Episode 186: The Quintinshill Wreck(s)

This is a totally anonymous podcast by people who you don't know who they are.

You don't know what the subject are is.

You don't know what the subject are.

Yeah, you actually don't.

It do be like that.

So here's podcast is no longer released on traditional channels.

It's just like we put a cassette tape in an envelope and we mail it anonymously to several reporters who will then leak kind of.

I don't know what they say.

The revolution will not be televised.

what time is it

we're only an hour late starting recording it's fine yeah i was about to say that was that wasn't what i was getting at what i was getting at was i was referencing uh a a nice little film called one battle after another which i highly recommend people see noted yeah we're gonna have to do a sync point here all right i'm gonna do three two one mark three two

one mark

okay

uh and uh i guess we're podcasting yeah um

fantastic for the first time in a minute So, well, you know, it's been a while since we recorded because we've all been preparing for our debut at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

Yeah, doing some crowd work at the Riyadh Crowd Festival

Festival.

Would like to thank His Royal Highness

Muhammad bin Salaman for inviting us.

And actually, we have a special bonus episode soon about how the line is good, actually.

It's tough doing crowd work in Riyadh because you're going from the front rows back and you're like, so what do you do?

Oh, Prince.

Okay.

What about Prince?

Right.

Sure.

Anything funny about your family?

Oh, you're cousin, like, bone sword or journalist?

I mean, I guess.

I've heard that one before.

So here's the thing.

Everyone listening,

it's me, but also it's Victoria.

And we're on a podcast together.

And that's extremely dangerous because we are, of course, sworn mortal enemies.

Wow.

So, yeah.

My pronouns are she and her, just to be clear.

It hasn't changed.

We're not updating them.

No, there's a way we introduced the podcast.

I know there is.

I know.

But I was peaceful.

You've gone out of line.

I know.

Well, it's getting back into shape.

You're trying to buy this and shit.

The whole system is out of line.

Score one for me.

It's disaster.

We've lost one variable has gone, has changed, and everything is upside down.

The only solution is that we're going to be able to do that.

We're doing like sort of primary school where we're doing like good guest host points, and you know, whichever one you lost the most at the end of the episode has a sticker, and now Victoria has one, and Gareth doesn't have any.

Oh.

The only solution is to trans-Roz.

That's the only possible solution we have to fix the standard podcast.

Sure.

Make sure your own gender is securely fitted before adjusting anyone else's.

Exactly.

Hey, whoa.

Yeah, well.

If the gender comes down from the ceiling, they should make their own.

Oh, dear.

Yep.

Yep.

You could make an emergency gender dissent to 10,000 genders.

That's what Joe Biden was trying to do before the fucking anti-woke deep state stopped him.

Just about to say.

Hello, everyone, 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.

I'm the person who's talking now.

My pronouns are she and her.

Nay Liam.

Nay Liam.

Liam is unfortunately not with us today because he has been dragged, kicking, and and screaming.

Confined.

Yeah.

Confined to Disney World.

My God.

This is inhumane.

Particularly for the mass transit they have down there.

Also, the mosquitoes.

Read the Disney World one.

And by one, I mean Leon.

Yeah.

But we do have our new

temporary co-host, Victoria.

Hello, my name is Victoria Scott.

My pronouns are she and her.

Thank you for having me, as always.

Yeah, I'll be annoying all of your guests.

You don't have to say thank you for having me.

You work here now.

Yeah, you work here now.

Yeah, we're paying you.

No,

whenever I have full-time employment, I email my boss every day and I say, thank you so much for the job again today, sir.

We're also not your boss.

It's a collective.

I honestly thought Ross Ross is my boss now.

I thought it was easy to be emailing me.

I don't think he wants that responsibility.

Yeah,

I don't think any of us want that responsibility.

I don't understand how this podcast is set up in a legal sense.

How many years?

It's sort of like by ancient custom, you know, like it's like Gorman gast.

It's billet on top of itself.

And if it hasn't fallen down yet, then it's part of the podcast since time immemorial.

A very great man who I worked with in my previous engineering job said something to me, which is:

the less I know, the happier I am.

Oh, also, I'm here.

Yes, we also have it's Gareth today.

Yeah.

Hello.

My name's Gareth.

I'm not being paid to be here.

I'm not being paid to be here.

My pronouns are he and him.

And yeah, no, it's it's it's a delight to be here.

Um, as I said in a pre-recording segment that might be chopped, uh, yeah, mortal enemy Victoria Scott is on the podcast.

Um, what's actually fun is that Victoria and Nova and I all had a very important business lunch in Glasgow not too long ago, which is an absolute unbelievable delight.

I had such fun, such a nice time.

But obviously, you know, Victoria and I are

mortal enemies.

Yeah, now the gloves are off because we're competing.

Because now, Victoria, you're going to rack up some numbers that don't count like I did, which means that our score against each other remains.

I think possibly you're still winning in terms of guest appearances on the Well, There's Your Problem podcast.

I think we're officially entering the era in which these don't count as guest appearances because I'm just here.

Exactly.

So I just have to come and rep cars, which is too bad because I just got found out that S-Dot's ripping out a bus lane that I really liked using.

So I'm pretty pissed at them.

Just the general concept of personal automobiles today.

So I think we're going to have to, I may have to yield and say train good.

Yes.

They'll get you.

We see it before us.

Train being good.

What we see on the screen in front of us is a wooden passenger coach, which is completely burnt out.

That's no fun.

Some other people spraying water on various other pieces of railway equipment, which are also extremely on fire.

Today, we're going to talk about the Quentins Hill rail disaster.

Although, before we do that, actually, before even the goddamn news, I do have to mention two things,

which

Liam's...

Liam's thing.

This is at the Lutheran Settlement House,

their Dance Away domestic violence event.

That's October 16th.

The link is in the description.

Give them some money.

Yeah, give them some money.

Give money to them.

Or, you know, I don't know.

You could even attend the thing, I suppose.

Hell yeah.

The other thing is from one of our,

you know, colleague podcasts,

podcasting is Praxis.

James from there has

an extremely simple surgery that the NHS is just not able to do because they're so backed up.

There's a fundraiser for that so he can get that done and over with.

It's like pretty, pretty debilitating the skin condition he's got right now.

So, you know, if you want to donate to that,

that's a probably good thing to do.

I'll put a link to that in the description as well.

You know, so much for socialized healthcare, huh?

Well,

the labor fun versus getting rid of that, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, shout out to Jamie, yeah.

Um, that's it, yeah.

So, with that, uh, let's do the goddamn news.

It's always gratifying when I put in the chiron and then I get to see the reaction, yeah.

Um, so the

somehow still secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has has gone

what I can only describe as warfighter modes.

He has gathered together

everyone gold at Quantico.

Yeah, it's kind of like he's at the stage of like drunk at work where you start pulling people in for like really like maudlin or like self-aggrandizing conversations, which is exactly what this was, because when he started calling in like every general from like every kind of far-flung fucking command.

There was some sort of like consternation about this, I admit, to also thinking, is this going to be a kind of like bath party purge?

And it wasn't.

What it was going to be was

just kind of lecturing the troops about how DEI is bad, how they're all fat,

how too many of them have beards.

and that wokeness is no longer allowed.

I was surprised at how stupid it was.

I'm going to be honest.

I was also like, I didn't think Pete would bring everyone down to Quantico.

There's only one bar in that town.

It's a shithole.

I've been to Quantico.

And that's where the coup is being planned immediately following that speech.

Because like, not to, not to kind of like, you know, lionize the U.S.

Armed Forces, but it was interesting seeing the...

absolute silence in that room that prevailed whenever he tried to land one of his big lines about, you know, fucking around and finding out or whatever the um brass was not amused by this no he ended on a big flourish about you know sort of like being like we are the war department and he got like a woo from two of his staffers and dead cold silence they could just coupon they could just coup the government why aren't they doing that i i am

like they could just i

here's the thing in my admittedly limited experience of uh american military officers, they really do take the whole constitutional actor part seriously.

Like as much as Trump wants him to be, Mark Milley, not a liberal, right?

Not a lib, at least not in that sense, right?

He's not a woke guy exactly.

And what this is doing is we're cascading down.

We're going to less and less woke offices and calling them woke, which is funny.

And I don't know.

I don't know what would happen in a situation where, I mean, for my money, Trump is already so flagrantly unconstitutional in his actions that you would be perfectly justified in cooing him and, you know, doing some kind of like,

fuck knows,

like,

I almost said rally to restore sanity.

But I think it's probably good if you're a military officer that the bar is a little bit higher than that.

But yeah, no, I...

I don't know.

I don't want to predict anything.

It's just this is this is a really comically dangerous thing to do if you are the regime is to get all of your officers in one place, really try and make them feel bad.

And then immediately shut down the government so that they don't get paid for several months.

Yeah, it's just be like,

point one, you are fat, woke, and gay.

Point two, no paycheck this month or indefinitely.

Point three, we've brought out the president, this aged, like senile rapist paedophile to be like, to tell a bunch of like extremely technocratic navy officers that they should bring back battleships because he saw victims

that was a good one i enjoyed that very much oh yes that was glorious i the thing it's like they're confusing the army with the cops the cops are better armed than the army sure but the cops are all slovenly gits without any like whereas the army are like you know they're like nate might disagree with this but like the army are basically quite well organized and could easily just make these people disappear.

Well, not make them disappear.

You can't say that.

Like, you know, am I organizing insurrection?

I'm in the UK.

It's fine.

At the very least, officers have

generally speaking.

Yeah.

I'm calling my lawyer to figure out what bits I can make about this currently.

One moment.

If you want to think about the deep state or about the blob, right?

Like what these, what these guys want

is to maintain american power to maintain american empire such as it is right um

and much like the money the the hexa thing is a real indication that donald trump is going to try and touch that you know and it's it's been interesting it's been watching uh trump sort of like tack more sort of like NATSEC on Ukraine and be like, oh, well, you know,

they can sort of like get back all of Ukraine or, you know, NATO should shoot down Russian jets that overfly their airspace or whatever.

And it's like, you always wonder whether it's Trump sort of believing the thing the last person to speak to him said, or you always wonder at what point they take him into the big room from network.

And then for some reason, he just seems to keep forgetting that if they do.

It's not good enough.

If he's loving the battleships,

showing him like battleships were last an effective tool of war in like before the First World War.

So

the last time they were an effective tool of war was before they were built

like like i think the last time the last time there's a battle on this uh like naval nerd the last time there was a decisive battle on the sea won by a battleship was like 1910 or something like like it was like no

like that it then it was aircraft carrier you know then it was cruisers then it was aircraft carriers then it was like oh no then subs like this what is he on about it's very funny

it's as you say he's fun he's fucking with the thing that you're not allowed to fuck with, which is like the military-industrial complex.

It'll get angry at him.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, if you think about what Trump said, besides the, you know, we should have battleships.

This stealth ship doesn't look aesthetic to me.

One of the things was just openly being like, yeah, we're going to deploy more American troops domestically because we're fighting a war from within.

And it's like, yeah,

if you kind of take your head out of your hands when you're sort of like not being called fat and woke and actually listen to that.

I think that might be the kind of thing that's more likely to make you go,

maybe I should have a quiet word at the one bar in Quantico with some kind of like-minded officers.

The other thing about this is, if you want to talk about kind of like military liberalism, combat liberalism in the Maoist sense, but you know, reading combat as an adjective rather than a verb.

If those guys don't do it, then sometimes a lot of mid-ranking officers do.

And you've been seeing the posting about like American Napoleon, right?

You need like an artillery major or colonel from like Puerto Rico to do

what are we going for?

Puerto Rico, yeah.

I mean, you know, the other the other option here is, you know, I guess Trump's mad at the littoral combat ships because they don't look good.

Maybe he is going to develop a river navy because he wants to fight our internal enemies, right?

We need a battle.

You saw Border Patrol driving up and down the Chicago River, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, we need something that fits up the Chicago, it it goes up the Chicago sanitary and ship canal to go up the Mississippi River.

It's got to fit in the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, you know?

Oh, damn you shit.

Like, yeah, it's going to be so fucking stupid.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Monitor 2 versus Merrimack 2.

That's going to be amazing.

Oh, my God.

Cresses Forums monitor.

The thing that's really wild to me.

He's gotten what he wanted and like he's managed to find the people in the military who are willing to drone strike

like fishing vessels off the coast of Venezuela for no reason.

They're 90% of the way to consolidating all of their power and they just need to make it the final like 10 feet to the to the goal line.

And at the at the at the five-yard line, they're like, actually, you're still too woke and we

we're gonna like we're gonna purge you if you think as much about like hiring any.

It's it's it's women.

I don't know.

I'm gonna forget about raising canes.

There's no point in like trying to dissect it.

Yeah, well, it's just chaos and anarchy.

Trump would like say, like, Douglas MacArthur was woke if Douglas MacArthur was a guy who was in the military right now.

Like, he would.

It's, it, it, it, it's one of his funniest qualities is his like reflexive contempt for the military.

I still think about the I'm not going to go to the like war cemetery because those guys are suckers.

I don't know.

I don't want to cross-post, but like I was listening to just finished listening to last week's or the most recent TF bonus episode.

And Hussein made a really good point, which is that these guys, like, they're addicted.

It's politics by posting.

And the trouble with that is that at some point, you've got to do the next post.

And so you are going to, you will shoot into flames whatever power you've won.

The trouble is that you then get swept aside.

And the next, like, you know, Musk, we've seen it happen to Musk.

He has been swept aside and, you know, something else takes his place.

So, yeah.

Hey, but today he's worth $500 billion.

Yes.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I think the thing is, if you look at like

sort of the precedence from Trump's first term, right?

You can see kind of like Millie and the other joint chiefs of staff

being extremely unprepared for Trump, which I think they potentially still are.

but also very, very hesitant, right?

That's why I mentioned the kind of constitutionality thing.

And I think having this idea that it was fatal that anything kind of come out in public, right?

Because you have to maintain sort of like trust in the institutions.

And I think correctly judging that if you sort of have a kind of open fracture in civil-military relations from the military side, you don't come back from that, right?

And I genuinely think the question is, can Donald Trump and Pete Hagseth post themselves into a situation where that becomes the lesser of two evils?

And Trump just gets, you know, goes out you know node in gem style um i i don't know i genuinely do not know love living here president please please inspect the back of our please inspect the the rear compartment of our very cool m113

personnel carrier

uh don't worry victoria it's absolutely god-awful over here as well we might not be quite as far into fascism but labor are desperate to take us there so uh oh boy i've been trying i've been trying to persuade victoria among others

not that there's really any feasible way to do this but to like lifeboat into this country as it gets significantly worse and i'm just like if anyone's got any suggestions for places where it's it's it's not bad i guess mexico if we could go to mexico see the mexican navy squash the beef yeah yeah sorry all amlu's gone now so uh yeah we're we're good we're good yeah

i think we're i think we're actually good yeah i've uh you know apparent apparently uh

scooter's back in good graces down there somehow

Shit, okay, yeah.

Maybe it's time for us to go to Mexico.

Well, no one else can sell them railroad cars.

Mexico City live show.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, that should be sick, though.

In other news.

Oh, shit.

I can't laugh at this.

This is actually bad.

No, no one's dead.

It's okay.

We can laugh again.

Eric Adams finally got the 9-11 he always wanted.

He was mayor of New York City during a kind of transcendent disaster as a block of public housing's gas riser exploded, hurting no one, which amazing work.

Incredible.

It doesn't even look like there was a significant amount of damage to the building.

Like, I think this was like, you know, there was a garbage chute here, and then probably, you know, the gas and the plumbing riser.

I don't actually have any idea what happened here because I was

doing slides when it happened, and I was like, I don't want to.

Oh, as far as I know, there was just,

some kind of explosion

in either the like garbage chute or the gas riser, and it just blew off the side of the building.

But it's fine, no, no one hurt,

let alone died, you know.

So, if they've really built these buildings, you know.

Well, you know, there's a lot of bricks on the ground.

I mean, it's uh fortunate no one was walking down there.

No one in the building,

yeah, no one in the building would have gotten got by this.

This is uh actually an impressive success from a uh you know building standpoint.

Um, yeah, I can't comment too much on it because I don't know exactly what happened.

Um, other than damn, New York City Public House

is pretty, pretty well built.

I think that's our kind of like our takeaway here:

you can build the buildings pretty good, especially out of brick.

Oh, yeah.

Well, this is this is a mostly steel-framed building.

Um, this has got,

you know, it's it's got like uh, I don't know, one or two, maybe three widths of brick as a facade, probably on the lower end of that.

So, you know, it's all, it's all like steel frame in there.

And then I guess whatever, this entire like chute area here, you know, where the riser

New York City recovers and so forth.

You know, you know,

I'm sure.

And just...

It all blew out at once, but path of least resistance was outwards.

Yes.

that's what I was thinking.

Yeah, it's been a well-directed explosion.

Yeah, crikey.

Yeah, you wouldn't want to.

If this happened like somewhere in the middle with the elevator shafts, well, probably it would have been stronger construction to start out with, but you know, you might have had a different outcome.

Uh, yeah, so uh, a public housing building exploded in New York, but no one was hurt.

So, it's good question mark.

I mean, that's like a bad thing to happen.

Um, that shouldn't happen.

Yeah, I guess.

But we finally had the like, the good 9-11, not in the sense of it being a good thing, but in the sense of it being kind of.

In the words of Eric Adams, it truly was New York's 9-11.

Yeah.

The good 9-11.

Oh, you just mean 9-11?

Well, this is the thing about New York.

You could see.

I can't put that in.

Every day, you could see anything from like

one of our public housing towers exploding to people celebrating a new business that's opened.

I don't want to get too Eric Adams here, otherwise I'll switch into mayor mode, you know?

Oh, well, that was the goddamn news.

Let's ask a question.

What is the Caledonian

main line?

That's a good question to ask, Ross.

Yes.

I mean,

it's so we've done a lot.

We've done quite a few episodes on the East Coast mainline.

Yeah.

When I was around in the past.

And this is the other one.

This is the top end of what is now known as the West Coast Main Line.

But it was built by a separate railway company called the Caledonian Railway, who wanted to connect the already emerging railway network in the middle of Scotland, in the Scottish Central Belt, kind of Edinburgh, Glasgow, that area, Nova's home, among other places,

with that their England that they have and connect up to the railways being built by the...

LNWR, by the Midland Railway and others.

Very, very bad idea.

You don't want to connect Scotland to England because then you get things like people like me moving to Scotland and ruining it for everyone else.

And that makes Glasgow quite nice.

Scottish people move out of Scotland.

Yeah, this is it.

I mean, yeah, you simultaneously do a brain drain on Scotland and also you

fit a solid like quarter of Glasgow with the most annoying accents you've ever heard in your life.

And I include myself in that.

I remember distinctly when I I was at uni, because I went to uni in Glasgow, hearing many instances of the Glasgow uni accent.

And I remember hearing

legit a girl behind me going, oh yeah, I was in Bali.

To mean, and it took me a second to process that she meant like Indonesia rather than

grain.

And I was like, we...

Someone should like detonate something in this vicinity right now.

We would deserve the official opinion.

This is a consequence of the the Caledonian.

The official opinion of Will There's Your Problem podcast is entirely closed borders and ethnostates.

No one should be allowed to move anywhere.

Correct.

Yes.

Yes.

Complete ethnostate.

You can clip that.

Post it on Twitter.

Post it on Blue Sky.

See my new job and already fucking canceled.

Jesus.

Yeah, I know.

Well, this is it.

Good, good grief.

yeah so so um if if uh listeners cast their mind back to the um to the morpeth episode where we talked about the various battles of george hudson and his mates to get a railway across the scottish border but on the east well the caledonia railway was competing with that on the west and did so over uh the east coast mainline was fairly flat near the coast tricky but not too tricky the um the caledonia railway was built over several extremely large hills, including the very high summit of Beatok,

which you can see just about in the middle of the slide.

In fact, Roz is the highlighting underneath it, marvelously.

Meaning, this railway is quite wibbly.

It's also worth noting that the East Coast main line is very, very pretty.

You go by the sea.

It's a nice journey.

You can look out of the window and have a nice time.

Whereas the West Coast main line, no disrespect to the scenery, but it does, it's bad.

bad.

It's not, you're not seeing.

Once you're north of Lockerbie, there ain't much going on.

Apart from the Forest Tenants T,

the wooded tenants T that you can see from the train is about the only highlight on the way north.

Yeah,

it's pretty bleak.

Anyone who's right, everyone in the comments, YouTube comments, go absolutely buck wild for that, please, because

people should know about it.

Anyway, Weavy Wibbly.

It goes from Glasgow.

It went from Glasgow and Edinburgh southwards.

with a funny old triangle junction at Kerstairs, which has been recently remodeled-ish.

Worked on that, actually, for a bit, and then didn't.

Down to Carlisle Citadel Station.

Citadel Station is the name of the big station in Carlisle.

Roz, does that cover the question?

Yeah, very, very, very wibbly.

And 80 years later, some genius would put tilting trains on it and cause a podcaster to get more motion sick than she had ever been in her life.

Oh, well, you did the APT episode, so everyone knows all about that.

Let's do Virgin Trains as an episode, actually.

Yeah,

that's an episode right there.

Anyway, right.

So that is the main line, the first main line of the Caledonia Railway.

That's what that is.

Yeah, and this is starts, they start building it in the 1830s.

They finish it in stages in like the 1840s.

And this is during like a pretty early era of railroad technology, railway technology, excuse me, it's Britain.

So, you know, but it's, it, it becomes very busy very quickly, which means we need, we need methods.

Yeah.

Stand-up comedians going south.

You need to use Glasgow.

We need

methods to prevent the trains from running into each other yeah glasgow at the time an absolutely oh sorry i was going to say glasgow uh at the time an extremely important imperial port um only gets more so actually yeah absolutely second city of the empire birmingham found dead in miami beach if you ask me awesome like birmingham's just northern skylands where the engineers come from too So, you know,

and quite a lot of the generals with blood on their hands during the during the height of empire.

Yeah.

So sorry, Scottish nationalists, but it is true.

Yeah, so yeah, a major undertaking, extremely complex, challenging, a bit of engineering, but instantly under capacity for the amount of traffic.

Yeah.

And so, you know,

I hope they solve that problem at some point in the ensuing century.

Maybe two centuries of not resolving that problem.

Yeah.

So one of the bigger problems on these busy railroads, especially early early on, was like, how do you keep trains from crashing into each other?

Because trains don't stop very quickly, especially before you have

air brakes or vacuum brakes or something.

Or any brakes.

Any brakes at all.

Yeah.

General aviation rules.

See to a tool.

You know, like just look out the front.

Yeah.

Remember, it took until the 1890s, before the 1890s, that is, everyone, before all trains had to have brakes.

So yeah.

Yes.

What?

Just like, like it just does we were doing speed we haven't done the RMR rail disaster on this podcast and we will get there because that's an important one that's an important one yes so um good lord one of the first ways to stop trains from running into each other is timetables I was going to add a picture of a timetable there um and I couldn't find one um or an employee timetable excuse me that's that's a that's a beautiful piece of piece of text um I love it I'm holding a New Jersey Transit Newark Division employee schedule in my hands right now that I was given by a friend of the podcast.

I'm waving it in front of the camera, which is switched off for the sake of Nova's bandwidth.

There you go, listeners.

Enjoy that.

Everyone can imagine that in your head.

Just imagine.

Just imagine.

You're getting a homeopathic picture of an employee timetable.

I swear to God, I am writing the alternative medicine bonus.

That's a vague notion of a timetable.

The idea of a timetable is that trains will pass through this location at this time that means especially if you have a single track railroad um you know uh people driving the trains they know when they have to take a siding and wait for another train to pass or they know you know when they they are able to proceed right and this is all time based and it's all also based on the idea that

you know if another train is late ah too bad you still got to wait for it to go by.

It's very primitive, but it works if you don't have things like the telegraph or

they still do a kind of radio-enabled version of

quite a few lines in Scotland.

Yeah, yeah.

The Alaska Railroad is like almost all single track.

Yeah, and then you have a slightly more advanced version of that, which is train orders, right?

Where because there are telegraph stations or something like that,

you wind up picking up train orders that are physically written down by someone to tell you what to do with the train.

So we see here a man leaning out of a caboose to pick up a train order from a big loop next to the track because you could pick it up without stopping.

Then you have a fun thing.

That seems like an excellent way to get your entire hand up.

It's just a little loop.

It's fine.

You're supposed to do it at 15 miles an hour, but lots of people didn't do it at 15 miles an hour.

Yeah.

You got some bruises, but it was fine.

Yeah, tokens.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tokens are a fun one where, you know, if you have a section of track that you know is limited to only one train at a time, there is one physical token you have to carry.

from one end to the other to give you permission to use that section of the line.

And these weren't necessarily physical.

There's, I know that, like, as far as I know, part of one of SEPTA's trolley lines,

the 101, which is now called something else,

still uses a token system, but it's a button you press.

You reach out of the cab and press a button on the track.

Scotland has multiple lines that still use tokens.

They're called RETBs, radioelectric token block signaled sections.

The West Highland line is one, Far North line is another um they work very well on a single on lines that are mostly single track it's a very sensible way um to keep it it uh operating the test track i i i like this but only if the token is extremely like physically alive oh so like it has to it has to be kind of like very aesthetic

on one of the test tracks that i uh work that i work now work on um

uh we still have a token to access it and it is literally a cast it's like a proper iron staff that's been it's like that way of that way rust gets when it's like rusty, but so hand-worn that the rust is like a completely impervious kind of layer of like material.

And this thing is probably 140 years old.

It's great.

I'm imagining like a big challenge coin.

Yeah, some of them are like that.

Some of them are like a staff.

Others are like literally like a disc thing.

Yeah, it depends on like some of them have a machine to dispense them.

Some of them are just like slipped.

Oh, it's

the wonderful world of tokens.

Having to play a Liatra lot game before you're allowed to proceed down the track.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Connect four.

That's it.

Yeah.

The main problem with these is if someone loses the token, the line's out of service forever.

Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, you have to literally have to dig it up and build a new one.

Yeah.

But eventually, we discovered technology which allows us to build signals, right?

And that lets you just relay commands down the line, go, stop, slow down, so on and so forth.

And that's what you really need to run a lot of trains on one line.

It's worth saying that the railways employed light speed technology fairly early on, like from the 1830s.

In fact, the first use of commercial electronics was at Euston Station down the Camden incline.

to get to basically start this is back in the day when you still had like powered steam inclines rather than locomotives in various bits of the railway and into houston station was one of those examples and to set that basically to set trains off up and down that they the initial railway operated using a um it's in the book actually i talk about this um they used uh the first commercial use of electronics was to was a signal system um which got ripped out like two years later uh for various stupid reasons but um so we did have signals you know in various ways the signaling was

we started out pretty well and the basically so that the modern tech industry can we blame the railways for creating it because we were the ones who started off with commercial electronics sorry yeah yeah you know that's that's unfortunate but there it is difficult to uh it is difficult to do signals without having a zero or a one it's true it's true of course the majority of signals were not worked with commercial electronics they were worked with uh like the one here you'll see cables and immensely well i'll tell you what we'll get there we'll get there i was about to say we'll get there immediately hooray the signal box What is a signal box?

If only there was some way to like signal this in advance.

Nice.

I'm easily entertained.

What can I say?

Hey, listeners, you know this about me.

Come on now.

So

you have a place where a bunch of trains are coming through, right?

Okay.

And I'm listening.

They can go a lot of different directions.

Okay.

Different directions.

Yeah.

Obviously, you can't change directions from inside the train.

So you need a man to sit in a room where he can see what's happening and pull a bunch of levers to change the tracks so the train can go where it needs to go.

Person in box cannot

do a train in campus.

Like these frames.

Oh, yeah.

I love a big lever frame.

Because like some of the beautiful, beautiful pieces of like mechanical engineering and a lot of them have like physical interlocks on them to make sure that you can't, you know, perfectly 9-11-1 train into the

most of the time.

Exactly, Nova.

I was going to say, going underneath.

There's a lot of kind of like mechanical complexity.

It's very.

Yeah, I should have put a picture up.

Maybe I'll maybe I'll throw Devin a picture of what underneath one of these looks like.

Because, yeah, even a signal box of the size of the one at Quintus Hill

here, but particularly, okay, let's take, I don't know, Shrewsbury, which has the largest mechanically interlocked signaling layout in the world.

You go to the on so the top bit with the window is where you have the levers.

It's where the signaler stands.

So they can look out and see

whoever they might be.

And underneath in the brick bit is where all the interlocking is.

Now, when we talk about interlocking, so often people talk about interlocking.

In the US, interlocking is often an interchangeable word for like railway junctions and track layout.

But interlocking specifically refers to the way that bits of metal interlock to prevent or enable certain types of behavior of your signaling, of your railway track layout and the the way that things will, your switches, your turnouts, whatever you want to call them, will move to allow trains to be protected from hitting each other.

Because ultimately, the purpose of a signaling system, it's purpose number one, make trains not hit each other.

And so that interlocking

became fairly quickly became more and more developed to the point where we now have solid state interlocking.

which is doing the same job as the enormous thing of mechanical hoopalies, which the picture will appear on screen.

And it's doing that job, but in a solid state hard drive.

And in fact, the interlocking, again, influenced the design of early computers because of the way that interlocking worked is a series of logic gates.

It is a series of physically represented logic gates, which is fun.

Oh, yeah.

And like

the way these guys worked is,

well, I guess hopefully there'll be a picture on screen, but if I recall correctly, there's just a bunch of cables that go into trenches that go out into the tracks to like you know physically move the switches you know it's it's not like this this this uh this lever is not an abstraction no you are physically creating mechanical yeah absolutely yeah and

for example in hot weather you'd have challenges from the fact that the you'd have the cables expanding by potentially quite substantial distances metal expands and so those cables you ended up having to have quite complex pulley systems to enable the to kind of deal with the increasing and decreasing lengths of those cables in varying weather conditions.

And what the interlocking is doing underneath those levers.

So there are different ways to manage this.

And in early days, you didn't have the complex interlocking.

You relied on the training of the signaler to, you know, with, as Ross is about to tell us, with some potential additional physical aids.

But in the early days, it was just the signaler had to know what levers they could and could not pull in what sequences.

And sometimes they were, as you can see in the picture here, sometimes they're painted different colors to help them to know which ones related to which other ones.

And as that became obviously obviously not huge, you know, as you had more and more complex systems,

that moved from being entirely manual to being mechanically interlocked, where you had these metal kind of teeth and gears that would engage with each other.

Then that moved into a situation, but again, still with physically manual, those were basically stopping the levers from being pulled.

And then you move into later years, you move into

electromechanical, where the lever is just a little, it still looks a bit like this, but it's a little one.

And then it powers relays.

And then the relays do the interlocking.

And then again, you you move to the modern era with all all the all on the computer yes yes i have everything eventually becomes going on the computer exactly yeah yeah yeah but one thing to pay attention to here is this wooden block yes right or a collar um and this is there to indicate to the signaler that there is a train in this location this lever cannot physically be moved as a result of the block yeah it's in place of a modern of it's in place of that interlocking that I've a picture has appeared on.

It's in place of that.

So it's a more primitive version of that to as a both an eight de memoir to the signaler saying, hey, fuck it, but also, as you say, in theory, to physically stop that lever from being pulled.

Yes.

Or returned.

It's perfectly physical as well.

Like, you're not.

I say this in total confidence, not looking at the number of slides we have left.

You're not defeating that as a system, right?

Like,

well, as long as you're using it, yeah,

um, as long as it's say mandated by the company, or

and you follow that, man.

Has anyone seen the one collar for the thing, and meanwhile, it is like the doorstop in the waiting room downstairs?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and ash, it's an ashtray, it's a makeshift ashtray.

Yeah, I had to give it to one guy in place of a token, I didn't have it.

So, another thing to mention here, maybe this is less relevant.

I wanted to mention it anyway.

We talked about timetabled operations.

Well, what is extra or a special train, right?

And so,

I mean,

you

know, I feel like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, you know, any train which is not part of the regular timetable, which is not part of routine operations is going to be an extra or a special, right?

I think in the UK, they call it special.

In the United States, we call it an extra.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's something that appears as a VAR, as VAR on real-time trains.

Yeah.

It's a change, an additional service running on top of the working timetable.

Yeah, in the UK.

Yeah, so.

Why is the Thomas the Tank engine 125, why does it look like that?

Well, firstly, because the Reverend Audrey's illustrator could not do a very good real alphabet for stars.

That's that's the main problem there.

My real

with this guy is like they replace

it's a she actually.

I think the NCT125 is a she character, so we're misgendering the uh the class 43 off the bat.

They had to replace the cabs on these relatively frequently, right?

Because they were made of fiberglass.

Those faces got smashed up to fuck.

So, yeah, wait a minute, facial face

preference.

well,

it's more of a kind of horrifying, like warhound type situation where it's like I, you know, I sexually identify as an attack train and my face just gets stoved in routinely in the course of my work.

And they just replace your face.

Is it

the face or is it like hold on a second?

Sorry, sorry.

Personality change each in the Intercity 125

is arguably non-binary in the sense that it comprises that it is a set comprised of

like Pip and Emma so I mixed mixed gender train set huh yeah

well is it pip yeah that's a good point is it pip as Philippe

yeah I thought this implied train headmates it's just well yeah I guess so do they function in the way of those of those extremely Siamese twins of uh

uh of like um when they like have two heads and two organ sets.

Is it that situation?

Yeah, this is like I don't know.

I don't, you're sort of being welded to

it's definitely not Simon's twins anymore, is it?

I'm cancelled.

It's conjoined twins, isn't it?

We're sending Pip and Emma to Mexico.

Yeah, exactly.

Some kind of cat dog situation.

Well, I'm thinking of like you have like permanently coupled train sets, but like all like we've seen the like Annie and Claribel have faces.

So I'm imagining a situation where

six or seven permanently coupled coaches and the middle five have never seen the sun.

Jesus, that's terrifying.

I'm on the Thomas the Tank engine wiki, right?

Let's go wait.

Let's go.

The detail here that I want to note is that it identifies both of these um these trains as being um

active i guess in both england and the island of soda and the island of soda the flag that they've used for that is just the trans flag so wait what i don't know if that's intentional or not island of soda flag hmm that's holy shit it's like It's like potentially a better than the trans.

I know your hatred of the trans flag, Nova.

It's potentially a better one.

I love that's going to be a good idea.

I think it could be floating in a swimming pool.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure enough.

I just want it on record that I have no problem with the trans flag.

I think the trans flag is absolutely fine.

You're really trying to get those points back, aren't you?

It's more

visually.

The Isle of Soda's flag is more visually interesting because it breaks up the, it's not like monoblock.

colors it's it's like they're they're sort of like different yeah it's quite nice um but it is the trans flag in a lot it is it absolutely is yeah i it's also somehow inadvertently kind of the rail narrative orange and white uh so um interesting uh that's very interesting maybe i planned that all along learning so much

although there's like a yellow and white version as well i mean they could just turn that to pink and then it absolutely is the like that's the that's the south soda

secede like a cypress situated like like Oh, I was thinking of Vietnam.

Soda has a native language that's dying out.

What the fuck?

There's so much to okay.

I'm not gonna I'm not gonna sidetrack.

Well, no, the Reverend Audrey wrote that book, The Isle of Sword or its

Isle of Sodor, it's history and people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I, yeah, I, in my head, there's a, there's, there's been a civil, like that's a secession and a civil war.

I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna get on that wiki and add a few extra pages, I reckon.

It's not a real

English novel, English fantasy series, unless you built the whole backstory, right?

If it doesn't have extensive laborious,

a guy who has never been diagnosed with any form of neurodivergence, just painstakingly doing a bunch of worlds.

Yeah, no, no, that's uh, that's that's the Silmarian, but for Thomas the Tank.

The Archipelago series is a series using Transport Fever 2 to reference.

Oh, wait, sorry.

That's, yeah, sorry.

Anyway,

so, right.

Sorry, Ross, we've got sidetracked talking about FFS for HSTs.

HRTs for HSTs,

that's supposed to stay on fucking 4chan.

So, so these.

Just like looking at a bunch of old railroad acronyms.

It's just like, why is there a T T T?

So this is, this is,

we're talking about specials and extras.

They're trains that don't appear on the timetable.

They run as necessary.

They may not be like special, you know.

An empty coal train could be a special, or it could be like an excursion or a private charter train full of VIPs or a troop train, for instance, right?

Well, I think all trains are special roles, actually.

So, you know, I think, you know, yes.

And thanks to precision scheduled railroading here in the United States, we agree.

Um, because we've completely done away with schedules, nearly every single train on the rails today is an extra or a special.

You can never really tell what an extra is thing.

Yes, exactly.

You know, these in the United States, they were indicated by these white flags up here on the locomotive.

In the UK, the signals are more complicated, or

the lamp codes.

You can see here, Edward has four lamps

indicating that he is hauling the royal train, which had its own special code.

Yeah, crikey.

Oh, fuck off.

I hate this stupid concept.

I don't know much about lamp codes because it's a steam train thing, and I don't know anything about steam trains.

But

that is okay.

Fine.

Yeah.

Nowadays, we do it in head code.

Well, not nowadays.

In the BR years, it was head code.

Good news is.

Yeah.

Good news is we can't afford a royal train.

Exactly.

I mean, of all the reasons why we don't have one, that's my least favorite, but we just don't now because we can't afford it.

Yeah.

Oh, dear.

But anyway, we just can't afford railways at the moment.

That's basically Britain.

We've decided we can't afford railways anymore.

So we're doing away with them.

Can't afford anything anymore.

It's going to have to do without.

It's because of work.

Yeah, exactly.

Everyone's going to have to live in like a hut pretty soon.

Yeah.

To go back to, you know, traditional like long houses.

And we deserve it as well.

Yeah.

But yeah, so

you have some amount of a predictable schedule if you're in the signal box.

But if one of these extra trains or these special trains shows up, you just got to deal with it, right?

Send it along as best you can.

So anyway, now we have to talk about coach construction in the 19th and 20th century.

Oh, it's the crashworthiness slide deck again for me.

Oh, no way, it's not.

Why are you always talking about crashworthiness on my side?

Yeah.

They are very pretty.

I'm not interested in crashworthiness.

Look at this.

Look at this mock Tudor situation we're dealing with and the cleric as well it's lovely that's a very nice looking car they're they're they are yeah that i mean so that first one is uh um oh actually i have to correct me that one first one looks like an lner teak um coach actually uh

made out of teak yeah the teak one we're deep into the the like vicky 3 extractive economy thing where we're pulling teak out of like borneo and sending it to britain in order to make it into the yeah the yeah nova seriously the equivalent of the

Azumas that you get if you go.

I mean, you always hit, you pretty much always hit the West Coast mainline, but if you happen to go via Edinburgh, go down the east and got in one of the Azumas, the equivalent to those, the cracked North-South Expresses on the East Coast mainline, were a beautiful garter blue streamlined A4 Pacific with a bunch with a rate, like with like 15 or not quite, like 14 of these things behind, these teak LNER coaches.

I don't know whether this specifically is why I can't quite see the picture about

railways and people getting like really romantic.

Yeah, that is what it's about.

It's like you get that train,

you're supposed to be like, and you know, someone is kind of like seeing you off at the platform and it's like very tragic and you're, you know, you're crying and stuff.

I'm still doing that, but the trains have gotten worse.

So the railways need to return to my level of aesthetics.

Meanwhile, when I visited Glasgow and we got on a Scott rail train and Nova was like, this thing's a piece of shit.

I fucking hate it.

I was like, They come every 25 minutes.

You can, you can just, you can just get on the train and go.

What a concept.

Yeah, we were running for a train, and I was like, oh my God, if we miss this, when's the next one?

Because I was like, I don't know if we're going to make this.

And she's like, oh, God, it's like 25 minutes.

I was like, are you fucking kidding me?

This should be the last one for the month.

Yeah.

50 minutes trains to Mulgai.

it was only this it was only between the two largest city the two largest cities in like you know the region and so i was like yeah this should be the last one for the day oh yeah edinburgh glasgow yeah the uh get the nice express over there they're they're they're not bad um but there's also four railways for edinburgh glasgow so if you really want to you could just get one of the slower ones and enjoy looking at sheep for an additional 20 minutes and go via like bathgate it's all good anyway we digress we're looking at trains crashworthiness wood or steel ros uh

materials and train car construction let's go It's been

in the late 19th, early 20th century, it was for a long time considered impossible to build a steel railroad car because there's no give to steel, so it will shake itself apart, right?

And to a certain extent, that's kind of like a might as well be putting people into a blender.

Are you in?

Yeah, that's partly a track thing because early days of

the modern railway, we built our track form to be

rigid.

We took the Nova School of Engineering and it was rigid as hell.

Yes.

And so it was more rigid.

And then only kind of later did we learn that actually you can build a track system that's resilient, which means kind of it has some give to it.

And the design of vehicles kind of followed that a little bit.

Like it was a little, it wasn't entirely the train people who had the epiphany.

It was a little bit of a, we made our track to be less, you know, we

spread it on more.

you know, more sleepers, more ties, and it became a bit more resilient.

And so then an epiphany could come along, thanks to, in this case, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company.

Yes.

So the Interborough Rapid Transity built, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company built one steel car

and it worked fine.

It was a little bit heavy, so they couldn't really use it in service, but it didn't shake itself apart.

The Pennsylvania Railroad followed this.

Everyone realized, wait, you can build a steel passenger car, right?

Yeah, it's fine.

Yeah, it's fine.

Nothing bad's going to happen.

This big revolution didn't come until around 1903.

And, you know, passengers.

Also, when battleships were useful.

Okay, noted.

Yes.

Yes.

Back when you could also build those out of T,

but you did still have to use a lot of steel.

And, you know, passenger cars last a long time.

So throughout the First World War, which is about the era that we're talking about, there's still a lot of wooden coaches rolling around, right?

Yeah, but coach has a four-year shelf life, which is not uncommon.

I mean, you're not going to complain.

They look beautiful.

They seem to be fine.

Yeah.

Another question is, okay, are you using vacuum or Westinghouse air brakes?

In Britain specifically, there was for a long time a question of whether you use vacuum brakes or air brakes.

And those are essentially they work in reverse to each other.

An air brake keeps pressure on.

to keep the brakes off and a vacuum brake keeps a vacuum to keep the brakes off um i which i always like the idea of because it fails safe right it fails safe which is good but i always like vacuum even though technically it's a more primitive system and don't put the diagram of the valve cock up again yeah exactly and a vacuum is also interesting because of uh it's very easy to have a vacuum brake system when you have a huge pressurized steam vessel at the front of the train because you can use a venturi device to create that vacuum very easily, very cheaply.

I would love to use something called a Venturi device.

I'm using so few named devices.

I know, right?

Not enough devices.

Yeah.

Put all the devices into

the computer.

It's such a disappointment.

This is not really a factor in this accident, but at the time you are going through a period where it was not clear which brake system they were going to adopt in Britain.

So a a lot of cars were equipped with either one system or the other, or some had both, or some had a pass-through where it was like, okay, we can use this car with an air brake train, but it doesn't have air brakes, but it does have an air brake pipe, but it can work with vacuum brakes.

Yes.

Love it.

Yeah, what if we just never standardized anything?

Eventually,

eventually vacuum brakes became standard.

And then in the 70s, everything was converted over to air brakes.

Yep.

Yeah.

Thank you to the Mark II coach.

What else, Ross?

What other things?

Tell us about other variations in design at this time.

More.

I need more.

Hold on.

This is embarrassing.

I have to use the restroom again.

This is something my digestion is not happy with something I ate earlier.

I think it's genuinely the latest thing of COVID going around.

I will explain and we can cut this or leave it in depending.

Part of the reason why it's been so difficult difficult to record podcasts is I have been sick as a dove lately.

I had like, I had like three days back to back where I just was like useless.

I was still working.

I was doing my best to like work through it.

But like,

I was genuinely sort of like concerned about my health at that point.

And

yeah, I don't know whether it was like COVID or like something like something else viral or what, but like it was, it was very much like the kind of ideal girlfriend in the sense that it kept like absolutely knocking me down on the floor.

And then any time I tried to get up, just it hit me again.

And so I'm still kind of not really

not really rid of it.

I'm still, I like, I feel, I still don't feel great.

And it's just like, it's real, real bad.

And I know that's been going on.

What's really good is that the NHS have been allowed, indeed, funded to continue to keep the information on their COVID page up to date with the latest symptoms for the latest variant.

Oh, wait a minute.

I'm just getting a message through my ear.

Oh, no, they haven't.

No, it's still from about four years.

No, they don't actually.

Sort of just about, but it doesn't, they don't think you should do anything.

You know,

just don't worry about it, which I guess, fair enough, but it's very difficult to not worry about it when you're sort of like spending day three of lying exclusively on your side and sort of like fairly bad.

Yeah.

It's being like,

at what point do I sort of like go to the hospital about that?

I mean, I still have like nasty and just regular fatigue that I just never felt before I got COVID, that I definitely feel now, just like utter fatigue.

It's not just from the toddler.

Like this happened before, well before the toddler arrived, that I just had fatigue and I've felt I just couldn't do and still can't do half the stuff.

And it manifests for me as my brain is much more chaotic from the ADHD because when I'm tired, I'm more manic.

by quite a dramatic level.

So yeah, it's, yeah, thanks.

Thanks for keeping up to us all up today.

I've had that.

Um yeah, so so I've I've had um basically I always get like whenever I get any any like sick at all, I always get like this huge like post-viral fatigue thing.

So walking feels like walking underwater.

It's like it's like painful, but it's it's also like uh kind of kind of frightening and also really kind of like debilitating.

Um and I but I don't know that that sort of like is something that originated with COVID in the sense that this is also partly why I kind of get mad at like long COVID as a thing,

is because I got really sick in like 2019, early 2019.

And it was, it was just kind of like downstream of that.

And I genuinely think what happened was I just got like a bad flu and I got, I got unlucky and got long flu or something, because you can get long anything, you know, and it's just like, it was, it was this kind of thing

up your insides and you can have this like mess of like really, really like difficult to pin down post-viral symptoms that just get thrown into the same basket as like chronic fatigue syndrome, right?

Where it's just like, or anything like that where it's like this is this is mental woman problems right and for a while people kind of were like uh you know long covered maybe this is a thing maybe it's the first one of those things that we're going to recognize and then of course they didn't which they were never going to and now long covered is no because the government cast cannot it yeah the government is not allowed to acknowledge that chronic conditions exist because then they'd have to think about actually doing some research into understanding what they are and uh chronic conditions often are sort of like primarily one of the kind of...

Like they're often women's health questions as you know, as we,

and therefore they often get pushed into the, well, women things.

So, yeah.

Also, the kind of the economic considerations of being like, well, we have to cut benefits.

And a key part of that is refusing to acknowledge that people can be sick in a way that prevents them from working for long periods or even indefinitely.

Right.

And we have to

trim all of the fat off of that, you know, which is, of course, but.

I'm just checking in on the on the scale of workforce long-term sickness.

Those numbers, just double-check.

Ooh.

Ooh, okay.

Yeah.

That seems like a good idea economically to just ignore that problem.

Yeah.

Just what to do is to just ignore it.

Yeah.

Not engage with it.

Cool.

It's crazy that you can genuinely make that worse by defunding a bunch of stuff.

Interesting.

Like you sort of stop spending money, you stop investing on anything that might make people's lives better and that might make them, you know, healthier.

And and for some reason you're surprised when they they get and stay sick do you know what's a really good icing on that cake is to also make everything so obviously that everyone has like a really like is like 40 despair on any given day it's really good extra icing on top of that cake and i the one thing about specifically like post-viral stuff i will say is that like

People don't understand the like kind of psychological or like even psychiatric aspects of it, but like you can get so like depressed in a way that even if you are a kind of like habitual depression haver feels so alien and so out of proportion uh and and feels much more like kind of idiopathic physically you know it's like yeah real bad real bad we can cut all of that but that's some context as to why i've been struggling a bit at work

well we love you nova and i'm sorry you've been struggling well thank you i didn't hear any of that

i don't mean to complain and i feel bad when i do say the last round of covet definitely left me with some problems my god um

yeah yeah Yeah.

No, for sure.

It's fine.

We'll, we'll just cut all of that because I feel bad for complaining.

It's a good time to complain.

Devin, you get editor's veto on that.

Yeah.

So

trains.

Part of front of the house.

You're in this beautiful train.

You're experiencing yearning, right?

Yeah.

You're sort of like...

But you also need to be able to...

You got to be able to see stuff.

Maybe it's dark.

And there's basically two choices for you.

Do you have electric lighting or do you have pinch gas?

Right?

Ouch.

Sorry, I couldn't resist you.

Yeah, I think I've had some of that the last few days.

It's part of why I've been feeling so bad.

Pinch me and I pass wind.

That's gross.

I don't like that.

Yeah.

Just like the entire train being like pulling it.

So Carl Friedrich Julius Pinch developed this proprietary gas, right?

It's distilled from Naphth.

Back when you could just do that.

People would just be having it.

Developed a gas.

Yeah, yeah.

Proprietary gas.

Oh, yeah, me too.

Yeah.

It's a degree in inorganic chemistry.

I could develop a proprietary gas from Stuttgart.

It's distilled from naphtha, which is, you know, like white gas or camp fuel or something like that, which can be compressed very easily, which meant that you could have a relatively small container slung underneath the railroad car full of this compressed gas and you could run gas lamps off of that for like days at a time it did not need to be refueled off i have a question i have a question we've talked about fractional distillation and stuff before and from this i remember and correct me if i'm wrong that naphtha naphtha's a pretty like high octane hydro

right like it's got a it's higher up on the uh on the distillation column yeah yeah so it's got a lot of kind of like volatile it's got a lot of energy kicking around which would make it good oh yeah i mean it's great for lighting it made a very light a very very bright very smokeless flame um you know it it it it worked really good for what it was but the thing is what it was was gas lighting and it was being used in wooden cars no it wasn't

oh that's fine though that's definitely fine no in fact it isn't and everyone knows it isn't if you don't derail nothing bad happens and in fact, interestingly,

one of the properties of these particular lamps and their associated gas was they were much better at, you know, the flame kept going when there were bumps or there was, you know, some kind of jolt or something like that, as opposed to like earlier oil lamps.

So these flames liked to keep going regardless of shocks.

That's also probably fun.

I get

you have a like a constant, even supply of, of, of fuel, um, which you can then sort of like slowly adjust to make people feel like they're going insane.

Um, so again, this is an obvious safety hazard, but there wasn't really another way to do it until uh electricity came along, right?

Um, I'm not very familiar with like early British practices here.

I know that in the United States, early electrically lit cars, they attached the dynamo to one of the axles, and then they had a big lead-acid battery underneath.

And,

you know, the dynamo would charge the battery.

Everything was dangerous back then.

The dynamo would charge the battery, which would run the electric lights.

And if you, if the train stopped for too long, well, it got dark.

Yeah, not dissimilar.

We had dynamos, but also we would have an electric feed from the from the cab.

Certainly once we moved to diesel, diesel and diesel electric, we would have an electric feed through the through the train from the locomotive,

even even even early on but with with steam it was uh dynamo and and and lead acid battery similar just as the uk probably because we were inheriting a lot of those designs from the pullman rail car company that would make sense yeah i don't know if you could fit a large enough um

alternator on the steam locomotive to power a whole train um you might need a second steam locomotive for that which weirdly is how a lot of Amtrak trains work just with their second diesel locomotive devoted to head-end power.

But But yeah, so a lot of these advances, you know, they made train cars got a lot safer very rapidly in like the early 1900s, 1910s.

They were steel.

They had better brakes.

They had

electric lighting.

A derailment wasn't quite the death sentence that it used to be, right?

And because these cars were, I mean, they're expensive up front, but they're more durable.

They have lower lifetime maintenance costs.

It did behoove the railways to move to them relatively quickly.

Yep.

But then

an event happened.

In order to understand the Quentin Soul Rail disaster, we must first explain the causes.

The causes of the First World War, yes.

Beginning with sort of like wounded nationalisms all over Europe in all sorts of different ways, which then play out in the form of like

a guy.

Yeah, a guy shoots another guy.

The second international shits the bed.

I use this exact identical.

Yep.

The last time we discussed this.

All of Europe goes to war over essentially nothing.

Britain gets dragged in.

And what does that mean for the railways?

Lots and lots of traffic, right?

Yeah, you got to move all of these troops around.

You got to move all of this newfangled sort of like various devices.

and wizjigs and things.

You have what you macaulate.

Yeah.

You have, you know, man and material, right?

It's paramount to send as many boys over there as quickly as possible so they could all immediately die in a muddy ditch fighting for control of 10 feet of a French pig farm.

And this required a lot of railway equipment to be pressed into service, including stuff that was obsolete or no longer suitable for civilian service, right?

You know, you also have to remember that you're running the railways with, I mean, like railway work is like a reserved occupation, so you're not conscripting people, but you can't necessarily stop them from volunteering.

And it also means that you're not getting new intake anymore because all of the, you know, 17 or 18-year-olds who might have been going to work on the railways are now going to die fighting for control of 10 feet per french yes um yeah it's it's very difficult to recruit people um surprising amount of women wind up working on the railways i know that like world war ii is supposed to be oh that's when the women were in the workforce no world war one as well it also happened yeah very much yeah there's a reason why the interwar years were big for suffrage right because a lot of women had got a taste of doing stuff and were like wait what this is fine like why can't i want to do the stuff again why can't why can't i do this stuff I like working on the train.

I like getting various forms of chemical warfare weapons, like stuff smooshing up my face and skin and hands and hair.

It's all good.

Phosgene, delicious.

Wonderful.

So your railways are dealing with like normal traffic, but also troop traffic.

Like there's a lot of troop trains, special troop trains that are being, you know.

to move as many of you know Britain's best and brightest to go get murdered.

And of course, all the material needed for the war effort.

You know, so all these lines suddenly get very, very, very crowded.

And you're having to do, you know, like a lot of exotic signaling to get trains around each other.

Yeah.

That's wait a minute.

So you're

an extremely saturated rail network having to do increasingly bizarre things to its operating regime and timetable to satisfy the

demand.

that that couldn't possibly happen today yeah thank goodness

that is that is not something we can you know consider these days um well actually the joke the joke there is that that's precisely what we're doing on our railway network currently because uh we're doing extremely bizarre things operationally and to our timetable to squeeze as many trains in as possible on without actually doing any infrastructure work uh so yeah no I don't know.

I guess we never learn lessons.

No, no, we learn nothing.

Well, you know, I'd rather have that problem than a car shortage, which is what's happening over here.

But that's a different episode.

Although, incidentally, also what we're about to talk about now.

Actually, though, yeah, no, we do have to talk about car.

Yeah, um, so they don't have enough cars to run everything with modern rolling stocks.

So I think it's uh useful here to look at our contestants today, which are about to meet at Quentin's Soul Johnson

in the red corner.

Oh, dear.

I, I tell you, actually, so you've got.

Annotate, everyone, Google

some of this rolling stock because it's so key to see.

We'll get there, but right, Ross will get there.

But I really want you to understand

how knackered the coaches of

player one are in this situation.

I was trying to find some pictures, and I couldn't find any good ones, unfortunately.

So this is on the morning of the 22nd of May, 1915.

This is outside of Quentinshill, which is just barely, you know, it's a little bit north of Carlisle, right?

And there's several trains which want to get through this set of sidings.

We'll show that in the next slide.

But so, all right, we have a local train, which has

these are Caledonian Railway, relatively modern coaches.

There's two coaches, a brake van and a milk van, right?

You have a troop troop train special, which has, oh boy, a bunch of great Central Railway,

really old, really terrible cars.

This is what?

Third-class passenger.

Yes, mostly third-party.

No, you got some

wooden

composites, too.

So I don't know.

Maybe they put the officers in those.

Composite means something different in Britain.

than it does in the United States.

A composite car here means it got a steel frame, but a wood body.

Composite in Britain is it has first and third classes in it.

Correctamundo.

Yeah.

All of these guys are all wood.

So yeah, we got composite brake, third class, third class, third class, third class, composite composite, third, third, third, third, third, composite composites, caravan truck.

I don't know what that is.

So I've, so I've put in the group chat.

what the coach looks like.

And I want everyone to just go in and look at the DM, our group dm um and have a look at the picture

and that's what the troop train is made of that is a three axle okay piece of that's a barn that's a barn with some some yeah this is not like the pictures that roz put up earlier give people a false impression of how modern this this kit is that's what it looks like that's that's a that's a conservatory that's been erected without planning permission i thought that is what the troop train was

okay i don't i don't like this at all Those are those, those three,

those six-wheel coaches, I always assumed were like children's drawings.

Okay, as opposed to a real thing that existed.

Yeah,

that is what the troop train was made of.

It was made of what, what was that like, like, uh,

just

like 20 of these fuckers all sellotaped together.

Um,

yeah, no, I, uh, in long train, many trains.

Yes.

Uh, and squeezed in like the chickens that ultimately occupied most of these things when they ended up in fields.

Yes.

And presumably feeling pretty good about the prospects of going from Scotland to France to die in the city.

Yeah, you're in Leith.

You've just congregated in Leith and you're getting onto this thing, which is a GCR coach, which has no business being up in Edinburgh in the first place.

Like, what the hell is it doing up there?

Secondly,

there's no nationalism strike.

Exactly.

Get that Edward Watkins ship back south of of the border.

Anyway, how did they go around curves?

I wouldn't worry too much about it.

They had a lot of play in the axle.

Just hold on.

Yeah, they had a lot of play.

I know you look at it and you're like, why has it got the extra wheel?

What does it need it for?

The thing's 15 feet long.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know.

What the fuck are they doing?

Like, this is bad.

But because it's GCR, like, this is a GCR coach, which means it is.

This thing was built in

the turn of the century this was late very late 1800s if not early 1900s because the gcr had only existed these were built new for the gcr and the gcr had only existed from the the late 1890s so um yeah this is i mean as you say these things are they're old they're definitely old but they're more importantly they are it's a situation where they've been made obsolete by new technologies and new design approaches to rolling stock a bit like the pictures we showed earlier anyway sorry roz i've derailed this but only because i think it's really important that people see what this fucking thing looks like i didn't actually know it was a six-wheel coach.

Again, I had, I always suspected those things weren't real.

Victoria, I mean,

you know about coach builders in the sense of the traditional description of that.

How would you describe what you can see as that?

Would you get on that vehicle?

I mean, it's third class, so I assume it's kind of the equivalent of like a Spirit Airlines flight.

In which case, I just don't ask ask questions.

I just kind of get on and I'm like, sure, whatever.

It's probably fine.

Especially in 1915, you, you're like,

you've been simmered in a broth of like class anxiety your whole life.

You're like, of course you don't know.

Yeah, I mean,

presumably at some point I would have thought about the fact that there was an enormous compressed gas cylinder directly under my ass that likes to explode and ignite and burn for hours.

Kind of like I do every time I get in a Tesla from an Uber call where where I'm like, huh, I hope this doesn't go wrong.

I just don't think about it.

It's a skill that you learn as an American.

It's actually a remarkable experience.

Yeah, it's a remarkably similar experience to getting in a cyber truck, I suppose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a good point.

I just don't think about it.

I think one of the interesting things about this train is that the, you know, it's a troop special, but the Caledonian Railway is still like, okay,

we've got the caravan, the two caravan trucks, which I assume are some kind of like express freight cars.

The open scenery truck, I don't know what that is.

I assume, I don't know, the troops could have like, go get a breath of fresh air.

And then two cars of fish.

Remember that these didn't have corridors between them.

So when you were in one coach, you were stuck in one coach.

That's true.

Yeah.

So the only people in the open scenery truck are the people unlucky enough to have been, because this train was going from Leith to Liverpool, right?

So they're the only people that are unlucky unlucky enough, I believe.

I mean, catch me wrong on that.

They're the people lucky enough to be put in an open coach from Leith to Liverpool.

But notably, they don't have lights, so they don't have a compressed gas tank sitting directly under their asses.

That's a very good point.

So, really, perhaps that was the true first class.

Those would have been the lucky ones, right?

Yeah.

You could actually at least have a dart on the way feeling the words thrown clear of the rack, you know.

Then there's

an express passenger train, which is also going to be involved.

This is a normal, you know, civilian train, you know, brake van composite, sleeping saloon, not a coach, it's a saloon,

composite cars, third class, third class,

brake, third, brake composite, so on and so forth.

So, yeah, this is, you know, we have a wide variety of equipment coming through.

Some of these got 12 wheels.

That's a lot of wheels.

That's a, that's a lot of wheels.

So, yeah, this, Oh, that's because they have three-axle bogeys.

So, they've got two sets of three-axle bogeys.

So,

I said Midland Railway earlier.

Actually, the expresses were not Midland Railway.

They were, of course, the equivalent of what are now the West Coast, kind of Virgin Trains West Coast, or whatever it is now.

What is it?

Avanti, which are the

LNWR, so London and Northwestern Railway, which is basically they were the crack north-south.

They're basically the London up to Glasgow kind of crack expresses.

The fancy train for fancy people and the fancy train for fancy people with three axle bogeys.

Lots of sleeping cars.

Yeah, look at them.

I'm happy.

Yeah,

everyone's going to wake up fresh in Glasgow, fully rested, you know, have a nice day.

The podcasters of their day were on this.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

I do a radio show.

I do a wireless.

I do a wireless program.

I do a show on a wireless.

Getting on the train in the morning, hey?

Gosh, well, that seems to be a problem.

Hi, it's Justin.

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

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

We have this thing called Patreon, right?

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

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

You get what you pay for.

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

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Uh, join at patreon.com forward slash wtyp pod.

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Back to the show.

So, let's look at the tracks around Quentin's Hill.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, oh, shit, it's my slides.

Yes.

Uh, okay, okay, okay.

So, this is Quentin's Hill.

It's really important.

So, Quentin's Hill is just kind of a little bit north of the Scottish border.

So for anyone who doesn't know the geography of the UK,

the Scottish border runs in a kind of a weird diagonal direction from like Carlisle, kind of northeasterly towards Berwick.

The Carlisle end is further south.

The UK is a very weird shape, or Britain is an island is a very weird shape.

The border is north of Carlisle by like 10 miles or so.

And then after Carlisle, the railway gets increasingly weavy and windy as it heads towards Betook Summit, but it's fairly flat and straight

just across the border, which is where Quinton's Hill is, in the sense that Quinton's Hill is nothing.

It was a local farm that was called Quintin's Hill, and that, I think, even at the point of this accident, had mostly gone.

The buildings have been swept away.

Certainly today, there's absolutely no remnants of that farm.

The only way that Quinton's Hill is remembered is from this bit of is the fact that the railway's kept the name alive.

So, in any case, this was the location of a signal box.

We talked about those a minute ago, in 1880.

It was built in 1880.

As capacity was increased along the caledonian railway um basically additional signal blocks allowing you to have more trains running between those six you know between the signals so you have it uh more signal boxes means you can run more trains uh at the time um there was also a trailing crossover so that's just a crossover that um in the trailing direction so you had to if you wanted to go but anyway it makes sense in the diagram i'm just going to show you in a second um and um yeah so traffic increased um massively um uh so on this railway.

So loops were put in either side of the main line.

So you have the main lines, the up and the down main.

And in 1903, these two loop lines were put in, the up loop and the down loop.

They were installed in 1903.

And the signal box was flattened and a new one was put in basically the same spot, but just with an extra track width away.

And the Caledonia railway.

Just one more track, bro.

Just one more track.

Just one more track.

Just one more track.

We'll do it.

Yeah, well, in this case, it was classic.

You know, people talk about, you know,

if only we had the profligate days of the early railways.

Well, no, the railways have always been cheap because the Caledonia Railway absolutely cheaped out here and built the loops between two bridges so they didn't have to rebuild those bridges.

So the loops are pretty short.

Like they're only 500 meters long, which is long enough.

Like even for the UK is kind of uselessly short today.

And even back then, it's not actually that long, but I suppose long enough.

Anyway, this is kind of all besides the point, other than the fact that, yeah, the railways have always been, we've always been cheapskates when it comes to building railroads in the UK.

Um, uh, next slide, please, because what I'm going to do from that map, um, which is a little after the time period we're talking about, is explode out and show you it in

true GD diagram scribbly form.

So I've kind of blown this up.

This is what I'm this is,

yeah.

So, and I just want to point this out before we go.

If you look on various sources, um,

this this uh switch crossover, the crossover is in like five different places depending on the source.

Yeah, and I don't know why that is because the crossover,

back in yon day, well, firstly, the crossover was there before the loops were there.

So, why would the signal box be anywhere other than where the crossover is?

It doesn't make any sense.

You're not going to put the signal box where the guy has to keep warm, more than just a very short walk from the crossover, where the signaler and the fitter will be going out, and the plate layer will be going out to hit the crossover to make it work.

So it doesn't make any sense.

And you're not going to run the cables longer than they need to.

So the signal box is going to be next to the crossover.

And this, and this, so flip down its head, that we know where the signal box is from maps.

So the crossover is right next to it.

So why do all the diagrams put it in weird places?

So I've corrected.

So this is the best diagram now on the internet for what we're about to describe.

We are afraid everyone else is wrong.

And dumb and stupid.

Let's put that on the line.

That has always been true.

That has always been true.

So

on the left-hand side here, you've got the lines going up to Glasgow.

And on the right-hand side, I'm sure that the lines go down to,

well, sorry, I'm used to, I should say that the line, they'd go down to Glasgow.

You're doing Scottish supremacy here.

I know.

It's the like weird kind of

thing I kind of liked about British rail parlance that like you go up to London and up to London.

Yeah.

Yeah, up to London, down from London, down towards the, down towards the frozen south, north, sorry, which is technically correct given that the

planet is an orange shape.

So, technically, going south is going uphill on average.

But anyway,

so

Carlisle in one direction, Glasgow in the other.

And kind of here, you have Quinton's Hill in its funny little corner, kind of like, well, like 12 miles or something, 10 miles-ish, not very far north of Carlisle, like a few minutes north of Carlisle.

And at the bottom, you have the down loop, at the top, you have the up loop.

So, um, in schematic form, track layout look like this.

Um, uh, and the up loop serves southbound trains, and the down loop serve northbound trains.

Worth saying for everyone's benefit, the track on the left-hand side goes north, the track on the right-hand side goes south in

GB world

mostly, unless it's bi-directional.

Yeah, exactly.

Drive on the left.

So this,

next slide, please.

So this is our sequence of events.

Roz, I don't know whether you want to, I can run through this, but just chip in, or do you want to run through this?

How do you want to roll with this?

Well, yeah, I think

you can run through it and I'll chip in every every once in a while perfect yeah so this is the oh that means that all the people have to listen to my weird voice again sorry everyone you've you've you've survived without me for so long when i'm back here so sorry you know they're whooping they're cheering everyone's sad uh

there's there's there's uh signs in the background there's um

right so here we go well actually what will happen is and it's the thing that always makes me feel happy is that devin will say uh devin will be saying here he goes we're all getting excited we're whooping we're cheering uh thanks devin for your kind words So, right.

So, it's early morning.

Oh, actually, Ross, you need to read a date because we've not read a date yet.

No, we did.

It's the morning of the 22nd of May,

1915.

There, we go.

At least you're outdoors in May on your way from Leith to Liverpool.

Yeah.

Can you imagine if it was like, oh, crikey?

Yeah.

Thing is, if it was like January, then the gas lamps that we're about to talk about in some more detail would have immediately snuffed out, you'd hope.

Anyway, but also everyone would have instantly frozen to death for reasons that will become clear momentarily.

So, right, I'll shut up.

No, I won't.

I'll be clear about what I'm saying.

5 a.m.

It's early in the morning, and a Carlisle goods train has arrived.

And it's arrived, and the signal in the signal box has gone, ah, yeah, right, okay.

I'm going to pop that train into the down loop.

Fine, okay, I've done that.

Next slide, please.

So there's the train parked in the down loop, minding its own business.

No bother.

Next slide, please.

6.20 a.m.

A local train arrives going from Carlisle to Betook.

It arrives at 6.20 in the morning.

And the signaler goes, Signal says, okay, next slide, please.

Signal goes, okay, park up.

Thing is, you've actually tell you what, Ross, you explain what's happening.

So, why is the train, why is that local train stopped here?

Why is it being held at signal?

And what happens?

What happened?

One of the things, if you work on the railroad,

excuse me, railway, this is Britain.

Oh, no, we we were still, we call things railroads still.

It's fun.

If you work in these places, it's actually very convenient to get to your job via train sometimes, right?

But sometimes the schedule of the railroad doesn't match up with the schedule of the railroad being your employment, right?

So the signalman on duty in the box was supposed to get off work at six o'clock in the morning, right?

That was George Meekin.

Um, but he had a deal with the next guy, right?

Who was James Tinley?

He would stay on duty an extra 30 minutes

so that Tinley could take the local train in and just walk over the signal box.

They changed shifts, and then I believe Meekin would then take the local train out.

Because one of them lived further up towards Glasgow, and the other one lived in Carlisle or further down towards Carlisle.

So, this was a very convenient arrangement for both.

What could go wrong?

And I'm seeing the whole for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost sort of layout before me here.

And so,

it was the company was fairly strict about like, okay,

you can't stay on duty later.

You can't have this arrangement.

But what would happen is Meekin would just, you know, do the trains for the extra 30 minutes and would fudge the records so that it looked like he left 30 minutes earlier and Tinley showed up 30 minutes earlier.

Right.

And the thing is, shift changes are usually pretty safety critical.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, especially for, well, yeah, stuff like trains, you know, where you...

you don't want to be in a position where you've lost track of what's happening.

And and that's adding oh don't don't remind me i with if anyone's read my rice up on the the lap i went to a lot of the kind of disaster of that uh i'll put a link in the description maybe a lot of the disaster of that was downstream of uh information not being

being lost on a shift change it happens like Yeah, the way that they were coordinating this too, from what I read, was that Meekin would basically take a second log on a sheet of scrap paper and just kind of write down like whatever the hell else he was doing for the next half hour.

And then Tinley would come in and be like, okay, I'm going to copy all this down to the past guidebook in my handwriting.

Yep.

Cool, cool, really cool.

No potential for loss of data whatsoever.

So on top of all this, let's add in some corporate shenanigans as well, because you might ask yourself, what's this?

Well, tell you what, let's go to the next slide, please, Roz, if we may, because this train gets shunted back.

back, well, not shunted, it reverses itself back onto the up main.

It's pulled back onto the up main.

Next slide, please.

Where it is held,

that is right, facing into the direction of oncoming traffic.

Now, you might ask yourself, why the fuck have they done this?

That's fine.

Just pop that there.

It's probably fine.

Don't worry about it.

So let's, this requires a little bit of explanation.

So

this at this time of day, there were three passenger trains that would come through from Carlisle northwards.

Two overnight sleeping car expresses that we've talked about, one of them from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

They would depart Carlisle at 5.50 a.m.

and 6.05 a.m.

when they're on time.

Now, they were followed by this local train that we see on our screen now in bright yellow.

It would depart from Carlisle.

It was advertised in the timetable, it departing at 6.10, but it normally left at 6.17.

If the sleepers ran late, so those expresses, if they were, yeah, if they were, if they were running late, then the local service would not be held back to depart from Carlisle after them because corporate shenanigans approaching, precedence would then need to be given to the departure of the expresses, which were run by a rival company, in this case, the LNWR.

So that's the Caledonia Railway getting upset that its local service would be deprioritised versus the LNWR services.

Also, if that local train was then late, it would cause knock-on delays to a Moffat to Glasgow and Edinburgh commuter service, which it connected to at B-Tick, which is kind of B-TIC.

Ross scribbled under it earlier.

B-TIC's halfway up the line.

So basically, if one or other of the sleeper trains were running late, the stopping train would depart.

It's advertised of 6.10, and then it would be shunted at one of the various stations or signal boxes to allow the sleepers to overtake it later on.

Now,

the problem is that train would normally go and park in the down loop, but there's a big fucking train in the down loop at the moment, isn't there?

There's a big old goods train.

Yep.

Oh, so

what would happen is that actually, if that was occupied, then it would be shunted via the trailing crossover onto the up mainline.

Now, this might seem mental.

See also Nova's reaction a minute ago when I explained this happening, but actually, this was allowed by the rules.

Like, it's fine, it's like

it's not dangerous because there is various safety processes in place and a professional signaler to make sure that it is all fine and good and safe, right?

Right, Right?

Right.

And

this just goes to show: a lot of people think they don't have room for a model railroad.

And no, the answer is: you can have an incredibly small model railroad with a very simple track layout and just make the operations insanely complex for no reason.

Just do all of that in like T-gauge, you know?

Yeah.

So next slide, please.

And the train sits there.

Just sits there for a long, long time.

Quite a while.

Now,

actually, so the train sat there.

With it, actually, it sits there for a long time.

But first, first, another train's coming along in the direction of our local train, but that's fine because it's expected.

It's a flow of, this is the Navy getting, those fucking battleships get involved again.

It's the flow of empties from the major fueling flow of coal from Scappaflow and where a lot of the navy sits down to South Wales or from South Wales where all the coal is.

So there'd be a regular train.

Normally, this would be done by boat at this time.

But unfortunately, those coal boats kept getting hit by mines and sunk by ships and shit.

Yeah.

Yeah, the fucking U-boats and shit like that.

So they were like, well, the railway will have to pick up the slack.

And so just chuck more traffic onto the railway.

That's fine.

So along comes the empties.

The The first special.

This is the first of our specials.

So

here's the empty coal train arrives.

And so it arrives at

just a couple of minutes after the train had halted, waiting for instructions.

Next slide, please.

And it rolls in and sits and occupies the up loop.

So there it sits, happy as Larry.

Our local train.

Still sitting, doing not very much.

Now, this looks great in the signal box.

Great idea.

In the signal box.

Presumably, your second guy is getting in and you know getting the tea on and

like copying out all of the like scrap paper movements somebody he's like he's doing that and he's also reading the newspaper to hear what's happening in the war yeah he's locked himself into the toilet is um he's flicked to the back pages he's seen if he you know he's he's he's just getting busy before he starts his shift you know checking to see if the secretary of war is called the troops gay yet yeah exactly 1915, quite possibly.

Kitchener lining up like Hague in French and being like, you're all woke homosexuals.

1915, page three girl.

Oh my god, look at that ankle.

So, um, so we have now we have three trains just sat at Quinton's Hill in this, in the in the middle of butt fuck nowhere in the Scottish borders, Riva territory.

Um, uh, yeah, so, okay, so far, things are fine.

Signaler paying some attention because the first of our expresses expresses arrives 6.38.

So we're still, there's a bit of time passed.

This express passes through completely fine on the down main, whizzing northwards, happy as Larry.

Right.

At 6.38.

Fantastic if you were a foamer just seeing this insane meat on this stupid siding.

Just the amount of stuff.

It's just all the train.

Yeah, and I was like, why is that local train just there in the face in the rock?

What?

What's going on?

What the fuck?

Okay, fine.

Okay.

Yeah.

What's going on?

so and about the same time next slide please um the fireman of the local train as are theoretically the rules if a train's been sat for more than you know five minutes then the um the fireman oh this is there's a rule for this by the way the rule 55 that's it this is important this will be important um the fireman goes oh i better go and speak to the signal to work out why the fuck i'm still sat here facing into traffic this doesn't feel good um so uh yeah fireman has to go to the signal box to ensure that the train's presence was noted by the signaler.

You went to the signal box, Revolution.

You sit here.

Yeah, I know you just got off this train, but I have to come here and say that I'm here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's like not reassuring.

It's like, you got off this train and you've, what's what's happening with it?

What's what's going on?

Um, so yeah, he went to the signal.

Roz, yeah, you, you, you, you take these words.

Black one.

He's supposed to go in there and say, hey, the train is here.

I'm just here to make sure in compliance with the rules, that you are aware the train is here.

And that also you put that wooden block we talked about earlier, the safety collar, in place, you know, to

get the hell out of here.

We're trying to figure out which troops are woke.

Yeah, no, you're reading the newspaper to figure out how woke our troops are, you know, and everyone's kind of like, hey, this is routine.

This doesn't matter.

So,

you know, and a fireman just, you know, goes in there.

The crew of the other two trains are also in there, if I recall correctly.

They're all talking about war news.

Everyone's just in, having a nice chat.

Well, yes, and then be like, I hear the Royal Flying Corps awokes.

Do you want to be on the foot plate of horrible 1915 British steam locomotive, or do you want to be in the nice warm signal box where there's tea?

Hey, I'll have you know

pretending I'm not autistic.

Yeah.

Hey, I'll have you know, I mean, yes, but also I'll have you know that those the locomotives involved here are all absolutely gorgeous.

They are so stunning.

It's like the peak of like steam locomotive design.

They are uh go look you can everyone can google the Caledonian railway locomotives involved here are all stunners.

It's quite something.

This is still well before you had like enclosed cabs or anything like that.

Yeah, it's cold.

It's May, but it's it's 5 a.m.

in May 1950 in Britain.

It's fucking, it's like one degree.

Your fingers, your dick, your nose have all fallen off.

Like, it's cold.

No, no, the front of you is incredibly hot from the locomotive and the back.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

So your ass has fallen off.

Yeah, okay, right.

Right.

So, so everyone's

rotating like a 7-Eleven hot dog.

Yeah.

Well, if you're the farmer, I suppose you were, weren't you?

As you're shoveling, yeah.

But if you're stood still and not shoveling, you're going to rapidly cool down.

So a few minutes later, our farmer waddles back to

the locomotive, the local train.

And so

that's 6.46.

One minute passes.

Next slide, please.

And a troop train is offered forwards towards Carlisle.

So that's one minute after the fireman gets back into the cab of the locomotive, the local train.

And the signaler offers forwards.

the troop train.

Basically, provides the right signal to say it's to the previous signaler.

It goes, sorry, to the previous signal box one further north says, Yep, yep, on he comes.

That's fine.

Yep, yep,

we got space, it's fine.

Yep, next slide, please.

And we wait.

And uh, next slide, please.

Two minutes later, at 6:49, the Leith to Liverpool troop train heading southwards at speed on the upmain

arrives on the scene.

Troops heading at high velocity towards your location.

And the result of this is,

yeah,

the next slide, please.

This is not good.

That no, that's gone poorly.

That's yeah, that's not

three trains.

So, that's not three, that's one, two, three, four trains in a piled-up heap across four tracks of the main north-south railway in and out of Scotland.

Um, that's about probably the most trains you can pile up here, right?

I don't, I don't think there could be like a situation where you've mic style, right?

You know, you know,

it can't happen no yeah exactly uh so next slide please oh one minute later the 650 uh at 650 the second northbound express train uh heading northwards at speed also arrives at quinton's hill and well roz well in the words of denzel they were a wreck on a wreck

oh god and uh what is yeah next slide please

and is he mewing i am so glad that i'm not the only person who saw that stupid movie enough times that it changed

my brain's wired.

Oh, it's great.

That's a great movie.

It's so good.

Also, Chris Pine has exceptional cheekbones, doesn't he?

Just I think he is legit mewing here.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's mewing in the sense of M mewing.

That's right.

There's two locomotives on this train.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Next slide, please.

So that's one, two, three.

This is the worst of five trains.

Yeah, it's spillikins, folks.

This is not good.

Did I mention that this is all on fire?

Oh, because of the gaslighting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So and because of being made of wood.

Yeah.

So if we and just to round it off, so that all that happens at six, three minutes later, next slide, please.

The signal is sent from the signal box to stop all trains.

So

that was three minutes, I would imagine, of not great vibes.

Looking at some newspaper and like being like, no, I'm reading about Gallipoli, you know?

Yeah.

So this is, this is, this is so much on fire.

Like, this is real,

this is really, really on fire.

Yeah.

Roz, I hope that was a reasonable explanation of what the fuck happened here because to get five trains in a pile

is, well, this is it, you know yeah um yeah i think you you have to go through that sequence to really understand how the fuck you put five trains through each other yeah this is this is a difficult feat but it was accomplished in victorian bret or excuse me not victorian it was after victorian edwardian edwardian

yeah yeah we did it we did it folks Yeah, I wonder if this is the record for most trains involved in one collision.

Yeah, that's a good question.

I don't know.

It is the deadliest train accident in British history.

Oh, it absolutely is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But

yeah, yeah, okay.

Everyone in the YouTube comments, get cracking.

Tell us, is this the rail crash with the most trains involved?

Because, good God, if there's one with more trains involved, we will do it within the next five episodes.

Did any of you ever play burnout?

Yes.

Yeah, hell yeah.

Crash mode.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's what this is, but with trains.

Oh, my God.

There's just like a rolling multi-million dollar ticker on the bottom of the screen inside the signal box the entire time until they send the stop signal.

It's like

old timey.

It's like old timey, like the flip, not flipboards, like just the old counters, you know?

It's a little guy chalking it out in like pound, shilling, and pence.

Yeah.

And because of currency valuation, the high score is like six pounds.

Yeah, six pounds.

You translate that out.

That's 11 billion pounds today.

Victor, you've absolutely just laser-pointed me with, like, you've just now immediately sent my brain back to burnout too, which I spent really

to remember.

Googling backwards compatibility.

No, the way you do it is you get to PCSX2.

And you just get ISOs.

You need to know a really cool girl who's got the ISOs for a bunch of...

I don't have those.

Sony, it's not me.

It's some other cool girl.

Some other cool, cool person who's, yeah.

I respect copyright law.

Yeah.

So I appreciated that another.

We did get you to admit that you're cool, finally.

Yeah, that's the long-term project that is this podcast to restore my self-esteem to something resembling a healthy baseline is succeeding.

Yeah.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got her.

So, yeah, we have to.

What's happening?

So return to Scotland.

What's going on?

What's going on in the Scottish borders on this fine morning there?

Starring shift in time.

Oh, no.

This has gone quite poorly, actually.

You can see this train is very much on fire.

Here's some empty coal wagons.

They're also on fire because they're made of wood.

Bad things are also happening over here.

You're getting like functionally shell splinters from wood, right?

Like your

glass as well.

So by far, the train that came off the worst was the troop train, right?

Every single car on it instantly caught fire um except for the six cars on the rear end which detached and through the magic of vacuum brakes rolled away

problem is those cars those cars were the ones that were full of like baggage and fish um

so well i mean

yeah Jesus okay so we saved two cars of fish from being smoked effectively yes pretty much yeah we may have we may have killed a couple of hundred people but we did prevent the creation of a bunch of like our bro smokies.

Yeah.

So, um, yeah, all these cars were lit with the pinch gas, and those cans had been recently filled.

Oh,

so there was no hope of extinguishing the fire at all.

It burned until the following day.

Um, jeez, and I mean, this is in the middle of nowhere, right?

Yes, fucking miles from anywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's like a fire company in the nearest town, which is Gretna, but they don't have like, you know, there's no fire hydrants.

There's no anything like that.

There's no way to get

away with water.

Yeah.

So, you know, they try to rescue people from the burning cars, and it's nasty.

You know, if you could get out really quickly, maybe we're fine.

If you got like injured.

You got trapped in the car really quickly.

There was a lot of like field amputations and things like that.

There was a lot of, you know, I mean, everyone was armed.

So some people chose to just, just end it.

Just like, no, I'm not burning to death.

And there were also reports of

officers who survived the crash just walking down the train and doing mercy killings.

Well, in fairness, if you're a, if you're a sort of like British infantry officer of 1915, shooting your own men is a real core competency.

You know, you're not coming out of Santa without feeling prepared to do that.

That's why they give you the revolver, you know?

Yes.

They don't give you the revolver as private purchase, but that's why you purchase the revolver.

Is uh, normally you're expecting to shoot some of your own men who are, you know, recalcitrant rather than you know, burning to death, but that makes no odds, you know?

It's a skill transfer, you know.

Like, it's mercy killing, it's it's good.

Um,

I think we can be a pro-mercy killing podcast.

I don't think that'll cause any controversy for us.

No, no, well, you know, we haven't caused any controversy in this episode so far.

May as well clip that one, put it on Blue Blue Sky.

Let's see how it goes.

So

yeah, so

packed troop train all on fire.

Everyone is shooting everyone else.

It's like the psalm of the world.

I don't really need the encouragement at that point.

You're just like, if you're sort of like, you know, second lieutenant in the, in the sort of like the Subaltern and the territorial force in 1915.

You're like, you're one sort of moustache twitch away from doing that anyway.

Yeah.

So just, I mean, one of the things you got to remember is that all these, all these kids on the train, they were going to, you know, go to France and get impaled on a bayonet covered in shit and then die as sepsis, you know, four weeks later.

Um, so I don't know.

This might have been a better way to go out.

Um, yeah, I mean, it really is the case that, I mean, I know you're about to talk about the numbers here, which are spoiler large.

Yes.

But in terms of like the grand scheme of things for the First World War,

nothing.

Just like,

it's like it's sort of like quiet morning's work in like one sector of the Western Front, you know?

Yeah, just staggering.

So go on, Ross, what are we talking about?

Let's put some numbers on the scoreboard.

One railway accident, 226 people were killed.

About 226 people.

We don't actually know the full number.

215 of them were members of the 7th Battalion, Royal Scots, who were on the troop train.

Yeah, so effectively you knock a company off that battalion.

Royal Scots, by the way, kept existing until options for change.

So existed until 2006, and now it doesn't.

R.I.P.

I'm sure.

Great legacy of that particular element of the British Army, I'm sure.

No skeletons in that closet.

There were 246 people who were injured.

The vast majority of the dead and wounded were on the troop train.

The newer steel coaches of the Express, even the local train.

I think the local train might have had one wooden coach.

I'm not sure.

They were largely up to the task of surviving an impact, and they didn't just instantly catch fire because most of them had electric lighting.

So

you're sort of like you're on your commuter train up to Glasgow where you're going to record your wireless program.

Gosh, well, there's your problem.

And you're opening a newspaper

reading about the woke troops, and you see, hear and feel

200 of said woke troops slam into the back of your train, instantly obliterating a good

quarter of them.

And then the rest of them burning to death while their own officers shoot them.

And you're just sort of like ruffling your paper like, that's what bloody country's coming to.

I'm just still thinking about the vibe shift in that signal box.

You know, you've got all the words in the middle of the

Having a great time with the boys, and all of a sudden it just really goes wrong.

Just the feeling, the feeling of anxiety that I have all the time of like, you are in so much trouble, made very real for like a half dozen guys at once.

And the fact that it's sequential trains, like it just keeps getting worse.

Like the first one gets your attention and then the second one fucking hits.

that was when

at that point i would be like okay i'm gonna throw myself on a machinery and tell the other guy to throw the lever so the machine kills me you know i'm i'm kind of i'm kind of going down and asking one of the officers if he can like you know spare an extra bullet at that point you know

yeah yeah pretty much it's not yeah it is it is not great um yeah i mean you just look up and

see just burning carnage and then another train slams through it all.

Yeah.

Good work, Lance.

Good work.

But this is W2IP, so we can't necessarily trouble the signalers.

We'll get there.

We can't.

Yeah, we can't really heavily blame the signalers.

No,

there was a pretty big investigation.

There were two separate investigations immediately.

There was a coroner's inquest, which said, you know, there's gross negligence on the part of the two signalmen and also the firemen of the local train.

There was a Board of Trade inquest that said there's, you know, negligence in the procedure, but also a lack of modern safety equipment.

If you had track circuits rather than manual signaling, this would not, this could not have happened.

You know, and there were, you know, just sort of general deficiencies in the process of

moving trains safely through this area.

There, you know, there was also, it was found, I believe, that they simply didn't use the wooden blocks to interlock the signals.

Yeah, the absolutely rudimentary sort of protection

equipment was not used.

But yeah, I mean, the thing is, like, the instant response, you might, you know, earlier we were talking about the fact that local train was put facing traffic.

Like, that was a kind of a standard move.

Like, in the last sort of, you know, in the six months before the accident, that happened 20, 21 times.

Sorry, the local train had been shunted at Quinton's Hill 20, 21 times.

And four of those, it had been shunted onto the upline without incident.

So it wasn't a completely unusual kind of uh move to use.

It was unusual, you know, it was, it was, it was definitely not um ideal, but it wasn't uh, it wasn't totally unheard of.

Um, and it was, you know, seen as safe within the working practice if they'd put the little wooden cock ring on the top of the kind of the signal lever.

Um, yeah, so yeah, there was there was um nothing particularly wrong about what they were doing, although it was weird.

Um, it could have it could have been done more more safely, obviously.

It's also,

I don't know exactly if there were any improvements to procedures that happened after this,

because they did try and sort of pin it on, you know, the two signalmen and the firemen.

It did not stick.

You know,

this was a disaster that could have been prevented by new.

more automated technology that simply would not be able to make this mistake.

Yeah, and also on a line with extreme traffic through there, and a problem that we are still played with today.

Had we instead four-tracked north from Carlisle and up until further up the line, maybe even as far as Lockerbie, you'd have resolved an enormous number of problems we have today with capacity on that line.

But you would absolutely have solved this problem because you'd have just overtaken the local, you know, the expresses would have just overtaken the local trade.

So, yeah, but that would cost money.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or say if the competition between private enterprises, you know, on the railway, two different private railway companies hadn't resulted in an obviously stupid method of working.

If they just held the train, the local train and allowed the expresses through, then that would have also completely prevented this incident.

Like

that's one of the key root causes for me.

The capacity issue is one thing.

But the fact that it was the competition between the railway companies, meaning that

they didn't hold the local train and they raced local forward 10 miles for it to just end up having to stop and get overtaken anyway, just so that they could give preference to their own versus

competing companies' rail services.

Overline,

by the way, remember, over the railway that was theirs.

And so...

you know, that was used extensively by just obvious conflict between the way that the train operating,

the, sorry, the railway companies were competing with each other.

It's just daft.

So for me, that's the really nasty, nasty bit of this is that this wouldn't have happened.

It's interesting.

Have they not been competing?

It's interesting as well that the,

so the two, the two signalers got convicted of, I think it was like culpable homicide, which is like Scott's Law manslaughter, right?

Got out after a year in prison and both went back to work on the railway.

which suggests a couple of things in terms of this not being a kind of career-ending piece of misconduct.

One, I guess, is is that, you know, there were a lot fewer sort of of those, but also that, like, someone in that railway has got to believe that it is not exclusively or sort of like not primarily your fault to give you your job back.

Yes.

And also, everyone got killed in the war.

So, you know.

Well, also, yeah, like, I guess you're, you're sort of like short of, short of sort of like railwaymen.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's like,

they only killed 225 people or so.

That's not that many all things considered um just give him his job back it's fine yeah i mean you you kill 200 people in sort of slightly different geographic circumstances and they give you a dso you know exactly

being in jail

yeah in in in in 1915 sort of like um in sort of like country and continents a wash in killing i can see how this kind of like you know um

briefly horrifies people and then the song happens a year later so you know whatever exactly yeah yeah it just blows the scale of this out of the water I mean there there are two other

two other elements involved in this incident that I want to talk about and that is number 140 and number 48

of the Caledonian Railway which were the two trains at the front of the

two Caledonian railway trains at the front of the express

because of course the Caledonian Railway asked for its locomotives to be connected to the LNWR train anyway stupid railway system.

Anyway, those two locomotives, by the way, that locomotive, it's in the in the DMs.

Go and have a look at that locomotive, how beautiful they are.

Those two locomotives that careered into the wreckage a minute after the first crash both repaired and uh returned to traffic uh pretty rapidly as well so um in true railway crash style if that loco is fine you're running it again but the picture you have to lose all the blood off of that exactly they're gonna replace the they're gonna replace the face on the front but you know

yeah well, we've got a process for that.

It's fine.

The face on the front is looking very traumatized.

Yeah, if people want a sense of this sort of scale, when I talk about the Somme, which was like almost a year later, the first battle, the Somme stuff,

the

British casualties, like killed, first day, like one day, 19,240.

So this is sort of a footnote, you know?

Yeah.

I like observing this in the sense that like this is this is a society in sort of like about to be up to its knees in sort of like mechanized slaughter.

And

I don't know.

I always like doing this podcast because we can get kind of holistic with it, not just in the sense of like, you know, oh, why was the railway built there?

But also

why was the kind of investigation, why was the aftermath as it was?

Well, because this was something that happened in a...

profoundly sick society, you know?

Very,

very much very little value on human life at that at that time of, you know, our existence as humanity.

You know,

we are sending tens of thousands of young men to their deaths for

we don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It reminds me of Palestine in the sense of there is something so obviously monstrous being done here that it kind of like overshadows everything else.

And it also, in so doing that, it kind of like throws into really sharp relief why it's sort of like,

you know, it's sort of like, it overrules any claims to sort of like valuing human life, but it also shows how stuff like this can happen, you know, just by virtue of this is a society in the grips of industrialization that is sort of like in the process of losing much of its humanity to it, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Which is a a good thing to talk about, a timely thing to talk about on the sort of like 200th anniversary of the railways as well, is, you know, that's, that's part of what the, the story of the railways in this country is.

Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

Sure.

Well, 195 years of modern railways this year, yeah.

Um, it's uh, yeah, pertinent to think of the ways in which the movement of people on the railways dehumanized us as much as it was part of the machinery of a of a broader war that absolutely dehumanized us.

Um, particularly the first war, a reminder to everyone, purposeless, completely purposeless.

There were no particular bad guys or or good guys.

There was just everyone shooting everyone else.

Yeah.

Well, but it did give us some real bad guys a couple of decades later.

So it's okay.

What's

a good thing?

Yeah.

Is it a dorna who has the line about like, you know, all this kind of like

civilizational kind of rationalism leads inevitably to madness, right?

Like, um,

anyway, I just, I wanted to kind of like tie that together because I, you know, this podcast,

I like doing it.

Yeah, yeah, well, you know, uh, luckily, you know, super intelligent AI, you know, Grok is going to save us and return us our humanity very soon, I'm pretty sure.

Um,

so yeah, ultimately, you know, the dead whose remains survived the blaze because a lot of people were completely incinerated, uh, buried with military honors in a mass grave in rosebanks cemetery in edinburgh got this nice big really really kind of a nonsense to say that you you you gave your life uh you you gave your life for your country when your country has sort of like killed you negligently you know yes yeah

yeah yeah i mean this gets me on to another thing i mean yeah

you know the one thing the one thing i spend a lot of time in the form of former yugoslavia and the one thing that always strikes me particularly about

is the war memorials of which there are plenty in the former yugoslavia

And those ones, I mean, admittedly, in the First World War, as we said, there were no particular bad guys.

The Second World War, there were.

And the thing that always strikes me with war memorials is how much in the UK, we never talk about who we were fighting.

We always just say our brave boys who arbitrarily just died and gave their face to this country for

a question mark.

Yeah.

Whereas the Yugoslav...

uh war memorials absolutely point out fuck the fascists we were murdering the fuck out of those guys and it's great that we did that.

And actually, it's really good that you remember that we did that, that we should keep doing that.

And these guys who died doing that are absolutely heroes.

I kind of feel like there's a sickness in our country that we still don't,

that we have not healed from.

In relation to the fact that no, are there any war memorials in Britain that mention who we were fighting?

It's sort of like our culture of like institutional remembrances is one of the First World War, much more than it is one of the second.

It's when we decided

what a war memorial should look like

and the kind of form of words to use and things like the cenotaph.

And I,

on the one hand, I appreciate a lot of that because a lot of it was born of very authentic, very experienced kind of horror of this stuff.

Actually, my favorite war memorial in London is the Royal Artillery Memorial because it was grotesquely unpopular at the time because people wanted something like the cenotaph.

In particular, the royal family and sort of like patrons and stuff wanted a very, very clean, very neoclassical thing that allowed that kind of like vacancy.

And the officers of the royal artillery, who had been, you know, had been a technical arm and who had been, you know, slightly more working class, they didn't go to cavalry regiments, said, no, we want you to put a howitzer on the top of it, which is what they did.

And it's an ugly thing.

It's an ugly object.

And I like it for that.

But yeah,

I think that a lot of it has been kind of turned into this

really kind of vacant thing.

It's a whited sepulchre.

It's what a cenotaph is, right?

Like it's,

and the thing that you wear your fucking poppy, mate.

The thing that really fucking broke me was when I saw those, those, the Royal British Legion.

uh putting those kids in like future soldier t-shirts and giving them big plastic poppies to wave around.

Yep.

Sick country.

We are a sick country with real problems.

It started earlier than with

what's his face, Boris Johnson.

Yeah.

No, for real.

Well, nasty, nasty,

nasty, nasty sort of like addendum to it, you know?

I think that

if I'm going to say one last thing on this point,

it's incredible that it was the worst rail accident in British history and it is just utterly disappears into the horror.

This really reinforces your point, Nova, but it's just the fact that we've dedicated an episode to the worst rail disaster, one of the worst rail disasters that we will ever cover on

this podcast, and that you'll ever cover on this podcast.

And it was just at the time and even now barely remembered.

Probably had a lot less impact on the way railways were run than anything else of a comparable magnitude just because there's a war on, you know, shit happens.

Yep, 100%.

100%.

Yeah, I.

What did we learn?

I would say almost deliberately nothing.

Don't start World War One.

That's what we learned.

Yeah, don't start World War I.

If you're in, what international are we on now?

Oh, Christ, don't ask me that.

I don't even know what party I'm in now.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

At least one.

Don't let the workers of the world

engage in World War III.

Yeah.

Always use a coch ring.

Definitely.

Please do.

Definitely.

Don't get in the three-axle carriage.

I don't get in one of those.

No, those were real.

If your train car looks suspiciously like a coffin with a large propane canister taped to the underside of your seat, perhaps rebook.

If it looks like a child's drawing of a railroad coach,

don't get in.

Roz,

in a way, you're right in that they don't exist anymore because all of them were turned into charred splinters.

Yeah, well, that's that's how that's how you dispose of a wooden railroad car.

You burn it, hack it up.

You burn it with access.

So you can set fire to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You don't even have to do the first part.

You just put some gasoline on it.

Yeah, like the U.S.

with most of its streetcars.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just burn it.

Just burn it.

Same in the UK, to be fair.

Just burn them.

They're made of wood.

You can just burn them.

That's fine.

Ah, crikey.

Yeah.

Just for like a really brief point of levity, just because like, wow.

I did go to San Francisco relatively recently for the historic running of the SF railway.

And I am eternally jealous of like previous eras foamers because I got to ride in like an actual wooden streetcar.

It was one of the Milan

cars.

And it it was just, it's just, I'm so jealous.

That looks like it was so much fun.

Your car is like made out of a tree.

It was great.

I don't know.

There was something very, very innocent about it that I really enjoyed.

I'm sorry.

I'm desperately trying to make the episode more fun again.

They got a nice historic streetcar program out there.

Yeah.

I got to make it out there one of these days.

It was genuinely great.

But yeah, I just was like, wow, I can't imagine what it would have been like to go train spot like 50 years ago.

Sure, it'd be a lot harder to get the estrogen, but then once you're over over that hump,

it would probably break even at that point.

Wow, you know, based on strength of trains.

The problem is back then, people were like, you know, it was a lot better in like 1870.

Grass is always greener.

Turns out Quinton's Hill in 1915 is also a great place to train spot because there's a lot of trains going through there.

Yeah.

All at once.

All at once.

How do you fit five trains on four tracks?

Don't don't do that.

We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Greetings, beloved pod hosts.

Even though,

what the hell is happening here?

Even though one of you has my dead name and I get slapped by it every time I listen.

Sorry, your dead name is November, but you have to admit it's improbable.

Yeah,

that was not likely.

I'm writing to you as I listened to the caving disasters pod, and it reminded me of repressed memory from my first job with the late lamented National Park Service.

R.I.P.

That's off.

For the sake of pseudo-anonymity, I will not name the park.

What was that?

Sorry, Rose, did I say that again?

Anonymity.

Anonymity.

I don't remember.

It has, there's too many whys in that word.

I will not name the park, but it is one of the U.S.

national parks that features a show cave, which I gave tours of, as well as a number of smaller wild caves which are closed to the public, but are cave scientists used for research.

Cave scientists.

Change the emphasis you put on the words cave scientists.

There is so many

people.

Cavemen who are scientists, right?

That's how that works.

Cave test hypothesis.

Is that cavemen?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

I'm going to offend a bunch of those guys who showed up in the Keico commercials.

Anyway, so my role was an astronomy interpretive intern, which is basically I teach people about the night sky at the park.

Seems like a weird job to do inside a cave, to be honest.

Yeah, well, you know.

Well, occasionally, I'd be drafted to give tours of the show cave, which was fully lit and an easy walking path.

I had some trepidations upon first going into the cave, but soon came to love the cave and its unique environment.

Love the cave.

Learned to love the cave.

One day.

That's what dad used to tell me until I left home.

One day when I walked into the office, our cave biologist was there and threw a helmet at me and said, you're coming with me today.

I'm not getting in the cave.

I'm not getting in the cave.

I'm especially not getting in the non-show cave.

That's part of their culture.

I understand that.

I think that a cave scientist inviting you to their cave is a huge honor in their culture.

However, I will not be partaking.

While we got kitted out, I was briefed on our mission for the day.

Replace a data logger in one of the wild research caves in the park.

We then drove to the trailhead and began the two-mile hike to the cave location.

Upon arriving to where the biologist said the cave was, I was incredibly confused as I did not see a cave.

She directed my attention to a spot on the ground and I noticed a rusty grate covering a small hole in the ground.

No.

The entirety.

This is

this is great.

So there's a cave north of Ingleton that which is deep in the heart of Yorkshire caving territory, which is covered by a classic British steel bin lid.

I've been in that cave and it is pretty much as described here.

Yeah,

love that ship.

The entirety of the cave entrance was no more than about one meter in diameter and appeared to disappear straight down into the cold, dark earth.

The metal grate, as seen in the provided diagram, covered about half the opening, leaving a small hole for us to enter.

At this point, the biologist pulled out a diagram of the Earth's cavity we were about to enter, as the second cave technician began tying ropes to the metal grate and tossing them down the hole.

Upon reviewing the diagram, my first thoughts were, What the fuck?

and Are you fucking serious?

Though my mouth said

Uh, cool

The data locker the data logger we were to switch out was at the end of a nine hundred meter long passage that varied from roughly one to one and a half meters tall, which would require crawling on our hands and knees for almost a kilometer with the narrow squeeze at the end about half a meter to finally reach the logger.

The salon was to

give a

reasonable person cause for alarm, but that passage was about 20 meters beneath our feet.

I really want to know what data is on there.

Yep, it's cold and dark.

Yep, yeah, it's cave.

My questions about the ropes tied to the grate were soon answered as I was informed that the way to get to that passage was down a 60-degree downward slope with the grate, which the grate was half covering.

My brain said, What the actual fuck?

And my mouth said, Oh, that's okay.

And it got worse.

You got a real brain-mouth problem going on.

Yeah, no, this is sometimes, sometimes, like, I,

you know, sometimes it's okay to to say, no, I don't want to do this thing.

This downward shaft was even narrower than the passage we were going to crawl through, averaging about 0.4 to 0.6 meters in diameter.

For context, I am six foot four inches and at the time weighed about two hundred and forty pounds with broad shoulders.

I was assured that I would be fine.

It was not, in fact, fine.

The biologist went down the hole first.

I was to follow second, with the cave technician bringing up the rear.

I sat on the ground.

I thrust my legs into the abyss.

To get down the dirty, rocky shaft, I had to put my arms at my side, legs straight, and wiggle my body like a worm.

Christ.

Slowly inching down the jagged rocks.

About 10 meters down the shaft, I suddenly couldn't go any further.

Kill me, kill me.

Shoot me in the fucking head right now.

Let me let me get one of those fucking rocks.

One of those officers in right now with a Webley.

Yeah.

So when I used to do caving, I used to do do it with a, with a massive, chunky, like lead-acid battery and an old caving lamp.

And the standard thing that would happen is that the knackered old belt that that was on around my like caving suit would roll to would usually roll to the side and get snarled on a rock with my arms above my head and with me having absolutely no way to adjust it.

And you'd kind of just have to, in a similar pretty sounding situation to this.

And you'd basically just have to bum shuffle to kind of get this thing, this battery to wiggle around unless you you could just about squeeze your arm down to your side.

So, this kind of sounds, I like the sound of this.

This is good.

This is my dirty secret that everyone now knows on WTOP is that I was once a caver.

I've done it for a while now.

Yeah.

I also, what's more terrifying is probably the state of that battery.

Did somebody make you do it at gunpoint or like was it, was it, was it coerced?

Uh,

no, I mean, I mean, yes, in the sense that my father forced me to do it, I suppose.

But uh,

no other sense, yes, but no other sense that no, I love doing it, it was was good fun.

It was freezing cold and filthy and absolutely horrible, but then so is living in Britain.

So, you know,

oh, yeah, Britain is just a large open-air cave, yeah, pretty much exactly, yeah, quite.

So, uh, no, I um that was good fun.

Uh, I need to find a picture of me with a bit next to the bin lid about to go in the big hole.

Cause uh, yeah, anyway, my broad shoulders had fully found themselves wedged into the rock, and I was unable to continue further down, nor really turn myself to try and unwedge.

I yelled to the experienced caver above and below me for advice and they told me to just try and get unstuck.

Oh

no.

Shoot me.

Shoot me.

No.

What a great idea.

I didn't think about that.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of struggling with micro movements, I was able to free my arms enough to grab the rope.

and begin slowly inching myself up the rope and finally reached the point where I could use my legs to really kick myself out of the cave, thus ending my career as a professional caver.

I let the tech go down and waited under a tree near the entrance for an hour or so as these two expertly made their way through the cave to do their job.

When we all returned to the office, another ranger noticed the helmet and muddy clothes and an ashen thousand-yard stare on my face and asked, Did

the cave biologist take you to Fat Man's Misery?

She does that to everyone.

Oh my God, this woman is an evil fucking sadist.

Can I say something?

I don't even need to.

You know what it's going to be.

Yeah.

It was at that point.

I really questioned if that was a training opportunity or just a sadistic hazing ritual for all the new Rangers.

Either way, it's like, yeah, I got a got a job at this national park, and one of the cave biologists is like measuring my like uh hip size with a tape measure and licking her lips.

Either way, I have never and never will set foot in a wild cave again.

Fuck that shit.

Um, yeah, for real.

Stay the fuck out of the caves, they weren't meant for us.

Thanks, bye.

Have a great day from Kaz.

Thank you, Kaz.

thank you kaz thank you kaz enjoyed that very much uh although uh

i i'll put an asterisk on the fuck that shit because uh yeah

you know i'm a psychopath and i do quite enjoy that sort of fun as she was describing this is the bit where i realized that i'm that i'm more of a sadist than than i realize when i'm like i was like licking my lips and rubbing my hands together as she was describing getting stuck in the cave i was like yes make me have glaustrophobia force it into me you're gonna you make it yeah uh when i'm when i'm in when I'm in Britain in a couple of weeks,

you're going to force me in the cave.

Oh, God.

Live show from the caves.

The caves.

Go to Shislehurst.

Hello.

Hey, maybe we could.

We could drive you up to a show cave and I could take you down into

one of the very streets.

I'm grabbing the wheel and veering the car into traffic if you try.

Go to Luray Caverns and have a show at the

stalagmite organ.

White Scar Caves is very lovely.

I can heartily recommend.

This is the only cave I've been in is Luray Caverns.

That's pretty

definitely a show cave.

I will say that much.

This is a cave agnostic

lineup of WTYP hosts.

I was about to say.

Just don't take me to Fat Man's Misery.

I have enough of that already.

No, that was safety third.

Shake hands with danger.

Our next episode will be on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Railnatter.

Ah, thanks.

Yeah, you should.

You should watch it.

It's good.

You should buy,

you should buy.

Tell you what you could do is you should go on to Victoria Scott's website.

Yeah, by Victoria Scott.

Well, no, forget my book.

You should go to Victoria Scott's website and you should get hold of We Deserve This.

You should get hold of uh Victoria's books.

Victoria, well, Victoria's book, Victoria's Projects.

You should fund anything that Victor, you should subscribe to Victoria's projects.

I'm gonna do this podcast now.

So, like, uh, subscribe to the Patreon.

I'd like to plug the show I'm currently on.

Exactly.

Subscribe to the Patreon, but also listen to your Transport.

I'm someone who like listened to like three hours of this and is like, nah, I'm probably not going to subscribe to the Patreon.

It's a fact.

It's a fact.

You should give your money to trans women because i get one-third of that

you're doing a kind of comprador economy thing on us yeah no

it's what could be more trans than to be like yeah fund me it subsidizes two cis men as well

Thanks, nobody.

But yeah, no, Rail Natter on Wednesdays, apart from for the last, or as at time of recording the last two weeks because i have been burned out and having a mental health crisis so yeah but rail lateral return um and it's going to be fun because the the next one at time recording is going to be on the ridiculous history of tilting trains and how uh america is now running the advanced passenger train up the uh northeast corridor which is kind of funny oh yeah that'll be good and theoretically uh gareth and i have an episode that we do god let's record that yeah we got to actually record that one yeah uh i'm gonna try i'm gonna try and get Gareth to take coach Bill.

You know, no, EMUs, garbage.

It's over.

No, in America, you need coaches.

Anyway.

Oh, on that bombshell.

No, thanks so much for having me.

It's been fun to do.

Yeah, well, you probably did, didn't you, Victoria?

Let's be honest.

I want the who's line isn't anyway a true carry count at the end.

The tally of all my points.

Being pinged up on screen right now by Devon is how many points you got for a second.

I'm calling this one a droll.

I'm sorry.

Swear out.

Well, there's your problem where the points are made up and we describe the horrors of war.

It's been so this is an important moment because Victoria and I are both on WTYP together, which is extremely fun.

Let's do this again, actually.

Who knows what episode is?

I have to find some event with cars that killed 240 people.

It looks like kind of keep parody, and I'm not sure how to do that.

Oh, that's true.

I mean, they kill or seriously maim 30,000 a year in the UK, and I think that's going to be an additional U.S.

scandal.

Oh, wow, this is it.

Oh, yeah, that actually would be great.

Shit.

All right, I'm on it.

All right.

Well, I think that was the podcast, folks.

Beautiful.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, bye, everyone.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.