Episode 168: Cincinnati's Ghost Subway

All right, I got the video going.

I got my local audio going.

Me too.

Yep, I'm going.

Yep, local, good.

And now

the Zencaster is also going.

You're going to do 3, 2, 1, Mark.

That's 3, 2, 1, Mark.

Beautiful.

Anyone might think we were professionals.

And

no one would ever fucking think of that of us.

The emails I have been sending

back and forth with these people where they're just like, hey, like very professional email form.

And I'm just like, yeah, it sounds good.

Dude, I don't fuck it.

What do you want me to say?

Just high, warm regard.

No, I listen.

I actually want to give one special shout out.

I will not name my coworker, but I will name her husband Tim.

This unnamed coworker has told me that her husband, I believe, is an engineer and is a fan of the podcast.

And she's like, you know how fucking disorienting it is to come downstairs at like 7:30 in the morning and just hear your voice.

So, Tim, hello.

Hi, Tim.

Sorry to your wife that we are in your house.

Actually, we live in your walls.

It's crazy how we fit there.

Yeah, we've been doing a sort of a parasite situation.

No, no, no love for that movie.

Whatever.

I was just thinking about how that would look.

Yeah, you know.

Do you think we could all fit in the walls?

I wouldn't.

Why are my big walls bulging outwards?

Yeah, me too.

I'm right there with you, Nova.

Why are the walls so fat and ungainly?

And I'm just like lying behind the wall.

Why is there a beer belly-shaped series of cracks in my drywall?

Just like that's very hurtful coming from the insulation.

All right.

Hello, and welcome to Well Scares Your Problem.

Fuck you.

That's right.

It's the Halloween.

It's the Halloween episode.

I'm Justin Rozniak, brackets, scary.

My pronouns are boo and

it's not bad, actually.

It's pretty good.

I'm Evil November Kelly.

You can tell because I didn't shave for like five minutes, and so I've grown a goatee.

My pronouns are still she and her, though, because Halloween is no excuse to misgender me um yay liam yay liam uh hey so my name is uh

uh

scary liam mckanderson nailed it absolutely nailed it you could you could tell because i'm in your walls uh collapsing your your your your fountain your whatever your house and and please don't say things about my body it's it's very hurtful to me um

my pronouns are he and him and i you know we used to we used to do better at these halloween episodes i think with the with the haunted the haunted ships that everybody got mad at us for.

It's fine.

We'll get it next year.

I couldn't work something in like that for this one.

It's abandoned.

Ooh.

And your future is a Silverada 3500 squishing you like a bug.

Do you want to work in a Ye Gareth or something along those lines?

Oh, no.

I'm not doing Ye Gareth.

I'm going It's Gareth.

I will not steal Ye Liam from Ye Liam.

I will never do that.

Hello, it's

Scary

Scarathan

shopping it.

Scarath.

Scarathanna.

Scarath.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, my pronouns are also he, him, because I'm not imaginative, and there's no way I can follow up Roz's scary noise.

So

yeah,

I didn't know you could do a Wilhelm scream.

I could have liked, I have a drop, I have a Wilhelm drop, but I don't have my drops up.

So I'm just gonna, I'm disappointing you.

I'm disappointing my mother.

I'm disappointing everyone right now.

I think the Wilhelm scream is more of a, ah!

You know, ah.

Yeah, exactly.

Are you scared or are you orgasming, my guy?

It's kind of both.

I think it's both.

I think it's both.

The frightened orgasm, yeah.

I think I'm both my time.

There's like a B-side Wilhelm scream that pops up every now and then.

When Ben Burt was really in a good mood, he gets like the B-side Wilhelm screaming.

And that one's definitely a guy coming.

What you see on the screen in front of you is a spooky, empty, concrete room.

See on the screen in front of you.

This looks pretty fucking scary.

I wouldn't like to be down here.

I watched Cloverfield yesterday for the first time in like 14 years, 15 years since the movie came out.

And I had a really embarrassing moment where I was like, Well, they can't go down the tracks because you dirty realized no electrified.

Me, me, me, me, me.

And I was like, Oh, yeah, power got knocked out to the entire city.

Like, they could probably go down the tracks.

The Cloverfield monster did not listen to your cinema since ding.

And then A.

Yeah.

No, I and it would be right to do so.

That movie is so.

I love that they were just like, what if monster movie, but also we kind of tried to make it a broken.

This is not Kill James Bond.

Moving on.

Well, it's not supposed to be like that.

There's supposed to be trains in here, but there are not.

Yeah, you're telling me this isn't this is this isn't scary.

This is depressing, this image.

That's really scary.

You find out.

But it's also scary.

Yeah, that's true.

Today, we're going to talk about Cincinnati's ghost subway.

Nothing scarier than being in Cincinnati.

Built in every single day.

Being in Cleveland.

My two main sources on this were Cincinnati's Incomplete Subway.

That's by Jacob R.

Mecklenburg.

Also check out his website, cincinnatitransit.net.

And also the Cincinnati Subway History of Rapid Transit by Alan J.

Singer.

But before we talk about that, we have a new segment that we're going to have for a bit called Announcements.

Yeah.

The announcements begin now.

Yes.

Do you like the concept of seeing us in person?

I hope you do.

Do you live in the northeast corridor of the United States of America, Kaka?

If you do,

you can come and see us brackets my physical presence pending,

like entirely dependent on the whims of U.S.

customs and immigration.

But.

Yes, we're doing an acela corritor, if you will.

Yeah.

I also want to float the alternate name, which my wife vetoed, which was the four to six days of Sodom tour.

We will be appearing in a number of regional locations, such as New York City, Somerville, Massachusetts, which I understand is almost Boston, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,

and Washington, District of Columbia.

Yes.

There may be more tour dates right now.

It's this is May 1st through 4th.

Tickets should be on sale by the time this episode airs.

So all those details will be down in the description.

Please purchase our tickets because the agent set up us up with some really big rooms.

Yeah, we've got some massive venues.

Like we are playing some impressive places.

We are going to be on Times Square in New York City in Sony Hall.

That's like 500 seats.

If customs and immigration do not let me in the country to do this, I will become severely depressed.

So,

come and see us.

Please.

Come see the tour.

Our Broadway debut.

How could you miss it?

Oh, we're going to do, well, there's your problem on ice, the musical Hamilton Broadway.

Yes.

I don't know if they're going to, I don't know if the floor is going to hold.

Welcome to, to, well, there's your problem in New York City, a hip hop bro.

And yeah,

it's going to be the most annoying thing you've ever seen.

No, it's going to be great.

It's going to be less annoying than Hamilton.

I cannot wait.

It'd be cheaper than Hamilton, too.

I cannot wait to do this.

And I hope to see you all there in person.

And yeah,

we're going to be doing

like this whole run of shows.

It's going to be absolutely fantastic.

So save the date for next summer, summer 2025.

Yes.

May 1st through 4th, as of now.

We may add some dates in late April if we manage to fill up again these absolutely fucking huge rooms.

Buy the tickets, Michael.

Please, for fuck's sake.

I also want to reiterate that.

I want to make a plug real quick for just 0.4 miles from Sony Hall is Audio 46 headphone superstore.

So

if you have made some sort of parasocial bond with me and want me to be happy, reach out to Audio

Why?

Because I keep buying headphones with them and I don't know how to stop.

So it's not even like you just like their product, you like their story, and you want them to have a lot of fun.

I want them walking around money.

Okay, okay.

So it's not even SpawnCon.

You just like

the thing that I like.

Yeah.

It was the same thing with buysnoos.com and we almost had an ad deal with them until we ran into some legal issues, but that's fine.

It's like

the Achawood comic where one of the characters just sends Oreos money because he likes the product without without roz that was the joke we were making that was the joke you were making jesus yeah and if you want to hear jokes this good buy tickets at the link in the description you can see them on a on a beautiful large stage and listen if we've really up here right and we've booked too large a venue you can be one of like a couple of people on a in like a massive venue while we do bits to you personally.

Exactly.

If anyone watched the FIU Sam Houston State game yesterday, that would be October 22nd.

You could be the one guy in the stands who was trying to block the field goal by waving his arms real good.

I do want to say we wanted to use

Accela Corridor, but we are terrified of running into Amtrak's lawyers

because that's legal.

I don't fuck with government lawyers, man.

Not again.

Non-specific Northeast Corridor.

Northeast Northeast Corridor is that.

Oh, yo, you called the train that.

That's not fucking trademarked.

This being the Halloween episode, it's the Northeast Horror Tour.

Horror Tour.

Yeah.

Horror Tour.

We have a second announcement as well.

Don't we?

Yeah, we do.

Oh, fuck.

The library.

The library.

You know that room that you go to to learn how to read good?

Well,

we are hosting with the Free Library of Philadelphia

Podcasting 101 session that will be at the main branch at the Parkway Central Library.

Why did they let us do this?

I don't know.

Those who can do, those who can't teach, and brother, are we teaching?

We will teach you all of the deep secret knowledge that you need to start a podcast.

We'll have podcasting demonstrations.

We'll have to have the copy for this fucking thing is unbelievable, by the way.

Oh, God.

What have they said about her?

Oh, you should read to see this.

You should read.

Roz wrote the bios.

I wrote the

batch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I hate all type of bias.

I know you bio bios.

Podcasting.

Thursday, November 14th, 6 p.m.

Literature Department of the Parkway Central Library.

That's the one.

That's the one that Ben Franklin invented and put on the

Parkway, even though it hadn't been built yet.

are these are some great bios um yeah november kelly is a prolific poster and podcaster and has at one point or another made all the world's worst people extremely mad

oh that's that's nice i like that it's not it's not inaccurate

so i'm just giggling at the bios they're very good everyone you should go and find that you can find it at the freelibrary.org uh calendar uh there with all the all the bios all the information it's all there go go go read about it.

Thanks to Ross for writing those.

But yes, Thursday, November 14th.

Yeah, I should say this one I will not be physically present at due to the, again, US customs and immigration.

However, I will be there as a flat screen, which is my second favorite way of being present in a location.

Oh, I do want to say, I tickets for the, I don't even think there's tickets for this.

I think you can just show up.

Yeah, it is.

I believe you can show up.

It is free.

It is open to the public.

You can just arrive.

Yes.

So, yeah, please do that.

We can't stop you.

It's a public venue.

I don't know if there will be jokes in this one.

I think this one's just going to be like, here's how we did this, which.

There will be jokes, but you aren't going to like them.

Yeah.

That's also the disclaimer for the fucking tour.

Don't, don't.

Speaking of tours.

Have you seen our writer, which says we need the tech.

like the tech stack we actually need and then also beer

just so long as we're not doing the like m's thing, you know?

Yeah.

No.

I suggested that.

I vetoed it.

I like the M ⁇ Ms thing because it's like a check that they're actually reading the rider.

So that if you've got like an allergy thing, they actually know it.

I quite like the story behind the annoying M ⁇ Ms thing.

It's quite clever.

This was Justin's position, and then I was like, but we don't actually need them to read that much of it.

We just need them to read the tech part.

If you get mad at us at Sony Hall, you can walk to the M ⁇ M's New York immersive experience.

That's cool.

It's like a block and a half away.

Getting so.

So mad about that you go and get MM.

Those are the announcements.

I didn't have a stinger for this.

The goddamn news.

Yeah, have you ever seen

a film called The Battle of Algiers?

Fewer pixels in this image than I thought.

It's drone footage.

Israel has

killed Yahya Sinwar, leader of Hamas, in a move that is sure to once and for all finally defeat Hamas.

Yeah, I'm just going to note here that every leader of Hamas in the last like, what, 20 years has died of being assassinated by Israel.

It doesn't seem to do very much.

Yeah, well, I mean, in the short term, sure, but like, as we have seen with this whole thing, like, all you're doing is creating the sort of like groundwork for like future insurgency.

I was about to say,

this is the just more one more lane, bro, of

you know, Middle East geopolitics.

Yeah, actually, whatever they could say.

That's like one part of the overlap between this genocide and like city planning.

The other is the city that they want to build on top of Gaza.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that's

it's the situation there has definitely gotten uglier in the past couple of weeks.

I mean, we haven't recorded even even since they killed Nasrallah by blowing up a whole block of apartment buildings,

which is ridiculous.

I mean, you know, back in the early days of this conflict, you know, the Israeli media was talking about proportional 9-11s.

I don't know what that is in proportional 9-11s for Lebanon.

Many.

Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, I highly because the only way I have of relating to real life anymore is through movies.

and because I keep seeing like, you know, man-made horrors beyond my comprehension,

I recommend watching Battle of Algiers, also Army of Secrets.

Just to give you a sense of the kind of like of my feeling about this, again, I will say that I am depending on the federal government of the United States of America to let me into the country.

Right, yeah.

Oh, God, can you imagine whatever fucking ice agent has to listen to this shit?

Yeah.

all right agent here's 400 hours of podcasts you have it till friday do you think we can push the ice agent who's detailed to listen to this left Oh, that's a good point.

We're changing the system from within.

Yeah, it's people say to me, Nova, it's like you don't do any real activism.

And it's like, excuse me, I make whatever federal agent is detailed to surveil me listen to hours and hours of leftist content.

If that doesn't count as activism what does it's a good question i don't even know what to say about uh israel's stupid genocide anymore you know because it just looks like they're going full steam ahead with it i i do have one beef here which is i i i think this might get me accused of being defeatist right but i think there's this uh kind of this vibe that people have especially on the left and in like uh the us and the uk to be like well none of this stuff actually like matters and it's like I think you have to concede that this is like, this is what Israel winning and what Netanyahu winning within Israel looks like.

Right.

It sucks.

It's criminal.

But like, I think there's this thing.

I remember this tweet that was doing the thing recently about like, oh, we've got to like build coalition with like traumatized IDF soldiers because like really this stuff.

This stuff like harms their interests materially too.

And it's like,

but it doesn't though.

Like it might harm them

in the short term, but or in the, you know, in the longer run.

But it's like, no, this is what they want to do.

And they're doing it and they're doing it successfully.

And I think you can acknowledge that and you can say, yeah, this is stuff that's like going to plan for them.

You know,

the kind of, oh, it hurts everybody.

Oh, maybe, I guess.

But like, ultimately, I do think you can lament that.

Yeah, this is shit that is being prosecuted according to like the way they want it to go

and

been very successful at that.

I don't think that means that like any kind of protest against it is like futile or anything, but I do think that you have to kind of acknowledge that first, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, and there does seem to have been some movement in some of the major media outlets to maybe highlight that, oh, maybe there were a few atrocities committed by Israel, maybe.

Yeah, but it's just a

don't worry.

It's just like a don't worry about that, right?

Like,

like it always comes off to me as like, well, who can blame them, you know?

And it's just like, fuck me.

You run into the

flat denial.

Isaac Chopner's latest interview, for instance, or like Danny Finkelstein on Twitter being like, well, despite this video of an Israeli drone targeting a child, an Israeli drone wouldn't target a child.

So

if you photoshop that, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Or all of these x-rays of children's heads with bullets in them have been photoshopped.

Because at this point, you can just kind of there's nothing left for it but to either say, this is good and I like this if you're a defender of Israel, or to be like, well, it's very complicated, but ultimately I'm going to have to like deny the evidence in front of me.

You know?

Yeah, it's all it's all very depressing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I I I I just uh every every day I feel like I log on to Twitter and I see uh the worst thing that I've ever seen and uh uh more so every day.

So,

and there, I don't,

yeah, no, I like I say, I don't, I don't want to get accused of defeatism, but I don't know what the fuck I can do about it, you know.

Yeah, you know, it's uh

speaking of things which are bad,

the weather was very bad recently.

Okay, sure.

Um,

you didn't want to go with like Appalachia destroyed then.

No, no.

So we had recently two hurricanes, Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

Hurricane Helene did this thing, which is, you know, kind of wacky for a hurricane to do.

They usually do that, yeah, which is just, you know, take a hard

left turn right before hitting Florida and just go straight up and dump everything on western North Carolina.

Yeah, get a little quirky with it and just absolutely fucking decimate the hollow.

Sure.

Yeah, exactly.

It goes straight for Asheville.

I like it.

I like Asheville, man.

Yeah, Asheville's nice.

I've never been.

I want to go to Asheville.

We'll go to Asheville.

Yeah.

But the,

yeah, so it dumped quite a few inches of rain into, you know, western North Carolina, which is obviously it's in the Appalachian.

So, you know, all of this water is concentrated into the few rivers and streams there,

resulting in pretty huge flooding.

I mean, this is not as unprecedented as some people made it out to be.

I mean, hurricanes have done this in living memory.

It's just that this usually does not happen.

I mean, helpfully, we had an intervention from the kind of like libs of TikTok caucus to be like, you should, if you were a sort of a patriot, you should go to North Carolina and like shoot at FEMA or whatever

because they're trying to like, you know, do deep state globalism and like vaccinate your kids or whatever the fuck.

The guys, the guys working 28-hour days to reopen your infrastructure should be shot at.

Yeah, I mean, so we had that, and then we also had authorized helicopter flights.

That was a big one.

Apparently, there's a lot of people.

So there's a reason collisions or

collisions they gave me an RPG-7.

And

I've been out for the last couple weeks, which is just simply to pave the way for the FEMA black choppers, which are coming for you, you and you deserve it.

If Trump, when Trump wins the next election,

and

he does what he says he's going to do, which is get rid of FEMA, right?

And also get rid of the weather service, apparently.

Rick Santorum, that son of a bitch trying to privatize the...

Yeah,

it's been gearing up for that one for a while.

Yeah.

Also,

quick interjection on my interjection, which is it's based that one of the NASA, like, not NOS, NASA, sorry, what are the NASA guys?

No, what are they called?

Noah.

No, NOAA.

Yeah.

Yes, Noah.

Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

One of the, so in the eye of one of the storms, or on the edge of the eye, they tossed out the ashes of one of their

dead former colleagues, presumably someone who's long retired and stuff.

But that guy's wish was, I'll chuck my ashes into a hurricane while you're working your way through it.

So that's based.

Anyway, that's an interjection.

Yeah, that's very cool.

So when they go, when FEMA, Noah, all these services go,

and then there's the next one of these comes along, which, by the way, it will be happening with increasing frequency until our civilization collapses.

Frequency is a lot of fun.

What do you think happens?

Yes, what happens?

I suppose they just

have to

black rifle coffee company kind of patriots organized in community with each other and definitely don't devolve into weird paranoid little cabals and you start shooting at each other.

They definitely feel like

not to like kick anarchists in the teeth for no reason here, but to be like, yeah,

in year 2024 to be like, no, we don't need a like state capacity for any of this shit.

No, it'd be fine.

It'd be fine.

We're going to actually, we're going to trust some guys on motorcycles with the horse trailer to go raid the grocery store and then

distribute it.

I mean, if you want to kind of

anarchist critique of that it's like interesting so you would rather have be paying the cops to like guard the empty grocery store and its groceries from people but like um equally to to this in appalachia we also had the uh the florida hurricane that uh caroline calloway survived which

unfortunate yeah actually hurricane hurricane milton was uh more recent that was bearing down on um tampa bay the tampa bay area has always been uniquely positioned to be completely destroyed by a hurricane.

And once again, the hurricane got near Tampa Bay, and the giant atmospheric pinball bumper went boop

just veered off at the last.

Special providence that protects children, drunks, and the United States of America.

Brackets, Tampa Bay.

Yes, yeah.

The most United States of America bit of the United States of America.

I sort of believe that.

And yeah,

influencer and scammer, Caroline Galloway, like tanked a hurricane in her apartment building, which is like beachfront in Sarasosa.

Yeah.

And yeah, this was...

I remember this one chiefly as being a kind of like empire of like social media grifts, like guys trying to win money off of like streamers by

riding the hurricane out in like a sort of, you know, paddle boat or whatever the fuck.

People misunderstanding how storm surge works because Tampa Bay got a negative storm surge and everyone assumed that meant a tsunami was going to wipe it out.

No, the water just sort of gently flooded back in eventually.

I think the best thing we can say here is to do our PSA, which is do not touch the poop, right?

Flood water.

Flood water is mostly full of sewage and God knows what else.

Don't fuck around in it because you will get very sick.

Follow evacuation orders.

Even if you are convinced of God's providence for Tampa Bay, I would still not ride out the storm in a boat.

Yeah,

do as the FEMA black helicopters tell you.

You guys see Cloverfield, right?

I will say,

that's the only time I'll ever say it.

God bless the Tampa Bay lightning.

That's it.

That's all you get.

I don't know, man.

It's sort of horrifying, right, with the private helicopter flights being, you know, what they are.

People say, oh,

just the weird.

So when we're recording this, we are, what, 13 days from the election in the United States?

Oh, God, is it that little?

Christ.

Yeah.

Jesus.

And this is how they're campaigning?

What the fuck?

Yeah.

I mean, that's, I just,

who's, no one's seen Kamala Harris.

Trump is having PTSD meltdowns.

This is the lowest energy.

It's like looking at the end of an ultra marathon where like two guys who are 90% blister like stumble across the finish line.

What the fuck?

You're not wrong.

And I just, I, I just, I don't know.

I just wanted to just like express my frustrations that we can't fucking do shit in this country.

I genuinely, how does it feel like Joe Biden would have more energy than this?

Like,

because the Labor Party got involved.

And so they told him to switch off all that energy and make it disappear.

I will say that there is a terrific image of Joe Biden and I think DeSantis in Florida.

And Joe Biden is talking to people who had survived a storm.

And the man he's talking to is wearing a shirt that just has like cracker on it.

And Rob DeSantis is like, it's like pouting to the side.

Magnificent.

It's a great picture.

I have one correction to make, which is it's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I regret the error or whatever.

And also, if you're ever interested in signing up for USAA and you served in the NOAA Uniformed

Corps, which is a real thing that exists, you can sneak in to USAA through the back door doing that.

Nice.

Plus, they get the coolest combination of uniforms.

It's like Navy dress blues and Coast Guard working uniform.

So

we love our coasties here.

We love militarizing our public services sometimes.

Yeah, sometimes.

I think the commissioned officer corps of NOAA is pretty interesting.

Yeah, for sure.

Same as the public health corps.

That's how you sneak into USAA through the back door.

You're just like, yeah, I served in a

yeah, and as

someone who likes likes a uniform, you know, I think that maybe we should do more bureaucrat uniforms.

You know, I think that could be cool.

I wonder if there's a nation who gave us a model for what that might look like.

If only I had a drop of that nation's national anthem with which to with which to end the news segment.

We could have left the Navy in charge of the railroads for some reason.

Oh god.

Oh no.

Hey, we're all still alive.

Anyway, that was the goddamn news brackets spooky.

You see, you prime me with news and I just cuss off whatever you say after that.

Anyway, here's something spooky.

That's right, folks.

It's Cincinnati.

It's Cincinnati, the Queen City, right?

I mean, I don't know if you can be saying that.

This is that white boy, but like.

Sure.

Liam's done.

He's done.

Cincinnati, it's a city.

It's on the Ohio River system, right?

It was incorporated in 1819.

Lots of German German immigrants immigrated in the 1840s.

That coincided with the opening of the Miami and Erie Canal, which we're going to talk about later.

That's why

there is something.

There is something of that.

It's good.

Erie.

Yeah, no, that was good.

There is something of the Rhineland about the way they've built this city.

That's four very fetching bridges we can see in this little postcard.

America's Cologne.

Yeah.

Or Disseldorf.

Let's go to Disseldorf, actually.

You know, we'll talk more about this later, but the Miami and Erie Canal was actually referenced by the German immigrants.

They just jokingly called it the Rhine.

And then there's a neighborhood that was past the

canal.

It's still there called Over the Rhine.

Which is a beautiful neighborhood.

It's troubling how many Americans are just crypto-Germans.

I completely agree.

And I will have my revenge in this life.

Like many towns on the Ohio River, it's built entirely on a floodplain and it's extremely hemmed in by hills.

Nonetheless, the city grew very, very rapidly.

115,000 people by 1850, making it one of the largest cities in the country.

It was a major stop on the Underground Railroad because, you know, it's full of Germans and most of the Germans did not like slavery.

And it was just north of the Mason-Dixon line.

On the other side of the river here, that's Covington, Kentucky.

That's where those horrible teenagers are from, from a couple years ago.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah.

I remember.

Sure.

Yeah, from the fake Catholic school.

Yeah.

Quote-unquote Catholic.

Quote-unquote school.

Yeah, the trajectory of American Catholicism.

That sounds like a bonus episode, to be honest.

We're already getting Protestantism.

We're doing Catholicism.

I have it outlined somewhere.

A set of vacantists are just Protestants.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Dude, a lot of American Catholics are just, well, no, trad cats, not American Catholics necessarily, but trad cats cats are just Protestants.

You want to be a prod so fucking bad.

You deserve the same fate that, no, no, no,

no.

Car bombing.

Car bombing.

Although, I will say that, like, I think

the fertilizer.

Much of this is on the American church itself, and it's like the whole

ecclesiastical hierarchy has positioned itself this way on purpose to try and make those people like that.

But anyway.

Yeah.

They got the Roebling suspension bridge in 1866.

This thing was absolutely massive for its time.

It's still there.

The Dark's suspension bridge.

It's gorgeous.

I like it.

It's very pretty.

Yeah, well,

we need a better picture of it, but yeah, it is very pretty.

Electric streetcars were introduced in 1889.

They got lots of fantastic Italian architecture.

They got this really cool music hall.

But the big thing they have in Cincinnati is hills.

The big hills?

It's the Midwest's Pittsburgh, kind of.

Cincinnati is a kind of Pittsburgh, I would say.

Are you going to do the fucking insane Pittsburgh topography shit again?

Yeah, I think it's a good idea.

You date one Pittsburgh.

And you just learn.

You learn whether you like it or not about the hills.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for betraying Philadelphia by knowing about this.

Also, Cincinnati, named for Cincinnatus, or Kinquinatus, the Roman, like briefly dictator statesman who like famously gave up power to go back to his plows.

He seized absolute power as dictator, and then you know, when he did what he had to do, he was like, all right, I'm gonna go back to the farm now.

Yeah,

it's how the system of dictatorship was supposed to work as like an emergency powers thing.

Washington got compared to him a lot.

There was a like a weird quasi-Illuminati thing called the Society of the Sincinnatus.

Yes.

Yeah.

Still around, I think.

Yeah, they were real weird.

There was a fear that they were going to be a

sort of a, oh, God, like an inheritance base.

Like, that's how

power would work in the new United States.

Yeah.

They did the sort of like anti-Masonic stuff with all the know-nothings.

I mean, the thing is, it always interests me how, in early American history, how close on a number of occasions the U.S.

got to having a king.

Like, constitution or no, it was within spitting distance a few times.

And like fucking

Tyler, Tyler, James Tyler, was like, sort of like, definitely had some like kingly pretensions.

As did Richard Nixon, weirdly enough.

Anyway.

Yeah,

John Adams did not do an especially great job

in the framing with that stuff.

I do recommend, I believe it's McCullough's biography of John Adams, or you can just watch the miniseries with, oh, God, not what this fucking name, Paul Giamatti, which is actually pretty good.

Ooh.

Notice.

It was called Billions.

It was not called Billions.

You asshole.

Paul Giamatti in a powdered wig with like a French cortisan walking over his back.

You guys saw sideways, right?

All right, let's do this.

Wait, wait, Ross, Raj, Raj, we cannot move past.

There was a funicular on the last page.

We didn't even mention it.

I know that you put that in the page.

I think the same funiculars on the next page.

I know, but this one doesn't have the track in it, so I'm less interested.

Yeah, it does.

Permanently.

You're right.

You're right.

It does.

It's got the track for the track.

Wait a minute.

This is a P-Way for P-Way.

Did we do this whole episode for me?

Oh, now I'm happy.

Okay, everyone's forgiven.

I'm happy now.

We're going to talk about some train shit here in a moment.

My career and life.

Weird train shit.

My career and life.

We're going to try and break the not a metro chart.

Yeah.

So.

There's lots of hills in Cincinnati.

That means it's unable to sprawl like a St.

Louis or a Chicago.

So it built up.

They got really dense, really fast.

It eventually lost out to other major cities due to the topology.

You know, the gateway to the west turns out to be St.

Louis and not Cincinnati because its location naturally restricts locations of things like railroad yards, large factories.

They tried to build a harbor.

It didn't work.

You know, and the question was, okay, how do you solve this?

There's a lot of flat land just past the hills.

They tried getting out there using electric streetcars.

Getting Getting over the hill is very difficult.

There were a number of inclines like this one

in Cincinnati, which were built to take the streetcar over the hill.

Extremely cool.

Yeah.

Also just nice.

Like topography makes a nice city.

Like I know

lots of U.S.

cities don't exploit topography because they just needed to get away.

Sorry, I have one note here, which is that I'm doing flat viewings at the moment.

And if you've had to walk up the Gardner Street or down Gardiner street uh in the west end of glasgow when it is covered in wet leaves you take your life in your fucking hands you will be killed yes you will be killed yeah yeah she should have installed a funicular i mean honestly true yeah

i probably used to have a funicular and they got rid of it just like this one they got rid of

ski slope yeah

i've genuinely fallen on my ass walking down the hill from the uni before so brutal

yeah worse is because like, because it was next to the uni, teens saw me and laughed.

Oh, that's over.

That is worse than dead.

You just like, I wish I'd hit my head.

Like, yeah, I wish I were dead.

Yeah, no, I hear you.

Now, the other thing you could use if electric streetcars weren't enough to get farther into the flatter areas north of the city was this wonderful technology called the inter-urban.

Yeah,

it's the era of those.

Oh, yeah.

Hi, Miles.

Hi, Miles.

What is an inner-urban?

Generally speaking.

Oh,

I had a smart-ass answer, but no, go ahead.

Oh.

No, I have the smart-ass answer, and I have it in a graphic form.

I like the little chuckle there.

Generally speaking.

I'm enjoying myself.

We're talking about a lightly built electric railroad that runs between urban areas and runs on streets within urban areas.

They focused mainly on passenger service and used essentially what were larger and faster streetcars.

Yeah, they're really cool.

I really like them.

Oh, yeah.

I love me a good interurban.

Every rule has an exception, and on interurbans, exceptions were the rule.

Their main unifying characteristic is that all of them are weird.

The purpose of these things is to try and break Gareth's Metro flowchart.

Yes, precisely.

Because they're all trams, actually.

But let's see what happens.

So here's a few examples.

This is Washington and Old Dominion Railroad number 26.

They built this thing from scratch out of a boxcar, which I think is funny.

Oh, yeah.

This ran from Alexandria out to Bluefield, Virginia.

That's something like 78 miles, I think.

What?

That's some miles.

Yeah, and here's the streetcar.

The Westchester Traction Company here.

This is the 104 trolley that ran out to Westchester, Pennsylvania from 69th Street Terminal in Upper Derby.

Nice.

You can see here on sort of this crappy grass track adjacent to the Westchester Pike, which was considerably smaller back then.

They still went very fast.

The track was just not good.

This thing is screaming along on grass track an inch away from your Ford Model T.

Yeah.

Yes.

And it will win.

Here we have the Chicago Aurora and Elgin, which is sort of the reverse of that.

Extremely high-quality right-of-way, powered by third rail as opposed to overhead line.

The schedule on this interurban was still faster than driving the same distance is today.

Oh my god.

Return with a V.

Also, wait,

do you guys say Elgin rather than Elgin?

Interesting.

I noticed.

I think so, yes.

American

how to pronounce anything.

Yeah, it's always funny when, yeah, because Elgin's definitely Elgin, but yeah, maybe the Scots who came over on the boat got lost because

when the Scottish people sent people over the Atlantic, we had a habit of sinking those ships.

So,

yeah, so that's fair.

Anyway, sorry, I digress from

the nation that brought you Cairo, Illinois.

Yeah.

This particular

Versales, Pennsylvania.

That's a good one.

Or particularly, which also

I think the CIA and E will be a future episode.

This was infamously after they started to lose money because part of the tracks were relocated to build a highway, they were much slower.

They were actually the

they actually abandoned the passenger service with no notice at noon on July 3rd, 1957.

And a bunch of people who were waiting for the train that afternoon got a nasty surprise.

God.

You can't get home now.

Sorry.

Exactly.

But without the sorry, but

exactly.

Yeah, we apologize to passengers for the inconvenience, but this is now a buyer car replacement service.

Exactly.

Most famously, probably the Pacific Electric here, as seen in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

You know, the cars we're showing here are the blimp cars.

Why are they called blimps?

The answer is.

Are we supposed to know an answer to that?

No, I have no idea why.

No, I have no idea.

Much like blimps, they're fucking huge.

Do not body shame these cars.

They're They're bigger than some mainline passenger train cars, right?

You know, they would just run three of them coupled together in the street in mixed traffic with cars.

This is the proper like sort of way things should be is that the train should be the natural like apex predator and like cars should be should be afraid of it, you know?

And if you yeah, none of this situation where a tram like the you know, when like I remember the Sheffield tram got extended and and like just the day of the like the day all the press people had just gone home and then the first tram just crashed into a car on a level crossing.

It's like, well, not a level crossing, just went.

It's just like, no,

the car should always lose.

They should always lose.

There's videos of like Weymouth when the uh when the trains like they just had full-size like class 37s going around like going around the corners on on the the tram track that was the mainline railway that went to the harbor and uh and yeah if people got their cars in the way the 37 would just shunt it out of the way no bother bring that back

uh urbans also handled freight.

Here's this very small but extremely mighty box cab on the Waterloo Cedar Falls in Northern.

I love everything about that image.

It's a gorgeous image.

Lovely black and white.

The image is stunning.

The infrastructure is stunning.

Just that bridge is beautiful, low arch.

Oh, just...

gorgeous, absolutely fantastic.

You know the thing that makes me angriest about this is that this is a weird real image that only the like thin red line of like FOMA autism is holding back the tide of like AI generated slop that's just convincingly enough weird train stuff from like swamping this you know

that is yeah we will never like in a year's time we will simply not be able to find any of these images on the internet ever again we get it it gets it it's definitely become more difficult in this line of work to find specific images of things i watch you know?

Fucking gross.

Stop making me

a seven-wheel streamliner.

Just show me the real streamliners.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Here's the fun one: the Iowa Traction Railroad.

This is inexplicably still operating.

Wait, what?

Most of the equipment is 90 years old.

They did this incredible thing back in the 1970s or 80s, which most railroads did not and still don't want to do, which is purchasing an adequate amount of rolling stock for your customers.

Absolutely remarkable.

90-year-old railway still transports passengers the old-fashioned way.

Yeah.

Well, they got rid of the passenger service, unfortunately.

I think they still do fan trips.

But this is in the middle of nowhere.

All they do is interchange with the Union Pacific, I think.

But they still are using the old electric engines.

I think one of these is an old Washington, old Dominion engine, actually.

Wow, sir.

And then, how weird could they get?

We'll look at the Electroliner in Chicago and Milwaukee on the Chicago North Shoreline.

Oh, fuck.

Gorgeous.

Yeah.

Because

this is a high-speed interurban.

It starts in Milwaukee on the trolley tracks, right?

Making local stops.

Then it would go south onto its own dedicated high-speed right-of-way, go 80 miles an hour all the way to Chicago, where they would then put it on the Chicago L and make local stops

in the loop itself.

Absolutely incredible.

For good measure, the same company also ran freight trains on the L.

Amazing.

Of course they did.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

I love it.

So this is just like local merchandise, but eventually they also handled carloads.

This is actually

when eventually the Chicago Transit Authority took over and they kept running freight trains until April 1973.

Hell yeah.

Oh, yeah.

These are full-size, you know, mainline coal cars here.

You're just commuting and like the coal train goes past you.

Yes.

Quite literally.

Amazing.

Wow.

On the express tracks, too.

It's like covered in coal dust.

Yeah.

Well, it's main, the main customers towards the end were several commercial coal dealerships.

Back when we had those in the middle of cities.

Yeah, exactly.

Um,

all right, so where does an inter-urban fit on the not a metro chart?

Secondary question: Does the inter-urban then retroactively make a metro into not a metro?

I feel like I'm watching two chess grandmasters playing.

I know, right?

Literally unrolling the scroll, the sacred scroll, onto the table, and Ros and I are sat on either side of it.

Oh,

no, so all of those are trams.

But the people were astonished at his dog track.

Does the Chicago L then become a tram

because it shares tracks with trams?

Yes, and it would even, because it ran freight on it, it also gets broken.

So, the fact that it isn't fully segregated means it isn't a metro, it's heavy suburban rail.

So, yeah, it's broken.

Not only is the interurban

a tram, but it has also un-metroified the Chicago L.

Yeah.

They just took the metro right off of it.

Like a Mego brick separator?

Yes.

Yep.

Yeah, that's it.

It doesn't mean it's not good.

Trams can be good.

I would love to know what the capacities, like when they were fully running, I'd love to know what their actual passengers prior per direction system capacities were.

Because I bet some of those were hauling people.

Some of those were definitely moving lots and lots and lots of people.

And then other ones were like,

yeah, we run four trains a day.

And

you'll be grateful.

You'll be grateful for it, yeah.

Like the blimps must have, if those blimps, what, three, three car, and each car massive, so potentially 120 people in a car.

So that's,

those are big.

And if they're running them frequently, then that.

You might start tapping on the door of some seriously high capacity.

You might start reaching the point where you're competing with Budapest in terms of the heavy tram title, which doesn't get to be honest, there's only like one system in the world that

hits the heavy tram button.

So, yeah, maybe they're heavy trams sometimes when they're really good.

Yeah, I would definitely say if you, if you some, some of those, um,

some of those systems would be running like a huge train like that every like two and a half minutes.

Oh, big okay, heavy tram.

Then I like that.

Heavy tram.

There we go.

So, uh, heavy tram.

Heavy tram.

Yeah, that's that's uh so I have illnesses, which means I can do my vocals.

I can really fry up my vocals down this mic today.

So in Cincinnati, there were several interurban lines that sort of converged on the city, but they could not enter it.

This is due to a classic problem, the break of gauge.

Oh, for God's sake.

Okay.

Because Cincinnati's street railways were built to Pennsylvania trolley gauge, right?

That's right, baby.

Pennsylvania dominance.

That's the only thing that's

the limits of Pennsylvania dominance.

Yeah, that's it.

I just want that as a drop.

Just Liam shouting, that's right, baby.

Pennsylvania dominance.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So that's five feet, two and a half inches between the rails, which is about six inches wider than standard gauge.

This was chosen for two reasons, right?

One was supposedly to make more room for horses between the rails when the system opened and it was using horse cars.

Oh, the reverse horse ass theory.

Yes.

Yes, turns out actually need a little bit more room.

The horses got fatter.

Who amongst us?

Yeah.

The other reason was to prevent steam railroads from easily acquiring the horse car lines and subsequently running steam trains in the middle of the street in residential neighborhoods.

Ah, that old chestnut.

Okay, fair.

Yeah.

So, your inter-urban lines faced no such qualms, and so, with only a few exceptions, they were all built to standard gauge.

There were a couple of small lines rating out from the city that were built to Pennsylvania trolley gauge, but they were the exception.

You know, your inter-urban needed to be standard gauge because they interchanged freight with the steam railroads and they interchanged, you know, passenger cars with each other a lot of the times.

Sorry, I was just getting handed a glass of wine here why are we are we still talking are we still on the horse's ass thing

maybe no we're looking at a map of interurbans and and the reason why they are all standard gauge and getting sad yeah we're just we're still we're still sad we're still sad are we being are we experiencing halloween in the form of hauntology then

oh you betcha

So the inter-urban system in Ohio is massive, right?

I could ride a train, a local interurban, all the way from Cleveland to Toledo and then down to Dayton and to Cincinnati.

A better world was possible.

That's all on fast electric trains, or at least electric trains.

Not necessarily,

why can't we build high-speed rail in this country?

And the answer is, we built moderate speed rail in this country and then dismantled it.

Two things strike me here.

Number one, if this was still around, this would be the equivalent of people who

like do like hilarious long-distance journeys on local buses only in the UK, which I love.

I love that content.

I want more of it always.

It's great.

The second thing that strikes me, because of the predominance of interurbans and their demise,

it feels like what so I watch a lot of air crash investigation because I think it's a fun show.

Mayday, for those in the North America, hi.

And one of the things that always angers me on the North America episodes is why are there flights between there and there?

They are like a half-hour train away from each other.

That always angers me.

And I guess lots of those places had interurbans rather than other railroads.

Like they also had interurbans

that did and could still be excellent.

Ohio is particularly egregious when it comes to passenger rail at this particular time because

there's only two Amtrak trains that go through Ohio and they both make stops at like two o'clock in the morning.

I was going to say,

there's like three trains to Cincinnati a week and they all arrive at 1 a.m.

And that horrifies me.

Yes.

Nothing to Columbus.

Cleveland is also served at 2 o'clock in the morning or so, both ways.

It's like, well done, Cincinnati.

You have like a tenth of the number of trains as Dovey Junction in West Wales that has a population of zero.

Just absolutely spectacular work.

So if you were taking the interurban, you couldn't get into Cincinnati proper.

You actually had to stop and disembark at the edge of the city and get on a slower local trolley.

Um, that's the change of gauge, right?

And

Pennsylvania Excellence, yes, yes, and then you were stuck in traffic for an hour to get into the city.

That's that's the price of Pennsylvania Excellence.

That's triggered.

It's because they haven't invented bus lanes yet.

The strong brackets, Philadelphia, do as they will, and the weak brackets Cincinnati suffer as they must.

Well, you know,

I was,

they deserve it, right?

Like, that's what you, you should have just remained Extendo, Pennsylvania.

Or whatever.

Extendo, Connecticut, technically.

Yeah, exactly.

You're going to chop off a bit for the Connecticut Western Reserve.

Now, another problem Cincinnati had was, you know, a lot of this railroad construction had made redundant the smelly and gross and unsanitary Miami and Erie Canal that ran through the center of the city.

Didn't this catch fire at one point?

Probably you're thinking of the Cuyahoga in Cleveland.

Okay.

Sorry, sorry.

I fucked up my post-industrial Midwestern cities.

No one blames.

This is named for the Miami River, which it paralleled for much of its length.

It actually goes right up the side of Ohio all the way to the Erie, Lake Erie.

You know, there's no, there's actually no connection between the Miami River and Miami, Florida, despite the fact they're both derived from Native American place names.

Huh.

Yeah, it's weird.

That is weird.

I'm going to be thinking about that for a little while.

Locals, again, they sort of referred to it as the Rhine.

That's why the Over the Rhine neighborhood is up here.

In 1913, a major flood finally took the canal out of service for good, and there was suddenly this major right-of-way available to get straight to downtown Cincinnati.

Miami, it turns out, means big water, which fits for both, you know?

Yeah, yep, that'll do it.

The Great Miami River is actually very small.

Well, that's that's really sad.

So, so Miami is one of only 10 words surviving recorded from the language of the now-extinct Miami people.

Oh, yeah, they they they they got them pretty early on in Florida.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So here's the idea.

The city fathers think, why don't we kill three birds with one stone, right?

Oh, you got too many birds there.

That's a decorative.

We're going to replace that dirty old canal with a public-private subway for use by rapid transit trains and interurbans, possibly even freight service as well.

What a concept.

And then we're going to put a beautiful urban boulevard on top.

Oh, boy.

Perfect.

Yeah.

It's like cut and cover, except you don't have to do any cutting.

You don't have to do the cutting.

Yeah.

There's a picture of that.

The idea for a subway in the canal bed had been around since the 1880s, but back then they were still thinking, well, we got to run steam locomotives in there.

I don't think that works.

That only works in London.

Let's not look at it.

London excellence, baby.

It's like like Pennsylvania, but it's better.

Oh, God.

No, no, no, it's not.

Well, I just think Connecticut has new London.

Yeah, and it sucks, Ross.

Yeah, it was so good.

Why did they have to build a new one?

Don't ask about new Philadelphia.

You're going to be laughing out the other side of your face when there's a new Pennsylvania on Mars or whatever.

There's a new Philadelphia in Ohio.

There is.

Yeah.

Is any good?

No.

It's what happened when you lose your save game for original Philadelphia and you're like, okay, so I just moved to a new tile

on the Sim City Four map.

Philadelphia underscore real, final, final, real.

Underscore this one.

Yeah.

Dash copy.

Yep.

The city keeps growing.

Due to the topography, it's going up and not outward.

This was back when urban density was a bad thing and Cincinnati had a lot of density.

Only parts of Manhattan were like similarly as dense as Cincinnati was.

That's like hauntology to be in like downtown Cincinnati and be like, this is like mega city one of the like 18 of the 1890s to be like,

this is the most, the most density anywhere on earth.

It's like fucking Kowloon walled city.

You're in a Warhammer hive city.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Called Cincinnati.

So Henry Thomas Hunt is elected mayor in 1912 on a platform of abolishing the corrupt Republican machine that ran the city.

Yeah, this is why Cincinnati is a shit to essentially because they had a corrupt Republican machine instead of a corrupt Democratic machine.

Yeah, and also they got rid of it.

You know, I think sometimes

these machines did less bad than people think.

You should listen to a podcast called No Gods, No Mayors, which will cover some of this very shortly.

Yeah,

also,

I really am having a sort of hauntological moment of like, you will never be in downtown Cincinnati in like 1912.

You know?

Yes.

I do imagine.

Yeah.

I just.

These are moments I enjoy on other podcasts that are available to listen to as well.

Kill James Bond being one.

Where it's like footage of like Tokyo in 1981, and it's just such a vibe that the

Time is

recreate.

You can't jump in the same river twice.

You can barely jump in the same river once.

You'll never step out of like a

bar in Cincinnati in like 1910, almost get hit by an interurban going 80 miles an hour down the middle of the street

and look up at every and every building is like 100 meters tall.

Yeah.

It's what's something.

So Cincinnati, the government was corrupt and it was broke.

And it was broke because it was corrupt.

That's what it was kind of corrupt.

Yeah.

Henry Thompson Hunt managed in a very short period period of time to implement very basic but effective reforms, such as actually collecting taxes.

A quick way to become very unpopular.

Yeah, he was one term.

He also spearheaded a serious effort to build the subway.

He convinced the state to lease the canal to the city and set up a committee.

the Rapid Transit Committee, to actually plan the damn thing.

Several features were planned.

There'd be a downtown circulator route shown here.

There would be a huge freight terminal right behind Cincinnati Music Hall.

That won't fuck with the music at all.

Sounds of boxcars slamming into each other.

There'd be a beautiful new boulevard on top of the whole thing.

Fine, nice.

Don't put cars on there, of course.

Just leave it as a nice green park.

Nope, no, they're not going to do that.

Oh, okay, never mind.

This thing was heavily based on the Cambridge-Dorchester subway.

Okay.

I'm various municipalities around Boston.

I am now fascinated by Cincinnati.

I wish to go to Cincinnati and like absorb its local history.

Dear United States customs and immigration,

please let I am normal and can be trusted with entering the United States.

I'm sorry I called it the United Snakes of America kicker earlier.

That's just speaking Maoist standard English.

Yeah, bilingual yeah well very proud of you

um

so the the cambridge dot subway uh is extremely large the cars were very large for their day these are 10 feet wide 70 foot long cars those were larger than larger than some contemporary mainline passenger cars hell yeah

um

The city also planned to ban steam trains in the tunnel except for emergencies.

And what an emergency is, is left as an exercise to the reader.

They included quite a lot of ventilation.

But yeah, if you want to see what this subway looks like,

go to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And that's essentially the same design.

Yeah, I was going to say, you know what you could do while you're in Cambridge, Massachusetts is you could come to Somerville, Massachusetts on May the 1st, I think, and you could see us.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

So there are a few schemes that were developed.

Some of the schemes.

Lover scheme.

Lovers.

Oh, in Roman numerals as well, just to make them seem even more sinister.

There was scheme one.

Scheme one is just the area outside the downtown loop.

There was scheme two where they built a loop downtown.

These sorts of distribution loops were very popular in sort of the pre-war subways.

They also didn't work very well, but they didn't figure that out for a long time.

Yeah, I mean, many metro is not very intuitive sometimes.

Scheme two just has it do this little dog leg into downtown.

Scheme three.

That's actually better.

Dog leg is better from a design perspective, for sure.

Scheme three here had it go down

God inventing the dog.

Liam, to answer your question, loops are a nightmare operationally.

They're just a very, very annoying.

It's actually better operationally and for capacity to just have a continuous line, even if it does weird, like, weird shapes.

It's better to just have a single line.

All the trains get in each other's way.

Exactly, yeah.

Sometimes they get in their own way.

Scheme four is this sort of they do a

straighter line through downtown and then come out the bottom near the waterfront as an elevated rail system.

Oh, interesting.

Quite a lot further south coming the other end, so there's quite a massive variation in where it ends up to the

I'm going to say to the right of these aerials.

I don't know what north is, but

I guess north north is

roughly this way.

Um, now there's more outside of this area where it goes out into the suburbs.

Okay, yeah.

Um,

this uh supposed on that, did it for this?

This is I'm not hugely prone to it, but was it just taking some of the interurbans at that point?

Was it kind of occupying the space of the interurbans at that point?

Yeah, we'll we'll see that in the next slide.

Okay, okay, yeah.

Um,

so there's a six million dollar bond issue for constructing the subway.

This passes with the six to one ratio at the ballot box in 1916.

I mean, 1916,

you know, America hasn't even entered the war yet.

You're like, everything is fine here in like the densest city in the world and the way of the future, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Yes.

Everything is going to be fine forever.

It's going to be the American century.

I would love to.

Yeah, I would love to do some trains.

This was not enough money to pay for the whole thing, but this is going to be the sort of public-private partnership, remember?

The city was going to construct,

the city was going to construct the tunnels and grade the rights-of-way where it was above ground.

And the Cincinnati Street Railway, which was the local monopoly on the streetcars, would lease the tunnels and operate them and install the tracks and so on and so forth.

So, administratively, this is a tram.

Essentially, yeah.

So, just putting a line in the sand there.

So, the really complicated bit, the public are going to take that on, right?

So the public are going to take liability for the expensive, complicated, heavy civil engineering.

And then these little,

the private company, Chucklefucks, can come in and all they have to do is put the tracks down and run trains through it.

Okay, I'm just going to take note of that.

That feels important.

Yes.

Yes.

So.

All right.

Here's like the fuller system zoomed out a bit.

You can see we have the sort of dog leg down here.

You can also see these green lines radiating off are various interurbans

that connect to the subway.

The parts in red are tunnels.

The parts in blue are

surface or elevated tracks.

But this is going to sort of form a big loop on the outside.

And then all these interurbans are going to feed into it.

And they're all going to go directly downtown as express trains.

Sure.

Okay.

So there's pretty quickly a legal roadblock here.

The Ohio Supreme Court decreed in 1917, the city's lease to the Cincinnati Street Railway was illegal.

It's a core technicality.

It goes against Ohio law.

Yeah.

So now there's no one to lay the tracks and purchase the rolling stock, right?

Oh, that's so that those are important for a railway.

Those are very important.

Yes.

Without those, you've just got a hole.

Yeah, it's just a hole.

And it's a Cincinnati street hole.

Yeah.

Although maybe it should be.

That That would have been good.

This was probably solvable.

You know, it would just cause some confusion and delay while they worked through the legal difficulties.

It's not a fatal blow until America enters World War I.

One of the first

things you did that.

Yeah.

One of the first things they did was ban the sale of municipal bonds.

Oh, you dickheads.

Yeah, because, like, as we saw on that one L-train earlier, you have to buy war bombs, you gotta buy war bombs instead, yeah.

So, that was foreshadowing, Rod.

You're getting very good at these.

You gotta buy like 10 million pairs of Pershing boots, you know.

Yes, exactly.

Well, Cincinnati has a really nice flag.

Sorry, I have ADHD, possibly,

possibly, huh?

Gotta do some vexology.

We haven't been diagnosed, you know.

Hey, me neither.

We saw the six million dollars.

The six million dollars that was um authorized by the public, that does not appear.

Yeah, that's going to buy

war bonds.

Yeah, exactly.

One of those gates of weird lemon sprees that squeeze our hats.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The war results in massive inflation due to the wartime economic reasons, straight-up labor and material shortages.

So it was time to do some value engineering.

I don't like those words when they're together either.

No one likes value engineering except the people who, for some reason, enjoy doing it, and they're freaks.

Another project gets curb stomped by value engineering.

Oh, these motherfuckers.

So, wait a minute.

So,

let's just do it a quick, I'm not going to derail the podcast, but I'm just going to say: so, we have no trains, we have no tracks, and now the money to build the infrastructure has also disappeared.

Yes.

Okay, noted.

All right, cool.

The money still exists, sort of, but it needs to be, you know, it can't be

used until after the war.

And also, it's worth a lot less money now.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the engineers come back with something called modification H.

Oh, boy.

Basically, the idea here is, okay, we're going to get something built, right?

Okay.

That can sometimes be a good way to do things.

Build something.

See also HS2.

We are building at least a bit of it that we will need later.

You kind of salt the thing a bit, you know?

Yeah.

So they cut some tunnels north of downtown.

They elevated some tracks.

They put some tracks on the ground.

They tried to use some existing right-of-ways near the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

You know, overall, they're just sort of...

you know, they're cutting costs, but they're still coming up with a functional product, right?

and this proved not to be enough with the inflation, right?

So, after modification H, we had the most drastic cut, which was the entire eastern side of the loop was eliminated.

Oh, oh, yeah,

hey, but at least now it's not a loop, that's an efficiency gain, dog leg also looks like the cheaper side because it's mostly at or above ground level, so that kind of surprises me.

There we go.

This one is

all like pretty steep uphill, though, I I believe.

Ah, okay, okay.

So lots of lots of cut and fill.

Okay, I understood.

Yeah, and then a big, big portion of this was eliminating the subway under Walnut Street down here

because that would have been cut and cover under an existing active street instead of in a canal bed, right?

So that would be very expensive and disruptive.

So they were, even though it's the most useful part.

So they were like, all right, we're going to cut that for now and hopefully later we'll have the money to finish it, right?

Carbrain before Carbrain had ever arrived.

Interrupt all the people who like driving their horse.

So the terminus of the system would be Race Street Station down here, which we'll talk a bit more about in a few slides because it's weird.

But the main terminal at Fountain Street would have to wait for a while.

So they've eliminated a whole lot, but they're still going to build it.

They start building in January 1920.

Okay.

All right.

Oh, here we go.

There's some comfort burn.

You can see here in this not very many pixel image.

They're constructing the tubes in the open canal pit.

This is very, very simple.

It's cut and cover, but they don't have to do the cut part.

Everyone's real happy to get rid of this horrible, smelly canal.

Right?

Apart from the workers.

Yeah.

This is just cast in place, reinforced concrete.

Nothing fancy here.

There are different contractors working on different parts with slightly different materials.

But overall, the thing is, you know, pretty unified.

There's rumors about low-quality material and construction, but as we'll see, that's completely unfounded.

I know they wound up using a little bit lower quality concrete than they expected, but they sort of compromised with that.

They just made the walls thicker.

It was fine.

Yeah, it's fine.

I like this.

This is nifty.

It's quick.

It's easy.

I suppose that's why they built this bit.

First, the terminus of this line was a very strange station in Race Street.

There's nowhere to find these images online.

I had to take a picture from the book with my phone.

Incredible.

Just totally lost media.

Incredible.

Exactly.

So a Race Street station was going to be the centerpiece of, you know, Modification H.

It's a four-track station with one convoluted island platform, right?

Okay, bit of a weird design, I'm gonna be quite honest, but that's fine.

The platform is H-shaped.

Okay, well, uh-huh.

And so you have one track up here, one track down here, and then two stub-ended tracks that terminate there.

This is like something if you misclick in like a game where you're building like railways.

It's a very strange design, but But the idea here is these two stub-ended tracks are for interurban trains that are coming in and they're going to stop in reverse.

And then you'll have the outer tracks would be for the rapid transit trains that would presumably continue through once the subway was completed down Walnut Street down here at the end.

It was also designed in such a way that it could be expanded with two extra platforms on each side with this weird staircase that goes down and under the platforms which pretty commonly shows up in images of this that no one knows what it's for well here's what it's for folks it's for extra tunnels to concourses underneath the central parkway

as well as extra platforms which were not built but were anticipated to be needed at some point yeah just just like getting the sort of masculine urge to dig and letting it run right

run riot municipally, being like, yeah,

we're going to need this for future trains,

nuclear war, more lock storage, child center,

we're not some kind of Podunk town.

This is Cincinnati.

We're going to need a four-track subway at some point.

Come on, guys.

Yeah,

based on current trends, Cincinnati will have 8 trillion people by the year 2020.

Exactly.

There was also some amount of thought since this is going to be serving some interurbans that went quite a long distance, there will be room for baggage handling as well.

Unclear if this was actually followed through on.

At each end of the station, they built a Y, right?

That's just, you know, a Y-shaped piece of track that's for turning.

That's for turning the inter-urbans around.

So, right.

I'm going to interject again.

I suppose that's what you do when you're a temporary host is interject repeatedly.

Sorry, Roz.

The problem with them trying to do everything with this is that there is so much much expensive extra stuff that they're putting in.

The switchbacks are not necessary if they were running this as a pure metro system rather than with all the interurban

interactions.

It's trying to like fuck with your your flow chart a bit here and it's trying to be all things to all people.

The other question,

most interurbans are double-ended.

I don't know why they need the two whys.

Because that's a lot of under the ground digging that they're having to do again.

Like they don't need to do that's a lot They are adding a lot.

This isn't value engineering so much as just doing sensible engineering.

I would not,

I would have been converting the interurbans or just managing that in such a way that you didn't have those switchbacks because that is a lot of extra cost.

Also, the track layout is

so

it's yeah, bonkers.

It's a bit bonkers.

Yeah, it's a bit bonkers.

It's weird.

Yeah.

The Y at the end here would eventually go down Walnut Street.

That would, if they, if they continued the tunnel to a actually more substantial terminal at Fountain Street.

And this is the most commonly photographed space in the subway.

You know, of what was eventually built.

The creepiest looking one.

Yeah.

Oh, definitely creepy because it's got the weird staircase to nowhere.

Hell yeah.

It's hauntology, but the better world envisioned is being able to go down a flight of stairs.

Right.

Now you can't do that.

You can't go.

You can get it all flooded down there.

Yeah.

I guess you could if you wanted to like die horribly.

Listen to the caves episode.

Don't fuck with caves.

So they actually, they got.

Are you listening?

Stop fucking with caves.

They got a substantial amount of this constructed, but they finished construction in 1926.

The infrastructure's all there, but there's no tracks and there's no trains.

About seven miles of right-of-way is finished.

That sounds usable.

Yeah, other than the lack of tracks, everything is there.

But in the interim period, send the trains anyway, just like the sound is off.

Just dig your own rails.

It's fine.

In the interim period, while this was being constructed, a lot of people are buying cars.

Those fucking tracks.

And a lot of the inter-urbans that were designed to connect with the subway went out of business.

ah

this is the new yeah yeah

the new central parkway was still incomplete uh that was facing a a series of bond issue failures so there wasn't really a great way to get into downtown cincinnati yet um

but you know the rapid transit line has been graded and constructed but there's no tracks there's no trains and political issues start developing that makes sense i assume this becomes a political football pretty quickly yeah more so anyway.

So Cincinnati, of course, is run by a Republican machine that was run by

George Barnesdale Cox, also known as Boss Cox.

Boss Cox.

Bosque.

Boss Cox.

Boss Cox.

And then later, Rudolph Kilker Heineke.

Oh, these fucking Germans.

That guy mostly ran the political machine from Coney Island.

Good for him.

He didn't deign to go to Cincinnati.

He just ran it.

Absentee landlord.

Yes.

They're doing all the normal stuff.

You know, they're fixing elections.

They're dispensing patronage jobs.

They're giving out favors, redirecting city fees to private individuals, adjusting property tax assessments for supporters.

You know, all the fun corruption stuff.

All right.

You know, and despite being initiated by a reformer, the rapid transit loop was, of course, a great source of patronage jobs, right?

That makes sense.

But the machine is falling into crisis.

Certainly,

oil machine.

Yeah.

Stuck inside the belly of this machine.

And this machine is not vibing.

The machine stops, as it turns out.

Oh, no.

By patronage jobs.

Certain taxes were about to be made illegal by the state.

Income from liquor taxes had dried up because of prohibition.

It was harder and harder to distribute patronage jobs when there's no money coming in right

so this was a prime opportunity for a guy named Murray Seasongood to come in with making up a fake name like yeah yeah yeah

um and he he is the leader of a movement called the charterists

not the chartists not the

chartist universal suffrage no he's the charterists um seasongood wanted major reform right a complete rewrite of the city charter he wanted to reduce the power of the mayor.

He wanted the appointment of a professional city manager so as to distance day-to-day operations from politics.

Sounds like lip shit to me.

Yeah, he wants to do all the normal good government stuff that all the progressives loves back then.

That just fucked everything up.

And he got it.

After campaigning against the Central Parkway bond issues, which were separate from the rapid transit loop, even though they were sort of the same project, he was elected mayor in 1925, and he goes in and he throws the bums out.

The entire city council turned over.

Incredible.

It was also reduced from, I believe,

32 members to nine.

32 people is too many people for a city council.

Yeah, that's shit.

That's a sort of Venetian level of like.

Yeah, exactly.

Where's the doge at?

Exactly.

Yeah, and it was basically like, okay, who owns the tavern in this neighborhood?

You're on city council.

Sure.

And he sets his sight on this rapid transit loop, right?

He commissions a new report called the Bueller Report on what to do with the incomplete subway.

Bueller.

Bueller.

Bueller.

Ross, have you ever even seen that movie?

Yes, I have.

That's another movie he's seen.

Write it down.

Write it down.

Yeah.

It's a real short list.

It chaduly is.

The Bueller Report recommended finishing the tunnel under Walnut Street, but also abandoning and demolishing several already built above-ground stations to save time compared to the surface streetcars, right?

What?

Some of these quite substantial above-ground stations, as you can see here.

The idea being that, okay, this line is sort of, it goes all the way around the hill.

And some of the streetcar lines have a more direct route.

So from certain stations, it would be faster to take the streetcar than the new rapid transit.

Now, the thing is, from other stations, that would not be the case.

Yeah.

And these stations were already built.

Just they've built them.

You don't have to stop the trains there even that many times, but

at least keep them there.

Oh, I'm angry.

Oh, I'm sad now.

And this sort of did not sit well with the public, you know, recommending demolishing these brand new stations.

And so, some nasty rumors start to circulate in the papers based on this report.

You know, maybe the line was too circuitous.

It was badly planned.

Maybe they made the curves in the city too tight for modern rapid transit, which they didn't do that.

They were good for 45 miles an hour with a lot of super elevation and everything.

There were rumors that, you know, streetcars weren't going to be able to use the tunnels, which they could theoretically.

And then there was, you know, a pervasive rumor that the city was now too small for rapid transit at all, even though it had grown since the system was planned.

It's all HS2 arguments.

They're all very familiar to anyone who.

Do you think there was a kind of like Cincinnati, like a German Gareth back in the day?

Like, who was

it must have been, yeah, tearing his hair out.

Yeah.

My God, I'm so angry about Spy as I tried to win

my line.

I'm so angry about this.

They're not simply best.

Ha-S-S-P-Y.

Oh, the mayor is going on the list.

Season Good was elected to a second term and abolished the old machine-run rapid transit commission and put the project under full control of the city manager.

They still didn't have the cash to complete the system, but a second report came out, also by Bueller, recommending full conversion to streetcar operation.

Oh, that's also not a good idea.

It's a

the whole point of this is that it's hidden away, segregated, so you can get high capacity.

So you can run long, good trains with lots of people on them.

Yeah.

Pay for the system.

I mean, you already built it.

It's already built.

It's already there.

You've built the fucking thing.

You've built the thing.

You've built the thing.

So this report actually had some legs legs uh to the point where the cincinnati street railway actually purchased new uh trolley cars that could use the high platforms in the tunnel and uh

these things down here called red devils were purchased by the cincinnati and lake erie interurban those were capable of 90 miles an hour god damn jeez

let's pat down the inside of a like former canal

well the thing is once they left the subway this this this company was sort of a consolidation of a whole hell of a lot of interurbans in ohio so once they left the subway they then went uh 280 miles to cleveland in about 50 minutes yeah i i i'm thinking of the line from the takey of pellham 123 what do they want for their lousy 15 cents to live forever

And that thing is the size and speed of a cannonball.

It's quite something.

Yeah, so they are now, you know, it looks like, okay, maybe this is going to go through.

Some of the streetcar depots were actually,

not depot, the car barns, were

refitted with dual gauge track with the anticipation that, okay, we're going to get this thing up and running finally with something, right?

And then it's 1929 and the thing happens.

Oh, boy.

I hate it when a thing happens.

This time it's not cocaine.

It's whatever the 1929 version of cocaine was.

Also cocaine.

Yeah, it's still cocaine.

Yeah.

It's cocaine, but it's branded as a sort of tonic.

Cocainium.

War was declared.

Right.

Everybody's going out of windows and shit.

October 29th, 1929, the Great Depression had started.

The stock markets crashed.

Good luck funding that brand new never-used subway.

You know, you're not going to get anyone to issue a municipal bond right now.

But on the other hand, they had managed to force through the parkway bond.

Wow, look at that.

Isn't that pretty?

Oh, my God.

Central Parkway was completed, and it was immediately a total failure because they built it on the canal, which meant most of the buildings didn't face the parkway.

Well, more lanes, bro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All the buildings' asses were facing the road.

Yeah, that's it.

Yes, exactly.

This one segment here is an exception, but also this nice landscape median.

Guess what happened to that?

Oh, more lanes.

Yeah, you need more lanes.

Let's get real.

That's one more.

Okay, so the subway is still there.

People are going to try and revive this, right?

One thing about the Depression is we have this great guy named Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

He forced through this thing called the New Deal.

And the New Deal funds a lot of infrastructure all across the country, right?

Yeah,

sure.

Yeah, this would presumably be one of those options.

Yeah, yeah.

The Works Progress Administration funded a new study for use of the subway in 1936.

This recommended a total conversion to streetcar subway, replacing the high platforms with low platforms, adding a bunch of new exits and entrances for various streetcars on local streets above,

significant reconfigurations to the entire streetcar system,

and lots of weird stuff where the tunnels would tie themselves into knots in order to be able to use center platforms when the streetcars only had doors on one side.

And this is a very heavy lift that was very expensive, and the city ultimately didn't go for it.

Instead, they asked the Work Progress Administration for parkways and slum clearance.

So there was still support for a streetcar subway, though, and the charterists had indeed turned the city's finances around.

Cincinnati could probably plausibly fund the thing by itself with a large municipal bond issue.

You know, the economy is starting to improve.

World War II hasn't quite happened yet.

So the Ohio state legislator steps in and mandates a 65% supermajority for municipal bond issuances, and the idea was dead again.

Of course.

Fuck this idea specifically.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not like they're just seen, we've just done mad, like big Keynesism, right?

So we just seen that like investing infrastructure was good for economies, particularly urban economies.

But apparently no one had realized apparently no one realized this in Cincinnati or not in Ohio.

Or in Ohio at the large.

Yeah.

Fantastic.

So we get through World War II

and then some things happen that sort of change this.

The supermajority starts to be a big problem in the 1950s.

No one in Ohio could, you know, you couldn't finish the subway.

You also couldn't couldn't build highways.

You couldn't build airports.

You couldn't build hospitals.

Infrastructure ground to a halt in the whole state.

Just that thing where you accidentally abolish your own government for funsies.

Yes.

So

in the meantime, there's also a plan by the state to build a north-south highway,

sort of roughly along the alignment of the old

Miami and Erie Canal, right?

That's now interstate 75.

don't do it don't do it don't do it

that was originally supposed to connect up to the parkway but the parkway quickly became overwhelmed with traffic because you know traffic expands to fit the space allotted

um so a new expressway to the north that paralleled the mill creek was necessary that passes through a narrow valley so of course space was limited but some of that space was taken up by the grade for the rapid transit loop

That's up here-ish, right?

Yeah.

So, of course, through some creative financing and the state legislature reducing the supermajority rule down to 55% in 1949, the city managed to alter the terms of the lease of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad.

which until recently was the only interstate municipally owned railroad in the United States.

That went up for a bond

for a vote this year, I think, and the city finally sold it to Norfolk Southern.

You know, now instead of it only being used to retire debt, that money could fund any kind of transportation in the city.

So now they were going to use the revenue from the railroad to build a highway.

All of these never-used above-ground stations were demolished, as was almost all the above-ground infrastructure.

You'd see one of the stations had collapsed on its own by this point.

I will say that.

Whoops.

God bless them.

Saving everybody's time, I guess.

Yeah, exactly.

All that was left were a few short tunnels in the suburbs and the two-mile tunnel under the parkway.

This also thwarted a private plan to run freight trains in the tunnels.

Some people were still trying to do that.

This is a kind of like freelancer.

This is all prior to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, right?

That mandates a state and local and federal split for highway construction of 5, 5, and 90%.

You know, so if you wanted to build a transit project, to get a dollar, you had to spend a dollar.

But if you wanted to build a highway, you only spent five cents

to get a dollar.

Yeah.

I I swear to fucking God, I really want to these people.

So the unbuilt eastern half of the rapid transit loop

was then replaced with Interstate 71.

And the northern half, northern portion was replaced by State Route 562 up here.

The whole rapid transit loop was now a highway.

So I've got.

Yeah,

I've got contemporary Google maps up of Cincinnati, and one thing strikes me, which is, holy shit, do highways obliterate the most theoretically good bits of the city?

Yes.

Like the waterfront, a park that has been obliterated, and oh my God, the lanes going everywhere.

Like it's proper, like, body horror stuff.

Oh, yeah.

The West End got particularly badly hit.

Because this is one of those neighborhoods that was like declared an overcrowded slum in like the 30s, right?

So the Works Progress Administration paid to demolish this and replace it with public housing, which was recently demolished and replaced by private housing.

You know, these are all like, you know, good, solid brownstones.

I mean, they probably had sanitation issues at the time in the 30s, but those are easy to correct with modern technology like plumbing.

But yeah, these were all knocked down for slum clearance and then knocked down for the Mill Mill Creek Expressway and the approach to the Brent Spence, the Sprent Spence Bridge.

Right, you can see up here, Cincinnati Union Terminal.

That was very nearly demolished.

Yeah.

Didn't quite happen.

Even though it was quite new at the time,

that was eventually saved by none other than Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer in the 80s.

Future episode right there.

Forgetting what podcast I'm on here.

But essentially, yeah, a lot of the money that would have, the money and the planning that would have gone into the subway eventually went into, you know, destroying whole neighborhoods and replacing them with highways.

And here in the West End, these were mostly residential buildings.

Today, right up next to their huge train station, almost entirely one-story light industrial buildings.

Yeah,

it's like the most stupid usage of zoning

on on a city skylines map I have ever seen.

It is absolutely, it's wild.

Also really upsetting on the other side of the city where you've got Mount Adams, which is like a really clearly like a bit of history, historic district, right?

And it's just completely surrounded on three sides by highway.

It's just, it's really up.

It's like, it's pretty horrible.

It's like almost Detroit levels of destruction.

It's quite spectacular.

Cincinnati got bad by the highways.

That is is um

ultimately you know it's it's it's amazing how far they went um

yeah

that that's what happens when highway construction is basically free

um yeah

the good thing is you can rip all of that up and replace it with uh ground level mass transit yeah that's what you need to do rip that shit up theoretically theoretically i mean you know the city ate itself alive as the new highway system allowed residents to live in distant suburbs.

Eventually, they did access all that land to the north, and it was all built up as horrible single-family homes.

More sprawl, more mansion bullshit.

They did it.

And so the tunnels just sat there until 1957.

Someone found something to do with them, which was to put a 52-inch water main in there.

Oh, boy.

Just flood them, sweep out all the Morlocks.

One station was used for a time as a fallout shelter, but it was kind of there to give the impression that there was a fallout shelter rather than to actually be used as a fallout shelter.

Yeah, because you had an absolutely no, you have to have facilities for a fallout shelter, and I'm guessing they didn't put any of those in.

Well, this is more like a

room with water bottles in it.

Yeah.

You can die of starvation after the thing.

Yeah.

The tunnels are all still there.

They're inspected each month.

They're still in good condition.

There have been several proposals since then to try and reactivate the tunnels.

A big one that looked likely to happen was back in the 70s when Lyndon Johnson finally came out and said, what if we gave money to public transportation as well?

It looked like Cincinnati would be only a few.

positions in line past like Atlanta and San Francisco and

where else got one?

Baltimore in getting one of these modern Great Society style subways.

But

the urban mass transit administration was pretty quickly

the conservatives put a stop to that nonsense.

Brighton.

There was a plan to try and put light rail in the tunnels in the 1990s.

That also failed.

The big one most recently was the Metro Moves project in 2002.

The idea being they were going to put to voters a quarter cent sales tax increase, which would build one, two, three, four, five light rail lines and also build commuter rail out from Cincinnati Union Terminal.

And

this failed miserably at the ballot.

It was rejected two to one.

Kill all voters.

I believe this is because, quite recently, before that, there was another ballot measure that passed

to raise the sales tax by a similar amount to build a stadium.

Oh, okay.

How's that going for you?

That's always a bad idea.

Oh, no, the Bengals are good.

Oh, Joe Burrow is awful.

Give Jamar Chase the ball.

Eventually, rail transit.

Eventually, rail transit does return to Cincinnati in the form of one of the Obama-era modern streetcars.

Oh, boy.

Which could be a whole episode on their own at some point.

This is now called the Bell Connector.

It is a streetcar in mixed traffic that runs in downtown Cincinnati and in Over the Rhine.

You know, it is, there's no dedicated lanes or anything like that.

Oh, my God.

These are sort of, again, these Obama-era streetcars were deployed a lot of places.

They were built very cheaply, and they're almost for increasing property values as much as they're for transportation.

A lot of them are slower than buses on the same route.

They look futuristic.

They do look futuristic.

This one does run on Walnut Street, where one of the tunnels was supposed to have eventually been.

Hey, you can do it.

Do an unironic

corpse.

An unironic thanks, Obama.

I guess.

An ironic, unironic thanks, Obama.

Yeah, yeah.

Thanks, Obama.

Yeah, this is no substitute for real rapid transit, which I think ultimately that is what a city like Cincinnati needs.

You know,

everywhere these days, people do light rail, especially in the United States, where you probably want heavy rail, actually.

Yeah.

Having worked on a few,

I have to say, strongly bizarre vibes off all the, I mean, it's the same in the UK, UK, to be honest.

Like, trams being proposed, trams are excellent, but they are to improve buses.

They are not to replace metro systems and dedicated suburban rail.

Like

Cincinnati, enormous city, very sprawling city, needs the speed and the capacity that metros and suburban rail provide.

Dig that highway up.

The infrastructure's there.

The tunnels are still there.

They're good for modern subway cars.

I mean, they're good for 45 miles an hour in there.

I mean, you have the stuff, you may as well use it.

Absolutely.

But also dig up the highways.

I would definitely dig up the highways.

I mean, there were some proposals when they were building them to have space for rapid transit, and that just did not happen.

Lol, no.

Yeah, of course not.

You know, so all that's going to be very expensive to implement these days.

You know,

it's amazing when you go back even to the Metro Moves plan in 2002, how how much bang for the buck you got back then.

Now, everything's going to be

very steep, very steep to do anything.

Yeah, but we shouldn't buy into how much it costs.

I know some people on Twitter get very angry about how much everything costs.

It's like, no, shut the fuck up, build the thing.

It doesn't matter how much it costs.

Just build it.

Money's fake.

Just build the damage.

The federal government, the money is actually fake, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

I didn't think I'd get so upset on this one, actually.

Well, I mean, the one thing you can say is the tunnels are still there.

They're still being maintained.

They're still in good condition.

I'm going to figure out what to use them for sooner or later.

Yeah, some people tried to start like a winery in there.

That didn't work.

Every time someone proposes an alternate use for them, the insurance companies take them out.

They'll do that.

Yeah, it's kind of funny about that.

I mean, yeah, ultimately, they're only good for one thing, and that's trains.

Put a train like a water main.

Yeah, yeah.

And some fiber optic cables, I think, are down there now, too.

As long as they don't put HV cables down there, you're fine.

Because as soon as HV cables go in there, you're screwed.

They're too difficult to move.

I think there's a redundant water main they built shortly afterwards.

So if they have to remove that one, it'll be relatively easy.

Ah, good.

Good.

Put trains in there.

Put trains in there, yeah.

Yes.

Well, what did we learn?

Fucking nothing.

Put trains in the thing.

Put trains in the tunnel.

Put the trains in the thing, yeah.

Rip up

the tunnels.

The Fed shouldn't be in charge of transport at all.

They can't be trusted.

This is

an intriguing corollary to abolish the Treasury, abolish the Department of Transportation.

I mean, that's not the craziest idea I've heard.

Yeah, it's amazing the outcomes you get when you make highway construction free.

All of a sudden, it's impossible to build anything other than highways.

During the period when, you know, it would have been really relevant to get the subway done, you know, which is between like, you know, 1930 and like 1950, I believe there was only one rapid transit project underway anywhere in the United States, and that was

building the State Street Subway in Chicago.

To be fair, we can't get on our high horse in the UK because

none anywhere.

Yep.

No.

We were building just a few extra tube lines.

Great.

Great for London, but nothing anywhere else.

Yep.

How's the Glasgow subway looking, Nova?

Oh, I mean, there's new trains in it, which are worse in a lot of ways and better in a couple, and then they're going to make those sort of driverless soon allegedly but you can't sit in the front look out the window can you no no you can't uh they're still insanely like loud and like uh very like rattly and also the fact is it's it's a loop and if you build a loop like you you close yourself off into the fucking like interstellar thing or i guess the true detective thing and if you if you go out west for instance or you know further south or wherever and you're like man i wish there was a subway here

get you know because you you're you still have the loop that um you know you had in like 1890 something

and changing it would be too difficult so

love love britain uh love love

don't don't like it there's the thing about the thing about scotland as well is that you can't even do the like don't like it leave the united kingdom because uh i tried and that didn't work so yeah thanks alex salmon for fucking that one up for us all

rest in shit

Well,

we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Got a 50-50 chance.

And she makes it.

We take those.

All right.

Hello, Justin, Liam, November, Devon, and Milkshake.

Today I recount to you the majority circumstance that led to my untimely termination from an unnamed Canadian passenger railway.

Well, that's one of of like two, right?

Yeah.

And you have to have a ship.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At 19, I was fresh out of college with an associate's degree in railway operations and managed to join Canada's National Passenger Railway.

Uh-huh.

Okay, you're really narrow.

The main part of my job was quite simple, working as either a conductor or engineer to move equipment around our shop in the yard and at the adjoining passenger station.

For the most part, that part of my job was great.

Where the real difficulties lied were the myriad of other jobs myself and the rest of my crew could be put on when not switching.

Such jobs included, but were not limited to cleaning locomotive engine rooms and cabs, dumping locomotive toilets, general shop cleanup, cleaning up the managers and administrative offices,

running errands like picking up parts and materials, and most significant to our story today, locomotive exterior washing.

So

you had to be like a fucking.

Oh, God.

What's the word for the, like,

a domestique?

You had to be a domestique, like on a fucking Tour de France team.

I was bouncing back and forth between domestique and stagier, which is funny given that I don't remember how to, I don't know how to ride a bike.

But like.

The phrase I was thinking of was Charlie work.

A dog's body.

He knows Charlie work, yeah.

So a locomotive's exterior could be washed in a myriad of ways.

One was our very entertaining yet largely ineffective train wash system that would reliably leave the sides of the train wet and occasionally cleaner.

See figure one.

The train wetter.

Yeah.

Another method was at what we called the wash pit, a section of track just outside the shop, which suspended the rails on I-beams above an access pit and had two levels of scaffolding above to access either side of the body and the roof of the locomotives.

Using the wash pit, industrial pressure washers, and lots of chemicals deemed to cause cancer in the state of California, we could meticulously restore even the nastiest shit caked locomotives to a rather impressive level of cleanliness, albeit rather slowly.

I, first of all,

power wash simulated DLC when.

Second of all,

I know I've mentioned this before previously but like it is genuinely impressive to me and I think generally unknown by a lot of people how nasty everything around a working railway gets everything

covered in like

just like the nastiest mixture of like uh just like grit and dirt and mud and shit and like every possible toxic chemical um which is cool if you ever ride an M-Track long distance train take a look at the locomotive at the end of the trip.

It's up there with like ocean-going ships where you're like,

this just gets nasty over time, and there's not much you can do to prevent that.

You can happily go to any terminal, almost every terminal station in Britain will still, will just have like, they won't have done much to the tracks of the terminal tracks because you can't, there's no point.

And they will be coated in all of what Nova just described.

And let me tell you, as someone who spent and will probably continue to spend quite a bit of time out on track, yes.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, Jim Crunch, the locomotive comes in and it has a deer impaled on the knuckle.

Uh-huh.

Do you remember when they did that study a few years ago that tried to work out the average color of the universe, right?

Which is this kind of like mocha brown?

The average color of like the railway is like just kind of shit brown.

Yeah, as you can tell, because everything averages out to it.

Brown.

What can Brown do for you?

Yes.

Give you some intriguing diseases.

You know, UPS Brown is a candidate for what the original Pullman Green was.

I kind of like the UPS Brown.

I think a nice dark brown is kind of cool, but this is not.

I'm not talking about a nice dark brown.

I'm talking about a really dull

brussel smeared through it.

Then there was the third option, unbeknownst to me until the day I was told to do it.

There was a third option option at the east end of track two.

This was a location so far away from the shop no pressure washer or garden hose could feasibly reach it.

On that hot July day, myself and my coworker were told by a manager to go wash a customer's locomotive on track two.

In an effort to make extra dough, our maintenance center had contracts with some of the other railways to maintain and store their equipment.

After much back and forth regarding the feasibility of the task and countless offerings to move the locomotive to a more appropriate location, we were handed two telescopic scrub brushes, a bucket of water, and a pump action spray bottle of corrosive alkaline degreaser.

Oh, Jesus.

Oh, my God.

Much to our dismay and with a fear that refusal may result in a write-up for insubordination, we proceeded.

With one person acting as a runner and the other one taking turns throwing water as high as they could, then chasing the splash with the degreaser and vigorously scrubbing.

We somehow managed to wash the entire locomotive.

Then came the rinse.

Oh.

Oh, boy.

The locomotive in question was an MP36PH, shown here.

More commonly referred to as a dildo liner.

Named for the town in Newfoundland, I assume.

Yeah, it's a very nice town.

Dependent on the whims of like Immigration Canada.

Coming in at an overall length of 70 feet and just under 16 feet tall, this made bucket-aided rinsing techniques rather difficult.

We once again repeated to our manager that we needed to move the locomotive in order to properly rinse it, to which we received a rather annoyed dismissal of our request.

We did our best, each taking turns chucking buckets of water onto the locomotive's phallic cowl until it was time to pack up and call it a day.

The next day was a departure day, followed by the weekend, followed by an arrival day and another departure.

It was five days later we could truly witness the fruits of our labor, or rather hear about it.

Fifteen minutes into my shift, an audibly frantic voice erupted from my radio beckoning me over to the wash pit.

Oh boy.

It was there I found my manager frantically rubbing the locomotive windows as where there once stood rinse water, there were now half millimeter deep cavities in the protective coating on each of the locomotive's windshield panels.

Anytime you get to like specialized applications of glass, I'm like, that's so much money.

There's like one factory that makes these.

And it's out of business.

Needless to say, this was a suboptimal windshield condition that only worked to further enrage the hot-headed manager that originally put me to the task.

To quickly sum it up, she had a long history of unprovoked negative interactions directed at myself and her other subordinates.

So, regardless of fault, this would still be a burden I'd have to bear.

This incident, despite not being formally investigated by management, would soon later be cited in my dismissal following me bottoming out a poorly maintained forklift that myself and others had continuously reported to management for having, amongst other things, bald tires, no coolant, a broken coolant reservoir, and most concerning, a non-functioning parking brake.

Oh.

Incredible.

Join a union.

In the two weeks leading up to my dismissal, I consulted my agreement's union rep for what to do when likely facing termination.

Okay.

Instead of preparing a logical counter-argument and other evidence to support my innocence, he advised me to injure myself on the job to claim I was wrongfully terminated.

Union strong, baby.

I,

okay.

Not all unions create equal.

Incredible.

It's like, how do I get out of the fucking Pacific theater of operations shit?

That's not.

Wow.

To wrap it up, trust your gut.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where your decision will either result in thousands of dollars in damage or an insubordination write-up, it's probably best to step back and ponder updating your resume.

And for the love of God, don't let your union rep be elected purely by no contest.

No kidding.

Yeah, get involved.

In an act of pure masochism, I've since hired on to another railway with its own host of problems, so I'm sure I'll have more stories to share.

The other Canadian Railroad.

Yeah.

Thanks for letting letting me ramble and keeping me company on long drives to and from the rail yards from

anonymous

speaking of that i saw a tick tock of a guy who uh was listening to us when his dash cam caught him getting in a car accident there have been several of those

yeah i

yeah i i i feel like if you crash your car while listening to us and it's not your fault we should like be able to like issue you a shirt or or something.

I just want to say there does seem to be a pattern in the railroad of people pointing out problems and then getting fired for doing so.

Curious.

Somehow safety averse culture.

It keeps happening.

The trouble is, yeah, we need to, yeah, we have to rise up and kick the

suits out

and then run the railroad proper.

Yes.

Last time that opinion was mooted was like 1917 in Russia.

And you know what?

They were right to do it then too.

This is the type of shit that leads railroad employees to start forming like infantry battalions.

Yeah, because then you get to round up a lot of people and then you can send them off

in front of their

minds.

I mean when the Soviet Union collapsed the only thing that remained functioning was the public transit and the railways.

Oh, I mentioned that in the book.

Yeah.

Buy the book.

Buy the book.

Buy the book.

Buy the book.

Yeah.

Buy the book.

But more importantly, buy tour tickets.

Yes.

Thank you.

There are a lot of seats.

On the next slide.

That was safety third.

50-50 chance.

Shake hands with danger.

It's a real memory test there.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Yeah, buy some tickets to the fucking tour if you, if you sort of like forgot to do that already.

Buy multiple tickets, buy them for your friends, your family.

Like machine politics, you know, like buy, buy, buy tickets for some guy, like shave, shave them, bring them around again, buy some more tickets.

Buy a ticket for your dog.

Uh-huh.

Buy a ticket for your cat.

We'd love to meet your cat.

We would.

Buy a ticket for you.

Whoever you think you can get to the venue, you know, bring them.

together.

Hand them out on the street.

Yeah, exactly.

Bring the polycule.

Bring the.

What other kinds of ethical non-monogamy are there?

Just imagining Times Square, but it's like that scene at the start of Death of Stalin.

Come and see a podcast live show.

Yeah, exactly.

Bring your wives, bring your concubines.

Anybody.

We'll take anybody.

Bring your wives.

Bring your wives' boyfriends.

Anybody you can get.

We will have one section of chairs at the venue slightly separate for cucks.

Give a ticket to your boss.

And then we will.

Bring your entire office.

Do like a works outing to see us.

I would actually love that.

I think that would be sick.

If you're in the military, bring your whole platoon.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, absolutely.

Do like a divisional level kind of like training outing to come and see us.

It'll be funny.

Yeah.

I'm not going to freak out.

I'll salute you and thank you for your service in a dubiously ironic way.

Yes.

If you're in the FBI or

a member of our law enforcement community,

I genuinely,

it will be an honor to meet some of my surveillance officers for the first time.

be fun.

Something I've established before.

I will sign anything you put in front of me.

If you're a firefighter, you could show up with the Dalmatian.

That'd be cool.

True, true.

Yeah.

Buy a ticket.

Give it to the Prime Minister of the UK.

He's easy to buy.

If you work for the Postal Service,

if you're a garbage man, bring the truck.

Uh-huh.

Just do it.

Come prepared to do like show and tell for like whatever your job is.

Yes, exactly.

You could show up in a subway car.

True.

All the venues are transit accessible.

We made sure of that.

Hell yeah.

No one's getting stranded in the middle of nowhere, hopefully.

Nice.

Unless they sell the railroad halfway, like in midday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In which case, we just lead you on foot to the nearest

transit link.

Yeah, to go on an expedition.

Like the Dodgers want you to do from

the Dodgers.

Yeah.

25 minutes.

From Chinatown to Dodgers to Dodger Stadium, yeah.

So yeah, buy tickets to that.

Come to the library to talk.

Buy Gareth's book.

Yes, yes, please do.

I've sold 600 of them so far, which is apparently extremely good for a independent

first-time book.

So, yeah,

I think it's towards how the railways will fix the future.

Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting to tell people what it is.

I just say buy the book and then tell people to Google the book and see what happens.

How the railways will fix the future.

Yeah.

Listen to No God's No Mirrors.

It's new.

It's very, very funny.

It's extremely funny, in fact.

Highly recommend it.

Thank you very much.

And I'm also getting very, very excited for robbery season on Kill Jay's Bond.

That is extremely good.

It's very soon.

It's very soon.

It's a matter of weeks away.

I'm excited.

And listed 10,000 losses as well.

Yeah.

It's fun to drop in.

And

I know nothing about sports, but I was a guest on there.

And it's good fun just listening in and hearing about the sports.

Sometimes you talk about refrigerators being airdropped by Mossad.

That's why your name on here is El Mosri Refrigerated Appliance Something for.

All right.

Let's wrap up.

All right.

That was the podcast.

Good night, everyone.

All right.

Good night.

Good night.