Episode 166: The Privatization of British Rail

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Yeah, we're five minutes in, actually.

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Hello, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

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I'm November Kelly.

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Yay, Liam.

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Hi, my name is Liam McAnderson.

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I'm the person who's both talking and trying to download this goddamn PowerPoint file.

And we have a guest.

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Hi, my name is Guest.

Yeah, it's me, Gareth.

My pronouns are he, him.

And I, and I don't like Gareth.

I have a family, but no job.

That's one of the worst combinations.

I assume.

Yeah.

It's like job and family, all good.

Job and no family, potentially pretty good, depending on your feelings about it.

No family and no job, kind of sad.

Family, no job that's

crisis becomes becomes a headache deal yeah yes it's fine uh

thankfully uh we have a really good safety net in the uk uh for these conditions uh that safety net being adhd and having six paying jobs all at once uh in the background so yeah uh

thank you for that and in fact no it's just the patreon people are giving me uh they're currently paying for uh a week's worth of rent a month so that's thank you uh thank you patreon people not your patreon people they're not paying me anything.

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We'll put the plug up front for once.

Rail NASA.

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Yes.

Absolutely.

Yeah, no, I'm a well, we'll get to that anyway.

Sorry.

There's something on screen, though, which is quite nice.

It makes me very, I see it and handles Messiah players whenever I see it, which is pleasing, pleasing roundel or whatever.

It's not a roundel because it's not round.

The CIS, the corporate identity symbol.

Isn't it beautiful?

We finally found a good sis.

It's the branch rail double arrows symbol.

Guess what?

This doesn't exist anymore.

And why not?

Well, I mean, it's still at some stations.

Well, it's still the symbol 4 station because it was too good to be stationary.

Yeah, still owned by the DFT.

Yeah, it's still the symbol, and it's been reinvented.

There's a new version of it,

the symbol 2 that is going to be rolled out.

But more on that in the future as well.

It's literally symbol 2.

Yeah, they're calling it symbol 2.

Symbol 2.0.

Grim.

That's offensive.

Today we have Gareth on to talk about the privatization of British rail.

Woo!

This one's been a long time coming, folks.

I'm super excited.

Oh, yeah, this is going to be fun.

One of the greatest world historical disasters beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

This is another moment when our future was foreclosed upon.

Opening up a bunch of time capsules from old British rail engineers.

Greetings, comrade descendants.

Yeah,

they're all buried in Derby as well.

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

Oh, yikes.

I think maybe there's some problems with transit policing.

I was about to say,

there was a shooting at the Sutter Avenue station on the L-train.

Police shot a suspect who had gone around the fair gates using the emergency exit door.

And

in addition to shooting the suspect, they also shot another police officer and two bystanders, one of whom was shot in the head.

New York's finest, baby.

They have an officer-involved officer shooting,

amongst other things.

I believe the sort of the narrative here is the guy jumped the fair gate.

They tried to stop him.

He pulled a knife, which they don't have.

They don't have the knife because there's no actual proof that a knife was involved as of now.

Allegedly, someone else stole it.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

And then on seeing that knife, they then lit up an entire subway car,

like brain injuring a guy, shooting another cop, etc.

Yes.

They fired something like nine rounds.

I don't know that there was a reason for this to escalate to a gunfight.

Don't let any cops in the tunnels, I think, is what we've learned from this.

Keep the cops out of the tunnels.

Yeah, I've seen it.

The Stutter Avenue is an elevated station.

Oh, you said the L.

I was going to say, you said the L.

Keep them, just don't let them step onto the steps.

Don't let them near transit.

Just keep them.

No stairs for cops.

No.

There's not really a reason to have armed law enforcement enforcement of fares, right, of ticketing.

Yeah,

catch me if I'm wrong on this one, but all and this isn't the case for every single municipality that has fair fair resistance.

So, for example, in TFL, fair invasion, the cost versus the enforcement isn't quite as simple as it is in New York.

But I'm pretty sure the numbers are in New York that if they just got rid of fares, like they got rid of all the fair protection stuff, particularly the cops, it would be an enormous saving.

Like, they would save money.

Yes and no.

I mean,

I suppose if you

I don't know if

I know that like they've they've spent lots and lots of money on police to

combat fare evasion and they haven't really done very much, certainly far more than they could ever recover in revenue from having the police there.

I don't know if you would

I don't think the New York City subway could transition to like, you know, a fully proof of payment system like Berlin or Munich or somewhere like that.

I'm not sure if Berlin has that.

I know Munich does.

You know,

it is a system that's big enough that fares are a significant part of the revenue.

So it is at least covering the cost of fair enforcement, but it's not like

I mean,

I guess the big issue is, you know, we hire police officers to do that, this, and what do they do?

They just shoot people.

We know that this is what U.S.

cops do.

They just shoot everyone.

Surely having them in

highly dense environments, i.e., mass transit systems, isn't a good idea.

Well, that's evidenced by this.

They were put there in the first place for

counter-terrorism.

This is a post-9-11 phenomenon, as much as anything else.

And I mean, as you say, they have kind of two speeds, right?

Which is either play Candy Crush on your phone for your entire shift or shoot someone on the code.

And

in both cases, you are providing, apart from everything else, a very poor like return on investment there, right?

Like one of the reasons why this is so much more expensive than it would be in the in like the UK or anywhere else is because American cops are sort of like militia.

Well, grotesquely overpaid is what I was going to say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And sort of like over

like over armed and like over tactical, if that's a word that makes sense.

And I mean, also, just apart from everything else, the fact that it has to be the NYPD and the NYPD Transit Bureau, which this would be, is a hive of scum and villainy, even by NYPD standards.

You may care to remember that Eric Adams came up through the Transit Bureau.

I'm sure there's no other news that's pertinent to Eric Adams.

Of course not.

No.

And

if you are interested in hearing about mayors of some kind, maybe mayors of New York City,

there is a newly launched podcast called No Gods, No Mayors that has me on it that you could go and listen to.

Do do that.

It's fun.

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, you got to figure out a different way, you know,

that if someone, you know, doesn't pay the subway fare.

You don't murder that person?

That is not a crime deserving of murder.

It's also not a very good business decision because, I mean, you're not getting the $3 back, but you're also not getting any other fares from that person ever again.

That's not like a long-term revenue solution.

Yeah, and on a sort of like broader basis, it doesn't really jibe with the idea of like this is a public service that feels kind of friendly and accessible.

And by the way, we'll kill you, you know?

Yeah,

we'll just kill you for no reason.

People complain about British Rail's customer service, but

sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad.

But I don't know if you're not.

The only person shooting you is November with the rocket launcher for the crispy.

That's the only time that's that's right.

I don't remember British Rail ever just saying, like, we will shoot you, you know?

Yeah, I mean, mean shooting uh shooting uh four people over three dollars is an extremely trailer park type uh thing to happen you know this is just this is a bad look for everyone involved i mean i i don't want to be too too condescending about british like uh british policing here given that the met did literally shoot and kill an innocent man on a tube train but they managed not to hit anyone else so the bar that's buried like 50 meters below the floor in the sub-basement level, you know, they're just kind of like gently hopping over that.

It's 140 stairs to the surface.

Oh, dear.

Horrible.

Whatever the sign says.

I know they use the same number at every station, even though it's different.

Do they really?

Yeah.

Well, just another kind of example of a tremendously like inhospitable and like kind of murderous urban environment, which is not great.

Well,

folks, if you don't want to get shot, I guess you got to pay the fare.

No worries, they'll still find a way.

But they might shoot you anyway in the course of trying to shoot someone else.

Yeah, just make sure that everyone around you has paid the fare to the NYPD's satisfaction, I guess.

I'm going to have to wear a Kevlar vest

and like one of those fancy Kevlar helmets, you know?

Yeah.

Is my Call of Duty riot shield as I get get onto the subway exactly i hate riot it's interesting too that this came in the context of like um you know your your favorite fearmongers like the new york post being like subway crime has surged and you look at like homicides y'all motherfuckers doing it on the subway and the homicide rate went from five to eight last year like eight total that's one of those situations where they say it doubled it's like yeah it doubled from basically zero to continuing to be basically zero like given how many people use the system i mean come on that's yeah i love i love uh weaponizing statistical noise yeah

it's a good point it's a good point yeah i mean criminologically it's it's always difficult with statistics because uh criminology is one of the fields that's most like uh

sort of affected by sometimes people just are doing shit you know sometimes stuff just be doing stuff

um and often in tremendously unpredictable and statistically like dubious ways, you know, people do be doing things.

That's my kind of like reasoned judgment on it as a social science is, yeah, the social part can really fuck with the science part.

Speaking of people doing things.

Oh, boy.

Oh, God.

I

explained that this floated every pager in Lebanon.

This is just a fucking war crime, dude.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, they followed this up the next day by blowing up a bunch of like handheld radios, like walkie-talkie.

Yes.

Yeah, so this is almost certainly in breach of the convention, the convention on certain conventional weapons, or whatever it's called.

And it's like, you know, a number of people have been killed, including children who are like collateral damage.

Obviously, the Israelis don't give a shit.

The most moral army in the world strikes again.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I said this on Twitter, not to just recapitulate stuff I've been saying on Twitter, right?

But like,

I think a lot of people have been talking about, particularly in like Western press, about how technically impressive this was as like an act of espionage, which is true, right?

Like

at the same time, like

it doesn't, that doesn't detract from the humanitarian sort of like criminality of it or the kind of political stupidity you know it's

it's fucking frightening it's the cat for me it's the cat out of the bag element of this like right no you're not putting this back in the box now that israel

well you know any state but particularly israel at the moment realizes oh we can do this and get away with this too like what they're just gonna start hacking like they're just gonna be it's everything like it's fair game everything is fair game yeah it's it's really frightening like we all carry an explosive device around i have it next to i I, I tweet so much.

I spend so much time with that thing near my dick and balls.

Like, I, it's

getting free gender surgery from Assad by

tweeting on my phone.

Uh, if you consider this to be, like, militarily impressive, you have to say that October 7th was tactically impressive too.

Putting my phone near my balls and waiting for my free surgery.

So, as I understand it, right,

what has happened here is that this has been a supply chain attack where Hezbollah, who I'm so old that I remember when Hezbollah was a byword for competence, right?

Which is getting to this point, it's embarrassing.

Hezbollah has gone, okay, well, we need to secure our communications.

So we will order in from some combination of fronts and cutouts, like say 5,000 pages and 2,000 walkie-talkies, right?

Just off the shelf.

And Mossad has like found out that they're doing this.

And at some point, in either the manufacture or the shipping of those things, they have like placed explosives in all of those devices and then activated them um

and

i think but they made sure they made sure to turn on the beeper first so people would take it out of their pocket and then squeeze at it and then it explodes in their eyeballs yeah i mean it's it's it's sort of the same thinking as a landmine in a lot of way and it's also terrorism but like to be clear like

killing them right well yeah but it's it's intended to disable right it's intended to maim um and you know the sort sort of benefit of that, besides the drain on the Lebanese healthcare system and the kind of like psychological terror that you inspire, is that you kind of hope to disable a large number of Hezbollah operatives before you then start the invasion, which it turns out they had to do this thing early before they started the invasion anyway.

So I guess they also got like a bunch of healthcare workers using the same pagers.

I don't believe that, to be honest.

I think when you're talking about Hezbollah, you're talking about like a sort of like a movement that is deeply enmeshed in Lebanese society for good reasons, right?

And it's like not at all unthinkable.

I think part of the point of doing this, right, is that you blow up a bunch of people who are deniably affiliated with Hezbollah and then go, well, how did you get that pager, right?

I don't think this is a case.

I don't think we're going to see that this is something where it's like affecting.

unrelated pages or unrelated radios.

I think it's going to be people who are like engaged in some capacity with Hezbollah and have now been like blown up in a sort of like war crime about it and in a like a vaguely targeted way.

It's not to say that there hasn't been collateral damage, but I think a lot of people are kind of going to make hay of the, you know, this sort of like, this doctor was blown up by his pager.

And it's like, well, yeah, but he was blown up probably by his Hezbollah pager because he was in Hezbollah, right?

We don't have to be, you know, we don't have to sort of like

you know, cover for that.

I think the other implication of this is that uh this means that a whole bunch of communications infrastructure is now going to become like much more secure and omics like this has to be made in country um i think some of this already is for exactly this reason um and i think

at least crack a couple open and make sure there's nothing suspicious in yeah well ideally you want like physical control of the factory and the whole like supply chain right um which is uh something that like a lot of places already have hezbollah by virtue of its position as being like a prescribed like internationally designated terrorist organization doesn't have.

And so it has to rely on these like more vulnerable commercial supply chains.

But still, it's like really like striking on a couple of levels.

One, that they are able to like develop this like communications network.

And two, that it was so vulnerable and they didn't notice.

And it's just like, I don't, I think you underestimate Hezbollah at your peril always.

Right.

And I think that like, especially given given that this seems to have been something that Israel were forced to like detonate early,

that's, it's going to affect the sort of like situation if Israel do invade Lebanon less than it otherwise would have done.

But still, it's like an embarrassment.

Oh, yeah.

And I mean, who's to say they won't blow something else up tomorrow?

Well, absolutely.

I mean, this is the thing is that you just kind of keep trying to do this kind of like rolling barrage and increase paranoia.

And, you know, presumably if you're in Hezbollah, you are like ripping open every piece of like electronic infrastructure you have, which is part of the idea.

But yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, um,

I have the same feeling, and I said this on Twitter too, as, as with the, the screwpile poisonings, uh, where Russia used nerve gas against some guy they were mad at, where I'm like, you've really reached quite deeply into sort of Pandora's box of tricks here for not a very good reason necessarily.

And you're not putting the lid back on it.

No, I mean, I think this is harder to replicate against a state.

But yeah, I think there are lots of other kind of like non-state actors, groups, you know, sort of like at a lower level than Hezbollah, where this is going to really, you know, provide some opportunities to fuck with them.

Yeah, my individuals in places, you know, individuals in countries across the world who, you know, even, you know,

does it come to the US and how, you know, US politicians who are particularly, or activists who are particularly

successful in

pointing out some of the awful things Israel is doing, are they going to start getting, you know, where does it, it's.

Well, it's sort of backwards there because this is something that, like, on a more targeted basis, Israel's been doing for decades.

They killed the

head of Hamas's technical wing

with explosives in his mobile phone.

I don't remember which year this was, but

we're going to start implanting bombs in left-wing podcasts.

Well, you have a basement, dude.

Yeah.

It's not yours.

No, we're not talking about that.

Yeah.

No, I just

think this is unprecedented in terms of the targeting and the scale.

And

yeah, it's just, it's remarkable, really, is my main kind of of takeaway from it.

I'm still stunned, you know.

I think in terms of like being able to target members of Hezbollah who are like sort of enmeshed within Lebanese political and like civil society,

obviously, criminally and obviously at the cost of this like collateral damage, it's like, I don't know that anyone's been able to do something like this before.

It's a grim time for Lebanon right now, given just the succession of like, you know,

very economic, massive economic booms and actual booms that they've been dealing with over the last successive you know succession of years yeah i mean the thing that really struck me was i i saw um a twitter account from a lebanese like uh er doctor who uh was had been treating this kind of like wave of and literally thousands of injuries like people walking in with like you know serious like facial and eye injuries or like uh like missing fingers missing hands um and you go back in her like tweets and like a couple of days earlier she's posting about like game of thrones or whatever It's like totally normal.

And you're just like

the kind of, yeah, seeing the contrast with all of this stuff, like with any of these like human rights abuses anywhere, you're like,

these are like

the kind of sheer strangeness and brutality that you're imposing onto like ordinary people's lives.

This is why the terrorism is absolutely the right the right word for it because it's

that cascading through the system through right the way through society of just a lot of people who've now had their lives sort of completely impacted and

the haunting they're going to experience of dealing with this.

Yeah, it's grim.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, you know, it feels like there's always sort of a tendency in the mainstream media to sort of really otherize, you know, a place like Beirut,

let's say, which,

you know,

is a city where people live.

Yeah,

no, this is just a weird Middle Eastern terrorist compound as opposed to, you know, this, this is a normal city,

just a regular city with

a lot going on.

Or even Hezbollah itself, right?

I think this is the other thing is Hezbollah is like, it's a prescribed organization.

It's a terrorist organization.

It comes by those labels pretty honestly, but it is also like it's a political party.

It's like this organization of like charitable movements that do social services, obviously with the aim of like consolidating its own

movement.

It's a bunch of different things that are very, very deeply enmeshed with all aspects of civil society in certain areas.

And that's like,

like I say, it's really kind of

remarkable, you know, to

even have this ability to kind of target it in that way.

And obviously, the results are horrifying.

Yep.

Well said Ross in other news

you heard about this oh this

now into the funny news yeah

hey hey yeah here we go um award-winning engineer fired for truth

that's it oh god yeah yeah so in what was probably the most like soft interview I've done in a long while, like I've said much punchier stuff, I pointed out that

there are challenges at historic challenges at Euston Station because the government has cancelled Crossrail 2 and then it's cancelled HS2 and so on and so forth.

All the stuff that you guys, you know, everyone, hi hogs, hi, hi, old patient folks.

Hi, everyone listening.

You all know this stuff.

And it was pretty softball.

And it extremely pissed off one Lord Peter Gerard Hendy of Richmond/slash Imber in the Wiltshire of the brackets he him.

And he didn't like this.

So he

very personally got me sacked in the sense that my job that was mine isn't anymore.

Yeah, he went straight to

my employer, threatened the CEO with not getting any more contracts, threatened him again, saying he would go and pester his shareholders and

the head office, whatever, what earth that meant.

And then my former employer, Sistra, promptly sacked me.

Thanks, Sistra.

And did all of this in text as well, which is the thing that's all in email.

What's really astounding is that, like,

this guy,

the chairman of Network Rail, which, if you've listened to this before, you know, it's the like sort of like arm's length sort of like governmental body that owns the tracks and like infrastructure for rail.

Yeah.

Um, uh, just like emailing your boss or your, your CEO, like, like a kind of like stereotypical mobster being like, you know, nice contracts you've got with Network Rail.

It would be a shame if anything were to happen to them kind of thing.

And it's, and it's what's subsequently happened.

So then I've been bounced around through a horrible disciplinary process for several months, been spat at the end of it without a job.

And so then, you know, I kind of said in the 11th hour,

hi, Chucklefucks, do you have any idea how much of a shitstorm I'm about to create for you if you do this?

And they did not.

So I created the shitstorm.

And, you know, someone who has quite extensive media contacts and a large social media following proceeded to tell everyone what happened with all the receipts.

And that's not gone hugely well for

Hendy, who's not made any public appearances

since this went public.

It's not gone well for Network Rail, who have been somewhat hounded by an enormous number of freedom of information app requests from journalists and the Rail NAFTA Discord server.

Oh man,

the oughts are at them.

It's great.

And yeah, yeah, so Network Rail put out a statement that could not have been written more to look like there's a cover-up at Houston.

Even if there isn't a cover-up at Houston, the statements that have been written about Houston station by Network Rail make it look like there's an enormous cover-up.

Everyone's digging around in Hendy's kind of private and professional life.

A lot of the supply chain are really pissed off and getting very angry about it.

And there's some more fun news to come out in the next.

It's annoyingly taken.

I always forget that I can go quicker than lots of big companies.

And indeed, so long-form journalism moves a bit slower, but there is more to come.

The story's not done yet, even if it is very boring and annoying.

But it does mean that I'm not

the professional head of track for in the UK for Sister anymore.

But we'll see what happens next.

I will still be and continue to do engineering.

That's not going to change.

But yeah, it's a chance for me to think, ah, what else can I get up to?

So, you know,

it's just, it's so striking that what you actually said was so not just mild and not just like something that was like, you know, known to, known to like your employers as like, you know, part of the kind of commentary you're doing and they were happy that you were doing, but like so blindingly fucking obvious to say like, hey, when it gets really crowded, when like one train is delayed and like another one arrives and they're all dumping passengers onto the same platform where people are sprinting through it, that's dangerous.

Anyone who's been to Houston in like the past, I venture to say decade, has personal experience because like someone else's suitcase has taken out a chunk of the back of their ankle.

So

let me get this straight.

Like the boarding procedure at Houston is like Penn Station.

Okay,

let me explain Houston station to you, right?

There is, so there's like a boxy like station hall, right?

Which is, which is very ugly.

It's got like one LED wall, which you could use for announcing stuff.

They don't use it for that, they use it for advertisements.

And then you have a couple of like displays oriented 90 degrees away from that, showing you where people are going.

You have a little like fucking like

a Leon, like shitty fast food restaurant and whole deck with a pub above it, and all the seating crammed into the back.

And then you have a very narrow corridor,

sort of transversely with the platforms extending out from it.

And what they do is, if you're getting a train from Houston, is it will like be announced on all of of the displays or over the public address system about 25 seconds before that train's doors close and it leaves.

And also, I have to mention, every train operating company is canceling

every third or fourth train at no notice.

So you get a bunch of trains which are oversubscribed, too small on a bunch of platforms connected by very narrow corridors and ramps.

And please don't run here signs, nothing to stop you running, no barriers.

And so you either get like a little text on your phone or the tannoy goes off or whatever saying, you know, go to platform six.

The entire contents of not just that train, but the train before it that's been cancelled and maybe the train before that are now in a dead sprint

across a narrow corridor down onto a platform

through this like station hall.

It is an absolute fucking disaster waiting to happen.

Yeah.

It's pain station, but worse.

Yeah, it's pain.

Pain station, but worse, yeah.

Yeah.

Imagine if, now, firstly, imagine if you're doing that blind or in a wheelchair.

And yeah, no, imagine if that had been mentioned by someone

in a an engineering disaster themed podcast.

merely the purely coincidentally the episode before I ended up going public with all this.

It was very good time in Nova for you to talk about, to briefly allude to Euston Station in the

episode about crushes on London transport infrastructure.

It seems like it it was coordinated, but honestly, it was come by it honestly through the form of having just been in Houston and thinking to myself unprompted, fucking hell, that was dangerous.

This sucks.

Yeah, I've just had to like take my like rolling suitcase and do like a sort of hundred meter sprint with it down an incline.

So this is this is why every time I've been in the UK, I take the East Coast main line.

Absolutely.

It's a much more civilized way to get up and down the country.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, no,

that's weird to be in the news.

But yeah, what's funny is that the PM was getting asked about it.

So, yeah, it really went up to the top level.

And it's fun to annoy Keir Starmer.

The fact that I've personally annoyed Keir Starmer brings me great joy.

That's all we can hope for.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

Warhammer, you know, the Emperor knows your name.

Yeah.

For better or worse.

But yeah, so the good thing about me going really public with it is if I get assassinated, you all know, firstly, it won't be Amlo.

um and uh no it was mossad

three states all gunning for you at the same time

oh it's like a cold war thriller i love it's

the first british mexican israeli joint coverse operation and let me tell you two two legs of that stool the food is terrible and mexico is carrying the cuisine on that i was about to say i was about to say and then they all come to assassinate you at the same time and they bump into each other like three outfielders going for the same flyball

oh boy yep anyway so that guy doesn't have a job anymore the guy on the television screens right now

it's it's it's a great shame and you know uh we hope that you get a better offer soon yeah yeah let's see what happens uh but uh so if you're out there engineering consultancies uh hi yeah do you do you want someone who is like sort of able and talented and takes their safety responsibilities as an engineer and their kind of professional ethics very seriously?

Because you should.

Yes,

I want that.

Yes.

You can't fire him because he'll get you to get yelled at.

Yeah.

Oh, poor Sistra.

Do you have to briefly feel, I mean, only very briefly feel for them because they just don't have a clue of what shitstorm they were going to create, clearly.

And oh boy, what a shitstorm they've had to deal with.

So what a shame.

Yeah, I mean, getting bullied by someone who could like credibly threaten them, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And and lord handy

yeah you guys uh but uh okay it's not it's i i i had a great team and i i miss my team that i was working with it was uh we're gonna do fun stuff but anyway enough of that let's let's let's talk about something that isn't a miserable disaster oh

that was the goddamn news

average average um west coast mainline this is the west coast mainline yeah oh this is oh boy So

Ross foolishly let me drive a little bit on this one.

And so this is WTYP, and therefore we have to start at the beginning, which is what is railway?

So this comes from the Roman cart pads, actually.

Well, actually, it's funny because they picked Welsh.

Well, actually, I've gone earlier than that because to my mind, the first railway, so that's a thing that is

a guidance system that guides the wheels of

kind of wheel vehicle, and it's not, the vehicle doesn't steer itself, is Diolkos in ancient Greece.

So back in 700 BC.

Yeah, and yeah, so this thing, southern central Greece, it connected the Ionian and Aegean seas.

The gauge, interestingly enough, between these two ruts, because we can call this a rutway, which kind of sounds rude, doesn't it?

The gauge here is 1600 millimeters, which is not far off.

You know, it's Irish gauge.

So yeah, this thing moved ships basically would go onto the wheels and would get kind of holed between these two seas.

A canal was built later, but this thing was actually developed a bit of a reputation of being a pretty fast way of moving things around, which is kind of cool.

So this is, it was also open for fee-paying customers, which kind of makes it the first public railway as well.

But I admit, maybe calling it a railway is a bit of a stretch, but it is the first sort of permanent way, if you like.

But if we jump to the next slide, I said we're going to hammer through these.

That's the old class in Greece.

That was 700 BC.

Let's jump to 1515 and the first kind of permanent way that we would maybe recognize as being kind of a railway.

And that is the Hohen Salzburg Fortress funicular.

It was a funicular railway, it was the first kind of permanent way.

And it kind of went, you can kind of

see where it went in this picture, I think.

It's to the left-hand side.

If you were in the 16th century, you could just kind of do whatever.

Do whatever.

The plot of pentiment is happening in the background.

And you're like, I don't give a shit about any of this calligraphy bullshit.

What I'm doing is i'm i'm making my special interest in venting trains yeah exactly and so these are the you know so the austrians um got there got there first with kind of what we'd recognize as as as the shape of of of of today's railway really um it wasn't the british sorry all the adenoidal um uh boomer weirdos who shout at me every time i diss their hst but uh no it's not british it's it's kind of the railway as we recognize it is austrian um and it went up a hill into a kind of cool castle but we we do have to talk about Britain, unfortunately, in this episode because that's the literal episode thing.

Oh, no, I'm so sorry.

Sorry, Liam.

So let's jump forwards again

to not that much later, but to 1594 and the first overground railway in Britain.

So, so we, even as early as the 18, sorry, the 1560s, we'd started having Nova, exactly as you'd said, we'd started having these kind of mine tracks being built.

Actually, the first ones kind of were popping up in Cumbria.

But the first kind of outdoors thing was uh the prescott wagonweight in uh 1594 and here is not a picture of it but it kind of it vaguely gives you an idea what it looks like right yeah just like man's man's quest to not have to pull or push heavy

exactly at a certain point it gets beyond even a horse really and you're just like there's got to be an easier way i'm i'm dying yeah i'm dying my horse is dying the child that i got to push the thing is is definitely dead like you know uh yeah so if you the the funny enough the logic of all of this is to move a load, if you reduce the friction between the load and the ground, you can move, you require less effort to move it.

That's that's kind of logic of all this stuff.

So, you know, Diolkos used very nice, um, sort of hard sort of limestone, which really nicely created these ruts and ended up being really smooth and really nice, low friction.

Um, you know, we ended up using split timbers on the uh for Hohen Salzburg and for all the kind of Cymbry mines.

This thing's similar, but if we jump forwards again,

you have this glorious scene here of Wakefield.

This is glorious Wakefield.

Look at this suburban shithole that is out of Wakefield.

Sorry, everyone who is in Stanley.

Actually, you know what?

It's not so bad.

It's fine.

90% of Britain looks like this, and I feel a kind of swell of patriotism and romance looking at it.

They got to work on the brush clearance here on this right away.

So

unfortunately,

Wakefield City Council has tarmacked over the thing that I took this street view screenshot of.

And because the thing that this screenshot of is of the

is of the Lake Lock Railroad.

And yes, that's right.

That is a railroad, not a railway.

The Lake Lock Railroad, which was the first public railway that used iron edge rails.

What is an iron edge rail?

So we've had all these wagonways going all over the place.

And then some Bright Spark in Colbrookdale decided that they could create iron to kind of to pretty decent quality because because of their coke and coal that they had access to.

And so

another Bright Spark decided, you know, what we can do with this iron is kind of roll it out nice and thin and stick it on these wooden rails that we've got on all these wagonways.

And this started happening kind of in the middle of the 1700s to the point where by the by kind of the 1780s, 1790s, we'd actually developed a rail as you or I would recognize it, what we called edge rails that were kind of a rail that you see now.

And this, the Lake Lock Railroad was the first public railway using them

in the world, in fact.

And at this point, we did start, Britain can start saying that we started accelerating beyond everyone else.

And it was really because of our ability to kind of create cheap, reasonably consistent quality iron that we would then either put on top of the wooden wagonways or we'd kind of start rolling these edge rails.

And other railways kind of around the rest of the world, places like Russia, for example, where some of these early examples of wagonways started finding their way.

elsewhere, started using rails, but they were British rails.

They were rails that were manufactured in Britain because no one else could quite get the quality.

So that's kind of cool.

Anyway, Wakefield City Council, go back, take the tarmac off this bloody important piece of history, you oicks.

Just because people are getting upset because there are potholes, like, screw those guys.

They're probably all driving SUVs anyway.

But also, everyone can go and start go to Line Pit Lane.

It is an honor for the suspension of your Kia Saranto to die handling this.

Exactly.

Are these edge rails the kind that have the flange on the rail?

No, so they are,

so there were two types of, there were plateways that basically relied on, yes, having a kind of an L-shaped rail and the wheel sort of sat in that.

And then edge rails are kind of relied on a conic wheel, which is very much the kind of what ended up being the technology we use still to this day.

So yeah, no, you got the two.

You got the L-shaped rails and the edge rails.

And these kind of, even when this railroad was built, they were very much competing with each other.

Like no one had quite decided on which to use.

So if we jump forwards once more, we're not looking at track anymore, you'll be glad to see.

We're looking at this thing.

Look at this nonsense.

Look at all this.

I mean, this is such a waste.

Those gears could have been put to so much better use decorating a top hat.

This is this is Trevithick's, one of Trevithick's,

well, basically just put a giant kettle and attached it with a bunch of pistons to some and cogs to some wheels and and went and said go and the difference between this and some of the other steam engines at the time that well firstly this one moved but but secondly it used high pressure steam rather than low pressure steam which is quite revolutionary so what james watt kind of famous steam engine guy uh he was a low pressure cornish engine he was using low pressure trevithick decided to use high pressure and also wheels and and in 1804 uh he made this thing haul a train for the first time ever a there was a locomotive train on the Pennadaran

tramway

in what is today Merthyr Tydville in the Welsh Valleys, north of Cardiff.

And so that 1804, kind of a pretty epic moment.

Shout out to Trevithik, who, as with many engineers, he ended up ruining himself financially multiple times over, kind of bummed into George Stevenson in South America, as you do, and then continues to kind of live penniless for the rest of his life.

Doing

like a FOMA version of Butch and Sundance.

Exactly.

So it took until.

So by this this point, we're still having a battle about what railways should look like, but jump forwards to 1830.

And the next slide.

And here's Chapmos with

the first modern railway as we know it.

So all the previous wagonways and railways and shit, including the Stockton-Darlington, were all kind of

pre-modern railways, early railways or pre-modern railways.

This is the first modern railway.

Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the first intercity railways.

Well, why do I call it the first modern railway?

Because it took a lot of kind of stuff that we decided on.

Like, oh, timetable maybe is a good idea but we're not going to use that with everything else oh having signals is a good oh double track it's oh locomotive this is the first railway that pulled all that shit together and actually went oh this is a system and all this stuff together ends up being quite good and and it was and and from 1830 onwards partly as a result of an enormous basically the demise of the slave industry in the uk

kind of timed rather well with a bunch of people no longer having a a frontier of capitalism they could horribly

there's kind of this thing you know that meme about like, you know, America is deficient in a key resource, some random farmer in Nebraska finds the world's largest deposit of it.

The kind of like, there's a special providence that protects like fools, drunks, children, and the US and the United States of America.

That used to be true of Britain,

which means that that mandate of heaven is transferable and that the US will one day lose it.

And there will be a situation where, like, whatever the resource of the future is, some random farmer in China is going to dig up the world's largest like deposit of it instead of the US, you know?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So, there's at the point of abolition that happened a couple of decades before, but actually, it was only kind of 1830 and this point where firstly, and not the majority funding of the railways, but a large amount of capital started getting freed up because the British government

compensated the slave owners, not the slaves, the slave owners for all the slaves that they'd had to free.

Slavery Keynesianism by accident.

Yes.

Genuinely like

giving like the worst criminal in the fucking world like millions of pounds, millions of 1807 pounds, which is

exactly millions of 1807 pounds, which is

trillion.

Yeah, just insanely.

And being like, hey,

you're like, you know, plantation career is over.

There is like no reason for you to stay in Jamaica or whatever.

Why don't you instead take these trillions of pounds?

And like after buying yourself everything you could possibly want, why not splash that around on some more investments?

You know, exactly.

You know, this railway was built very much to, you know, among other things, but to move slave one cotton from the US into mills in the interior of

northern England.

And at this whole time, you had this explosion of railways that then happened.

And it was no coincidence that it was at the time of, you know, the slave industry was very much that.

It was an industry.

You had huge numbers of managers, clerks, merchants, this huge network of people that all of a sudden didn't have much to do.

And so they were basically diverting, you had to see a transfer, wholesale, of this

industrial might,

evil industrial might, into railways.

So people, I'm afraid, have often thought of railways as being this benign, peaceful technological wonder that just appeared without any negative.

No, no, no, no.

Wrong-o.

So, yeah, so anyway, 1830.

All transport is political, I understand.

Yes, quite.

An enormous explosion in railways.

And it was hopelessly disorganized, chaotic, and

not great because the British Rail Network,

from this point onwards,

we went into the stupid zone and built

never left.

Correct, yes.

Our rail network, the stupid zone.

Welcome to the stupid zone where the service will terminate.

Yeah.

Reminding passengers to take their baggage with them.

And shovel up their asses.

Yes.

So the problem in Britain was that we had like a hundred companies all competing and building railways with each other.

Some of them, lots of the railways were like half-built or they were built, they were like proposed prospectively.

There was zero strategic oversight.

And so you just had lots of very weavy, very useless railways, all sort of none of them making any real sense.

You just had to get like identification.

You just had to get like sort of some act through the most corrupt houses of parliament like imaginable.

Yeah, the MPs were all funded, well, we're all like directors on the boards of these railway companies.

So like they just like pick their pet railway project they were going to front to Parliament that day.

And, like, people would, there's a reason why all the drawing offices for railways were like next to Parliament.

There's a reason the Institutes of Civil Engineers, their fancy offices on Great George Street, are right next to Parliament.

It's so that they can, they don't have to jog very far with all their plans to lay out on the table for the House of Commons to accept and then everyone get their slush fund money.

Yeah, not just not a great way to build a railway network.

And no one else got it particularly right in the rest of the world either, but there was much more strategy in mainland Europe about the rail network.

Russia, for example,

this is what happens if you have a Napoleon or a czar.

Well, quite.

A little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit less laissez-faire, a little bit more organization.

Just like a 19th-century podcaster being like railways, Napoleon.

It's the old joke about the interurbans that were being built in like the 1890s and early 1900s in the United States.

We're here to build the Nowhere and East Armpit Railroad.

Ah, yes, the Nowhere and East Armpit, famously.

Yes, of course.

I guess here it'd be the

Nowhere Sure and Armpit upon Drainage Ditch Railway.

Oh, you mean that's south of Little Armpit?

Yes.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's two clicks.

So it's east of like

Great Armpit.

Let's jump forwards almost a century from this point.

So we have a huge explosion of railways, hugely wasteful.

Let's jump forward to 1923 and the railways act, actually, let's jump forward to 1921 and then what happened in 1923, which was the Railways Act 1921, which gave us what's called grouping, where all of these railways, let's go next slide, all these railways were smooshed into four large railways of the LMS.

We love cartels.

We love

conglomerates.

The GWR and the Southern.

And these are the four, what they're called the big four.

These are the big four railway companies.

And

this actually wasn't a great idea.

It wasn't a bad idea, but it also wasn't done that well.

Why does the LNER logo look like a bumper sticker you'd see on the back of somebody's car?

Like a Christian fish, yeah.

Why has Southern used a kind of like old West font?

Yeah, I know.

She's a damn.

I know, right?

I guess like it's a good thing that none of these were like revived as kind of zombie brands to put a like gloss of like patriotism and old-time feeling on like some quite shit trains.

Yeah, Southern literally reused this logo.

So the current Southern Railways, which obviously has absolutely no connection to the original, reused this logo.

LNER is back, obviously.

GWR is also back.

No one's bothered recreating the LMS, though, which is the West Coast mainline one.

So, you know, sad times.

Yeah, no, the big four were created.

And

the thing about just doing a big thing like this, and I would say this was a bit of a half-arsing of it,

in that this didn't solve a lot of the logic of this was to remove a lot of clerical duplication, if nothing else, to try and, you know, in the middle, between the two, the two wars, the railways were starting to lose money in a big way.

They were struggling, you know, they were competing with road logistics more and more.

They were also, they were also just huge, complicated companies that no one really had a handle on.

And so

the good idea was to merge them and

attempt to make some of that go away, which maybe it didn't.

But we'll never know because then the Second World War happened.

And then immediately after the Second World War happened, this is where Nova needs to line up the USSR.

I got you.

I got you.

Clement Attlee elected sorry Davin

so yeah we um we have Attlee we have a socialist government and they nationalize the railways so we have the Transport Act 1947 which creates

this this little guy the the old anemic lion that's uh in the next slide balancing on his motorcycles sure

there there is British Railways and you know what I okay so the lion looks like Britain did at the time.

But, you know what?

I don't mind this logo.

It's all right.

Compared to like the kind of Soviet and Eastern Bloc railway logo, which is a winged conic wheel, which looks

quite Nazi.

It doesn't bit.

Yeah, it does a bit.

This was also like no wings involved.

It's on the ground.

Why do you need the wings?

Exactly.

Wings, not necessarily.

I'm a lion with chronic wasting disease.

You have to shoot this lion, but not eat it.

What's funny is one of the later logos did include a, it was more of a silhouette, but it did include a dick outline for the lion.

So interesting.

Yeah, so whereas this one is,

there is a bit of a funny outline, but I'm not sure.

Not sure it's a good idea.

It's like Churchill's hiccup, you know, it's like the border between Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Exactly, yeah.

So anyway, British Railways.

So

BR, it's a funny one.

So BR was an absolutely necessary move because the railways had just been absolutely hammered by the Second World War.

Well, they'd been hammered by both world wars and they'd never really caught up in the interwar years.

And so our railways were kind of just a bit of a shambles.

And,

you know, much as the US had successfully done in the First World War, it kind of had made sense to run them under one unified organization, which had been a bit of a boredom combining kind of the four grouping companies.

But they kind of knew, right, okay,

we're going to be nationalized.

Annoyingly, as often happens with a big change like this, this did cut or this did stop a lot of modernization efforts in their tracks.

For example, quite a lot of creation projects were going on that the nationalization uh you know all the stuff to do with nationalization kind of stopped in its tracks but i mean clement attlee in many ways like sort of like climate stalin in the bad way in the sense that like if you're nationalizing stuff like the national coal board for instance then you're like we got to do something with all this coal apart from everything else you know

quite we're we're we're sort of like gonna make sure that everybody has good jobs

and this is a genuinely factor in exactly genuinely a factory in us keeping hold of steam for as long as we did it because we had a lot of good coal and a lot of good coal jobs.

And why would you not run the railway with steam locomotives?

But

so, you know, there was still a realization fairly quickly, there was a realization that I know everything's still fucked, and we're going to really need to look into the future.

And so, if we jump forward to the next slide, we have an oft-maligned bit of documentation, which is the

modernization plan, 1955, modernization, re-equipped the British Railways.

This context is all important, by the way, for where we get get to in the future.

This is all very important stuff.

So, modernization, kind of often stated as a failure by kind of rail nerds who've bought the treasury sort of line on this.

Treasury, our longtime enemy in this story, I'm afraid.

So, it's often stated as a failure, but it's kind of, I find it difficult to agree with that modernization is a failure because it really moved BR forwards in a pretty dramatic way.

If you go to the next slide, I'll show you one example of this, which is like fancy schnancy signaling.

Look at this.

Look at this fancy stuff.

Look at this.

Wow.

Look at this person who's here.

Who appears to be on like a Moog board.

It's like Deadmouse, but from 1955.

Controlling steam trains with this.

Well,

yeah, actually.

Weirdly.

I mean, increasing number of diesels, but yeah, plenty of steam is still running at this point.

A decent whack of steam still running at this point.

We're still building steam locals at this point.

This is also like when

it was like, okay, we got to buy all these diesel locomotives really quick so you couldn't have any standardized designs because you got to buy them from 50 manufacturers.

this weird like warship class stuff yeah

and don't get me wrong that was wasteful but actually it kind of ended up like kind of worked out in the end and actually you know it was a bit of a move past and break thing situation yes it would have been better to standardize and go for a kind of a standard uh locomotive and we kind of learned that the hard way and there there are various reasons for this but but i would say that that the the mess of the of the the locomotives partly because history railway history is often written by the train nerds right and so they're all like well the diesels were a mess so modernization was a failure but actually if you look look at the infrastructure, modernization represented huge amounts of track renewal, massive re-signaling projects.

We saw the beginning of what kind of was a bit of a ruling program of electrification, right the way through to kind of the East Coast mainline getting electrified in the 80s, actually, was initiated by the modernization plan.

Because, like, until about 1950, like a third of signals in Britain were just like children waving a red jumper, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

You know, the flannel petticoats and such.

So, so, like, this, this was kind of pretty.

And, you know, Britain, once again, our rail network sort of started catching up in terms of its signaling.

We started having signaling systems that were world leading again, whereas we kind of hadn't for a long while.

Imagine Britain being world leading in anything.

Wow.

I know, right?

Not a thing we can do.

The challenge, the trouble the railways had, though, this is all happening at the same time as we started seeing the emergence of the motorway construction sort of boom in the UK.

Unlike the railway, which was very much centralized and therefore Treasury could just get his grubby hands all over it, the motorway construction was pretty decentralized and kind of regionally led.

And so Treasury didn't really have much involvement.

So we just have Glasgow City Council decide to run the M8 through a big portion of their city, you know?

Oh, yeah.

F's in the chat.

Yeah.

Oh, dear.

So, so the Treasury, you know, like BR, British Railways had to kind of directly please Treasury, who are a bunch of short memory psychopaths.

So there was like very, that was a problem.

And so organization.

Attlee Treasury as well.

Like, it's just endemic.

There's that you can't get people out of these modes of thinking.

Attlee's failure was that he didn't round them all up and drive them off the end of Brighton Pier.

That was his failure.

Fuckers.

Anyway, so Treasury continued to exist.

I can't stop staring at this guy here.

All I can think is.

I am the key master.

You the gatekeeper.

Yes.

He has a very nice.

I mean, he's got a lovely cardi there.

It's just very, very nice knitwear.

Yeah, it's good.

And his glasses are good.

He's just...

You know what?

That guy is serving.

I like what he's got going on there.

He's got to bring back 1950s engineer.

Oh, hell yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Oh, beautiful.

I don't like glasses.

Yeah, no, not those.

Leave those guys.

Join the treasury at the end of Brunton Pierre.

So let's just have a look at some numbers, shall we?

Let's jump to the next slide.

Because I want to look at some numbers.

So, okay, immediately.

Treasury fails.

Let's find a failure.

Yes, do it.

Numbers are important.

We don't have to look at all these these numbers.

The important number here, so this is basically the income and expenses of the railway in 1961 versus 2021.

And I've normalized it into pre-LizTrust pounds for everyone's convenience.

So

the important number here is the bottom one.

So if you've got the top, you've got all the income.

The bottom, you've got all the expenses.

So Treasury were very angry that in 1961, the government, the deficit of the railways was £1.9 billion in

pre-trust funny money.

whereas in 2021 the deficit was 18 billion pounds

so that's those are the those are not because of inflation those are the same equivalent numbers in 2022 prices so when people i get angry at the railway going oh yeah no we'll do more efficiency it's like no treasury have always just wanted more and more um so we had a much more efficient railway running without much of it being cut back in 1961 versus 2021 so yeah i just thought i'd throw that up there for people who for the real number crunchers to get to get to get uh to get angry.

So,

that's a big drop in freight traffic.

My God.

Yes, it is, isn't it?

Because

we got rid of it all onto the roads because that felt like a good idea.

Yeah, we're talking about a bunch of the industry generating it as well.

If you look at the British sectorization, and we'll talk about sectorization,

one big sector of it was, for instance, coal.

Don't do that anymore.

Don't like there's still coal trains, but like we don't, you know,

mine it.

Well, it's just gone.

there's no steel as well last coal train ran a couple weeks ago right yeah we we we just we just don't yeah we don't need coal in this country anymore you know and and and likewise like steel traffic similarly like later on steel traffic massively massively diminished you know we did a lot of steel in this country we don't anymore um yeah what's interesting is how similar the traffic receipts the passenger traffic receipts are like there's there's there's barely a bit there's like a lot of billion in it which is actually quite close okay fewer people traveling for sure but that's it's kind of interesting how close those are as you say versus freight, which has been obliterated.

It's kind of interesting.

Um, and we, you know, we're earning 0.3 billion more from retail, apparently, or some other shit.

Hooray, sort of, like, Cornish pasty companies, you know,

selling more sandwiches, yeah, exactly.

Selling something, saying something in like um Leon that is approximately food nets.

Oh, we'll get, we'll, we'll get to sandwiches.

I am looking forward to talking about sandwiches, so finding something I have like expertise on.

Yeah, I hear you.

So let's uh, let's go to the next slide and prepare the the booze.

Here is Dr.

Beeching is indeed here.

There he is.

There he is.

There he is.

He looks so nice and friendly.

How could anyone find him offensive?

He does look like a smug cunt, doesn't he?

But

probably not a bad suit.

But I like the there's like typical extra worker guy who's kind of got the dumb shoulder in the middle.

He doesn't have to hops like this anymore.

And thank you.

That dude on the left looks like fucking Joseph Goebbels.

He really does.

He really does.

Like, you've got West Treaty's half-brother on the right-hand side, but the guy on the left is absolutely straight from the bunker.

You don't really seem like a broad cop anymore either.

No, no, no.

It's a sad loss.

It's a real

stopper recipe.

I genuinely have a theory that stuff like steroids and even just more gym accessibility has taken away one of the great British like stanchions of public life, which was the big big lad.

Yes.

Because like if you were gonna look like this,

if you had this like, I don't know, what is it, fucking phenotype or whatever, now you're in the gym all the time.

You don't look like this.

I just can't take them seriously.

I need a large lad to be saying, what's all this then?

You don't have the combination of like the genes that code for this build and also a diet of mostly meat pies and racism anymore.

Exactly.

I don't respect it if it's coming from a guy who looks like Andrew Tate or something.

Yeah,

this guy is on the protein.

You know, he's drinking fucking bone broth, and it shouldn't be like that.

He should be like

drinking stout and eating meat pies.

Exactly, exactly.

14.

Dying at 35 of like a coronary, you know?

Yeah.

So

we had this guy, Dr.

Beeching, Dr.

Richard Beeching, much maligned, was brought in as the chair of the, as the last chair of the British Transport Commission and the first chair of the newly formed British Railways Board.

Um,

sorry, I'm just kicking back to this picture.

These signs

they're ostensibly they're protesting him, but what they're doing is they're acting as his hype men.

Yeah,

waiting to see Flava Flay back here somewhere.

Yeah, they've got this in a really nice, like kind of painted, like

really nicely done, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr.

Beeching is here.

It's like, whoa, fuck.

Check this guy out.

He's got like a police escort and everything.

Dr.

Beeching and his medicine band.

Yeah, it's just hyping him up.

Well, funnily enough,

Beeching must, we'll get to, in fact, next slide, we'll get to what he's doing.

But anyway, Beeching arrived and was told by basically set about his role was to attempt to make the railways revenue neutral, just as the modernization plan had done and kind of failed to do.

That was what he was supposed to do.

So if you go to the next slide, please, we get to the thing that's the kind of age of innocence of like, you know, village green cricket and, you know, like

old maids cycling to church

and your like local branch line that had three passengers a decade.

That's it.

And so this is exactly that.

You know, he, and it's as much the fact that he accelerated the, the, the, the, the, the, he said, get steam the fuck off my railway.

He did indeed get rid of a lot of fringe branch lines.

And that's the thing that everyone remembers, right?

Is the fact, oh, he closed a bunch of rural railway lines.

And, you know, in some cases, that might have been a bad idea and whatever.

These are the two, you know, so the reshaping of British Railways, by the way, the Beeching report, as it's often called.

I mean, we're going to call it the Reshinging.

The Axe, as it's then referred to, came in two parts.

I have them behind me of my shoulder.

I have literal original copies behind me on my shoulder because it's an interesting thing to have a hold of.

Very interesting thing to read through, actually.

I did a rail now on it, and I've written stuff on it.

So if you want a detailed deep dive into this, this isn't the episode.

You can find it elsewhere.

But

one of the things, so it's much maligned.

You know, it kind of was, in a way, it was just a rebranding of the kind of the ongoing modernization efforts.

Yes, it chopped a lot of lines, but actually, it chopped a lot of pointless rubbish, to be honest.

I'm crying into my like rear lay that the kind of like Uppington upon Blossom like sort of like model railway was

branch joint line was cut, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This, this, like, kind of beautiful, pointless like artifacts, because I don't want a railway that's

a little tank engine with the happy face, yeah, yeah, exactly.

This guy put, like, had all of the cast of Thomas the Tank Engine cut apart with Oxycepple and torches.

Yes, I should have got that picture, that high-res scan of the Audrey picture where

they've got a guy with a cutting torch just taking the faces off

the Thomas the Tank Engine Steve Locus.

I love that.

It's so good.

It's so punk.

So,

actually, what?

Sorry, that was a weird laugh.

Yeah, okay.

I'll let my psychiatrist evaluate that one.

I've been under a lot of stress over the last few months.

Anyway, right, so let's jump to the next picture, and I'm going to talk about what reshaping actually represented, which was a real acceleration, some very important and successful things.

One of those being

the kind of the first successful deployment of intermodal rail using these container shipping, you know, shipping containers as a system.

So these had existed all over the place up to this point, but the first proper deployment of them was in the UK and thanks very much thanks to Beeching himself.

So this was highly successful.

And we still have a railway company called Freightliner.

It kind of sustains, spoiler alert.

So, very, very successful, but also intercity.

You know,

just

introducing the NCC concept.

I have personally barbecued Thomas the Tank Engine.

Design me the best font to have ever existed, or you're next.

Yes, and it, goddamn, it worked.

And good grief, we will, I mean, yeah, we're going to get there.

So, um, maybe he was railway's Napoleon.

He was.

So, you know what, Beeching, people say, you know, okay, he might well have been a bit of a prat, but actually, I think he is annoyingly maligned, much as he was a, you know, he's a Tory and blah, blah, whatever.

But I like, actually, he did some very large, very positive things for our railways.

And I think it's, I think there are a lot of boomer types who like to, because he got rid of steam and got rid of their, exactly as you're saying over that innocence.

He kind of, it was around a moment where that innocence was lost and everyone's hung it around his neck.

But actually, a lot of what he did was really good, but it wasn't all good.

And the biggest mistake he made was not closing a bunch of rural railway lines, but it was the removal of network duplication in the cities in the UK.

And this is going to come and haunt us momentarily.

The removal of like the network duplication in the cities.

So getting rid of like having a having the opportunity to have one station that was the suburban station and one station that was in city station.

No, it was no, have just wherever you can, just have one station and get rid of all the duplicate lines.

That was a really big error.

So basically saying,

generally, just deprioritizing suburban rail in the UK was one of the things that Beech and Report did.

And it was, you know, reshaping that was its biggest failure by a long way.

You're still in this weird situation where, like, the sort of like you'll be in a British city that has one train station, and that train station still has a name that implies the existence of others in that city.

Like,

I'm pulling examples out of my arse here.

A bunch of these have other stations now, like Bristol, Temple, Meads, right?

Or like Liverpool, Lion Street, or like Glasgow, Queen Street, right?

Where it's like this implies that there are others, and often there are not because there used to be, and there aren't.

Yeah, exactly.

And the only reason we're able to have a northeast corridor in the United States is because

several parallel lines were combined into a separate line for freight that was only able to be done strategically because we had conrail at the time.

You want some

placed.

You want some redundancy.

Yes.

And this is the challenge, exactly.

And so whilst actually the rail network had you know, not as much redundancy as we might like today, but actually had some redundancy in it in terms of north-south main lines, for example, although not enough on the east-west axis.

It was in the city centers that we didn't because that was seen partly, it was seen as a good way to make real estate or to make some cash was to sell off that land, um, prime real estate in city centers rather than retaining.

And often that ended up getting used for nasty urban motorways and shit like that.

So, yeah, but uh, now I the handle messiah drop is about to land.

Because next slide, please.

Oh, god, I don't even have that.

Can I do it?

I realize I can't play them through here.

Yeah, do somebody you want to get actually.

Yes, but

there it is

because

63 was reshaping.

65 was the time that we moved from British Railways and the limping lion to the double arrow, the corporate identity symbol.

I, behind me, have a copy of the corporate identity manual.

The ruby of power.

BR got shit hot.

And,

you know, all of a sudden it started looking really modern.

It wasn't just the branding.

Branding is very important, but it wasn't just the branding.

Like the overall system really started modernizing at this point.

It was kind of

the end of the

beginning for,

yeah, so it was the end of the beginning, if you like, for the way that British Rail and British Rail operations as a unified thing would be.

It was kind of the point at which from this point onwards, we knew kind of what we needed to do and we started getting on with doing it.

It's like deadly serious.

Like this is the age of the train, right?

Now then, no, let's not talk about him.

Yeah, but like, still, we're going to like lean into this, right?

Yeah.

And we did in a big way.

You did the APT episode

150 years ago when you did it.

And actually, part of that was the optimism of the future.

There was a really positive, optimistic view of what the future is going to look like.

And we did spend quite a bit of money on research.

You know, BR Research was a beacon of light that genuinely revealed, you know,

we do the reason we have high-speed rail across the world is because of the work that was done at the BR Research Department.

You know, Alan Wickens,

thankfully still alive, actually, one of the great railway engineers in history, still alive.

I would love to go meet him up in the northeast.

He gave the world advanced your dampers and the science behind how to make your train go faster than 125 miles an hour.

And it was thanks to him that everywhere else could do, the TGV wouldn't exist without him.

You could not do high-speed conventional rail without the work that he did.

So that was all happening thanks to BR.

So thank you, BR.

No one else has the wherewithal to do basic research anymore.

That's right.

Just like as a piece of like design, as well.

I'm going to talk about this so much, but like every single thing about the branding, whether this is, whether it's like the rune of power, as we see here, or even just stuff like I mentioned sectorization before because it's something that like really struck me as like, hey, we're going to have like, you know, we're going to divide up sort of the main freight structure into like a kind of series of things that like make sense, like coal, steel, aggregates, uh, and like, you know, like parcels and shit.

But we're also going to make sure each of them has like a distinct visible

like sort of identity that's going to be beautiful as well, even if it's going to be on a diesel locomotive that's covered in like dust half the time.

Yeah, yeah, it's also funny that there was a few narrow gauge steam locomotives that survived for a long time under British rail control that eventually got the double arrow and the blue

game in, in, yeah, well, it's just just

specifically the one in Aberystwyth, the Radel Valley line that had the

BR Blue steam locos.

Very weird.

So, yeah, lots of other successes at this point.

So, from this point onwards, we still had, don't get me wrong, we still had pretty messy industrial relations going on.

Like, it was a very APT episode, for example, that the union fight over the fact they only had one seat in the front cab ended up costing more than the whole research

budget of APT.

So, clearly, there are still messes, but it was also a period of kind of substantial modernization and improvement.

We kind of had a loosely rolling program for electrification across various lines.

As

with the demise of Beeching,

not literally, they didn't kill him, but

they told him to go off and come back to ICI.

They told him to go back and do more explosive inventions over ICI again.

And so Barbara Castle came up and gave us passenger transport executives.

So that was kind of doing some level of devolution to city regions to allow them to take control of their passenger services.

So there's lots of good stuff, lots of station openings.

And by the mid-80s, we actually had a turnaround in passenger numbers.

So rather than passenger numbers dropping, that kind of leveled off through the through the 80s and started climbing by kind of 82, 83, the line go up, which is very good.

There is this situation where you know British Rail is doing more and more stuff and you're just like,

you know how Streeting said the other week that like Britain was in danger of being an NHS with a country attached and how this was some terrible, like unspeakable fate, right?

I think we should like, should have lent into that, right?

And just like, we do full communism under the auspices of British Rail.

Like, it's a kind of a train.

It's a train with a country attached.

Yeah, it's a train company with a country attached.

Exactly.

You could do the backwards of Mexico and put the navy under control of the railroad.

Why the hell not, man?

I would love that.

I mean, in a way, BR did have a little navy for us.

We'll talk about them in a minute.

So, right, so next slide, please.

Briefly, so I alluded to the Transport Act in 1968.

This kind of was the first time when the British government acknowledged that railways

aren't just going to make a profit in and of themselves and they serve a public good, a social good.

And they started quantifying it and therefore understanding how much money

social good justified the railways getting, which is quite positive.

Also, passenger transport areas, what became the PTEs and sort of devolving power, a brief bit of light, a brief moment where we had the right kind of network structure before the bad things happened.

So let's hop forwards again.

So that was 1968.

We hop forwards.

We have to jump a couple of years forwards to this, though, because one of the things that BR started doing was kind of hiving off bits of itself into sort of subsidiaries that were wholly owned, but were also their own corporate structure.

So in 1970, we had an organization called British Rail Engineering Limited created, Braille, as it's often referred to.

And this is the start of a slippery slope, folks.

So pay close attention to this.

So that was

making British Rail into a kind of like startup incubator, you know, where it has spin-outs.

Yeah.

So Braille was the train manufacturer.

So, this covered all of the places that made almost all the places that made the train.

And so, actually building the damn thing.

So, next slide, please, because there are other things that started getting hived off.

So, here, so yeah, in fact, on the left-hand side, in fact, this one's for you know, but there's the old Glasgow works there,

still doing some railway stuff, but a lot less.

Beautiful van, is that a comma on the left?

I think it is

incredible.

We used to build things in this country, namely weirdly shaped vehicles that would be used in the Terry Gillian film Brazil.

Jesus.

Yes.

That's a reach and a wonderful one.

I like the shed on the flat car.

Yeah.

So on the left-hand side, you have British English.

On the right-hand side, you have a static caravan.

I'm going off to my Brellham.

Someone doing

holidays in one of these outside Portsmouth.

God, shoot me in the back of the head.

So on, yeah, Brell on one thing, but in 1979, um, Sea Link, the so the fair.

So, we talk about BR having a navy, they did have a navy, quite a large one.

Uh, they didn't have any guns, particularly, but yeah, they had a big navy of uh ferries, a pretty massive navy, and some of those ferries are pretty modern as they continue to modernize.

I did an episode on Sea Link a while back, it's kind of an interesting history.

Um, and in 1979, uh, Sea Link was formed as its own sort of subsidiary, uh, which also had like the Belgian and French railways kind of part bought into it, which this is a photo from uh

I suspect Bruce is it is it Belgium or a deranged Belgian freak attempted to ship a static caravan on a ferry?

Yes, exactly.

My dad.

Static caravan enthusiast would never in his wildest dreams have like considered considered this, you know?

Yeah.

So this is Dieppe, actually, maybe.

So this might well be France.

Anyway, some nice, a very nice

kind of mainland European locomotive there with some stuff behind it.

Very nice, nice pictures, lovely.

so those two now, the first actual privatization of British Rail happened in 1982 when we so next slide, please.

I just, I, I just, I just noticed like these, these, these passenger cars just look so fucking old.

Yeah.

Yeah, those cars.

You still got a car cement on the roofs and everything.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, those, those, those have got to be like inter-war.

They're old.

They're really old.

They're really, really old.

Really old.

Lovely.

beautiful stuff so next slide please uh because in 1982

british transport hotels are sold off this is the first actual privatization of british rail is when the british transport hotels which was part of br were sold off so uh rip to the station hotel in aberdon and the adelphi sucks it's a it's a great idea and like it's one that's still being capitalized on now is that like you have a train station that has a hotel attached to it so you don't have to worry about getting to your train like there's these still exist in a lot of places.

They're just privatized and you get like a, an entrance from the station to the hotel that's called something else that has like three corporate fucking identities.

And even if because railways have got faster, there's not as much of a need for overnight stays.

You know what's not a bad idea for a railway that has lots of, I don't know,

cancellations delays.

Well, yeah, that as well.

But also, like, these things double up as conference centers and training centers and might have been a good idea to just have hotels and make income from them, question mark.

But if you're on a particularly long run and the crew has to stay overnight, well, if you own a hotel, that's a lot cheaper.

Well, yeah, exactly.

And also having these tactical okay, so again, Britain's small enough that the need for these had certainly diminished as train speeds had increased.

But we do lots of overnight shifts that are near railways.

And maybe having hotels that

people with their oranges can go and sleep in overnight might also not have been a bad idea rather than paying travelodge, you know, over and above the odds.

So that's nationalized.

Nationalized Travelodge.

Nationalized Travelodge, exactly.

So, let's jump forwards to the next slide.

And a picture I took yesterday, in fact, of the footstep of a York-built train.

Train Brell York, Train Makers to the World.

There we go.

This is on the footstep of a Class 150 Sprinter.

So, a lot of you listening to this right now and watching this will have a visual image of that, which should entertain you greatly at the idea of that being exported to the world.

But anyway, no, so in 1984, c-link were sold off proper in 1988 braille was sold off proper so it was sold off and then there were management buyouts and all the boring corporate that happens in weird neoliberal world where stuff gets privatized but yeah so so braille was privatized and crucially I said we were going to talk about sandwiches.

Traveler's Fair was sold off in 1988 as well.

Travelers Fair was the BR sort of catering organization.

And one of the brands that it had launched was Uppercrust.

The puns, you know, I knew it was too key to be like, you know, a private invention.

Quite.

It was, of course, all the good stuff ends up being a state invention.

So, yeah, Upper Crust, which is still in lots of stations in the UK and will still serve you an immensely overpriced and disappointing crusty baguette.

Still exists.

So hooray to Upper Crust.

I did say we were going to talk about sandwiches.

But also, Travel is Fair weirdly.

It's what holds this podcast together.

Yeah, this is it.

Yeah.

I mean,

I mean, God, I would love a cheese steak right now.

The thing is, Warren Zeven's advice to like enjoy every sandwich, very difficult if you live in Britain, even more so if you regularly travel by train.

Um, yes.

I, yeah, I, I mean, it's, it's also this thing because it kind of like one of the biggest like kind of

sort of thing, targets on British Rails back was the catering for a long time.

Yes, it was.

To be like, you know, you get like a sort of famously terrible sandwich, right?

And then you look at how much this famously terrible sandwich or like burger or whatever cost you, and it's like, oh, it was like 70 pence or whatever.

As opposed to now, where you get like the still the worst food ever, but it costs you like a fiver.

What exactly

was in the sandwiches that made it so terrible?

I need a description of the British railway.

Well, I can answer this for you by the fact that I was on a TransPennine Express train, and a sort of large segment of the audience will kind of get a sense of where I'm going with this.

And I had

a vegan sausage bap that you could only describe as satanic.

So every

different component of this was,

I suspect, made of like a slightly different wetness level of cardboard.

I don't know how I survived the experience, but like, just like

meant to be hot, nominally heated

and like

cold and hard as bone.

Um,

yeah, no, I think British Rail, right, because people got used to the like very striking design and because it became invisibleized, became like dismal and banal to people.

And so, you get a lot of like sort of Clarksonian takes about it, where it's like absolutely, you know, you get like sort of grey beef or whatever, and uh, sort of like grey and navy blue, and grey and grey, uh, and it's like the worst

sandwich in the world, Exactly.

Yeah.

And we kind of, it's exactly what you alluded to.

We inherited, because it was a state entity, we ended up kind of imparting our, and this is a kind of a general class thing.

And there's all sorts of annoying British shit that gets wound into this, but like BR kind of, like, whilst it's an incredibly good thing and incredibly successful on lots of different metrics, it kind of, we're going to, we're about to jump forward to 1990 and

we'll jump to the next slide in a second.

But like, it very much started to, well, not started to, throughout its entire lifetime, like the upper classes hated it because it was, you know, it was, it was the proles being in charge of a big thing.

And in some cases, being in charge of their beloved railway that they'd argued so much against or their great-grandfathers had argued so much against 100 years before.

I do also note, by the way, in passing, that British Rail Sandwich does have a fairly extensive Wikipedia article.

Of course it does.

What I don't get is, you know, we don't, I mean, Amtrak serves some pretty mediocre food, but it's not like we legend.

God damn.

The thing is,

it built up a life of its own.

I don't think the sandwiches were ever that bad.

They just kind of built up a bit of a bit of an allegory for being, you know, probably popularized by a two-ronnie sketch or whatever.

You know, they like built up this banality of like, oh, it's the state running things.

And we have to just shrug our shoulders at the banality of the state running things and the idea that it wasn't.

And it to me is a little bit of that chip on the shoulder thing about all those chippy Americans with their entrepreneurialism and all this shit.

I just, I I feel like a post-Soviet Russian, right?

In that, like, I'm not saying it wasn't bad, but I've seen the alternative.

On the top of the wheel, you had somewhere to sit down.

Yeah, exactly, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and everything they told us about communism was a lie, but everything they told us about capitalism was the truth.

So let's jump towards the next slide.

Sorry, Devin, I'm so sorry.

We've slowed ourselves down a bit to not let us.

Yeah, I knew I would do this.

So I apologize.

Sectorization.

Sectorization.

You can look at every single one of these, a beautiful corporate identity.

Look at

delivery services.

Sorry, sorry.

I'm trying to restrain myself.

It's like the

New Jersey transit of Britain.

My first commute to school was a network Southeast still just about networker.

Was that class 365, I want to say.

Yeah, very likely.

The noise that those things make is like embedded in my skull at this point.

I have fond memories.

Actually, were you the southern end?

It might have been a 465.

Quite possibly.

This would have been Shortlands out to West Dulwich, if that tells you anything.

It would have been a 465.

You're very close.

It would have been a 465, also made in York, actually.

The ones with the slamming doors.

No, no, they're

club doors.

I still catch them them today to go to denmark hill regularly

no the the slam doors are like in my head as what my dad takes to to work at like cannon street you know and actually i'm glad you bring those trains up nova because BR hadn't just been like, oh, we've made our train, our old NACA trains look nice.

No, they, they'd, by this point, so this is 1990, right?

By this point, BR had absolutely turned things around.

You know, we had a railway that was the,

it was incredibly impressive.

Ridership had been climbing solely since the mid-1980s.

Average subsidy was as low as like 20% of running costs, which was amongst the most efficient railway in Europe.

Like pretty impressive stuff.

You know, we had, we had, you know, even in London, which funny enough had ended up with a lot of the oldest stock being left over, we started seeing a rolling program of fleet renewals.

So we'd seen regional railways getting new fleets.

Obviously, intercity had had, by this point, we were starting to see the appearance of the 225s as well.

So we were starting to see fleet modernization right across the board, which is cascading stuff down and getting rid of the really old crap shit.

So, this was you don't have a compartment, you don't have a door, you can't do the thing.

I forget which, like, uh, sort of British eccentric this was whose train went past his garden on the way home, and he used to like pull down the window and throw his briefcase into his own garden to save carrying it home.

Quite possible,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, yeah, that's that, that, yeah, the good stuff.

So, at the time, also, so, so let's um, let's uh, let's hop forward a slide actually, um, because often people cite privatization as being this wonderful explosion in ridership, and it's all because of privatization, but that's because what they do is chop the x-axis off at the start of privatization.

But if, Roz, if you drawn madness the line that's at like kind of look at John Madness at 1990 and see where the line is around then,

and and then look at where if you go back to 1980, you can see that things have been climbing since the mid 80s.

So you can exactly.

That line's very good.

Thanks, Ross.

Yeah, that's perfect.

Can I add one more diversion?

It's about the last slide.

Didn't have my favorite British Rail sort of hived off thing there, which is Red Star Parcels.

Yes.

Lest you forget that all of these people were like crypto communists and like ardent trade unionists.

Fun story.

Red Star Parcels, the massive logo is still attached to the north-facing side of Euston Station if you want to go and see it.

Could have had that instead of Amazon Prime.

I'm just saying.

Literally, Red Star Parcels was the express rapid parcel delivery scheme that used like kind of basically passenger express trains to move stuff rapidly.

It's a very good idea.

And we're, as with so many things on the railway, in the process of very expensively reinventing it right now.

So, yeah, so on the one side, you've got the ridership showing you how it kind of dropped through

from the kind of the post-war years, dropped through to the kind of the mid-80s and then started climbing.

And there are reasons why it dropped off again in the early 90s that we'll get to in a moment.

They involved cocaine.

But

the next graph shows you the government subsidies and showing that subsidies were extremely low through the late 80s.

They climbed a bit for cocaine reasons in the early 90s and then dropped again in the final years of BR.

So next slide, please.

And very briefly,

a question.

Oh, yes.

Ask the question.

I have heard that a good amount of this ridership uptick is like all TFL.

Not entirely.

A good chunk of it is, but no, actually, we had a lot of climbing usage in the cities outside of London as well.

So it's not entirely London.

Actually, I do have a version of this that splits between the different,

but

no, it's not quite that.

Perhaps whoever told you that might have slightly oversold it.

Certainly a major component because funnily enough, the only place that we really built a good suburban and urban rail network was london uh funnily enough when you build that railway uh people will use it talking of which talking of london rail investments so next slide um it's 1990 and we have this um funny thing called thameslink providing the first high capacity suburban rail link through london uh next slide again we have um planning for this funny old thing cross rail here um running yeah so that's uh you know so all these optimistic things if we go to the next slide we were even talking about planning for new high-speed rail links between the channel tunnel london and the north of England.

What an idea.

You could get a train from,

you know, from Rome all the way to Glasgow and have it be like 200 miles an hour the whole way through.

Yeah, even on a slightly more mundane level, we had

this funny project called the Trans-Pennine Route Upgrade being mooted in 1990s.

Very interesting.

So the next slide, sorry, Roz.

I did say this would get through them at a whack.

So, yeah, the TransPennine Route upgrade here, which I'm sure that is long delivered.

That electrification presumably finished in the mid-90s.

You could go to Hull.

You could go to Hull.

You could have some kind of a TransPennion Express.

You could, yes.

Actually, interestingly, TransPen Express was a brand name that BR came up with and did stick on some of their funny, curvy-window, glass-fronted DMUs for a while.

So, and actually, if you want to read about some of the stuff that BR was in the process of doing in 1990, then you can go to the next slide, please.

You can have a look at this nice report called Future Rail, the Next Decade.

This is a nice, optimistic thing.

The trouble is, as soon as this document was published,

the fact that we, well, we have to, of course, jump forward.

So, next slide, please.

1991.

And there's this guy appearing freshly.

Shout out to my dad's leather jacket

there.

Weird.

Hey, we're the same age.

We are the same age.

Yeah, there's me, this tiny little weirdo.

I'm not supplying a baby picture for the podcast.

No, I don't.

Am I?

Is this TMI for the hogs?

No, maybe.

No, what we have to talk about is cocaine.

Because what happens when you're in your economic?

Yeah, I was about to say.

Next slide, please.

Because what happens when your entire economy is run by people who are just insanely coked up?

Oh, well, they obviously make stupid decisions.

And obviously, it went to absolute the UK economy, the financialized economy, in fact, the world economy went to complete rat shit

in the early 90s.

Indeed.

So what happened there was

we'd had, in the UK at least, we'd had a decade of Thatcher and us all having no money.

And so

the line that the reason that the rise that started in the 80s dropped back again in the early 90s was because

a decade of kind of austerity

Keynes fucking told you so.

Yeah, I mean, Marxism more prominently, but like, even

Keynesianism tells you this is going to happen.

You should have dropped money from helicopters.

You should have dropped money from helicopters.

And if you go to next slide, please, because more fuckhead economists are going to get involved in this situation.

Those fuckhead economists are the horror show Tufton Street Adam Smith Institute, folks, and the Treasury.

Now, what do these

fun-loving guys get up to?

Well, what they do is they

get together, they presumably get up to nothing nefarious, and they, next slide, please, publish a document called

New Opportunities for the Railways, or should I say, heavily input into the white paper, New Opportunities for the Railways.

So up to 1990, no one was counting, not even Thatcher was countenancing national, privatizing the, you know, privatizing what was left of British Rail, which, let's be fair, was most of British Rail was still just one thing.

It's like it's too deeply embedded.

And also people are kind of fond of it in the kind of love to hate sort of way.

Like as much as the kind of the you get the sandwich thing, it's also like this is a kind of shared national thing that we all hate.

It was yeah, yeah, it was

exactly

complaining about shit that we do well in this country.

We love it.

We cannot get enough of it.

Cannot fucking get enough of it.

We cannot probably get enough of destroying the good things.

You accidentally start believing the stuff you're complaining about.

We are doing it now to the NHS.

Yeah.

The cycle fucking repeats itself, and there's not much left to do it to after that.

So, this document, New Opportunities for the Railways, was absolutely penned by a combination of the Treasury and the Adam Smith Institute.

The reason why no one had been really countenancing privatization of the railways, despite asset stripping everything else, was because the railways were just too complicated.

There were too many interrelated moving parts.

It was also a safety-critical industry in a way that was

that made kind of the way that risk would flow through the industry quite complicated as well.

It's also quite strategic, like

in the same way as like Stalin never fucking with his nuclear physicists.

It's like you want this kind of state capacity until you don't, you know?

Exactly.

So July

1992, this thing was published and it was a mess.

It proposed what can only be described as an atomization of the rail network.

And there was this one guy, this conservative MP, Robert Adley, who was like the chair of the Transport Select Committee at the time.

In his words, successive appearances of ministers and officials in the committee had shown a deep lack of understanding of how their proposed system would fit together.

But then he died of heart failure in May 1993.

So, F.

So, what that John Major shot him with a counter gun, you know?

Yeah, well, quite.

So, um, the cancer gun sent to heart attacks.

Sorry, sorry, we're trying to fix it.

So, next slide, please.

Uh, they did that, they did the crazy thing.

So, uh, okay, deep breath.

This is the Railways Act 1993, which is an act to provide for the appointment and function of a rail regulator and director of passenger rail franchising and of users, consolative committees for the railway industry and for certain ferry services to make new provisions with respect to the provision of railway service and the persons by whom they're provided or to secure their provision to make provision for and in connection with the grant and acquisition of rights over and the disposal of other transfer investing of any pro.

I can't even fancy that.

I love statutory construction.

Can you see why I didn't want a career in this?

Whatever it is, protecting America.

The

bullshit nonsense.

Hang yeah, it stands for something.

Oh, yes.

The uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and abstract terrorism.

Parentheses, USA Patriot, close parentheses.

Act of 2001.

I would say

you should at most use one semicolon in a sentence.

I really liked when my dad used to watch Glenn Beck.

Hi, Dad.

Hi, mom, if you're listening.

Is that just out of malice?

Yeah, we're going to get there.

It was to see how long he could last before he turned the TV off in rage.

Oh, I see.

He would time himself and see how long he could last.

But Glenn Beck's great complaint about, and one of the right-wing talking points about the Affordable Care Act when it came out, was like, well, it's too long.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's like 5,000 pages or whatever.

Not that it fucking matters.

But my dad was like, all right, cool.

I'll do it in one sentence.

The United States of America hereby adopts universal health care and authorizes the Department of Health and Healing Services to oversee SAM.

Done.

Boom.

Oh, man.

I

shout out to Liam's dad.

You know,

that would have been beautiful.

He had some real good takes about

Cuba the other day that I'm sorry I didn't get to post.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

They were nutty.

I mean, they're

we in trouble with your dad for the Cuba episode.

No, he liked a Cube episode.

I've been consulting with a friend of the show, Noah, to try to get him to Havana.

Just once before my dad dies, he should see the fruits of his labor?

Question mark.

Oh, yeah.

So next slide.

I personally intervened to prevent several Castro assassination attempts from somebody.

Yeah, my dad actually beat Batista with a baseball bat.

I would actually love to see that.

Thank you, Lee McCannison.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

So

this act,

what did it do?

Well, I used the word atomization earlier, and so I decided to do a diagram to show you what that looks like.

So here's British Rail on one side.

On the other side, if we go next slide, please.

I hate this.

Take it back.

It's like

a military PowerPoint episode.

What the shit is this?

Building state capacity in Afghanistan.

And I have simplified this slightly.

So

from one organization.

From one organization, British Rail, you end up with...

The first entity being created was Rail Track, which took over the rail infrastructure, like track signal stations.

Hey, they've got Transrail on there, which

I still think it's funny to have a sweatshirt with Transrail's logo on it.

Yeah,

so that was Rail Track, which took over the infrastructure, but it wasn't in charge of infrastructure maintenance.

No, no, no.

Seven infrastructure maintenance units and six track renewal units were set up to split off maintenance from operation.

This feels like a

cause any problems.

I am being driven to madness.

Yeah.

And we're only getting started.

Six freight operating companies were created

and

25 train operating units there.

There's a nice little blue sort of kind of battalion there of train operating companies.

Six freight operating companies, rail express services, one of the sectorization ones, which I don't remember.

Yes.

Mainline load haul,

transrail, freightliner, and weird triangle.

Oh, the weird triangle, I think, is actually the weird bit of the freight liner logo they did for a while.

Yeah, it's just my bad logo size shaping for my little diagram.

sure I didn't need that.

I know, it is a bit.

I much prefer the one with the BR arrow next to it, you pricks.

So then, that's not the worst bit of it, though, because

we end, okay, a whole bunch of regulating and franchising authorities and safety regulators and economic.

But the evilest part of this, the most evil part of this, I talked about the fact that BR had scrimmed and saved to have this rolling program of rolling stock kind of renewal.

And we ended up by this point quite a decent fleet in terms of age.

Like, okay, lots of Mark One stuff still floating around, but actually, you know, the BR had kind of got into a rolling program of fleet renewal.

Enter the Roscoes, the rolling stock operating companies, three of them.

Here they are: Angel, Eversholt, and Porterbrook, all still extant.

There are others who have entered the fray since then, but these three are still the big players.

And they were at the start all

consortia of banks and private equity.

And interesting things.

So, what did they do?

They got all these trains for unbelievable cheap prices, like criminally cheap prices.

Basically, they then lease these back to the train operators at eye water and cost with no oversight whatsoever.

This continues to be the main flow of cash out of the industry.

And it's absolutely zero coincidence that these groups

funneled all their cash via low or zero tax regimes.

I'm sure that that money re-enters the economy and like trickles down to

cocaine.

Yeah, the only trickling going on was the shit and the piss out of the out of the kind of the loose storage tanks that in the old stock that they have.

Because the trouble with the Roscoes,

they've landed this kind of massive, cheap asset that they could rent out at a high price.

Why spend money on it then?

Yeah, why spend money on it?

Exactly.

So it basically killed the UK train manufacturing industry.

So we lost, you know, in the aftermath of privatization, but the only orders that remained were kind of BRs kind of orders that were kind of rolling over.

New passenger trains then wouldn't be built until like kind of the early 2000s.

And we lost pretty much every well, we lost every single train manufacturer in the UK except for the one in Derby.

They all went.

We've since then opened new plants at extreme cost in Newton April and Newport.

But

we killed our train manufacturing industry as a result of the Roscoe's.

Brilliant.

Thank you, privatization.

They're all like foreign-owned.

I mean, well, I guess really the thing, the thing that gets me here, this is all being done in the name of efficiency through competition, right?

Exactly.

And if you look, if you know any railroad history

like globally,

competition between railroads has always been kind of fake.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's always a facade.

If you don't like your Roscoe, you can go and rent your train carriages for another Roscoe.

Yeah, exactly.

Which is the same three hedge funds in a trench coat, but the trench coat is a different color.

Whenever there's like actual competition going on, it's always destructive and it leads to a rate war that eventually drives both companies to bankruptcy.

Yeah, if they were serious about this, Roscos would be going out and sabotaging rolling stock of other companies, you know, like putting the windows in with ice axes and stuff.

Well,

a guy with a really evil mustache.

Did you just say the phrase funny you should say that?

I did.

Yeah,

sorry, November.

Yeah, no, um, uh, yeah, interestingly, both freight companies um refused to fit stuff on their trains that would even that would make their journey more efficient, such as like better sanding equipment if it risked improving the traction for the their competing freight train running behind them.

And likewise with so one of the one of the fun things about the

rolling stock operating companies is say one of the train operators wanted to fit a load of nice like new kit on the train, and they're like, no, no, we'll pay for it.

The rolling stock operator, so say it's like sensors improves

it like closed down tracks, like

line side crews with like shit and piss.

Yes,

having been lineside and had those trains go past and had to duck, it's not a very pleasant experience.

No, the Rolling Stone operating companies told those train operating companies to, oh, God, to strip all that stuff back out of the train when they came off lease.

So, yeah, really, really efficient system.

So, yeah, you allude to precisely this point, which is the psychopaths and treasury in the Adam Smith Institute, the whole British economy, and it's only more true today, is built around the idea that value comes from the interfaces between the things that do stuff, not from the things that do stuff.

And that was very much the logic of

privatization.

Rent seeking, which, as we know, Adam Smith was famously like a big fan of.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's why they invented the train landlord.

Yep.

And so we have literal train landlords.

We had Rail Track at this point, very much not what Network Rail is.

At this point, Rail Track, very much a contract management organization that didn't see itself in the business of being an engineering company, despite having, you know, what, 16,000 miles of railway to its name.

And also a whole bunch, you know, like the same number again of engineers, skilled engineers that it promptly attempted to sack or just generally make their life horrible.

Don't these Roscoes also cause problems with like the availability of rolling stocks?

So you wind up with the wrong

story.

Why is my train to Glasgow Central one carriage filled, every inch of it filled with people?

The thing about having a lease, the thing about leasing a train is that the more coaches you lease, the more expensive it is to lease the train.

And so you end up in a situation where, okay, so for most, okay, your train might be full.

You don't want a super full, basically, you end up with a situation of trains are way too short, right?

And also it's not just, okay, there are lots of other reasons why trains are short, but you also, by consequence of that, you remove some of the incentives to fix the infrastructure reasons why trains have to be short as well.

So this just all of this incentivizes a situation where the railways

either get shitter or the rate at which they were improving slows down massively.

Now, let's just, let's maybe, you know,

everyone watching and listening to this you thought this was just going to be one of those kind of systemic big picture disaster episodes no let's go to the next slide and ask how did this go poorly poorly episode episode in itself you know yeah so we've interestingly we've not done any of these four because oh boy there's another one so this is the south hall uh crash the south hall rail disaster um This resulted, the root cause of this was a lack of effective communication between the fragmented parts of the new industry.

Whoops.

All sorts of horrible things going on here of like protection systems being isolated and trains crossing and signalers doing this and drivers being stupid and not training enough.

And lots of actually, the driver wasn't.

Okay, this driver was a bit stupid, but actually it was.

It was very much a failure of

the new fragmented structure.

And it resulted in...

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Like,

this was not good.

So, so, yeah,

seven people were killed, 140 others were severely injured.

Um, very much not good.

So, I'm sure this is not the, not the, not the, you know, we're not going to see another one of these.

Next slide, please.

Oh, oh, boys.

Uh, yeah, so

only just up the line.

Two years, so that was 1997.

In 1999, 31 people were killed at Labbroke Grove, um, which was as a result of poor safety regulation and poor safety oversight of the new railway structure.

Ah, oh dear.

Yeah, and this is a pretty horrific.

I mean, we talk about those nice, nice network of turbos that go around, the nice aluminium-bodied thing.

The first car and second car were basically burst open by being hit head-on by

an HST going at full tilt.

Not good.

Is this the one that there's like a pretty graphic video of?

There's like a fake CCTV fee video of this.

I'm not sure if there's a real video of this one, actually.

There is a YouTube video, and I'm not sure it's the, but maybe it is the real one, and I've just told myself that it's fake to deal with the fact that it's a horror show.

I thought it was like maybe upscaled a bit.

I'm not sure.

Yeah, possibly.

Yeah, maybe.

It might be that it was from

a Dispatches episode or something, like some documentary, and they kind of upscaled it.

But yeah, really, 31 people dying.

That's a really nasty rail crash in the UK.

It's worth saying, as we get to the midpoint of these horror shows that overall safety did continue to improve through the, like, okay, these are some big, prominent, very public failures and crashes, but overall safety did continue to improve on the rail network.

I do just want to put a flag in the sand on that.

Like,

and that's not because of privatization.

It's because you still had all the same people working in the industry and going, actually, I kind of want safety to get better.

There are some other secondary

inadvertent side effects of safety that maybe were improved by privatization as a result of everyone becoming super risk averse.

But I still think that as we go to the next slide, please,

we will.

So, this is Hatfield in October 2000.

And this is an accident that I want to spend just a minute longer talking about.

I mean, this is a disaster podcast.

So, maybe we should spend longer talking about these things.

We can just do all of these as episodes in due time, you know?

Well, exactly.

And it would be very interesting to do so because

they are all pretty frightening in different ways.

So, this failure was specifically an infrastructure failure and it was pretty pretty uh instructive on me as a track engineer and how we do track engineering both in the design of railways and also the maintenance and inspection of of the rails themselves but i i just want to read from some twat's book um actually page 123 of some twat's book so um basically i just want to quote from uh what the report started talking about when um uh about rail track right so so we always talk about the fact that rail track had been formed uh the fact that it saw itself primarily as a contract management organization.

It retained as little of its specialist engineering knowledge as possible by its very design.

And kind of the structure of the industry around it involved kind of various separate contractors, subcontractors, those like infrastructure maintenance units and track renewal units.

They're just like all run by like companies like Jarvis and like First Engineering and all these sort of things that the question mark, question mark, red flag raised.

So like skills and knowledge were like deliberately split apart in such a way that no single responsible person was both competent and empowered enough to like match engineering knowledge to decision making.

So it's worth saying.

So it's like it was deliberately split up.

So if you knew stuff, you had absolutely no power.

And if you were

if you were like, yeah, so no single person had both the knowledge and the competence and the knowledge and competence and decision making.

And those high up enough to treat.

We got to put the MBAs in charge.

They know how wider.

Literally, literally, right?

All the the guys who are supposed to be in these safety oversight roles were

consciously just MBA guys.

Yeah, no, he's doing business success here.

We're doing super business success

business.

I'm finding efficiencies.

I'm engaged in sort of contracts awarding.

Efficiency maxing.

I'm finding.

Yeah.

I'm doing.

Unreal just gains.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm selling train tickets.

It's

all I'm doing.

So, so, so.

just to be rounded up and executed.

I mean, 100%

one of Robert E.

Lee's other horrible contributions to the world

is the score.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, shove them all to the end of Brighton Pier.

So that's a lot of people.

Just push it off a pier, man.

I know, right?

That's a big pier.

So just for clarity, what happened at this accident was that

a length of rail about 35 meters long shattered into about 200 pieces underneath a train going 115 miles an hour.

This beautiful in City 225, 35 meters of rail, shattered like a dropped vase into over 200 pieces.

There are a few pieces at the National Rail Museum now you can go and see and kind of just kind of say the word fuck under your breath a few times when you look at them.

And the train going around a curve

swang to the outside of the curve and the restaurant car, the kind of the dine, the kind of the shop car bit

hit an OLE mast and was ripped apart and all the fatalities were in that you know in that vehicle.

You're just buying this kind of like early privatization sandwich, thinking, can my life get any worse?

Oh, it sure can.

Just immediately taken out by a cadnary pole.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or worse, you're the staff member serving the thing.

And unfortunately, it was mostly staff who got killed in that car, four of them wiped out in there.

Absolutely horrific, along with a lot of injuries.

It's pretty unpleasant.

Thankfully, it was...

reasonably isolated because these Mark IV coaches were really decent in a crash.

And yeah, and kind of that, that, the, the design of that particular car, just, it just managed to sort of snatch a lot of the energy out.

So, this could have been a lot worse, thankfully, wasn't, but still, you know, really horrible.

So, I'm just going to read out.

So, the thing that led to this was the fact that

there was an absolutely shagged rail that they knew they needed to take out and replace.

And they basically couldn't get maintenance.

They didn't really understand quite how bad it was, or the people who did didn't have the power to tell the others that it was that bad.

And they couldn't get access to actually replace the rail in the first place.

So, I'm just going to quickly read a thing thing because this this is going to make you all miserable and really angry so the outsourced maintenance contractor did not comply with engineering standards in relation to defect management or carry out inspections to level the detail required they did not employ staff competent to inspect or assess track defects or the maintenance techniques employed to minimize the risk resulting from them grinding trains that could have prolonged rail life were operated by a separate contractor and infrequently and guidelines as to the use of grinding Trains were held by Rail Track's central engineering team that no one had access to.

Ultrasonic testing was screaming on each pass that the rail was shagged, but this received little attention from the maintenance contractor.

Yes, I used the word shagged in my book.

I wrote it.

I get to do that.

Records were, this is, it gets worse, I'm afraid.

I'm going to just briefly, because it just, it's so the precision of how miserable this is is quite important.

Records were sent to Railtrack's zonal management, but few staff at this level were capable of renewing those records, of reviewing those records.

The view of its highly paid executive staff was that Railtrack was a contracts manager, not an engineering organization.

This led to contempt for engineering skills and the recruitment of totally totally unqualified staff, among whom there was also high turnover.

Hooray!

The zone compliance and engineering manager responsible for the section track around Hatfield failed to comprehend what track work was being undertaken and what was required.

And I'm quoting here because of its technical nature.

Yes.

There's railway stuff in my railway job.

I'm confused.

Is this a kind of widget?

The zone quality standards manager, in his own words, did not have the knowledge of railway engineering nor railway safety.

Why not?

God damn it.

Yeah.

So, in the words of the independent investigation published about six years later, Rail Track was not putting safety as the number one objective in its maintenance strategy.

You should probably say that.

That's kind of your job.

I just felt like I needed.

Sorry for slowing things down and reading that, but I just wanted to lay out the level of

what I could, the short word to use is evil within this organization that resulted in people dying.

This intransigence had horrific outcomes, and the intransigence was as a direct result of the privatization of the UK, of the GB rail network.

Northern Ireland's railways, by the way, at this point, still nationalized.

God love them.

The North of Ireland.

Indeed,

the North of Ireland.

Yeah, and to be fair, the Irish railways were also.

I look forward to the unification of those rail networks for

good reasons all around.

I'm afraid, folks, we're not done because next slide, please.

Two years later,

two years later,

we decided to tumble a Class 365, like some kind of like almost like a Hornby train getting kicked down a sofa, tumble a Class 365 full of commuters into Pottersbar railway station.

And in the meantime, knocking the parapet down and flattening, like hot fuzz style flattening some poor lady on a bridge below with a bunch of brick parapet.

Wow.

So this was as a result of, oh, yes, that's right.

The outsourced infrastructure maintenance teams not looking after a switch properly, which opened under the train and sent it tumbling into the canopy of Pottersbar Station.

And yet again, we found ourselves killing passengers.

It did some of that.

About seven of them.

Multi-characteristics.

Six of them and the lady under the bridge.

Really horrific.

And now

this rifting is not so good in real life.

It isn't, and

not when you're going at 100 miles an hour.

So,

yeah, not good.

So

as a result of these, this spread of accidents, there were a lot of changes in the industry.

And if we go to the next slide, the big one was: fuck you, Rail Track, you're off the case.

Network Rail arrived.

Network Rail was

essentially a government body, although at this point, it was kind of one of those sort of weird half and half like arms-length things, but it was essentially a government company.

And after Potter's Bar, all infrastructure maintenance was brought back in-house as well, which was not only a good idea from a safety perspective, but also much cheaper.

You know, it's just funny enough, when you don't have a bunch of individual companies you've got to run contracts for and you just do it all in-house, it's a lot cheaper to do this stuff.

So

now, as I've said, like overall passenger and worker safety had continued to improve, but these massively

visible public tragedies really like they properly exposed how much of a mess this was as Treasury had drawn it up.

So bad news, very bad.

Network Grail ended up becoming officially a public body in 2013.

So, what else is going on then?

New Labor came in in 1997 after all of this privatization had been finished, and we'd ended up with all of our rolling stock, our train operating companies and such.

What did New Labor do to reverse this and make the system better?

Next slide, please.

Oh, the Socialist Rifle Association.

Oh, my God.

They created

more.

Oh, my God.

Liam, I'm so sorry.

I feel like I'm giving you brain damage.

I'm so sorry.

All of Britain gives me brain damage, man.

Nova and I have to live here.

We have to drink the water, for God's sake.

Do you have any idea how much poo is in the water that we drink every day?

Probably the prions, too.

Yeah, you guys don't talk to Nova about the prions.

I don't want to hear about it.

I just don't.

Like, I understand this just based on the finance broification of everything.

But it just still makes me so goddamn upset that like we had a perfectly good system and then we just shit and piss all over it to make a few NBA dickheads from Duke or wherever the fuck you went to business school fuck you and fuck Tobacco Road,

which are at the expense of like normal people who are just like,

our NBAs don't really have like a sports angle you can make them feel bad with.

You can't really be like, yeah, fuck the LSE.

Listen, listen, listen.

No, it's cool.

It's cool.

What you're going to do is walk to Brighton here, right?

You're going to put on

the biggest lead shoes you can find and do us a favor and jump in and fucking stay there.

I think it would be funny if in Britain they were all inexplicably Duke alumni, though.

Yeah, I just assume.

What asshole.

I mean, you go to...

Well, what's the shitty business school I hate?

Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?

That is makes sense.

Drexel University.

Yeah, we'll say Drexel.

Fuck yeah.

Oh man, we're getting

we're off topic.

It's fine.

No, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna take a bunch of people to Brighton Pier for the sightseeing is why

yeah right so the strategic railway authority gets created by New Labour and in theory it's a kind of a good thing but it's very much a sticking plaster on a on a messy system that clearly is is starting to well it's not starting to it's clearly caused a lot of problems and death uh so you know it does start awarding these longer term franchises there's some kind of actual strategic thinking going on if if not them actually having the funding powers to to back it up um

but

there are problems of the structure of this industry that cause real headaches that the sra could not really resolve uh next slide please we have to talk about again the west coast mainline so here's the west coast mainline and this is this is halfway through them for tracking the trent valley and and doing a little electrification to to kind of provide well basically we ended up spending what in today's money is about 25 billion quid on upgrading the west coast mainline between uh london and uh and kind of manchester and glasgow uh and liverpool and don't get me wrong fantastic project no no-ish.

We achieved a tremendous increase in capacity that was used up, every seat used up before we'd even finished the project.

So before we'd even signed the contract on completing the West Coast route modernization, every new seat of capacity we'd created had been sat in by new passengers.

So yeah, not enough, folks.

The trouble is this project was an absolute shit show.

So, you know, the West Coast mainline had been considered the jewel of the crown for a long time.

It was electrified and modernized through the modernization plan plan in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, in fact, with electrification reaching Glasgow in 74.

But

BR, before it had been privatized, had actually developed plans to significantly upgrade the route kind of along, this train that we're looking at now

is what's known as a Bendy Dildo.

I think I've made everyone laugh about that on the show before.

Please laugh again.

It was a tilting train.

It is a tilting train kind of with recycled APT technology in it-ish in a roundabout way.

And

yeah, this thing was running up and down.

But BR had already kind of had plans for this, not least, obviously, we knew about the tilting trains, but also in introducing, you know,

more upgrades in terms of speed and four tracking and such and such, and actually a new fleet of trains as well.

But that got delayed because of privatization.

Hooray.

By 1998, passenger growth was really putting stress on the route.

Everyone's favorite beardy dickhead, Richard Branson,

was wanting to introduce these trains.

It's always good when someone owns an island in the British Virgin Islands, right?

That's always good.

Yeah,

totally normal guy.

Can we say he's a pal?

No.

No.

Well, actually, though, technically, Liam, you can say that.

Come and get me.

I don't think that he is.

We don't think that.

Devin, have fun with this bit.

So,

you have to get into the United States of America.

Yeah.

So

no billionaire could ever interfere with that.

No, I come and get me in the titania bathtub I rescued from an A10, motherfucker.

I've got a GAU7

and,

you know,

whatever.

It's fine.

The A-10's a good plane.

Suck me off.

So the SRA came along, the Stitcher Rail Authority came along kind of halfway through this project, hemorrhaging money and achieving very little.

So by 2002, costs had risen for this project from 2.5 billion to 14.5 billion in then money, which is like about 35 billion now in post-trust cash.

And the scope of the project had been like significantly curtailed.

So this thing was supposed to provide like in-cap signaling, 140 miles an hour everywhere.

And it was like, no, no, 125 miles an hour, regular ass signaling,

less capacity improvements.

But this, you know, they still delivered it.

But basically, yeah, any benefits that it actually afforded in terms of increased capacity were pretty much immediately absorbed.

And indeed, before the Wayneworks had even completed in 2008, it became quite clear that, oh, we still need to do that new high-speed line that BR had started talking about in 1990.

So West Coast root modernization had made Treasury angry again.

So next slide, please.

I just want to issue a correction.

It's a GAU-8 for you all before I get another laser pig video bait about me.

You're really taking that to heart.

I will never surrender my stolen GAU-8 and Titania bathtub.

I keep it right next to Ross's basement, Nuke.

That's not mine.

So, right, the Strategic Rail Authority had kind of provided the rail industry with some level of long-term vision and a decent amount of organizational kind of autonomy.

Rail Traxtomizer kind of slowed it down, but they started awarding these 20-year franchises, which did help fix some of the stupid issues of the early kind of privatization years.

This, however, was an absolute enough.

This kind of long-termism was basically made everyone in Treasury get

a tummy hurty.

And so, what they did was, next slide, please, they killed it.

Yeah, and they just killed the strategic rail authority.

You're gone, you're off the case.

So, yeah, that was like how many years was that?

Not many years, like a few years, the strategic rail authority existed for, and then it was killed off.

And

that was kind of like, yeah, Treasury, their last gasp.

Well, if only it was their last gasp, that was Treasury going, no, no, we're in charge.

And so, a lot of stuff ended up being brought back into the DFT.

And we found ourselves in a situation where the DFT and central government had more control over the railways than at any time in the railways history, including under BR.

Like, central government had not had this level of control under BR that it, that it, that it ended up getting after the collapse of uh, or the, the, the, the uh, pistol in the back of the head of the SRA.

Oh, so it's a bit of a whistle-stop tour, this, isn't it?

But this is this is the mess that was privatization.

This is the whole point, right, of the episode, is to tell you how much of a fucking shit show it was.

And all of these kind of sticking plasters did not solve the big problem, which was this was bad.

So, let's jump forward to 2007.

What a wonderful job the new Labour government had done of railways not.

And so by 2007, they decided to actually talk about them a little bit.

And so we had this paper released called Delivering a Sustainable Railway.

Now, what this paper did was it said, we're not going to electrify anything else.

We're going to use biodiesel everywhere.

And that's going to give us definitely sustainable.

Yeah.

Why the hell not, baby?

Yep.

So that's how we're going to run the.

The thing is, sometimes, and this is weird given how much of a,

well, you'll see see what I mean when we go to the next slide.

Sometimes a nerd comes along, and sometimes that nerd is called Andrew Adonis.

Next slide, please.

Name not matching

the title.

Lord Adonis to you is Lord Adonis.

1776.

You flash up the painting of surrender at Yorktown, please.

Yeah, exactly.

We need to, you know, I think we need to ratify the titles and mobility amendments.

Yeah, no, it should be illegal to address someone by their title in the middle.

I agreed.

And

after recent events, I could not stand by that more vigorously.

Fuck the Lords.

Yeah.

But so this guy

might well be like

whatever the word for a weeb is, but for Tony Blair, he is that.

However, he's also a massive rail nerd.

And as a result of this, that 2007 report came out and he basically said, okay, Gordon Brown, that report is shit.

Because the same year Gordon Brown came into power,

there's something about war criminal and stuff with Tony Blair making him becoming like electoral poison.

Anyway, Brown ascends and he puts Andre Adonis in as Secretary of State for Transport.

Adonis not only says, no, no, actually, strategic electrification is a good idea.

Let's crack on with that.

But also initiated development of this thing called High Speed 2.

which flipped the previous kind of,

flipped kind of Blair's agnosticism towards doing anything to railways.

And suddenly we're like in a situation where oh we might finally after this long period of a supposedly like supposedly social democratic government

absolutely not we're gonna maybe do something about railways and and indeed next slide please yeah we ended up with network rail publishing this uh this document saying the case for new lines which is kind of laid out why we needed high speed two um happy days lovely days um

oh but we have to talk about the fact that things actually aren't still going so well so let's let's just go to the next slide again i i just wanted to, I'm just looking at the color of this report.

Yeah,

the way the OLE is set up is appalling.

I mean, I presume that it's a tram line, given how many.

Oh, no, I just realized what you meant.

It's centrally located, and there's one every like 15 meters.

Hangers alternate position.

Yeah, so whichever graphic designer, whichever like late 2000s CGI guy in like Bryce3D was like setting this up,

Presumably, he didn't know anything about railways.

Which, sadly, when it comes to renderite stuff, see also our Hyperloop episode, folks, is not something that is ever going to be fixed.

I don't think so.

I mean, they're going to have AI doing it soon.

So, you know.

Oh, my.

They already have AI doing it soon.

They already do.

They already do it.

I hate it.

That thing doesn't know anything about railways.

So, next slide, please.

Let's talk about National Express East Coast and Virgin Trains West Coast because

in 2009, National Express East Coast, having been awarded the franchise of the East Coast Mainline, collapsed horribly, RIP to them.

In 2012, Virgin Trains West Coast, or rather the West Coast franchise,

the bidding process was kind of scrapped by government because it was found to be flawed and they were being threatened with judicial reviews in left, right, and center.

We have to briefly talk about franchise agreements.

So franchises were these sort of, basically, you have an area of trains that were a company or that would run under it, a train operating unit that a company would come in and run as a franchise operator, right?

And these things were at the start, they were changing hands left, right, and center all the time.

So the logos were changing as quickly as people were getting on and off the trains.

It was kind of chaos.

And this

is a lot of money on paint.

A lot of money on paint and even more money on lawyers.

And that number only went up.

We talk about line go up.

The lawyer line really went up because at the start of these friends.

And you're going to have to sort of go and an organization that spends a lot of its time on contracts to an organization that spends a lot of its time on lawsuits.

Literally, yes.

Because at the start, these were really the franchise agreements were like one binder, right?

One A4 binder.

And by the time of, you know, by the late 2000s,

these things like filled up the back of a transit van.

You know, these agreements were thousands and thousands of pages.

And the money that you had to spend for the lawyer to just read through the whole thing was eye-watering.

So at this point, like as a result of this complexity, it became difficult to actually run it.

The number of people in the number of companies interested in running trains massively diminished.

So, you're Roz, you're talking about the fakery of railway competition.

Well, here it is in action, right?

So, the number of bidders reduced, the ambition of their bids increased so that they would win a chance of actually getting a bid.

And this is why we started seeing these collapses.

So, like, National Express was stripped of the franchise after they failed to meet their payment targets.

This isn't because passenger growth wasn't good, by the way.

It's just that they were saying that they were going to get this crazy made-up wizard levels of money that just never materialized.

So, yeah,

exactly, right?

So, we have both the failure of one franchise and the failure of a bidding process in another.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so

the franchise system was creaking at this point.

And it was only going to get worse.

Let's jump forward to the next slide to talk about something else that's going wrong.

Because one of the things that British Rail had done was strip out all the fat of the system and made it really efficient.

You know, I said it was 20, it was running like one of the most efficient railway systems in Europe.

The trouble when you then privatize that and tell the private companies to find more efficiencies is that there aren't any other than the big lever that says, fuck the fuck over your workers.

And so by 2016, that's in a very big way what was happening.

And so we were seeing changes to the responsibilities and the roles of staff because the only lever left to these private train operators was fuck around with staff T's and C's or staffing levels.

And so in 2016, we started seeing enormous levels of strike action, just a huge escalation in the level of strikes that were happening, kind of spearheaded by the RMT, but absolutely ASLEF were there with them.

You know, there were no levers left to minimize costs.

And so this is where the, in a way, this is really the only thing that the private train operating companies existed to do, right?

It was to act as a shield against public outcry and also as a way for government to say, well, it's not us fucking over you workers.

It's the private train operating company that we've talked to.

You're not mad at Ravine.

You're mad at TransPennine Express or Avante West Coast, you know?

Sure.

They look at American railroads and the obsession with operating ratio, and they saw that.

And they're like, that's a good idea.

We should have that here.

So we should do it right.

Of course.

So, young, everyone will be glad so that we're heading towards the climax of this story.

And it's not a good climax.

So, next slide, please.

Sorry.

Thanks, Liam.

Gotcha.

I'm glad someone lied.

So, yeah, so next up, we get, so let's talk again about our Roscos, right?

So, we've already talked about the annoying things that Roscoe's relating, but one of the other things that Roscoe's had incentivized was because why would you buy new trains, was a freeze in train procurement.

So, we had a very kind of a trickle of new trains popping up.

But in 2015, well, 2016, we had

a record-breaking order for new trains, like an enormous order for new trains, and

nowhere to actually build them, question mark.

So, you know, we have this decade-wide gap in kind of building trains.

And so, a lot of new trains are being built.

At the same time as this,

oh, but it's worth saying,

these two pictures here are, this is some foreshadowing.

These two pictures here are of mothballed trains.

On the left-hand side, you can see here are a bunch of still kind of within their usable life Class 319 electric multiple units, um all stored at long marston for everyone to look at and put their heads in their hands over these were supposed to end up in the north of england we'll explain why they didn't in a minute on the right hand side is um what were some of the brand new trains that started running on the transplant express network of which they ordered a three a set of three different trains because the train manufacturers didn't have the capacity to deliver all of one type of train so uh and they ended up being a disaster to operate so these are also now being stored at long marston for everyone to look at This, this kind of alien versus predator-ass-looking motherfucker on the right-hand side here.

They just replicated like the stupidest inefficiencies of British Rail, but in the private market.

Correct.

Yes.

We got to buy three different kinds of trains because the manufacturers don't have capacity.

Yeah, literally, we're rediscovering what BR had learned was a bad idea in the 50s.

Isn't private enterprise wonderful?

No, isn't it wonderful?

Very innovative.

Very innovative.

So next slide, please.

One of the challenges, so that we've talked about trains, but one of the challenges with the,

there was a similar story from an infrastructure perspective, the fact that we, other than the West Coast Route Modernization Project, there wasn't much going on in the infrastructure world.

So we ended up, you know, we have this decade-wide gap in skills on the infrastructure side, particularly when it comes to electrification.

And the consequence of that was that

suddenly we did, we ended up kind of in the, at the start of the 2000s, well, kind of from like 2008, 2009 onwards, we started seeing a surge in infrastructure projects.

And we had a massive skills bottleneck combined with an industry structure that exacerbated costs by kind of maximizing these organizational interfaces meant that we were delivering this infrastructure work and in electrification in particular way too slowly and way too expensively.

And so government cancelled a load of electrification in 2017.

Whoops.

Now,

the problem is, as we were approaching May 2018, we had what was going to be the biggest change to railway timetables in like a generation.

This required a load of new trains.

It required a load of electrified railway and a load of tracks to boot, and it also required a load of trained staff.

Next slide, please.

The trouble is we didn't have any of those things.

And so when we tried to run a timetable without those trains or tracks or trained staff,

we ended up in a situation where

everything went to complete ratshit.

So we had the May 2018 timetable meltdown, which people might remember

because none of the trains ran.

We ended up with a huge number of trains just not running, being cancelled.

You know, hundreds of trains delayed or cancelled after biggest timetable change in decades,

causes chaos across the country.

Thank you, the iPaper.

Well, that was what they called it meltdown on the railways.

And, you know, the timetable meltdown is kind of what it ended up being called.

And it was genuinely catastrophic,

an enormous drop in performance.

And at this point, let's just jump forwards to

just a little bit later, like a couple of months later, just to really piss on everyone's parade.

Next slide, please.

You could get a two for one at Sandals Resort.

Get two for one at Sandals Resort.

Yeah, on that day, though, only on that day.

Rush home to get to

take advantage of that deal.

Yeah.

Sale not to be extended.

Yeah, next slide, please.

Because I was talking about paint jobs being changed on trains.

Well, here is

a actually, I think this is a DVT.

Here's the other end of an Intercity 225 having the Virgin logos applied to it.

Sadly, though, Virgin Trains East Coast was not to be because once again, they'd overpromised and Virgin Trains East Coast collapsed in July 2018, just after the timetable collapse.

It was kind of a bad year for the privatized rail network at this point.

So, you know, with the franchise system already struggling, you know, with this lack of bidders, you know, no one really wanted to get involved because it was more trouble than it was worth.

This whole thing, with Virgin Trains East Coast going over, the whole thing just fell over.

That was kind of, it was quite clear that the franchising system was done.

It was doomed.

And everyone's favorite

for another few years.

Yeah, well, unfortunately,

it continues to shuffle on to this day in a roundabout way.

But we'll get there in only a couple of slides.

You'd be glad to know.

So, Chris Grayling, who some people might remember as being a very annoying transport secretary, but by far not the worst, given that we had Mark Harper until the last general election, initiated a thing called the williams review next slide please i just which was supposed one thing i'm reminded of here is just you know it looked like virgin trains was doing so well for so long right that i think they were actively in talks with the book the bush administration to start running virgin trains on the northeast corridor

really

weren't they gonna weren't they like weren't weren't they like branded on bright line for a bit and then decided not to because the name was shit or something yeah but i believe the bright line west was going to be virgin trains usa And then,

and then all this kind of happened, and then I think they decided not to.

Yeah, and they're like, I don't want to touch a train ever again.

It's interesting, isn't it?

Because the Virgin, a lot of people got really upset when Virginia, because when this went, that was the end of Virgin running on the rail network.

Oh, no, what a shame.

A lot of people were like genuinely upset for it.

Virgin is such a 90s brand.

Like, everything about it from like Richard Branson wearing a dress, like offensive, like cross-dressing offensively to like, just like, like, all the like happy-clappy stuff and the tongue-in-cheek stuff.

All of it's so 90s-coded in a way that just has not aged that well.

I don't know, Nova, you might have a different view on this, but like Virgin, it just feels it even then, like even in the kind of the mid-2010s, it felt really outdated in a way that I remember Virgin feeling kind of cool when I was getting on the first pendolino I did when I was you know like 13 or something.

I think this is most acute with uh the airline, but like Richard Branson, uh, like picking up on like princess carrying flight attendants attendants or like painting a kind of pin up on the nose of the planes.

It was all

stuff that makes you go like

in hindsight.

You're like, this wasn't cool at all.

And in fact, was like deeply sus.

You need a more sex positive railroad.

You need like the sex worker train.

Well, yeah, well, thankfully, well, we didn't, you know, Virgin, you know, they did start doing pride stuff there.

But yeah, no, we did start getting gay trains at this point, which was nice.

I don't know if that we can credit that with privatization, but you know, I like

British Rail would have done a gay train had they survived into the 21st century.

Come at me with the fucking counterfactual that says otherwise is all I have to say.

Because I agree.

There's too many gay people working in railways for it not to be like an inevitability, I feel.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So,

next slide, please.

Williams Rail Review.

This went rapidly to shit.

Oh, dear.

Well, it was privatization.

It was going to be messy, wasn't it?

Exactly.

Yeah, this was the thing that was going to look at, oh, how are we going to make the railway system still work?

And that was set about in 2018 in the aftermath of all of this kind of shit kind of hitting the fan.

And this was kind of ongoing, and people were like, well, this is taking a bit of time.

This is taking a bit of time.

But okay,

I'm sure this guy's going to get it right.

And then next slide, please happened.

Oh.

Oh,

oh,

yeah.

So, this little thing

I was doing a lot of podcasting at the time.

Yes.

Yeah.

And, you know, every

so this came along and decided to like kill

hundreds of thousands of people across the globe.

Millions.

And

millions of millions.

Yeah, millions of people across the globe.

I mean, we still have 5% greater excess deaths than before the pandemic, right?

And the WHO might have announced that it's over.

But if you look at water, you know, wastewater traces in like the US and the UK right now, we are very much still not through this.

This is just part of our life now.

Well,

we failed the pandemic stage, so it's just endemic now.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, we failed that one.

It is over in the sense that we got the bad ending.

Truly, this is America's Vietnam.

And Vietnam's Vietnam as well.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

Yeah, and Italy's, yeah, just the list never ended.

So next slide, please, because this had effects on our railway system.

Namely, no one was on it.

This is a trace of like the railway usage as a percentage of pre-COVID levels.

So the top line is cars and taxis in red.

The middle line is bus services outside of London.

And the bottom line is National Rail Services.

And you can see that everything dropped to 5% of pre-COVID levels.

And It took a bit of time for us to get back to where, actually, with the Benfield hindsight, the curve is quite a nice fit, actually, from when it dropped to the bottom to kind of coming up to 100% again.

We are back at, by the way, and I know I like to shout this every time I'm anywhere near a microphone.

We are back and indeed above 100% ridership on the GB Rail network.

So don't let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Patterns might have changed a bit, but we are right back up there again.

But it took us a bit of time.

This is immediately obvious to you if you were trying to squeeze into the one car leaving from Houston, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

You and 3,200 of your best friends.

yeah yeah so uh in march 2020 uh the current vibe you know we had five percent of pre-covered uh kind of uh ridership and the industry was put on life support uh all franchises by the end of march were transferred forward onto emergency concessions and that was it that's the end of the franchise system it was gone killed stone dead one of the only like welcome casualties of covert 19 yeah absolutely yeah um this thing's in hospital on ecmo and i'm busy trying to like kick the shit out of it, you know?

They're still

branding everything in like these,

you know, different ways.

They're like, okay, now we have L and ER back, right?

Yeah.

And then this has kind of started happening.

We talked about this.

Actually, no remember, you and I have talked about this on other public, other media platforms, like this, this branding of

these trains kind of popping up.

And that was actually a bit of a fad.

of the Department of Transport even before this started happening.

They started going, what if return with a V?

But anyway, so we have the Williams Review.

Finally, we get the response to that.

With all this chaos kicking off,

next slide, please.

We finally get the Williams Shaq's Plan for Rail, which sounds like a kind of a prop rock band, right?

As the outcome of the Williams Rail Review.

And they say, we're going to have great British railways.

That's going to be the future.

The Age of Innocence is back.

Crickets on the village green.

We're going to hate the GWR to seven feet.

So we'd had three years to get to the point of this thing being published, and then we continued to do nothing for another three years

other than erode all the stuff that had been going properly.

For example, next slide, please.

High-speed 2.

The only strategic view, we've done this to death on the pod before, so we're not going to do it again.

But yeah, so Sunak, as one of the last things he did, was kill HS2.

and so we really had wrecked up the so the franchising system was dead, but nothing had come to replace it.

So, the industry was in a horrifying, arguably worse than things had been limbo.

And we just lost our main strategic plan for the future.

Great success, long-term decisions for a brighter future.

Thank you.

Hi, guys.

Thanks, Rishi Sunak.

We forgot how to run trains.

Yeah, we forgot how to run trains.

Yes.

So,

is there hope, though?

So, next slide, please.

Is there some hope?

So

it's worth saying at this point that the privatized rail system as it existed before is pretty much entirely dead.

The only part of it that's been that's survived because like successive like secretaries of state and ministers have thrown their bodies in front of the bullets to protect it are the Roscos.

The Roscos continue to exist.

And indeed, here is the pre-election Labour Party publishing their Getting Britain Moving plan, which is basically their thing saying we're going to just do what the Williams plan said,

but with more like flag shagging stuff on it.

And, you know, that along come Labour and say, look, we're going to get Britain moving again.

We're going to do everything they said, but obviously we're going to leave the Rolling Still operating companies exactly as they are.

We cannot get in the way of the money that is made from that hugely extractive part of the industry.

So this is pre-elected.

We need the train landlords.

We need the train providers.

I just don't know if that's the same.

There's no train providers.

Who will provide the trains?

Who provides exactly?

Where do the trains come from if you don't have the train landlords?

Exactly, right?

It's not possible.

So, next slide, please, because we have all of a sudden an election of which there are only two interesting and useful things to notice.

The first is that the party of adult human females or whatever

party of women did real shit.

We should really just pay attention to that.

Yeah,

they did really bad.

Really, really bad.

That's worth paying very close attention to and being entertained by.

The other thing to pay close attention to and be entertained by is that Labour

got fewer votes in 2024 than they got under Corbyn in 2019.

It's just a nice little thing.

Loveless landslides there.

Loveless landslide.

I almost said Loveless Landline.

Yeah, this is it.

So anyway, so let's move on from that stupid general election.

The third Starmer Reich rises.

Keir is here.

And we have appointed, fun enough, on the day of, yeah, good old, good old, good old, yeah, oh man, I welcome

Lord Hendy.

Next slide, please.

And funnily enough, on the day that I receive a letter from my employer telling me that I'm sacked,

the transport team is appointed, including Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill being appointed.

He is a life peer.

He becomes a labor life peer.

One of the High Minister of State for Wales.

No, Hendy of Richmond Hill.

I'm not saying Lord, fuck you.

We won't be able to do it.

I can't believe

the Sunak's government would do this.

Well,

this is Labour now, of course.

This is Kier Star.

I mean, he's a man for all seasons, you know, like Boris kept him on in TFL.

Boris loved him.

Having, you know, him having been there under Ken.

So, like,

you know,

very flexible man, I understand.

Flexible man, or was good at getting dirt on people, although by the way that he conducted himself in sending a lot of emails,

maybe he's lost his touch

i think boris johnson's not you know

yeah that's not something to put on your cv yeah i will put in a word for the the youngest member of the um of the of the cabinet which is louise haig who i do still stand by actually being a good secretary of state for transport i think she's actually good she cares a lot about buses which is genuinely important and and and and I think she's good.

I think she's surrounded by a load of tawdry men of which boring, useless men who think they're better than she is.

And you know what brings me joy?

Is that after all of the Hendy shit went public, Louise Haig will have had him in a room in a meeting without biscuits or coffee, and she will have got to dress that prick down and good grief, and by which I mean, sorry, that's a Britishism, I mean shouted at him.

And the idea of Louise Haig, who is young, has funny coloured hair,

shouting at this nasty old establishmentarian git brings me immense, immense joy.

Immense joy.

Anyway, so they bring forward their bill.

Right on the week that I go live with telling that their rail minister is a corrupt piece of shit.

They come forward with the Passenger Railway Services Public Brackets Public Ownership Bill.

Yay, it's another bill, another change.

But this time it's to basically bring all of the already collapsed franchise kind of what are now concessions into public ownership as their contracts expire, which is pretty revolutionary stuff there, folks.

Wowza.

So meanwhile,

nothing has been fixed still.

HS2, labor have shown no signs of doing anything on it.

There is no rolling program of electrification.

Rail accessibility is a little better now than it was in 1993.

Capacity is deliberately being constrained once again by increasing ticket prices.

Everything's a mess.

And next slide, please.

Oh, actually, so there's two next slide, please.

Yeah, there's the bill there that I should have said

next slide, please, about it's not that interesting.

That's the bill, and it's half finished because it's as brought from the commons.

So this is the version that the Lords are looking at.

Talking of which, next slide, please.

Because, yeah, this guy's in charge of deciding what the structure of the rail industry is going to be.

And given aforementioned news,

is this a good thing?

I don't know if this is a good thing.

Probably not.

Yeah, I'm going to go with possibly not.

Yeah.

The picture is too small.

Is this still Lord Hendy?

I refuse to learn anything about the Brit.

This is Pete Hendy.

Yes, I'm going to call him Pete Hendy.

Really fucking annoying.

He's got a name tag.

Yeah, he does.

That's back when he was only a sir.

I'm going to.

Oh, man.

No, I can't say that.

That's an actionable threat against a named person.

I invite you

to step into my home, Pete.

And I can say stuff, which is, I'm going to get you sacked, motherfucker.

I'm not done yet, you praise.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, so that is the story of.

I'm afraid there is not a happy ending to this one.

It's just that we're,

is there some hope with the renational, the very, very vigorously rabbit-eared renationalization?

Not yet.

Can you sum it up in a word?

No.

A noise?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's going to take a half-hour podcast.

Sorry, everyone.

Sorry, that escalated.

Don't get me wrong.

It's a step in the right direction that

we're bringing the franchises back in-house.

But it's so much.

You just know that this government are going to do it in the worst possible way.

You just know that.

And it makes me very angry.

And you should buy my book about it.

Next slide, please.

Yeah, that's right.

I was going to do that after safety third.

Oh, shit, there's a safety third.

Yes, please.

I've missed safety third.

Let's do a safety third.

Yes, we need cheering up by hearing someone get horribly maimed by

good actions to safety.

Yeah, was the goddamn news not a safety third, I suppose?

Anyway, sorry, go on.

Safety third.

Safety first.

Safety third.

We've segments on this podcast called Safety Third.

What the hell's a spiraling pipe?

Shake hands with danger.

Meet a guy you ought to know.

Hello, nerds.

Anchors.

Oh, oh, shit, I just realized what this is.

I don't like, I immediately don't like this because heavy thing, moving thing, feet.

I've seen anchor chain fires on YouTube, and that's...

No.

You drop the anchor, like, sort of out of control.

The friction on the thing ignites the grease on the thing.

Hole

thing catches fire.

It looks like a...

It looks like a jet engine going, doesn't it?

It's crazy.

Yeah, not good.

Don't like that.

Hello, nerds.

I've been a fan of the pod for around seven months now.

Address me by my rank.

Yeah.

Would like to share an experience from my time in the merchant navy of this god-forsaken island in the North Atlantic.

I hope this meets your strenuous standards for safety third.

Yeah, that's it.

This story takes place around two years ago.

For context, I had just dropped out of a university astrophysics and astronomy course and applied for the Merchant Navy.

I've since learned what a terrible decision this was.

There's a phrase that sticks with me

because somebody was asking about joining the military at age 38.

And one of the replies was, you're never too old to make the worst mistake of your life.

And I think about that, that changed my entire worldview.

For those unfamiliar, the Merchant Navy officer training course in the UK, it requires 18 months of study on land and 12 months of operation on ships, followed by a final spoken exam.

You can do it at City of Glasgow College, and believe me, I thought about it when I was considering making the worst mistake of my life.

From the start, this ship had me questioning my life decisions.

I was given a lift to the port by a safety inspector who took no time at all in describing the numerous accidents that had taken place aboard over the past three months.

These included a cook that had been accidentally stabbed, an engineer that lost a hand to a fan, a second cook that fell down the stairs and was buried alive by frozen fish.

Is this an Edward Gorey sort of deal?

Or is it a car chap?

A fire on the fuel tank manifold.

Bro, what?

A large oil spill on the cargo deck, which was unrelated, and approximately 50 tons of diesel oil that mysteriously vanished because of a misaligned loading valve.

Trust me, the actual oil spill figures are always way underreported.

I would like to repeat that this all happened over a period of three months.

Oh my god.

I joined the ship against my better judgment and encountered the approximately 18 people managing the 77,000 tanker.

One such person was an older man we shall call Josh.

He was the boatswain.

Is that because that's what his name was?

Yes, apparently, maybe.

He was the boatswain and was uncomfortably friendly for me as a fairly young trans girl that was trapped in a medium-sized apartment with him for several months.

No.

This is hitting close to home.

I had been on this ship for about two months and we just arrived in Greece.

As there was no space in board just yet, the captain decided to drop anchor and wait for a berth to open.

Josh was put in charge of the deck side and I was supposed to watch and learn.

Now, the normal procedure for anchoring is to conduct several break and winch tests, to open the guillotine, which is a big metal bar that holds the anchor chain when you're in open sea, which is labeled here as a riding chock.

This guy here.

Gently lower the anchor to the water line, conduct several more break and winch tests to confirm everything was okay,

and then finally let go of the anchor, controlling it carefully with the brakes.

Now, as you can probably guess.

I think you did foreshadowing on this one.

Oh, my God.

As you can probably guess, this was not followed in the slightest for reasons of it's slow.

So what actually happened was open the guillotine, disconnect both the winch and brake in quick succession, let the anchor free fall,

and lean over the bow and guesstimate when to reapply the brake.

Oh God.

Or at least I think that's how it went in Josh's head because nothing happened.

The anchor and chain were trapped by some tangle in the system somewhere and they didn't move an inch.

You'd think this would be a sign to backtrack and do things properly, but not for Josh.

No, it never is.

Josh walked right up to this person-sized chain, stuck his leg deep in the hot the hospipe, hose.

Oh, no, Josh.

That's bad.

Joshua.

Yeah.

And started kicking.

Don't do that.

Oh, no.

How attached are you to your leg?

How attached to your leg would you like to be in future?

How attached is your leg to you?

I think it's pretty obvious, but some of the ways this could kill you include, but are not limited to, ripping ripping off your leg, getting yourself crushed by a shift in the chain, or being sucked through the hospipe while it contorts you into whatever shape it so desires and then drags you screaming to the salty depths.

Getting the kind of black hole, like Schwartzchild radius experience on

Earth.

I would at least use a stick for this.

Getting Biford dolphined in one atmosphere of pressure.

Exactly, exactly.

That requires a special kind of circumstance.

I believe.

Volunteering your foot for flensing.

I believe this is a prime opportunity to use a stick.

I stood there in shock until there was a loud clunk and a deafening roar, and the anchor chain started flying out in a cloud of rust flakes and mud dust.

This was enough to shock me into sprinting over and applying the brakes as fast as I could in an adrenaline-fueled haze.

I was convinced I was going to be radioing the bridge with something along the lines of, oh, God, it's everywhere.

Oh, God.

As it is, Josh escaped with only a broken leg, losing his boot, part of his jumpsuit, and a few toes.

Oh,

he got airlifted to a hospital, and I didn't have to deal with them staring at me the entire trip home.

I'd already decided in that moment that I was not getting on another ship, and I was going to go back to my pretty stars and telescopes.

Too fucking right.

Good enough.

God bless you.

Was the lesson learned here?

I don't really think so, but it's not my problem anymore.

Jesus stitches.

Jesus stitched.

Don't lie what's going on there, Bricks.

I have never respected a merchant navy officer more than this.

Yeah,

just get the fuck out

as quickly as possible.

Oh, nice.

Okay, a happy ending.

Possibly not for the rest of the crew.

I'm hopefully only one year from getting my M master's in science in astrophysics, and I genuinely have no idea what possessed me to leave.

Love your podcast.

I would absolutely go to a live show if I could.

November in Devon, I came to see you in London for your Charlie's Angels show and had a great time.

I even got a signed poster, but I was super shy.

I wanted to see the more recent one, but I just don't have the time or money right now.

Keep up the awesome work.

Best from Rebecca.

Oh, thank you so much.

Well, time, I mean,

make yourself noticed at the live shows because we will, we will, like, I was signing stuff and I was like, I could personalize these quite easily, you know?

Like, yes.

Um, yeah, um,

wow,

weird guy maim himself,

yeah.

Exactly, that's that's what I'm writing.

I will write that, I will sign that.

There's very little I won't sign, and there's very little I won't sign it with, you know, little we won't sponsor.

Yeah, we're

absolutely, absolutely

As far as live shows go, all I can say is that I am talking to lawyers right now about US visas.

Um, yes, and we will see what transpires there.

Oh, that is that's very, very exciting.

Um,

um, yeah, no, uh, do yeah, let's kill James Bond.

That's a that's a good idea.

Um, everyone should do that, and also listen to Rachel Master and subscribe to the Patreon for that, is what you should do.

Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, that That was Safety Third.

Oh, yeah, that's

shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, but of course, we do have commercials before we go.

Gareth, talk about your book.

Yeah, I actually have a commercial, which is that I wrote this book.

And

what I did was leave it in a Greg's in Derby railway station today, my nice advanced copy that I was getting all tatty and that has got like stickers and my scribbles in it.

So to Harold from the Railman Our Discord server, I hope you enjoy the copy that you picked up when I told everyone everyone in the server that if anyone was in Derby to go get themselves a nice copy.

Nice word.

Sprinting towards the Derby station, Gregs.

Yeah, it's fine.

I enjoyed my sausage bean and cheese melt, so it's all good.

But I know, I have a book.

It's called How the Railways Will Fix the Future.

And it's, there's plenty.

I mean, it's just so much in everyone here's wheelhouse.

Partly deliberately, but also partly because it's things I love writing about.

But the point of it is saying, you know,

the left and people who want to actually survive the future have kind of fallen, you know, apart from us lot, us nerds, far too much to the left have just like forgotten about railways or don't think about railways or somehow feel like the railways are evil or whatever.

You know, we've seen all this with the HS2 shit and the Green Party.

Hooray for them changing their stance on it, by the way.

And this book is kind of trying to remind us that, no, the railways aren't just like, you know, they have a bad history.

They have been used for ill.

They are useless who run in lots of ways.

But actually, there's no, you know, they are.

Their fundamentals stick and they are the way that we build a better future.

It's not just that they are one of a series of tools.

My view is that they are the tool that will give us the future that we need, that will give us the better future.

So that's kind of what the book's about.

And there's, yeah, there's lots of fun, optimistic stuff.

I slag off plenty of people in there.

It's there's lots of fun stuff about Hyperloop and about gadget bands.

And yeah, thanks, Roz, by the way, because your early loop video is definitely some inspiration.

In fact, WTYP is mentioned in the book, you know, Roz, you get a little quote in there, don't you?

And I mentioned the podcast.

So yeah,

exciting back on my visa application international press yes exactly exactly um and uh yeah uh so these are available for pre-order now from all reputable locations uh and also some disreputable ones that are evil uh you can get this from your local thieves guild it is it is available at your local gregs

very likely well i've realized it is quite a good viral marketing campaign so my box of my sadly rapidly diminishing box of advances clearly i need to just distribute them around the british rail Network, right?

Watch this space.

No, I had a lot of fun reading it.

I didn't have a lot of fun writing it because having a very badly sleeping little baby and trying to write a book in about three weeks is really hard work.

But no, I'm actually quite pleased with how it's come out.

I'm very proud of it.

And it's going to be really weird to have people reading my book.

That's going to be a very strange experience.

I'm just a steel and concrete guy.

So this whole experience is very weird to me.

But thanks, everyone.

And

you lovely lot who are talking to me right now, as in Liam Ross November.

Thanks so much for being pals and being so supportive of me as someone who comes on.

Hogs, those, those watching, I love you as well.

You're all great.

And it's like coming and having a chat with me.

In fact, it's not like, it is, you are my friends.

It's like having a chat with friends.

I am having a chat with friends on here.

I did stay in your house.

Yeah.

Why did you say that?

Like,

remember when we were

doing a great hound bus in Harrisburg that never showed up?

Yeah, that was enraging.

Yeah, that was very enraging.

But no,

it's a delight.

I love this podcast.

And

yeah,

I'm going to stop being

sobby.

But no, this has been fun.

Hopefully, this is an aura episode.

And it's two hours 49.

Oh, my God, Devin.

I am so sorry.

We got to make up some time because we had some episodes we had to

scrap recently.

We've been a bit behind.

Don't even remind me about that experience.

Can you cut that out?

The hawks need some slop the hawks need the slop but yeah no thank you so much for coming on it is always a delight it's always a pleasure

and uh yeah i i always learn a lot and i always enjoy it

there that's it we did privatization but that's this is the definitive history of privatization we've done it

yeah we've solved the problem

all right bye everybody bye

that was a podcast

that was a podcast we did it solved

in under three hours as well So, yeah, it's all good.

That's the efficiency of the podcast market.