Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 98: Penn Central (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

railroad no work good bsquikle's twitter: https://twitter.com/bsquikle?lang=en his youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV4eVAMCOKcutg4zs26tT6w 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

I'm not in a great mood, but you know, I'm sorry. No, I just have a little bit of a Tuesday and just, you know, she's getting to me a little bit. I'm having a bad day, but I'll be fine. We're about to talk about trains. We're going to talk about trains. Oh, thank you. Although I have something very embarrassing. I have a story about our guest and I've got to tell without I'm going to embarrass Corinne and her sisters real quick. Okay. Jay, I've never told you this. So our guest today is with all due respect to Roz, my most handsome friend. Jay, when we went to your house, all three sisters were just like in love with you. They were just like, he's so nice and he's so charming and

he's so tall and he brought us Coke zeros. And I was just like, yeah, yeah, like help me steal this. Help me steal his dad's car. Like, let's go. Let's go. Let's give us everybody. We're going to Bob Jay's dad. Yeah, to be clear, this was my parents. They came to my apartment. They'd be like, Oh, he lives like this. Yeah, you live like this. And it's just like a throat of Coke zeros. Yeah. So everyone's in love with Jay. And if you're not in love with Jay in the comments, I will fuck you up. It's got a very good voice. I mean, we have a lot of guests with sexy voices. I'll say that. Like we have a lot of people who just have like good, good podcasting voices.

And meanwhile, I'm just out here like, I am in to talk about the fucking trains or whatever. I would let Gareth Dennis do stuff to me that he would probably laugh at. Oh yeah. I mean, um, hello. Back on top. Back on top. We just rate all of our guests by like voice sexiness. That's not good. It's a bad idea. You're right. We have to give everyone a 10. It would just be like, we were eight dogs. Except for Dan, except for Dan McQuade on the process bonus episode. Dan, I love you. But you called in from a world war two field telephone. Okay. Welcome to Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with

slides. Yes, it is. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Caldwell Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he, him and we have a guest. We do. That's right. Jay, for fuck's sake. This time I'm on sexy voice. Damn it. I'm Jay. You might know me better as B. Squykelhausen on YouTube. My pronouns are he, him and New York Central. Yes, my additional pronoun is Pennsylvania Railroad. Because we're doing a bit of a bit of a partisan episode here. That's right. Yeah. At the end of

the episode, Jay will be executed by firing squads. It's a real shame we had to go like that. We're going fully like North Korean mode. We're going to turn an anti-aircraft cannon on you. Sorry about it. I mean, I was outvoted. That's going to be the least convenient way to execute someone. Yeah, you have to like hand crank the thing to aim it. You had to roll like that, bitch. Yeah, no. Some fucking poor North Korean conscript is like, oh, for fuck's sake. I have to go get the anti-aircraft gun. Do you got to like pull it along like you're a cart donkey? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's important, though, for these episodes that you guys have a token green hat aboard. This is true. Because today, we're going to start our three-part series investigating a

company known as Penn Central or 871 days of Sodom. Cool logo, though. It looks like a madness rune. These are the mating worms. Yes. Which I just realized today. It's train couplers. Oh, yeah. That's a good point. Right? I was literally, I was watching a video, a hilarious video. You should all watch it. I stole an image from it later in the slides. But it's a 1968 promotional video about like, oh yeah, how much this is going to kick ass. And it starts out with the P and the C kind of sliding in from across the screen and coupling with a train coupling sound effect. I'm just like, oh, that's what that's for. The sole time I will ever feel bad for marketing guys is when they do something like this and

then nobody gets it, you know? But first, we have to do the goddamn news. Big ship on fire. I mean, there's a big, big ro-ro cargo ship on fire in the ocean. I have posted here two examples of cope from Twitter from a guy called Matt Farrah, whose Porsche is on this, is on the ship because it's mostly luxury cars is the thing. Oh, that Farrah rules. I know we're an anti-car podcast, but go listen to the Smoking Tire. It's a great podcast. Yeah, we should have him on so we can laugh at him for losing his car. So this ship has like a shitload of like Porsches, Bentley's, Lamborghini's, also some like VW's and Audi's and shit, but that's not important. They're shipping them from

Emden and Germany to Rhode Island. And just off the Azores, it just catches fire. And because like half of these cars have lithium ion batteries in them, once the fire starts, it's just unfightable, probably would be on land too. Do they ship cars with fluids in them or are those drained? I don't know, actually. As far as I know, they are drained. I think they have to keep some in. I believe that's correct. I don't think they're totally drained, but I believe they're mostly drained. I could be wrong. So if I am, someone corrects me in the comments without being too cruel to me. The good news is that the crew got rescued by the Portuguese Navy. So this thing is just now they got a holiday in the Azores, which could be worse. Exactly. And

now this is just drifting and burning while a bunch of salvage tugs race to it because it's now in a sort of legal position known as finders keepers. The salvage rights to this belong to whoever gets there first. And so a lot of people trying to get there first. If you feel able to go to the middle Atlantic, you could get yourself a lightly burned Hassan Pika car. No cost other than like getting out there and getting it back. Could you? Are these salvage tugs really souped up? What does it take to be defined as a salvage tug? Can you shop in a cigarette boat? Can you try it? Can you imagine trying to get one of these rescue of these salvage cars titled

like even as salvage in the United States be like, yeah, this is my this is my Lamborghini Aventador. I got it off a boat. I don't really fell off a boat. Please title my car. I don't think there is a definition of a salvage tug. So I think you could just show up, right? And at that show up in like a dingy with like six outboard motors on it and then wait for your actual tug to show up, you know, a week and a half later. Unfurling a banner that says mine. Now yours go away. I don't know. I feel like we're getting into this sort of like portion of the law of the sea that tends to involve crews fighting each other with like ax handles and shit. Yeah, like, you know, you got you need you need to get you need a really good crew of

swashbucklers on your dingy. Yeah, I've created this sort of stuff. It's just brought to the pirate costume muttering over and over about his Audi A8. I got one for me and one for my parrot. A new startup that's going to rehabilitate Somali pirates by turning them into salvers. Yes, pirate.ly salve.ly. Yeah, it's a gig based salvage tug app. And then hopefully once they get there, they're going to take the like remaining ship in tow and then just tow it back to the Azores. But yeah, I'm a dirty hypocrite and I have to use the bathroom. Oh my god. Fuck. Why didn't you go? Congrats. Okay, we get to keep talking about this hilarious, but I feel like you need to show up in a dingy with like painting

scaffolding and the pirate flag. Yeah, yeah. Before anybody notices repaint. It's like, oh no, this is like, this has been mine the whole time. See, it's really like registered to me. Well, clearly the answer is that there is no there is no fire. This is just you set off a bunch of smoke bombs. Jesus Christ, is he flushing an aeroplane toilet? What the fuck? I like that was audible on the podcast. Yes. Jesus. We run a classy operation here. So what I'm thinking is there is no fire. This is like a collaboration between some of the crew and whoever happens to own a salvage tug that can just have a preposition nearby and get a free dentist car. An enormous number of like theatrical smoke machines.

Yes. Yeah. It just gets that like weird dank scent. It's like, this doesn't smell like burning Italian leather. This actually smells awful. This Lamborghini comes pretty on fire. Does burning leather smell? You just like downwind of downwind of this and you're just like, God, that smells fucking amazing, actually. You know, they're inhaling so much new car smell and it's on fire. So like, it's got to be even better for me. That's true. There is other news regarding fabrics. Storm Eunice is occurring in the United Kingdom. It ripped the fabric roof off the millennium dome, which is fucking hilarious. Oh, yeah. Luckily, the big boy statue that was in there is now safe in Denmark. But yeah, this is the first red weather warning, which is the like, you might die one,

that I can remember for London at least, like since ever. And like a huge, a huge proportion of the southeast of England, southwest of England, south Wales, are just having sort of 90 mile an hour winds. And this is the worst storm in three decades until it isn't again, because it's just normal when the next one happens. Like, congrats, you got Nor'easters now. Yeah, I guess that's the recho. Yeah. But in any case, rules, yeah, rules. We killed like four people. There's a lot of cool. There's a lot of cool videos of people's like wheelie bends going flying. And I mean, literally flying like, you know, but by the way, and I think that need posted. Yep. Yep. That happened. Also, my new favorite media phenomenon, Big Jet TV,

which is a plane spotter guy, the sort of Rodney Kantorsky of planes went down to Heathrow. And for some reason, for some fucking reason, they haven't suspended flights, even in 90 mile an hour crosswind. And so they're just landing like full size, like heavy jets in these. And you have this guy filming them doing commentary. I don't know what else they could do other than land the planes. They're already up in the air. They're running out of fuel. You got to get them up there. Leave them up there. Leave them up there. I mean, aircraft need in flight refueling too. I fucking fly out of the area. Go to, I don't know. I mean, okay, you can't go to Denmark. Yeah, go to Denmark. Go to Denmark. Go see the boy. You have to go to

like Ireland or like really pretty much just Ireland. That's probably the only place in range. Yeah. Well, I mean, just do that. Just do that. We'll stay up there. It's not my problem. I'm not still up. Just crash randomly. Yeah. My favorite video from all of this has been the very top of a church spire getting blown off somehow. And like, I'm sure there's going to be a great photo of like the ornamental top stabbed into the grass, like perfectly. But we just like doing the hot first thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it looks like it comes off and it came off like the very top of it in like a straight line too. It looks like you took the top off of like a Lego set and just like flicked it over. Yeah. I mean, we got a little tiny bit of this in Scotland as well.

Like we got some pretty intense winds. We got some snow as well. But like England got it worse than Scotland, which is again, unusual. And I've been seeing the tax going round from delivery companies like, you know, Uber Eats or Deliverer or whatever to their drivers. And they're just like, hey, what's up, Bestie? Don't die, but you still have to work. I just love you. Just try and like keep hunched over on the bike, I guess. Have fun. If you die, we will do nothing for you or your dependence. Because you're flying away on a bike going over the moon like E.T., you know. Oh, yeah. I think I can actually read one of these. Let me see if I can find them.

Just imagining a guy like hang gliding off of one of those insulated pizza box carriers. Here we go. Here we go. Okay. Hello, team. I'm going to redact this. Hello, team blank. As you may have seen from the news, we are in for a bit of windy weather. So here are our top tips to keep you safe and ready to go. And they've bullet pointed each top tip with a little fist emoji. If you don't already have a winter jacket and gloves, swing by the hub and grab them. Make sure you have notifications turned on in your app to receive up-to-date messages and weather alerts. Practice safe driving on the roads and be extra alert. So stay warm, stay safe, and let's smash Storm Eunice out of the ballpark. I don't know. These companies just never receive

any kind of consequences for telling their staff in a very happy and chipper voice, hey, go out and die. Dear Courier, there's another one of these. Dear Courier, we are expecting strong wind and possible wind gusts in your city. We want to remind you to take the necessary precautions, which are as follows. One, watch out for wind tunnels created by strong winds between buildings. Two, keep your body low for less wind resistance and more stability. Three, avoid baggy clothing.

Four, bike in a lower gear than you usually would. And five, be on the lookout for possible flying objects, brackets, branches, garbage, etc. Is he stabbed with a tree branch in like 80 miles an hour? Just dodge it. Just dodge it. Why didn't you dodge it? Yeah, I just just frogger yourself. My god. Yeah, you guys are playing frogger. Congratulations. You're frogger now. What's insane is that like these guys could just easily go and turn on a mandatory, minimum 20% tipping. Oh, yeah. But they won't.

And the crazy thing is, when they do that, they keep like 15% of that tip, any or 15% of that 20% anyway. And the other thing is, I'm sure what's actually happening is the guy is adding special, the customers are adding special instructions to the driver like, hey, when you get here, could you dance a jig? Oh, do the little fucking dance. Yeah. That made me about the angriest stuff that we're talking here about. I know, just completely homicidal.

Someone who left an special instruction for, I think it was an Amazon courier. It was like, hey, do you want to do like a fun little dance and say, thank you for keeping me employed when you leave my parcel? And I'm like, I think Amazon couriers should have railguns, like man-possible railguns. Yeah. Well, apparently it's not just that one person. Like, apparently that's a TikTok trend. I'm execution by firing squad, Alice. I agree. I no longer support the Chinese government.

I would say someday a real rain is going to fall, but it currently is and they're just making them deliver in it anyway. So yeah. In other news. So you have to talk about the Super Bowl. Yeah, we do because we're a sports podcast and we have to stick to sports. Let me do this. Every knuckle in his body. All right. I don't want to hear about, oh, well, if the Bengals defense had just

held up because you can't swallow the whistle and not, if you're going to let that Bengals player, I think it was T Higgins, get away with that gruesome offensive pass interference and not call it. You can't swallow the whistle on that. And then on a third and goal situation, just, oh, it's holding. Well, it wasn't holding. That was the best play available to make. You can't swallow the whistle for 48 minutes and then just give them try after try after try. Furthermore, Aaron Donald was visibly offside on fourth and one when the Bengals went for it and they didn't call it. So it was the worst kind of ref ball, which is just like

visible game interference, but not the fun kind. It was agonizing watching them do call after call as the Rams still managed to fuck up the touchdown over and over again. And like, listen, we have to get the Rams to win. So we can justify putting this $5 billion stadium or whatever it is they just built for the Rams. It was not paid with any public money. There will be. Well, there's your problem on public private stadium partnerships. I feel like the fact that it was not done with public money means the NFL has more of an investment in it. I just hope both teams had fun. No, no, absolutely fucking not.

Absolutely fucking not. I was bored for like three quarters. And then the last one was kind of exciting if only because it turns my favorite thing to do with the game of American football, turn a game of football into a courtroom drama. So yeah, I enjoy I enjoy the kind of football that is litigated and I had a great time. This was this. This was coastal elites taking potshots at Middle America once again. I I'm firmly on the side of the coastal elites here. Like, you know, if I can go go go deep state you I genuinely. Yeah, fine. Happy for the Rams. This is good to me. I suck so much out. Los Angeles shouldn't have a football team.

They definitely shouldn't have a football team. I'm saying they shouldn't have any. I stopped watching football really a long time ago. Los Angeles is a one party state, but with typical Californian extravagance that they have two football teams. I stopped watching. This was my first football game and I watched in a while. And I thought, like, you know what, if they're going to not give that face mask or the OPI, fine, whatever, it deserved one makeup call at the end. And then they just kept getting the makeup calls. It was ridiculous. Right. If you get like it was an obvious panel, the face mask OPI was an obvious penalty. And they missed it for sure. And they scored.

Great. That deserves one makeup call, not like three ticky tack ones back to back to back. Bullshit. I this this the the the Bengals losing, I believe was a blow to Middle America. It truly was in some ways America's 9 11. This was as disgraceful as the Kyron says, the halftime show was good. It was good. Yeah. It was fine. Yeah. It was good. It was too short, honestly. It was really short. And also, I would also like to complain to the manager of aging about the fact that Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dreyer now 9000 years old. Yes. Yeah. It's sort of rough when you're just like, Oh, the music of my youth is the music of the middle age. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Well, all right. P.

Us. Absolutely. Okay. So in order to talk about the Penn Central, we need to talk first about its predecessor companies. And we're going to talk with a Pennsylvania railroad. We're going to talk about the New York Central Railroad. And we're going to talk about the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. Now, I guess one thing I should say to anyone who came to this podcast, not knowing very much about trains. The Penn Central Railroad was one of the largest corporate disasters in American history. Largest bankruptcy until Enron. Yeah. Largest bankruptcy until Enron. And unlike, you know, a lot of companies that go bankrupt today, you know, stuff like Lehman Brothers or, or, you know, it's it's all like just weird financial stuff. It was a real company that has

real employees who want stock brokers. Yeah, they did actual things like bring stuff to you so you could eat. You know, it wasn't just a company where people went on the computer like every company today. I mean, there have only been what like three times where the US government has had to step in and nationalize train service. Yes. World War One. Until this point was World War One, World War Two, and then the bankruptcy of Penn Central. Yes. So I think this is a disaster on on the approximate equivalent scale to either World War. And we're going to we're going to do this. This is going to be a three part episode because there's a lot to cover here. This episode is going to cover, you know, prior to the merger. And then we're going to cover some of the fun scandals that

happened early on in the merger. And then once you've once you've seen all three episodes, you will get 100 college credits that you can transfer. This is true. This is true. Congratulations in advance. This is absolutely. This is going to be more information than you get from an MBA. When MBA just teaches you how to go on the computer, like it's actually just two books. What they teach you at Harvard Business School and what they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. I mean, I'm stealing this from a tweet that went went viral years ago, but I find business school in general very funny because you get a bunch of people in a room and you show them a graph that shows profits go up and they all take notes like it's real school.

I don't know if I can comment. I went to film school. Law school dropouts. You put a bunch of people in a classroom. You showed them a graph that says laws go up and then we all take notes like they're all real things. So yeah, part one, we're going to talk about some of the fun scandals towards the end of this. Part two, we're going to talk about some of the economic factors and really the short and horrible life of the Penn Central. And part three, we're going to talk about Conrail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation, which is, of course, America's experiment with long-term railroad nationalization, but without any kind of socialist impulse and sort of, I guess, the

accidentally made a georgist railroad. Yeah. I mean, and some of the political economic effects of that, because I know there's like, we need to bring back Conrail, we need to nationalize the railroads. Well, we got to look at Conrail as Conrail was, which was actually existing socialism. Yeah, no, actually existing, not socialism. With that said, it was better than anything we've had before or since, but we can do better than Conrail too. Yeah. And there's an interesting side thing that I want to explore there, which is the time the government tried to divest itself from Conrail. And the only credible bitter was Conrail's own union, which I think is one of those points in history where maybe the left could have gained

power prior, after the Reagan Revolution, and it just didn't happen. But that's for episode three. Yeah, the executive was like, Oh, God, absolutely not. We can't do that. So anyway, we got to start with the origins of the Pennsylvania Railroad. So in the 1830s, there was a problem, which is how do we get people and goods to Pittsburgh, right, and the Great Lakes by extension? Yeah, it's gone by wagon was very, very bad. You had the Lancaster Pike, which actually went all the way to Harrisburg, you get from Philadelphia to Harrisburg, Philadelphia is where the port was, to Harrisburg in a couple of days. And then setting off from Harrisburg on a horse and cart,

it took you between 18 and 34 days to get all the way to Pittsburgh, right? At which point, you could do river shipping again, right? So the Pennsylvania Legislature commissioned the main line of public works again. And at late 1820s, early 1830s, this was a system of canals and inclined planes, right? And railroads, which was designed to bring people from one side of the state to the other. And this was okay at best, right? Beats a wagon. Yeah, it beats a wagon, but a main line of public works is an oxymoron. It didn't work very well at all. Not so good. Because you had to transfer freight from a canal boat onto a train car back onto a canal boat, back onto a train car. Eventually, they invented canal boats,

they could separate in sections, just put those on train cars, which is kind of cool. But it wasn't very good. So Philadelphia businessman started making noises about what if we build a railroad clear across the state, right? This is in competition with the Erie Canal up in New York, which Jay will talk about probably. So the idea was we build a railroad clear across the state. You get to Pittsburgh real quick and easy. In 1847, the Pennsylvania Railroad was incorporated as one of the first formal corporations of any kind, right? At least in the modern sense, Jay Edgar Thompson was the chief engineer. Later, the president of the railroad he surveyed the first route, including the horseshoe curve. And this double track Pennsylvania

Railroad that was built very quickly rendered the main line of public works obsolete almost immediately. And Thompson, later appointed president, grew the Pennsylvania Railroad from the sort of regional railroad in Pennsylvania to the largest corporation in the world in something like 20 years, right? And also made Pennsylvania itself sort of a corporate state under his whim, right? Yes. That wasn't perfected until later, though. Okay. You know, and they interchanged with other railroads. Eventually they acquired them outright. That sort of happens in the 1880s. The Philadelphia Baltimore and Washington, the United Companies in New Jersey, several companies west of Pittsburgh that became a division known as Lion's West. The furthest extent the Pennsylvania Railroad got

was Omaha, Nebraska. Jesus. But they eventually... That's what, 1200, 1500 miles? Something like that. Yeah, they eventually sold off that. It's doing 19th century cyberpunk. Yes, Pennsylvania. Goes all the way to Nebraska, apparently. But eventually they sold off that section of the railroad. And the furthest extent in the more modern era was St. Louis in Chicago, right? In the Civil War, they did very well. Other railroads like the B&O, Baltimore and Ohio, they suffered huge damage in the Civil War. The Pennsylvania Railroad was far enough north that Lee never quite got there, except there was some damage to Lion's near York, Pennsylvania, which I forget if that was... Yeah. Yeah, York, Pennsylvania, a little bit of local history,

is the most northernly town occupied by the Confederacy during the Civil War. We surrendered without a fight. They wanted it. Yeah. Central Pennsylvania never changes. So this guy, Tom Scott of YouTube fame, became president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I'm here today at the Pennsylvania Railroad. Yes. No, Tom Scott became president, I believe, shortly after the Civil War. I didn't write down when he used his... He was not so much a... Because the Pennsylvania Railroad was traditionally controlled by military engineer guys, right? Because that was the only way of learning to become an engineer at that point. Yeah, you went to West Point. You were commissioned as an officer

for six months. You resigned. You went to go work on the railroad. But Tom Scott was more of a people person, right? And he was very good at being a people person. And he used his influence and schmoozing to completely control the Pennsylvania State Legislature. In Pennsylvania, it was said that if you referred to the president, people had to clarify whether you were talking about the president of the country or the president of the railroad. Yeah, he has more power. Yes. At its height, the Pennsylvania Railroad had a larger budget than the US governments. Jesus. Now, the farther west you went in Pennsylvania, the more people hated the railroad. This came to a head in 1877 during the Great Railroad Strike that brought the entire country to its knees,

right? Workers were upset over pay cuts and rule changes that reduced the number of crews to handle freight. Huge swaths of Pennsylvania Railroad infrastructure was destroyed or burnt in riots that followed. These riots were something like a quarter of them were railroad workers. And then the other 75% were people who were just mad at the railroad in general. Yeah, people who just like a ride stuff. Yeah, they just want to burn stuff down. Yeah. It's a little bit of free street theater, right? Exactly. Most of the damage, the worst damage and the worst riots were in Pittsburgh. And this was solved. This riot was violently crushed by way of Philadelphia declaring war on

Pittsburgh. Good. Under Alexander Cassett, thousands of National Guardsmen from Philadelphia were brought in and they just started beating people, shooting cannon at them, whatever, you know, and everyone. That's a very abrupt sort of switch and use of force there. Yes. I believe, Tom Scott, I believe heads pulled some political strings to get the president, Rutherford Hayes, to allow them to send the National Guard in in that way. Jesus Christ. And this is why Philadelphia and Pittsburgh hate each other. No, it's not that. It's that the penguins beat us every sport, every year, except baseball. That's Pittsburgh's revenge for us murdering them.

Yeah. And listen, listen, I normally, normally this is a pro labor pro rights podcast, but not today. Pittsburgh deserves to suffer. And the lesson is clear, right? Anytime Pittsburgh beats Philadelphia at any sort of sporting event, you should have the National Guard wheel in some cannon. Yes, we do. Actually, every time, every time city Crosby scores, we have a Pinkerton detail follow up to his hotel and stand over him with a 38 until he leaves town. So, yeah, this the crushing of the strikers was supervised by Alexander Cassett, who was the brother of Mary Cassett, the impressionist painter. But yeah, he personally oversaw the restoration of order. In the meantime, Tom Scott had transcontinental ambitions.

He started a railroad called the Texas and Pacific, the idea being he'd connect the Pennsylvania Railroad to the West Coast. But he had difficulty acquiring the charters he needed to get that. I'm a little clear on this. When you say he, like he personally or like with Pennsylvania Railroad money or like personally. Okay. Right. Being president of Pennsylvania is not enough for him. This is true. Yeah. It must also be president of Texas and the whole Pacific and actually the whole country. What's pretty crazy is that a bunch of these like different railroad moguls and things just like operate the railroads on their whim. Yes. Pretty considerably. It's like, yeah, no, it's my railroad. I think it would be,

I mean, there was no like business science really. It's just like, yeah, we should go connect to there. And then all of a sudden, you know, 10,000 guys were out there trying to build tracks through some Godforsaken mountain range or whatever. Yes. So you could bring your terrible little steam engines, you know, take five days to get from Albany to Boston or whatever. But God damn it, you could do it. Right. So in order for Tom Scott to secure his necessary charters, he uses his influence in Congress in the sort of political gambit, which I think is too complex to explain here fully, to get Rutherford B. Hayes elected as a Republican, right? But on the platform to secure more Southern Republicans, Southern support, not Republican support necessarily,

on the platform of really winding back reconstruction, right? Oh yeah, he'd like inadvertently just sort of ended reconstruction. Yeah. Yes. And in return, Tom Scott would get approvals for the Texas and Pacific, right? This shit never would have happened if a fucking Benjamin Butler had agreed to be Lincoln's vice president. Yes. And so Rutherford Hayes was elected, but he decided as a show that he was independent, never to grant Tom Scott his charters. I'm going to do the bad thing, but I'm also not going to allow myself to do it because I've been bribed. Yes. No. No. So instead, he, you know, he just did not, he didn't grant those approvals. He did end reconstruction. He did destroy the Republicans in the South.

Liberals will really be like, you know, this is a victory for democracy. He did directly, you know, cause other research into the Klan and lynchings and all that other stuff because reconstruction was just suddenly ended for no goddamn reason. So yeah, among among the crimes of the Pennsylvania Railroad, that's a big one. Yeah, that's not so good. Perhaps the most American thing is to like end reconstruction because of a series of scams that also don't come off. Yes. So now the Pennsylvania Railroad avoided direct competition with its rival, the New York Central, until the rail, the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the West

Shore Railroad. It's West Shore, the Hudson, which paralleled the New York Central in 1880, right? William H. Vanderbilt was very unhappy with this. So he acquired the charter, the charter of the unbuilt South Pennsylvania Railroad, right? Which had rights to build from Reading the Pittsburgh and started construction. Now, finance here, J.P. Morgan, right? I've heard of this guy. Yes. Him of the massive nose. Yeah. He had investments at both railroads, mostly the New York Central. He saw this was not good because it would lead to destructive competition, right? These two

railroads would actually compete with each other, then rates would go down, then no one would make any money. Yeah, that's not how you do business in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The way you do business is you form a series of cartels inside a trade with each other and then J.P. Morgan makes a shitload of money. Now, there is a genuine argument against destructive competition because railroad competition in the 1800s was generally a disaster for everyone involved. Everything ran on a shoestring budget because rates had to be so low, but that meant service was unreliable. So everyone hated the railroads because they still... We'll get into destructive competition later. There was an extent to which a monopoly was bad and competition was worse.

But Justin, I heard once that the free of the markets, the free of the people. Oh, well, we're in a free market and J.P. Morgan uses the free market to get his way. He invites Vanderbilt and George Roberts, who was the Pennsylvania Railroad President at the time. He invites them both to his yacht, the Corsair. This is an 1895, I want to say in the summer. Not normally helping the whole Robert Barron thing to name your yacht, the Corsair. Yeah. No. And he said, we have to come to some kind of arrangement here. And the guests and then both of them were like, no, we're just going to do this. And he's like, all right, we're not going back to shore until you come to an agreement. Get swimming.

So in the middle of the night, they got back to shore. The Pennsylvania Railroad sold the west shore to the New York Central Railroad. And the south Pennsylvania Railroad was canceled. And this started a long sort of informal ceasefire between the two railroads, at least in the eastern states, right? But my favorite fun fact about the south Pennsylvania Railroad is that enough construction was done to sort of clear a right-of-way. And Pennsylvania turned around and used that for the turnpike. Yes. Yes, they sure did. So thank the New York Central for your Pennsylvania turnpike.

Thank you, New York Central. That's right. Please would, baby. Our previously mentioned friend of labor, Alexander Cassett, became president in 1899, began planning some of the largest public works undertaken in history to this point. So the New York Connecting Railroad, for instance, would allow the Pennsylvania Railroad to put a station smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, which is the New York Central's territory, and also connect to the New York, New Haven, and Hartford to get trains up to Boston. And this was, they built Penn Station. They built some of the first mainline underwater tunnels

under the Hudson and East Rivers. They built the Hellgate Bridge, and they wound up electrifying their whole mainline from Washington, D.C. to New York City over the next 30 years or so. Penn City kept expanding and improving their physical plant. They put in more tracks, automatic block signaling, grade separation, both between grade separation between roads and the railroad, and grade separation between different sections of the railroad. This is your positive composition. We accidentally made the most advanced railroad in the world for 100 years because we were trying to own New York. Yes. You had an automatic train stop for when trains ran signals. You had advanced telegraph telephone systems. They invented the

train phone, which was a way that you could use magnetic induction to have a telephone on the train, on the moving train. Oh, shit, that's sick. Yeah. It was either relayed through the rails or through adjacent telegraph lines. Fuck, that rolls. Yeah. It's a real bastard if you model trains, though, because all the Penn City equipment has these incredibly fine little wires across the tops of the roofs. This is true, yeah. Which you just immediately smash with the finger taking out of the damn box. During this era, they called themselves the standard railroad of the world. Everybody else was deluxe. Thank you, Rodney. This was because a lot of their equipment was very standardized, right? It was standardized almost to a fault. They were still building cars that

had been designed in 1908 in the 20s. But it was also a marketing scheme. And one of the things that helped their marketing scheme was that one of their employees invented the concept of public relations. Yeah, that was Ivy Ledbetter Lee, right? He invented both public relations and crisis communications. He was one of the guys who could go out and really issue a press release that would stop the press asking questions about like two trains that crashed into each other and a million people died. Absolutely not shooting anybody with cannons. No, he was able to. There was a scandal, I forget in what year, where someone discovered that in Broad Street Station, which was the Philadelphia, the main Philadelphia station at Pennsylvania Railroad, and also the company

headquarters, someone discovered that the attic had been converted into an armory where management stocked the rifles in case of labor unrest. And so Ledbetter Lee here said, oh no, these are for protection of the passengers. Again, sure. I don't know. And the press accepted that. Space aliens. Yeah. And then Lee was very good at his job. He went on to do PR for illustrious groups like Standard Oil, the Democratic National Convention, Bethlehem Steel, and of course the National Socialist German Workers Party. I mean, so you like the man had a consistent ideology. Yes. So between when they started electrifying the railroad in World War II, despite the depression, you know, it marks some of the high points of Pennsylvania Railroad engineering,

high speed luxury trains. You had lots of trains that could be run on not so much track, so high traffic density, but the railroad stagnation and like their organizational sense was sort of evident by this point. But they, you know, you had a sort of old aging sclerotic management, which wouldn't really be a problem until after the war. You know, and they're all mainline, you know, weird Protestant guys, right? Very, very Republican. Very, very, they were they were extremely racist in that peculiar mainline way. Oh, the kind where where they just happened to tamper with the amount of scholarships the black kids from West Philly get. Yeah. But you know, if one of them gets the Ruan scholarship,

they're nice enough to get through the sieve. I'm fine with the blacks and Jews as long as they don't come to my country club. That's the sort of thing we're looking at here. Yeah. I'm familiar. That's also because when I go to the country club, I drink 18 beers and I try to fight the CFO. I'm not bad for being Jewish. I'm bad for being an asshole. Now, despite this, the Pennsylvania Railroad was famous for never suspending the dividend during the Depression, right? So if you own Pennsylvania Railroad stock, you were still making a return on it. That's back from when stock was based on real stuff like dividends, as opposed to now, when it's based on fake stuff like the Tesla. Yeah, Tesla doesn't pay a dividend,

which I thought was wild. Do they not? They don't pay a dividend. That's insane. Their stock is worth so much and it's just based on being worth a lot. Do we mention that they don't electrify West of Pittsburgh because they were busy paying the dividend? I'm not sure if that was the reason, but yes, they planned to electrify out to Pittsburgh. That never happened. It was mostly it was Washington, D.C., the New York City, and Philadelphia to Harrisburg. That's most of what got electrified. Honestly, look at a map of electrified mainline rail in the U.S. today, and that's what Pennsylvania Railroad electrified. It's like a lost technology, like hubs.

Exactly. Yeah. Now, during World War II, you had this huge increase in railroad traffic, and then the high quality of the Pennsylvania Railroad's physical plant helps to stymie some of the horrible damage that occurred to other railroads because all the equipment got such a pounding it was being run so much. But deferred maintenance was a problem by the end of the war, especially the passenger facilities, which was very bad because passenger traffic after the war dropped off significantly. I do want to mention too, if you don't think the Pennsylvania Railroad was important, German saboteurs who are captured off Long Island as part of the United States

Dynasty's Governance Cooperation with the mob, you can read about it, Operation Underworld, one of the targets of sabotage was horseshoe curve. And the Hellgate Bridge, both Pennsylvania Railroad. You were saying when we were putting these slides together, I couldn't put the Hellgate Bridge on as a Pennsylvania Railroad thing. Hey, I know. This is a very past and podcast recording. That's right. We love you, Jay. Although you will be executed by firing squad at the end of this episode. By anti-aircraft cannon. We've been over this, yeah.

You'll have to go through the rocks the first. Now, after the war at the Pennsylvania Railroad, they're still going okay. They start building some of the largest and most advanced steam locomotives ever constructed. This is one of their big duplex locomotives. It's duplex because it has two sets of driving wheels with two sets of cylinders. So it can make better use of all the steam that the huge boiler has. You were running into problems where you're generating a huge amount of steam and you couldn't, you physically couldn't put it through one set of cylinders you needed to. I love this thing. It's so overbuilt. It is very cool.

It's not even articulated either. It's a rigid frame. They built several classes of these. Some of them went really fast, like this T1. Then they had the Q2, which is funny because it had four, it was a four, four, six, four. Just trying to do that in my head, trying to picture that. It had two sets of driving wheels, but there was a different number of driving wheels on each set. No one else ever did that. One awesome shit about this is like some of these giant duplex locomotives have these huge fuck off pipes for all the steam going past them. They're just absurdly cool looking.

And these things, they were very advanced. They had automatic train stop. They had cab signaling. They had automatic stokers. They had a whole nine yards. These were very modern locomotives for the late 40s. Not only did not have speedometers, which is how we don't know that we're not all of them had speedometers, which is why we. Yeah, that was a long Pennsylvania railroad tradition. No speedometers in the locomotives. You get just eyeball it. It just says fast. These, in theory, are faster than Mallard. Or faster than Mallard. In theory. So they're building a new one. Hey, Alice, you know how you don't speak German? I do speak German. Oh, yeah. Get her. Somebody get her. Take her away, boys. They're building a new one of these to take that wreck.

They're doing it. I am shocked every time I go back to that website and they've cast a new driver or whatever. Or they will have a full boiler done and I got the firebox done. The cab is done. The firebox is done. I think they've got three or four drivers done. They got the whole tender, the last one of its type. The frame is like out for bid or something like that. It's crazy. They're going to do it, which is ridiculous. Yes. But the Pennsylvania railroad as big and successful as it was in the after the war, you started to succumb to the pressures from the trucking industry from passengers who could afford their luxury trains, could also afford to fly Pan Am. You had subject to the large decline

that was the entire industry that was subject to. A lot of their revenue, they had to focus on bulk traffic. They had to focus on all your East Coast railroads were subject to the same economic pressures. That's a lot of what we're going to talk about in the next episode. Interstate highway system, so on and so forth, freight shipping to trucks, industrial sprawl. Again, that's next episode, but now we have to talk about the New York Central. That's right, baby. That's Jay. New York Central will start at the very beginning. In the 1820s, there was a problem. How do you get goods to Buffalo? Wagon. Well, that's how you did it originally. But New York State built the Erie Canal.

This was a canal, basically. It was like if the main line of public works worked, and also if it didn't have to have a bunch of inclines and go over a bunch of mountains and shit, because New York is much flatter than Pennsylvania. The Erie Canal was a publicly managed canal linking Buffalo and Albany, which more specifically linked the Great Lakes and the Atlantic without having to dive over Niagara Falls, which good thing to avoid. Yeah, you have to put all the goods into a barrel for that. All the goods, all the crew members, there's just a lot of barrels. Great for Coopers, but everyone else, not so much.

So, basically, if you ever look at all the... If you know more cities in the state of New York other than New York City, chances are pretty good they're either along the Hudson or along the Erie Canal. That's basically just where everything grew up. Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Buffalo, Schenectady, all these places with their Albany expressions and what not. Sorry, I knew I was ready for you setting up for that and I figured I'd diffuse that for you. You actually did, yeah. That was going to be my next thing. You took the words right out of my mouth. Just as revenge for them, I'm just going to interrupt you with the drop of it that I have. So, please continue as normal and enter a full sense of security.

Got it. So, you can't have... D-pams. Okay. See, I thought you were going to wait until later and really get me down to these things. Steady hands. Okay. So, you can't have any... See, now I've lost it. Thank you. That's... I'm a master of the psychological warfare shit. Like, yeah. Truly.

Oh, boy. You can't have a big public amenity like this in the early to mid-1800s without businessmen and financiers wanting to take advantage of it. God forbid, right? J.P. Morgan, again, poking his enormous nose into it. Pretty much. So... I'm not joking about that. If you look up a picture of J.P. Morgan, it's like... Oh, he had a fucking...

It was a fucking... Yeah. And I know something about big noses in greed. Let me tell you. Oh, my. Steamed hams. Thank you, Alice. So, we got the... Business people want to do this and you can't really build a parallel canal. That would be way too expensive.

So, it's time to rely on that. Very funny, though. Cool new technology, the railroad. So, a whole bunch of small little railroads, kind of each... Paralleling the Erie Canal and linking adjacent cities, you know, Buffalo to Rochester, Rochester to Syracuse, Syracuse to Utica, Utica to Albany. I think it was a specific, another one, a separate one from Albany to Troy, which are like the same city now.

And of course, Albany down to New York City were all separate small railroads. And in 1853, they were all combined and merged together to make the New York Central. The main line went straight from New York City up to Albany, then turned west at Buffalo. And because it was basically all paralleling rivers and canals, incredibly flat, which is extremely different to the twisty mountainous curvy Pennsylvania railroad. Like, there's nothing like... It's handy for shipping goods. And then once you've built that, you can also, as this pamphlet says,

take your wife along. Yeah, it's true. I'm amazed the return limit is three months. So you can really go on quite the expedition. Why not bring the ultimate piece of breakball cargo, your wife. Do we talk about Cornelius Vanderbilt overthrowing the government of Nicaragua? I mean, that was recreational for him. It was.

That's just sort of the things that you did. Yeah, especially if you were named Cornelius. I was. Well, you're about to get into some fun stuff and be careful about what you say. So it was famously purchased pretty soon after kind of amalgamation into one railroad by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who is a distant relative of mine, to the point where if I was going to be a girl, I was going to be named Cornelia. They should have stuck with the Cornelius, though, I think.

That would have been fun. Also, a relative of Anderson Cooper, whose mother was Gloria Vanderbilt. So he basically went and used his massive influence of being a shipping mogul, robber, baron, industrial tycoon, whatever the hell you want to call them, to collect and merge in other railroads. So the big four, the Michigan Central, a whole bunch of smaller lines, the Boston Albany, the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. So pretty much all the kind of thicker lines on this map,

except for the one between New York Albany and Albany to Buffalo, were these extra railroads that he brought in. And basically it led to a 13,000 mile network that really kind of took over the whole northeastern U.S. And northeastern, again, sort of being relative because it went as far as St. Louis to the west, which not quite as far as Nebraska. But it also went farther south than the Pennsylvania did. It made it to Cairo, Illinois, which is where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers meet. And a site that basically everybody thought would be this big, huge mega city to rival New York,

and sweet F.A. ever happened. That's still time. There is still time. Yeah, crime capital of the world. Is it really? Oh, dude, Cairo is rough, at least from what I understand. Not Cairo, it's Cairo. It's Cairo, right?

Didn't I say Cairo? No, you said Cairo, yeah. Oh, my fault. Yeah, Cairo, from what I understand, is very rough. I obviously could be wrong, but I don't think I am now. Just need to scratch that off my list of deeply nerdy railroad tourism destinations. We'd probably go there and not be killed. No, you have to go, Jay.

Visit Cairo, be killed. Jay, you're like eight and a half feet tall, dude. You're going to be fine. Got those Vanderbilt jeans, you know? Look, I might have some of the jeans barely, but none of the money. Jay, I have seen your cheekbones, sir. No, I mean, you get attacked by a poorer person. The genetics just kick in before you know you're like

beating them unconscious with a diamond-tipped cane. Yeah, he's got the Batman car. I need to get that. I have a good cane that is in my name, but it's in India and I need it. 00:57:46,880 --> 00:57:50,240 I told them the story of how you think Jay is handsome. He is so handsome. See?

Thank you. I hope that made the podcast. And I'm not just leaving him. Just thanking nothing. Anyway, the New York Central went from St. Louis and Cairo all the way to Montreal and Boston, including like some pretty substantial lines up through Southern Ontario, which is pretty cool and a route that you cannot take by train today

because the border crossing doesn't really let you do that. Once again, Canadian 9-11 is, yeah. Critically for New York Central, they had exclusive access to Manhattan until 1910 when the Pennsylvania Railroad and Cassit went and built Penn Station and the Connecting Railroad. It was a pretty big deal because everybody else, you had to get off in Jersey and take a boat. So it was a huge outlay and a huge like, or not outlay,

it was a huge like promotional piece to be like, yeah, we'll actually get you to Manhattan. Unlike everybody else, we have to get on a boat like some commoner scum. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Is that the... Roz, Jay, just the PRR that ends at Hoboken, right?

Or Jersey City. Pennsylvania Railroad ended at Exchange Place. Which is in Jersey City, yeah. Yeah, where you exchanged to the fit. Okay, yeah, because we have a stolen, I mean, definitely not stolen. Signed from Hoboken Terminal. Nice. We have a legitimately acquired sign.

Yeah, my parents sit on the ton of railroad memorabilia that they won't explain where it came from. It was a drift at sea and on fire. It was a drift at sea. Absolutely, we have salvage rights over this sign. But yeah, it was what, the Hoboken was the Erie Lackawanna. The Erie Lackawanna, there we go. Yeah.

But you know, it used to be, if you ever look at Jersey City, the reason why it's all modern and new buildings, because it was 100% railroad terminals. Because the only way to get to New York City proper by train was our good pals at the New York Central. All of their railroads were focused on low grades following rivers. So even the ones that they bought and, you know, they were bought early enough that they were still mostly charters and things.

Fuck hills. Yeah. Fuck hills. But really what this lets you do is build faster trains and use smaller locomotives. So you never got any huge articulated locomotives or duplex drive locomotives basically anywhere. No, the New York Central railroad does not believe in topography. No, you just go flat and you follow the river.

And honestly, it's why that if you ever look at some of those crayon maps of the US high speed rail network, a lot of it follows former New York Central routes in the Northeast. Because that's, apart from a couple twisty pieces and curves and bad junctions and things, you got your straight flat railroad right here. People are too cowardly to build an Allegheny base tunnel. That's true.

So next slide, please. Now, this is probably what you're familiar with the New York Central for. They're pretty kick-ass streamliners. There were some of the earliest sort of traditional streamliners, even though they were steam and came after some of the diesel ones. They were special locomotives pulling more standard cars. Instead, like the really early streamliners were these wild kind of integrated train sets. They commissioned Henry Dreyfus to make all of these.

He's a famous industrial designer, and you'd sort of see his influence on all of this stuff. And I love all of them. I mean, you just look at these, you're just like... Just Art Deco icons. And one of the big things that he did was he also modernized the interiors. So I don't have any shots of it here because they were all really low res. But they were very bright and modern,

and like they'd still feel kind of modern, slightly retro. Streamline, modern kind of thing. Yeah, in a major way, in this huge contrast. I mean, you could just see sort of the Beaux Arts buildings and things around. Yeah, I mean, you see why people, where for, you get the sort of like watercolor poster of steel mills and progress and shit. This looks like it's been dropped in from space. It really does.

And like everything else in your life looks like basically unchanged since the 1890s, except maybe it has an internal combustion engine on it. And then this fucking thing shows up. I mean, it's wild. Absolutely. It's also really cool. Sorry. I was just thinking along those lines, like have you ever seen

Le Corbusier's photographs of his own buildings, where he always puts a 1920s car in front of his incredibly modern building. The building still looks modern today, but the car looks antiquated as all hell. You know, I guess sort of a similar contrast. Well, I don't know, maybe not similar. It just, it reminds me. Yeah, but what was incredible with this too is they were so concerned about kind of the overall experience on these trains that they, you know, the interiors, the exteriors,

they had special features. So the 20th century limited, which is the one on the left, had a barber on it with the idea of being that it ran a schedule. So you'd finish up work in New York City. You would get on the train. You would pull out of the, of Grand Central. And then you'd have dinner up on the way. You'd fall asleep sort of around Albany.

Then you'd wake up the next morning. You'd send your shoes to the onboard shoe shiner. You'd go and get your hair cut and you were in Chicago ready to start the work day, 9 a.m. the next day. Incredible. Which just like Broadway limited also had a barber to compete with them. Yes. Yeah.

Those are the two, the two big rivals, the New York Central 20th century. Rises too. I have to imagine. Little and figurative. Bouncing along on jointed rail as well. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah, this is before getting a straight razor shave.

But yeah. So like these were very kind of scrappily, not scrappily put together. It's sort of the wrong word, but like they really made the most of existing infrastructure. The train on the right, the Mercury, or that's the Mercury train set. The cars for there were old commuter cars that they went and rebuilt for this. So instead of at first, instead of purchasing bespoke, lightweight cars or whatever, they just said, we're going to give this to an industrial designer to really trick out and make nice. And this is it running down.

This is Syracuse, right? I believe that's Syracuse Street. Yeah. Though the Mercury never ran to Syracuse. I think this was a demonstration run showing off how sick their train is. But the 20th century would just like come through like 60 miles an hour, right? I'm not 100% sure because I this, you know, obviously I went and found this picture. This is the famous one that everybody tries to recolor and gets wrong.

What do you think are wrong about the recoloring out of curiosity? It's just that I think they make it way too blue when it was really more of a silver. Sadly, none of these survive. You'll learn more about why later. So kind of hard to know. But anyway, so these Mercury's, yeah, they ran between Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati and Detroit. So it was kind of a streamliner hub based around Detroit.

Tons of trains between New York City and Chicago, including one, the Wolverine up through Canada, north of Lake Erie. The Wolverine? The Wolverine. One tradition I do admire Americans for all is... Go blue, Alice. Is a named train as a service rather than like the individual locomotive or whatever being named.

And as you say, there's some good names. Yeah, all the Northeast regionals had names until like 2001. They did. And they were mostly just the old Pennsylvania railroad names, too, which was hilarious. And a lot of them were a lot less sexy, right? For every Twilight shoreliner or Twilight Limited, there was a Bay States or New England States or, you know, a bunch of garbage like that. You all get really fucked up on the overnight fast mail.

New York Central Render, James Whitcomb Riley. That's the fast Liam backwards, Roz. That's how you know it's a good train. My dad has stories about his college friends who everyone took the fast mail to get home from GW. And he had stories about people who had been banned from the fast mail. Jesus. Insane.

I'm just still writing the high of the 20th century limited as a name. Like I think the sort of the unspoken dynamic of this three part episode is like Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central are like the team fortress two teams, right? And me as a sort of agnostic here, me in the middle, this is like, you know, Justin on the one hand and Jay on the other trying to like pull me into their camp. And so far, honestly, I'm feeling I'm feeling pretty New York Central. That's right. I'm feeling New York Central Pilled.

That's right. No, it's it's it's cool. It's cool. No, it's cool. It's cool. It's cool. Look, fewer Nazi collaborators. Tire iron.

No, please, please ignore the tire iron, Alice. Yeah. Fewer Nazi collaborators is a big point in Jay's favor. I'm not going to say no. I haven't done that. Yeah, it's no Nazi collaborators. Yeah. Fewer.

Many fewer. It's low sodium, not no sodium. Yeah. Am I coming across OK? Are my levels OK? Yeah. No, you said you said your levels are fine. Excellent.

Thank you. I'm I'm sort of just I'm in my I'm on my tablet, which is plugged into the wall now. Thanks, Alice. You're curious to me. So I'm recording in the most weird position I've ever recorded in, but I'm I'm in a lovely hotel room in my underpants, cranking it, cranking pod for you.

Yes. Thank you. You're welcome. Ross, you've seen it before, buddy. No, I haven't. I made a point of not seeing it. You have seen my butt. You have absolutely seen my butt.

I did see that once. All right. Jay, back to you. You might also know the grand the New York Central from Grand Central Terminal. They are out of this central and it has not been destroyed. We'll get to that. Yeah.

Grand Central, of course. The big fancy station built in response to Penn Station, actually the current Grand Central Penn Station was a little older. They had Grand Central Depot, which was much harder to track down pictures of and shittier. But basically, you know, the Vanderbilt's were kind of your definition of old money, even at the time, and personally appointed all of Grand Central to be as beautiful and grand and opulent as possible. Yeah, the sort of like the rock thing.

Yeah, and it was it was also a statement of their wealth and power. And at the time, it was very trendy to be like, and we're making it a public good. Here I am, you know, the Carnegie Library. Here you are. Just remember to think of your your grand benefactors, the Vanderbilt's, every time you take a train and pay us money to take a train somewhere. It's kind of a contrast to Penn Station, which even as grand as it was,

it was still an austere kind of grandeur. One thing I read, which I thought was very entertaining is Alexander Cassett didn't know anything about architecture. And so but it's one of his one of his direct someone recommended to him, hey, hire McKim, Mead and White. And he talked to McKim, Mead and White, and they're like, we don't know anything about train stations. And and that was a match made in heaven right there.

And so when you say an austere kind of grandeur, I'm picturing the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad sitting like a cure or chair like watching watching the concourse. Well, there's like one statue in the entire Penn Station. And it was a statue of Alexander Cassett. Yeah, I mean, meanwhile, Grand Central, you know, huge statues on the outside, like the big famous one with the clock in the middle and Apollo, the Tiffany clock, the big spherical clock on top of the information booth right in the middle of the concourse, which is still there.

Wild to look at up close because all the hands are curved, which is strange. You got to do it for a spherical clock. Uh, Grant, the New York Central did not really electrify as much as the Pennsylvania did. They weren't as concerned about that because they generally ran trains with smaller, lighter locomotives and could still achieve those speeds. They did have small electrified urban networks based around Detroit, Cleveland and New York City because steam locomotives were illegal in Manhattan after a big time train crash because smoke in a tunnel legal.

Yes. Don't do that. Yeah, smoke in the tunnel obscured a signal and a, I think it was a New Haven train plowed straight into the back of a New York Central train or maybe the opposite. And they went, ooh, maybe we should stop doing that. And electrified. Detroit and Cleveland were more for freight lines. Detroit for the electrified Detroit Windsor tunnel, which is still there, just not electric.

Cleveland was, Cleveland also had a steam locomotive band. You had to switch to an electric locomotive to get into Cleveland Union Terminal. For unit? Yeah. Cool. So that's kind of the heyday in New York Central. After World War II. And then what happened? I don't know what happened. Well, this is a picture, I believe, of that same 20th century limited.

Oh, it's in color. It's in color. Oh, God, it looks like Doom 3. It's not the best. Note the two different styles of cars that was used to have been assigned to two different streamliners. The silver ones in the front were the Empire State Express. The rear ones were 20th century limited.

Both were famous marquee trains. I think none of these three locomotives match. You've got a later V8 in the back. You've got the lightning stripe in the middle. You've got the earlier E7 in the front. Anyway, not great. Post World War II, like most railroads, especially in the Northeast, the New York Central was in a decline.

There was enormous wartime traffic that kept things afloat. But as with the Pennsylvania, hounded the network. And the New York Central's physical plant was not quite as good. A lot was four-tracked still. And they were pretty good at keeping things maintained. But just it was overbuilt to handle all of this extra traffic. You had borrowed locomotives. You had extra locomotives.

You had all sorts of stuff that you just couldn't quite keep up. And not great. Competing airline, trucking, and auto traffic whittled the way at all sides of the business. Critically, the New York Center was a little more Northeastern focused. It was really kind of the heart of the network was upstate New York, out to Boston, those sorts of places. And after World War II, there was a lot of emigration from there,

specifically on the freight side. You got a lot of deindustrialization up there just after World War II. And that meant that your real money makers, the freight business, you ended up with a bunch of expensive tracks and expensive trains, not hauling a lot of freight. In the mid-fifties, Al Perman, who we'll talk about a lot, was brought on to be the president. He was not a traditional railroader, namely the fact that he was Jewish, which was...

Railroads were kind of the last bastion of waspiness, especially railroad leadership. And for the fact that Al Perman was brought in, it was kind of a real sign that the New York Center was ready to kind of run things differently. America's last batch of anti-Semitism until all of the rest of it. It's an American tradition, Halis. It's a batch of a sort of bastion of.

I don't know, this is like the last big business anti-Semitism. Certainly, small business anti-Semitism is alive and well. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about big business anti-Semitism before this. You've got Hollywood, but then Louis Mayer destroyed a great deal of that, and I want to say way pre-war. Yeah, I was about to say, if you had Penn Central right now, they'd be playing advertisements about their queer millennial engineers with anxiety. I wonder if the CIA is still a bastion of anti-Semitism,

because you've still got all of those Yale skull and bones guys in there, plus all the weird Mormons. Anyway, Al Perman. He was not really your traditional railroader. He was just kind of, and I'm going to name drop, a very good book on this whole subject. He was a man who loved trains. A great book.

It is a good book. The book is The Men Who Love Trains. But he was a good fit for the New York Center, because it wasn't really a traditional railroad anymore. Their heights of grandeur had never been as giant and profitable, and old-school gold-plated as the Pennsylvania. They were the kind of cool brother, almost. The alternative is the railroad, the Vapes.

Yeah, the New York Center, a railroad that vapes. The fourth kind of train. Pennsylvania Railroad is more of a conquering foreign power. Yeah. The P&O Railroad is a railroad that dips and hates you. Marching elephants and 200 coal cars over the Alleghenies. Yeah, railroad that vapes, second car this train here, or the fifth after the locomotives, appears to be vaping.

So it's a good match. It's true. Pennsylvania Railroad, the railroad that hates you back. Genuinely true. Especially if we get into, I think, in the next episode, or maybe in the third episode, the commuter, the state of the commuter operations. The railroad that hates you so much,

it stockpiles rifles just in case. It's to protect the passengers, Alice. Oh, yeah, right. I'm sorry. So the center was, go ahead, Joe. It was more stylish. It was leaner than the Pennsylvania, which was, you know. More stylish.

Get the fuck out of here. Oh, it was stylish. Can we just reverse one slide to that 20th century? Don't go back. Real quick. Don't go back. If we go ahead and tell you, there we go. So it was the more stylish railroad.

Now we can get out of here. I mean, I think I get the, like, casting vote here. And yeah, no, he's right. I do think a lot of the Dreyfus designs were... I think you just thought about the Mallard, Alice. I think the Dreyfus Hudson looks better than the Raymond Lowy K-4. I will say that.

The K-4 is not a very fashionable locomotive. Especially the semi-streamline K-4. I think K-4s weren't great. The Pennsylvania had two really, really, like, all-timer streamlined locomotives, the G1 and the T1. And the rest were, like, below average. The S1 looked really good. I'm not a big S1 fan.

Sorry. The T1 prototype, I said, looked a lot better than the production T1s. I haven't. I don't spend my time looking at a tremendous amount of Pennsylvania locomotives. I apologize. Oh, that was brutal.

I don't think about you at all. I don't even concern myself with the activities of the Pennsylvania railroad. See, again, that was, like, pure Vanderbilt. I'm sorry. The, like, epigenetic memory is real. And it only takes the form of, like, trains, but... Oh, God.

A lot of that, you know, the Vanderbilt Glitz and Glamour was real. And... Yeah, the breakers exist. No one remember Alexander Cassett's house. It was on Ridney Square. It was demolished for the big hotel there. Ross, there's...

Frank Furness designed it. Yeah, but I could name two Vanderbilt houses off the top of my head, Ross. Yeah, we'll look at any big house on the main line. There's a street named after Alexander Cassett in Burwin. A bunch of big houses. Oh, wow, in Burwin.

Wow, in Burwin. Yeah, it's the fucking main line. That's where all the bunch of... I don't know if I'm just trying to guess the answer. I'm round on this one. Would you say Alice? I just said I had talk to you round on this one on the glamour of the Vanderbilt.

I will say, I do like the Biltmore estate and Ken Vouch for the tour. I actually also purchased the breakers with the Patreon money since we're so wealthy from Patreon. Oh, you see, I spent it all on one of those cars that's currently on fire. Oh, rookie mistake.

So, Perlman showed up to be president of New York Central under Robert Young, who unfortunately kind of during all of this sort of decline had to suspend the dividend for New York Central, which was seen as like deeply shameful. Well, Robert Young did, and then he committed suicide as a result. He also had...

He had to commit seppuku. He wrote his death poem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wrote his death poem on a stock certificate. But this basically left Perlman in charge, which he was sort of just expecting to be the president of the railroad, but he was kind of completely in charge.

And the big problem was, when he and Young had come on, they kind of learned that the New York Central was broke, like really broke. They'd been late to see... We accidentally spent all of our money on a 500-foot guilt statue of a Vanderbilt. Of a Vanderbilt.

Huge... You had huge amounts of assets in all these companies, and you had huge cash flow, but no cash on hand. Yeah, the margins were incredibly thin on account of those competition. You could sell some of the guilt at... No, absolutely not.

Well, even that was still like a fairly small amount of, you know, the actual physical assets. Yeah, exactly. Protecting my gold-plated trade with my gold-plated cannon. I think that's a criticism, which is legitimate for the Catholic Church, but not the railroad. The railroad actually does things.

The railroad can't mess up baptisms, but the Catholic Church could run a trade company into the ground. So, the New York Central had been late to dieselize, and they really kind of didn't focus on traffic that wasn't their prime moneymakers, which is something you're kind of seeing, again, happening today.

Though, obviously, it's dieselized. But there's a quote, I'm afraid what has happened over the years is that we've concentrated on steel and coal, and we've let other traffic go to the highway, which, of course, now railroads are actively pushing other traffic that aren't the prime moneymakers away to the highway.

No one ever learns from history is what I'm getting from this. Which is insane. And there was a big reason why the New York Central was failing is because they were spending a ton of money on expensive-to-run passenger services that were no longer profitable. They were spending a ton of money on crates

with razor-thin margins, and it wasn't great. So, Proman, on kind of taking charge of this, he overhauled management with a bunch of like-minded younger guys. I think he was only in his mid-40s, which was basically a newborn for railroad executives, probably at the time, not be exaggerating too much, but had civil war stories.

Yeah, yeah. So, all minimum 70 years old have eaten a cigar a day since the age of three. Absolutely. Yeah. And have had butlers their entire lives as all these tycoons and barons. And remember the good old days

when you had this tea kettle engine pulling wooden cars? Proman overhauled the management, and basically he implemented kind of like modern company, like a modern kind of cool company, business culture. Everybody was called each other by their first names, except for Al Proman, who everybody called Mr. Proman. Though he is quoted in The Men Who Love Trains as saying, I would have let them call me Al if they wanted to.

We have all of these guys who have only ever grown up with bosses who whipped them with a fucking saddle whip for even making eye contact with them. I'm like, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. I'm not gonna, no, no, no. No, I'm not. Yeah. This guy is trudging through the halls, sadly,

at the New York Central office with you. You can call me Al. You can call me Al blaring through a stereo, just looking for, learnably at his employees, pointing to the boombox, like, guys. You can call me Al. Big name tag says, hi, my name is Al. It's like, Mr. Proman, please.

God, you can call me Al. This guy trying to single-handedly reform this culture, he's like, no, no, you don't have to kiss my shoes every time you try to tell me something. Really, that makes me uncomfortable. Yeah, but no, they're all doing it. In contrast, a friend of labor, Alexander Cassid, where there's at least a couple anecdotes of him,

he never fired anyone on the Paoli local, which he took to work every day, but he did severely berate several conductors who didn't recognize him and were rude to him. Yeah, it was kind of, the more I was looking into this for this episode, it was kind of an impressively modern sort of corporate culture, at least from my tech industry poison corporate culture lens.

I don't necessarily think they had free snacks and nap pods, but for the 50s, it was probably the equivalent of that. He allowed frontline workers to suggest ideas and improvements, which was radical to let people actually on the ground be like, hey, we should run the trains like this. And he sent researchers to other railroads to learn best practices and to set up ways to find money or find ways.

He even set up research labs, which went and looked at the deep sciences of railroading, and they developed like new engine oil formulations to save literally like millions of dollars of engine wear and maintenance. Wow. And really kind of got deep into this and what took the fairly shoestring budget

of the New York Central to kind of really overhaul it. And it was on the ups, though, you know, relative to the overall decline of the industry, still on the decline. He really, one other thing he developed was Flexivan, which was a very early container on flat car service, which pretty much revolution, like eventually revolutionized railroading, sort of intermodal thing.

I was reading a book today about containerization in general. It's called The Box. And apparently, some of these Flexivan containers actually managed to make it as far afield as Europe and Japan, which I just think is a wild thing. You see like a Flexivan trailer with big New York Central cigar band on the side, just in the streets of Tokyo. Hell yeah.

On two K cars. Yeah. But he developed these, you know, in a very modern sort of city. He's like, we're losing traffic to trucks. Here's how we can gain it back. We need to be focusing on trying to regain this traffic, regain these profits, and to really especially get for like merchandise traffic as the Northeast kind of divested from manufacturing.

So it was trying to get these goods manufactured elsewhere up to where people living. He ushered in a pretty early set of like what we now might think of like precision scheduled railroading priorities. He reduced infrastructure. He ripped up the quad track mainlines and replaced them with computerized double tracks. So they had crossover switches every seven miles,

so you could still get efficient passing operations. And kind of with tighter scheduling and everything, you didn't need four tracks because who knows where trains were. You could just have used two more smartly. And actually the railroad was so broke, they ripped up these tracks and used the rails to rebuild the yards instead of buying new rails. They would rip the tracks up, they'd throw the rails onto flat cars and bring them elsewhere and use them to rebuild other parts of the system.

He implemented a really stunningly advanced computer-based control system. Essential control and control switches and movements for entire stretches of track, you know, hundreds of miles. Jay, what year did he introduce that system? Do you know? The computerized systems? Yeah. This was all the kind of...

I think he gained full control like 59, so sort of in like 62, through 65 or so. Liam and I both trying to picture what size room you need for the computer here. The biggest one you have. The giant tape backs, you know. I'll take a tape. Guys running around on shopping carts to swap out the vacuum tubes. Yeah, exactly.

We had a five megabyte hard drive delivered yesterday on three flat cars. He overhauled freight yards as well to be computer-controlled, so you'd have systems of... So the way these work, they're hump yards, ha ha ha. But you'd push a train up the hump and then uncouple the cars at the top and people would... They'd roll down and switch, you'd switch trains on these tracks. But he built computer-controlled ones in the early 60s that used radar to detect how fast the trains were going and automatically applied track brakes, basically retarders that would pinch the wheels and slow the trains down

so that they would all couple at the perfect speeds to the right train. Fuck. So before this, you had to have a line of breakmen who would climb onto the train at the top and stand and ride the handbrake down. They'd ride these cars down, smash into the car under the handbrake, then run back up and ride the next car down. And instead, he's like, yeah, here, we'll have one guy in the tower and he's got the list of cars and he knows what tracks these need to go on.

The switches are computer-controlled based on this. And bam, bam, bam, it's going to perfectly park these cars at the exact right speed to couple. It's always amazing how much productivity improvements there were at hump yards. And yeah, your overalls are still trying to get rid of them and use flat yards instead. These hump yards? So Selkirk quadrupled its processing capacity. It was like 2,800 cars a day and it went up to almost 10,000 cars a day. Wow.

With this at one yard, it was insane. I just love this idea that it's the 50, so no one knows how much radar costs yet. So it's plausible that you can just show up and be like, hi, I'm from the New York Central Railroad. I'd like to buy one radar system for every yard that I have. I will give you one shiny silver dollar and a guy wearing a sweater vest who has been staring at an oscilloscope screen over the course of the entire war is like, that's more money than I've ever seen in my life.

Absolutely. So Perlman, however, he was kind of a land of contrast for train buffs and foamers and whatever you want to call it. He was not sentimental. He axed the 20th century limit. He's like, it's not making money. Buy ripped up tracks. As we said, he really quickly and really completely dieselized.

And to pay for that, he sent every single New York Central Steam locomotive to the scrapper. But wasn't even that it was he actively wanted all the locomotives scrapped because he didn't want the central to be viewed as an old fashioned organization. He wanted the complete history of it to be annihilated just completely. Yeah. So yeah, there's no. So of their most famous locomotives, the Hudson's, the Niagara's, they're all gone. They were all turned to razor blades because of this one guy. Even if you could pay for the locomotive at fair market value for preservation,

he wouldn't give it to you. He insisted on having it scrapped to exist. One which was sold, I believe, as part of a locomotive trade to another row, I think to the Texas Pacific, actually, in 57. So before he could get his hands on it. To escaped him. Another one was was hidden by crews who were sentimental. They literally squirreled it away in the back of a shop and covered it in tarps and shit.

And like didn't let him or his guys see that they had it. That's it on the New York Central. If you could just go to the next slide. I didn't realize this was here. Could you go to the next slide? Oh, oh, that's really funny that these ended up in this presentation. Well, you know, I mean, there's a reason why they tore down Penn Station and not Grand Central.

And we'll get to that. That's true. It's because Grand Central looks nice. There's Perlman on the left, by the way. Yes. Wait, this is Perlman? Yeah, that's Perlman. And this is Saunders.

That's yeah. Saunders is the guy who looks like the Turtle Club guy for them. Kissinger. Big bald Kissinger. My God. Lifetime movies adaptation of Mike Pence and Bernie. I guess we want to introduce some of the characters here we're going to be talking about. One of which is Jim Sims.

He was president of the Pennsylvania Railroad before the merger, but he was one of the first guys who said, I need to get out of this office before it kills me. Because traditionally, the office of president of the Pennsylvania Railroad killed everyone who took it. Dude, if I was president of the PRR, Mike, all my desk drawers would just be labeled bourbon. I would have a little cot under my desk, and I'd have a shotgun like that architect you like. And if someone came in and said, Mr. Anderson, we need your help at Hartford, I would put two in the chest and say, don't bother me before lunch. I cannot imagine that job other than just like, yeah, you dropped out of a heart attack.

That's your retirement package. So one of Sims last acts as president of the Pennsylvania Railroad was to recommend the next president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And this will be ironic for reasons that we will get into shortly, which was Stuart Saunders, who was president of the Norfolk and Western Railroad, right? And so he was educated at Roanoke College, then went to Harvard Law School. He had an incredibly, he had a proven track record and a very successful track record of managing a railroad that had a whole lot of income and few expenses, right?

Because Norfolk and Western had this great business model called, we haul one thing, it's coal, we move it from West Virginia to Norfolk, Virginia. And you can make a lot of money doing that. Yeah. And then we have Perlman, another key character who we just talked about. One extra fact is before going to the New York Central, he had helped turn around the Denver and Rio Grande Western, which later destroyed all of their steam locomotives also. Yeah, like King Kong, just flinging them into ditches.

Yeah. The men who love trains, only diesel trains though. You can even sort of see the ethos in like the logos up here when they're both next to each other. Right? The Pennsylvanians had that Keystone logo forever and this New York Central logo, it was a much more sort of ornate oval thing. Yeah, the cigar band thing, yeah. And then they redid it to the cigar band. The 1880s Pennsylvania Railroad was this bizarre, much more, it was the same format, but the lettering was much more ornamental.

Also, I believe there were some like floral things that came up off the top and the sides. There should have been in the 1880. Everything needed to take like four days of a professional lithographer to go in. That's what they valued the labor of people who drew things. Hand engraveds, corporate logo. Right up until they shot them. Now we have to talk about the redheaded stepchild. Oh, please don't be mean to her.

The New York New Haven and Hartford Railroad. I would rate delivery. That might be the only person alive who likes this railroad. I like the livery, New Haven. I like the livery, yeah. 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 wtyppod. Do it if you want.

Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. The New Haven, the main line went from Boston to New York City and New Haven to Hartford and Springfield, Massachusetts, and they had a lot of problems. Chief among the big, they'd never really been solving ever. Despite that, they managed to massively overbuild their infrastructure.

The line from New Haven to New York City was completely electrified. At a huge cost, it was designed to handle huge amounts of goods manufactured in New England, which by the 50s and 60s, they weren't manufacturing that much goods in New England. And a lot of the new industry that was popping up was shipping stuff by truck. Pratt and Whitney out near Hartford ships everything by truck or by plane. They had no use for the New York, New Haven, and Hartford. But it was massively overbuilt, nonetheless.

And they were required to operate lots of commuter service, because if not, Connecticut would implode. The other thing is, Sikorsky isn't Connecticut, but it doesn't go so well when you try to strap a helicopter to a train. Now, my proposal for the Hover Train was for Helitrain, was shot down, unfortunately, by Roz and his RPG7. I thought it was very rude of you. Like you imply that both the idea was shot down in the physical product.

You managed to consolidate both, yeah. Frequent. Well, there's your problem, listeners. We'll remember the New Haven from those guys who owned those lightweight cars that were a bit shitty and managed to fuck up a train, driving straight into Washington Union Station. Yes, the Osgoode Bradley cars that were made out of three kinds of metal that all interacted poorly with each other. And at this point, it recently been run.

I don't remember who was still run, but it recently run by Patrick McGinnis. And Patrick McGinnis' main legacy is this very smart paint scheme that everyone loves. Absolutely. And also an insane libertarian management style, which drove the railroad into even more chronic bankruptcy than it had before. Absolutely. Tell me about the insane libertarian management style.

I unfortunately, I don't know too much about it. I need to go back. Yeah, he wasn't running it by the end. He was succeeded by George Albert, I want to say. Didn't McGinnis only run it for like a year and nine months? It was hilariously brief. Yeah, yeah. That's how long it takes for libertarianism to destroy a railroad.

Yeah. Genuinely. They also had a train called the Cranberry, which is one of my favorites. So the problem was that the New Haven had like your big problem here is it could never make money. And it absolutely had to run. And the government's not going to give you any help. But they have to give it to someone.

But no one wanted it. It was bad for business. And this is where maybe to understand sort of why these railroads are unprofitable, especially in the most populous area of the area of the United States, we should talk a little bit about railroad economics here, right? And before we do that, can we talk about the turbo train? Because that was that was New Haven, man. That was New Haven.

I'll probably get its own episode. What is it? The UAC one. Is that the New Haven? That was the New Haven. I didn't know that. Yeah, it hit 170 miles an hour in 1968, and they never operated in revenue service. Jesus.

In the US, Canada ran them. Yes. I thought that was Amtrak. Nope. Nope. Well, later, it does appear in Amtrak paint. I have a I bought a folder on eBay from the unveiling and handover ceremony from the DOT to the New Haven.

Wow. So I have a bunch of information from that. Pictures, please. Oh, I need to scan it all. OK, thank you. Did it did it appear in McGinnis paint scheme? No, I think it was still in the DOT. It shouldn't have.

Because that was that would be after McGinnis. Yeah. So yeah, let's I guess we'll talk a little bit about basic free rail concepts here, right? You put the goods onto the train. The train goes to where it needs to go. You take them off. That's basic free. We've all played video games.

Yeah, we've played Transport Tycoon. No, it's actually much, much more complicated. So one of your what you do when you're trying to put a train together, right, is you take many cars going to many different destinations, you put them all together in one train that goes sort of near all those destinations, then you take it apart again, right? And then you send them all to other destinations on many smaller trains, right? And so if you are shipping, let's say, from Los Angeles over here to Chicago over here, you handle highly sort of like conceptual map of the United States.

Exactly. You handle the car maybe once or twice in L.A. and then you handle the car again in Chicago once or twice to get it to its customer, right? Santa Fe all the way. Exactly. This is easy in the West because there's only a couple interstitial destinations. You might handle the car, you can ship to St. Louis and that'll be another direct trip or Denver.

That'll be another generally direct trip, right? But on the East Coast, there's lots of destinations, right? And they're all close together. And so let's say, I don't know, I have a carload of something. What's made in South Jersey? Steamed hams. Blueberries. Blueberries.

I don't know. Lockheed has a plant there, but I don't know if they actually make anything there. Just go with the steamed hams. I'm saving that one up for a while. Steamed hams. I have a carload of steamed hams made in Collingswood, New Jersey. Yeah, they have to get to Utica. They have to get to Utica.

That's a good example. So in order to do that, because there's so much local industry, this car then goes to Pavonia Yard in Camden, where it's sorted into a train, which I think today would go directly to Selkirk Yard. But back in the day, it would cross the river because you have to transfer between Pennsylvania Redding Seashore lines to the Pennsylvania Railroad. It would go to the West Philadelphia Yards, right? And then you've got to hand off the car again to New York Central at that point.

So it would have to go back up to Oak Point or something like that. You have to handle the car again. Oak Point sounds right. It might have been done in Jersey City as well. It could have been, yeah. It's somewhere in that area where they'd have to hand it off to the Central. The Central would presumably take it up to Selkirk, right? And at Selkirk Yard, that's the very efficient one.

It'd be sorted very efficiently there, but not efficiently at any of the other yards. Then finally, the steamed hams would be delivered to the customer in Utica, right? Well, they'd probably go out of full train, dropped off in Utica, then run on the local in Utica as well. Yes. And most of these yards, other than Selkirk, you're adding between one and three days transit time to go from South Jersey to upstate New York. So this could be a shipment that takes a week, a week and a half, right?

And this is your fundamental issue with eastern railroads at this time, is that there's so many of them. They're all competing with each other. And the way you handle cars is so inefficient. Yeah. And by contrast, you can put it on 50 trucks, overwork the shed out of 50 drivers, and just drive it there in one or two days. Yeah.

And this is a 40-foot boxcar back then. So it's probably two trucks per one 40-car. 40-foot boxcar of steamed hams, right? Absolutely. You'd also critically for this and exacerbating the financial problems, the payment for this one boxcar of steamed hams would have to be split between three different railroads. Yes.

And all their rates were competitive, so they were all barely scraping by. There was a lot of carload freight that was actually, the rates were set so low that the railroads were paying for the privilege to haul steamed hams. And this is one of the issues. We talked about destructive competition before. Yep. Because these railroads were competing with each other, they could not operate efficiently. You couldn't run like a train from Pavonia Yard directly to Selkirk, right?

And then put the local train out to you. But what if it was all one railroad? Also, I'll be right back and do Alice Voices if you need to do a joke in between. Okay. One of you, just be me for a bit. Got it. Okay. I live in Glasgow.

Look at me. My name is Alice. I know many things about many things. We need to just like leave her, leave her bait, make it so she really wishes she was here. Like, anybody see any cool Soviet watches lately? Oh, hundreds. Yeah, a million. Hundreds of Soviet watches.

I got a bunch of patches. Yeah, I too got a bunch of patches. Some cool military regalia. Yeah, I was I was I was looking at a whole bunch of uniforms yesterday. I was drinking a nice cherry Coke. What else that looks like? You guys are the ones who podcast her with her every week. This is a good point, yeah.

Gee, I was watching, I don't know, American football and I was cheering for the Rams. We could we could say more anti-Semitic things, I guess, but we should probably avoid that. Probably avoid that. But what this is called? You want to talk about how handsome Jay is some more? Oh, you could do that. I was going to add productive discussion to the podcast. Man, fuck you.

Liam, don't you have like a heart out in half an hour? No, Korean, we canceled our dinner reservation so I could be here. Oh, okay. Well, now I feel badly. I feel bad, too. Hello, I'm sorry. It's okay. I blame Pico.

I blame Jay's sorry. Yeah, excellent. With that voice and those cheekbones, you just get anything you want. So this is called so on the one hand, you have the western railroads, you know, LA to Chicago, one trip, that's your, you know, your long haul. But if you're doing something like the Pennsylvania and the New York Central are doing, you know, they have main lines that go all the way out to Chicago too, but most of their traffic is on the shorter routes, that's a short haul,

and you're never going to make the same amount of money doing short haul as you do long haul, unless, you know, some people are able to focus on that today. But it's much more difficult, right? You also had, you also had additional competitors, like Gary Lackawanna. There'd be some long haul trips that to get better prices, shippers would negotiate a long haul trip down into three short haul trips. And then you'd get a third of the cost of that or less. So you can't even stay, solve it on that.

Yeah, because I have, I have what? I have the Lehigh Valley. I have Erie Lake, Iwana. I have CNJ in there. CNJ down this way. Central, New Jersey. And then I have, let me get a, let me get a Lehigh in New England going that way. You know, I can interchange any, any dumb way I want if I'm a shipper.

Might add to travel time, but it may be cheaper for you. But, and also with the amount that you're, you're moving cars, it doesn't add to travel time that much, right? If you, it's going to be there in two weeks. What's the problem with it getting there in two and a half weeks, if it's going to be half the cost? It's also very bad for perishable cargo. Yeah. What would you think?

Yes. And so this is, this is why eastern railroads were not doing as well as western railroads, except the ones that handled coal as their main, main, main product. Which leads us to some of the early merger attempts, right? Oh, you forgot to put the red egg down on that one. Oh, that's again, the more red egg and the short line. So before World War I, World War I is when we had the first experiment with nationalization. But before that, there were these sort of ideas of railroad combinations, right? And the idea was you'd merge several smaller railroads

into larger railroads, and these would be able to perform better than a whole bunch of small railroads that competed with each other, right? Yep. The New York Central System did this, right? 01:51:26,880 --> 01:51:30,160 It was all these tiny little railroads, and then it became one big one. And to a certain extent, like the Pennsylvania did that, but that was, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't to the extent, but you still had like, you were looking at much larger combinations, like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Norfolk and Western, or the New York Central and the

Chesapeake and Ohio, or like the Wabash and the Norfolk and Western, stuff like that, right? And this is all your larger network has better economies of scale, and it avoids destructive competition, right? And that had been a problem with the industry since its inception, as we mentioned before. These railroads were constantly undercutting each other. They were deceiving the public about rates and deceiving chippers about rates by providing preferred industries with rebates, right? And they all forced each other to sort of run on the ragged edge of insolvency at all times.

And it led to bad and unreliable service, right? If you consolidated from 50 small railroads to a couple big railroads, it would be, at least the railroad executives thought, better for everyone, but no one could actually come to an agreement on that because everyone wanted to be in charge of the resulting large railroad. We had these theoretical combinations that a lot of railroads wanted, but the executives couldn't agree on who would be in charge of them. They didn't happen.

This is, I feel like in contrast to what happened in Britain, where the government stepped in and just passed the grouping act and said, all right, there's four railroads now. Fuck you. This is what you wanted. I mean, in fairness, all of those would amount to one... All of the big four railroads, railways, I should say, in the UK together amounted to one small American railroad. So like, you know, there is a problem of scale there, I feel.

One very small and dense American railroad. So they were all one New York, New Haven, and Hartford. Or four competing New York, New Haven, and Hartford. Due to like a time machine mishap, British rail now operates passenger service between New York, New Haven, and Hartford, and the New York, New Haven, and Hartford is now doing trains through fucking Loughborough. All right, Jay, you wrote the rest of the slide. Go.

Oh, I did. So these mergers, yeah, they were first kind of brought up in the mid 50s when they really, Al Perlman in particular, thought, oh, shit, we need to pair off these money losing or barely solvent northeastern railroads with a money printing coal hauling railroad. Yes. Oh, yeah. The two coal hauling railroads, really, the two bigger ones, at least, were the Norfolk and Western, which was already a Pennsylvania railroad subsidiary, but not directly linked.

And the Chesapeake and Ohio, they were both hugely, hugely profitable, especially because you ran the empty trains up the hill efficiently, filled them full of black diamonds, and you ran them down the hill to the coast. And because they were shipping internationally, they got to set their own rates. Yes. So they made a ton of money off of that. Overseas coal was still booming, even after American coal kind of died down, which meant that the Pennsylvania and New York Central didn't really have a lot of coal traffic

of their own. Huge proportion of the shipping fleet and also navies were still powered by coal. So there's this huge international market for it. Absolutely. But in the US, even the traditional sort of power or in-home boiler technique and things, those were going away in the 50s. You had your newer houses coming up with gas heat or electric heat. You had coal power plants, still definitely a thing, but you were getting your first generation

of nuclear plants around this time. You had gasoline plants and natural gas plants, and you were really kind of... And it's not as much money to haul a big train full of atoms. Yeah. There's a wonderful picture of the first nuclear reactor, first commercial nuclear reactor being delivered to shipping port in Pittsburgh behind a steam locomotive of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Great photo. Yeah.

One steam engine hauling another. The PRR, of course, had this issue where they did have access to coal fields, but they were all anthracite. Yeah, it was shitty coal. Yeah. No, it's the good coal. It's much better. It's just too much harder to burn.

It's harder to get to. Yeah, shitty economically to extract. Great for home heating because it doesn't produce anywhere near as much smoke. Yeah. But bad for power plants. Yeah. And as home, again, home heating stopped being individually coal fired. So all of these, it was a bad time for everybody,

basically, except the Norfolk and Western and Chesapeake, Ohio, and the Virginia Railroad as well. Yes. It was another smaller player in that field. The Perlman thought this was a great idea. And the Pennsylvania already controls the Norfolk and Western. So the executives, the budgets, the networks, they're already compatible. In fact, I think at the time, the Norfolk and Western was technically headquartered in Roanoke, but really kind of only nominally.

The execs all met at the Pennsylvania headquarters in Philadelphia anyway. That makes sense. They did have a large presence until probably five or six years ago, though. Yeah. So they thought that the ICC, the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was the government regulatory body for all railroads, basically, as they dealt in interstate commerce, thought that mergers always had to go before the ICC,

and they were not particularly merger friendly. But Perlman thought it'd be pretty easy to get this one done because the Pennsylvania and Norfolk and Western are already so tight. And once that happened, he thought that now the New York Central could dissipate in a three-way merger with the Chesapeake in Ohio and the Baltimore in Ohio. Oh, my. Which would combine these. This is like fucking Crusader Kings level of like dynastic marriages.

Genuinely. Genuinely. And it was ways to link infrastructure, right? The New York Central and C&O didn't touch each other too much, especially in the Northeast. So you bring in the B&O, which had lines up through New Jersey and everything to connect the two. And anyway, they thought that Perlman was fond of metaphors about

marriages and suitors, actually, for this particular segment. Of course, in his grand plan, he'd be the big boss of this new giant railroad, which would be approved by the ICC as a way to kind of rebalance the Northeast against the giant Pennsylvania Norfolk Western combined road. This would let these profitable coal haulers subsidize the money losing Northeastern roads, because they're still providing an essential service. And the Northeast would be fucked if all the trains stopped running. That's a future episode of this mini series.

But anyway, all of these alliances fell through because Perlman went to the B&O and C&O, and they said, great, this will be awesome. I'm excited for me, president of the B&O, to be in charge of this bigger railroad. President of the C&O went, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, sorry. This bigger road, I'm going to be the president, right? Surely. No, I'm going to be the president. I was my idea.

This happened with the Norfolk Western and the Pennsylvania. This happened with basically all merger partners. This is why you've got to do hell in a cell. That's the only way to be fair. Thunderdome. They all demanded they were going to be the ones in power, and they refused to be locked out of any combined railroad, locked out to the position of executive vice president or whatever.

Of course. Locked into being the chairman of the board only, or locked into an early retirement with more money that I could possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes. You've lost the big paradox game of railroading. Everyone wants to run a railroad. Especially because these guys were all people who'd grown up around. Especially at this time, all the people who basically just wanted their money to leave were either already working for the Cole Hallers or Western railroads, or who had already left,

because nobody wanted to be attached to these failing railroads anymore. Of course, the only way knowing that they were failing was to be working for them in the first place. You had younger, hungry guys show up being like, oh, I'll grab the New York Central. This will be great. And then realize, oh, God, oh, God, what have I done? I have accidentally fought my way into the heart attack job. Yes, exactly.

So these plans and proposing these did have a secondary effect, though, in that they scared the shit out of all the smaller railroads nearby, which made them all merge together. So the Norfolk and Western said, uh-oh, we don't want to be absorbed by the Pennsylvania, even though we're already subsidiary, so they merged with the Virginian. The Erie Railroad and the Delaware Lackawanna and Western merged together to reform the Erie Lackawanna. And we've all heard my thoughts on the Erie Lackawanna. This also caused the C&O and B&O to merge together, excluding the Central, because they

thought they could make a better agreement. And then they'd be a bigger enough railroad to just buy the New York Central and just take that over. And that was, you know, a big thing. So all of a sudden- So that problem is the guy who's like, oh, shit, I got to stay on top. Yeah, exactly. You guys ever play King of the Hill on Halo? It's kind of like that.

When the C&O and B&O merged, they were worried that the ICC wasn't going to approve that merger. So they thought there's no better way than to get approval from our biggest competitor, which would have been the Pennsylvania. So they went to the Pennsylvania and said, all right, here, let's start putting together some plans and like really kind of go for some big time trade-off or shit. All right. So the Pennsylvania eventually agreed to support the C&O and B&O merger on the condition that the C&O and B&O, which would become the Chessie system,

would support the Pennsylvania and New York Central merger. On the condition that you put a cat on all of your shit, because we wanted to have a fursona. And the Pennsylvania Railroad had previously had controlling interest in both of those railroads. So, you know, there was some hereditary bullshit going on there. Definitely. One caveat though was that Pennsylvania would have to have given up their stake in the Norfolk and Western. Jim Sim said, yeah, sure, that's fine. I guess somehow not realizing that that was like the most profitable part of

the Pennsylvania Railroad empire by a huge margin. At that point, they technically only owned 30% of it, but they still had a controlling interest through financial wheeling and dealing. One of the things I always thought was funny is I live near Woodland Cemetery, and there's two kinds of guys buried there. Pennsylvania Railroad executives and Norfolk and Western executives. Still fighting each other on the ground. Just from beyond the grip, just kicking each other.

The Pennsylvania Railroad did sell their N and W investment, and they invested that in diversification, which we're going to get to in a bit, which was bad. Well, we'll say. Yeah. So, the Penn Central system starts to look more and more inevitable, even though it was probably the worst possible combination. They were going to do it. You basically paired up the profitable roads, and then you paired up the not profitable roads.

Yes. Somehow assuming that two money losing railroads could combine into a money earning railroad. Yeah, if we're using if we're using poem and sort of marriage allegory, this is the sort of marriage that you have a mountain goat song about. Just in the executives meeting blaring no children. So, there's nothing they could do with the merger at this point. So, you know, Perlman at this point, he has to combine with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Penn Central system is like no other merged railroads before, right?

Before, if you were merging railroads, usually it was something end to end, right? For instance, when the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, you know, they built out the Pittsburgh, and then they merged with a railroad that went from Pittsburgh to, I forget what the next stage was. Somewhere stupid, like Alliance or Crestline. Yeah, something like that, right? That was how the system was built. We're doing something entirely else here with the Penn Central, which is

the Penn Central, Pennsylvania Railroad has very different territories from the New York Central until you get to Ohio, and then every single line is duplicating another line. Yes. So, we're taking all of these railroads, which don't make money individually, but serve the same area, and now if there's only one railroad with twice the amount of infrastructure, will that make money? I don't know. Impossible to say. And this pissed off a lot of people. They had to prove to the public and the Interstate Commerce Commission the merger was, in fact, in the public's interest.

They're shippers who are going to be very unhappy with no competition. Passengers and cities worried about their commuter trains. And then the other issue was the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, right, which is again up here. The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad petitioned the ICC to be merged into Penn Central, right, which means Penn Central is suddenly here. Hey, we're all so failures, please. Hi, hi, help, help. Take me with you.

No one wanted this thing. Mom says I need to turn with a controller too. No one wanted this thing. In fact, Pearlman suggested, okay, what if we spin off the Boston and Albany and the Boston and Maine and merge it with the New Haven, and then that'll be their problem, right? Yeah, the Boston, Hartford, New Haven, and Albany Railroad's question mark. That doesn't go through. The ICC eventually insisted that the New Haven be included, and it was included in the merger. They were also supposed to take the New York,

Susquehanna, and Western and the Lehigh Valley. Neither of those things happened, because they were more forceful about not getting that one. I don't know why they took the New Haven. I think that was probably a political thing. So now the Penn Central already not making much revenue. Now they're saddled with even more commuter operations, which stopped making money probably in the 20s, and were essentially only there because of regulations, right? And it added almost no freight traffic, and all that freight traffic was short holes, right? That didn't make much money. And you were losing other freight traffic that made money on those

routes, like the US Mail, like Express Freight, the Railway Express Agency stuff, like the forerunner of today's UPS. All that stuff is going away. Right. So it was impossible to make these numbers pencil out competing with truck traffic. None of these railroads, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, was always going to be a drag, right? You basically threw a cinder block at two drowning guys. Yes. And then they stopped fighting over the cinder block. And he's like, no, you guys, you're both drowning, but maybe if you hug each other, you'll stop drowning. And we're just going to check the cinder block on you too.

And maybe that'll make you stop drowning. It wasn't great. So this process took six years. All the while, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania were hemorrhaging what little money they had. And just like watching trucks and autos and planes and everything, take all of these, watching all the manufacturing leave the Northeast and basically all the area that they served. And it was pretty bad. And you had, you had nothing but like, you had the port of New York, but that wasn't going to really start becoming an international port for another couple years while containerization ramped up. And these two railroads, they were smashed into each other. And when that happened,

when the merger actually happened. Which is usually bad for trades. Yeah. So despite the fact this took six years, because they were still rivals, they weren't really allowed to do a lot of talking to each other. Because that could have been collusion drawn down the middle of the apartment. Yeah, pretty much. And then all of a sudden the ICC came in and said, great, and ripped up the line. And they were, I don't know, forced to slam into each other. Now breaks down. That's what coupling is. Yeah. So you had made the trains kiss.

They basically had no preparation done by the time the merger was approved. They had a few documents and books and things, but neither Saunders or Perlman were really happy about these things. And like, basically, they'd fight over this. And Saunders, who was nominally in charge, would decide that instead of agreeing to the changes that Perlman made, and or Perlman insisted on saying, I'll pull out of this merger if you don't do this my way, they'd rather just do nothing. Which is not a great managerial strategy. And you had, you had... Bringsmanship. Fundamentally different railroads, not just in corporate culture, but physical plan, right?

Yeah. So you have different standards of maintenance of the track. You have different electrical systems for the Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York, New Haven and Hartford. The Pennsylvania Railroad, for instance, they bought diesels from the Baldwin Corporation of Philadelphia, right? The New York Central bought diesels from Electromotive Division of General Motors out of LaGrange. This was partially because the railroad served those two different plants. That also meant that there were no parts commonality between the two fleets that were now being merged together. You had very different freight cars as well. You had very different passenger cars. All this stuff, suddenly on day one, you had two completely

different railroads. You had to operate as one railroad with no planning, right? Surprise. Yeah. Look who we got you for your birthday. It was another railroad you have to run. On day one, there were 5,000 new routes and new origin destination pairs. As basically on one day, every New York Central yard clerk had to learn the entire Pennsylvania system and the other other way around. They had received no training on these, so thousands and thousands of cars in the first few weeks were just put onto the wrong trains and sent to the wrong yards. Fuck it. Why not, right?

There's a great quote from the yardmaster at Selkirk, which had been this wonderful computer-controlled yard, who said, now they'd get a car for Harrisburg, which wasn't on the old Central, and they'd say, where the hell is Harrisburg? I know where Pittsburgh is. Shit. I'll just send it to Pittsburgh. Go bugging that. And so that car went to Pittsburgh. Fuck it. Those steelers? Cars were sent through the system without waybills. Waybills is just like a little

piece of information that says where the car came from, what's in it, where it goes, the number of the actual car, whatever. It's a good information to have right there. It's true. Cars going through the system without waybills meant that nobody knew where they were supposed to go. So yardmasters just send them out on random trains or send out entire full trains of cars they didn't know where they were supposed to go to other yards, just literally like, not my problem anymore. I need to get these out of my yard. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone.

And I forgive it. Just incompatible train routing systems meant that entire trains got lost, which is pretty incredible. That rules. I mean, it sounds like absolute chaos. The Bangor and Arrowstook Railroad, which was Maine's kind of big, big, small railroad, I guess. The big, small railroad is a good way to describe it. Yes, because it has some of the most size of a small railroad.

Some of the most important commerce in the state, the entire Arrowstook Potato Harvest, they sent it by rail. It all went on a series of a couple trains. It all went down to Selkirk Yard, right? And on these big, pretty box cars that say state of Maine products on them. And the thing about that is those red, white and blue ones. Yeah, the red, white and blue ones that are always like Lionel makes them. And these box cars were special because they had to have heaters, because the Potato Harvest came out late fall, early winter.

They needed to be heated to stay fresh. Well, they all went down on, like, I think one or two trains. They all went on the BNA out to Selkirk Yard, and then they lost them there. Yep. Oh, yeah. They sat in the yard, all these cars with their little heaters, they all ran out of gas, and all the potatoes froze, and all the potatoes rotted, and an entire season's worth of Maine's potato crops failed. Like, couldn't make it to market, nobody got paid.

Oops. Oops. Most efficient allocation of resources. This bankrupted the Bangor and Aristic Railroad. Really? Yeah. Which, because Maine potatoes where the farmers all swore off rail and trucked everything until last year was the first year that Maine potatoes had been moved since the Penn Central fucked it up in 1969. So, the Penn Central had the incredible ability to bankrupt

railroads that weren't part of it. Another story that I came across while researching for this was a 100-car coal train was lost outside of Syracuse for 10 days. How do you, what, how do you, I don't know. It'll turn out. It'll turn out. It'll turn out. Actually, it'll turn out. So, trains would sit outside of yards because they'd be too full to take incoming trains, which meant that crews would time out of them.

You're not allowed to be. What, just bounce? Well, yeah. So, they didn't have to send a relief crew out by taxi. Or, because this means it's not technically a train anymore, which I think is ridiculous, you could just cut off the engines and leave. But the engines are what counted in the computer system as like the train. So, all of a sudden, all the cars weren't a train in the system anymore. And just stayed there and sat there and just blocked main lines.

And it was a huge disaster. All right, I got the train in. Where's the cars? Where's the cars? I had to leave them. I'm not allowed to pull the rest of this train. Yeah, I'm going from I don't know where to, I don't know where. Carrying nothing. Carrying God knows. Where are the cars?

I left it somewhere. Where are the cars? I'm not allowed to tell you. There's another great story in the early days of the Penn Central. People working for the railroad realized that it was so mismanaged that they could skim a little off the top. You know, these are like your blue collar guys. We'll get into white collar guys skimming off the top pretty soon. But what they would do is they would just go and take perfectly good rail cars

and write them off as if they'd been in a wreck or had been scrapped. Then they'd turn around, repaint them and lease them back to the Penn Central. Ah, you shouldn't have been punished for that. It's just some pretty floppy. You shouldn't be punished. It's some pretty incredible grift to to pull that off. Yep. Have a shop shop for fucking railroad cars. Like you didn't even they could just turn around and be like, yeah, it's a wet lease.

So it's in your paint job. You know, these are these box cars. It has a number on it. I have 200 of my box cars. Oh my God. Yeah, I run the Jeff railroad. I love I love the idea of like Jeff. Where are you going?

It's like, I can't tell you that this is like the Langley and Fort Meade railroads. It was bad. The Penn Central merge on day one, they had $13 million in cash reserves, which sounds like kind of a lot until you realize that the Pennsylvania railroad alone spent more than $50 million a day. It's bad. Yeah, that's not great. Six hours of cash reserve, maybe less.

Well, less than six hours of cash reserve on the Pennsylvania, not including New Haven, not including the New York Central. Yeah. And $13 million of cash total. It was pretty bad. There was some good news, though. Yes. The unions took the Penn Central to the cleaners.

Yeah. It was unbelievable. They got a guarantee that everybody would keep their jobs. So nobody was made redundant in this merger, which is a great way to realize the efficiencies of a combined system is to keep the jobs. The unions also got a huge severance. So anybody that was fired or laid off got a year of full pay for every five years of seniority that they had.

Holy shit, dude. Which especially for an industry like the railroads, which was... I've been doing this since I was 14 years old. Exactly. I have two fingers left. An enormous business of old heads. Everyone's a lifer. They would get huge payouts, just obscene.

And it burdened the Penn Central with enormous payroll overhead. Also helping, not helping this, was that Saunders went behind Pearlman's back. So Saunders was the chief... We'll see an org chart in a second. But Pearlman had laid off a bunch of people who were not relevant to a streamlined New York Central, specifically mail clerks. They had 1,000 to 2,000 RPO, like mail clerks. The mail was now... RPOs are a railway and pros office.

Yes. The mail was now shipped air mail or truck, so they'd laid them off. Sorry, your service is no longer required. You're two later. Penn Central comes around. You guys are rehired. Welcome back to the Penn Central. Here's your new incredibly high pay rate and all these crazy new benefits and everything.

This pissed Saunders off like you would not believe. Hell yes. Wait, Saunders or Pearlman? Sorry, this pissed Pearlman off like you would not believe. That's about to say. They just rehired a lot of people who have no job to do. Yeah. For the elephant, apparently.

They had no real use or place in this new railroad. Then they just were now on the payroll. I will say big L for the USPS on that one too, though, because they had built barely 30 years earlier some of the largest and grandest post office in the United States right next to Pennsylvania Railroad's major rail terminals. None of those are in use now. I regret to inform you. I have to drop off.

Okay. We overrided a little bit. All right. Bye, Liam. Bye, guys. Good luck. Believing we're two slides from the end. Only another hour or so to go.

All right. I took this picture of an organizational chart from the wreck of the Penn Central. You can see. So yeah, this is the org chart. This is one of the first mega mergers that ever happened, right? And you can see they've hopefully color coded everyone's allegiance. Yes. Today, when you have a mega merger, again, all business is just people going on the computer,

right? Yep. This was very different from the Penn Central, where you had people who had allegiances, people who had very different cultures. And the way they decided to integrate this was that each level of management would alternate between a red hat on the Pennsylvania Railroad and a green hat from the New York Central. Yeah. They insisted on merging as equal.

So even though the Pennsylvania was the nominal survivor, it was basically just nominal. You know, in a modern merger, you'd basically have one company eat the other one, and the entire executive suite would stay minus a couple, maybe. This, they really tried to interleave these things thinking, this will solve it. Yeah, absolute discontinuity of management at every level. For sure. This meant that basically everybody hated their management and they hated their direct reports. I love that for a few of these and pretty important, important directives like the

Assistant Vice President of Transportation, the Director of Industrial Development, the Director of Real Estate, even the General Solicitors. Some of those are two guys, one each from each previous Railroad. Yeah. Yeah. You have a... They share a desk where you're allocated one share. Just like kicking each other in the shins.

I was just surprised there weren't fistfights in management. Yeah. Oh, how do we know that one? Good point. Well, I know that Pearlman refused to come to Philadelphia, which is where the nominal headquarters were, unless he was expressly directed to. He kept doing all his business from the New York Central Building. And that was kind of how it went overall.

And of course, before email and everything, you ended up with a lot of directive skipping levels. Yeah. Right. So Pearlman, instead of having to talk to his direct reports, would just go around them and talk to the New York Central guys just under them. And then I can't blame Pearlman for wanting to stay in the New York Central Building. It was much better than Six Pan Center. Yeah.

So corporate cultures, as we sort of alluded to in the history, could not have been more different either. The PENSI was a highly structured, from the men who left trains, it was a militarized organization. Yes. They were supposed to call your superiors, Sir. So not even like last name. It was like, excuse me, Sir.

And they still acted as if the Pennsylvania was like a gold-plated moneymaker with enormous coffers. And did genuinely have a very strong military history. I mean, I think it was probably not until after I think it wasn't until Cassit that people who ran the Pennsylvania Railroad didn't go through West Point. There was enormous infighting and corruption on the Pennsylvania side of things. Every manager basically like made it there.

Also an incredible military tradition. They had their team and they'd kind of make a little inner circle of confidants and then try to fend off attacks from others for jobs. And you get a promotion and then immediately turn around and make sure nobody was going to sabotage you because they were jealous of not getting the promotion. It was like, it was an incredible bureaucracy for the bulk of his existence. And it sort of just started collapsing.

And as it collapsed, it decided to absorb the New York Central. Imagine being a New Haven and Hartford guy in the middle of this watching these two sets of executives just go at each other. And you're just like also present with your little joke toy railroads. Go back to Connecticut, asshole. Pennsylvania Railroad. If Danbury's got any more hats for you to move. It's a quote from the men who love trains.

No other railroad in the industry was disliked as much as the Pennsylvania. It's basically the late Soviet Union of railroads. Yeah, it was good. And then it was destroyed by revisionism. This could not have contrasted more with the actually good New York Central. Which was led by Perlman, much more modern and casual. They were imaginative, is the word that keeps coming up in research. It was informal young men leading a lean and hungry organization.

Yeah, meanwhile, of course, all of these like crew cut ice cheering psychos. Yeah, these guys just hate their guts. I've been thinking about box cars since I was 12 and this guy shows up. In fairness, Saunders was chosen by Sims. One of the criteria was that he was young, which is 54. It was not great. One of the biggest things was that the Pennsylvania Railroad was very staunch and like where ideas came from, you didn't do anything unless you were told to by your superior.

Meanwhile, the New York Central said like, yeah, ideas can kind of come from anywhere. Like if you are some yardmaster and you have a better idea how to do this, go and tell your superior, hey, I think I can make this more efficient, go for it. There's power relations now where you can't go up the corporate chain so easily today, even with modern corporate culture. But the Pennsylvania Railroad was like, no, do as you're told. It was something else. And needless to say, when you have somebody like the Assistant Vice President of Accounting

going and suggesting something to the Vice President and Comptroller, Comptroller, I can't remember what you're supposed to pronounce that as, but these people would get deeply offended and it would just piss off everybody. Because all of a sudden just like, wait, you think you can tell me what to do? Says the Pennsylvania guy. And then you'd end up the opposite direction where former New York Central guys would be like, my guys aren't making any suggestions. I'm a level removed from actual operations from these guys.

They're the ones that are have to be kind of taking these ideas and filtering them and telling me what to advise other people on. Yeah, I'm sitting backwards on my chair and everything and I'm getting nothing from nothing. Exactly. Can you imagine sitting backwards on a chair in front of your flat top West Point guys? Hey guys, you know, we're just going to keep it casual. Just come and get me up, anybody. Keep an open door policy.

No, absolutely not. It's also the opposite of what kept the Pennsylvania Railroad so dynamic in like the 1840s through like the 1870s, you know, because that was when it was very dynamic organization and no one could actually figure out what was in charge of what. But you know, people just did stuff and you know, it worked very well. Definitely. And the New York Central was like that before, you know, in the Vanderbilt era, I don't think Vanderbilt was taking, you know, doing town hall meetings.

Frank Reynolds character, really. You went to Nicaragua in 1920 to open a sweatshop. 1820. Oh, you're right. Yeah. So this was tricky, especially like with dealing with how a broke railroad should operate. New York Central guys were used to it. Pennsylvania guys, not so much.

They had continued to operate as if they weren't broke. More of a broke railroad, really. Which meant that, you know, the New York Central side of things was a little more able to react to these changes and the Pennsylvania was less able. And at an executive level, nobody was able to do shit. Well, they were able to do shit, though, which was corruption. That's true. All right.

This is such a good slide. Took me 10 minutes in Photoshop. This is this is this is because of diversification. And I figured, you know. So prior to the merger and when the merger seemed uncertain, Pennsylvania Railroad had some ambitions for diversification. And this is during the era when conglomerates started to form. And there were good examples of this working.

The Atchison Topeka in Santa Fe, for example, diversified into like a million different industries until the ICC caught up and told them, no, you can't do that. But this is where we have to talk about David Crumley Bevan, right? People love to be loved to be named David Crumley Bevan. He's another he's another main line guy born in 1906. He had established himself as one of America's foremost financiers. By the time he was hired by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1951 as chief financial officer

and a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And as CFO, he developed an insular group within the company, right? If you didn't talk to Bevan, Bevan didn't talk to you. His group was known as Bevan's Railroad, right? Perfect little sort of miniature cartel. Yeah, he does. He does all the finances. And you can see the finances, I guess, if you really want to.

But first, you have to have a relationship with Bevan of some content. You have to have like the yeah, I'm not I'm not going to make that joke. Actually, I'm I'm better than that. Well, in the time that I'm not, but it's all ice chewing Protestant shit. You know, absolutely, absolutely. Or you have to like do a bunch of like weird freemason shit with this guy. I believe Saunders mentioned in the wreck of the Penn Central because he was interviewed. He was like, well, in the years that Bevan served under me,

he never invited me to his house for dinner, even though our houses were a mile from each other. I never knew his first name. So Bevan, you know, he developed a reputation as, you know, he good with finances, right? And it was apparent that he could be president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, right? He would be he would be the big guy. But then James Sims leapfrogged ahead of him. He became president in 1962, right? And once someone else, which he'd come to regret for the rest of his life.

Yes, bad, bad decision. And Bevan decided, well, I'm not going to run the railroad, but I can make some money from it. So he, along with a few other Pennsylvania Railroad executives, formed an investment club. This is what you want to hear from your money guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was called the Penn Phil Company, right? Bled for in the late days of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the early days of the Penn Central, they got loans from the same bank as the Penn Central is the chemical bank of New York, I want

to say. And they started investing in companies and projects, which the Penn Central just happened to also invest in, right? Yeah, but of course, they didn't know that because otherwise that would be inside of trading and that would be illegal. This is a coincidence. No conflict of interest here. Right. So these are again, these are all Pennsylvania Railroad finance executives. They start to invest in pipelines, industrial parks in Texas, strip malls and sunbelt housing developments. As Jay put in here, it's a great idea investing in housing that makes your railroad

assets less relevant. They invest in investing in a series of like schemes that the villain of a film noir like detective movie would do. But like, I can't like at least invest in local, right? It's like, move to this housing and never use the Pennsylvania Railroad again. Yes. They invest in Six Flags amusement parks. I think they owned it outright at one point. That sounds about right. I mean, at that point, it was just being divested from the remnants of the inner urban companies. Yeah. And a little company called Executive Jet Aviation.

Good one. Remember what I was going to say. The reason why the Pennsylvania Railroad started divesting or started diversifying was using the money that they got from selling off their shares from the Norfolk and Western. Great. Yes. The only thing that made money consistently. Yeah. In favor of a bunch of like scams and bullshit. Pretty much. Well, here we go. Executive Jet Aviation was founded by a man named Albert Dick Lasseter. Not sure. Like my question about people who go by the name Dick. Yeah. What if your name's Albert? Yeah. No, he went by. Maybe it's an upgrade.

You're going to have the Albert and the Dick. Yeah, absolutely. It's old Dick for short. He was a retired Air Force Brigadier General. And his job in the Air Force was to run an air taxi service to ferry generals from one place to another. Right? That's cool. You're a Brigadier General and you're a chauffeur. Yeah, exactly. Well, so he operated a fleet of small aircraft to bring Air Force guys from anywhere to anywhere as quickly as possible. Right? And his idea for executive jet aviation. What if we replicate that service as a sort of jet chauffeur service for guys who are not wealthy enough to own their own private jet,

but wealthy enough that they can charter a plane? You get the sort of fleet efficiency of having a fleet of private planes that go from one destination to another. Well, if it was stupid enough for the Air Force, it's stupid enough for civilian life. Oh, my God. If this sounds familiar to anybody, it's because this company is still around doing the same thing. They're just called net jets now. Yes. It's got to be sexy. This is how we get to all of our live shows. Now, over like the existence of Penn Central, they quietly invested $25 million into the company. But it was also controlled by the Penn Phil Cabal, right? And Bevin was doing the investing, so no one knew about it unless you

knew Bevin, in which case you didn't tell anyone else. No, because you had been initiated into the various mysteries of the square and campus or whatever. Yeah, it's the Keystone and the ours. So the board of directors of this company is composed entirely of guys in Penn Phil or Penn Phil companies. Their best customer was Bevin and fellow executive Charlie Hodge, mostly flying from Philadelphia to Boca Raton, right? But also, they chartered a lot of flights for Pennsylvania Railroad executives because by like the 1950s, Pennsylvania Railroad executives really prided themselves on never using their own trains. Of course, yeah. The days of having like a special limousine that you had fitted with a couple of rail wheels

were long since over, right? That moment actually did that. Really? It was a Cadillac and it's sick. Wow. That rules. He's got a sick 50s Cadillac limo, too. So it's been stretched first, but then stretched. Yeah, Saunders lived next to the Ardmore Station and worked in Suburban Station, I want to say, and had a chauffeur drive him there. Fuck railroads. Meanwhile, you know, not to stay on my high horse of how much better the central and Perlman were, but he would go on like three week rail only trips to go and see like the intricacies of the network and visit yards and things to like quiz operators on their shit to find out what the deal is. Yeah, exactly. I would say the Pennsylvania Railroad was more like they had they had a

that the relationship with the railroad was similar to, I don't know, the Protestant relationship with God. All of your trespasses. Yes. So the ICC at this point and the Civil Aviation Board had ruled that railroads owning airlines was illegal, right? Highly illegal. Highly illegal. Executive jet aviation, as sound as the concept was, was relying on Penn Central Railroad money to operate. But it wasn't technically an airline. It was an air taxi service, which is something that no one had figured out what it was yet. But they said it's like an airline, but less regulated. Yes. So they set their sights on acquiring an existing airline called Johnson Flying Services.

And they would somehow get this past regulators, right? And they went ahead under the radar, as it were. Yes. And then they went ahead and purchased two Boeing 707s and two Boeing 727s, which they couldn't legally operate with Penn Central money. But I mean, listen, I'm prepared to forgive this if they put the pinstripes on them. No, they would. You'd have to do the black dip. That's not so good. I do can still kind of want to see it, but yeah, not as much. I could only find one crappy watermarked picture of any executive jet aircraft.

And I have like a cool sort of cool, but like very literal and overdrawn compass logo on the tail. That's the sign of a legitimate business, right? Do you want it? Can I see one of your planes? It's in the back next to this steam locomotive we definitely don't have. I got to tarp over it. Next to one of the mohawks. Yeah. What's crazy is that technically this does mean that at the time, Penn Central owned like brand new 727s and also were like still operating turn of the century electrics in like daily service. Yes. You know, probably there are probably some like some late 1800s cars still around and like

maintenance service and shit too. Absolutely. So executive jet airlines circumvented the regulators by leasing these planes to other airlines. There was Transavia, which operated in Europe, and international Air Bahamas, both of which were controlled by an executive jet airline of executives, right? Yeah, I was like a self-dealing. I was self-dealing and neither of them could possibly make payments on the leases, right? And they had bigger ambitions, right? The idea behind executive jet is they would become a worldwide on demand charter airline. Uber for planes. Yes, but 60 years before Uber. Yes. Maybe Uber is the executive jet aviation of cars. Yeah, maybe.

And so Pan Am heard about this and they took notice, Pan American Airlines, right? And so did the Civil Aviation Board and they ordered Penn Central to divest this company, right? And so they tried to pawn it off on U.S. Steel, which was traditionally... One group of rubber barons gets mad at another and they attempt to like pawn off a company on a third group of them. Yes. Well, U.S. Steel had traditionally been a very... They were big Pennsylvania railroad fans there. In fact, the big steelworks near Pittsburgh is still called the J.Ed. Your Thompson works after the first president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. I think what's hilarious about this is due to the fact that this was all Bevan's secret shit,

the Civil Aviation Board writing to Sixth Penn Center would have been the first time like Saunders even would have heard of this. Yes. Yeah. Just like unfolding this like, I own an airline? Wait, what? Why would I get mail from the Civil Aviation Board? I'm not supposed to own an airline. You must sell immediately. Wait, what the fuck? So there was a secret meeting at the U.S. Steel offices in New York, which was ostensibly to discuss the vesture and acquisition of Penn Central shares by U.S. Steel. But Dick Lasseter instead explained in detail all the illegal contracts with foreign airlines executive J.Ed. I do like to have a meeting that's ostensibly for something, but is actually about

full discussion of my deep multinational illegal activity. I'm just going to explain all of my criminal activities. You should take two to three hours. In addition to this, the notes from this meeting were written down in a secret blue book, which only Lasseter and Charlie Hodge were supposed to have access to, right? Great. Sure. Just look, you write down all your crimes in a nice little book. I think Stringer Bell had a line about this, but I guess these guys hadn't seen the wire. So it just so happened that someone in the meeting was a double agent for Panham. I love corporate espionage so much, dude. I genuinely do.

Just like the stakes of this are so fucking. You go to this meeting, listen to the guy, explain all of the shit that he did, and then tell us. James Bond. They got a copy of the blue book and photocopied it and mailed it to the Civil Aviation Board. The only way that this would have been more ironic is if the Postal Service still used trains and it was delivered to the Civil Aviation Board on a Penn Central train. So this was in 1969 and Bevin was very unhappy with this development. He didn't fire Lasseter or make any changes in the company. He ostensibly controlled by way of the railroad of whose finances he controlled, right? And it's sort of like, okay, why didn't he do this?

And in the meantime, Dick Lasseter was living the high life, right? His salary at Executive Jet was $58,000 a year in 1960 something. And his expense account was about the same. Oh my God. This is when the executives of Pan Am and United Airlines had an expense account of $7,000 a year. Still a lot, I mean. And his expenses, he was just charging everything to the expense account, right? He charged $2,850 for furniture for his apartment in Manhattan. He charged $19,000 for use of his own apartment in Manhattan for his business, right? He charged $116,000 to buy his girlfriend a house. I mean, listen, coming around on this guy, actually.

He set up the Executive Jet headquarters in Columbus, Ohio, in just the most opulent settings again for 1969. Had a full gymnasium and had a squash court, had tennis courts. They had a full-time masseuse. And then Lasseter was also a womanizer, right? But the money he spent on his woman who he eyesed was all executive jets. Of course, of course. There was a woman he met at the Indy 500. I need to open a book for this. I didn't put this in the notes. Let me find this. For what it's worth, I plug these numbers in the inflation calculator. And his $58,000 year salary is equivalent to a $450,000 year salary. And that's with the fucking air he breathed

expense to the company as well. Plus transport not even having to be expense, because he can just get a fucking jet anywhere to anywhere. Yeah. This is from Wreck of the Penn Central, page 197. At the Indianapolis 500 race on Memorial Day, 1967, Lasseter met a generously proportioned blonde. Love to be generously proportioned. Named Linda Vaughn. Miss Vaughn was also known as Miss Hearst Golden Shifter. And she toured the auto racing circuit for Hearst Performance Products Company of Warminster, Pennsylvania, trying to drum up business for the firm. Hold on. Miss Vaughn became engaged to Lasseter in 1968. And he presented her with the diamond ring,

which she later estimated was 10 carats in weight during their friendship, because I don't think they ever got married. Lasseter flew her to Europe twice at EJA expense. And it's about to say that's probably Penn Central's 10 carat diamond. I mean, I just, and this was something about a railroad involved in this story. At some point. Well, he was also an enabler, right? Of his various friends, many of whom worked for Penn Central, or rather worked for Bevan or were Bevan. So back in 1964, before the merger, he was on a party on a yacht.

This same yacht would later feature in the film Thunderball as the disco volante. Oh, shit. Yes. Lasseter met Joseph Ricchiardi, who was sort of a Miami fixer guy. And he wound up on the payroll of executive jet as public relations. But the main relations he facilitated were of another kind, right? Okay. Ricchiardi's unofficial function was to take the stress off of Bevan and Hodge during the difficult Penn Central merger process, which he did by finding them dates to accompany them on their many and various business trips. Uh huh. Sure. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Now, this all came to a head on July 1, 1970, after Pan Am had really forced the Civil Aviation Board's hand and made Penn Central formally divest.

It was one of one of my one of my favorite types of guy, right, is the the American one of the my favorite and one of the most American types of guys is the kind of guy, right, who engages in a scam that requires law enforcement activity from a branch of the federal government you didn't think had that. Like whether that's a guy who is a consequence of his scams is being pursued out of his apartment by the US postal inspectors or the Fish and Wildlife Service or some shit like that. The idea of the civil aviation, let's see, kicking this guy's door down at three in the morning is just perfect. Exactly. Right. This was this came out in a later deposition over control, a court case over control of the company. But what happened was

Penn Central was forced to divest by Pan Am. These shares were held in trust by the Detroit Bank and Trust Company. On July 1, 1970, the trustee was like, this last year, guys and moron, we're going to replace them. Right. So they replaced them with Bruce Sudlin, who was a lawyer who had been working there for a while, but they trusted a lot more. Right. So Bruce Sudlin organized a raiding party which entered the executive jet offices at midnight that same day. Oh my God. To seize the corporate documents before last year could destroy them. And they went through all the financial improprieties, but for some reason, stored on site were all the pictures of mainly of Lasseter in the company

of many young women in varying states of undress, all blonde with big boobs. You've got to have those in your filing cabinet. Of course. Of course. They're right next to each other. It's like you're filing through with your fingers. It's like improprieties, financial. Yes, actually. And so Sudlin took no chances. He called the Pinkerton Detective Agency and said, hey, give me some armed guards in front of the Columbus Ohio office here. Right. And so the Pinkerton showed up. They were patrolling the outside of the building. A lot of these photos, the more, the ones that were appropriate for publication, fell in their

way into all the major newspapers. This executive jet aviation business tying it back to Penn Central was in all the newspapers instantly. Right. And it turned out Sudlin was correct to have those Pinkertons because Brigadier General Lasseter decided to show up three weeks later with a bunch of armed goons to retake the company by force. Just this. You see this. How does that work? If you show up to the office, you call the Detroit Bank and trust Mac being like, hey, guess what? Yeah, you seize the radio stations and you go, I am now president for life of executive jet aviation. I'm president for life of this company that's never made money.

And like, why? What was all of this in aid of? And why did Penn Central keep funding it? So that is a good question. Because they knew, for a period of time at least, they knew because he explained it to them, presumably with like a power point of his own sex photos. Presumably. Because he also had sex photos of Bevan and Hodge. Exactly. In Bevan's office back in Philadelphia, he also has a file in proprietary. I make sure to store all my own blackmail. I don't want anyone else to have it. I can only blackmail myself. I do it constantly. I'm covering such a rich vein of fucking weird guys.

It's just incidentally the sexiest thing they can imagine is a blonde woman with big tits. And they're constantly engaged in a scheme of cat and mouse about all of the photos they keep of themselves. Oh, my God. Proudestinism, it's a curse. Yeah, what if my wife, who I hate, finds out about this? Oh, my God. Lassiter shows up with his grip of armed goons. And the problem is no one wants to fight a pitched battle over control of a failing not airline.

Or, more importantly, a filing cabinet full of sexy photos. Yeah, so Bevan and Hodge's impropriety came out in a later deposition by Ricky Artie in a court case over control of the airline or not airline. So the result of this was the railroad wasted $26 million that no one knew they were spending and no one knew they had on a small not airline. And this was a railroad which at any given time had less than $10 million cash on hand. Great. Yeah. Incredible.

And that was that was the investment side. The amount they paid for flying executives from one place to another rather than using their own trains. This $350,000, I think. Jesus. Ridiculous and stupid. And there's also not a chance that this was the only place this was happening. The only way this was happening. And just this is just the funniest. This is the sex scandal that made it to the papers. I'm sure these people had many other weird sex scandals that didn't come to light. If you went through...

Yeah, this is publishable because the sexiest thing imaginable to them because they're all weird Protestant is a blonde woman with big tits. Exactly. If you went through six Penn Center back in the Penn Central days and you went through every filing cabinet, every other filing cabinet would be pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Oh, my God, guys. Have you seen this? I mean, I see what you're saying. And I think we're coming to a synthesis here, which is we have to say that the Pennsylvania Railroad killed Marilyn Monroe. I mean, the issue we are fundamentally presented with is the Pennsylvania Railroad had no kinks.

That's true. That's true. It was like the kind of kink where it's so normal that it comes back out round the other side and becomes the weirdest shit. Yes. Like incinerating your own railroad because you want to see like a single boob? Yes. These people are repressed. This military organization slows the seeds of his own distraction because no one can get off at anything other than the most basic things. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Anyway. Also, the railroad was garbage. Yes. Also, the railroad, which was the main point of this episode. That was the main point of this episode. An executive jet didn't bankrupt the railroad,

but as we mentioned, it's a symptom of the endemic corruption and dysfunction throughout really the Pennsylvania Railroad side of the organization, which again, is most of upper management or the upper, upper side of management. Right. In part two, we'll look closer at the broader economic factors, which we're bringing this railroad to its knees. Part two, we'll look at the sex scandals of the New Haven executives. I can't imagine that. They're too Puritan. That's a whole different kind of psychosis. You go through the headquarters and the filing cabinets buried behind two false

containers is like a photograph of a woman's ankle taken from 40 feet away. Yes. Six men have been killed to preserve its secret. Everyone's wearing hats with buckles. Well, what did we learn? Railroads. Yes. Trains, if you will. Yes. You don't get to do a mega merger right on your first try. That I want very much for us to sell a T-shirt of the Apollo lander in Pennsylvania Railroad livery. I wonder, because I know the bud company got into rocket part manufacturing for a little bit.

I wonder if the Pennsylvania Railroad had anything to do with the Apollo landings. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a finger in that pod, you know? I'm sure. And honestly, this is all like we're joking about the moon landing stuff, but like this is also the late 60s. Like this is when this was happening. So I'm sure that some of the sites, right? This is when you get the like TWA moon lander graphics and things. So I'm 100% sure Pennsylvania was like, how can we become the Pennsylvania and moon? Penn Central slipped Neil Armstrong of 50 to take a filing cabinet's worth of documents up and bury them on the moon, but they would never be found. No, that's what gets you off is it might

be found. Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. This is the whole thing. It's like under the American flag. Yes. This goes unfurls the flag. And instead of an American flag, it's a picture of two giant tits for mankind. Oh, God. All right. This is the three hour podcast episode psychosies. Yes. Yeah, it's segment on this podcast called. Oh, thank God. Thank God. Hey, neat trifles. Yes. Hello. Well, there's your problem, comrades. Today, I have a story about a situation even worse than an unsafe work environment, an unsafe school environment. Hell, yes. It's like prison or something. IDK. I haven't read Foucault.

Yeah, but you basically don't need to. You've got the gesture. That's true. I was in eighth grade taking a semester long shop class, primarily focused on woodworking. I wish I had some chocolate. You don't have shop class? I have a shop class in eighth grade. Oh, that's important. No, they didn't give a shit. They never let you touch a machine. No wonder you weren't scared off from engineering. Our shop class was called design and technology because it was high-falusing. And I've mentioned this before, but my DT teacher's big brag was that he had invented the anti-homeless bench. Oh, my God. What was I's called? I was was called Minuteman Tech. I grew up in the northeast. Why study industrial arts?

Under the best of circumstances, giving a bunch of 13 to 14 year olds access to power tools is a bad idea. What is even worse when the instructor of said children doesn't really give a shit? The teacher of this class was pretty old. We'll call him Mr. Michaels because I can't remember his name. He would gesture vaguely at an assignment. For most part, allow the students to figure out what it is they were meant to do and how they were meant to do it. This laissez faire attitude also extended to safety beyond making us wear shitty old safety glasses. He never really instructed us on how to safely use the equipment in the class. Good. I don't remember exactly what the assignment was, but it's not really important. I was at the bandsaw picture attached for reference,

cutting a squat rectangular block of wood corner to corner. Now, if Mr. Michaels had been a little more proactive about safety, he might have taught the class that when sawing a piece of wood, you should push it into the blade with another piece of wood. So that when you get through your cut, you don't push your hand into the blade. Hey, I was never taught this either, and I still have all of my fingers and thumbs. Wow. However, this was something I was not aware of as a dumb, tired 13-year-old. I guess you should have got good. I'm just smarter, I guess. Gotta get good. I'll repeat to your thumb, but I'm different. Another lesson of the Penn Central merger. Mm-hmm. They just got good at railroading. That's true. Sure.

Well, that's part three when the Penn Central did get good at railroading. That's true. They were named Conrail. Instead, I was pushing the wood into the blade with the flat of my thumb diagram attached. As I was absentmindedly cutting, I noticed a sharp hot pain in my thumb, and looked down to see blood starting to go everywhere. No. Slightly delirious, I walked quietly over to Mr. Michaels and showed him my thumb, at which he looked with a horrified expression and told me to go to the nurse's office. Upon them taking a look, it was determined that it wasn't as bad as it seemed.

The cut only went about halfway through my thumb. That still seems pretty bad. It's pretty bad, yeah. Yeah. It was only through my apparent quick reflexes that I avoided cutting the tip of my thumb off. So they put a couple of band-aids on it, and I had to finish the rest of the school day. Okay. Great. Yeah. Great. Fantastic. Fragile like flopping around. Yeah. Suit yourself.

Yes, I got the joke. Hmm. Because a suture is a kind of stitch in a medical contact. It's true. It's true. Mr. Michaels didn't take this as a learning opportunity to emphasize safety more. He just kept not giving a shit. My only consolation was that towards the end of the semester, he stopped showing up to his own class. So a substitute finished out finals week. What's final in a job class? You have to make it like a wooden box or something.

I mean, I think we should make teachers unions about 9,000% stronger so that all teachers can be like this. That would be pretty good. I mean, considering what Jason said about throwing children in the canal, that would be a good step towards that, you know, Dutch utopia. Just absolutely bulletproof teachers union. Every child submerged in a canal. I can just kill any child who annoys me. It's fine. Absolutely. The thing is, the thing is, right, as a society, we mixed up the power of cop unions and teachers unions, right? Cop union should be under constant assault from politicians and should be banned from doing anything. And teachers unions should be able

to make or break any political candidate and get anybody off of any misconduct charge. Basically, yeah. And like teachers unions, especially in urban areas, all the teachers are black, right? So they're going to be biased against white people for once. Yeah, we can finally start doing anti-white racism. I mean, I think it's time to make it happen. I think it's time to make the fraternal order of educators happen. Yeah. They also have like a deeply problematic Twitter account that brags about Look at all the kids we've fed into a wood chipper. All the pencils they took. You go into the homeroom and your teacher has like a punish a skull sticker on his desk and

you're like, oh, my God, they're still there. They're constantly complaining about the lack of chalk, you know, but it's like a major number two. The Twitter account just has a photo of a note from one student calling another student gay and it's like off the streets this week. Like that and one of those like pencils with their pens with like the eight different colors. Yeah. An intelligence led search led to the confiscation of this dangerous weapon. The TI-83 with all the answers to the test programmed into it. Yeah. No, I 100% believe this cops and teachers should switch places in terms of how we value them. Yes.

This is not the most deftifying or exciting of Safety Thirds, but we can all use a little laugh at the negligence of the safety of children. Absolutely. I was saying this. Thank you all for the great podcast and I hope you have a great day from Dan. Post script. Go Packers. Go back. Liam wasn't there for that. Shake thumbs with danger. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disaster. Does anyone have commercials before we go?

Did you want to like plug anything? Uh, sure. I can. I'm on Twitter at besquickel. Good luck spelling that. I'm on YouTube at besquickelhousen. Good luck spelling that. And I do have a Patreon for a city skylines project that I promise you is not dead. I'm just very busy. We've honestly, we've been talking for like months that like next episode, Presidio Bay and the next episode, Franklin, same day, we're going to do it. This is true. Yes. What that is. Question mark. But get ready for that double feature. Yes. Great. Perfect. All right. Listen to all of my podcasts. Follow me on Twitter if you're not

already. Yes. Bye. And yes. Bye.