it was. It's probably still secret. I'm going to continue to think of it as Johnny five. That's probably half the reason why so much old military crap is still classified is because it, you know, they don't want us to know how stupid they are.

They're ashamed of it. To repair. All right. Well, that was safety third. Got one half correct drops. Yes. Good job, Alice. I'm proud of you.

Our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Do we have any plugs before we go? We have a discord. Apparently we do have a discord. We're gonna have to. Sorry, I heard you feeling earlier about it, Alice. I thought you do. No, no, no.

I thought you do your own mod. Yeah. Well, fucking send me the link and I guess I will be. But yeah, we'll do. Sorry to advance there. But international shipping, international shipping. I'm on it. I'm on it.

Yeah. Windbreakers. We're going to record bonus episode on Wednesday. It should be out hopefully maybe on Monday. Oh, recording on Wednesday? Well, I unless that doesn't work. No, that works. I just the funny thing.

I'll have to do it a little later than normal. Yeah. Also, funny thing about that is I'm gonna have had a tooth freshly pulled out of my face on Wednesday. It's gonna be good. Oh, good. 01:29:14,320 --> 01:29:15,760 It's up for free, aren't Alice?

Yeah. Exactly. All right. I'm going to go lay down. We could theoretically do it a different day. No, it's Wednesday time. Wednesday time. All right.

All right. In that case, you'll see us next. We'll hear us next with large-faced Alice. That's right. Yeah. And... Little chipmunk Alice. Yes.

And yeah. And then I can stop feeling bad about taking so long with the bonus episode. It's okay. Yes. It's my fault for saying I was going to do one and then remembering I didn't know anything about the subject matter and just leaving it to you to do it.

We could still do that. I might just write that episode. Okay. We're still going to Cuyahoga sitting around. This is true. All right. But the next episode is, of course, on the Tacoma-Narrows birth test.

That's right. That's right. Yes. Okay. I think that was a podcast. Bye, everybody. Did it? Off to the Zen.