Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 79: Malbone Street Wreck

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

former MTA employee @bsquiklehausen  was on the show we recorded this the day before cuomo resigned i will fight you bsquikle's twitter: https://twitter.com/bsquikle?lang=en his youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV4eVAMCOKcutg4zs26tT6w TICKETS FOR THE LIVESHOW: https://www.caveat.nyc/event/well-theres-your-problem-9-3-2021 Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we HAVE INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING NOW so please send us pics of you with our merch and your yak or other exotic pack animal Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance

Yes, the guy lived to be 70 years old. He kind of always looked like a child. No, he lived to be 50 years old. Maybe it was like one of those one of those one of those brave new world deals where you have your your youth until age 60. And then you just, you know, sort of just go dead. Yeah, just want to go full picture of Dorian Gray. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, no, picture of Dorian Gray. Well, yeah, he got his picture of Dorian Gray painted too early. Well, that's so he can trade slaves at like infancy. Hmm, fun. So anyway, yeah, for those of you who just came into the discussion, we were talking about a guy named Malbone. Thomas Francis, Francis Malbone, Jr. Babyface slave trader extraordinaire United States senator from Rhode Island.

We will get Justin in post-production to put his portrait up on the slide here. He looks like a child. He looks like a child. He looks like a little baby child or baby boy. Well, the boy I have the birthday boy as you're just selling entire families into slavery. So welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slavery. No, not usually about slavery, although that was also a disaster.

Yes, sort of incidental. Yes. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK, go. I, Justin. I am Alice Colville Kelly. I served as United States senator from Rhode Island from March 4th, 1809 to June 4th, 1809.

And my pronouns are she and her. But notably, you did not sell slaves. No, that's right. Congratulations, Alice. Thank you on the right side of history. Yes. Oh, I guess I'm going next. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him and to those beautiful people in the discord who have created the Liam zone.

I see you. I love you. And I appreciate you. I do feel kind of like a almost like a zookeeper waving at the captive monkeys. Like, hi, boys. Good morning. There's also the beautiful. That's how I know. I know what I feel awful, but I'm just like, oh, like a little bit.

And we have a guest. We do. We do. Yes. How are you? And how did you get in here? What are you doing in my podcasting room? Click the link and it brought me here. Now, I'm I'm B. Schweigelhausen or Jay, which, if you know me in real life,

you'll probably call me that. I'm the person who everybody thought was Alice in the discord for a long time until Alice actually showed up. Oh, there was just that there were three people modding. It was Justin, Liam and me. People all thought I was you. Congratulations on having been me for a while. That's it. It was fun.

But it was basically just like a lot of tags. And then immediately like 10 people go, you know, that's not her. I I always love when people in our discord in case you're wondering how to get to this discord, subscribe to our Patreon and or look around hard enough for the link because I posted it publicly when I first made it. But I love what people are like, who's angry panda? And I'm like, it's Liam watching from the shadows, maybe

waiting for you to fuck up and do something stupid. It is like a 2009 screen name you've got there, though. What, angry panda? Angry panda. Yeah. In courtesy of my ex-girlfriend and I just have elected to never change it because I'm a dumb idiot. That works. Very nice. That's how I got mine, though.

That was courtesy of me being like a stupid fifth grader. Oh, OK. Mine doesn't go that back that far. Yeah, I guess I feel better about myself. Fifteen years of regret on this username. Why? Why? Why? Squigglehausen. The squigglehausen shows some respect, Alice, please.

So random. And then it became my email address to play fantasy football the next year. And then that was my email address. And then it became my YouTube channel. Then I started making YouTube videos and now it's permanent hell. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Jay, tell us more about yourself. What do you what do you bring to the podcasting table, Jay? We're going to leave you as much

dead air as we possibly can. That was a lot of time. I think I was talking. My my internet has hiccups sometimes, so you might be able to backfill that with my source audio. Good public speaking is when you fill all the dead air with. Like scratching yourself. Yeah, I get a lot of like and I'm really up close to my mic.

So be able to hear every like skin flick coming on. I can get a selection of like a wet mouth noises. Yeah. Oh, well, I'm I'm hard as a rock, honestly. Hello and welcome to the weather as your problem, ASMR experience. Oh, my God, I can come just from that. I'm not gonna because I'm a man of dignity in class. But that's right. That was good.

Well, I was the guy who convinced Justin to get into this whole video making podcast, making stuff in the first place. This is true. I do the occasional city Skylines video trying been trying to make them regularly for like four years now, maybe more and have never really succeeded. Casino Bay is coming, folks. Casino Bay is coming.

It's it's wild. We're actually finally getting stuff finished up and made. There was a long time of just like waiting on assets and waiting to make stuff. And sure. Yeah, it's a great video game. But it's a lot of work, I feel. It is a lot of work. And it's even more work when you have the ability to make assets because then all of a sudden there's that bit in the back of your brain.

It's like, you know, you could do this perfect. See, I have turned that section of my brain off and I replaced it with drinking. So anyway, what you see on the screen in front of you is an old wooden subway car, which says right here out of service. Which is helpful. Yeah, I would have wondered.

It has it has sustained very subtle. It has sustained a little bit of damage, though. You might notice roughly one third of the car is missing and it'll bust out Leonard Rowan. That's to save weight, right? That's what I always heard. Yeah, that's a good lightweight car. These look these were open air cars.

This was an experiment to see how quickly they could convert it into a fully open air car. Welcome to the New York City Superlegara. Superlegara, excuse me. This is a, yeah, simplify and add lightness. But today we're going to talk about the worst accident in history, the New York City subway system, the Malbone Street wreck, or possibly any subway system. Yeah, that's a good question.

I don't know. It was a bigger wreck than this. Definitely for New York City, though, at the time, you know, I feel like there's surely there has had to have been a far worse subway accident. The only ones that come to mind to me are like intentional, like bombings, right? Like how many people do the Kings Cross Fire kill? It's got to have been like, I don't remember top of my head. I killed 31 people. That's nothing. 31 dead, whatever.

There's going to be people that comments are mad at us because you're so casual about their deaths. They accidentally routed a full Moscow metro train into Moscow metro, too. And, you know, they had to they had to disappear all the passengers. Oh, I heard that. Get out of your stoker. It's like the it's like the lost cosmonaut, but with trains. No, lost cosmonauts.

You know, that never mind. We'll say that for a bonus episode. All right. It's like 1995. Baku Metro fire killed two hundred and eighty nine people. Well, Joe Cassavi, I'll be pleased about that. That's pretty bad. Jesus Christ, two hundred and eighty nine. Anyway, that's another episode we're here at station or it doesn't matter.

Let's do this one. Yeah, exactly. Welcome to Well, That's Your Problem, the podcast where we decide what the subject of the episode is ten minutes into the episode. All right. So anyway, before before we talk about the Malbon Street Rack, we have to do the goddamn news. Well, the news is in the the official report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. I mean, if you actually read it, it's sort of like

there's nothing much there beyond we've refined our existing our existing studies and our existing models, which show that you're fucked. And that's like that's good. We're going to blast straight through the the target of one point five degrees Celsius of global warming. Probably we were supposed to hit that in 2050. We're probably now expected to hit that like 2035. And one point five degrees is sort of our like threshold for

it lots of extremely bad things happening. Yeah, yeah, the opposite of whatever the of the cools are the very hot zone. It's like one point five is like the bad zone, two is the really bad zone. And above two is like the catastrophe zone. And so we're talking here about like extreme weather all the time, like an ice around ice free all the summer. Yeah, yeah. And a bunch of other stuff we might shut down the the Gulf Stream, which is fun.

And as ever, fossil fuel companies knew about this from like the 70s at the latest and just, you know, built that into. Yeah. You ever feel like you're having the the game clock run down on you? Yeah, I fucking do. Yeah, I kind of looked at this report and it didn't look like it said anything really new, you know, maybe it's because my brain crack pinged on this ages ago. You know, that we're we're just fucked. We're not going to do anything about it. Right. Right.

Doing something about it would be hard and it might change our way of life a little bit. Yes. So if we wait, our way of life will still be changed. But then it won't be hard until later. And that's a problem we could figure out later. That's right. I think there's two different kinds of being a doomer about this, right? Because like I mean, and I want to say it's hard not to be a doomer about this. Yeah. But the scientific advice is we are not doomed, right? And that like you shouldn't be a defeatist about this

because there is stuff we can and should be doing. However, I think there is a sort of a corollary to that, which is the kind of doom that we all are, which is we understand that there is a lot that could that could be done very, very urgently to mitigate. And in some cases, even like halt and reverse the effects of anthropogenic climate change. But we don't believe that anybody is going to do them. Right. Yes. I know, like, I don't want to get too far into it just because, like,

I'm not going to say anything new or groundbreaking or anything like advocate for acts of eco terrorism. I mean, you do what you want. Like, I can't stab you. Yeah, I can. Right. I'm sorry, not a cop. And we don't we don't have a legal responsibility to prevent you from doing that. Like, it's, you know, it's certainly very hard to, you know, say at the straight face,

some variant of it's all going to be OK. Yeah, because it's not because it's not. And it's already not OK. And the not OKness is being unevenly distributed. Right. Hundreds of millions of people are going to die and we don't give a shit as a species or I shouldn't say that. That's not fair. As a collection of industrialized countries, we simply don't give

enough of a shit to, like, get the lead out basically and actually do something meaningful. And we all know that. I assume if you're listening to this podcast, you know that I don't want to insult your intelligence. It's kind of what I the way I felt about covid is that it's hard to exist when it feels like nobody gives a shit if you live or die. Yeah, because we don't have the like it's not even just that our leaders don't want to do it, although they don't.

It's that I'm starting to believe that as with covid, even if we did have sort of like broad like institutional support for addressing climate change, like we wouldn't have we don't have the state capacity left to do that. Because it turns out that a lot of stuff for like, you know, even just basic public health interventions, we don't we don't the government can't make people do it. Right. Yes. Which is good, I guess, if you're like an Ancap or whatever. We are not you are free to not take the vaccine everywhere in the world.

You might lose your job, but like, you know, nobody's actually going to like stick the needle in you. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that really. This is me off and like the way I feel about it personally is kind of like, listen, you know, I did everything right. Like I messed up and I got the vaccine when I was eligible and like I didn't do anything like I didn't go to like play Gorgie or whatever. You didn't go to Lake of the Ozarks. Right. I didn't go to Lake of the Ozarks.

And now I'm essentially being punished for it. Because I did everything right. Like that's that's what pisses me off. Pisses me so off, pisses me off so much because it's like I did everything right. Why am I fucking suffering for these people who like and I understand vaccine inequity? Like I understand truly, especially like where we live in Philly. Like not everyone's able to get it for a variety of reasons. But like at this point in fucking Montgomery County, Pennsylvania,

if you didn't get it, it's because you just didn't fucking feel like it. Yeah. If you're an adult, obviously, like there are caveats. I'm aware of them. I don't need the comments to we don't. You don't come to this podcast for nuance. No. No, you don't. But there is good news.

What's the good news is, right? Oh, it's our next news item. We are going to start mining Bitcoin with atomic energy. It's keeping friendly. Yeah. Problems solved. Yes. Talon Energy plans to establish a nuclear powered mining operation and data center that will have up to 300 megawatts of onsite power

when it's finished sometime after second quarter 2022. The mining operation and data center will be built next to the company's Susquehanna steam electric station in Pennsylvania, according to the report. And Talon Energy could eventually triple its capacity to one gigawatt of onsite power. The facility's power capacity would grow in stages, expected to have 164 megawatts of capacity supported by the dual one gigawatt nuclear units and two independent substations when the first phase of development is complete.

Good. We love the dumbest timeline. And this is this is going to be used to generate fake money that you use to buy drugs. You buy a lot of drugs with that fake money, though. I'm never going to be able to get a new graphics card. Jesus Christ. Oh, Jay, buddy. I got a sixty seven hundred XT.

We should talk. We should talk. No deal as I know what I have. So I won't even scalp you that bad, Jay. I am going to require your literal human scalp. I've got some spares. Does it have to be mine? No, just a scalpel there. OK, I can find some. You could just start like a fake bitcoin mining company

and raise a bunch of venture capital for it and then actually just use it to buy and resell GPUs to people. So you just want GPUs. Yeah, you just inadvertently you remake Nvidia or like AMD but like as a bitcoin mining rig. That's just fucking funny. Yeah, it's it's a proof of work, after all. Yeah, so this is like part of a broader thing with Bitcoin

from like trying to shift from a proof of work to a proof of state because the proof of work system is killing everything. Also, a bunch of extremely annoying people are doing it. Like, you know how Ecuador's finance minister is like a big crypto guy? Well, no, is he? I don't know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of his things is he wants to like build mining rigs off of geothermal power, like just build one on top of a volcano.

Do do supervillain shit. The thing is, though, if you're going to build a volcano layer with a supercomputer in it, I feel like mining bitcoin is the lamest supervillain shit you could possibly do. Yes. Hello, Mr. Bond, welcome to my volcano layer. Don't actually do I use it. Yeah, what do you do, Dr. Nefarious? I use it to like

have you heard of the docus? I use it. I use it to mine bitcoin, which I use to buy mail order drugs because I'm too socially anxious to go to a drug dealer. That's that's the problem with this like boring dystopia we have, right? Even the most supervillain shit is like. Actually, sort of legal. It's just really lame. We get we gave the volcano basis to nerds.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bond breaks in. He just gets in a forty five minute tour about the GPUs he's using. Just the Russian self of the volcano, like that. Yeah, exactly. He like grabs the laser and slices himself up. Crotch first faster than the time would have done. So there's there's been occasional like

attempts to do renewably powered bitcoin aside from geothermal. Like I know there's been like some attempts to do like wind powered bitcoin and also previous to this before it came to the U.S. There was like an attempt in in Ukraine because like the one thing Ukraine has a lot of, I guess, is nuclear power plants. Oh, wonder how they got there. Yeah, it was to use them to to to mine bitcoin is great. We're going to take Chernobyl units one and two

and build a bitcoin mining facility outside. Stop laughing when that's their actual plan. And then. It's a shame that that electricity couldn't have been used for anything else. No, no, it's an infinite resource. J. Duh. Just. And this is again, I should stress, this is an improvement.

Yeah, like part of the reason why this is happening is because China is cracking down on like like illegal or like dubiously legal mining rigs, which are just sucking up all of their nice new coal power generation. And so the various nerds of the earth are looking elsewhere and they have a lighted on nuclear power. I hate it here. Hmm.

Horrible. The good news is you won't have to like live with it for long because it's going to get too hot. Yes, exactly. At this point, good. Well, I'm joking. The good news is that's the end of the news. Oh, we didn't put in Andrew Cuomo. No, Andrew Cuomo.

No, like Ross now refused to go first. Right now, he refuses to do the impression. All right. So we'll do it in news. I somebody fucking resigns, which we never never never. Exactly. So, OK, we have to start by asking a question. What is an L? It's a thing that you you post online.

Yeah, when you're a woman of the alphabet. Oh, Mr. Bob. What is an L? Tell us, Socrates. It is an elevated railroad. Wow, thanks, Socrates. Yeah, you just call it an elevated railroad because that's too many syllables.

It's like five syllables. Well, L is only one. And what are you so busy that you can't say? Yeah, oh, hi. New York, the city that never sleeps. I was going to say, if I'm busy enough to need an L, I'm busy enough. I can't say elevated railroad.

I do like this this the streetscape here. I like this a lot. This is this is the Bowery, right? Yeah, this is the Bowery. I always like the single pillar thing. It looks like some Dr. Seuss shit. I know, right? And it there's a lot more light on the street.

Diamond watches. Diamonds and watches. Alice, you're home. I love when you could just put up a big a big like a gaslight sign that says, Rob, this premises specifically. I'm Dr. Mordecai, dumbass. And OK, so so we built elevated railroads starting a long time ago in 1836.

The London and Greenwich Railway was built between London Bridge Station and Greenwich Station. Right. That was sort of like a commuter line to the leafy green suburb of Greenwich. Metroland. Yes. And then the USA, we sort of started out in New York City with the West Side and Yonkers Padden Railway.

Oh, why is it called? Did they have patents for it? I know that sounds stupid, but. Or is it like patent leather? It's a very shiny railway. Thank you. I think so. I was actually pretty proud of that one. Well, well, patent patent leather is, you know,

there's patent behind that no one can copy it. Do you fucking go around my shoes, dude? Wow, that's not very punk rock of your eyes. I hate what intellectual property law fucking attaches to my wingtips. So the West Side and Yonkers Padden Railway built down on 9th Avenue, they started running the trains initially with cable power, where they'd have like a

stationary steam engine in the basement at just a random building to have a one mile cable along the elevated structure coming from that stationary steam engine. And then, you know, the train would be pulled along by the cable. That didn't work very well. So eventually they gave up on that and bought these cute little 40 steam locomotives and used those, right?

They are adorable. They started doing that in 1871. And a whole bunch of private companies got franchises to build more L's. L, Mr. Bob. In Manhattan, right? So, you know, the 6th Avenue, 3rd Avenue and 2nd Avenue L all showed up in 1878, right? Wait, wait, wait.

Does that mean they're like running more or less like in parallel? Or have I just? Yeah, competition breeds success. OK, so if you don't like your service on the 3rd Avenue L, yeah, if you can block and take the 2nd Avenue L, which is absolutely kind of kickass. Yeah, like I know capitalism is bad for any number of reasons. But like, I do like the idea of like, no, no, like,

it's such a strange idea on that train. It's such a strange idea to have actual competition now that we live in a form of capitalism that has none. You know, in fairness, those Manhattan blocks are pretty long. So you'd be able to take trolleys and things the same roots on it. I mean, you can see it right here, right? You got, what, three, four trolley tracks and two elevated tracks. And look at all that public transport in one photo.

Yes. Must have been nice. Must have been. Must have been nice. You got all these competing steels. You can stop off, rob that guy of his diamonds and watches, hop on a trolley. A competing trolley even. That's some nimby bullshit, Alice, and you know it. Yeah, I'm actually opposing the L because people are going to ride in and take all of my diamonds.

Gadzooks, this horse car line will bring in hoodlums and vagrants. But that beautiful, historic character of my neighborhood, it might be changed if Irish people could ride the elevated rail. They're going to spill their stouts on my diamond watches. What are the problems with the steam elevated railroads as they ran very frequently with steam locomotives, right? Oh, no, what a shame. Yeah, reliable transportation.

Well, more reliable than horses, I guess. Maybe sometimes depends how attached you are to the horse. Not very, given this podcast history of basically sacrificing horses to the gods and New York cities. They're not particularly fast. They don't accelerate great. They need to carry all this fuel. They need a few police to not make fun of me on the podcast.

Then they also need like a like more like water. So you need to have like big fucking water tanks along the thing. Yep. Yeah, I don't know if you'd have to rewater the engine through that short of a run. But then again, I don't know. So just like do it at night or still? No, you'd have to do it at the ends of the line, at least one end of the line. But that still means, you know, a modern I'm sure we'll get there.

But a modern system, you need your water, your coal. Yeah, it's not. You kind of laborers. Park the train, go to the other cab and drive it out again. You actually have to show stuff. And that's a pain in the ass for transit operations. You got to run the locomotive around at the end of the line. Yeah. But someone just throw the reverser.

Easy. You don't need to see where you're going. So this is why you're in an elevated railway. Yeah. Yeah. And they're on the tracks. That's their problem. Well, actually, that was another thing about the early elves. They didn't really have signaling. Yeah, because you're up in the sky, Roz, duh. They ran on line of sight operations.

I see no problem. Just sort of looked at the guy ahead and tried to stay not too far behind him. Back when there was that much cold dust and shit in the air that like the fog killed people. And when it came time to install signals, the companies running this were pissed because they're like, excuse me, we won't be able to run as fast or as many trains anymore. No, we don't want to do this.

We don't want to do this. Yeah. Once again, big governments overregulating a successful private industry. I mean, that is a big theme of like the New York City subway system in the 1900s, honestly. It's true. But also, I mean, as you'll see, the other big theme is that without regulation, it was just complete chaos and anarchy. Yes. Well, good. The good news is when I'm on the subway today, it feels orderly.

Yeah. And well run and maintain. Exactly. Not like chaos and anarchy. Exactly. And and like as as as status, Justin and I have to uncritically support every state intervention into anything at any time. No, because you have to you have to like critically oppose every single government. Yes, it's a plus again, a curse. Alice, you have no idea.

All right. So one one solution to some of the problems posed by steam locomotives was what if we make the trains electric? All right. I like electric trains. They're cool. Yes. The first fully electric elevated railroad was built in. Beautiful. Sue City, Iowa in 1892. How about for the bustling metropolis? I was going to say a world city to this day.

Yes. Yeah, they they I think they kind of jumped the gun on how fast the city was going to go a little more enthusiastic. It's called civic pride. Eighties nineties were a big year for electric L's. Following that was, of course, the Liverpool overhead railway in 1893, which claims to be the first electric L but is not. Louisville built one in 1893. Louisville, Kentucky, Chicago.

Got their electric L in 1895. New York City's L's remained mostly steam powered until the early 1900s, though, because the system was so big and you had so much sunk cost, right? Sure. That's a New York City transit sort of theme for this year. Yes. Just remaining older and more out of date because the system was so big, sunk costs, etc. But once you install the electricity with a third rail,

you had faster trains. You had less complex equipment. You had fewer crews. We were easier to train. You still had other issues, though, with these L's. You know, the trains were still loud. The L structures weren't particularly pretty. They darkened the street below.

And you still feeling like Lovecraft and Brooklyn waiting for going to jump out from under like a shadow of an elevated train and like turn into a monster or whatever. Yes. That's a long way. That's a that's very convoluted to just be racist, Alice. Well, that's what that's what Lovecraft was all about. Yes, I wanted to say the sequence of words. Lovecraft and Brooklyn as a reference to a mountain goat song.

Ah, very good. I see. I'm not all that familiar with the mountain goats, but I do like I like no children. As we all do. Yeah. Can you imagine being the poor guy living in that apartment above the Atomitrits office, which looks like it's maybe 10 feet wide and has trains on both sides? He's constantly watching these trains go back and forth.

Yeah, Ross would love it. Very spacious. My kitchen is my bathroom, but look at these trains. Spacia is centrally located. Three thousand dollars per month. Steps from transit. Yeah, my best friend just picked me up in a police car from prison. I fucking knew it was going to be there.

I had to go to his apartment. How often does a train go by so often you won't even notice? I mean, that's for a place like this, that might genuinely be true, because when they were line of sight, you'd get a train every 90 seconds or less. Yeah, I think it's it's always tiny train world. Yeah. Well, I mean, you see, it's like three cars. Like these were short little trains that they would just run, you know, absolutely nuts to butts.

I thought it was less than 90 seconds. I thought it was like 45 seconds. Probably, honestly, it was genuinely like the governing rule for speed was make sure you could stop in time to not hit the guy in front of you. And that was it, which sounds crazy, but that's how we do it on highways and driving. That's all the rules are no rules.

I imagine you're the guy pulling the levers in the interlocking tower, though. Oh, yeah, you'd go nuts. Yeah, you'd walk out and you'd have, you know, you'd be like some guy, the cartoon guy who missed leg day, right? You'd have these enormous jacked arms from just standing there, pulling the switch over 400. I bet they had to have like F one pit crews to change switch components. You got 45 seconds to change this.

There's an electrified third rail. If you fall off the structure, you're dead. Good luck. Ah, the good old days. Like when life was cheap. Yes, I mean, I would trade some human life for 45 second headways. I didn't say how much. I didn't say how much. I said some.

So the else is they were originally built. So this is battery place in Lower Manhattan, which is now the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. You know, these these. So the structures are built very close to buildings. They cover most of the streets, especially where there's a lot of tracks, right? You wind up with all these complex structures here, like Chatham Square. That's up here.

You can see this is a double decker interchange station, right? Oh, yeah. Just keep building like lines on top of lines on top of lines. It's trains all the way down. Oh, yes. I like this. I want to be a surface level moorlock and above me and below me are infinite Z levels of trains would be a bad way to live.

Especially in the outer boroughs, the L companies were kind of fast and loose about what equipment ran where, right? So you may have sections of L's that had trolleys on them, or you may have the L trains briefly operate on the street. The Long Island Railroad shared tracks with the Brooklyn Rapid Transit on the Brooklyn Bridge for a while. The Brooklyn Rapid Transit even put freight trains on some of their tracks. Oh, that's hell. Yeah. Yeah.

And you didn't have so much like fixed lines for these trains, right? You'd have you'd have lots of different trains. They would take different routes requiring complex junctions everywhere. The whole thing is, you know, chaos and anarchy. Oh, so like a modern subway? Yes, but, you know, less. I mean, if you take the New York City Subway today, your train will occasionally do some wacky fucked up shit.

Oh, occasionally. Occasionally. But but on the L, that was basically an expected part of daily life. Yeah, I mean, standard operating procedure was basically get as many trains from one place onto as many different lines and to as many places as possible. So you'd have like four or five different routes between, you know, one station in Manhattan and Coney Island or whatever. And they'd all be different and they'd all have different trains going

different places and it'd be nuts. But this is perhaps related to the fact that everybody was like doing a shitload of cocaine all the time. Well, the guy in the guy pulling the switches in the interlocking tower sure was about to say you're looking kind of you're looking kind of tired. You should maybe take a twenty seventh cocaine eye drop. West Coast turn around. West Coast turn around. Good news is you always have a one seat ride.

The bad news is you don't know where that ride is going. Yeah. But I mean, look, when you have a train every forty five seconds, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Ten trains go past you and it's like. Eight minutes less. Eight minutes. Yeah, you're still doing better than the modern subway. Yeah. These these L's were built by private companies and they're originally

a whole bunch of them, right? And some of the companies were which eventually became L lines weren't originally L's, you know, especially the lines down to Coney Island or what we're what we're called excursion railways. But by the time of our story, there are really just two, which are the IRT, which is the Interboro Rapid Transit. Who took over the sixth and third Avenue L's and also built the first subway lines, right?

IRTs, they have the narrow loading gauge so the trains are smaller. They mostly operated in Manhattan and the Bronx, right? The sort of the surviving bits of IRT stuff for the numbered train. So one through seven. Yes. On the other hand, we had Brooklyn Rapid Transit, which operated primarily in Brooklyn, including on. Yes. Funny how that works. So they ran over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan

and Williamsburg Bridge to Chambers Street. You know, they had terminals in Manhattan. They didn't really run through Manhattan until later when they were reorganized, which we'll get to. And. Theoretically, these companies competed with each other, right? But sort of in practice, they colluded to prevent competition, right? So I take back the thing about enjoying competition. Yeah. You know, if the city, you know,

tendered another franchise to build an L or something down a city street that might compete with an existing one, you know, one of these companies would just buy up that franchise and then not do anything with it, but prevent anyone else from building there, right? I love her like at this point, like sort of contract law hadn't been discovered yet. And so there's no provision for like, yeah, once you buy this franchise, you have to like use it.

No, you just offer it for sale. And they're like, yeah, OK, we're just not going to do that. And you're so understandable. Have a nice day. I assume that's also like heavy bribes going on to be fair. But still. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Damning Hall is still a thing, right? County Hall is like at its most thing right now. And we'll get to Tammany Hall later.

How they did nothing wrong. Book recommendation. It's called Machine Made. Tammany Hall in the making of America. Highly recommend it. Although it is pretty much Tammany Hall did nothing wrong. I, you know, I wouldn't say Tammany Hall did nothing wrong, but I will say the the.

Their virtues outweigh their voices. All I can recommend is the musical that Chris once threatened to write about Tammany Hall as a joke, because it was the worst thing he could think to write. And he was going to title it, Sing For Me, Boss Tweed. You can see here. This is a map of BMT, which is Brooklyn, Manhattan, transit. What we need to do is cross out this M and put an R here.

Right. And then there's some parts of this map you can ignore. I'm not going to specify which because it's not relevant. It's a beautiful map. Incomprehensible. Funny thing is it does not it does not show the there's an entire other system of L's and subways, which are not shown on this map, which is the IRT at this point.

Yeah, of like directly competing ones and ones with with transfers. I think even at this time, free transfers. But I think even even when this map was made, I think the flushing line and the Astoria line were both jointly operated. Yeah, so that was a fun one. That that Queensborough Plaza Station was an insane. I really, I really appreciate the idea of like secret hidden transfers. There's like deep railroad law, you know, we're not we're not going to show it to you.

You have to walk with this map. As you can see, a couple of spots where they hadn't quite finished updating the line to not serve the ferries after the bridges had been built. Yeah, so you can see there's still a couple little spurs that go to ferry slips. And then you circle them, but right here by the Williamsburg Bridge and by the Brooklyn Bridge, right? These hadn't been really built. So you used to have to take the, you know, to get to Loist, Manhattan.

You'd go and take this to be the Brooklyn Bridge connects pretty far up Manhattan. So if you're trying to go to, you know, this was all industrial docks and things at the time and Wall Street and whatever. Sure, sure. We have pain in the ass to go all the way up to City Hall and come back down. So you'd go and take the ferry. And then, of course, they dug the tunnels and fuck the ferries. So now they're all gone, except now they're back again

and they're more useless than ever. I like that they don't show the entire IRT, but they do show Hudson Terminal here with the Hudson and Manhattan Railway. Now, of course, path. They show the H&M up 6th Avenue to sure enough. Yeah, just pretending your compasses, it doesn't exist. I wonder if they were like, I wonder if they're like guys selling like bootleg maps of both systems.

Can't remember. I used to be better with maps because I kept wanting to for April Fool's Day when I worked for the MTA, I kept wanting to put one of these maps up instead of all the digital ones. That's fucking funny. I just put the old old one up and just be like, you they kept telling me know that people rely on the maps. They need this, right?

It's just one day. Exactly. You can figure it out. You everybody just searches on your phone anyway. Why can't we just start calling ourselves the BMT for a day and see what happens? Just hide all the tracks. Check out what hiding the number trains does to ridership. It's an important experiment. That is an important experiment.

Yeah, you might be able to abandon the entire A division. No one will notice. Yeah, think about how much money you could save. Just stop showing it on the map. Yeah. Go back to having a secret subway. It'll be like, you know how like at Disney World, they always they always make the the wait time estimated wait time larger

than it actually is so that people people are really happy when they get through the line quickly. This would be the same thing, except there's a whole extra secret subway that you can take, right, to get to your destination faster. Like the urban exploration possibilities for discovering a fully serviced, but totally unmarked subway system. You thought the Moscow to weirdos were bad, but a bunch of bunch of like YouTube thumbnails of the guy like making that YouTube face. Found a secret subway three question marks.

You said there are there are lots of fully finished but unused stations in the New York system. Yes, some fully finished but never used, which is hilarious and sad. So in 1918, Brooklyn Rapid Transit was clashing with the brotherhood of locomotive engineers, right? What they were doing was just straight up firing motormen who joined the Union. The motor is the guy who drives the train, right, in this case. And after this is like right.

Is this during or after World War One? I forget when World War One in 18 after I ended in November. Yeah, we had turned 1917. OK, the the the brotherhood of locomotive engineers goes to the war labor board, right? And the war labor board eventually recommends that B.R.T. rehire the fired workers with back pay. And B.R.T. decides, no, we're not going to do that.

Right. We love we love a toothless regulator. Yes, the war labor board couldn't do shit about that, right? But the brotherhood of locomotive engineers could do shit about that. They called a strike beginning at five a.m. November 1st, 1918. So the war was still going on right at the like last last two weeks of the war. Yeah, at last 10, 10 days even. Yeah. And they knew the armistice was coming at this point, right?

Yeah, B.R.T. had an ace up its sleeve to keep service running on November 1st, right? They were going to use scabs. Oh, well, what could go wrong? What could go wrong? Well, almost nothing. Managers at administrative personnel were pressed into service to keep trains running during the morning and evening rush hour, right? Some had experienced running trains, but most of them did not. Now, funnily enough, this practice actually continues on SEPTA, I believe.

Yeah, as far as I know, yes. Yeah, when city transit goes on strike, they usually keep a minimum of trains running on the on the L in the subway using some qualified managers just to keep the tracks fresh. And I believe they run a secret train for city employees and cops. Secret cop subway. It's really a secret cop subway when the city transit division goes on strike. Yes. That's incredible.

Some real deep state shit there. I know, right? On a B.R.T., one of these scabs was a man named Edward Luciano, right? But he went by Billy Lewis so as to avoid anti-Italian discrimination. OK. Yeah. So he was a shift manager, but he had received some instruction as a motorman,

a total of two hours of it, right? Nice. Well, it's got to be a kamikaze pilot. This was before the invention of the meme that said you can always do an Italian accent, it's never racist. Back then, back then it could be. I feel like two hours of motorman instruction just is like the classroom portion, maybe, like. Do you think he did it in, like, in one two hour block?

Or do you think he, like, had two one hour lessons or like 15 minute blocks? Oh, it's going to say sixty two minute. Yeah, they just took attendance and that was the other class. Yeah, we did. We did sixty TikToks, which are going to teach you how to fucking drive a train. He watched a YouTube by an Indian man. So, you know, he also spent two days riding at the front of trains, you know, to get the lay of some of the land, right?

But, you know, he wound up as a shift manager. He didn't become a motorman. And as such, of course, he was available to SCAB that day. A man named Brian Kudahi, whose book The Malbone Street Wreck I was not able to obtain, did say in the book that the normal BRT education was 60 hours of training, a 90 question exam and 60 hours of apprenticeship aboard regular trains.

Right. So this guy's doing has done a little bit less training here. He was close. Two hours, sixty hours. Needs to do that, that 90 question exam, I think. You pick up most of it right at the beginning anyway. Multiple choice. I answered all C all the way down. All right, good. You got him on the train. So Luciano's shift on November 1st began at five a.m. and ended at four thirty p.m.

Right. That's doing his regular work as shift manager, right? And at four thirty p.m. he was offered a twenty dollar bonus to take a rush hour train from King's Highway, which is down here, which King's Highway. There's a lot of them. Oh, right. There are multiple Kings Highways, aren't there? Dollar inflation calculator is a trick that they play. There's three Kings Highways there.

You got one more on the sea beach line. Yeah. Nineteen, eighteen. I drive the guy twenty dollars. Calculate three hundred and fifty nine dollars and eighty six cents. Damn, I take that. Yeah, deal. Sold. So I'm going to I'm going to hazard a guess that it's not the King's Highway

on the sea beach line because I don't know if that was built yet. So it might have been on the Culver line or the Brighton Beach line. I would guess I would guess Culver knowing what we know now, but. Not sure. So either way, he's taken it up either the Culver line or the Brighton Beach line over to Park Road Terminal here in Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge. And then he's going to come back, right?

He's going to go up the Fulton Street, Al. He's going to go down one of these frosty roads. And then he's going to go over to, I believe, Coney Island Terminal. So Luciano is like. Hell, yeah, that's three hundred and fifty nine twenty twenty one dollars. I'll buy an Xbox at 1918 Xbox. Set of fancy playing cards. Gather round, kids, for a multi-player ball and a cup.

Ball and a cup. Ball and a cup. Hoop and stick. Yes, it's a pack of all of those. And a pack of smokes or just a stick. And a hoop is DLC. I hate having to sign up for hoop and stick live. Hey, kids, you want a hoop and a stick and a pack of six?

Wow, sure, Mr. Rosniak. I'll be three hundred and fifty nine dollars. And eighty six cents. And two hard boiled eggs. All right, let's let's look at the equipment he's using for this. OK, so the only thing that rivaled the chaos and pandemonium of the operating scheme of the old New York City L's was the equipment. You had dozens of different types of cards by dozens of manufacturers.

Some of them had open platforms like this guy right here. I took this picture in 2019. Yep, I was there. Yeah, Jay was there. They still run these things on occasion. His unlike historic runs, not regular service. I was about to ask. Yeah, because they don't because they don't have they don't have enough balls to do that. So you're writing outside, though, incredible.

Oh, yeah, I recommended it. If you can do it, it's great. You can just ride out on the open platforms. You know, the nice best way to ride the subway is with a lot of fresh air. Some of them had open platforms like this. Some of them were closed with automatic doors. Some of them rode especially close to the ground because passengers were afraid the trains might tip over on the earliest L's.

Southern were powered cars. Some of them were unpowered trailers. Some of them were actually entirely open to the elements like they didn't. They had they had like just slats instead of windows, right? How? Yeah. The main characteristic that united all these cars is they were made of wood. So it's a fine material. What was what's wrong with craftsmanship?

So Luciano had almost no experience running trains. And eyewitness accounts said that it showed, right? They reported lots of jerky starts and stops. You know, he and again, I've ridden on these cars when operated well, they're pretty jerky. So I don't know what a especially jerky starting stop on the run halfway out of the window. And he kept overshooting platforms.

He missed a few station stops entirely. Just sort of getting off those trains and penalties. And the less well times, less well times. Yes, he's that much closer to making his 20 bucks. Have you skipped those couple stops? That's right. I have to say, yeah. This is this the highest paid subway operator on the entire system. And he was finishing up just coming off a 12 hour shift, too.

I wouldn't be missing some stops, 12 hours of scabbing. Yeah, 12 out of 12 hours of scabbing having to pretend that you don't have an Italian accent the whole time. That's hard work. 12 hours, not just of like scabbing, but scabbing in a sort of Don Draper way. He's he's a sexually trying to do a Swedish accent. I'm getting your good train.

It's hard enough. I'm Swedish. Don't get mad at me. One confirmed instance of speeding when he just came off the Brooklyn Bridge at Sand Street Station. Hold on. He made it to Park Row, the Park Row Terminal on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge in Manhattan. He took on passengers there who were bound home because it's the evening rush hour, right?

Sure. And. Proceeded down the Fulton Street L to the Franklin Avenue line. So that is this is the Fulton Street L. This is the Franklin Avenue line here, right? When he got to the Franklin Avenue stop, he actually overshot the platform and then continued down the Franklin Avenue L. As you know, the Fulton Avenue L Fulton Street, whatever it's called. New York's confusing.

Yeah, he had to back up and then go down the right line. You know, he's got some mitigating circumstances here besides the fact that he just came off an 11 and a half hour shift. He was also recovering from the Spanish flu. Don't spit. Yes. Don't spit. He was also grieving his daughter, who had just died of the Spanish flu. Don't spit. Yeah. This guy is this guy is a bit of a wreck

at this particular point in time, right? Right. And his train was composed improperly, right? So this was this train was five cars long. It was a motor car and then two trailer cars and then two motor cars, right? This meant it was heavy in the back ordinarily when you were because the motor cars weighed about twice as much as the trailer cars, right? Usually the. Oh, I was going to say,

importantly, the weight was lower because the wheels were the heavy part of a motor car. Yes. Yeah. And usually the practice was you would alternate motor and trailer cars. This one, this one was not put together right. One one source I looked at speculated it was put together wrong because of some some scab switch man in a yard. I'm not sure if that's accurate. I think this may have just been was like someone's so recovering from the Spanish flu.

Yes. How many how many of these fucking things are we going to have post covid if there ever is a post covid? Or it's just like, oh, yeah, this guy is like crashed, you know, in fogged to hell. Yeah, exactly. And we probably will have I mean, this was exacerbated by a strike and we don't have unions anymore. So I guess it probably won't happen. We completely broken labor there by the safety measure. Yes. Okay.

So now we have to talk about Prospect Park Station, right? Looks nice. Yes, it is nice. It's OK. Oh, negative Nancy. All right, you can see the screens I designed there on the left. Yes, you didn't. You didn't think it was nice when we were there. Was I tired? Was I being a little bitch, baby? Yes. Oh, because we were that's because

you're going to be what Jay. I didn't say it. All right. So in 1918, Prospect Park was sort of a newly finished station, right? Not not entirely finished, but it had been reconfigured, right? Because the dual contracts were underway and they were building a new subway underneath What's It Street? Flatbush Avenue. Flatbush. Yes.

Previously, the Brighton Beach Line had continued sort of directly onto the Franklin Avenue L, right? It had been reconfigured so that the Brighton Beach Line, which is now four tracks, the outer track would go onto the L and the inner track would go into the subway, right? Now, in the future, only elevated trains would go on the Franklin Avenue L and the new subway trains would go into the subway.

And that's why they they didn't configure this line with particularly great curve geometry. You can see as you come in the Prospect Park, you take this reverse curve. Oh, it's a bit weird. Yeah. Yeah. And a reverse curve is how you say S curve would make it sound more technical. Yeah, you have to you have to navigate this track in the shape of the cool S.

Yes. This legend is the it's modern stuff. Every every track you can see here was in service. Back in the day, when the when the Franklin Avenue L actually connected to something. Wait, so so every every track. Wait, how does this how does this? Legend, just like non revenue track, whatever. That's modern.

You'd use both sides. I see. On the original one. So you'd have trains coming from. I see this legend. All right. Yeah. You thought to think about like a literal like urban legend. I thought there was an urban legend that I wasn't aware of. Think about the Will Smith movie.

I am legend. Yeah. So you'd have it. And it was, you know, this this is now a permanent kind of fucked up part of the subway because you have four tracks of local and express service that have to squish down to two tracks because the local tracks turn off to become the Franklin Shuttle. Yes. So Liam, that was why you were mad because we had just come down here

on a train I didn't know was diverted. Oh, yeah, that's right. Franklin Avenue shuttle back up. Hey, the shuttle rules. I thought it was going to be quicker, but it wasn't. Oh, that's right. That's OK. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We were there recently.

I was getting our New York City trips confused. Yes. Now, the shuttle's great, but it's it's you end up a lot of the time if you're coming from Coney Island and you get the express train, you wait for your transfer or whatever and you go shooting up past the local train and then it passes you at Prospect Park, you know, before you go in. You feel like a real douche. Great. Thanks. Cool.

Love this express train that gets held up behind the local. That's a bizarre way to operate. It's dumb. Anyway, what? Oh, go ahead. No, I was going to say, anyway, back to you. Yes. OK. I was trying to make this nice and smooth. Yes. Well, it has never been that.

We will never edit anything out or in. Well, you know what was not smooth was this curve. It was limited to six miles an hour. Oh, that's baby soft. Yes. So Luciano had never driven this part of the line before, right? Leading into the six mile an hour curve was a steep downward grade as the Franklin Street L descended into a tunnel, right? Now, Luciano approached the grade with his packed rush hour train

with only the faintest knowledge of what lied ahead. Oh, and this man is also a zombie at this point. Yeah, he's at least 12 hours, probably longer than that. He doesn't even know what accent he's pretending to do anymore. Yeah, he slipped into Irish. People have started discriminating against him again. Now, there's, you know, so Luciano sees, you know, the curve. Or maybe he doesn't.

We don't know exactly what happened at this point. There's a difference of opinion here. Luciano claimed at this point he lost control of the train, but forensic investigation determined the brakes were not applied at all. At any rate, the train did not slow down for the six mile an hour curve. So my mind was asleep at this point, probably. Yeah, I was going to say, but dude's sleep, dude's out. He was just dreaming about the sweet hoop and stick

he was going to play later with his brothers. Yeah, actually, you didn't have like a seat for these for most of them, right? Like you stand in there. Yeah, you still only get like a little half seat. So you can fall asleep standing up. Oh, yeah. That's fine. Thank you. I was standing up.

Can't they rise? It's true. Yes. I have done that. I've watched you do it dozens of times every night like a horse. Yeah, it's actually incredible. He just starts eating oats out of nowhere. Sometimes Roz gets spooked, and that's why the podcast gets delayed. He's just kicking his PC in the middle of the night.

Hey, I don't want to add it. So he plunged into the tunnel at very high speed, reported by some eyewitnesses as 70 miles per hour, but more like closer to 30. Nobody, nobody knew how to estimate speed back then. Good point. Yeah. And this is not a good speed to enter a six mile an hour curve in. Terrain, terrain, terrain,

pull up. So the first car with Luciano in it left the rails, but it remained mostly intact. It also severed the third rail, which cut off it cut off power to, you know, the system in the local area, right? The fourth and fifth cars. So here's the first car. The fourth and fifth cars are back here.

They both also remained mostly intact. I believe the fifth car was totally undamaged. The second and third cars, which were the trailer cars, they didn't fare quite as well. I see that on the diagram. Yeah, they've been smushed. They've been smushed. Yeah. You generally don't want to see a diagram where you have to draw a train

with a very squiggly line. Yes. They hit the wall up here where the reverse curve transitions, right? And they just sort of scrape along the inner wall as they're being pulled forward by momentum, right? Now, the wall here was studded with steel beams, right? You can see the poking out, right? Those are just shredding the wooden walls of the cars, right? You know, the wood just starts splintering their shattered glass everywhere, right?

And the splinters then, you know, impaled the passengers who were next to them, right? And this well before safety glass. So we're talking about danger glass. Danger glass, yes. You know, so the whole side of the second and third cars was sheared off. And then there are passengers flung by centrifugal force directly into the mass of bodies and splinters. Right, thank you.

Now, since the third rail was shut off, there was no lights in any of the trains anymore, all the lights went out. And the New York Tribune reported at this point that the train caught fire. But looking from the photographs, it doesn't doesn't really look like it actually caught fire. No, I don't want to say it looks fine, but it's not like compared to the cat from Tom and Fires. Yeah, yeah, it could be a lot more. It's made of wood for fuck's sake, too.

It's really surprising it didn't catch fire. Yeah, for real. They have like gas lighting on these by any chance. By that time, I think it was electric because it was electric. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think they even had like, you know, gas heaters on there. Yeah, no, it was not. They weren't meant for nice, long trips. Yeah, exactly.

So first responders who came to the scene reported, you know, they went down in the tunnel and found a solid, massive debris and splinters and impaled bodies. Jesus, what? Just just a mulch of subway car. It was it was there was some. There was no light whatsoever in the tunnel. So they actually went and commandeered some

private automobiles in the area and just drove them down there and turned the headlights on. Jesus fuck. Now, Luciano, our motor man, was completely unhurt and just sort of climbed out of the cab of the chain laugh. But like, of course, he was a special providence that protects drunkards, idiots, children and the United States of America, as I was on Bismarck once said. One of the passengers in the first car was like, hey, what happened?

And he responded, I don't know. I lost control of the damn thing. That's all. Then he then he walked to the prospect of sleep. No, you've walked to the prospect park platform, walked up the stairs and took the trolley home. Just he just left. Head to bricks. Head to bricks. You can just leave.

Cause it cause it in a train accident. You can leave. You can just leave. You can just leave. That's that's that's powerful scab vibes. Yes. I don't know what that night was like for him. But he was playing. He was playing hoop and stick the whole time.

I don't think he made it back to collect his money. So like consider the past couple of days, he has lost his job, killed a train load of people, lost his daughter. Yes. And lost his 1918 Xbox. They say he's sticking it off from him. It's a pretty bad day to be this guy. That's why you shouldn't cross the picket line.

I bet it's that's true. He fell asleep the moment he got home because he's just fucking exhausted. Yeah. All right. So in the course of your subway car being reduced to a bunch of pulled soup like a much very sharp pole. Oh, spicy like this is not this is not some a pulp would be a lot less harmful than just getting a splintered two by four, like just impaled through your stomach.

Right. So 93 passengers were killed and 250 were injured. Right. That's a lot. I mean, this is a packed rush hour train. Yes. And there was another issue, which was Spanish flu. Don't spit, which meant all of the hospitals were full.

Do not spit. Don't. Yeah. Well, so a lot of the a lot of I think they wound up having to open up Abbott's field as a makeshift hospital. They did. Yeah. And if there's one adjective you never want to hear applied to a hospital. Makeshift makeshift.

Yeah. Ebots was where the Dodgers played, right? Ebots was and it was like a block away from this place, too. Well, that's convenient. Yeah, no, it was very close. I mean, if you're going to have to open up a sports stadium for a makeshift hospital like Prospect Park kind of was the de facto station for Dodger fans. Sort of helps.

I picked a good spot for it. Yeah, right. If you're going to throw a train into a tunnel wall like this, that's about as good as you can get. Because I think there was also a nearby hospital, but that one was very definitively full of Spanish flu patients. Probably. So, you know, this is a catastrophe, right? And word got out that this accident had occurred

to the brotherhood of locomotive engineers. And they called off the strike. So, I guess in his position as strike breaker, Luciano was very successful. More value for money than the Pinkerton's, because you don't even have to pay him. Yeah, I was about to say, maybe. The Pinkerton's are going to want their like hoop and stick that you promised them. But this guy, you can just fire him.

You can just fire him. Yeah. The Pinkerton's have a hoop and stick that also manages to shoot miners. Hmm. Capitalism breeds innovation. Yes. The hoop. But I mean, the stick is also a gun. The boomstick. Terrible. All right. So what what results from this?

Good, good, good news. Jay wrote this slide, so I don't have to do anything. Oh, all right. So we're going to kind of rewind a little bit because there's some fun backstory with this. As you can see, again, we've got our train helpfully marked out of service just in case. Blue flag. Do not move.

But this equipment locked and tagged out. What if that just showed up at the platform like they expected to get on? Probably, yeah, I probably would do it. Having having written. I mean, it's definitely not the exact same thing, but having written like work trains or museum trains and things out of service. The number of people who just are completely blinders on and will just, you know, the second that something that's not the platform,

you know, not the tracks appears on the tracks, they'll just walk straight into it. They should just they should just make the only thing that really repels people is a really smelly car. Yep. Well, you can do anything for 10 minutes. So when we go back. The mayor of New York at the time was was John Highland, who now famous for Highland Boulevard in St. Island, which I know of, because it's a lot of bus stuff there.

So I had to make a lot of crap that said Highland Boulevard was, you know, blocked or construction or something. But he was a big Tammany Hall guy and, you know, a big anti big business guy. He was not a big fan of the Rockefellers or the Carnegie's or, you know, these private private elevated and subway operators. Hilariously, maybe not hilariously, I don't know. But he got to start working in New York City for the BRT, coincidentally. And he literally.

So this this will also show you kind of their track engineering. He got his job at the BRT by showing up in Brooklyn one day, climbing up the elevated structure and talking to somebody who was standing up there. He just climbed up the pillar and said, hi, can I have a job? And they gave him a job. He started the next day laying track. Wow. Wow. That's that's that's impressive.

Right. It's sort of nuts. But he genuinely still think you can do that. Yeah. Just climb the elevated way. His job. That's yeah. That's just super far off. He drew on a guy's face and said, give me a job or it's not coming off. But. He worked his way up to being, you know, a conductor, an engineer,

and well, conductor, something else, and then an engineer. But that was sort of his kind of end goal almost of all of this. He's like, I'm going to be an engineer, collect 100 bucks a month, paycheck or whatever. That's fine. I can, you know, find my house in Brooklyn next month. I got the stick. Exactly. You do have to get it in installments. You can't just get them all at once with a hundred a month.

But anyway, well, I mean, you got to think, you know, driving the L is, you know, basically like having a train simulator today. It's he's just playing Densha de Go. Yes. Full time. And it's all line of sight, which means it's basically how I play train simulator. And Luciano overspent at a curve and flung the train off the tracks, which is actually exactly how I play train simulator hard. Same. Yeah.

You got to turn derailments off. It helps a lot. Thanks, Ross. I miss you. Did you guys ever download that old roller coaster track for original train simulators? Oh, my God. Yes. Yeah. Oh, my God. I got that. And like I managed to get the roller coaster track and like I was living outside of Boston, so I got like MBTA trains and just took MBTA trains

on this insane looping roller coaster. That's fucking awesome, too. Oh, yeah. That was a good one. What's hilarious is like 90 percent of the train people, capital train, capital people, by the way, that I talk to now that are like around my age. We'll remember that same roller coaster map. It was just like a it's a cultural touchstone. I'm sure.

We're on the same plane. Disease group of people. All of the all of the the tracks, they were so distorted that they just turned into two lines. Yeah, it was just like two lines, red ties, you know, every 200 feet. Yeah, I was like the I was like the sea view map. That was fun. I liked I downloaded, you know, all these like broken super acceleration things.

And I found out on the vanilla Japan map, there was some starting location and terminal that if you just punched it, you'd go flying off a jump ramp at the end of the world. So I just did that a lot and just sent dashed lines full of intermodal trains, you know, just careening off this jump. This is the problem, the problem with the train simulator world. Well, the train simulator genre as a whole is they're just not as good at derailments as they should be.

Yeah, when are we going to get like B-men G physics, but train simulator? Imagine being the train company or the train manufacturer that agrees to hand over that data. They just have to make your own fake ones like they do for B-men G, right? Yeah, you just this is not. ACS 64. This is a. Yes, 128. Yes, perfect.

Ship. And any any any simulators are purely Quintanelle. Stop serving us. No resemblance is intended to any living person alive or dead. Which the the onion Pacific. Yes. Anyway, so John Highland had basically kind of achieved his life goal of being an engineer with a steady income and his wife who'd moved down

suggested he should maybe start trying out law school stuff. So he did. And shortly before a minute, you should climb up City Hall and demand a job and they made him the mayor. But even so he was about to take the bar. It's like Godzilla. This was the only way you could get any job in 1918 was to climb the crime to the top of the job happened.

And you demanded the job in the corporate ladder. All King Kong was trying to do was to get hired. I said Godzilla, I meant King Kong. Do you guys have an opening in the sanitation department as you're just flinging shit off roofs? So unfortunately for John Highland, just before you're supposed to take the bar exam, he got his ass fired by the B.R.T. Because the supervisor almost caused an accident with his train.

One man did nothing wrong. Yeah, well, he made the critical mistake of not outranking the guy who caused who almost caused the accident. Wasn't Highland also reading law books while driving the train? No, I don't. I didn't read about multi-tasking. Ron, so many of my interests collide. So he he claimed that it was not his supervisor's fault. But that meant he just not a big fan of the B.R.T.

And additionally, when he was an engineer, it meant that he was a member of the brotherhood of brotherhood of locomotive engineers. So he is a union guy who does not like the company. And all of a sudden scabs for his old union going on strike just destroyed a train belonging to this company. He was not a huge fan of. So he threw the book at them. Hell, yes. Hell, yeah.

So he went and he he took the B.R.T. to court. He tried Luciano and the executives of the B.R.T. for manslaughter. A lot of rules. The fun fact of this, this was such a high profile case that. John Highland went and they had to figure out, where can we go that like we can get a fair jury? So they took the court all the way to Mineola Long Island,

which is less than 20 miles from the wreck and I was as far as they could go. So it was like they couldn't get a fair trial in the city because everyone was calling for the executive's heads. Yeah, literally, yeah, literally calling and saying that they should be brought out into the street and shot. So they brought it 20 miles away, where apparently I'm in many ways. Apparently news hadn't spread 20 miles by the time they managed to get the trial done. But anyway, they're all acquitted.

It's like when you want to put cops on trial or when you have to put cops on trial, so you go to like the cop suburb, you just go to like the railroad suburb. Yeah, the system works and Luciano and all the execs were acquitted, right? I think Luciano went on to become a developer in Queens. He did. Yeah. And he lived until like the 80s, too, which is sort of crazy. He lived, he lived to the age of 91. Jesus. Because a good day on your bash is the very. Yeah, I think I think I think

Luciano has the least amount of responsibility for this accident. Yeah, he does. He does. No, I mean, the guy was clearly exhausted, even though he was a scab. Now, people do dumb shit sometimes. Yeah, he was a scab, which is almost as bad as murder, but not a murderer. Yeah, I was about to say he was he was a scab and he never scabbed again. He merely became petty bourgeois. Yeah, so he retired from scabbing.

He quit the quit the BRT and one became a developer. I think he just went and developed houses in Queens or something for the rest of his life until 1985. Again, insane. So that means statistically, given that we're talking about developers in Queens until the 80s, that Donald Trump growing up encountered this guy. He might have. I love New York. Ridiculous, but it ended up still being pretty costly for the BRT. They settled for more than seventy five million dollars.

Which seventy five million dollars in 1980. That's a lot of hoops and sticks and sticks. But that doomed the company that sent them into receivership, which fucked them over in a pretty major way. And, you know, as these things usually happen, they just reorganized their way out of it. They absorbed a handful of more railroads. I think they signed had signed some big contracts with the city recently.

And they became the BMT, which is why it said BMT on that map earlier. The BMT survived until the New York City trains. It took them over. If the seventy five million dollars is preinflation, and they have a fine of about two point zero five billion dollars. Wow. Nice. They'll do it like that anyway. No. So what you can see here is another

subway map for New York City that also doesn't show the be the BMT or the IRT. Because that's a third subway company that didn't quite exist at the time of this wreck. But what's kind of interesting. So two years after this wreck, John Highland, the mayor, pitches a third subway system and says, all right, it's time to quit fucking around. The city needs to build and own its own subway.

Yes. Which, you know, turns out this that 1921, it was finished sort of in the late thirties. It's got, you know, beautiful deco tiling and everything. And it was just, you know, absolutely pumped full of New Deal money. So all these stations are huge and enormous and overbuilt. And these, you know, junctions are these crazy high speed, multi level things. And they had signaling in there from the start and, you know, all this stuff. But a lot of these lines, because this this incident

really kind of sullied the private subway system in the eyes of people. And it wasn't particularly kind to how everybody thought of the L's as well. So a big part of the of the independent subway here, the city owned subway, was to replace elevated lines. So Sixth Avenue had an elevated and it later got an independent subway line a little late in this. You can see this line through Manhattan here is Eighth Avenue,

which was replaced the Ninth Avenue L. They plan to replace the Second and Third Avenue L's with the Second Avenue subway, never built, still substantially never built. You can see down here, this bottom line here going out to Rockaway Avenue is the Fulton Street subway, which replaced the Fulton Street L eventually. Uh, you know, so you ended up with a lot of these things replacing the L's because the L's became not very popular. And a lot of this, you know, this system was never really finished.

So they kept trying to build it out and World War Two came along and they ran out of money and then Robert Moses came along and nobody wanted to pay for transit. And then basically they were super hosed. So you ended up with them not being able to take down all the L's. So like this grand concourse line here in the Bronx runs like one block away from the elevated line that the IRT continues to run to this day.

And you end up with a lot of stupid, stupid stuff that's still kind of screwing over New York because we have, you know, two systems that were designed to work closely with elevated systems and one half built subway system. And then the elevated, like a lot of the portions of the elevated systems were ripped down and all these remaining parts were sort of stitched together into this weird ass kind of hybrid, non-functional subway. It's nuts. And it's, you know, one of these things continues

to fuck over New York to this day because there's no funding nor like full blown competence to get huge mega projects like this done without Cuomo dipping his hands into it and making it stupid. It's goddamn impossible to build any amount of subway anymore. It's true. Can't be done impossible. We forgot how to dig holes, but Elon Musk will fix it. So the next next big consequence, they renamed Malbone Street to Empire Boulevard, except they forgot a little half block section

so you could still get the little picture of the Malbone Street sign. Sort of weird, it's like it was like a parallel part that was still signed as the same road. Now that's all that's left of Malbone Street. Anyway, it's Empire Boulevard now, though part of it is Empire Boulevard Malbone centennial way because they went and made an honorary street thing for it a couple of years ago when this hit its 100th birthday of this horrific disaster.

And then they also went and banned wooden cars in subway tunnels, which probably seems overdue. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty smart at this time. And, you know, this this still actually means so when the Transit Museum runs the old wooden cars, nobody's allowed in them when they're in the subway and you can only go out and so they'll hook them up, they'll get them ready and they'll tow them to wherever they need to go and then they'll unhook them and let them loose, which, you know, seems seem smart.

I, you know, especially when every other train in the systems, this giant steel thing. Yeah, you one of those could probably hit this train of wooden cars and not notice. Yeah, matchsticks, yeah. Fair enough. Yeah, exactly. And especially now in their 125 year old matchsticks. Let's go drive what? Yeah. Well, the last thing the subway realized they needed to start, you know, considering loosely at least some sort of speed control systems.

So line of sight was kind of on the out. You know, this kind of proved like, you know what, maybe in tunnels and things you need signals. So they started equipping some of the fleet with speedometers. Cowardice. Some of the. There were some trains operating until another couple of over speed crashes in the nineties without speedometers. And it took until that.

Oh, they're like, man. All right, it's finally time. What a city. Train drivers need to know how fast their train is going. This is actually important, it turns out. And then this was actually when, when signal timers started. So you didn't actually need speedometers because the track controlled your speed for you.

So when you you were going on the track, you know, it's like you basically have to try to time a green wave. And if you overran it, you'd get the emergency brakes tripped. Which is a pretty clever way to do it, right? You don't the trains can be pretty dumb as long as there's something that prevents them from going too fast. So, you know, if you're supposed to go 100 feet in 10 seconds when you enter that 100 foot segment, the timer starts.

And after 10 seconds, then it won't stop you anymore. It'll turn green. Just clever, you know, that's the sort of 1920s engineering. Some of these are, you know, reasonably original still. But after like a couple more accidents occurred, these signal timers kept getting more and more conservative, right? Yeah, so they ended up putting them everywhere. And as these started to age, they also started cheaping out on them.

So there's a two shot kind that gives you two chances. And then there's a one shot kind that if you screw it up, you're e-braked, you're done. And the one shots are the big problem lately. But these all started to like drift and slow down, which sucked. And, you know, you ended up with this huge problem where. Train operators now couldn't trust and still can't trust in some spots. The speed limit sign.

So they just go way slower anyway. And that screws over everybody back to line of sight. What could go wrong? That's one approach. We just saw what could go wrong. What could go wrong now? Yeah, we learned from our mistakes. That's true. The trains are more rigid now. That's right.

Like, I'll just be like, yeah, you bet your ass are more rigid. That's why Governor Cuomo came in to fix the subway. I think the subway is still technically in its Governor Cuomo authorized state of emergency. This is true. Really? Yeah, like three years of state of emergency, maybe more. You hired Andy Biford to come in and fix the subway and then fired him. Just wild. Just because Andy Biford quit twice, which is hilarious.

Yeah. Andy Biford, come on, well, there's your problem. Please, that'd be fun. I think he's living his best life in London now. Nobody's living the best life in London right now. Oh, yeah. OK. But that's it. That's what we learned. We'll be learned. Ninety hundred people are so dead.

Two hundred and fifty people in the lesson. The lesson, of course, make sure that you always that you always vet your employees to make sure that you're not hiring secret Italians. Yes. We thought he was Swedish. He was actually Italian. I see one meatball, you know. He was so convincing. He hardly ever did the like hand thing.

I knew those meatballs tasted off. This sauce is brown. Excuse me, red. Brown sauce is on the Swedish meatballs. Why are you going? I don't mind. Sounds good. Well, a segment on this forecast called Safety Third.

Shake hands for danger. Oh, a tank farm. I see a tank farm. Uh, yes, we have we have a we have a we have an oil themed. Safety Third today. Oh, perfect. To close us out after our news item about how hydrocarbons are killing everything. We get to see about how they almost killed one writer.

Hello. Well, there's your problem, comrades. Hello. Hello. Thanks for hours of warped entertainment. I must share your mental of which is Twisters. Many years ago, I worked for a large consulting and engineering firm you briefly mentioned in one of your episodes. I mainly worked on industrial environmental remediation project.

Right. We work for the Bin Laden group. This this refinery appears to have too much greenery on it for it to be a Bin Laden group project. I am going to probably spend like hours and hours now trying to figure out which refinery this is. Anyway, this story occurred at a 70 year old refinery, which had a large bloom of various petroleum products

floating in the water table beneath it. Cool. Yes. Our job involved pumping and bailing this plume of nastiness from numerous wells and French drains throughout the refinery and tank farms. What? Wait, hold on. What's a French drain? French drain is sort of it's sort of a linear drain.

It has gravel underneath like a metal grate. I guess for infiltration. I don't know why they call it a French drain. It's the French door of drains. It mocks you as you pour shit into it. I assume that says our food is not very good. Renamed it to a freedom drain. You don't want a French drain under a refinery because they're always smoking.

It's only a French drain if it comes from the right region of France. Otherwise, it's a sparkling gutter. The goal was to shrink the plume or keep it stable. So I wouldn't contaminate the adjacent river again. A few weeks before the incident, the refining company Safety Wonk told my manager that they wanted to receive near missed reports to show that us contractors were fully participating in their safety program. The manager said that because of the nature of our work,

we should be able to come up with a near miss any time we're working there. All right. All right. I have one small detail to add, which is that I learned that a French drain is also called a weeping tile, which is terrifying. I don't like that. That sounds like something out of silent hell. No. He gave us an example near missed report from a person who had nearly cut their hand on a burr on a steel pipe.

You know, rather than removing the burr with a file or or a deburr, right, get a deburr. Get the little deburr, the burr, the burr, the burr, the burr. Rather than moving the burr with a file and moving on with life, this person instead wrote a three page report on the incident. And my coworker and I decided to just ignore this directive and get on with our jobs. After a long morning of getting dirty and stinky, working in the refinery,

processing units, we were able to do some simple inspections in the banks of the river and short bluffs next to the river and wastewater treatment, lagoons. Now, when groundwater levels were high, there would occasionally be seeps of the floating petroleum products that could get into the river and treatment lagoons to get to the bluffs adjacent to the lagoons. You had to go on to a narrow spit of land between the lagoon. And that would be the thing in the middle of that, huh?

Yes. OK. The flare stack for the refinery was in the middle of the spit of land. Right here. On this day, there was a bunch of equipment and stacks of pipes stored between the lagoons. So we had to park our truck near the access road on the far side from the bluffs over here. I'm enjoying this.

It's clearly this this diagram was clearly made in AutoCAD and these leaders have very short horizontal segments. I don't know how to use. I don't know how to use leader scaling either. Just so you're aware, I cannot figure it out. As we were scrambling along the bluffs to where the seeps generally were, an alarm siren for one of the process units went off. We couldn't remember which unit that alarm tone corresponded to.

But that's a three page report right there. But we guessed it was the catalytic cracking unit or the cat cracker. That's what it splits one cat into multiple cats. Mm hmm. The cat cracker was usually where shit went awry. They must have immediately diverted the unit's flow to the flare stack because there was suddenly a large fireball over our heads. Oh.

We looked at it and it got much brighter and hotter. Oh, and it for the truck. As we were making our way, they diverted the flow from the two crewed units that are upstream of the catalytic cracker. There was a loud roar of all that flow going through the pipes just north of us. And we could tell the fireball got much bigger without looking. We knew our worn out Nomex coveralls and plastic hard hats were no match for the hell above us, so we kept our eyes down

and concentrated on getting out of there. All the while there were flaming blobs of heavy fuel oil being lobbed out of the flare and falling around us. Most were falling in the lagoons, but some were hitting the ground near us. Jesus, you're doing fucking Omaha beach shit with with refinery byproducts. We finally got to the truck and sped off. We got away with some thermal burns, no worse than a mild sunburn. And some of the trucks paint and equipment in the bed of the truck was burned.

Some people who were much further from the flare told us the fireball was hundreds of feet tall. We related the story to our manager and joked that we had a pretty good near miss report for him. He said, maybe we shouldn't submit that. They might reduce our scope of work if we do. I'm telling you, just submit the bit about not remembering which units alarm it was. That'll do it. Yeah.

Oh, we'll refinery work. Not even once. Oh, girl. Girl. Well, that was we got to we got to make this shit obsolete. Yeah. Just just to save the guys. Yeah. Well, that was Safety Third. Yeah. Our next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster.

That is right. Yes. That's right. We have shirts with international shipping now. You can buy the shirts they will ship to you internationally. We have a live show. Tickets to that live show is sold out, but you can buy tickets to watch the live stream of that live show. If you're a patron, you do still get a discount on the live stream. I believe there are also tickets at the door available if you want to try your luck.

Oh, nice. Probably wait to confirm that before I put the. I thought that was why they only sold one hundred and thirty. Oh, you may absolutely be right. I think you're right, actually. OK. Yeah, my bad. Good. Yes. Jay, where can people find you?

Yeah, what do you do? You can find people can find me on YouTube and Twitter under the name B. Squackelhausen, which you should probably just look in the description for. Yes, this time we will try not to put a line break on the end of the link and break it. We'll try. No problem. No, no promises. Yeah. Sounds good. I have a Patreon as well for my new city skylines project, new being

in terms of number of episodes, not in terms of time, because it's been a year or more. Priscilla Bay is coming. Yes, it is coming. There might be something fun coming with it, you know, that I may make. We'll see. Really? Yes.

The next episode, it could. It could have a crossover episode. I know. Maybe. Who knows? Genius at work. I was. Yes, sir. It'll be fun, whatever it is. Yes, we have a Patreon.

You can get money off of the live show, live stream tickets, but you also get a bonus episode. The next bonus episode is going to be going to be on the concept of the museum as soon as I finish the slides for it. Yes. You still need help with those? Yes. All right.

I think those are all the commercials. All right. I think that's it. All right. That's podcast. That was a podcast. Bye, everybody. Bye.

I'll feed the Zen. Bye.