Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 91: Chicago - New York Electric Air Line Railroad

Episode Date: December 18, 2021

just GO STRAIGHT see Gareth at Railnatter: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzA-8fUrw2C5cRcP9gO5BwA Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp 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 in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

we're podcasting. I think we're podcast. Now, this is podcasting. Now, that's what I call podcasting. You know, the thing I love best about that joke is that you've made it at the start of every single one of our getting increasingly close to 100 episodes. Yes. Oh, shit. Are we recording? Oh, shit. Now, that's what I call podcasting. Yes. Professional podcast is called Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast with slides about engineering disasters. I did that in the wrong order. I'm the person who's talking right now, Justin Rosniak. Okay, go. My pronouns are she and her. I'm the person who's talking now. My name is Alice Coldwell Kelly. We're going backwards. Jesus fucking Christ. We're going to start with safety third and do the news

at the end. No, no, I'm not. I'm not doing that. Liam Anderson. He have got fucked. We have a guest. I guess. Hello. My name is Garth Dennis. My pronouns are he and him. We got we got Garth back on to talk about railroads. We're going to talk about we're going to. Okay, so so imagine you want to go from one place to another place, right? I can't imagine that. I never want to do that. No, no, no. Terrible. Now, the easiest way to do that is in a straight line, right? Or the most direct way. With a car. Incorrect. False. Today, we're going to learn about a man who attempted to build a railroad in a straight line. Mohammed bin Salman.

I'm Mohammed bin Salman and this is Jack X. My muck probably pronouns are he and him. That's how they are. They're they're opening up Saudi Arabia's. They're making everyone do pronoun checks. Yeah. And if you don't want to do a pronoun check, you should see what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. They'll give you rashes if you don't do the pronoun check. No, today we're going to talk about the Chicago to New York electric airline railroad. That's a succession of very cool words. I thought an airline was in the air. What's an electric airline? It's an electric airline. Shut up. The air here references the directness of the line, right? That doesn't really make sense. Okay, whatever, fine.

But before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news. Man, our peppy upbeat news theme really does not go with launching immediately into human tragedy. I was about to say this was this is a pretty bad one. Amazon kept their workers in the in the warehouse that got wiped out by the tornado outbreak in in multiple states. I think this was in Illinois. And they killed at least six people, but they won't know like an actual number until they've been through all of the wreckage of the fucking fucking through film and center with all of your like packages of sex, dildos and whatever. And the reason why is as you see the last text of one of the guys who died, Amazon did not let them leave. It also like they

didn't know that there was even a storm warning because Amazon keeps their phones and lockers outside. They didn't have any kind of evacuation plan. And incidentally, Jeff Bezos has not said word one about this. Nope. It's he's going to space. Yeah. Lucky him. Hopefully he could edit this out. Hopefully fucking media crashes into him and kills him. Yeah. I mean, I guess he's like out of Amazon now. So who considers it not to be his problem? He's just washed his hands, which is that much. Yeah, I think I've heard the worst Amazon thing ever, which was like, oh, he said thanks to all the workers he has in cages for allowing him to go up to space. I think, oh, there's not a worse thing that Amazon can do, you know, all the ambulances that get

phone to like Amazon warehouses in the UK. But this is this is that they did it. They did it, folks. This is absolutely horrific. It's a perfect like encapsulation of the US labor market because there were two big like mass casualty events. Both both factory collapses are in this case, a warehouse collapse. Yes. One with Amazon and one with a candle factory in, I believe, Kentucky that was using prison labor. Yeah. And it's interesting because, you know, these areas are known for, you know, really, really bad weather. This area that's sort of south and east of Tornado Alley is actually where all the really bad stuff happens. You know, the Tornado Alley tornadoes just look very aesthetic, but they're not very powerful. This is where the really bad

weather ruining it for everyone. Sorry, go ahead, Justin. Ordinarily with these these types of buildings. This is a tilt up warehouse, right? So, you know, you cast these big concrete planks on the ground, those are the walls, and they use an excavator to tilt them up so they're vertical, right? Now, as a result, they are actually very prone to falling over in a windstorm. Which is why these buildings are supposed to have internal storm shelters, which are like hardened bunkers, right? Where the workers can go if there's like a tornado, and like the vast majority of the building is not expected to survive, you have an interior storm shelter. And this building does not seem to have that because there was another shot that came out of

this tornado of another factory with some kind of industrial products factory. It did have those storm shelters. Everyone stayed, you know, in the warehouse, but they got into the storm shelters. The warehouse collapsed all around them, but the people were fine. The shelter zone was on the north side of the building, and the southern end has only got torn up. Oh, that'll do it. I do want to read an article about this, and I brought it up just because I wanted to say a couple things where... Like a couple of actionable threats. Actually, I have that. I hope they have a nice time. A driver who was coming back to the warehouse read the alert allowed for a tornado alert in Spanish. The name driver, Alonso Harris, his manager, who he doesn't

know the name of, he only knows the first name, Julie, apparently basically, physically grabbed him and basically was like, you have to fucking get to shelter now. And I did want to take a say. I'm not obviously relieving Amazon of any guilt. Everyone from the C-suite on down should have a nice time. Yeah. But I do want to say, I try to remember, especially when we talked about Paul, that people are still willing to risk their lives just to grab people out of their vans and get to the shelter zone. That's very noble. And I just want to talk about that because everything else in this story is inexcusably bleak and horrible. I've had diarrhea for the past 18 hours. I'm not in a good mood. And stop buying shit from Amazon.

It doesn't even matter if you do, man. It makes no difference. It's too big to be killed by you. That's true. I did buy the research material for this episode from Amazon. I am going to cancel an up dose of my anti-depressant. Let me just log on to Twitch, which is owned by Amazon or any of the websites that I use every day, which will run on Amazon web services. I'm going to get a Nerf gun and the Nerf bullets are going to be filled with effects, sir. And I'm just going to shoot it into my own mouth for the loss. You need to atomize this company. Yeah. Nationalize Amazon.

Yes. Whatever. Have a nice time in the streets. They need to get that guy who ran Sears into the ground in charge of Amazon. It's true. It's like Alien vs Predator. The only thing that can destroy Amazon now is the same corporate ethics that birthed it. Yes. Can we not get Trump to take charge of Amazon? Oh, step away from the lathe. Oh, man. It's so fucking grim. In other news. Oh, geez.

There were more storms. We got Storm Achwen, because in Britain, we've now, instead of doing alphabetical names or whatever, we're just going from like lesser known Lord of the Rings characters. And you can now get killed in like Storm Galadriel or whatever. Can I get you? That's right. Storm Pippen. I hate to get killed in Storm Tom Bombadil. And as I die, people are arguing on the internet

about whether or not he's based. Anyway, this only killed three people outright in the form of shit falling on cars. But what it did do was knock out a shitload of utilities to pretty much the whole of the rural northeast of both England and Scotland for like two weeks. The electricity is still not properly back in a few places. I've got friends in a little town called Chemney near where I used to live. And yeah, all their garden got smashed up and everything was wrecked, but also they had no power for, I think it was 11 days. And like that, the northeast of Scotland is a pretty hardy part of the country. We used to sort of pretty shocking weather, but this was crazy. This was, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, my friend, friend of the show, Abigail Thorn, a philosopher, she had her parents live out in the country in the northeast, had no power, no water, no heat for a week. And then the army showed up, which you would expect to be like, oh, it's like, you know, civil aid, right? And what happened was a troupe stuck his head around the door and was like, are you all right? And they were like, well, no. And they couldn't really do anything. The thing about Britain is that it's a failed state. And unlike Amazon, which will just kill you directly, Britain will sort of kill you by negligence. And that's largely because we've sort of committed ourselves to at least a quarter to a half century of governance by people who are

ideologically rigidly opposed to the state ever doing anything more than poking its head around the door and going, you're right. Oh, man, I have a personal grudge against Storm Arwen, which is that it smashed up a lot of trains, right? Really, this storm threw a lot of trees at a lot of trains and smashed them up. So it's a personal grudge match between this storm and me. Weirdly, there was a there was a storm like a few years ago that was called Storm Dennis, that also smashed up a bunch of train lines. So yeah, Storm Gareth. And it's coming. It's coming. In fact, there was one. I'm sure there was one, wasn't there? And it also smashed up a load of stuff. I can only apologize. The good news is,

the good news is that these are going to get worse every year. And although it seems like, because Britain is in some respects, a sort of a low stakes country compared to the United States. So it's like a small version of like, say, the Texas winter where nobody had power and a bunch of people froze to death. But it's, you know, just sort of this general pattern where everything is getting worse forever, and in sort of like stochastic uncontrollable ways, as exemplified in, you know, just storms that just fuck up your shit. It's a it's a cold little rock out in the Atlantic Ocean. And so we're going to get I think I think there are a lot of like, re-smog sort of haunted pencil types who think that they think that Britain

is going to somehow not be impacted by climate change. And yet like, if you go and I don't know, go to the like the North Yorkshire coast and it's falling into the sea by like several meters a year. And then everything's being smashed up, the coast is being battered down the Southwest. But no, no, Britain's getting fucked over by climate change. But right now, no, by 2050, we're going to look like fucking Rockall. There'll be like competitions of like French people who will like compete to be the first to go and stand on what is this small cluster of rocks is the remains of Turf Island. Well, we can't say we didn't deserve it.

All right, that was the goddamn news. All right, Train Zone. Justin has seized back control of this podcast, because it's been too long since we talked about trains. Having seized back control, I'm yielding the floor to Garrett, who did this section. Restly, it's straight back out behind me. I'm sorry. Well, it's your Justin, this is your fault for hinting in the in the early form of the notes. You're like, maybe talk about a permanent way design or like right of way design, which immediately, it's like a red flag to a bull. I was like, oh, shit, I can do that.

Yeah. So I can only apologize. It's all right. There aren't so many slides. I think there are only about 50 to 60 slides now where I explain the design to everyone. No. So right of way design or permanent way engineering is what I do. It's my day job. And basically the way I explain it to people, because basically no one really outside of a slot know what it is, because it's not a thing you can go and study really. But it's essentially taking civil engineering materials and turning them into a mechanical engineering system with mechanical engineering tolerances. So here are some nice sketches I've drawn of stuff like steel and concrete and aggregate. And then you use that to create a system that has machined tolerances of millimeters. And there

is a five pence piece, which is basically the same size as a five cent piece, which is the size of the contact patch between the wheel and the rail. So it's like really, so you're taking these big chunky materials and you're turning them into a very kind of kind of system that has to be very kind of carefully tuned. So you don't, well, if we go to the next slide, you'll see what happens if you screwed up. Sort of playing piano concertos, but all you can use is a sledgehammer. Correct. And if you hit the, if you hit the thing wrong and balls it up, then this happens, which is obviously bad. The bad things happen. And this is Hatfield, which maybe, you know, for episode 215 of, well, there's a problem podcast, we'll get there. But Hatfield was

like the worst thing that permanent way engineers did in the UK in recent history, which was, to be fair, it was because of privatization and rail track and stuff. In fact, in the middle picture there is the all, is the new rail that was supposed to replace the old one that's just sat there looking happily. Just sat there fine. Anyway, what happened here was because the permanent way engineers and also management got things wrong and it resulted in a train being derailed here. And if you flip to the next slide, the reason this train derailed, because we're not actually talking about this disaster, is this is a length of 35 meters of rail that shattered like glass into 200 plus pieces. Steel rails are, they are not blimsy bits of metal. So if you can

imagine that shattering, that's what happens if you screw up permanent way design. Anyway, that's the fun bit. Next. Now, I've just lost the opportunity to say next slide, please. Yeah, the work required to reconstruct that rail. I know, right? It's like the boffini people like, well, we don't get to do crash reconstructions of 747s, but by damn, by George, we will reassemble this one rail and we'll do a good job of it. And so the simplest form of permanent way engineering is the alignment, right? There's more to it than that, but the alignment's a good place to start. And we generally split our designs into three components. So this will become relevant for reasons. The horizontal, which consists of straights, which are good. If you could make

everything straight, this would be good, but it's not possible because of reasons. There's just a range all of the towns in a straight line. Yes, exactly. Next, if you go to the next one, you also have these things, these weird things that are called curves. These are bad. They can be small, they can be large, they can be flat, they can be tight. No matter how you describe them, they are curvy. And we use these to connect up our straights. But actually, we also have another thing, which if you go to the next slide, please, we also have these things called transitions, which connect curves and straights. We don't need to talk about much more of those. Alice, I think you know more about these

than I do, actually. The thing that my transitions and your transitions have in common is that they both have to wait to be approved by the government. It takes a fucking effort. Yes. Next slide, please. So that's the horizontal alignment. The next component is what we call the Kant alignment. This is where we tilt tracks over to counteract some of those curving forces, or we can decide not to do that, or we can be really wacky and invent tilting trains, which is really weird. Yeah, just for fun, just to give me motion sickness. Exactly, yeah. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is probably the easiest part

of the alignment, which is next slide, please, which is the vertical design. So the vertical alignment, which consists of just grades, it's really simple, just things that go up, things that go down, and then we connect them up with vertical curves, which I show in the next slide by magic of next slide. So you can't just get the train to get sweet air? Well, we sometimes... I'll help us now. So firstly, yes, we do quite often have grade to grades. And secondly, I once was looking down

a theodolite, kind of doing some surveying, and saw HST get air over a particularly steep grade change. So you can get air in trains, yes, which is good. So you combine all these sort of different elements, the horizontal, the count and the vertical, and that gives you a 3D alignment, which can end up looking a bit like this thing, which is about to appear on your screens. Sort of chugly. Yeah, this is very chugly. This is a high speed rail alignment that the Germans never did again, because they realized this was completely bonkers, and it made everyone throw up.

It is quite fun to look at, though, so hence why we have a picture of it. But you can see there's vertical stuff, there's horizontal stuff, it's all happening. This is the fastest anybody has ever gotten through a half dozen, well, a full dozen slides on this podcast. I feel like I should be timing you. Yeah, we should give you some sort of a medal. Hey, I promised I would keep this bit simple, because if I don't, there's a risk that it would just descend into me talking about next slide, please. Have you heard about this podcast before?

Well, I fear that I might go off on one later on. Yeah, so I'm saving myself. So the way we know how to make or how not to make railways curvy or not curvy is by standards. So by long established series of design parameters that we know a train will be comfortable to ride. And it's worth pointing out that we, this is not particularly relevant to this one, for reasons that will become obvious when Justin puts the map up. But we, yeah, curves, the limiting factors for curve, if anyone, people ever wonder what the risk of derailing going too fast around a curve is, you have to go really fast around a curve to derail a train, like a lot faster than design speed,

because we design to comfort limits. We don't design to like safety limits of derailment, we design to like comfort limits. It's not like railroads online. Can I ride the extreme railroad where you decide to like spec? Yeah, you can. If you, my recommendation is to go anywhere where there's a transition between signaling systems, like in Spain or in, if you remember that, that didn't go so well. And that is what a train derailing at too fast around a curve looks like. Anyway, so there's some standards that's what define how I do my design. A lot of these standards, right? Like, correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't they worked out?

But like, on the basis of like a couple of studies in like 1849, and it's only in the 70s and later that people went, wait a second, all of this data is from like top hat times. Yes, actually, quite a lot of it is quite old. And quite through the rules of thumb that we've used for design have been shown to be utter bollocks. So yes, feel safe, everyone, feel safe. Yeah, no, no, for sure. There's lots of old archaic stuff in there. I mean, the laws of physics don't change a huge amount, but like our understanding of the way that vehicles behave has come along quite a lot. So that has kind of gone back and altered design, kind of the way that we design. Anyway, I've gone off on one. I knew it happened.

Quick, next slide, quick, quick. Yes, so with all of that stuff results in us having a railway that looks like these things. Actually, this is what's left of HS2. This is the 2018 version of HS2. They've already chopped bits of it. No, it's not. No, it's not. This is a Windows 98 screensaver. It's a Winamp visualizer. Yeah, yeah. It's just the pipes. It's the pipes screensaver. And they've already chopped. So, Justin, if you go to the bottom right hand corner, you can see there's like a single track in that station, that terminal station. That platform's gone. That's the 11th platform at Houston that government has chopped. So that's gone. RIP. RIP. And yeah, so they're continuing to chop at it. But that's another story. But

anyway, yeah, it looks quite pretty. And the fun stuff about my job is when it gets fiddly, because the straight lines are kind of boring. It's the fiddly, faffy stuff is where it's kind of fun. And in places like the UK where there's this thing called topography, you have to do quite a lot of those. Yeah, the UK, which is a fiddly, faffy country in general. Absolutely. Fiddly, faffy, and yeah, a real time westerner. Awkward. Awkward is right. It is an awkward place, isn't it? Oh, that's me done. Yeah, that's it. I'm finished. That's your PY lecture. You're all now certified permanent way engineers. Congratulations. You have like 100 college credits from this now. Yeah, I was about to say this is a certified

continuing education course. If Donald Trump can start a university, I don't see why we can't. We started our own secret service. I'm pretty certain we could do a WTYPU. So this on screen right now is me opening up the 3D line strings for 2018 version of HS2. And as you can see, it's not very straight. The Green Party, you're speaking bollocks. It's not a straight line. It goes around the whole thing is on curves. There's basically no straights on this thing. The whole thing is just curves. So you can see I'm like zooming in and showing you the verticals a bit weird and it's all very squiggly. So I'm just making the point. This is a 225 mile an hour railway and it is not a straight line. Put that down in your

copybook folks. This will be relevant as we proceed. Also, I'm showing you this sexy thing. This is Delta Junction. My God, look at that. Oh, I'm pointing. It's funny because Delta Junction is also a place in Alaska. Yeah, Delta Venus Junction. Yes. Do they have like great separate junctions? No. No. They have snowmobiles. I mean, Alaska Railroad's own, or rather I should say the Alaska Railroad. But yeah, last train in America, you can still get by flagging it down. Oh, that's cool. There's a couple of flagstaps on some of the Canadian lines. Also, I said in America. Yeah. Some of the SEPTA staps are flagstaps too. That's light rail.

That doesn't count either. No, this is no. This is on the regional rail. Well, still though. Most places in America you can flag down an SD40. Thank you. In contrast to what Gareth was saying, in the United States, there are big parts of the country that are very flat and you can go straight for a long time. This is like the New York Central main line here from Toledo to Butler, Indiana. We have the advantage of being able to build the town on the line. This is true. Yes. There wasn't much there before they built this, but this is a good 68 miles with no curves. Just dead straight. Liam, I can join you in Horn Club. This is nice. I would like to be able to have a railway like this.

We can all be pointy together, Gareth. There's a lot of lines like this in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, you know, long straight aways through a lot of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois. Come on, make some Illinois. That's right. Alice, you need to have a drop lined up for this. Are there any in the US that have a thumb print, like a thumb shape, a horseshoe curve in them because someone's thumb got in the way? Oh, that'll be the next slide. So we got a lot of these really long straight railroads, especially in the Midwest. Almost none of them have passenger service on them, which is crazy. But, you know, I miss out on all those passengers going from Toledo to Butler, Indiana.

Yes. And, you know, this is why people are telling you you can't have high speed rail in the United States or lying to you or just completely ignorant of geography. Sometimes you do have like hills or mountains or stuff, and then you need to do alternate methods like, you know, for instance, straight through them. Yeah, yeah, blow it up. Well, you can do like the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western did with the Lackawanna cut off. You build a whole lot of fills and a whole lot of cuts and a lot of big bridges. And you get this nice, straight, high speed main line through mountainous areas, right? Is that the one with the sexy bridge on it? Yes. Yes. Yeah.

So you can do alternatively sort of follow the terrain like the Pennsylvania Railroad did down here with Horseshoe Curve, right? Big thumb. Yeah. That's not so direct, but, you know, you get lower grades. Or you can do what the Southern Railway did here at Saluda, which is just build right up the side of the mountain. Average grade on this is 4.2 percent over two and a half miles. I think a lot of faith in brake engineers there. Yeah. I mean, actually, not that much faith because the switch you see on the front is actually a runoff track that leads into a pile of dirt.

I really, it's catch points. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. Good. Good. And if it automatically switches to the main line only if you approach it less than eight miles an hour. Yeah. So that is very much the railroads online approach. Yes. Have the crazy grade. Derail the train. Don't worry about it. Just get a new one. Yeah. Every day I derail six coal trains and that's just because you're at Norfolk Southern. Oh, yes. Hold on. I mean, this whole time. Since you got a lot of long heavy freight trains, you know, there's some extreme examples of trying to keep the grades weighed down.

I'm just, I'm just, I'm sorry. I'm still thinking about faith in Norfolk Southern guys just lining up all of the engineers like the fucking Chernobyl like guys have to go into the reactor like, listen, 75 percent of you are going to die, but that's just the cost of doing business. Yeah. I serve Norfolk Southern. Just imagining like a guy in a Norfolk Southern sort of one of those like railroad engineer hats and just like, he's so used to derailing trains, he just kind of goes, whoop, and then just pops off and I think Kareen's off down a mountain and explodes. Yeah. Just drop and roll. Also, I badly want a photoshop of the I serve the Soviet Union

meme, but the guy's wearing a Norfolk Southern hat. If the train next to you derails, pick up his cars and keep moving. So since we got really long and heavy freight trains in the United States, there are some extreme examples of really trying to keep the grades down at the expensive distance. This is the clinchfield loops. And this is in this is somewhere around like the border between Virginia and Kentucky and Tennessee, I want to say. I cannot stress enough the extent to which the P-way engineer, the right-of-way engineer, took acid when designing this.

I have done this approach to track laying in a railway empire when I don't have enough money. And so I'm just like edging out the curve I can afford the whole time. I'm just working my way through a whole ass mountain range like this. You can see here, it says 1.9 airline miles right from here to here. But that is 16 miles by the railway. It's an airline mile here means like straight line. Yes, it's the engineer. Yeah, I was going to say it's as the crew flies, right?

That's kind of where the line miles. I get it now. Was the engineer who designed this kind of trying to tell us something? It looks like a hand emerging from the ground in some way. It does. Yes. Oh my God. What's it pointing to? What's at the end of that furthest north loop? Coal.

Oh, no, sorry, furthest east loop. I would assume this is all just so they could run longer coal trains, you know, because it doesn't matter how long coal takes to get through its destination because it doesn't go bad. It doesn't go bad. Yeah. Yeah. If you leave it for long enough, it becomes diamonds.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, it's at the end of that loop. 78 multi-generations of boxcar just upside down. So until about 1916, when we basically stopped building new railroads in the United States, usually designing to one of those philosophies of how you sort of, you know, design the railroad. You're either doing it expensive and quick or you're doing something like this with lots of loops to keep the grades down. You might be doing something.

But another thing is we started to get a sort of an interest in running trains faster, right, in this sort of era. Now, here's where the argument starts. I know because some new research, this is so nerdy, some new research by, I think the Institution of Mechanical Engineers has put into question the Mallard record. So we're shooting it ourselves. Good. Oh boy.

Yeah, it's not yours. T1's got it back officially. Yes, it's timing. Yes. So by the late 1800s, early 1900s, you know, some trains are starting to hit tremendous speeds, like 100 miles an hour, right? And it depends, you know, where you are. If you say, if you're American, you say New York Central, 999 did it.

If you're British, you say City of Truro did it, or maybe Flying Scotsman did it. But of course, if you're us, you know, it was Frank Elrington on the Dahlke Atmospheric Railway. Yes. And that's 18.4. An angle, terrified Irishman. Striking by a fly. Striking by a fly. Yes.

Yes. So, so there were. They cared for them as if they were his own children. And we salute him for it. So there was, there was some interest in this era at, at figuring out, okay, how can we build like rail lines for these high speed services, right? One of the first proposals was in Scientific American in 1893. The St. Louis, or the Chicago and St. Louis Electric Railroad.

Look at those pointy noses. I know, right? Really early streamlining. Just put a, just put like a cone on the front. That's streamlining. You're not getting a wreck at a level crossing. That's shooting that shit into you.

00:33:18,560 --> 00:33:26,400 Just winding back the tension on a big crossbow bolt at one station. Oh, can you imagine a truck getting stuck on the tracks with this barrel? I got it. Oh, just, just, just the engineer in the cab. Just like, right? Okay. Open up the regulator. Here we go.

So this was supposed to be a straight four track main line for Chicago to St. Louis with trains achieving sustained speeds of 100 miles an hour. Didn't go anywhere. That proposal, you know, it was just sort of like, well, this is something we could build. And the experts were like, nah, you couldn't do that, right? Now I would note that in the view of our Lord 2021, we have only just managed to upgrade the actual tracks between Chicago and St. Louis to 110 miles an hour. And the trains are actually limited to 90 miles an hour.

And they look this cool. They do not look this cool. Towered shit. They took them 10 years to do it on a dead straight right away. Almost dead straight right away. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It is depressing. It is depressing. I mean, Britain is a wreck of a country and we managed to get... How did we manage to do this? How did we manage to get 100 miles an hour on our main lines? Welcome to the Ledlis Act. One person I saw on Twitter said, you know, the reason it took so long and was so expensive to upgrade this line is because it was essentially...

It wasn't so much line upgrades as figuring out how to bribe Union Pacific. I admire the Union Pacific Railroad's commitment to still living and working like a 19th century robber baron would run that company. In the same era, there were some experiments with high speed electric traction. This is a German car made by AEG. It reached 120 miles an hour on the Marion Feld Zawson Military Railway in 1903. I really like this triple-pantograph system because it's a three-phase car. One pantograph for 12 cars is cowardly bullshit.

Six pantographs for one car, baby. That is the feature. That's the ratio. I love these guys to do in front of it. Like, yeah, we have caught all of the pentographs of you and put some on this train. It is very fast. Yeah. I like two things in life.

Pantographs and great codes. And I'm having the time of my fucking life. Oh, it's made by AEG. They made my stove. Cool. How many pantographs does it have? Zero pantographs is incredibly disappointing. And then in the United States, we have railroads like the Chicago, Aurora, and Elgin

were running in urban cars, these little really fast trolley cars. They were running at speeds of 70, 80 miles an hour. Yeah, like sustained or average speeds of 60 miles an hour over 35 miles from Aurora to Chicago. And that's with stops, right? I mean, it's so cool. I mean, it's urban, it's so cool. It's based. Yes.

It's really fucking based. The Pacific Electric was going even faster in Los Angeles. I don't know if it was going so fast on this line, but I know that the president of the railroad managed to ride in his private car from downtown Los Angeles to Long Beach, which was, I think it was 20 miles and 15 minutes. I don't know what they took from us. I mean, that is awesome. But also, I would be interested to know what the dentist bills of any passengers in that

vehicle would be afterwards. I'm also thinking of all the children the car ran over on the way. Smashing through horses and carts. That seems like a personal problem. Yeah, why do we round it through an orphanage? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. But in the early 1900s, electric interurbans were like a really hot new trend.

They were cheap to build. They were easy to get investment financing for, right? And they sprung up everywhere. Often even the smallest town would have multiple interurban lines coming to it, right? Must be nice. It was sort of like, it was like, they were like tech startups. If there were like, We have a slide in our office.

If there were a Trash Future podcast in the early 1900s. Riley would start each episode by trying to figure out what the gimmick behind the new interurban line was. He'd be doing his KMC voice. And that'd be it. No one knew at this point if electric traction was going to work on steam railroads, as they were called. Anything that was not an interurban was a steam railroad.

Electric locomotives were in their infancy. No one knew if it was feasible. But one guy had an idea. So, Muhammad bin Salman. Yes. Pennsylvania edition. So Alexander Miller was aware of the Chicago Aurora and Elgin high speed main line, but he had bigger ideas than that.

So he was a businessman, right? He had started a bank in Aurora. He had his own block signaling company. You know, for like railroad block signals. And while he was on the new and very fast 20th century limited. That's the New York Central's train from New York City to Chicago. You know, he was traveling at this incredible speed of 85 miles an hour along the Hudson River, which coincidentally is about the same speed it goes today.

Three hours into his journey at Albany, he realized as fast as the train had been going, he was actually farther from Chicago now than when the trip started. This is such a getting bored following the GPS on the plane. It's like not understanding how great circles work. Be like, what the fuck? Why Newfoundland? Why are we further away? Why not?

And of course, the answer is because New York Central had an exceptionally low grade line. This is the path at least resistance. So, I mean, we say these resistance. What was it? I mean, I suppose maybe we'll get there, but like presumably it was going to pass through some stuff, right? Yeah, you're going up the Hudson River. You go past all these places like Poughkeepsie, Albany, all these towns that grew up along

the Hudson River. Then you sort of follow the Erie Canal up to about Buffalo, right? And you had other big cities like Rochester, Syracuse, you know, Schenectady. So, what year was it that he had this epiphany? Do we know? This is, I want to say 1903-ish. So, the indigenous populations have been long decimated through you. Oh, since when has that ever mattered to a railroad guy?

Yeah, this is just the only people you're pissing off are like early 1900s new nimbies. Yes. Well, most of this area was relatively pints. Actually, a lot of it was more populated than it is now. Oh, wow. Okay. So, Alexander Miller is thinking, well, what if the train could travel much more directly? And he comes up with this idea, what if you just built it in a straight line, right?

An airline. Yes, an airline. And he comes up with the Chicago to New York Electric Airline Railroad. Now, the specifications for this right of way were very impressive, right? There would be four tracks, 1% ruling grade, right? Yes. So, one foot in every 100 feet, right? At most.

Full grade separation, right? We're going to be no railroad crossings. It was going to be third rail electric operation because that's what people thought was the way forward back then. But the main thing was there were going to be no curves. Put me out of a job, baby. Yeah, you've been replaced with Guy who owns his own ruler. The trains were going to be powered by electric locomotives, which the press,

we'll talk about the press later, called electromotives, right? Cool. They were going to run at a sustained speed of 100 miles an hour. Now, of course, there were no electric locomotives that could make that speed at this time. It's a stealth up. The technology is going to follow the innovation. They would make the trip from New York to Chicago in 10 hours for a $10 fare. Now, this is echoey because the fact that it's going to be so cheap

does start sounding a little bit hyper loopy. Because that's claimed to have been for the chip. I'm just going to go to my inflation calculator. $10 in 1903 gives $315.85. So less than I thought, but still. Damn. Well, that was about that was $10 cheaper than any other method of getting between the two cities.

There's a not insignificant distance. You begin to see why hobos in the rail travel are very, very expensive. Yes. And at 742 miles, this route would be 150 miles shorter than the Pennsylvania railroad. That's this lower green line here, which is the more direct route, but it was a little slower just because it went through the mountains. And it was 230 miles shorter than the New York Central's route. That's the upper green line up here.

Right. And both of those railroads, they had their premiere passenger trains that competed with each other. There was the New York Central had the 20th century limited. The Pennsylvania railroad at this point had what was called the Pennsylvania special. It would shortly be renamed to the Broadway limited. Those two trains. You got to say the 20th century limited is a cooler name.

This is true. There you go. Get fucked. So this is 742 miles, right? Yes. This new route. So for scale, for all of the weird people who, like me and Alice, decided to stay living on this weird cold rock,

that's about 20 miles longer than the longest journey you can do by rail in the UK. It's between Aberdeen and Penzance. That gives an idea of scale here. That is a long, long old journey. Oh, yeah. And both the Pennsylvania special and the 20th century limited were on 20-hour schedules at this point. Those that would eventually be reduced to 16 hours and then increase to whatever the

fuck it is now, like 25 hours or some crap. So, all right. So he has his idea. Next step is to get investors, right? Yeah. I think fittingly, this weird railroad starts in Chicago's weirdest building, the Modded Knock building. This is a 16-story skyscraper, but rather than be built with a steel frame,

they just built it out of load-bearing masonry. I remember this one. Oh, yeah, yeah. We talked about this, yeah. Yeah, we did it in the tall building's bonus. Subscribe to the Patreon, folks. Yeah, do that. Thank you for doing a better job of advertising our Patreon than we do.

We do. Well, I put the bumper in now. Yeah, you're cool now. So, this is A.C. Miller in a very bad photograph. Hello, him. He's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Not looking sinister at all. Just looming out of the darkness. Yeah, nice. Hello, Clareas. Although, I have a lot to say. There's a lot to be said for those rounded collars. Big fan of those. There's another photo down here.

This is Jonathan D. Price, who we'll talk about in a second. I think you've got to bring the rounded collar back, to be honest. Like, there's nothing stopping you. You can get a rounded collar shirt. I think it's pretty good for sure. Where are those? Need them. Yeah.

So, Miller had a plan to finance his railroad, right? Which is he was just going to sell stock directly to the public. Right? He was just going to say, I have a railroad. Buy stock in it so I can build it. This was how all investment worked until... Well, I mean, it still does, but especially so. This was how all investment worked.

It was just, yeah, you should give me a lot of money. Yeah, just give me your money. Just give me your money. To be fair, it was a more transparent time. At least you could sort of see what was... I feel like I understood early stage... No, early 1900s capitalism. At least it sort of kind of made sense.

You could see what was going on. You could see where the money was going. Yeah, well, the thing is the reason why that's the case is because if you were, say, I don't know, like a Carnegie or a Stanford or whatever, and you wanted to do a tax dodge, you just said that's what you were doing because half of that shit wasn't illegal yet.

Whereas now you have to have all of these sort of schemes and names for things in order to hide that what you're doing is a Ponzi scheme. No, I didn't fucking heard of Ponzi yet. Yeah. On July 8th, 1906, Miller took out a full-page ad in every major newspaper in the United States advertising the incredible new airline railroad.

Right? You can see that. This is that advertisement. You can see it's beautiful text formatting. Yeah, Jesus. You got the engraving. Bro, this is a shit post. Yeah, you got like the picture of the proposed

electromotive here. I quite like that. Yeah, it kind of looks like a World War I tank. But yeah, it's cool. I was going to say, it's got the scoop shit out of the wave vibe again. So you're safe on level crossing. Just nice to know that even back in the day,

reading the newspaper, you'd find a fucking full-page advertorial when you'd be like, oh, fuck's sake. So 20,000 shares were issued at $100 a piece, right? Oh, wow. Okay, sure. Sure. Cool.

That's that. That's fine. And that is stonks right there. Yeah, golden. Airline Railroad was a holding company, right? Which operated in Indiana, but incorporated in Portland, Maine with its headquarters in Chicago. Oh, right.

Delaware hadn't invented the only industry in Delaware. Yeah. It issued this extremely rosy prospectus, right? Which said that one of the main things they really, really advertise is like, we don't deal with the banks. We just issue stock directly to you, the people, right? Uh-oh.

Oh, that also rings true. Yeah. Hyperloopie type, loopie type. Yeah, you're a rational consumer. Now you can be an investor just like the big banks. And it published its own newspaper that was sent to the stockholders for the purpose of spreading propaganda about the railroad.

That is fucking genius. I mean, to be fair, I would like that. If we had a newspaper that just spread propaganda about railways, I'd write for that. Well, it's a podcast, but it's true. Oh, yeah, true. It's it. We're doing it now.

This is it. That's right. It was called the Airline News, right? Once a month, you'd get... A matter of a name. Yeah, you'd get a newspaper about all the latest goings on on the Chicago to New York Electric Airline Railroad. Subscribe to AC Miller.

Like, subscribe to my sub-stack. But they're making out as if it's real. This is interesting because it's like what we see with all these sorts of... Okay, yes, this was a railroad and it was based on actual real technology, rather than some of the sort of bollocks that we see nowadays. But there are so many parallels.

So this idea that they're sort of hyping up this thing as if it's real. Talking about it as if it's a real thing being, oh, yeah, it's happening. It's happening, folks. It's happening. And just hyping it. It's quite interesting because that is so much what we see

with some of the kind of, well, basically hyperloop that claims there are several lines being built now, which obviously is bollock. And the fact is that this is like the state of the art for advertising at the time. It's like, if you transport this to the present day, this is like a lot of like glossy videos with special effects and stuff.

So, yeah, the parallels just keep coming. Yeah, yeah, this is the equivalent. In fact, that picture at the top is the rendered, it's the rendered CGI, isn't it? That is good. You can put it in renderite. That makes it real. Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent,

but, you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider

if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at Patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So the most respected journal of, you know, Electric Railway Technology.

The Electric Railway Review wrote that. I still get that. Yeah. The financing scheme of the Chicago to New York Electric Airline Railroad seems to us vicious, dangerous, and wholly unworthy of confidence by investors. 20,000 shares, baby. All right.

So they start drawing up plans, right? And it's difficult to determine to what extent plans were drawn up for the airline. Well, it's because you only really need one plan. It's you draw the line. You draw the line. There was occasionally some admission. They thought maybe we might have to put some curves in

when we hit the Allegheny Mountains, right? So there was always a potential. There may have been a curve. But we do know. I'm just picturing the guy. I'm picturing the design guy with like, with his union badge and then holding up his ruler, which also has a union badge on it and sort of smiling for the camera.

So we do know that surveyors made it as far as the Ohio, like most of the way through Ohio, because one of them named Theodore Nimoyer was shot by a farmer while he was surveying the route. That's happened to me. Oh, my God. OK, right. Brief segue.

So while surveying for a railway line being built in lovely Oxfordshire, I had a local massively inflated red nose, tweed-wearing landowner come down, clearly smashed, and waved a shotgun around and shot a shotgun over our heads. So this, this, this hurts. This, this comes close. The Green Party is out of control. They must be stopped.

Threatening railroad surveyors is like a bipartisan consensus. Everyone loves to do it. Uniting right and left. Nimoyer survived getting shot, which is a lot easier to do in those days. Yeah, that's true. You can jump out of the way. Now, the general plan here was they were going to build out the route in stages, and once each section had paid for itself,

they would move on to the next section. How will it pay for itself if it's only going from fucking Chicago to a field south of Cleveland? Because Cleveland is in the wrong place. You'll just issue some more stock. Getting some dot-com vibes now. So they, they put some thought into how to access Chicago. The idea was they would lease tracks from other railroads until an actual,

their own right of way could be required. And they put almost no thought into how to get to Jersey City. Yeah, neither do the rest of us. I think getting into Manhattan was out of the question at the time, right? Oh, really? So where were they planning on terminating this? They would have terminated at like the edge of the Hudson River and had a ferry bringing it across.

That was what every railroad was doing at the time, except the New York Central, which had Grand Central Terminal. And the Pennsylvania Railroad was gearing up to build the New York Connecting Railroad and Penn Station. But at the time, the Hudson River was kind of this impervious barrier, you know, and there were like half a dozen gigantic railroad terminals on the Jersey Waterfront for various railroads, only two of which are left now. Oh, Boken and Communipaw.

I bet that's fine for modern capacity. Yeah. So a wholly owned construction company was founded headed by J.D. Price, who we saw in the last slide. It was called the Cooperative Construction Company, right? And it was paid exclusively in airline stock, right? And then this was legal then. Yes.

And that stock was then resold by the company, right? Oh, dear. Now, the airline holding company, again, was just a holding company. So to build the first segment of the airline, they got a charter for the Goshen South Bend and Chicago Railroad, right? Goshen and South Bend are both towns in Indiana. We all know South Bend because, you know, Peter and Mary Pete, yeah.

Yeah, Mary Pete, yeah. Oh, I was going to say touchdown, Jesus. Construction began September 1st, 1906. OK, so you know what I was saying about understanding early 1900s capitalism? I think I might have lied. It got confusing real quick. Yeah. Like the three cups and there's one ball and you've got to keep your eye on the ball

under the cups. They've just correctly identified that if you issue stock, you could just say it's worth whatever and just deal it to whoever is your friend and then just have them sell it on themselves. It's a fantastic idea. And it's wildly illegal now. This is also an era where you really had to like charter 15 separate railroads to build one continuous railroad, right?

In this case, they chartered this particular company because they were building in Indiana. Indiana required the railroad to be incorporated in Indiana for it to build in Indiana, right? So, you know, this would be the company that would be for the first segment and presumably they'd charter another one in Ohio. They'd charter one for Pennsylvania. They'd charter one for Jersey, right? Maybe several smaller ones.

You know, it's a whole, it was very complicated getting railroads built back in the day. As opposed to now when it's very easy. As opposed to now where you just can't actually do it at all. Well, physics has changed. Justin, you know physics has changed now, so it's just not possible. It's true. It's actually made, it's actually more efficient to do everything with cars, as we know. So, construction started September 1st, 1906 in the big city of La Porte, Indiana.

It's probably just La Porte, but it is La Porte. And they built this line from downtown La Porte, Indiana to South La Porte, Indiana. There we go. But was it in a straight line? Yes. This is right down. Good. I think this is I Street.

Oh, right. Okay. Great. Perfect. No notes. So, the intention here was they were going to build a railroad 120 miles from Chicago to Goshen, Indiana. The slight complication there was that none of the towns named in that name,

Chicago, Goshen or South Bend, were along the line. And in fact, no towns at all were along the line. Oh, whoops, it is. It's the line. They're in the wrong place. Yes. All of these were going to be served by branches of which this initial three-mile segment was the first one, right?

There's a joke about how a lot of interurbants in this era, they kind of go from you're getting financing and building the nowhere in East armpit electric railway. This is definitely that because La Porte, that's an actual town. It's not a big one. South La Porte was nothing. There was nothing there. Like literally nothing. So, like what Dan Snyder did to make with the towns around FedEx, that sort of thing.

The one thing that was there was a work camp for construction of the Chicago to New York Electric Railroad. No way to get to work. It's self-sustaining. Yes. So, this is interesting because we've gone from a line, we've gone from a straight line, a 740-mile straight line, to many branches going in all directions and the reality is looking somewhat different to the vision.

So, JD Price hired an experienced electric street railroad engineer named Blake Maple Doram. I looked at that. That's a fucking name. Maple Doram, I don't know. That's a math name to Blake Maple Doram. That's the sound of a Google Chrome skin. Come on now. It's like one anime would name a Canadian.

So, JD Price was like, listen, the shareholders are getting antsy already. We've got to start construction now. And Maple Doram was like, no, actually, it's September. You should wait until the spring fall to start building. And Price was like, no, do it now. So, he started doing what he could get done during the winter and then they had to rip it all up and start over again after the spring fall. Who wants to be a looser?

Price hired Italians and African-Americans at the whopping rate of $7.25 a day. Very close to the railroad and blazing saddles here. Would not hire local labor because of reasons. I think he said they were lazy. You were probably Union. He's discriminating against Indianans. You have to pay them enough to buy, pay for a house and food. Unacceptable.

Service began with great fanfare on June 15. From where? From where? Service from where to where? From Morkam. From La Porte to South La Porte. And then back again, if you go back again. That's service.

June 15, 1907, over 2,000 fares would be carried that day. This segment of the airline, that would be one of their best days ever. The entire town just gets the railroad there and back. This is something close to the more predatory start-ups we talk about on Trash Future, where it preys upon the hopes of a small town that is otherwise neglected. I'm just visualizing all these incredibly pleased people from La Porte. Just like all of them, where they're like excessively long dresses and they're like. Really going to put La Porte on the mat.

Just the joy, that big pupils, they're doing dirt face because they're so happy and they just end up in a field and they say, oh, we're going to wait here for a bit before we go back. I want to walk. In a hundred years, people are going to remember that La Porte, Indiana, was the starting place of the Chicago, New York, electric airline. And in a way, they were right. The monkeys poor, cold.

One of the fun things about La Porte is the Chicago, New York, electric airline was actually the second interurban to come to the city. They already had one that ran down the same street. I think it's great just to have like trains as a fad. Can we bring that back, please? Well, I'm visualizing that the interurban just overtaking the new one, just like the old slightly shabby interurban just whizzing past. And the people in the interurban going, oh, the fare was cheaper.

Why did you get that? You couldn't pay me to step foot on that interurban. On their main street, there were two railroad tracks in the main street. And you would think, oh, this is a two-way trolley line. No, it was actually two bi-directional. No, no, it's two signal single tracks, not a double track. Jesus owned by two separate companies who run cars in both directions on each one. Mm-hmm.

That's fucked. Yeah. Now, while they're doing that, plans for building the actual airline start to happen, right? They got their work camp set up here. They know they're sort of right away. They start building. Good.

So, sure. Then they built 250 miles of it and started running services, right? Well, yes, that's what happened. How could you disappoint La Porte, Indiana, home of the Marion Ridgeway polygonal barn, the Francis H. Morrison house, and the downtown La Porte Historic District this way? Listen, Gigi, I'm sorry. Do you think there's something funny about the downtown La Porte Historic District?

Because it's got a long list of some nice and tally-in-it buildings. It has a Romanesque county courthouse. So, sorry. I'll be back. The bank is a typical Greek temple façade of limestone, but what makes it special is that they imposed the façade on an otherwise flat surface. The combination of a projecting pediment and a receding arch make the entrance imposing and seemingly larger than its neighbors.

One of the best of its kind anywhere in central Indiana. Plus northern Indiana, excuse me. Price and Miller were trying to figure out how we're going to build the airline proper, and they figured the best option would be to build west towards Chicago from south La Porte, right? You think Chicagoans are ready? They're probably going to get like Stentale syndrome once they see the La Porte Historic District. Someday soon we'll be a real player.

I got to say, back then it wasn't the historic district. It was just the district. Yeah, the district. Actually, I think there was the block where they had their local offices for the airline was called the Balcony District, and I took a look on Street View. I didn't see any balconies. I was confused. The liars.

La Porte is canceled. J.K. Rowling has a key to the city. The fuck? What? Ah, fuck him. Because it was presented to her by a guy called Emerson Spartes, incredible Indiana name there, who was the founder of MuggleNet, a Harry Potter fan site. Emerson, Spart and Palmer.

I can no longer relate to these La Porte people. Yeah. You guys don't want to read some Harry Draco flashback. You guys, is it just me? Guys? Guys? This is where... I'm just thinking about the opportunity to uplift Chicagoans by letting them see the

home of the Advance Roomly Tractor Company. This is where the... Rumi. Rumi Tractor Company. The Advance Roomly Company. We're talking about the Roomly Tractor. Yeah. Apparently, this Roomly Tractor was one of the great innovations of Great Plains Farming.

Really? Please go on. Well, they had Roomly Oil Pool Tractors powered by a hot bulb engine. Say that again slower. Used kerosene. We're going to talk about the airline. I'm not sorry, actually. I like this annotation on this particular drawing here.

You can see the extended sleepers, the extended ties for the third rail. Yeah, they were actually going to put a third rail in. Which begs the question, what the hell is above it? Why have they built what look like catenary supports above it? They put in trolley poles because those are cheaper to start out with and they figured they put the third rail in later. Failed it. Yeah. This is where the engineering requirements start to take their toll.

The first thing they value engineered out was building the four tracks. What they decided to do was grade it for two tracks and put in one track to start and they'd put in the rest of the tracks later. Here we go. Here we fucking go. It's H2 again. It's fine if you just, it's just a bus now. It's fine.

Jesus. They had to cross several railroads and they were going to grade separate all of them. You can see one of the big abutments they built to cross the, this is the Manangahila Railroad. That's nice. Looks good. Yeah. You can see the crappy wooden trestle here that was all going to get filled in.

Right. So, you know, they're building these big heavy steel girder bridges. Very expensive. Right. They needed lots and lots of cuts and fills for areas which under normal circumstances you could just made a little curve and go around. Yeah. But then that defeats the purpose of the straight line railroad.

Obviously. Yes. But the railroad, you know, they seem to make some good time for a while. The one difficulty is that JD Price insisted on building during the winter. Which didn't work. No, they just love building during the winter. Yeah. Yeah, like Hitler, like Napoleon.

He just loves, he just loves the Rasputitsa. So, they, you know, they proceeded to pace until they reached an incredibly formidable obstacle. Okay. Which was Coffee Creek. Oh, correct. I was going to say, there was a picture in the previous slide of which said the big cut near Coffee Creek and it looked like shit.

So, that, but that's not actual Coffee Creek. That's just a cut on the approach to it. Yes. Coffee Creek was. Oh, golly. So, because according to local Porter County legend, a teamster had dropped a bag of coffee in it once by accident. Yeah.

I love the. Well, if you don't have names to start with, because you killed all the people who originally named the place, then you got to make them up. That's true. Clearly they were reaching at this point. Do my boss is a shitty asshole, Creek? Every once in a while, you hear like about a waterway that's named Creek, which is actually quite wide and formidable.

This is not one of those. This was very, very tiny waterway, right? This is the stream of water that happens when you pee in sand. Which was at the bottom of a small valley, right? And because of the engineering requirements, in order to cross it, they required maybe not the largest fill ever, but certainly a fill which was wildly disproportionate to the geographic obstacle in question, right? What's the same thing to do here?

Like, if you're not wedded to the straight line thing, how do you fucking cross Coffee Creek? Follow the contours, I think. Yeah. That's what I'd do. Definitely follow the contours. Find a better place to cross, maybe. I have to say also, just as a civil engineering note, I do not like their approach to building these fills.

Do Jesus, do not bury a trestle. That is a recipe for disaster. We built a few like that in the UK and they have all failed horribly and resulted in the railway being closed. This was a really common practice in the United States. It's interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, what they, you know, so the airline at this point is 15 miles west of South LaPorte,

right? They have gone through zero towns or cities, but they were very soon to pass just a few miles north of the town of Valparaiso, Indiana, right? Valpo, there's a university there. Yes. All right. A place I've heard of. They built a 6,800 foot long wooden trestle.

And then they brought work trains out and they just dumped dirt over the side to make the fill, right? Now, luckily, owing to the absurd quantity of cuts on the route, there was plenty of fill dirt available, but the work was. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure. Certainly, the way the railways, the railroads were done, I mean, most places where you designed the railroad to balance cut and fill so that you had enough material, right? Yeah.

I'd hope they did that here. I have no idea, hopefully. It's pretty wild that they had all these cuts and fills because northern Indiana, it's not as flat as Ohio, but it's pretty flat. And they still needed all these cuts and fills. Righty. Now, what's a bad construction practice is combined with bad terrain. You know, there are delays, there were accidents.

They still tried to build it during the winter. In the middle of construction, there was a sinkhole that opened up underneath the trestle. And it collapsed part of the trestle and a work train fell over. It's gone. Just let it go. Just let it go. Just the guy just takes his hat off and holds it to his chest. It counts as fill.

Yeah, it counts as fill. Just looking down, holding his hat to his chest, and the supervisor comes up and says, you've done it. You've done us proud. It's part of the job now. It's just another train immediately arrives and starts pouring dirt on top of it. It's like the equivalent of a burial at sea for a train is to be buried into a railroad cussing. And this drained the company's resources, right?

Just completely. Because the resources were largely made up. The only resource they had was dirt, and all of it was in this one fill. It's incredible that back in the day, a stock market scam could actually result in a physical change to the environment as opposed to an app. I mean, this is more than any hyperloop will build this century. So we should respect them. This is true.

And this resulted in Price and Miller considering the unthinkable a curve. Those sons of bitches, they don't even know what they're doing. They betray their ethos like this. Rather than wind up with an extremely expensive and over-engineered railroad from nowhere to nowhere, the airline chartered a new railroad, the Valparaiso in northern, to build north from Valparaiso to a place called Goodrum Junction. Right. And that sort of followed Coffee Creek.

And then that built further up to Chesterton, right up here. So now they had a railroad from nowhere to somewhere. That's a little bit better. I have this map, right? I have queries. These may come up. Why are they doing little branches to all of these places when they could just join them up with dot?

Like it's a join the dots. They don't need to have branches between all of them. A straight line. You need the straight line. The straight line is determined by Chicago to New York. But it would still be basically a straight line. They're insistent that you do both a micro and a macro straight line. The fact that you're merely charsing like a sort of a straight line course that hasn't

been done before, that's too good of an idea. Instead, no, what you have to do is you have to have it be literally straight the whole way. Oh my God. And at this point, the airline, they're looking for an excuse for people to use most of the line because not a lot of people are going from La Porte to Valparaiso. So they build an amusement park called Airline Park over here. Right? Yeah.

I was actually very common for interurban lines to do that. Yeah, we have one in Philly, right? Fairmount Park? No, Fairmount was not an amusement park though. Oh, okay. My bad. We did. There actually was an amusement park just outside of Fairmount Park, which one of the,

I don't remember which company built that one, but it did exist. It was an interurban park. A couple of the Six Flags parks were actually interurban parks. You know, some of them survived. Most of them did not, but it was something that interurban lines did in order to keep collecting fares on weekends. You know, everyone would go out to the amusement park. They'd take the interurban out there.

I mean, that is kind of awesome, but also absolutely hilarious. Yeah, make your living months. But they needed to do that to drive. I also just, I mean, I'm horribly interrupted. I'm so sorry, but I suppose that is basically all of our jobs other than you, Justin. And I'm just seeing the scale here. I was kind of visualizing that this is kind of going off to get in towards Chicago. No, no, this is, the scale is like 22 miles, 16 miles.

We're looking at just like a very short, like 50 miles section of the line here. All right. You know, it is surprising that even guys are 50 miles. They just acquired two very large, very fancy interurban cars, number 103, which was named Ohm and number 104, which was named Amper, right? Clever. See what they did there. Yeah.

But the track conditions weren't good enough for them to actually be used. So it's zero Amper and infinity Ohm. Yes. That's what the new shenanigans should have been. A lot of resistance. Yeah. Three. So at this point, everyone sort of saw the airline was sort of financially infeasible.

They needed to figure out a new business plan. Stockholders are really angry at the, like, you know, how, how their money had been squandered here on crossing a small creek. Listen, we have conquered Coffee Creek. Is that not enough fee? We've like, it's like the transcontinental railroad. We're driving in a golden spike. Jerry Van Der is buried with the trade.

Like just imagining Alex Miller, Alexander Miller, just standing like with his arms, like with his arms on his hips, sort of with his hat down on it, nodding at this massive, long bill from nowhere to nowhere and going, Oh yeah. I badly want to see one of those like triumphal sort of like a meeting of the transcontinental railroad oil paintings, but it's taking place on like a 50 foot trestle above a tiny creek. Oh, man. Ampere just meeting each other with just this tiny, tiny like piss trickle at the bottom of the, at the bottom of the film.

Yeah. For reference, everything we've talked about so far is happening in section D right here. Right. Okay. Oh yeah. Okay. So this, this is 20 miles. This is about 28.

Yeah. 20 miles or so away from South La Port, right? Doing good boys. Doing good boys. The stockholders are really mad. Like what, you know, we want a way to like recoup our money. Like come on guys. And US Steel Corporation came to the rescue.

Here we go. Yeah. So going to like a national steel shortages because of under production, US Steel was trying to build a big new steel mill. The site they chose was at the Southern tip of Lake Michigan at a place which was going to be called Gary. Right. I know that place.

Gary Indiana. It's a place. Oh, Gary Indiana was a planned sissy. Yes. Was named after Albert Henry Gary, who was the founder of US Steel. Not so much, I mean sort of founder. I mean, he, he was one of the guys who brought together all the big steel companies like Carnegie and others, you know, into one brand really creating a proper monopoly.

Mild segue. Was US Steel entirely like just capitalism becoming a monopoly type situation? Or was there any state intervention to make that? It was just, it was just capitalism becoming a monopoly. Standard. Um, yeah. No, standard was oil. Now this brand new city required a brand new streetcar system.

And luckily the airline had accidentally acquired one. So a man named Frank and Gavit had started the Gary and Interurban Railway in 1907, right? And he decided to contract with JD Price of the cooperative construction company to build it, right? And JD Price said, oh, you don't have to pay me cash. Just give me stock. Oh, here we go. What?

Yeah. 01:20:58,320 --> 01:20:59,040 Real believer. I just loved getting stock certificates. He loved that shit. He's not getting anything here. So has he got like, is he like, has he got some sort of neurodiverse obsession with just collecting stocks?

I just want stock. He's like, what's going on here? Relatable, yeah. Yeah, you walk into his office and you know, like, what's the price? He's like, oh, you don't pay with money. 01:21:25,760 --> 01:21:32,000 So by 1911, as Gary, the Gary and Interurban Railway became relatively successful, but they were still extracting, they had given enough stock to JD Price that he now had a

controlling interest in it. Oh, there we go. All right, just give him some more stock until this weird guy goes away. And it turns out they've accidentally given him 51% of the stock. Oh, he sees the radio stations. The airline now owned a franchise in Gary to build street railways, which they capitalized on, right? They chartered the Gary Connecting Railway to build from East Gary over here along the

proposed airline right of way. But when they hit the Baltimore and Ohio right of way here, rather than crossing it directly, they made a curve. At that point, you know, the airline dream was dead. The curve had been made. There was actually a bridge under construction to cross the B&O. They abandoned it. Oh, devastating.

Right around that time, airline news ceased publication out of shame. And so this was like the end of the airline, but the railroad itself, the idea of the airline, the railroad itself continued on for a little bit longer. But one of the issues is the charter they got from the city of Gary specified a 5-cent fare, right? Not accounting for inflation or anything, right? So the airline, which is now largely doing business as Gary and Interurban Railway, started losing revenue and losing revenue and losing revenue.

And in 1917, they went bankrupt, right? It's very funny to like trap your Interurban Railroad in a sort of like contractual term like that. It's happening everywhere in the country. Like not simultaneously. Interurban's are awesome, but also simultaneously, all of them seem to have murdered themselves. They all seem to have gotten into a room with like the conniving mayor of the town who is like, oh, yeah, we'll set the fares for you at a generous 5-cent.

A lot of times it was, you know, you have a 5-cent fare regulation basically everywhere. A lot of times if you ran a railway down a street, you were responsible for paving and snow removal as well as like street sweeping and other stuff. These towns would ring an Interurban Railway for all it was worth, right? That's one of the reasons why so many of them went bust. The other reason so many of them went bust is because they were way overbuilt. They built way too many of these things. I love that.

We should spare a moment for airline news. RIP airline news. I suppose that's kind of like the boring company making their YouTube channel private. Let's face it, it's going to happen before the end of the decade. They had to make this black afterwards. So I went bankrupt in September 1917 and as a result, it was split into its constituent parts, right? Just to make sure that the original stockholders only got the crappy portion here and the newer stockholders got all the good stuff over here.

Anybody who'd held onto that stock for 13 years, oh my God. And as a result, the airline proper from Goodrum Junction to South La Port was abandoned on November 3rd, 1917, right? So this whole section here abandoned. But there was a shuttle from La Port to South La Port, which was considered a public service, and that actually continued going on for one more year. For one more year, then what happened? Yeah, did they protect the right of way at all? Is there anything, any use made of that? Oh, the right of ways.

Oh, so yeah, section D. Yeah. So, well, the right of way is all still there. It's completely abandoned, but you still see some remnants. Oh, really? So this one line lasted until one year later when the single employee who ran the line who was the motor man and the conductor and did everything else got the Spanish flu. Oh, no. He got killed by 1900s rona.

He did. I don't think he even died from it. It's just like, we don't have this. Yeah, I don't want to work. Yeah, it's like, we don't have someone. Fingers together, kiss them, salute and walk the way. Yeah. So long space cowboy.

Yeah, they didn't have anyone to run the trolley for a couple of weeks. And you know, the company just abandoned the line. 1917. So what, did everyone start using the bus or something? Like, yeah. There was another interurban line. Oh, of course. That seems productive. Lasse fair, ladies and gentlemen.

Yes. Build so many railroads, you don't know what to do with them all. So Coffee Creek had won. The airline was gone. The Gary and interurban survived, however, as the Gary Street railway until 1947, when they replaced it all with buses. Yeah. Bastards.

And what did we learn from the Chicago, New York, Electric airline other than gimmicks always work and are cool? Yeah. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing. We learned nothing. When we learned nothing, we wasted our time and yours. I think the main thing here is, if you're going to build an interurban railroad, you should probably do it between places where people lived. Between hubs. Another big issue with this railroad was that you didn't have a huge number of

points of interchange with other railroads, so you had no freight traffic. Ah. This is, generally speaking, a very good system if they had finished it completely to the original specs, but that was not going to happen. You'd have thought they'd have used some basic lodge. Railroads had existed fresh, bloody long time by this point. You'd have thought they'd have gone, where are the major centers of industry here? Let's offer them a sweet deal on getting between these two massive centers,

Chicago still, the absolute center of the railroads in the US at the time, and New York, the biggest. These are two places that are sensible to connect with a quick freight line. Clearly, they did not realize this. Yeah, but he also, overall, the amount of main lines between Chicago and New York City was already overbuilt. The only way they could survive is if they somehow came up with the most direct route out of thin air, and that was obviously not going to happen.

Yeah. It was called the airline, Roz. Be sure to try. But for Coffee Creek, this would have worked perfectly. That treacherous bastard. Goddamn Creek. First it took that guy's coffee, and then it destroyed the fucking railroad. I'm putting Coffee Creek on my list of places I'm going to visit when I come to the US,

eventually. I'm going there. Just hop on for Coffee Creek and do what the airline could. Gently, just gently, a slightly elongated step to cross it. Well, unfortunately, the giant Coffee Creek fill is gone because Interstate 80 is there now. Motherfuckers. What? Yeah.

Oh, how many of the Creek isn't hidden under a culvert or some shit? It's hidden under a culvert. I'm going in that culvert. 01:29:46,720 --> 01:29:47,760 Bring a flashlight, Gareth. I was going to say something. I forgot what it was. Oh, that's what I was going to say.

I always wondered what would happen if they had managed to hold out a couple more years. Maybe if they had gotten this thing as far as Cleveland, how it would have worked out then, because Cleveland was at least fairly close to the airline. You know what this is? This is a failure of conceptualization. It's a failure to understand something that Gareth said in the very first slides, that a railroad, a permanent way, is a collection of straight lines joined together by curves. They didn't think about it in that way, and instead they thought,

oh, what if only straight line? Yes. Should have been happy with the straight lines that they would have had. This could have gone differently had they started it in a major center, like Cleveland is a great example. Starting Cleveland, clearly the interurban model was a good one to start with making cash. Build it outwards as an interurban, and then once it started reaching larger places, then you start running regional services on it.

Like, why didn't they start in Cleveland? Honestly, not even Cleveland. You could have started in South Bend or Toledo and done a lot better. I don't know anything about US geography, and immediately to me seeing this, I'm thinking, why didn't they just go to some of the big places? They could have done that, and it would have still been basically a straight line. I am irritated. I've run out of whiskey, so I'm doubly irritated.

Damn it. I'm about to run out of beer, so maybe we should have it having enraged everyone. Maybe we should write about how diarrhea this whole episode. I'm getting there. A segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Oh, I like where this is going. I'm more terrified of this than I have been of a lot of images that we've had from Safety Thirds. There are two different reactions, listeners.

Dear parasocial acquaintances. Fuck off. I come to you with a tale from the wonderful world of American regional theater. Someone's gotta die. He's gonna murder people. I'm in. Non-profit arts organizations in America's mid-side cities are often quite strange. Not that this is unique to the arts or determined by the size of the city,

but let's just say that the financial incentives upon which they'd operate tend toward the perverse, if not the entirely predictable. The budget for a given show is typically split into two buckets. There is the artistic side and the production side. The general feeling is the audience and donors only really care about the artistic side. The beautiful and the talented, actors, directors, designers, anyone else who might be designated as an artist rather than a craftsperson. Yeah, nobody puts their name on a concert hall because of the lighting, even though they should.

These are the people that these institutions feel are most worthy of their limited resources. Yeah, see, Hollywood takes a different approach, or at least it did in the middle of the last century, where they gave all the money to Ken Adams. Over on the production side, where folks just staple boards together and hang lights in the air, it becomes imperative that you spend as little money as possible. Any schmuck off the street can work a C-Wrench or a nail gun, and the expectation is that they will jump at the chance to work for peanuts on someone else's art project.

There was an art installation safety third, and I'm already getting horrifying flashbacks to that one. Good God. We had a lot of safety thirds from theater people. Them in chemical lab decks, those are apparently very dangerous places. Those are the two most dangerous places to work. It's also key that the board's being stapled together over the inexpensive variety. This helps keep the budget down, and if it doesn't look great, a scenic painter can be relied on to make it pretty.

They don't even have to do that good of a job with the painting, seeing as how we're operating under the 30-foot rule. The audience is never close enough to notice. And that works for track, too, to be fair, that works for P-Wings, though. Barring all that. Actually, one thing I saw, this is actually going back to the Chicago, New York, electric airline, but I think Gareth will like this one. One thing I saw in the book I bought for this, the book's called Faster than the Limited's,

The Story of the Chicago, New York, Electric, Airlines Railroad and its Transformation at Gary Railways. One of the things I saw in the book. Yep. So there was a crossing of one of the later iterations of the railroad, a grade, like a diamond crossing between the inner urban line and I think a faster railroad. I forget which one. It was on a curve. The curve was super elevated. There were two tracks, right? But it was a super elevated curve, and it was a diamond, which meant that, you know, the trolley would ride up and then down and then back up and then back down.

It was the jankiest track work I've seen in my life. We call it too leveling. We do that sometimes, still. Oh, it's horrifying. You have to wear a special hat to do that sort of design. It's amazing. I love that. So it was, I'll see if I can find a picture. I'll send it to you after this. Yes, please. Anyway, so where was I? Bearing all this in mind, I'm thinking of a particular incident from a particular scene shop of a particular theater company that, as we might have said at the time, qualifies for safety 12th. Particularly. Yeah, particularly. The scenic designer for the show in question had

specified a grooved decking material. Thin kerfs cut parallel into the four by each, four by eight sheets every six inches or so to mimic someone's idea of a deck in the cheesiest way possible. Of course, there was not enough money in the budget for the specified material, and there was not enough money in the budget to rip strips of a quarter inch material and attempt to achieve the look. So without talking to the designer, without trying to negotiate some sort of solution, the guys looked at a large pile of three quarter inch CDX plywood they had already purchased and decided that they could make it work. Now, the thinking was that all you needed to do was run a circular saw across the plywood seven times or run the plywood through the table

saw seven times to have all the necessary kerfs cut into your sheet to match the specified material. But that makes perfect sense. But what's I'm an engineer, not a not a joiner. What's a kerf? I'm thinking in this case, it's just like some kind of groove in the wood, right? I think that is exactly just to kind of give it a finish. Yeah. Okay. I am also not a joiner. The width of material removed by a cutting process. So yeah, a groove. Okay. Yeah. I'll do it. But anyway, this seemed way too inefficient. So a couple of guys got to work building a table saw. Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Platforming was wrangled, bolted together in the appropriate size and legged up at the appropriate height. A fence was installed. And then seven

circular saws were mounted upside down at the appropriate interval. It missed me. How do you get them all going? Is someone just running along the table, just starting them all up? I love this. Seven circular saws were mounted upside down at appropriate intervals to the underside of the platforming with the blade depth set to the platform surface by the requisite three eighths of an inch, right? And after the first pass, it became apparent that the CDX was nowhere near flat enough for the contraption to work as intended. Cheap plywood does tend to resemble the potato chip a lot more than what the platonic ideal of flatness these folks had in their heads. But the solution was obvious. Weight. Flatness could be achieved with sufficient sandbags and

stage weights. Oh, no. The problem was this was way too heavy to be workable. And the weight would move with the board, causing the kerf cut to be uneven. What was needed was consistent pressure concentrated at the point of contact with the seven circular saw blades. Enter from stage right, a new sinister baddie, gravity. Yes. At this point, someone ran to the office and promptly returned with a rolling desk chair. Wait, what? In short order. I mean, it's better than my my first thought, which is some genius has the idea. Why don't you just hold that down? I was kind of visualizing like bags of sugar getting yeeted at people. But, you know, okay. In short order, the unpaid intern was installed in the desk chair.

No, I did not see that coming. Oh, my God. On top of the sheet of potato chip CDX plywood. On top of the ad hoc table saw with the seven upside down circular saws. This is like a horror film. The circular saw is approaching the intern on their little on their little Ikea nest chair. Fortunately for everyone involved, an individual had been deep in the welding project all morning in a separate part of the shop. He became aware of the scope of what was going on and successfully prevented our heroes from completing their quest.

I was hoping for an explosion. I just visualized in the chair getting shorter with each pass. I mean, so they were smart enough to realize, OK, don't like hold it down with your arms. But what you should do instead, hold it down with your your ass. Hold it down. Yeah, well, he's on a rolling chair, though. He's like, yeah, rolling chair makes it safe. This is why I don't have that like sigma grind set. Absolutely. Scared money don't make money.

The motto of the Chicago to New York electric airline. This tail. Oh, dear. This tail has now been passed down for many generations with generations at an institution like this lasting about three years. It's always been a crowd pleaser. I hope you enjoyed. It was a T shirt in this seven circular saws with someone sat looking nervously at them on top of a rolling desk chair. There is definitely a T shirt. With very scared money don't make money. How many of these planks did they have to make that it was a good idea?

They felt it was a good idea to rig up this janky device. I'm seven circular saws. Every time you say it, it just gets worse. Oh, man. Where did they get? I thought they were just talking about having no budget. Where did they get these seven saws from? Harbor Freight. Yeah, they only need to work once.

It's definitely late. Yes. So it was seven circular saws from Harbor Freight. They probably cost seven dollars. For UK listeners, that's the equivalent of the middle aisle in a little. Well, this has been a segment on this podcast that we like to call Safety Thirds. What? Our next episode, as always, is on the Boston molasses disaster. As it's always been.

That's right. Absolutely. If the people want more Gareth, where can they find more Gareth? Oh, God, I do a podcast on Wednesday evening. It's called Braille Natural. It's live. You can ask me questions. It's a strange format. It does not hold up well, but it's still going on 90 plus episodes later.

Oh, yes. Yes. If you want more of us, we have a Patreon. You can subscribe to it. We get bonus episodes. Next one's probably going to be with Victoria Scott. Again, back to back, Victoria Scott bonus episodes about NASCAR. NASCAR.

Last one was very good. Strong recommend to do that. Absolutely. These are good bonus episodes, folks. Absolutely. Do that. Well, I'm wrapping it up because I feel like shit and I need to lie down. I've got to poop my pants.

This has been the world's biggest problem. 10,000 losses. The podcast with diarrhea. Have a good night, everybody. All right. Yes. Bye. Bye.

Bye. The podcast where we talk about pooping in a straight line.