Episode 177: The Balvano Rail Disaster

There we go.

Excellent.

Is it going?

Is it going?

Yeah, it looks like it's going to me.

Hi, this is Justin in the edit.

You may not recognize my voice because I'm being piloted by Liam.

Some sort of Kermit situation.

We regret to inform you that Roz has been murdered.

You saw.

You seized control of the radio station.

Ah, yes.

Welcome to Radio Free Liam, baby.

We still have to do a sync point for Dev.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Okay.

So

way it works, one of us counts down three, two, one, Mark, when you hear Mark just clap or snap by a microphone, please.

Or say, that's me.

Yeah, just scream.

Just really like primal, like.

Yeah.

Make a big loud peek.

Yes, we have that.

Exactly.

All right.

Three, two,

one,

Mark.

Perfect.

All right, we did it.

Okay, hang on.

I got it.

That was early, but that's okay.

No, that's fine.

I just got to shut down my torrents real quick.

Sorry.

It's just going to be like ballpark, you know, and it's all good.

Yeah.

Enough to, yeah.

We want to avoid our skin being peeled off with flinting knives.

Anarchism is about seeding torrents, and the more torrents you seed, the more anarchist you are.

I know for a fact you're not sassing me right now.

We do a bit of pirating around these parts.

Information wants to be free, dickhead

wait wait why when people know things they're wait that's like beneficial to society what do you mean i'm just something something boots bootmaker i don't know anything about anarchism right like

in the same way i don't know anything about the kansas city chiefs why would i learn about losers what what happens in anarchism is you get

an asshole

yes yes and then people get real mad at you for recording a podcast

people get real mad at me in the comments because they're like why you say an anarchist recording with two communists.

And it's just like, because they're my pals.

Because my friends, like we're friends.

We're not in the Spanish Civil War.

Oh, but we hope it.

Yeah, in Marvel's A24's Civil War II, it might get into kind of a factional situation, and I'm okay with that.

So, my favorite hypothetical thing to do or thing to do with hypotheticals is to say, like, Ra's ex, who you got.

So, it's just like, you know, Ra's Tom from 10,000 Lost is who you got.

The answer is obviously Tom, by the way.

Well, of course.

Yeah.

Tom's got guns.

Kind of.

Yeah.

All due respect.

Roz v.

Eddie One is kind of the other guy, but.

I disagree.

I think there's, I think there's people that Roz could tell you.

If you went like Roz Timothy Chalamay, right?

Like.

That's

the one.

You look at the dead French Canadian, right?

How tall is Timothy Shalam?

He's like wispy, you know?

He's 5'10.

So, Roz, you got like two inches.

I got two inches on him.

Yeah, I could definitely beat up like Ben Shapiro.

Oh, Oh, you can fuck up Ben Shapiro.

Hell yeah.

I'm not going to do that.

Oh, that's an actual threat against a named person.

Yeah, exactly.

Sorry.

No, no, don't do that.

Anyway, welcome to a special Italian episode of, well, there's your problem.

Bonjourno.

Podcast.

Bongiorno.

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 was going to do a whole bit in Italian, then I realized I don't speak Italian.

My name is November Kelly.

I'm the person speaking now.

My pronouns are she and her, yay, liam.

She's Liam.

I don't speak Italian.

Exactly.

Bian Vanu, uh, well, there's your problem.

Uh, Jimmapel Liam.

Um, my pronouns are he/him.

Uh, fuck me.

We have a guest.

We have a guest,

uh, a River Derci.

If in case we haven't gotten the Inglorious Bastards references out of the way.

I'm Mark, Mark Heiss Huber.

You probably know me as Heiss on the interwebs and YouTubes and the things, and perhaps as Mark at Studio 346.

Figure it out.

I'm the same person.

What is a brand?

Who knows?

And yeah, my pronouns are he, him.

Hi, delighted to be on.

Love your guys' pod.

Yeah, we're glad to have you on.

This is going to be fun.

Now, what do you see?

Oh, do you want us to refer to you real quick as Mark or Heiss, or is there no problem?

I don't give a shit.

Fun little aside, I was giving a Breakman training to new trainees, and our president of the museum at the time, of the board, couldn't get my attention.

He was saying Mark, Mark, or whatever.

And he finally yells, Heist, and he's in his 40s.

Like he's not a young,

you know, not like he watches my YouTube.

And I was like, yeah, oh, shit.

So either is fine.

The kind of the we have people everywhere moment is.

Yeah.

yeah, it's striking, yeah, it's fine.

So, what we have on the screen in front of us is a tunnel.

Nothing wrong with it.

It looks fine.

Nothing wrong with the tunnel.

Nothing particularly wrong with it.

You'll be happy to know in this episode, there's it is about trains, but there's no derailment, no fire, no bombing, barely any property damage, no nothing.

And it still kills 520 people.

That's a lot of people to care for.

Yeah, that's numbers on the board.

And I'm looking at here like a a functional time.

I'm looking at a hole.

A perfectly good hole.

Yeah.

That was made for me.

Tunnels with trains inside don't bode well sometimes.

Yes.

Today we're going to talk about the worst disaster in Italian railroad history, which is the Balvano disaster.

Everybody remember to be respectful of the great Italian people, nation, culture, etc., etc.

The gallant people of Italy.

We're going to fuck up so bad on that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But before we talk about that, we have to do the goddamn news.

Must we

have a bit of more breaking news, which is that Garrett Cole, the Yankees ace, has time, has to have Tomidod surgery and he's out for 2025.

I mean, can this also be the fault of ending DEI initiatives?

Yes,

it stands for don't elbow injure.

They've got that on the wall of the doctor's office.

It's just like PSA, don't fucking do that to yourself, idiot.

Doctor, Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Then don't do that.

Doctor, Doctor, why is your fist inside my ass?

I mean, listen.

So, DEI, I mean, the end of DEI has taken another victim here as

two boats have hit each other.

Classic of the genre.

A Portuguese-flagged container carrier, a small one, crashed into

a tanker, an American flag tanker.

I believe it's one of our few Jones Act compliant ones,

which was at anchor.

Just, you know, just slammed right into the side at full speed.

The tanker exploded.

A lot of damage to the container ship as well.

A lot of injuries.

I don't think anyone died.

I think both these ships are write-offs.

Yeah, I think the front fell off.

80,000 tons of oil fell in the sea, got fired.

It's a bit of a giveaway.

I think they're missing one

crew member from the smaller Portuguese ship, which, by the way, was carrying a shitload of sodium cyanide, which is, we don't know what that is at the moment, but we do know where all of the jet fuel that the American was carrying is because it's busy oxidizing, as you see.

It's going up in the air, which is where it was going to be anyway.

So, it's not in an environment, it's been towed outside the environment.

It's making its way towards the jets, which is where it wants to be.

You know, it's sympathetic resonances, it's like a color-based diet.

You know, it's like you know, it has the energy that it wants to have, anyway.

So, uh, I'm thinking that this is a really bad time to be a mariner if you're if you're kind of like boat sinking, boat on fire,

also cyanide.

You know,

that's a bad combination of things to be happening at once.

Hey, you've got a caustic burn, the likes of which no one's ever seen before.

Congratulations.

I bet it's one of those situations where it's like the added sodium actually makes it harmless.

Oh, just like, bet God we're not a chemistry podcast.

This cyanide's only dangerous if you get the low sodium version.

Exactly, exactly.

It's just regular hcn uh i think that's the diet chemical burn diet chemical burn i feel like

cost-ish cost ish i feel like anything with a cyanide in it is going to be probably pretty dangerous to like cellular respiration but what do i know uh who knows almonds nova allman's so so i can quite confidently say i do not know So at this,

maybe people on Reddit can get mad at me for like being confidently wrong again.

But this happened in the North City

off the coast of Yorkshire.

And coastal Yorkshire is now under a like, maybe don't breathe the air kind of warning,

which, you know, is not great.

It's not like, you know, sort of HF refinery spill type thing, but it's not great for you to be breathing any of this stuff in.

I like how all the containers have puffed up like a lithium-ion battery.

Yeah.

Oh, no, my shipment of lithium-ion batteries.

It's fine.

It's fine.

So, I mean, we don't know what the like oil spill resulting from this is going to be like, but obviously, none of it's good, right?

Still on fire at the time of recording, I believe.

Yeah, this is pretty much like right before we started recording.

Also, the

American tanker was transporting jet fuel for the U.S.

military, which means this was an active Portuguese anti-imperialist praxis.

Yes.

But also

special F-35 fuel.

They're going to have to spend $2.5 billion to make more of it.

I'm not going to talk about the F-35 anymore because LaserPick will get mad at me.

I think it's also crucial that this happened a couple of days after Hexeth removed all of the woke stuff from the DOD's website, including a photo of the Enola gay because it had the word gay in the name.

So it's funny.

This is what happens.

You take away the wokeness and all of a sudden things like this start happening, you know.

So,

the next U.S.

like U.S.

flag tanker you're on, you have to make sure and check that the bridge crew comprises a diverse mix of racial, ethnic, gender, and religious identities.

We need the uh, we need, we need the uh, the the the the one-legged uh

trans woman

who is

romantic and uh yeah, I remember

indigenous, yeah,

But yeah, so we dunno, basically, but um

it feels like this is just part of a general uh ill-omened moment in any kind of transportation, right?

Like I know that's a statistical anomaly, but I think it's more fun to say that it's because of, because of Trump.

So yeah, I was going to say, I mean, you know, the only thing we haven't seen, I mean, we have seen a big train wreck.

We've seen a couple of them recently, but that's like the normal amount of train wrecks.

We haven't seen one like involving an amtrak train yet so that's probably next up um

well i mean i hope you're not touching the lathe i hope not uh either i tried to i tried to get all the lathe touching in last episode yeah but well you know that the united states is going to be sunk shortly.

So that kind of does throw the whole United States out into the ocean and sink it.

Like a Bugs Buddy cartoon.

That's what they're doing.

She's on her way, unfortunately.

SS United United States recently left the dock in Philly.

Tay towed it all the way around to Mobile, Alabama for asbestos abatement.

They're going to sink it off the coast of Florida as an artificial reef.

You can't sink it with the asbestos.

The fish will get mesothelioma.

What a dignit way to go, man.

Yeah.

I suppose it's better than it getting scrapped, but that's

surprised it made it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that thing was rickety.

It's being probably a little generous.

I have a friend who used to be in the conservancy and quit in disgust, I think.

And yeah, they were like, yeah, it's going to sink.

It didn't sink.

I mean, it will sink eventually, but that's the deliberate sinking.

She's made of iron, sir.

Yeah.

No, aluminum.

Oh.

Yeah.

I mean,

yeah, all things aluminum.

I did not know that.

I guess that would explain the speediness, but

at least with a trained person over here.

At least with the name, it doesn't feel like, you know, like a metaphor for kind of

United States to be sunk off the coast of Florida.

No way.

No, no, no.

It's like after Trump got elected the first time, people started finding all those dead bald eagles.

Real thing, by the way.

I remember seeing the news story the day after he got inaugurated the first time.

Somebody just found like a bald eagle face down in a swamp.

And I'm like,

what do you want from me?

God has a peculiar sense of humor.

It's difficult not to believe in omens at times like this, you know.

Yeah, in other news,

uh,

why is this memory of quarter zip?

Yeah, yeah, Trump and JD Vance got really mad at Zelensky for not wearing a suit.

The thing, the thing is, shut the fuck up,

okay.

Wow, Jesus, not you, not you.

I guess, I guess, the thing is, right, irrespective of all of the JD Vance edits, um,

the

him leading into it makes me want to myself, by the way.

I, I, I, I kind of, I kind of feel like the Russia gate libs are vindicated here in the sense that whether or not the piss tape is real and like Donald Trump is being remote controlled from Moscow with the promise of the piss tape being released, he wouldn't act any differently if he were, right?

Like, this is this is like a hundred percent the same in outcomes, if not in process, because uh, the whole like uh sort of core assumptions of American foreign policy are just being demolished here.

And all in Russia's favor, which is fun.

You know, I figured this would end in some kind of brokered solution immediately, but now that it's happening, I find myself very mad about it.

They're actually too stupid.

I mean, if it makes you feel any better, right?

I had

the similar kind of feeling.

from the opposite side with Syria, right?

Where I was like, well, you know, I know it might be bad, but, you know, Assad's gone.

I'm going to let myself hope for for like a week.

And then, you know, now obviously there are very good reasons to stop doing that.

So, yeah, it just.

People getting kidnapped in broad daylight.

Yeah, it turns out even if you win, you kind of still lose, which

I did not support.

I want to make that very fucking clear.

If I have to do that,

no, I know.

She's never Christ.

I never ever commented on any of that shit because I knew I didn't understand it.

Yeah.

I

listen,

at the resist, at the risk of sounding like the guy in my neighborhood, uh,

yeah, man.

I mean, I listen, imperialism is bad no matter what flag it happens to be wearing.

Uh, you have a sod in your neighborhood?

I don't have a sod.

Well, we don't know where he's like, supposedly, he's in Moscow, but like, I don't know.

If you're like, hey, a new optometrist just opened up around for me.

Guy looks weird as hell.

Yeah.

Um, like, yeah, I do need a new optometrist, so uh, we're gonna, we're gonna find out.

It's like that guy they captured in like the mid-2000s who had been like the architect of a bunch of Rwandan war crimes.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, when they when they captured Ratkom Ladic, he would been working as like a tantric sex coach.

So, like,

the second career of the war criminal is like an interesting one, right?

So, but yeah, no, so I obviously this is like very, very bad and infuriating.

And um, I think you can even at this point do worse than to sympathize with uh, you know, just lip out, become like a napo kind of dog person yeah

like because they were kind of right uh like uh you know all those comments are not gonna be kind to you nova i know but listen the the thing is right you're like wrong russia started the fucking war it was a it's been a series of war crimes and crimes of aggression um and the us was obviously supporting ukraine for cynical reasons obviously there were like bad elements in ukraine they were supporting but this is the what even even like within that internal logic, this is one of the worst things you could do.

This would be the thing you wanted to do if you wanted to cause Ukrainian 9-11.

Like fucking a bunch of Azov guys blow up the capital or something and like 10 minutes.

And say, yeah, yeah, the Azov battalion's gonna 9-11 us.

They're also gonna shoot Zelensky.

I mean, you know, all this is, this is not a great outcome, guys.

No, and the thing is that there was a kind of opportunity for a a limited sellout here if Trump and Vance had been smarter, but they're not.

They're the guys that they are.

And so even in selling out Ukraine, they had to do it in the stupidest possible way that alienated the most people and fucked with the U.S.

the most.

I will say that if anyone has access to long-rumored Ukrainian loose nukes, it's probably Azov Battalion.

I mean, I so you want to explain what's going on in your basement there, Ron?

That's not mine.

Yes.

These belong to some Ukrainian guy at Twitter.

I don't know.

You guys know equal red.

Fuck you.

I got these from my optometrist.

I had to explain that Libya armed the IRA the other day to my wife, and that was

just doing shit.

He was just a guy.

A man of many things.

Yeah, so no, I don't know.

I've been like infuriated by this.

It's been making me feel crazy.

And just everything since the fucking Vance speech in Munich, where he's like, you know, Europe is fucking woke and gay now, so you can get fucks.

I've just been like,

I always wanted the US Empire to collapse, but not like this.

Yeah.

We would have preferred another white tail.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Speaking of war crimes.

Don't yell at me in the comments.

In other news.

It's Hitler time.

It is now Hitler time.

We're doing Hitler stuff.

The administration has pledged to start deporting students on foreign visas who support Palestine, which they call supporting Hamas.

It's flagrantly unconstitutional, but it remains to be seen if the courts will bother to stand up to that at all.

And even if they do, who knows if they're not going to be able to do that?

There are specific green card protections.

I mean, I know I'm going full resistance lid, but like, come on now, dickheads.

Yeah, this is Mahmoud Khalil.

Also,

fucking doing it like shalom.

It's like, again, I've said it before, not in my fucking name.

It's great.

I might be Catholic now.

I don't know, but nah, it's still, still got the circumcision.

Circumciscition.

We can't schism.

We can't all become Catholic before

we do the Catholicism bonus episode.

They can't give us

like a total, like across-the-board win before we fucking put the episode out.

Yeah.

This is Mahmoud Khalil.

He's a graduate student at Columbia University.

They just sort of vanned him a couple days ago because he was doing negotiations at one of the big Palestine encampments at Columbia.

He had his student visa revoked, but he had a green card.

And they're also like, oh, well, we're revoking your green card.

That was the thing.

It was clownshoe shit because they showed up to be like, your student visa is revoked and you're getting deported.

But when he told them that he had a green card, they didn't really know what to do because they didn't know that, which they're the government that you're kind of supposed to.

And they're like,

okay, sure.

Well, I guess we're going to revoke that and deport you too.

So, like, this is, like I say, it is massively, massively illegal.

Um, it's one thing I will say is that at the moment, it's still not normalized yet to the point that it's scaring even like fucking lib, like squishy libs, like Jonathan Chate or whoever.

So, maybe that's going to make a difference.

I don't know.

But I, I just,

The thing about resist libs, right?

And I've been saying this for a while, is that they're not wrong about Trump.

That was never the problem.

Right.

And when we said to like, you know, not to vote for Harris or Biden or whatever, and I stand by those things,

it's, it doesn't mean that they weren't right about Trump.

It's just that they were the ones who are happy to lay the groundwork for him on this.

This is something that like a democratic president might well have tried to do in a more legalized way.

Yeah, yeah, I could see that.

I could definitely see if they had kept the

war in Gaza at

a more brisk pace as Biden wanted to seem to want to do.

They might be doing exactly the same thing.

But, you know, it would be like the kids in cages, right?

They weren't a problem when Biden was doing it.

The cameras were running, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

But that's also not the reality we live in.

So we live in a reality where Trump is president.

They're not going to fucking do it.

Like, Columbia's response has been, I don't know, shameful, to say the least.

Strike, strike.

You have to treat all of these institutions as your enemy, right?

Whether that's all.

The university, whether that's the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, right?

The kind of distinctions don't really matter at this point.

Every institution is your enemy now.

The FAA.

Oh, I don't know.

Except for the Vanguard party, we're going to start any day now.

Any day now, we're going to do it.

Come on, be an anarchist.

It's more fun.

You got to go protest everything.

Go protest a Tesla dealership.

Go protest Amtrak.

I don't care.

Yeah, go do whatever you want to a Tesla dealership.

I don't know if we have that in the news, but it is pretty funny to watch their stock price just

check this shit out, liberal.

And not just theirs, but also everybody else's with this tariff shit, which should have been a single thing.

Once in a day, baby, yeah,

amazing process.

So, when so, my dad used to be a bankruptcy authority before he retired, and he did a lot of like you know, small business bankruptcies, he did personal bankruptcies, and he was always just like, Oh, yeah, the economy's crashing.

Oh, this is so fucking great, and that's like I'm like, oh, yeah, I mean, it's it's bad for like my savings because I'm trying to buy a house, but also like, yeah, yeah, you want it.

Yeah, I'm a social worker, baby.

I'm recession-proof,

Yeah, I mean, I'm sort of, I mentioned this a bit in the last bit, but it's like, I

love the collapse of the United States apart from the fact that a bunch of my friends live there, and also my country is entirely dependent on it.

So, you know, and your state has already collapsed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Basically, so secure.

He's not going to secure.

I thought that he.

Oh.

Yeah, I don't know.

I welcome collapse, but I would encourage it to go further.

You can, you okay, well, you're seeing my dad on Saturday, so you two could just bro out over the accelerationism.

Wednesday, you're seeing him on Wednesday, yes, not on Wednesday.

But but yeah,

in the meantime, this is obviously terrifying and is intended to terrify you.

Exactly, but that's the thing you should do is not be terrorized, but to, you know, fucking

again, if you, if it, if your form of resistance is to do the like pink pussy hat, I think it's kind of pathetic, but like it's better than nothing, right?

So

Christ.

Also, she won't because no, you know what?

I'm not going to because

I want Nova to be admitted to the United States pretty quickly.

Yes, yeah, thank you.

Hello, DHS.

Hello, Customs and Border Protection.

Hello, State Department.

Thanks for listening.

Please approve my visa.

Yeah, and that reminds me I forgot to put in a slide about the tour.

So pretend that's here.

That was the goddamn news.

Why'd you say tour like that?

Okay, so now the picture for the tour should be up.

I don't steal the.

Oh, stop.

Yeah.

Oh, we're going to.

Oh, yeah.

I forgot to put it in.

So

we have tickets left in Philly.

We have tickets left for the first night of New York.

Please come buy those.

Please come see us.

I believe that some of the tickets in New York have gotten cheaper.

Yes, yes.

You're welcome.

We're sure mess hubs that are inscrutable to us.

Exactly.

I just approved those emails.

I don't read them.

Dictated, but not Rads.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have one more announcement, actually, which is, I guess, we could also put it in the video description.

We have a website now.

Riddle.

Oh, shit.

Oh, yeah.

Only took us, what, like four years?

Yeah.

I got to set up your email addresses.

So when it goes to Roz, well, there's your problem.

It just bounces to Roz's Gmail address.

If anyone wants Roz's Gmail address or his cell phone number, you guys know where to find me.

Oh, God.

We need to get Elia back on in a hurry so she can dox you again.

Oh, God.

All right, let's talk about

the upside-down train.

Yeah, so what?

The upside-down train.

Let's

fully Mussolini'd itself.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Yep.

Yep.

Let's go.

Take a forensic vision.

I am a hack.

What do you want from me?

Yeah.

Low, hanging fruit.

Much like Mussolini himself.

Yeah.

So I guess we'll start with some context.

I did not mean fruit in a sexually derogatory sense.

I just mean that he was strung up from a lamp post.

Calling Mussolini like the epsilon is a great bet as well.

Because I'm doing that.

I can't do that.

I will leave that to you.

I am an ally.

See?

Caught my clenched fist here.

All right.

Talk to me about this dead bitch.

All right.

This is Mussolini, Benino Mussolini.

He was the fascist dictator of Italy.

One thing people like to say about him is, say what you want about him, but at least he made the trains run on time.

Not true.

Not true.

Myth.

Famous myth.

Yes.

Famous myth.

You can go to the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions.

I mean, one kind of thing is even though this is a myth pre-war, one thing that really stops the trains from running on time is

getting bombed a lot.

And we were doing that and he helped start the war.

So there were

politically important luxury trains that started running on time better.

And they put, you know, fascist guards with fancy uniforms on them and everyone loved them.

You know, so that was

fancy uniforms was the main kind of contribution of Italy to fascism.

Pretty much, yeah.

That and like the futurism.

Yeah, although even then, like, it's kind of

i mean fascism's this like mix uh it's like this marriage between uh like the revolutionary and the like sentimental conservative right so like

it kind of every time it gets like sort of pinned down one it retreats into the other and so you get the like arno broke kind of like nazi statues but you also get the like chocolate box kitsch kind of like high

shit so Yeah, I don't know.

Not even that, maybe.

Yeah.

Mark, are you still there?

You haven't said anything in a while.

I'm here.

I had not much to contribute to previously, but

do you have any actionable threats against any named persons?

I do not have an actionable threat against any named persons.

I do just wish that humans would look at other humans and other living things and be like, yeah, that's important.

I treat myself this way.

Maybe I should treat everyone else this way.

And there seems to be a distinct lack of that.

Apparently, empathy is a sin now.

I don't know if you feel that.

I'm a very empathetic person, and listening to the politics section was a little challenging on my end because it was very depressing.

But such is life these days, I guess.

Here we are.

Yeah, I'm sorry that we make all of our guests sit through a kind of mandatory 20-minute segment of us making actionable threats against named persons.

Bad news, Virus.

It's fine.

That's what I say, right?

Before I do a shot of whiskey.

It's fine.

It's fine.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is a a wee bit hilarious that uh i i didn't know this about mussolini uh people will come to learn about me uh people looking like oh you work in vintage train things and you're on youtube talking about old trains and i'm like yeah i'm an engineer and i'm neurodivergent i really like the train part i didn't get the history part uh so i did not know these statements about mussolini which is kind of fun and hilarious to learn but yeah no no one in power has the charge of whether or not a train's on on time.

Like, yeah, they can they can approve like, oh, yes, comrade, our train will be on time.

They can do that, and that's great.

But, you know, every other train, you know, like normal day-to-day operations, no, that's not going to happen.

What do you think?

Like, it's the same thing about, I don't know, prices of eggs anyway.

I would say

the closest to anything directly that someone did to make the train run on time was that when Lenin was being covertly returned to St.

Petersburg, he was disguised as the stoker on the locomotive.

And apparently, he was very good at it.

Just realizing you're kind of missing the career you're really inspired for as you go back to like

everyone would have preferred you being a fireman than

you did.

Yeah.

No, I would not.

But, you know, well, you know,

I do like the idea that I thought I would be writing poetry after the war, but it's just Lenin and just like, when do I get to shovel more coal?

Yeah.

So, yeah, they do fascism in Italy for a while.

That leads to them getting into, of course, World War II.

Is that Monte Cassino?

Yes.

Ah, yeah.

That's arguably an Allied war crime and certainly a strategic kind of piece of futility.

Yeah.

But hey, we won the war.

So.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, well, Mark Clark,

in particular, kind of forced the bombing of this like very ancient monastery.

Yes.

Destroyed a bunch of like very, very old manuscripts and art and stuff because it was on top of a hill.

The Germans were in it, but they weren't really using it.

And they ended up fighting out of the craters and it was a whole fucking thing.

It's just disastrous all around.

The whole Allied campaign in Italy is like ego and stupidity.

It's wild stuff.

Yeah,

we'll talk about some of that in a bit.

And I killed my great uncle, who again was maybe killed by Germans, although by that point, 300,000 Italians are fighting.

It's not relevant.

Go on.

We miss you, Uncle Charlie.

The war goes pretty poorly for Italy, enough so that they're like a wildlife.

Yeah.

And once they surrendered, Hitler was like, oh, no, you don't.

And he invaded.

We must defend the Gothic line, which went so well.

Yes.

It's a great combat mission game, though.

They wind up being occupied in the north by the Axis, which included occupying themselves.

The Italian social republic which is the setting of salo uh the pasolini movie yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know uh the war essentially ended in southern italy relatively quickly it was just like okay we're under allied control now whatever

Yeah, we're all doing like Godfather Part 2 shit and there's like Godfather Part 1.

Whatever.

Sicily is cool, right?

It's a bunch of like, Michael Corley owns there.

It's fine.

Yeah, exactly.

You know,

now during Allied occupation, the economy was all kinds of fucked up, right?

If you're in a port city, you know, something like Naples or Rome's,

Rome's singular.

Rome's, yeah.

It was only the one.

They captured Rome, but there was a bunch of, they didn't destroy the German 10th.

There was a bunch of, I don't know, mismanagement of the war, we'll say.

Yeah, go on.

So it's relatively easy to come by things like clothing and cigarettes, all kinds of stuff.

The American military was bringing in on Liberty ships and stuff.

There wasn't much food food was harder to come by in the countryside the situation was reversed right now the problem there was that travel was pretty restricted so you gotta you gotta steal a bicycle there's a whole thing about that the main way

ride a bicycle my bad

use the other appendage it's funny yeah i gotcha i can't see me pedaling but i sure am

the main way of fixing this economic imbalance was to stow away on a freight train and go barter out in the countryside right?

It was a thing in like

early occupation Japan as well.

Like people getting out of Tokyo to go back to their like, you know, family hometowns and stuff and try and get, you know, like whatever they would harvested.

It's, it's a thing generally with trains.

It's one of the darndest things.

You know, people bum around the country and bummer ride whatever country it is on trains when they can.

I had somebody do so and they decided to hop off at 50 miles an hour at the shop I used to work at for the MSF.

And he insisted that I don't call an ambulance.

Uh, but his, you know,

whatever bone is attached to the shin, I'm an engineer, not a medical person, being sticking out through his knee made me say,

no matter who you are, you need to be a bad guy.

You may need an ambulance.

Yeah, we don't, we don't love to see an open fracture.

Yeah, that was, um, that was pretty gross.

It was a fun time.

Folks, uh, train hopping is dangerous.

You can and will get turned to pasta sauce if you fuck up.

Don't do it.

We tell the train crew.

We tell the goddamn train crew not to get on and off moving equipment.

Don't fucking hitch a train, please, if I can say one thing in this episode.

So during this time in Italy, of course, the train service is actually pretty poor, but it's also Balkanized, right?

There's some trains being dispatched by...

Shoes on the other foot.

Italy tries to Italianize the Balkans and ends up Balkanizing Italy.

Yes,

all can't rerun the train like this.

That's gone poorly.

Some of the trains are dispatched by the Italian state railways and some are dispatched by the Allied command.

There's not very much coordination.

There's some pretty poor communication.

Passenger service is especially bad.

You know, so a lot of times no one actually knows what's running on which line with whose equipment and how and where.

Oh, it's a the crane situation in Philly.

Yeah.

Dude, this just sounds like the railroad.

Like literally

the amount of times I sent gifts of Led Zeppelin playing communication breakdown to my coworkers on a day-to-day basis when I work for the railroad.

Yeah, this is a day that ends in Y.

Oh, yeah.

So now most of these trains were these wonderful things called steam locomotives.

Fantastic.

Beautiful.

Great technology.

We love these.

And I have to say, you've picked a very, very, very specific, really, really stupid one to use for your diagram.

But I'm here for it.

You know what?

I just realized a bunch of extra stuff on there.

Yeah.

This is Andre Champlon's one or whoever his name is, right?

This is a French choo-choo with four cylinders.

Much power and small space.

Apparently.

I don't know.

It was a shitpost of a locomotive, but yes.

It does make a good diagram, though.

Yeah.

So what is a steam train?

It's literally, we're doing the Simpsons bit of like Le Grille.

Locomotive vapour.

What the hell is that?

Dumpf, dumpfloch.

What is that?

Yeah,

it's a bomb on wheels.

It's a bomb on wheels, really.

I mean, it is James Watts invention taken to a horrifying final modern end, quote unquote.

modern being like you know 1920-ish yeah but yeah steam train you have a steam engine which is the bottom bit, and you've got the bomb, which is the top bit, the boiler.

And, you know, you put all those things together and you can make lots of stuff move.

And they're really good at making lots of stuff move.

You make a fire, it boils some water, it makes the steam, use the steam, and rather than reuse it like a sensible marine kind of situation, you violently vomit it out the stack, which causes the fire to get real, real hot.

And you get rid of all the fiery gases and all that stuff, which may or may not be important to the rest of this episode out the stack.

And, you know, hopefully it goes out into the stratosphere and meets the jets, like the jet fuel we talked about.

But, you know, maybe it doesn't.

So it's fine.

Yeah.

There is an issue where you're making all this smoke and steam, but sometimes trains go in holes.

Yeah.

So how do we compensate for that?

Stupidly.

Yeah,

I was really hoping that the answer would be invent electric locomotives, which eventually.

No, so not even eventually.

This is the fun of this, okay?

So we understood this intrinsically as the US very early, much earlier than this story takes place.

Look up the Great Northern Railway of the U.S.

We've done stories on my YouTube channel about it previously, where they had electrified in the teens of the 1900s, you know, 100 years ago-ish.

plus

and they ran through the longest tunnel in the U.S., which is seven miles.

And they used the electric power just for that.

But even before that tunnel existed, all those things, all that fun.

But all these steam examples that you're showing on the slide are hilarious to me.

Except the Cab Forward.

The Cab Forward's badass.

I've seen it.

Everyone likes the Cab Forward.

Yeah.

Did a video about it.

It's kick-ass.

You could have used a worse Cab Forward, which

we need not discuss.

North Pacific Coast number 21.

So

as I interpret this, three three solutions to the same problem.

Problem is if you're in a tunnel,

everything is going to get filled with like choking steam and smoke.

And you know, like that's not good because people need to breathe air.

Yeah.

So solution number one.

We do like a like a fume hood type deal and we just make you wear this in the tunnel.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so the the hilarious thing about this, anyone who's ever worked on a locomotive, regardless of a steam locomotive,

will understand how terrible this is.

This is, it's like a gas mask.

Southern Railway did this, and I've been meaning to do a video for a long time on this.

They plugged the gas mask into the main reservoir of the air system on the locomotive.

So, okay,

it's air.

Yes.

But you're getting damp steam locomotive, air compressor, scuzzy, disgusting, milky air.

I don't know.

When I asked myself,

we literally all said, no, I would never put that on.

I would rather just put a rag over my mouth and nose.

That is disgusting.

It's literally like,

I want to breathe some ventilated air, so I'm going to hook up a big tube to the fan on the back of my computer and just take a big inhale of that.

Especially your computer.

And it's air contained within.

Oh, you're assuming it's not voiced already.

I've, I've listened, there's some things going on in that case I don't care to account for.

That's valid and fair, but

hard drives properly.

The drip that that comes out of the main reservoir looks like chocolate milk

tasty

so just breathe just breathe the chocolate milk that is not chocolate nor is it milk it is steam cylinder oil and all the things that are worse for me so delicious looking why does lead taste so good i think it starts

at the mummy water

yeah there's still time rod

so so so that's one solution two uh the second funniest to me what if we put the steam in a tube and we run that tube all the way

back, baby.

There will be blood style out the back of the thing, so it's not my problem anymore.

So this sort of thing kills draft, right?

Like we talked about ejecting the steam with great velocity out the top of the smokebox, which is the front bit, which is not pressurized.

That's where the gases and the steam mix.

It goes out a literal rocket nozzle called the blast nozzle, which induces a normal shockwave inside the smokebox to suck those gases out quite violently.

And putting it through a long tube reduces the effectiveness of that.

So you don't get the same draft, which means this locomotive would steam like shit.

They also

do well.

They did this for like war locomotives

underneath sometimes.

We've talked about it before, to like hide

like steam clouds.

The steam, like they would have steamed like crap.

They would have sucked to fire.

They wouldn't have made steam.

But like, if you got to be sneaky, you got to be sneaky.

But if you're trying to use a locomotive and like, I don't know, move some tonnage, which, well, I mean,

you know, no offense to my British friends here.

You know, the Brits were not known for doing compared to what we did over here.

I mean, one thing we did do

is small freight trains.

Yeah.

Smaller country, more dense.

I love British trains, but I do love giving the Brits shit too.

you know

he would have been fine with that

who won the war anyway yeah

without us you'd all be speaking german uh well you know it's uh the details such

it goes back to the politics section you scratch your head and go

but anyway and then solution number three

what if what if i'm in front of the big scary bomb and the bomb is just doing its thing behind me and i don't have to worry about it exactly and solution number three is actually fucking kick-ass I've seen that exact locomotive.

It is a tragedy that there are not more of these because the Southern Pacific built several hundred like this.

It's Cab Ford, put the cab in front.

They were extremely successful.

They had 12 classes of, although the AC9 was not cab forward, whatever.

They had what they called articulated

consolidations, AC.

And they were AC1 through AC12.

And they're fantastic.

That engine is preserved in Sacramento, California, California State Railroad Museum.

Amazing museum if you can go.

I haven't seen that.

Stupid question.

It's just incredible.

My stupid question is, I see the coal wagon behind it.

It's not coal.

That's how coal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What?

You're so British it hurts.

I hear this so often.

How could it not burn coal?

It's a steam train.

If I was Swiss, I would say, where do you put the wood, right?

If if i was a marine i would say where do you put the bayonet this is this is just essential characteristics of the thing

national stereotypes are hurtful facts the better part of half of the engines in the u.s burned oil fuel oil and the southern pacific being located i don't know damn texas friend

uh and all along the south and up into california had large sources of oil to utilize.

So they burned fuel oil.

It is an oil-burning locomotive.

And the firebox, I mean, the firebox is gargantuan.

You can see it in there and they've got the oil burner and you get to see it.

It's super neat.

What a fantastic artifact.

But, you know, they just plumbed everything up to the cab, which is one of those hilarious little things about this kind of engine versus any other kind of engine where, yeah, you have to bring everything from the tender, which is still behind, up to where you can control it and then back to where it goes.

So yeah, the oil comes from the tender, from the bunker, up to the cab where the firing valve is for the fireman, then to the burner.

The water comes from the tender, runs all the way, you know.

I mean, this is a huge locomotive.

This is bigger than anything they built in Britain by a factor of four.

Well, size isn't everything.

Well, it's true.

It's how you use it.

We know this.

And you guys have the speedy boys, and we'll let that be.

But

water

T1 Trust is going to fix that.

Oh, man, you guys are on my side.

I love that.

I love that.

Yeah.

Duck for dinner.

Anyway.

Well, it's not as pressing.

And well, well, you know, again, beauty in the eye of the beholder.

First, well, there's your problem episode to end in a fist fight.

You said this locomotive wasn't pretty, and I'm going to fly to Britain right now.

Anyway.

Tell me you're neurodivergent without.

Anyway.

This is like, what's the purpose of your visit?

Combat.

Yes.

Somebody has to go down.

All in all.

British trains, lovely.

American trains, lovely.

Very different purposes, very different things, all the stuff.

Who cares?

Whatever.

Blah, blah, blah.

Imagine plumbing 100 feet almost of water from the tender to the injector that's in the engine to then plumb it almost 100 feet back to where it needs to go into the boiler.

A little stupid.

Lots of extra work, lots of extra rework, which is why these things were not common.

The Southern Pacific having...

the ridiculous amount of tunnels that they had, it made sense.

They made a ton of these.

They used them all the time.

Amazing locomotives.

And it's a shame we only have the one, but the one we have is one of the last and one of the best.

And it is truly an engineering marvel.

And we're very thankful to have it for reasons that we will learn about very shortly from Justin.

What can we say other than restore it and run it on the main line?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, SP, yeah, there's details there, but who cares?

Yeah.

But like, if I'm doing all of this, this is exhausting.

Can't we just electrify the thing?

No, shut up.

Okay.

So, you know, most people do that.

String the wire.

And they say that.

You know how much wire you'd have to string?

You know how much maintenance that would cause?

You know how many meth heads we have in the US that would steal the wire?

Wow.

You know,

it's called Keynesianism.

What you do is you string the wire.

That requires a bunch of wire strings.

And then you station a railroad cop every 10 meters, like a presidential motorcade's coming through, and to just like shoot anybody who tries to steal the wire.

That's jobs.

And then, pretty soon, everybody is either working as a wire stringer or a railroad cop, and nobody's left to steal the copper.

I like this plan, it's a good plan.

Well, there's your problem, make work problem.

And they say Leninists don't know how to organize an economy.

I mean,

central planning at its finest.

When I was at the BNSF, we had three cops for the Northwest Division, three for the Northwest Division, which is a small division.

And when I worked at Transit, we had overhead contact systems stolen all of it, like several miles worth.

It's fine.

And, you know, several miles worth in transit versus the, I don't know, 32,000 miles of just that one railroad.

Details.

I mean, this is this is kind of like it reflects a fundamental inadequacy of the American criminal, right?

Because it shows a lack of ambition, right?

Steal, steal, steal the wires, whatever.

Fine.

Show me, like, if you're telling me that, you know, a steam locomotive is safer because it's harder to steal, you need a better class of thief, right?

Start stealing steam locomotives.

Yeah.

And then running it on the main line.

Of course.

It's fine.

Like the general?

Many options of that, including an episode of three-quarter show where we talked about the CB stealing South Korean locomotives, which is hilarious, but another story for another time.

So my understanding with running steam locomotives

in the tunnel is that you're not supposed to to open the firebox because the flames will shoot out at you.

Is that a thing?

Or is that like something I made up?

That depends on the draft.

For all my viewers, drink.

That's the fun.

Everything depends.

Everything is situational.

Nothing's black and white.

Everything's kind of gray, right?

So if you've got a good head of steam, you're working hard, you're working the engine hard, and it's ejecting shit out the stack.

It's going to draft everything in.

I mean,

point of context, when you put in the snow shovel-sized shovel to put coal in the back corners when you're working hard, it is trying to rip that shovel out of your hands like somebody pulling you away from a car that's going to hit you.

Like it is a crazy amount of force from the air.

So, no, it's not going to blow back if you've got that draft.

If you don't, that air pressure back down the stack, oh man, it'll blow flames out the cab six feet.

I mean, to touch the tender and beyond.

Oh my god, it's that's not a fun time so i i mean what i'm hearing is make sure you got enough power and the other one of course don't stall um yeah don't don't do that that's uh that's not stalling is bad and and ideally you know like just in case because power is variable trains running slow the draft is variable you fire before you go in and then you hope that the fire is gonna take you all the way through typically but there you go you know what i mean i mean that's that's that's like root knowledge right Like, I have to fire the thing this much in order to get through this tunnel, which I know is this long beforehand.

Exactly.

Sure.

And that's not always possible because it's not an ideal world.

And I don't know, maybe the same guys who came and stole all of the copper wire have lengthened the tunnel by 10 feet or like

conversely stolen part of the tunnel.

Me and my gang of tunnels.

Me and my gang of tunnel thieves have removed about 10 feet of the mountain.

So

somebody stole my tunnel.

Now it's just a fucking normal railroad.

They daylighted the tunnel because that happens all the time.

It's fine.

All right.

So, yeah, that's steam locomotives and tunnels.

Now, sometimes you also do something fun, which is what if you operate two steam locomotives on the front of the training.

Yeah.

So that is an intrinsically fun time of everyone always asks,

are are there controls for that?

Or, like, how do you, how do you talk to the other engineer?

And it's a lot of, I feel with my butt what I must do.

Oh, yeah.

Like rally directions, yeah.

Right.

Like, it's literally the, the, the road engine, which is the engine in the back, which the engine, uh, the train is typically designated with in the U.S.

So in this case, it'd be extra 475 because 475 is in the back.

Is this Yiaoi or Yuri?

That's the real question.

Yeah.

You got to think about those things.

That engine's going to

work its nuts off.

It's going to work as hard as it can, balls to the wall, everything.

And then the helper is going to try and stay out of its way, basically.

Like, pull hard enough that you're pulling away and you're maintaining whatever speed you need to maintain.

Because anytime you're doing a gabang-yabangy between the two of them, you shoot yourself in the foot.

And you'll feel it.

If the engineers are not in sync, the train will not orgasm.

It's very true.

Okay, so it is.

So

it's Yaoi, then.

Okay, right.

We've set a settled question.

Got it figured out.

Phallic.

Just

doing some feminism and wondering why the lack of yonik sort of steam locomotives.

It's like, no, no, it is designed to pressure vessel that way, but I think that's telling.

Hoop stress.

It's easy to make it look like a dick.

You can tell the uh the male dominance in the railroad industry yeah

it's fine do you also use whistle codes for this or is it you know every railroad is unfortunately different because of course they are because that's just the way they want to be um we do out in the west very much so um okay so we also have to talk about coal coal

Coal.

I've heard of this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you don't have a bunch of petroleum just coming out of the ground

in Texas or wherever, you have to use this.

Solidified dinosaur.

Yes.

Yeah.

The OG spicy rock.

Solidified dinosaur food, right?

Like it's mostly like.

It's not actually dinosaurs, yeah.

Yeah, it's all like sort of dead plant material and stuff.

Forgot my.

It got crushed before.

bacteria developed that could break down.

I forget which plant part.

Yeah,

it's one of the most effective carbon sinks.

Yes.

That's its natural

burning.

Yeah, well, then you're destroying the thing and the carbon comes back out.

And that's a whole problem for everybody.

Well, what we clearly have to do is make more coal.

Start crushing up more plants.

Yeah, real quick.

But yeah, no, this is.

This is one of the most effective carbon sequestration things ever devised, which we incidentally use to make train go fast sometimes.

Right.

Coal burning is a huge part of railway stuff, particularly over in your land, Nova.

They're actually freaking out that they've stopped mining the Welsh coal and it'll be the end of the railway.

And actually one of my good friends is helping you guys convert things to burn the liquid diet, which you'll figure out, hopefully.

Burn the liquid diet is such a hell of a phrase.

So much better than, you know,

in the windiest fucking country on earth being like,

where are we going to get electricity?

The turn a turbine of some kind.

I don't know.

It's a mystery to me.

Yeah.

What are you going to do?

It's not as if anybody has the technology to split the atom, you know, or anything like that.

Yeah.

Or nuclear?

I think, I think we call it nuclear over here.

Despite the impression that you get living here six months out of the year, the sun does shine on the United Kingdom.

So you can also use that, maybe.

And then don't you.

That's because God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark.

shouldn't trust them under the kind of like shadow of all the solar panels either but the point is you can build a lot of them and then you can put all that beautiful copper wire up give everybody a job as a railroad cop and then pretty soon you don't have to burn the the jurassic swamp burning coal do you not burn coal over there isn't that the way it works but yeah

you know i i i isn't the welsh coal anthracite i believe so i don't know what it is and i doubt it's anthracite because there's this whole whole debate in railroad things.

You have the grades of coal for the uninitiated.

You have lignite down near the bottom, you have semi-bituminous, you have bituminous, and then you have anthracite at the top.

And easy way to tell for the uninitiated again, how shiny is it?

Anthracite is like it's darn near a polished, ridiculous substance.

So I'm looking here on Google.

I could buy a ton of very shiny-looking Welsh anthracite for 648 quid.

Jesus Christ.

Is it really really anthracite?

I'm surprised by that because

our

locomotives over here are typically designed to burn bituminous coal, and the anthracite burning engines had weird fireboxes that were very, very thick.

That's why you have a camelback locomotive where the cabs in front was because the firebox had to be so dummy thick that it could prop up

and burn.

a smaller amount of anthracite.

That's because as far as I know, that's because they didn't burn the actual mined anthracite.

They burned the spoil, the comb.

Oh, you know, I would not be surprised by that.

I'm not an anthracite expert.

Because the anthracite is too expensive to burn in the locomotive.

You use that for like home heating or building heating because it burns so clean.

That does sound like the railroad that I know.

So, yeah.

So, anyway,

our engines are usually designed to burn bituminous.

Bituminous is a lesser grade.

It's got a lot of bunch of crap in it.

But coal, as we'll see in this episode, coal is so dependent on the grade, the quality, the what it is, even in those ranges.

I've had bituminous that we've burned in our locomotive that burns great.

Makes a bunch of ash, but burns great.

It's fine.

I've had the same grade of coal.

It was bituminous coal that we burned in the locomotive, and it had so much oil content in it that it plugged all the way.

every single flu and tube in the locomotive.

203 fucking flus and tubes, including the big five and a half inch ones, were plugged solid with this weird, cakey, greasy, disgusting coal particulate.

And we saw they were trying to fire it up the one day and it's like it got to seven psi.

We've got the blower, which drafts the fire with a steam draft open as far as it goes.

And it wouldn't make more than seven psi.

We shut it off.

We go and look later when it cooled down.

It's like the tube sheet looks like a blackboard.

It looks like something in a classroom.

It doesn't look like it has tubes because it was just covered in this shit.

And it was just junk garbage, still bituminous, but just junk garbage.

So sometimes you get good coal, sometimes you get bad coal.

It makes a huge difference.

Yeah.

And during the war, the Italians use German bituminous coal.

Not the lignite they're famous with mining, you know, with the big bucket wheel excavators that tear through a whole village.

You know, this is a higher-grade bituminous coal.

But during the Allied occupation, of course, they couldn't use German coal, so they use a lower grade American bituminous coal, which was shipped over on, you know, Liberty ships, probably from like West Virginia or somewhere.

Well, from Norfolk, Virginia, or Baltimore, Maryland, but the coal originated from West Virginia.

Um, and it was found just in general to have poorer steaming quality than the German coal, and it created a lot more smoke.

Uh, and this didn't really bother Allied command.

Like, it's not like they're about to go out and buy the better coal from Germany, right?

Yeah, fuck them.

Shovel

bitch.

Yeah, and you're also, you're occupying a formerly fascist country, and all these guys were shooting at you five minutes ago.

It's like,

I don't care about your

passenger service, right?

Figure it out.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So let's talk about the Batapaglia to Metaponto Railway.

Hell yeah.

I'm looking at all of these names on the thing and just soaking them all in there's beautiful language uh oh yeah i i do not speak third best italian so i'm gonna try to get

all right roz you're up you love italy i i do love italy italy's fantastic um this goes from down here about paglia right and it goes and it goes and it starts getting into some mountains reaches this place called belvano this is like a really tiny town that's off the beaten tourist path.

You know, and it's also weird because it was entirely rebuilt in 1980 when the earthquake knocked it down.

It looks like a tiny Italian traditional village, but it's all board-formed concrete.

Yeah, brutalist Italy.

This is like southern Italy, right?

Because I see Bari over there on the east.

Okay.

Yes.

Naples is like right up here.

We're sort of like about at like ankle level of boot.

Yes.

Yeah, down there.

Yeah, you mean to tell me that a train having to do a squiggly left and right also probably has to do a squiggly up and down, and the train don't like it?

Oh, yeah.

So it goes through at this point at Belvano, the Galleria della Army.

That's,

I believe that's just the Army tunnel, right?

I don't know why it's called that.

It wasn't built for the Army, to my knowledge.

No, because it's not Army, because Army in Italian is Ehalcita.

Esita?

I doubt that.

That makes sense.

One of those.

So

it's like the arms gallery, I suspect.

Yeah.

Like,

in the sense of like weapons.

Welcome to Weapons Tunnel.

Welcome to the Weapons Tunnel.

Anyway, the Weapons Tunnel, it makes a few curves in its route.

Then the route goes over here to Potenza, right?

Potenza is home.

to the larger longest escalator complex in Europe.

Oh, good.

Huh.

Yeah.

Not at the time.

Escalatorland.

Oh,

when we say escalator complex, what do we mean exactly?

So part of the old section of the town is on a hill.

The new section of the town is on a hill.

There's a valley in between.

And there's a covered escalator that goes down the entire hill and crosses a road and then goes up the other side.

So rather than being a temple to the stair god like Dubrovnik, they...

you know, weaponized the stairs.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

It's fun.

And then from Potenza, it goes somewhere.

I have a vision of myself falling down every single fucking escalator step.

Loop, blup, blup, being carried up to the other side and then falling back down every other escalator step.

Gary's mod right doll sounds intensifying.

I feel like I'm making those all the time.

Being in your 30s.

Yeah.

So it's a great idea.

Then it goes down here to Metapanto, right?

That's a squiggly ass alignment.

Oh, yeah.

And

this is one of of those lines.

I don't know too much about it.

What sort of it looks like to me is this thing was old when it was new.

Yeah.

You know, definitely a kind of a very squiggly line.

You know, not electrified, obviously.

Maximum grade is 2.6%.

That is stout for a choo-choo.

Yeah.

I mean, also, as much as the fascists kind of like

boasted about trying to remedy it, as have every other political tendency in Italy, there's this really stark, like north-south divide, particularly in like poverty as well.

So, this is kind of a backwater, and it's like in

like you know, towards the kind of ankle end.

Yeah, there's there's a lot of stuff here that has not been really well modernized.

I mean, I would say the Italian rail network is in better shape than, let's say, the U.S.

rail network, at least for passenger service.

But

passenger service in the U.S.

is depressing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But this is still a very curvy route.

They have electrified.

They electrified it in 1994.

Italian route.

Yeah.

Interesting.

A new girl like that once.

Still a number?

Look it up.

This was still a very popular route.

It served a bunch of major population centers, but it only had one real passenger train each week.

You could catch the train on Wednesdays.

Hey, one a a week is worse than Amtrak.

You're talking a lot of shit, but like Amtrak at least does that.

Yeah.

So anyway,

let's meet the players today.

The players

in the red corner.

Do the locomotives from this exist?

This is

one

number ahead.

of the locomotive involved.

Okay, sister engine.

Next one off the production.

I love the Kunti.

Sorry, I probably shouldn't call them Kunti.

I love the stylishly Italian cutout silhouette standies there.

That's the

very non-American.

They're very skinny.

It is funny that

it's a decapod.

We want, you know, no,

I can't even do it in an Italian accent if I tried.

We wanted to parody

Daddy Germany with a 210.0.

And so we made this, and it's not quite a class 52, but you know, it's funny.

Yeah, but it's it's yeah, it's got cleaner lines because you know, it's Italian.

Yeah, that looks like it'll go as fast as a Ferrari.

It's just like we're gonna red, for sure.

We build our trains and we build our cars, functional and basically not running, or beautiful and not running.

Yeah, it's fun.

Oh, Jesus.

This is an FS480.

It is a 210, a Decapod.

This was designed for the Branner Pass line, which had just become part of Italy instead of Austria owing to World War I.

Italian irredentists

only victory.

Weights on drivers.

You have something to help you through the curves.

I mean, it looks spindly to me, but I mean, it's not an American train.

This is really big for Italy.

Not big for here, big for Italy.

Yeah.

I would wager a bet that my cute little narrow gauge choo-choo that I deal with all the time over here in the States weighs more than this thing.

Oh, we might be able to look that up even.

Yeah, I bet we can.

We can wager my bet, and I can owe somebody money within the context of this episode.

The FS480 weighs.

Do we use long tons or short tons?

I forget.

We use short tons because long tons are metric tons.

Oh, I see.

92.9 short tons.

92.9 short tons.

Is it just for the engine or the engine in general?

It's just for the engine.

The tender is 57.4.

They're like the same.

That's hilarious.

I want to say 91 is like 94 short tons.

She's right there.

491, a narrow gauge, three-foot gauge locomotive in the U.S.

Biggest to the narrow gauge, biggest to the three-foot gauge.

But, you know,

still very small and presumably much smaller driver and all that stuff.

You know, less power, who, what, whoever cares.

About the same size as this thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So these guys have four times the power.

It's fine.

Yeah.

These guys were built in 1923, but they were rendered redundant on the Branner Pass fairly shortly after they were built because they electrified that whole line in 1930.

So they moved them to Sicily and then they moved them back to the mainland to work the Battapaglia to Metapanto railway.

The one you can see here, this is at Pia Trarza, which is the Italian State Railway Museum.

It's incredible.

You should go visit.

I have been there.

I have seen this locomotive.

Great location right there on the ocean.

You know, you can see Vesuvius and everything.

Also, the museum's huge and really well done.

All the railway works buildings are really well preserved.

Got to put that on my list.

The railways of that region are so neat.

And they're preserved so well.

I spent a lot of time at a railway museum just

a couple doors down in Slovenia recently.

And so freaking cool and so lovely how

tied in the history is to the present day there.

What I liked was that the railway museum had a train station attached to it.

So I could, I was, it was with my parents in Italy last year.

My brothers,

this is when I went rogue.

Yeah, because they were like, we're going to the Vatican today.

And I was like, I've been to the Vatican.

I don't care.

So I woke up early and took the high-speed train down to Naples, specifically to go to this railroad museum.

To hell with Jesus.

Train.

Exactly.

Train vibes.

The problem with St.

Peter's is it's so big, it's not impressive.

Catholicism is coming, I promise.

This is the problem with getting conservation estimates.

Yeah, exactly.

You end up with a new build, and it's kind of too much, you know, and it's

fine.

It's fine.

All right, it's great.

You go into like, oh, this looks like some kind of early Christian basilica.

No, some Renaissance asshole redid it in 1620.

You piece of shit.

Son of a little son's asshole.

Listen, listen.

If you didn't want that to happen, blame the Protestants.

They shouldn't have started the Reformation.

There wouldn't have been a counter-Reformation.

It's all

Russia.

It's all Martin Luther's fault.

Look at history, kids.

It's fun.

And this other guy, this is an FS 476.

It is an O10.

Oh.

I was going to say, is it an O10-0?

010-0?

It looks like it.

Yeah, boy.

Raising my hand here to ask, why would you do that?

Why would you

not?

Ride quality is not important.

No, so this is so stupid.

I mean, all the weights on drivers, that is very important in some contexts.

I did a video maybe a year ago now about wheel arrangements, and I talked about all of the popular ones.

Wheel arrangements are a big deal for steam engines.

You have lead wheels, you have driving wheels, wheels, you have trailing wheels, maybe you have multiple sets of lead wheels.

Why do you do these things?

And it's generally because you need the engine to perform a certain task, which is why steam engines kind of went out of favor.

A diesel engine, which is a box that just does a do, is so much better than, oh, I need that exact tool.

I don't need a 10 millimeter wrench.

I need a hammer.

The diesel is a hammer.

versus a specific sized wrench for an application.

And an O10-0 means, hey, you're probably shunting.

You're probably in the yard.

You probably are not going fast.

You need all your weight being adhesive.

And if you go more than 20 miles an hour through a curve, your crew is going to hate everything about existence.

So, you know, fun time.

I'm a little bit confused as to what these were originally designed for because I think this might be one of those situations, you know, like the British like to do like 060s and like 080s for mainline service.

It's normal when we do it.

Well, that's because your track is so much better.

That's right.

I can hear Gareth pumping his fist in celebration.

That's right.

So,

yeah, I mean,

the British equivalent of a 440 was an 060, you know, so.

And they had no slop between the laterals on the driver, so they couldn't move back and forth.

And they could go faster without being incredibly stupid.

and uh they didn't have to be incredibly stupid because they were pulling uh checks notes almost nothing

so this was actually an austrian locomotive um and quite a few of them were seized as war reparations after world war one oh that means it's a wiener yes

I'm reading here about the the FS476.

Their poor riding qualities and huge mass led some Milanese crews to nickname them after an icebreaker.

Not shocked.

The lead truck has a point, ladies and gentlemen.

I'm not exaggerating it.

You watch an O blank O do anything, it fucks the track.

It's fun.

This needs to haul like three wagons full of like beautiful vegetables.

Like

the nicest San Marzano tomatoes you've ever seen in your life.

Please.

Not a single blemish on any of them.

If I could get my San Marzano marzano tomatoes delivered via this o10o

i that would that would be all i'd buy and then then you eat the tomatoes that gives you the energy to go out and fix the rails which it has absolutely devastated

hi it's justin uh so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to uh People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

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Or don't.

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Back to the show.

So the other thing this train is going to have today is an unusual amount of freight cars.

Oh, a shitload of San Marzanos.

47 cars of...

well, they'd be empties because they're heading into the countryside to pick up the San Marzanos.

They're going to make a lot of pizzas.

Oh, yeah, delicious.

Exactly.

Well, the interesting thing is there is actually, because of things we'll discuss later,

there were going to be quite a lot of black olives on the train coming back.

That is that Italy.wav.

Yeah.

So yeah, this is an unusual amount of freight cars for this route, owing to the sharp curves and the steep grades.

And, of course, they have north of 500 stowaways on board.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Of course.

You know, we always talk about the

people tonnage.

You have tonnage and then you add people.

And like a person's not super heavy, one of them.

One of them.

Well,

you add a lot of them.

They do add up, especially if they're American.

It's Justin's measurement of like an extremely fat man on a French bicycle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's that guy and his 15 brothers have all sort of like rolled their bicycles directly into the goods yards.

I'd like to think that in 1944 Italy, they're probably not that level, but still.

Oh, just indulge me in a little whimsy, you know?

These are all fine.

These are all the people who would later come to America and become Italian Americans.

Oh,

yeah.

Sorry, Jersey.

Yep.

Just a bunch of fat guys drinking Pironis.

Hell yeah.

No shirt on.

Have we failed at respecting the noble culture and people of Italy?

I think we've failed at respecting the people of America, but I think that's fine.

It's like task failed successfully.

You can't appreciate Italy without appreciating the contrasts, which are what makes it great.

That's true.

You know,

you go to Rome or you go to Florence and you see the most beautiful architecture, the most beautiful, you know, streets, you know, the cities, everything.

You know, and you see up there on this gorgeous building on this beautiful street on a balcony is a fat shirtless guy and his boxers drinking a peironi.

Hell yeah.

Yeah,

and it's like, this is the life.

You've heard of five o'clock somewhere.

I remember, I've been to Croatia a couple times.

My family's from Troy.

It's 11 o'clock.

Yeah, 5 o'clock somewhere doesn't apply in Europe.

I'm pretty sure, at least Central Europe.

It is probably 8 a.m.

in Croatia or Italy or wherever, and they're having beers.

It's what happens.

So, train 8017 was made up in the yard at Naples on the night of March 1st, 1944, and it started the next day for Potenza.

Initially, it was hauled by an electric locomotive, but at Batta Paglia, the wires ran out and the power was swapped for the two steam locomotives on the previous slide.

Oh, boy.

Meth heads stole the wires, so we got to use our steam engine.

The rest of the world is a lot of fun.

So just the VMA.

Yeah, I feel like they'll be meth heads in like 1945 Ethelia, like in the Waffen-SS.

Legally, they would be Nazis, yes, because they did distribute meth.

That is that whole thing.

It is amazing to me.

that you know in american railway culture we electrify i don't know the place where you can breathe or can't breathe, rather, the tunnel.

That's what's electrified.

And, you know, they electrified what was close and convenient, but maybe that's,

you know, the easy thing.

And

it's a

classic decision-making management strategy, right?

You do the easy part first, and then you never have to do the hard part because you just don't bother.

And nothing bad will happen from it.

Nothing bad can ever happen, man.

So, on the lead locomotive, which was the 480, were Espetito Senatore and Luigi Ronga, right?

Did you just put this in so you would get to say some Italian names?

Yeah, it's funny.

Yeah.

Espetito Senatore is a fantastic name, though.

That's a really good name, apparently.

The fast senator.

Apparently,

he was a very good engineer, had a good reputation.

He was like, you know.

consummate professional.

And then on the second locomotive were Matteo Gigliano and Rosario Barbero.

Oh, okay.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

I don't think you've, as Hanson just said, you need to let me hear the music in it.

I don't think you've got enough music in these names.

Rosario Barbaro.

Yeah.

All right.

So they were engineer and fireman, respectively.

Anyway, it's slow going, right?

This is a 520, 520-ton train with several additional tons worth of sewaways on board.

Yeah, not to mention the bicycles.

Yeah.

So they're freakishly heavy bicycle deals.

As they're traveling away from Naples, there are a few times the railroad cops show up and they start trying to throw people off.

There's so many damn people on the train that they can't manage it.

And people keep, you know, picking the train up at various stations they stop at because this is Europe.

The freight trains stop at stations.

I don't know what they do there.

Why not?

The freight team decides they need a coffee.

Matteo Giuliani goes on, puts the fucking,

what do you call it?

The mocha pot on.

And Rosaria Barbaro goes back and like eats a couple of olives off of the wagons.

Oh, there's your next K-28 cooking show.

See if you can put a mocha pot

on the

rancher.

We will, we will do that.

That feels like an interesting way to bomb your own

next time I cook on a K-28.

We will do that.

Small pressure vessel, big pressure vessel.

Yes, porque no los dos.

Yes, let's see.

This is a 520-ton train.

Yes.

Ah, yes.

Italy.

Italy.

Yeah.

520 tons.

That is, that is five cars in the US.

Yes.

Five.

Yeah.

Five.

Christ.

So this thing is slow as all hell, even on the flat portion of the route.

It takes the whole day to reach this crucial piece of infrastructure on the line.

Have we found a tunnel?

Yeah,

it's weapons tunnel.

It's weapons tunnel.

Weapons tunnel near the town of Bolvano.

Is it actually weapons tunnel?

It's not a weaponized tunnel.

It's weapons tunnel.

Yeah.

For me, it's the license of arms, weapons.

Christ.

So the army tunnel

is a monster, right?

It curves through its entire length.

It has a 1.3% grade.

It has absolutely no ventilation.

Okay.

Well, you know, you don't want that in the tunnel.

This gives me anxiety.

Me too.

Even in its later years, when it was run by diesel locomotives, the crews complained about dense smoke in there.

Yeah, but

for context, the two tunnels I'm aware of that I have experience with in the U.S., Moffett Tunnel, Stevens Pass Tunnel, the two longest in the U.S., like five and something or six and something, change miles in a seven-mile tunnel.

They have gigantic fans.

They're ridiculous.

The biggest fans you've ever seen that clear the tunnel the instant the train goes in.

And it still smells like exhaust if you go in a couple hours later.

Yeah, it's a whole thing.

Yeah, this one's about a mile and a third long,

which isn't like especially long.

It's a lot for a steam engine with

a lot of ventilation.

Yeah.

You know, so this is a nightmare with not one, but two steam locomotives in it, right?

Oh, boy.

Double the belching.

Just after midnight, they arrive at the Bolvano Station.

This is just an isolated building and platform that's about three kilometers away from the town.

because the town is way up on the hill and the railroad's way down in the valley.

Station master, you can hear him falling down all the escalator steps.

Yeah, yeah, little spot near the tunnel because important for railroad.

Fuck the people, duh.

Yeah.

Well, the station master is actually pretty suspicious of sending a train this long through the tunnel, especially with this many stowaways.

But he can't do anything because this train was ordered by Allied command.

He's it's out of his jurisdiction.

This train has to go.

Yes, bosses said yes, therefore, train go.

That sounds a lot like modern day railroading and has resulted in

modern day railroading.

Check the news.

Being out of a station master's jurisdiction is fun conceptually because it just plays into like old cop movie tropes, you know, like give me a badge and your gun.

Yeah.

Your weirdly accurate pocket watch in your gun.

Yes.

So the train makes a brief stop right after midnight.

They put on some coffee.

You put on some coffee.

Yeah, they put on like, I don't know, a record or something.

I don't know what Italians do.

Smoke.

I'm doing the smoke.

They're smoking.

Yeah, that's true.

Paint.

But

having a glass of olive oil as you do in Italy.

Having a glass of like Cinzano or like Limoncello or something.

Yeah.

Have some grappa.

And rule G.

Rule G's.

No, no, no.

Rule G is don't drink on the job.

And it's a very American thing.

They don't have Rule G in Italy.

No, I would not imagine they do.

They're the opposite of that.

Rule G drink on the job.

And at 12.50 a.m., they set off towards the tunnel.

It's just about a mile away.

They go through two more short tunnels and over a bridge to get there.

So they don't pick up very much speed.

They're going 15 to 20 kilometers an hour.

I mean, I feel like for this to be safe, the

route leading into the tunnel needs to look like the euthanasia coast, you know?

Yeah, I well, the problem is then, you know, going the opposite direction, you'd have to go up the euthanasia coaster.

No one's actually

figured that one out.

You'd have to have a switch for that, you know, euthanasia coaster or not, you know, uphill, downhill.

So they go in the tunnel, and as they enter the tunnel, the wheels turn slower and slower.

The chuffs get farther and farther apart.

There are wet rails.

That's reduce the traction.

The sanders on board can't compensate.

that's the thing that puts the sand between the wheel and the rail gives you more traction finally with only a few cars sticking out the end of the tunnel the train stalls uh-oh the air becomes thick with smoke and the oil lamps illuminating the locomotive cabs win out that's bad right yeah so the joe the joy of this The joy of this is that a coal-burning locomotive is a, it's a promise based on the principle that the locomotive is going to keep doing whatever the fuck it's been doing recently so stomping up the hill big grade double-headed big train bump bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum like working its ass off that means the fire is being drafted really really really fucking hard and it stomps bum bum bum bum bum bum bum into the tunnel slowly slows down and stops that means that fire which had been combusting probably perfectly if not a little heavily, maybe a little bit more carbon, no longer has the suction of oxygen because the blast nozzle, the rocket nozzle that we talked about, is no longer supplying any of the air through the smoke box.

Means the fire is no longer getting anything, which means you would go from a perfectly clean stack or maybe a slightly hazy stack into,

hey, I'm stomping up the grade.

I need a big fire.

Big, violent, crappy coal, crappy coal fire.

All of the smoke is now going everywhere and not just out the stack.

Yeah.

So it gets really dark.

That makes sense.

Is that why this slide is just black?

It's funny.

Yes.

Except for our friend, the Activate Windows logo.

Well,

I decided, you know, rather than look for a photo, it'd be funny to just leave this one black.

Also, I couldn't find another photo.

That's good.

I like that bit.

Yeah, there we go.

Sometimes laziness,

you know, leads you to creative decisions you wouldn't otherwise make.

So, as we said, drafted a fire is not good.

The locomotives are no longer producing power.

The whole thing is a big mess right now.

So, in the first locomotive, the fireman, Luigi Ranga, he's searching for air and he doesn't find any.

He tried leaning out of the locomotive and was completely overcome by smoke and fell out.

Jesus.

And miraculously, he fell out into the only area where there was breathable air, which was the horrible drainage ditch next to the tracks.

Ah, Ah, yes, the chocolate milk factory.

Yeah.

Christ.

Again,

God's sense of humor is

immeasurable, isn't it?

Because,

Christ,

I get on our new firemen all the time at the museum, coal-burning engines.

You shut the throttle, you stop.

Not even working up this kind of grade for this long, just you know, working up a steeper grade, but shorter time.

Shut off, black smoke smoke rolls in the cab.

And I always joke to them, like, open the blower, or I will make it an oil burner.

Figure it out.

And

to be in a double header and to go up this hill in a tunnel, stall out, have the ripping rage, roaring, crazy fire, and you jump out the window for air.

So believable.

Anyone who's fired a coal burner will know they're awful in many ways.

So he lays there in the ditch, unconscious and injured, but alive for several hours.

Christ.

Better than the alternative, I suppose.

Yeah,

engineer Espacito Senatore was not so lucky.

He was found slumped in his chair with the throttle and reverser both at full forward.

Yeah, the amount of, oh, yeah, the crew died or the crew passed or you know, um,

went unconscious in a tunnel, significant in recording history.

Yeah.

In the second locomotive, a different scene played out, right?

Matteo Giuliano threw the reverser backwards and passed out before he could reopen the throttle.

I think this was, you know, in the United States, you have a big lever.

That's the reverser, right?

Easy to throw it back real quick.

This is Europe.

I think they had a screw reverser.

Yep.

And you got to turn that a whole lot.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Screw reverse is great for running one direction.

You have infinite positions it could be in because it's a screw, not individual notches.

But changing directions is very hard.

Very, very hard.

And you have to really crank the thing and it's not a simple, easy thing to crank either, depending on the size of the engine.

And so what you've told us is the front engine was pointed one way and had its reverse pointed that way and the rear engine had it the other way like they were trying to bunch up the cars and trying to restart on the hill.

And they were both fighting each other at this point.

Yeah.

So at least one of the sources I looked at said, okay, if

Giuliano had managed to reopen the throttle, the train probably would have started moving backwards.

I mean, the front locomotive would have gone into an insane wheel slip scenario, which it probably did anyway.

But

yeah,

guy who is most concerned about the track at this point is just like...

Yeah, depending, you know, we're worried about the locomotives, not the 520 people.

Yeah.

I mean, Allied Command might have been.

Well, if

you have details.

It would probably be true.

I doubt it would go to wheel slip.

It depends on.

It probably stopped stuck centered, which is when...

One of the valves or one of the pistons is at dead center, which means you're only getting force out of one side.

Steam engines usually only a two-cylindered thing.

And so, when one of the cylinders is at one end, clocked 90 degrees opposite, such that one can be in the middle of the stroke while the other one is at either end.

So, typically, you have both strokes of power.

When one is at the end, you only have one.

And that's almost always where they stop, because guess what?

That's where the power output gets the least, which is why it was hilarious that you used the SNCF four-cylinder engine as your

piece of reference.

I didn't even think about that.

God damn it.

But anyway,

yeah, so she probably stopped dead center and said, wide open throttle, it's putting all of the force on one piston, the other piston's getting bupkiss.

Ah, damn it.

Godspeed, you know, like it probably sat there and went, okay, I'm not going to move.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Italian engine.

Both Matteo Giuliano and Rosaria Barbaro also passed out in the cab.

Back on a freight train, no one knew anything was going on because nearly everyone was asleep.

I forgot it was at nine.

Yeah, or we in the morning.

Yeah.

And the vast majority of them quickly became much more asleep.

Oh, God.

Small mercies, right?

I mean, of the ways to go.

Yeah, but also, oh my God.

my grandfather died uh quietly in his sleep along with his passengers who also died quietly in their sleep yes

yep yeah roberto massullo was the rear brakeman um this train had two braking systems on it the cars at the front had air brakes and the cars in the back had manual you know hand brakes right so they needed a brakeman and you know a van at the back right um now he saw the train stall he waited a few minutes for it to restart or reverse back.

Then, after that didn't happen after a while, he decided to go up to the train, figure out what's going on.

He got a few meters in the tunnel, realized how bad it was in there, and he got the fuck out.

Smart man, yeah,

he ran all the way back to the Bolvano station through the two smaller but still smoke-filled tunnels in pitch darkness.

Jesus, wow, it took him nearly an hour.

Yeah,

Good for him.

Here's the thing.

I'm going to call it a marathon.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That guy didn't have to deal with smoke in the original marathon, you know?

And he was running with good news.

Yeah.

Yeah.

True.

When he got there, he exclaimed to the station master, they're all dead in there, all dead, and then immediately collapsed.

Oh, so there's a marathon.

Yeah.

Pal,

you're doing this in like 1940s, like railroad worker boots as well.

Yeah.

And this is, you know, it's a single track line.

The closest place they can dispatch a rescue train from was Salerno, right?

Which is all the way back at basically the start of the run.

You know, they telegraph back, get a rescue train up here.

That train arrived very early in the morning, like five o'clock.

And they pulled the train out of the tunnel, shut the throttles, and took stock of the damages.

They also managed to get Luigi Ranga out of the tunnel as well.

He lived.

Jesus Christ.

His instinct to jump out the cab was a good one.

Turned out that was a good one, yeah.

And

yeah,

if you're on YouTube, you don't want to look at a whole bunch of dead bodies.

Look away from the screen now.

Well, they're pretty low resolution.

They are low res dead bodies, but it is a large pile.

That's great.

Yeah.

The official figures are 517 dead and 90 injured from partial asphyxiation.

We're never going to actually know the actual number of survivors since quite a few of the stowaways fled the scene when the authorities showed up.

I'm amazed as many people survived as they were.

That's crazy, no?

The last four cars of the train were stopped outside of the tunnel.

Yeah.

The bodies were piled up beside the tracks for identification.

Most were never identified and were buried in a mass grave in Bolvano Cemetery.

I mean, it's wartime, you know?

Like, nobody gives a fuck.

This is one I've never heard of this one before.

I've heard of a lot of railroad disasters, but they're typically more like, oh, the railroad did this and then the train died or the train got hit by an avalanche or natural weather or whatever.

But, you know, outside of wartime.

This one being in wartime and being the way it is, this is one of the worst railway disasters disasters in history yes obviously obviously italy's worst but the the this

is one of the worst like it's it's in the top you know x amount

yeah i i mean certainly probably the worst freight train disaster in history because usually you don't have that many passengers on a freight train right

yeah

um the two engineers and the firemen were given funerals luigi ranga actually lived to tell the tale and returned to railroad work massacre

Back in those days, it was all professions, you know?

Like, what are you going to do?

Get another job.

Right.

One of the engineers was going out with a large sum of money from

the Railway Drivers Collective in Naples to purchase a huge consignment of black olives for the return trip.

Oh, boy.

And that was discovered by one of his colleagues

during the identification of

the bodies.

And I believe he went out to go purchase all the

black olives with that.

I mean, that's alien solidarity.

Complete basic errand at all costs.

But also, crucially, do not like rob somebody who you find like a giant stack of banknotes on.

Yeah.

So then we get to the blame game.

Some people blame the station master who didn't have the authority to stop the train for not stopping the train.

Some people blame the brakeman because he applied the brakes when it seemed appropriate to do so.

Two flawless pieces of logic.

I think even if the brakes were applied in the van at the end of the train, that would have not stopped it from moving backwards if they really needed it.

One car with the handbrakes, you do real quick algebra, even including the multiplication of leverage.

Yeah.

One car with the brakes does not get you a whole stalled train.

The train was overloaded.

Yes.

Lots of people blamed Allied Command for putting together this huge-ass train and running it through the tunnel with bad coal.

Well,

the huge-ass train is Allied Command.

The bad coal is also Allied Command, but in separate instances, right?

Like

the same sort of thing, and you get bad coal, you get bad coal, and who knows what the pressure gauge readings were.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, the investigation here was very brief and inconclusive.

Allied command actually ran some test trains through the tunnel with the crews that had respirators on them and found out that, um, huh, this coal that works fine in the big American locomotives isn't working in these smaller European locomotives.

Engines are designed for the kind of coal that they're designed for.

Hence, my earlier story of 491 and coal that's perfectly good perfectly good btu plugging the entire fucking thing up yep but rather than get better coal they slapped a wait limit on the line and banned doubleheading ah well bam banned it there there she be

then they added a mandatory waiting period of one hour between trains uh to allow the smoke to clear out of the tunnel sort of did they at least employ a local to wave a fan at the tunnel during that that hour?

No.

I think they did station guards at each end for this purpose.

Good enough.

Yeah.

Well, they could wave a tunnel.

Wonderful step to the primarily railroad cop-based economy.

Yeah.

There were no...

Oh, go ahead.

The other fun, you know,

solution to this.

Why do mechanical engineers exist in this day and age?

Mechanical engineering is so easy.

Tunnels,

they compute the amount of cubic feet per minute that must be evacuated from a tunnel like when when i went to work in transit everybody who is a mechanical engineer except me because i was stupid and did signals instead everybody was just figuring out how do you get all of the air out of the tunnel as fast as you can uh so i saw this movie tenant about that yeah one one little italian boy with a with a uh you know paper whatever

Not so much.

Yeah.

There's a reason that there's jobs for that.

Oh, God.

I knew someone who was working in, I forget if it was on this podcast or not.

They mentioned this anecdote, working in the ventilation tunnel for, I think, the Holland tunnel.

And they asked while they were doing some inspection in there, what happens if there's a fire and the ventilation system kicks on?

And the other guy was like, well, we die.

Just say it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a there's a reason there's this whole like thing.

It's a national thing that,

you know, hopefully continues to exist.

Screams in agony vaguely at Washington, D.C.

So, yeah.

National Fire Prevention Act?

What if it became the

nothing?

What if it was nothing?

The nothing protection.

The nothing act.

Yes.

That one.

There's nothing good that they do there.

They don't try to prevent fires or, you know, prevent people from dying this way with flames in a tunnel.

Have you considered that fire protection is woke?

Ah, yeah.

Oh, sounds uh sounds pretty gay to me so

i i mean when you don't have it you go to sleep so uh yeah so

damn didn't think of that yeah

hard to argue at any rate there were no further accidents in the army tunnel problem solved everyone

this this situation remained until you know diesel trains hit the line in the 1950s they're able to up the tonnage then uh finally real modernization arrived in 1994, and they put some fancy tilting electric trains on the line.

Are you saying that diesel trains are not modern?

How dare you?

It was a 50-year interlude, and now thankfully it's over, and they have a real train on there.

Are real trains only trains with electric overhead wires?

Yeah, I'm thinking about becoming like a

here.

Here is my argument: these

real trains and mental disorders.

That's even worse.

All right.

I follow the mental disorders camp.

I'll call diesel trains modern when they build another one in the United States.

Oh, shots fired.

Well, I mean, they built most of them in the U.S., but

what was the last big order, like 2019 or something?

Yeah,

the GE Evolution series has not been a while, and Caterpillar has been on the struggle bus trying to figure out tier four emissions.

So

we have no modern trains anymore.

It's over.

It's done.

Yeah, U.S.

was really good at making locomotives, and then all of a sudden they weren't.

Private equity happened.

Yep.

So, what did we learn?

Fans, war is hell.

War is hell.

If you say anything anti-steam engine, I'm blocking your podcast.

Don't ride on a freight train.

Yeah, don't ride on the freight train.

Yes, the exhaust gases from Chu-Choo's whatever variety are bad.

Just in a more human sense, you can be killed at any time by something of which you have no comprehension, like a bug in the gears of a complicated machine.

Yes.

And perhaps, maybe, have some more empathy for everyone.

that you know and everyone that you don't know.

It's important.

We're all humans.

We're all living things, whether or not we're humans.

We're all living things.

We all care about each other, and maybe we should all respect that a little bit more.

And steam locomotives are bullshit.

Fuck you.

Eat shit and die, you whiny bitch.

We respect locomotives.

I love to defeat empathy.

We love living things, except for those.

whiny bitches that do not like steam locomotives who can eat shit and die.

The clear answer here is that you know these these uh italians should have bought you know nice big steam locomotives for this as opposed to whatever whatever this is

should have put a should have put a k28 in there

k28 was a wee bit smaller but we bit wider wouldn't fit through the tunnel but damn well that's your that's fine easy solution like it doesn't fit in the tunnel nobody dies in the tunnel just bounce it out

k28s instead.

I mean, K-28s of the grand locomotives, one of the best designs.

Alco had it figured out.

They've got really nice suspension designs that I could talk about for way too long for this podcast.

But anyway, they're fantastic.

There's a reason they're called the sports models, and it is easy to suss out.

All right.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake Shake hands with danger.

Dear November, Roz, Liam, and Gareth.

No.

No, no.

If there is a guest, no, there isn't.

Fuck you.

Hey, see,

I don't even need to say anything.

I don't even need to say anything because the person who wrote the safety third is on my side.

Yeah.

May I say, first of all, rest in paradise milkshake.

What a guy.

Oh.

Oh.

Yeah.

This is a story about the one true enemy of solar workers.

No, it's not roofers.

I'm talking about the wind.

A few months into my solar installing life, I was working on an office building in the northeast.

It was the tallest building around with no protection from wind gusts coming across a big body of water a few miles away.

It was a flat membrane roof in February, covered in ice.

with no lip on the roof edge between you and a three-story drop into the parking lot below.

There was one portable penetrator-style tie-off point, and about 10 workers.

I assume that's when there's like something you stick in the roof, and then that's where everyone ties the fall protection system.

I see, okay, sure.

I was thinking of something else.

Yeah.

And about 10 workers.

I'll let you guess how useful that was.

When we started the job, the first task was to set up a guardrail

system made out of two by fours set in plastic bases and weighed down with sandbags.

oh that sounds safe as hell in order to build this you had to walk practically practically to the edge of the slippery roof carrying lumber or 60 pound sandbags then assemble all the pieces getting getting killed assembling the guardrails is a great bit

yeah whenever we left the job for the day the wind would blow the guardrails over sometimes actually ripping out the screws and disassembling the pieces

to solve this problem our foreman had us assemble and disassemble the guardrail every day when we arrived and left the job.

There's got to be an easier way to do that.

Yeah, it's called

have a fucking parapet on your building.

Architects, put a parapet on your fucking building.

People got to work on that roof.

Again, think slippery roof and then add more solar racking underfoot every day as time goes on.

One day we got up on a roof and quickly realized we were standing in the middle of 40 mile an hour gusts of wind and still had to build the fucking safety system.

Jesus.

A couple hours of back and forth with the foreman and a few absolutely fucking knots and we were out of there.

We left all our guardrail equipment strapped or weighed down in the middle of the roof as per usual before we left.

Less than an hour later, I got a call from the foreman asking if I could come back and help him out.

Me and another guy that were still nearby went back.

It turned out that the guardrail posts and bases were blowing off the roof into the parking lots below and it only barely missed a lot of parked cars.

Oh, good.

So we went up with more ratchet straps.

That solves every problem, right?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

If it moves, then it shouldn't, et cetera, et cetera.

So long as you say that shouldn't go anywhere.

Yeah.

Slap on twice for extra power.

The wind had gotten worse.

We literally had to crouch down to move around so the wind wouldn't blow us off the building.

As we were praying and strapping everything behind an HVAC unit, our foreman told us we had to go help another job as soon as we were done.

Now, when I say this next one was a doozy, my God, we went to a job that this company had finished almost a year prior.

It was a new library with a nice modern architectural twist.

The solar array on the roof

extended over the edge of the roof and had had then kicked upward into the direction of the wind.

I see that.

Very stylish.

Yes.

The solar panels were bolted through their aluminum frames onto rails running parallel to the face of the building.

The uplift from the 50 to 60 mile an hour gusts was tearing the aluminum frames away from the bolts and had blown two or three of the solar panels over the top of the building and into the parking lot behind it while the library was full of old folks for senior day.

Oh no, less stylish.

You may see in the photo there's a slightly lower section of the roof at the front of the building where the two planes of the solar array meet.

That's down here.

Uh-huh.

Uh hold on.

We got up on a roof through a hatch, crouched down onto that lower lip of the roof, moved down to the front left corner of the building where the panels were blowing away.

And every time there was a big gust of wind, we ducked under the panels as if it would protect us from a 50-pound

three and a half-foot by six-foot flying sheet of tempered glass and metal.

Yeah, a horrible way to get killed to just get fucking crash-bandicooted by a giant solar panel.

Then, my foreman proceeded with his plan, throwing the hook of our biggest ratchet strap into the wind to try and get it over the panels, then fishing it underneath the array with a makeshift crook made out of taped-together plastic reflective stakes and some six-gauge wire.

Jesus Christ.

Okay.

Sure.

I watched him do this for about 15 minutes, all while the lips of the solar panels were bouncing in the wind.

He was using the ratchet strap we used to tie down pallets on our flatbed, and the wind was blowing it right back at him.

In a moment of frustration, I watched my co-worker, who's not a small guy, try to climb out on top of the solar panels hanging over the left of the building.

to try and help him out.

That wasn't the loudest I'd ever yelled at someone in the workplace, but it it was close.

Eventually, I went to go get some longer, heavier ropes, and we got a couple of panels, secure-ish, and got the fuck out.

Jesus.

It was bad enough that the ciset 50-something building manager, thank you for your service to me.

Am I allowed to say that word?

I'll read it.

I call me Dyke.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

On my way out.

We found out later that the engineer who signed off on the design hadn't looked at the prints that closely.

Go figure.

Tracks.

You'll be shocked to know I don't do solar anymore, though I still miss it in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way.

Thanks for listening and putting together such a great show.

And hey, if any of your listeners are lefty electricians, do yourself a favor and Google the Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers.

You can't read this one either.

And Cheers Quiz.

And cheers to you.

Yes.

Brilliant.

This is why I stopped working on roofs, too.

I mean, you know,

don't get up on the roof.

Never let them make you get up on the roof.

Don't get up on a roof.

It's a bad idea.

And again, design your buildings.

Give me some parapets.

I like some parapets on a roof.

Maybe, you know, three or four feet.

One time I was in a building where it was like 12 feet.

That was great.

Maybe design design buildings to think about people who work on them as well as people who are going to live or work in them.

Yes.

Maintenance.

Just a thought.

Yeah.

Maintenance?

Maintenance.

What's that?

It's, you know, the thing that you have to do to make sure that the solar panel doesn't just randomly kill a senior.

That's when you hire an engineer to look at something and they write a report.

And then you throw it in a filing cabinet.

Yeah.

Usually it shows up like photocopyer are burned to hell in an episode of, well, there's your problem, like 20 years later.

You're welcome.

I've got my own filing cabinet full of things where engineers were told to not.

That should be an episode of this podcast.

But I'm just going to appreciate being a guest and letting you know that engineers are important.

Listen to them,

dumbasses.

That's a good idea.

Yes.

I would also recommend that.

If they give you a report and say, do something, you should probably do that.

Do that thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do that.

What did we learn?

War is hell.

Solar panels are hell.

The mallet is still the greatest steam locomotive ever devised

by the hand of man.

How dare you, Nova?

Gay and all serial.

All right.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Christ on a bike.

Sorry.

Yeah.

The concept of Christ on a bike.

The worst of all possible worlds.

Freakishly heavy Christ are.

He's so sad.

Trying to describe the Crystal Redenter above Rio de Janeiro in engineering.

Oh, God.

Excuse me.

Very fat Christ on a freakishly heavy bicycle.

Uh-huh.

The notes say don't forget to mention the worst of all possible worlds, which is a great podcast.

Not sure.

No, I was on it recently, but I copied this from the last podcast where I also mentioned I was on.

Well, I guess they just get a free endorsement.

So listen to the worst of all possible worlds.

Really is a good podcast.

Listen to no gods, no mares, also trash each of Kill James Wand.

Mark, I believe you should have several commercials.

Yeah.

What's up, guys?

This is Heiss.

Please check me out on YouTube.

Heist, H-Y-C-E.

And that is my YouTube.

And yes, we do talk about trains.

So if you want to learn more about train things, check me out on YouTube.

H-Y-C-E.

Heist.

Find the Blue Bird with the Engineer's Hat.

That is me misspelling something for my entire existence.

As well, Century of Steam, Studio 346.

I'm the president of Studio 346.

We're making a train video game

bit by bit.

It's going to take a little bit more time.

It's not coming out this year, but hopefully, maybe shrugs next year.

Hopefully, it's great.

I heard every time someone asks you when you come out, when it's going to come out, you delay it by a week.

You know, I'm trying to pull a page out of of Gabe Newell's book, and that seems reasonable.

The point of it is

we love this.

I know that my fellow friend, Tom Coletti, aka Wings and Strings, the they, the them, the amazing.

I have yet to

meet a human who is as smart in every single possible, fasciable way than the way Tom is.

Tom is a part of the team, and they've been on the podcast before here.

Yes, multiple times, and they were the reason why I am now here, which very much appreciate you guys, including me.

It's been fun to talk about trains.

I like to talk too much, so you're going to have to edit a ton of me out, but you'll figure it out.

You guys are professionals.

I am really excited for San Juan Esteem.

I am also putting my full-throated endorsement on this project.

You should,

if you're listening to the podcast and you like trains, go get excited about this.

I'm excited.

I'm excited to finally see a devlog with polling.

Give me that polling.

Come on.

Okay.

All right.

You know, we're actually talking about, we were literally talking about polling the other

one.

We have not talked about polling

since the trailer.

And we're like, do we show it?

Do we save it for later?

Like, we know it works.

I will say that Justin said that, and maybe we'll get some traction.

Either way, Studio 346, Century Esteem, we're talking about Train Things.

We love it.

We care about it so much.

We're trying to give you all of the experiences, sans, the dying in a tunnel from the inhalation, but we're going to give you everything up to that point where you can feel every little piece of a locomotive along the way.

And we really, truly believe and loving it with all of our hearts.

And that's the hill we will die on.

So

please check it out.

It looks beautiful, which is my problem.

It should be set somewhere horrible in Britain instead.

Have you considered that, maybe?

Like some kind of industrial sort of like hellscape?

That'd be cool.

No, sorry.

We're trying to have an escape from this fuck shit that is this universe that we live in right now.

But what if, what if I like the misery?

Well, then you're fucked in the head, but thanks for having me.