Episode 157: Howard Street Tunnel Fire

The podcast is now going.

Oh, great.

I get to record with my two best friends on

the worst day in recent memory.

Oh, I'm sorry, man.

It's okay.

I feel fucking terrific.

And I get to see rods after this.

So there are,

you know, there could be worse things.

There could be no rods.

As I said, mandatory fun immediately after this.

Mandatory fun.

Mandatory fun.

You will receive mental health from this.

Exactly.

Mental health is approaching your location.

Do not attempt to resist.

Approaching at high speed.

Extremely fucking high rate of velocity.

Yes.

Hello, and welcome to, well, there's your problem.

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Roznik.

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

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

Hi, I'm November Kelly.

I'm the person who's talking now.

You may have gotten a glimpse of me if we keep the video in of me being on webcam.

I don't think we need to do that.

Perfect.

Yeah, because I look like a terrible fucked witch scarecrow, and my pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Don't know how I'm going to follow that up, but I'm sure going to try.

I don't have a webcam for this exact reason.

And people, people, when I guess on other podcasts, if I was like, oh, you don't have a webcam, but like, you guys are really successful.

I'm like, yeah.

And part of that is because you've never seen our faces.

Yeah,

we're all self-conscious about the way that we work and all that.

I don't like my body.

You don't.

Yeah.

Have you ever considered transition about it?

That way you can not like it in a different way.

Like in 4D, right?

Oh,

body dysmorphia in Smell-O-Vision.

Wow.

The Spike It's 3 of Body Dysmorphic Disorder.

What you see on the screen in front of you.

in extremely low resolution.

Yeah, beautiful.

This is horrible.

It was really hard to find pictures for this one, actually.

I was surprised because I always remembered it as as like a big deal.

You see down here, what vaguely looks like some train tracks going into a hole with smoke.

Yeah, does this count as like a stop signal for practical purposes?

I believe so, yes.

I believe this is a situation you would not want to proceed further down the tracks.

Ah,

just gun it, notch eight, you know?

Fuck yeah.

We'll get to that later.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

So, but that involved a high-rail truck.

But anyway,

today we're going to talk once again about Baltimore, but this time, an older transportation disaster than the one that's in recent memory, which is the Howard Street Tunnel Fire.

You know, for two guys who live in Philadelphia, we do, we buy Baltimore a lot, Ricardo.

Shout out to Baltimore, the greatest city in Baltimore County.

That's yes.

Lord,

you a bigger fan of White Marsh or something?

I just say these things, I put them out into the world knowing that they're going to be provocative.

You know the joke, right?

Because Baltimore County doesn't include Baltimore.

Yes, yes.

I'm aware of that because I've seen the TV.

I was a liar.

I was making fun of Roz because he was like, Do you prefer White Marsh?

And I thought he didn't know.

I was like, No, man.

I did once take a mega bus from Philly to D.C.,

which stopped at, as a conductor, or whatever you call a bus driver, the White Mash Mall.

And I was like, ah, it's just my dad driving this.

All right.

Hold on.

Check this out.

Shout out to Baltimore, home of the second best bird-named NFL team.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, that's true.

That's the official endorsement.

of the city of Baltimore by Well, There's Your Problem Podcast.

Second best NFL bird team.

And you can go to Vaccaro's in Baltimore and then eat your weight and pastries.

It's delicious.

Never been.

I'd like to.

I'll take you to Baltimore.

We'll go to Vaccaro's and you'll

look great.

Yeah, Baltimore.

Well, for loyalty reasons, I have to go to Philadelphia first.

But like, of course,

I do like the idea of going on vacation from Britain to the United States, specifically to the beautiful city of Baltimore.

Yes.

Baltimore, yeah.

Baltimore.

Like being like, this is just like the wire once every 10 minutes until someone shoots me.

And then as I die, I want to do it, Nova.

Yeah, and then as you like execute me i'm like damn this is just like the wire

david lynch your genius as my chest cabinet has been white brother muzza and i just killed you know

it was worth it david lynch who did the wire david simon there we go david lynch the wire is a very different show i i would say not a worse one right just a different one very different show yes

Do a bad for dead because my levels are fucking blown out on that joke.

Sorry, everybody.

It's fine.

Everyone's still reeling from White Brother Muzan.

Yeah, yeah.

Get a water.

He has to stop apologizing today.

Yeah.

We're all having a nice time.

This is a mandatory fun hour.

Anyway, jarring shift of tone as we go into the goddamn news.

Oh, my God, dude.

Oh, yeah, there is some actual news happening, huh?

Like, even as we record this.

As we're recording, even, yes.

Yeah,

if you listen to this show and are a Zionist Jew, my advice for you is just turn it off now.

You're not going to like this.

Yeah.

And I'll see you at Shoal.

Yeah.

So,

you know, there's a severe problem with anti-Semitism on America's university campuses.

Yeah, these guys with Israeli flags are showing up and telling a bunch of like Jewish students that they're all members of Hamas.

Yeah, the cops are like beating up Jewish voice for peace and stuff like that.

Those fucking hippies.

I love them to death, but those fucking hippies.

Yeah, acts of anti-Semitism, like interrogating Jewish leftists as to why they don't have dual loyalty like they should do.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, this has been

several.

large campus protests going on ongoing right now.

The big one that has been in the news is the one at Columbia University.

um and you know they uh the president came out with just like well i i think my first option we should be subtle we should just violently put this down using the police um

yeah really really really really just went just

not dick out that was zero to 100 came to mind yeah zero to a hundred is a better phrase than dick out

the thing about like violently repressing student protests is i don't want to say that it always makes the student protests more effective especially

that the history of like student protest in the United States has been not very effective in general.

Like it didn't stop the Vietnam War, it didn't stop the Gulf War, it didn't stop the war in Afghanistan, it didn't stop the Second Gulf War, and it's probably not going to stop this, but we're sure going to try, baby.

You never know when it's important to try is the main thing.

I'm not being defeatist about this.

I'm simply suggesting that we don't have a good grasp on what works and like anyone who presumes to lecture you on what will, whether that's someone who like used to be in Students for a Democratic Society, or

whether that is like a university administrator, has no idea.

Yeah, and they're being real nasty to these students.

They're doing stuff like they're just like saying, okay, you're suspended now.

By the way, you have 15 minutes to collect your things before we lock you out of your dormitory.

Have you considered sucking me from the back?

Yeah.

You know, it's just, all right, well, you know, you show solidarity with the Palestinians.

uh

yeah you're homeless now i mean nypd turned the uh the l rad the noise deterrence device thing on uh like a bunch of students praying so that's the level we're at at time of recording uh texas state troopers are going into ut austin uh and like beating the shit out of people um and people are like openly calling for another kent state massacre at this point yeah they want it so bad is the thing um um like the bloodlust is incredible in some sections right like is the word that comes to mind yeah um

and i mean look even if that you know god forbid like the worst comes to pass there and there is some like serious act of like anti-protest violence like that that also does not stop the protests right is the thing like any more than kent state stopped vietnam war protests um

we're gonna levitate the pentagon again baby

Yeah, but this time we're going to rotate it counterclockwise.

Yeah, exactly.

We're going to rotate it and we're going to lay it out so it's longer than the line.

Yeah, unravel the Pentagon.

Yeah, this is our demand, right?

We have two demands, right?

Stop the genocide, unfold the Pentagon.

Let us see the eternals.

Take us to the Pentagon Burger King.

These are our demands.

Most moderate.

Unfold the Pentagon, end the genocide, and tell me what the fourth section of the sculpture and the CIA statue are.

You know, you can just go in the Pentagon.

Like, you can take a tour.

I mean, it's not going to help

that, but yeah.

Ross, we're trying to levitate it.

The tour is not, I mean, maybe we could get inside and try, we'll try to do it in segments, but yeah,

levitating a portion of the Pentagon.

Area

Caster is now most banned people from Pentagon.

Just one section of the C-ring just levitates up.

Just like Zachary, we're sad.

We're just like sitting there sadly at ourselves.

Just like whatever, like Defense Force Protection Agency there is being like, well, we don't know if they can levitate the Pentagon, but why take the chance?

We're going to find out.

We're all going to find out together, dickheads.

If you only levitated one section of the Pentagon, you would probably do more damage to the building than 9-11 did.

That's probably true.

Well, I, I, you know, that's whatever, man.

I'm going to shut down the military-industrial complex simply by being really fucking annoying.

I mean, so the way in which the like university administrations have responded to these has obviously been like extremely panicked, both by sending in the cops and also Columbia just like boarded off their business school.

Um, good, they should keep it that way.

They built like a Northern Ireland-style peace wall around their business court, this business school to keep Shea David in there or out of there.

I don't, I'm not entirely clear.

This is Robert E.

Lee's fault.

Well, yeah, it isn't everything.

If you're not familiar with this guy, he's like a business professor nominally who spends most of his time like screaming at students on like on YouTube.

Shouldn't he be teaching?

Well, I mean, let's see.

Ross, do you know a single professor that can teach?

It's business school as well.

What's he going to teach?

Line go up, Mr.

Bond.

Yeah.

Look, look, I know one professor who can teach, but Dr.

Mark Brack is retired.

He retired the one teacher.

They found

one professor who's good at teaching.

And yeah, he's retired now.

Don't go to university.

Anyway, as ever, I would say the kids are all right.

Like,

their hearts are in the right places.

They're doing the right thing, a good thing by protesting.

And at considerable personal risk, you know, and

I don't want to just be like, oh, the thing that matters about this is what people in the West are doing, right?

Because, like, if you want to talk about universities, the Israelis have killed like thousands of university students and killed like sort of most prominent academics in Gaza.

Every university in Gaza is destroyed at this point, and they've been destroyed like gleefully on video by people who filmed themselves doing it on purpose.

Which, by the way, is one of like add it to the list of war crimes, right?

It's like they opened up the Sim City disaster menu and just targeted every hospital, you know?

Yeah.

I will say, as someone who believes,

or my most lib opinion is that academia good, actually.

Yeah, of course.

I will say this.

What you said, the kids are all right.

It is heartening to see like teenagers get real fucking mad at this shit.

And

I have a coworker

or a related note who is Iranian.

She emigrated from Iran to the States.

Her daughter's visa to the University of Michigan is being held up in part because of this bullshit nonsense.

Because if you want to get out of Iran and come to the United States where you would be an asset to academia, you can't do that because we're mad at Iran now.

Make that make sense.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

No, it's life-saving cancer research, but who gives a shit?

We're going to bomb Tehran.

Yeah.

I don't want to facilitate a brain drain.

I don't want to do any of those kind of strategic things.

That's good.

What we should do, that's why China has better 5G than we fucking do is because we just didn't review the guy's visa.

And that's why I support open borders, because I should never have lag.

Yes, absolutely.

Open borders, not because of human dignity, but because I want my games to be fast.

Every border implies not just the violence of its maintenance, but the worst 5G of a gamer on the other side of it.

It's right.

It's okay.

Elon is going to fix it with Starlink.

I'm gonna, I of all the things, right, of all the things that he does,

that is the one that they should take away from him by force of thirst.

Like, nationalized, not to be like, full, like, you know, NAFO dogman, right?

But like,

the shit that he did in Ukraine, where he's like,

just like, oh, so like he spoke to a Russian guy and is like, okay, cool, well, uh, get war's over, I guess, because he's like the dumbest, most easily led Nazi cunt on the internet.

And it's just like yeah it okay these guys don't need internet because i'm scared they're gonna start world war three or whatever a man who believes in rocco's basilisk they should take him out the back and they should

him leave it leave that in

listen listen i don't rocco's modern basilisk i i don't support everything that the ukrainian government has ever done or is there

but I do think they should be allowed to execute Elon Musk, right?

That would actually be pretty good, yeah.

You gotta give them that.

You gotta give them two things, right?

You gotta give them like they are the victim of an unjust invasion, which they are entitled to resist by like the sort of means available to them in the same way that Palestinians are.

And you gotta give them the ability to execute Elon Musk.

Yeah, no, I'll buy that, but I wanted to talk about my idea, which is Starfish Link, in which I just send 900,000 pictures of my butthole to Elon Musk, overwhelming him so much he walks into the fucking sea.

Yeah, reasonable.

He's a a fucking Nazi.

And you know what?

Dev, you'll have to bleep this, but I look forward to the day that Elon Musk sees Picture 9000 of my butthole and just, and hopefully fucking himself.

I hope.

I don't know.

Or my butt, you know, you know that movie, The Ring, except The Ring is my butthole, and Elon Musk killed himself.

I don't have a joke here.

I just really hate the guy.

The other thing about the campus protests, I think, is hauling it back to something vaguely like a topic, right?

Is that

if

administrators had been at all smarter about this, like it would still have been evil, but they could have like sort of avoided these problems for themselves, right?

But because the system is what it is, right?

Like

you have to prove all of the people who say that like, you know, the violence in Gaza and like police violence in the US is part of the sort of same overall structure by immediately sort of like sending in the cops and like talking about sending in the National Guard and stuff.

Whereas if you had had done nothing, if you had done absolutely nothing and just like sat on your ass, collected your immense sort of like administrative salary for your hedge fund disguised as a university and just gone, this will fizzle out because they'll get bored.

And, you know, it'll get smaller and it'll be like, you know,

there'll be like a small little protest camp that.

like one of our business professors can be insane about.

And eventually the people who aren't Palestinian will get bored and peel off.

That might have even been true.

But like by

sending in like state troopers in the NYPD or by sending in like the National Guard, God forbid,

all you're doing is like galvanizing this stuff.

But they can't do otherwise because that's what the system is, you know?

Yeah, I mean, you know, they probably have inspired like 50 other protests that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

You know, even.

You know, I wouldn't be surprised to see even like the most politically inactive campus I've ever been on, Drexel University, having a protest soon.

I mean,

yeah, I mean, if you're a student listening to this, you should, you should go to one.

You should organize one if there isn't one.

Like,

this is a good thing for you to do.

And I think also I appreciate how

all of the attempts to like bait and provoke and to lie on the path of the opposition have not worked.

Did you see that one video of the guy who like took his wife to the protests at Columbia wearing a shirt on which he had like handwritten

Jew front and back.

I saw that.

Yeah.

My wife bravely confronted these anti-Semitic protesters and not only did no one either notice or confront her, but behind her, there was a giant banner saying like Jews for a free Palestine.

And none of those people noticed her either.

They're just like, you know, like a big circle around her, just like, you're fucking moron.

Yeah, yeah.

Like,

that's the level of regard it like deserves, you know?

And I'm, I'm proud of all of these kids, not just for protesting, but also for like

sort of remaining above that kind of thing and like being organized and being making it not just engagement bait, right?

Yes, yeah.

I hear you.

Because like when I was a, when I was like 19, 20, I was a fucking idiot is the thing.

Oh, me too.

So was he.

And if you would have asked me,

yeah, if you would have asked me to like, can you organize a protest in a way that has like a designated media person so when a guy from the Atlantic comes looking for like quotes to make us look bad, we refer to that.

I was going to mention that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I wouldn't have been able to do that.

I wouldn't have been that smart or that disciplined, you know, and these kids are.

I would have just started

yelling probably like pro-Hamas slogans, something like that.

You would have endorsed Hezbollah.

I would have said that like Ukraine should get the right to execute Elon Musk.

What is our one demand?

That's a weird list of them.

And that's fine for a podcast, I think, but like, it's probably not okay for like these kids to be saying, and they're smart to

be sort of canny and all this.

It's well done on not taking the bait.

Yes.

Yeah.

No one's showing up with like the Hamas red arrow on a t-shirt.

Just a big like Hamas red arrow on a stick.

You can like, oh my God, that would be really funny.

do it doing mit style pranks where you like climb the campus in the middle of the night you put a big red arrow over it

okay that is pretty please no please no do not do this don't do it

that's that's the sum total of my like protesting advice life experience is this idea that i have is funny never do it don't do it oh yeah don't don't no no no

before before we get any any other big big ideas, let's go to the next news item.

Yeah, so this is a fun little story.

I don't know if you saw this, but today,

time of recording, a couple of the household cavalry,

like army horses, just like busted loose.

Yeah, they didn't like what was going on.

They didn't like what was transpiring, and they decided to quit the army in

the way they were supposed to do.

Yeah, they deserted um and so like five horses just like unseated their riders at bucking palace and just went loose through central london one of them

the horses are organizing shit

now

my you know 32f horses 4m 5m 4m have organized against me um i i mean it's obviously it's not good to get thrown off a horse as you see here the like white one is covered in blood which i

don't know if that's horse blood or like cavalryman blood, but either way, I was going to ask about it.

Horses said unified Ireland now.

Yeah.

I mean, if horses knew what a unified Ireland was, they would support it.

Unfortunately, horses are the dumbest animals on God's green earth.

Yeah, which makes them unionists.

Can you imagine if there were like more horses on the road, though?

Like there were like, if you were still using horses and carts and the horses.

What if everything were West Philadelphia?

When you learn to drive in this country, they do include on the list of hazards like horses.

I'm hitting the big fucking hazard perception test button on this.

Like this is a hassle.

I have seen one of the West Philly cowboys lose control of a horse on my street.

It was very funny.

The thing is losing control of a horse is

like it has the high level of like risk of physical injury, death, disability, but also high slapstick comedy value.

I don't know if you remember during, like, I think it was some of the Brexit protests, maybe, but like, there was like a Met Police, like, mounted, like, riot cop who lost control of the horse and went full tilt into a sign in a way that she just got, like, perfectly wily coyoted off of the horse.

And you're like, that's got to really fucking hurt.

It's also really funny to watch.

I'm going to watch this like five or six more times.

Like, by the same token, this.

If you run a red light on a horse do you get the ticket or does the horse i mean would you would you like to try and ticket that horse it's covered in blood and it's mad like yeah but what if what if like the rider is still on there and he's lost control and it's like well it's not his fault you sort of approach approach the horse and like slap a ticket onto the horse and then it kicks you in the head killing you instead

no no no no the guy the guy who named kicking horse pass survived um i like that you know that that makes me really happy

One thing I will say is you know who the real winners are in this situation?

Not horses.

Street photographers, right?

Because imagine, like, obviously this looks very creepy.

It looks very like portentous anominous, but like, if you're a street photographer, you're just walking down the street in central London, all of a sudden you are presented with this,

like something's going pretty, pretty well for you.

Like, I'm walking around with the camera a lot and I'm often thinking like, oh, I wish there would be two runaway horses.

I wish there was

some horse chaos occurring.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And there so seldom is, you know.

But

someone was there on the scene, you know, and I'm so glad they were because the pictures of it, like, this is a pretty low resolution version because it's just like pulled off the internet.

But, like, they're genuinely, like, really, like, compellingly sharp.

So, yeah.

They did get.

Oh, see our photography bonus.

Oh, please do.

It's one of my favorite we've done.

But, like, they've recovered all the horses.

All of the horses are, like, now now back in the army.

I think they should have just let them like run free and be like a sort of feature of central London for a while.

There's just some horses that hang out.

Watch out for the wild horses, you know?

Yeah.

So dodging lime bikes and like delivery drivers and stuff.

They would get hit by like a truck instantly.

Yeah, it's true.

And as you see in the background there, we do let like a lot of HGVs just used like main roads in central London.

So

yeah,

i don't know i think maybe the solution is instead of like pedestrianization you know we love pedestrian horsesization equestrianization equestrianization that's the word yes yeah

i'll just

i think i i'm not sure where this is this might be the strand um we just equestrianize that and we just have like a big like hippodrome there that does that does slap i do like you're you're you're you're gonna regret this when you realize about dealing with the poop i mean listen london streets are not that clean to begin with yeah

it's many ways it's like return with a v right because like all the streets of this is what you want to write in horse and so we're just going back you know also maybe we could train them to use like big litter trades or something i don't know oh you're gonna have to have a municipal pooper scooper service It creates jobs.

It's Keynesian.

Like, you got to have the guy who like equestrianizes the road, the guy who does the road markings, the guy who like picks up after the horses.

It's perfect.

You know, that's three good union jobs paying a living wage right there.

Equestrianize Britain.

All right.

Yeah, we got to go back to horses.

We've got to have more horses so we can strengthen the horse union.

Horse good, car bad.

Yeah.

I'll buy that.

Why not?

We just can't have atmospheric railways.

No, no, no, no.

What Irish guy is going to shit his pants.

And that's what the municipal pooper scooper is for.

There you go.

Absolutely.

Cleans up after horses and one terrified Irish man.

Yes.

Well,

speaking of horses, that was the goddamn news.

We do have to talk about horses a bit.

My eye is sort of unfocused looking at this dread map, and I briefly pictured it as a kind of like battle map.

It kind of looks that way.

Kind of is.

Battle between the Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baltimore and Ohio in Baltimore.

The Pennsylvania Railroad draws up its troops at Mount Vernon, you know.

It's used to Civil War maps.

No, that's still probably what the Pensu would do.

There is some Civil War relevance here.

So

Baltimore has historically been the terminus for a number of important East Coast railroads.

I mean, the BNO, which is in blue, the Pennsylvania Railroad's in red here.

Over here in brown, we have the Western Maryland Railroad, which it deserves.

You have the Mon Paw, the Maryland and Pennsylvania up here in orange.

And then, you know, there's a number of things going on here.

But in sort of the early,

whatchamacallit?

In the early 1800s, in the mid-1800s, this was the terminus of the BO main line, which

is.

the Baltimore and Ohio.

This is where the B ⁇ O Railroad Museum is now.

That's mile zero, the B ⁇ O.

And then it was the terminus of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad over here at the President Street Station, which somehow still exists.

And if you were going south from...

New York, Philadelphia, points north, you came down the PW and B and you went down to the President Street station, and then your train car was unhitched from the locomotive and hitched to horses, and they pulled you down Pratt Street until you could get to the BO station.

This is what we like, you know, and

then intermodal horse.

Yeah, intermodal horse, yes.

Um, you know, but every train on the East Coast had to do this.

Intermodal, intra-urban horse, exactly.

So, you had like horses pulling freight cars and all this crap.

It's very annoying, It was very slow.

It almost got President Lincoln assassinated.

Run that one by me again.

So when President Lincoln was,

I forget exactly.

No, no, he did.

He did get assassinated later, but this would have been before most of the Civil War happened.

Yeah, you kind of needed him alive for that.

Yeah, because he took a train from, I want to say, New York to Washington, D.C.

And of course, you know, Baltimore was a big Confederate city.

Yes.

And they had to pull his presidential train car through downtown Baltimore.

And they wound up, they just did it at like two o'clock in the morning, so no one was awake.

So like the reputation of Baltimore in the 19th century is

like racist, but very sleepy about it.

Yes, they're too sleepy to be racist.

You're going to get your bad time

The other big railroad that terminated here was the Baltimore and Potomac up here,

which was the Pennsylvania controlled line to Washington, D.C.

Now, after the Civil War, the trains started getting bigger.

The situation with hauling all the trains down Pratt Street became untenable.

So the Pennsylvania Railroad does two things.

Number one,

it solidifies its control over the PW and B going northward.

And then they build the Union tunnels here and the BNP tunnels over here.

And then all of a sudden, they have their own nice Pennsylvania station up here that they can use, and they don't have to use any of that street trackage.

And so

around 1873, this was all finished, right?

All their traffic is no longer on city streets except for their very like the local freight deliveries, which still ran until like 1980 or or something.

God damn.

Yeah.

So

the Baltimore and Ohio has a more complicated problem, though, because they have their original terminus in Mount Claire,

and then there's no clear way forward from there, right?

They're kind of boxed in.

They're boxed in, yeah.

In 1884, the Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore was finally completely acquired by the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to kick the BNO trains off of it entirely.

So they no longer have access to this up there.

They're like, no, fuck you.

Right.

I love railroad wars.

Yeah.

So the BO is like, all right, we'll build our own line to Philadelphia with blackjack and hookers.

And that's the Philadelphia branch up here or the Philadelphia subdivision.

1870s, quite possibly.

Yeah.

So, and there's still a problem here, though, which is how do you link the two halves of the railroad together?

Initially, this was done by a car float over here.

I think there was also some other route.

This map is from trains.com, by the way, and it shows the situation in about 1949.

So this is not exactly what it looked like.

Here's a little bit of an older engraving of the original situation where the trains came off of the Camden station, they went onto Pratt Street, they went around the inner harbor, and they went into President Street.

I know it's also Gay Street, hell yeah, representation we've always been here etc etc there's a gay street dock even

i'd love to dock at gay street

so you couldn't bridge the harbor for reasons we mentioned in the previous episodes and reasons that were you run a

ship into it you know yeah yeah pretty well demonstrated a few weeks ago uh no one wanted to try tunneling under the harbor um there was only one way to go build a tunnel directly underneath downtown baltimore hell yeah Hell yeah.

Can we get some like Minecraft footage or possibly dwarf fortress footage over this?

Oh, yeah, that would make sense.

That would be, that would be a good one.

Um,

so the Baltimore and Ohio's Camden station is down here next to Oriel Park at Camden Yards.

Um,

I hate how things are at things now.

They're at things.

Well, this is one of the first things to be at a thing because that is a that's a relatively old ballpark at this point.

They invented the preposition for this.

It is a good ballpark, though.

Camden Yards.

It is a good ballpark, yeah.

I enjoy going to Camden Yards.

What makes a good ballpark as opposed to a bad ballpark?

Sight lines, relatively cheap drinks,

just a good atmosphere.

Is that

so?

No, no, not in baseball.

No.

That's the cool thing about like all the different parks have weird, different little like idiosyncrasies and stuff like that.

The new ones, the new, the newer ones seem to be like allowed and encouraged.

Yeah.

The newer ones seem seem to be sort of,

whatchamacallit, sort of zooming in on like a standardized baseball field design.

What can I get with it?

Like, if I'm designing a baseball, can I be like, yeah, the field's at like a 45-degree angle?

I don't know that you could do that, but there's stuff like that.

No, that would, that would be,

that's just, whatchamacallit?

The one in Philly, the Baker Bowl.

The Baker Bowl is like there.

The one in Nashville, there's one in Nashville that had a hill.

Yes, like a real actual hill.

Yeah,

we did a bonus of, if anyone's interested in this, we did a bonus of 10,000 losses with rods where we talk about these designs that I've always found pretty fascinating.

Yeah,

baseball would be better if it would, if it was worse.

Yeah, sports are better when they're worse.

Yeah.

So actually, though, Camden Yards is nice.

It's one of the first, it was the first modern retro ballpark.

It has

the concessions are nice and convenient.

The sight lines are good, so on and so forth.

Shout out to Camden Yards.

Friend of the

train stations right there.

So the Howard Street Tunnel went from the Camden station up Howard Street to a new station at Mount Royal, which is still there, but it doesn't see trains anymore.

Long-ass tunnel.

But I mean,

you can tunnel under a city and put trains in it, like many cities have.

Oh, yeah, no problem.

This is 1895, though.

So there are some issues.

One city has done this at this point.

Exactly.

Two more cities are shortly to follow.

So it has a relatively steep grade.

It handles full-size mainline trains.

So steam engines would have to work very hard to pull heavy trains through the tunnel.

If you're doing heavy work with these steam trains, that means a lot of smoke.

And in a tunnel, that's a bad situation.

You end up with the same thing of the early London Underground,

of

what happens if you get to the station and you have suffocated all your passengers.

Yeah, not good, not good.

You want to avoid that.

So the BNO turns to a new technology, electrification.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

Cutting edge.

Still can't do it on a lot of places today, it seems.

Yeah, it's a lot of technology.

This looks so funny.

Yeah, it's stayed cutting edge.

Yeah.

So

scientific American.

Yes.

So the very first mainline electrification system in the United States was installed in the Howard Street Tunnel to haul trains through the tunnel and through several tunnels that followed it.

These electric locomotives are attached at the Camden station and were either detached when a passenger train made a stop at the Mount Royal station or the freight trains, they would actually just keep going up the line and they would uncouple them on the fly and put them in a siding and the freight train would continue on towards Philadelphia.

I like how enthused everyone in this looks.

Like the engineer sticking his head out of the cab, the guy like in the tunnel waving to him.

It's just like, yeah, fuck yeah, this is the future.

Everyone's like, yeah, this is fucking great.

We're doing the future.

Things could happen.

Yeah.

Pretty soon we're going to electrify all trains.

Oh, you hold on to that thought, buddy.

So this was done with a 675-volt DC third rail system, which was initially on the ceiling.

You notice this very strange panograph here.

The idea was to give more clearance that the two third rails would be next to each other on the ceiling, and then the panograph would just sort of ride in a slot on the rails and be offset.

I prefer this to like a third rail on the line in that it feels less likely to kill me for looking at it wrong.

Oh, yes, but it didn't work very well.

So they eventually put third rail on the ground.

Haven't there been some places where they tried to do like

third rail like along the side of the like the tunnel?

There's like some

like really weird one-off like proprietary systems that do something like that.

Um, especially if you have something like uh

something that's like cable hold, um, you know, and does not have electricity on board as a result.

You have a third rail that's entirely for like lighting and heat and air conditioning.

I think this is the way Glasgow did it for a while, but that would make sense.

Yeah.

Um, um, eventually they actually installed something called a gauntlet track down here, which is essentially a track in the middle that was offset to give higher vertical clearance.

But if you were using that track, you couldn't use the other two tracks.

And they actually had the third rail on like swiveling mounts so it could be just slid into position,

rotated into position.

It's very strange.

Do not just be standing in this tunnel waving when there is a 675-volt DC line that is moving around like a kind of mobile platformer game.

Yeah, exactly.

It's not a good situation.

I would avoid that.

But yeah, the way he would handle this is the steam train comes into Camden, you shut off steam, you know, you close the,

you close up the cylinders, you do all the stuff, and the electric locomotive pulls you through.

So you're not creating a significant amount of smoke while you're in the tunnel and no one suffocates.

It's a good system.

And it was very, very successful.

And thus it was not extended or replicated.

That sounds a rather problem.

Yeah.

The BL Philadelphia subdivision was never very busy because the Pennsylvania Railroad just had better connections and went more places in the northeast.

Traffic to New York and the BNO, for instance,

if you were sending a car from Baltimore to New York City via the Baltimore and Ohio, you would have to be interchanged onto both the Reading Railroad at Philadelphia and then the Central Railroad to New Jersey and Trenton.

It's adding a lot more time.

So, you know, this huge tunnel was used by as few as like six trains a day, right?

Perfect.

Yeah, beautiful.

That's American rail infrastructure.

There you go.

Yeah, it's really cutting edge to solve a problem that shouldn't really exist.

Yeah, competition is great.

All right, let's fast forward a bit.

Dieselization happens.

So

the third rail is ripped up in 1952, right?

Here's one of the BNO's passenger trains at Harper's Ferry.

You get these very beautiful trains that are also killing the planet.

Yeah.

A lot of them.

The Baltimore and Ohio becomes the Chessie system in 1976.

With the cat.

Fantastic.

They discontinue passenger trains altogether in 1958.

Chessie system becomes CSX in 1986.

Boring corporate.

Bring back the cat.

Got to bring back the cat.

Oh, you should see their heritage units.

They suck.

They're awful.

They do have a Chassis heritage unit and looks awful.

In In 1987, the Chase, Maryland accident happens, which I'm sure we'll talk about in the future.

The entire Northeast Freight Railroad system is restructured as a result of this.

Nearly all freight traffic on the Amtrak Northeast corridor was rerouted onto the old BNO Philadelphia subdivision.

And as a result, the Howard Street Tunnel becomes one of the busiest tunnels in the country with 28 to 32 large freight trains passing through it every day.

I mean, finally, a use for this thing.

Like, you have it like under the

guts.

It's like not going anywhere.

It's quite well built.

Like, yeah,

it's a hazmat right through the center of the city, which I assume will be fine.

It's in a tunnel.

It's fine.

It's fine.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, we'll see you.

Listen, if there's one thing I want between me and the hazmat, it's ground.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

All right.

I probably go like ocean before ground, but like ground also.

That's where I put my car batteries.

Yeah, exactly.

Hazardous waste belongs in the ocean.

I hate seals.

Universal solvent,

really good, like dilutor, insulator, like, yeah, insulator?

No, it's not.

But like, you know, throw it in the ocean.

It's a safe and legal throw.

Dilution is the solution to pollution.

That's right.

We'll see a few more shots of this building here.

This is the train shed for the Mount Royal Tunnel or the Mount Royal station, which which you can actually go down there and watch trains there.

It's really nice.

I've been down there a couple times.

So, you know,

now with all this extra traffic, it was also reduced to a single track for higher clearances.

Okay, sure.

I mean,

helps you not run a hazmat train into another hazmat train.

Well,

we haven't had that for a while.

If the next slide is about a fucking chemical, I'm

oh, well, every train goes through this tunnel, including, of course, dangerous azimat trains, which may be carrying chemicals such as tripropy.

Motherfucker.

Yep.

Yeah.

Oh, that's.

Boy.

I like that the slide says, I have no idea what this is or what it does.

That is true.

I don't know.

No, Google wasn't very helpful either.

It's a clear, colorless liquid with a sharp odor.

I mean,

it's, that's a lot of things.

Yeah, so yeah, this is

it's some kind of hydrocarbon.

It's got nine C's.

It's got 18 H's.

There's a double bond in here, I guess.

I don't, I have no fucking clue.

People get it delivered by the tank car load, such as these big 28,600-gallon tank cars.

Um, the only information I found is it's used to make other chemicals and as a lubricating oil additive.

Yeah.

This is like so much of the chemical industry is just this stuff, right?

Like, I actually, I actually, I, listeners, I did try to find out what this was.

Yeah, I believe it, yeah.

Yeah, the hogs have Google.

The hogs have Google.

The safety data sheet for tripropylene glycol.

I probably should have just put that up here.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's flammable.

That's another thing you should know because, you know, it's a hydrocarbon.

I mean, they're all flammable.

So anyway, on July 18th.

Oh, geez.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, something's going to go well because there's a CSX trade here.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Well, they've been doing a lot better than Norfolk Southern recently.

I will say that.

Yeah, I know.

But, like, Roz, let me ask you a question, buddy.

Yeah.

In a world where you have to pick between me pissing on your face and shitting in your mouth, which would you rather have?

Is it neither?

Is this also your argument for voting for Biden?

It is not.

I wrote in Rozebo.

Rice in uncommitted.

Yeah, I wrote in uncommitted yesterday.

I was like really frustrated.

I had to go vote, even though that's partially because our ballot question was important, I thought.

Yeah,

the ballot question, I can see arguments for both sides.

I voted no.

I also voted no.

I mean, I'm sure.

What is this?

Let me Monday morning.

It's about the indemnification of registered community organizations in an event where they are sued in connection with a zoning board of adjustment decision.

Well, that's how they got Acorn, right?

So, like, yeah, of course not.

Yeah,

it's kind of like, you know,

I just think voting no means they're not going to be able to NIMBY as easily.

But, you know, who knows?

I have no idea.

It's a city ballot question.

People always vote yes on those.

So

whatever.

Yeah, I was a little frustrated that I had to go at all, but a friend of the the show, Matt, wrote me in for president, which I thought was very funny.

Hell yeah.

We don't have any like

questions, any like referenda apart from

Brexit.

Yeah,

we can't be trusted with them, clearly.

Yeah, I don't know.

I'd like the opportunity to do those kind of like bullshit, like policy questions.

Um, I think it'd be fun.

The other thing is, my next-door neighbors are effective organizers because if I don't go to vote, they know and they yell at me.

They do.

This is the way that you organize people, right?

Is you find out what they're not doing.

Shame works.

Exactly.

Do not ask me about what I am not doing and do not shame me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, they run the polls, so I, you know, I have to, if they don't see me, they know.

Yeah.

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast.

that you're already listening to.

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

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

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

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

You get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them.

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

is this one

anyway that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month uh join at patreon.com forward slash wtyp pod

do it if you want or don't it's your decision and we respect that

back to the show

all right so july eighteenth two thousand one it's a beautiful pre-911 morning uh oh yeah

yeah no one knows what's going to hit them.

Just before 3 p.m., CSX train L41216 left the West Baltimore yard, which I believe is now disused,

bound for Philadelphia with 31 loaded and 21 empty cars.

Excuse me, 29 empty cars, including eight hazmat tank cars.

That's a 60-car train, which they would be a very short one.

The length of like American freight trains is always cool to me.

Oh, yeah.

They just, they, you know, now it's like everything's 250 cars.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

You know, anyway, so the train was traveling around 25 miles an hour.

And as, you know, as you enter the tunnel, you're going through a short downgrade, right?

So you're easing up on the throttle.

You're around notch five.

Then as you go through the lowest part of the tunnel,

you start to have a steep upgrade.

So at that point, you start to notch up to notch eight, which is the highest throttle setting on a diesel locomotive.

So, you know, the engineer is trying to take up the slack, keep the train stretched through this entire situation so you're not having weird in-train forces.

And he gets about 1,800 feet from the north portal, and the train dumps the air.

It goes into emergency.

Something had happened on the train to break the air hose, so the emergency brakes come on automatically.

And that's good, right?

That's what we want.

Well, it's better than not lightning.

Yeah,

potentially.

Oh, I don't like the it depends answer here.

It's one of the reasons runaway train.

Yeah.

Sometimes the emergency brake going on is extremely bad.

Sometimes it causes the derailment it's supposed to prevent.

So also the airbags of trains.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

It's better than not having it, but it can still cause problems.

So the crew is unable to radio dispatch to make anyone aware of the situation.

Hey, we're stuck in the tunnel because they're in the tunnel.

Um, and apparently, the radio just doesn't work.

Yeah,

yeah.

One of the things is about ground about the ground is that aside from being good at like protecting you from hazmat, it's also very good at protecting you from radio signals.

Eventually, the conductor used his personal cell phone, which is today a really big no-no, to uh call dispatch and tell them they had a problem in the tunnel.

Why is that?

Like, now

like frowned upon.

It's like, it's like, oh, God, I forget which accident someone was looking at their phone and crashed.

Wasn't that Frankfurt derailment, or was that the allegation?

That was the allegation there.

That was an allegation there, but it was not the case.

Right, right, right.

My bad.

It might have been the one where Union Pacific

slammed into Metrolink.

I don't remember.

I'm not 100% certain on that one.

So just because you can't be looking at your phone.

yeah you're not supposed to look at your phone because your cars are even now they're stopped and you like can't use the radio like yeah they're they're a lot more psychotic about it now huh yeah

um

so anyway yeah a lot of times it's like it needs to be turned off and stored in your bag unless there's like really extenuating circumstances um you know

Seems pretty extenuating to me, you know?

Yeah, in this case, okay, we got to call dispatch somehow.

They told them they had a problem in the tunnel, and eventually they wind up saying, All right, we're sitting here.

The fumes are getting pretty bad.

We're going to move the locomotives out of the tunnel.

Diesel trains still in an unventilated tunnel.

Yes.

Didn't even occur to me at any point during this that they saw running diesel trains through this.

Yeah, right, right.

Good things are happening to your lug, Snova.

Good things.

Breathe deep, baby.

So the engineer and conductor moved the train out, moved the two locomotives out of the the tunnel, but the whole train is still in there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so it takes a while to figure out exactly what's going on here.

But eventually, after a lot of back and forth between the dispatchers, the crew, the Baltimore Fire Department, when smoke started to come out of the tunnel portal, so on and so forth, they managed to figure out, oh, we had a problem.

Something's on fire back there.

Right.

And no one can figure out exactly where it is.

Just in the tunnel that runs the whole length of downtown Baltimore.

Yeah, exactly.

There is a serious fire somewhere in that tunnel, and we don't know where it is or what.

Action movie setup, you know.

Yeah.

So, what had in fact happened in there was that several cars full of timber and paper products had derailed,

as well as one car,

SRIX33015, which is what is it?

Car number 52 here.

Right here.

Car number 53.

Yeah, Yeah, it says on the notes 53.

Yeah, but the note is wrong, is the thing.

Yeah.

So this car had derailed in such a way that it pretty much eviscerated itself.

You know, it derailed.

It like, you know, leapt off of the wheels and then crashed.

And, you know, it was really bad.

So it, it was pretty heavily damaged.

And it was, of course, full of that wonderful chemical.

tripopropylene.

So it caught fire.

Anything to be done with the like design of the tank car that could have like mitigated this?

I will get to that in a bit.

Okay.

That's a good question.

But yeah.

So, you know, it just sort of,

it has a bad time.

It breaks open.

It catches fire.

And it wasn't until 4 p.m., CSX dispatch determined there was a serious problem, and they called the Baltimore City Fire Department.

The fire department showed up at the Mount Royal station at the north end of the tunnel about 4.10, and they couldn't get into the tunnel because of all the fire and the smoke.

In the meantime, the Baltimore City Fire Department had another call to make.

Oh, god, how bad is it?

Do we have to evacuate the city?

Yeah, I mean, because this thing runs under the whole thing, right?

Like, exactly, and it's hazmat.

You could be like giving everyone in Baltimore like every cancer, yes, that they don't already have from living, yeah.

So they decided not to evacuate the city, but uh, to tell people to shelter in place along the route.

They did, however, evacuate Camden Yard Stadium in the middle of a double header.

Incredible.

Yeah, and someone finally got to use the emergency broadcast system for something other than a test.

It feels good as hell when it's not like the nuke or whatever.

Right.

We're just like,

yeah, I get to break this bad boy out.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So confusion reigned in Baltimore City as Howard Street was completely blocked with no alternate routes right at close of business for most commuters.

The light rail system was shut down because it goes straight up and down Howard Street.

Residents of the city were told to stay indoors and shelter in place, turn off your air conditioning so you don't breathe any horrible fumes.

Close all your windows.

Yeah.

At 5.45.

That sounds like a pretty amateur hour disaster response, or am I reading that wrong?

I mean, that's still standard around like all kinds of things.

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

At 5.45, they sounded the civil defense sirens nights and no one knew no one knew they still had them or what they were supposed to do

just for vibes and the vibe bad yeah i was about to say i mean i assume you know if i hear the civil defense sirens i assume that like uh you know the zeros are closing in and battleship yamamoto is steaming under the francis scottkey bridge you know would you would you like my drop of the foster steam siren that you goes on a world war ii destroyer

sure why not a foster steam siren

This thing.

There you go.

I like it.

Fantastic.

You say Yamamoto?

Like the pitcher?

As opposed to Yamoto, the battleship?

Yeah, the battleship is Yamato, but you're thinking of Isoroko Yamamoto, the Admiral.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I'm not a World War II.

Yoshinibu Yamamoto, who is a baseball pitcher for the Dodgers.

But yeah, sure.

Either one, it's fine.

Thanks for exposing me as a Baka Gajin, you know?

I don't know what the fuck that means.

Gaijin.

Gaijin,

I don't speak Japanese.

Yeah.

I don't know anything about Japan.

I don't.

I mean, I don't either.

And like, my Japanese is terrible, but like.

Yeah, my like partner's partner speaks Japanese to like a sort of fluent level.

So I like end up with a bit like through osmosis.

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

So it was impossible to get in the tunnel to determine the extent or the location of the fire.

One of the first indications of the location of the problem was when a 40-inch water main fractured underneath Lombard Street directly over the Duran.

No.

Is this it here?

This is the main.

Yeah.

Fuck.

Here's a guy.

And presumably a welder here for scale.

Although this might also be some kind of Inger Serand compressed air system.

I'd have no idea.

I was thinking it was, but yeah, you know, better than I did.

I'm joining those like shirt sleeves.

You can,

I can't see because of the resolution, but I know in my heart this man has a pocket protector.

Yeah,

staring into the pit.

I would have loved to have had higher resolution photos, but this is before we invented pixels.

Well, like, as with Salang, I feel like tunnel fires by definition are very poorly documented.

Yeah, not very good pictures, yeah.

So, the 40-inch water main fractured under Lombard Street directly over the derailment.

This cut off water and power and internet to downtown.

Not the internet.

Yeah.

There's more than one internet.

You can't get on GeoCities anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

I can't go post on something awful about this.

Watch Mayor Martin O'Malley.

I was going to say watch

Mayor Martin O'Malley started.

Yours was way funnier and I stepped on it.

I'm so sorry.

I thought Martin.

I think Martin O'Malley was the mayor at this point.

I'm not.

Martin O'Malley, you got a children's book ass name.

You sound like the mailman in a town where everyone's a bet.

Yeah.

He's commissioner of the Social Security Administration.

I got that from Twitter.

It's just I have tweets in my head.

Oh, it's okay.

We all have disorders.

I spent yesterday doing a psychiatric evaluation, and the doctor was basically the least helpful psychiatrist I've ever had.

And that's saying quite a fucking bit.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a pretty broad spectrum.

Yeah, I've had some pretty useless ones, but she was just creme de la creme of what, of just why do you even have a fucking doctorate?

Is my question.

But yeah,

Martin O'Malley.

Yeah, he's yeah, he

was elected mayor in 99 and was re-elected in 04 and then became governor in 06.

Oh, there you go.

So why is he so smooth?

Yeah,

I've googled him and his skin very, very like.

Oh, and then he's just like,

yeah, like a real

serumed-looking motherfucker.

Like.

Is that retinol?

Is that a smooth mare?

Yeah, do you not know about it?

I know about retinol, but I don't really know what it does.

So I have a wife, right?

I have a kid's wife.

Yeah.

And she does a skincare routine, but she explains it.

It's that noise from the

skincare routine.

It's really, really, really simple.

What you want to do is you want to do twice a day.

You want to do a cleanse.

You want to,

you know, like wash your face.

Then you usually get like a cleanser and a toner combined.

I have one.

CR Ceravi.

I use it twice a day.

That's kind of all I do, honestly.

Then what you want to do is you want to put a little bit of serum on as a kind of like pre-moisturizer.

And then you want to moisturize.

And you also want to like fairly regularly also be doing like a scrub as well.

And

that's a skincare routine.

I can barely shower once a day.

Yeah, depression manifests in many forms and it fucking sucks.

I mean, in my case, it kind of turned out in a beneficial way where like anxiety manifested in doing a very exacting skincare routine twice a day.

So anyway,

the water main.

Drop the skincare routine, bruh.

Yeah, having, having a, well, my skincare routine is having a 40-inch water main straight to your face.

I mean, you will be moist.

I am emerged from the goo.

You will be cleansed, you will be toned, you will be moisturized, and you will be scrubbed.

Try the try the There's Your Problem skincare routine where we come to your house and open the water main.

We open a 40-inch water main into your face.

Yeah, doing like a kind of like very expensive moisturizer bottle, but it's just full of like Baltimore City, like municipal water.

Yeah.

Pretty good, actually.

One of the positive things about the water main breaking is that all that water went straight into the tunnel and did dampen down the fire a lot.

Oh, yeah, because Fundamentates having a water main opened over it.

Yes, exactly.

It's one of the key techniques of like defeating fire.

But now downtown

has, there's no water, there's no electricity, there's no internet, it's uninhabitable.

And a fire is still burning.

Downtown Baltimore is uninhabitable.

Where am I supposed to post on something awful about this?

Yeah, exactly.

I was going to do the much more obvious joke about whenever anywhere is said to be uninhabitable, which is, and then the water main collapses, you know?

Yeah.

Oh, sure.

I'm bad at jokes, Nova.

Sorry.

No, no, no, no, no.

It's fine.

It's a cheap joke.

It's hacky.

You know, I don't even have anything against Baltimore.

I love Baltimore.

Yeah.

I'm in Baltimore.

So drunk in Baltimore.

It's a great city.

Attacking an underground fire.

So

they must figure out.

Can you tell me where Saddam Hussein is in this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's probably like right about here.

You know, that's Saddam Hussein.

It's a pretty good freehand Saddam Hussein, I'll be honest.

That's not that bad, actually.

Yeah.

So you have a problem of like, how do you actually extinguish this fire?

Right.

Once you figure out where it is, it's a million miles from either entrance.

You can't get the hoses in.

You can barely get people in because you need, like, you know, a self-contained breathing apparatus.

You know, you need like a whole, it's a whole rigmarole to get any man or equipment in here to fight the fire, right?

Eventually, they managed to find a manhole, a single manhole that gets you into the tunnel near the fire.

Now, the fire fuck that.

Fuck going down a manhole.

Don't like that thing Oh, no.

No, into the fire.

Yeah.

So

smoke hoppers because they have the hoppers.

It's been tamped down somewhat, but it's still burning quite hot.

I mean, at the peak, this fire was estimated to be at, you know, that whole tunnel was 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fuck my ass, dude.

Yeah.

Just seal it off.

It's the fire's city now.

Yeah, it's sorry.

Baltimore is big Centralia.

Like, it's fine.

It's over.

At 10.30 a.m.

the following day, firefighters were finally able to gain access via

the manhole at Lombard Street.

The situation there was not great.

There's 11 train cars on the ground.

The fire has thoroughly consumed the tripropylene tank car.

Adjacent to that car was a car full of hydrochloric acid, which was leaking.

Oh.

Okay.

And then...

Yeah.

And then there were cars full of wood and paper products, which were still burning.

I'm so concerned about the hydrochloric acid.

That's hydrochloric acid is

a bad issue because, in order to go in there and fight the fire, they want to be able to drain that car or just not have hydrochloric acid there.

Right.

So, here's what they do: they do a pretty wild thing.

Firefighters go down with a hose and they put it into the hydrochloric acid tank car, and then they pump the hydrochloric acid out of the car and into a tanker truck at the surface while the fire is still burning.

Fucking crazy.

Jesus.

That's

MacGyver shit.

That's incredible.

Yes.

I mean, that's just amazing firefighting.

Like, not to like sort of

like, not as if I know anything about firefighting, but on the scale of firefighting where one end is Texas City or like jerking off onto it

and the other end is this, right?

Because this is like, it's, it's inventive.

It, I hope, works.

I mean, it's audacious.

It worked perfectly.

They got the whole thing.

I mean, it took a long time to fill the tanker trucks because they needed several because the tank car is bigger than the tanker trucks, but it worked perfectly.

Amazing.

By 7 p.m.

that day, you know, the first truck was on its way.

And then, you know, by then, I mean, it's only a couple more tanker trucks before they have the whole thing empty.

They're also trying to do fire suppression this whole time, but they can't quite knock the fire entirely down.

They're working in the tunnel.

It's nasty.

It's dark.

It's smoky.

You're working on, you know, again, on oxygen, on compressed air, because, you know, next to a hose full of hydrochloric acid.

Yes, exactly.

And so

one thing bad.

Yeah.

But at some point, you know, they've knocked down the fire to the extent that

CSX decides, all right, can we pull some more of these cars out of the tunnel?

Sure.

So, oh my God, dude.

This is a high rail truck.

People try and invent these as like new modes of transport all the time.

I saw one called a Ferromobile, where they were like, you'll be able to drive your regular-ass car on train tracks for some reason.

And we think this is going to be a business.

Yeah, sure.

Why not?

Why not?

Cool.

So if you can get the rest of the train out, that does reduce a lot of potential fuel for the fire.

Also, you save the merchandise, you know?

Because I believe they also did wind up shipping the hydrochloric acid to the intended destination.

Well done, boys.

So to do this, they need to get some guys in there, close the air hoses on the train cars so that they can then release the brakes and bring everything out, right?

Just send the locomotive in there and pull the rest of the train out.

So with more breathing gear, two CSX guys, a guy from the Maryland Department of the Environment, and a contractor from the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid System, which is just sort of

this big consortium that all like the manufacturers in Baltimore have, where like, if there's an emergency cleanup, we pool our resources.

They all get in a high rail truck and they enter the tunnel from the north portal.

Fuck that.

Drive this pickup truck into the

fire.

Right.

Yes, exactly.

Okay, that's bold as hell.

So anyway, one of the guys panics and exhausts his air supply immediately and they have to reverse out at high speed.

Would you not?

Like, you see that shit, you're like

big sweeping breaths.

Oh, absolutely.

You're not keeping up box breathing doing that shit.

That's gone poorly.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess a bunch of firefighters were keeping up box breathing doing this shit, but like, you know, probably not the train guys.

Or maybe it was the Department of the Environment guy.

Or maybe it was the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid Guy.

I don't know.

It was the South Baltimore Industrial Mutual Aid guy.

No, I think the

Department of the Environment guy also wound up being hospitalized.

Just for like vibes?

I'm not sure.

The sources that I had were, I assume it's just the CSX guys were tougher because of railroad.

They built different types of exactly.

So this was on day three.

They tried again later that day.

By 4 a.m.

on day four, the cars that were not on fire had been removed from the tunnel.

Okay.

Which leaves the cars that were on on fire.

Yeah, I mean, they've been in with this fucking high rail

and they've done the thing.

And they brought the cars out.

They sent a locomotive in.

They brought the cars out.

I have no idea if the guys on the locomotive had breathing apparatus.

You probably have to.

You must, yeah.

Again, I'm sort of struck with, like, given how bulky all that shit is, how do you drive a truck or a locomotive for that matter, wearing it?

Like,

it was actually.

I know the Southern Pacific

used to use it regularly for steam locomotives, actually.

They would just give you

an asbestos breathing helmet.

Okay.

Because, of course, it was asbestos, right?

For safety.

We've been mulling an asbestos episode at some point in the future, and that's going to be a good time.

I'd love to talk about all the kinds of asbestos suits.

There's so many.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Some people have like a latex or a leather fetish.

I have an asbestos fetish.

No, I don't.

I'm going to vomit.

I'm going to puke and that'll be it.

Yeah.

All right.

All right.

I crave death.

Anyway, so that left the cars that were on fire.

Some of them were upright and still on the tracks.

What do you do about that?

You pull them out while they're on fire.

Yes.

Yeah.

Fuck yes.

I love this shit.

This is, this is, this is precision railroading to me.

Yeah, like somewhere around day six, you know, firefighting efforts that contained the fire to a low smolder.

And

CSX just went in and pulled the still burning cars out of the tunnel so you could fight the fire in the open.

You can see this boxcar smoking here.

As we learned from East Palestine, being on fire does not mean it's not good for like full track speed.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Or like that train from London, Ontario.

Yeah, was

just on fire recently.

Being on fire is not like a a failure condition that accepts you from being like movable.

Yeah, being on top of it.

Yeah.

So, in total, this fire had shut down Baltimore for five days.

Buses had to be rerouted.

Buildings were closed.

Roads were blocked.

Three Orioles home games were canceled.

Oh, no.

Yeah, commuter trains were canceled.

The MTA light rail was unusable for months.

The whole inner harbor had been closed to boat traffic.

The fire was officially, finally declared extinguished a full six days after it had started.

Wow, woof.

Yeah, but no one died.

When did they get their internet back?

That's the real question.

When were citizens of Baltimore able to post again?

I think they got that back up online relatively quickly, but it was slower because it was a big cable that

got got.

And unlike a water main, like bursting an internet cable over a fire doesn't do anything to the fire.

Yeah, exactly.

It's not like there's, you know, all the packets come out, and then it's

yeah.

So, internet traffic does count as like a dry fire suppressant.

But everyone was relieved that the risk was over until two weeks later.

Uh-oh.

Oh, no.

A bunch of chemicals leaked into the sewers, and uh, two weeks later, they exploded, and every manhole cover in the city flew 12 feet in the air.

Oh, my God.

This is not a real city.

This is not a serious place.

You got having the fucking loony tunes.

Did anyone die doing that?

Like, I walk over a lot of manhole.

Everyone was fine.

This is a Looney Tunes disaster.

Let this be a lesson to you.

Like, don't walk over a manhole cover in case shit like this happens.

Something like this could happen at any moment.

Yeah.

Anytime.

Anytime.

Anytime.

Anytime.

You want to know.

Especially if there's

a train fire in a tunnel downtown for a long time.

Yeah.

Oh, look at them.

They're fixing it.

Yeah, they're fixing the tunnel.

So the tunnel held up surprisingly well, despite this raging inferno for six days.

This is ultimate like 2001 just to wear the cargo shorts to the fire.

The thing you're taping.

Yeah.

I like repairing the tunnel Open parentheses, LOL, close parentheses.

Yes, that's in the notes.

After they removed all the damaged cars, the track was repaired.

Trains were back using the tunnel again on July 23rd, 2001.

Good for full track speed.

Send it.

Yeah.

It's a tunnel.

It's not going anywhere.

You know, it's not going anywhere.

It's not a lot of chemical fumes in it, whatever.

Out of service for a grand total of seven days.

Despite

an intense investigation, no cause for the derailment was ever determined.

Just to know.

Vibes.

We don't know.

Sad.

The NTSB has a lot of theories about what could have happened, including like, you know, like bad rail car maintenance or it just randomly climbed over the rail or something.

We don't know what happened.

Bit flip.

Mysterious act of God's love.

Yeah.

Sasquatch.

Mothman.

Yes.

Probably cryptid.

This could be a cryptid type situation.

Well, 100%.

Like, if you're a cryptid and you, like, get under the wheels of the thing, you like might die in a way that's totally untraceable and like foul the like airline and then the break goes on.

Yeah, perfect.

I mean, well, if the train derails, the airline snaps regardless.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, maybe

could be anything, you know?

So the maybe, maybe like bin Laden determined to strike inside the United States was about this, you know, and 9-11 was kind of like the mental choke bonus.

Yeah.

So here's the thing, though, where you ask, all right, were there any kind of mitigation strategies put in?

Was there any kind of improvement to anything after this to prevent it from happening again?

It could have been much, much worse if it had been like a more explosive chemical.

I believe one FRA administrator was like saying, well, if there had been an explosion, it would have shot out both ends of the tunnel like a bazooka.

Did they improve anything?

And the answer is no.

I mean, I wasn't expecting them to like

replace the tunnel because, like, the tunnel's fine, but like that was one of the first ideas was maybe we should replace the tunnel with something more modern.

Shut up, Cal obviously did not happen.

Here we are back in the train shed of Mount Royal Station, and you may notice, well, that's a tanker car on the ground and another tanker car on the ground behind it.

Um, yeah, this one seems to be in slightly higher resolution, too.

Yes, because this is in 2018.

Yeah,

yeah, okay,

they're just gonna keep derailing trains here.

Going terrific.

So people made some

like some people made some noises about rerouting hazmat trains around Baltimore, but that would require building a new tunnel or a whole new railroad.

And you just can't do that anymore, right?

No, no, not unless there's coal involved.

Yeah.

So what we're seeing here is essentially like, this is a way in which Baltimore could have a second infrastructure crippling disaster at any time.

At any time, yeah.

At this time, maybe.

You know,

Further up the line in this direction, there's been a couple of infamous incidents recently

where a bunch of retaining walls from the other part of the Baltimore belt line collapsed.

That was a few years ago, almost took out some houses.

And then I think some people's cars fell on the tracks.

Oh, geez.

And then they managed to derail a freight train on the bridge right after this and drop a bunch of freight cars onto the Baltimore Trolley Museum.

I mean, at this rate, it's like a wonder that CSX didn't dump a train on top of the boat like that.

Yeah, yeah.

I was about to say we should look into whether CSX took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge.

So, CSX is currently in the process of enlarging this tunnel for double-stack container cars and other large freight cars.

And, you know, with today's monster freight trains, which like to derail for no reason at all, it's never a better time for Baltimore disaster enthusiasts.

Two 250 car long trains, every car of which is full of car batteries and acid,

slamming into each other at full track speed

directly onto downtown Baltimore.

Yes.

Cool.

Well, you know, something to look forward to, I guess.

It's nice to know that we're never going to run out of subjects, you know?

They'll never stop the Simpsons.

We will be going with similar diminishing quality returns into like season 45.

Well, there's your problem.

Exactly, exactly.

We'll have to start redoxing all disasters.

Not to sue that, Silverbridge.

I mean, listen, I don't know that we really did Silverbridge justice because it was Liamless.

And we were still figuring out what the deal was going to be.

And we didn't know the deal was going to include Liam.

So shit, maybe.

Yeah, that was before Liam muscled his way into the podcast.

That is what I i did yeah to improve it yeah yeah

he was he was he was indignant he was like you started a podcast without me

and you two are still roommates at that point so you had the like welcome home cheetah

yes

yes yes yes

no i mean it's it's it's a pleasure and like

doing this is great and I will look forward to doing it with you when Baltimore is destroyed.

in the next few years

yeah i have friends in baltimore i i'll feel bad about it but on the other hand i do have an enemy in baltimore so i'll feel less bad about it so these things there's a calculus happening here you know well there you go yeah so what did we learn i'll go to baltimore i guess make make the tank cars a bit better maybe more remote that is that is one of the things here this is a newer dot 113 uh tank car as opposed to the older dot 111s and they are a lot better in derailments than the old cars were

We did learn something, sort of.

But that was not, that regulation was not changed in response to the Howard Street tunnel fire.

That was from Lac Meg Antique.

Oh, yeah.

So, yeah.

I mean,

this could happen to you.

Not to be the voice of your anxiety disorder, but this could happen at any time.

At any time.

Yep.

Visit Baltimore while it still exists, folks.

It's nice.

Tick off all the stuff that is going to be underwater in 20 years, see all the endangered species, and visit downtown Baltimore.

Yeah.

You can go see

Baltimore County.

Yeah.

Go see the aquarium.

You can go to the BL Railroad Museum.

You can go to the Trolley Museum if they haven't dumped a train on it.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, CSX can dump a train on any of these things at any moment.

Yes.

At any moment, CSX can and will dump a train onto you and your family.

The train will crash through your house.

Yeah.

Even if you're like 20 miles from the railroad.

There's an anti-train cartoon, like a newspaper cartoon about this, where like a train busts through the wall of like a family eating breakfast

as a kind of like

steam train monster.

And I've long thought that this was like the correct attitude to take, except to think that, yeah, this is cool.

Oh, yeah, that'd be pretty funny.

I mean, there's a Thomas the Tank Engine about that.

But that's a

another story yeah

well we have a segment on this podcast called safety third

shake hands with danger hello november and the rest not wrong oh perfect thank you yes yeah we have our priorities in order i see

long time first timer mechanical engineer here with the story of how i survived getting hit in the chest with a frying angle grinder.

Oh, that's way worse than

most other kinds of angle angle grinders.

Yeah.

Also, English is not my native language.

So I apologize for any typos or misspellings,

wrong uses of phrases.

No, I just like the idea of a frying angle grinder.

I think I'm like,

yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's two and I can like make some hash rounds with it.

I hate when I have to like reseason my angle grinder, but I also now feel bad for this joke.

So I apologize, particularly since you like emphasized my name, which is, you know, the correct thing to do.

So this story takes place two years ago when I got hired to work on a recall for some Yutong passenger buses.

Largest bus manufacturer in the world, no less.

The ZK6129 tourist bus that could carry a maximum of 50 people.

I have a disparaging remark to make about

like Chinese automotive engineering.

They don't name them.

They don't know how to name them.

Like they got to like name them.

There's a lot of names names you could use, but instead they have the kind of post-Soviet communist thing of being like, oh, this is the beloved YK6129.

It's like, you got to give it a name, please.

You got to have a name.

Yeah, a name would be nice.

The problem with this bus was that the supports for the back suspension were faulty and needed to be replaced.

This job involved opening the last two exterior doors between the rear axle where the battery is restored.

That's this here.

Then you have to cut a square out of the back panels to get to the support that needed replacing.

That's this square here.

That's that's that's beautiful engineering to be like, yeah, just like cut through this place.

This is surprisingly common on like, you know, transit vehicles and stuff like that.

It's like, well, when this part needs to be replaced, you do need a full metal shop to do it.

Hell yeah.

Yeah.

So replacing the supports was relatively simple.

First, we lifted the back axle to release the tension on the supports, then made them drop, which is the important bit.

Then we unscrewed two massive massive bolts at the bottom that held in the wheel.

You fight with your whole ass against the 14 one-inch screws that hold the support, then slice the top

part of the half-inch thick steel plate support with an angle grinder to finally drop them.

I will be real with you.

That does not sound relatively simple to me.

That sounds like a pain in my ass.

That does sound like a pain in the ass.

I mean, it's like, ah, the procedure is simple, but you know, you can't access anything, right?

Anything that involves like 14 screws, particularly, like, I'm not considering that simple yeah that's annoying

then i put in side by side with the new supports and cut off at the same height so they would fit in the same position screw them into place then re-solder both the support and the interior panel walls to hide my work right so you got to put the you got to put the plate back in place and it all in all would usually take me a full day of work to do one bus with almost an hour to spare now you might be thinking that this doesn't sound too hard to do which is actually that that's actually the opposite of what i'm thinking yeah you

whoever wrote this i think you work too hard i think you need to like re-evaluate your attitude to your work in favor of more laziness because like i don't consider this relatively simple

that's because the pictures i sent you guys are from the right side of the bus which has a much larger compartment than the left side because the right side is where the batteries are stored.

The left side was barely half the size of the right side, so barely enough for one person to sit, let alone stand.

And also, operating.

Yeah.

And also, operating the angle grinder on the right side was easier because the place you stand to operate the grind meant you could hold it in a position where it pulled away from you rather than towards you.

Now, as earlier, I mentioned how we lifted the back axle to release the tension on the supports.

This was a trick I learned a few weeks into the project, but had not mastered until after this accident.

Oh, boy.

Oh, Jesus.

Because what happened is I was cutting the support, and just as I sliced through the last portion of it, I hadn't lifted up at the proper height and the angle to release the tension.

And instead, the support fell on itself and completely

squashing.

Squashing.

Let's go with squashing there.

This is a new and interesting word, actually.

I might start using it.

The blade in the angle grinder and causing it to fly off of my hands, crash into the metal wall a few feet in front of me, bounce back and hit me square in the chest.

Oh,

ow.

Do not like do yourself like the fucking like circular sawblade zombies in Ravenholm, dude.

Oh, yes.

Now, thankfully, the same motion that caused the blade to get stuck also broke it.

So when the angle grinder flew back at me, it was already disarmed and all the damage it did was some nasty bruises.

Which was something I realized a good 30 seconds after I fell out of the bus screaming like a little girl when I suddenly remembered

right there with you.

Yeah,

suddenly remembered I needed to breathe and proceeded to do a quick check for any missing body parts.

So there was nothing beyond a bruised ego and some light bullying from my coworkers for my high-pitched scream that apparently the entire shop heard before running to check on me.

This is the thing.

You can't do anything in these situations you like oh you fell into the like vat of hydrochloric acid but you made kind of a funny noise as you did it you know like you got kicked off a horse but it was kind of funny to watch

yep

you're gonna get a nickname from that one dangerous dangerous injuries often funny is the terrifying thing

so remember kids always make sure the angle grinder is spinning away from you and always wear as much protection as you can.

I'm going to go a step further than that and

protect myself by not doing relatively simple automotive repair jobs like this for a living, if I can possibly help it.

Yeah.

Thanks for all the work you do.

You keep me entertained on my now soulless but less dangerous job of spare parts supply distribution.

Love Diego from Central South America.

South, South America.

I'm not sure.

Central, South, South America is like Chile, I guess.

That's, yeah, it's got a, well, we don't know.

But that's also like Central South America and like Central North South America.

I mean, ultimately, South South America is Antarctica.

So maybe this guy's like doing the buses on like South Georgia.

It could be like

Chile.

Chile and Argentina, you know, they cover a lot of that.

That's true.

Yeah.

Long Chile.

Yes.

Thank you, Diego, for

me by name and no one else.

Please, please try to remain safe in spare part supply distribution.

You shouldn't get any like

circular sword blades coming at you, but CSX can drop a hazmat train on you at any time.

At any time, yes.

Anytime.

All right, I realize I may have done these next two slides out of order, so I'll just do this.

That was safety third.

Our next episode is on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

I know for the fact that you do.

I do have a commercial, yes.

So come to Space Melt Cinema presents Airplane with Justin Rozniak of Well, There's Your Problem.

That's the podcast you're listening to right now.

Essentially, it's going to be a thing where we go to a place and we all watch, I talk a bit, and then we watch the movie Airplane.

Space Melt Cinema is, you know, just

we get a big screen and people watch movies that are fun to watch together.

Doing like podcast comedy about movies, never going to catch on.

Yeah,

I was wondering if anyone had ever done that before.

If they had

talked about movies on a podcast, it might be a good idea.

This is May 4th at the Ukrainian Club.

Slav Ukraini.

Exactly.

If you have contrarian takes about the war, if I can shut up about them, so can you.

Not a point.

Not a point.

Yeah, Yeah, doors are at eight.

Tickets are $17, but closer to $20 with the fees.

I didn't set the price.

It's a really good movie.

And it's a good funny.

So I can guarantee this is going to be a good evening.

Yes, exactly.

And we will have custom hot dogs.

Yeah.

Yeah,

we have a hot dog roller that we're bringing that, you know,

it's going to be it's going to be a good time.

And there's beers, don't worry.

Exactly.

So, yeah, May the 4th.

Come to the Ukrainian club.

Check this shit out.

May the 4th be with you.

Yeah, that's.

Yeah.

Like in Star Wars.

It's like in Star Wars.

That's the airplane sequel, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also pretty good, surprisingly.

I only watched it once.

I don't think I liked it.

Maybe I have to watch it.

Actually, I'm not going to make that claim because I haven't seen it since I was a kid.

So, like, it's good.

I think it's good.

Yeah.

All right.

Oh, and it does have an intermission, so you can use the restroom.

No, you can't, yeah,

hold it, hold it.

Yeah, um,

I also have a bit of an ad, which is uh

uh donate money to Lutheran Settlement House, we need it, we're doing our big fundraiser.

Thank you, good, okay, yeah, put that link in the description.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, always donate money to Palestine, to Palestinians, buy eSims, all of the rest of it.

Uh, protest vociferously at every opportunity, yes, yep, But watch out for CSX crashing a train through your protest.

It can happen at any time, it could happen at any moment.

All right, good.

That's a podcast.

All right, all right, see ya, bye, off eat is then.