Episode 189: 2017 Point Defiance Derailment

coercively assigned, ready at birth. Oh, God, it's not on. I can't just push the button anymore. Give it a second. Because I haven't done this in two weeks. There we go. Oh, God, hold on. Oh, my God. Any time. This is. Don't you just know how to open Adobe? This is the most shut the fuck up and don't touch nothing podcast in history, where it's like any time anything changes, all of us become fucked mentally. Delirious with rage. You know that XKCD about every update breaks somebody's workflow? Yeah. We have one hit point workflow. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Hold on. I'm going to kill you. Oh, I should start the virtual camera too. And we should do a sync point. A sync point? A sync point. A point where you sync. Ask me about the Titanic. 3, 2, 1, Mark. 3, 2, 1. Mark. Oh, Chris being close enough. That was a violent clap. I was fond of that. That was good. Stimulating. Alright, we're locked in. The podcast with a one hit point workflow is back. Yes. The podcast barely cling to life most days, yeah. Don't worry. We're never going to stop doing it. We're never going to stop doing it, but it's a battle. Hi, haters. Alright, yeah. 60 gigabytes. that's fine i'm gonna oh i'm gonna beat you to death with your own shoes i hope there was nothing incriminating on uh recent files i don't know something incredible i don't know i might have all the epstein files you don't know that i guess we don't clear bone plans yeah not my dot exe why is it inexecutable don't worry about it yeah yeah shut up hello hi ross hello and welcome to well there's your problem it's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides I'm Justin Rosniak I'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay go I am November Kelly I'm the person who's talking right now My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam. Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him, and we have a guest slash employee slash what are you, Victoria? That's a great question. That was not rhetorical, by the way. I'm a Victoria. My name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her, and I survived the month of October, so I'm fucking back. Survived the month of October. Yeah, I tried really hard to kill me. Yeah, we'll get you a medal of some kind when we get a chance. Yeah, like a medal of Lennon for valiant service. I will absolutely get you an order of Lennon. You just have to come to Scotland to pick it up. Okay, that's fine. We can arrange that. Who would do that? Go to Scotland? Yeah. In this economy? In this economy? I know exactly what kind of asshole is it. Entirely to purchase Buckfast. I needed it. Two suitcases laden down with the caffeinated fortified wine made by monks. The thing is, right, that I need caffeinated alcohol because it is my lifeblood. Because my two favorite things in the world are being stimulated and depressed, baby, and I'm gonna have both at once. God made caffeinated alcohol for the same reason he made trans people, so that we could share in the joy of creation. That's right, baby. Here's the thing, I couldn't find Buckfast in Scotland, I had to go with respected railway engineer Gareth Dennis to buy it in York. And father. Where did you find it in York? That must have been like a little bit of an odyssey. There was a bar, but it had a beer store underneath. Bizarre. Everything was crooked. The bathroom was the smallest room I've been in in my life. I'm so glad you enjoyed my stupid, stupid country. It was a nice time. I liked it more than other parts of the trip, to be honest. So, what you see on the screen in front of you is a pretty beat-up M-TRAC whatever the new Siemens diesel locomotives are called. It looks like the kind of... Like the Dodge they sell to the Marines. It looks like the train equivalent of Darth Vader with the helmet off. It's bad. It's not very good. You might as well just spray painted that's bad. The T right here is shorthand for that's bad, folks. Yeah. The WTOP inspectors arrive at the site of this train and like spray paint a W and a YP on the side of this instead of an A. It's better than a fan. It's not supposed to look like this. Today we're going to talk about the 2017 Port Defiance Amtrak Cascades derailment. You can tell that this is the Pacific Northwest because someone has clipped a leash to the front of this train, the Caribbean. Lesbians. Yeah, there's already like vegetation growing on it because there's so much rain, you know. Yeah. I think we have not friends but friends of friends who were on this train when it derailed I hope they're excited for us to like make light of that tragedy yeah exactly exactly you survived a train crash not many people can see that yeah so but before we talk about that we have to do the god damn news fuck you So, I mean, a lot of things have happened in the past, whenever the last time we released an episode. We had the longest government shutdown in history. Yeah, do you think it's a coincidence that the federal government shuts down and the podcast doesn't come out for a while? Hey, it's shit we can't talk about on air, part 455. Yeah, it's fine. Listen, the good thing is we established what they call in the business a legend by also not releasing a bunch of times when the federal government was funded. Oh, we're the most inconsistent podcast in the world. It comes out when it comes out. It says so on our website. Shut up. Yeah, it makes me want to kind of ritually disembowel myself because of the dishonor. People love A-Lab series. I can only hope to become that inconsistent. It's aspirational. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So we had the longest government shutdown in history, and like 10 Democrats or whatever, including our own Senator John Fetterman. Oh, my God. Boo! I decided, nah, we should just capitulate and reopen everything. Yeah, I mean, Fetterman had like another stroke maybe, or like a fall and a heart attack or some kind of unhealthy shit, but it didn't turn him woke. That happened after he voted, though. It didn't turn him woke. God's just consistently trying to strike him down. Who could let God through his sick at it? Certainly not me. Pennsylvanian Satan being like, we've created a smite-proof oath. You thought it was going to be me, didn't you, motherfuckers? you might be smite proof but we don't know a moral is still proven otherwise yeah so this was an extremely frustrating thing for it to end in this way because you know you do this very long government shutdown when the government shuts down for those of you who have been living under a rock which seems like an ideal place to live to be honest and that's the federal government's rock yeah that's true then they kick you you know the federal government's like ornamental hermit. Yeah, I work in the folly at Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, exactly. A lot of non-essential government employees just don't get paid until the government reopens. The Trump administration is trying to not pay a lot of these people, which is vile. This is like a whole crisis that was sort of around like, okay, we have to fund the government somehow. And, you know, Democrats, of course, wanted to continue such things as Affordable Health Care Act subsidies, right, so that people's insurance doesn't, you know, double next year. And, you know, Republicans did not want to do that because they, I don't know, want to kill everyone. Yeah, fuck asses, dude. And you know what they say, in a standoff like that, you can always rely on the famously iron spine of the Democratic Party. Yeah, yeah. Devin, 10 minutes, 30 seconds in, take those motherfuckers out back and f*** them. Kneel them over, ditch, f*** them, f*** them all, f*** them if you gotta, shoot and f*** them, 10 minutes and 30 seconds in to reiterate. Yeah, I don't know what to say about this other than, you know. I already said it, man. With the ultimate capitulation here, it's like, why did we do any of that? What was that for? That is exactly right. It was to disrespect a bunch of troops, which is the most noble reason for doing anything. Including air traffic controllers who were a type of troop. Yeah, and being like, hey, fuck us. And then you slap them in the back of the head so their glasses fly off and they can't see the planes. And you go, we're not paying you for three months. Yeah. Well, and the Dems were winning this, too. Like it was they were they polling showed that, you know, even for like the wonk minded out there that the Democrats were perceived as not the problem. And the Republicans were actually getting, you know, kind of shellacked for this. So it made perfect sense to immediately be like, no, actually, it's our fault. We were just. We're so. And then, of course, the second after they did capitulate, Donald Trump came on stage with a big briefcase, which snapped open to reveal a bunch of documents incriminating him as a pedophile. So, yes. Tactical masterstroke once again from Senator Chuck Schumer. I did like the article. I just got a phone call today from Blue Cross Blue Shield saying that my premiums were going up next year. So, thank God for that. Yeah, I am trying to have a family, and I have to do some stuff around that. And if you try to prohibit me from having a family, I'm going to take a battle axe, Senator Schumer and Senator Fetterman, and I'm going to come to your offices with my battle axe, and I'm going to – Dev, 12 minutes, 25 seconds now. You hit Fetterman with the blunt end over and over again each time. You die. Always die. No, no, no, no. He comes back with a different ideology each time. I can't stand in the wheel. I was like Chairman Gonzalo thought for a minute there. No, no, no, no, fuck, go back. I hit him one time, and I think he called me a cracker? I would pay good money to see black Israelite liberation John Fetterman. Yes, yes, so would I. Well, I mean, to be fair, if anyone made that guy, it is the evil scientist Yacoub, right? Like, no question. Doubtless. He gets enough lumps on his head that he looks like the evil scientist. I do like the idea of just spitting the wheel of ideologists, whoever this dirtbag fucking believes. Dirtbag used not affectionately, by the way. George Spetterman. George Spetterman. Everyone works but the vacant lot. Yeah, so Chuck Schumann knows that Americans love their health insurance companies and they want to spend more time on the phone with them. And so courteously, he, you know, decided to really enable that, you know? Yeah, I mean, you know, a few people have tried to, you know, say, well, Schumer didn't do this. And it's like, okay, maybe he didn't, but he did lose control of the party. It's kind of like, well, what exactly are we doing here? What is the point? Right, exactly. What exactly would you say it is you do here? Well, from what it seems like, even the House is mad at him. Like, everybody, like, even the Democratic establishment is pissed at him. It's kind of insane to see, like, unanimously every single person is absolutely fucking furious. Resign, fuckface. It might be time to hang up the hat, quit while you're ahead. Retire to spend more time with your imaginary family. Yeah. Quit while you're ahead. Yeah. Hanging with the Bailey. We don't know. Chuck Schumer does frequently consult with imaginary friends for what policies he should vote for. Yeah, he's like a secular Mormon in that way, you know? Yeah, that's true. He has like a kind of prophet, seer, and revelator role. Well, at least if you're Mormon, other people believe in your imaginary friends, too. And God, the Mormons haven't figured it out because God can change his mind. Yeah. That's, see, God is a consensus builder. And also you get your own planet when you die. We got to write the Mormonism bonus episode. We got to have Jordan from bringing your money out here or Greg or one of the other ones. I don't know. And, yeah, it's coming. Just when I get around to it. Shut up. So, yeah, we did this whole rigmarole for nothing. Goddamn nothing. Yep. Amazing. Didn't even last long enough for me to get stuck in Europe, which would have been funny at least. Could have been an expat. No, instead we sort of forced the air traffic control people back to work. Yeah. And, you know, Ronald Reagan's criminal legacy continues. Yes. In other news. All right, we got to talk about the Hess truck this year. Oh, it looks like shit, dude. What the fuck is that? It's not a truck. It's not a truck. That's a, what is that, NASCAR? Maybe. The Hess truck is back, and it's worse than ever. It's two stock cars, right? It's two stock cars, a big one and a small one. Now, notably, two cars do not add up to one truck. Don't talk to me or my son ever again. The big stock car, you can open up the hood of the big stock car and put the small stock car inside the big stock car. Russian stock cars. Yeah, it's a Matryoshka stock car. Regular cars are going to have a field day with this. This is my big car. This is my little car. This is my big car. This is my little car. This is a fucked up thing to do in the cars universe. This is like some Ed Gein shit to them. Yeah, well, we never really established how the new cars are made. I guess this is, you know. They're made by fucking Ross. Car vor. What have we got? We got, I think, 67 lights, five roaring. That's covered up by the Chiron. The small car fits inside the big car. there's a pullback motor you know i mean i like the pullback motor i guess but yeah for a shipping battery that's 50 fucking dollars pound sand yeah jesus the economy is fucked this is downstream of tariffs to me this is not a good hess truck because number one it's not a truck right the children crave like large industrial or commercial vehicle you know that's what a truck is gonna be truck body, you know? This is some real light truck exception shit. Maybe if the big one was one of those NASCAR truck series trucks. Oh, I love the half-smen series. Yeah. Do you think Hes know about the Parry-Dakar truck rally? They must. Someone in that office must know about that. The Hes truck is a DIF turbo twin and it kills you instantly. Oh, God, please. That's an episode I want to do at some point in the future. Absolutely. No, this thing sucks. You have to teach your kids about the Dakar Rally. Teach your children's own rules. Talk to your kids about the Paris Dakar Rally. Talk to your kids about the Dakar Rally. Here's how one man created a truck so powerful it kills you instantly. i just if you if you're not familiar you should look up like just google images just look up some of these trucks because they look like a big bouncy excitable dog that's really happy to be doing what it's doing and what it's doing is driving like 60 miles an hour up a sort of near vertical sand it's great yes yeah or like 150 miles an hour over like smooth i remember that I wanted to enter the Dakar. They only let professionals do it. And I was real mad. And then Joy yelled at me. She was like, why did you think you would be allowed to do the Dakar? I was like, I don't know. It just seems like fun. Having a sort of amateur bracket where you just use whatever car, like, you know, whatever lemon. Let us do it. What do you care? 100% fatality raise. Lemon's Dakar is a thing I want. I think that there's like a pro-am, you know, you can kind of be like sort of an amateur team to enter the Baja. If you want to do that. All right, we've got to step up from sponsoring teams to being teams. This is why you hired me. Yes, that's right. I'm the driver. What's the most kind of ridiculously dangerous thing we can sign up for? And there's just like a clause buried in there somewhere from like 1924 that says that like wireless enthusiasts are allotted a team spot at Le Mans or something. And we just get to go out there and die. we've earned this New York to Paris and um do you want the Leslie special or do you want um the uh Hannibal Twin 8 I'm always going for Hannibal Twin 8 on that one actually we should there's not enough like silly bullshit in the world just in general still less that we're involved in and any kind of motorsport shenanigans like that they should bring back the mele mele so that we can enter it. Yeah, but it's not like... You can't die. Yeah, they don't let you die. What I want is for us to go, let's meet up and race and die. Oh, shit. That sounds like fun. Well, we're not going to Saudi Arabia, so we can't do it right now. But when it goes back, we'll do the Dakar. I was going to say, I don't think I'm legally allowed to drive in a couple of those countries. That's kind of an interesting quandary for that legal system, you know? Alright, motherfuckers. Trans women are women, but only in the sense that they're not allowed to drive. Love, Saudi Arabia. I see you've observed some of my driving lessons. Well, I don't know. By that definition, Roz is a trans woman. He can't drive. Yeah, I was wondering how long that would take. Oh, we cracked the egg. All right. Listen, that was the goddamn news. Salty snail. We also have to talk about the live shows. Live shows! At the Spaghetti Warehouse. Come to the Spaghetti Warehouse. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You will be stored in the Spaghetti Warehouse. You will be accommodated. You will have a good time. But I have to emphasize, we are no longer asking. Come to the podcast live show or the podcast live show will come to you. Do you want a bottle of wolf urine for hunting purposes purchased from Amazon.com poured into the air vents of your parked car? No? Come to the live show. yeah that's my ad rate yes yes so um there we go we are doing a pair of live shows relatively soon at the spaghetti warehouse in philadelphia pennsylvania right it's called union transfer there we go okay right yeah dead naming union transfer well otherwise i i was there more when it was spaghetti warehouse than it was when it's called zimbabwe now implying the spaghetti warehouse was more of a rhodesia situation just like there's nothing justified about the existence of spaghetti warehouse what are the dates it's like december 15th and 16th the links will be in the description um yeah it's exciting sorry december 14th 14th and 15th okay yeah I cannot stress enough. We are not asking. Do not fucking embarrass us. No, do not fucking embarrass us. Yeah. We're there with the Quorators. They are a podcast about asking questions on Quora, the question website. It's a very good podcast. Listen to that podcast. It's a good podcast, but under no circumstances allow their fans to outnumber our fans. No, you will be. Not permissible. We'll be doing a wall of death in the parking lot after. But we will also have exclusive merch. You will be asking some Quora questions of your own, such as, why is this happening to me? How could a loving God watch such agony and do nothing? And please have mercy. That last one isn't even a question, but you'll be asking it unless you come to the live shows. Yes. There will be the most requested piece of merch we've ever had available exclusively at the live show. we have made the piece of merch that I have to tell you what it is because I think current went rogue on it hang on what kind of merch is that it's in the chat of the Zencaster the fans will have to find out what have we done let's fucking go don't flash it up Ross god damn it dude no they have to actually know you can't like tease it. No, we were supposed to tease it. They have to actually know what it is. You motherfucker. What the hell? No, they have to actually know what it is. Because what if they didn't request that, but they realized, no, I would like some high-vis. Yeah, there's going to be, well, there's your problem, branded high-vis. Get the high-vis, otherwise you are going to be highly visible to me through a gun sight. Okay, okay. So yeah, unfortunately we will... December 14th or 15th. November, how do you sell out all your shows? Threats. Violent threats. Incredible violent threats. Yeah, fans are going to learn what duty to war means real fucking quick. Unfortunately. Extending castle doctrine to someone else's house. I'm just going to repeat this from our previous announcement. November is going to have to appear on the video again. Yeah, I know. It fucking sucks. The O-1 visa process is very difficult for us to accomplish because we have no press whatsoever. So if you work for a newspaper or some other journalism outlet, please write some articles about us. There are exceptions. If your name is Olivia Knutzi, maybe not. A picture of my butthole elicited a mere nice, which we've all been there. But the other thing I want to announce is the toy drive is back. I'm going to parrot what November said and point out that if you do not donate toys, you will be executed. There will be no quarter given to people who do not donate toys. You will be spent over a shallow ditch, which you have dug with your own two hands. I'm not even giving you a shovel. You will be donating gifts to the children. Wait, so this might be a little excessive, you know? I mean, we can threaten to kill them for not going to the show. Unlimited genocide on the listener. You're going to, like, wind up, you know, killing. How many subscribers do we got? Not enough. 25,000 on YouTube. Yeah, if we got 125,000 subscribers. Come to the live shows and donate to us. There are 650 seats at the live show. Times two, 1,100. A bunch of you are going to have to sit in each other's laps or get killed. It's going to get real fucked up. That is six figures of killing. Why do you think they call it the spaghetti warehouse? Oh, yeah. Friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, lovers to enemies, exes to lovers, mpreg tag. All of these things are experiences you will have at, well, that's your problem live show. Yeah, you'll get pregnant. Surely! Just do your best to bleep enough of this that it doesn't get like, you know, fucking adult only signing required. I think it's good that every single time I'm on an episode, there's a YouTube disclaimer for warnings about self-harm. I think that fits my theme. This isn't self-harm. No, this is your sort of others' harm. Alright, alright. we'll figure out the logistics behind this later just cut enough to make it visible and then you know fine we may have to start a gulag anyway so yeah come to the show so you don't get sent to the gulag limited genocide out of self preservation if for no other reason come to the live shows wait a second because of the fucking visa shit and Trump right technically physically i can't come to the live show so am i obliged to once i'm done wading through the blood of our listeners like just put me on the list as well like we'll put you under a comp ticket okay okay yeah yeah yeah i i don't have to go to the shows because i work here you know yeah oh i have a fun story about that i think i've told this on on uh on the show on the podcast before but we were playing the somerville show and i was standing in the because rin and megan work merch and so rin megan and jay were standing around working merch uh not doing their goddamn jobs for which i don't pay them and uh and a woman came up to me and said excuse me uh is this the merch line and i said i just work here and then uh she was like oh okay and i'm good and so i was just like the merch line's over here and she's like okay thanks and then the show concluded and we were doing signings and she said, I've never been more mortified in my entire life. One third of this podcast, which is fine. It did not hurt my feelings or make me sad in any way, shape or form. I promise. But now we've aired your dirty laundry while also announcing our intentions to kill upwards of six figures of people. Yeah, man. That's what I've said. That was announcements. I don't have a sting for that. What do you want me to do? Announcements. Announcements. With Gareth always one to two seconds behind Ross and I. I don't know anything about the Pacific Northwest, so we're handing this off to Victoria. I don't know anything about the Pacific Northwest. Hands it to trans women. It's true. Yeah, we've actually claimed Capitol Hill in Seattle as our own. We have achieved figures of upwards of like 10% of the city. And we also have a woke mayor now. So that's my news. We have woke mayor. We have woke city council. We have about as woke as a city attorney as you could possibly get, which is to say an ex-prosecuted or one that doesn't like Trump. So we'll take it. Yeah. So to figure out what happened with the Amtrak Cascades derailment, first we have to ask, what is the city of Tacoma? Seattle's uglier sister. This train station fucking rules. Yeah, it's still there. They don't have any interest. I read perfectly counter-mighted responses. Yeah. Yeah. The big, like, Bell Epoch, like, dome here. Oh, my God. I was going to say this is, you know, I was kind of going to go with the Tacoma sort of Pacific Northwest Trenton. It makes the world takes. Yes. It was kind of like the more industrial city. Basically in 1865 there was a Civil War vet who came out west to try to make his fortune or whatever and he paddled around Puget Sound looking for a spot of land that he was going to claim as his And he put a cabin down in what is modern Tacoma on the shores of Commencement Bay specifically on the least slopes, like, flattest edge of the bay, because he was like, Northern Pacific is building a railroad up here, and they're going to need some land, and I'm going to make a fortune when they pick this spot. And this is 1865. Nobody lived in Tacoma Yeah, nobody lived in Tacoma except for native people Because at this point the territorial capital was Olympia Which is, I don't know, 30 or 40 miles southwest of Tacoma Or they lived in Seattle, which is 25 or 30 miles north On the shores of Elliott Bay And Seattle at this point is up and coming It's kind of like a logging town They still hadn't figured out how to not dump raw sewage into the Puget Sound and then flood the streets with shit and piss every high tide. But they were getting there. Oh, I sense judgment. I sense a lot of judgment. What do you want? Paris? I mean, it's like, no, I mean, that's a very. Piss and shit everywhere kind of is Paris. That's true, especially in 1865. Yeah. One of my favorite things about Seattle is that it used to be just an entire environmental apocalypse. apocalypse, and we managed to clean it up to the point where sometimes there are whales. So, no, I mean, you know, but it was still kind of like Seattle was not a city. You know, like SF is way bigger at this point. It's not really like the place people. There are a ton of people, but it's definitely bigger than Tacoma. So, you know, for the next decade, this basically goes unchanged. Tacoma is like a village of like 50 people. 50 settlers, I should say. There's, you know, natives still up here in this era. And then, you know, Seattle's an actual city with, like, money and industry and jobs. And by, you know, by the middle of the year, Great Northern had their rail link in Tenino, Washington, which is south of Olympia. And they had until December 19th, 1873, to finish their transcontinental railroad, or they would lose all of the federal land grants that they had been given to build it. They would revert back to the government. They'd lose, like, they were basically borrowing money off of the value of these grants so they would be completely and utterly destroyed. I love a whimsical federal government that's, you know, sort of like around the world in 80 days type shit. Yeah, well, I think we've worked on this for a while, and, you know, completion of a Transcontinental Railroad is you have to hit saltwater you know, somewhere, and, you know, the Puget Sound is saltwater because it connects to the Pacific Ocean, so they're like alright, we just have to get here as fast as possible. Hit saltwater thousands of miles of rail rust instantly. It just travels up. Yeah, capillary effect. It's like when you you know what I mean. It's like when you pour a bunch of water into a cup. No, that's not a capillary effect. Whatever. We'll figure out what the fucking capillary effect is. I'm not a scientist. I just drive cars. So, you know, Seattle at this point is offering a bunch of money and they've got prime real estate they're going to give to the railroad. And they're like, okay, we got this on lock and uh lo and behold the job car the man who put his uh cabin down Tacoma next slide please was correct this is not job car this is the next guy one second um they picked so northern northern pacific is looking around they're like okay we just have to finish this thing as fast as possible we have like less than six months to complete our transcontinental railroad um and it just so happens that you know there's a bunch of prairie land south of Tacoma and they can build it in. Basically, they can lay down rails as fast as humanly possible. Total vindication for one insane kayaker slash homesteader. Yes. Yeah. Man successfully prospected a railroad terminus. Eight years before it even got there. Like, it was... Yeah, it was like, these guys are going to finish it in the stupidest way possible. So I'm not pretty stupid too. Yeah, only a stupid guy can predict another stupid guy's actions. Yeah, but it paid off perfectly. So, of course, they start laying rails heading towards Tacoma. This is July. By September of 1873, J. Cook & Company, which was the first wire service bank in America, was collapsing. It was Northern Pacific's primary lender and, like, the source of all of their gold to pay the workers to build the railroad. The banks are out of money. Stop. Well, this is before, you know, you had, like, a centralized currency. So you needed, like, actual gold to back up the bank notes and so on and so forth. The bank is out of gold. Stop. yeah well and and it's interesting because this is like the beginning of you know sort of like an early understanding of what monetary policy would become because part of the reason you know part of the reason they went they collapsed is because they were just over leveraged to shit building this incredible money sink at the railroad because you know northern pacific was kind of operating off of the yes if we lay more rails we'll just make more money sort of operating strategy yeah oh my god they were open ai for railroads oh my god well it's a very least they got land grants. The land grants made a lot of sense. Well, they did. But also at the same time, most of this land was totally worthless in a monetary sense, unless the railroad actually ran through and went places, which if your railroad is disjoint and incomplete, it's not doing, which is kind of a lot of the West Coast operations in 1873. So they had a lot of land. There's barely demand for one transcontinental railroad at this point, let alone the three that were being built. Yeah. So, you know, one half is that the railroad itself is kind of a bad idea. The second was because, you know, there had been so much mining out west that there was actually a glut of silver on the market. And it was pushing like it was creating massive inflation. And so what ended up happening was, you know, you had you had inflation at home. What companies would do is they would basically ship off a bunch of silver immediately overseas. where there wasn't the same inflationary pressure to hire, you know, usually like Chinese workers to come over and then work on the railroads, basically taking advantage of like early like, you know, currency exchange rates. And so basically it meant that there was, you know, there was not much cash and also like inflation had driven the value of what there was lower. and you get a bank run and all of a sudden basically you start with a bank panic and the American economy gets wiped out so this is September when this begins and by November the workers had now not been paid for three months and they were hearing that they weren't going to get paid again and so they struck in late November of 1873. They are like, I couldn't find an exact source for how far they were, but I think it was within like 10 miles of salt water. And, you know, they have like... 10 feet away from this guy's log cabin. He's just like tearing his hair out. All the guys who talk about going back to the gold standard, this is the economy they want to go back to. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, like, it's wild because so much of this is just like it does kind of feel like the US sort of operated off of like an and-prim philosophy for like the first couple hundred years it was going. It was just like, yeah, if somebody's on land you want, you can just kill them, and then also, like, you can build around the show. You win. But also, like, yeah, from, like, I don't know, from the end of the Civil War to the 30s. Yeah, we just have a horrible depression every 10 years. Yeah. Panic of 1871, a lot of that. I wrote my undergrad thesis on that. Yeah. 71, 93. There was one in the 1880s, too. We used to have a panic. We used to have panics. We don't have that anymore. We have a recession. Yeah, I was going to say we had the Great Recession like 15 years ago, man. Yeah, but that wasn't a panic. You're right. I was pretty anxious. We barely have, like, incidents anymore as well. Yeah. Like. No, we don't have to go back to having panics. Excuse me. We need to have sound monetary policy. Return guy, but only for monetary panics. Yeah. Wanted to go back to the gold standard, but just because you think it's good to get a little adrenaline going because of the panic. Keep capital limber. I want to see some guys jump off of the stock exchange building. Come on. No, sound monetary policy. Let's go. So this is General John Sprague. He was a Union Civil War vet who was quite accomplished. He joined in like Sherman's March to the Sea. and he was He looks like the kind of guy who would do that That is not a mustache that hides a secret smile It's a mustache that hides a second angrier mustache Jamie Heinemann type facial hair Jesus, I just realized I plagiarized that joke from a Cracked.com article I will add myself to the list of people who would be killed for not attending the live show maybe He is a walrus We are looking at a walrus angry looking man how do you want your lithograph taken furious man but yeah so he's super intended to the northern pacific and overseeing building this section of the rail and you know of course the local cops are like let's start a war let's kill all of the strikers let's murder literally everybody here yeah and then they found out about the strike which you know redoubled that conviction. And, you know, the cop literally rolled up to the strikers when they barricaded themselves and began reading the riot act and was literally ready to go to war. And this guy was like, let's not. It's probably a bad idea. I think it's hard to ascribe reasoning to him centuries later, but part of it is kind of like, these are all Civil War vets. You know, some people, you know, may evoke memories of who we serve with. Part of it is also like, wow, these guys are probably insane. We haven't paid them for three months. They're definitely, you know, they have the sympathy. We're about to get our shit kicked in. Literally everybody around us, we're going to get absolutely fucking wiped out. So he negotiated a settlement where, you know, he and a bunch of the other execs started withdrawing money from their personal bank accounts and working with, like, literally every shop and saloon in the area to give them basically script that they could spend there. Because he was like, look, we have got to finish this railroad by any means possible because if we don't finish it in the next three weeks, we lose all of the land, and this was all for naught. We're all basically bankrupt forever. And for reference here, the land grants for these transcontinental railroads, they were generally like, okay, you have every other square mile in a checkerboard pattern for like some number of miles away from the actual railroad right of way. So for the Northern Pacific, I mean, in the mountains, that was not so valuable, except for timber. But if you're going from like, oh God, where did the Northern Pacific start? I mean, it started from Chicago to some extent, but you know. They have routes up north too, I think. like the Dakotas and Montana and stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, they went through the southern part of Montana. That's still perfectly, like, viable, like, agricultural land. Like, this was big, big, big bucks they were talking about. Yeah. Yeah, well, and actually, it's fun. If you look at, like, a BLM survey map today, you can actually still kind of see the checkerboard pattern in a lot of places because you'll see where the government owns lands and sort of, like, you know, that checkerboard around railroad tracks and stuff. And then a lot of it's been transferred away from the railroads, but you can actually see the original grant patterns overlaid over top of Nevada where the Union Pacific line cuts through. Oh, yeah, and also logging in the Pacific Northwest follows that same pattern. Yeah. Which is pretty crazy to look at. We striate the terrain. Yeah. Sorry. Next slide, please. Doing great. Yeah, I quit smoking this week, so I'm, like, extra money. Good job. Thanks. I picked it back up for a month of hell, and I was like, all right, month of hell's over. Time to stop poisoning myself. Anyway, this is an artist's rendition of what Tacoma looked like in, I believe, like, the mid-1880s. You can tell there was not a lot there. That's Mount Rainier. It looks like Japan. I was about to say, that looks like Fuji to me, yeah. Yeah. Some lovely tall skips. Rhaenyra and Mount Fuji are part of the same chain of volcanoes. People didn't know this, but actually Seattle and Tacoma were part of a closed country system until the railroad arrived and forced them to be open. This is sort of the anime version of the Appalachians. yeah we're trying to reclose it so all the racists and like transphobes on the other side of the cascade stop coming over to you know beat up people we're working on that you gotta force them into like based on my study of history you gotta force them to interact with your specific named ports and then that way you have a kind of designated chud zone and you can acquire kind of chud knowledge you have to use the duchess a go-between? Yeah. Well, the Dutch would be the chuds in this. Ah, those motherfuckers. Lost their $500. Alright, here's the thing about the Dutch. Yeah, get it. From going to Amsterdam once. Go on, please. Here's the thing. I was so excited to go ride a bicycle in Amsterdam. And the infrastructure's great. Everything's fantastic. Then you get the fucking bicycle. The bicycles suck shit. Holy fuck. They all have coaster brakes. I was like, I was like, I got on the bicycle and I was like, something's off here. I can't stop. Oh, shit. There's no brakes. Fuck. Just put your legs down. I'm sure a Dutch person will say extremely securely. Yes, that did happen. What do you mean by, I'm sorry, I'm stupid. What are coaster brakes on a bicycle? Coaster. So you know how you were a kid and you pedal backwards to stop the bike? Oh, my God. They have that for adults? Yeah. That's weird. That's like the main. I'm supposed to revere these fucking people that can't even build a bicycle properly? If you build enough of the infrastructure around it, nobody will question why the actual bike is bad. I understand why they need such great bicycle infrastructure, because the bicycles themselves suck so bad. Anyway, this is going to be a whole... This is a whole other subject. I shouldn't bring this up. Do an entire episode on the bicycles you rode in. Yeah, no, no. No, we're going to have to do a new episode. Bicycles suck shit in the Netherlands, you know, and I don't know. We'll get not just bikes back on and berate them the whole time. But, you know, this is a different situation. Yeah, we've got to talk about trains today. I would be remiss during this conversation to not mention my favorite thing that makes fun of the Dutch that my wife introduced me to, which is the Stephen Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures, which has an entire song about how goofy the Dutch are. It's an all-time moment in making fun of Europeans. Anyway, so December 16th, 1873, with three days before they lose all of their federal land grants, the Northern Pacific hits saltwater on the shore of Menson Bay into Tacoma. Like Indiana Jones reaching in under the thing to grab the hat, except it's like a railway engineer's hat. Yes. Yeah. Some high-vis from Network Rail. Sprague drove the final stake, or spike rather, into the rails, and, you know, they've got their rail link. Now, of course, this was about the most rushed train line that had ever been constructed, because, you know, not only they have no time, but then they got delayed by striking, and Tacoma has nothing in it, really. They've started clear-cutting everything to make timber for trestles or whatever, but basically they're importing a lot of stuff. They're importing a lot of labor. So they basically were like, yeah, that looks possible. Let's go for it. And this showed because as they were bringing supply trains up, they laid down a train because the grade was just laid so poorly. it was just this is the final essay at 11.58pm the night before the due date of rail lines really really funny to derail a train on the way into the place selected to be the flatest place where it would be hardest to derail a train yeah well I wasn't the thing is about the Pacific Northwest is that like flat here is a very relative term you know Seattle is like insanely hilly and like our flat streets are. I think, you know, for a lot of, like, if you're used to the Dakotas and Montana, you come out here and you're like, oh, holy shit. Everything is sideways. What's happening? But, yeah. But, anyway, I found, like, newspaper reports from the era where they had to, like, dig the cook out of the roof of the mess car, you know, because they just overturned the train trying to, you know, race this thing to the finish. So, next slide, please. This was also relatively common for, like, transcontinental railroads in general, just because you were you were racing for the, you know, for the land grants, you would, you know, a lot of these railroads were built with the idea that, okay, we build the railroad, and then once we're finished, then we build the good railroad. Yeah. We'll fix it in post, but for railroad construction. Exactly. Having Devin go back and, like, straighten your ties. Yeah. So, you know, this dotted line here from Tenino to Tacoma is this line that was built. It was the initial construction of the Transcontinental Link. In 1891, the Tacoma, Olympia, and Grays Harbor Railroad added the leftward bend from Lakeview to Lacey. Lakeview is now currently, like, southern Tacoma. But that, so that in 1891 completes the rail line that we now know more or less as the point defiance bypass. So it's just sitting there and it's going to wait about 120 years for us to get to the rest of the episode. It's sitting there and then we can sort of see the whole timeline of it leading inexorably to, well, there's your problem. Yes. Yes. Yes. So the thing about this route is, you know, it's it's two point two percent grade for like 12 miles. And this is kind of a pain for trains of the air to traverse because it's steep and consistently steep. So they start looking into alternative routes and they end up building a northern Pacific builds a waterfront line that goes around the edge of Puget Sound through Point Defiance to Tacoma. And that one's much flatter. And they end up cutting two rail tunnels through it. And so by the 40s, most passenger traffic was using the long flat line that went around the Puget Sound itself. And traffic on this, you know, original sort of, as they call it, the prairie line diminished as Northern Pacific stopped shipping as many freight trains out. after Burlington Northern, you know, was created in 1970 from Great Northern and Northern Pacific merging, they widened the clearances on the Point Defiance line to allow oversized Boeing freight trains to get through it. And so by 73, this original line, you know, a hundred years after it was laid down, was basically no longer used. It just kind of sat here. There was a couple of locals on it, but there was not like any through traffic. So yeah, if you want to go to the next slide, please. Oh, yeah. This is the Boeing Oversized Freight. This is actually my staff photo. I would like credit for this one. That's absolutely sick. You can tell that it was taken by you because it's a good photo. Thank you. That's at the rail yard here, one of the rail yards here in Seattle. They actually just run these sometimes. You can catch them, and it's wild. It's just an entire 737 fuselage. Yeah. For those of you who are on audio here, what you see is an entire 737 fuselage that came up from Kansas, which is on a railroad, two railroad flat cars. They just run these trains fairly frequently up to Wren, I think. Yep. Yeah, there's like a horrible sighting. It's like 5% grade. They got to haul all these things up. Good thing it's pretty light cargo because it's an airplane. Doing a kind of ground-based 911. I was waiting A second flat car has hit the Boeing fuselage I was waiting for the sounder which is the sound transit name for our regional rail which I'm sure I don't know I know they did they did the font they use for it is also terrible I'm not a big fan in any case I was waiting on the platform oh that fucking thing oh fuck that took me i then i remember what a wow shit god damn it yeah yeah yeah otherwise known as one of the one of the uh the many people's hard limits for those who have thought about it in any case yeah um yeah i was standing in the king street station and an entire bnsf train just made up of like 15 fuselages came through and i have never foamed so hard in my life. I was like fumbling for my phone, like visibly, like tears running down my face. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. I think the engineer was like, is she okay? Like they've got to be used to like seeing like abnormally tall, overly excited women next to the tracks in Seattle of all places. But I feel like I really kind of elevated it that day. It's, it is really cool. It combines train and plane, which I, you know, both good. Anyway, that's, That's all I got about that. We can go to the next slide. So, hold on. I'm going to take over here for a second, but I do want to do one thing, which is check on the chili. I'll be right back. Listen, that kind of sort of helicopter parenting is very important, you know. What if I got a beer? That's allowed. I'm experiencing some agonies. I'm sorry. I'm going to grab a beer, though. I'll be right back. No, it's okay. My agonies are quite funny in this case. So in a sort of like desperate attempt to maintain general hygiene while being sick, like really sick, I've been washing my hands a lot. Right. Which means I have like badly dried out and cracked all of the skin on the back of my hands. Oh, no. And I went looking. I haven't seen it all the time. I feel awful. I was like in sort of moderate agony looking for some like hand cream for this. and what I alighted on was some cocoa butter and while I'm sure it is moisturizing the absolute fuck out of this skin that shit hurts that burns so I don't know I will see whether or not this is the good kind of burning or the bad kind of burning but just another day in sort of like dipshitville you know hi it's justin uh 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 uh sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at Patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. Wait for Liam to come back. God damn it. Temperature was too low on the chili, but I've now rectified that. I was too conservative. I will have to be punished for my reactionary tendencies. It's a chili, chili dish that rewards audacity in a chef, I believe. Yes. Well, no, I use audition because I'm bourgeois. That already got you, huh? Yeah, it took me a second. So by the time it, you know, it's kind of like chili. The joke steeped for a little bit and then it really hit me. And I'm back. All right, excellent. We're going to do a second sync point. so I'm going to say 1, 2, 3, Matthew in order to keep these separate we're going to use a different book of the Bible each time excuse me, 3, 2, 1, Matthew so 3, 2, 1, Matthew really good visual of you almost clapping but in the title he's fine alright, this better not happen 3 more times because I only got Luke and John left after that you're into the like deuterocanonical stuff yeah first letter to the Philadelphians or something you guys gotta stop being so fucking weird yeah okay so you know this sort of thing that eventually becomes to be known as the Cascades service you know between like Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and Vancouver and Eugene and I don't know what else is up there. Yakima or some bullshit, right? This sort of by the late 60s is like a daily train between Seattle and Portland and a few horrible long-distance trains. You have the Pacific International. you have some kind of train that goes down the Oregon short line to Salt Lake City. The Oregon short line sort of followed the Oregon Trail where you may have, you know, shot several animals. Dumped the wagon into a river. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cocked the wagons and floats on and so forth. You know, so only like the international and the train called the Mount Rainier serve local markets. The Mount Rainier went from Seattle to Portland and Portland to Seattle one time a day. The International went from Seattle to Vancouver and Vancouver to Seattle once a day, right? There was the Coast Starlight that went from Seattle to San Diego. That's not for local markets. And you had, what was the other one? The Pioneer was the one that went to Salt Lake City. So this was not great for local service, which was a market that seemed to generally work because Seattle and Portland are not too far away from each other. They're both pretty walkable, even back in the 70s when Amtrak was created. So it made a lot of sense to say, well, gee, maybe we should improve this service. But it took several decades before Amtrak really seriously started considering maybe we should put a few more trains on this court. I really love the mess of cars in this what appears to be like an in-era slide, too. Yes, this is early Mount Rainier train. This is shortly after Amtrak took over. You got Northern Pacific cars. you got Burlington Northern cars you got some stainless steel ones you got sort of they put together whatever the hell worked A train of many colors yes Yes But, you know, it took a few decades, again, before Amtrak really responded. And, you know, they picked an interesting sort of train. And in order to talk about that, we have to go back in time a little bit and talk about Talgo. Oh, my God. What the fucking haunted clown train. I like the cloud catcher, the cow catcher. I want to wear you like a stew. I'm currently changing my vocabulary with that. This is the Talgo One. This is where it all began. Don't tell me there's more of them. so in the late 1930s Alejandro uh-huh someone else do this that and Jose Luis Oriol like the baseball team yeah sure whatever they're two Spaniards they have a vision Their vision is, what if we put a kind of Thomas the Sank Engine character in the Hannibal Lexer mask? What if we made a really fucked up looking train with a weird suspension? I mean, I guess it would be bad. Don't do that. Oh, no, that's the problem. It was good. So the idea here is very simple. It was very new for Spain at the time, right? Train, it's all made of aluminum. None of that's steel. It's all aluminum. It's lighter and the cars are smaller, right? So it can use fewer wheels. The center of gravity is really low. So it's harder to tip over and it tends to cant less in curves, right? It doesn't like swing out as much. That means you can go faster. How does this work? It's a weird little clown bug. Yeah, it's a weird little horrible train. Now to explain this, we have to look at a normal train. There is a big Pennsylvania Railroad P70 coach, which is actually here. It's Pennsylvania Redding Seashore Alliance. Your normal coach, you got eight wheels on two trucks, right? You got a fairly high center of gravity up here. If it's on a curve, right, here's the car. Here's the car. It's a box here. Well, actually, no. Hold on. Let me, and we got the clear story, and yeah. Okay. So here's the car, and here's the wheels, right? Right. And then there's an axle, and then there's, you know, so on and so forth. So it's, and then there's the rails here, right? Okay. So when this goes around a curve that's going this way, right, it has a tendency to lean over to the outside rail, right? And this sort of tends to have the perception of increasing the G-forces inside the car on the passengers, right, who are also forced out that way. Yeah, exactly. So you can't go that fast, right? Getting a real East Coast mainline experience. Exactly. So, you know, this is because, again, the center of gravity is relatively high, even though this is an old-fashioned heavyweight car where, you know, the floor is actually like six inches of concrete. But, you know, that's just how heavy everything was at the time, right? The Talgo cars, and they evolved pretty quickly from the horrible clown train in the first slide. Talgo cars are much more low-slung, right? You can see here, they're very short, and so they have a lower center of gravity, right, for each car. What this means is you can go a lot faster around curves without the cars sort of leaning outwards, right? So this increases passenger comfort because ultimately the thing that limits train speed is not, you know, derailing on the curve. It's, you know, spilling drinks in the cafe car, right? Yeah, the weakest link in that chain is the passenger wanting to arrive comfortable, you know? Exactly. You could achieve greatness if you just sacrificed your need to not spill your drink over yourself. I'm not going to lie, having ridden cross-country Amtrak recently, I feel like passenger discomfort is not the limiting factor. so this this example this is uh a talgo train this is the new york new haven and hartford railroads john quincy adams they were an early adopter um i was desperate to figure out how the hell this thing made it into either penn station or grand central because as far as i know they only boarded low platforms uh i have no idea so uh step right in the comments and climb in through the, like, oh yeah, like a NASCAR, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe the New York Central or the Boston and Albany or someone else had a similar train called the Explorer, right, the early Talgos, they were moderately successful in the United States, you know, there was some precedent there, they were much more successful in, you know, Spain, where they were from, right, you know, the other thing about the Talgos is, of course, you have a much shorter passenger car, right? And rather than having four or two sets of four-wheel trucks, each car has two wheels in total, and they're shared between two cars each. Legally a motorbike. Yes. So Talgo is actually an incredible success in Europe, less so in the United States in the early years. That's because we have taste and don't want to get the haunted clown train. Well, that's also because we decided passenger trains weren't real around the time that it made sense to buy Talgos, right? I'd start to decide that around the time of that if I'd seen Talgo 1. So, yeah. It haunts my fucking nightmares now. So the early Talgos, they're very successful at providing a lot more passenger comfort using, you know, these weird, you know, these very weird train cars. I mean, they work great. They're very good. I'm not the guy here to denigrate Talgo technology. You should be. Look at the fucking back. If you use it properly, it works really good. But then it got better, right? So we have to understand how these cars work. So in order to do this, we had a friend cut one open for us. So a couple of things you can notice here is that you have – so here's the wheels. right, the wheels are actually not linked by a solid axle. They're two separate units, right, that go through this, like, aluminum frame here. That means that, you know, among other things, the wheels spin independently. You're never going to get things like flange squeal as a result. You know, again, the center of gravity is very, very low, and you can see here the suspension goes all the way up to the top where the car is actually mounted to the wheels, right? This is very good for going fast. In the 1970s, the Talgo Corporation realizes, oh, wait, we can go further here with the Talgo Pendular, right? Sick name already. Yes. So the idea here is we have the suspension system. What if we let the train tilt a bit, right? Because of how the suspension is mounted, you have a very low center of gravity, but you have a very high pivot point, which is actually above the physical limits of the car, right? So when this car goes around a corner, the bottom swings outwards. As a result, it is a tilting train with no hydraulics, no active systems, entirely passive. The APT, fuck that shit. Don't need any of that shit. Too much money. Do it on the cheap. Just basic physics causes this train to tilt in such a way as to increase passenger comfort and allow the train to go much faster than it otherwise could have. This is a brilliant system. It's really good. Talgo is cool. So when you're looking at old-fashioned, you know, very curvy lines, such as you might find in the Pacific Northwest, This is a natural system to say, ah, let's give this a shot. Other advantages that Talco had is that they manufactured their own, like, power systems. They had an integrated bag. They had a whole bunch of stuff that meant that, you know, you could deploy these pretty much anywhere very quickly and cheaply. You know, it was a whole, like, self-contained system, which is one of the reasons why it had so much success internationally. and continues to to this day. Building the train AK? Yeah. So Amtrak gets a test set of some kind. They run in the Pacific Northwest for a while. They call it the Pacific Talgo or something. They are so pleased with it that they eventually order their own sets. The Talgo 6, right? You can see a train set here. I love the little cat ears in the baggage cars. Oh, yeah. The cat ears are really cool. I love those. I had the fortune to ride these once, but I was very small, so I don't remember much of the trip other than we got stuck behind the American Orient Express, which broke down. Yep. Yeah. It was at, what, Pacific Station in Vancouver or whatever they call it. Yeah. It was at that moment that the fires of communism were lit within your heart. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, what if I remember distinctly there was there was someone there was someone in front of us in the next booth because I was with my family. Someone in front of us in the next booth was calling someone was like, yeah, the train in front of us, it's overhanging the platform. So we can't. Yeah, it's a three thousand dollar train. Just anger sort of building. It's like season one of Andor. It's a three thousand dollar train in like 2002 or something as well. So these these talgo trains are used to expand what becomes the Cascade Service, right? The Cascade Service becomes a corridor between Vancouver and I don't know, Eugene. They run a they run a car. They run a train from Portland to Seattle and they run one from Vancouver to Seattle that no train completes the whole route. But OK, they run like six of between six and eight of them a day. I can't remember. They change service a bunch with COVID. Yeah, I don't know either. I don't know anything about that coast. We have the one train. I've taken it once, and it was – I didn't get to ride the Talgo for reasons you'll discover. Yeah. Anyway. But, yeah, so they get this Talgo pendular. It works really good. They do some basic modifications to the lines to allow these, such as putting in new speed limit signs. Look, you can see here this says P70. That's for passenger trains, 70 miles an hour. But T, that's 79. That's where the towel goes. Hell, yeah. Why is it 79? Because after Naperville. Because after Naperville. American's a scan of real speeds? Yeah, after Naperville, you could only do 80 if you had cab signaling. They didn't go that far. You also had to add a bunch of other safety systems, you know, to protect from, like, overspeed and, you know, that so on and so forth, right? You know, which will be relevant later. You know, but anyway, yeah. These are very cool train cars. They had a very fancy bistro car with a bunch of bespoke, nice glasswork. We'll talk about that later. Why would you use them with these locomotives as well? It's like beautiful sort of European sports car. They still use those locomotives as well, but they've gutted all the engines out of them, and they use them as baggage cars. Yeah, so this is an F40, which has been converted to baggage, right? Well, the door is actually back here. That's actually from before it was converted to baggage, I think, because now they have just a big sliding garage door on the side of them. They call them cabbages. On the other end, there's a F59 PHI, which is actually more streamlined and designed for the thing. But these guys, whatever. I think they're cute. Yeah, I like them. It's trying its best. It's like an old trusty Toyota pickup or something. You know, it's like, get the job done. Have the cat ears. Plus it gives you the nice little swoop sort of line down the side. Yeah, cat-eared locomotive. That's very much a Pacific Northwest kind of thing. And the F40s were good for 110. So, you know, it goes as fast as you need it to, which is 79. This is what, if you're a car guy, you might call this a slow, fast train, you know? Oh, yeah. Because it goes 80 miles an hour. What is the fast 80 miles an hour? Yeah. It's like an old 80s turbo car where it takes you seven seconds to get to 60, but you're like, damn, it sounds so cool. Rowing through the gears, it's like screaming, and you look down and you're like 35. You're like, oh, hell yeah. So that's Talgo technology right here, which allows you to go faster on slow track. Anyway, back to Victoria. So do you remember that thing I was talking about earlier where they built this rail line in the 1890s? Well, so 2006 rolls around and Amtrak is like, hey, so we have this huge checkpoint up here at the Nelson Bennett Tunnel at the edge of Point Defiance because this has been converted to single track and it also serves freight. And, you know, this is it's constraining our ability to run as many trains as we want. And if we want to do high speed service someday, because they've been talking about doing like an actual high speed rail line in the Northwest since about 2000. We do not have one, but they dream big. So they're like, what if we bypass this? Sound Transit, which is Seattle's regional rail operator that runs the aforementioned Sounder, already owns most of this right-of-way, highlighted in red here, from Tacoma to DuPont. And they use the Lakewood stop as one of their stations for the Sounder. you know what if we just modernize this whole section of rails we can actually run you know the talgo trains on it we can skip this whole section it should save us like it won't save a ton of time I think they were projecting like 10-15 minutes but it allows us to run with a lot more reliability and also you know when we do further high speed upgrades in the future we already have this track here that's like a lot more suitable yeah there's a lot of problems with like if you're sharing with freight railroads they don't like the idea that they gotta you know upgrade their trains with stuff like cab signaling or like you know um modern signaling systems in general they're kind of like i don't know i think i'm fine running trains at 45 miles an hour um yeah and also trains that are notably too long to fit in siding so you can't let amtrak's pass yeah as i discovered on my recent cross-country trip on the Empire Builder, which was certainly an experience. Yeah, they're still using Superliner Ones on those. I had a car that was from the Carter admin on that trip, actually. Hell yeah, that's sick. Yeah, it was hell yeah until the toilet stopped working. Oh, that's good. Which happened like three separate times on the two and a half day trip. You are now a living history re-enactor. Yeah, it felt like we were just grabbing the Oregon Trail segment earlier, and I was like, yeah, I almost died of dysentery on Amtrak. That'd be a good shirt. I mean, I was not on Amtrak just like the last few days, so I'm with you. One of those things about Amtrak is the Amtrak long-distance trance is like, okay, you know, you wake up in the morning on day two. That's when the big, horrible cardboard trash cans have come out in the toilets. Yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, God. Yeah, yeah, no, it was certainly an experience. The coach seats get more, they get less comfortable every night you sleep on them, too. Or you get the roomettes, the old, the roomettes and the old view liners that have the toilet in the room, but like not like in a separate room, but like it's in in the room. That's like, I'm going to go to another car. Yeah, I'm going to poop in somebody else's bathroom. Fuck this. Yeah. I don't shit where I eat. Yeah. But yeah, so the Tacoma to Lakewood section here roughly corresponds to the original route that was laid down by Northern Pacific in 1873. The Lakewood to DuPont section is that extension line that was built by the Tacoma and Grays Harbor in the 1890s. But it's been more or less sitting here waiting for them to be like, hey, we have these tracks. Let's use them. So the initial budget is like half a billion dollars. But then, you know, 2008 hits and they're like, OK, we have limited federal funding and limited appetite to spend all this money. So they take they get 800 million from the feds for the stimulus project that they spread it all across the state. They spend one hundred and eighty one million dollars on this section of line. And the feds attach a deadline of 2017 to finish all this work or otherwise they run out of money and they don't get any money anymore. History rhyming. So they're like, okay, we've got to hurry up and finish this section. So, you know, they modernize all of this so they can run the talgos on it, and it's kind of coming down to the wire. But, you know, wait, I'll start with the next side of this text, and then we can switch. On December 18, 2017, at 7.33 a.m., 144 years and two days after the first trackage was laid on what is the right-of-way for this route, On its maiden passenger voyage on the newly completed Point Defiance Bypass, next slide, please, the Amstrak Cascades speeds through a 30-mile-an-hour curve at 78 miles an hour, derails, falls off a bridge, and lands on Interstate 5 beneath it, completely blocking southbound I-5 and crushing a bunch of cars. Incredible. Just like we set this bomb for our great-great-grandchildren to find. Yes. Yeah, so this is a picture of the accident aftermath. You can see all of those pretty tallow cars completely destroyed. Next slide, please. It's worth noting that this really does just completely block off Interstate 5 South. Every single car on the train, except for the trailing locomotive, derailed. There were 83 people aboard. Three of the passengers died. that 65 people were injured, including people in the cars below, you know, on the tracks. I don't know how anybody below didn't die because the train was just literally dropping on top of, like, SUVs and stuff. It's insane. Looking through the NTSB report, it is like three people feels like a miracle. The three killed passengers were all foamers who were riding to celebrate the new bypass opening, which does feel like, you know, it's rail fans dying in the line of duty, and for that I salute them. This is, you know. Three orders of Lenin. Yeah, three. I mean, it's just, yeah. That's really sad and pointless. And, yeah, no, that sucks. Yeah, extremely. But I do salute them for, you know, being there to ride. I've ridden so many first-day transit things that it's actually very, like, damn, I totally get that kind of moment. This is one of the reasons why I wait until day two or three. Yeah, well, everyone else. nah I always get so excited I'm like I want to say that I rode it so and I mean you know you ride an Amtrak and like yeah they have accidents and stuff but you know generally speaking it's assumed the train is safe train safe car dangerous yeah and I mean this is really bad for like the entire Pacific Northwest because they closed down all of I-5 South and you know it's an hour and a half because of the geography of the Puget Sound It takes an hour and a half to get the detour around this. I mean, this just destroys, like, all local transit. So, obviously, as you can tell from this, the train was going too fast. The why is really frustrating. Yeah. Next slide, please. So, I've done my best to highlight it here in blue on this Google Maps screenshot. But this is where the crash happened, the part of I-5 south here, where the first bend is. And you'll notice that that seems kind of sharp for a passenger train that's supposed to do 80 miles an hour. I am noticing this. Yeah. So back in 2006, when Amtrak was going to, you know, build the Port Defiance Bypass, they were like, hey, this curve is kind of sharp. We should probably build a new bridge that's a lot gentler, that allows us to, like, maintain speed. And then they did the math on it and realized it was going to cost $400 million. dollars so they were like well fuck that we can still hit six trains a day which was their you know service target or eight trains a day or whatever i can't remember which two they were actually projecting at this time it was 2006 they were like we'll have high-speed rail by 2015 we see you know none of this came true um but they're like we'll just slow the trains down to 30 for this corner and we'll skip this and we'll just spend the money elsewhere because there need there's so many other improvements we got to make you know along the entire cascades route and we only have 800 million dollars so like let's just leave the bridge for now fine yeah this is not like a crazy idea you know because we've had like um you know systems that can detect overspeed for 125 years at this point it's yeah it's it's it's not like you know you're gonna you're you're you're not likely to have an overspeed as long as people recognize this is a place where it should it would be catastrophic. So we should install those systems here. Yeah, yeah. So next slide, please. So one of the systems that you would use to stop this from happening is called positive train control, which is, you know, the train knows where it is because it knows where it isn't. And, you know, let's say you have a 30 mile an hour curve in the middle of your 80 mile an hour, you know, trackage. If it rips past the 30 mile an hour zone and the engineer does not start applying the brakes, it will say, hey, I shouldn't be doing this. And then it will slam on the brakes. And of course, you'll remember this derailment happened in 2017. Congress mandated implementation of this in 2015 for all major passenger routes and big freight lines. So it should have been in place. This exact situation was anticipated and legislated theoretically out of existence. But the freight railroads were like, hey, this costs money. well also they did it in like the most completely useless way possible where they rely on gps you know which uh gps isn't accurate enough to even know what track a train is on when there's two parallel tracks so like you know it's it's i mean it's crazy i you could use a lot older systems to do this properly uh but they didn't do that either which is the case on a lot of railroads in the United States where there's just like the systems that should have been there for 80 or 90 years just aren't. Yeah. Yeah. So, so notably like none of this was there. There is no positive train control. The train is just, you know, the engineer drives the train and if the engineer fucks up, the train goes off the bridge, you know, that's, which, you know, is again, one of those situations where you're like, okay, but I mean like, you know, the sounder runs on a lot of these similar, You know, it doesn't run all the way down south to where this exact derailment happened, but it runs a lot of the same trackage. And, I mean, they run fine, and they don't have positive train control. So, you know, it theoretically should be fine. You know, that's why you do training runs. Next slide, please. Yeah, yeah, you've got to have the knowledge. You've got to know the route. Yeah. So here is a map of the trackage leading up to where the train derailed. and you'll see that there's the T30 P30 and that's your speed limit signs for the two mile warning the diagonal ones yeah diagonal ones mean the speed limit's coming up yes and then in the middle here it's not marked on this this is directly from the NTSB but it's not marked here somewhere between 18 and 19 closer to the 19 there's your one mile warning sign and then at the curve there is the hey you're going to go off the bridge if you're not doing 30 miles an hour sign increasingly urgent warning signs please do not die please don't make an ass of yourself re my previous three signs as per my previous sign these are again these are like the speed limit is for comfort and not so much for like safety but But, you know, okay, if you went around this at 40, you know, people would be unhappy. If you go around this at 80, you're going straight. Right. Yeah. So, you know, there's a new section of rail with this corner that's been discussed in multiple meetings. And, like, you know, Amtrak knew about it. And so it's, like, kind of a known quantity. But, like, oh, this could be a problem. And so what they do is they take all the engineers that are going to run on this section, and they just cram all of them into the cab of one of these Siemens chargers. and like, here, take a look at it. Or actually, in most cases, it was an F-40. They're like, here, look. And so the engineer who was driving on this maiden voyage had only ever actually gone through this section of track in this direction once at night in the rain. All the other times he was either riding shotgun or he was shoved in the back of the cabin facing backwards. So this guy has a piss-all idea what he's doing. I mean, yeah. Also, again, I can't stress this enough. It keeps getting worse. So the sign at mile 19.8, which is supposed to be your, hey, you have a mile to slow down, and that's when you're supposed to start hitting the brakes, right? Like the two-mile sign is too far ahead. If you start hitting the brakes, then you'll just be doing 30 for a bunch of time. So you're supposed to hit it a mile. That sign is extremely poorly placed and, like, blends with the signal box that is placed right behind it. And so, like, it's very, very easy to miss. And so the engineer misses the warnings, the first warning sign of, like, hey, slow down, which is like, you know, he's kind of monitoring a new section of track. You know, that's not completely unforgivable. He misses the second one because the sign is completely invisible. And then, you know, you get to the third one. And, of course, there's a conductor in the cabin, too, on this maiden voyage. But, like, he's never even run this before. This is his first time to get familiarized with the trackage himself. So he's not there to help. He's there to, like, learn for himself. So he's not giving the engineer any assistance whatsoever. Bad enough, but this is a paying passenger run. They have brought foamers along because they do not believe that they are ensouled. Yeah, no, I mean, who can blame them? Yeah, I mean, like, again, of all of the people who have ever died in one of these episodes, these are the, I spiritually relate to these guys the most possible, where it's like, yeah, I got super excited about public transit. Where it's like, we hope that our deaths will not delay the program because the exploration of space is worth the risk, but it's like getting the train on the first day. Yes, yes. So, okay, so there's the two signs. You know, the human error causes him to miss the first one. Signage being poorly laid caused him to miss the second one. But, like, you know, usually engineers aren't, like, paying super close attention to the signs. They're looking for, like, landmarks. So, you know, maybe he would notice, like, hey, this corner's coming up. I should probably jam on the brakes. Next slide, please. So this is a Siemens Charger. This is a locomotive that was involved in the crash. These were pertinently very new when this happened. They had just entered these into the fleet. So 27 seconds before he reaches the corner, the engineer knows that the track is downhill sloped coming into it. And the train hits 82 miles an hour and it starts beeping like crazy because it's over the speed limit. This is a it a it an overspeed alarm but it is not tied to the position of where the train is on the track It just saying hey you breaking the federally mandated speed limit Now the engineer who again has driven this section of track once in a different locomotive has never actually driven a Siemens charger. He's attended classroom training, and he's like, you know, he's hung out in one, but he's never actually, like, driven one. So this thing is beeping, and he's like, uh... I'm hung out in the train, too. Goddamn. Yeah. So he's like, uh, what does this mean? And, of course, it's a different alarm than the overspeed alarms he's used to, so he spends like 20 seconds looking down at the gauges of the train, trying to figure out what the fuck is beeping at him. You know, and just, meanwhile the train is like headed directly towards this corner and so he looks up with six seconds to the corner and you can hear it on the, you know, cockpit voice recorder, basically. Where he's like, oh, fuck. And, you know, tries to apply brakes and of course at this point you're doing 80 miles an hour and you are coming up on a corner that, you know, mandates 30. So it's too late at this point. So, brand new locomotive. Only run this section of track once. No positive train control. No fail-safes whatsoever. So the train, you know, next slide, please. I mean... The train goes off. Here's another shot where you can kind of see, like, I can't believe the people in the cars below just didn't die. Jesus, what? Left and right. That's actually, if you look, you can see the uprights for the suspension here. Yeah, that's that's that funky suspension that Ross was talking about earlier, lying flat on the ground because, yeah, the talgo designs were heavily implicated in the final report about why there were fatalities, because the cars were not built to modern FRA standards regarding crash worthiness. So the engineers live, like the train, obviously, you know, the locomotive went off first and hardest. But the Siemens Charger did its job and kept them alive. But, you know, some of the passengers died because the train crushed and basically the wheels fell in and, you know, destroyed entire rows of seating. God. And then, of course, the wheels bouncing around everywhere were just kind of like, it's amazing that nobody else died. because you've basically got, you know, thousands of pounds of chunks of steel bouncing around an interstate where cars are going 70 miles an hour. Now, in fairness, I think if it were conventional rolling stock, it probably would have done the same thing just because, you know, the wheels, the bogeys are basically held on by gravity. That's fair. Yeah. It's not really a kind of expected sort of deviation to drop a train onto somebody's car. Yeah, also, FRA crashworthiness standards are fundamentally broken. That's a different subject. That's fair. But the wheels coming in and crushing parts of the car definitely didn't seem like it was suboptimal. Yes. Yeah, so, yeah, this one was just kind of a, you know, and I had written this down one second. Yeah, it's worth noting that in 2000, so earlier in 2017, the NTSB in an unrelated report had noted that Amtrak had, quote, a labor management relationship so adversarial that safety programs became contentious at the bargaining table, with the unions ultimately refusing to participate. The crash was a month after that report. I am literally never going to blame a union for anything. So this is management's fault. It is. I mean, it's very much one of those cases where it is like looking through it. The NTSB cannot blame management. But also a lot of the engineers are Amtrak immediately fired the engineer and he was like, what the fuck? And the court was like, you have to compensate this guy for the rest of his life. What were you doing? Throwing him into this train and saying, like, go do revenue service. He'd never even driven one before. Yeah, this this this is I mean, the railroad as an institution is fundamentally broken. You know, this is definitely like an example of, okay, even, you know, you can talk about the Class 1 freight railroads and all the horrible things they do. Amtrak does horrible things, too. It's all rotten to the core. I mean. Yeah, well, and again, this was, you know, it's kind of funny that, like, this was driven by a race to the deadline to secure federal funding. Again. Again. Again. that then, you know, I mean, this is, and it's not even like one of those things where it's like, oh, you could say, you know, this could have, this could have happened whenever. It's like, no, this is probably going to happen, like, one of the first couple of trips, because so much of it also depends on the engineer not knowing where he is, like, you know, they, all the engineers that the NTSB reviewed talked about how, you know, usually they have, like, fixed positional landmarks to orient themselves with, and, you know, for tricky sections like this, they have, like, a house they pass or something, you know, they look for. in addition to the sign in case they missed something. And so, like, you know, this was just kind of like a first-day disaster waiting to happen and really a reason not to rush this because it's likeliest to be a problem when your engineers are the least proficient in the segment. And, of course, like, the track being owned by Sound Transit and, you know, it was built by, it was, like, managed by BNSF for this section, and Sound Transit didn't actually run any trains on this part of it. And so they were like, no, it's Amtrak's responsibility to make this. Basically, you know, there should be a whole, there should be a lot of training around like specific hazardous corners like these and everybody just sort of blame gamed it. And nobody had the training for like a corner that was this obviously going to cause a problem. Because again, nobody, like everybody manages it and runs on it, but nobody really wants to own it. Yeah. I mean, there was no like basic safety systems in place to prevent, And, you know, we all make boneheaded mistakes, especially on the first day of work. And, you know, there was nothing in place. There were systems that you could have implemented to stop this from happening. Yeah. Nah. Yeah, I mean, if they had positive train control, this just wouldn't have happened. If they had not even positive train control, I mean, you could put an automatic train stop system from, like, 1910 in there. It would have done its job. I mean, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it was it took them until 2021 to end up resuming service on this segment. They waited to get PTC implemented. But, you know, it ended up taking another four years anyway to fix the bridge and, you know, like actually properly do training. And then COVID hit. And so it didn't it's just one of those things where it's like, you know, one of the things that's eternally frustrating is reading about trying to, you know, hit these man-chosen deadlines for engineered projects that sometimes maybe just need more time. But anyway, next slide please. Amazing. Yeah. Then, you know, one of the consequences of this was these Talgo 6 trains were scrapped. Jesus, like putting down a dog? Yeah. Well, cats because of the ears. No. Yeah, exactly. That makes it even sadder. They were sent to a company called the Railroad Excursion Management Company. Oh, no. Then a colleague of ours put them through a shredder and then got a phone call from the ambassador to Mexico for Commerce. And then episode 143 of this podcast happened. And a great time was had by all. Yes. nobody nobody had to hide in electrical closets dodging the mexican navy as a consequence of the kind of murder of these innocent talgos yeah um a lot of people a lot of people are you know mad about the talgo sixes being scrapped um i i am told by scooter that these things were in fact shot to hell by the time he got to them um and i have now seen the videos of him smashing all the priceless glass fixtures in the bispro car oh um it was going to go through the shredder anyway it doesn't matter still man you know oh one of them's preserved don't worry well they preserved 90 of it i preserved 100 of it and then there's 10 of another car on the end yeah that's true this is my franken trade this is my real trade this is my franken trade this oh god i've seen a picture of it it's it's hilarious it's like they just ripped they ripped it off another car yeah they have that up at the um at the snow quail me um railroad museum um which is where my wife and i went on our first date oh we rode uh we rode northern we rode northern pacific's 894 the steam locomotive it's a baldwin 260 i think like 1895 I made the same trip we did. Yeah, yeah. It's a really cool little museum. It's also, yeah, we moved in together and then immediately the next day went to ride a steam train together because we're lesbians. Good idea. They do have the talgo up there. Yeah, I mean, other notable side effects of this is that it takes three hours and 25 minutes to get from Portland to Seattle today. In 1966, it took three hours and 30 minutes. Progress. That's an improvement. Notably, it takes two hours and 45 minutes using a car at posted speed limits. I think the fastest Metroliner schedule on the Northeast Corridor is still faster than the new Acela. So, you know, it's slower across the board. Yeah. Yeah. Nowadays, we don't even have – we've got the – I was talking with you about this before we started recording, where we had to scrap, I don't know if we scrapped them, but there was substantial rust damage in the cars they were using instead of the Talgos. So we are now using like Amfleets from the 70s. They had to ferry out here from the East Coast for the Cascade service. So instead of the fancy bistro cars and like the nice seats, it's just kind of like an old dingy, you know, kind of like worn to hell. You can go in a cafe car and see a picture of Trenton, New Jersey. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or as I like to call it, the East Coast Tacoma. There's one cafe car that has a picture in Nashville, which is a place Emtrak doesn't go to. It's aspirational, Roz. Yeah, you know, it'd be nice if they did. I'd love to go back to Nashville. I, too, want to be. Well, that makes you one of us. I'm going to be, throw what you know, Victoria, I am going to be an AOPI on the town with my boyfriend, bottom tier Trent. I don't know. Some jokes about Prats. I'm running out of material here. Let's wrap this up. I've been to Nashville three or four times for work, and it's the only city I've ever traveled to repeatedly that has a 100% slur rate and that I get called a name every single fucking time I'm there. That sucks. I'm sorry. And I'm only ever there for like two days because it's press trips. So it's like you fly in, you go to some fancy hotel, and they sequester you for everybody. I go outside for like a cigarette, and somebody's like, hey, you know, redacted. I don't know, can I, yeah, can I? You can, we're not going to stop. You can say training. I've been, I've said it so many times over the course of the show. Yeah, two, two thirds of us can't say it, but you can say it. Yeah, no, I, yeah, so I'm, I'm, and every time I go to Nashville too, it's like, I feel like, you know, even the people who are nice to me are kind of like, I feel like I'm in a zoo, or like, it's like. It's impressive to be able to like clock that hard, you know, like that's. And just to have the full, like, Tisla on deck as well, you know? It's been a different one, like, every... It's been, like, it's, like, Tranny and, like, Bagot and, like, a couple... I don't remember specifically because I've tried to block all memories of Nashville out of my mind. Who can blame you? But, like, it's, like, different... It's a rotating cast of... The only city that's ever been, like, consistently meaner to me is Reno, Nevada, and I lived there. Which shocks me. You'd figure Reno would be, like, who gives a shit? This is bad news for the... Oh, no, Reno is bad. This is bad news for the show I just booked at the Grand Ole Opry. I can't believe it was in that place. Come to the show or we will have an unthinkable island. Slurs for like straight men. She called you while you were there. Anyway, yeah. What did we learn? What did we learn? Train your engineers. Yeah, don't do fancy European cars. Too fancy for America. There's a lot of safety systems you can install on the railroad, not even positive train control, because the freight railroads fuck that one up, which can prevent boneheaded mistakes like this one. One of the things which I have personally found fascinating from watching, you know, well, airline accident videos such as on Mentor Pilot is, you know, sort of compare how the airlines handle huge accidents like this to how the railroads handle them, which is the railroads are just like, ah, fuck you, including Amtrak. You know, it's like there is like idiot mistake occurs. And then someone notes that the idiot mistake preventer was developed by a guy in his spare time in 1909. Yeah. 1909 sounds pretty late. But, yeah, you know, these are these are solved problems. They just don't exist on huge swaths of the American railroad network. You could have easily prevented this problem with a little bit of modern infrastructure. And no, we just don't do that. It's confusing as to why. And this is the whole industry, the safety culture needs to change. You know, there is a future where people at least aspire to zero derailments. We're far from that. You know, people need to realize things can be better. Oh, yeah. Having ridden Amtrak recently, it's pretty easy to look at that and be like, this could be better. Yeah. You know, I this was this this was it's confusing just because you would think if you're rehabilitating a railroad in the year of our Lord 2006, you would install some systems that would have been considered advanced in 1898. But here we are. I don't know. Maybe it's just that guy's fault. And notably, if they had just spent a little more money on the bridge, they'd have like a little bit more money instead of having, you know, limited bucket of money. They could just rebuild the bridge. The train could have gone 80 and no one would have died. Yes. And it also would be faster and work better. Yes. That's what we learned. Yeah. Spend more fucking money. Yeah, if there's a system that will prevent a problem that was developed before your grandfather was born, you should install that. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Greetings, Justin, Liam, and November. Fucked up. Yep, yep, nope. Miss Victoria, transphobic. Yeah. I've been meaning to share this for a while, but my ADHD just wouldn't let me. I am a train dispatcher for a regional railroad here in Michigan. And this is the story of how Pete Buttigieg gave me COVID and ruined my vacation. So this all starts on what I thought would be a completely normal day. I showed up for my afternoon shift at our dispatch office, which is inside an old Yardmaster's tower. The yard masters are long gone, so us dispatchers have inherited the best view in the house. Nice. Back in the summer of 2022, Pete Buttigieg, who was Biden's secretary of transportation, pictured here, was on this big national tour, talking up investments in infrastructure. One of his stops just happened to be our rail yard, and I had no idea. We're usually kept in the dark about these kinds of visits. mixed my days up, ended up on Casamund in a room with Pete Buttigieg. Who amongst us, you know? I like usually here implying that this has happened several times before. Or once or twice they were informed. Plus, since a bigger company had recently bought the railroad, assume that's Genesee in Wyoming, we had already had random executives in the orange menace, yeah. We had already had random executives in fancy suits showing up all the time. They didn't write that it was GNW, by the way. I just inferred that. So when I walked up to the tower and there was this big guy in a black suit and sunglasses standing at the door, I just assumed he was one of them. I said hello, asked if he needed to get in. He mumbled no, and I went upstairs like nothing was out of the ordinary. Yeah, that's my interactions with Secret Service, too, yeah. What interactions have you had with Secret Service? I went to... Oh, this is going to dox my location. Shit. No. You live in Philadelphia. I'll tell you after... Beep! Got it. Joe Biden likes a Vietnamese restaurant near my house. Yeah, you are. Yeah, I like it, too, right? You're not special. No, it's a very good Vietnamese restaurant. Yeah, they have the fucking fishbowl shit that you're supposed to have two people to drink, and now you just get it by myself. It's owned by my landlord's cousin, I believe. Oh, is it? See, giving out this kind of information is exactly how our guests end up supplying you with satellite images of your own day. anyway no this is a problem with living in philly is you just have run-ins with joe bide even now so anyway where was i weekdays are insanely busy and most dispatchers absolutely do not enjoy surprise visitors staring at us while we work when i walked in my co-worker on the first took one look at me and said, oh, you're underdressed. For the secretary of transportation? At your job. Yeah. Turned out the visit was supposed to be over before my shift even started, which is why no one even bothered to warn me. Kind of Habsburg shit is it to expect your dispatchers to be wearing, like, white ties. Suit ties, right. Maybe tails. Yeah. Yeah. Not even a minute later, a motorcade of black SUVs and police cruisers rolled into the parking lot. You'd think May O.P. would take the train to see the train dispatcher, but apparently not. It's not that important. Okay, sure. America's fucking crazy. Yeah, we know. I thought he was the transit guy. Apparently not. Well, no, different guy's the transit guy. Secret Service haven't worked out how to up-armor a bicycle yet. Yeah, actually, I understand The presidential bicycle is just like, you know, it's landmine proof in the sense that the president is a kind of fine mist, but the bike is completely impervious and it's fine. Also, for some reason, he did try and bike around DC, but there were like three SUVs around him protecting the bicycle. Insanely paranoid. Like, there's no reason for this. Nova, we have 350 million guns. Yeah, but How often do people take a shot at Pete Buttigieg? USA. Well, never. That's because we have 350 million guns. Well, never, because they go... I don't understand how the SUVs... I don't understand how the SUVs prevent you from taking a shot at Pete Buttigieg. Their aura is too strong. Yeah. Deflects the bullets. Like Fortune and Metal Gear Solid 2. Yeah, the kind of psychic violence of Fed Security Theater dissuades any potential assassin. A thing feds actually believe works. As a high-ranking government official, you should just be able to get drunk and wander out and hang out with hippies on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Oh, going forward, right? There's a Netflix miniseries about the Garfield assassination. That's my lightning. I think also, yeah, should take you to that position, which is, eh, it was probably better when just let him walk around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These people are so coddled up that they never experience. Anyway. Never experience shit that, like, President Garfield experienced. Being made a slutty little carpet by your doctor, yeah. At some point, you forget how to shop for groceries. And at that point, you should be disqualified from public office. So anyway, not even a minute later, a motorcade of black SUVs and police cruisers rolled into the parking lot. And of course, the railroad doesn't stop for anyone. So there was little time to spectate at the crowd of people outside. A minute later, a parade of people ascended the stairs, including railroad executives, reporters, security staff, and then Pete Buttigieg himself. He walked right up to me, shook my hand, and introduced himself. And honestly, he seemed like a genuinely nice person. That's his job, is to seem like a genuinely nice person. After a lightning-fast introduction, the president of the railroad turned to me and said, OK, go ahead and give everyone a quick explanation of what train dispatching is. Oh, my God. I was completely unprepared and frankly horrified. Fifteen minutes earlier, I had been expecting a normal day, not a spontaneous TED Talk. in front of the Secretary of Transportation, I did my best to explain what we do, probably stumbling over most of my words and sounding like a fool. Meanwhile, I'm making desperate eye contact with my coworker, silently begging her to save me. She just kept working away on the phone, like it was the most important phone call of her career. eventually she finished and thankfully stepped in explaining what was happening on the ctc that centralized train control uh deep dispatch screen as if she was turning over to him to take over uh the dispatching duties this whole visit lasted maybe 20 minutes before they all left pete shook my hand one more time this is important for later oh no thank you freddie foreshadowed. Now we're going to jump ahead a few days. My wife and I are at Walt Disney World, or as I've started calling it, Bay Lake Country Fair, because it's really gone downhill. It fucking has, dude. Listen, as somebody who's forced to go to Disney World a lot of the time, because I'm married to the most terrifying woman in the universe, I keep the fur and it's really She's 5'7", and she's very scary. But yes, go ahead. And then other people are puking up their Grand Marnier slushies, but not Liam, because I can hold my liquor, you motherfuckers. Now, when I'm in the Disney bubble, I try and leave all real-world stress behind. Hey, whatever gets you to enlightenment, you know? You can Disney mode. That's fine, probably. We were in the Space Mountain queue. Oh, no. Family in front of us started talking about the news. Pete Buttigieg just tested positive for COVID-19. Is Pete Buttigieg that much more important than I imagine him to be, the just random Disney enthusiasts like, hey, do you hear the fucking high elves of, like, necromancy is banned in Cyrodiil or whatever? The nice centrist lives think he's going to be the next president because he has a straight gay boyfriend. And I'm Mary Marnia. Keep going. Yeah, exactly. And without thinking, I jumped in with, oh, I met him a few days ago. You idiot. As you can imagine, they put the pieces together a lot faster than I did. By day three of the trip, I woke up with a dry cough. This is pleasing to me because, like, this is one of the... I've only had this one out of the three times I've had COVID where you get the kill count, where you know where and when you got it and from whom. And you should get that every time, if you ask me. Like, doubly so if it kills you. Then you should get a little like... Yeah, no, no, you definitely better get... You better have, like, a cutscene, yeah. Yeah. By day five, I was coughing so much that strangers were giving me the side eye. I wrote it off as allergies because apparently denial is a powerful thing. Masks were optional at Disney at the time, but my wife, who was significantly smarter than me, suggested that I wear one. Yeah, that might be a good idea. I'm feeling it in my fucking bones. It helped to cough at least. By day six, our last day, I was completely wiped out. I didn't even leave the hotel room. I shut the curtains, laid in bed all day, and my phone would buzz every now and then with pictures of my wife living her best life in the Magic Kingdom. Yep, been there. When we got home, I finally took a COVID test. Surprise, it was positive. I spent the next several days miserable, but I did get an extra paid week off. So I guess that sort of balances out the ruined vacation. I feel like you should get like a challenge coin or an achievement or something. If you got infected with COVID by a cabinet secretary. A little Xbox notification in your peripheral vision. It's like how some video games have an achievement for like played with one of the developers, you know? so in true safety third fashion here's the moral the odds of pete buddha jedge giving you covid at work are low but never zero and honestly the safest way to avoid getting covid is simple just don't go to work ever buzz yep feel free to cite me in your hr meetings thanks for listening i hope you enjoyed my story i did try to keep it short but well you know how that goes from Andy. Thank you, Andy. So yeah, this could happen to you. Remain vigilant. Always, always be vigilant. You never know when Pete Buttigieg is coming to your location to give you COVID. Secretary of giving you COVID. I thought that was RFK. Or the worm, actually. I can't believe that one. They pulled him a picture of her butthole. He's not a real doctor, but he is a real worm. He likes to play the drums. Don't send people pictures. Or do send pictures of people in a butthole, but a lot of people who like you. And he can handle criticism. Yeah. That was Safety Third. Next episode will be about Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Come to the live shows, Victoria, and all that she does. Come to the live shows or else. You have one warning remaining, and to show you we're serious, you have no warnings remaining. Exactly, exactly. Come to the live shows and we'll shove you into the reactor at Three Mile Island, which is apparently being reactivated. They're not calling it Three Mile Island anymore. They're calling it the Crane Clean Energy Center. Fuck. You know. we'll shove you into the old reactor that's melted down actually you know that sounds like some George Orwell trying to come up with examples for newspeak kind of shit that's like in Seattle our stadium is owned by Jeff Bezos and it's called Climate Pledge Arena subscribe to the Patreon and if you do don't subscribe to the Patreon on iOS Do it like not through any of your iPhone apps because Tim Apple takes a cut and the cut is substantial actually. Yeah, if you subscribe to the Patreon from your iPhone type device, all you have to do is to subscribe on your web browser as opposed to through the Patreon app. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. We will make literally dozens of dollars more if you do this. Yes. And I love technology. anyway it's good isn't it yeah good night everyone bye everybody bye