Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 7: Lac-Megantic

Episode Date: November 22, 2019

Today @donoteat01, @aliceavizandum, and @oldmananders0n talk about railroading in the age of loneliness: the MMA railroad, and one-man crews. here are the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdtQi6TEcjs listen to trashfuture: https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/ listen to @donoteat01 on Grubstakers talking about the Irvings: https://soundcloud.com/grubstakers/episode-89-the-irving-family-feat-donoteat

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. Also, you lied to me. It's not Lake Megan from Unknown Origin, which is probably Native American. No, it's not. They're like Lac-Magantique is French for Lake Megan. So I have a friend named Megan who just not listened to this podcast, probably will never listen to this podcast. And I just wanted to say hi to you and also that your taste in all media is extremely bad. But they didn't name a lake after them. Congratulations, Megan. All right. We're all recording and we can do podcasting. All right, everyone. Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about episode seven.

Yes, podcast about engineering disasters. I'm Justin Rosniak. Also, do not eat on the Twitter. Pronouns he and him. And that that's who I am. Alice Coldwell Kelly, Alice Avazande on Twitter, she and her. Liam Anderson, do not eat roommate and general agitator of big, dumb, fucking trans folks. Pronouns are he, him. Respect our pronouns, please. I live as a man and I expect you to respect that. This is recorded on International Men's Day, too. That's a good point. Yes. We should all be just fired into the sun with some sort of extravagant. Gerard Butler did nothing wrong. The project Babylon was a good idea.

You just get every single man loaded into Hunter S. Thompson's funerary canon. So that's efficiency. I will get the VC money for this right away. All right. So this this episode, I'm tentatively titling railroading in the age of loneliness because it's about MMA. That sport we love. And one man cruise. No, no, it's about the Montreal Main and Atlantic Railroad. That's a stupid name. Yeah. I mean, is that more or less dangerous than mixed martial arts? Slightly more. I don't think 47 people have been killed in martial arts in one go. Oh, I don't know. See, that's because you don't believe in the wonders of my awesome fists.

Yeah, it's because he doesn't believe in the kumite. Yeah, this kind of shit could happen. This is what happens when you don't take a warrior code douchebag. Absolutely. So like it's this podcast, the dynamic here is two warrior monks and one baffled engineer. Lackmegantique is a town in Quebec. It used to have a charming main street. A dozen anymore. What happened to the main street? Well, we're going to learn. We love learning. Oh, good. If you can't tell from the picture. I genuinely cannot. That, you know, it's just like that. I mean, it's in California. That's very normal. Hapsuck. I mean, there's a giant like offshore refinery in Scotland where they've just been

burning off excess fuel because they can't sell it. So it does look a lot like that. Jesus Christ. Yeah, they've just been burning it off. It's great. I just want to report good news for those of you watching on the YouTube and not on Apple Podcast where we are now. I have figured out the laser pointer function. And there's also a pen so I can John Madden up the place. All right. So anyway, he's too powerful. Yeah. So our story starts in Saint John New Brunswick in 1885. I got pictured here. Yeah. Pictured here. Of course. Lovely town. In 1885. Yes. Yes. Notable 1885 features such as the reversing Falls Bridge and like a station wagon. So in 1885,

the Canadian Pacific Railroad had just completed its main line from Vancouver to Montreal, right? And Montreal is a big busy port. It was closed from December to May because, you know, ice. We're taking care of that problem. Oh yeah. Yeah. Slowly but surely. Oh, Stan Rogers. They were competing with the Grand Trunk Railway. Not to be confused with the Grand Funk Railroad. That was a reach. I liked it. You know, they were named after the Grand Trunk. Anyway, so the Grand Trunk Railway had a line from Montreal to Portland, Maine, right? Which is an ice-free port. And they had an indirect line to Halifax, which went around the top of Maine, called the Intercolonial Railway, right? Problematic already. Oh, well, they had

a whole class of cars in Canada called colonist cars, right? God damn it, dude. Yeah. It was designed to bring people out west so that they'd settle there. Thanks for nothing. The Canadian Pacific Railroad decides to build a new railroad to an ice-free port. That was Saint John. And they decided fuck borders. That's some fake-ass nationalist shit. Praxis. That is praxis. They plan to build a railroad from Montreal straight across Maine and into Saint John, right? Yeah, just through a succession of Stephen King novels. Yes. Yes. And yeah, that part of Maine gets fucking weird and all right. And they decide to start it out where the rail ended already at a place called Lac-Meg-Antique, which is right here. So this line was incredibly remote. Like,

I cannot overstate how far away from anything this is, right? And it was also incredibly busy, mostly with freight. You know, it seems contradictory, but because especially during the winter months, it was like everything going into Quebec went through this line because, of course, the Grand Trunk Railroads line was much more indirect because it had to go all the way up. And then come all the way around. I guess since, you know, this went into the United States, but then back out, you didn't technically have to pay, you know, U.S. duties. Whereas if you brought it in at Portland, you did. And in this case, you get your whatever your 19th century Amazon shipment is faster. Cocaine. Yeah, your big thing of Lordinum and cocaine and like steam

powered dildos and stuff. Look it up there, real folks. So this is a very successful railroad for a long time until 1958. The St. Lawrence Seaway opens, which means you can bring stuff in from the Great Lakes to Montreal. And as a result, the Canadian Coast Guard is like, hmm, we should start ice breaking on the St. Lawrence River. And they do so. Now Montreal has an ice free port all of a sudden. So the traffic on the line collapses almost immediately. The bustling port city of St. John becomes a backwater. The line sort of fades into obscurity for a while, which not many trains on this line. So there's this family called the Irvings, right? And the Irvings own the province of New Brunswick in Canada, right? It cannot be overstated how much control this one

family has over almost all the industry, the population of New Brunswick, right? They own the gas stations, the trucks, the trains, the lumber industry, shipbuilding industry, they own rental properties, they have oil refineries, and they own all of the newspapers and all the agriculture. Yes, it's a company town, but for an entire province, it's a feudal society. We don't have a slide illustrating this, I don't believe. But when Roz and I were in St. John's, Newfoundland, there's these Irving oil tanks on a hill overlooking the city. And they light them up at night, just so you know who your glorious masters are. Cool. It is. It is the most fucking like Canadian dystopia I can imagine. It was interesting because I looked at that and I was like,

that's a great place for a billboard, but a terrible place for an oil tank. They will get their revenge on the Newfoundland Railroad one way or another. Currently, yeah. If you want to learn a lot more about the Irvings, I was on an episode of the Grubstakers podcast, a podcast about billionaires about the Irvings, which I'll link in the description. I think it might be a bonus episode. You might have to give them money. Yeah, it's worth it. It's really good. And the weirdest thing about the Irvings is that they did put that giant logo across the entire province. That's just to scale. A lot of people died making that. It was either that or put it on the moon. These are the people that managed to barge

carrying two new turbines from St. John to a nuclear generating station that the Irvings opened the barge and they managed to tip it and they sent the turbines in the road transport vehicle right into St. John Harbor. Whoops. Yeah, whoops is a thing this family does a lot. It's gone poorly. But speaking of whoopses, in 1960, the Irving group of companies, because there's several Irving corporations that are all like, they work together. It's a family. Several family businesses, all the same family. In 1960, they built the St. John refinery, right? Seen here being comprised of tubes. Which blew up a couple of years ago, actually. And here's how one of the Irving owned newspapers described that explosion as a Thanksgiving miracle.

Because no one died. No one died directly. Don't worry, we'll get there. Because I'm sure all of the stuff that came spewing out of that is fine. As we know, there are no such things as long term environmental impacts of engineering disasters. Thank God. Look, don't question the miracle. I have been very close to an exploding refinery and I was fine. You didn't even hear it. I don't want to. No, I just passed out drunk right before the refinery exploded, actually. This is why you survived those. You were doing the sort of slapstick comedy thing where you like the drunk guy stumbles out, covered completely and certain, like missing his pants. Yeah. That's the same on a Wednesday.

Once again, Makers Mark sponsored the podcast. So this refinery, right, mostly received and refined crude oil from Saudi Arabia, I believe, for most of its existence, shipped in on big boats. The product was shipped out on barges. There's no trains involved, right? That makes it less socialist also. This is true. Did it not get any bargain stuff? We're getting there. Okay. I have ruined the pacing again, a non binary pass. Okay. So as traffic's declining on the main international railroad, the Canadian Pacific Railroad tries to abandon it in 1994. The Canadian Transportation Commission refused or they sold it in 1995 and they split it

down the middle at Brownsville Junction, right? The eastern half was sold to two companies, which were both owned by the Irvings, right, which were the New Brunswick Southern Railway and the Eastern Main Railway. Meanwhile, the western half was sold to an Alexandria Virginia Bay short line holding company, which sold it again in 2002 to another holding company, which called it the Montreal Main Atlantic Railroad, the MMA. A pleasantly retro logo, though. It is actually kind of nice. I like it. Yeah. The kind of keystone shape. It's a lot better than the fucking giant Irving Chevron. Yeah. I do want to point out that the holding company used to be called Iron Road Railways. It was establishing the Canadian American and when

they sold it, it was sold to Rail World Inc. This is going to be a super villain story, folks. Well, both of these are like company names in like Railway Empire or Transport Fever or something. That does sound about right. Okay. So disaster befalls this railroad almost immediately, right? The two largest shippers on the line, which were a pair of paper mills, declared bankruptcy. MMA laid off 75 of its 350 employees. They reduced salaries by 40 percent. The railroad continued to struggle. And in 2010, after two more rounds of major layoffs, they received permission to operate with one man crews. Oh, good. That sounds safe. Yeah, I was about to say. Which I mean, a one man crew is kind of like that's not a crew. That's like just a guy.

A guy. Yeah. Yeah. So can you tell us about some of the dangers that might befall one man crews, especially in say a remote area that's not exactly known for say emergency services? Yes, I will in a moment, but we're going to do history first. Oh, good. God damn. Yeah. So it used to be that there were five men on a freight train. There's the locomotive engineer. There's the fireman. There's the conductor. There's two breakmen, right? And that's five unions in total. Yes. Yes. So the the engineer and the fireman were up front in the locomotive, the conductor and breakman rode in the back in the caboose, right? Sure. Say caboose again. That's that's pleasing to me. Caboose.

Here's one on screen. Hey, I've been there. Yes, I've also been there. I've seen that with you. I managed to get someone mad on Toronto Housing Twitter about how they have a railroad museum straight downtown that's occupying a whole bunch of land. He's like, this is a policy failure. Like, fuck you, let people have nice things. Yeah. Instead of billionaires, it's railroad museums. Every railroad museum is a policy failure. I can tell you personally that having gone to Toronto very recently or Toronto, excuse me, so I'm not a tourist and seeing the goddamn whatever Jurassic Park where I'll have to worship the Raptors and also the Leafs who, by the way, haven't won a Stanley Cup since the nineties because Mitch Marner will never be the person

you want him to be. This is not the policy failure, folks. No, the policy failure is is Drake's fucked up plane circling the city like an AWACS. I like that. I like the idea of that. Drake's just desperately looking for someone to land in 757. No, it's just up there being the airborne early warning system. For what? We don't know. Airborne polar bears. That's why Canada's in NORAD. In the 1980s, this five man crew was reduced to a three man crew and then a two man crew, right? Because eventually they realized that you didn't need a fireman on a diesel locomotive. But they also got rid of the caboose, right? So, caboose were abolished after the adoption of this. It's caboose. It's grammatically correct. Anyone who says otherwise is a fascist. Oh boy.

I think the traditionalist Anglo-Saxon plural would be caboose. What do you know you're Scottish? Go away. Caboosan, Cabis, not caboosez, were abolished after we really started adopting two way radios and the invention of Fred. This is a guy. We just invented a guy named Fred. No, we replaced a guy with Fred. The guy might also have been named Fred. That's true. Now, Fred is the flashing rear end device, right? And it's, you know, it's at the end of the train. It makes a whirring sound, right? What? Yeah. If you ever hear a weird whirring sound at the end of a freight train, that's from the flashing rear end device. Because in order to power its red light that blinks, there's a tiny wind turbine inside the Fred, which is attached to

the air hose, which is part of the train's braking system. And it bleeds off air from the brakes to power that wind turbine, to power the Fred. Wind turbines are fine, I guess, but that probably kills a lot of birds. They should power that with like a little nuclear reactor or something. That's a good point, and that may have helped out with what happened, but that's getting ahead of myself. So yeah, I mean, you could have, what's the, what's the like, radioisotope decay, whatever? It's a radio thermoisotope generator, I believe. Yes, that one. Obviously something we should look into. Oh, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but I think we can all agree that whatever ends up happening with this one man crew railroad, it would have been immensely improved by the addition

of fissile materials. Yes. It would have been way cooler for one thing. So since this is bleeding off air to power itself, we got to talk a little bit about railroad air brakes, right? This is a representative diagram. You don't have to pay attention to it. Very simple. Yeah, exactly. So train airbrake. I see a thing in the middle there that just says cut out cock, and that's a mood. So your train air brakes, right? There's a big tube of compressed air that runs the length of the train, right? That's your airline, right? Now through a pneumatic device called a triple valve, if there's a drop in pressure in the airline, that causes the brakes to apply on every car down the train via compressed air from an independent reservoir on each car.

There's a reservoir on each car, but it's fed by the main train airline, and that actuates a pneumatic cylinder that applies the brakes, right? So it fails safe, right? Because it needs positive action to keep the brake off. Yes, it is fail safe-ish. Fail safe in quotes, I assume. Under certain circumstances, which are sort of required based on railroad operations, if the train airline is unpressurized, the brakes will be released. And that's if you know, say we're trying to shunt cars around in the yard, you don't want to have to like repressurize the airline every time you want to move the car. So, but that means if you're parking a train for a long time, right, you're supposed to apply handbrakes as a fail safe against the fail safe. And that makes sense.

You don't want to have like a train having no brakes. So you have two sets of brakes that fail safe. And I mean, what are the odds that both of those would go wrong? We're gonna find out. So now this is this is pretty good system. It's much better than the old system, which was a guy running along the top of the train to set the handbrakes, which by the way is pretty much the only previous braking system to exist other than airbrakes. The Westinghouse airbrake system, I believe, was patented in 1869 and it hasn't really changed since. Nice. Yeah. I mean, prior to this, like the only braking system you had was like trying to put your arm out of the locomotive and hope that like air resistance kind of slows it a bit. Yeah,

exactly. Big spoiler, big spoiler. And then there's there's sort of this thing called vacuum brakes as well, which was popular in England and nowhere else. We do love that. Like sort of like Alice. But so and one of the things about an airbrake system is because, you know, it relies on air pressure sort of equalizing across a 70 80 car train, brakes are applied sequentially. Like if you pull the lever to apply in the locomotive, it starts to apply on the first car and the second car and a third car or fourth car. It might be a couple minutes before the brakes are applied through the whole train. Now, so anyway, we talked about the brakes, Fred siphons off some of this air to stay alive and flashes light, right? Fred can also apply brakes from the rear and emergency.

And Fred, of course, also relays some data about the train via radio to what's called the front of train device or Wilma. Why why Wilma doesn't the Flintstones with Fred and Wilma? Yeah, it's the Flintstones. Oh, fuck. Yeah, that's bad. That's real bad. I don't like that. Excuse me. Well, I get up, walk the 20 feet to your room and beat your unconscious. I didn't come up with it. We have to get Fred and Wilma into a union, though. Yes, unionize the Flintstones. Unionize tiny cubes on the back of the train. This is this is the this is the carbon rod in this situation. Why do you not believe in solidarity forever? What is the worker but a cube on the end of a train? What strength on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one, Justin? Exactly.

In adamant carbon rod? No answer. No answer. What a surprise. So thanks to Fred, we have two man cruises standard. So I guess Fred kind of busted the union. Maybe Fred's bad. I don't know. Fred is a scab then. Fuck you, Fred. Fuck you, Fred. Just hitting the Fred with a baseball bat. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to put a big scabby the rat thing on the back of every train. Just to like torment the Fred. Anyway, so now we have two man crews as standard. There's the engineer and the conductor. And this system works. The conductor is technically in charge of the train. And the engineer drives it. And the conductor can take care of some problems in the train while the engineer stays in the cab and has access to controls, right? So like, for instance,

let's say if, you know, the train makes an unexpected stop and they're blocking a railroad crossing, well, then the conductor can walk to the, you know, location where they're blocking the railroad crossing, uncouple the cars there, the engineer can pull forward and unblock it, right? Right. And then like, you know, if someone falls asleep or has a medical emergency, there's someone else there, you know, it's, and also since you're not like allowed to listen to music or anything in the train, you know, you keep each other entertained at the very least. Just general, general utility. Sometimes you need a guy to like, I don't know, hit the outside of the train with a wrench or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. MMA got permission to run one man crews,

right, to save money and to keep operating. They're one of the, I think only railroads to have successfully achieved one man crewing, because I'm not exactly sure how they got permission, but they did just because they are out of money. There must have been a hell of an oversight thing to let them do that, right? Like they have to have been so thoroughly inspected and regulated to do that. No, there's, there's technically no regulation against having a one man crew. This is something that unions have kept in place and only unions. That's wild. I mean, it's kind of like one of these weird loopholes. I like the idea of them cross pollinating and being like, yeah, you can have a single person train crew because it's

technically farm work. You can have a monkey. Yeah. Apparently, there is a permitting process which requires public approval for public input. But that wasn't followed. They were just kind of allowed to do it, which it's nuts to me. So there is a process in place, which they just didn't have to do. Yeah. I mean, my my ex actually used to still is a lawyer at the whatever it's whatever the rail pass of the federal Department of Transportation is. And pretty much all of her job was like legislating on what a break is and what a break means and how long before you can have one in very granular detail, because railroad companies would push back on everything and be like oh, well, this is like not a break because they I don't know, like they're still sitting in the

train or whatever. And meanwhile, just going past the window is yeah, we can just have one guy in there. Yeah, that's cool. If I drag a stick along the ground, that's a break. Yeah. I guess technically yes. It's only a break if the if the train operator gets to like push a big hoop around with a stick for recreation. One of the things I did to facilitate this though, which I think I've seen in many other railroads, I was certainly unfamiliar with this before I started researching. They did some hokey pokey with remote control locomotives for local freight, right? So there'd be like a caboose that they would put behind the first locomotive that contained a computer. Oh, hell yeah, the local troll. Yeah. That is the brand name, yes.

And that would relay multiple unit controls to the locomotives it was attached to. So it was like a fake cab, a fake locomotive cab that you controlled from like, I don't know, an iPad or something. It's just like running a bunch of Bitcoin miners in there. So I could like, if I were doing a local freight, and I had to switch a car out, I could get out of the cab, flip the switch. Then while I was out of the cab, I could drive the locomotive backwards and move the car into the siding. That seems fine. It worked. It didn't contribute to this particular accident. But I think it's worth mentioning this was their practice. It's just to have a caboose full of like, what even, you don't need that bigger computer. It's

not 1953 anymore. You don't need like a caboose computer. It's one of those old like, I think it was HP or it was a gateway who had like the computers that had the sticker on them that said this computer is never obsolete. I think it was e-machines. Well, it's e-machines, yeah. Yes. It's like, oh, that's bold of you. My future proof train that can only be operated by an Amstrad e-mailer. So anyway, this railroad had been sold twice now because it was unprofitable. So they haven't been doing much maintenance on it. They're operating deteriorating locomotives on deteriorating tracks with one person out in incredibly remote main back country. And their quality of service is deteriorating. And, you know, things aren't looking up for the railroad.

I believe there was an incident slightly before this where one of their biggest customers cut them off because they just, you know, the rates were too high and they said the management were assholes. In 2010, improvements to oil extraction suddenly meant it was finally profitable to extract oil from North Dakota's back in formation. Whoa. We're fracking now, right? Since the pipeline capacity was limited, most of this oil was shipped out by rail in these big 31,000 gallon DOT 111 tank cars. Which, fuck, they fail a lot, don't they? Yeah. Kind of aesthetic, though. Yeah, that's it. Can't wait for one of those to just blow up the children's hospital we live next to. Yeah, this one is right next to Children's Hospital,

Philadelphia, where I took this picture. Apparently, all I could find was that MMA entered into negotiations sometime in 2012 with both the United States government and the Canadian government to reduce down to a single operator. And for whatever reason, they were just allowed to. Yeah, it's fine. That's not suspicious at all. Just that they had the Justin Trudeau blackface photos before anybody else. Apparently, yeah. I think their workforce was represented by the United Steelworkers for some reason, as opposed to a railroad union. So they may have had less organizing power against the specific. I don't know. I have no idea. In 2011, back in St. John, the Irving Group of companies decided to add a new

rail terminal and import oil from North Dakota via their two railroads, the New Brunswick Southern and the Eastern Main, which meant, of course, they would interchange with the Montreal Main in Atlantic in Brownsville Junction. So suddenly, the international railroad of Maine, which was almost dormant for decades, was a major shipping route. But I mean, we could have avoided this by simply building the Dakota Access Pipeline, the thing which famously had no problems. Oh, absolutely none. There's no problems with pipelines whatsoever. No, it was a great idea. Everybody loved it. Yeah, it wasn't in any sense a lose lose sort of situation in terms of like extracting this stuff. We need to get we need to get out the goo that's

going to kill everyone. Yes. Yeah, we need to do that. And also we need to do it in a way that fucks everyone's tap water. And then to move it, either have it in a bunch of railroad cars, or run a pipeline through, I don't know, a bunch of different like sovereign nations. That's cool. Yeah. Or you could truck it all, which is even worse. So MMA starts turning a profit for the first time, right? They started hiring people back. They bought some new ish locomotives. They kept running one man crews, though, because one man crews are the current holy grail of railroads across North America, excuse me. You know, there's sort of a managed decline mentality in the railroad industry,

you know, because they haven't really built anything new since 1916, except a couple lines to the Powder River Basin so they could grab some of that, you know, sweet coal. And so they think the only way to grow profits is through cost cutting and the conductor is the most obvious cost to cut. Well, wait, don't forget that, you know, before the derailment, they also repaired the lead locomotive, which was a C 37 with epoxy. They just repaired it with epoxy, which also failed in service and created excessive smoke. And then oil began to accumulate in the body of the turbo where overheated and caught fire the night of the derailment. So this is not exactly a railroad paying attention to safety. And I believe they also had they failed to take

advantage of millions of dollars of funding that they could have had, because all their railroad ties were fucked up, and they didn't take the money that they were entitled to. This is not a company that gives a shit about anything but reducing costs. They don't believe in handouts. Yes, it really is. It's a bootstraps kind of thing. Oh, yeah, that's it. I mean, the thing is like that if your grandpa owns one rail car and then you like make money off of that and buy a second rail car, you just kind of keep doing that. There's no other way of having a railroad. That's that's how you build a railroad. Yes, you just buy train after train after train. It's it's like castle like that's how the Pennsylvania did it.

Just five probably. So the MMA is like we're not going to give up these cost savings. We have we're still using one man crews. So here's where everything starts to come together. On July 5th in the morning, engineer Tom Harding picked up his train, which was MMA train two. It's a train number, not the locomotive number. In Farnham, Farnham, Farnham, I don't know, Quebec. Habsuck. He brought it over the railroad to Nantes, Quebec, where the next crew was supposed to pick it up. They're probably fucking perverse and they pronounce that one like Nantes. Nantes, yeah. This was 11 kilometers short of Loc McAuntique, and it was downhill the whole way. And it was about 11 in the evening, right? This train had five locomotives and 72 tank cars.

The lead locomotive was this guy right here, GEC 30-7, number 5017, right? This is an older 16-cylinder diesel electric locomotive. It's built around 1976-ish. And for whatever reason, a number of these locomotives were exported to Estonia. Yeah, just so there's one unbroken line between all of our podcasts. Of course. Yeah. And also, here's that remote control caboose that I mentioned earlier. That's the caboose behind that is the remote controlled one with the Bitcoin minus in it. Yes. Yes. It's 2013. You can make a lot of money doing that. Yeah. Almost as bad for the environment as the back in formation is. I believe also the Iranians, for whatever reason, had their hands on a bunch of C30-7s. That's true. Yes. The Iranians

have a bunch. There's also some in South Korea, I think. Iran is so cool. They keep those running. They keep the F-14 running. Basically, they're like a railroad museum. Nobody else appreciates this technology. Also, I'm doing like back of the envelope math here, but you said 72 tank cars. Each one is 31,000 gallons. Yeah. So that's like two and a quarter million gallons of... The goo that's going to kill us all. Yeah. Yeah. Trains are good at moving stuff. Yeah. Sure. The thing about GE locomotives is they're very famous for one particular feature, right? Is it moving stuff? No, they catch fire a lot. So it's sort of the opposite of that. On this particular day, again, owing to repairs that Liam mentioned earlier, which were not well conducted, I think

they were about eight months before the accident. Yes, they were. Yeah. 50-17 decided it was time to throw a rod, right? So thick black smoke and oil spewing out of the stack. But at this point, Tom Harding, the engineer, his shift was over, right? He had to tie down the train and go to a hotel. Yeah, because you have that break policy. He has to go and push the hoop around with a stick for Ace Alice. This is true, yes. Well, so like the railroad, we could get mad at them if you like, tried to address the issue because they'd have to pay him overtime and shit, right? More overtime. There's four other locomotives on the head of this train, right? But 50-17 was leading. So 50-17 had to be the one left on for the night to charge the braking system. I'm not exactly sure why it

had to be 50-17 that was left on, but I believe that I think there was a reason why it was this locomotive that was left on, the one that was having problems. And they just left it by the side of a railroad, right? Or the side of a road, right? Just totally unsecured? Yes. Yeah, cool. So Harding set to handbrakes on the five locomotives, the remote control car, and the buffer car between the locomotives and the tank cars. Now, MMA procedures required nine brakes to be applied, but Harding performed a brake test, and it seemed okay, right? Oh no. It seemed like nothing bad was going to happen, right? That's what happens when you leave the airbrakes on. Shake hands with danger. Are we going to find out that it's not actually or not entirely this guy's fault though? Because I

feel like that's kind of a recurring theme. Spoilers. All right, so locomotives trains in general will have as many as four braking systems, right? There's the train brake that applies air brakes across the whole train. The independent brake, which applies the brakes only on the locomotive. There's the dynamic brake, which is interesting because it basically rewires the electric traction motors in, you know, that power of the wheels. It turns the motors into generators. And the generators, you know, they generate a shitload of electricity to slow the train. And then that's all sent up here to a big set of radiators where it's just burned off as heat. I mean, if you wanted to generate electricity using the wheels, it would be a lot more efficient to have a nuclear

reactor on each wheel. Now, you could do that, but because it's a Carnot heat engine, I think it would make more sense to have one large one. Oh, I see. Yeah. A serious engineering talk. And then of course, there's the handbrake right here. I'm circling a little wheel if you're just listening. The handbrake in most circumstances is a big wheel you turn, right? And that applies the brakes. On some locomotives, there's like a lever you got a pump, which takes forever and crews hate it. I think we now have electric handbrakes where you push a button. And then the backup is the fucking lever you got a pump that everyone hates. Plus, you can't do any sweet handbrake turns with the electric handbrakes. That's the worst part. How are you supposed to go drifting?

Just doing donuts. Yeah. Multi track drifting. I hate when I get a new train, I just end up doing donuts in the shunting yard with it. Yeah, you hate that. It makes you cool, Alice. That's actually what they have the turntables for is just so you can like drift in circles. So one of the flaws in sort of handbrake systems on most trains now we got electric handbrakes. This isn't the same is that how hard you apply the brakes varies based on how big and muscular you are. Because it's just mechanical. Because it's all mechanical. Yeah. That's promising. So if you're not a big muscular guy, you need to set more handbrakes. And then, you know, obviously, that can result in some like macho issues. You know, like, I don't need to set that many

handbrakes. I'm a big tough guy, you know, it's like. It sounds kind of more like that's a problem with engineers on trains. But okay. The other thing, of course, is you got to apply them individually on every locomotive. You might. So yeah, it's a pain in the ass. It's a pain in the ass to do. Yeah, which takes like what two or three minutes to actually set the handbrakes. Yeah, and you're doing at the end of your shift. It's like, you know, and you're on an incline and you're having to fucking jerk off this lever. Yeah. And the look and the railroad is going to chew you out if you take too long because you're going to be fucking against regulations or something. But yeah, but it's not against

regulations to leave a part freight trade running unattended, holding dangerous materials on the main line on a slope in the vicinity of residents. Yes. Okay, cool. Good. All right. Yeah. So Harding performs the brake test and figures he's set enough brakes to hold the train, even though it's fewer than the nine required by MMA regulations, right? Well, he tested it, right? Yeah. Yeah, he tested it. It was fine. It's not like he was just like blowing it off. He just, you know, he put on a bunch of brakes and then he tested the brakes and they didn't move. So. Oh, and don't forget that Transport Canada had reprimanded the MMA 2004, 2009, 2011, and 2012 for violations of the Canadian Rail Operating Rules section 112

for hand brake, excuse me, requirements on part trains and no fines had been issued. So that's super tight. So they'd been doing this for fucking years. Yeah. So that's just the procedure now, not officially, but so we're looking at an aerial of Nantes and not has a siding where Harding could have left the train, right? That's over here, right? The siding, there's a second track, right? You can leave the train there. And that second track had a derail set so that the train moved unexpectedly while it was unattended, it wouldn't make it to the main line, right? They'd be like, it would just sort of go on the ground, the first two locomotives that should stop the whole thing, right? So this siding was being used to store empty boxcars. Oh, good. Yeah. So. Famously much

more dangerous to the main line than like two million gallons of oil. Yeah. So Harding left the locomotive, I believe it was right here where I put this big arrow, but then I looked later and it may have been further down the road. I'm not sure. But he parked the locomotive on the main line, right? And, you know, he tied down the train, he called dispatch, he was like, look, this train's you know, spewing, you know, smoke and flames and like, it's well, not flames yet. It seems like this is a bad idea and dispatch is like, we'll deal with it in the morning, you know. So. Sure. Yeah. So he tied it down, he left around 11 o'clock in the evening and around 11.50 in the evening is when the first 911 calls came in, right? Before we get there, I would like to point out that he,

the engineer told, he took a taxi to his hotel, told the tax driver he felt unsafe leaving a running locomotive, spitting oil and smoke. And he wanted to call the US office of MMA, said they could tell him what to do. And he was also apparently covered in drops of oil, which were also covering the windscreen of that taxi. Yikes. Yeah, this just gets worse. I feel bad for this guy, actually. This is not great. And it kind of sounds like he realized it was not great and was then stuck in a series of like bad decisions with no good options. Yes. Yes. So around 11.50 in the evening, 57 caught fire proper, right? Or that's when the first 911 calls about it happened. So the firemen showed up, they shut off the engine, they extinguished

the fire, right? MMA didn't let Harding back to the site. I'm not sure if he knew about it or if he's like, you know, if he somehow found out about it, I don't know, but they wouldn't let him back to the site. Instead, they sent a track maintenance guy out to help out with the situation, right? This track maintenance guy didn't know how air brakes worked. And he didn't see the problem developing. Now, as it turns out, Harding had done the brake test incorrectly. When he did the brake test, the independent brakes were still holding the train, not the handbrakes. Now, these brakes, plus the train air brakes were no longer being charged. Because they turned off the fucking locomotive when they put the fire out. Yeah, because they didn't want, you know, more

oil flowing in to feed the fire, right? And actually, I hate to use the restroom, I'll be back. Sorry. All right, talk about yourselves. It's fine, we just leave all of this in. Yeah, I have a favor to leave all of this in. You can hear him using it in my feed too. That's a little bonus for the fans. Yes, you can hear him pee. Thank God. My favorite thing too is that the rail traffic controller of the MMA was apparently warned of the train having difficulties while it was still in nauties. And yeah, this was my favorite thing. They just like they end up leaving the fire. They just they just kind of let it burn like like the like they put it out and the track being exploited. Like, yeah, everything's fine.

Everything, everything is fine. I don't think it's bad. This is literally he did that this is fine comic with a little dog. Yes, literally that the fire is the same. Wonderful. All right, now it is my time to read on air the fan fix I have. I think you should absolutely not stop reading fan fix. I'm gonna I I can confirm that fan fix do exist and he has never read them, but I sure as hell have. Are they good? No, no, no, no, they're not good. He's gonna have to take this all out of it. No, no, these were written when he was just

out of or he was still in college, I think. Are you talking about the fan fix? What are you going to take it all out anyway? It's true. Also, I said a bunch of slurs. Oh, hundreds of them. Good. I just listed which of the slurs are my favorite. Well, we are a dirtbag left podcast song. That's true. Gotta do more slurs. I'm actually I was doing the Red Scare thing where I just say that I'm trans as a bit. Fucking yikes. Don't do that, folks. Praxis. Praxis. All right, I'm back for those of you who didn't notice. So anyway, so the the the locomotive was shut down, right? If you ever stood by a locomotive and you heard,

you know, going, you know what I mean? Like, you know, that's the air compressor going, you know, it goes intermittently, right? So that was no longer going. There's nothing charged in the air brakes. So our friend Fred. Bastard. Yeah, Fred the scout. Yeah. Yeah, he's a class trainer. Fred kept diligently flashing his light on the end of the train. Thank God for that. Now without a compressor charge in the braking system. And after about an hour, Fred's light started to get dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. And it went out. And the train quietly slipped away into the night. But I thought the brakes were failsafe. Ish. Did you not hear failsafe in quotes? I don't know if you're taking this out from the slursorama we did earlier. But

at 12, 13 a.m., two MMA track maintenance employees had arrived from Black Bug and Teak, and the firefighters left the scene as the MMA employees told them that everything was fine. Yeah, we said it was the this is fine Casey Green comic. It's literally surrounded by columns of flame, but we'll get there in a minute. Jean-Luc Montménage, Montminy. God. I don't know. It's French. Jean-Luc Picard, a firefighter. Was driving home from extinguishing the fire, right? And he stopped at a grade crossing and the lights started flashing, right? Like there was a train coming. The gates went down. And he was waiting for a while. The train didn't seem to show up. He didn't hear a horn. He didn't see any lights. So he thought maybe it's

a malfunction, right? So he drove around the gates. It just barely cleared the intersection as the Montreal Maine and Atlantic train number two screamed through the crossing lights off, unoccupied, sparks flying from the wheels at 65 miles an hour, which is ripple the typical speed. That's an album cover of just this like fucking, like entirely darkened train, just throwing off sparks. So events begin to unfold quite rapidly, right? Yes, you don't say. Yeah. So we had an aerial view of Loc McAntique before the incident here, right? So you got train two direction of travel is coming in hot here. He's going to go around this corner, right? This curve here, right? Right. So this is not a particularly tight curve,

right? Under a lot of circumstances, taking this at 65 would be risky, but not, you know, it probably wouldn't throw the train off the tracks. But MMA, of course, is suffering from years and years of deferred maintenance, right? Of course. This is now what we call accepted track, right? And accepted track means that, you know, you can run trains at 10 miles an hour over this, because the tracks such bad quality. And you have to do an annual risk assessment to say, all right, can we still run trains on this? So, you know, that's all the track management guys hanging around this burning train. Yeah, exactly. So like, it's like a dirt road, but for trains, it doesn't matter how straight it is, you can't go that fast, right? Train two is about to try and

take this curve on accepted track in about 65 miles an hour. Oh, good. I feel the need for speed. I'll read a quote from the Wikipedia, right? Just before the derailment, witnesses recalled observing the train passing through the crossing at excessive speed with no locomotive lights. Infernal noise and sparks being emitted from the wheels. Was also stated by witnesses that since the train was going so fast, the flashing lights and bells on the crossing didn't activate. I know this is about to get real bad in a second, but I just want to airbrush that on the side of a van. Like, that's that's a striking visual. I've been in the van. We did as you go by the president's stuff in Atlantic City.

Yes, we did. Yeah. And then the engine blew up, much like what's what's happening to our friends who'd locked back at sea. That'll be a bonus episode. It's Liam's van. Just the Grover House of Vans. It is. Yeah, it's it's it was never not a mistake. So, uh, Jill Fluette is some French, French garbage. Jill, Jill, Jill, Jill Fluette. Yes, Jean-Claude, Jean-Claude du Blackface, do do racism, does lamaphobie. Habsuck. He was he was, uh, a guy sitting at the Music Cafe, which I've conveniently put on the slide here a while back. If you were wondering

about why that showed up, I was leaving the the cafe just before the derailment. And he said, he saw the train. He said, the wheels were smoking with lots of white smoke. Now, the runaway train passed 50 meters, 160 feet behind it, moving at highway speed, traveling with no signals to train, jump the tracks, sending a river of burning oil into the lake. Massel. Uh, the man, he said, uh, it was moving at a hellish speed, no lights, no signals, nothing at all. There was no warning. It was a black blob that came out of nowhere. I realized they were oil tankers and they were going to blow up. So I yelled to that to my friends and I got out of there. If we had stayed where we were, we would have been roasted. Boom roasted. That's how

I would have wanted to die when I was like 14 and I was like, what's the most epic way I could get killed is just be incinerated by like a speeding freight train. Kill by capitalism. Yeah, it'll happen anyway. So that's true, but it'll probably happen in a really like, really boring and depressing way where like the air pollution gets me or something. Whereas this all sound, all fury, probably not even going to be aware of it. Like there's nothing lingering about this, I suspect. So anyway, pay attention to the slide unless of course you're listening on Apple podcast or something else, in which case you can't see the slide and I'm going to switch to the next one. Right. This was the day after the accident. You can see the music cafe, uh, definitely did not

farewell. You can see all of the tanker cars here. You can see a lot of buildings not in good shape, right? Yeah, doesn't look good. Yeah. So like, uh, Megan Teak's entire downtown was caught in the ensuing firewall. Back in crude oil, of course, is light crude oil, right? That means it's, it's not very viscous. It readily vaporizes and especially it readily ignites. Um, it's the good stuff, right? Yeah. That's why we, that's why we love it. We build our whole society on it. Back in crude oil is notably explosive even by light crude oil standards, right? Jesus. This is one of the reasons why the explosion was very big. That whole field is just, I think it might be cursed or something because just from start to finish, miserable, immiserating thing. Like it, towns

full of like rig workers who like get stupidly drunk and like murder each other, uh, pipelines killing people, the fucking trains killing people, the environmental contamination killing people. It is, it is awful. I just noticed this from the aerial image. It looks like it derailed the train further down the line here that was just parked there. It just gets pissed off because you lose your like no claims bonus on your train because it just got dinged in this like fucking fireball. The, the oil that didn't immediately explode leaked out of the 63 piled up tank cars and it formed a one and a half million gallon lake of fire, right? I mean, yeah, it's still, still epic, right? Like this is, this is a hell of a disaster. Yeah. I mean, that's one way to go out.

Um, so oil starts flowing into the, the town's storm sewer system and columns of flames start shooting out of manholes, right? That's, that's how we get rid of that motherfucker, Pennywise. So heat from the flame is felt two kilometers away, right? Yeah, just 150 firefighters from across Quebec and Maine are deployed to the scene. The fire was not contained until early afternoon the next day. You don't, you don't say like that's like a million gallons of oil per firefighter. Yeah. Or because 100,000, 10,000. Excuse me. I don't know. You're the math guy. I just fucking like talk about what I want to airbrush on the side of that. That's, that's famously not a skill set that needs a lot of like analytical skills. I always told Liam it'd be funny if he

got like the solo cup design airbrushed on the side of the van. Buy my van and you could do whatever you want to it. Buy, buy Liam's van, everyone. It's a good, it's a good van, except when it's broken, which it is. It comes with two engines. Yeah, that's true. The, the LS swap didn't work out now. You're going to get people on the Twitter telling you to post van pics now. It's a good van. It is a good van. It's a really good van apart from being broken. So anyway, now Tom Harding, who was staying in a hotel near the scene was like, well, that's not gone well. Now he helps some folks from a local industry, which is, which was, I think, I don't remember what kind of factory it was, but it was up the siding. The racism factory. Yeah. The dick sucking factory. Yeah. The dick

sucking factory, which had a rail spur for shipping the dicks in. They got, they got a track mobile, which is this, this thing that can run on the rail or on the road. And was that the trolley? Yeah, I heard that on the microphone. Oh my God. Yeah. So anyway, they, they drive the track mobile down to the railroad crossing and they pull away all of the tank cars, which are still intact as the fire is raging. Wow. Yeah. So I think they got some firefighters to spray some water on it. So it'd be less likely that it would blow up, but you know, that's a hell of a thing to do. Yeah. I'll say. Yeah. And just, just being out in that, just fucking like, singling all the hairs off your arms while you're doing it. One of the local hospitals was like,

okay, we're code orange right now. We're expecting a mass casualty event, right? Those casualties never showed up, right? Is a Canadian Red Cross volunteer said, well, there's no wounded. They're all dead. I mean, you could do a lot worse. Like we've seen a couple of things doing this so far where people just get like trapped and like die horribly over periods of days or weeks, just getting fucking incinerated instantly. As, as far as these things go, I, I know which one I'd choose. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's like, you know, you're drunk, you're having a nice time at the bar and then just suddenly you're, you're, you're incinerated. You're probably not having a nice time. It's a place called the music cafe and fucking the middle of Quebec. It's probably awful.

You're like listening to some guy with a soul patch like fuck up blues guitar and you're just like, please kill me. That could be arranged. Somebody thought that too hard and then yeah. So anyway, the fire burned for two days. 2000 people were evacuated when the smoke cleared 42 people were dead. Five were missing and presumed dead, possibly vaporized. 30 buildings had been destroyed. And there was extensive soil contamination, which effectively condemned the rest of the town, right? Because it just fucking poisoned everything. Yes. So in the initial investigation, the benzene contamination was so strong that investigators had to work in 15 minute shifts, right? Benzene is like a really nasty carcinogen, which is also very good for raising octane

ratings and gasoline. Everything which is good at raising octane ratings and gasoline is immensely bad for you. But that's another episode. It's, it's one of those few chemicals that even the oil industry would admit back in like 1949 that, oh yeah, there's actually no safe concentration of benzene. I mean, luckily back then they were controlling it with like high doses of lead. Yes. Yes, tetraethyl lead was the safer alternative. I mean, this is having people working in like highly timed, minimized shifts to minimize contamination. That's something that as we learned from our favorite show, Chernobyl, only happens under socialism, right? So I don't understand why this is. It's because Canada is socialist. People's Republic of Canada. People's Republic of

Texas, just Canada. Oh yeah. And don't forget that two of the three local notary offices were destroyed by fire and only one of their document vaults survived the blaze. In a bit of irony, the last will and testament of some of the victims was also up in flames. Hmm. Just get, that's a, that's a nice metaphor. Just get everything about you totally incinerated by capitol. Yeah. And they had to have trucks carrying drinking water. There is a boil water advisory and then they dragged their feet fixing the place. Yeah, it's fucking rad. Oh, and also another thing I forgot to mention is that on this train that derailed, the derailment started at the buffer box car between the locomotives and the oil tank cars, right?

The five locomotives on the train just sailed on through and came to a stop about a kilometer away. Still on service? Oh yeah. Matter of fact, I mean, you didn't want to waste them, right? Exactly. They were fine. I mean, GE built it right. You know who the real hero here is, is whoever made the one document vault that survived being hit by like a million of fire tornado. Yeah. Yeah. Like I want to fucking, that's good. You can't buy that advertising. 36 of the remaining 39 buildings in downtown Lac-Megantic had to be demolished. One of the only significant old buildings left is, ironically, the train station, which hasn't seen a passenger train since 1994

when Canadian Pacific sold off the line. Thanks for having CP. So, you know, what happens after this? Well, you know, the next to can file a bunch of lawsuits against MMA, Western Petroleum, who were leasing the tank cars, Irving Oil, who were being shipped the oil, Canadian Pacific, who handed off the cars to MMA, Union Tank Car Company, who owned the tank cars, and Trinity Rail Group, who manufactured the tank cars, and then General Electric Capital Rail Services, which was involved in some way, which I don't fully understand, which, you know, that that's how rail car leasing works. I don't understand it. Basically, they sued that one office building in Delaware that contains every company on earth. Yeah. Yeah, basically. They just do service with, like,

a miracle on 34th Street sack of different summonses, but it all goes to the one address. Yeah. Yes. We live in such an efficient system, don't we? So those lawsuits are still ongoing. We don't know, that hasn't determined who is at fault. Of course. Of course. I assume they're, you just wait them out. Like, if you have the lawyers to do that, you're just going to have it keep rumbling on for another 20 years time, it still will be undetermined. Oh, yeah. So the town still hasn't really rebuilt some of the Main Street businesses whose owners survived the incident. They moved over here to this new lifestyle center, I guess you'd call it. Gross. Yeah, I know, right? Including, I believe music cafe is still here.

It doesn't have air conditioning. It does have air conditioning. Well, if it has air conditioning, then it's not a lifestyle center, it's a mall. The outside is an air condition, though. Yeah. Oh, that attitude. Yeah. Criminal investigations against the engineer, operations manager, and rail traffic controller involved in this incident went to trial eventually for 47 counts of criminal negligence causing death. All of them were acquitted. I know a fact about this, by the way, which I think reflects quite well on the people of Lac-Magantic, which is that when they were bringing them into the courthouse, the people were yelling to the media that the railroad employees weren't the people that they

wanted because they didn't hold them responsible. They held the company responsible. And I think that's like a Sally's. I appreciate that solidarity. I appreciate that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So, and of course, Canadian Transportation Safety Board, as Liam mentioned earlier, determines that MMA's regulations on handbrakes were insufficient. It wasn't nine handbrakes that should have been set. It was 17 to 26 handbrakes, depending on how macho you were about setting the handbrakes, I guess. Yeah, 17 is like the soy boy number. Yes. Sort of in response to this incident, though, there's a popular opinion of the DOT 111 car, which I'm sure was a very popular subject beforehand. Really, we start to turn away from the DOT 111 car. We get the DOT 117 car, right?

Oh, that's six more. Thank God. 286,000 pounds girl is, again, same, by the way. So it's now 9 sixteenths of an inch thick, as opposed to the previous 7 sixteenths of an inch thick, right? I believe the head shield goes to half an inch. I don't know what it was before. It's, there's a few other safety improvements, right? And these are now the only legal tank cars to build as of October 1st, 2015. But a lot of tank cars out there are the older DOT 111 specification, which has been around since like the 1960s, I think. And they won't all be upgraded or retired until 2025. Cool. Well, you've got to make it six more years, folks. What did we learn here? This is, this is lack mega antique before the incident. Train engineers more or less good,

train companies bad. Yes. I have some quotes, actually, that I've just found from after the end of the criminal trial of these guys. The mayor of lack mega antique, Julie Morin, said, like the French flourish I put on that, Julie Morin said, the company MMA had a big role to play in this. It's impossible that three men alone created what happened to us. I feel relieved because these are not the right people who should be there. Harding, Demetria and La Breed didn't deserve to be blamed. These are human beings with families who worked hard all their lives. These aren't killers. We treated them like killers. That's admirable solidarity, I think. Very nice people in lack mega antique. I'm sure if this happened in America, there'd be people

braying for, you know, like, let's let's let's hang someone, you know, this is like the most the darkest version of the Canadian joke is that somebody crashes a freight train into your town and you apologize. Sorry, sorry, as your spraying of whatever weird fireproof material you had to import. Yeah, you're just you're just like foaming it all down. And you're just like, yeah, it was my bad. But I mean, there's an incredible amount of things that went wrong to make this happen, right? You know, if the siding hadn't been blocked, the derail would have stopped the train from moving the locomotive and properly maintained it wouldn't have caught fire. Well, probably it's a product, but you know, it probably didn't help that they like had just like super glued it together.

The engineer had set the handbrakes properly, or if he had a second person to catch the error, I think that's the biggest issue here. Yeah, or even if they'd let him stay. Yeah, let him stay and say, let's let's make sure nothing bad happens here. Yeah, just pay the fucking overtime, you know, if the track in lack mega antique hadn't been accepted, if they were still running the Atlantic Limited, the passenger train from Montreal to St. John, that would still be 60 mile an hour track, it wouldn't have, it wouldn't have derailed. No, you just would have had an even an extremely epic thing of a fucking freight train with all of the lights off screaming through town. I mean, it probably would have rolled out and then rolled back.

And you know, if the tank cars had been designed adequately for the volatile cargo that they carried, I mean, I don't think anyone had fully appreciated how explosive back in crude oil was until this incident. You know, the thing is we live in capitalism and as such the railroad is a business, right? And businesses have varying degrees of success. And sometimes they, you know, they cut costs, they cut corners to stay afloat, right? Yeah, and that's that's built in. That's something that even regulators are kind of loath to interfere with, because that's like that's part of healthy competition. And it's it remains healthy until it just incinerates you and all your friends. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's like when a company that like makes an app that lets

you keep track of your farts or something. Yes, I'm ready. Has some problems. You know, that's not such a big deal, right? Right. Unless you work there, of course, in which case, you know, you might be out of a life and livelihood. But if the railroad is struggling and cutting and deferring maintenance, it puts us all in danger who live near the railroads and rely on them for transportation. You know, hey, that's me. Yeah. When the railroad shakes hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. We all do. Getting a reach around from danger. Yes. Yes, please. Get fisted with danger. Jesus. Yes. Sorry. That's bad. That's bad. I might cut that. No, cut nothing, including all the slurs.

Yeah, leave that in for the patrons. On that bombshell. Ha. Ha. Ha. I'm Jeremy Clarkson. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. End it now. Next episodes, of course, on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster, which we were going to do yesterday, but of course, Alice didn't show up. Yeah, that was my fault. I'm sorry. I fucked up. But next time, we're going to do the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Yes. Yes. So with this close. All right. So it's the end of the podcast. So I guess we do the pitches now. Listen to Trash Future available wherever podcasts are available. Oh, and also we have a live show coming up in London at the beginning of December for like election or shortly post election thing. So more details about that and on.

I thought for a second you meant that we had a live show. I was just like, I would have loved to have been told about this. Yeah, I was about to say. Yeah, that's once once that should be a Patreon goal, actually, is fucking getting me to Philadelphia and doing a live show for this. Just in our living room. Or we could really screw around. We'll go to London, Ontario. No, we'll work out great circle what's precisely equidistant between Glasgow and Philadelphia and do it in fucking like, I don't know, northern Greenland. No. All right, we're all going to St Johns. Yeah, going back, going back to New Zealand. Oh, yeah, I need to pitch my YouTube channel because this is on the new channel and or on Apple podcasts or wherever fine podcasts are

sold because we're adults now. So my YouTube channel is do not eat. I talk about urban planning and socialism and other stuff and also make jokes. So go check that out. There'll be a link in the description to everyone's stuff. Cool. Wrap this up. I am Liam Anderson. You can follow me on the bad website at Old Man Anderson. It's just a lot of me getting mad about national security. And generally, I don't know, being really rude to people in the podcast replies, because I have nothing better to do with my time. Oh, pronouns are he, him, just just to fucking throw it in there one more time. Oh, yeah, yeah, also pronouns he, him. She is international men's day. That's true. We have we have we have two kings here who we respect greatly. We fought a war over this,

Alice. I don't know if you remember this, but we kicked your ass. Remember, surrender at Yorktown. We forgot to make the loyalist jokes when we were talking about St John. Oh, yeah, a whole bunch of losers clustered into one fucking space and also give Massachusetts its mace back, you dickheads. They have Massachusetts as mace. They have colonial Massachusetts as mace from the state house, which the loyalists took with them and have never given it back. If they want, if you wanted it back, you should have won the war of 1812. I don't know what to tell you. They didn't lose the war of 1812. The first war America didn't lose of many. Yeah, I love to just like see the Huey evacuating the CIA agents from the roof of the American Embassy in Ottawa. Well, I guess to be fair, at least

someone did lose the war of 1812, which was to come to this confederacy. No white people won, but the natives lost, which thank God would never happen again. No. And I mean, yeah, the Dakota Access Pipeline, another one of those wins. Well, think if we had the Dakota Access Pipeline, this disaster probably still would have occurred. Yeah, because that because that oil doesn't that that pipeline would not have gone to St John New Bronson. The only way to avoid this would have would be to do Justin Trudeau's program of a pipeline literally everywhere. There's a pipeline full of shoe polish. No, it's just you have the crude and it'll be right next to the water pipe. So you'll just

get like an oil hook up. It's fine. A refinery in every home. Yes. Yes. I am ready for my home refinery and backyard backyard nuclear reactor. If you have the backyard nuclear reactor, you don't you don't need the refinery. It's about suspenders. It's redundant. Redundancy. Redundancy. Is it redundancy? I'm gonna come in there. I'm gonna come in there and kick your ass. I think that's the podcast done since Liam is now going to kill me. Rest in power, Justin. Yes. Please enjoy my new podcast, Franklin, which I am turning into a podcast because I don't know how to work city skylights. So look forward to that, everybody. Again, again, nothing suspicious happening here. It is I do not eat from beyond the grave. Yes. Bye, everyone. Bye.