Episode 171: The Morpeth Curve

More more more more peth, more problems.

More peth, more problems.

It's not funny, but I am going to do it again, and you're going to have to react to it again.

So, yeah, I was about to say, yeah.

Nova, what Nova, tell us about what what's what's been fucking you up today.

What if you can share?

Are you sharing?

So, so, um, I have moved house.

Um, it's it's done.

Um, there are some problems with the new place, um, in the form of like mold and stuff.

Oh, yeah, okay, yeah, yes, yeah, this is the thing.

Fun.

What I tried to do is I tried to spend more money to rent a nicer place for a year, just kind of push the bows out thing.

So I'm not going to have to worry about it, spend a year here, then I can start stressing about something.

It's the unit.

Yeah, I forgot that I live here.

And so, what I got instead was like a regularly shit flat, but expensive.

And in the course of like cutting up boxes for recycling, because when you move, you have a lot of boxes.

I managed to, like, if you can see here,

not the colourboard cut down,

down.

take this finger off.

And that was fine.

Except today,

because no food in the house, we got Uber Eats in.

And the guy's like, hey, can you come up?

Because I don't feel like walking down to your flat.

And I'm like, yeah, sure, whatever, because I'm a friend of the workers.

Open the door, bend my finger too far.

Blood everywhere.

Oh, God.

No.

One of my new neighbors comes down and is making conversation.

I'm dripping blood on like people's Amazon packages and

all that and shit.

And I'm like, yeah, no, it's great.

It's a fucking metal buddy.

Doing great.

I'm doing great.

You got to show dominance when you move in.

That's true.

That is true.

I've bled on this place twice.

I've been here less than a week.

And, you know, one thing I will say is because the decor is very landlord, because it's a rental, a lot of white carpets, and you haven't bled until you've bled into

a white carpet that you don't own.

That's going to be an awkward sort of thing.

Did they bring furniture to you, by the way?

Did they bring back something?

They're doing that when I get back from the live show.

So like the Tuesday, I'm probably going to have

a bed back because what they did was

I rented a two-bed.

And the day before I moved in, the landlord's like, hey, we took half the furniture out because we were trying to sell it at the same time as rent it.

And we had the furniture there to like advertise it.

So I had to get kind of legal on them.

And so now

they're sort of like response to that as well, we'll put one of the beds, you know, back in.

So

we'll give you half a bed.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll give you

the front half of the bed.

We're not going to tell you what half it is exactly.

So I'm going to have to get back to them with, okay, where's the other one?

And

yeah, like,

why is there so much fucking mold in here?

So, yeah, it's great.

It's been going great.

I hope that the collection of toxic mold spores currently piloting my body are still good at podcasting.

Well, if your flu game was anything to go by for the last episode of my life, we're going to be fine.

Fingers crossed.

Yeah.

That was a fun episode.

People have enjoyed that, the Tom episode.

That's gone down.

That seems to have gone down very well.

One other thing I will note is because of the new mixer, I have like fader slides.

I have to mix the drops down myself manually.

So if you want the news to fade out, I have to do

like that.

Oh, you have like a you have like a lever with like a really nice smooth motion?

It is really smooth, but the problem is if I bring it back up too quickly,

so I have to remember to turn the thing off.

Oh, God.

It's like it's going to be a whole thing.

That is some mental effort.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did some volunteer work at Fairfax County Public Access Television when I was in high school, and

I got to run the camera switcher, and it had a transition lever the way you transition between two different tele inputs.

I've got one of those two.

That lever was so smooth.

It was incredible.

Nova, I'm expecting you to lift up the box with like the leaves.

I'm not moving this fucking thing.

No, I'm not touching this.

I installed it.

I got it working well enough.

There is theoretically a kind of a multi-track thing that I can do so that you guys hear a process recording and what's recorded isn't.

But

I don't want to do that.

That's too much work.

So

we just go with this and see how it works.

Should we do a sync point?

Yes.

Yeah, I was going to, I was waiting for a break in the conversation to mention.

Sorry.

Sorry.

We're going to do three, two, one, mark.

Yeah.

That's three, two, one, mark.

Okay.

Hello.

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

It's a podcast about engineering disasters.

And PowerPoint.

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.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.

My pronouns are he, him, and fuck Microsoft.

With us is

our fourth.

I don't know what you are, man.

Internet.

I'm the seventh or possibly eighth co-host.

Yeah, my name is Gareth Dennis.

My pronouns are he and him.

Nice.

Also, if I sound different this episode, it's because I have a new mixer, which I hope to God is working.

There will be some adventures with the drops if I try and get them to work.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, and actually, yeah, in front of us right now, I have to do this bit because I've created something.

Yeah, there's a beautiful cottage.

3,500 PCM.

It's got a new extension.

Yeah, someone has put some train in a garden.

Thomas comes to breakfast type situation.

Yeah, exactly.

I really appreciate the free Hy-Viz, Hive-Viz vests, where they're sort of like sort of Viz.

Like the little boob tube kind of crop top type situation.

That's quite cunty, yeah.

They're sort of like

a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of

the cop with the old-fashioned like bobby hat.

Yeah.

Little kunty sort of boob tube type high-viz.

Yeah, it's uh

they still make sense?

Please say yes.

I badly need to see a like

actual retro reflective like vest that stops at the tits.

So here's the thing.

I have been searching for one of these for years.

I have a BR vintage Gile,

but I desperately want the BR vintage crop top.

And I have yet to successfully find one.

Getting like a beach body ready with Boucher.

Exactly right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The dad bod hangs out underneath the boot chube.

It's beautiful.

I quite like that just the guy in a t-shirt stood on the side of a Mark III coach

in the right of shot here.

I don't even know if that's a t-shirt.

I think that might pre-date t-shirts.

That might be a man in like shirt sleeve order.

With a hairline they don't make in this country anymore.

Just imagining all these guys, you know,

they cut out, they just cut off the sleeves of like orange t-shirts and turn them into tank tops.

Is the house supposed to look like this?

No, no, it's not supposed to have these in it.

Those are

an unnecessary and indeed unwanted addition.

He's standing on the side of a train, isn't he?

Oh, that's very bad.

Yes, and the train's also really mucky.

Yeah, it's well, it's done some like, you know, landscaping is what it's done.

Yeah, the garden is a different shape to what the garden was before as well.

Um, I like this picture, it's quite funny to me.

Um, oh, yeah, and we're going to explain why uh this has happened.

But first,

we have announcements.

We do.

We do have announcements, announcements, announcements.

Oh, yeah.

What was the song we decided last time?

I don't remember.

That one's scored on the old Mixer.

People think it was just me making those noises, but no, it's a complex program.

We still are on tour next year.

Yes.

We've sold a lot of tickets.

We need to sell more.

Please do so.

Weirdly, the place where we need to sell more is new york city which i understand

new york city

but i understand that there's a lot of people in new york city and some of them aren't coming to the live shows which they should do they should buy tickets now at the links in the description yes we have uh sony hall uh we still have tickets available for the april 29th show there sony hall are we allowed to call ourselves broadway performers after that I'm going to anyway.

Broadway performers,

plane crash, survivor,

other qualities.

It was formerly a Broadway theater, but it is no longer.

Did they move it?

Did they take it up to

deconsecrate it?

Deconsecrating the Broadway theater?

It's a secondary relic of Judy Garland.

It is essentially a deconsecration situation, yeah.

Fuck.

To the best of my knowledge.

Can I describe myself doing

musical theater there?

It's not a Broadway theater.

What if I say?

What if I do a song?

What if I got a song in the show?

We're going to say.

If we hire Lynn Manuel Miranda to

make

it do some raps about the

six days of Sodom for the hip opera on ice, yes.

Ross, you could sing the

Gilbert beginning.

The beginning of the major general song.

Yeah.

Ross.

Just do the major general show.

Like a boxing match, we'll begin each show with a sort of mandatory singing of the national anthem.

Yes, I think that'd be very funny to do.

So that's New York.

How's the fillmore looking?

Has it been filled more?

It has been filled more, but keep filling it.

We need you to keep filling it.

You still got to keep filling the fill more.

Yeah, there's still a lot of tickets there.

Unfortunately,

both Somerville shows sold out because, I don't know, people in New England are freaks.

Yeah, I'm going to say that.

It's just, you give them something to do in summer, and in the depths of a New England winter, they'll pay for anything.

What we're selling them is a warm evening indoors, you know?

Some hope.

There is also still tickets available in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, federal surveillance agents, please make your way to the historic, I forget the name of the theater.

It's not a historic theater.

It was a trolley car barn.

And

we're going to get, I assume, some sort of in-depth building tour.

Yeah, if you're in

the marine barracks that are adjacent to it,

buy some tickets because it's right there.

I'll see if I can get crayons in the bar menu.

Just a little martini with a crayon sticking out of it.

It's like what Applebee's did the Mountain Dew martini with the,

Buffalo Wild Wings.

They'll have the Dorito.

What's that called?

Garnish.

Yeah, we will be scrolling people on the door to make sure that they don't have any charms with them.

It will be marine safe.

You know, like how some places, some movies have an autism-friendly screening of stuff.

This will be a marine-friendly show.

It will be very marine-friendly if you are a marine.

We will not discriminate.

I found a recipe for a Cheetos Mountain Dew mule.

Oh, God.

That's not Marines.

That's Cavalry Scout.

That's.

I am a diseased human being.

Hold up.

There you go.

More smiles with everybite.com.

I look forward to playing every possible military town.

I look forward to playing Virginia Beach.

Fort Brown.

And we just get the seals in.

Hopefully, they don't say anything about starting a con, whatever.

Step one: a slice of lime dusted with crushed cheetos to garnish oh

you're dangerously close to revealing our secret langley show

oh yeah i mean they'll get us back in there for that

handsomely yeah we're doing we're doing a tour but it's it's like langley falls fort for fort mead fort belvoir uh and you know nowhere else yeah

i i do like the idea of that of like them like hustling us through the whatever uh pentagon Burger King.

Yeah.

We got you on your rigs.

That's all you get.

So anyway, yeah.

East Coast tour is happening

to buy tickets, especially in Philadelphia, because again, we need to fill more seats in the Philmore.

You bought enough tickets that it's early to say, but another tour will probably follow.

in a different geographical location.

Yeah, this is the thing.

If you can't make it to the East Coast and but you still want to see us, then you're claiming to like.

Well, yeah, that too.

But your ability to either travel to it or encourage people who are local to buy tickets will directly impact our likelihood of coming to your location.

So, you know, put your thumb on the scales there, please.

Yeah.

Because I want to see more of the these United States, you know?

Yeah.

Never better time to go to Duluth, Minnesota.

I'm going.

I think there have been better times, given the news about the shit that's happening to trans women in Minnesota lately.

Trans Minneapolis.

They're not as friendly there.

Okay.

Well, either way, if anybody tries to get Minnesota nice with me, I'm going to try and get Tom to do security for me.

That's fair.

Just get like choke slammed onto some light rail tracks, you know?

Yeah.

All right.

That was the announcements.

You forgot my announcement.

Oh, yeah, you do.

Oh, you got an announcement.

You do.

Oh, yeah, you do have an announcement.

Sorry.

Hey, so I know that I just called one of my colleagues an an asshole on the air, but have you considered donating toys?

And so the place I work, Lutheran Settlement House,

I am in charge of the, oh, God.

I don't know if I'm in charge, but they tell me that I'm in charge of the toy drive.

You're like a boy king.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, God.

With my trusted advisors, who I'm sure will never do anything to me.

So, yeah, I work at a place that does domestic violence counseling, that works with the homeless population, that works with families families in crisis.

And we need your help the same as we do every year.

We are undertaking the largest,

how would I say this toy distribution system

we've ever done.

We're really proud of it.

So please donate that.

And on a second list, if you hate children, but love old people.

We are also collecting donations for our pantry and our senior center so that we can, which is where I do spend a lot of my time in the the senior center, helping helping my beloved seniors not get phones scammed and listening to them just complain at each other.

It's amazing.

I love old people.

That is all of their time.

Avoiding,

yeah.

And they're just like, oh, well, you like, my favorite thing is it's gotten out that I'm pretty good with technology.

And they're just like, Liam, we'll fix your phone.

And I'm just, it's the most cracked thing you've ever seen.

I'm just like, I need you to take this and chuck it into the Delaware.

And it's not going to walk when I've got, no, no, because your phone's mostly in one piece well that's true no i just have those bars i've never seen i have other i have other old people problems with my phone i know i've seen your high viz keyboard with your low viz back it just doesn't make any sense roz oh my god this is a new thing that we're going to discuss every episode isn't it

how stressed you are by roz's phone you guys well nova also i think uh as a walking tech ban herself i

those are

they survived they made the trip right i was gonna say say, they're still inside the case of your computer.

I very carefully

took this computer, I wrapped it very gently in bubble wrap, I put it in the back of a hire car, and I

very kindly got it driven over to the new place.

I unplugged it, I re-plugged it, it's all good, it's fine, it works.

Um, so no dramas, please do not like like everything is

okay.

It makes some noises, right?

But that's fine.

So do I.

It's called getting old, you know?

But we're not in the business of shaming my computer for whatever she does, you know.

But that's those are her choices.

There's only one loser here who has RGB on his computer, and that is me.

So

I have hella RGB on the new mixer, it's not optional.

It looks like a

unlimited amount of RGB on my desktop.

Do you remember if Trump was in court and his lawyer had a Republic of Gamers laptop with the RGB going?

Yes, yes, just at the judge.

When we got my wife's

engagement ring design, thank you, patrons.

They used Razor gaming laptops to run CAD.

I was like, why do they have

the woman, the designer, takes out this

colossal gaming laptop and sort of slams it down on the desk?

I'm just like, ah, wow, I haven't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is for a little.

Yeah, yeah.

So we should.

We've derailed ourselves spectacularly.

We've not even reached.

We're in someone's garden.

Yeah,

we're still in the garden.

We need to escape the garden and talk about the doggone news.

The doggone news.

The doggone news.

The gosh gone news.

There we go.

Sorry, Devin, you don't have to edit the Karen again this time.

Thanks.

We think last time it was very funny.

I have to fade that down manually, by the way.

I hope you realize.

Let's talk about Matt Gates.

The sort of

highly pompadored

man with a penchant for Venmoing underage girls.

Just

buying them McDonald's, you know?

Yeah,

with sex tribes.

With the little Venmo notes that say, like, for being my cool friend or whatever.

Yeah, so he was Trump's first pick for

Attorney General to trigger the libs and also to get out ahead of this like congressional ethics investigation, which was looking into the Venmoing.

And then the Venmo stuff leaked again,

and he has now taken his name out of consideration for Attorney General because everybody in Congress hated him, even the MAGA people hated him.

I was about to say, it was like really well known this guy was like an insane sex pest.

Yeah, we knew that a while ago.

Yeah, just kind of

backcombed nonce was like,

you know, really in consideration for the job of like, you know,

America's senior like chief legal officer.

He's a very

square head.

He looks

like freaks, dude.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, for real.

I know that I also look weird, but like different kinds of weird.

Different kinds of weird general.

I come from a family of square heads, but this guy, this guy's a squarehead.

Yeah,

the backcombing is really not doing him any favors, and I don't know why he does that, you know.

As a man with an enormous forehead and an enormous chin, I've made different decisions about what I would do with my hair.

He has like a

hairline, like a staple.

It's remarkable.

Yeah, it's just

yep.

Yeah, nonce.

Like a soccer doll.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like a square bracket.

It's it's really quite something.

It looks like a parody of a Republican congressperson.

Yeah, I feel increasingly, and I've been thinking this too about Nancy Mace, the um uh

yeah, yeah, yeah, the representative who's like going uh going all in on transphobia.

That I feel like more and more I'm living in a world that has been illustrated by uh Garth Ennis because all of these motherfuckers look like preacher characters.

It's it's like like unnerving at this point.

And I know it's a case of like, yeah, they look like the thing because the thing is like drawn and written in imitation of people like them.

But still,

you know,

this stuff was supposed to be exaggerated, right?

Yes.

Yes.

I mean, the other thing is, I'm wondering exactly how this is going to, you know, go over with the MAGA crad, you know, since, or especially the Q crad.

It's the steal.

This is the steal.

We are starting the steal right now.

Yes, we got to do it.

I mean,

it's not only Gates, right?

The nominee for Secretary of Defense is this guy, Pete Hegseth, who Trump is.

Also a sex best.

Yeah, also a sex best, like allegedly full-on rapist,

but who

Trump recognizes from being a part-time host on Fox and Friends.

Oh, man.

Yes.

And who is like, I don't know, like an infantry captain or something.

And whose deal is like, oh, we're going to take women out of combat roles.

We're going to de-wocify the military.

And the the whole like Natzek ghoul establishment is like, well, obviously the rapes are fine, but I object to his policy of like

not knowing what he's doing in a managerial sense, you know?

And so, so, you know, fingers crossed for the steal.

Shout out to the America's horrifying, blood-drenched, genocidal institutions because,

you know, disrupting them in this way is somehow worse.

Yeah.

Yes.

And I still can't believe she fucking lost.

speaking of genocidal institutions,

yep, yeah, it's formal now.

Um,

the arrest

going to hell,

the

the the International Criminal Court.

I almost said the Interstate Commerce Commission, the International Criminal Court

for the arrest

has issued the warrant for the arrest of Benny from Cheltenham High School.

While you were cheering go Israel or go Palestine, I was cheering go Robert Mueller and the rule of law.

Exactly.

International humanitarian law has come good, sort of.

And they've issued two or three arrest warrants, one for Netanyahu, one for Yoav Galant,

and then one for Mohammed Daif, who is not like officially dead.

The other two Hamas guys that were going to charge are officially dead, which kind of limits their ability to charge them with anything.

Oh,

that's Quitters talk.

You can do a cadaver signage.

I mean, this is

like

scooping the remains of a guy who was killed in an airstrike that blew up three hospitals and collateral damage into the box in The Hague to be like...

I'd make a joke about collecting body parts into bags and putting them on the chair.

I've seen sometimes I've seen too many pictures of that.

I mean,

yeah, well, I mean, listen, inshallah, you know, someday Benjamin Netanyahu's body parts are going to get scooped into something.

But for the moment,

the sort of like implications of this are that

so every state that's party to the International Criminal Court statute is like obliged to arrest him and Galant if they like, you know, enter their state.

The U.S.

is not a party to the ICC.

So

he can go to the US, he can go to Russia,

but like anywhere in the European Union or in the UK.

And like, we've seen different states have different approaches, but like ultimately,

the line is, you know, we don't like it, but we're going to have to go along with it, right?

Because

didn't Kier Starmer say, nah, I'm not going to arrest him?

He didn't go that far.

He just kind of prevaricated.

The line here is, I'm not going to deal in hypotheticals, which is bullshit.

He is a lawyer.

He was a human rights lawyer.

He knows better.

But yeah, that's the line, pathetic as it is.

He can only triangulate.

He is only capable of that now.

Yeah, it was interesting seeing, like, it has implications for it.

It makes it that much harder for the UK to continue to justify selling arms to Israel.

Like, it makes that much more difficult.

I mean, I say much more difficult, marginally more difficult.

They will embarrass at the very least.

Exactly.

And then, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's, so that's something.

Yeah, it's kind of like

all of this IHL stuff has been, and I say this as someone with like an interest in the law.

You see a lot of legal people be like, well, it's not nothing, right?

And it's like, well, that's true.

But when you look at the actual kind of like facts on the ground of what Israel is doing and has done for a year plus at this point, not to mention, you know, decades before this,

it's grossly inadequate.

And of course, the ICC has no way of enforcing this, and it can have none.

The genocide is still happening, and it's only getting more and more dire for people in Palestine right now.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think the thing is, right,

the US is very clear that it has no interest in using the ICC except as a means of disciplining its enemies when it's convenient.

And the fact that the ICC has now taken action against a U.S.

ally is important in itself.

We will see what comes of this in the long run.

But I don't look to this to have any kind of

gross effect on

like the genocide or even on Israel necessarily.

I think this is one of the ones where you have to look at it as a long game.

And the sort of punishment, such as it is, is you don't get to go shopping in like Paris anymore.

I was going to say, I mean, if he's making a state visit to one of the few countries he's still allowed to go to,

they better do a lot of maintenance on whatever plane he's going on because there's going to be a real

short list list of alternate airports if there's a problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean,

it's a good job.

Israel has a free and unmolested supply chain for these things right now.

Yeah.

Wouldn't it be a shame if their supply of Boeing components

is not able to reach them?

Mid-air on the way to DC, a little red triangle appears on one of the passenger hatches, you know?

What is the Israeli state aircraft?

They have one.

It's a 747.

747.

It has a stupid name, like the Wing of Zion or something.

Oh, you're fucking kidding me.

You need two wings.

Yeah, it is the Wing of Zion.

It is a Boeing 767.

It belongs to the Israeli Air Force.

Technically, I guess, depending on how you count it, it's the Israeli Air Force plane that's done either the most or fewest war crimes.

So, you know.

Hey, see, that's the problem there.

They got one of the good Boeings.

Yeah, that's a shame.

That's a real shame.

I think

we just got to get in there and we've got to sort of like, you know, if you're looking at trying to change the system from within, you get a job at Boeing.

You work your way up to the kind of like international, like government procurement side, and you try as hard as you can to get them a brand new plane.

You really sell that to them.

If you're making spare parts for a 767, isn't that like Spirit Era Systems or something?

I don't understand the supply chain here.

Yeah, I don't think any of us do.

I think that's on purpose.

That's a good point.

Yep.

Oh, geez.

Well, I mean, listen, we're not going to see them in The Hague.

I do think it would be funny if you had some kind of paperwork mix-up and Matt Gates ends up in The Hague and Benjamin Netanyahu ends up in like federal pedophile lockup.

In like segregation way

in like some federal correctional institution.

I think that would be funny.

Speaking of people who should go to The Hague,

I have one further news item.

Fully cut you off there.

There's still fundraising.

Jesus.

There's still fundraising.

Did you send this?

I have never replied in anger.

to a fundraising text before, but I did reply in anger to this one,

which was asking me to sign a thank you card for Kamala Harris

for an amazing campaign.

Oh my god.

No, that's that's that's real.

Beyond insulting, Jesus

Christ.

I

don't know what I want to say.

No,

you want to say some things that maybe we can't say.

And I think I've already

touching the limit of that with some of the Netanyahu stuff, to be honest.

We'll let Devon make a judgment on that.

It's difficult to go through an election like that and then

they have the gall to ask you to sign a thank you card.

I halfway understand soliciting donations because they're badly in debt because they were raising no money.

But like...

What does the thank you card do?

Like, I don't know.

Okay.

Okay.

i somehow wound up on the trump fundraising list as well

they also asked me to sign a thank you card from what he doesn't know how to read

no if i if i really wanted to thank trump i would send him a burger yes that's it

this is this is the saddest thing about it is aside from all the other things a perfectly good fast food job passes donald trump's life by again you know i was about to say he's not going to get to do it he has to be president for another four years instead of he doesn't want to do it he's he he was being a line cook, he was born to be uh a winning contestant on Rupa's drag race, and fortunately,

fate has pushed him.

Yeah, I'm right, I'm right at you know it.

Oh boy,

would not be the first MAGA drag queen.

I'll say that I was about to say

that it would be interesting to see uh how Trump is uh reincarnated in the uh cycle of Samsara.

I know, I know.

Everything's miserable.

We live in hell still.

We live in hell.

I'm going to talk about the Sarah McBride stuff in

next episode when it's had a chance to develop a bit because I got some talking to do about that.

Wait, is she that?

Oh, she's, yeah, she's the first trans congress person

who was like endorsed by AIPAC and like, you know, APAC fundraised for her.

And then when she got into office, was predictably like the target of, oh, we're going to ban her from all the bathroom shit.

And her response was, you know, rank cowardice.

Like, oh, I, I don't even, I don't even need to piss actually, but ever.

It's fine.

A lot of stuff rubbed me the wrong way about that on two.

Yeah.

This is a distraction from the economy or whatever.

And it's like, what the fuck is that?

It's your bathroom.

Like, if you can't, if you can't fight for yourself in a very like personal, yeah, exactly.

Like, it's just, it's shameful.

It's absolutely shameful.

But, you know, what other kind of representation were trans people going to get out of like someone who was going to go to the U.S.

Congress?

You know, like, you can always hope we were going to get someone like, you know, Rashida Slaba or whatever.

But, you know, few people are as lucky.

So

I mean, she's from Delaware.

She's there to represent one building in Wilmington.

I mean, she was Biden's fucking protege, like, genuinely, which is one of the reasons why Biden is like unusually woke on trans stuff.

It's why he's like, Mr.

at least three genders.

And it's like, well, what a fucking legacy you set her up with, man.

You know, you fucking tried to be president until you're 86,

lose, you know, drop out and retire widely hated, and then hand her the most hostile Congress in like living memory.

Mistakes were made.

It's like, Jesus Christ,

if God sent me a mentor like that, I would assume he was punishing punishing me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll buy that.

At that point, you're like actively the opposite of a mentor.

You're more like a kind of enemy.

What's the word for you believe God exists and you hate him?

California.

Disotheism.

Disotheism.

Yeah.

Anyway,

that was the goddamn news.

Ooh, the voice.

We have to talk about trains.

It's a trains episode.

And

folks, they've given me the reins on this one.

I'm so sorry.

The reins, the rains and trains.

The reins

fall mainly on the planes.

So we have to talk about, in fact, not the trains, but this time

the tracks, the railway alignment.

What are railways?

Well, railways are formed of straits

in Sir Joe Kir.

I was going to say, I'm not sure that's always true.

I've seen some of the flight liveries.

Well, quite.

Yeah, so

railways, ideally, the ideal railway is a straight straight one, right?

But sometimes a thing is in the way.

So we did an episode on that.

Yes, exactly.

Sometimes a thing is in the way, and therefore you need to do something different, which is, yeah, you have the, you have the high line, you have the airline, or you put a curve in it.

Next slide, please.

Nova, this is a picture I took on the East Coast mainline.

And it very nicely makes and proves your point about what the railway environment is and the fact that it's gross.

It's this color.

This is the color you were talking about.

Yeah, it looks like an accumulation of a lot of sort of like break dust uh like mud

and that that's you can see toilet roll in the in those f23 sleepers there

yeah this is like three minutes past four in the morning direct drop toilets to be fair this was not anymore but this was before we banned them this was this is one of my it was it was one of those things that was like alarmingly recent like interracial marriage in america you know yeah

You look it up and you're like, wait a second, that's too late a year for that, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, the poo and the flushing was absolutely during my time of being on track.

For example, right, this, when I took this photo, this is a curve.

Look, it's a curve.

It's bendy.

The railway is bendy.

We've put a bench.

We flipped up two straights with a curve.

This is why you don't want the like high-vis crop top is you want something with as much coverage as possible that's going to, you know, repel water as well.

You particularly want a collar that you can flip up train goes around a corner and the angular momentum from the poo flings it over to you yeah poo shot yeah if you if you see some broken spectre coming from an oncoming train uh that's when to look away

there's one for the the real heads anyway right so um yeah curves here's a curve um and uh next so this is a curve they they exist and you'll notice something funny about this curve which is that one of the rails is higher up than the other rail

relevant.

It's uncanted.

Yeah, we're going to talk about cant.

Next picture, please.

Categorical imperative that we do that.

Yes.

So here's a nice picture of this is there's such vibes from this picture.

This picture makes me very happy.

It's a lovely class 86

hauling a rake, just a list of very

weird coaches at probably like 95 miles an hour up the west coast mainline.

Just put any old shit on the back of it.

yeah there's like there's like a GUV like a general utility van there's probably a brake van there's another general utility van it's possibly a post train this one anyway it's all kind all kinds of shonky you'll see that it's that's it looks like it's falling over it looks like someone slightly tipped it over it's because it's on a canted curve um again

but is

yeah well it's a bit like a bank so people often go well you know when you have a race car or even just a normal car and you go around a curve and the the road is banked you know you have bankings on those old race court race car kind of tracks It's a similar thing.

And if we go next slide, please.

See, in the United States, we call this

super elevation.

And in most places, you're not allowed to do it because the freight trains don't like it.

You just have a bunch of like open coal wagons that are now dumping coal out of the side.

Exactly.

So,

and there's another episode.

Actually, you know what?

Rail now is the place to go where we get into the deep lore of exactly why and how you apply can't and how much and so on.

Because good God, I can talk about it for too long.

And I'm not going to bore all of the hogs with this stuff.

The hogs are like, no, do it, do it, please.

No, no, I'm not going to do it now.

Another time, maybe.

Fully hit the Trump.

They want me to do it.

Should I do it?

I'm going to talk about Kent.

Anyway, right.

So

next slide, please.

Oh, yeah, we've done the next slide.

No, not next slide, Keith.

We've done this slide.

That's fine.

We're on the slide.

So

the reason we tip the train over is because when a train goes around a curve, you get an outward force from curvature.

That's kind of obvious.

Train goes around a curve.

It wants to fall off the other way.

So we tip the tracks up to kind of tip it inwards to kind of cancel out that outward force so we're kind of balancing outwards and inwards forces um so yeah this is an engineering bit we're gonna get we're not gonna go into any detail forces well we can go into a little bit of detail a little bit we can we can we can get we can get into a bit of detail because we're going to talk about next slide please newton's second law oh f equals m a force equals a mass times acceleration uh-huh and therefore acceleration equals force over mass exactly Yes.

You can rearrange that to mean that you can convert.

So if you've got a train, if you've got forces going inwards and outwards, and the mass is the mass of your train, then the useful thing you can do is go, well, if I've got an acceleration in and an acceleration out,

I can therefore ignore the mass of the train, which makes my calculations a lot easier.

So

I'm still beaming from rearranging a very simple equation.

Like I got a good grade in podcasting.

Did it be?

It's possible to achieve.

It's really nice when you can derive like a lot of complex information out of

an equation that you learned in high school.

Yes.

Well, that's kind of why it's fun to show people who did this and thought, why the fuck am I learning Newton's second law?

This is useless to me.

Well, we're about to explain why it isn't, which is designing railways.

So the useful thing about doing this rearrangement is that we can next slide, please.

take our forces and we can next slide please turn them into accelerations.

So we have outwards an acceleration and an inwards acceleration.

I think I've accidentally left animations in this one.

So, Roz, if you click forwards twice,

there we go.

And there we go.

There are some equations.

You don't need to know them, but outwards acceleration, anyone who's a real nerd will know that that's the equation for rotational acceleration.

It's the speed over the radius, speed squared over the radius.

The inwards acceleration.

It's really clearly a formula for generating the French month of August.

Out.

Out.

Out.

There's a cute name for Parisians who stay in the city in August when everybody else goes on holiday, which is Auscha,

like Augustinians, if you like.

I like that.

That's fun.

That's nice.

So outwards acceleration is that.

And then also to get the inwards acceleration from tipping your train over deliberately, it's basically a component of the acceleration due to gravity.

So that's what that equation is.

And that relates to the Kant, which is, as Ros said, superelevation, which we represent with an E.

And then it's over the over the also the track gauge makes a difference.

So if you've got a really wide track gauge, you have to tip the track over more to make the same uh same result so if you have narrow gauge you don't have to tip it up as much and you get the same result anyway doesn't really matter a huge amount in this situation you can make those two things equal to each other because if you've tipped the train up enough that the inwards acceleration is equal to the outwards acceleration and they cancel each other out you can make those two things equal to each other do a load more formula scrambling and you get next slide please which is on my mug which i'm currently holding up to camera that none of you can see look it's a mug that says e plus d equals 11.82 V squared over R because that's the Kant equation.

And that's what makes us make a railway do the shapes that it does.

Hooray.

Yes, this is the Kant equation.

It's so cool to have a profession that you can reduce to like a sort of fundamental equation and everything else is built around it, you know?

It is.

I like this, which is why I put it on.

I put it on a mud, study it.

Yeah, I put it on a mug because I like it so much.

Yeah, so this is basically like the amount that you tip the amount that you lift one rail above the other determines how fast a train can go around a curve, basically, for a given radius and such and such and such.

And if you've got things like, well, acceleration due to gravity is a constant, the track gauge is a constant, and also the conversion from like meters to kilometers is a constant, then you can smoosh all those together and you get the 11.82 number.

Is that part smooshing it together?

Is that the term?

That's the official term.

And so when we build a railway, we don't apply equilibrium counts.

So we don't tip the tracks up so much that they equal, that we cancel out the outwards accelerations because that's bad for a variety of reasons,

including, as you said earlier, freight, like freight goes slower than passenger stuff.

So

you might be in a situation where, like, if you stop there, it tips over.

Yeah, well, I mean, certainly does a lot of mess to the low rail, and you get a lot of horrible shelling, and you wreck your subgrade, and you maybe split your sleepers and all sorts of bad things.

And in fact, the next slide, please, is very useful because,

well, no, it's not, this is all the stuff that then tells me.

It's a lot of efficiency.

If you have, if you're firing piss and shit out of the side and it's the side going upwards, what you've created is a kind of toilet mortar.

So these are the these are the standards which allow us to understand how much cant we actually need to apply for a given railway.

And this is very fiddly, and this is obviously just like

as complicated as Kant

philosophy.

Table nine transitions.

That's it.

So transitions.

This is the length of transition fucking endless.

Table nine transitions.

That's it.

So you don't need to know all this.

Well, basically, like, this is this gets fiddly for all sorts of reasons, mostly because it impacts like the amount of count you use and speeds and stuff.

It's less about safety certainly in the short term.

It's more about like maintenance and comfort and how quickly I have to replace materials and all this stuff.

Much sooner that it results in like really bad things happening.

But if you get this really wrong, next slide, please.

Then the bad things can

be done.

Is that an ICE doing the bad thing?

No,

it's a Spanish, it's Renfa.

it's the Santiago

Don Compostala.

I think that's right.

Derailment.

There are actually signaling reasons why this happened.

But what it did was it ended up throwing a train at way too high a speed around a very tight curve.

And, well, yeah, I should have done a content warning.

If you don't want trains smashing up, this is not the episode.

Not loving the fuck this webcam in particular angle.

Yeah, that webcam did not survive to tell any more tales.

Yeah, this is bad, folks.

So if a general rule of thumb, this will be useful, is that going around a curve, you can generally go around a curve about twice the design speed in a train.

I wouldn't recommend trying this too often, but you can generally

frighten,

but not lethal to webcams or passengers.

Yeah, so you can, exactly.

So like if you're below twice the design speed, the chances are you're doing all right.

Obviously, that varies on a lot of things, but that's a rough rule of thumb, right?

So just half listening to that and my train driver orientation and being like, Okay, okay, cool, gun it.

You know, got it, got it, yeah, okay, good.

Design speed plus a bit, yeah.

No,

like the reason I say that is just to give an indication of like, we don't design curves on the edge of you might derail, we're designing them way below that because obviously you're putting a lot of extra force into the rails to drive this fast, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, we don't have to look at this horrible smash anymore, we're gonna look at something even more horrible.

Next slide, please.

It's made of the mold that there is in Maya flats.

Like,

This is what the country looks like from space.

People don't tell you this.

It looks like a scab.

This picture looks like a grayscale scab, and rightly so, because, of course, we're looking at a picture of Britain.

And also, Northern Ireland is attached as well.

The North of Ireland.

Yeah.

Yes, sorry, correct.

Yeah, the North of Ireland is also in this picture for some reason.

Yeah, so

this is Britain.

It's very soggy.

It's very smelly.

It's quite small and quite hilly.

So if, say, it's the early 1800s and you're building a nascent railway network and you've decided that you think it's a good idea to link like London to Scotland, Roz, can you John Madden London for me?

It's like here-ish, right?

Well, here's your geography testing, yeah.

Like, yeah, yeah, so

yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.

You're a little bit,

you've hit like kind of

like a little bit into like temp,

like here-ish.

Yeah, yeah, there we are.

Um, now the bigger test, can you circle Scotland, please?

Where's that line goes?

Like, more south, more.

There's more.

No, we have more territory than that.

We fought hard for that bloody territory

here-ish as well.

Yes, that's more like it.

Where do the mountains start?

You know, I like, yeah, basically.

I like the fact that we have stolen a little bit of Northumberland there, which is very pleasing to me.

So, yeah,

fuck you, Beric.

We've got you back, you prison.

Havby furious.

I don't know.

I think y'all are going to do a better job with

Newcastle than the English can do.

So, you'll notice something.

Get that Tynan Weir Metro.

Oh, exactly.

That is pretty.

I do quite like that.

Although the old trains are going, which means that the new trains don't let you sit at the front and pretend you're the driver, which makes me very sad.

Oh, bro.

I know.

I know.

Why do they do an organization?

Yeah, come to Britain.

Come to Britain.

Yeah, do that.

So this map, by the way, is a topographical map.

So, it's showing where things are hilly and where things are not hilly.

You'll notice on the east of England, if you're going from Scotland to London, the east side of England there is quite flat, whereas the west side of England isn't.

And actually, on the east side, you can see there's quite a nice route.

So, if you want to create a fast link from London to Scotland, the obvious, you know, this is the obvious property from the railway.

So, when you've drawn the sort of like overlap between your two Venn diagram circles of Scotland, you've inadvertently put a line right through the central belt.

And so roughly speaking,

on the west side of that is Glasgow, on the east side of that is Edinburgh,

your two largest cities, conveniently.

Edinburgh is the capital.

And Glasgow is part of the only urban economy that really works well outside of London is...

the Scottish Central Belt because it's a huge area connected by lots and lots of really good public transport.

I like to call it megalopolis.

So railway barons, they are wanting to build railways to connect major cities, and connecting London up to Edinburgh is an obvious, obvious main link.

So, we have to start talking about some guys.

Next slide, please.

Here are our guys.

We come upon a battle between a large guy, George Hudson.

We come upon a battle between this guy on the left and his own waistcoat buttons.

Believe me, I've been there.

Yeah, same.

And so, it's the large guy on the left, George Hudson, and this twink on the right here,

Edmund Beckett.

You can really just say anything these days, can't you?

Yeah.

He's not quite twinky.

He's got a sidebone.

He's too much sidebone for his daughter.

He's wearing like a solid, like, vertical four inches of cravat.

It's incredible.

It's taller than his head.

Imagine a noise happening behind this guy and how he would turn around, you know?

He's like Batman.

It's like George Cooney's Batman.

You just look like

what's the cat, the big cat that

can turn all the way around.

Do you mean an owl?

Because there's already a cat.

No, no, no.

I mean the cat that does it, not an owl.

It's like a serval or something.

What?

Sorry, the idea.

So I did write cat, but then I saw being like, you mean an owl?

Yeah, you're going cat that can turn all the way around.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

Forget this podcast that we're doing.

I need to know what this is you're referring to.

Servo is a cat.

Yeah.

I just don't know that they can turn the whole way around, a cat writing reflexes, a cat that can turn head all the way around.

Okay,

um,

I'm just going to quietly point out while no one's paying attention that actually, the guy on the right here, Edmund Beckett, like

probably a horrible man, but kind of um, kind of, kind of serving actually a little bit here.

I you love that phrase, don't you, bud?

I really do, yeah.

It's too much kill James Bond.

That's the problem.

So, I just, I, I, I think a lot of I think a lot about people who serve.

Is it a marge?

Is it a maybe?

A little Mexican wildcats?

This is a big African shit.

Oh, this is beautiful.

Oh, I like him.

Look at his guys.

Oh,

man.

Hold on.

No, this is.

We are so fucking good at this.

It's really good to do podcasting.

Turn and

all way around.

I love all of us are desperately deploying our podcast.

What are you thinking of?

What do you?

I had to go back through Will Maneker's tweets to figure out what this cat is.

Oh, god, damn it.

No, no, we're not doing that right now.

Get back on your mind.

Listeners and viewers, we will conclude this discussion off mic and Devin will provide the results to you all

so that we know.

Thank you, Devin.

So that we know what the hell is Ross is talking about because at the moment, none of us do.

So the thing about these two boys,

Hudson and Beckett, Hudson is known as kind of like the railway king.

He'd overseen several railway companies to kind of form a network around, well, centered around York, actually, the city that I am in, the old York.

He kind of like this guy was pretty vicious corporate operating-wise in the way that like early Victorians were.

They were all maniacs.

Included, so he had he built a railway network and it included a link to the Scottish Board parents.

Snuff and branding.

Yeah, incorrectly.

Like the things he was doing to his brain would make anyone a maniac, in fairness.

So it connected, his vast network connected to the North British Railway, which went from Edinburgh to Berwick, which he had also part financed, by the way.

And southwards, he had linked his railway to the Midland Railway at Normanton, which meant that he had a London connection.

He had built a railway or part financed and made negotiations to get trains that could run from Edinburgh to London.

Weeping because we don't know how to do this anymore, it seems like.

Yes, it's well, this is it.

Beckett, meanwhile, in a flex that today's MPs still insist on pursuing, he was the richest guy in Doncaster, the northern city of Doncaster, and he was MP for the West Riding Regional.

You're

resisting a cruel joke about Doncaster there.

Oh, there are so many cruel jokes about Doncaster.

A place I have a soft spot for, but the centre of Doncaster is an absolute dump.

It's dreadful.

Sorry, everyone in Doncaster.

You deserve to suffer.

Yeah, this is the thing.

And

so he was the richest guy in the city and its MP.

Normal situation.

He wanted a more direct route to London that didn't faff about getting Wibbly in Derbyshire.

Hudson, so he basically started putting forward some railways.

Like, fuck Derbyshire.

Fuck

the fuck shoes.

Don't care.

Darby, we'll come back to Derby in a second because it clearly makes him angry.

So he put forward a plan that was basically a straight line from Doncaster straight, you know, and York straight to London.

He was one of the like high-speed rail diagrams guy

because the thing we looked at well we looked at Britain and it was flat on that side so it makes some sense.

The only problem is there's basically no population between like York and Doncaster and London.

If we ignore Peterborough, whatever.

No one cares about Peterborough.

Going straight through Peterborough, straight line to London.

Right.

So Hudson was not happy about this because it would directly compete with his route that he'd just spent a lot of time and political effort creating.

And as often happened with early railways in the 1830s and 40s, shenanigans ensued, including an episode where Beckett and Hudson had a shouting match in Derby Station, where Beckett called Hudson a blackguard.

Thems were fighting words back in the day.

Exactly.

Calling someone a blackguard is like, is that, I mean, is it a slur?

It might be a slur.

I don't know.

Is that already?

I hope it's not a slur.

That's based on my deep, deep understanding of this stuff, which is having watched Barry Lyndon, a film set in a different century.

Yeah, no, actually set in the same century, so that's all good.

Having watched Barry Lyndon, that's a dueling offense.

Yes, exactly.

Colin Son of Blackard is like, oh, so yeah, 1845, they were shouting at each other in Derby Station, which, you know, people always shout at each other at Derby Station.

So it's something that's gone through the ages.

Anyway, after much, engaging in telling Jacob Reese Marga, I'm engaging in like Victorian values, having a fight in Derby train station.

Exactly.

I found the cat.

What is it?

Tell me about this cat.

It's a servile.

It has a very long neck.

Yeah, that was our first guess.

S-E-R-V-A-L.

Yeah, we don't.

Oh, and its ears are the size of its head.

We already looked at it.

Okay.

Handsome little.

There's one that goes around Twitter every once in a while where one of them is like turned all the way around.

You know, backwards head.

Okay.

Yeah.

I like these animals.

This is a good

female right here.

Yeah.

He's got some big ears.

He's got some.

Just a little bit larger than an ordinary cat.

Probably more violent as well.

Very violent.

Yeah, that's a cat that will tear your throat straight out of your neck.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, good stuff.

Show one of these to Milkshake and be like, look at your, you know, look at your compatriots and feel a day.

I believe Milkshake could make friends with a servile.

I think Milkshake could make friends with basically anyone except Pizza Boy.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm friends with Milkshake.

Oh, yeah.

That cat is basically a dog.

We are blessed to have him.

So having shouted at each other in Derby Station, these two boys did much wrangling and a significant amount of outright bribery and corruption.

But Beckett wins.

The rich MP from Doncaster wins and manages to get his straight line to London approved in Parliament.

And this would be called the Great Northern Railway.

Next slide, please.

Which meant that we had the makings.

of our East Coast route.

So if we hop forwards again, you can see that route and it looks, okay, it doesn't look quite as straight as you you might imagine, but the bottom half of it is pretty much straight.

Like it's it's a straight line from London to basically Peterborough, and then it's another straight line from Peterborough to Doncaster.

It's that bit, the Great Northern Railway bit, is really straight.

And then for the north, ish land, you get some nice

views.

Yeah, it's pretty flat, and so you see, it generally pretty flat.

And okay, there are some kinks here and there once you get further north.

Um, but

exactly, you know, who am I to kink shame?

So, this was formed of several bits.

So, so at the northern end, we've already the Scottish bit bit was the North British Railway, which was Edinburgh to Berwick.

That opened in 1846.

What eventually kind of got called the North Eastern Railway, which was built from like lots of other bits of railway, the York and North Midland and

the York, Newcastle, and Berwick Railway.

Anyway, that was basically finished in 1847.

And then Beckett's Great Northern Railway was finished in 1850.

So you have what we call now the East Coast Mainline.

So great, marvelous.

Now, one bit of, you know, the various kind of constituent companies and rackets that eventually formed the Northeastern Railway included a thing that was called the Newcastle and Berwick Railway.

Here is, next slide, please.

Here is the notice of that thing opening.

Look, that's all they're when they used to do all fonts, and they've even accidentally rotated the word two sideways.

Why have they done that?

I do not see, but they have.

This is some great typewriter, you know.

It is, it's nice.

I mean,

and there's a train.

Yeah, there's a little tray with a little

guy.

I like the difference in line weights on the n here

yeah oh yes that reminds me of

a little label on a pair of levi's you know yeah yeah yeah so um

so this railway this bit the newcastle and berwick railway so this went from the scottish border south to newcastle This was like the linchpin in Hudson's plans because it would allow him to link to the North British Railway

alongside his kind of emerging network in the Northeast.

And he would basically be able to control the whole lot, right?

So this is the problem, though,

which was that the former prime minister earl grey and his presumably web-footed son viscount hoick um did not want a railway intersecting their estate yeah i mean listen if a train goes by rattles your teacups which you drink your kind of like bergamot flavoured tea out of exactly which is which is not nice so they didn't want that happening they thought it would you know like scare the pigeons or or make their you know make all their cows give birth or whatever i don't know um so further shenanigans ensued uh including a they basically created a new railway proposal that avoided their land conveniently.

They called it the Northumberland Railway.

And they got Isambard Kingdom Brunel to become the engineer of the railway.

Literally, they got

the Musk slash Santiago Calatrava of his day to come along.

And of course, what did he propose as the way that the trains would work on that railway?

Atmospheric system.

He proposed an atmospheric railway for that alternative.

Investing heavily in bacon grease futures.

Yeah.

A lot of horse viscerae gone.

Yeah.

A lot of so that was.

So a friend of the show, The Atmospheric Railway, was proposed by Brunel for this alternative railway.

The trouble is, by the time both proposals were being considered in Parliament in 1845, Brunel's Atmospheric Railway had already been, had already kind of proven itself as being complete shit.

And so the Northumberland Railway was rejected.

And so Hudson had defeated the former prime minister and his weird little son.

So Hudson

throwing my teacup on the ground in anger.

Exactly.

This will not stand, simply.

Oh my God, I'm going to have to deal with a little bit of noise every now and then.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know, right?

It had to come at a cost, though.

Here is next slide, please.

Because

here is a map.

And in the middle of this map, this is a very old map.

This is like 17 bullshit.

17 bullshit.

1700 and fuck you.

This is a county map.

And in the middle of it is Morpeth.

They don't make names like Bedlingtonshire anymore.

No, they were right.

High house.

You've already named all the things that can be named in Breton.

Yeah, the country.

That is true.

Not a hole in the wall, hole on the wall.

Yeah, it's when you get to places that are called things like Lost

that you realize that we ran out of names for things kind of quite early on.

Actually,

a lot of our names make absolutely no sense.

They're just bollocks.

So, yeah, that's a fair point.

Anyway, Morpeth town is westward hoe.

Don't miss any exclamation mark.

The exclamation mark is important.

That's right.

You have to put punctuation into your town names.

It's important.

Like an accent mark, you know?

Yeah.

Morepeth at the time was like a castle and a major market town, like a properly major market town, actually.

But the problem with it is that the terrain around it is very hilly and steep, and there's a river wrapped around one side of the town.

So this is a problem.

And if we go to next slide, please.

Hold on.

To deal with this, to deal with Morpeth, Morpeth wanted to be connected to the railway.

Fine.

Originally, it was going to be on a little branch line, which would link to the main Newcastle and Berwick railway route.

But in drumming up local support for Hudson's railway, when he was competing with this like bullshit Northumberland railway atmospheric thing,

Hudson had changed the main route to run through Morpeth.

Next slide, please.

And you can see the problem with running through Morpeth is that all that steep hill stuff means that you need a lumping great 98 degree kink in your railway alignment, which is

it's a kink once again we are kink shaming this is a very kink shamy episode so if i'm cancelled because of that i can only apologize um next slide please so you will see that this is a big kink and the original route shown here ish would have kind of avoided this entirely the thing is though at the time it doesn't really matter that much because trains weren't going that much above 30 miles an hour so a 90 degree kink isn't that much of a problem so it's okay you're going like 30 miles an hour you're fine yeah you're fine

This is a high speed curve right here.

Yeah.

Exactly.

High speed 28 miles an hour.

You have to slow down to

exactly.

So next slide, please.

Blistering speeds, yes.

You have to perfectly have slightly pullback on a perfectly polished brass lever.

Oh, this is delightful.

Look how happy all these.

So the one that's.

God save the queen.

No fucking thanks.

No, fuck those guys.

I'm fascinated with this flag situation here.

We have a like pre-Northern Ireland Union flag, I guess, with

washed out and a red ensign.

Yeah, I don't

know on the like royal coach as well.

Yeah, it's yeah, this is all those people just

really on some like IRB supporting shit, you know.

So, um, yeah, the line opened in full on the 1st of July 1847, and everyone was very pleased pleased with themselves

until Hudson ended up in debtor's prison for fucking everyone around him over, partly in the aftermath of his battle with Beckett and kind of defeating or trying to defeat the Great Northern Railway.

So boo-hoo for George Hudson.

He kind of, his career is ruined.

Maybe some of these guys would be, maybe we'd be a bit better off if we brought debtor's prison back for a specific kind of guy.

Yeah.

I kind of want to send Elon Musk to debtor's prison.

It feels like a prison, and it wasn't a nice experience.

and if Musk will never go to prison, but if he actually did, he would go to the prison that's not you know, prison in inverted comments, and he would never suck.

Yeah, debtor's prison was horrible, and I want that.

That's

you know, we've talked about, I'm anti-prison, I accept having debtor's prison.

I want debtors' prison.

I think that's a good climate Stalin, oil executives to the fucking gulag immediately.

Gulag them, yeah, they're just gonna put every college-educated person in America in there instantly.

Like, you graduate and go straight to debtor's prison.

Come here.

We have to.

So if we jump forward to a slide by 20 years, something went wrong.

Something, someone has stabbed a train here.

We were looking at a train that has been stabbed.

Yeah.

I was looking at the lack of cab.

I didn't even notice this.

Yeah.

So the cab is missing, but also someone has stabbed the train.

I think it's important that we really emphasize how much that train has been stabbed.

So Ross, do you want to read a date?

On the 25th of March, 1877.

Yeah.

The UPEXPress from Edinburgh to London was making its way southwards and it went around the curve and it tipped over.

It fell over.

And it was navigating its way through the curve.

The locomotive tipped over at a badly maintained joint.

So it's like

it was going too fast around the curve, very likely.

We'll talk about that in a second.

Hit a badly maintained joint and went oop and fell over.

So yeah, whoops.

The train's scattered.

You know, the coaches behind it, I mean, it's a bit like the picture previously.

Like those coaches are made of nothing.

They're made of splinters and paraffin.

It's not good.

So the train behind it's scattered.

I have a question.

I thought up was away from London or no?

Up is no, up is to London because London is more to London.

Yes, up is to go.

Down is away from London.

Yes, that is confusing.

So yeah, the train scatters, bits of it telescope behind it as it stops abruptly.

The thing basically tips over and the train sort of rams into it from behind.

So

I'm going to quote from the Board of Trade Report

because this is horrible.

The passenger carriage, which had been the third vehicle in the train, dashed into the tender, lodged its leading wheels in the tank and was completely destroyed.

And one of its passengers was found dead in the tank of the tender.

whilst another was jammed against the end of the tender.

So not so good.

So all the meat sacks, i.e.

passengers, they didn't do well in that first coach.

So five passengers died and 17, I quote, complained of injury.

Yeah, well, you would.

You know, you can complain all you want.

You have to have a positive attitude.

What do they expect for that lousy 25 cents to live forever?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So next slide, please.

So the Board of Trade report suggested that it was poorly maintained track that was the culprit and that the train was not necessarily speeding.

I would say, given the damage described in the report, it's really difficult to believe that this wasn't just because the train was actually going too fast through the curve.

At this point, trains were getting a bit quicker.

I can believe that this train was actually gunning it and had reached like 45, 50 miles an hour and tipped over.

I really strongly suspect strongly that that's actually what the case was, but they didn't really have anything to prove it because it was 1877.

But the report did make an internal sense.

It was a very interesting CSI, just some exactly some colonel with an incredibly wide moustache looking at it with a magnifying glass.

Yeah.

Did they have speedometers?

No, they didn't.

They had a coach that would measure.

Well, they did two things.

Either they had a guy with a stopwatch

or with a watch that he would count the time, or they had a dynamometer car.

So they did, I think they did have quite primitive dynamometer cars, even in the 1870s, 1880s.

Someone shout at me if I'm wrong about that.

But for the most part, they were just timing things with a watch.

So

we're still in Pennsylvania railroad mode here, where they didn't install speedometers until

correct.

No, sir, I severely doubt there were any speedometers on these trains.

But again,

someone else might be able to correct me on this.

I'm not a steam train guy.

I'm not sure.

Particularly steam trains from the 1870s.

No one knows anything about those things.

Yeah, quite.

So the report made an interesting observation, which I'm going to read, which is it would obviously, it would obviously be better if a deviation line could be constructed to avoid the use of so sharp a curve on a main line traversed by the fastest trains between England and Scotland.

And so long as this curve exists, it is necessary to employ moderate speeds only in passing round it.

So some foreshadowing there.

So we've identified a problem.

We are now going to engage in one of the favorite British pastimes of doing, I imagine, fuck all about it.

Passing the potato.

Yes.

I'm

seeing some foreshadowing here, which is very similar to a much more recent realm and very close to home.

Yeah, quite.

So nothing was learned.

Decades passed.

Nova, you need to line something up for

this next slide transition, actually.

Do I?

Oh, God.

Because we're jumping forwards to nearly a century later.

And nearly a century later, we have the USSR drop plays.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Fuck.

Okay, I've got to add a little bit of shit.

Oh, fuck.

Customize smart pad.

Your Rodecaster 2 will be placed into transfer mode.

What does that mean?

What does that mean?

I can do this in my own way, which is slightly different, which is

there we go.

That's not quite as good.

If that's come through on the order, which it should have.

Yeah, no.

So, yeah, it's BR.

We've got BR.

It's a centralator.

We have British Rail.

Everything was bigger and faster and busier.

And next slide, please.

We have trains that look like this.

Look at this thing.

Yeah.

It's a Deltic

pistons.

Yes, it's got an engine that has

face each other.

It's a triangle.

Wow.

Just the most bonkers engine design imaginable.

Just utterly nuts.

But the noise it makes is beautiful.

Just like a proper like it's it's been a running thing that some people have noticed that whenever I see something that isn't a Deltic that looks kind of like one, I go, oh, Deltic.

So when there actually is one, I thought I would fuck them up by not saying it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

For those of you who are in audio only, we are looking at a Deltic.

The thing that was unique about them is they used a opposed piston engine where you had two cylinders facing each other in each,

whatchamacallit,

in each cylinder.

And those cylinders were arranged in a triangle driving three crankshafts.

It completely bonkers design.

Like the Greek letter delta.

I guess strictly speaking, you should call this a deltoid.

But deltic sounds cool.

deltoids are seething

yeah so this thing with its with like yeah with many pistons all firing at each other um makes a wonderful noise and it has a very funny looking nose as well um and they are they're they're cool i love these things they have quite a short life in service but actually they're great they they really sped trains up along the uh the east coast mainline actually and it meant that we were running trains really fast at 100 mile an hour speeds so we're going way faster than they were uh back in the 1870s um i like how it's just like yeah this is the really fast train.

Did you streamline it?

No, this is just a blunt antique.

Talk it.

Yes,

we will overcome the air.

We will not go around it.

Yeah, when you hear the sound this thing makes, I wouldn't want to put streamlining on it either.

So yeah, Roz, could you do the honors, please, on this on the notes here?

Oh, on the 7th of May, 1969.

Nice.

This plump beast of Deltic is hauling the Aberdeen Sleeper northwards.

So we're going northwards this time.

The train consisted of 11 coaches.

It's a sleeper train, and they're all Mark 1s, which we've talked about before in previous episodes in relation to crashworthiness.

They are not good.

I mean, they're absolutely rubbish by today's standards.

But back then, they weren't good, but they're also not that bad.

They're much better than everything that had kind of gone before it.

So, anyway.

Yeah, we made this one out of like, you know, wood as opposed to paper.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, this one, it was steel.

It was steel.

There was steel instead of wood.

Yeah.

Yeah, steel instead of wood.

So this thing was like okay

by the standards of the day so um back in the in the 60s kind of as it is today really route knowledge so that's where a driver has to know where things are along the route so they know where to break where to stop where to you know at what point they've passed the chat you know when a signal's coming they have to have all this knowledge in their head this is why drivers are extremely skilled people because they have to like basically teach themselves to have adhd which is it which is an extremely challenging skill to to to do so so like

you could just have the army step in to run the trains

Oh boy.

Yeah.

As the train, so this train's charging towards Morpeth on the down line.

It passed, you know, it passes various kind of key points for recognizing for the driver to go, right, I need to slow down now.

And it was dark, but they were, you know, they're pretty evident.

So one of these key points was Stannington signal box.

And there's a level crossing near it, both of which were illuminated.

So as the train goes through the level crossing, Signal Sierra 13 comes into view.

And this was the marker for any train running under full speed to shut off power.

So basically, you start coasting before you then apply the brakes a little bit later.

So the line rises, kind of you start going up a hill after signal CR13.

And the combination of having no power and the incline kind of starts slowing down the train quite nicely, right?

So just before the summit of that incline was a kind of a gate box called Clifton Crossing.

This thing wasn't lit.

So the train reaches this gate box and there's a signal beyond it that comes into view, which is called Delta 1.5, which is where a driver would typically make their first actual brake application to start slowing the train down to about 60 miles an hour before then slowing down again to 40 miles an hour to go around Morpeth Curve.

Morpeth Curve, that's for the episode.

So foreshadowing about this may not go well kind of date.

The driver of the train, Leslie Byers, reaches this signal,

but didn't do anything.

So

the power had been shut off at signal CR13, but after that, the driver stopped making inputs.

And actually, just as the train kind of passed that second signal, the second man in the train, because they still had those then, a guy called Clifford Graham, realizes the train was not slowing down quickly enough and like gets up to go across and basically apply the brake.

This kind of triggers Byers into going, oh, fuck shit.

Oh, yeah.

And clocks back in and makes a full brake application.

This was not enough.

Graham was thrown to the floor because of how sharp that braking was.

Yeah, Morpoff curve with its speed restriction of 40 and a train approaching it at 80.

That's not ideal.

Not ideal.

What was I saying earlier about the design speed and also how quickly you maybe can get around a curve?

Next slide, please.

Yeah.

This went poorly.

So, yeah.

If you roll the dice, sometimes you get a critical one on this one.

Yeah, this did not, this was bad.

This made a real mess.

Yeah, the train derails horribly.

Actually, you can see that these Mark I coaches have actually done remarkably well.

Actually, they've held together pretty well in this crash.

Um, you know, they've broadly stayed in line, which is really important in derailment.

Like, as soon as you've got things like kinking and knocking in and like twisting and overriding each other, is when the bad things happen.

But in this case, like, for the most part, they so actually, if you go to the next slide, so six people were killed, by the way, in this, and a further 21 were injured.

If you go to the next slide,

I was just going to remark on the big hook here.

This is a really big, big hook.

Yeah, that's a big, that's a that's a duct train-sized hook there.

My god, it's bigger than what we got in America.

Yeah, it's

you guys need to get yourselves a big hook, you know.

So the train mostly stayed in line, which is why the fatalities were so small, actually.

Train was going north.

Actually, the locomotive stayed on the tracks.

Like the Deltic was fine.

It was great.

Those things are unkillable, you know?

Yeah, it stayed on the track because it was that bit heavier.

It actually stayed on the tracks.

It had that much more force down into the wheels to keep it on the tracks.

People don't need a motor track.

Technically, they don't even need rails.

You can just point them in a direction it makes its own the canadians did that once it yeah and so this the delta went round and it made its coupler stayed intact with the vehicle behind which was like a brake van which it basically like dragged along like a shopping bag loosely dragging the floor

just like now the rest of you are coming with me

so that the coupler behind that broke and then the train sort of scattered but this like this like kind of brake van was just kind of dragged around to the point where it like smashed into Morpeth station around the other end of the curve and like made a mess of that station as well.

Um, yeah, so so that looks stayed on the rails, lighter carriages had scattered behind it.

Um, and yeah, Morpeth station got bashed up by this kind of dragged brake van kind of being swung around like a mace.

Um, and yeah, no one is injured in the station, thankfully, because it was empty because it was the middle of the night.

So, um,

two guys having a fight on an opposing platform, just gonna get wiped out by a brake van, like an MP and a

large, uh, kind of uh doing old-time large hookuffs, you know.

Yeah, that's it, yeah, yeah.

So, um, yeah, this was bad.

This was really bad.

Um, what next slide, please?

Oh, sorry, I should have said next slide, please, twice, uh, because the first next slide, please, was the diagram showing what was going on.

So, you can see that the train's come round, it's come from the south here.

In fact, Roz, you can jump out on this.

So, it's come from the south.

um, it's you can see it's gone round, and there's a there's a dark shape that's at the other end of the curve, which is the brake van being dragged around.

Um, and then in front of that is, is, is our class 55 Deltic, Deltic, happy as Larry sat on the rails, like, hey, hey, it wasn't, I'm okay.

What the old fuss is.

Is a brake van at this point still crucial for braking or is there like full train line air?

No, it's still most, it's still important for brake, like not quite in the same way, but it certainly applies, it's heavier and applies a lot of the braking force of the of the total thing.

Yeah.

I guess that makes sense why it would be it would not have derailed as much.

Yeah, actually, that's a, that's a good point.

And yeah, because it, yeah, so it's being dangled around, but yeah, it sort of didn't just fly off immediately and break the couple.

Yeah, because the rotation is what snapped the couplers behind because the vehicle is then all overturned, snapping the couplers.

So next slide, please.

You may be wondering, what happened?

Why did this happen?

Why is this?

We've got a driving crooner to explain it to us.

This is actually...

Leslie Byers.

This is the driver.

He's like using a hat to hide himself

from the press here.

It didn't work very well because the camera was in front of him.

Yeah, yeah he just stepped once once to the right um being publicly shamed like got way easier when they invented respectively sunglasses face masks and hoodies like yeah and also the superinjunction yeah well true but like you're you're kind of like leaving crown court paparazzi experience you know yes much improved by the the fake moustache the the sunglasses etc etc things of this nature coming out of court wearing the mr potato

so um so what had happened?

So, buyers alleged that immediately following him making that first brake application.

So, you know, so far, so good.

He makes that first break application, or rather, sorry, not the first, he, when he basically put the vehicle into kind of neutral, um, his mind started to wander to a notice he'd been given um when he was booking on that night, which had questioned why he had lost four minutes on a previous service.

And it was the second notice that he'd received that month.

Um, and it had clearly it like had stressed him out.

Uh, and in his in his words, he took them very seriously.

um and so he had his mind had wandered and he ditched the train um

for better or worse i don't think it's fair to you know this is there we have a kink in a railway and everything falls on the driver to not screw it up

but unfortunately the driver had the book thrown at him you know he he he he was

he was fully blamed for this this is also uh a lot of parallels to a certain derailment that occurred very close to home

about a decade ago

yeah they always find the littlest guy who they care least about.

And in this case, yeah, it's the driver.

And you might say, well, he was the one who caused the fuck up.

But no.

Hudson in,

well, you know, this is WTYP.

You know the deal, folks.

Social murder.

Yes.

You know, drivers crash trains, but not as they choose to.

Precisely.

What did we learn from this?

Well, we did actually learn some stuff from this.

Next slide, please.

Because we had already been installing this thing called automatic warning system around the rail network after a previous absolutely horrifying crash at Harold Wilson.

Yeah, and it wasn't actually related to safety.

It was just part of a general engineering quest to have as many people exposed to as many annoying noises at work as possible.

And that just happened to coincide with safety.

Yes.

So the thing that makes the

happen in your cab was it being installed, but it was mostly just for like stop signals and

for like signals and for sometimes for ends of track and then things of this nature the um the first generation aws uh green light sound is a rather pleasing bell though kind of trills it is nice

it's nice actually i have a wait do i have a bell i don't have a bell

it's a kind of

it's a kind of like equivalent of like a nice thumbs up you know nice pat on the back it is nice and you know what's funny is there is this so having done cab rides particularly at speed under 25 there is this nice rhythm of the aws doing its its thing you know we've largely seen amazon web services and getting really confused Yes.

Do you know what's funny is I was listening to a podcast the other day, and they didn't say Amazon web services.

They were just saying AWS the whole time.

And yes, all I could think of is the funny yellow magnet in the forefoot that I'm about to show you a picture of.

So these things that are on screen right now are what are called Morpeth boards.

The yellow text on the black is what they first look like.

And then we got rid of that.

And we decided that the Scottish people decided, hey, why don't we use a different shape, man?

Why don't you make it a triangle?

That's a Scottish person putting on a Scottish accent there for some reason.

And yeah, so they went from, they decided to make it a triangle.

And so, kind of by the early 80s, we'd moved into this like the realm of the triangle.

And so you have these things.

So if you see these things out on the network, this Morpeth board, what it does is it goes, okay, if you're stepping down from like 30 miles or from like from like 100 miles an hour to 30 miles an hour, maybe it's a good idea to pre-warn you that that's a thing and even to tie into the AWS system.

So if you go through that

Morpeth board too fast, the AWS will apply the brakes.

This is a good idea.

This is actually a good idea.

So, you get a sign, you get a warning vaws that the driver has to respond to.

And if there's no action taken, then the brakes will be applied.

So, this is a good idea.

We have Morpeth boards.

Next slide, please.

I can show you a picture of here is an AWS magnet, kind of quite a new one, but they kind of look mostly like this back in the day as well.

So, if you see this thing out on track, if you're in that Britain that they have, firstly, apologies.

Secondly, you might see lots of these around because often they've got funny iron filings on one bit because they're basically just a big magnet.

That is what they are.

That is a big electromagnet that is activated and deactivated.

And the next slide, please.

They activate.

So, here, Roz, can you circle the sunflower thing that's kind of sort of in the middle of the screen?

But kind of

what a low visual language to establish, just for you know.

So, this is this is the cab of an in city 125, freshly, which is why it says in very sexy sort of um uh dyno print stuff, max speed 125 miles an hour.

I like the 125 in a different size, but in case optimistically they ever needed to change it upwards.

Yeah.

I do like that.

We also have rocket on the movie, actually.

I also really, really like the like iPad in a sort of dangly case.

That really does.

Yeah,

I feel like I often wondered when I was looking at the kind of like Soviet retrofuturism stuff, what it felt like to to live in the kind of ruins of a failed state with a sort of capitalist superstructure built over it and be like, you can see the past and the present and the future all at once.

And now I know.

So, you know.

Here is that picture.

Yeah, exactly.

On the one hand, you've got the piece of paper in the plastic slip.

On the other hand, you have the iPad that's doing the driver advisory system, advising them when to kind of like break later and such on a coast and stuff to save fuel.

So, yeah, you get the little thing.

One of the funny things about the Pennsylvania Railroad GG1 is at least

apocryphally, they never figured out how fast they could go.

There's one story that it brought out that there was one test run

with 10 heavyweight coaches, and they got to 160 miles an hour.

And the engineer shut off the throttle and said, that's the top speed.

I am not going fast.

There is a approach somewhere.

Top speed established by nerves.

I also like, if you look forward to the

cab lights and the radio,

working as a train driver, you get harrogate water in this country.

Luxury.

Unparalleled luxury.

Smash the unions now.

They've had it too good for too long.

They get the fancy sparkling water.

Oh, my God.

You can look at that little faceted bottle, you know?

I know, right?

It's not like a crystal thing, but it's plastic and it's very, very fancy.

For ages,

that was like the bottled water of choice that was dumped in the kind of the guard spot at the back of the HST as well.

If you took your bike up there, you could steal some.

It was always very useful.

Very good.

So, yeah, that little sunflower dial would illuminate and de-illuminate based on whether the AWS had activated.

And if you didn't, you basically get the bell.

And if you don't respond to it, the brakes will apply.

This is quite a good system.

And it genuinely made our railways much, much safer.

A very, very good thing.

Weirdly, though, if we could jump to the next slide,

the Morpeth boards were not applied at Morpeth.

Oh,

I love this fucking country so much.

The reason why they weren't applied at Morpeth is because

the engineers, well, basically there was a stepping down of speed.

So rather than it being like, you're at 100, now you're at 40, it was, well, it dropped from 110 to 105 to 70 to 50 as the speeds ended up becoming because we did some upgrade work on here for the HSTs.

So the speed's gone up from, we've increased the canon from like 110 to 150 millimeters.

We can now go around the curve at 50 miles an hour safely.

But that stepping down of speed meant that the standard said you don't need to put the thing that's called a Morpeth board at Morpeth, which is fine, right?

Sure, great, excellent.

You didn't, you know, it didn't fall under the standard case for doing what is more pathet boards officially called advanced warning indicators.

We don't need them here.

That's definitely.

I'm still distracted by like village names.

We've got a Glororum.

Glororum is

Choppington.

West Sleekburn.

Uh-huh.

Hevron, which is interesting stealing, uh, stealing like Palestinian valour there.

Yeah.

Um, yeah, yeah.

Just very, what a bizarre country we live in.

What a strange place.

Just

odd.

Just fucked vibes.

Um, so, uh, yeah, so here's how it looks today, by the way.

This is, this is a traveling.

I sure hope I do.

Yeah,

I was about to mention that one.

So, um, this is the, so you can see that the trains either side of Morpeth, your trains are going 110 miles an hour.

This is a fast bit of railway.

And then it isn't for a bit

because of the curve.

So here's the thing.

It's kind of kind of like seeing a speed camera equivalent, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

This is a speed trap.

It's a speed trap.

Yeah.

This is how it looks today, and also how it looked in the 1980s because we've done nothing since BR did everything.

Yeah.

So that's how it looks.

Next slide, please.

Here is a diagram of Edinburgh-Waverly station.

Rise,

if you read the first line here, and we'll understand what data is and why.

24th of June, 1984.

So it's 1984.

We're at Edinburgh-Waverly Station.

Well, actually, we're not quite at Edinburgh-Waverly Station.

We're approaching Edinburgh-Waverly Station in presumably a local train as a passenger at this point.

But driver Peter Allen was booked to take the Aberdeen to London sleeper south from Edinburgh late that evening.

At first, though, he snuck in a cheeky one at a pub in Musselboro near his home in Drem.

So next slide, please.

Is it a crime to get drunk at work?

He had

a whiskey.

And next slide, please.

He also had a pint.

So, you know.

It's a spoiler maker, but perfectly legitimate.

Shot and chaser.

Fine.

I had a citywide special.

So he arrived.

Actually, he didn't get a local train.

Sorry.

He drove.

He arrived in his car

at 21.35.

He phoned his duty manager for this wee little bothy thing that wasn't really good step.

This drive will get me sobered up.

It's like one of the kind of

i actually i actually drive i drive a little better when i'm buzzed

so he phones

he he phones his duty manager to say that he's arrived um at uh at uh 2143 um and the the time between him arriving at 2135 and him phoning his boss at 2143 gave him time to sneak in a a cheeky wee nip and again perfect next slide please

uh he got in uh a can of lager and next slide, please.

Do we know it's the specific lager?

It's in Scotland.

It's going to be tenants, man.

So he got in a can.

And then he got in, you know what?

Step up a can of strong lager, which at the time would only have been tenant super.

So my boy is getting stuck in.

So Alan was seen in the car parking.

If you're interested in this beer, this looks delicious.

We'll find it for you.

Keep going.

Come to Britain, come to Scotland, work about it.

We will do a live show.

We will get you on some bucks and some tenant super.

Tenant super is, I wow.

I drank quite a bit of it.

Not enough of it, to be honest.

In fact, not too much of it while I was a student.

And I probably only had about four cans in total.

And that was enough.

It's not a nice thing to consume.

I'm going to be honest with you.

But the factory is nice where it's made.

It's a thing that, you know, you establish a preference.

You establish your priorities, what you want to receive from the alcohol, right?

Yeah, you drink a tennis.

You don't have to drack british yeah you drink a tenant's and you're like okay i don't want to have a good beer but i want to have a beer and i want to like relax and it's going to be a chill time you you drink a sort of a strong lager like your tenant's super and you're like not only do i not want to drink a good beer but i want to get wasted and you will yeah it's a beer with purpose and so having having that having snuck these in before fooling the boss You know, in like the seven interceding minutes where he's presumably just sat in the car again getting the tins in.

Virulently shit vibes being in a parked car in Waverly Station car park, drinking a can of like

sort of like

cold, but like cooled by it being cold outside.

Yeah,

super.

By the fact you're in a car with no air con.

Yeah, yeah.

Wait, Waverly, wait, I've looked at Waverly before on Google Maps.

You drive your car inside like the station.

You can do little cabs there.

That's what I see.

Okay, this was this was so back in 1984, it was really, really different.

So, you have to look at the old pictures, and you could drive everywhere in the station.

Really?

I mean, it's weirdly laid out now, but like, yeah, it's like that scene where Michael Cain drives into St.

Pancras and like hops out the car and jumps into a DM, into a kind of a train heading northwards on the middle of Maine.

It's kind of like that, messed up again.

It's just like, okay, open the doors for the brake van.

Let me drive my car in there.

Yeah, we we didn't innovate that much with the channel tunnel, you know.

Yeah.

So, presumably wibbling a little bit, Alan was seen in the car park by a colleague at about 21.55.

And they also saw him climbing the steps to the footbridge that spans the station at around that time as well.

So

he pulled the car up right next to the locomotive and parked it at a jaunty angle, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So actually,

run down several passengers on the way up there.

Get out of my way.

I have to drive the train.

20 different marks on this map for places he stopped to piss on things.

So we can kind of track his journey here because on this diagram,

you can see Ross, kind of like on the right-hand side, you can see the Bothy and the staff car park, and you sort of see the telephone, and there's like an arrow saying,

telephoned from here, 2143.

Yeah, it's weird that he's seen in two places at once because someone's been inexact about the time.

Either that or one drunk man has phase transported down the length of platforms.

Good for that.

Strong chance the person who called it in was also drunk.

All through

Scotland in the early 80s.

Of course, they were drunk.

So, hey, I can say this as

someone who was born in Edinburgh,

I know what's going on there.

I think having lived here for 10 years allows me to co-sign that.

Yeah, exactly.

So, you can trace this little journey.

So, there's a little dotted line that you can jump madden over the top of, Ross.

It's not as wiggly as it should be.

No, he's sort of moving around like the Indiana Jones plane body.

And so he kind of makes his way along and eventually finds his way to the footbridge.

Anyone who knows the footbridge, okay, it's mostly the same as it is now.

It comes out, if you go south from the footbridge, this is a fun thing.

So this is the diagram from the report, right?

From the report of something that's about to happen.

And on the screen, you'll see that in the bottom left-hand corner of the diagram, they've picked out a load of little blocks and they've written the letters PH in them.

Pissed out.

PH on the map stands for Public House.

Ah,

one, two,

three, four, five.

Going on a pub crawl before driving by train.

That's or by four.

Never change Scotland.

So this guy,

he went missing for about 45 or 50 minutes when no one in the station saw him.

Oh, jeez.

He was seen climbing up to the footbridge that if you go south, you come come out in the entrance that's directly opposite Fleshmarket.

Anyone who's run from like Sheens or wherever in Edinburgh, that you're as a student in Newington or whatever, and you're running to get a train late because that's what you do.

You will run down Flesh Market close to get straight out across into the footstep to run down Desperate Teachers.

I am picking up what you're putting down.

I understand this very deeply.

Also, Flesh Market close again.

All of Edinburgh is like this.

It is just Dunwall.

Sorry.

Yeah, it really is.

Yeah.

So there are a lot of pubs within very easy access of that entrance to the station.

Why can't we have that?

I have issues with substances, right?

Yeah, you and I both.

And after driving to the station and consuming two beers in my car, I think I would at most be able to do one more beer at one pub before getting in my train.

Well, this guy was

basically the entrance interview for like the Scottish division of British Rail.

So how many units are we in at this point?

So, the whiskey, right?

Two units for a whiskey, right?

Yeah, give or take.

If it's a strong pour, three.

Yeah, and this was in Musselborough, so I'm going to go for strong pour.

So, three units from the whiskey, two units from the tenants, two units from the other tenants, and then four units from the tenants.

Super

he's nearing like sort of you get this from like necking like half a big bottle of vodka, for instance.

Like, this would be your like sort of coat pocket-size bottle of like strong spirits.

Get your bottle of Glens out.

That's the stuff, yeah.

So, this isn't this is uh, this is Louisville or Nashville Railroad in the 80s drinking.

Yeah, I mean, this is

the handshake between like British Rail Scotland region.

What do you think all the Scottish people fucking emigrated out there?

You know, well, this is it.

The cultural traditions they brought with them.

So, our man Peter Allen was next seen walking along what was then platform 11, about 45 or 50 years old.

He He's discounting the possibility that he had a hip flask as well.

It could be, you know, several other things.

He's got like a, he's got like a

attaché case with like a frenzy on it.

You know,

he was wearing one of those hard hats with a beer can on each side.

He's got the little tartan thermos flask.

Like, that's, it's all kids.

It's all happening.

You got a camel back full of Everclear.

Okay, the phrase camel back full of Everclear is going to sit with me.

It was just mine.

It was just mine.

At least you don't have to worry about ever cleaning that.

You're not getting any fucking mold in there.

I'm not worried.

That's a good point.

Yeah, yes.

Remember the super soaker full of Canadian mist never had to clean that shit, did we?

So despite his claim that he'd been wandering around the station,

he was next seen at 2250, basically getting into the loco.

And yeah, he hadn't been seen at all in the kind of the inceding hour or so.

Uh, my boy was getting stuck in.

Oh, he was.

Let's um, next slide, please.

Let's let's leave Waverly Station and Peter Allen and his adventures

and talk about the train.

So, this is this is here's a Mark I coach.

It's not, it's a model, folks.

It's a model, very frizzy model, though.

It's not even a model, it's a picture of a model.

It's a picture of a model, it's true.

Well, actually, it's a digital representation of a bachelor.

Yeah, this is not a good thing.

God damn it.

These have been replaced.

Next slide, please.

These have been replaced by

Mark III coaches.

So the Mark III sleeper coaches.

And these,

you know, I'm often down on the Mark IIIs these days because they're just hopelessly outclassed by modern rolling stock.

But in the 1980s, these were still really very, very good.

They were very, very good coaches.

They rode well.

They were very strong.

They're very safe.

Good stuff.

It's kind of, you know, if you wanted to do a centrist shitlib thing, you could be like, you know, nationalized railway systems

in a kind of like, in a microcosm is your state-of-the-art train being driven by a guy who has had like six cans of lager and a couple of whiskeys.

Again, I mean, do you want that or do you want people drinking a fifth of

a bourbon in the

cab of a Louisville and Asheville train with 75 cars of chemicals?

Oh, geez.

Oh, my God.

Good grief.

So this train was formed of seven Mark IIIs.

It still had two Mark I's, but they were the brake vans either end.

So we still, for some reason, we've got these state, at the time, reasonably state-of-the-art coaches.

For some reason, that's just such Brit vibes, such BR vibes.

You have the Mark I coaches either side.

So next slide, please, because this was being hauled by, it's a Class 47.

It's the train that there is.

Oh, I love this thing.

This is,

it's honestly the best fleet of locomotives Britain has ever built.

I love these things.

This is 47452.

Um, that means nothing to anyone, and it shouldn't, because if, if, uh, for those of it, it does mean stuff too, shout out hi, um, my people.

Uh, yeah,

this is a, this is a beautifully simple, uh, elegant, powerful, and gruff locomotive.

You know, this thing is like from the 50s, basically.

Um, it's, uh, it's a, it's a tank and it's beautiful.

And they're a big rectangle with the motor in it.

And we built a thousand of them.

Oh, hell yeah.

And they did everything.

We used to to

do things in this country.

We really did.

We really bloody did.

Like, honestly, I think it's about 850, actually, but like, that's a shit ton of, just imagine all those lined up.

That's a lot of locos.

So in the small hours of the following day, so this thing set off, set off from Edinburgh, heading southwards on its way to London.

The train was approaching Morpeth from the north

at nearly 90 miles an hour.

Morpeth curve had been recounted.

Its permissible speed had been lifted to 50 miles an hour.

I'm just going to let the sort of like rocking motion of this train sort of lull me into a sense of like extreme awareness and professionalism along with all of this alcohol.

Yes, picture the seat.

So, you're the brand new Mark III sleeper coach.

Having slept in those, they're quite nice.

You're getting comfy, you're kind of feeling that nice, you're like, like the driver, but for different reasons, you're feeling the nice rocking sensation that's lulling you gently and pleasantly to sleep.

The trouble is, the train is still at 90, and Morpeth curve is getting closer and closer and closer.

Next slide, please.

Oh, whoa, train on the ground.

Train put on the ground.

That is not the way that train is supposed to be.

No.

So, anyway, it's a very nice picture of Morpeth Curve here.

As the train engine curve, the locomotive overturned, this time it's not like the Delta got away with it.

The 47 did not.

The locomotive overturned and pulled its carriages with it.

The train mostly stayed intact, as in like the couplings kept the thing kind of in alignment.

again is good.

It is, yeah, that's the brake van at the front, you're right.

Yeah, exactly.

And yeah, you're right.

It hasn't been obliterated, although you can see some damage at the vehicle end.

But yeah, mostly still intact.

The other good thing about the brake van is it's just got people's shit in it, so it doesn't really matter.

And it guards.

Your luggage has been crushed into a cube.

Yeah, but apparently it hasn't.

It looks fine.

Well, no, it's doing okay.

Yeah.

You've been crushed into a cube.

Your luggage is boring, or you're just goo.

So the train stayed most intact.

It helped to avoid too much mess.

And combined with the strength of the Mark III, it's meant that nobody was killed, which when you see the next pictures, you might be surprised by.

There were 35 injuries of passenger and staff, it must be said.

But so if we go to the next slide, here's kind of what's going on.

And you'll see that some Jesus.

Yeah, you'll see.

This house in particular, and also this house in particular.

The train has quite literally fucked that house.

It saw the bungalow.

And much like me, who, whenever I see a bungalow, I become irrationally enraged and want to demolish it.

The Mark III coach had the same sensation and decided, fuck you in particular.

And in it went and smashed up a bedroom and the half of this bungalow.

And also smashed up the front of its friend behind, smashed into a slightly stronger two-story building behind.

But yeah, this is quite a good picture because it shows a couple of things.

It shows...

Firstly, the locomotive is hidden behind a tree, but you can kind of see it kind of two-thirds into the into shot.

You can kind of see its front and its back.

You can see that Mark I coach Nova that you pointed out rightly, and the Mark III behind it.

The train's broken behind that, but you can also see that those coaches have stayed mostly in a line, which has helped with energy dissipation because all of them are kind of breaking together as they dig into the ballast and stuff or the bungalow.

What is a bungalow if not more ballast?

Anything past a track sign is ballast, engrave that in 50-foot-high letters.

Yeah,

you need an equivalent to the spaceship guys you would call this litho-breaking.

Yeah, bungalow breaking.

That's exactly what's happening on the street.

No, you need like a static term for bungalow.

Yeah, the fact the train has stayed largely in line

is a very good thing for the safety, as well as the fact that, okay, the one that's hit the two-story house has bent a bit, but most of them have stayed in.

If it's gone through part of that two-story house, that does technically make the two-story house a drogue.

Yeah, that is.

It is a drogue house.

Kind of sea anchor.

Yeah, that's it.

And then the back of the train is still most intact.

So that's fine.

So no one killed, which is really good.

Next slide, please.

Because we have to look at more pictures of a house being smashed to bits because it's extremely funny.

Whoa.

So here's another picture.

The first one there, you can see the train smearing through the garden.

uh smashing into the the front bedroom of the two-story house and obliterating the bungalow rip the bungalow Um, and then the next picture, you can see the Mark III that's had the most bashing, and it stayed pretty well intact, except that it's like been bent by

the metaphorical knee of the big house.

The next picture is a rather unhappy house owner whose bungalow has been demolished by a Mark III.

I don't know why you're unhappy, you're gonna have got a shitload of money out of BR for this.

This looks like a very long-suffering man.

Yes, I see if he's been through some of the things.

The guy who has just put the last lick of paint on his perfect bungalow to retire into.

I have a feeling he will have moved somewhere without a railway after this.

That's my suspicion.

So next slide, please.

Here's a diagram of what happened.

Well, so this time the train's come from the other direction.

So it's coming from the right-hand side of the slide heading southwards, although it didn't manage to get facing south at this point because...

Curve.

You can see the train has gone everywhere and made a mess of mid-track, which is very rude.

So many permanent way engineers would consider this to be an inconvenience.

Precisely.

Or

a convenience because we get some high-speed, we get some brand new track installed, which is always a nice thing.

Although, one of the things that really annoys me is whenever we have climate change-based smashing of our railways.

Tracks are risen in bungalow.

A thing that always annoys me with track washouts and stuff these days with climate change, because they're happening more and more, is they always seem to happen just after we've done a track renewal.

So you've got this beautiful track with like no ballast under it because a river's washed it out.

I'm like, why can't they happen to knack a track and then we get a free renewal off the back of it?

Anyway, very annoyed by that.

Always happening.

So next slide, please.

Because there's a diagram in the crash report that you remember the picture that I put up earlier of one rail

kind of raised above the other.

Well, here you can see that the cant 150 millimeters.

But you'll see there is a, they've added an extra bit to the diagram here, which is the wheel and axle.

And you'll notice something about that, which is that it's doing something that if you, if you just pay close attention here, you'll see it shouldn't be doing that, which is tipping way off the track.

No, it shouldn't.

That's bad.

That's a bad thing that has happened there, which is why, yeah, the fact that the report includes this diagram, I quite enjoy this.

You'll surmise that the wheel is not supposed to be doing that.

This is when there is a lot of cant deficiency.

Yes, this is a significant amount of cant deficiency to the point of train leave track.

Yes.

So anyway,

you've heard of

a dual track drifting.

This is one rail drifting.

Yeah, this is this is yeah, this is this is this is doing the the James Bond,

the good James Bond film that isn't a James Bond film where the guy they two-wheel a truck and and Stinger miss dodge stinger missiles in the process.

Doing that, but in a class 47.

Yeah, next slide, please, because anyway, yeah, after this, Morpeth boards were installed at Morpeth.

You'll be glad to know.

It only took them, what, 20 years?

Yeah, it only took them like 20 years, and another big mess, and several people's houses getting walloped.

Yeah.

So, job done, right?

Problem solved.

Oh, next slide, please.

Because that's right, this is a four-disaster episode.

Oh, my God.

Because 10 years later, on Roz, please.

27th of June, 1994.

Yeah, an express parcels train hauled by another Class 47, which

really didn't become well out of this.

Yeah, named after a sort of random North London suburb and hauling one of those beautiful Royal Mail post fans.

Yeah, so it was hauling, presumably hauling a load of these post fans.

I like this one for a variety of reasons.

This picture, so Finchbury Park, this is named after the depot at Finsbury Park.

And

this, so the train crashed.

So the Class 47 goes around the curve at 80 miles an hour, and obviously it crashed horribly.

Thankfully,

nobody was killed, but as his cab hit the dirt, the driver quite literally ate ballast and was pretty severely injured.

So

I would not like to be eating ballast.

I actually have some ballast down in a bag next to me because I'm a weirdo, but that stuff's the size of your fist.

And I would not want one of those to hit me in the head at one mile an hour, let alone lots of them hitting me in the head at 80 miles an hour.

This is sort of a dentally complex injury.

Gotta have a lot of

Novocaine.

Lada Novocaine.

Yeah.

So

I want to, so it's sort of like weird.

Is it ontology or is it just fun livery stuff?

This train hit the dirt so hard that it was delivery.

Yeah,

they took the intercity livery off it and it went back to blue.

Oh, geez.

It's got the British Rail blue underneath it.

Yeah.

Because this should be black, but it's just taken that off.

It's stripped it right back.

Yeah, quite something.

So

yeah, like the depot people being like, oh, shit, we're supposed to take that down to the...

Ah, they're going to see that we just painted over the previous one.

You're supposed to take it down to the...

Ah, damn it.

I mean, the paint guy realizing he's in trouble, but not the most trouble of anyone that day is probably like

organizationally interesting.

So, you know, the Morphov boards have been fitted.

So how did this happen?

Next slide, please.

Well, okay.

So the previous three incidents all had published official reports, which means that we, yes, it's the...

WTYP yellow with some reports over it.

People laughed at me in the privatization episode because I did loads of these and people were like, God, he really likes putting reports onto the yellow.

And I was like, it's the WTYP yellow.

I'm trying to be thematic.

It's a good colour.

Three reports.

lots it is nice um three nice reports telling us lots of things about what happened really nice in detail even the 1877 one's actually a pretty good report actually in its detail so you'd think there's going to be another one right uh next slide please

it's 1994 yeah

no wrong early privatization days everything's a free-for-all who needs to learn stuff we don't we don't need to do a railway we just need to you know do nothing at all

move fast and learn things yeah exactly so uh next slide please because at the time um these chuckle fucks uh had taken over the rail inspector and were in charge of writing crash reports what is this logo even meant to convey this is like a health and safety executive oh it's nickel ballots from uh magic the gathering

yeah yeah well the health and safety executive um are if you want to understand regulatory capture they are What an organization to realize, to kind of understand as a case study in that.

So they were supposedly at this point with privatization, early privatization, they were in charge of writing crash reports, which they either just didn't do or they did do them and they didn't publish them.

At some point, we'll do the Tesco tunnel collapse.

I'm convincing everyone on here to do the Tesco tunnel collapse.

So lobby your local WTYP co-host to make sure that you can't.

Do not lobby any.

And I will talk more about this, but suffice to say, they have this responsibility stripped from them after a series of horrible incidents and big failures in industry learning.

So we have no idea why that post-train crashed.

Just vibes.

Just

felt like it.

From that.

So, um, so yeah, that's and that is a weird end to the story of the Morpeth Curve, which, by the way, is still there.

And I've got a couple of friends who, when they go through it, they send me a picture saying, Yeah, I got through okay.

Um, so uh, yeah, it's uh, it's kind of a running gag.

Um, that uh, and again, to be clear, this this exists because of Earl Gray and his fail sons, correct, yes, literally, Earl Gray and his father.

Still killing people today,

still murdering people.

What a mixed legacy.

A shitload of train crashes, but tea by

quite nice tea.

Yeah, exactly.

Tea that Picard likes.

So did we, did so, did I?

I know I've talked a lot here.

Did we learn anything from any of this?

Well, it seems like British Rail didn't.

And it, you know, certainly seemed like a lot of people.

So BR did because BR did Morpeth boards eventually.

Oh, true.

They did Morpeth boards, but then they eventually decided to install them at Morpeth.

So we got there eventually.

But have we actually fixed the problem?

No, no.

The curve is still there.

Still there, 50 miles an hour.

It's a really obvious slowdown between 100 and 100 miles an hour plus bits of railway.

It's very strange.

Yeah, but there we go.

That's

Morpeth curve.

It's just this universal, like there are lots of railroads in the world that have these really tight curves in between high-speed segments.

They go wrong all the time.

And when I say all the time, I mean, they have a crash every couple of decades, but that's still too much.

Yeah, like, you know what?

Just don't have the, get rid of the king.

I know you're going to cast off the king.

Yeah, no, I'm sorry.

Get rid of the tight bend.

Let's put it that way.

Get rid of the tight bend.

Yeah, no, that's

it just too overbuilt and too established a right of way that now you're just like, you'd have to do some insane sort of purchasing to like change the shape of it at all?

You'd need a new viaduct over the river, which would be quite expensive.

Other than that, it would be cheap because the land is fairly cheap and it's Morpeth.

It's Northumberland.

It's fine.

You'd have some very unhappy landowners, but you know, just do it now and strike while the iron's hot, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

While the eye is turned on treasury and

away from DFT.

Yeah, we can just get stuck in.

Yeah.

Except that we need the money from Treasury to build the bridge to go over the river.

So we're screwed on that front.

But

you get Louise Hay to go to Rachel Reeves, like, I have a way to take the heat off you.

And all it's going to require is the cost of one viaduct.

I literally have a bridge to sell you.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, of course, my approach to getting rid of this kink is actually not to get rid of it at all, is actually build HS2 on the other side of the country, even though it's the Bendier side, build the HS2 base tunnels that get you from where it ought to finish in Manchester under the current plans to where it really ought to finish, which is Glasgow.

So do that, and then you will, then you don't need to worry about this curve because every train will stop at Morpeth.

So they'll all be slowing down anyway to do that and things will be much safer as a result.

But there we go.

So Morpeth on the map as well.

For more than just this.

Hooray, Morpeth.

Yeah, because what's ironic is that they shouted and screamed to get the railway.

And actually, what it did was wreck Morpeth as a market town because the railway just meant everyone left Morpeth.

So

maybe that should have come

for you.

No gosh, no business.

Yeah,

exactly.

Thank you, Lynn.

Awesome.

So,

Roz, I'll give it back to you.

Thanks, all of you, for listening to Morpeth chat.

Yeah, I hope we can really put Morpeth on the map.

I think this is going to be a global center for commerce pretty soon.

Check this shit out.

Morpeth, more problems.

See, after a couple of hours of derangement, that hits differently.

It does.

It does hit different.

You're right.

Yeah, exactly.

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

Shake hands with danger.

Shake hands with danger.

Shake hands with danger.

Danger.

Roz, what are we looking at here?

What's going on?

Hello, Roz, November, Liam, and Gareth.

I actually nailed it.

Yeah.

No milkshakes here.

Nah, faith.

F.

Until very recently, I was one of the sorry few tasked with reducing entire mice to various soup-like homogenates in under 30 seconds.

Let's go.

Atmospheric railways, soup-like homogenates.

It's all the hits today.

Well, in vivo research is a whole disaster on its own, this story comes from the benchwork side of the lab.

The reason that we need, from time to time, to make soup from rodents is that it grants us easier access to the smallest parts of the rodents, the molecules.

It is much easier to extract redacted target molecule from membraneless, homogeneous soup than it is to take it from complex and fiddly organs.

Uh-huh.

Though the tissue homogenizer does most of the work perfectly well, it leaves some microscopic pieces of organs floating around, which can grebel your data in ways that bother corporate.

Not the use of grebel.

I hate that sentence, though.

There is, however, a second machine which can be deployed to remove these contaminants and convert a batch of soup-like homogenate into crystal-clear lysate in just about 30 minutes.

Cocktail strainer.

Uh-huh.

That machine is called the Ultra Centrifuge.

I take it back.

That's the coolest thing I've ever fucking heard in my life yet.

Searching that ultrafund.

Yeah.

Your Bog standard off-the-shelf ultra-centrifuge can run you nearly $100,000.

Looks like an old-timey washing machine.

Costs, as you say, infinity dollars.

I just want to throw stuff in here, see what happens.

I googled it, and the first result is an introduction to ultra-centrifugation

from Beckham and College.

It generates acceleration as high as 1 million G or 9,800 kilometers a second.

What?

Your box standard off-the-shelf ultra-centrifuge can run you nearly $100,000 and is capable of accelerating samples to angular velocities on that same order of magnitude.

I note here a thing in the hazards section, which I'm going to keep to myself, assuming that the thing is about this.

Oh, yes.

Okay.

Okay.

Yep.

Ditto.

The force

applied to these samples maxes out at 150,000 times the force of gravity on Earth and readily compresses any particulates in your homogenate into an easy-to-discard pellet.

The subject of today's story is a shorter benchtop model, the rotor of which is about head height for anyone sitting at a bench in the same room.

Okay.

I'm regressing having read the first sentence of the hazards section now.

On an unspecified day, at an unremarked upon time, a co-worker of mine loaded a rotor, image B,

filled with samples into the machine and started a run.

Now, one quirk about the ultra-centrifuge is that it screams when it's working normally.

Same.

Yeah, yeah.

Since the instantaneous linear velocity of the rotor passes through the full range of human hearing on its way to 100,000 revolutions per per minute.

Uh-huh.

At no point since my co-worker started the run and promptly left the lab did it make any of the correct noises.

I leave the room.

Immediately, the ultra-centrifuge started to groan and to rattle before going into emergency shutoff.

I called this co-worker over since the samples are usually time sensitive and she took the rotor to confirm that she had balanced the samples correctly.

I did not notice when she came back since I was busy with my own work, but a few minutes later,

I heard the ultra-centrifuge kick back up to 5,000 RPM without issue.

Okay.

The rattling started slowly.

It jittered before it jostled, and it bumped before it banged, but the growl was sudden.

The growl is always sudden.

Whatever beasts they locked in there to spin the samples was unhappy, and after a few thousand more RPM tolerating the mismatched samples, it demanded justice.

But not before trying to reach its target speed of 100,000 RPM for some reason.

Like an industry novice and a general dumbass.

I approached the machine to shut it down manually.

Yeah, just pop the lid, see what happens.

Power cycling.

By standing to approach the machine, which is sound poised to fracture at any second, I had moved my abdomen into the danger zone where it would spew debris at any point if the machine fractured from stress.

And each step widened the arc I occupied.

Earlier, I mentioned the ultra-centrifuge's strength in terms of relative forces and angular

velocity.

The instantaneous linear velocity at this stage approaches 300 miles an hour.

Luckily, this model comes equipped with an easily accessed main power switch, and it applies an emergency brake if power is disrupted while the rotor is in motion.

When it finally settled down, I paused my work and decided to take lunch early.

Yeah, just almost getting shot with a 300-mile an hour rotor of rat viscera.

The sentence both both Gareth and I were sort of dancing around was reads as follows: The tremendous rotational kinetic energy of the rotor in an operating ultra-centrifuge makes the catastrophic failure of a spinning rotor a serious concern as it can explode spectacularly.

Bring your friends over, watch the rotor explode.

It's a spectacle,

just wild.

I cannot say how close the machine came to thoroughly homogenizing a slice of my torso, but I do know any internal damage was covered by our service contract with the manufacturer.

Just like breaking bad and trying to do science for crime, but you're like setting up one of these in front of the bulletproof glass at a bank.

They're like, you're not going to get through this.

Are you sure?

Just give me a minute.

When the technician was servicing the machine, I asked him privately to hide the calibration menu before he left, since I'm pretty sure this is how my coworker bypassed the emergency shutdown instead of balancing the samples correctly.

There probably would have been a failure in the motor of the bearings before any shit really hit the fan, but suffice to say, this experience left me with a healthy appreciation for microgram precision, microgram precision balancing, and the value of my own life.

Yeah, tracks.

I will note that one of the main guys in in the development of the ultra-centrifuge was apparently called Dr.

Jesse Wakefield Beams.

And I note down here: physicist

named Dr.

Beams didn't even work with lasers.

Waste my fucking time.

Waste.

Yeah, absolute waste.

Yeah.

Sorry, this one ran a little long.

It didn't run a little long.

You should have seen some of the ones that came in recently.

Hopefully, it gets paired with a short, bloodless disaster.

Respectfully or otherwise, another biosciences twink.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

That was a great safety third.

That was hugely great as well.

Yeah, that was

thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bioscience Twink.

Yes,

that was lovely.

I'm delighted to learn about the Ultra Centrifuge.

Yeah,

I now have several tabs opened after the Ultra Center Fuge, which are going to keep me entertained for a couple more hours.

I have several new fears as well.

Like an ultra centrifuge exploding in like a nearby county.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

I one of the things about moving is that I have my back to a window now.

I got to change that and get behind as solid of a wall as I can.

Understood.

You get that lead plate up.

Exactly.

Sort of a sort of explosive reactive armor like on Russian tanks

for when the

test tube of

homogenated rodent flies through the window

5,000 miles an hour.

Oh, God.

It's funny.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Listen to Rail NASA.

She said from across the room.

Listen to Rails.

Yeah, listen to Rail NASA.

Buy my book as well, actually, please.

Thanks for pointing it to.

I had a very cool

book.

I had a very cool launch event last night in

our timeline, which was really fun in Houseman's in London, which have lots of copies of the book there.

If you're struggling to find it anywhere else, Houseman's near King's Cross, great.

It was lovely.

We talked, we ended up talking about gender in the context of

tech bros.

It was interesting.

Yeah, it was a great chat.

So, yeah, buy the book.

And also, listen to Kill James Bond, listen to 10,000 Losses, listen to

No Godz, No Mayors,

all the podcasts.

A smorgasbord of ear-based entertainment for your enjoyment.

And buy tickets for the Fillmore in Philadelphia.

To do that.

That was the first New York show or DC.

Pretty pleased.

Yeah.

By toys.

By toy.

Yes.

Bye, everybody.

Bye, everyone.

Bye-bye.