Episode 153: The Overseas Railroad

You know, I didn't want to send Devin back to the torment nexus, but here we are.

Here you go with both feet, buddy.

What it is, is you wrote an episode about a railroad, and it was a railroad that interests you.

And so,

this is part of the canon of

goofy railroads.

I think we've gone over the impossible railroad.

We got to do at some point the Milwaukee Road Pacific extension.

But today, we're going to talk about the

overseas railroad.

The improbable railroad.

Very improbable.

I mean, like the impossible railroad, it was built, but at what cost?

Hey, I mean, it's 23 years.

That's not bad.

At what cost me looking at 37 slides at a Saturday at a workday on this that starts at 11 p.m.

my time?

Yes.

Yeah.

So one of the things I I think it's important for you, the listener/slash viewer, to understand is that normally Roz lies to us and says, oh, yeah, there's tons of pictures, but it'll go quick.

And he prefaced it by saying, there's tons of pictures and it will not go quick.

Yes.

Yes.

So, so

strap in for a real humdigger.

This is

a suspected situation happening here.

Yes.

Do you

also feel like

the bomb collar is getting tighter?

Every

day.

Well,

the tightness of the bomb collar surely is not the issue.

The issue is that.

It is if you get

strangled by the bomb collar, you're still dead just in an unexpected way, right?

I guess so, yeah.

Improperly applied bomb collar.

I think bomb collar safety is very important to the like completely.

Bomb collar safety third.

Yeah, we get a safety third, and it kind of like slowly turns out to be the entire plot of dead money.

Hello, and welcome to.

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

It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

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

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am November Kelly.

My pronouns are she and her.

Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam.

Hi.

I'm Liam Anderson.

My pronouns are he and him.

And I'm noticing this, the words, Jewfish Creek.

Is that a sun?

Say again.

Where are you finding this?

That's what it's called.

It's in the Florida Keys.

Is it for me?

is it just like hey leave you have to go swimming among the creatures you hate the most oh i thought i thought you would dislike it i i you know but it's also an important part of the story uh-huh i'm gonna make booing noises the entire time i'm i'm just i'm just happy i got my own name right well done thank you yes um okay so what you see on the screen is a train on a bridge

You may notice you cannot see either end of the bridge.

Maybe there's like fog or something.

No.

that is because that bridge is seven miles long.

Oh, I don't like that one bit.

I too.

That was a shortcut

in Transport Fever.

It happens to the best of us.

You can get most of that money back if you demolish it really quick.

Yeah.

Today, we're going to talk about the Overseas Railroad, the Florida East Coast Railway's Key West extension.

Oh, shit.

First, we have to do the goddamn news.

Oh,

jarring shift in tone.

Jarring shift in tone, yes.

So this is the thing, right?

If you

if your ally commits a genocide and you not only stop them, but in fact help them to do it, and then you suggest that anyone who finds this unacceptable wants to re-elect Donald Trump and Hamas at the same time.

and there's no one they can vote for to make it not happen.

And if they protest, they won't be listened to, then the list of options for what people can do about it shrinks to a number of increasingly alarming things.

Yes.

And someone did one of the alarming things

because

I mean, inspiration does stuff to people.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.

I think

I don't even know what to say about this one, really, like, without getting too emotional.

So

this airman,

Aaron Bushnell, Aaron Bushnell, yeah.

Self-immolated.

He set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.

in what he described as an extreme act of protest

against the genocide that that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.

I think this was a tremendously brave and moral thing to do.

And I think it is a sort of damning indictment of everything about the system that all of us live under that

he felt that this was necessary

and that it got to this point that there were no other forms of protest that he felt would work.

And I don't say this to be like, I'm not in favor of people setting themselves on fire.

All right.

But like, equally, I don't think people are going to choose to set themselves on fire or not because of like what I think about it.

I think that it's something that's going to happen when you make people see acts of extreme inhumanity just on their phones unprompted every day.

And their government and their media's response to this is

to be even upset about this is in itself something that is incomprehensible.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, the way people have sort of,

in certain circles, have sort of trivialized this has been really nasty and gross and disgusting.

I mean, self-immolation is not something you, you know, do lightly.

You know, this is like, I mean, it was like this with Rachel Corey.

It was like this with like any number of people who have been, sort of, like, have been brutalized or have been sort of like, have lost their lives in the

confrontation of Israeli war crimes.

crimes yeah it's it's uh it's it it's you know i i all i can say is you know a lot of people have uh you know sort of framed this as like we shouldn't talk about it because you're glorifying

it's not a it's a form of protest um i mean i guess technically you know by the the the raw definition of

it is um but you know self-immolation is not something that you just you know you do to kill yourself it's there it's there to you know to yourself in the nastiest way possible as a form of protest to draw, you know, to

just, you know,

shame.

Yeah, exactly.

To shame people, right?

To sort of provide them with an example of such a horrifying

sort of piece of violence to throw in the face the violence that they are inflicting on people every day.

Force their eyes open like a clockwork orange.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I think for me personally, as somebody who you know has attempted suicide we're getting real dark real fast huh somebody who's attempted suicide as somebody who knows people who have uh died by suicide i i can't say that discussion of this glorifies suicide obviously i'm not an expert i'm not the only one with an opinion but i do think that like you should look at this image or not look at this image because it is very gruesome and think and and and realize that like Joe Biden doesn't give a shit what you think.

Donald Trump doesn't give a shit what you think.

The only answer is this nation will pay for its crimes in blood and organizing, uh, whether that be with, and I can't believe I'm about to say the words, DSA or someone else, yeah, just fucking anyone at this point, doing

radical acts of mutual aid, right?

Right, hey, big showing for uncommitted in Michigan, yeah.

Well, I yeah, because this stupid asshole is gonna lose the presidency to Donald Trump because he was unwilling to like do anything

anything

to like prevent a genocide to like even lift his his own foot off of the gas pedal at all it's just it's it makes me so angry and depressed which is i mean in part what it's an expression of right and i

to say that it was a brave thing to do uh or a heroic thing to do isn't to say that i want anyone else to be doing it because i don't um but i

I understand the impulse, right?

I understand

because I mean, fucking on

this afternoon, before I started recording Trash Future, I, you know, looked on my phone for something unrelated and saw a guy who had been starved to death by Israel, by the US, by my country, the UK.

And

I don't know what the correct moral response to that is.

And the last, the most recent news segment, we were talking about Palestine, I sort of said that I, you know, I don't know what will work and I don't even know what won't work.

And I feel a kind of sense of moral loss and inadequacy.

And, you know,

here is horribly one answer, right?

And, you know, it's, it, sometimes it feels like the only thing you can do is just, you know, you just keep seeing the pictures and they all get worse and worse.

Right, right.

Yeah.

I, I, you know, I just, I feel out of November, sorry.

The same way of just a feeling, you know, today, on an unrelated note, we're not being positive in this episode, folks.

I did part of my state-mandated domestic violence training, and one in three women and one in four men will experience physical violence in a relationship at some point in their lives.

And I had to get up from the computer and take a walk

because that was that just that statistic drained all the life out of me.

Like, we, there has to, I forget who tweeted it.

There has to be a better world than this one.

And I don't know what the answer is, Yazidis, Israel, Palestine.

None of us know.

Your elected officials don't know.

But

we're going to get there some way or another.

We have to.

I mean, this is just.

But I have to say that to keep the fucking lights on.

You know what I mean?

I just absolutely.

Someone in the comments on the last video said there's something you can do, which is call your senator.

And I'm kind of like, oh, no, I don't think we're going to, I don't think we're going to get through to Fetterman, guys.

I don't.

Yeah, I mean,

as far as these things go, I think about this fairly often.

Charles Snow delivered this lecture called The Two Cultures, which is about science and the humanities not communicating with each other.

But he describes himself as a scientist and as

a progressive, as someone who is standing with one foot in a world that's dying and one in a world which at all costs must be born.

And

I've mentioned that before, and this is how I feel, right?

This this is the thing, um, both on Palestine, on the climate, on trans rights, on everything, right?

Everything historically progressive.

We either do this or perish horribly, right?

And um, having these sort of like little previews of coming attractions, not that they're not horrible in themselves, but knowing that like they can get so much worse if we do not fight them now and win now, is um

it's it's you know um really really um difficult and

um

i think yeah

yeah exactly right yeah uh

they're gonna probably like end up building a statue of this guy in yemen as you know and that's gonna be you know yes well stuff is bad and depressing um what else is new uh

yeah i i don't we we gotta we we should talk about a funny railroad let's let's move on

yeah i i can I can wrap this up in a kind of like more

optimistic way, which is that

historically progressive forces have existed for as long as history has.

None of your ancestors in this ideologically ever gave up and nor should you.

History is long, but statistical evidence says it bends towards justice.

Yeah, it bends towards justice not out of some like innate process, but because people will fucking get out there and bend it.

So

do that.

Past performance is not indicative of future returns.

Um,

yeah, you may lose money on this investment opportunity and others, yeah.

Um, in other news,

come on, uh, we said there was no positive news.

Check this out: uh, orange man, orange man done, Trump's over, orange, he's over, orange man is over.

Nikki Haley has won the GOP primary in the GLP stronghold of Washington, D.C.

That's right, she won all of like 5,000 registered Republican voters.

Like five registered Republicans.

But I mean, the thing is, Nikki Haley is fucking terrible.

And, but on the other hand, I do appreciate her doing the kind of Mueller she wrote thing for the Republican Party of staying in and just getting like abused from all sides for doing it.

I, I, it reminds me of when uh John Kasich stayed in and just was like eating his way across America, which John John Kasich's a ghoul.

They're all fucking ghouls, but John Kasich being like, I'm going to stay in and waste as much donor money as possible in this like tilting it windmill shit while I eat a fried Oreo was like the last good thing that happened.

The only man to like earnestly enjoy campaigning in the Midwest.

To like a horn dog or whatever.

Reminds me of one of Liam and I's old roommates.

was probably the only registered Republican in West Philadelphia.

And one day a guy came to our door

looking for signatures so he could be a Republican committee person.

You need 10 signatures to get on the ballot for committee person.

And he must have had to knock on every single goddamn door to get 10 signatures.

Yeah.

But I mean, obviously, like the sort of resurgent fascist threat of Donald Trump is now defeated because,

you know, after having eaten shit at every other primary, Nikki Nikki Haley, the sensible, moderate, brackets, no, also,

has defeated him in Washington, D.C.

Washington, D.C.

Yeah, well, guess what?

Guess where the

blanket lives on.

Yeah, that's right.

You got like a field advantage.

Yeah, you know.

Oh, God.

I think that the tweet about this episode will probably get more votes than she physically had in Washington, D.C.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

This is going to have more views in the first hour than she got votes,

which is beautiful.

We can all relax.

We can all sit back.

Ignore all the shit I said in the last one.

Just

wait for Nikki Haley to usher in an era of moderate centrism.

A new golden age of prosperity.

Shining city on the hill.

Don't say those words to me in that order today.

And that was the goddamn news.

Depression.

Yeah.

Now let's.

Oh, no.

here it is again here it is again

to evil the fucking hell milk i am going back to this building with a time machine and a satchel full of dynamite yes so how many times do you think we we're gonna milk this one this one

i i believe that like we will anytime justin writes an episode with like any kind of historical perspective it starts here starts here it all starts here this is the beginning of the end

um this is when we destroyed the planet in this shack yes

in this shack the fate of humanity was sealed in 1859 edwin drake invented a method of extracting petroleum from the ground motherfucker this has made a lot of people angry and was widely regarded as a bad idea yeah me just now and liam just now

so drake never made much money off his well but other people did crude oil could be distilled into many practical products.

But in the 1800s, that mainly meant kerosene for oil lamps, right?

Yeah, accidentally killed the whaling industry.

You don't have to like get it out of a baleen anymore.

You can run your lighting off of clean, burning kerosene.

Yes.

So we got to talk about Henry Flagler and Standard Oil and the railroads and the rate.

Again, we're going to do some like anti-capitalism and it's going remind me that for everything I said about historically progressive forces, so much of this stuff was stitched up 200 years ago.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, a lot of it is, um, well, especially like you talk about like progressive regulation, a lot of it is, you know, it just sort of

a big mishmash of stuff that doesn't quite work as well as it should.

You know, there's no, there's no guiding force here, it's just a patchwork.

Um, yeah,

so Henry Morrison Flagler was born January 2nd, 1830 in Hopewell, New York, which was a farming community, which is sort of southwest of Rochester, right?

New York.

New York.

He did say New York's.

I did say New York's.

I noticed that.

It's like the Carolinas, you know.

Yeah,

pretend I didn't say that.

No, we're going to make fun of you for the entire time.

There's several New Yorks when you think about it.

New York.

There's New York, New York, New York State.

There's a New York City.

There's a regular York.

There's another regular New York York.

You're welcome.

Yeah.

Hi, Gareth.

So Flagler worked some odd jobs in his early life before making a small fortune in distilling.

Then he got into

the good kind

where you drink.

He gets into the bad kind later.

He got into salt mining shortly before the Civil War.

That business failed miserably.

He tried to recoup his losses.

working in the grain business.

Then he met a man named John D.

Rockefeller, who was trying to make a name for himself in oil refining which is another kind of distilling yeah you can watch the documentary there will be blood about this guy great movie oh fantastic uh was his wasn't there will be blood uh in texas um

maybe

but like it's definitely like it's definitely rockefeller though yeah this is the pre

Texas days

um to make a long story short they go into the refining business together they form a company you might know from high school U.S.

history called Standard Oil.

Flagler is like Rockefeller's fixer, right?

He negotiates the contracts.

He instigates the hostile takeovers.

He does the dirty deals with the railroads.

He invents the rebate.

What's the rebate here?

One of the most contentious issues in business in the post-bellum period is the rate.

And the rate is what railroads charge for hauling a certain cargo a certain distance.

So I don't know, maybe it's like one cent for 10 hogs for one mile or two cents for 8,000 gallons of oil for one mile or so on and so forth.

If you're a big customer, like some kind of major refinery, railroads would offer you a rebate, you know, just for you, my friend, 20% off since you're such a good customer.

This sounds like a great opportunity to do some corruption.

It is.

It is.

There's a, oh, I,

I can't remember her name.

I read a biography of

Roosevelt and Taft, and there's a really great story by one of the muckraker journalists about the rebate and basically it coming to an end.

One of the glories of investigative journalism before everything was ruined by the New York Times.

If I had to guess, Ida B.

Wells?

Yes, it was Ida B.

Wells.

Throws doss at the list of investigative journalists, you know?

It's probably her.

Yes.

So Flagler negotiates these large rebates with the railroads, making them able to easily undercut their competitors, right?

The standard oil is, you know, they ship the oil for cheaper, so they can sell it for cheaper.

Ida Tarbell, sorry, I knew it was Ida.

I wasn't even right.

I just, just the Ida was a common guy.

You got Ida.

That's better than I did.

We got another Ida coming up.

Don't worry.

Okay.

So this allows the Standard Oil to take over their competitors, which means they're shipping more oil, which means they can have bigger rebates, so on and so forth.

Soon, Standard Oil owns almost every refinery in Cleveland, right?

Cleveland's the big refining center.

That was where all the refineries were there before they all moved to the Gulf Coast.

We form a kind of oil trust.

Yes, exactly.

You know, we're going to take over every refinery in the tri-county area.

And then the world.

So Standard Oil does quickly become almost a total monopoly on oil refinery in the United States.

If you want kerosene, you get it from Standard Oil.

This is where Flagler makes his fortune.

Flagler is a man of few words, but was essentially the brains behind the whole operation.

Does his moustache hide a secret smile?

Maybe.

I think probably just like more corruption.

No, he's just very stern.

Rockefeller was essentially just a pretty face.

You know, when he asked how he came up with standard oil, Rockefeller said, no, sir.

I wish I had the brains to think of it.

It was Henry M.

Flagler.

Pretty good job to just be the figurehead billionaire.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, he didn't have to do very much.

You know, he just had all the money.

Flagler had a lot of money, too.

We'll talk about that.

But Flagler has a problem.

He has a wife.

Yeah, that'll be.

And that wife.

You've been married for like 10 minutes.

She did bring me my dinner and she loves me very dearly.

And I love her very much.

My wife, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Once you're married, you're allowed to make the jokes, you know?

Yes.

In 1877, the doctors diagnosed Mary Flagler with tuberculosis, and as doctors did at the time, recommended that they take their winners in fabulous St.

Augustine, Florida.

You like open the windows, and you're like, it's pure refinery smoke outside.

I don't really know what to do about tuberculosis, but this probably isn't helping.

Go to Florida.

Yeah, go to Florida.

So Flagler becomes the original Florida Man.

Okay, I see what we've done here.

What we've done is we've added some Florida Man headlines.

Let me just read these into the record here.

We got a Florida Man accused of kicking chicken like a football player would kick a field goal.

We got birds suffered broken ribs, deputies say.

Uh-huh.

We got Florida Man pushes pastor knocks churchgoers to ground because service was too loud, police say.

I mean,

real.

I mean, that's respectable.

Florida man bites off his own nipples and slaps wife with them after heated arguments.

How?

Florida man dials 911 and demands a ride home to change his underwear.

Real.

I've been there.

Florida man.

The worst diarrhea I ever had in my life was in Florida.

Florida Man attacks mom's boyfriend with samurai sword over missing can of shrimp.

Real.

And

my favorite here, particularly this illustration, Florida man caught on security camera licking doorknob for three hours.

Methamphetamine is a hell of a drug.

Yes.

So in 1877, the railroads of the South were largely unified.

There used to be like a big problem within the South.

They had lots of different gauges.

There were breaks of gauges everywhere.

You had to change trains constantly.

Then all these guys in blue came and just like rolled through, pulled up the railroads.

Rolled through.

They did something called the U.S.

Army Railroad.

And that track that was not regauged was turned into rather attractive necktives.

So it was easy to take the train as far as Jacksonville, Florida.

That was where the standard gauge tracks ended.

Jacksonville is sort of in the north part of Florida.

It's not in the panhandle.

It's closer to the east coast.

So once you've got to Jacksonville to get to St.

Augustine, the oldest city in the United States,

you have to get on a boat.

You got to sail down the St.

Johns River.

Then you pick up a narrow gauge train that brings you across the swamps to St.

Augustine.

Could they not just situation?

Go up a mountain or something, which is the like classical European cure for tuberculosis.

Go to Colorado or something.

Nah, you got to go to Florida.

You got to take the sea air.

You get that ozone, you know.

Also, it's the winter, so you don't want to go up on the mountain in the winter.

I guess not.

So Flagler dutifully went down there every winter with his wife, and he really enjoys enjoys the climate.

He loves the place.

He has a great time down there.

But Mary Flagler's health continued to fail, and she died in 1881.

Yeah, of having tuberculosis.

Of having tuberculosis.

So one of the things that'll do it to you, yeah.

Yeah.

Now, Flagler works through his grief through interior decorating.

Oh, my God.

Raising a hat.

I have a homophobic slur to say.

No, you can't say it.

the bomb color is tightening

he finally found something he enjoyed he he bought and renovated a huge mansion on long island called satan's toe what

yeah

aging mr tarantino mr tarantino to the wife

he was smitten by one of his wife's nurses though

Ida Alice Shrouds.

I don't think you should be a nurse if your surname is Shrouds.

Yeah.

This is my wife's nurse, Nurse Mortuary.

She had fiery red hair and a temper.

She was Irish.

I get it.

I get it.

I get it now.

They were married in 1883.

Ida Alice proceeds to redefine the term women be shopping for generations.

Her shopping sprees were legendary

in Long Island and in Manhattan and so on and so forth.

Flagler was somewhat of a reserved man, a man of few words.

Ida Alice simply would not allow that.

She hosts the most enormous social events at Satan's Toe.

It's the talk of the town.

Everyone wants to be there, so on and so forth.

But Flagler is also sick of New York.

He wants to get in business in Florida, right?

I'm sorry.

Is someone not having a good time having parties all the time with their insanely hot, red-headed wife?

Yeah.

Who this man?

So he decides to build a hotel in St.

Augustine, the Ponce de Lyon.

Oh, God.

It's massive.

It has 540 rooms, big sprawling mission revival monstrosity just outside of town.

Flagler is like, yeah, Flagler's like expecting a modest return on it, but to be frank, he's just, he's doing all this for fun, right?

Nothing is going to beat his standard oil stocks.

The problem is it's really hard to get to.

So Flagler gets into the railroad business.

Just as a personal convenience yeah he buys the shitty narrow gauge railroad with the intention of extending it all the way to jacksonville over the st.

Johns river converting the whole thing to standard gauge um this is where flagler's sort of notoriously brief communications come in you know because flagler gets this long and detailed report from his engineers about the very the difficulties involved in bridging the very deep St.

Johns River.

He gets this report and he asks the engineers, can you build it?

And the engineers go in a huddle and they come back and say yes.

And he said, well, then build it.

Having infinity money is so, so bad for you in a lot of ways.

But like

the opportunity to do something my guy is trying to do here.

Yeah.

So Flagler also has a vacation house built for himself and Ida Alice near the hotel.

And Ida Alice decides to get into Ouija.

Oh, she's she's hot.

She's angry.

She's a redhead and she's crazy.

Yes.

Boys, hold me back.

Like, I got you.

I got you.

She's hosting a million social events each week.

She's flying off the handle at anything that goes moderately wrong.

She almost sinks a yacht with a party aboard.

She's appearing in an increasingly risque dress at every social event.

Do you have photos?

And she's convinced that she's convening with the spirit of Tsar Nicholas I,

who is in love with her.

This, this woman.

I don't even care.

This woman would ruin my fucking life.

Yeah, so in terms of the, if you ever seen the old hot versus crazy chart, probably circulated in high school.

Yeah.

Off-scale, hot, off-scale, crazy.

I want to point out that this episode was pitched to me as there's a hot redhead involved.

I mean, shit.

Why didn't you pitch it to me that way?

Oh, no, we're going to talk about the trains.

No, no, no.

We're going to talk about Ida Alice.

So Flagler has now built a railroad and decides that he likes building railroads.

Yeah,

it's like a full-size train set, you know?

Yeah.

He secures land grant charters from the state of Florida.

They're very generous.

8,000 acres of free real estate per mile built.

It's free real estate.

It's free real estate.

Yeah.

The new Florida East Coast Railway marched south from Jacksonville and St.

Augustine to Daytona Beach to Cocoa and Cape Canaveral.

No spaceships yet.

Bullshit Cape.

Yeah, to West Palm Beach and regular Palm Beach.

And in every town, Flagler had a legendary, like a huge legendary resort built.

You know,

Ponce de Leon in St.

Augustine.

The Hotel Ormond near Daytona Beach, the Breakers in Palm Beach.

Three quarters of the way down the state, he thinks thinks he's done.

But there's another woman,

Julia DeForest Tuttle, right?

She could just be named like this back in the day.

Oh, yeah.

She owned a large plot of land near the sleepy settlement of Fort Dallas on the shore of the Miami River.

Now, Tuttle was from Cleveland.

knew Flagler from the Cleveland times back when he lived up there.

And she wrote Flagler over and over again, please extend your Florida East Coast Railroad to my land holdings.

I will even divide them with you to sweeten the deal.

Please, I just want a railroad.

Give me the railroad.

I need it because women only want one thing, and it's disgusting.

Boss, did you write this letter?

Okay, but like, what color was her hair, and how crazy was she?

I'm not sure about that.

Hold on, let me Google this real quick.

This is the thing, but people always say, like, oh, you know, before color film,

it doesn't make that much of a difference.

It does.

I need to know.

I'm playing this up as a bit, by the way.

I love women regardless of hair color.

I respect women.

Only

unclear.

Yeah, unclear.

So for a long time, Flagler blew her off.

Like, I'm not going to send the railroad down there until something happened in 1894.

They called it the Great Freeze.

It was 18 degrees Fahrenheit in Orlando.

That's negative 8 degrees Celsius.

Jesus.

The freeze to death,

Yeah.

From hell's heart.

You're like coming towards Disneyland with a knife in your teeth.

Yeah.

You have no idea, November.

You have no fucking idea.

The entire Florida orange crop was wiped out except for Tuttle's oranges.

She sent Flagler.

Yeah.

She sent Flagler a bouquet of flowers and fruit.

Well, none of those were available in the whole United States, and this convinced him.

Florida East Coast Railroad would extend south to the Miami River.

Give me the railroad.

Yes.

He built another enormous resort called the Royal Palm and

a town to serve it.

People wanted to name the city Flagler, but he insisted on the Native American name Miami.

Oh, so it's his fault.

Yes.

Huh.

It's crazy how much of this is like one guy.

Yeah.

Yes.

Florida's wild.

He is the florida man

in the meantime ida alice had become even more crazy and probably even more hot yeah

flagler's doctor recommended she be committed to an asylum and flagler agreed to that all right you gotta get some medical

women back in the day merely for the crime of being crazy you can still do this to women for the crime of being crazy it's it's deeply unjust i mean what Listen, is it a crime to sink a boat?

And, you know,

probably.

But

it's Florida.

There's no rules in Florida.

I can do whatever the fuck I want.

I'm going to strut around with my shirt unbuttoned on heroin.

I don't give a fuck.

Yeah, you think Florida man headlines are bad.

Let me introduce you to Florida woman.

Yeah, let me introduce you to November Kelly, who is police

juice

exhuming a corpse for some reason.

It's 1897.

Being hot is illegal.

Being hot and crazy is like doubly illegal.

Like the sort of the grippy socks vacation had not yet been invented.

They were like electrifying this woman.

Yeah.

With a vibrator.

So when she was committed the first time,

when she was committed the first time, Flagler actually traveled back to the asylum regularly to see her.

And she was just really mean and nasty to him, probably because she was committed.

Yeah, that'll do it.

But eventually he was like, okay, come back, come back to Long Island, come back to Satan's toe,

where she proceeded to try and kill one of her doctors with a pair of kitchen shears.

I mean, here's the thing.

November.

Is it a crime to try and murder a man with a pair of kitchen shears?

Yeah,

yes, it's called attempted murder.

I mean, this is misogyny, pure and simple.

Yeah, well, she went back to the asylum permanently this time

um flackler moved to florida found himself a new companion mary lily keenan uh does he just cuss out julia deforest tussle the whole time after she was like uh give me your railroad they weren't romantically involved that was a business uh

i don't think that there's anything more romantic than giving a woman your railroad like well that's a good point yeah new definition of running a train yeah so on and so forth

over the course of a few years he managed to convince the Florida legislature to pass a bill that incurable insanity was grounds for divorce.

And in 1901, they were wed.

He was 71 and she was 34, creating the first widespread age gap discourse incident.

Very good.

Now, having essentially invented the concept of Florida, you might think that Flagler would be content to rest.

He's not Florida man.

He's Florida god.

Yeah, but there's still railroad to build.

The largest city in florida in 1901 was not jacksonville it was not tampa it was not orlando certainly not the brand new city of miami it was he west yeah it's shown on the previous map as america's gibraltar yeah fascinating little description so with a whopping 20 000 residents he west was a hub for cigar wrapping fishing sponge diving shipbuilding ship uh refueling and what was euphemistically called gentleman piracy which is aggressive salvage of wrecked vessels.

Oh, I mean, shit, this sounds like a pretty fun place to be.

Yeah, I mean, the

salvage business, because a lot of ships did just run aground and then everyone would go out in their small boats and they'd go take everything off of it because that was technically legal.

It got to the point where people actually put up fake lighthouses.

Oh, classic, like, Cornish activity, you know?

Yeah.

Just lure people onto the rocks and then be like, well, I'm doing legitimate salvage.

Stay still or I will hit you with this boat hook.

exactly exactly um what's more it was only a hundred miles to havana from key west and uh we had recently driven the spaniards out of cuba thanks to the fortuitous explosion of the uss maine yeah i remember the main to remember it didn't you

i hope everyone remembered that yeah but also at a naval station yeah also at a naval station um

you know it was a major stopping point for any ship from south america bound for new york that's where you got the coal from was key west Key West is, of course, located on the Florida Keys, which is a string of islands forming an arc southwest of Miami, making almost, but not quite, an unbroken chain of land the whole way.

It's very shallow the whole way.

It's, you know, the whole thing is they're sort of mostly very old and very dead coral reefs, which formed prior to the last ice age when the sea level was a lot higher.

Now, these facts in and of themselves would not justify a railroad to Key West, though it had been speculated on for a while, except for another brewing piece of geopolitical infrastructure.

I kind of want to go to the Florida Keys, except I'd have to go to Florida, and I am a trans woman.

You would be fine in the Keys.

Keys

with people.

Yeah.

They should secede, I feel.

We'll go with you with...

They kind of tried.

Florida Keys statehood movement.

or independence movement.

Fuck it, join, like throw in with Puerto Rico.

So there was a big geopolitical piece of infrastructure being built at the time called the Panama Canal.

I've heard of this.

Yeah.

So Henry Flagler's arch nemesis, Tedward Roosevelt.

World's most racist Boy Scout, yes.

Flagler had campaigned for Teddy Roosevelt in New York when he was running for governor, and then he got really pissed off because

Flagler passed a bunch of anti-business regulations that hurt him.

You know, I didn't think the trust-busting party would bust my trust.

It's so wild how Roosevelt kept managing to do this.

Like time after time,

guys were just like, well, we like him because he kills Spanish, I guess, and also Moose.

And then

they let him do his thing.

And his thing is antitrust law.

Harshly.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of Flagler is like convinced that Teddy Roosevelt is sabotaging him constantly.

Maybe he was the crazy one.

Well, I mean, you know,

you watch your wife stab enough people in your kitchen and you probably get a little paranoid yourself.

This is true.

So Teddy Roosevelt managed to sort of bootstrap the nation of Panama into existence and then entered into an agreement to build the goddamn Panama Canal, right?

Using the Panama Canal, ships from the Far East could avoid going all the damn way around South America to get to East Coast ports.

Flagler smelled some money here, right?

He reasoned that the closest American deepwater port to the Panama Canal would be raking in all of that freight traffic.

Sensible.

Yeah, at the moment, that was the port of Tampa, right?

That was served by the Seaboard Airline and the Atlantic Coastline.

Seaboard Airline is not an airline like we think of it right now.

Airline here refers to a railroad that has the most direct route between two points.

See our Chicago to New York Electric Airline episode for more information.

I forgot we did that.

Yeah.

How could you forget?

As soon as you were over in Maine.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, at some point, all the all the

things blend together, and I just, my life becomes one big, well, there's your problem episode, and then I'm just very confused.

Yeah, we could, we could earnestly just start over, and I would not remember some of the things that we've done at this point.

So, which is good for if we ever run out of disasters, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

They'll never stop the Simpsons.

We're going to keep going and we find out which one of us's voice fucks up like Marge Simpsons first.

But a port at Key West with a Florida East Coast connection could shorten the distance significantly.

Not a crazy idea.

This makes sense, pretty much.

Yeah.

So, you know, you come down from Panama, you go up and then you go over here, right?

So, you know, in 1905, Flagler gets to work.

The iron would stretch all the way to Key West.

Let's talk about the surveying.

Oh boy, oh geez.

This is all swamps down here, right?

Yes,

alligators, crocodiles, yes, only coastal, like just the harbor freight machete here.

Yeah, yeah, for when you want a machete that breaks instantly.

Um,

yeah, only place in the world that alligators and crocodiles like coexist peacefully.

Uh, yes,

it's got um

airboats, um,

incest,

um,

What else is in Florida?

Mangroves?

The mouse.

Mouse.

Mouse.

Mouse.

Yeah.

Flamingos.

I like flamingos.

Flamingos.

They're neat.

By 1905, the FEC extended south from Miami to a place called Homestead, which is essentially the last reliably dry land on the peninsula.

To even get to the keys from there, you had to travel through about a dozen miles of horrible swamp, right?

And then the further six miles of almost but not quite islands.

That's this stretch here.

These kind of like coral reef remnants.

At which point the real work could begin, which was 100 miles of railroad over the fucking ocean.

Oh, Jesus.

So, yeah, fuck it.

Let's do it.

I want so much cocaine.

You think my ex-wife was crazy.

That was the most obvious route, at least, but Flagler wanted to examine his options.

What What if there was a quicker way with more land, right?

So he sent a civil engineer named William J.

Crome to inventor of Chrome.

Yes.

To survey a route that would include an enormous bridge, but less bridging overall by way of a place now called Flamingo.

This is the bit in like Railway Empire or Transport Fever where you're fucking around with your rail placement, trying to be like, it can't cost that much.

So the idea for this route was to go to this place called Flamingo, which is down here, and then build 40 miles of bridge.

All right.

And then go to Key West.

Sure.

Why the hell not, man?

Yeah.

So what Chrome came across was just awful, just terrible.

Florida.

Yeah.

Should have hired William J.

Firefox.

He and his men brought flat bottom boats for the survey.

But the water was called me too.

I was going to go like that queen song, but but since you gave me nothing off of William J.

Files,

I was trying to respond with something, something with opera, but opera

is spyware now.

William J.

Netscape.

Yeah, well,

what do you need?

I mean, the real survey would be the Netscape Navigator, yeah.

Yeah.

Do you remember what fucking was it?

Was it Blackboard would only work on Netscape?

Yeah, that was a while.

This was like 2014 or something, I'm sure, back when I was in college but like fucking the blackboard learn system at drexel university did not work with chrome it did not work with firefox it did not work with internet explorer um the whole thing was broken but it worked fine in netscape navigator i i am coming to you live from microsoft edge the only browser that zencaster works with

It works with Chrome.

Yeah, but I'm fucked at installing Chrome, whereas Edge is already on the thing.

I want to point out that I actually have to run run off a backup PC I built for travel because for some reason my big expensive desktop throws a hissy fit with Zencaster.

So I'm coming to thanks, patrons.

The worst software for recording apart from all the others.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, we're going to milk this to three and a half hours.

November's never going to bed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Both of you.

Welcome myself.

Welcome to the tournament Nexus.

Welcome to the Tournament Nexus.

We're so happy you're here.

Algorithm already hates this episode.

We're going to get like three views total.

Apart from everything else, we're going to have to bleep every mention of the word,

which

is a lot of people.

Sorry, Dev.

Yeah,

yeah.

So, what Chrome came across was just awful.

He and his men, they brought these flat-bottom boats for the survey.

There wasn't enough water to use the boats.

but there wasn't enough land to walk.

Oh, gross.

So they don't make boots tall enough or boats shallow enough.

Exactly.

They have to trudge through the muck and the nast, cutting through the saw glass.

Was nasty.

It's like nasty.

Like hovering.

Yeah, it's like nasty.

It's like

it's something that's nasty.

Okay.

At this point, I would have invented the hovercroft.

Yeah.

You're just to cut through the sawgrass.

They have to dodge the alligators.

And the air is at least 10% mosquitoes by volume.

Yeah.

Sounds like Florida, dude.

It took 13 days to survey 40 miles.

What's normal pace?

Well, today you can make that journey in an hour.

They built a road.

I'm going to

do it and myself in spare November.

Chrome didn't mince words.

He simply called the place Godforsaken.

Yeah.

Yeah, it still is.

Yeah, so it was settled then.

The railroad would go by way of Key Largo and follow the Keys to Key West.

So construction.

Challenge number one.

Challenge number one is the Florida Everglades.

Florida Everglades.

Florida Everglades.

The Florida Everglades.

It's not land.

It's not water.

It's the Everglades.

The FEC had to build through 13 miles of it.

It's mangrove swamp, right?

Yeah.

Probably something like that.

Yeah, I don't know what that is.

It's swamp.

It's a river, kind of.

Yeah,

it's very shallow water

where it exists.

Everything's very damp.

There's a lot of peat as well.

Yeah.

Conventional railroad grading would not work here.

There was not enough fill in the world to build a stable roadbed from scratch.

Flagler's engineers came up with an ingenious solution, right?

You have dredges on each side of the right-of-way, and they would build canals for themselves on each side and dump the fill in the middle.

Huh.

So he's doing like land reclamation, but from two directions at the same time.

Yes.

Neat.

So this becomes the roadbed.

I almost said he's doing land reclamation bisexually, which doesn't make sense, but this is about the level of sort of cognitive function I'm operating on.

Then you put gravel on top of the fill.

Then you put the tracks in.

Easy peasy.

Except, you know, you have to clear all the scrub and the plants and so on before the dredges go to work.

There's mosquitoes everywhere.

And of course, there are gators.

Yay.

I love these guys.

Genuinely.

Oh, yeah.

Huge.

Huge.

I respect them for an alligator fan.

The one cool thing that Florida libertarians have is the let us alone flag.

Oh, yeah.

Because it's got an alligator on it.

And I like an alligator.

They always look so happy.

Yeah.

Very chill, very, very relaxed.

Nature's perfect killing machine.

Yes.

Big fan.

Big, big fan.

Nothing can kill them, but they can kill anything.

Yeah, I mean, these are sort of like inspirational words to like believe about yourself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gators loved the dredges.

Oh, boy.

They loved to just sit there and sun themselves.

It's a staple platform, you know?

Yeah.

And nothing can kill you.

The workers would wake up and go to work and find 40 gators had decided the dredge was now their personal beach and resort.

Incredible.

They're just these happy guys warming themselves up.

So you start your day fending off gators with a big stick.

That's just 9 a.m.

Fuck.

Oh, these fucking gators are back.

The guys working on the dredges, they're the lucky ones.

The dredges are somewhat automated.

Actual railroad work at this time is still hard, manual, back-breaking labor.

You're in a work camp.

You're far from home.

You're making menial wages, if indeed you are making wages at all, because Flagler's Railroad railroad made heavy use of convict leasing oh of course yeah that is you know you pick people out of jail and say well your sentence is to work on the railroad now and you know you didn't get a choice in that matter because you're in jail um so you said i i i

so the same thing that like stalin did with the gulags then uh with like arctic railways yes yes um or the jazz in burma or any number of like because working on a railroad fucking sucks and one of the easiest ways to make people do it is to make people do it exactly I mean yeah being being a navvy is uh hell of a hell of a work and this this one has this railroad has gators involved you know also gators I was gonna say not not typically a thing in the sort of Arctic I will say

swings roundabouts yet yet yeah we'll see what climate change does for us I will say I'm working on a secret project for the U.S.

Air Force, kicking like parachute-equipped alligators out of the C-130 over Sverdlovsk.

A good chunk of the information for this podcast came from Last Train to Paradise by Bles Standiford.

He takes great pains to iterate and reiterate that the men were well fed and clothed.

I'm not inclined to disbelieve him, but you know, still

through.

So they get out of the Everglades.

They're going over what's called cross-key, right?

You can see Route 1 here.

The ground is more solid.

The work is easier.

There's less mosquitoes.

The gators are gone.

This is easy peasy.

And then just after they pass Jewfish Creek right here.

Yeah, what?

Yeah.

You want to go ahead and explain that to me, asshole?

It's what it's called.

But why is it?

Why?

I don't know.

It is the name of a fish.

Oh, great.

In Australia, the black Jewfish, apparently.

This feels very disrespectful to me specifically.

There's a lot of politics and religion going on with that.

It's been renamed to a Goliath Grouper.

Yeah, I'm seeing that.

Big fish.

This is what I know many members of my congregation to actually look like, so the name's not far off.

Oh, dude.

Yeah.

It's going to ask me if my investments are doing as well as I expect.

It's not anti-Semitic if I'm doing it.

All right, man, those are your allegations.

I'm not taking any part in whether or not you're beating them.

So the land had been...

Actually, I'm very bad at investing, so maybe.

The land had been extensively surveyed.

So as the workers hacked through the forest at the end of the quay, they were surprised to find a lake.

A lake called Lake Surprise.

I feel like the name kind of makes it less of a surprise.

Well,

it was surprising at the time because no one knew it was there.

Yeah, BCL did like, ah!

Oh, shit, a lake.

Funny, therefore, to name it that after the fact.

Yeah.

Lake, my boss is a stupid asshole.

I hear that.

Loud and click, Ross.

Railroad bore, the railroad bore directly down on it.

It was too late to divert the right of way.

And the lake was only six feet deep, but the bottom of the lake was entirely peat.

It couldn't support pilings at all.

So Flagler had appointed a chief engineer named Joseph C.

Meredith.

Now, he was an expert in reinforced concrete, one of the few people with the cajones to actually take on the project.

Also, surprisingly young for being in charge of such a large project.

He was just in his mid-40s.

He had a reputation for.

Engineers youth differently.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, architects are young at 70.

Um,

yeah, he's a reputation for solving problems on this type of big project, right?

Um, Meredith sees this lake, he surprises anyone, comes up with a remarkably simple solution, take the dredges from the earlier part of the project, use them to take good fill from the seabed, and dump it in the lake.

It was, this was slow, but it worked, it worked.

Uh, Lake Surprise was conquered in 15 months.

Lake inevitability, yes.

Now, the railroad was on the keys proper, and that's where the real problem started.

Oh, boy.

So, challenge two is the keys.

Even in 1905, there were serious environmental concerns about the railroad.

Flagler wanted to do the whole thing on an embankment, but people complained.

This railroad was national news, right?

It was everywhere in the papers.

Folks were calling it Flagler's Folly already.

And the embankment idea, the papers said, might just straight up shut down the Gulf Stream and doom Europe to eternal winter.

Yes.

Finally, some like frost punk lore.

Yeah.

Did this happen?

No.

No.

So the Key West extension was to be built with a series of both embankments and bridges.

Lots of bridges.

Another problem was housing the workers.

So, you know, a big problem with building a railroad over open ocean is where to house the men.

Flagler came up with a solution which was barges.

Yeah, just get in this prison hulk.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's just like where we picked you up from.

The quarterboats, as they were called, would float just offside, house hundreds of men in four-man bunks.

Meals were provided.

There was some opportunities for recreation.

Alcohol was banned, which naturally led to camp followers showing up.

You seldom hear about camp followers anymore.

Yeah, well,

it's, you know, now that we're good at logistics and like the military, I guess you don't need them anymore.

In this case, some guys pulled up a large decommissioned freighter next to the camp, and

they opened a saloon and brothel on there.

Oh, fuck, that's cool.

Yeah.

It's a like illegal party boat.

Yes.

Another big problem was recruitment, right?

Convict leasing was fine and all that.

Wasn't a panacea.

They needed paid labor.

They needed more labor.

Flackler contracted out recruitment to

various independent recruiters.

They would travel to places like New York, Chicago, Sacramento.

They would offer work mostly to the poor, the indigent, the vagrants, so on and so forth.

Yeah, you got to trick people into doing this.

Listen, you build a railroad for like two years.

It's not very hard work.

There's a lot of sex workers, and then you can end up in Miami, which has like five people at this point.

Exactly.

You get a free train ticket to Miami.

A free Miami vacation.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

Terms of conditions may apply.

Don't worry about it.

Lots of folks took up this offer and then just they got to Miami and decided I'm not going to work for the railroad actually.

Nice.

Smart thing to do.

Yes, that is the smart decision.

Recruiters were paid by the head, so there's a strong incentive for them to somehow force the guys to actually go to work.

By hook or crook, recruiters got these guys onto the quarterboats.

Now, again, Standy Ford here goes out of his way to say, folks, we're free to go at any time, but you know, you're on a boat building a railroad over the fucking ocean.

Just hop over the side and swim, you know?

Yeah, just don't port.

It's fine.

Don't worry about it.

I mean, Flagler did get indicted for slave labor.

The charges were dropped, but it's funny you have to be slaving to get indicted for slave labor in Florida.

Yeah.

Well, he said it was just Teddy Roosevelt trying to troll him.

No, dude.

There was another problem.

Poisonous trees.

What?

Beg pardon?

Yeah.

The manchineal.

The keys are densely forested.

That's how they stay around.

But these Caribbean forests have a unique type of tree.

The tree that kills you instantly.

Oh, I don't care for that at all.

That's why I don't go outside.

Do not touch with three exclamation marks.

This tree is very toxic.

The fruit is poisonous, and the sap from leaves and

stems can produce painful blisters do not stand under this tree during rain as the water on the leaves can pick up the toxin and drip it on the skin

that no thank you no no he he who sleeps under the manchineal sleeps forever um

yeah oh so the manchineal sap is very poisonous it's in the trunk it's in the leaves it's in the bark it's in the twigs it's in the fruit it's in everything even yeah even standing underneath the tree in a rainstorm can cause serious blisters.

This fucking tree, get this, this fucking tree has fruit, and the fruit tastes good, and then it kills you.

It's like

Florida's sort of bio-middle finger up at any human being who tries to enter it.

It's a lot like Australia, I feel.

Yeah.

It's also apparently very good wood for like nice furniture and stuff, but you gotta, once you chop the tree down, you have to let it dry for like weeks before you can touch it.

Present-day Spanish name is Manzanilla de la Muerte, little apple of death.

That's poetic.

It's also known as the beach apple, I believe.

So, in the path of the railroad, these things are fucking everywhere.

Oh, Jesus, you can't even burn it because if the smoke gets in your eyes, it like blisters your fucking eyes.

When ingested, the fruit is reportedly pleasantly sweet at first with a subsequent strange peppery feeling, gradually progressing to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat.

Symptoms continue to worsen until the patient can barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain and the feeling of a huge obstructing pharyngeal lump.

What the fuck?

These are everywhere, right?

Challenge number three, open fucking ocean.

Yep.

This is nothing compared to the tree that kills you instantly.

No,

I'll take my bets on the hurricane.

I'm going to fuck with the tree that kills me instantly.

Nature is fucking scary, man.

By the time they reach lower Maticum Key,

stuff starts getting hard.

Flagler's idea here is simple.

The bridges, might be long, but, you know, okay.

First you build one arch, then you build the next one, then you build the next one, then you build the next one, so on and so forth.

Eventually you finish.

I mean, I can't fault his logic here.

I mean, I can, but

unimpeachable, you know?

It was not quite that simple.

To avoid complications from curing concrete, Meredith's men actually have to build each arch alternately and then fill in the gaps.

Surveying was painstaking.

Dewatering was absolutely miserable.

Lots of people.

Dewatering is sort of, in order to pour the concrete, you have to put down some kind of coffer dam around the area

where you're pouring the concrete.

Yeah, you dewater it.

You know,

surprisingly ancient methods being used here.

I mean, they are building a huge Roman viaduct out of reinforced concrete, though.

So they have to buy special underwater concrete to build the foundations from a new place called Germany.

Each arch was constructed out of reinforced concrete.

The formwork was reused from arch to arch.

These viaducts were incredibly heavy, incredibly sturdy, and incredibly expensive.

They were about 31 feet above sea level, which is, you know, more than enough to weather even the worst storm surge, right?

Well, unfortunately, that one guy in his cabin who discovered how to get petroleum out of the earth is about to fuck that for everybody.

Next with another Drake.

Yeah.

Drake the singer, Drake the guy.

Yeah.

In that cabin, Drake invented texting underage girl.

And fuck the Raptors.

Oh, yeah.

I fucking hate the Raptors.

The thing is, and you'll have to cut this.

Every Toronto Raptors fan is a p far.

And that's

not leave that one in.

Statistically, that's true.

No, I like that this podcast has inexplicable beef of the torana raptors oh oh my beef is pretty explicable it's the fact that they're all files yeah yeah okay yeah that's fair listen i i i derived this from two things i derived this from two things thing one

thing two the video of the like child predator who got like entrapped on the internet who shows up driving the tiny tiny car uh if you haven't seen it i probably put a link in the description because it's one of the funniest things i've ever seen but as he is confronted he pulls away and he is driving a tiny little, like,

you know, mobility scooter.

And on the back, in a huge decal is Raptor's Nation.

Tells me everything I need to know about the Raptors Nation.

Good enough.

Countries with nations with no right to exist.

The Toronto Raptors Nation Israel.

Owing to...

the slow pace of work and Flagler's insistence that he ride the train to Key West before he died.

Chief Engineer Meredith elected to continue work through the 1906 hurricane season.

Brave.

I guess brave when you're dealing with other people's lives.

This proved to be a poor decision.

So on October 17th, 1906, the railroad had just made it out to Long Key.

That's mile post 67.

The mile posts are measured from Key West.

They have 67 miles to go.

And quarterboat 4.

was docked just offshore with 150 men aboard.

The previous day had been calm, unusually calm, in fact.

All the seabirds had left.

It was about 6 a.m.

when the winds really picked up.

The quarterboat, flimsy as it was, held fast.

The cables securing it to the shore didn't.

By 7:30, the quarterboat was drifting in open ocean and heavy seas.

Should have been on the party boat.

Yeah, the bet.

The party boat.

Oh, yeah, I bet it was.

Hey, you guys sick, is anything wrong with all these winds?

Did you guys see the rub or possibly the sex workers?

Anybody?

A bunch of sex workers in like sexy 1900s outfits just like kicking their legs up really high.

They're fine.

The men on board tried to get to the horrible little steam launches they used to go ashore, but they couldn't start them because the fire boxes were all soaked.

Everyone on board, this boat was trapped, and the quarterboat was quickly succumbing to heavy winds and heavy sea.

Firebox is also what they called Ida, am I right?

About nine o'clock a.m., the roof came off.

Some folks tried to hold onto the wreckage.

Others ran down into the hold.

Others ran to first aid kits to overdose on lots of fucking Christ to avoid the horrible death.

To avoid the horrible death by shark.

I gotta be honest, this is me in any situation like this.

Anytime it starts to get a little bit dicey, I'm looking at the like painless methods of suicide thing.

And yeah, shark or no shark, the fact that you have a 1900s first aid kit with like a fatal quantity of laudanum just in it.

That's a difficult temptation to resist, you know?

The hurricane finally dashed the quarterboat against a reef.

Everyone who was cowering in the hold was entangled in the wreck.

This is why you do the laudanum thing.

Like if you're if you're on the laudanum hard enough, you don't care about that.

You're fine.

Some survivors were picked up by a passing Austro-Hungarian ship, which is called Jenny.

The captain ordered a full-scale search.

Once, after 45 minutes, they found someone who spoke English on board.

I mean, you're in Florida.

Others are picked up.

This is true, yeah.

Others by a British steamer.

Ultimately, at least 125 men were killed.

Flagler gave up on the quarter boats after this.

The railroad itself was also severely damaged by the hurricane.

Embankments were washed out.

Equipment was lost at sea.

It took a whole year to pick up the pieces.

get back to where they were.

Well, luckily, that was the last storm that's ever going to hit the

Florida keys.

Thank God for that.

Oh, yeah,

absolutely.

All All right, wrap it up.

Let's go.

53rd.

So the work continued.

By 1908, they got to Knights Key, where there was a piece of impressive but temporary infrastructure.

Knights Key is at Mile Post 47.

It's 47 miles from Key West, right before the most daunting part of the project, which is the Seven Mile Bridge.

We'll talk about that in a bit.

And it was here that Flagler decided that at least part of the route could be open to passengers.

Kind of the 18th.

In February of 1908.

Mr.

Two Damn Deals himself.

Yeah.

Yes.

In February of that year, the first passenger train left Miami, headed south to the temporary pier at Knights Key, shown here, discharging passengers bound for fabulous Havana.

Just to be like, you could get to Havana from

anywhere with the port, but instead you're like, I'm going to get it from a train in the middle of the fucking ocean.

Yes.

From a train on a horrible, rickety timber pier.

Oh, yeah.

Um, this structure is ridiculous.

It's all timber.

It's exactly as rickety as it looks.

You know, it's like, okay, there's some train tracks, there's some wood, there's a shed.

It actually curved underneath the seven-mile bridge, which at this point was under construction, but it worked.

And the railroad now had some kind of business on the unfinished line.

And this is one of those pieces of infrastructure you would think is, you know, completely legendary, lost to history.

There's no like pictures of it or anything.

There's so much in the railroad history that's like that.

It's like, well, this was said to exist.

No, there's pictures of this one.

You can see it here.

It's like absolute shit.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Look at those like cross

underneath ties on the fucking like underside of the thing.

It's that's

this gives me anxiety to look at.

Don't you want to go on that?

Don't you trust it?

No.

I like the guy here.

It's just walking.

Take a troll,

the girder.

Yeah, with no kind of safety protection.

It's like 1910.

Like the safety hadn't been invented yet.

I would go on this if I had like attached to my wrist by a lanyard, the like full bottle of laudanum.

Yeah, fair enough.

Just in case, just in case, in the same way, right, and for some reason, airport security is not receptive to this argument.

Because I have a fear of flying, I should be allowed to carry a gun with one bullet onto the plane.

Just in case, right, just in case shit gets bad and I'm like aware of it.

I want to be able to like, you know,

smash the fucking Laudanum bottle or whatever, or just, you know,

beep the word suicide again i get just have to like kill myself so that i don't have to like uh you know be in the plane crash all this is extremely uh relatable to me let let me take the attitude to transportation that canadian healthcare takes to everything kill them

the joke is better with the implication sorry for ruining it

really really kicking canadians around today i mean they deserve it we're we're resurrecting the bottleman pod

Yeah.

Canadians have never built an overseas railroad.

Too busy being

wrapped as supporting pedophiles.

Yes.

So, the seven-mile bridge.

They get the night ski.

This picture gives me anxiety, too.

Last one gave me a bit of anxiety.

This one gives me a lot of anxiety.

Hi, it's Justin.

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

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Back to the show.

up to Night's Key, it's been all embankments and reinforced concrete arches.

Past Knight's Key, there was a substantial obstacle.

Seven fucking goddamn miles of open ocean.

Good thing we're about to build a seven-mile bridge.

You build one arch, you build another arch, you build a third arch.

Unlike the various bodies of water before, this one wasn't like six feet deep.

This was very deep water as well.

I like that.

Upon assessing the task, chief engineer Joseph Meredith straight up died.

Yeah, he had this bottle of laudanum with him.

Ready to go.

Just like, this one's too hard for me to figure out immediately.

Like, shotguns, the thing of Laudanum.

He went into,

he had a diabetic episode.

Don't you feel like an asshole now?

Yeah, I think.

Well, the thing is, I think chugging an entire bottle of Laudanum will do that to you.

May have been brought on by the bridge.

Yeah.

So our friend the surveyor who was hacking through the jungle earlier william chrome was appointed chief engineer he's an even younger guy he's a strapping young lad of 32.

chrome was not a reinforced concrete guy so the bulk of the seven mile bridge would be steel deck girders cool so this was by far the longest bridge in the world nothing like it had been attempted before the top layer of limestone under the water was solid everything underneath it was not crews drove piles as much as 50 feet below the surface of the water without finding a solid footing.

Jesus.

And Chrome decided, since Flagler was still getting older, still insistent he wanted to ride a train to Key West, work on the seven-mile bridge would continue through the hurricane season.

Tell him no, this stupid asshole.

Well, this time they were prepared.

There were direct telegraph lines to the weather station in Miami.

Supervisors all carried barometers with them all the time.

Men were now being housed in sturdy bunkhouses on solid and high ground as opposed to quarter boats.

And sure enough, the 1909 Florida Keys hurricane slammed directly into the work site.

But aside from one guy who refused to leave his comfy houseboat when ordered ashore, everyone lived.

He's doing the like Homer Simpson in bed thing, you know.

Yeah.

But the railroad was in shambles.

A full 40 miles of track were washed out entirely on embankments.

A change of strategy was required.

There would be more bridges and fewer embankments to allow for better tidal flow.

Furthermore, the composition of the embankments was changed.

They went, rather than the expensive materials they were bringing in from land, the embankments would be constructed from the local sturdy limestone marl.

This saved a lot of money and was a long time of coming.

It's something they should have done much earlier, but you know,

you learn through doing, I guess.

And you kill a bunch of people in the process.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

The work went on.

In 1910, figuring lightning wouldn't strike twice, Chrome again ordered work to continue through the hurricane season.

Aw, dude.

Listen, I mean, hubris is a beautiful thing sometimes.

I'm the best at building railroads, maybe better even than the gods.

The 1910 hurricane was a doozy.

I hate to hear a storm described as a doozy, I'll tell you that.

It was not as strong as the 1909 hurricane, but it was very slow.

For 30 hours, it sat unmoving right at the railhead.

At what point do you not take that as a message?

To be like, fuck this guy specifically.

Each one of these hurricanes directly targeted the main part of construction.

Even these new, sturdily built workers' bunkhouses lost their roofs.

Storm surges inundated even the highest ground.

The Knight's Key terminal, that weird trestle from before, completely obliterated.

Yeah, I mean, it looked like a strong breeze would have pushed it over, to be honest.

This is true.

Yeah, this is a miserable, miserable situation.

One foreman survived the storm surge only by climbing and tying himself to a tree.

Guess what kind of tree it turned out to be?

Not the poison tree that kills you instantly.

Oh my god, yes.

God,

he lived barely.

Jesus Christ.

You have a 30-foot storm surge.

You're tied to a tree.

The tree is trying to murder you.

This is one of the worst things I can think of.

Now, by this time, work was underway on the Bahia Honda Bridge, one of the most iconic structures on the route, probably because it's the only like

through truss bridge on the route.

It was one of the last difficult engineering works before they reached Key West.

In the aftermath of the 1910 hurricane, the engineers noticed something off.

One of the piers, this was a pier that had been exceptionally difficult to construct, which required a full shipload of material to be dumped in the ocean in order to build it.

It was leaning, was not in the right spot anymore, led to a fateful decision.

This whole railroad had been designed for 70 miles per hour because Flagler was an insane person.

Over the, again, like bridges and embankments over nothing.

This is no longer the case.

Why?

Because you got to go fast.

He wasn't even trying to get to his vacation home anymore.

This is just going to be a man driven by madness.

Driven by madness to madness.

Yes.

I'm not fixing the show.

I understand

doing a lot to avoid going to Tampa.

Yeah.

Right.

But like this much?

No, I get it.

I get it.

Yep.

Yes.

Side my ass up, Flagler.

All the bridges on the Key West extension were now fitted with wind gauges attached to stop signals so the trains would stop if it was too high winds.

The maximum authorized speed on all the bridges was reduced to 15 miles an hour.

Slow train with a long view of nothing.

Yeah,

you're taking 30 minutes to get across a seven-mile bridge.

I mean,

so this proves to be extremely dumb and, in fact, inverse of the reality of the problems that would face the railroad, but we'll get to that in a moment.

You should have built high speed.

It was not the bridges that were the problem.

125 miles an hour.

Just throw an HST over this thing.

Exactly.

They finished the railroad.

You're joking.

Yeah.

Flagler was old.

He was frail.

He was losing his eyesight.

And on January 21st, 1912, he boarded his private railroad car called Rambler, which I believe is this one here.

And he had several private railroad cars.

One of them is preserved in his house in Palm Beach.

Anyway, so he boards the train at Palm Beach and he disembarks in Key West.

Crazy son of a bitch.

Actually did it.

Actually did it.

Yeah.

If you're rich enough and weird enough.

Yeah, sometimes you can actually move mountains, bridge seven miles of open ocean.

I love this advertisement here.

Every day, a June day full of sunshine where winter exists in memory only.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, you live in, it's like, see where it's addressed to.

You live in Chicago.

Do you want to not be where the weather is right now?

Come to Florida.

Come to Florida, yeah.

So the Key West extension was finished.

The Panama Canal traffic would roll in shortly.

The Key West port had been scaled back significantly.

There's supposed to be 12 huge covered piers.

They wound up building three.

The Navy was mad at them for it, but Flagler just sort of, yeah, he did, that's literally what he did.

He was just, I fuck you.

I'm old, I can't see.

I can't see it.

I'm very old.

And fuck the U.S.

Navy.

Yep, that actually tracks.

The man had done the impossible.

He built a railroad over the fucking goddamn ocean, and now there was nothing left to conquer.

He didn't.

A bunch of like convicts labor did.

Well, yeah.

Getting lashed to the tree kills you instantly.

Yeah.

Guys from New York can get tricked.

Regular service started immediately.

It became possible to board a train in New York and travel directly to Key West without changing trains and then take a short ferry to Havana.

Incredible.

A car float service was initiated so freight could travel from Cuba to the United States without transloading at all.

You're like a car full of like Hershey cocoa that comes from off the plantation in Cuba gets floated across and go all the way to New York.

Yes, easily.

Without ever having to, you know, have some cargo walk away from you at all.

Incredible.

Yeah.

Flagler died in 1913, one year after the extension was completed.

He was confident he had changed the face of transportation in America.

I mean, to be fair, at the age of like, you know, 9,000 years old,

having built the state of Florida and then single-handedly been like, fuck you, Florida Keys, that's a pretty impressive legacy.

Plus, also the like crazy redhead wife, which, you know, if we go back to her, actually.

This guy,

yeah,

this guy sounds like he had an interesting life.

He always had an interesting life.

He also, one thing he was fond of saying was,

I would have been a rich man if not for Florida.

He was losing money on all of these investments.

He just did it because it was fun.

Yeah, I mean, buying Twitter and then ruining it even more than it already was, like, isn't cool.

Doing this is fucking funny and neat.

And now we're milking it for a, well, actually, only in two hours, I think.

Yeah.

How tired are you?

November.

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm okay.

I'm surviving.

And I'm only just delirious enough to

falsely accuse every Torontonian.

No, they're pedophiles.

They're pedophiles, November.

I heard what you said.

I want to be very clear.

Devin, do not bleep this.

If you're from Toronto, you're a pedophile.

If you root for the Toronto Raptors, pedophile.

Everybody but Kyle Lowry is guilty of sin.

Um,

if you've ever been to the Eaton Center and went to the Orange Julius,

I have been to that Orange Julius with you, actually.

Interesting, interesting.

You went implicated, you're implicated.

Wow, wow, here's November associating with

sleep that.

Sleep that.

Surely there would be no repercussions to me

starting this ball rolling, you know?

And then within an hour,

like, I've been punished for my hubris way more quickly than this guy.

Yeah.

He was never punished for his hubris.

He died peacefully with his hot wife.

With his hot second wife.

Was it a third one?

Yeah, well, yeah.

The husband.

He has a a third wife.

Jesus Christ.

I don't know how hot his third wife was.

Hold on.

I'm going to Google this right.

This is like not.

His third wife didn't have any interesting characteristics.

Smoke show.

So

I'm still using the word smoke show or am I dating myself?

I think it's acceptable to use the word smoke show.

I saw a tweet by a friend of the show, Katie,

that said, I'm stacked like an IHOP on Sunday morning.

And I thought that was just about the funniest fucking thing I'd ever read.

So, Flagler's plan here was to capture traffic from the Panama Canal to refuel the ships to make Key West a major port.

There were some factors that inhibited that.

So, for one thing, the Navy wouldn't let him build the 12 piers he wanted.

He had to be satisfied with three.

Mary, Mary Harkness Flagler.

She's got the Ennsmouth look.

Mary Harkness was his first wife, I think.

Wait, hold on.

Yeah, 1881, 1901,

Mary Lily Keenan Flagler Bingham.

Too many surnames.

Yes.

North Carolina's reigning belle because of her vivaciousness, beauty, and accomplishments.

Wow.

That's all I did.

So because the Navy wanted some kind of reserve of fill they could use at some point in the future, Flagler was just like, well, we'll give you back the fill if you need it.

So another thing is, you know, Flagler made his fortune in oil.

And ironically, the sudden surge in demand for gasoline for motor cars meant there was more refining, which meant there were more cheap refining byproducts, namely something called bunker sea oil.

And bunker sea is this horrible, nasty, very thick, viscous oil, really only useful in huge engines, which you might find in a ship.

The Russian Navy in particular runs on

this shit.

You can see

the smoke trails off of their carriers,

which are

wild.

Most ships still run on Bunker Sea

because it's so cheap.

It's so available.

I think you have Muzzle.

Everything I'm saying is wrong tonight.

You're very sleepy.

It's okay.

So

most shipping at this point had switched from coal to Bunker Sea oil, which for all its shortcomings has more energy density than coal.

So you didn't need to refuel ships at Key West anymore.

Yeah, kills a bunch of coaling stations all over the world.

Yeah.

The biggest problem, though, is that there was nothing to import or export.

The largest freight traffic that Key West ever saw was exporting hogs to Cuba and seasonal imports of pineapples from Cuba.

The bulk of the business on the extension was passengers.

You know, it was all, hey, you want to go to Cuba?

You know, to the point where you can see here,

this is an advertisement on the pier.

for El Encanto, which is a Havana department store.

So all tourism and a long way to do that when you could just get a boat in slightly more luxurious conditions.

Yeah, the only consistent freight was.

What do you think is in these big vats on flat cars?

I don't know, like cocoa or something?

It's municipal drinking water for Key West.

It's a.

Okay.

Water train.

It's a water train, yeah.

Yeah.

And then you got one boxcar over here that probably has, like, I don't know, someone ordered a washing machine or something.

But yeah, this is like the only consistent freight traffic is transporting drinking water to Key West.

And admittedly, that did almost keep the line afloat.

You know, it sort of struggles on for a long time, managed to weather the start of the Depression.

The Florida East Coast Railroad starts to get into really bad financial shape, even absent the Depression.

The luxury train down to Havana is still a big prestige item, though, even if it doesn't make much money.

And in 1927, someone drives the first car to Key West.

Oh,

on

just regular ass tires, huh?

Yeah.

On train tracks.

On the train track.

I can hear this image, and the sound is unpleasant.

A LaSalle, too.

It's a beautiful car.

Oh, yeah.

Just don't drive it on the rails On the train tracks.

Yeah.

So we got to fast forward to 1935.

Oh, it says right here, the storm of the century.

Oh, boy.

The storm of the century, yes.

So hurricane forecasting is not good in 1935.

You sort of have to rely on reports from incoming ships and telegraphs from islands as to how bad the storm is and where it's going.

And pre-radar.

It's hard to warn people of the incoming storm.

You could broadcast on the radio.

Not everyone has a radio.

Some warnings were only delivered by airdropping messages taped to bricks.

Fair enough.

Just brick breaks your window, and you're like, oh, fuck.

And then the hurricane's

going to be.

It's coming.

Yeah.

Well, this was something called a message block, which I was unable to Google because it just gives you a bunch of software engineering bullshit.

So Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

had decided a while back that these guys who called themselves the bonus army had a point.

I've heard of these guys.

Yeah, he put them to work in the civilian conservation corps.

Do some odd jobs around the place and we will end the depression this way.

Exactly.

The CCC worked on public buildings, erosion control, dams, landscaping, and of course roads.

One such road was a road to Key West.

If Flagler could do it, so could Uncle Sam.

And Uncle Sam had learned some lessons from Flagler, like working through the hurricane season.

Uncle Sam had also passed on some lessons, like housing workers in sturdy buildings.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, the budget would have mattered.

The budget runs to like tents.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, literally.

Religious tents.

Fuck me.

Okay.

It was tense.

So the 1935 Labor Day hurricane went straight for the throat, namely the camp where 600 odd World War I veterans were housed in tents in Islamarada in Upper Maticum Key.

Islamarada.

Islamarada sounds like a sort of Salafis disco tech.

This being Florida, are we sure that it's not Islamorada?

Ah, maybe.

I prefer Islamerada, to be honest, too.

I like Islamerada, too.

Yeah, it sounds like

you go there and they've got like roller skates and stuff.

But, you know, it's also, everyone has to stop for daily prayer.

This being Florida, God knows how they pronounce it.

Exactly.

Also, I do appreciate the Florida-bound Hurricanes' ability to

target seek

directly target the most vulnerable part of the keys every single time.

100% hit rate.

Yeah.

No, they want to take out the road this time.

The railroad's already firmly entrenched.

There was about one day's warning for this.

No one knew if the thing was going to hit, and if it hit, how hard it would hit.

Therefore, it took a while to decide to evacuate.

And it was only one practical way to do that.

Yeah, it's finally useful.

Yes.

So, okay, here's an issue where I take a lot of, here's a situation where I take a lot of issue with

how Les Standiford describes the evacuation

being

the subject of, quote, old 447, unquote, the locomotive which was on the evacuation train.

So old 447 was the second newest and second biggest locomotive on the railroad.

It was a 482 mountain type.

This is 408 shown here, but it's very similar.

The 400 class were all basically the same, but higher the numbers, they were a little heavier.

These are big.

They're fast and stable at high speeds, which are common on the Florida East Coast because Flagler was an insane man and built the whole railroad for 70 miles an hour.

It's built by American Locomotive Company in 1926 in beautiful Schenectady, New York.

It's shown here in Jacksonville.

You can see the huge fucking Jacksonville Union Station back here.

That building's still there.

It's now the convention center.

So they're going to dispatch this rescue train.

The other thing you should take note of: these are what's called heavyweight cars.

They're called that because they're heavy.

They're all steel construction, 50 to 60 tons each, concrete floors.

You know, the very, very, they're just heavy.

Yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't try and build this railroad if you weren't trying to run the heaviest possible trains over it.

Right.

Yes.

At 70 miles an hour.

At 70 miles an hour.

Infinite momentum.

If this thing crashed, it would alter the Earth's axis.

So there had been some.

This is 431, which I think is also representative of the class.

I didn't like the lighting on this photo as much, but this is

a little closer to the actual subject locomotive.

There had been some preparations for the hurricane.

There was a train that was supposed to be held at Homestead, Florida, with a crew waiting for dispatch to the CCC work camps should the worst occur and evacuation was required.

Owing to normal railroad bullshit, this did not happen.

Precision scheduled railroading.

Yeah.

As it turned out, after the foreman and Islamarada sent an SOS, the train had to be assembled in North Miami, navigate the congested Miami terminal area, was delayed by a drawbridge opening for pleasure boats

in the hurricane.

Because it was Labor Day.

Only then preceded the remaining 75 miles to the Keys.

Locomotive engineer J.J.

Haycraft was not taking any chances.

He was experienced with the Keys.

He knew there was a chance they'd have to highwheel it out of there.

Highwheeling is an old-fashioned railroad term for speeding.

So his first order of business was that at the last passing sighting before the Keys was to run the locomotive around the train.

447 would back up the whole way to his La Marada.

He's got 11 cars, six passenger cars, two baggage cars, three box cars.

I guess they were planning to save some equipment.

So 20 miles from the destination at Snake Creek, the wind is picking up.

It's sort of, you know, it's raining hard.

There's squalls everywhere.

It's, you know, the waves are crashing.

Haycraft spotted a bunch of guys in what was now this roaring gale.

He brought the train to a halt to take them on, and then the train wouldn't start again.

The hurricane had brought down a thick steel cable from a nearby gravel pit.

I'm not entirely certain what it was for.

The book just says boom cable.

I don't know what that means in this case.

Well, yeah, it brought this cable.

This cable just lands on the locomotive and it's like, you should buy a house when I was your age.

It was easy.

45 stopping power.

Right onto the locomotive, right behind the cab that prevents it from moving.

It took an hour for them to cut the cable loose.

Pretty close call for the engineer, too.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, if it had been going at speed, who knows what would happen?

Probably someone gets cut in half.

Like, there's too much walk shit around.

At this point, the tracks are literally underwater.

There's waves crashing over the right of cool.

Now, fortuitously, and in contrast to modern diesel and electric locomotives, steam locomotives actually work fine underwater.

Yeah, because the cylinder, as long as the water is below the level of the cylinders, you are fine.

A diesel or electric locomotive, the traction motor sees up and then you're stuck.

So 447 pulls into Islama Rada around 8 p.m.

took on the evacuees.

He's still going over

like tracks that are underwater.

Yeah, he's just going.

Give this man the fucking Navy Cross.

The guy is just going to send it.

At this point, you're not an engineer anymore.

You are a sailor.

You're like a navigating master.

So he was scheduled to go farther than this, but he was like, there's no way we can keep going from Islamerata.

You know, so he's like, okay, we're going to cut the losses.

We saved who we could.

We can't go further.

We got to get back to land.

Right.

So he, you know, he pulls into Islamerata.

He takes all the people on.

He's like about to leave.

And then a goddamn fucking tidal wave shows up.

This massive 20-foot

storm surge just shows up immediately.

Again, it sweeps over the rails.

Vulnerable, most precisely targeted fucking hurricanes.

Swept over the rails, over the coaches, turned over the whole train, except the locomotive.

The locomotive is too heavy.

Incredible.

And yeah.

Well, that's partially because, okay, below the level of the boiler, a lot of the steam locomotive is just open.

You know, it's kind of the frame is very open and airy.

You know, the water just goes through.

I don't know about the tender.

I mean, the tender is probably just really heavy.

JJ Haycraft and his firemen lived to tell the tale, and not many other people did.

Yeah, I bet.

Yeah.

Because these coaches that were knocked off the track, they just instantly filled with water.

Everyone drowned.

Horrifying.

Not a good way to go.

Again, you got to have the Lordenum on you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I keep that saying on me.

That's just a.

40 miles of the Key West extension extension were washed out.

Every structure in the Middle Keys was leveled, including the luxurious and exclusive Long Key Fishing Club, which was a resort that Flagler had made out of one of the old work camps.

At least 423 people were killed by the storm.

Records are a little spotty there.

This storm, again, storm of the century, it produced sustained 200 mile-an-hour winds.

And despite climate change, it's still the strongest Atlantic hurricane on record.

Just like, fuck this train specifically.

Yes.

Yes.

It was bad enough that body disposal was an issue, despite promises of these various veterans who'd been sent down there by FDR that, okay, we'll at least bury them with honors at Arlington.

They mostly had to do cremation.

Yeah, just like dump them in the mangrove swamp or whatever.

Well, a lot of bodies never showed up again.

I mean, there's all kinds of stories about, you know, horrible ways people were murdered by like getting impaled by a piano or whatever.

Yeah.

It's also a problem for the Florida East Coast Railroad, and they were at this point in receivership.

The Depression did not treat them well.

They decided to cut their losses.

The entire Key West extension right away, which took seven years to construct, cost $30 million and claimed the lives of over 100 men, was sold to the state of Florida.

for $640,000.

Yeah.

And I guess you go, go, it was a stupid idea to build this railroad in the first place.

Well, they decided that what we need instead is a road.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they finished building the overseas highway.

It has some really goofy structures on it.

Here's,

this is the Bahia Honda Bridge, but instead of having a through truss where the trains go, they just welded a road deck to the top.

Okay, sure.

It's got a hump in the middle where there's this sort of Pennsylvania Pratt truss.

And you can just drive to Key West now.

You can just drive to Key West.

Well, yes, but this structure was later superseded by a newer highway, and they've actually demolished parts of the bridges to make it easier for navigation.

But all of the bridges of the Overseas Railroad are still there.

It was the embankments that were the problem.

You know, you can still drive to Key West as the main way to get there.

I don't think there's going to be many trains in the the future, but this thing has a long, long legacy.

It's sort of even like the symbol of Key West is the Overseas Railroad, even though they're not going to see trains again.

A lot of it is left.

A lot of the right-of-way is still there.

It's either covered by roads or it's being slowly converted into a rail trail.

They may actually fill in these gaps so you can bike 100 miles to Key West.

Yeah.

That'd be cool.

It's iconic enough that, hey, you can see the Bahia Honda Bridge in the Grand Theft Auto Auto 6 train.

No shit.

Yeah.

So, you know,

it's an iconic, you know, testament to man's hubris.

Also, some guys on Twitter got mad at me when I pointed out that they should have

GTA 6.

If they have the Baha'i Honda Bridge, they should just have the whole Key West extension running.

It'd be great to chase the train there.

See Jesus.

Some people got mad at me and said it was a made-up location for a game.

No, No, that's the Bahia Honda Bridge.

So, yeah, like the Q West extension, I mean, it was

one of the most insane things anyone's ever done.

Just because one guy wanted to.

Yeah, he was like, it'd be funny to do this, though, right?

I mean, again, difficult not to make the kind of modern billionaire comparisons where your modern billionaire tries to do something of this scale and then fucks it up immediately.

Modern billionaires don't do anything funny.

They'll just go to space and suck at it.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

If I had a billion dollars, I'd be like,

let's give this Key West extension another shot.

I'd just be like linking up stuff that hasn't been linked up and should be.

Like, where's my like UK-Ireland rail link?

You know?

Oh, yeah.

You gotta, you gotta, I don't know, build, build something like, uh, like, across South America or, like, Africa.

I don't know.

Links that clearly should exist.

Yeah, f f fill in the Darien gap, build the Trans-American Highway, you know?

whoa, no, I would do that with a railroad.

I would not do that with a highway, Trans-American Railroad.

You get on the train in

Anchorage and you get off the train in Tierra Del Fuego.

That's what we need.

The other thing is, what happens to the Florida East Coast Railroad?

They emerge from a receivership.

They're still financially unstable.

In 1960, this guy named Edward Ball, no relation to Ed Balls, I believe.

God

shouldn't know that name.

Yeah.

Takes a controlling interest.

He decides the way to go is to union bust like no one in the railroad industry had union busted before.

There was a nationwide railroad strike threat, which may sound familiar if you remember the past couple years.

Prompts President Kennedy to call a national mediation board.

Should sound familiar over the past few years.

This is 1962.

He orders railroads to give everyone a 10 cents an hour raise, and Ed Ball just ignores it.

Huh, shit, maybe one of these guys killed Kennedy.

There was this long work stoppage afterwards.

The railroad just sort of sits there.

No one's getting paid.

No one's working.

Ball eventually hires enough scabs to get the thing working again.

Union workers bomb trains and shot at scabs.

Oh, yeah.

But eventually, yeah, eventually the Supreme Court stepped in and said, well, scabs are fine, actually.

And Ball had given himself the first and only non-union railroad in the United States.

Jesus.

He kept wages wages down.

He had the first two-man crews in the United States before you needed five-man crews.

He completely eliminated passenger service much earlier than anyone else did.

Lots of nasty stuff.

Eventually, this railroad reunionized under the United Transportation Union.

I think it's the only railroad that they represent.

This railroad has continued its strong tradition of being run by insane people.

and having insane operating practices.

They still, to this day, will run like a gravel train at 70 miles an hour.

Feel the need, the need for speed.

In the past decade or so, they became the first railroad to reintroduce passenger service under the brand Bright Line, which is now famous for constantly mulching cars parked on the tracks.

Nice, nice livery,

as it should be doing.

Yeah, well, I don't like the Bright Line one.

What I like is the freight livery.

They just reused the old Streamliner one.

Oh, yeah.

Except, I mean, these are the best looking locomotives on the the tracks right now except they just got bought by grupo mexico and now they're gonna look like this

this looks off this is this looks like this is a shaving gel this thing is gonna sell me an nft of itself yeah oh the fucking like sans serif font out of here okay it's not not good not good and that's the story of a keyword

what did we learn uh it would be fun to build a railroad with your friends and also possibly convict labor

Crazy redheads will ruin your life, but will leave you with the legacy of a transport link to Key West somehow.

Yeah.

Yeah, get a hot and crazy wife.

I'm trying.

She's not going to listen to this anyway, so hybrid.

Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Shake hands with danger.

Hello, dear.

Well, there's your problem hosts and Schrödinger's guest.

By observing the guest, you have killed the guest, you monster.

A lot of the safety third seems to be sent in by our male comrades or from stereotypically male industries.

So I wanted to share a story from a female-dominated field.

Hell yeah.

It may not be as horrifying as some of the others we've heard, but it is a story that comes to mind every time I hear a safety third.

Please invent feminism.

I'm begging you.

I worked in the care homes laundry department through much of high school and university, mostly on school holidays and while saving for grad school.

We had the honor of being considered the most dangerous department in the building, primarily because of our giant industrial gas-powered dryers and the many, many chemical solutions required to clean soiled laundry at an industrial rate.

Oh, care homes, that's a lot of shit.

And piss.

Yes.

Fun fact, every day immediately before lunch, we loaded the diaper load into the washers.

Oh, I don't like that that's capitalized.

I never had much appetite on the days that was my duty.

The image of an industrial dryer provided is considerably more modern model, but it gives you an idea of what they're like, as well as a rough estimate of scale.

Gotcha.

We had three of these big suckers, and every day, someone would be on dryer duty and spend the day filling and emptying the machines and folding, folding, folding, folding.

I was upstairs delivering clothing to the residents' rooms when some of the staff remarked on the faint smell of smoke.

No alarms were raised, so I figured it was probably coming

from the outside somewhere, and I paid it no regard.

Unfortunately, the call was coming from inside the house.

When the elevator door opened as I returned to the basement, I was met with a thick wall of smoke.

Apparently, our alarms were heat-based rather than smoke-based, which is super useful.

I was ready to panic and pull the alarm manually when one of my fellow laundry ladies appeared to explain what had happened and assure me we weren't going to blow up the building.

A load of bedding had gone into one of the dryers, as many such loads did each day, five days a week, year over year.

The person on duty carried on with folding laundry as the load worked its way through its cycle.

Sometime later, another staff member returned to folding and hanging after doing one of their other tasks and noticed the drum of the machine with the bedding appeared to be filling with smoke.

Rather than raising the alarm, as they likely should have done, since said machine, again, had a gas line and an open flame inside,

they called the men folk of the maintenance department for advice.

Good job, ladies, letting the side down by relying on the dudes.

They just have an open flame in there?

When you said gas-powered, I thought I wasn't okay.

Well, you need heat to do drying.

I guess so, yeah.

In a rather stupid but very dudes-rock move, the maintenance man who came decided that the best thing to do would be simply to remove the fire

out of the environment using the small plastic laundry basket and his bare hands, ignoring the fire extinguisher we had hanging on the wall.

Excellent, excellent.

While my colleagues stood around and watched, he yanked open the door to the dryer and grabbed the offending item out, plunking it into the laundry basket.

The item in question was a stuffed pillow, which instantly went from smoldering to flaming as fresh air reached.

Our brave hero, the maintenance man, then gave Usain Bolt a run for his money as he sprinted out of the room, down the long hallway, and up the emergency exit staircase to the parking lot, where he tossed the pillow on the ground and stamped the flames out, you know, as shown here.

Incredible.

Luckily, he was fine with no serious scorch marks, and nothing else in the load had ignited.

Unfortunately, the whole basement was filled with smoke, and then we then had to do a weekend of overtime to wash absolutely every fabric item that was in the basement to get rid of the smell.

Pillows were then banned from the dryer, and as far as I know, that was the only change that occurred after the incident.

But hey, we didn't blow up the place.

Well,

I mean, I feel like if you have the fire extinguisher, maybe use the fire extinguisher.

How many times are you going to get to use that?

You know, it's fun.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

They're fun to use.

Yeah.

Make the like

noise, you know?

Yeah.

Regards from L.

Incredible work.

Yes.

Folks, use the fire extinguisher.

Anyway,

that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Oh, you know all of our podcasts, I believe.

And yeah, I'm doing some live shows in London for Kill James Bond and for Trash Future.

I think all of the tickets are sold out, and by the time this comes out, there might still be some for the Trash Future thing left,

which is going to be on the 13th of March in London.

Um, and we'll put a link in the description, maybe, but uh, otherwise, no, I got nothing.

All right, we did

all we did was defame the entire population of Toronto, yes.

Take them one more time.

If you have been to the Eaton Center, you are

there together.

So,

God.