Episode 175: The Marlboro Unlimited

That's the same for me and the little one.

She will have Serbian dual citizenship.

So, you know, that's safe on that front, you know.

No right-wing tendencies in Serbia.

No.

Thank God.

I have one citizenship.

As I've said on this show, I believe the deal is if I'm ever in a position where I need to, like, the U.S.

government has to come and get me.

That's the one deal I've cut.

It's like, I pay my taxes and you come and get me.

Yeah, off the roof of the embassy, you're like clinging to the skids of the helicopter, you know.

No, this is this says, U.S.

citizen, you kick me out of here.

I don't want a seat.

I don't want to stand.

I want a seat.

Just like, just like Chinook going overhead, like, excuse me, what's your in-flight menu like?

The movies on this thing suck ass.

Just trying to get my own cracked 4K rip of fucking 1917 to work, like showing it to the pilot so we can see the detail, immediately crashing into a hillside.

Sorry, we only we only show Vietnam movies on this flight.

Um,

yeah, so my wife, uh, the lovely and talented and beautiful lady that she is, doesn't know the difference between Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now and refuses to watch either of them.

I know.

Oh my god.

Yesterday, I thought.

Bridge on the River Kawai is the one with the bridge.

That's true.

Famously so, yeah.

Yeah, it's kind of the thing.

I mean,

geographically, it's not the hugest separation, I suppose.

Like, it's not like not being able to tell the difference between like Apocalypse Now and

I don't know, the guns of Navaroning or something.

Well, I think the thing is she's a civil engineering movie.

She hates

they blew it up.

No, that's not.

You bastards blew it up.

What is that?

That's from Planet of the Age.

Planet of the Age.

Planet of the Age.

Now, Liam, you're doing it.

Rin's confusing.

I don't know who's in the future.

Planet of the Aston haunts my prince.

Have you dropped this man?

It's just Charlton Aston.

Yeah, you remember that bit in Bridge Over the River Choir where they're in that chariot race and they're like whipping each other?

Oh my God, that's a good bit.

That's a good bit.

Everyone's in that movie.

Jesus shows up.

There's like some trirenes.

Oh my God.

God,

I used to believe this.

This was the Bridge Over the River Choir.

Yeah.

But then we get confused with El Cid, which if we're going to really get into the Charlton Heston in depth, and anyway.

Yeah.

i'm not seeing my own waveform which is a fine

that's a known issue yeah zencaster is the biggest piece of shit in the world don't worry about it i i i once i once tweeted at them i was like like no at them i think i just mentioned them i was like fix your product like i hadn't tagged them so they had to name search themselves oh and like the cfo was like uh

like we'll we'll set up a call and then we they never did oh

yeah and now now on their front page so like we've got a enabled tools and shit and it's like

it was a Zencaster call.

That's why it didn't work.

Yeah.

I can't wait for the random drop 45 minutes into this.

Anyway, welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters, which in and of itself is a disaster with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

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

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her i actually got them right this time yay liam yay liam hi my name is liam mckanderson my pronouns are he him i'm the person talking right now i think i never say you i think you just are expected to know it's liam uh and and uh

with me uh are the two not hostages not not hostages can't see that clearly enough hey no i'm i you know the next the next in line of the of the co-host although i'm very excited to say that devin they have they are now a voiced co-host in the in thank thanks to our

bit from a couple of episodes ago, which it will be.

God, I completely no idea why recording schedule is.

I think there is another one in between the last one and this one.

So, so hi, Devin, voiced member of the of the podcast now.

Um, no, my name is Gareth Dennis.

My pronouns are here.

Devin was on the photography episode.

Oh, yeah, that's what happened as a guest.

Yes, Devin was there, and they uh, they were very funny because I was just like, You leave the burps, and they just go, No, I cut them out, man.

And I was just like, Oh, fuck you, Devin.

How dare you?

And we have a bonus guest who, once again, is not under duress.

There's no bob collar here.

No, I'm here willingly.

My name is Jay Besquelhausen.

My pronouns are he and him.

And I've been invited back kindly with no coercion at all.

Yes.

Perfect.

Very, very well done.

Please ignore the beeping in the back of the mix.

Also,

I enjoyed badly disrespecting Gareth by like cutting off half of his introduction.

That's to be fair.

That's how you know you've arrived almost there's your problem and we'll be welcomed back as you just get talked over.

That's it.

So, what you see on the screen in front of you is a train going whoosh.

To be fair, it's going whoosh as fuck in there.

It's definitely really going whoosh.

Yeah, this looks like Loch Maganteak, which I learned.

I learned it's not Lake Megan.

The copy reads: for those of you on audio, Marlborough Unlimited, the train, the trip, the gear.

Oh, hell yeah.

We're going to Flavor Country.

Yes.

It literally took me, I've known about this train for a long time.

It took me until like this podcast that it's a play on like the Marlborough Limited.

Like this is the train something limited.

I had no idea.

Oh, yeah.

And I'm like, okay, that's a little clever, but it's not clever enough to make it like.

It's the last clever thing that's going to happen.

Today we're going to talk about the infamous Marlborough Unlimited promotional train that never ran.

Too cool for this world.

Yes.

So I want to say I got a bunch of info on this from themetrains.com and also a trainweb.org site about ultradomes and also alaskarails.org.

And then various public tobacco industry document piles, which they had to be like sued sued for, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

The stuff that the court ordered them to produce on the website is basically the equivalent of that scene in Pentagon Wars where they just wheel in, you know, one ton of documents in like, you know, uh, banker boxes.

Oh, you want you want the documents about how we were knowingly giving kids cancer?

Well, fuck you.

Here's the train stuff to it.

And

someone who's a real historian should go and look look this up because this was just me, you know, searching for two days through, you know, the piles of night.

Yeah, like a pile of submittals and meeting minutes and change orders to try and piece the story together.

Imagine getting your like PhD on on like the official train of smoking.

Yeah.

I want to say,

so, Nova, you used to smoke.

I did.

I did.

I used to smoke.

I smoke Marlboros predominantly, in fact.

Me too.

Interesting.

Okay.

Gareth.

I didn't get this voice from anything other than Marlborough Reds, and believe me, it used to be a lot worse.

When people are like, oh, it's so cool that you don't voice train.

It's like, no, no, no.

Anytime I even think about it, there are the thousands of cigarettes I smoked from the age of like 17 to 25 clinging onto me and dragging that vocal range downwards.

Yeah.

I'm just imagining like the oubliette scene from Labyrinth, all those hands, but they're not hands.

They're like cigarettes just like grabbing you and pulling you down the air.

That's it, gross, yeah, horrifying.

I would, I would describe myself as a moderate smoker.

I have a cigarette every 18 to 24 months, and you hate it every time.

Yeah,

you are the person for whom all of the like the tobacco industry's numbers are designed for.

You're the person who's like, for whom smoking isn't that bad, and four out of five doctors recommend camels or whatever.

So, like,

I was a heavy smoker, I was a two-pack a day smoker, uh, and like they did no favors for me don't smoke kids don't smoke uh no i and i'm i'm the weird i'm the nerd of this uh group uh and i'm uh that i'm including jay within that i'm even nerdier because i've never even taken a toque of a cigarette not even once you're better off believe me yeah yeah you're better off uh that's not the point the point is where's my snoosh trait

i just i just quit cold turkey and there's no cold turkey train either i guess that's all trains oh that can be arranged i'm sure there's.

I'm positive there is a cold turkey train somewhere.

Amtrak won't let us have it, but

the plan will be revealed in due time.

Yes, we're going to go ahead.

Well,

I will say,

before we talk about the cigarette train, we have to do the goddamn news.

Oh, boy.

Welcome.

I fucking fucking hate this cunt.

It's the fucking the Hitler zone.

It's the Hitler zone.

It's Hitler's time.

Look, look, this inauguration was amazing.

I'm sorry I said the word cunt, mom, but he deserves it.

I mean, listen, I'm gonna, I really like the bit that we ginned up last time where we have Devon cover all the stuff that we can't say vocally.

So

let me be absolutely clear.

I was hoping that somebody was gonna

in this place.

I was hoping they were all gonna know.

Yeah.

And that didn't, that didn't happen.

Instead, instead, they're just

rooting for the.

yeah, or like.

I'm going to have to take that out of the episode.

I was rooting for like some kind of

writ large.

I was roosting for a bunch of stuff.

You can cut all of that.

And like, you know, obviously none of that.

At least someone could have tried, right?

You could get an A for effort.

Yeah, you could have just like

we need now.

What if I'd left that in?

Now my left left.

I'm trying to get a visa out of this federal government, so please cut as much of that as possible and leave like two verbs and the and nobody did.

So yeah,

in order of importance, things that occurred at the inauguration and just afterwards,

the president saluted a man from the fake village people

wearing assless chaps.

No word on if the president was wearing assless chaps as well.

Trump brackets gay brackets question mark.

He's gonna, this motherfucker is going to like remove all LGBT people from the military, and he is saluting a man in assless chaps, which is in itself extremely confusing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Elon did

apparently not a Nazi salute.

It's a Nazi salute.

Like the dude, you are not this stupid.

He did a Nazi salute.

Everybody saw it.

Um, I think he was trying to make it more deniable.

He looks like biting his lip because he's like horny, I guess.

Yeah, for Nazis.

I think he was trying to do something uh that was a little bit more deniable than this, but then it came out as just full-on Nazi salute times two,

and everybody

brewed himself up for it because of how much of a fuss he made of it, right?

Yeah, and then everybody from the ADL on down was like, Well, listen, you know, maybe everybody gets a little

bit of an arm cramp sometimes.

You got to stretch that bad boy out, you know.

Well, some people were saying it's he did a Nazi salute because he had Asperger,

which

let it be known that that is actually also a Nazi disease.

Um,

so you know, this is so you're not going to clarify that one any further.

No, let it roll.

Hans Asperger was a Nazi, okay.

Good.

We need to do that.

This is a train episode.

If you just go in that one,

it's over.

No, no, no.

I like

Melania.

I can never say her name right.

I like the Undertaker outfit she had on.

Melania's hat is the most important part.

I didn't know the Benadryl hat man was a woman.

I'm enjoying kind of like slightly surrealist, like Tarsim directing the full 30s gangster look.

That's something.

It's also of like no relevance to this.

Trump is president now and is doing all of the stuff that he said he would do, which is

it's all the Hitler stuff.

You know, he got on stage and he signed like 50 executive orders, all of which are about as terrible as you can imagine.

You know, the usual kind of focus on trans people, on like

DEI,

whatever the fuck that's supposed to be, but you know, you know what that's supposed to be.

You know what it means.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, he repealed the fucking Equal Opportunity Employment Act, which I think that's pretty clear what the desire is there.

It's not about CIA officers wearing a rainbow lanyard to work.

A lot of these are just not going to hold up in court.

They're just going to force organizations like the ACLU to waste a lot of money and time.

Yes.

I have thoughts on three.

There's three things that I have thoughts on here.

The first is that this increases the likelihood that Musk is out on his ear quite quickly because it took all the attention away from Trump, which will have annoyed Trump extremely.

That's the first thing I thought about when I saw him do the Nazi salute.

Other than what a pathetic little weed, desperate for attention.

Because whether or not he's a Nazi is kind of immaterial.

It's just how much desperate for attention he is that really.

That's number one thing.

Yeah.

But also, he is actually a Nazi, of course.

Number two thing is all the turfs in the UK that were like actually cheering on Trump.

And this at the same time as like all the abortion advice was taken off every single federal website,

all of the protection on just that enormous erosion of women's rights immediately number two thing awful number three thing um is that it appears that every citizen of the united states is or every at least every new citizen of the united states all the kids born are all going to be classified as women yeah because the executive order feminism yeah the executive order said from conception and we're all women from conception for like several weeks.

I mean, to be clear, this is, this is the least enforceable one.

This is the one that I think even this Supreme Court has a chance of not going for, which is just trying to kind of unilaterally repeal the 14th Amendment and end birthright citizenship.

This was in court in Seattle this morning,

and the judge cut the Department of Justice off in their submissions to go, is this constitutional?

and then ruled that it was flagrantly unconstitutional and said that he was ashamed that like any lawyer could even claim that it was.

So, we'll see where that goes.

All of the other stuff.

I'm not going to say it's not even like the 14th Amendment that's the issue.

I thought birthright citizenship was in just straight up the Constitution.

Well, I

for is it first?

I don't know that

I thought First Amendment was no, no, no, no, no, wait, what is First Amendment?

It's freedom of speech, free speech.

Oh, shit.

Assembly.

No, maybe.

The 14th Amendment and

it's a citizenship clause.

It's a citizenship clause.

Okay, well, it's a 14th Amendment.

In any case, right.

I think that's the thing that's least likely to stand up.

All of the other stuff, there's

a decent chance that much of this can get through.

And in the meantime,

factually, rather than legally, like many people's lives can be made miserable in the meantime.

Every trans person that I know in America is terrified right now.

for good reason, I think.

Although I think you have to maintain some kind of sense of perspective and, you know, ability to, you know, plan uh and and think about these things in terms of like these people are morons and will fail they're just very dangerous on the way down yeah yeah I think it's true friendly easy to get Irish citizenship

I mean yeah absolutely

but yeah it really it feels like it's so bleak because if there's any aspect of policy that the federal government makes that you're at all interested in uh there there will be something to trigger and own you um like the the us is going to leave the World Health Organization, which, as someone who is married to a healthcare worker, I just congratulations, China,

congratulations, China, on your victory.

Congratulations,

I am, I am personally very worried about the executive order to uh quarter soldiers in my house in a manner not prescribed prescribed by law.

Um,

yeah, it's kind of a speedrun to violate

every article and amendment of the Constitution.

Yeah, except the second, except the second except the second

that's the only account i just think that i just yeah i i i think a lot about the words from the again i know i'd do an awful lot of cross-posting from the the the the tf episode the devon report uh where co-host uh in the behind the scenes devon and and you know

um and abby were talking about um what trans people have to do right now which is live And I'm not going to try and emulate the words.

All three of you said it so beautifully, but

that continues to inspire me in in these depressing moments and hopefully it's comforting for all of our trans siblings out there as well yeah i i think that like anyone who is being targeted by this administration and they're not being shy about who those people are uh it needs to be as resilient as as they can be right and that's that's partly a function of just like keeping yourself alive and keeping your own kind of motivation and like will up.

And it's also partly just like,

you know, whether that goes from that to like keeping a go bag by the door whatever it is you know um and i i think you know you just you you have to think about that stuff you should have been thinking about this stuff i've been talking about it um and yeah it's four years is a long time but i have no idea how this ends and you know maybe we will see uh trump getting executed on the white house lawn by the kind of loyalist troops of woke general milley so who knows i've been strong chance he gets executed by trump supporters yeah The strongest chance he gets.

But also, he might also just die.

He's really old and actually probably extremely unhealthy.

And not even the weird stuff that they give U.S.

presidents can keep that husk going for a huge amount of time.

Especially not now that he's defunded the NIH.

Well, quite.

Yeah, that's very true.

The thing I was going to say, the last thing I wanted to say on this is

there succession?

Is there someone else who can unify enough of an electorate in the same way Trump does?

Because I don't think there is, which means that when he dies, when he, whatever happens,

let's face it, the fact that he will reach the last of his terms doesn't matter.

That doesn't matter.

The rules don't matter.

But him dying would, if that, when that happens, it will happen.

There is no succession, really.

There's not some other goon who's going to come in who'll manage to do as good a job of unifying everyone that he does, right?

And that there's some hope.

I mean, they'll do auditions, but they'll have to hook him up to the eternal life machine, like the God Emperor and Warhammer.

10,000 MAGA psychers a day.

I, I mean, listen, the thing, the thing that I was trying to reassure people with,

because I was in a room full of trans people during the inauguration, and everybody was very depressed.

And I just, I, I, the way I tried to frame it was, if not politically, then actuarially, at least, we will outlive Trump, like pretty much all of us will.

Yes.

And you, you will get to see that man die.

So, uh, you know, that's a, that's a nice, that's a nice thing to think about.

Hopefully, sooner rather than later.

But, and also, Tesla's going to go to shit because he relies on China and

a lot of Europe.

And Tesla is, I have a suspicion that's a company that is very suddenly going to start getting valued more realistically

fairly soon.

I suspect

that's also be nice to see Elon Musk go from most rich to extremely not most rich guy.

But there's some minor companies.

There's a lot of money on it.

Someone pulls a trading places on them.

And outliving them all will be Melania wearing precisely this outfit.

What was really funny was today,

this morning, I got a, you will hear it in the next Trash Future episode, a non-mutable

emergency alert on my phone informing me that the weather was going to be bad.

Right.

It was like a

sort of like the full emergency alert system thing being like there's a like a red weather warning.

Don't go outside, everything's closed

because you know, storms because of climate change.

And I didn't look at my phone for a second because it was just like, oh, okay, I wasn't expecting him to like nuke somebody this quickly, but

I guess we're just going with it, fine.

And then I actually did look at my phone.

I was like, you're telling me that I might get like falling roof tiles landing on me.

Yeah.

Melania, just do us all a solid, you know, Slovenian power, you know, Slavo and Mir.

We can do it.

Yeah,

that man in his sleep.

Like they did to Scalia.

Listen, listen, right.

Here's what I want.

And I'm going to pitch this to you, right?

Elon Musk.

Whoa, come on.

Palace coup, right?

There's going to be so many words, YouTube words said here.

Thank you, Devin, for your service.

Thank you keeping me in my employment.

We do have to look on the bright side.

We will get to see some more insane Melanio White House decorations.

Okay, that's true.

Yeah.

I will say that.

That lady has a clearer sense of like Christmas aesthetic.

Yeah.

Yes.

Evil Christmas?

See you all for evil Christmas.

All the bits where he has to actually be president and do the bullshit ceremonial stuff, like the time he at Easter put candy on top of a kid in a minion costume's head or

funniest thing you still believe in Santa because at 10 it's marginal right like it's marginal

four more years of that

we got you gotta be able to laugh at the funny shit it's all horrifying

but like at least there's some stupid horrifying comedy to be scrounged out of it.

Talking of stupid to horrifying comedy.

Ooh, yes.

The setup.

Mr.

Space Rock.

Elon Musk's

Starship 7 exploded on re-entry.

Masterful

Gamba.

Yeah, that's real deals.

Yeah.

They caught the booster, though.

That's supposed to be the hard part, but yeah, re-entry, nah, it didn't work.

They had a re-entry a bunch of exit, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, they launched the thing and it second stage just blew up.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

Pop.

Technically, this is an MLRS.

So, you know, send SpaceX to Ukraine.

You had to reroute a bunch of airliners and crap.

It was

a new fear for flying.

Even though I'm not flying over the Caribbean alive, but just like, oh, sorry, you're going to get hit by an exploded rocket.

I feel like just one mission gets taken off by Elon's like anti-woke Mars colony ship that like gets up to like 30,000 feet and like hits a 737.

That or all the Starlink satellites, all the batteries run out at the same time, they all de-orbit simultaneously.

And what is like 175,000 like half-meter-sized satellites just like destroy aviation at one in one if L sweep?

That's just kind of like mortaring the entire world with a bunch of garbage can-sized satellites.

Giving yourself Kessler syndrome, but inside the atmosphere.

Yeah, it's way harder to do that.

You know, it's like letting loose a bunch of unmanned Cessnas to just fly around randomly.

In atmosphere, Kessler Syndrome 2025.

Yeah.

I love that.

That's the t-shirt suggestions.

I love that.

Yeah, there she goes.

Look at that.

Yeah.

I don't know what else to say about this one, other it's funny that Elon's rocket blew up.

It is.

I watch for all of his failures.

You know,

they're going to probably launch another one sometime soon.

We'll see if that one blows up and we'll report on it.

At least this one just blew up over the Caribbean instead of blowing up in that wildlife preserve in Texas that he's somehow allowed to keep blowing up.

Well, I mean,

essentially, it does blow up there.

That's what the rockets do.

That's true.

Controlled explosion.

yeah so how much of this expensive titanium etc is now being is now like

littered through the roofs of some innocent people

this one's made out of stainless steel yeah oh god it is yeah because it's not a fucking fire truck god he's such a cunt

the funniest thing when they were first doing the prototype of this uh they literally went and contracted the construction to like a water tower company it's like these guys know how to do stainless steel and just went and get like whatever company puts up the ones that say save ferris or whatever.

They're just like,

they'll build my rocket.

Do you know what's great is that all of us get to be smug about the fact that when Elon Musk was getting cameos in fucking Star Trek and popping up everywhere, all of us here and quite a lot of you folks listening knew he was a fucking wee shanner.

Yeah, I never liked him.

I can genuinely cash that one in now.

I have never liked or admired or trusted that man.

I've never met a nice South African.

shout out to Pierre Navelli.

How you doing, boy?

To be fair, I've never met him either.

So, you know, you're right.

Same, same.

Yeah, let's just look at this beautiful firework dancing in the sky and think of how much money it will have lost Elon Musk for us to say.

Yeah.

Speaking of money, that was the goddamn news.

We need to make some money by you buying tickets to our shows.

Oh, yeah, we need that to pay to pay our rent and to pay for goods and services.

That's the most monopoly guy Roz has ever sounded.

Speaking of money, as he rubs his hands together and falls back into like a bath of coins.

Current state of the ticket sales,

the two Somerville shows are sold out.

The later New York show is sold out.

Washington, D.C.

just sold out.

New York City on that Tuesday still has about half the tickets left.

So if you you want to come see us on Tuesday, I think it's Tuesday,

you can do that.

Or you can come to Philly, where I think we still have about a third of the seats open

at the Fillmore.

What do we need to do at the Fillmore?

We need to fill more seats.

Fill more seats.

What do we need to do at whatever the DC venue is called?

Nothing.

They're all sold out.

Yeah.

Tuesday on it.

You're done.

You're stuck.

I'm Tuesday.

I'm NYC.

I'm excited for this.

Yeah.

This is, I,

yeah, gonna be enjoying watching everyone get very excited for it.

Times Square.

That's in New York City.

We're all the stuff.

New York City.

That's the city where, like, you could, at any given day, you could see anything from a person celebrating a new business that they've started

to

smashing into the world.

So, yeah, New York, New York.

I want to be a part of it, you know?

It's making me a headache.

Yeah.

The big

town.

Oh, the New Orleans show is coming.

Wow, the windy city.

I don't know how the fuck we're going to book that.

America's second city.

The charm city.

Beaten town.

I will play a fucking house show in New Orleans if you'll have us.

I don't give a shit.

They say

New York is the Chicago of America.

I think it's really funny.

Who's the sixth borough now to do all of this shit and then not play Chicago?

We're working on it.

We're fucking working on it.

We're working on it.

Stay tuned for that.

Things are cooking right now.

The problem is, if Justin enters Chicago, it tips the number of Polish people in the county over a maximum that was set by Mayor Daly back in the day.

It's like an old odometer.

It just doesn't roll on.

It turns out it's actually

like a loose file, and it does have a stack overflow there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's why I show my Norwegian card.

That's going to be a problem if we go to Minnesota, though.

I hate to carry two passports like I'm trying to go to,

you know.

You've seen that one top gear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Get the passport.

Trying to go to like Jordan after you've been in Israel or something, you know?

You can do that.

They have relatively friendly relations.

Yeah.

What's the country you can't go most into?

Any of the other ones.

Damn.

I picked the only one.

Shit.

At least,

I think I'm right.

I could be wrong.

It's been a minute since I had to deal with, I went on birthright, sorry.

And

you didn't buy a condo there, so you cost them money.

Yeah, I agree.

it.

It's like you went to Israel's house, but you left an upper decker there, and you kind of ate all the snacks out of the fridge.

So, like, to be honest, like, you were a guest there, and that's not great, but like, you're more of an inconvenience.

I am always more of an inconvenience.

Sorry, my wife is here.

You can't see it, but

actually.

No, but the hogs can't see it.

Rin's excitement at seeing Jay on screen was

palpable there.

Things are cooking, Gareth.

You do not know my plan yet, but things are cooking.

Wait, do I know your plan?

No,

no one knows my plan.

We'll see you in April, Jay.

We'll see you in April, Jay.

All right.

I've told this story before, but the last time Jay was on, but fuck you.

It's been like 50 episodes.

When I went to visit Jay at his parents' house, an undisclosed location in Undisclosed.

Yeah, you were there.

I know.

Oh my God.

Okay, bye.

Okay, bye.

She brought me more waters.

I drank like six seltzers.

I'm going to have to piss at some point.

I'm going to be Roz.

But

Corinne and her siblings met Jay,

who gave us many Coke Zeros.

And they were just like, he's so nice.

And he's so handsome.

And he's so tall.

And they were like,

they were just fawning all over.

I'm like, he's not that great.

Wow.

Wow.

You're the only one of them who actually knows me.

So, yeah, well, you are nice and handsome and tall.

You wandered around New York City with me that day when Roz was the most hugover I think I've ever seen.

I'm like, God, Malion.

When you showed up, and they're just like, Roz didn't even get on the train with me in Philly.

It was just 33 minutes.

33 minutes.

Speaking of,

I don't care.

I don't care.

Speaking of

trains,

we should do the episode for the nice people.

Oh, yeah.

Hello.

I needed a half hour being cheered up by the company of my friends because I saw a bit of Conclave for the second time.

And anytime I see that movie, it makes me real sad.

This is also why the Catholicism episode is taking 15 years to do.

We're all confronting some shit personally about it, all right?

Yeah, so yeah.

Also,

it's like the Katrina episode, which I swear to God I'm writing.

We want to do it right.

And also, we all have trauma, so leave us alone.

This is a handsome train.

It's Rock Island, baby.

Yeah, Rock Island Line.

It's a mighty good road.

Rock Island Line is the road to ride.

Wow.

Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific, notably several hundred miles from the Pacific.

You'll note that New York doesn't have the Rock Island because it's an inferior city that we're very happy to play.

Please buy those tickets.

Chicago also doesn't have the Rock Island anymore, to be fair.

I think the the latest people to have the Rock Island was Mississippi because some foamer bought the trademark and named their shortline the Rock Island or something like that and just painted the Rock Island Islands.

There's a lot of islands with a lot of rocks.

The first question we must ask is, what is a gallery car?

Can you look at pictures in it?

A Wes Anderson type beat where you're inside a beautiful car and it's full of like paintings and art and sculpture and stuff.

I wouldn't say beautiful.

These

two cars that this Rock Island line E-unit are hauling are gallery cars.

And the gallery car is a labor-saving device.

And in the case of the Rock Island, I believe, also a way to make their trains shorter because they were charged for access into Union Station by the car.

Is it a labor-saving device because you increase the gauge of your tunnels by what appears to be about 75 centimeters by running these two wagons around your railway?

Is that why?

So it saves on civil engineers.

Well, it's the Midwest, so no tunnels to be found.

Yeah, a little bit of bridges.

That's about it.

You got that signal bridge in the back.

You could do this thing another level higher if you want.

Yeah,

that's pretty strong.

Yeah, but you could tunnel through the Rock Island, wherever that is.

You may have Stephen Seagal running on top of this thing.

More on that later.

Is that far on that later?

Oh, God.

Okay.

Oh, God.

Jesus Christ.

So the idea of the gallery car

is it's a double-decker car, but the conductor only has to make one pass through to collect tickets.

And they do this by means of something wacky.

Oh, it's a bunk bed train, but with seats, not beds.

Yes.

Yeah.

Just a conductor doing some cirque de sole shit suspended from a thing, just sliding through the zip line.

So do you appreciate my art?

I very briefly have to talk about the one time we did double-decker trains within GB Loading Gauge, and it was Bullied who did it, and it was on the southern region, and that thing looks like the shonkiest, weirdest thing to

travel in of any train I've ever seen in my life.

And it's not dissimilar to this, to be fair.

People's legs dangling down into your face, there are things of this nature.

It's getting kicked really hard in the face anytime you move.

The Long Island Railroad also had some with a similar configuration where, you know, one uh booth was two steps up the other one next one was two steps down knee knockers the next one was the knee knockers yeah um let you see up ladies' skirts oh no yeah exactly

so it's a real real kind of like bridging the generations thing of seeing up a lady's skirt there of like uh

of being like that's bordian like seaside postcard fun to that's a serious sexual offense

So it's hard to photograph how the gallery car works.

The lower level, you have sort of two by two seating.

Lower level is normal.

The lower level is a normal car, but you have a low ceiling over the seats.

You can't fully stand up.

In the middle of the aisle, you can stand up.

And that's because the upper level is one seat and then an aisle and then a hole.

and then an aisle and then one seat.

This is deranged.

This is the working of a madman.

If you tried to like make my railroad pay for this, I would kill you.

This is madness.

It sort of makes sense when you think about it in a very 1950s way, though, right?

You get a bunch of single seats.

People don't want to sit in pairs anyway.

So you get a bunch of single seats upstairs.

You're not thinking about accessibility or how somebody who can't get a tight little spiral staircase can get upstairs.

It's the 1950s.

And your guy just walks through and takes everybody's tickets.

On knowledge and belief, the United States of America has one thing in abundance, and that's space.

Notes, what's that too?

But like also space.

Like

things bigger in America, a meme not for no reason, right?

Just make 350 superiority.

Yeah.

Make the fucking trained longer, man.

Or do like an actual double.

And a conductor has to walk longer.

Hire more conductors.

What the fuck do I care?

That's Keynesian.

Expensive and their union.

That's expensive.

That's expensive.

And they're union.

Okay.

So all these have the same basic format.

You have the center vestibule.

That's the main door to the car.

From the center vestibule, you then go either left or right.

You can either go sit in the normal seats downstairs or there are four tight winding staircases which bring you up to one of the four galleries, the mezzanine level, and you can sit up there.

These These are, so the, and then in the middle of the car above the vestibule, that's where the air conditioning is.

Um, so these were actually the cars I rode when I commuted to school in Northern Virginia, a more modern type of gallery car than these.

If we're looking at some old Buds or possibly Pullman standards, they ended up all over the country, and we're about to export a bunch to Peru because fuck you.

In particular, they were a Chicago-area invention, and then they got imported to the Bay Area and then eventually went to, I think Montreal used some for a little while.

Washington, D.C.

had some for a little while.

Nashville uses some old former Chicago.

VRE still uses them.

Yeah, Nashville has some of the really old ones.

Yeah.

We used them in the Bay Area up until

like six months ago until we got actual good electric trains.

Yeah, the one thing about, but the thing, the main thing about the gallery car, this is a labor-saving device.

It's designed to,

you know, so the conductor does one sweep.

Although when VRE was taken over by Kialis, which is SNCF's like consulting division, they actually started to send the conductor up through each mezzanine individually, which was very stupid.

A labor-creating device.

Labor-creating device, yes.

Dumb French people.

Anyway,

don't understand how things work.

I'll be interested to see what the rollover strength of these

are compared to more normal shaped vehicles.

Just don't fall over.

Just don't do it.

They're all post-Naperville, so I think they're fairly beefy.

I was about to say, I'm not sure if anyone has made one of these rollover.

Well, we're going to be the first.

Which is weird because there's a lot of them.

There are a lot of them.

Yeah.

So, okay, we've talked about what a gallery car is, who manufactures American railroad cars in the middle of the 20th century.

but yes but

oh it's on the screen Pullman yeah Pullman standard

but Pullman standard

Osgrove no what's the company that made the ones in the Federal Express Osgood no

Osgood Bradley they were pretty much gone by now but there was also like there were some smaller crappier ones too these are the only two you need to know Yeah, these are the two the two big ones.

There's essentially a duopoly in railroad car construction.

Oh, and sorry.

Also, British Rail Rail Engineering Limited manufactures vehicles that were in the U.S.

in the middle of the 20th century.

We sent our paces over fairly soon after this.

Oh, right.

Yeah, that's true.

Christ, did we?

I didn't realize we were a net exporter of misery that late into the 20th century.

No, I got to see it at the Connecticut Trolley Museum once.

Oh, yeah.

Wait, it's still in the northern U.S.?

So it's selling chases to Indianapolis, hoping they'll like them.

It might be.

It might be.

I'm not sure what happened to that thing.

We actually discussed that way back in episode three.

Three?

Yeah.

Anyway, episode three, was it?

Yeah, back then I didn't have all the osmosis, so I didn't even know what a train was.

So, yeah, Bud made the cars out of stainless steel.

Pullman Standard made the cars out of regular steel, but also sometimes stainless steel.

Yeah, stained full steel.

Disgusting.

Take a look at Pullman Standard's disgusting gallery car.

It's like, oh, it's got mildew on it.

They both built gallery cars for what it's worth.

Yes.

I think Pullman did more,

but both still do.

And both of those built in the 50s are still running in Chicago.

Yes.

Incredible.

So, you know, railroad passenger traffic dropped due to a variety of reasons, bad service, bad regulations, bad investments, so on and so forth.

Most passenger rail is taken over by various government agencies.

That's outside of the scope of this podcast on this episode.

This introduces a few new factors for how the new passenger rail customers are acting, right?

People buying passenger cars.

They're either doing something like Amtrak, where they have pooled together every piece of existing passenger car, passenger rolling stock in America, and they are selecting all the best of them.

So they don't need to buy anything for a long time.

And they're trying to unify their fleet as much as possible.

Or if they are, you know, sort of a commuter rail agency or something like that, who's getting some of the rejects, if they want new cars, they don't have a lot of money, but they may also be subject to regulations which require them to accept the lowest responsible bidder in acquiring new railroad cars, right?

Or again, they might just not order new railroad cars at all.

And

the thing about products from Budd or Pullman Standard is, you know, they were usually a little bit premium.

You know, they're not, they're not the bottom of the market.

Admittedly, there are duopoly, but

it was not difficult for other manufacturers to sort of come in and try and undercut them as a loss leader.

Yeah, cash.

Yeah,

exactly.

Yeah, fun.

So these big manufacturers start to struggle in the 1970s and the 1980s as a few manufacturers manufacturers from overseas start to try and muscle in.

And also, again, there's just less orders.

The Surface Transportation Act of 1982 creates this buy American clause, right?

This attempts to sort of shut the gate through protectionism after the horses have left.

You know, Amtrak and transit agencies are forced to purchase American-made trains just as Budd and Pullman Standard both exit the market.

Whoops.

Beautiful.

What a beautiful set of of incentives and responses.

Yeah, so Bud and Pullman Standard both exit the market in the late 1980s after filling their last absolutely massive orders.

I think for Bud, it was Subway cars of some kind.

Pullman Standard, it was the Superliner 2s.

I want to say, but it was the CTA cards, right?

That could be the, yeah, that sounds about right.

And then, you know, there's clearly no more orders that could keep the companies afloat that were forthcoming in the next couple decades.

So it was like, time to close up shop, I guess.

You made exactly the same as what's happening in the UK at the same time.

And your punishment is no more product ever.

Yeah.

But there are still people who want to buy new train cars, right?

So we have this flood of manufacturers

to come in, you know?

Efficient.

Yeah.

So

these two regulations, low bid and buy American, both resulted in extremely expensive cars from overseas being the norm.

Okay.

Well done, boys.

All right.

You know, no.

Sorry, real quick, I got a game for you.

What do you think that M and MBB stands for?

Oh, MBB.

The BB puts me in mind of like all of the German-speaking train companies.

Correct.

What's a German company starting with M?

Mercedes?

No.

Not Mercedes.

It's Mesheschmidt.

It's Mesherschmidt.

Oh, no, no.

I mean, listen,

one of my other guesses here was

because, like, I know Meshesmitt kept obviously, like, as from this, making stuff after the war.

Mengela, like, as in Joseph Mengela, like, literally his family's company,

still make, like, combine harvesters and shit and tractors.

Oh, God.

You can still.

Did they change the name at least?

No, you can still buy one.

That's brand recognition, you know.

So

why have you changed that?

Just the thing that came into my head when you said that it was Mesheschmidt is the uh is the BF one two five.

Is that a thing?

Is that a thing?

No, no.

Was.

No, it was a it's a gag it was a gag.

So, right, Jay, what that was, you see, was uh what I I took the BF one oh nine, which is a non-HST, I combined it with the HST, the one two five, combined the two of them in in as a bit, uh, but uh, didn't didn't didn't land.

I didn't land.

I thought it was pretty good.

They did show up.

They made exactly one type of rail car for the Boston area.

It came

and they never made another rail car for U.S.

again.

Yeah.

Okay.

Fuckers.

Funds are still running.

Yeah.

So you have like Nip and Shiro comes in.

They make

that again.

Nip and Shario.

There we go.

They come in.

They start building new gallery cars.

You got Bombardier coming in.

They make new double-deck cars.

Messer Schmidt, they make those nice cars for the MBTA.

Hyundai Rotem makes double-decker cars for the T and also for, whatchamacallit.

SEPTA.

No, it was Mark.

Mark.

That's right.

You guys have Rotem cars.

Yeah,

we did get the Rotem Silverliner 5s.

Yes.

But that was a separate plant from the first one that opened up and shut down for the first order.

Then we had a second plant that opened up and shut down for SEPTA.

Efficiency.

Yeah.

We have Mafursa from Brazil.

They made some cars for VRE and later Shoreline East.

Commonwealth Engineering out of Australia.

They designed some cars for the Long Island Railroad, which were then produced by Tokyo Car Corporation, as well as the M3s for Metro North.

The fun part is, of these companies, I believe most of these are producing.

Bud or Pullman Standard designs with Bud or Pullman Standard technology under license.

They were just not allowed to enter the American market after Bud and Pullman Standard disappeared.

So now you can pay a lot more money for the same product.

Mafersa, who holds that license then?

If Bud and Pullman are gone, who actually holds the IP for those licenses?

Now Bud is Bombardier or Alstom.

I want to say Pullman is also Bombardier Alstom now.

Yes.

Because of course.

But Mafersa was the Brazilian license builder for Bud.

So they already had the licenses from when they existed and then they just kept it.

Kalang was the license holder for Australia.

Tokyo was the license holder for Japan.

And then once the parent company, once Bud died, they were all able to bid.

Basically, I mean, you can see if you look at those Mufersa cars, they clearly like share components with Bud cars.

They're basically just Bud cars.

Just Bud cars.

And they look great as a result.

Bud knew what they were doing.

And I love the look of those Mufersa cars, but it's embarrassing.

But one of the things that happens here is that,

okay, when these manufacturers want to make cars for the American market, they're based in foreign state code FN.

So, you know,

they have to open up a factory in the United States, hire people, train them, manufacture the cars, hope they get a second order.

Then they don't.

Then they close the factory.

And then everyone gets laid off.

And then they, you know, maybe sort of idly try to bid for another order.

and then you know in order to sweeten the deal for the uh politicians they try and open a new factory in a new location closer to where the contract is you know rinse and repeat over and over again two to seven lights a very efficient way to distribute resources itinerant

like train builder

yeah

yeah the nomadic

of the gallery car building culture yeah

this shuts out most like small uh passenger car uh people who want like a small order of passenger cars, you just can't do that, right?

If you want to, if you have a small commuter railroad, you only need a couple cars.

Nah, sorry, we can't do that.

That's impossible.

Maybe you can buy some used cars.

But as discussed in another episode, we don't really have used railroad cars.

They're all spoken for.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So one man thought he could change that.

One company will rise from the ashes and build real American railroad railroad cars, and that company was Raider Rail Car.

Like the BTK killer?

Good question.

Dennis Raider getting into like a side gig aside from all the murder where he's like, I'm going to build railcars.

So I have comments on the top left-hand vehicle because that just looks like they've hollowed out a Deltic and put windows in the top and allowed you to travel in it.

This is, I believe, a Pullman standard superdome.

I'm getting superdome in the Pullman standard.

Yeah.

And it's an Alaska Railroad car as well.

She's super dome to Alaska.

We're going to talk about the Alaska Railroad a lot today.

Hell fucking yes.

Yeah.

So in 1982, Tom Rader was a man with an idea.

opening up the heart of Alaska to tourism, right?

The Alaskan cruise industry was getting into its stride, but most cruises stuck to the Alaskan panhandle, right?

Usually, you left Vancouver, you stopped in like Ketchikan and Juneau, got as far north as Skagway, then you turned around.

The one I took a long, long, long time ago also stopped in Wrangell.

I think that's usually off the beaten path.

That town was a shithole.

No offense to anyone in Wrangell who listens to this podcast.

I'm sure you also know that.

If you wanted to like the double down.

That's in exactly.

It had one store.

You liked Saint-Pierre Mukalada.

That had one store.

Yeah, that's a good point, actually.

So all I know about Alaska and small towns of that size is that they have a store that sells

mattresses.

I've learned this from a podcast that I enjoy listening to.

Thank you.

So I take it it was a mattress selling no gods.

It was kind of like a,

oh, yeah,

it was silly, yes.

If you wanted to go into the interior of Alaska to go see like Denali or go meet Sarah Palin,

you boarded a bus.

She's from like 20 minutes north of Anchorage.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You boarded a bus in Skagway.

Then you spent four days traveling.

You took a picture of the mountain.

You shook hands with Sarah Palin.

Then you spent four days going back all on sort of rough mountain roads, you know, the Alaska Highway with no services, no nothing for like hundreds of miles at a time.

No less than four border crossings because you had to go through the Yukon territory to get there.

So I'm just, I'm stuck on Skagway because that sounds like a word for the seam on my testicles.

It sounds like a location in Borderlands 6.

It's actually a really nice, pretty little town.

Looks beautiful.

Yeah, the white sky.

I do apologize for that.

And if you live there, you know that.

Strong opinions on towns in the Alaska panhandle on this podcast.

It's rich coming from a guy who grew up in Inveruri.

I will give you that.

It's okay.

So anyway,

you know, Rayner was aware of an underused and now state-owned asset, the Alaska Railroad.

Oh, boy.

If cruise ships bypassed Skagway and went a little further to the much less scenic town of Whittier, that's the town where everyone lives in one building.

Yes.

Okay, yeah, I know about this.

Because Nova mentioned it in the previous episode I mentioned.

It's so cool how the list of facts about Alaska is so limited.

All I know comes from a very recent episode of Acosta Mix.

That's my entire Alaska knowledge.

That's it.

You betcha.

Then, then, passengers could board a charter train, which would whisk them to the big city of Anchorage and then on to Denali and then to Fairbanks.

Excuse me.

Denali, thanks to Trump, is now back to Mount McKinley.

Oh, my God.

Jesus.

Oh, the national park is still Denali, though.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

You hear Florida is already, the Florida Weather Service is already calling it the Gulf of America.

Actually,

yeah

that's embarrassing for

the executive order i'll accept a limited trade where the gulf of mexico becomes uh the the gulf of denali and then as a result you get to you get to call it mount mexico

mount mount of mount mexico and then you have uh mexico becomes america

so yeah you take the train up to uh anchorage and then on to denali and then you go on to fairbanks you can enjoy the beautiful scenic Fairbanks, then return home by air.

So, Raider rehabilitated these four ex-Milwaukee Road Superdome cars, that's these guys up here,

for this service.

It proved to be an instant hit, right?

This revolutionized the Alaskan cruise industry.

These were actually just attached on the back of regular Alaska Railroad passenger trains.

You know, so

he built a business on this called Tour Alaska, and eventually he sold it to Princess Cruises, but he wasn't done yet, right?

Because there was a flaw in the super domes, they weren't big enough,

and they had to.

I was getting super dome,

yeah.

The super dome actually not super enough, yeah.

There's this big panel on top, and the way the windows were curved, it meant that it was pretty difficult if you were on one of the inner seats to see out the windows, right?

Rubbish, yeah.

So, clearly, we need a new type of train car that rectifies this: the ultra-dome.

So the concept is very simple.

You take an old busted gallery car, you cut the roof off, you extend it upwards a bit so you could stand up on the lower and upper floor.

You cut the holes in the side for bigger windows, right?

You add a shitload of glass over the new roof.

Hey, you got an ultra dome.

Ultra dome.

And so these ultra domes are some of of the largest passenger cars ever built, unless you like count, like, I don't know, articulated diners or something.

We don't like that, right?

No, we don't.

No, fuck those guys.

These make the full use of American loading gauge.

They do.

You know,

a lot of double-decker cars,

the floor is actually lower in the middle to make more room.

Not on these guys.

It's a full 48 inches above the rail.

And then the next floor is higher.

I mean, you can see there's a super liner to the left, and the super liner is on that bottom left image.

Super liner is a big ass railroad car.

And this person taking a photo can see clear over the roof of it.

I mean, this is epic.

Good God, do I want to be in this?

I assume that they are still running today and I can have a fantastic trip.

Yes, quite a few of them are still running.

In fact, I think basically all the ones that rolled off the assembly line from the series of companies associated with Tom Rader, if they made it out of the factory, they're still running.

Incredible.

We'll get to that later.

Oh, okay.

Noted.

Just don't think too, too hard about how the frames and shit are all like 50s commuter railroad cars that are now

moose.

That's what the locomotive is for.

That's a good point.

We don't have a cow catcher.

We have a moose catcher.

The first order of cars.

You're not catching that fucking thing.

You've got a moose obliterator.

Yeah.

The first order of cars was four cars that were designed to operate in pairs.

One of them had an 18-foot observation platform, an elevator, a gift shop, and the other car had a full-width kitchen on the lower floor and dining above.

No, you don't understand.

I need to see a cutaway Dorling Kendersley style illustration of this motherfucker immediately.

Full DK book dedicated to this vehicle solely.

You can see here, this is the elevator right here.

It was just a platform that went up and down.

It was for wheelchairs.

That's good.

Still cool.

Yeah, and then it had like a narrow spiral staircase.

Otherwise,

but yeah, you've got not just fine dining, but also luxury shopping on rails.

I don't know what you need the line for.

Yeah, that one doesn't even move.

Yeah, exactly.

Rolls around.

This could also operate alongside standard single-level equipment, unlike the roughly, you know, equivalent MTRAC Superliners, which required this special transition car if you wanted to hook it up to normal stuff, right?

These were just chucked onto the back.

These were essentially just like they paid the Alaska Railroad just to chuck these four cars on the back for a land cruise.

Yes.

So the fact that you could get between to, I don't know if they even let people use the regular train, but at least let crew get around is pretty important.

Yes.

One of the flaws was because they were essentially greenhouses, they needed really beefy HVAC, but they were enough of a hit, you know, with the tourists that they make loads of money, right?

Sure.

So these are big successes.

So Raider's like, we could probably sell more of these cars.

So he founds his own company, Raider Rail Car, right?

And decides we're going to design the most late 80s cocaine train cars match.

Yeah.

Oh, geez.

Train cars.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

But it's taken the furniture out of

like my great auntie's house from 1992.

Yeah, great.

auntie just had this chair.

This is cool.

I actually,

I wrote this slide and I realized the notes for it are actually a little bit inaccurate here.

This should probably go later on in the podcast, but these are just demonstrator cars to show what

Raider could do.

And the auntie

wanted, yeah.

Yeah.

This is small place restaurants, but the 80s, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

You want a car, you want a car with a mezzanine and it's got a grand piano and a dance floor and look it's got all these nice plush chairs so you guys have working area and it's got you know

um again you can look down the hole and see the people below um yeah

this is very this shows who this is pitching to though right because this is actually very nostalgic even this is super nostalgic this is like like kind of old-timey sort of saloon type stuff for for people who are used to cruising around or going to like slow bars that look like this.

So it's kind of interesting in a way.

You can see who the market was at the time.

And timing-wise for this, the whole like rail cruise idea was happening all over the place.

And a lot of times with shitty old gallery cars, just because those were the only cars available.

But it was because all of the, you know, this was when the boomers first started getting money.

And they had remembered, you know, their train trips and things from their youth and now wanted to do it again.

But fancy.

Yeah, it's when Heritage Railways in the UK started

growing quite rapidly.

Yeah, exactly.

This is sort of

the money.

Your greatest generation are now retiring and can travel, and your boomers who did it as a kid were starting.

So it's like, oh, shit, there's this whole new age of luxury train travel.

And Tom Rader said,

like, between huge bumps of Coke, I'd imagine.

Yeah, I can be the guy.

I can be that guy.

I got this.

So I'm so awake.

And Rader says he can do all kinds of stuff for these cars.

You can do sleeping cars.

You can do coaches.

You can do cars with balconies.

You can do cars with mezzadines, downstairs lounges,

upstairs lounges.

Any hair-brained idea you have, Raider Railcar could supply.

They were just putting anything on rails at this point.

I don't just mean this company.

I mean, you know, the government's like, what if we ship nuclear weapons around just at random?

And

this guy, and this guy's like, what if we ship grand pianos around basically at random?

you gotta nail that shit down

and so you know raider quickly carves out a niche for itself in building like luxury railroad cars you know a couple a year not not any more not any less uh unlike other builders builders they are able to fill small orders right from their facility in denver they both convert old gallery cars and build brand new cars from the ground up using a lot of off-the-shelf equipment right customers included holland america lines, celebrity cruises, the Rocky Mountaineer, which is the sort of luxury cruise train through the Canadian Rockies.

Even eventually the Alaska Railroad orders some of their own cars because they were sick of hauling around the cruise lines cars.

You know, because this train out of Whittier was like now pulling out with like 14 cruise line cars attached to it.

Oh, wow.

But Raider wants people to know they could do more, right?

I bet he does.

Through the massive pile of cocaine on his desk that would put Scarface to shame, yeah.

And I will note again, some of the cars in this image are actually from the successor company, Colorado Rail Car.

Why?

What's the matter?

That's the second successor company.

We'll get to why there was a successor company in a bit.

The other connection this company has, which I think is important,

is they supplied the cars for Under Siege 2 Dark Territory.

It's the episode of Kill James Bullet that I'll be on at some point in the next some time.

Oh, yeah, it'll happen.

Believe me, it'll happen.

I love this poster, by the way.

You know, like

he's clinging onto the side of this stainful steel going at like some speed.

And he's still,

oh, okay.

Well, so that much the better then.

And serving face, like

really like put together, you know, kind of like mid-career Segal.

It's really funny looking at the train in this as like a train nerd because you can really see they tried to make it look like brand new Amtrak, Superliners, whatever.

Yeah, but they didn't quite.

It's just this weird ass, cheap, shitty, and uncanny valley.

Shitty gallery cars up front.

Um, they added, I understand this is supposed to be stainless steel fluting here, but they actually use tin roof material.

Um,

got it in my budget, man.

Yeah.

You know, these are just really shitty gallery cars that Raider owned, dressed up to look nicer repainted added stuff to make the stunts easier there's some trap doors and plywood platforms on there I think that's grip tape on the roof too yeah yeah it's got to be yeah technically making this a skateboard there's one god that's the coolest skateboard it's both technically and legally a skateboard let's see a kick flip that

But yeah,

they supply the whole train.

Most of the cars were scrapped after the film, but not all of them.

We'll get to that in a bit.

Okay.

So that's the train portion to start out with.

That's the context.

Now we have to talk about smoking.

Yay.

It's a cool thing that presidents do.

If only it were good for you, you know, but science hasn't got there yet.

It's not likely to now that Trump's paused basically all research in the U.S.

It's a good point.

And it's a great show.

I hope the National Institutes for Health are like one day away from like a real breakthrough on the cigarette that's good for you project because like

you know, it's it's like David Lynch, RIP, said about smoking, and that's a guy who died of smoking in large part.

But like, you know, it's all all we want as an addict is for the subject of your addiction to be good for you, right?

And it's not.

In fact, it's actually terrible for you.

Um, and yeah, they're gonna, if you guys remember Premiere Cigarettes, uh, no, there was a, it was a, it was a smokeless cigarette that RJ Reynolds came out with that hemorrhaged just a shit ton of money.

I think they lost like a billion dollars on it, but it tasted like garbage.

Apparently, when they did research in Japan, they told the researchers straight to the face, this tastes like shit.

But yes, we are.

That was in 88.

So there's been 37 years of working on the cigarette that's good for you.

So we'll get there.

We'll get there.

I was about to say, you know, if it, if the, if the people in Japan say it tastes like shit, you know, it tastes like shit because those guys are really good at smoking.

So, yeah, cigarettes.

There's some tobacco.

You buy them in a pack.

You smoke it.

You feel a little nice.

It looks cool if you're in high school.

I think FDR looks pretty cool there, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, having it on a stick does make you look cool.

Worth pointing out that filters are complete pseudoscience.

They make absolutely no improvements.

They don't do anything, yeah.

They don't do anything.

That was an invention of the cigarette industry to make you think that cigarettes were healthy and it really worked.

Stuff you got a joke.

Yeah,

no, I think we should bring back having a big long holder like your FDR.

Yeah, yeah, like Corella de Ville.

That's always the vital art of

streaming.

Dip is good for you.

They've invented the dip that is good for you.

Copenhagen winter green long time, baby.

So, yeah, cigarettes are

bad for you.

Oh, they're not.

Yes, they are.

Yes, they are.

We must say that.

I'm not going to get shut down by you, the thing that got us on the COVID disinformation attack.

Philip Morris, sponsor our podcast.

We're going to have to furnish this tour somehow.

Philip Morris, R.J.

Reynolds.

So

anyway,

cigarettes, in order to get people to smoke them, you need to do advertising, right?

So there is this brand called Marlboro.

Marlborough.

Marlborough.

Marlborough.

Marlborough.

White triangle, red background.

For reasons that I believe we might get into.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very, very effective branding.

Cowboy shit.

The original Marlboro man died of like every kind of cancer.

The original Marlboro man didn't smoke.

That's smarter, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, that's the irony is that he died of all of the cigarette-based cancers despite never having smoked.

You know, that is the painful irony.

Marlborough is interesting because it was one of the original filtered cigarettes and as such was marketed to women, mild as May.

Yep.

Yeah.

A cigarette breed by Philip Morris.

It's like the Wolf of PPK, right?

It's a little, there was a bit of masculinity that's actually originally intended to be like geisha for women.

Exactly.

Ivory tips protect the lips.

Anyway, so

they don't, folks.

No.

No, it does not.

I mean, eventually there is a sense of like not smudging your lipstick.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Eventually, there is this push to like, okay, we got to market filtered cigarettes to men, right?

A lot of the marketing was based on,

here's the science of why the filter is good for you.

You know, these, the, the, the companies were making the horrible mistake of acknowledging that smoking was bad.

Um,

well, it was actually after the fact that it was after the first surge of, wait a minute, this might not be good for you.

And the response of the entire tobacco industry was uh okay well filters so it was a response to the first wave of science saying oh no no smoking will kill you and so the the the tobacco industry as and continues to be one of the largest lobbying groups in the planet on the planet and was like oh well filters that's it's so now it's fine again and yeah it worked it worked

but then men were selling filtered cigarettes yeah so they decided all right the marlboroughs aren't selling well with women what if we turn them into a product for men?

We are the dumbest creatures on earth, man.

Yeah.

I voluntarily smoked for like eight years.

Fucking stupid.

And that's how Marlborough becomes the cigarette for the manly man.

The Marlborough man, he's outside.

He's a cowboy.

He's whatever.

He's doing all kinds of, you know, manly man shit all over the place, right?

I mean, he's saying he's a manly man, but this is not suggesting that skincare routines aren't manly, but he is looking care.

He's taking great care of that skin.

Look at that lovely slight, slight oily sheen, but some lovely skincare and some very careful manscaping on those sideburns as well.

There we go.

Look at that.

Look at that.

Look at that edge.

Beautiful.

Also, I'm just enjoying the man on the picture, the Marlborough man.

He's handsome.

Doesn't it make you want to smoke cigarettes?

Yeah, how does the most wrinkles around it?

This is before the invention of retinol as the thing.

But not before the invention of smoking, which will fuck up your skin something awful.

Look at his lashes.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're lovely.

Extremely bushy eyebrows.

He looks like

my dad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't know the Marvel man was Armenian.

Yeah.

Check how much hair he has on his shoulders.

So

anyway.

These are different ways you could market the cigarette.

Cigarette advertising.

You know, it used to be you could just say, hey, more doctors smoke camels than any other cigarette.

Then, you know, regulators started to crack down on cigarette advertising that was just blatantly dishonest and fake.

Um, so you had to do things like sponsor F1.

Yeah, you had to create a bunch of extremely cool liveries for things.

Uh, everything since has been trying to evoke this and failing.

I don't want to see a car covered in fucking like cryptocurrency logos or like shit that's being marketed to the like four cyber security executives that they think might be watching.

Why the fuck is CloudStrike sponsoring a car?

Uh, fuck you.

CloudStrike.

I don't, I don't, it's not even, I don't even

give a shit.

Bring back the Gulf Oil livery and bring back the Marlborough livery.

Uh, and invent a cigarette.

Marlborough McLaren, because you know, fuck, fuck Ferrari here.

They don't know shit.

It's the Marlborough McLaren livery.

Oh, the white with the orange across it.

Oh, well, I was waiting.

My favorite fun fact about the Ferrari at this time is Ferrari didn't sponsor with like AMD or Acer or Vodafone directly.

They just sold, they sold the whole car to Philip Morris.

Incredible.

He then sold the pieces and parts on.

What?

Come on, boys.

I sold the whole car at once.

This is my most cranked belief and one that I can empirically say is false.

With data, I believe that having the cigarette delivery on the car makes it go faster.

It doesn't, it doesn't.

This is historically slow compared to now, but like I believe in my heart of hearts, you know, I love the, I love the AMD, I love the AMD.

I just, that's, that's what I, I want to go to work in.

It's just the best with all my PC parts on me.

Here, here, here, here is my theory, all right?

Because most of these cigarette companies, you know, they, they adopted like a cigarette pack design in like 1940 to like 1970 and never changed it, which tells me that objectively that's when the best graphic design was because they got nothing else they can advertise with so you know that's why the cigarettes are the best looking packaging in the entire convenience store um

yeah yeah

it's science it's inarguable the f1 era where some countries let you advertise cigarettes and some didn't was so funny too.

Because you ended up with all of these graphic designers, people having to figure out: okay, we can't have it say Marlboro, but how can we make everybody think it says Marlboro?

So, like, Ferrari had a barcode that, like, every vertical line, the Marlboro logo, yeah, was just drawn on, and then other ones, it's like West cigarettes for the West Sponsored McLarens just replaced it and it said East.

It's like, and it's like, it's not cigarettes, guys.

It's all taken care of.

Don't worry about it.

It's the cardinal direction.

What are you, what are you complaining about?

Actually, you put some duct tape on the side and write earn airlines.

It's like when the

Cardiff Beer Brains sponsored the Welsh rugby team, but I think when they were playing in France, you can't sponsor alcohol through sport.

And so they changed the word brains with brawn, which I thought was quite funny.

That's clever.

That's very clever.

Similar vibes.

Oh, is it the Jordan team had the buzzing hornets instead of Benson and Hedges?

I mean, they just made it look like a bee.

It's like, nice job, guys.

And I had toys of this stuff with the cigarette ads on it.

We all

advertise your brand subtly or through things that weren't considered advertising was, of course, to create a lifestyle brand around your cigarette.

Yeah.

Bread bull.

You're still allowed to do this.

Yes.

Bread bull.

What we're looking at is the Marlboro Adventure Team.

Although I believe these guys are like, because this was a multinational campaign, this is the Marlborough Adventure Team from Indonesia, I want to say.

This is not as cool as the Camel Trophy.

Sorry to tell you, but that's some of the coolest a car has ever looked is the like Land Rover defenders like going through like a sort of swamp that's filled with 50 foot deep mud that is like simultaneously also on like a 70 degree angle uh and like covered in wet leaves um Yeah, big, big

while also laden down with a shitload of supplies and spare wheels and stuff.

That's

aesthetic to me.

I remember when

I realized that you couldn't just be an amateur and entered the Dakar rally.

Yeah, you can't just like buy like a usual car.

Hey, I got a DAF twin turbo I bought off eBay.

Look, I got some all-leathers on this thing.

You know what's weird?

And like, they pussied out of doing it any further because they, you know, because they suck now.

But like, for a second, they tried to modernize the camel trophy stuff beyond Defender.

So they had Range Rovers and they had one freelander within like the livery and then nothing after that.

And it's like a huge, huge shame because it looks cool as fuck.

Yeah, that's my little contribution, Camel Trophy.

A lot of people are going to be doing a lot of Googling through this episode.

I got to

Some Google image results up, you know?

So here's Devin.

The Marlborough Adventure Team, right?

You save up your cigarette boxt tops.

You mail them in.

You get cool gear for outdoor activities, which you do as a smoker.

Yeah, you do.

Most of them are standing around.

You know, like some of these attacks are pointed.

If you smoke enough, you may be selected to go on an all-expenses paid trip to the American West to smoke and ride some horses or something.

How do they all fit in the Jeep is my question.

Sort of a clown car situation, but a lot of smoke here.

Yeah.

But when they get out, they make a sort of sound.

Yeah, that's it.

This promotion was active from the late 80s to about 2006.

Wow.

But, you know, they're bringing all these groups on tours of the American West.

Philip Morris is like, okay, what else can we do?

Can we make this special somehow?

Someone comes up with a great idea.

This is where I'm going to ask you to turn to your YouTube link, and hopefully, Devin will be able to patch this in somehow.

They're all watching the YouTube link.

Okay.

Marlborough Country.

A land without limits

sunrise to sunset summer to spring

Adventure rolls through Marlborough Country.

Okay,

balls 20 state of the artillery.

It's the cool train built in outfit.

It's good guys with cowboy hats on it.

It's got like hot girls.

It's got beards.

A third of a mile of sleek red steel ready to take on.

There's some nice P-Wed shots in it.

They knew who the audience was.

In advance, they knew I would watch this and get excited about the train.

2,000 members, 2,000 guests, on board and off the Marlboro Unlimited for five days and nights of non-stop adventure.

It's got meat.

It's got the meat on me.

It's got the meat train.

Yes,

this is like too many cooks.

It's like the next bit that kicks off.

So many horses involved in this.

Oh, obviously.

Hot air balloons.

Why not?

Okay, the Marlborough brand duffelbag looks good as hell and I want one very bad.

It actually does, yeah, I'll give you that.

As dependable as the people, it's me.

Oh, the Marlborough brand shot.

Sorry, no, the merch is cool.

I hate to say it, but it's cool.

Yeah, the marble band stay here.

Yeah,

I need the duffel bag.

I need the duffel bag.

They're showing the duffel bag more times on the train because they know it's the coolest thing they've ever come up with.

It's just they only had a model of the train.

Yeah, the duffel bag's probably real.

All the shots of the train in this are almost.

It says in the

disclaimer limited to smokers 21 years of age or older.

I think it'd be really funny to go on this as a non-smoker.

Just never smoked in your life.

Okay.

Okay.

One second.

I have to Google Marlboro duffel bag by where.

Wait, this video is of an age where they have to put the smoking warning in.

It's hilarious.

I think it's the same narrator, too.

Holy no button.

You can buy one for 50 quid on eBay, and I might.

Yeah,

I was going to offer, if you couldn't find any, I have a Marlboro backpack a friend of mine bought me at Salvation Army for $13 that I was willing to mail to you.

This is cool.

Oh, my goodness.

Nova now googling everything you can imagine that is

branded Marlboro.

The one problem, right, is you buy this, you know, it's got a smell.

It comes pre-scented from the factory.

Yeah, they've they're kind of like it seems they've run it in for you by smoking a couple of

packs into it.

Oh, God.

I don't know where.

It's like when you got a gym bag that you haven't cleaned in quite a while and you come over to your friend and you're like, hey, smell this.

No, it's cigarettes instead.

Just ball.

Stale 35-year-old cigarettes.

I got a pile of

my piles of laundry and shit that I still haven't done.

I have a

Ren bought me a size of this Copenhagen snuff.

and I'm just like, just like, when we got, I had to clean the layer, what was clearly like dip stains off of it.

You're just like, oh, God.

We have, we have, we have much

dip memorabilia in my house, but it got, it's, it's, it's, it's not around us.

It's like on the third floor.

That's where it has to live.

To be fair, I also had to do that with my uh Yugoslav airlines ashtray.

I did have to scrape quite a lot of yellow scum off it as well.

I mean, this, this, this wouldn't be the worst thing that that I've got secondhand in my house as someone who ends up like collecting gas masks because I'm a normal person.

I do think there's a decent chance that one of them is kind of slowly killing me.

I got one that every time I go near it, I get a weird tightness in my chest that lasts for a couple of days.

So I should probably like, I don't know.

That's probably because it's some sort of plastic that releases

cyanide into your blood or something.

I'm just, I don't know if there's someone you can like call about that or something to make it not my problem.

Because I want to just throw it out.

Just line the inside with Vaseline.

You'll be ready.

You probably just cut it in a layer of nicotine.

Yeah.

You probably get the tightness in your chest because it works so well that when you go away from it, you feel the toxins from everywhere else.

That's smart.

That's fine.

You consider that.

Yeah.

That's true.

I have an increasing amount of crap in my office that's covered in like transit system break dust.

That's probably killing me slowly.

That's getting back into Nova's brown theory of railway crime.

It's the same brown.

It's railway brown.

It is railway brown.

It's the same railway brown.

Yep.

And I'm trying to figure out whether I clean it off or whether that's part of the authentic look.

You can probably put a punch of iron on your diet.

If you want.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, no.

Iron's supposed to be in your diet.

It's supposed to be there.

It's good.

That's like what my traffic engineering professor said when he explained criteria pollutants.

We don't count CO2 because it's supposed to be there.

And meanwhile, I'm just looking forward to the comments of people typing furiously like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You're going to die.

You need to see a doctor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Please, for the love of God, don't use that mask anymore.

Yeah.

I mean, we should probably say that too as well, as we'd rather you didn't die now.

I literally,

this is the thing.

I haven't, because just going near it or like touching it makes my like chest just close close up enough that I'm just like, okay, well, you know, I'm not going to not gonna push the issue on that one.

So it just like it just sits in storage with me in this uneasy truce with it where I'm like, well, I don't want to throw it out and kill somebody else.

I don't want to take it out and kill me.

Do not open.

Yeah, do not open.

Dead dove inside, except instead of dead dove, it's like whatever the fuck Port and Down

is in South With.

Yeah, well, yeah, I was going to say, whatever Frago was murdered in it in Port and Down.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's yeah, it's found its way to you.

I mean, the good thing is, because I got it off eBay, I can trace back exactly to the guy who sold it to me.

So I'm like, if I die, avenge my death on a

guy in my eBay purchases section about two years ago.

I'm going to leave him a negative feedback on eBay soon as

the worst.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, it's like 99.8% positive.

Okay.

You know, he's a thematic moment.

So, yeah.

Philip Morris comes up with what they internally refer to as Project Thunder.

This is the Marlborough Unlimited.

The Marlborough Unlimited was to be a train like no other, a brand new double-deck luxury train with bars, restaurants, spas, movie theaters, any you can think of.

that would travel the American West for one season, offering excursions with horseback riding, mountain biking, off-roading, Conestoga wagon rides, fishing, white water rafting, more horseback riding, hot air balloon rides, tours of Yellowstone National Park,

hiking, more horseback riding,

rodeo classes.

I just want to

panning.

You don't have the breath.

You have to stagecoach rides, more horseback riding, ski shooting, alpin slides, horseshoes, and horseback riding.

That horse takes two steps, and you're just like,

The horse is smoking too.

It doesn't matter

badly, they've got bigger lungs.

It's a horse-sized cigarette, so it's all

on the market.

It's the coolest horse I've ever seen in my life.

Hi, it's Justin.

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

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

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

The deal is you give us two bucks a month, and we give you an extra episode once a month.

Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks.

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes.

So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

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

Join at patreon.com forward/slash WTYP pod.

Do it if you want, or don't.

It's your decision, and we respect that.

Back to the show.

We do have pictures of some of the t-shirts.

Holy

pulse.

When I was looking up some of this, somebody's trying to sell that top left t-shirt for $300.

I was going to say, that's a $300 t-shirt if I've ever seen one.

That thing kicks ass.

It does kick ass.

It does rain.

Also, the audacity for the Marlborough Unlimited smoking train to sell a white t-shirt on the right.

I particularly enjoyed the One Wolf Moon.

That's a big fan of that one.

Yes.

Why is it so long?

Why is it so long?

It's for Jay specifically.

I think it's just a giant shirt that some secondhand store on eBay or whatever found their normal model for.

Look, we don't have anybody else who can try on this triple XL

free promotion hope t-shirt from 30 years ago.

So we know that this train fucking whips, right?

So we know this is the coolest thing that humanity has ever created.

So I presume it's running today successfully, right?

Of course.

Yeah, we'll get to that.

Part of it is, actually, but

we'll get to that in a moment.

Now, how do you enter?

Oh, this was going to operate for one season in 1996 for a total of 2,000 lucky passengers.

There are some anecdotes online.

You had to smoke 1,000 cigarettes to enter, but it was a sweepstakes.

No purchase necessary.

Okay.

But to enter, you did have to be a smoker 21 years of age or older.

How did you prove that you were a smoker other than

that?

They just smell you.

You come in and the guy just takes a big sniff and just like, yeah, this one counts.

I love this.

Rarely seen Freight Track.

That's a little foreboding.

Oh, because it was going to go through

whatchamacallit.

The old Rio Grande mainline.

I am telling you this.

SDS.

Yes, that's the thing.

They're orienting this advertising at me specifically.

I've rarely seen Freight Track.

Good brief.

Okay.

Well, I think the idea is like you got to do this.

You got to smoke like crazy.

You're not just going to be able to do this by getting some Amtrak ticket like some suck-ass loser.

Yeah.

Day two of the Marlborough Unlimited, and you're like, I don't know if I can keep pace with this kind of competition.

They keep handing me more cigarettes.

I can't light another one.

I'm trying so hard.

I feel like my dad is punishing me.

Like creating some sort of creating some sort of contraption out of things in the kitchen, like Apollo 13, to just get as many cigarettes into you as possible.

You're doing the reverse.

You're like a normal style smoker, unlike everyone else who goes for this.

And you're like, I'm not prepared to compete at this level.

You're trying to create some pocket of clean air to hold out in like a mind collapse.

We'll get to that.

Imagine what

everyone else is like that

the file photo of Homer with like a thousand cigarettes.

Oh, yeah.

I worked as the executive chef on the Marlborough Unlimited and completely destroyed my sense of smell and taste.

More so than already happens from working in a kitchen.

Oh, my God.

Here's how the Marlborough Unlimited sweepstakes works: 2,000 prizes of six-day, five-night trip for two on the Marlboro Unlimited train plus one thousand dollars cash will be awarded in random drawings.

The first one thousand prizes will be awarded from among all eligible entries received blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah on an official entry form in the spaces provided.

Hand print, your complete name, address, including zip code, your date of birth, and your current brand of cigarettes.

How many of you have additionally?

Lucky Strikes won the war in all caps.

Important, in order to be eligible for a prize, you must sign your name in the space provided, certifying that you are a smoker 21 years of age or older as of date of entry.

Do you think there are any people who are just like huge like weed smokers?

Never touch a cedar.

Also, when I went to win this thing, I forgot it was a sweepstake, so I imagined it as a kind of a squid game of smoking, which would have like smoking-themed elimination events in order to discover who was the best, who

wanted it to just

my grandparents really did not commit to the squid game of smoking.

They just smoking themselves.

They didn't have what it took to make it through, you know.

2,000 grand prizes, a six-day, five-night trip for two on the Marlboro unlimited train, including round-trip, coach, air transportation to and from point of embarkation, debarkation, meals aboard train, lodging, one room, double occupancy, and activities plus $1,000 in cash, approximate retail value $6,000 each.

That's pretty cheap for a luxury train these days.

Yeah, but there's going to be some horse bullshit.

Yeah, train will travel through the states of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

Winners must agree to travel on scheduled dates specified by the sponsor.

Winners selected for the first sweepstakes drawing must accomplish travel on dates designated by sponsor between what's eight?

It is August

4th,

1996

and

October 11th.

The way you do

in your country is so fucked.

Oh, yeah.

Hey, sorry.

What language are you not speaking right now?

Okay.

All right.

I'm raising my hand politely.

I have a question.

Why did they have to warn competition entries about which states the trade-offs are?

In case you had like an active warrant here to get back

to be fair, the guy who tries to go on this absolutely is like, oh, I can't go to Idaho anymore because I had some like problems out there.

I don't want to.

Yeah, it's pretty DUIs.

This, yeah,

this turns out to be a bigger deal,

yeah.

Custom-built luxury cruise train unique in the world.

20 cars total, two locomotives, three staff cars, eight sleepers, five dining activity cars, and a spa car.

Double-decker, glass stone, double tablets with full bath, red.

And the Marlborough.

tour.

Yep.

Just shoveling.

They don't make moisturizers strong enough to upset you.

They're putting polar bear urea on you or some shit like that.

Closing you down.

Oh, my goodness.

Here's where we start getting some questionable decisions by Philip Morris, right?

Philip Morris's marketing department has two options.

They could refurbish old equipment equipment because Amtrak was getting rid of a lot of their old heritage equipment they inherited from the other railroads back in the 70s, right?

Or they could buy brand new trains.

And they decided for the sake of consistent quality to do the latter.

Hell yeah.

I mean, I guess they're making enough money off of giving people cancer that they could just do that anyway.

Yeah,

those cancer sticks are consumable, so you make money off of them every time.

They also don't really go bad.

I mean, they do.

Well, they they go bad once you've smoked them.

I'm sure I have like half a pack left in the back of a filing cabinet somewhere.

And

even at my lowest, I haven't been desperate enough to consider that shit.

Good for you.

I gave the emergency pack of cigarettes in the house away when I was drunk.

I hate you.

They're like the inputting case of emergency pack of cigarettes that it should be in your go bag, but it's like buying a gun, right?

You've got to make sure you've got the like mental fortitude to really mean it yourself with that you know

i thought you could get better than having a pack of cigarette to not use the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a cigarette

well i mean

in my experience doesn't have a lot of good ways of stopping

the bad guy with a cigarette and the good guy with a cigarette both go uh have a smoke break and they either come back both bad or both good

that is what the movie High Noon is about.

On a long enough time scale, I think the cigarette stops the bad.

You're facing up against Lee Van Cleef.

He's got the little cigarillo in, and you don't draw, and you don't draw, and you don't draw.

And you're just like, I'm just waiting.

Still good?

All right.

I can be patient.

For the sake of consistent quality, Philip Morris wants to go with all new trains.

They want a sleek locomotive with a bullet train-shaped nose, right?

Now,

for the benefit of the audio-only viewers and listeners, no, audio-only listeners, that's how that works.

This is a very fetching, shiny train we've got on screen right now.

Marlborough livery, by the way.

So it looks sexy as fuck.

It's fresh off the line because it's painted and beautiful.

And it's also, most importantly, on some, the trap might be crap, but the ballast is okay.

So, you know, all around, a very nice picture here.

Yeah.

This is the official train of smoking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the question is, who supplies the train, right?

First, they go to Bombardier, right?

They're in the process of finishing Amtrak's Superliner 2 cars.

For whatever reason, this falls through.

They couldn't like tack on an extra 20 cars to the

order, right?

They make some headway with the locomotive very quickly.

Originally, they were thinking, we're going to have to buy a shitty locomotive and add

a fiberglass nose cone to it.

But no, they buy these EMD F59 PHIs, which were still in production at the time.

A lot of commuter railroads bought them.

It looks very nice.

It comes with the shitty fiberglass nose.

It does have a shitty fiberglass nose.

And even better, the shitty fiberglass nose was mass-produced.

Nice.

Yeah.

Well, you need to because it gets dented every time it hits something at Grey Crossing.

Correct.

What I've realized is that this thing

has quite a

Class 91 look to it, actually, with the kind of the setback level, just with it, just with

the fiberglass nose is a bit rounder on this than a 91.

But no, that's a very, very fetchy looking.

I hope you realize

the Class 91 next to this thing would come up to like

two toys from different gauge, like from different scale train sets.

Yeah, no, I am aware of that.

I already recorded that episode.

I can't do that.

Yeah, that's true.

Well, actually, I want to say some of the same locomotives that went down to Mexico, they're the same model locomotive, just with a different nose.

Yeah, the less sexy version.

The F-59PH.

Yeah, that just has a regular-looking cab.

So these were ordered from EMD, Electromotive Division of General Motors.

These are the only almost off-the-shelf equipment on this train.

And I say almost because they had some wacky modifications to the generators.

We'll get to that in a second.

And they had to install really good air filters.

EMD delivers these on time and on budget.

No problem.

No job too small for EMD.

Can you imagine

the smears on the inside of these windows within like a week of the train running?

You think they made the engine crew smoke too?

Of course they are mandatory.

You have to be 21 years or older and a smoker to run the train.

Just trying to get down the aisle.

It's whatever asshole is smoking like three cigarettes at once and wants another fucking pathetic bourbon on the rocks because you drink it neat like an adult.

And just like, how can I take your order?

Just collapses.

So Philip Morris's second choice for new cars, because Bombardier couldn't do it, was this upstart company in Denver.

Oh, no.

Raider Rail Car.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, let me play the grand piano if I can see the keys through the fog in here.

Let's see what they ordered.

Oh, God.

Here's a schematic of the train.

Yeah.

They were so serious about this.

They were really like, we want to do a whole ass train, like an Under Siege 2.

I got to say, that bottom right project, you know, just being in the normal format of blueprint and then thunder in big letters next to it.

Yeah.

Thunder.

Kind of rude.

Yeah, that's nice.

I love that.

I understand when these documents were created, Raider Railcar was in the process of switching from an older CAD program to this new program called AutoCAD.

Wow.

Yeah.

AutoCAD volume, like AutoCAD version 1.0.

I think it was already at 12.

Wow.

AutoCAD's fucking stupid.

I hate it.

Worst program imaginable, except for all the other ones.

Zencaston.

Well, yeah, that too.

Yeah.

The unholy abomination that would be the Barlboro Unlimited Unlimited Train would cost $27,860,000 without factoring in the locomotives.

It consisted of a lot of people.

We used to build things in this country.

Okay.

Eight sleeper cars, two dining cars, three lounge cars, three crew cars, one power car, and of course the infamous spa car.

I want to hear about the spa car so badly.

We'll get to the spa car.

I don't like that you're saying it like that.

Depending on the source that you believe, these were either brand new cars, but I believe

as far as I can tell, these were built from cut-down Southern Pacific Gallery cars, including some of those previously used in the filming of Under Siege 2 Dark Territory.

Hell yeah.

A representative sample of the train was due to Philip Morris on January 1st, 1996, for an early promotional tour with the full train required by March 31st, 1996, the day I turned three.

The contract was signed sometime in 1994, giving Rader precious little time to design and build the most luxurious train in the history of mankind.

Philip Morris would then attempt to find a buyer for the train when the season was over.

What?

Yeah, they were only going to use it once.

What?

What?

I think they're actually going to to use it for like one summer season, one winter season.

Jesus, that's incredible.

Let's take a look at this.

We've got our brand new F-59 PHI locomotives producing 3,200 horsepower each.

This seems like a lot of horsepower for an 18-car train, but this train uses Ultra Dome technology.

And

everyone is smoking.

Oh, the air filtration required for this thing.

Jesus.

Can you imagine this thing pulls up at your local station briefly because there's a freight train in the way or something?

And you're just still stationed innocently next to one of the air vents of this thing and just the clag coming out of just one of the HVAC vents.

Oh my god,

it makes East Palestine look like a fart.

Oh my god, the train is smoking too.

Oh, we've killed Liam already.

I have been podcasting non-stop since 5 p.m.

I have been podcasting non-stop since 2 p.m.

This is my third of the day.

Oh, God.

We got to do it all again tomorrow.

So, yeah.

The result was a requirement for really, really, really beefy HVAC systems, right?

Yeah, really?

Was there?

Was that a requirement?

Yeah.

So the two locomotives were not enough to provide electricity the whole train which leads to the first car right the generator car and i'm just thinking you're going to need to create an entire new union just for the little boys that'll have to run up and down the train cleaning replacing the hv

you're going to create a whole new society in there it's going to be like

smoke piercer in there

So on almost all trains, they're powered by something called head-end power, right?

This is supplied by a dedicated unit in a locomotive.

There's multiple locomotives in a long train.

A whole locomotive can be dedicated to the purpose of just providing power to the train, right?

On this train, a whole locomotive was not enough.

So a separate generator car with two 1,000-horsepower Detroit diesel engines powered two generators.

Wow.

So

you called it head-end power.

Also, some of the people might know it's hotel power.

Hotel power.

Yeah, we call it hotel power.

Yeah.

Uh, usually in the United States, I think it's only called hotel power when you're connected to a line from a station.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, it's uh weird nomenclature.

Maybe you're, I think we refer to it more broadly as just the train, the train draw when it's not the non-traction power.

But actually, maybe I'm wrong.

People correct me in the comments.

Who knows?

Um, now this results in this problem.

The train runs on three-phase 480-volts AC that's being supplied from three locations, and they all have to be synchronized.

So, I don't know how they did it, but the locomotives locomotives were extensively modified for fine throttle control.

So the generators could all be synchronized so they could deliver power to the train without the whole thing blowing up.

It's like a legit

engineering problem someone had to put a lot of work into solving in order to let you smoke on the train.

Yeah, on the train you're only going to use once.

Okay, so every time when I smoked, I was stuck in a situation where I couldn't and I was looking at the no-smoking sign, trying to stare it to death, thinking how hard could it be to let me smoke in here?

I apologize for all of those times because apparently, pretty fucking difficult.

Well,

it is difficult.

Yeah, EMD takes one look at the requirements and like, yep, no problem.

You know, and they just

get country.

Yeah.

I suspect they didn't consult any mechanical or electrical engineers when saying yes to that.

So behind this were the crew cars, right?

So we have

we have a sleeper, we have the sleeper, and we have the sleeper slash diner slash amenity car for the crew.

Okay.

Behind that,

we have some sleepers for the passengers.

We got four of them.

We have the dining slash galley.

We'll go into these into detail in a second.

How many fires do you think they're getting from people falling asleep with lit cigarettes?

Poor

mild.

That was a significant concern.

Yes.

Yep.

It looks like that picture from the Under Siege 2 poster, just without cigar in it, just flames pouring out of one car.

Yeah, that's it.

Except it's all of the cars.

Dining multimedia/slash library car.

We have big sky lounge/slash office/slash open platform.

Library?

Don't do that to books.

Yeah,

books deserve better.

They're all books about cigarettes.

Lots of studies about how smoking is good for you, actually.

Car number 14 is

Rembrandt.

Bastards.

Good grief.

This is crazy.

That's why they keep the shotguns.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Behind that, Consulate and Railroad Heritage, yeah.

The cowboy bar, four sleepers, and the spa car.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Why not?

So, some version of this train also proposed including several auto rack cars at the front of the train.

Oh, my God.

So they could haul around a bunch of buses for the various excursions the train would.

No, that's based, actually.

Yeah, I'm all for that.

Oh, intermodal, baby.

Yeah.

There's also a proposal for a baggage car to be added as well.

All the crew cars were just regular passenger cars they stole from Amtrak.

Well, not stole, they bought.

It's like so much as like no expense spared unless you're the crew and you get some old garbage.

You get nothing.

Well, yeah, it's like Dubai, right?

Yeah.

I think the crew probably got a better deal.

That's true.

They didn't have their passports confiscated, though maybe they did, and that's what we're leading up to this whole state lines situation.

But anyway, foreshadowing.

Here's some early concepts for some of the lounge cars.

Note that, okay, we have such things as we are going to have the virtual reality game room.

What?

What years is it?

This is the mid-90s.

Jesus.

Jesus, those 3D graphics.

Incredible.

Yeah, the date here, 13th, September, 94.

It's also called Project Lightning on this one, not Project Thunder, which I didn't notice before.

Thunder and Lightning.

Yeah, that's true.

It was on Raider's side they called it Project Lightning.

Actually, you can see a handwritten sketch they've got on on it says thunder slash lightning yeah you know what uh this looking at the order of the cars sorry again i went too deep into this looking this up this is the preamble train this is the five cars they wanted to deliver earlier than the rest yes okay this is the whole set you've got the the first cars you've got you know dining up here lower level you got a big ass kitchen Right.

Next car, still pretty big kitchen, bigger than on most trains.

That's just the service area.

you got dumb waiters to bring everything up to the dining area upstairs you got a spiral staircase at the end right you got a spiral staircase over here okay next car we have um this is the big sky lounge right 60 seats unspecified here right there's a downstairs lounge as well note these large air ducts those will be a common theme um there's

all that smart straight out of the vehicle yeah there's the general store over here right as well as the elevator next to the spiral staircase, as well as the ADA lavatory.

Jesus, right?

Okay, so

when I was saying parallel society evolving in here, I was joking.

No, this is going to end up like Snow Piercer.

Okay, right.

I mentioned virtual reality over here.

Over here, there's a whole half of the bottom level of this car devoted to virtual reality games, right?

Next to that is the

virtual reality of the 1990s.

Yeah, yeah.

Imagine playing, I don't know,

shit, what did they have in 94?

For nothing.

Everything was fine.

Start the first Pixar film, you know, like real shonky.

There you have the most beautiful scenery in America rolling by.

You play Star Fox.

I've just seen the Spark car.

I've just seen the Spark car, and you are kitting me.

On top of this, on top of this is the Big Sky Lounge, the other one, right?

60 seats with bar living room configuration okay next car we got a bar on the lower level we got a bar on remington's bar on the upper level we have uh excuse me strike that reverse it um there's a dance floor on the upper level on the lower level of course you have pinball machines right and another dance floor and car dealers and lounge seating on the upper floor and more lounge seating right and then of course we come to the low-level dome spa car yes we do which has oh

two massage rooms and six hot tubs.

Six massage rooms.

And then there are three hot tubs just set on one side, three on the other, with like a maze between them.

That's where my god

sloshing around full of cigarette butts.

Cigarette butts.

You are going to get every possible waterborne disease.

Oh, despite

GL.

It's only a non-smoking car.

It's non-smoking cars.

Come on, still being foolish.

This is tyranny.

If you can't smoke in the hot tubs, what even is the point?

Not being allowed to smoke at Jay's is like not being allowed to pray in church.

Excuse me, I got excited.

I got to use the restroom real quick.

What?

Just the thought of

some questions about that sequence of words.

I don't like that.

Can you imagine getting stuck in that central hot tub?

Welcome to the bitch top.

There's like Hawk Top.

You know what it's going to look like?

Each of those is going to be so dark with tar, you're going to be emerging out of it like a Harkinen.

Yeah, just incredible.

A Harkinen, With the cigarette butts kind of stuck in the moisture area.

What I'm making is a kind of broth.

Broth.

We're making soup.

We're making soup.

Cigarette smoker stew in here.

Oh,

this is spectacular.

And this is when you win.

This is the prize you win.

You have to be on here for like a week.

God.

And they don't even have enough water on board to like change that out either.

Get out stale that would get at the end.

Everyone everybody's

weeks later, the same water.

Oh,

hey, it does have an open platform, though, and that absolutely rules.

Yeah, I can throw myself off at the middle of the most isolated freight track in Wyoming and just let the train roll away from me.

Yeah,

leave me to the coyotes.

I just learned there's a handle on my gamer chair that allows me to recline.

Have you just figured that out?

I've had this shit going like, there he goes.

Look at that.

That's kind of too far back, to be honest.

I'm way back.

Masses are here to raid me in, so I can do whatever I want.

All right, I got back.

Fuck.

Damn.

You shouldn't have said it.

You shouldn't have said it.

What happened?

Nothing.

Don't worry about it.

Oh, okay.

We discussed the hot tubs.

Yes.

Well, there's going to be more discussion of those to come.

I don't like that.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Let's look in some more detail.

Here's a sleeper car.

Upper level, lower level.

You notice the cars are wide enough that it's just like, yeah, you walk perpendicularly up and down the car to go up and down.

Oh, God.

It's going to be steep.

Staircase.

I believe it was pretty steep, yeah.

Yeah, private rooms with individual toilets and showers, big rooms on the top at each end, lots of plumbing, lots of ducting, lots of complexity.

All the weight.

Oh, my fucking fair.

Only single bedstone.

No fucking on the train.

Well, not in this car.

Not an ass.

They needed extra fire-resistant fabrics and extra fireproof partitions because, you know, these chuckleheads are going to smoke in bed.

Oh, yeah.

Probably while drunk and depressed from losing all their money at Blackjack, but we'll discuss that in a moment.

Just imagine this thing coming over the prairie, just like one of these, just like burning to like burning down to the trucks, right?

Just the yellow haze coming off the whole train.

I want to say one of the sleepers had an infirmary on the lower level.

Yeah, you're gonna fucking need it for all the cancer you're getting.

Yeah,

he's the first train to have an on-call consultant oncologist.

He's gonna get work.

The amount of preparation that they did for what if somebody dies on this fucking thing was enormous.

Crematorium at the back for something that they're using twice.

every time every time someone says it, I auto-delete the fact that this thing is a single-use trade.

Double-use, like obviously, I've said it and it's often

consumable goods.

Yeah, Philip Morris just cannot,

these things get burned like the cigarettes.

Like, it's like, I don't know, you don't keep a thing, you use it, you throw it away, done.

Yeah,

incredible.

Here's one of the dining cars, the first dining car with the galley underneath, this huge fucking kitchen on the bottom floor, right?

And up above, you know, it's regular table seat, booth seating, right?

You got three, count them, three dumb waiters, because why not?

Sure.

I'm just thinking mostly to the kitchen.

They've got to be, right?

Like, yeah, it's mostly.

I was going to say, I'll just think about how big the kitchen probably was on the Royal Yacht.

And I'm going to guess maybe a third of the size of this.

I will say it has fewer air ducts in the kitchen, presumably, because that's the least smoky part of the train.

God, it's so weird.

The weirdest part about this thing is that it was going to have walkthrough on both levels, which I think has never been done on any train anywhere.

I believe that was only on certain cars.

You would have walkthrough on both levels, but yes.

So like, yeah, there's walkthrough on the upstairs here in the diner.

and on the downstairs yeah oh my good grief and of course as we've seen on all these i just every time i see it it makes me laugh particularly as they've chosen italics font.

Project Thunder.

General Arrangement Dome Diner with Galley.

Okay, so we've got our second diner, right?

This is the diner library theater car.

Upstairs is the diner,

still in the same configuration, but backwards, right?

Downstairs, we have...

the multimedia room with large air duct.

We have in the middle the library where you can read a book.

No one's using that library, let's be honest.

Yeah, yeah,

you turn a page and have to like waft your hand a few times to read every sentence.

Yeah, over here is something I don't know what it is.

Oh, that's good.

Classic.

This diner had a small non-smoking section.

The shame box.

The cuck store or whatever it is.

In case you brought a guest who was not a smoker,

to torture them?

Hey, honey, do you want to come with me on the like, you know, my cigarette hobby?

Do you want to come with me and

really share this with me?

Really enjoy my smoking together?

I love with my spouse and Khlizmi and their hobbies.

There's so many

human stories being implied here.

And they're all brutal.

Oh my god.

Yeah, none of them are good.

None of them are happy.

Oof.

Isn't Sandus the concentrated like bad vibe that radiates off these blueprints?

There's like not quite enough windows on some parts.

There's not, it just doesn't, it doesn't look like a trend shit.

It doesn't feel right.

The blueprints look pretty fucked up.

Between between just

the area that we don't know what it does, the general implausibility of all of this, are we sure this isn't some kind of like

US Army like secret experiment on the experiment?

It's an all the experiment, but on wheel.

They got surprisingly far, and we'll get to this later.

Oh my fucking gosh.

Jesus, okay.

Here's a 60-seat observation lounge with downstairs open platform and ADA elevator.

Yeah, I believe they call it an observation lift because that's where they observe you secretly.

I believe this area down here called Purser's Square, which is next to the purser's office, which is just a desk with a chair.

I believe that's where there was a small gift shop.

You could buy a duffel bag.

Yeah.

Surely you only use the gift shop at the end.

Unless they're selling like a bunch of people.

Oh, no, because every time you board or disembark, you go through the open platform over here, which requires you to walk through the gift shop.

Of course, it does.

And also, I suppose you need somewhere to buy the cigarettes.

Yes,

whoa, whoa, whoa, I got to buy my own cigarette.

Fuck you.

No.

I love the

give them

dropped off in your room every night in a in a brown paper back they're cheaper walking around with them like pre-hole like or

you don't even need to smoke like just the second hand is gonna be enough to keep anybody still going

that's what they do they just put a massive cigarette into the air filter and just everybody

should have one big cigarette

they should do that at nightclub smoking areas should be one big cigarette that's lit all the time You just go out and get a couple of deep breaths.

Over here is the office.

More on that later.

For some of the cars,

if you were looking at the side views earlier, a lot of these cars don't have side doors.

Because, yeah, again, they were trying to funnel everyone in and out of this car so they'd go through the gift shop.

Which is great, unless there's a fire.

So

design.

Well, they have the smallest little, on all these cars, they have, I love it's like the upper deck here, those two tiny windows are marked as the emergency exit.

Yeah, giant fuck-off windows,

permanent.

Yeah.

Tiny little ones, emergency exits.

You got to hoist your

you can sort of crawl out while hacking and coughing and then fall 15 feet and die.

15 feet under this flaming train wreck in remote Wyoming.

Oh, no.

Like I thought that you would notice you were falling.

Yeah, crikey.

it's like all the danger of like cruise ships but on the land but on the land

okay we've got smoking dining drinking what else

upsets me this upsets me the gambling that's too many angles that's too many angles

not a that's not a blueprint shape no it is not a blueprint shape the poker table somehow only one for the whole train so you can get a fight later

yeah so you can get a fight

you smash a bottle over someone's head.

Oh, big kidding.

Of course, the road does a window like a Western saloon, but it's the 15 feet above the ground emergency.

I had a hat.

I bet the hats they, I bet they sold some kick-ass Marlborough cat.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I did.

That's going right on email.

I was going to say, let me Google that real quick.

All right.

Upstairs, obviously, we got another bar.

We got a lounge section here, right?

And then we have this exciting area here marked open to below.

Oh, this hat looks like it smells bad.

Open to below, also very fun next to the poker table for any fights that need to take more cinematic angle.

Yeah,

yeah.

I'm gonna put an image link in the Zencaster chat, and I want you to click on it.

Oh, God.

Oh,

it's impressively not like stained.

That is a light khaki-colored Marlborough Adventure Team bucket hat.

It was right when it was new.

Is this for the South Africa tour?

All right, so lower level, we have

what does it say here?

Something with cocktail swivel tables.

Bonquettes with horseshoe swivel cocktail tables, which

these look on the thing like toilets.

It looks like you're doing challenges in your toilet.

Eight of you all facing each other having a shit off.

That's for like the Budweiser train.

We got some strange looking bar seating here around the dance floor, which is, of course,

underneath, open to below, above.

What do we imagine they're playing that you're dancing to on

this train?

Country music.

Yeah, exactly.

You've got Wolf Tyler, Country Air Western.

The sort of shit that you could buy in the hydroelectric shop on the high street in Brewery in 1994.

That's what I'm in.

1994,

country music.

You're in a bad place, you know.

Gosh,

that's Alan Jackson.

I think you're in a better place than like 2024.

Okay, that's true.

I mean,

you did this like even 10 years later, and this is the train, the train that plays big and rich non-stop.

Yeah.

Here's the answer.

They play What's New Pussycat 14 times a row?

Here is the jukebox.

Oh my god, he's going for the jukebox.

Are you going to play the boys are back in town again?

I am absolutely not going to play the boys are back in town.

That's how you get thrown out of a 15-foot window.

No, bad news, it's the lower floor.

You're only probably going to fall like eight feet.

There is an additional bar adjacent to which there is seating facing the window on saddles.

Just in case you hadn't ridden enough horses.

Yes, you're not too

horses.

You're going to get free, free perma talk from this.

Yeah.

It's actually for people who have only ridden the horses and are like i can't sit anywhere else right now my legs won't go straight

can't afford the estradile take the train upstairs there is an arcade hell yeah

okay yeah just like the grossest most nicotine encrusted game of pack miss pac-man you've ever seen in your life

all of the open to belows here are so striking in the sense of somebody is going through that and landing on a polka tape yeah yeah

to enable violence.

Imagine the noise environment in this car where you have multiple bars, lounges, arcade games, smoking.

You won't be able to hear anything.

It'll all be muffled by the thick smoke in every single one.

And just like the ambient train noise.

Yeah.

Like even the Amtrak lounge car now, which is like church compared to this thing, is...

A pretty loud place.

Good God.

But don't worry.

There's another one of these.

Oh, Christ.

The second

lounge car.

Okay, upstairs, we got some lounge seating, right?

We have a second open to below, right?

That's almost disappointingly tame.

Seating facing the windows, right?

It's nice.

Three seats over here.

Yeah, this is nice.

This is regional, reasonable.

Go downstairs.

More lounge seating and then blackjack.

Oh, God,

I can't wait to punch a fucking casino worker who survives only on tips

with my cigarette.

If hand made out of entirely out of cigarette.

Okay, wait.

These blackjack tables are up above.

You can definitely stand there and look down and see what cards people have.

I don't do that.

Signal to your friends.

What are they going to do if you're counting cards on the Marlborough train?

They get thrown on the bottom.

They force your head under the water and just block cards.

All right, again, some more lounge seating looks very nice.

Then, after this, there were four more sleeping cars, and then the spa car.

I will say,

the revised version of this, very progressive.

They had gender-neutral dressing rooms.

Woo!

The Malcolm Inhabited has gone woke.

Then there were two massage rooms.

That's out.

That just

having to massage the most calloused skin in the world.

Why does your skin look like my leather couch?

Why did the back of your hands have knurling?

Then

six hot tubs and two groups of three.

Finally, a large open platform.

All of those hot tubs full of like

lumpy charcoal milk.

single bed.

So, if you want to fuck anywhere, you got to do it here as well.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Oh, we'll get to that.

I appreciate the

bench seats there for, I guess, waiting your turn.

In the spotlight, one leg daintily crossed over the other.

Like, hello,

give me three minutes

in your speedo or your trunks, you know, whatever the hell.

Goggles.

I like to think that each of these hot, each of these hot tubs has a little lever that's, that, that opens up like sluice at the bottom that just slops all the lids.

Oh, like Dave Matthews bad poop incident.

Yeah, I got you.

I try to limit myself on this one, but I know it smells crazy in there.

In the railroad press at the time, this was the most controversial car, despite apparently something similar already existing in Japan.

That's because all Americans were jealous.

And apparently there was also a hot tub on the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus train, but only one.

Why, Cat?

For the Ringmaster.

It's like an

ancient privilege of the job.

They still fit all 80 clowns except one hot tub.

You don't need more than one.

70-year-old circus still washes clowns the old-fashioned way.

Cigarettes is good, but clown is more difficult.

Sometimes maybe cigarettes, sometimes maybe clown.

Who's to say?

Which is worse.

Who can say?

There's a lot of open questions here.

How would the hot tubs cope with the movement of the train?

How would sloshing water affect the frame of the car?

Was this thing too damn heavy?

How do you ensure the passengers behave in there?

These and more questions were unfortunately never fully answered.

Oh, so before you even get to those questions, you know, it's the insta corrosion from all the cigarette smoke that I'm worried about.

But anyway, yeah, we will never know why, why, why were they never answered for us?

Why?

Well, before that, we need to see the itinerary.

Oh, Jesus, web.

Oh, you're edging me with the demise of this thing.

I don't see those words to be in that order.

There were a number of routes suggested.

All of them were subject to various squabbles by the various railroads and also Mtrak.

Because

nominally has,

um, you know, they, they, if you are running like a charter passenger train, you technically, in some fashion, always go through Amtrak.

I want to say Amtrak was going to run this, like, it was going to be an Amtrak crew in the engine

would have been an Amtrak crew in the engine.

Yeah, nominally running the train.

Holy shit, the most charcoal.

It's like the Chernobyl miners, Jesus Christ.

Yeah, you're going going to say you have to dig out the bloody like asbestos suit from those steam trains.

It's like that bit in this stand where they realize that none of the like army guys are wearing wedding rings, so none of them are married and they're like expendable.

It's like that, right?

The guys they volunteer for this, no dependents.

Yeah.

That's

your union.

That says you're deserving union.

You do deserve whatever the Amtrak equivalent of the Medal of Honor is.

One of the routes had the train starting at Phoenix, visiting the Grand Canyon, then proceeding via several extremely scenic railroads to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then back down to Denver.

This was killed due to, I believe, clearance issues, right?

These cars are very big.

This was eventually shortened to one route from Denver to Billings, Montana.

with many stops and excursions along the way.

And then a second route from Phoenix to San Antonio for the winter months.

We'll see later why this was never really hammered out, but a typical day on the train was spent off the train doing excursions while the actual travel

capacity.

And most of it was on the bus.

The actual travel with the incredible expensive dome cars offering unparalleled views of the scenery happened at night.

I see the power

in the copywriting on the right there of like, the scenery is great, but you're going to sleep through it really good.

Oh, this is actually an Amtrak advertisement that was not contemporaneous, but you know, same idea.

Back when Amtrak was doing clever ads,

weird sexy anime conductors.

Are you not in?

No, you guys?

So, yeah, if you want to, if you want to be on this train when it's moving, okay, here's a sample itinerary up here: 3:30 a.m., they depart Tabernash or Cheyenne five and a half hours.

Yeah, so 6 a.m.

breakfast, 9 a.m.

arriving.

Cheyenne breakfast, fuck you.

Have you ever tried waking up a smoker have you ever tried waking up a heavy smoker

i want this trip i want this trip

you can show up as late as 9 a.m

then you get up

when i smoked i woke up filled with a homicidal rage for all creatures yep yep hard same there bud you get on you get on the bus and you go to the terry bison ranch that takes 20 minutes right

You try and wake me up at 6 a.m.

and take me anywhere?

I'm putting your cigarette out on a bison and get you.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

You don't have to wake up then, but if you want breakfast, you got to get it before 9 a.m.

All right, fine.

I guess this is acceptable.

But

the buses leave at 9 a.m.

You either go to the Terry Bison Ranch or you went to Territorial Park in Laramie.

That's a 50-minute ride.

Or you could hang out in Cheyenne, the beautiful city.

The Terry Bison Ranch, of course, you could do horseback riding, mountain biking.

You could see bison herds, whatever a petting pen is, jeep tours, private rodeo, Conestoga wagon ride, mountain man rendezvous.

You could meet the mountain man.

Private rodeo feels weirdly unwholesome.

Also sounds like a kind of 80s B-side.

Yeah, private rodeos are why they skipped, they only did single bands

for fear of the private rodeos.

This ain't my first private rodeo.

Private rodeo.

You get a lunch at the ranch.

I'm doing my belt.

It's kind of immoral to have like big Marlboro guys like fuck each other because the big belt buckles swing around, you know?

Like,

yeah.

3 p.m., get on a motor coach, back to the train.

4 p.m., depart Cheyenne, Wyoming for Idaho Falls, 14-hour trip.

6 p.m., dinner on board.

Then the murder mystery.

Yeah, the murder mystery is Philip Morris killing all of these.

Who actually died today?

It was Zemphicina.

Who actually died?

Who died at the Terry Bison Ranch today?

10 p.m.

to 2 o'clock a.m., midnight buffet, dancing, bars, and hot tubs.

My gosh.

Again, that's part of the bad.

Weirdly unwholesome to put hot tubs as an itinerary item.

I'm surprised there isn't an item on the itinerary at like 8 a.m.

roll call of those who died during the night of unrelated causes.

You do like a burialist

if you under a Marlborough flag, you slide their bodies out off the moving train onto the track side

until the soul.

Until the sea shall bury her dead or whatever.

Wait, so Lord, the next dulgences,

an executive has

made some addendums here.

6 to 8:30 a.m.

Breakfast on board.

Arrive in Idaho Falls at 8 a.m.

or wait, is that 6 a.m.?

Okay.

My annotations got in the way.

7 a.m.

Begin motor coach transfers to Jackson, Wyoming.

Two and a half hours.

Very scenic drive.

I also like Continental Breakfast Bus and Bus for Early Departures for all the people like, fuck this.

I'm out.

I can't handle this.

No.

I want to.

Imaginary activities.

Grand Teton Park National Tour or National Park Tour, excuse me.

Whitewater River Rafting on the Snake River.

Fishing.

Shopping in Jackson.

Jackson Hole Ski Resort Gondola.

This is shit saying box lunches.

Fuck you.

Horseback riding.

Then box lunches.

Yeah.

Fuck you.

The Marlborough chefs.

The Marlborough chefs have made me a box lunch.

It's a box of cigarettes.

It's a bento box with a pack of cigarettes.

Okay, that does kind of go off, actually.

Bento box, but each compartment has a bunch of loose cigarettes in it.

Try these other wonderful fruit boxes.

Oh, my God.

Motor coach transfers back to train two and a half hours.

Depart Idaho Falls for Bozeman, Montana.

Dinner on board.

Midnight Buffet, Dancing Bars, Hot Tubs.

Right?

So similar itinerary every day.

You're not seeing the scenery in between.

That's all at night.

This also did involve significant investment in stations and tracks along the route.

Most of that stuff actually happened.

Oh, I am all for this then.

Good stuff.

The big part was a lot of these stations, you didn't have the clearance to bring the train in.

Y'all bet.

We also had to upgrade the tracks for, you know, because the cars were heavy, which we'll talk about more in a second.

also had plans for various contingencies.

This is one document I found, Security What Ifs.

So

this is incredible.

I mean, partly because you know that almost every event has something like this.

It's just weirdly, no one gets sued as much as tobacco companies.

And so they don't get forced to release this in a giant document dump of like

Roz had to go through.

Yeah, that someone has bullet pointed out.

What if somebody rapes somebody on this train?

Like,

exactly, yeah.

How do we do you think they're do you think they're all called the operational operational nightmares brainstorming list?

I think that's a bit of like sort of 90s office culture, but like holy shit, that is what they've called that.

There's a hybrid

brainstorming list, there's a hostage situation.

What happens if someone goes under siege 2 to this?

I was going to say that, yeah, Steven Seagal to save the fucking Marlborough train.

Fight between passengers, alcoholic issues with engineer, no-show engineer.

Oh, wow.

Pretty stereotyping the engineer here.

There's a lot of stereotyping the engineer.

You should see the there are other pages of this document.

The doodle that whoever did the notes on this, drawing the jail.

For the people who aren't listening, it's like a you know, it's a shitty rhizograph scan or whatever, but somebody's clearly doodled an unhappy stick figure in town jail next to passenger arrested.

I'm really like the one where they worry, right?

They accidentally plan quite a good action, as is the thing for red teaming bad stuff, where they're like, what if anti-smoking protesters paint bomb the train?

Can we carry paint on it to repaint the Marlboro livery?

Yes, obviously.

This is interesting because you got to talk about this because there are two types of secondary sources on the Marlboro Unlimited train, either from train guys or from really anti-tobacco guys.

And this is what the anti-tobacco guys all talk about, right?

You know, it's like, oh my God, this train had to carry an infirmary with a paramedic on board in case someone dies from smoking.

Yeah, people do that.

It happens.

Shut up.

Yeah, it happens.

It's fun.

You know,

it's probably like a wise idea.

It is kind of just, this is like any cruise ship will have a, like a book, like a, like a big binder full of this shit, right?

Like, yeah, exactly.

They carried body bags on board again, because in case someone dies from smoking, the rustic human condition,

you're carrying, you're carrying 2,000 people over a season.

I mean, you know, this is not an unwise thing to have on board.

The one that was always really big that people mentioned was these trains had bulletproof glass in case there were protesters who might shoot or throw things at the train.

I mean,

incredible.

I don't blame them, but also don't don't shoot it by prize trade, please.

Here's the thing: standard FRA type 2 glass is bulletproof and cinder block proof.

I was going to say, it's probably bulletproof from a side effect of just its ability to resist bullets, like a flighted ballast.

It's this happy coincidence, not because they wanted bulletproof glass.

It's just, no, all the glass is bulletproof on every train.

They test that.

That's how they literally test compliance, though.

They take a shotgun and shoot the glass point blank.

I would love

for a shotgun.

Let me take care of this.

Break action.

So the official, it's you know, painted safety orange or whatever.

There was also, I believe, they developed a procedure in case people got frisky in the spa car.

Yeah, you'd hope.

I mean, you don't hope.

It's a hose.

Yeah, just left out.

Oh, my God.

No.

Hey!

Hey!

You keep misbehaving, you're gonna be dunked at the cigarette tank.

You want to threaten these guys, you take them out in the balcony where there's fresh air.

You know, everybody who's taking this is like a kind of extremophile who could only live in very nicotine-saturated air.

You expose them to like fresh mountain air of Wyoming or whatever.

It's like, all right, boys, take them outside.

Yeah.

When I was done, they washed me out with a hose.

I was expecting a Randall Jarrell pole, bad, but hell yeah.

It's not the only type of ball gunner.

But you can also see here the reason why they had to list the states earlier.

Different states have different gambling rules.

And since that was such an activity on the train, you had to make sure a lot of states are not allowed to gamble at certain times, certain days of the week.

Same with alcohol policies.

That's why every Amtrak train is legally Washington, D.C., because they go through some dry states or states that are dry on Sundays or whatever.

Yeah, or like dry counties.

I mean, sometimes they technically, I believe they are not supposed to serve you alcohol if you're going through a dry county.

Now, I'm yet to see a crew that...

abides by that rule, but technically.

God bless them for it.

Yeah.

Thank you.

But like, these are the weird things you have to be worried about, especially when you're creating like the fucking debauchery express.

Yeah.

Like, what are we doing?

What, what happens?

Passenger arrested, property damaged from consumer, wants to give friend a tour of the train, brings a pad to seeing iDog.

Someone shows up who didn't win, follow-up to locating missing passenger.

I mean, apart from the like anti-smoking activist stuff, this is all pretty like sensible.

It's pretty normal.

Yes.

This is like, yeah, we should probably think about this stuff.

So, anyway, construction on the cars begins.

Oh, no.

Jeez.

Okay.

Yep.

They're doing it.

Yep.

Construction began almost as soon as the contract was signed and fell behind schedule almost immediately.

Engineering proceeded more slowly than expected, and Raider needed to ramp up its staffing levels considerably to ensure completion on time.

Keep in mind, they've been producing like one to three cars per year

consistently.

Now they're producing 18 in one year.

Oh, boy.

Right.

How hard can it be?

How hard hard can it be?

Yeah.

We've done cars before.

As they continued to slip behind schedule, they hired more people, which meant they ate up more money in the contract, which meant they were under more pressure.

That impeded progress, of course, which made them go more slowly.

Okay.

Building these brand new cars from used railroad cars meant that they ran into issues you might not expect.

like asbestos abatement, which had to happen on some of the crew cars and also the spa car.

Yeah, you don't want to abate it too much, though, because otherwise shit's going to catch fire.

Yeah.

As you go through the various status reports in the documents, it's very funny because there'll be the same section each time.

Production staffing levels increased to 176.

This week, however, in order to meet future production requirements, staffing levels must continue to increase to 202.

Then a few weeks later, it'll be like the new schedule requires at least 320 floor staff versus the current 267.

Oh my God, it's just reaching the point where it's like that video of China doing a track renewal where they have a thousand people in the space of about a hundred meters.

Just people crawling around like Spider-Man on this trainer, like putting bits of it together.

My God.

This is

a much later picture of the spa car down here.

This is one of the lounges.

Behind that is one of the sleepers.

So the other thing is, this is not the only large contract that Raider has taken on at the same time.

The other one is for,

of course, the Florida Fun Train.

What does shit is that?

What's that?

That's a bit of a Madeline back to like kids' party buses from when I was a kid.

This color scheme, it's like the official color scheme of fun as a concept.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

Still in the 90s.

The Florida Fun Train does actually sound pretty fun.

Many people were asking in the 90s, why is there no train from Miami to the various theme parks around Orlando?

And a company called First American Railways, which, by the way, Tom Rader helped found, operated a few tourist railroads out west, and they thought we could pull this one off, right?

It would be fun for the whole family with brand new amenity cars from Rader Railcar with huge wraparound windows so you could take in the views of the various light industrial parks, used car lots, and strip mall loading docks between just outside of Miami and 15 miles short of Orlando.

The Disney episode is coming.

Actually, it's the Florida episode.

It's just going to be me

complaining to my wife about Disney World for four and a half hours.

I married a Disney adult, and I love my wife.

Jesus fucking Christ, hug.

Well,

this was,

what's the word?

Non-denominational.

You could also take this to Universal Studios.

Why would you want to?

Fuck you.

I don't know.

I got

Universal Studios.

What would you Nick Ordium World or whatever the fuck they called it?

The Nick Studios, dude.

I got slimed there.

You're going to go get slimed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So these were composed of ordinary F40PH locomotives leased from Amtrak, right?

Glass dome passenger cars for seating around tables for four and meal service for up to 80 passengers.

The adult lounge and entertainment car with full service bar, musicians and disc jockeys for listening and dancing, including the Tiki bar.

Hell fucking, yeah.

I know it's not, but I want to imagine those DJs on like vinyl turntables that are just skipping like crazy at everything.

I'm just like, I'm trying my best, guys.

Like, it's the 90s, so it would still be CDs, even if it was digital.

Yeah, it's true.

They would be skipping.

Still skipping.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can see here.

This is a much simpler modification than what they were doing for Marlboro because up here, this upper gallery is just the gallery car that they left in and painted fun colors and removed the gallery from the other side.

Um, there were kind of like a soft play, you know, there was the youth lounge and entertainment car, which provided sodas, shakes, and snacks, music, and live entertainment provided by musicians, disc jockeys, magicians, comedians, clowns, so on and so forth.

Yeah, they got them all out of the hot tubs and you know, they're ready to go.

That sentence is a very Matt Berry sentence.

Provided by musicians, disc jockeys, magicians, comedians, clowns, etc.

It's just a bit of a cadence to it.

Yeah, that's

something.

I've heard this described several ways.

The Space Station Arcade Car.

for travelers to experience the latest high-tech video and virtual reality games.

My understanding is this also included a large space shuttle-themed

play place for the kids.

It was a time of optimism.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was an interactive and gift shop car for educationally oriented computer and video games with a unique gift shop using a wireless point of sale system and a baggage car for baggage.

Emotional or put it somewhere.

Yeah.

I appreciate that.

We didn't have emotional baggage in the 90s.

Everyone was happy.

All right, man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

History didn't remember?

Yeah, exactly.

The crew of 24 would dress in shorts and t-shirts with fun train written in vivid colors.

They would be specially trained to be relentlessly helpful and cheerful for the entire five-hour journey.

Going to fucking Disney.

And Devin, you will have to bleep this.

This is a hiding to mass YouTube.

Mass YouTube, you said.

I remember.

Mass YouTube, that's correct.

Yeah.

This relentlessly helpful and cheerful.

That sounds like a description of me when I'm like at my apps, when I'm at my tiredest and therefore most unrestrained ADHD.

This is the thing is, this is now exactly how Brightline works.

You've done this.

And they also have the relentlessly helpful and cheerful facade.

They literally hire people from Disney who are used to having to put on the like relentlessly cheerful facade.

Yeah,

we both have friends who've taken that train and they're like, you know, they're used to Amtrak.

And, you know, it's hard to tell the conductor, please be normal.

Please, God,

please look like you hate your job as much as you actually do.

Yeah, this is Brightline.

If Brightline had a Tiki Bar car, which

get on it,

we will be consultants on the Tiki Bar car.

Yeah.

So

this particular venture ran into some serious issues very early on.

The company was very undercapitalized.

It could not get permission to run into Orlando proper, meaning longer bus rides to the resorts.

But most seriously, Raider Railcar was strung out.

Most seriously, Raider Railcar was strung out with orders, resulting in serious delays to delivery of the cars, which resulted in canceling most of the first season, right?

So First American Railways ran out of money and couldn't pay the full balance to Raider Railcar, which had already delivered the cars.

So

Florida Fund Train managed to run a second season and then went bust.

Oops.

And then those cars were sold to Alaska Railroad.

And Alaska Railroad did actually keep running the tiki bar until 2006 when the car was converted to a normal boring car.

Having tiki drinks in Alaska opera is a kind of like, you know, god-defying hubris.

I think one of the funniest parts about this fun train is

these engines, the engines that they had were just leased from Amtrak.

And when it died, they put them back into Amtrak service before they repainted them.

Yes.

So there's pictures of this like insane Florida fun train look in like Seattle in just like the shittiest weather.

It's like, you know, filthy in Chicago in the winter with the Florida fun train.

Incredible.

Hey, kids, you want to ride the Florida fun train?

That sounds.

Whatever.

That doesn't.

Yeah.

Tickets were only about $50, I think.

That was a lot of money back then.

Jesus Christ.

So.

Engineering difficulties persisted, and Philip Mortis and Rader agreed to delay the promotion for a full year to 1997.

When they are truly getting sued into oblivion.

Yeah.

Real serious cost overruns start to present themselves in the middle of 1996.

More than 300 people were working on the train, which was

twice the workforce that was budgeted for in twice the time.

Philip Morris had so far paid $50 million for their $26 million train.

So that's, whoa, $50 million.

So that's, whoa, that's, this is one train.

Yes.

And it's costing in today's money, I think, probably like the best part of $150 million.

Please, nobody look up how much getting a normal Amtrak car is going to cost.

They're going to make this much more.

It's much cheaper than that, yeah.

True.

Yeah, no one look up the cost of the Intercity Express program fleet because, yeah, probably less than that.

Good garish.

The worst was yet to come.

Oh, no.

Here's a sampling of problems from the May of 1996.

No one knew how to write manuals for the cars.

Engineering had not been completed on the steel tubes to hold the hot tubs in the spa car, despite said tubing already being under construction.

They're just rolling around in there loose.

Quality assurance was shaky.

The clowns are falling out.

Improper batteries were installed, which could not handle a railroad environment.

Oh, let ass.

That's probably fine.

ADA compliance was shaky, especially in the dining car.

The office could only be locked or unlocked from the outside.

There were tremendous amounts of drainage issues.

Oh, so it's

in there as well.

Yeah.

Almost universal fit and finish issues.

Oh, it's a Tesla.

Many of the fabrics and all of the leather finishes were not fire-rated.

Definitely.

It's got a tesla.

There's so much fire in here already.

Yeah.

Air handlers were so huge and heavy, they caused the floors to sag underneath them.

No, I do not like that.

And probably most attractively, the cars were too damn heavy, meaning a lengthy and difficult search for new trucks or if you're British bogeys was required.

Fantastic.

So they created some extremely heavy steel tubes with no way of actually connecting them to a railway.

Yeah, pretty much.

It's a bunch of ugly buildings.

Oh, dear.

Sunk cost policy prevails, and Philip Morris just keeps funneling cash into the company while offering $6,500 refunds to the winners of the first sweepstakes should they not be able to take the trip in 1997.

I mean, he doesn't give a shit.

He's just throws them.

Just like 2,000 people each time.

So your refund is going to be $13 million

and instead you are paying $50 million to build the train.

Yes.

Absolutely counter.

How does the tobacco industry still exist?

One executive.

I'll tell you what this explains to us.

It's how much money the tobacco industry makes for this to kind of be a drowning arrow to them.

Yeah.

Pretty much.

Jesus.

It's just like part of the marketing budget, too.

Yeah.

Oh, also, if you're, if

we were talking about the emergency windows earlier, here, here it is.

God, just

peeve yourself out of that and fall to the ground below.

The one right below it appears to be plated over with wall, which I don't think is how an emergency window is supposed to work.

No,

yeah, that's I would love an emergency accent that required me to punch through a really easy-to-punch through wall.

I would feel so strong.

Those would be an accident.

Well, that's a knockout panel for when you get thrown out of the car in a comedy way after getting mad at a poker game.

Yeah, it's painted tinfoil for humorous effect.

Yeah, exactly.

One Philip Morris executive who was on a site meeting,

he took some notes at at Rader in late August during this meeting.

Quote,

Rader is an egotistical maniac.

The chief operating officer, Mike Novak, has management experience, but he works for and fights with Tom Rader.

Quote, they don't know how to supervise people.

This results in much of rework.

Engineering also stinks.

Quote, quality manual is is excellent, but Rader doesn't follow it.

He just, he, he's, he's the

guy.

He wants to put more grand pianos in here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Noted structural issues under the car, on oil tanks, on the car bodies themselves, on collision posts, lack of FEA or real engineering.

That's finite element analysis.

That's when you put the structure in the computer and there's all the pretty colors, right?

They removed the exterior panels, or they had to remove the exterior panels in order to remedy defective welds.

800 welds per car for 14 cars.

I believe that's why there's no sheathing on this car.

They had this sort of truss system that was like the bulk of the structure, right?

Incredible.

I feel like you can see that seam where it was, like where the roof used to be on the gallery car, and they just added that like three-foot panel in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

MAS, which is some kind of third-party service, previously inspected welds and passed them.

Tom Turner thinks they didn't inspect properly.

Inspected through paint.

Inspector who passed the cars now works for Raider.

This guy is so cool.

One of the favorite quotes, I found this document through an Oregon,

I think OregonLive.com article.

I'll link in the description.

I was able to sort of reverse engineer this.

But my favorite quote is: there's a fine line between stupidity and dishonesty, and I think we're on it.

There was an issue on the ability to travel between cars on the upper level while the train is moving,

presumably, because these cars were so tall and they would rock back and forth.

The amount of movement in the upper sector would be enormous.

Yeah, no wonder.

Apparently, even though these things hadn't turned a wheel, there was some expectation there were going to be some ride issues.

No shit.

Quote, six-foot horse statue for lounge car may not be able to be stabilized.

Well, fuck this then.

Look, if you can't have your six-foot horse statue, strike the whole fucking thing.

Get the shit out of here.

Like, what are we even doing here?

1997 comes around.

The trains still aren't fucking done.

The tour is again rescheduled to 1998.

Oh, dear.

Philip Morris was still trying to limp this thing over the finish line, but they'd spent something like $78 million at this point.

Holy shit.

And probably wound up subsidizing the Florida fund train in the process because Raider was really bad at accounting.

Then, February 1997, Philip Morris pulls the plug on Raider railcar.

Things get a little murky here.

You can see here the framing for the hot tub car.

Hot tubs.

Oh, yes.

The Hocken and time.

The things this could have almost seen.

Yes.

Yeah.

The thing was really, it was saved.

Over the places you'll go.

And it's like Laramie, Wyoming.

Full of

naked grounds.

Things get a bit murky here.

The popular narrative is that Philip Morris took possession of the railroad cars, had them scrapped, swore Raider to secrecy to avoid embarrassment for all involved parties.

Problem with this theory is that you can still see the cars on Google Street View in 2007, and everyone knew about it.

And the unfinished spa car definitely survived until at least 2008 when they started trying to convert it into a business car.

I mean, at least it was never used.

Imagine having your business meeting in the business car, and you're like, why does it smell like clown?

Well, they never

exactly, exactly.

The hot tub's still under there.

It's just like underneath the conference.

That on a moonlit night, you can still see.

Honestly, just like the White House press room that's still musty from the swimming pool.

Yeah.

I think you put a big tabletop on there.

If you hit a curve or a switch too hard, like the water sloshes out on everybody's lap.

This is the giant waterbed car.

Yeah.

And you said these had drainage issues.

There are some documents I've found suggesting Philip Morris still still tried to save the project by repossessing the cars and sending them to a builder called Transportation and Transit Associates in either Hornell, New York or Kinona, New York.

I couldn't quite figure this one out, but they specialize in refurbishing old transit vehicles.

If the cars were moved, they were moved sometime that January.

I can't confirm or deny this actually took place.

At any rate, the train never ran.

Raider Railcar laid off almost its entire staff that January, having just hired them.

They lost the Philip Morris contract and they were stiffed on the Florida Fund Train contract.

They went bankrupt and reorganized as Raider Rail Car 2.

Oh, really, really liking that renaming scheme.

It's all about Deli 3.

What happened?

Dolta House, what happened to the first deal?

Raider Railcar 2 then went bankrupt.

Oh, yeah.

And they reorganized something called Colorado Railcar.

Oh, no, the sequel.

If at first you don't succeed.

Yeah.

As for

the rest of the train, the passenger cars, a lot of it is question mark.

Very definitely, we saw the demonstrator cars before.

I'm like 99% certain those were Philip Morris cars.

They were just left on the property.

And they finished them.

as like a demonstration, right?

The locomotives that Electromotive Division delivered, you know, like instantly, they're like, you you want locomotives?

We got locomotives.

Here, have some.

So many of these.

Yeah.

They were absolutely fine.

They were sold to Metrolink in Los Angeles, the commuter railroad there.

They were retired just recently, I think.

Oh, nice.

2020, supposedly, because they were not emissions

compliant.

Yeah.

They love retiring locomotives in California for hypothetical technology that doesn't exist yet.

So

Marlboro and Philip Morris Morris decide to never do trains again, except in a weird financialized way, where a lot of the locomotives on the Northeast Corridor, most notably the Amtrak HHP 8s, are actually owned by Philip Morris and leased back to Amtrak through some sort of bizarre financial agreement that I don't understand.

Oh, my God.

Train landlords.

They got in a big trouble about this because the HHPH kind of sucked.

So Amtrak set set them all.

They replaced them with newer engines and

they tried to start parting some out for other things.

And Philip Morris is like, yo, we own these.

You're still making this.

You can't part out our trains.

So Amtrak had to go put them all back together and just they sat there in Delaware or whatever for ages and ages.

In case Philip Morris could find another electric railroad in the United States who would take this.

Yeah, I.

It's all very stupid.

So that's how trains, that's how a good number of trains in America are owned by a cigarette company.

Colorado Rail Car still shambles on.

Um, they were able to stay afloat for a while,

just let it die.

They were actually still able to produce pretty good small batch luxury train cars for a long time.

Wow.

We showed some of them earlier in the podcast, right?

Tom Rader was unsatisfied with the slow but steady business of building one or two large luxury railroad cars per year.

He wanted to get into mass transit.

Oh, no.

Uh-oh.

That's a fast-moving world of movers and shakers.

Let me tell you.

Yeah, I could play.

So the first was takers, really.

The infamous Colorado Railcar diesel multiple unit shown here advertised as the only FRA-compliant diesel multiple unit in the world, meaning it could withstand the insane FRA buff strength test, right?

It found no buyers,

but the capabilities of the company had been sort of proven, right?

It looks Russian, like that thing looks like a Russian multiple unit.

That's that's you can see how much he loves those wrap-around windows up top.

Like, oh, yeah, he loves those things, just loves

really big windows are pretty good.

Um, they are pretty cool, except that you need shitloads of HVAC, even if you're not smoking on these things.

This is true, build a greenhouse, it gets warm.

Um, eventually, Tri-Rail in South Florida bought several of these huge, ginormous double-deck

diesel multiple units for service out of Miami.

And they worked okay.

And they only needed four of them.

So Colorado Railcar was able to provide.

These guys were retired in 2012.

They also built one for Alaska Railroad, which is the only company that has ever had success with anything this company built.

Another one that only works in Alaska due to sort of shared derangement field.

Apparently, still working.

I talked to a colleague who works for Alaska Railroad as a conductor.

It's like, these cars sound like shit.

How bad are they?

And he's like, yeah, they're a little high maintenance, but they're fine.

Apparently,

you bring it into the below

whatever latitude.

These cars don't work.

But in Alaska, all the Raider cars are absolutely fine.

As you do.

powered, powered, their competence is powered by like moose proximity.

You know, you take them out of moose range, it just falls apart.

And down they go, yeah.

I think VRail has a few as well that, again, work absolutely fine.

Yeah, they've got, I think, some of the single, they have the ex-Florida Funtrain single-level dome.

It's like me, it only works in cold weather.

I hear that.

Oh, I thought you were going to say little high maintenance.

Yeah, little high maintenance, only popular in Canada and parts of Alaska.

We will play.

Oh, what's that town?

Ketchikan.

We will play Ketchikan.

Ketchikan.

We'll talk about how the bridge to nowhere was actually a great idea.

All right.

Which I unironically believe.

It went to the town's airport.

Come on.

Anyway, we don't have time for that, Roz.

Yeah, okay.

Anyway, TriMet in Portland bought some of the single-level DMUs for their Westside Express service in 2009.

Stylish orders only got normal windows, though.

Yeah, but I like it, though.

Yeah.

TriMet's order went so poorly, they wound up taking direct control over Colorado Colorado Railcar's finances just to get the damn trains finished.

This involves, among other things, trying to separate Colorado Railcars' finances from Raiders, a Tom Raiders side project, the American Orient Express.

Should have just moved all of Portland up to Alaska.

Following delivery, poof, Colorado Railcar was done.

It was over.

Finally.

R.I.P.

Except their assets were bought by Value Recovery Group,

who intended to move the plant and equipment to Columbus, Ohio, rename the company U.S.

Railcar, and make a bid to supply equipment for the 3C corridor.

That's the train from Cincinnati, Columbus to Cleveland, right?

This was just fully funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, you know, Obama's big stimulus package, right?

Yeah, Obama fund bucks for trains.

Yeah, this was

the most obvious rail corridor in the nation that was not served at all.

It would have served over 7 million people along a flat, dead straight, 230-mile railroad, and it was unceremoniously canceled by the new governor, John Kasich, in 2011

on account of no one in Ohio rides the train.

Shut up, dickhead.

You do not measure the need to build a bridge by counting the people who swim across the river, you daft prick.

Now, hold on.

There were trains in Ohio.

Ohio hadn't been before.

One of them shows up at Cleveland at 2 o'clock in the the morning.

One of them shows up in Cincinnati at 2 o'clock in the morning three times a week.

Incredible.

So because this was canceled.

You told me it many times and it makes me angry every single time.

Because this project was canceled, the plant in Columbus, Ohio was never built.

The intellectual property for this is

who knows what happened.

Valueless.

The status quo remains.

Today, you can't order small batches of railroad cars at all.

And what's more, they don't even let you smoke on them.

What a country.

What a country.

We flew too close to the sun.

Yes.

I think that's it.

The cars were too tall.

We flew too close.

Absolutely.

Yeah, maybe a controversial point of view, but hand Amtrak over to the cigarette companies.

Yes.

I don't ironically believe this.

Let it happen.

Some of those Amtrak trains already don't smell very good.

I've got lots of trains where I'm just like, hmm.

Yeah, what are the hot tubs like, you know?

Yeah.

I don't know if I'd trust an Amtrak hot tub, actually.

No, you wouldn't.

Yeah, Joe Biden's just in there chilling.

Horrifying.

Oh, my God.

This is just pure chlorine.

I wouldn't feel comfortable if it wasn't.

What did we learn?

It's one of the most

stupid trading.

I want a Marlborough Unlimited duffel bag.

I just think it's really funny that, no, they work fine in Alaska for some reason.

For some reason, it just worked.

Build different.

I really wonder why.

There's got to be a very boring actual explanation for it that I'm not interested in.

I want the

guess it has something to do with the HVAC being less stressed.

And just like light duty cycles or something totally boring.

I want this

to fit, sir.

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

Shake hands with danger.

I'm not another medical one.

Whatever it is, give me nightmares.

Hello, gang.

Fuck you.

After listening to your episode on the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, it reminded me of a near-miss experience I had with helium whilst I was studying for a PhD some years ago.

That should be

I was was doing my studies in a medical imaging department full of MRI scanners, an obscure device known as a magnetoencephalograph.

A what now?

Or mag for short.

Oh, mag.

This thing doesn't give one the anxiety that an MRI does because you're not fully encased, just your head is

tailoring at the same time.

I can watch Netflix.

It's fine.

Ridiculously.

It resembles a 1950 salon hair dryer, except the bit on top is a tank full of liquid helium.

Oh, never mind.

Nope, I like this less.

To keep the electronics cold, to detect magnetic fields from the brain, the helium tank was pretty basic, so it would boil off the helium quickly.

Don't worry, we weren't wasting precious said helium.

We would capture it in a system for reliquification and use it elsewhere.

But this meant we still had to fill the mag by hand twice weekly.

Filling was, for some reason, the responsibility of the PhD students rather than the technical support staff.

Oh, they are nagging you while you fill up the mag, for sure.

The training consisted of a 20-minute safety presentation and what can only be described as a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-Do, on-the-job training from which

from whichever more senior PhD student you were paired with on your turn.

Oh, no.

This process was as follows.

Number one, put a feed pipe into a 250-liter DWER.

I think a D-WER is a type of tank, of liquid helium, which, when it is at 290 degrees warmer than the contents, it boils some of the helium in the tank and builds pressure.

Number two, divert the evaporating helium from going back into the recycler and instead to the atmosphere so there's no back pressure.

Number three, connect the feed pipe to the meg.

And number four, open the feed pipe and let physics do the rest for you until the meg is full again.

Okay, four-step plan, simple enough.

Yeah.

One below-freezing January morning, we were about to fill, but forgot two crucial steps.

First, we didn't divert the evaporating gas, and second, we forgot to open the lab emergency exit to let in fresh air from the outside because it was really cold.

Normally, the back pressure from the recycler alone just restricts the flow of the filling, but this day something unexpected happened.

The back pressure in the DWAR was so immense that the emergency pressure valve on the D-War opened, ejecting liquid and gaseous helium all over the lab.

Oh, dear.

Oh, no.

Quick, somebody!

Oh, my God.

After a short panic, we realized we hadn't diverted the evaporated gas and pulled the lever to do that, bringing the D-War under control and resetting the emergency release.

Now, what happens when you flood a room full of cold liquid helium?

Oh, God.

Two things I remember from that day.

First, it made all the normal air in the room condense into clouds on the ceiling.

Oh, boy.

Oh.

And then it looked like it was raining indoors, which for some reason I found uncontrollably hilarious.

Not for some reason, I suspect, for one very specific reason.

Related to what gas was in your lungs at that point.

The second is that when helium boils, it expands to about 700 times its volume and starves the room of breathable oxygen.

Yes,

in that situation, you don't get the squeaky voice, but goes straight to inert gas poisoning.

That's way less, that's way less fun.

My passing trick of getting inert gas poisoning,

where symptoms include disorientation, hallucinations, and often a feeling of euphoria just before you die.

Oh, at least that's possible, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Luckily for me, the senior PhD student realized what was happening, opened the emergency exit, and pulled me outside into the fresh air, where I made a prompt recovery.

We quietly agreed not to mention this to the senior staff, changed the standard operating procedure, and unofficially made our policy do as I say and do.

Luckily, smarter people than myself have found a way to build a meg which requires no liquid helium.

So hopefully this kind of nonsense.

can be soon left in the past.

Boring.

Of such

scientific progress made of, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Still not sure whether the raining indoors really happened or if it was a symptom of oxygen starvation.

I don't want to find out again.

Oh, that's a Peter Watts blindsight kind of fucking detail.

I was fine with this until you throw in, and maybe this bit didn't happen.

Yeah, I don't like that.

Unreliable narrator trope.

It's a useful tool.

Keep up the good work from please don't mention my name.

The meg world is quite small and I'm somehow still a part of it.

That's a strange name,

just meg for sure.

I need to do like advice column

from Helium Filled in Helena.

Well, that was uh actually tame compared to the exploding cadaver in the recent episodes and other such things.

Yeah, it's for medical ones.

That was okay.

At least you got out of it with both of your ass cheeks.

Yes, yeah.

Oh, oh, I didn't want to have to think about that again.

Oh, I haven't stopped.

Good.

Well, good lord.

That was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anybody have any commercials before we go?

No.

I have one thing to say, which is this is my last mainline episode as a

co-host, I believe, which is really sad.

I've had such fun.

Gareth Dennis, job haver.

Job haver.

I I do have a job.

It was made public today as of Dave recording.

No, yesterday as of Dave recording because it's 2:36 in the fucking morning.

I have a child.

Yeah, so

not only do I have a family, I also now have a job again.

So

mainline episoders, thank you for having me.

And I'm apologizing.

Apologies.

You're back to your normal lineup in the next mainline episode.

It was our pleasure to

exploit your skills and humor in your time of need for our commercial gain.

I had so much fun.

It's very sad that it's coming to an end, but it means that I can do battle with Victoria Scott again.

So it's all good when I return as a guest for perhaps undisclosed future episodes.

Who knows?

But yeah.

No,

thanks for having me.

Thank you.

Thank you, listeners, for allowing me to be on this podcast and not shouting immediately and say, get this twat off our screen.

They love you and they're right to do so.

Well, you're still scheduled for the bonus episode tomorrow, right?

Yeah, of course.

One last

time,

go subscribe to the Patreon so you can get one more Gareth.

Yeah, I have to think of something fun and patronable to say at the end of that episode.

Yeah, that's it.

So all the Networkrillcom staff listening to this episode to see what I said.

Subscribe to the Patreon to hear me make all the actual threads.

YouTube, quite a lot, as I recall.

Wow, which was it?

Yes.

YouTube.

Sounded like someone else.

Weirdest thing.

The usual podcast plugs, though, for everything else, of course.

Everyone, listen to everyone's podcasts.

There's so many podcasts out there.

Also, subscribe to Jay's YouTube channel.

There's always some fun stuff going on on there.

Mother, I haven't posted that in like a year and a half.

Shut up.

It doesn't stop us from plugging the Patreon, does it?

They're used to.

Exactly.

There used to be fun stuff on there.

Maybe once they make sense.

There still is.

You just have to, it's just not new fun stuff.

You got to let go of this toxic idea of like, you know, being entitled to new content all the time.

We used to have fun, then along came some Finns and some Swedes.

Honestly, having just spent the past three hours plus the time yesterday looking at all these

blueprints at trains, I already have the hard part of this thing done.

I've already made these engines.

We might be able to get this

fucking train in city skylines.

The particle effects alone would

any computer.

Garrett's coughing, just thinking about it.

This is the first and only thing I make for City Skylines 2.

This is what you get.

This is your punishment.

City Skylines 2.

Oh, my God.

Incredible.

All right.

We'll see.

That was a podcast.

What a stupid idea.

Bye, everyone.

Bye, everybody.

Yeah, stupid.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.