Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 93: Tay Bridge Disaster

Episode Date: January 2, 2022

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but up, but up, but up, but up, but up, but up, but up. So on and so forth. The doobly doo means the podcast is going. Oh yeah, when, when YouTubers say the doobly doo, that's what they mean is the little noise that they make to themselves when they're not sure if they're recording yet in order to see their way of lungs.

True. I don't like that the opening slide says after accident. This is exactly like the, the Texas school disaster that just said after explosion. Looking like my lower front teeth right here. There's a big gap. You have a big gap in your lower front teeth. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would have thought it was pretty noticeable. Like if you go back and look at the like live show camera, you can see it. Oh, I'm going to get some pretty R. Oh, thank you. But I have like a big field goal thing going on there. It's not that bad. Yeah.

You've never had to be in the same room with both Ross and I are sweaty boys. Boy, not to embarrass you, Ross, but like you and I are both big dudes and we smell pretty hideous when we're sweating. We do sweat a lot. Can you listen to like send some like nice soaps and fragrances, things of that nature to the PO box, please.

Just when we do do a live show together, like these guys will smell like, you know, something like. Yeah, exactly. I will say the best part of having a girlfriend, not the best part literally, but one of the great parts about dating Karin is that she's like very gently like, oh, like, you should take a shower.

Yeah, have you considered washing your balls this year? Maybe. Hey, I shower regularly. Thank you. But it's also like she has all these smell good soaps and stuff. So I'll just be in the shower like lathering myself up. I'm worried I got that dove sensitive skin. I'm just like, I am as lovely as a fresh picked daisy.

Now smell my balls. Hello, and welcome to. Welcome to well, there's your problem. It's about bulls and that's the one thing there. I'm trying to get a sponsorship from that soap company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, when you at boys. Oh, boy, it's the podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK, go. I am Alice Caldwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. You didn't say it.

Yeah, and with my my my balls being all fresh and clean. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. Yeah, we're going to start introducing after the after the pronoun check. We're going to start introducing a little ball smell check. So we tell you how what we've recorded when I've been pretty sweaty. I'm not sweaty right now. I've been drinking for a while, though.

Yeah, I just cracked my first beer of the day. Actually, this is like my fourth beer of the day. Oh, all right. Oh, I found a new brand of Michelada, not very good. So today we have lined up for you a classic. You fuckers have requested this quite a bit. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we are nothing but like obedient servants of you, the viewers.

So, yes, one of the canonical engineering disasters. What do you see on the front here is apparently two high peers. Hmm. But as a matter of fact, this used to be one continuous bridge. Oh, and then the first of Tay. Ah, we're in we're in. I have a home field advantage here because we're in Scotland. This is how we get around to a Scottish engineering disaster. Have we done a Scottish one before?

I don't think we have. It might be our first one. Well. So today, we're going to talk about the Tay Bridge disaster. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. You get a novel coronavirus, you get a novel coronavirus and you get a novel coronavirus. I don't it.

Our boy did not podcasting from beyond the grave. I actually did die of covid last week, as well as editing the podcast. And this point at this point in the game, you start haunting me and said, please give me my stuff back. You should get an achievement like a little like badge or something if you have gone this far into the pandemic without getting covid. Yeah, baby. I'll believe so if you live in the United States of America,

because, man, you guys are you're dropping the ball. I'll be honest with you. It's not going to ask. Yeah, it's I mean, we've talked about it ad nauseam, but it's absolutely disgraceful. The I don't know. Make sure your bosses have a nice time because that's what this five days or less quarantine is, you know, if you are boosted.

I know that in most cases, from what I anecdotally anecdotally just want to put that out. A lot of people are saying that it's not too bad if they're boosted and vexed. I have also seen people that have been boosted to vexed. That's like I feel worse than I ever have my entire life. So if you haven't get vexed, get boosted, make sure that you're taking the necessary precautions. Make sure, again, that your family has a nice time.

We are in the end times. Yeah, don't go out to Eric Adams's new years. Cyanide capsules are under your seats. What else we got? I have two things to say, which are, number one, I edited the last episode during the second worst day I had covid symptoms. Right. We're very proud of you.

Yes, everyone should be nice to me and thank me for my service. Also, also to the P.O. Box, please send some various ball soaps, but also an order of Lenin. Number number two, number two is I was just weirded out by the complete lack of action when these numbers started going up. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's over, dude. Pandemic's over. If I were if I were Joe Biden, I would have I would have gone ahead. I mean, no, if I were Joe Biden, then I'd be Joe Biden.

I wouldn't do anything. If I were looking at some nice curtains, drooling a bit. Yeah, absolutely. If I were president, I would have gone ahead and cancelled Christmas in order to no rad to shoot down Santa. Just because it is a failure from like the checks. It's the Czech Army posted a video where they shot down Santa because in the Czech tradition,

presents are delivered by the infant baby Jesus. So they have they put out this like PR video where they shoot down Santa with a surface to air missile. Nice. You know, you got to you got to you got to be you got to be strict about people violating your airspace. Absolutely. Absolutely. You can't be like the Swiss, where you have an air force that only has office hours.

So anyway, my advice that all y'all is try to avoid getting COVID. It doesn't seem possible at the moment, unfortunately. You're going to get it. Yeah. But I know. Give it the old college try. That's all I can say. I mean, the thing that amuses me about this is

capitol now finally being like, oh, you wouldn't hit me. I'm just a little birthday boy where it's like, listen, you wouldn't stay off work for 10 days because you had the novel coronavirus, would you? Because if you did that, that would totally destroy the economy. And this caused pretty much every communist I know to begin looking at each other like the sickos meme. Yeah, it's bad to say.

And I I wonder how much this is like we're trying to keep Starbucks open versus we're trying to keep the power plants running. Well, well, yes. But, you know, don't worry about it. Just don't get COVID. If you do get COVID, go to work. And, you know, because it's important for you to keep the Starbucks running.

Yeah, exactly. In other news. Tesla has recalled four hundred and seventy five thousand cars, I want to say. Is that not about it's a good proportion of all the cars that they have sold? I mean, like I'm thinking back to the people who got mad at us for making fun of Elon Musk, because, you know, he makes something, right? And it's like, well, five hundred thousand last year for what it's worth. I make something. It's called a podcast.

That's right. And we we only have to recall. We recall very few of these. I don't recall any of them. We've recalled one that we don't talk about. Hmm. Wait, why don't we talk about it? I don't remember that one. Was it the one where one of us set a slur? No, that's the one that was only slurs.

Actually, we only serves the slurs. Stravaganza. Yeah. Yeah. So some really unkind things about each other's peoples. Yeah, well, that's your problem, the Balkans. It was a weird episode over time. Repeated opening and closing of the trunk lid may cause excessive wear every day or anything. No, of course not. May cause excessive wear to a cable that provides the rear view camera feed says

a safety recall report submitted by Tesla to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the U.S. on 21st of December. That's some really bad wiring. Who's going to say there seem to be a lot of issues with these things. Finish issues. Yeah, no kidding. Well, it's another instance of this. This car sort of being built with California brain. You know, it seems to be like a common problem with these, you know.

OK, so like one of the problems that Tesla's have with their trunks. I forget which model this is, but the trunks, when they open, if you open it in the rain, all the water slides off the trunk, trunk lid into the trunk, right? That rolls. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how these things are in the snow, but you know, they don't have. Not good because the batteries don't work. Well, that's also true.

I use these don't they're not all weather vehicles is what I'm saying. I was in California over the summer. Oh, I mean, I was in. You remember the London? The undisclosed location. Yes, I was in California with my girlfriend and her family. And we saw obviously a just huge amount of Tesla's. And I always thought, like, even in the Northeast,

where we don't really have winter anymore because of global climate change, I still wouldn't trust this in like a 15 degree day. Or like what it does eventually snow. Yeah. Or if it rains. Another thing they don't really have in California. Well, I mean, right before this happened, Elon Musk sold a bunch of Tesla stock, something which should be, again, wildly illegal and is just not. So that's fun.

I don't know how this would affect the value of the company, considering, number one, their stock value is tied to nothing. Number two, the company exists to sell tax credits. And you know, a side business, right? Well, in this economy, we all have to have side hustles, right? This is true. Yeah. Make your passion, your job, Alice. Well, I did.

And I did. I had to end up having to talk about how my balls smell. Delightful, by the way. But still, I'll do my balls smell, actually. You don't have to wait for an update here. I don't want to do this out there. Good Lord. That's right. I have shared many hotel rooms with you and you and CB do some pretty gross stuff. I am glad that this podcast is not presented in smell of vision.

That's all I can say. All right. So we're going to New Orleans at some point together. You, Ross, you are going to have to smell my balls. This. No, that was the goddamn news. Well, let's talk about the cray cray bridge. OK, so I thought we'd start with some context.

Oh, no. About to start with context on the show, though. Yes, let's learn. Yes, learning is good. So we got to talk about like expansion of railways and Victorian Britain, right? Oh, wow. Oh, the railway mania. Ross, isn't that just you on like a Tuesday guy?

Why? Why is this guy to the right of the sign? Is he even buried up to the waist? Possibly. I mean, they put these railways runs. They put these ways up pretty quick. He may have just been standing in the wrong place when the entrancing went up. When cars, when I put new ass all down and the cars just get like left in them.

Yeah. OK, so so they invented capitalism in Britain, right? Yes, sorry. I was sorry. Yeah, sorry. And as such, it was a location of some not the earliest, but certainly early speculative bubbles, right? Yeah, the South Sea Trading Company, too.

Yeah, things of this nature. Yes. Now, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830. It was the first intercity railway carrying passengers and goods, right? Before that, most railways had been like, you know, special single purpose, like tramways. There's one in Massachusetts that I think was just for like a quarry or something. Yeah, there's a bunch of like Welsh quarry, tramways and stuff at this point.

Yeah. So the business model here turned out to work pretty good, right? But people didn't really invest in it because the economy was in sort of a slump in the 1830s. By the 1840s, this was no longer the case. The Bank of England lowered rates, right? And so capital started searching for return on investment, right? Best way to do it seemed to be railways, right?

Yeah, whereas now it's like various companies that do things as a joke. Yes, like Bitcoin. Exactly. Yeah, railways were sort of the Bitcoin of their era. Locomotive with a big board ape on the front of it. Yes. Smoking for some reason. So railways at Britain were almost completely unregulated. They were often highly unprofitable, but everyone invested in them anyway, right?

Not just rich people, but the sort of emerging middle class, right? Because they had retail investors. Yeah, they had access to like stock markets. They there were a lot of newspapers now. So people could advertise their railway project really easily, right? Old school Robin Hood source trustee bro. Yeah, absolutely. Incorporating a railway and petitioning parliament to authorize that railway

was incredibly easy, right? So by the 1840s, tens of thousands of miles of railway were authorized by parliament, right? And and some of those miles were even built. Wow. Yeah. So a lot of these railways sort of went from, you know, nowhere to nowhere, right? Some of them were clearly fraudulent schemes. You know, and it was a standard bubble, right?

He's suggesting there may have been some corruption in British political life at this time. No, no, no, it's perfectly legal for a member of parliament to own stock in a railway company that they are authorizing via act of parliament. That's absolutely. Absolutely. And especially when you're like in a in a rotten borough that you bought your seat and it has like two voters. Yeah, absolutely.

Exactly. There's two voters and it's soon to have 45 railways. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's called freedom of choice. Roz. Yes. So a few profitable lines survived. And we're going to talk about one of them in a bit, which was the North British Railway, right? OK. Now, in order to build your railway, you need actual engineering works, right? You need to bury that guy.

Yeah, you need to bury the guy to make your sacrifice. Yes, particularly, you know, big fill, you know, you might not want to fill. You might want to bridge as big fill as big fill. The guy's name. Yeah, that's big fill. That's big fill, big fill. Ironically buried in a big fill. It's like the wicker man. You know, you have to have a guy like sacrifice to the embankment for each railroad.

Yeah, it's like building the Great Wall of China where they buried the workers in the in the in the wall. Absolutely. Absolutely. That didn't actually happen, by the way. No, they got dumped outside in ditches. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So this is so they had to build bridges, right? This is the Meldin, Meldin viaduct, which is near. Oh, Campton in Devon.

Sure. Yeah, uh, front of the show. Yes, yes. So in the United States, for like big rail railroad engineering works, the material of choice was either stone or wood, right? Wood was the more economical option because there was a lot of it around. We had already cut down all of our wood to make ships and like the fucking God knows one. Well, the dark of the new forest. It was not just ships.

It was also charcoal for iron working, right? Yeah. So so yeah, Britain was almost clear cut. So your choices for bridges were either stone or iron with iron being the more economical choice, right? Mm hmm. So this results in an explosion in like new bridge designs, right? Bridges that scan gaps that people previously thought unbridgeable. And they all had some similar qualities, right?

A lot of them were very, very lightweight. I can listen to a very first episode of Silver Bridge. Yes. You know, and these certainly lightweight by modern standards because foundries didn't have the capability of like rolling really large girders like we have today. Most structural elements had to be sort of small, spindly little things, right? Yeah, my beams and stuff.

Yeah, not even I beams. We couldn't really you did an I beam would be composed of like a plate and like the whole L sections. Do not like and they'd all be riveted together. So you have lots of trussing. You have lots of small elements joined together rather than one big column, right? You know, everything, you know, you had you had some some pros to this, which were, you know, all this was very easy to manufacture

and it could be put together by just some guys rather than a big trade, right? But this is your sibling bridge. Just go is being lads. Yes. And then you will have scurvy and die. That's right. That's right. But it's also very, very labor intensive, right? And it was complicated. You also have, you know, you need lots and lots of rivets.

That's your other thing. You don't have welding at this point. Hot rivets that they just fling at each other still. Yeah, but it's still going on. Being a riveter is as good work if you can get it. And you have fairly primitive engineering calculations for determining like the loads on a structure, right? And you don't necessarily know how, you know, the structure is going to be loaded.

You know, you don't have ideas about, you know, calculating for wind loads or earthquake loads, stuff like that. Right. No, it's just vibes instead. Pretty much. It's largely vibes. Well, to calculate my load was a vibe, if you will. Very big factor vibes. Up to the 1860s, really. It's like, you know what?

It feels good to me. Build it. Yep. It's just like listening to the, I like putting your ear to the iron being like, tell me your secrets. Sounds good to me. Now, one popular sort of structure or structural element in the Victorian era in Britain was something called the lattice girder, right? So that's like this section up here, right?

This is the Benerly Viaduct, which is near Nottingham over the River Airwash. It's not a real name. I say this is some from Pennsylvania. So the lattice girder, right, rather than a conventional truss, right, which, you know, maybe you would have just these triangles here, right? Those are bad triangles or maybe it would be frost braced like this with vertical sections, right? There's lots of different forms of trusses.

The lattice girder instead has lots and lots of diagonal sections. They're all very small and there's a whole lot of them. And they're sort of interwoven in a lattice, right? It's redundancy, what's not to like. Department of redundancy department, yes. Exactly, exactly. And you have you there's so there's some pros to this design, which, you know, it uses a lot less material than a bigger truss, right?

It's easier to fabricate the pieces, you know, because it's just a lot of, you know, bars with holes drilled in them, right? Again, some guys can just put it up. That's that's for the the super Legaria bridge. Those are speed holes, right? Yeah, those pros, those are pros back in the Victorian era. Today, today would be very, very expensive to do this. Much cheaper to just roll a big girder, right?

But back then labor was cheap and material was expensive, right? And they couldn't really fabricate a really large girder. So this lightweight, complicated structure was the way to go, right? And what's a good design? There's still a whole bunch of them around. But there's also a whole bunch of them, which are no longer around, which we'll get to. And some of your later lattice trusses were built with thicker members

and a single lattice rather than many interlaced ones. So you just have the X's and we'll we'll see that in a second, right? Now, another piece of context here is metallurgy at the time, right? Um, so in the Victorian era, particularly in the earlier parts. Oh, yes, like, yeah, getting getting COVID back to back consecutively. Every time you record, you get infected with novel coronavirus. Yeah, got double secret COVID. Double secret reverse backflip novel coronavirus.

Yeah. Yes. So in the Victorian era, a lot of these ironforges, they weren't like massive, you know, ironworks or steel mills. They're sort of smaller operations, right? And the products varied in quality, right? Like sense. So today, like Jim, Jim's forge. Yeah. Yes. No, it's it's Jeff with a G.

It's usable. So today, we use terms like rod iron and cast iron to describe basically the same thing. You know, it's all mostly ornamental iron work when it's talked about today. Back then, there was a very distinct difference between the two. Cast iron is the sort of high carbon brittle iron, which was very good in compression, but bad intention, right? Cast iron is is what we think of today as cast iron, right? So and this this was good structurally only for like columns and things that barrel load,

maybe parts of an arch, right? But rod iron was something a lot more similar to what we would now call mild steel, right? It has a low carbon content. It was very good intention and is produced by working the iron, right? So, you know, you get this sort of iron with a high slag content out of what did you just call me? Oh, you heard him. Yeah, that's that slutty iron. You get that slapping the side of the iron and just moans.

You're just like, oh, yeah. Well, yeah, that's what you would do with it to get the slag out. Oh, yes. Alice, try not to be that excited. You take what's called bar iron out of, I think it was a puddling furnace, you know, and you sort of you'd heat it up for the blacksmith would hit it with a hammer and just work it until all of the non iron came out of it. That that could be done by hand by a blacksmith.

It could also be done by a mechanical rolling machine later on, right? So that's wrought iron. It's called wrought because it's worked and wrought is an old way of saying work. What has got Roger? Yes, in this case, meaning what has God hit with a hammer? Just constantly, right? It looks like one of those old communist posters. So transportation is not super great.

Mines weren't really big or centralized. So material quality sort of varied by locality, right? You know, iron ore is like everywhere. The earth is a big ball of iron, right? But today in modern times, we sort of limit iron ore extraction to where it's economically recoverable, right? You find the biggest piece of iron ore that's the easiest to get at rather than just, you know, going out in your backyard and finding a cool rock

and then trying to hit it with a hammer until it turns to steel. Where do we mine iron for the most part? A lot of it's in Australia. There's a bunch in northern Scandinavia. There's a bunch in Africa. There there's still a bunch in the upper peninsula, but labor costs mean we don't really do that upper peninsula of Michigan. I mean, yeah, I don't know exactly where else.

That's just what I know offhand. It's more than I know offhand. So also the fact that so much American steelmaking has moved overseas means, you know, you lose the transport cost efficiency of pulling iron out of the upper peninsula and then just shipping it to, you know, Chicago or to be turned into steel. Chicago or Cleveland, there's still the Gary works is still an operation, but that's like the only integrated mill on the Great Lakes, I think. Integrated meaning they turn steel into steel from iron ore as opposed to turning steel into steel.

So anyway, back in the day, you could you could dig up iron from any old place and people did that, right? And then they smelted it, right? So that means there's some pretty wide differences in quality, depending on where iron was mined and smelted, just owing to different compositions of ores, different local techniques. And, you know, there's no there's no consolidation in the industry. There's not necessarily widely accepted best practices.

You're on your own, right? If you're if you're selecting metals, you know, theoretically, you could tour the country and try and find the best, you know, quality iron out there. More likely, there's one guy who does the work and you just trust that guy and hope he hope he's not a moron. He's probably a moron. So it's impossible to find good metal unless you really know what you're doing.

Now, let's look at a guy who knows what he's doing. This is Sir Thomas Bush. OK, great. He wasn't a sir at the time. We'll we'll get to this. Just plain old Thomas Bush. Thomas Bush, do you think? Do you think guys like in the Victorian era

when people still got knighted pretty regularly were like, man, I really got to work in my field because my name just doesn't sound right without a sir in front of it. I mean, yeah, I you definitely definitely need the sir for this guy. It really needs like, yeah, it doesn't come into it. Like there's some names where I feel like you just need a title in front of them. Otherwise, it just doesn't work. And you need to be like a doctor or something.

And this is one of some. So he is, you know, a sort of typical Victorian railway engineer. He's also inventor of the Rowe Rowe Ferry. Oh, first bastard. Kill him. Yeah. When when he was buried, they left the grave open by accident and just filled up with water the next time it rained. So he had a reputation for very economical,

yet high quality railway right of way, right? And he let his his work allowed a lot of railways to get built at sort of the tail end of railway mania that may have otherwise been uneconomical. One of the lines that is specifically mentioned when I was looking him up is the the railway that goes to a place called Peebles. Which is where is where is Peebles? Peebles is like

that's like that was more than my ex's nickname is for it. It's it's it's it's it's it's it's like borders, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, like that's pretty obscure, too. So it's yeah. Now, very few of his structures survive today. And you might you might ask why why? Well, they had very low they had lower weight limits because they were built pretty cheaply.

They a lot of them are structures on marginal lines which are closed in the 60s, right? But also for some reasons we'll get into soon. Here's one of his stone bridges here. This one is still up. This is the Houndsgill viaduct. This one this one is interesting because yes, it's very nice, very light. You got a very narrow stone piers on this one. And what's interesting is the weight,

the reason he's able to keep them so narrow is that below ground, there's actually another set of arches, inverted arches that spread the load out into the ground. Oh, that's clever. That is genius. OK, so this guy, he's a land of contrast because he does something that smart, but then he also invents the the roll on roll off ferry. Yeah, yeah, I was just designed sort of a mass produced one

or this is just this is a one off. OK, yeah, I was just like, yeah. Let's talk about a railway that used his his designs pretty pretty extensively. Oh, here's Peoples on the map right here, by the way. Oh, OK. This is also a store. And it's very helpful. At least in central Pennsylvania. So this is the North British Railway Company, right?

North North British is a kind of like early Victorian affectation for Scotland. It was like a particular thing like after Union and like the late 1700s, early 1800s to be like, I'm not, in fact, Scottish. I'm North British. North British. Yes, that's that's definitely a term that has some more go to it as the Victorians would say. So now this is a pre grouping act railway, right?

The grouping act was in 1922, I want to say that consolidated all the the entire British railway network into four private companies. You know, which may people may be more familiar with the London, Midland and Scotland, the London and North Eastern Railway, the Great Western Railway and the other one. The other one. Yeah, I forget what the other one is. So no show.

All right, so I'm not super familiar with any of the pre grouping railways. So bear with me here if I screw some stuff up. There's a billion of them, too. As we have heard, there have been so many of them that just like were invented as various like tax avoidance schemes. Yeah. So the North British Railway was headquartered in Edinburgh, right? And it was authorised by Act of Parliament in 1844

to build from Edinburgh to a place called Berwick. Now Berwick on Tweed. I think I'd say Berwick, but yeah, it's a town that's like half in England, half in Scotland. Yes. And then at Berwick, they would connect with the Newcastle and Berwick Railway, right, which would get them down the Newcastle, right? And from there, there's another railway, I don't know which one it is,

that got you all the way down to London, right? Have we considered simply doing an entirely straight line right away? There were several of those proposed during railway mania. Course there were. Yes, we know. Straight line, best line. Yes. Most of those are about the only ones that got their acts of parliament

rejected because they were so clearly infeasible and no members of parliament were invested in them. All right. Anyway, so, you know, they got down to Berwick. They had an issue because the Tweed River ran through Berwick and their terminal was on one side of the river and the other railways terminal was on the other side. So for a long time, the everyone just had to get in like a cab.

Well, it wasn't like a cab. It was 1844. I don't know what you'd. Like a handsome cab, yes. And go across the river and then get on the other train. This was not a ideal situation, right? And there was actually another break, almost identical in Newcastle. So this is not a direct route to London.

In the meantime, there was a second railway in Scotland, the Caledonian Railway, right? Caledonian Railway. Is it Caledonian? Yeah, because Caledonia, yeah. OK, OK, excuse me. I have an acceptable the Caledonian Railroad is like it ships Kail to Glasgow. So the Caledonian Railway was building from Edinburgh to Glasgow.

And then their next idea was they were going to go down to Carlisle, right? Because if they go down to Carlisle, they can connect to the London and Northwestern Railway with a direct track connection. And then they can have a direct train all the way to London, right? Yeah, that plus everyone wants to go to Carlisle. That's been like the abiding sort of impulse in British railway building is. Yeah, you want to go to Carlisle, right? You got to go to Carlisle. Yeah.

And so they they got their act of parliament, I believe in 1845, right? And so they they started building, they got down to Carlisle, they got their through trains, North British Railway sees this happening. And they also build they build from Edinburgh down to Carlisle. And they try to make a deal with another railway that's there. And Caledonian intercepts that deal and stops it from happening. And that line was almost useless to them until 1875, when the Midland Railway built the Settlin Carlisle.

Up to Carlisle, as the name would imply the name. Yeah. Yeah, and then finally, there was a North British Railway through train to London, right? But that's that took a long time. And in the meantime, they started aggressively expanding their network north of Edinburgh, right, including most of the stuff up here between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay, right? Yeah, this is this is slightly before the period in which the the topography

the demography of Scotland becomes like everybody lives in Glasgow, Edinburgh, in between those two in the central belt, everything either side is empty. Yeah, I mean, like, obviously, the Highlands are still, you know, sparsely populated, but you have a lot of like smaller cities that are more sort of like economically viable and more populous. And what they really wanted to do is they wanted to get their own line up here to Aberdeen, right? And there were a couple of ways to do this, which would be either to go around

the Firth's, right, which is indirect, or you go over the Firth's, right, which is hard. Now, we need to ask the question, what's a Firth? It's a river. It's OK. Well, I didn't know that. It's a river estuary. It's an estuary, except with bagpipes and haggis and kilts. Yeah, it's an estuary, but it's on the front of a tin of like fudge or whatever.

Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Firth's only exist. There's Firth's in Scotland. I think there's one Firth in like Norway, and then there's one in New Zealand. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, but it's a river estuary. It's big. It's wide. It's fairly shallow. There's like lots of fishing birds live in it, right?

There's, you know, there's handy for shipping, which is why Glasgow and like Lightbank are good places to build ships, because you can just go up the Firth of Light. But yeah, in terms of like crossing it, that fucking sucks. Pretty irritating. Yeah. You know, a lot of times they have some pretty high winds, you know, because Scotland has that sort of, you know, windy climate, you know. Yeah, it do be fucking windy up here. I will say that.

You know, so the North British Railway had a few options in its early days, which either go upstream and cross at Perth, right, for the Firth of Tay, right? Which is one option they did fairly early on as they built up to Perth. Not Australia. This is Perth, Scotland. And another part was to cross at a wider point near where more people lived, right? In this place near Dundee, right? This is where Thomas Busch gets involved, right? He designs the first row, row ferry to take trains across the Firth.

Here's a wood cutting of it here, right? Horrifying. No, thank you. This one's actually. Sooner die. Don't like that. This one's actually on the fourth and not the the first and not the Firth of Tay, right? But there was a rail ferry at both locations. Just throw me in the safe. I'm good.

Yeah, just swim. The main thing going on here is rather than taking the goods off the train cars and putting them on the boat or taking the passengers off the train cars, putting them on the boat. Thomas Busch designed this movable bridge which could hook directly onto the boat. And then you could take the train cars and just roll them on the boat, right? And then the boat goes to a similar thing on the other side of the river

and you roll everything off again. So this is much faster than, you know, transloading all of the goods and passengers. It's still pretty slow, though, because you got to break the train into sections in order for it to fit on the boat, right? Sure. Yeah. So a better solution was a bridge, right? And by the 1870s, it seemed technically possible. So the North British Railway decides to go for it.

And and thus we get the Tay Bridge, right? Sure. So. They had a coffee. I like this. There's there's actually a lovely name to one curve, right? And then the rest of it is straight. I really like these really spindly trusses here. Like that. It looks rickety. And I say that in like, yeah, no, it's

for primarily like vibes based engineering situation, the vibes here atrocious. I believe in that region, they call it chugly. Yes, it looks chugly. Absolutely. You don't know the half of it. All right. So. So it was necessary to cross the first of Tay for the North British Railway to the most direct route to Aberdeen. At the same time, they were also considering replacing the rail the rail ferry over the fourth with a bridge.

They commissioned Thomas Bush to do both of them, right? Mm hmm. They chose a site just west of the town of Dundee, right? This is looking south from the town of Dundee to be for what was going to be the longest bridge in the world. Right. Uh oh. Curse by man's hubris. Yes, that's exactly what I was cursing.

Just under two miles long. They start. Yeah. So they start building in 1871 and problems start to arise very quickly. Of course. So as is traditional. Yeah, is this going to be some sagrada for me a shit or a. So Bush chose a design based on Lattice Trust, right?

There would be these sort of shorter sections here with Lattice Trust is underneath the rail, right? Where the bridge was lower and it had more piers and then where the bridge had to be higher to keep the navigation channel clear, it would be a through trust. The train would go through the truss, right? And that was those were longer and stronger sections, right? Sure.

So there were trial borings performed to determine where the bedrock was, right? To figure out how to build the bridge and indicated early on that the bedrock is pretty shallow here. It's going to be real easy to, you know, just build some nice brick piers, right? And it'd be easy to build a whole bunch of them, right? I noticed that these do not look like brick piers, however. Yes, that turns out to be because the borings were all wrong.

Oh, what they thought scientists once again, fucking up. Yes, what what they thought was bedrock turned about turned out to be like a thin layer of gravel. Oh, yeah. OK, we found a single rock, therefore, you know, it's bedrock. Yeah. So so they had to lighten up the bridge a whole lot. So. Oh, the bridge Super Lagaria, yes. Yes.

So the the the bridge goes from having stone piers to having cast iron piers. This is something Thomas Bush had done several times before in other parts of Britain. You know, it wasn't like impossible or like a crazy idea, right? But he does try some innovative new methods. Keep costs down, right? OK. Oh. So Bush goes for this hexagonal design, right? For the piers at the high girders, right?

Those are the ones that are going to be relevant today. OK. So it's hexagonal, which, you know, there's there's there's crossbracing at each face. There's some crossbracing that makes a square in the middle. Notably, there's no crossbracing all the way across. That doesn't exist. And yeah, there's six columns per pier that are anchored into the first two courses of masonry in that pier by big hold down bolts bolts.

They were called, right? And the pier itself was built in a case on that was sunk into the river until it reached, quote, unquote, bedrock. It's actually the gravel until it reached gravel, gravel, gravel, gravel. Yeah. Bush thought it would work and in fairness, all those piers are still there. So I guess it did. You just in the case on you can you can feel it sliding around on the gravel.

Oh, but because of these bedrock issues, right? Or lack thereof, in order to reduce cost further, he he wants to build fewer piers, right? So he increases the length of all the lattice girders to two hundred and forty five feet per span, right? Hmm. Very, very. That's great bridge engineering is just getting annoyed. And I go, yeah, just going. Yeah, just just just keep in mind that bridge is under construction

when all these redesigns happen. Oh, cool. So these are cast iron columns, cast in sections, right? So this is I forget what your peer this is, but you can see here's a section here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven sections, right? Hmm. Yeah, you know, there's connections between all these different sections. You know, it's it's all kinds of stuff going on here.

Now, the connection between the actual columns and the bridge were only fixed at three locations, right? That sounds like too few. Everything else was on rollers to allow for thermal expansion, right? Oh, OK. Sure. Yeah. But I thought you told me, Justin, this is like what you want to do in a bridge. I remember you telling me that you want to make it less rigid so that it can flex.

Yes. Yes, that's actually that's actually a good thing. This is a well engineered part of the bridge. We're going to get to some of the parts which maybe weren't right. OK. But these these high girders were three sections in total that were moved independently of each other, right? Another notable part is that one of them had a significant downward grade toward towards Dundee, right? The bridge was mostly leveled, but then started the slope downwards towards Dundee.

Now, so once they had settled on the design of the bridge, the foundry, which was in Cardiff, I believe, went bankrupt. Oh, good. Perfect. Yeah, Jeff's Jeff Steel has like gone out of business. Jeff's Jeff's foundry has finally been the dust. Oh, right. So this work was then instead contracted out to Hopkins Gilks and Company, right? Oh, this is stupid contrary.

And they had a high quality locomotive and iron works in Middlesbrough. And they also previously worked with Bush, right? Yeah, Hopkins, Gilkin, Bush. Yes, a normal set of names for a normal country. I think Bush also had some kind of financial interest in the company. Oh, that's all on the up and up, baby. Yeah. Well, instead of using their foundry at Middlesbrough, they instead decided to use a different foundry in Wormitt, right?

Wormitt being the south end of the bridge, right? Nice and easy to transport stuff. Yeah, transport costs, baby. Sure. They're working with different local labor now, right? But they kept all their iron suppliers, right? And the Wormitt iron workers didn't like that, right? They complained about what they referred to as Cleveland iron, right? Cleveland here is the area around Middlesbrough.

It's not Cleveland, Ohio. So but they were like, why do we have to use all the shitty Cleveland iron? Spiritually the same. Yeah, instead of good Scotch metal, right? And this foundry produced all kinds of quality control issues, right? So the castings were sort of uneven, bad thickness. This is mostly in the columns where the problems were the foreman on the job considered, you know,

if there's a cosmetic deficiency or what he thinks is a cosmetic deficiency with the column, that was filled with something called Beaumont egg. Oh, excuse me. That sounds bad. The Beaumont egg is a corruption of a French word, which sounds like Beaumont egg, right? And it's a filler used in furniture making, right? It's essentially Victorian Bondo, right? Great. Yeah, perfect.

Yes, this does solve my weight savings problem. Yeah, it's mostly fiberglass. Yeah, you guys know how the Corvette is built. It's kind of like that. I just think it's like this thing is this thing is like iron violings and beeswax held together by spit and prayers. Yeah, I think there's actually some boot polish in there, too, or something like that to get the color right for it.

Yeah, for extra racism. Yes. Um, so there were some issues in the construction of the columns. We'll get to a really big one in a minute. But no one was really supervising this foundry very well. And there were all kinds of like little problems going on constantly. Quality control was just not good. And a few accidents occurred during construction,

notably two of the high girders, like the full sections, right, were dropped into the furth while they were lifting them in the place. Whoops. Yeah, that's nine. I have no idea. I couldn't figure out if anyone was killed in the construction of the bridge or not. I'm going to swim in this area. Probably. Yes. Just not worth recording.

Yeah, it's just I don't know. It's just some scouts, you know. So they started in 1871. You remember that, you know, in this era, big structures tend to go up pretty quickly. Not this one. It was finished in on June 1st, 1878. One, have they started building it again? 1871.

Thank you. Yeah, it took a full seven years. Here's here's a picture from the Wormitt side. You can see where they started with the brick pillars and then stopped. So the North British Railway could now achieve its dream of Lincoln, Edinburgh to Aberdeen, which it still never quite did. Getting more and more of the way there. Yeah, yeah. We got an old stuff to slogan.

We're getting there. We're getting there. Yeah. This was a single track bridge. You can see the train going here. And it had a primitive form of block signaling called. Yeah. It was there was a token, right? So you guess a non-fungible token. And you guess how the token worked? Yeah, you you paid some theory.

So in order to control access on the bridge, when you're on the train, you go up to the signal box and you stop. And the signal man hands you a thing. Sure. A picture of an ape smoking a cigarette. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's some kind of some kind of wood carving of a primate of some kind. Yes. Mm hmm. And then you're authorized to travel across the bridge to the other end

where you hand off the wood carving of the ape to the other signal man. And they both record that the train has gotten on and off the bridge. They telegraph each other to make sure the bridge is distributed ledger. Yes, which is kept on the blockchain. Absolutely. It has no pornography on it. There was quite literally a ledger in each tower that had to be like correlated at the end of the day. This is a distributed ledger.

Like it is an example of like achieving consensus through distributed ledger. So this is Bitcoin. Pretty much. Sorry about this. You can find historical parallels everywhere. So all right. In 1879, June of 1879, Queen Victoria traveled over the bridge. And she have to like use the Ape token. No, that's for the driver.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So stupid. She's the queen. She outranks him. Good point. Yeah, she could just travel over the bridge without authorization and smash. You know, the queen doesn't need a pass by. You know, the queen doesn't need a wood carving of an ape to cross the the tail bridge.

So so as a result of her travel over the bridge, she was so impressed that she knighted Sir Thomas Bush. He's like, finally. Yes. I sound normal now. Now, there were some issues with the single track operation, right? Local trains were usually delayed for express trains going across the bridge. Now, for southbound trains, tough luck, you're delayed. Northbound trains.

And you can see where the bridge slopes down here. Northbound trains could make up time, right? Because they would go at regular. They would, after being delayed, they would then go down the bridge, pick up as much speed as possible and then use the gradient to get even more speed coming into Dundee and then just stop at the last minute, right? Awesome. Yeah, everyone loved speeding on this thing.

I love speeding. Yeah, speeding rules. I don't think there was an actual speed limit on the bridge. Why would you need one? Who cares? There was a recommendation by one of the inspectors on the bridge to limit trains to 25 miles an hour. A lot of times they did 40 or 50 miles an hour. I was going to ask, what was the cost of being a train in 1878 or so?

It's hard to say. Yeah, not in regular operation, but like that was my question. A regular probably you're probably hitting on a well maintained like the upper end of expresses, I would imagine we're doing maybe 60 or 70. Oh, wow. But one of the things that when they went that fast on the bridge, there was a noticeable vibration in it, right? Yeah, women got pregnant and the uruses fell out.

People like asphyxiated from the lack of oxygen. Absolutely. All the stuff that we were warned about with railroads going too fast. Yeah, and I think there were some measurements taken by an inspector from, I want to say, the board of trade while a train crossed at speed that showed the bridge was swaying about two inches if the train went too fast. They I think it was them who recommended the speed limit, which was not adopted.

And a little bit of a shugal. It's a little bit of a shugal. It's fine. Yeah, it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit. 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 catalogue 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. December 28th, 1879. Oh, everybody's coming home from Christmas.

You're in that weird dead zone between Christmas and New Year. Yes. And you're going to go over the Shugley Bridge. Yes. So a huge windstorm hits Scotland, right? Sustained wind speeds of 71 miles an hour recorded in the train. Surely a good sign. A train from.

Oh, God, aren't burnt islands burnt? But I don't know. Burmiston, but it's a train from the south. Friendly, slowed to pick up the token at the south end of the bridge. It was 7.13 p.m. There were two guys in the signal box, right? There is the signal man. And then he just had his friend there for some reason.

I don't know. They were hanging out, right? Five. You could just do that. Five. Yeah, true. Yeah. The concept of like no one knows my last name and Ben Macklemore. Yeah, exactly. The concept of no one authorized personnel had not been invented yet. And it was a better time for it.

Scotland, I love you. I've never had a bad time in your beautiful country. I was a very pretty girl at the World of Whiskey Shop. With you know, it's fine. You move on. But so the signal man logged the time. She was so angry, my dad thought I should have buried her. He was like, you could have seen.

You could probably apply for asylum. Try to bury her asylum on the basis of like what being oppressed for your many like GTI speeding crimes. Yeah. I actually have a brief story about that. My I was doing I was coming home. Chris doesn't listen to podcasts. It doesn't matter anyway.

I but I was doing in her car a couple of days ago. For those of you who live in the Northeast Corridor, you'll appreciate this. I made it from Newark Airport in Jersey to my house in Philadelphia in an hour flat doing 110 most of the way in a 2018 Toyota RAV4. Well, under the logic, if it gets impounded, it's not my car. I'm naming the file for this podcast.

My crimes. Waf. That's what we call a statement against interest. Thank you. I have a lawyer. He told me when I told him how fast I went. The lawyer is just like that. So the signal man logged the time while his friend in the signal box

looked out the window as the train sped off little Jay. Yes. And he saw sparks flying from the wheels of the train. A previous train had done the same thing, right? The signal man didn't believe him. Like, you're you're you're you're fucked in the head. The signal man was at this point tending to the fire in the signal box. Both of these guys are drunk off their ass anyway, almost certainly.

So there was a flash of light and then darkness. Right. The the tail lights of the train disappeared. Right. And then a few minutes later, the telegraph from the other signal box didn't come, right? Indicate the train had gotten off the other side of the bridge. Oh, when the signal man tried to contact the north signal box,

he found the telegraph didn't work. Oh, rocket, baby. Yeah. And it's a night. It's cold. There's a howling like Gale going. This is your friend. Yes, it's a horror story. Yeah. And it's Scotland. So it's already been night for like five hours.

Of course, in December. No, absolutely. Yeah. So what what had what it happened was. All of the high girders had fallen into the river with the train on it. Right. Oh, that's not what you want to happen. Not ideal. No savings, baby. You know, they they they telegraph for help. People showed up in like steam launches and crap pretty quickly, right?

But the recovery efforts didn't turn up anything, right? All 59 passengers and crew were killed. Um, well, I mean, you're in that train just sinks, right? Yeah, just instantly. And you know, you're nobody doing like like fucking like scuba rescue shit in in 1880, whatever. Yeah, exactly. And plus, it's probably taking you like, you know, like

40 minutes to get up there and you're like shitty steam launch. You know, if you if you haven't drowned, which everybody has, you're dead. You're like, yeah, like in the water anyway. So, yeah, they 59 passengers and crew were killed. That was that's all of them, right? And eventually when when the waves calmed down, they did send some divers, you know, Victorian divers in like the weird suits to go take a look. And they found the train still like just sitting there in the girders,

which had fallen into the river. Oh, yeah. No, thanks. So this is not an ideal situation if you're Sir Thomas Bush. No, because you look like a douche. Yeah. That is us. Yep. You see here, the the entire high sec, all the high girders fell on the river.

The rest of the bridge stayed up, right? But all the high girder sections fell over. And this is where the blame game starts, right? Because it's wild that this engineering marvel, the longest bridge in the world, just up and falls over. Mm hmm. So what happened? Who do we blame?

What punishment did they receive? When? God. God. God. God. The investigations revealed cost cutting and generally bad practice at, you know, lots of levels in the construction.

Report comes out that just says we have to guillotine God. You know, just like, ah, OK. The investigation came up with like, OK, multiple factors contributed this, but, you know, the one everyone cites is just it was the wind. The wind did it, right? Mysterious acts of God's love. Well, there's more going on here. You know, Sir Thomas Bush had supposedly under designed for wind.

And he did sort of under designed for wind. He designed for 10 pounds per square feet of wind. Right. I don't know exactly what that corresponds to and wind speed. Stupid unit. Absolutely. No excuse for. Well, square foot.

What? Pounds per square foot. Yeah. Yeah. Pounds per square foot is much more useful for structural calculations. Yeah. Alice. Yeah.

Because pounds per square inch. All right. Excuse me. Shut up. Because he spoke the truth. Like, if you wanted to convert 10 pounds per square foot to pounds per square inch, you'd have to divide that by 144, which gives you. Maybe she's right.

Maybe it is a stupid unit. See? See, I was right. You fucking retract that bit about me seeing my own poop. Alice does not eat her own. No, it's true. She does. She's like, I see her.

I see her with my own two eyes. If you do structural loading in America, you use pounds per square foot to this day. And you might eat your own poop. Who's that? Possibly. The 10 pounds per square foot is much lower than a modern bridge, right?

And most bridges at the time, it was designed with a significant factor of safety in addition. Back in the time, your factor of safety was like four or five, right? So you need a really significant wind to knock the bridge over. There was a disagreement among the investigators as to whether that wind would also knock the train over. So there's more stuff at work here, right? And sort of the forensic evidence indicated something interesting,

which is the structure fell apart as it fell rather than falling in one piece, right? Is it sort of the expected behavior of a bridge falling over is that it's going to stay largely in one piece and tip over rather than breaking apart as it falls. It would break apart when it hits the water or hits the ground, whatever. But this one broke apart as it fell, right?

Sure. You can see this. This is one of the piers here. You can see it broke two sections up, right? As opposed to at the base of the columns. But a lot of the other ones broke at the base of the columns, right? Sure, right. And a lot of parts of the, you know, some of the structural numbers

you might expect to break did not. So for example, this is pier five looking north, right? You can see here's a section of column. The hold down both bolts, of course, went through the two courses of masonry. And those have stayed intact and pulled the masonry up with them. You know, rather than, rather than let's say, you know, snapping off right at the masonry, right? You can see here's a column here.

You've had something break off at the, at the lugs up here at the top. Yeah, it's fucked, but it's not in the way that it should be expected to be. It's not necessarily fucked in the way you might expect. Yes. Sure. So what sort of happened is owing to a wide variety of deficiencies in the manufacturer, different parts of the bridge, the structure was not as rigid as it should have been, right?

Cleveland, Cleveland iron. The scouts were right. Well, no, actually. Really? So one of the main causes was down to sheeping out on some of the casting process, right? So we'll talk about the lugs, right? So these columns are cast iron, right?

That means as implied, they were cast in a mold, right? You know, they pumped a bunch of molten metal in there, waited for it to solidify and then, you know, touched it up with Bondo afterwards, right? Right, of course. So this is where these lugs, that's this section here, this sort of protrusion, this is where the cross bracing was attached, right? And that's through, you know, you have a rod, you have a nut, you have a nut on the other side, right?

Yes. Yes. That's what this is about. So the specifications indicated, or actually, I think the specifications did not indicate, but implied, these holes were supposed to be drilled, right? That's what you want to do with rods and nuts. Yes. You want to drill the hole for the rod and put the nut on it.

Yes. And that's what you want to do in a specification is imply the correct thing to do, but not say it. Well, the foundry at Wormit instead decided we would cast those holes instead of drill them in order to make the cast. I think this is the place that was controversial among the iron workers, right? No, the Wormit iron workers did not like the iron that came from... Oh, there we go.

Oh, sorry. Right. Sorry, I was confused. So they cast these holes and the easiest way to cast them is not to make a cylindrical hole, but a conical one, right? You can see that here, this hole has sort of a conical shape, right? If you looked at that more in section... Yeah, you can pop it out of the cast.

Yeah, you can pop it out of the cast really easily if it's conical, as opposed to if it's cylindrical, you're going to wind up damaging the mold. I think this was a sand mold, and then you'd have to make a new mold for each column, right, which they didn't want to do. So that's much easier for the foundry workers and the operator of the foundry, and the foreman and everything else. There's also very common practice at the time. They did it everywhere, right?

And you had to really, really sort of stand over these people's shoulders and make sure they didn't do it. It was just sort of something that was commonly known at the time as the foundry is going to cheap out on this, right? So here's the problem, right? So you have a pair of cylindrical holes, or excuse me, conical holes. Yeah, I do. Yeah.

And you've got a rod that goes through them, right? The rod is shaped to the minimum inner diameter, right? Do you want to shave my body, please? Thank you. We respect all shapes approaches on this podcast. And it's got a sort of shear force on it, right, from the crossbracing, right? If these holes were cylindrical, that shear force would be distributed over the whole cylinder.

Because it's not, that shear force is concentrated at one point at the end of the hole. Just accidentally making a little shaped charge on each fucking column. Right. Yes. So this was the case with every single hole in the bridge. Right? Now, they also did another thing to ease construction of the bridge rather than use a rod that was the full diameter of the hole.

They used one slightly smaller. But how is it like fixed in there, then? The tension is a little bit smaller. You know, I said a little bit. I'm not talking hot dog down a hallway here. We're just to make it easier and quicker to put together, right? Now, this did allow a little bit more flexibility in the bridge and not the good kind either, right?

Because rather than having, you know, a whole structure that bends, we have sort of a bunch of cast iron parts clanking into each other. And this was used throughout the entire structure, including I believe where the two column sections met each other. There was like a flange. The flange had bolts in it, right, or rods. And these are also conical holes on each end. Right?

You had this whole, you had a whole situation here. There were just stress concentrations everywhere in the bridge, owing to, you know, cheaping out at the foundry, right? And improper supervision. Now, after the bridge collapsed, they pulled out some of the lugs that had remained intact and the inquiry tested them. And four out of the 14 they tested failed at lower than specified loadings, right? Right.

So big fuck up on the foundry's part, right? Yeah, obviously. But you might think, okay, Bush is off the hook, right? No. No. Because it's his job to make sure the foundry doesn't fuck up. Yeah. He has to kick the laborers up the ass because he's the guy in the top hat.

Sure. Absolutely. He's the guy in the top hat. He's supposed to make sure, but also wrote bad specifications. And, you know, he's, you know, he's also using this sort of experimental design. Some of the investigators thought, well, you know, this bridge seems a little underdesigned to start out with, right? That's number one.

At least one of them thought that if it had been built as intended, it would still, it would still be standing. It wouldn't have fallen over, but it certainly wouldn't have fallen apart as it fell over. That was just an indication of sort of gross underdesign, right? Yeah. So it gets a big frowny face from the engineers. It's the main thing. Big, big frowny face from the investigating engineers.

Yeah. And, you know, so this, this was, this was clearly Bush's fault. He fucked up the design. He fucked up construction supervision. There were also some maintenance issues, I believe. I forget what they were specifically, but some of the, some of the maintenance guys were complaining, yeah, this bridge seems to shake around a little bit. One of them mentioned a chattering sound, which sure sounds like everything's sort of

chugly, right? Yeah. Yeah. Generally speaking, if you, like I said, if you're going to do vibes, right, then maybe what some of the vibes that you should have are, does it make weird noises? Is it at least more structurally sound than a Tinker toy? It's like McConnell, actually. Yeah.

They're like, yeah. I don't love this. Yeah. So you don't love this. Isn't McConnell and Tinker toys the same thing? I'm actually not sure. I'm not sure. I never had Tinker toys.

No, I'm not familiar with them. Yeah. Can X or like plastic Tinker toys? So like Lego Technic then? Yes. Sort of, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

So Bush is sort of found to be largely at fault, but I don't think they moved to like formally punish him or anything, but his reputation is fucking ruined, right? Yeah. He also quickly moved to like reinforce one of his earlier bridges, the South Esk Viaduct, which had been built similarly, but it was very fucking dead. Yeah. And it was actually found to be too far gone to be fixed and it was demolished. And he was already in pretty poor health at this time, but the inquiry completely broke him.

He died October 30th, 1880 at the age of 58. I think just a couple months after the inquiry wrapped up. Yeah. But that's not the only like lasting aftermath of this because this also led to a separate disaster when William Topaz McGonagall, possibly the worst poet in history, wrote an ode to commemorate this tragedy entitled simply The Tay Bridge Disaster. Oh, no. Now, it's a long poem.

I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I'm going to read the first and last stanzas, right? So he begins this poem, beautiful railway bridge of the Silvery Tay. Alas, I am very sorry to say that 90 lives have been taken away on the last Sabbath day in 1879, which will be remembered for a very long time. This is off. This is like me in middle school, man. And oh, my God.

Okay. So he ends this with a little bit of like engineering advice, a little bit of architectural advice. Oh, ill-fated bridge of the Silvery Tay. I must now conclude my lay by telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay that your central girders would not have given way. At least many sensible men do say, had they been supported on each side with buttresses, at least many sensible men confesses, for the stronger we are houses do build the less

chance we have of being killed. It was just incredible. Where would you put the butt? Where would you put the buttresses onto the sides? Where would they be buried into? The gravel, the bed gravel. Well, are you just suggesting that you put like some big threats that go all the way down into the water?

Yes. Yes. He also got the number of deaths wrong. It's been called one of the worst poems in the English language. And it took him three tries too. He wrote two other poems about the same bridge collapse and they're both fucking awful. There are other lasting legacies of this disaster. Fairly quickly, the railway decided that we're going to rebuild.

We're going to build a new bridge, right? This is the second Tay bridge. It was built to a much more conservative design. So that nice curve. Yes. This is by William Henry Barlow. This is a double track bridge too. Better than single track.

Also, it actually reuses some of the pieces from the original bridge. Yes. So they took some of the, I think the debt girders from the bridge, they cut them in half. They doubled them up and then they put them in for the new one, right? Because, you know, they took some of the parts that were good. This is on, I think, either stone or brick piers as opposed to cast iron ones. So yeah, this is still there. It hasn't fallen over.

So better bridge. But another issue. Twice as good, some would say. Yes. Another thing is that Thomas Busch was in the process of designing a first of fourth crossing at this time, right? So Busch came up with this wild suspension bridge. That's this one on top here.

Whoa. I like this. Yes. I wonder if this could have been built. I suspect no. There's some very strange other designs that were considered like this suspension bridge. You can see the cable goes under the deck. One with chains.

There's really trying some weird shit here. Yeah. Which I appreciate. So North British Railway, of course, fired Sir Thomas Busch. From the design team at this point and tried to start. They like, okay, we need a new bridge to roughly the same specifications. And one of the sort of informal criteria for this new bridge was not only that had to be strong, it had to look strong.

Right? Because you have like a crisis of confidence from passengers and stuff. Exactly. So Sir Benjamin Baker and Sir John Fowler proved to be up to the task and built the first of fourth bridge. I love the fourth rail bridge. Yeah. It's so overbuilt.

Like you kind of like, if you live in Scotland because it's on every fucking like TV thing, like intercut or whatever, you kind of get bored of seeing it, right? But it's only when you see it from like this angle or like up closer, if you're actually over it that you realize how fucking like catastrophically, like mega maniacally overbuilt it is. And I really like that. Yeah. I like it because it's big. It's a big bridge.

It's a hefty boy. Very hefty. Another reason why it was this big is that where the cantilever centers meet the water, that's those are the three locations where bedrock is close enough to the surface to build. Well, they think for all they know, it's still gravel. That's a good point. Yeah.

Well, this hasn't fallen over yet. So yeah. Well, we we killed a bunch of people and all it got us was this bridge was very nice. And the worst poem ever written in English. Yeah. I think we're about even on that. Yeah. Yeah.

It all kind of pans out. Yeah. Life finds a way. That's what they tell us. Yes. Well, what did we learn? Make it more or less don't. If you make it too rigid, then it is bad.

But if you make it not rigid enough, that's also bad. So you would recommend checking your shop drawings to ensure that the foundry isn't creating conical holes where there should be cylindrical ones. And I think it was a good thing to move to a model of accountability where the guys making the things have to like check their own work instead of it being the job of the guy in the top hat to make sure. Yeah. Don't make stupid concessions to manufacturability.

Yes. No. Build as designed exactly as designed every time. Have you had to that. Don't do that when you shouldn't make smart concessions to manufacturability. Yeah. Only change the things when it's smart and will have no negative consequences. If you're a pussy.

Yeah. Exactly. That's right. That's a helpful PSA from your friends that will ask your problem. My official advice is don't be dumb. And if you are dumb, don't get caught. Yeah. And if you do get caught, have an alibi.

Yeah. That is a damn truth. Find somebody else to implicate. This is the onion model of engineering. Don't make super changes. If you do make stupid changes, don't get caught. If you do get caught, have an alibi. And if you don't have an alibi, then find somebody else to blame.

Yeah. Beautiful. Yes. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Greetings to Justin, Alice, Liam and possible guest. We haven't had a guest in a minute. You and Garrett all went two weeks ago. Yeah, I guess so.

Garrett feels like family. He doesn't feel like a guest. That's true. Yeah. Unspoken fifth host after the Activate Windows logos. Yes. Love the podcast. My brother got me into it.

He's the kind of person who happily rant about inefficient urban planning for hours. But I am mostly here for the jokes and your radical left agenda. Thank you. Well, that's the only things that I'm bringing to this. The recent episodes about public education, this one came in a while ago. Got me thinking about my own experiences. After some examination, I decided the combination of hilarity and failure stood out enough from the rest of the burning trash pile. That is the American public education system.

Which I'm doing a bonus episode on at some point. A whole thing. A through 12 baby. Worthy of a safety third segment. I attended Helena High School in Helena, Montana. Our most notable alumni is L Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology. Oh, wow. You know, when you look at someone and you think you're not racist enough to be in the KKK now, but 40 years ago, you 100% would have been.

That was the vibe of a concerning number of my classmates. In my US history course, a teacher once had us do a mock congressional debate about abolition. And there were several people who were concerningly enthusiastic about role playing as a southern senator from the 1850s. Doing the accent as well. Like wearing a seersucker suit to class. Just the racism. I guess just the racism because the accent and the seersucker suit part sound fun. I could do that part.

Just pronounce everything like with an H in front of it. Perhaps you could have fought me as to why, you know, things of that nature. Why you should have seen that argument before the wall. I hear location is very important in real estate. The location of Helena High pose several challenges to its function as a school. First off, running along the east side of the school is the busiest road in town, which isn't a highway. The roads on all other sides of the school are limited to school zone speed limits of 15 miles an hour, but this road is not. Its speed limit is 30 miles an hour with people frequently breaking 40.

40 sounds like a lower boundary to me. That's probably an 80 mile an hour road. Liam in the RAV4. Yeah, buddy. It's not my car. I don't care if it gets impounded. As you might imagine, this led to kids being hit by cars on a semi-regular basis. Not me, not Liam. I fell by. Another issue facing the school is the fact that it was built in what could be argued as a swamp.

The school is at a base of a hill with a set of stairs leading down to the main entrance. As you might know, water likes to run downhill and the lowest point is in the school gym. It's called a swimming lesson. These two facts meant that the gym could flood very easily, which it did. The storage basement of the gym flooded due to simple snowmelt every year I was there. We've accidentally done the bit of the Coliseum where they reenact naval battles. That would be a fun gym class, actually. I did that for physics. We had to build cardboard canoes.

Dodgeball, but you're on a tri-ream. Yeah, I'd be like, you know, the little scooters with the casters that they had. Imagine that, but it's like tiny tri-reams. That'd be fun. Yeah. There would be a massive ventilation tube running out of the gym into the parking lot. We'd have to jump over it as we were doing things during gym class. One year a water main broke and the school had to be shut down for a couple days.

They worked quickly to clear the school so classes could resume, but one side of the lawn became a literal swamp for the rest of the year. The biggest disaster Helena High School suffered in my time there was a fire. The fire itself wasn't too bad, but there was severe smoke and water damage. The repairs ended up costing an estimated $3 million. Here's a picture of one of the hallways after the fire. Yeah, I was about to ask if this was like what had happened here. The cause of the fire in this case was arson.

A 13-year-old middle school students broke in at night while drunk and started a fire in a janitor's closet. Classic 13-year-old activity. I gotta say, these kids had a fuller childhood than I did. Oh, yeah. They then entered a classroom and lit all the posters on fire. One of the night janitors eventually noticed the smoke and called the fire department. Who arrived and put out the fire?

The young arsonists were caught by the cops attempting to flee the scene. Should have had an alibi. You should have had an alibi. No, I was starting another fire, not this one. The disaster was caused by outside actors so we can't really blame it on the administration. You can, however, blame them for how they handled the aftermath. Goal was canceled for a whole two days after the fire. After that, we were right back to class.

Most of the math and English classrooms were damaged so the classes had to be moved. English was held mainly in the library, which worked out alright. The math classes, however, were held at the nearby community college, which was across the West Street, not the super dangerous one, thankfully. But you still had dozens of students crossing the street twice every hour to get to and from classes. I was half-expected to be in the gym, so... Yeah, that was full of Greek fire, not regular fire.

All this occurred in the middle of Montana winter and the weather was almost always below freezing. The five-minute passing period was still enforced, so you never had time to grab a coat before going outside if you wanted to get to class on time. No, just run out and get hit by a car. Yeah, get hit by a car instantly. And they give you a demerit at your funeral. Well, that goes to 100% attendance-racing. This time limit also incentivized students to dash straight across the street

instead of going up a little bit to reach the crosswalk. All of this continued for over two months. I can't help but wonder if it might have been faster to shut down the school for a couple of weeks and work around the clock instead of pausing during school hours. Here's the thing, American educators and American parents I've learned fucking love to send their kids back to school even when it will kill them. I just covered this with COVID. Yeah, I gotta say, the fact that the American education system needs basically a daycare,

and it's necessary to the function of our two-income trap economy, but also it turns people into psychos. Everyone involved is just psychotic in some fashion, including the kids. Yeah, you could speak of that because you went to public school, right, Roz? No, I went to private school. That's a different type of psycho. He went to Catholic school, everybody. Catholic school, yes. And he eats his own poop.

No, and I don't do that, actually. I've seen you do it. No, what I have is intractable shame about every action I've ever done. Oh, you're so handsome. I love you very much. Part of the reason it took so long was that during the repairs, traces of asbestos were found and all that had to be carefully cleaned up. I'm just looking at this and I'm thinking traces of asbestos.

What size is this tile? This is probably all asbestos up here. This just says more fucked on it. I mean, yeah, it's there after a massive fire. Of course, it's asbestos. Good point, yeah, that's why the fire wasn't worse. There was a big... Yeah, asbestos like you're welcome.

Yeah. There was a big federal effort to get asbestos out of public schools, but Montana had been failing at that pretty consistently. There are also a couple of other high profile asbestos scandals at Montana schools asbestos in every school. I think brand new schools just have asbestos in them for old times' sake. But all that happened in four years, I was there. I'm sure Helena High School is still stumbling along,

especially with the pandemic. Maybe our public schools could do with a tad more funding. And asbestos. Yes. Hope you had fun reading this. Have a nice day. Oh, thank you so much. Sorry about your misothelioma. Yes.

Yeah, you're dead already, actually. Yeah, well... Sorry. If you were a loved one, you'd have died from misothelioma. I'm so fucking hungry. All right. That was safety third. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disaster.

Does anybody have any commercials before we go? Listen to Kill James Bond. Listen to Lions led by Donkeys. Listen to 10,000 losses. Watch Franklin. Yeah. Listen to Trash YouTube. Send some ball cosmetics to the PO Box.

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Give us your money commercial earlier. There may have been a commercial. There was a man who was annoyed about it in the comments. But he could suck my holes. Exactly. Absolutely. I invite him to suck my holes. Sometimes you just got to put a commercial in your thing

because that's how you make money. Get down and really lick some... Anyway. All right. Yeah. Bye, everybody. Bye. It's Scottish.