Episode 184: The United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle

Three, two, one, mark.

Okay, classriest clap I've ever done.

Yeah,

all right.

Uh, so for a little behind baseball here, folks, it's 6:42 p.m.

What time are we supposed to start recording?

6.

Nova is gonna drop.

Is it 6:42 p.m.?

Because

I make it 23.42.

I know, I know, but I'm also a social worker and I had a bad day today.

So

we'll be somewhere in the middle over.

Okay, okay.

Okay.

Well, I'm sick.

I was going to say, to your credit, you're sick.

I will come over there.

The thing is, right,

the combination of never, ever taking a day off in my life, I would rather hack one of my limbs off than like take a day off.

Plus us having taken four weeks longer to record this than I wanted us to.

Yeah.

Plus working with Americans across a different time zone have really conspired to fuck me over.

So this is going to be a good episode.

This is going to be another flu game.

I feel pretty confident in saying that.

Yeah, exactly.

Can somebody assume that?

We're going to pitch a no-hitter on LSD tonight, folks.

Yeah, they call her Nova Alice.

I think that someone should do a Photoshop of Nova as Jordan collapsing into either mine or Roz's Scotty Pippet arms.

All right, let's go.

Fucking hurry up.

Okay, no jokes.

No bullshit.

Run on.

No jokes.

No,

no jokes.

Just straight down the line.

Welcome to facts about engineering.

Yeah, exactly.

We're just going to read the Wikipedia article today, folks.

No.

Welcome to Well, Lair's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's speaking right now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi.

My name is Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him, and we have a guest.

We have a guest.

My name is Miles.

Pronouns are he/slash they.

Why are you here?

Why are you here?

Yeah, for fuck's sake.

I'm here to teach and

introduce you to the wonderful world of what happens when aerospace engineers try to make trains.

The Boeing light rail vehicle.

Yes.

Oh, no.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

All right.

I feel like I've got to regret.

I'm seeing, you know, I'm cheating a little bit.

bit.

I'm looking through the notes.

The thing I don't normally do.

I like to be surprised normally.

So

I often don't look at the notes.

I know I'm looking through it.

I'm horrified.

What do you see?

You are Boeing to get a rail replacement service.

What do you see?

Who fucks with that shirt is dads.

Like, middle-aged dads fuck with the you're Boeing to Die shirt.

I get compliments on mine every time I wear it.

It's just like dads and their three kids be like, oh, that's so funny.

I really like the shirt, man.

And I'm just like, you're responsible for other human lives.

I'm fucking not.

Well, you know what?

So is Boeing.

Yeah.

And what you see on the screen in front of you are two vehicles.

Both are made by the same company.

Both are built in the same decade.

Both are called LRV.

One of them worked pretty good, but yeah, we're going to talk about this one.

The United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle.

Should have sent this one to the moon.

Yeah.

It would have been happier there.

Probably would have fared better.

Before we start, I just wanted to add a note here, since we'll be talking tangentially about defense procurement,

which is something

a certain YouTuber, Mr.

LaserPig, lampooned us for briefly a long time ago in a video entitled Shut Up About the F-35, published June 23rd, 2022, with a clip of our Osprey podcast from August 21st, 2020.

and then also a clip from our live show at Caveat, New York City.

And,

you know, for one thing, I'll have you know we've only had one Russia Today propaganda presenter on our podcast.

But for another thing, I'll have you know that while I don't know anything about anything with guns on it, what I do know about is ladders.

Now, in LaserPig's latest video, the USS Defiant Sucks, published July 25th.

2025, which I otherwise enjoyed, he mentioned about 43 minutes and 20 seconds in, the single ladder from engineering to other decks was unsafe, and he recommended a caged ladder in its place because, as he said, they prevent falls.

Then again, mentions about 49 minutes, 50 seconds in that this is a flagrant breach of OSHA regulations.

And I'm just here to say caged ladders are no longer recommended as of November 2018 as a fall protection system because they don't actually protect from falls.

They only provide a false sense of security.

And the main thing they do is you can get entangled in them.

And if you fall off the ladder, you fall directly onto people below you.

Right?

Cage ladders are not safe.

They merely give a false sense of security.

Right.

What a bizarrely specific beef we have now.

Well done.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ, dude.

He killed his ass.

He started it.

He started it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I still like the A-10.

Fuck you.

Yeah.

Ocean 1910.28 duty to have fall protection and falling object protection.

In fact, recommends phasing out caged ladders in favor of more sophisticated ladder safety systems or personal fall arrest systems by 2036, well before the events depicted in Star Trek.

Anyway, you know what?

And I've never been wrong about anything in my life.

Even perhaps, especially when I have not known what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also don't know what I'm talking about, but I like the ATF.

Sorry,

I was getting a visit from my wife.

Yeah.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the video

and I expect your response

based on the previous,

what you would call it,

timing.

Beef.

You have three to five years.

Okay, yeah, sure.

The slowest moving beef since like the Hundred Years' War.

We'll get them in 10 to 12 years.

Yeah.

Yes.

All right.

With that having been said, let's do the goddamn news.

I don't know how you expect me to just go into the news having just witnessed my co-worker perpetrate a murder live on air.

It was beautiful.

Okay, so all websites are now illegal in Britain.

Yeah, it turns out.

Sorry about this.

I don't know.

It's Nova gently caressing her computer.

Yeah.

Yeah, listen, it's the only way it'll learn.

No, I'm coming to you from like three proxies and five different VPNs and a tin cable with a USB cable coming back in the end of it.

At about an hour into the recording, they're going to kick my door in for like illegal podcasting.

You still have that FBI.

I'm going to launch

for that podcast.

I don't.

I don't have a license for that podcast.

So it's only a matter of time before the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, like

kick my front door in.

Excuse me, the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport kick my front door in.

But yeah, so because of the Online Safety Act to stop kids from getting like traumatized by the internet, the internet is now illegal.

Yeah.

Oh, well, you had a good run, I guess.

Yeah, and so now every website from like Reddit to Wikipedia, not just like, because it's intended to be like, oh, you can't just like go on porn hub by clicking a yes, I super swear, I'm over 18 box, right?

But now it means that a bunch of websites that are not porn hub have to institute some kind of like age verification system which could be defeated with very rudimentary means from what I've seen.

Yeah, basically the thing that most people have gone with is a like a kind of take a photo of yourself thing

that you can easily beat with just about anything, including

like a David Lynch Funko Pop I saw.

Yeah, I mean, this does make all those like, you know, phishing emails you get about, you know, I hacked into your webcam while you were browsing porn you know that this is a lot more plausible now

no it's like no the fuck you didn't because no one can browse porn anymore yeah it's that's

i'm going back to like dirty novels i'm going back to like lady chatterly's lover you're gonna have to that's how we get the kids going outside they're gonna have to find woods porn again

horrible yeah so i mean basically um

everything is illegal in britain increasingly like um You can't even have a good time, like, sort of jerking it to Pornhub with the one hand and, like, other hand resting on your ninja sword, because that's illegal, too.

Yeah, I saw that.

That's very stupid.

Yeah, they banned katanas.

So, um...

Come on.

Why don't...

No fun island.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of ridiculous.

Did someone get arrested today for having gardening implements?

Wow, gardening.

Arrested by armed police for carrying

a trowel and like a garden sickle.

So

Britain is not a real place.

And

on the one hand, this is very easy to defeat.

On the other hand, it's like crippling for a lot of websites.

There's a lot of people who just can't see tweets now, which is kind of a mercy given Twitter.

But like this is true, yeah.

Because Twitter has decided that it doesn't know how to verify people, it's just like, okay, well, any tweet that has like any kind of adult content of whatever form.

Boobs.jpg, yeah.

Not even boobs.jpg, but like anything, including like a decent amount of my tweets for some reason.

Pig balls.jpg.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just like you just can't see it whatsoever.

And so Wikipedia is suing to be like, this is bullshit.

We shouldn't have to.

It would like.

bankrupt us and also we shouldn't have to have like an age verification system oh like keeping all their data like yeah i i'm surprised the stuff hasn't leaked yet you know there's an app called T, which did have a leak that was using just like

vibe coding, basically.

And that happened like a week before this came in as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The thing that really gets me about any of this is that, you know, you're adding steps, you're wasting data and bandwidth just to continuously prove yourself who you are, who you might be.

The whole picture thing is so insidious.

Like, okay, yeah, sure.

What if I just want to be, you know, in my case, the profile pic of, you know, a Pacific Electric blimp on the internet?

Then to be fair, that blimp is over the age of 18.

That's true.

Yeah.

It was built in 1927, so yeah.

It's, but yeah, I mean, so the really funny thing about this is the discourse around it, because this is something that the Labour Party have really decided to dig in on, right?

Oh, you stupid assholes.

I know, I know, but like, the only real like opposition to this is from reform, the like far-right, like further right

conservative

party.

Yes, I don't don't know how to say his name.

But yeah, Nigel Farage's party.

And so Labour's response has been to call them all paedophiles and to suggest that the only reason why you would be against having to upload a photo of your own face in order to look at Wikipedia is because you too are a kind of like predatory sex offender.

Suck my dick and die.

I'm entitled to my privacy.

I'll never move to Pervert Island.

Yeah.

But

shit's getting really weird with reform.

Like, this is one area where they're, like,

better on civil liberties than labor.

And then just the other day, their prison spokesman was like, or spokeswoman, I should say, was like,

why is labor putting trans women in men's prisons?

That's fucked up that they do that.

And I'm like, sorry,

I'm not going to vote for you because you guys are Nazis, but it's very, very strange to be affirmed by the Nazis, you know?

Like, just a guy wearing like a full Waffen-SS uniform being like, well, of course the transgenders are part of our Western culture or whatever.

It's like, fuck off.

I don't want your help.

But I wasn't expecting to get it in the first place.

You know, I thought you guys were going to be the ones to kill me.

Turns out it's the like moderate centrists doing that.

And you guys are just like,

yeah, fuck.

I don't know.

It's baffling.

Baffling things are happening.

I think it's the word that

comes to mind.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of of things in culture and history are vibes hitting each other, basically, coming up against each other.

And at this point, I feel like we've eviscerated the expert.

We've eviscerated educated people making educated decisions.

And now it's just scraping the fond on the bottom of the pot.

Yeah.

It's so frustrating.

It's, it's, it's like perverse outcomes, I guess.

But yeah, that's just another little dispatch from

My Nation of the United Kingdom.

Fuck off, useless island yeah yeah i'm i'm sorry we're like this and i'm also sorry because like uh just by virtue of how the internet is uh and i know that the us version the kids online safety act is gonna kick in any minute now yeah that that stuff is spreading yeah

but it's already spreading in the sense that a bunch of sites that are just hosted in the u.s and you know displaying stuff to us users are just like well we still need to do the age verification i guess just in case you're secretly broken no you don't yeah so uh this is just a thing we We've appreciably made the world a bit worse just in the last couple of years.

That's crazy how you guys are so good at that, though.

Well, I mean, listen, it's a core competency we've honed over like hundreds of years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, am I incorrect in imagining that British politics is in some way like a three to five year preview of the crap we'll see in the United States?

It's weird because it's traditionally it's been the other way around, but

stuff does seem to be switching, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you know, we still haven't, you know, banned guns in the United States, let alone gardening implements.

That's true.

They have banned letting your kids play outside, though.

Yeah.

Because

the cars are too big.

The cars are too big.

You don't need anything larger than a VW golf.

Fuck off.

Everyone gets a mandated government GTI.

The Germans won.

I don't care.

There is a weird kind of wrinkle in this, which is that.

I mean, obviously, like, Nigel Farage is lying about the kind of more pro-trans stuff.

And the reason why I can prove that he is, is because some of you may remember

the weird pro-LGBT Trump arc that he occasionally had in fits and starts, where someone would ask him and he gave his like real answer instead of his base answer, which is, I don't care.

And so,

like, obviously, that dropped in a second when it became like, you know, useful for like Project 2025 to be like, transgender is now illegal, right?

But, like,

there were a few times where he was just kind of caught, like, uh,

sort of not policing himself, where he was like, I don't care.

I was in clubs in Manhattan in the 80s.

I know what a trans woman is.

Yeah.

But, like,

so, yeah,

if you translate that across, Farage will also continue the like transgender murder machine.

But it's fun when these sort of strange little symptoms happen.

If only we had Trump of the 1980s.

Still

just as racist.

No, still pretty bad, but yeah.

But maybe better on trans.

Who's to say?

The monkeys pawns.

I said it earlier.

It's not a trade-off I'm willing to make.

The monkeys pawn girls and he de-ages 40 years, but is the same guy?

I mean, maybe, maybe the like...

Maybe the pro-trans part of Trump's brain will get reactivated as the dementia hits.

Because now he's like, he's in all the Epstein files.

We'll talk about that another time, I'm sure.

He's like wandering around the roof of the White House.

Oh, he was so funny.

That was so funny.

That was so fucking

fucking great.

Just like, come on, man, do a flip.

He's going to

bring back a classic from Occupy Wall Street, the pasteboard sign that says, jump, you fuckers.

He's going to demolish the East Wing of the White House and put a ballroom there.

And you know what?

No, I agree with him on that one.

I'm sorry.

The The White House is an ugly building.

It just is.

Yeah, the East Wing, in particular, is a shitty building.

We were right to burn it down, not least because if you look at Trump on the roof, he's on the roof of the West Wing, which is just this

one floor.

It looks like a strip mall with some decoration on it.

It looks like absolutely.

Oh, that's the corridor to the West Wing, not the West Wing itself.

Excuse me.

Yeah.

The memorized White House blueprints give me a little bit of concern, but that's okay, Roz.

Go ahead.

Just played a lot of Hitman blood money.

Yeah, look,

it picks things up when you live in or near Washington, D.C.

Anyway.

This is my project.

I just call it the First Street Tunnels.

Well, in other news.

Oh, shit.

I gotta boost the volume.

There we go.

Yeah, we didn't talk about Air India Flight 171 at all, which mostly because there wasn't much that we knew about it, but we probably should.

Now we know like a little bit about it.

This was Boeing 787 that took off from

what airport?

I don't recall off the top of my head.

Because you see people still don't know anything about it.

Well,

I know like two things about it, which I will get into.

I met about two

Gatwick, which obviously

it's like

you get out of going to the United Kingdom by crash.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're like, man, I hope this plane lands in a country where I'm still allowed to like access Wikipedia and the plane immediately crashes.

Yeah.

It also had a real kind of like

sort of far-side crash location in that it landed on a medical school dormitory.

So it's also just like,

you know, Boeing at the last second taking over from Cessna number of doctors killed per flight.

Yeah, this is.

Oh, well, yeah, excuse me.

Beechcraft.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, you know, this flight took off from the airport.

It gained altitude, and then it started losing altitude, and it didn't really seem obvious what was going on.

Then it crashed.

Now we know from the initial report that the fuel cutoff switches had been flipped.

And you can also see down here the ram air turbine.

That's the emergency little propeller that comes, drops out of the airplane.

You know, if you lose all hydraulic power because, let's say, the engine shut down,

that had been extended very early in the flight.

We still don't know very much about anything else.

No, very strange.

This is the first 787, like Holos, isn't it?

Yes.

So, I mean,

the Boeing shirt remains topical at least, but like,

the other crazy thing about this is that one guy survived yes um yeah and he like not even badly injured he doesn't know how he just like uh

you know found himself in the wreck of the plane inside this building he just like got up and walked out and it's like everyone else is soup and this guy's just fine and then i found muhammad ada's passport on the street

Yeah, genuinely, there was like one guy, which is just like one horrible.

I thought he like bailed out like early or something.

Like he got the emergency exit open early.

I mean, this is extremely, extremely tragic, but I would also love to see a serious Bollywood movie about the guy.

This is true.

So he was in the like window seat of the emergency exit aisle, which I guess tracks.

That makes sense.

But yeah, just straight up walked out of it.

which absolutely insane.

And I don't know that you can hand much credit to Boeing for that either.

Well, you know, I frequently replay fantasies in my head of how I could walk out of various dangerous situations.

Oh, yeah.

This is the first guy who did it.

You know, you just hit the bricks.

I mean, you know exactly about calling myself a plane crash survivor because my like Jet 2 flight was delayed by 15 minutes.

This guy gets to call himself a plane crash survivor.

This guy, yeah, he just walked out of the plane crash.

I don't know why anyone else didn't try that.

Rise.

If you're already like liquefied, you know, it's harder.

Yeah, it's just spilling out, literally spilling out.

Because there have been other wrecks where there's loss of airframe during, you know, in combat aircraft and also passenger aircraft where like somebody falls out of the plane at altitude and survive on the ground somehow.

Normally it's the landing that kills you.

But like, yeah.

In this case, guy just shrugged it off, which that's, that's pretty impressive.

As to like,

why it crashed in the first place after like, what, like, 30 seconds of flying?

I don't know.

Someone moved them accidentally, someone moved them on purpose, some something happened mechanically, but like, um,

we, we, it remains to be seen.

I was just, I, I was kind of feeling bad that we hadn't talked about it at this point because it had been like on for a while, you know?

Yeah.

Did all of you have the chance to did you ever do an episode about that Tupolev airliner where they bet the guy he could land it blindfolded?

Never ask me about what we've recorded because I have no idea.

I honestly said that we had recorded a a bonus episode episode that i had been planning us to do on uh like pyramids archaeologically uh i had been planning that one for about three years never recorded it so i

yeah the the the workflow of doing the show is we'll get serious you mentioned it just washes over you

what i wish it was

i had projected false memories into you of a presentation I did in Contracts and Specs 2 class about the bent pyramid.

Yeah.

So that might have been what you were thinking of.

That's not a problem.

Even though

I don't think I've ever told you about that.

Well, you wouldn't need to.

We all share like a gestalt consciousness.

Yeah, we all have

a single mind.

It's not my turn to use the brain.

Everybody has their one brain cell on a timeshare and they have to split up.

Yeah.

It's like when you're writing a bonus episode, you get to use all of them, which is why the other two don't have any memory of it happening.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

That's fair.

Oh, that's fair.

I mean, also, I'm stupid.

So, no.

Oh, me too.

It's all good.

Well, that was

the goddamn news.

Okay, so I think a good place to start here is

streetcars in the 1920s, 1930s, right?

You've got lots of different types from lots of manufacturers, right?

Some are even home-built by the various streetcar companies.

There's not really very many standard parts.

There's a huge market for them, right?

So we got a, here's a Peter Witt from Toronto.

A street car named Bothhurst.

Yeah.

Les Catchy.

So for the viewers who are listening to a podcast, a Peter Witt is a type of 1920s streetcar that has a center, it's pay-as-you enter.

So you go into the front of the car, pay your little dime, and then go in the car, and then you exit via the center exit it was invented by i think a guy in cleveland whose name was peter witt and it the idea spread around the the world you can ride peter witts in numerous cities the most famous of which are the melanese street cars which you can ride in francisco and milano

yes and then there's uh

here's uh here's a pearly thomas from new orleans uh

here i don't know yeah that actually is the streetcar named desire yes well no that's on the st clair Avenue line.

Desire shut down in the 50s.

God damn it.

Yeah, exactly.

Here's a Third Avenue Railroad Company streetcar made by I have no fucking clue.

That's from New York.

It's an old JG Brill design from the late 1890s.

That makes sense.

So this is an interesting one to some viewers of old comic books.

This was the inspiration for the Tunerville Trolley.

It's a little two-axle JG Brill design that was used in hundreds of places all around the world.

It was exported

as often as it was used in the United States.

Maybe you have something fancy that's entirely made of wood.

This is an open streetcar for the Connecticut Company.

They use these for the Yale Bowl games.

Or maybe you have something even more exotic like,

hey, it's the Golden Chariot from Montreal.

I love these things.

That's for sightseeing.

It's set up like a theater.

So the original open side streetcars are basically the Ur streetcar.

These were, these allowed so much flexibility because you could hop on and off.

In this picture, the little steps are folded up, but they would be down at all times.

You could,

you know, hop on and off whenever you reached stop.

Some of them had automatic little levers you could pull down and the steps flopped down.

Kind of fun.

That's really cool.

It looks like very Final Fantasy, you know?

Yeah.

You know,

they're very pleasant to ride, I will will say that.

Other than that, these old cars, they have straight-cut gears, so the traction motors sound fucking awful.

You're just

in this beautiful kind of carriage, and it's just screaming at you the whole time.

It's like,

constantly, yeah.

So the sightseeing car is really fun because, if I'm not mistaken, these were cut down from other cars, and it basically has theater seating.

Yeah.

Where each, each, there's a bunch of rows of seats, and each row is a little bit above the next, and it gets taller and taller as it goes to the rear of the car.

It has no roof and it just has a trolley pole mounted on a little tiny metal pole that goes straight down to the control surfaces.

Now, one thing all five of these cars have in common is their little control stands, which were universally made by General Electric or Westinghouse.

They were kind of an interesting and beautiful cast brass affair with a gigantic throttle lever.

And basically, all these pre-war trolleys, if it was home-built or built by Brill or St.

Louis Carr or whatever, it was taking an overhead electric wire, you know, throttling it through a large cast brass throttle, which went directly to the traction motors.

And you also had airbrakes to stop the train.

And the airbrakes were electrically powered by an air.

And so this is basically how every system's, at least in the United

States and North America, this is how it works.

Yeah.

And, you know, think about these Golden Chariot cars, I've seen four of them.

I've been on two of them.

If you're in the back in the top row here, you do feel alarmingly close to the wire.

Just seeing something really exciting and jumping out of your seat and just meeting your own life.

600 volts DC.

Yeah.

You completed the circuit.

Congratulations.

Yeah.

So,

but yeah, so a lot of these cars, you know, there's lots of different manufacturers by the 20s, even by 20 standards.

A lot of these are looking pretty old.

So the presidents of various streetcar companies got together in a big conference to fix this mess and then created a committee to design a new universal streetcar in 1929, which led to, of course, the President's Conference Committee Car, the PCC.

I like these things.

I've seen these things before.

Yeah, I recognize this guy from L.A.

Noir.

Yes, exactly.

They were widely copied all around the world.

A bunch of cities came to the United States to gaze upon the marvel of the PCC, and then they would take the idea or, in some cases, directly license it and build their own versions.

There's tons of European and even Soviet copies of the PCC car spread around the world.

Ooh, okay.

Yeah, I...

Patra made a bunch of them in the Eastern Bloc.

Strongly pro-a-Soviet copy of anything, pretty much.

Like, you know, the intellectual property law is a bourgeois delusion, right?

It's not stealing.

We're just going to take your thing and make it better.

The PCC car was the most successful streetcar design in history, basically.

The other manufacturers, such as J.G.

Brill and a couple of others, tried to make PCC-influenced ideas.

On the right-hand side is a Brill master unit, which is from the late 1920s and sold through the 30s.

These were probably the second most popular design for a

post-1920s all-steel construction

free car.

The Brill also made the Brill liner, which I kid you not is as close to a carbon copy of the PCC as you can get, except for it has all of the Brill parts in it.

It didn't sell very well because people looked at the Brill liner and like, I could just buy the PCC and they bought the PCC instead.

The PCC, which is prissier, mind you.

Yeah, the PCC has the nice, you know, the nice styling.

It's got automatic doors.

Sometimes they're air, sometimes they're electric.

You know, you've got

you've got helical gears, so the motors are very quiet

as opposed to the straight-cut ones.

You've got, yeah, you've got magnetic brakes.

Those are essentially, you just divert all the current into

a big electromagnet underneath the trucks.

that just grips to the rails so you can stop really quickly in an emergency.

And it works extremely well.

It works too well sometimes.

It's why, you know, you don't want to use it unless you have a real emergency.

It is, what else does it have?

There's one more thing.

It does not use a traditional control stand.

Yes, it has pedals.

Yes.

Well, on a podcast, you should never say that something was the first ever to have done this because obviously the PCC was not.

But this was the most popular version of using pedals like you would on a bus.

And it works extremely well.

You just tap it to go and tap it to stop.

And then you just sit there confused as to what to do with your hands.

You know?

Yes.

Yeah.

Get really good at agitator.

Exactly.

Another thing about the PCC is it's not entirely standardized because there's a lot of different streetcar systems that need to buy these things, right?

So lots of lines order these with like little changes to the body work or how the windows are arranged or like, okay, does it make more sense for us to use an all-electric system or an air electric system?

You know,

you could customize these a lot for what you needed, up to and including like

the Chicago Transit Authority just bought subway cars, which were basically PCCs with a different body on them and a third rail shoe as opposed to a

trolley pole, right?

And there's single and double ender versions, both of which you can ride in San Francisco as restored and current tool.

Yeah.

And this sort of is one of these things that sort of staves off the death of the private streetcar for a long time, you know, but there's still problems with the entire corporate model of the private streetcar system.

Yes.

And keep in mind, we're saying this.

This is a private enterprise.

Very few cities had a municipal railway.

Obviously, San Francisco.

Yeah, San Francisco's Muni is a perfect example of a city-owned transit district.

However, yes, a lot of these were for-profit institutions across the bay.

In Oakland, the key system was a private institution that provided tram and interurban service, even across the Bay Bridge.

So think about that.

When we think about modern discourse about transit stuff, we're usually talking about publicly owned

transit authorities versus a privately owned for-profit institution.

So when we think about the demise of streetcars and we think about the economization, or at least what they thought would be economization by going to buses, this is why in many cases.

Obviously, you know, without going into forever, you know, the ends, north, the national city lines debacle/slash conspiracy/slash what have you,

this was the simple cut and dry drift is that if you had the infrastructure and you maintained it fairly well, it was expensive.

So slowly, one by one, the tram networks were cut back back and back to just core lines with buses slowly leaking in until many cities,

at least by the late 50s and early 1960s, had sunsetted networks.

However, there were a few that held on for dear life.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the fact that the American streetcar by the 1940s, 1950s, you're in mixed traffic.

You can see here, this is Washington, D.C.

You know, lots of cars that are getting in the way of the streetcars, right?

A lot of times they're, you know, these center running systems on huge boulevards.

This is Detroit over here, right?

You know, or, you know, and that's where, you know, okay, you can definitely drive faster than the streetcar.

Or you might have a situation like Pittsburgh here, where you have these ancient right-of-ways with really tight curves, really steep grades.

And, you know, just trying to navigate these streetcars through them was, you know, miserable.

Oh, yeah, that gives me anxiety.

That's, that's diabolical, though.

Yeah.

I put this out to all of my listeners.

Please, somebody, seriously prototype model Pittsburgh's tram system and build a beautiful model railroad.

I would love to come visit it.

Do it right and do it beautifully.

I would love to see it.

Pittsburgh had so much stuff that you looked at it and you're like, how did this not derail every single time?

Anyway, worry about that.

You also had, you you know, these streetcar companies were run on, you know, franchises granted by the city government.

So their fares were regulated, right?

They often had to be responsible for repaving streets and snow removal on streets, right?

The city was the only one who could increase the fare.

And a lot of times they were like, nah, nah, nah, we don't have to do that.

You're going to be fine.

And, you know, a nickel in 1920 is great.

A nickel nickel in 1958, not so great for a fare, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was huge, huge issues with fare increases.

And in fact, it was like the biggest like op-ed thing of that period when it came to transit.

Whenever the company was like hurting and cutting as much as they possibly could to just make ends meet.

And people are losing their shit about like, oh my God, we need to raise this from five cents to 7.5 cents.

You know, and it's just like, it was insane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was, you know, a nickel wasn't worth a dime anymore, as the great Yogi Berra said.

So, yeah, there's a lot of deferred maintenance of these systems.

They were not doing good.

And again, cities were using these sort of as, you know, cash registers, right?

It was like, well, as long as we have the streetcar company, we get free paving and we get free.

snow removal and other street maintenance stuff.

This is the correct relationship of of municipalities to capital, I think.

We should bring that up.

I mean, honestly, it kind of, you know,

it is like, but the problem was we didn't quite, you know,

at some point, they, I hate to say it, they ran out of other people's money.

God damn it.

It was.

You know, there's no such thing as a shortage of other people's money.

All there is is a shortage of regulations.

Yeah, it's true.

I'm going to go out of business.

I have a gun.

No, you're not.

Oh, yeah.

Well, honestly, that's the way to go.

Yeah.

I might not be able to win, but we could both lose.

Streetcar Stalin.

Just hire a commissar

to get every driver, every trolley operator to.

So one of the most important parts about this is that with the private companies is that they were expanding from downtown all the way out into Greenfield, upon which they would buy the land, the greenfield, to develop into what became known as the bungalow belt, which were these hub rings around cities of beautiful 1920s and 190 houses.

And they would sell the land to people to build, or they'd even build the houses in some cases.

The Realty Syndicate in Oakland is a perfect example.

And so they were a theme fund, yes, or a theme park, and or actually in most cases, both.

So

you would have this income at the very beginning of the system in the you know, the turn of the century through the 1920s of they're selling land, money's coming in from the other thing.

But the problem is they're selling it off.

for instance in japan a lot of the privately owned railway networks uh before jr they would buy the land and then develop it and manage the land themselves and get rent every month from the commercial and residential uh you know uh patrons who would you know uh what do you call them um renters um yes you know so they would have consistent income decade after decade and the american systems in most cases did not do this they just got the money from the sale and then that was it and so you can see how this decline worked very quickly and effectively over time because you ran out of places to sell new land for, obviously, and you were not getting any new income.

That's right, folks.

Here we are.

We're now anti-regulation and pro-landlord.

I'm sorry.

Wow.

I didn't see us doing this.

Just being like, I always knew this day would come.

Yeah, we're going to have to kneel rods over a ditch.

Here we go, baby.

Folks, yeah, no, let me, I got a new line of new tropics to sell you.

Now, this was not the only path we could have taken, though, right?

Let's talk about which way Western man here.

So in Europe in the post-war era, obviously all the cities got bombed to shit, which, you know, did mean that there was a lot of investment coming in to rebuild the cities.

Particularly.

The United States Army Air Force's urban renewal plan.

Yes.

So, particularly in Northern Europe, right, they take control.

They modernize their streetcar systems, right?

You know, you have, you know, these like dedicated lanes on the streets.

You got dedicated right-of-way where, you know, the streetcar is far away from the cars.

You got these fancy new, really big streetcars or, well, they say trams over there.

They have tunnels, bridges.

They increase the speeds.

They reduce the number of stops, right?

They generally improve the passenger experience for riding on a tram, right?

They build on the PCC model, right?

So, because there were a lot of PCCs that were exported to Europe, right?

Those streetcars we were talking about earlier.

Using the same electrical and mechanical equipment, you know, they just like, like you know take that and build something gigantic and faster right

yeah

the netherlands was particularly good at this the germans as well of course um you had a bunch of pcc clone manufacturers uh just improving on the original ones you can see that in these cases the the noses are narrower so they can handle tighter curves on some legacy systems.

But otherwise, they're pretty much the PCC.

Yeah, they're pretty much the PCC.

All the technicians from the end of Gravity's Rainbow, just like really, really excited about rockets, couldn't cut it at NASA.

Just like, well, guess I'm going to be the Tram's guy, I guess.

Yeah,

this does explain how we get to Boeing, I suppose.

Werner von Tram.

And simultaneously,

that was all the reaction that deserved.

In the United States, we either scrap or burn our streetcars.

Oh.

And yes, we're still inhaling a bit of them now.

Yeah, that's what you do with a wooden car.

You burn it.

It's like microplastics.

I piss out a credit card a week.

The top image is the infamous picture in Minneapolis.

I might get this wrong, so put it in the comments.

But if I'm not mistaken, one of the guys is from National City Lines and the other is the current mayor of Minneapolis St.

Paul or Minneapolis or St.

Paul.

Mayor Detected.

Okay.

Yeah.

Writing this down for future use.

And then the bottom image is the classic iconic used in every book about trams ever covering American stuff.

This is the Terminal Island scrapyard in Long Beach, California in the early 1960s.

And these are all Hollywood cars.

They were called Hollywood cars.

They served Hollywood.

They're Peter Witt variant.

Were scrapped out there and only a handful survive today, some of which you can enjoy riding at the Southern California Railway Museum in Paris, California.

Look at how they massacred my boy.

Yeah.

Seriously, boys.

Yeah, our streetcar systems, they don't have the money to modernize.

The streetcars couldn't take advantage of the, you know, wildly generous funds that the government was dispersing for road improvements and the shiny new highways and so on and so forth.

And, you know, these streetcars required expensive to maintain tracks and, you know, wires and, you know, depots and all this stuff.

And, you know, ultimately, I...

It was sort of a rational economic decision to say, okay, to hell with this.

I ride a fucking bus you know um

there was no sort of support for any of these operations um very funny to do the marshall plan on europe and not on america not not on yourself yeah well i keep that in mind for later um

oh god so many years pass um by the 1970s folks are starting to notice that in europe these trams right they seem to work a lot better than they do in the united states one man is set to the task of figuring out why.

That's Dr.

Lucan Vuccik of University of Pennsylvania.

Oh, yes.

So, Dr.

Vuccik puts together this huge report for the new Urban Mass Transit Administration about tram systems in Europe, how they compare to those remaining streetcar systems in the United States, and he calls it light rail transit systems, a definition and evaluation.

And in the process, he coins a term that will later come to haunt us us all, light rail.

What is light rail?

It's whatever you want it to be.

Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah.

In this day and age, yeah.

For the purposes of this podcast, let's define light rail as the following.

Light rail is typically an electrified uh sort of uh it's an electrified steel wheel on steel rail streetcar system that can also have elements of earlier inter-urban designs.

They can have legacy stuff.

But in general, it is not a, in the old days they used to call them the steam railroads,

the heavy rail, which is, you know, in modern day, a diesel or electric locomotive hauling separate coaches that are unpowered on normal railroad main line.

So light rail.

will go typically in the street, sometimes on segregated rights of way, but will be part of the urban fabric versus heavy rail, which is its own thing separated typically from the urban fabric.

And your main points of contact are actual stations.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, light rail is going to, I mean, you know, it's going to, it's, it's, this, you know, heavy rail is like a subway or an elevated train or something.

You know, Vuccik goes around Europe and, you know, sort of looks at all these different operating practices, right?

You know, you're separating the trams from the cars.

You have

elevated lines.

You have tunneled lines.

You have all kinds of stuff that makes the tram work a lot better than a bus, right?

It says, hey,

you know, we should consider applying these to the few remaining American streetcar networks, as opposed to some of the plans at the time, which were the plan for the Urban Mass Transit Administration at that point was we're just going to give every city the size of Dayton or larger a subway system.

Yes.

Yes.

Why shouldn't Harrisburg have four subway lines?

You tell me, motherfuckers.

Control C, control A, control V.

It's the point in the city builder game where you're getting kind of bored with it.

Yeah.

But this is a situation where, okay, we can build an upgraded tram system, a light rail line, for a fraction of the cost of a heavy rail line with most of the capacity and most of the usefulness.

And in many cases, recycling old legacy rights of way.

And in fact, in many cases, retracing the original routes of old streetcar lines that may have already been ripped up or may...

have the rails still in the street, but obviously would have to be rebuilt to accept light rail

modern equipment.

And a very positive example of light rail that's more transit-oriented,

and this will probably get a lot of comments, is the Docklands Light Railway reusing heavy rail rights-of-way and putting in new stations to take advantage of that, right?

It's not a traditional light rail system by any means, but it's a good example of reusing an old right-of-way.

It's always one of those situations where it's like, okay, what exactly makes it light?

It's the capacity.

And the Docklands Light Railway is, well, I wouldn't consider it light by American standards.

But it's light rail as a branding exercise.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's ultimately what light rail becomes.

You know, I mean,

I remember a couple of years ago on the Inquirer, they called the

Market-Frankford line light rail.

It's like, no.

No.

No, that definitionally is not.

Light rail as a term today doesn't mean anything.

No, it's useless.

Yeah.

But anyway, yeah.

So, you know, here's a bunch of nice little vignettes of European tram systems as like, you know, this is what we should be striving for as opposed to, you know, what we have in the United States.

And what do you have in the United States at this point?

It's

moldy.

Yeah, it's moldy.

It smells a little bit in here.

Like, Boston, for instance, has...

I believe elevated and subway systems that date back to the late 1890s and the very dawn of electrification.

Yes.

And the SF Muni has elements like the

West Portal Twin Peaks Tunnel, which date back to, well, as it said on the thing, 1917, right there on the arc.

Yes.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it or upgrade it.

And, you know, I have to give some credit to the systems that did stick around.

You know, they did it tooth and nail.

They thought of brilliant ways to keep things operating far longer than they should have.

And in some cases, resulting in various patents for various fixes they did.

But by the 60s and 70s, it was all really long in the tooth.

And the youngest new equipment were the PCCs, the last of which was built in 1954.

And now we're approaching 1970.

So think about that.

Yeah, and the systems that were left usually had a lot of dedicated right-of-way where you couldn't really use a bus.

So as we mentioned, you had Boston, San Francisco, down here.

You had sections in Pittsburgh where because the streets were so narrow and the grades were so stupid that buses couldn't fit.

In Philly, we had the Subway Surface Trolley Tunnel, of course.

You know, in New Orleans, of course, they ran the streetcars on the neutral ground, right?

Newark, New Jersey also ran mostly in tunnels and dedicated right-of-way.

And then you had the weird one,

which was El Paso.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Because their system ran into Ciedad Juarez where no one had a car.

Ah, okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

Sure.

Why the hell not?

Yeah, you could take a PCC across the border.

That fucking rips.

Take me back.

Which you don't even need to be taken back.

They're still running them.

They just restored a bunch of them.

The border crossing is not back yet, but they do want to do it.

No.

Yeah.

You can ride them in El Paso proper.

But yeah, the the way these cars survived was really funny.

Some random guy bought the remaining cars and stored them at the airport for 30 years until the early 2000s.

God bless hoarding, the cause of and solution to all of our nation's problems.

Right.

Yeah.

So yeah, all these systems are still using their old and busted PCCs, except in New Orleans.

where they are, of course, using their Pearly Thomas cars from the Cretaceous period.

I'm very, very, very into the guy being like,

I'll need him someday.

I'll need him someday.

You should really give up these like 30 streetcars.

You're never going to use them.

It's like one day.

And then, of course,

he is the most vindicated a man has ever been.

My time has come.

So clearly, what we need is a new universal streetcar.

It worked great the first time.

Again, again.

It's like this X KCCD.

Solution.

There are now 15 competing standards.

Yes.

So let's talk a little bit about the formation of his very president Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Yes.

Jumbo.

Jumbo.

Oh, y'all did it.

Killed a lot of kids.

Mixed legacy, let's say.

Mixed legacy, yeah.

Next legacy, yeah.

Well,

but he did have an amphibious car.

That is true, and he did use it to prank people.

On the other hand, he also used a lot of napalm to prank people, which is a lot less funny.

I think it was less funny.

I'm just imagining like the fallout new vegas reputation management system but for lbj yeah the the the prank is you don't think that the plot of kill everything that moves is going to happen to you and then it does you're it's not the best prank you're dropping napalm on a vietnamese a vietnamese village and um you're on tick tock saying just a prank social experiment just just a prank social experiment i think i think we're a couple of steps away from tick tock is actually doing this

yes yeah it's true Don't, don't, don't give them any ideas.

And also, if you're going to get ideas, uh, we want those royalties, motherfuckers.

Oh, that's a good point.

Doing the doing the Mr.

Beast

video thumbnail format, but it's like I launched a limited intervention in Southeast Asia to protect democracy.

Did you see the guy who keeps emailing us but only addressing me, asking to make new thumbnails for our videos?

I didn't he has emailed us five times.

Five.

One, two, three, four, five times.

And it's just an estimate.

I'm not opposed to a more YouTube-style thumbnail, just so long as it doesn't have Mr.

Beast in it.

Well, no, it would have to have all of us soy facing.

We take it in turns to do the Mr.

Beast face.

I would like to

that guy.

I hope he has a good time.

I don't know that that guy's in sold.

No, he doesn't have it sold.

He doesn't have a fucking soul, which is fun.

Whatever.

Yeah, go on, Miles.

Yeah, so the formation of the UMTA happens in the early 1960s.

And basically what they wanted to do is throw out the book of old school railroading.

They could see that both heavy rail and light rail were faltering in the 60s for obvious reasons, competition with trucking, competition with buses, all this sort of thing, and lack of infrastructure investment because most of them were privately owned at the time, blah, blah, blah, right?

So

the Great Society goes forth and thinks maybe we can completely rethink this from the ground up.

So they do a bunch of crazy spaghetti, you know, throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks things.

One of which we won't cover here, but perhaps could be another episode is about the air cushion maglev train that they're thinking about for intercity stuff that doesn't go anywhere.

We have the

absolutely delightful

Pueblo rail testing facility in Colorado, which comes out of the UMTA, which is where all, including the Boeing LRV, will be tested eventually for certification for operation.

It does a bunch of other things, including an absolutely buck wild 1968 report on what they think transportation should be like in X number of years.

And a lot of it is a bunch of really beautiful 1960s, like jaunty madmen era gouache illustrations of the most hare-brained PRT personal rapid transit.

uh rubber-tired uh concrete guideway bullshit you've ever seen in your life but sold to you in this gorgeous, jaunty illustration that almost, almost makes you think it's a good idea, but it's not.

I looked like that.

Yeah, I searched light rail or, you know,

steel rail in this 1968 report.

It came up twice.

And it was only in passing as like, this is the past.

We need the future.

And so it's very interesting.

that out of the blind optimism of the great society UMTA, we start getting a new idea for maybe we should throw out the entire book on streetcar and sign it around.

So yeah, he signs this into law in 64.

A bunch of stuff happens.

Let's go to the next slide real quick.

Yeah.

Because we have to frame this a little bit.

And there's a little Easter egg for those who are following along in the slides of the little tiny H-21 helicopter.

This is an era.

of absolute unbridled optimism for what technology can bring to us in the future.

We harness the atom.

Yeah, we harnessed the atom.

You know, 15 years, 20 years earlier, you know, we're re-engineering.

The Army Corps of Re-Engineers was engineering waterways and building dams, you know, for the last 45 years.

We built the plane that goes Mach 1 million and flies using its own shockwave.

It has 10,000 engines.

Chuck, yeah, you ain't got shit on me, Isaiah is like just kicking a break out the back.

Yeah.

Like the XB-70, to me personally, is my, the perfect evocation of unbridled 60s optimistic future thinking.

Like it was flawed.

It had a lot of issues.

It was fantastic and batshit in the most inciting way from an aeronautical engineering perspective.

And of course, it ended tragically, or at least one of the two ended tragically.

So you can see the foundation upon which we're thinking maybe we should redesign the tram, right?

Ridership is down.

The shit's fallen apart.

Maybe with...

I love they say, yeah, I love to say vigorous leadership of federal government.

When's the last time you saw that in a document?

Oh, my God.

No, no, they don't like vigorous leadership.

People like alligator alcatraz.

Yeah, well, I guess that is vigorous leadership.

The bad kind, yes.

Oh, my God.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

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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.

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Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want.

Or don't.

It's your decision and we respect that.

Back to the show.

So, who will rescue transit?

Who knows how to address the future?

Guys like this, and it's a picture of an old retirement age motorman in his full regalia blue suit, or guys like this.

And it's two absolute

IBM style NASA engineers pretending not to look at the camera.

Well,

this is the secret.

Both these guys, all three guys pictured here are drunk.

Yeah.

Why?

Dude, it was

71, man.

Nixon was president.

You could do fucking anything.

So, I mean, obviously the spoiler is that the guy on the left, the retirement age motorman, did end up knowing a little bit more.

He knew a little bit about running a streetcar.

Yeah.

Train good, NASA bad?

Well, NASA had trains, but those guys weren't allowed to consult on the trains.

What?

Not allowed.

Flatly.

Yeah.

All right.

I'll just go fuck myself.

Yeah, they're just locked outside the door, like with their hands on the window looking at me.

No, don't do that.

Don't, no, no.

You're going to mess it up.

You're going to mess it up.

Exactly.

So let's get a little vertical.

Let's check out some things that go up and down instead of side to side.

Piyaseki Helicopter Corporation.

Wow, the liveries on these motherfuckers.

Oh, my God.

They delivered almost more bananas than United Fruit.

Yeah, this is the company that wasn't Sikorsky, but was still, you know, still proved.

The only people stupid enough to build a helicopter are Polish.

Boss.

Kiyoseki, I'll have you primarily talk about this, Justin, but for our viewers who are not looking at the slideshow, produced an array of twin rotor helicopters,

most famously later on, of course, the Chinook and C-Knight.

But the earlier ones were...

incredible banana-shaped affairs to the point where they actually literally called them the flying banana Twin rotor,

all metal-framed helicopters, and in some earlier cases, steel tube with a doped fabric like an airship.

Yeah, try and wrap your mind around that.

I just realized I forgot the guy's first name.

Okay, right.

Shit.

Frank Piyazaki.

Right.

Okay.

So, you know, from season two of The Wire?

Good question.

Sure, man.

That's his son.

That's his son.

So he starts this helicopter corporation.

He's one of the helicopter pioneers.

He is,

you know, he's a true believer in a helicopter.

He believes, you know, this is going to be.

I don't like the phrase true believer in helicopters.

He's a true believer in the helicopter in that he believes it will be the flying car.

He will be able to market a helicopter to every household.

I believe he builds one of the first working helicopters in the United States.

Not the first, but one of the first.

Yeah, he's the first guy.

Piaseki's the second guy.

You know, and he's a pioneer of the dual rotor design as opposed to having, you know, you have a main rotor and a vertical tail rotor.

You just have two big rotors, right?

Which turns out, yeah, that works pretty good.

You know, he builds a big factory in Morton, Pennsylvania, which is now this BJ's.

But you can see the control tower is still there.

In the BJ's control tower?

Yeah, the BJ's control tower, yeah.

Hell's a Maestro Club.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's right there in the name, though.

Come on.

It's right next to the coffee station where you can get the famous award-winning Morden Monster breakfast sandwich.

I have not had it.

I saw it once in a Beard Meets Food YouTube video.

I was kind of like, damn, I should next time in Morton, I should go get one.

It's a pretty big sandwich as I understand it.

But yeah, so, you know, Piyaseki is, you know, he sells all these helicopters mostly to the

cheese twice.

Yeah, scrambled eggs,

cheese, bacon, scrambled eggs, cheese, and sausage on grilled Texas toast.

That's how you know that Chat GPT didn't write that.

Yeah, no, it's like I.

It's got scrambled eggs twice, too.

Yeah, it's double checks.

Oh, yeah, so it does.

Finally clawing my way to literacy at the age of 34.

Adam, girl.

Adam girl.

It's layered in that order, yeah.

Oh,

okay.

Oh, well, the literacy, literacy continues to escape me.

Oh, well.

Oh, well.

But yeah, Piaseki built a pretty successful chain of helicopter designs throughout the 50s and 60s.

And of course, you know, we decided foolishly to help out the French in that weird overseas proxy war.

And we started the war with these little flying bananas.

And they worked fairly well.

I do love the word mark here where Piyaseki, the two eyes, are hubs for rotors.

Yeah, that's cool.

That's great.

That's great.

We had an idea, and it's like integrated all the way up into the branding.

Sick.

Yeah.

It's the future.

We're using helicopters for everything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, one thing we did use them for.

Is, yeah, I mean, is the Vietnam War.

But the problem problem with the Vietnam War is sometimes you run out of war.

Yeah,

sometimes you run out of helicopters.

Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, the driving engine behind the United States economy since World War II has been we're going to, you know, the government gives companies to build things that we then ship overseas to blow up.

Right.

You know,

this is the basis of the American economy.

And the problem is you need a war in order to do that.

And unfortunately, in 1975, peace broke out.

Yeah, I remember playing all of those Metal Gear solid games about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Here we have cursed competitor Bell that's 206 Huey in the famous iconic What is this the U.S.

Embassy shot?

I think no, it's actually CIA housing.

That's an Air America helicopter.

Oh, is it really?

Interesting.

That is it's as far as I know the like last helicopter out, but it's not off the embassy.

It's

like, I'm willing to be corrected on that, but I'm pretty certain this is like

sort of like near embassy or in embassy compound housing for the CIA specifically.

Wow.

You're like, no, no, no, this is

a civilian helicopter.

Don't shoot at us.

It's a civilian helicopter.

I'm pretty certain they were shooting at Air America, and they were right to do it.

Although,

I'm vaguely remembering that Air America had the

most recent and I think to date, well, to date most recent shoot-down of a plane from a helicopter with a handgun.

So, yeah, they got up to some weird shit back then.

Yeah.

So, eventually, the flying bananas gave way to helicopters, one of which is still in service today, the other retired.

The CH-46 Sea Knight, which was used by the Marines.

And I think also to a limited extent by the Army and the Navy, I'd have to double check.

And then the Chinook, which is still flying today.

And you've got your usual Piaseki twin rotor layout, and they were very effective at carrying troops, light artillery, all sorts of things.

And, you know, stateside being used for stuff like the aerial logging I described earlier and a bunch of other executive transport.

Piaseki got kicked out of the company because his ideas were too out there.

And then I believe he started a second company just called Piaseki Aircraft, which I believe still exists.

But that was when...

Just a Boeing guy being like, this is clearly you trying to kill yourself in a helicopter.

And he's like, well, fuck you.

I quit.

Yeah.

The most elaborate hitman environmental kill ever.

So they built thousands of both of these types of helicopters, but of course, war end, and then you have surplus.

So then what?

It's how Piaseki gets, you know, absorbed into...

They become Boeing Vertile.

They get absorbed into Boeing during the war.

Yeah, you are Boeing to be part of the collective.

Exactly.

Exactly.

But now, yeah, there's no helicopters to build anymore because you can't send the Vietnam to get blown up.

But we do have this obvious pressing need.

We have more streetcars.

And Frank Piasecki wept for there were no more helicopters to conquer.

Yeah.

Slash blew himself up and right.

So what happens when you hire an aerospace company, design a streetcar?

You might think you might get something like this, which is a drawing I did a couple weeks ago of a CH-46 C9 fuselage on some PCC trucks with Tommy's.

I like this.

I hope, I hope, I would have hope, fucking hell, I would have hoped we would have got something like this.

It would have been better engineered.

But yeah, I couldn't resist it when Justin and I were talking about this a couple weeks ago.

It's like, you know, I got to draw this.

It looks like it has a happy face.

It's very happy.

And And you can see the pedestrians in front of you on the ground level as well as straight ahead.

It's actually pretty, pretty smart.

There you go.

Yeah.

So it's like, okay, yeah, we're doing defense conversion.

Let's do this.

We're having a helicopter capital.

You know, the colonial violence returns to the Metropole in the form of having to get the Chinook to work.

And it is, you know, reconversion has happened after most 20th century wars, happened in World War I to some extent.

It certainly happened in World War II and a little bit in Korea.

So it's not surprising that this would happen after Vietnam as well, especially after the largest outlay of expenditure since World War II, if I'm not mistaken, for men and materiel.

So it makes sense that if you've got all this stuff spun up, you need to do something else with those factories.

You should presumably, you know, do some, I think there's literally a swords to plow shares quote made by Carter in this respect in exactly talking about the Boeing.

Let's go to the next slide and see why that might not be the best.

It is easier to talk about beating swords into plowshares than it is to convert a production line from jet fighters to subway cars.

And indeed, he was right because it was extremely difficult.

And especially because,

so it wasn't just a president's conference committee of the 1930s where he had a smoke-filled room, cigars, and whiskey all around, coming up with, you know, relatively logical ideas because at the time, most of the people who are running the

transit companies probably came from some transit-oriented background instead of installed

McNamara style into a corporation.

That sounds like a great meeting to be in.

I'm going to be honest.

It would be really fun, honestly.

Yeah, back in the 30s talking about like, we need to make it better.

You know, it's fantastic.

But so when they were first developing what would eventually become the Boeing LRV, they had a bunch of cities on board to kind of guide the process.

And one by one, they kind of disappeared.

They dropped out.

Yeah.

New Orleans.

Yeah.

New Orleans was fully on board to modernize their system.

Thank God they didn't do that.

Just finally, like, we're finally going to bring the New Orleans streetcar system into the 19th century.

Yes.

Kicking and screaming.

And so I think a couple of other cities, their names escape me, were also involved.

I think Philadelphia, at least.

Buffalo, I believe.

Yeah.

I think El Paso also did some

consultation.

It was basically everywhere we mentioned before.

there was some kind of consultation into creating this standard light rail vehicle.

Yeah, and a lot of ideas were passed around, some obviously better than others.

The problem though, why it got necked down to just the two in the end, is the two most demanding clients were San Francisco and Boston.

You know, Boston was dealing with the legacy subway system from the engineered in the 1890s.

And

SF Muni was on this crazy project to build the new Muni Metro subway, which is directly above BART, going up and down Market Street and then goes through the aforementioned tunnel that pops out in West Portal.

And they had just built this subway with the hopes that they would have like this high floor, you know, semi-automated system that would work really well.

And they're, you know, you can see that these are wildly different systems.

These are total polar opposites.

You know,

they're just like, yeah.

Yeah, they wanted to build a car that could do both.

And it didn't either.

So you had this huge issue of these wildly different systems demanding all these constraints.

The reason why the nose on this car is narrower than the PCCs is because of Boston.

The reason why it has low floor, high floor steps, wells that I think pneumatically or electrically raise and lower.

And of course, you can imagine how many ways that could go wrong with 1970s really solid state bullshit.

because both have legacy systems where you're getting on and off at street level and on and off at high platform.

All sorts of other crap as well that that we'll get into later.

But let's take a look at the blueprints and see what we're working with here.

So we have, to the people who are just listening to this on a podcast format, imagine in yourself the ideal platonic tram.

I have a perfect, perfectly spherical tram.

Perfectly spherical tram, just rolls down the rails.

Yeah.

So it looks like a very long eclair.

It is an articulated car, which is articulated in the center.

It has three sets of trucks, which have two axles each underneath.

It has two cabs, one on either end.

It has three sets of doors.

I believe some also had other door arrangements, if I'm not mistaken, or were modified in other ways later on.

And two pantographs, or does it just have one?

Oh, it just has one in this room.

Interesting.

Okay, and some came with trolley poles for a panoply of other reasons that we won't get into.

But this is basically the as-delivered Boeing LRV.

This was not on paper, not a bad design necessarily.

Just looking literally at the plans, not a bad design.

What they would choose to do later and how they would construct them, that's where it went.

Yeah, this is not anything that looks

especially controversial.

It's a nice, big, good size articulated tram, you know, but it's not like too big.

There's nothing here that's like incredibly controversial, right?

Other than the fact that you didn't really have too many articulated streetcars in the United States at this point, other than like on the key system, I want to say.

I don't know if anyone else had them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jacob's truck, like, articulated cars were not uncommon in the United States, but they were also not common.

It's a weird middle ground.

Like the systems that bought into it, like the key system, really went for it, and other systems never used them.

Europe loved the.

And in fact,

Sarajevo bought a bunch of used

PC Transit PCCs.

Oh yeah, those guys.

Yeah, those are so weird.

Yeah, they're so cool.

I want to kitbash one and HO so bad out of the Bowser streetcars.

But they took two PCCs and sawed the front off one of them and the rear off another and built an articulated twin-unit car just like this using PCC.

equipment.

And they ran until the war, the Kosovo war.

So they're pretty reliable.

So much of this just seems like you can just like kind of carve a streetcar out of another, out of a bigger streetcar, like a block of marble.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

The Michelangelo approach.

Yeah.

You can see the streetcar inside.

Yeah, we already produced the ultimate streetcar.

We just have to change the body work.

That's another system that was using PCCs at this time.

The Tandy Center Subway in Fort Worth, Texas.

Yes.

Yeah.

And thankfully, one of those still survives.

I think it was restored and it's on display, I think, at the shopping mall or whatever it is.

Wow.

I was really shocked to know that somebody had saved one.

Probably our hero from earlier who just hoarded 30 cars that would not surrender, though, God bless him.

So

apologies for the eBay screen cap one, but there were basically no pictures of the Essington, Pennsylvania Virtual Plant building.

LRVs out there.

So you can see both the San Francisco and the Boston cars are being built concurrently right here.

The orange ones obviously are the Muni and the green Boston system.

Buffalo would also get some single unit versions of these, non-articulated, really long boys,

which we might talk about later.

I put a slide in about them, yeah.

Oh, good, good.

At any rate, so you take a helicopter factory and you ask them to make trams.

What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?

First of all, you would think, logically, right?

This is a helicopter factory.

They're used to building airframe.

What do they do?

They decide not to build the airframes at all.

They decide not to build the tram bodies at all.

They hire Tokyo Car Corporation in Japan, which is honestly a pretty good choice.

They're good builders.

Yeah, it's not a bad idea.

They were a good idea for a contractor.

But you know what the problem was?

They built them.

Yes.

They built them in Japan and they put them on the deck of a brake bulk carrier freighter.

On the deck of a brake bulk carrier freighter.

red primer paint no other protection and they tied them down to the deck and they took them all the way across the pacific through storm season and they went through the panama canal all the way to pennsylvania on the deck with the sea water splashing up all over the each and every one of those windowless primered metal steel you know uh tram bottoms so you had you know, seawater everywhere.

And I'm sure some guy at the, you know, the former Piaseki plant was like given a garden hose or something to, you know, lackadaisically wash them off when they arrive.

Yeah.

Well, you unstrap the first one from the deck of the ship and it just collapses into a pile of iron fire like that.

Yeah.

It's like average British 60s car, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or average Alfa Romeo of the 1960s and 70s.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, okay, you know, how are we going to put these street cars together?

Step one, add 60 years of aging.

Yeah.

Bake in that sea salt.

It's nice and seasoned.

So Borrowing Vertal proceeds to subcontract out a bunch of components to a wide variety of subcontractors with mixed success, just like

Roar did with the barred cards.

You know,

they subcontracted a bunch of electrical systems to various other companies.

You know, not all of them talked to each other well.

There's a bunch of wiring issues.

There's a bunch of labor issues.

Everything that you could imagine basically went wrong as they were converting over to building helicopters at the Vertal plant.

It does seem seem like more like they're not really bringing any engineering expertise to this.

They're just becoming a project manager and not a very good one at that point.

And the funny thing is, so this is their first foray into it.

They would, and we'll talk about later, Boeing assembled some Chicago L cars that were engineered by a different company and

pre

done as knockdown kits by a Portuguese manufacturer and just assembled in London.

And those worked fine but these were built in-house from too many different subcontractors and it didn't work so let's go to the next so even before they hit the street it was already the writing was on the wall the testing in the facility was not going well they were doing them out on the streets i believe in boston initially um and boston took delivery of them first um and basically had hell to pay from day one.

Doors wouldn't work.

There were electrical fires.

There were all sorts of traction issues.

You know, everything that you could think of going wrong did go wrong.

The air conditioners

were like a real big problem, right?

Oh, yeah.

Talk about that.

Like they're mounted under the car and not above the roof.

So all of the brake dust and all the street smells were basically sucked into the air conditioner.

uh intake units and basically barely uh filtered before it entered the cabin so you were getting you know ethyl ethyl-leaded gasoline fumes from trucks and cars coming right into the AC unit and then being pumped into the field window tram.

Yeah.

And, you know, this was never a problem on aircraft.

I don't know why.

I guess they don't, they're not on the street that much.

No, if they are, something's gone terribly wrong, right?

So it became a huge contra-tom.

And later on, like, I think in the 90s or something, they rebuilt some of them with roof-mounted air conditioners and solved that problem.

But this will be a long long and torture process, right?

When the Boston cars hit the streets, I think in the next, yes, in the next slide, we can see

some of the amazing, like genuinely good reporting of the 1970s of like the Boston Globe and other things.

I just love this headline.

Cannibalized, stripped, and parked in the yard.

Yeah, ask me about my fucking Tuesday, bro.

So this was an insane story.

So what ended up happening was, so the Boeing LRVs were having, were being tested out before they were accepted by Boston MBPA, right?

So they would, Boeing would deliver them online, and then they would run them for X number of days and determine whether or not they would accept delivery of them.

And so some of them were running just fine long enough to accept delivery.

And then after they accepted delivery, they would break down.

In some cases,

they would last as little as 600 miles, track miles, before

breaking.

In an average day, you would sometimes, or in an average week, you would run more than 600 miles.

So it would break, you know, you'd break down more than once a week running these cars.

Eventually, a Boeing Virtual is not producing enough replacement parts for these cars.

At night, Boston MBTA shop crews would take parts off of some of the cars that were out of service in order to keep the cars that were in better condition.

And keep in mind, these are less than a year old and they're already cannibalizing cars.

Yeah, they take windows or door controls or electrical stuff out of the brand new cars and put them in the other cars to keep them in service.

And eventually, this fleet, every night, was moved into a portion of the Subway tunnels that was away from public view during the night.

Like in the Dark Knight Rises?

Yeah, yeah.

They have

the advantage of having one abandoned tunnel that they could just shove these things into so no one could look at them.

You know, they could hide their shame.

They could hide their shame.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just, I, just kind of like, apart from anything else, like culture mismatch where Boeing Versil is looking at these and they're like, where do you put the Agent Orange?

Yeah.

So it gets crazier.

So they've been doing this.

And in the early days, they were taking them out and putting them in each night, which was insane.

Okay.

Wow.

So they were, they were doing some sort of move.

with some sort of freight motor and shoving this increasingly longer consist, adding cars to it each time and shoving it in this tunnel.

Just getting bigger and bigger rugs to like shove it under.

Yeah, just like snake, but in real life.

And so

a Boston Globe reporter was going down into the tunnels for a different thing to cover a completely different story, not even related, right?

And he casually looks over and sees all these Boeing LRVs and they're missing windows, they're missing headlights, they're missing.

you know, other pieces of equipment.

Pretty obvious, right?

And he casually says to some Boston guy, and if anybody of you have a better Boston accent than I do, the guy says, oh, yeah, we've just been stripping these for parts to keep the other ones running.

What he found essentially were the like the chuds of, in the original sense, of streetcars.

Yes, exactly.

So, you know, the reporter literally has his eyeballs go out of his head like an old Tex Avery, you know, Looney Tunes cartoon.

Yeah.

And he runs as fast as he possibly can to his probably IBM Selectric typewriter and bangs out a story.

And it becomes this fury of MBTA falling on its ass yet again.

And it turned into a giant lawsuit, which was an interesting lawsuit.

So they didn't want money in the most, you know, in the 21st century, I'm going to sue you.

I just want money out of you sort of thing.

No, they wanted blood.

The MBTA sued Boeing Vertil for to repair the cars on their dime.

They're like, fuck you.

We don't want money.

We want you to make these things actually work.

And so

they forced, yeah, they forced Boeing to pay on their own dime to repair each and every one of the cannibalized ones with brand new parts to get them back to operable condition and take back the ones as they broke to be fixed and then recertified for operation.

So this is costing Boeing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.

And you can see where this is going, right?

Like only two cities agreed to buy this flop of a streetcar, and now they're having these insane teething problems, the likes of which at this point we really hadn't seen before like the pcc's probably had negligible teething problems but they were also electrically and mechanically extremely simple you know these were these had stolid state electronics they had all sorts of bespoke uh aerospace engineered uh bs on them and whatever could go wrong did go wrong um and so this continued for many years throughout the the late 70s uh let's go to the next slide hold on i just wanted to read this off the uh the the article here.

So far, the trepid reporter has preconceptions of incompetence and fiscal irresponsibility lurking in his head.

The one other thing which you ought to suspect when looking at the MBTA and Boeing Vertol is terminal arrogance.

The Vertol division made helicopters.

Helicopters, as almost everyone knows, are things that go around and around and up and down.

They are probably very difficult to build.

Trolley cars, on the other hand, never go around and around and never should go up and down.

Such events are called derailments.

Got his ass.

Got his ass.

Now, if you knew how to make helicopters and someone gave you tens of millions of dollars to build trolley cars, the average person would, faster than the speeding bullet, hire some people who knew how to make

trolleys and pick their brains, buy their patents, and keep them bent over the drawing board.

The Boeing Virtual people did none of this.

It was a strictly in-house project and an out-house project.

God damn.

That's too murderous.

No.

It just continues.

Like the poison pen on this article just

kids.

Yeah.

So let's take a look at the next slide.

So in Boston, this is a great clipping from 1978.

Go ahead and read the.

MBTA returning 35 LRV cars because they don't work.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is returning 35 of its new LRV transit cars to the build at Boeing Vertal of Philadelphia because they don't work.

The LRVs have been plagued with breakdowns of doors, air conditioning, electronics, propulsion systems, and many other components.

David L.

Gunn, the MBTA's director of operations, said yesterday that he has had a team of 95 men working on the cars since they began arriving in 1976, but that even with many modifications paid for by the contractor they have provided unacceptable service Jesus how bad it's got to be in like the eight what is this 78 yeah for it to be unacceptable service in 78 gun said that it takes more MBTA personnel to keep 50 odd LRVs going on the green line than it does to maintain 220 cars on the red blue and orange line yeah it's breathtaking isn't it three hundred thousand dollars per car it says and this this continues.

I love this other quote.

He says, the LRVs are not like Ford's, he says.

The parts are hard to come by, and a lot of it is oddball stuff.

The MBTA board has authorized the purchase of $2.2 million in additional parts since May.

Everybody was taken by surprise by the LRV's rate of failure, Gunn said.

They were supposed to be reliable, but it just wasn't true.

A new LRV would cost more than $800,000 today, according to Gunn.

San Francisco's Bay Area Transit Authority has put in the only other author for the Boeing Versile LRVs, which were designed to U.S.

Department of Transportation specifications.

The other one, which we...

We don't need to read this one, but I just love that the headline and deck for the one on the lower left.

Oh yeah, a half million dollar ride when it works.

Really good.

Yeah, and all of this journalism is coming out in the...

in the late 70s and they're basically just getting their asses handed to them and it becomes a complete fiasco.

Well, I mean, Boeing hadn't worked out that they could just like kill anyone who reported negatively about them yet, you know?

My God, could you imagine if they did that back in the days?

Like, oh yeah, they found 32 people with their Lincoln Mark IVs on in the garage with their engines running.

How could this happen?

Well, I mean, either that.

Either that or they did.

It's just that it was so easy to become a journalist and make a living wage off of it in the 70s that like they were just outpaced and it was like Stalingrad.

You know, they got, they lost a battle of attrition.

You know, the Boeing wet work team was killing guys in their garages all the time.

And it just wasn't quick enough because there's a new guy ready with like, you know, the press card in the hat ready to go.

You know, when the gent, when the whistleblower in front of you is killed, you pick up the typewriter and you keep typing.

Okay, IO Interactive, after you're done with the James Bond game that's coming out soon, I need a 70s era version of Hitman in which we're doing this.

I've been telling them this psychically through beams beams for many months at this point.

It would be so great.

It's just, I mean,

it's much easier to play 60s Hitman because the cops do even less.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

You get caught, you get two years in prison.

Yeah, so just

a wrist slap.

So this happened throughout the 70s and throughout the early 80s.

And when we go to the next slide.

So we're talking about the car barns in both Boston and San Francisco and probably also, let's be honest, Buffalo, fighting with these trams.

And one by one, they think of unique and interesting and genuinely smart solutions to get these things running.

A lot of them is jury rigging on the fly.

Others are sending out parts to new manufacturers who can manufacture them to better tolerances or replacing electrical components like micro switches and hydraulic components as well.

And just slowly, one by one, ship a thesiasing these trams into actual operable LRVs.

Yeah, so sorry, it's not, I can't, I can't, I need railroad tolerances.

I can't deal with aerospace tolerances.

I need railroad tolerances.

Oh, yeah, totally.

You know, this is also the case with Roars, Bart and Wimata, and I think Marta cars were the same deal.

It's like slowly, one by one, the systems would fail.

And slowly, one by one, the shops would put their their genuine like best machinists and electricians on the job.

And they slowly, car by car, made them reliable to the point where they were useful.

And throughout the 80s, reliability and track mileage between repairs increased and people stopped hating them much.

This thing can't be a delicate little flower like your fighter jets.

I'm sorry.

This thing actually has to do work.

But there was one ticking time bomb with these cars, and it was something we touched on earlier with the Tokyo Car Corporation Japanese-built Japanese-built car body in two, you know, remarkably great seaside tourist destination city with the salt air continuing to rot these mild steel car body.

You can see where this is going.

You know, they could have done something smart.

Perhaps an aerospace company could have made the frames and bodies out of aluminum and this would not have been an issue.

Yeah.

Or they could have used some

sort of stainless steel alloy from a competitor across town.

Right.

They could have hired Kirk and Bud, of course.

It's the podcast that argues that you fucked up a lot by not hiring Bud.

Just whatever it is, whatever the engineering problem is.

Should have those guys.

No, you know what it was?

Is Tokyo had the

patents for Bud's processes, but they could only sell mild steel in America because you would have had to go to Bud properly.

Oh, I didn't know.

Is that true?

I think so.

It would make sense.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, mean, look at this.

So instead of literally going across town and hiring bud and giving them a little bit more life by hiring, you know, making stainless steel bodies for these things, they went halfway across the world and shipped mild steel across a saltwater ocean.

So you can see what kind of brain they're thinking.

Let's go on to the next slide, which is a flowchart, and I will describe it in a logical way for listeners.

Oh, God.

Let's start.

There are two, only two paths in this flowchart.

And it starts in the upper left-hand corner, with, which is the PCCs are getting old.

All the cities, their PCCs were at least 20, if not 30 or 40 years old.

The government suggests hiring a helicopter factory.

Yeah, because that's logical.

The LRV has massive teething problems, which then flows into the cars can only run 600 miles between breakdown, which flows into agencies sue to fix the defective train.

which flows into almost a decade of delays to get to working trains, which flows into they rebuild them at their home shops one at a time.

And then it flows into reliability now acceptable.

And this is like the early 80s.

But then the next flow, it flows into the rebuilt LRVs get old.

And then that flows into two paths, which is in San Francisco's case, Bretta wins the new LRV PID.

And then this whole thing...

goes in a circle again.

The other one is that the equipment gets scrapped.

However, there is a second path that you could take as a transit agency, and it starts with the PCCs getting old in the first slide, and then flows into, they rebuild them at their home shops throughout the 60s and 70s.

They run reliably longer than their discerning service life.

But then the ADA passes, the Americans with Disabilities Act passes.

And the PCCs are a high floor design, and they are not compatible.

And so the final cell in the flowchart is for the PCCs, and it flows into still used on Heritage Line today.

And that's true in both Boston and San Francisco.

Are there any still left in Philly?

Yeah, no,

they're PCC3s now, but we still have them.

Okay.

So you can see a car designed on the eve or just after the Great Depression, almost a century,

you know, 90 years ago, is still rolling around doing the job it was designed to do.

And if that is not a testament to great quality, I don't know what is, but it's also a testament to the desperation and ineptitude of what happens when you hire an aerospace engineering firm to design a freaking street car.

So, let's go to the next slide.

So, these soldiered on in service through the 90s, and eventually they became reliable enough that

most of the complaints had evaporated.

They fixed the air conditioning systems, they replaced all the electronics and stuff, and they were fairly good.

But in the early 90s,

San Francisco sent out RFQs to replace them.

And Bretta, a Melanese Italian manufacturer, won that bid.

And as mentioned in the flowchart, this whole rigor marole, despite them not being an aerospace company and being a train car manufacturer,

the cycle happened again in the late 90s and early 2000s, where they were accepted for They were manufactured as knockdown kits and Pier 70 in San Francisco for their Buy America sort of certification.

And then they had a bunch of teething problems for a bunch of years until eventually they were also rebuilt reliable cars and they were just recently retired.

So you can see how this is kind of our de facto cycle.

Yeah.

The only guys who can keep these things running are the guys in the shed, unfortunately.

Doing some Apollo 13 shit every day in order to see one street car running.

I clock in, I save the world.

I clock out, the world moves squeal.

Now,

this is not the end of the LRV.

The United States standard light rail vehicle goes to Britain.

So, the 2002.

Don't come here.

Don't do that.

The 2002 Commonwealth Games were held in Manchester, and Manchester needed more capacity on its existing Metro Link tram system, right?

So, unable to quickly procure a low-quality British tram and unsatisfied with how low the quality a British tram would be,

Manchester figured the Yanks could give them an even lower quality product.

So they bought two, count them, two Boeing LRVs from San Francisco for £170 each.

Wow.

Yeah.

To evaluate on their system.

These are fully functional, you know, to the extent that they were fully functional LRVs.

And potentially they would buy some more, you know, just to bump up the capacity for the games, right?

Now, on Metrolink, which they knew was basically compatible with the LRVs, and also it's a brand new system, brand new high-quality track, high-quality rights-of-way, everything's in working order, so on and so forth, right?

They start testing the Boeing LRVs.

The first test was:

we are going going to pull the LRVs using a little utility vehicle through the system to see how they do.

And they derailed on

everything, just anything.

They just derailed for no reason everywhere.

It just fell over.

It fell over.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

And so they're like, no, this is a bad idea.

They put them into storage.

And I think both of them were relatively recently scrapped.

And Boeing Vertile owes Metro Rail 340 quid.

Yes.

Well, plus, I think it was about 30,000 pounds shipping.

That's how they got it.

And that's how it is with eBay sellers sometimes.

Board games.

So, yeah.

And then Metrolink was just, you know, crowded during the Commonwealth Games.

Yeah,

everybody survived.

Nobody died.

Yeah, everyone lived, probably.

As opposed to, you know, derailing on every...

The end would come for both Boston and San Francisco's cars in the 2006 to 2008 swath.

Most of them were sidelined before then, but the very bitter end was right before the Great Recession, the credit crunch, or whatever you want to call that thing.

And most of them, of course, were turned into razor blades.

A few were scattered to the four winds.

One ended up famously in a scrapyard in Richmond, California, which was recently saved and by a private individual.

And they started an Instagram saying they would make it into some fun little like uh tiny home situation um that you could rent as like a uh

an Airbnb type thing but they went dark a couple years ago and I haven't heard anything else about it I'm just glad that it's saved and no longer scrapyard it was used as an office at the scrapyard which is kind of fun um there's a bunch in there's well i can't say a bunch but there's a few in museums and let's go to the next slide so we can take a look at that um if you want to go visit one in person you can go to a couple of museums.

You can go to the Western Railway Museum in Rio Vista, California, which is north of San Francisco, northeast of San Francisco.

You can also go to the what used to be called the Orange Empire Museum, which is now the Southern California Railroad Museum in Paris, P-E-R-R-I-S, not P-A-R-I-S, California.

And of course, you can go to the Seashore.

and go look at the trolleys at the Seashore Museum.

Oh, yeah.

There's also some stuff at the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society, which is in Brooks, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, south of Portland, some distance, north of Reading, basically, somewhere in that swath.

The only one that actually runs is at the one in Brooks, Oregon, Brooks, Oregon.

Yeah, so Western Rail Museum, go to the next slide.

At any rate, yeah, so you can go visit in museums.

You can donate to help make them come to life again because older trams at museums are getting top billing.

These are usually sidelined and not top priority for restoration.

However, the WRM is actively trying to restore theirs to operable condition.

So let's talk about how can we break the cycle.

Biles, this photo is alarmingly close to my house.

I was going to say, I think I know this guy.

It's a photograph I took like about 10 minutes before I met you in person.

So there you go.

Oh, well, that explains that.

Yeah.

Second Second guest to dox, John.

A second doxing has hit the World Trade Center.

Well, you didn't have to admit that it was near your house.

It's just a tram picture.

Anyways.

So

let's enter the final spreadsheet here.

And this was vetted by somebody who's deep in the transit agency world.

So this is the typical cycle that we have entered into in the post-1970 era of acquiring railway equipment.

So the flowchart begins with the first cell, which is transit vehicle aging badly, which flows into hires overpaid quote-unquote consultant to write specifications, which flows into manufacturer, consultants,

which flows into manufacturer has to build quote unquote a new assembly line, which flows into vehicle has to be tested at Pueblo, Colorado, which takes months, if not years, delays and cost, which flows into eventually reliability reliability now acceptable.

Acceptable.

Well, gee, you wrote all of those crappy specs that are so custom tailored to that one city, the manufacturer cannot sell the custom vehicle to other transit agencies.

Then all of that flows into

manufacturer has to manufacture new parts or hunt around for other similar parts.

And then it flows into the

first cell, which was transit vehicle agent badly.

And this is a cycle that has continued unabated with multiple major manufacturers, and only a couple of

national manufacturers have been able to overcome this.

I'm glad we were able to simplify it down to a nice, concise 13-step process.

Yeah.

I mean, the one thing is, you know, the pictured here is the Philadelphia K-Car, the Kawasaki car.

you know, because we dropped out of the United States standard light rail vehicle order, even though, you know, for a while we were going going to be one of the main systems to get it.

But, you know, thank God the trolley tunnel put unacceptable constraints on that.

These things, you know, we went to Kawasaki and we're like, we want a trolley.

And they were like, we'll give you a trolley.

And

yeah, no, it's there.

All of them are like 45 years old now, and they're all tanks.

You know, they're indestructible.

The other thing, which is interesting about the LRV, like the shell,

is,

yeah, Buffalo, New York essentially got a very similar car to the LRV, um, but it was a single unit instead of a multi-unit.

Rather than going through Vertal, um, they just had the whole car put together by Tokyo Carp Corporation.

And uh, yeah, they work fine.

They still run to this day.

Yeah, they're just fine.

And it's so funny because like all the stories of the of the Boston and San Francisco cars are riddled with issues and the the Buffalo one is like barely a footnote.

It's like, yeah, these run.

Yeah, no, they were fine.

They're great.

Yeah, basically the same design.

Nah, they were fine.

So, Justin, fill us in on the bus fly.

Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, when we talk about defense free conversion, oh, I forgot to put this on a white background so you can see the Grumman logo.

You know,

just say it like a Swedish death metal band.

Yeah, Grumman.

Yeah.

You know, defense free conversion actually worked in a few cases.

I think a great example was that, okay,

Grumman came out.

I think they bought the Flexible Company, which is a bus company,

but they sort of integrated that expertise into their production lines.

And they were able to come out with an actually extremely successful line of buses, which I used to ride the school every day back when I was in high school.

Not every day, but some days.

And they worked fine, and they lasted a very, very long time.

So like this was, this was never a project that was doomed to failure.

It was just,

you know,

it was just horribly and competently managed from start to end.

It turns out that, you know, I don't know.

One of the things that you have to do as an engineer, it's good to be a little bit humble.

You can't come in to like, saying, I'm an aerospace engineer.

I know everything.

I can build a streetcar, no problem.

No, you can't.

You don't know shit about that.

You know, it's like, I don't know, the software engineers who want to say, you know,

they could write a novel, no problem.

You know, no, you can't.

You're a moron.

You're a dumbass.

Right.

People got to understand their limitations is ultimately, you know,

the first way to overcome your limitations is to understand you have them.

So I mean, I think the real,

the lesson to be learned from the Boeing LRV at the end of the day is don't be an asshole.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Don't go in with Kubris thinking you have the solution.

Actually listen to the people who are going to use your product.

Yeah.

Like it's user-centered design.

Like there's a whole area of industrial design centered around exactly that kind of thing.

Yeah.

You know,

you come out and you're like, I designed the greatest helicopter of all time.

You fall flat on your face trying to design a trolley.

It's as we've seen in this pod, like, it's a great story arc.

It would make a fantastic season of Mad Men or something.

Like, if Mad Men was set in Boeing in the 60s, like I said, Pentagon Wars.

Yeah.

So let's go to the next slide.

So I mentioned in passing that the Breda cars are now being retired.

And in fact, the Western Rail Museum is in the middle of fundraising to rescue one of them from San Francisco before they're all scrapped.

So I just put a little blurb on there.

If you want to donate to ensure that both this Boeing LRV gets properly restored to operable condition and that they can successfully secure at least one, if not more than one, Reta LRV so that future people can visit the museum and ride behind trams, please do donate.

You can do that at WRM.org/slash support/slash donate because, you know, who doesn't want to ride the world's worst streetcar.

And if you like this kind of thing uh you can find uh my my modeling at innerurbanera.com um i also build model railroads uh so if you live in the uh bay area or if you're willing to pay money to fly me out to build you a model railroad i am happy to that is my bread and butter and my day job um and i regularly post uh update videos at youtube.com slash interurban uh with layout updates and kit bashing projects like this yeah yeah you know and the other thing is you know what else worked?

The PCC?

That's right.

This whole damn time, the PCCs were still running.

And they're still running to this day.

In Boston on the Maddow Pan line.

Unecessary.

Yeah.

In Philadelphia on the 15th.

This one's at Kenosha.

The El Paso cars are back.

And, of course, Chicago made the weird L-cars that were based on them.

It's like, you know, when it comes right down to it, the only replacement for a PCC is another PCC.

It's like a Kalashnikov.

Got it right the first time.

Yeah.

Accept no substitution.

Why you need, yes, exactly.

Why do you need to pervert?

Rifle is fine.

Yes, yes.

Whoever can do the best Soviet accent, just say like, is Tram.

Iz Tram.

Well, yeah, because the Soviet, like, the Tatras are pretty close.

Yeah.

The Tatras are beautiful, and many of them still run today.

And yeah, they're directly based off of the content.

The windows are bigger.

You know, they changed exactly one thing, and that was a good thing.

Well, what do we learn?

Stick with the PCC.

Never change.

Never upgrade anything.

Never change anything.

Never upgrade anything.

It's a man's hubris to think that

you as an aerospace engineer can improve society.

Sorry.

Never, never hire a defense contractor to build a trans vehicle that they've never done before.

Yeah, I mean, you have to like look at these defense contractors in the space and say, look, listen, your job is to

defenseless people.

Leave

transit vehicles

with compassion.

Well,

we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Dearest, well, well, there's your problem, pods, swineherds, and any parasocial pals.

Yeah, sure.

I hope the happy mental health meters are high after the depressing goat rope of a disaster you probably just covered.

In the assumption that they are not, I hope the following bumps them up a few notches for you.

Okay.

Well,

a firefighter man am I?

And I'm telling you, no luck.

Firefighters are frequently thrust into situations involving a whole lot of stupid.

It's a capital S stupid.

Sometimes capital S stupid wins.

Sometimes sense wins.

Sense is lowercase.

Rarely does the public win.

Although if their day was going so great, they probably wouldn't have had to call us in the first place.

The trick is to get away from it.

Yeah.

I just called 911, so I got to talk to a firefighter.

They get mad at you if you do that.

Yeah, Yeah, that's true.

The trick is to stay out of the splash zone of the stupid.

And the thing is, it's not a bad tactic if your goal is to talk to an angry firefighter.

Yeah.

On Thanksgiving Day 2021, my company was toned out to help a neighbor of the neighboring department fight a garage fire.

The first thing that is supposed to happen on any scene is called a 360 degree scene size-up.

This is a quick recon around the perimeter of the scene that serves multiple purposes.

The pertinent one here being the identification of any hazards on the scene.

Yeah, is the guy like trying to build a twin rotor helicopter in his garage?

Does he have a bunch of

JPCs

stacked up against the back wall?

Like.

By engine pulled up, we found a long driveway packed with cars, two of which were on fire, and a burning detached garage with fire that had extended into the nearby house via an electrical line and into a stand of trees next to the structure.

Wouldn't be a problem.

Yes, the problem with being a firefighter is that you can't be like, this one sounds too annoying.

I don't want to do it.

Skip it.

Yeah, no, it's like, damn, these guys are loaded.

They should get their own guys to fight this fire.

You know,

when we were rotated into the garage, we found two ATVs, a go-kart, a golf cart, a mess of wires, chargers, oil, and gas cans, and all the eclectic fun hazmat detritus of dads everywhere.

All of this, along with the two walls and the roof, were fully involved.

After some time of doing it, we had extinguished everything and saved Thanksgiving.

I went around the exterior of the garage and suddenly took psychic damage.

There was a 250-gallon propane tank, such as the one pictured here from a company called Big Iron.

I got this off of DuckDuckGo images.

There was a 250-gallon propane tank about six inches from the burnt, smoldering back wall of the garage.

It was scorched.

The paint was bubbled, peeling, and burnt off.

There was a one-foot section of warped deformation, and I could see heat waves in the air above it.

I coolly and professionally.

I coolly and professionally relayed this development to my lieutenant by shouting, Holy fucking shit, Lou, there's an LPG tank back here that looks like it wanted to bleed.

That's a boiling liquid evaporation vapor explosion, I believe.

I don't remember that acronym offhand.

He calmly.

Bleve.

Bleve, yes.

Ah, yes, a fine bleve.

Of course.

Only the finest.

In other countries, it's called sparkling propane.

Oh, you don't want that.

You don't want to drink that.

Yeah.

It's only a bleve if it's from the Bleve region of Texas.

Keep it moving, moving, Ross.

He's got to go to bed.

Right.

He calmly cooled it with the hose, and we checked the tank's gauge, which showed that it was nearly empty.

This indicated that the pressure relief valve had done its job.

Justin can explain what this little guy does.

Okay, so there's a pressure relief valve.

I don't know where it is.

It's somewhere on here.

If the pressure gets too high, that's the gas.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Oh, yeah.

The pressure release valve and much of the tank, however, were extremely corroded, making me extremely thankful that Thanksgiving Day that it had operated at all.

Why this tank's location had not been reported on as part of the 360 size-up is a mystery.

It was obviously not to code, and its location dictated that someone should have had an open nozzle on it throughout our entire attack.

It turns out someone knew about that tank though.

I was rolling hose a few minutes later when a teenager came out of the house and asked me if the family could turn their oven back on so they could finish cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

She and I turned in in comic unison to stare at the blackened and deformified tank.

I rolled a morale check and decided then that well it it may have not had the spoons to blow up that day.

At that point I did not.

To spare the blameless miner from my wrath, I directed her to my chief, and when he heard her request, I wordlessly motioned to the propane tank which he had obviously not yet heard about.

Again, we all comically turned and silently stared at it for a long moment.

With the defeated, Picard-like face palm, he sighed.

Nope.

It can be rough when you realize you've been splashed by someone else's stupid.

I suspect the 360 size up was more like a 90.

Close enough for government work, I guess.

Hopefully this incident...

I just, I, okay,

sure.

Yeah.

Well, we didn't die.

Time to leave.

Hopefully, this incident illustrates again the importance of trusting only yourself to give a squirty shit about your own safety.

Thanks for the old episode covering five over ones.

It was eye-opening for me as my training hasn't covered them much.

Keep up the good work.

That's reassuring.

Yeah, keep up the good work and keep the mental health meters full.

Bruhs and bruh.

Yours in parasociality, Firefighter Jake.

Thanks, Firefighter.

Tempting to be like, take a libertarian angle on this and be like these, you know, jack-booted fire thugs

not only assaulted my perfectly innocent fire, but also ruined Thanksgiving dinner for an entire family.

Good.

Good.

You get nothing digital.

Sorry.

You're going to Arby's tonight.

Ooh, or Applebee's.

You can get riplets.

All right.

End this.

Okay.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

And that's our next episode is on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Well, I was hoping.

Listen to all of the podcasts.

Listen to No Gods, No Mares.

I haven't plugged that in a minute.

No GodsNomares.com.

It's a podcast about Mares.

It's got Riley.

It's got Maddie Lebchansky on it.

It's a good time.

Yes.

Listen to Buy Our Merch.

Buy Our Shit.

Swear my dad.

Buy the merchant.

Yeah, buy the merch.

Yeah.

Is the dad shirt selling well?

Please buy it.

It'll make him so happy.

You're going to have to buy the dad shirt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And if you love model trains, go check out the YouTube channel, youtube.com/slash interurbanera, or go to the website, interurbanera.com to see train pictures and all sorts of things.

Yes.

Do you want to look at pictures of trains?

Obviously, yes, because you listen to this podcast.

Of course, you do.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thanks for coming on.

I think that was a podcast.

All right.

That's a podcast.

Good night, Nova.

Good night, everyone.