Episode 189: 2017 Point Defiance Derailment

Speaker 1 Coercively assigned ready at birth. Oh god, it's not on.
I can't just push the button anymore and give it a significant because I haven't done this in two years. There we go.
Oh god, hold on.

Speaker 1 Oh my god. Anytime

Speaker 1 doesn't know how to open Adobe. This is the most shut the fuck up and don't touch nothing podcast in history where it's like anytime anything changes, all of us become

Speaker 1 fucked up mentally. Delirious with rage.
uh you deal with that x kcd about every update breaks somebody's workflow yeah that that that got we have the

Speaker 1 one hit point workflow yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly um hold on uh and i'm gonna

Speaker 1 oh i should start the virtual camera too and we should do a sync point a sync point a sync point a point where you sync um ask me about

Speaker 1 one mark

Speaker 1 three two one

Speaker 1 mark.

Speaker 1 Oh, Crispy. Close enough.

Speaker 1 That was a violent clap.

Speaker 1 I was fond of that. That was good.
Stimulating. All right.
We're locked in. The podcast with a one-hit point workflow is back.
Yes.

Speaker 1 The podcast barely cling to life most days. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Don't worry.

Speaker 1 We're never going to stop doing it. We're never going to stop doing it, but it's okay.

Speaker 1 Hi, haters.

Speaker 1 All right. Yeah.
60 gigabytes. That's fine.
I'm gonna, oh, I'm gonna beat you to death with your own shoes.

Speaker 1 I hope there was nothing incriminating on recent files. I don't know.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I might have all the Epstein files.
You don't know that.

Speaker 1 I guess we know. Nuclear bomb plans.
Yeah. Not my

Speaker 1 DXC.

Speaker 1 Why is it inexecutable?

Speaker 1 It's got to do. Yeah, yeah.
Shut up.

Speaker 1 Hello. Hi, Rod.
And hello, and welcome to.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I am November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now.
My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.
Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson.
My pronouns are he, him.

Speaker 1 And we have a guest slash employee slash, what are you, Victoria?

Speaker 2 That's a great question.

Speaker 1 It's not rhetorical, by the way.

Speaker 1 I'm a Victoria.

Speaker 2 My name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her, and I'm survived the month of October, so I'm fucking back.

Speaker 1 Survived the month of October reward.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it tried really hard to kill me.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we'll get you a medal of some kind when we get a chance.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 like a like a like a valiant, like a medal of Lenin, like for valiant service.

Speaker 1 Absolutely getting an order of Lenin. You just have to come to Scotland to pick it up.

Speaker 2 Okay, that's fine.

Speaker 1 We can arrange that. Who would do that? Go to Scotland? Yeah.
What kind of economy? In this economy?

Speaker 1 I know exactly what kind of purchase entirely to purchase Buckfast.

Speaker 1 I need to

Speaker 1 have two suitcases laden down with the caffeinated fortified wine made by

Speaker 1 the thing is, right, that I need caffeinated alcohol because it is the, it is,

Speaker 1 that is my lifeblood because there are two favorite things in the world are being stimulated stimulated and depressed, baby. And I'm going to have both at once.

Speaker 1 God made caffeinated alcohol for the same reason he made trans people so that we could share in the joy of creation. That's right, baby.
Here's the thing.

Speaker 1 I couldn't find Buckfast in Scotland. I had to

Speaker 1 go with respected

Speaker 1 railway engineer Gareth Dennis to buy it in York. And father.

Speaker 1 Where did you find it in York? That must have been

Speaker 1 a little bit of an odyssey.

Speaker 1 It was

Speaker 1 there was a bar, but it had a beer store underneath. Bizarre.

Speaker 1 Everything was crooked. The bathroom was the smallest room I've been in in my life.

Speaker 1 It's pretty good. I'm so glad you enjoyed my stupid, stupid country.

Speaker 1 It was a nice time.

Speaker 1 I liked it more than other parts of the trip, to be honest.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 what you see on the screen in front of you is a pretty beat up

Speaker 1 Amtrak, whatever the new Siemens diesel locomotives are called. It looks like the kind of

Speaker 2 Dodge they sell to the Marines.

Speaker 1 It looks like the train equivalent of Darth Vader with the helmet off.

Speaker 1 It's bad.

Speaker 1 It's not very good. You might as well have just spray-painted that's bad.
The T right here is shorthand for that's bad, folks. Yeah,

Speaker 1 the WT Legacy. Victoria gave you a piece of arrive at the site of this train

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 like spray paint a W and a YP on the side of this instead of an A. I lesbians.

Speaker 1 It's better than the fan sex.

Speaker 1 It's not supposed to look like this.

Speaker 1 Today we're going to talk about the 2017 Port Defiance

Speaker 1 Amtrak Cascades derailment. You can tell that this is the Pacific Northwest because someone has clipped a leash to the front of this train, the the Caribbean.

Speaker 1 Lesbians, yeah, there's already like vegetation growing on it because there's so much rain,

Speaker 1 you know. Um, yeah, um, I think we have not friends, but friends of friends who were on this train when it derailed.
I hope they're excited for us to like make light of their tragedy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly, exactly. You survived a train crash, not many people can see that, you know, yeah.
Um, so, but before we talk about that, we have to do the goddamn news.

Speaker 1 Fuck you.

Speaker 1 So, I

Speaker 1 mean, a lot of things have happened in the past. Whenever the last time we released an episode, we had the longest government shutdown in history.

Speaker 1 Yeah, do you think it's a coincidence that the federal government shuts down and the podcast doesn't come out for a while?

Speaker 1 Hey, it's shit we can't talk about on air. Part 455.
Yeah. It's fine.

Speaker 1 Listen, the good thing is we established what they call in the business a legend by also not releasing a bunch of times when the federal government was funded.

Speaker 1 Oh, we're the most inconsistent podcast in the world. It comes out when it comes out.
It says so on our website. Shut up.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 it makes me want to kind of ritually disembowel myself because of the dishonesty. People love

Speaker 1 A-Lab series. I can only hope to become that inconsistent.

Speaker 1 It's aspirational. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. So we had the longest government shutdown in history, and like 10 Democrats or whatever, including our own

Speaker 1 Senator John Fetterman. Oh, my God.
Boom!

Speaker 1 Decided,

Speaker 1 nah,

Speaker 1 we should just

Speaker 1 capitulate

Speaker 1 and reopen everything.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, Fedderman had like another stroke, maybe, or or like a fall and a heart attack or some some kind of like unhealthy shit but it didn't turn him woke that happened after he voted though

Speaker 2 it didn't turn it didn't turn him woke god's just consistently trying to strike him down but

Speaker 1 who could blame god through his thing

Speaker 1 being like pennsylvanian satan being like we have created a smite proof oath

Speaker 1 you thought it was going to be me didn't you motherfuckers

Speaker 1 You might be smite proof, but we don't know.

Speaker 1 I'm mortal until proven otherwise. Yeah.
So this was an extremely frustrating thing for it to end in this way because

Speaker 1 you do this very long government shutdown. When the government shuts down,

Speaker 1 for those of you who have been living under a rock,

Speaker 1 which seems like an ideal place to live, to be honest.

Speaker 1 Unless it's the federal government's rock. Oh, yeah, that's true.
Then they kick you. You're the federal government's like ornamental hermit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I work in the folly at Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 You know, a lot of non-essential government employees just don't get paid until the government reopens.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 they're going to,

Speaker 1 which is. vile.
Yeah. You know, this is, this is like a whole like crisis that was sort of, you know, around like, okay,

Speaker 1 we have to fund the government somehow.

Speaker 1 And, you know, the Democrats, of course, wanted to continue such things as Affordable Health Care Act

Speaker 1 subsidies, right?

Speaker 1 So that people's insurance doesn't, you know, double next year.

Speaker 1 And the, you know, Republicans did not want to do that because they, I don't know, want to kill everyone. Yeah.
So fuck asses, dude. Yeah.
And you know what?

Speaker 1 In a standoff like that, you can always rely on the famously iron spine of the Democratic Party. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Devin, 10 minutes, 30 seconds in. Take those motherfuckers out back and them.
Kneel them over, ditch.

Speaker 1 The them.

Speaker 1 Them all.

Speaker 1 If you got to shoot and them. 10 minutes and 30 seconds in to reiterate.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know what to say about this other than, you know, I already said it, man.

Speaker 1 With the ultimate capitulation here, it's like, why did we do any of that?

Speaker 1 That is exactly right.

Speaker 1 It was to disrespect a bunch of troops, which is the most noble reason for doing anything.

Speaker 1 To go to air traffic controllers who were a type of troop. Yeah, and being like, hey, fuckass.
And then you slap them in the back of the head so their glasses fly off and they can't see the planes.

Speaker 1 And you go, we're not paying you for three months. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, and the Dems were winning this too. Like, it was, they were.

Speaker 2 They polling showed that, you know, even for like the wonk-minded out there, that the Democrats were perceived as not the problem, and the Republicans were actually getting, you know, kind of shellacked for this.

Speaker 2 So it made perfect sense to immediately be like, no, actually, it's our fault. We were just.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, the second after they did capitulate, Donald Trump came on stage with a big briefcase, which like

Speaker 1 snapped open to reveal a bunch of documents incriminating him as a paedophile. So yes,

Speaker 1 tactical masterstroke once again from Senator Chuck Schumer. I did like the article.
I just got a phone call today from Blue Cross, Blue Shield, saying that my premiums were going up next year.

Speaker 1 So, thank God for that. Yeah, I

Speaker 1 am trying to have a family and I have to do some stuff around that.

Speaker 1 And if you try to prohibit me from having a family, I'm going to take a battle axe, Senator Schumer and Senator Fetterman, and I'm going to come to your offices with my battle axe and I'm going to

Speaker 1 have 12 minutes, 25 seconds left.

Speaker 1 You hit Fetterman with the blunt end over and over again each time.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, no. He comes back with a different ideology each time.

Speaker 1 I love to see

Speaker 1 what Gonzalo thought for a minute then.

Speaker 1 No, no, no, I fuck them back.

Speaker 1 I hit him one time, and I think he called me a cracker.

Speaker 1 I would pay good money to see black Israelite liberation liberation John Fetterman. Yes.
Yes. So would I.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, to be fair, if anyone made that guy, it is the evil scientist Yakub, right? Like, no question.

Speaker 1 Yeah, doubtless. He gets enough lumps on his head that he looks like the evil scientist Yakub.

Speaker 1 I do like the idea of just spinning the wheel of ideologists, whoever this dirtbag fucking believes. Dirtbag used not affectionately, by the way.
Georgist Fetterman. Georgist Fetterman.

Speaker 1 everyone works but the vacant lot

Speaker 1 yeah so chuck schuman knows that americans love their health insurance companies and they want to spend more time on the phone with them and so courteously he you know decided to really enable that you know yeah i mean you know i i i a few people have tried to uh you know say well shumer didn't do this and it's like okay maybe he didn't but he did lose control of the party it's kind of like like, well, what exactly are you doing?

Speaker 1 What is the point? Right, exactly. What exactly would you say it is you do? Well,

Speaker 2 from what it seems like, even the house is mad at him. Yeah.
Like, it's it's like everybody, like, even the democratic establishment is pissed at him.

Speaker 2 It's, it's kind of insane to see, like, unanimously, every single person is absolutely fucking furious.

Speaker 1 Resign, fuck face. Yeah, it might be time to hang up the hat, quit while you're ahead.

Speaker 1 Quit warning more time with your imaginary family. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hanging with the Bailey. I don't know.

Speaker 1 Chuck Schumer does frequently consult with imaginary friends for what policies he should

Speaker 1 vote for. Yeah, he's like a secular Mormon in that way.
You know,

Speaker 1 that's true. He has like a kind of prophet, seer, and revelator role.
Well, at least if you're Mormon, other people believe in your imaginary friends too. And God,

Speaker 1 the Mormons haven't figured out because God can change his mind. Yeah.
That's that, see, God, God is, is a consensus builder. And also, you get your own planet when you die.

Speaker 1 We got to rate the Mormon as a bonus episode. We got to have Jordan from bringing your money out here or Greg or one of the other ones.
I don't know. And yeah, it's coming.

Speaker 1 Just when I get around to it, shut up. So, yeah, we did this whole rigmarole for nothing.
God damn nothing. Yep.
Amazing.

Speaker 1 Didn't even last long enough for me to get stuck in Europe, which would have been funny at least. Could have been an expat.
No, instead,

Speaker 1 we sort of forced the air traffic control people back to work.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And,

Speaker 1 you know, Ronald Reagan's criminal legacy continues. Yes.
In other news.

Speaker 1 All right. We got to talk about the Hess truck this year.
Oh, it looks like shit

Speaker 1 is not a truck. It's not a truck.

Speaker 1 That's a, that's a, what is that? An ass car? I maybe I double.

Speaker 1 And it's worse than ever. It's two stock cars, right? It's two stock cars, a big one and a small one.
Now, noticeably, two cars do not add up to one car. Talk to me or my son ever again.

Speaker 1 The big stock car, you can open up the hood of the big stock car and put the small stock car inside the big stock car. Russian stock cars.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and some troyshka stock car. Regular cars is going to have a sealed day with this.
This is my big car. This is my my little car.
This is my big car. This is my little car.

Speaker 1 This is a fucked up thing to do in the cars universe. This is like some Ed Gein shit to them.
Yeah, well, we never really established how the new cars are made. I guess this is

Speaker 1 made by Cocker.

Speaker 1 What do we got? We got, I think, 67 lights, five roaring. That's covered up by the Chiron.

Speaker 1 The small car fits inside the big car. There's a pullback motor, you know.
I mean, I like the pullback motor, I guess, but yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's 50 fucking dollars pound sand. Yeah, Jesus.

Speaker 1 The economy is fucked. This is downstream of tariffs to me.
This is not a good Hess truck because, number one, it's not a truck, right?

Speaker 1 No, the children crave like large industrial or commercial vehicle, you know. That's why it's a truck, it's got to be on a truck body, you know.
This is some real like light truck exception shit.

Speaker 1 Maybe if the big one was like one of those, like the NASCAR truck series, you know, trucks. Oh, I love the Happs series, yeah.
Slaying trucks,

Speaker 1 about like the Parry Dakar uh, like truck rally, they must, someone in that office must get in on that, you know, yeah. The Hess truck is a DAF turbo twin and it like kills you instantly.

Speaker 1 Oh, god, please, yeah,

Speaker 1 that's an episode I want to do at some point in the future.

Speaker 1 Absolutely,

Speaker 1 no, this thing sucks. I hate it.

Speaker 1 You have to teach your kids about the Dakar rally.

Speaker 1 Teach your kids.

Speaker 1 Talk to your kids about the Parry Dakar rally. Talk to your kids about the Dakar rally.

Speaker 1 Here's how one man created a truck so powerful it kills you instantly.

Speaker 1 I just,

Speaker 1 if you're not familiar, you should look up. Like, just Google images.

Speaker 1 Just look up some of these trucks because they look like a big, bouncy, excitable dog that's really happy to be doing what it's doing.

Speaker 1 And what it's doing is driving like 60 miles an hour up a sort of near vertical sand.

Speaker 1 It's great. Yes.
Yeah. Or like 150 miles an hour over like smooth.
I remember that I wanted to enter the Dakar. They only let professionals do it.
And I was real mad. And then Joy yelled at me.

Speaker 1 She was like, why did you think you would be allowed to do the Dakar? I was like, I don't know. It just seems like fun.
Ross is a good one.

Speaker 1 It's like having a sort of amateur bracket where you just use whatever car, like, you know, whatever light. Please do it.
What do you want? 100%

Speaker 1 fatality rate.

Speaker 2 I think that there's like a pro-am, you know, you can kind of be like sort of an amateur team to enter the Baja if you want to do that.

Speaker 1 All right, we got to step up from sponsoring teams to being teams.

Speaker 2 This is why you hired me.

Speaker 1 Yes, that's right.

Speaker 2 I'm the driver.

Speaker 1 What's the most kind of ridiculously dangerous thing we can sign up for?

Speaker 1 And there's just like a clause buried in there somewhere from like 1924 that says that like wireless enthusiasts are allotted a team spot at le mans or something and we just get to go out there and die we you go from

Speaker 1 new york to paris

Speaker 1 and um do you want the leslie special or do you want um the uh hannibal twin eight

Speaker 1 i'm always going for hannibal twin eight on that one actually just we should that there's not enough like silly bullshit in the world, just in general, still less that we're involved in.

Speaker 1 And any kind of motorsport shenanigans like that.

Speaker 1 They should bring back the Milla Melia so that we can

Speaker 1 enter it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but it's not like I die. Yeah, they don't let me die.

Speaker 1 They won't let us do the Dakars to go, let's meet up and race and die. Oh, shit.
That sounds like fun.

Speaker 1 Well, we're not going to Saudi Arabia, so we can't do it right now. But when it goes back, we'll do the Dakar.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, I don't think I'm legally allowed to drive in a couple of those countries. Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's kind of an interesting quandary for their legal system, you know.

Speaker 1 All right, motherfuckers,

Speaker 1 trans women are women, but only in the sense that they're not allowed to drive. Love Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1 I see you've observed some of my driving lessons. I well, I've, I don't know, by that definition, Roz is a trans woman.
Uh, he can't drive.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was wondering how long that would take.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 we cracked the egg. All right, all right,

Speaker 1 all right, listen, that was the goddamn news.

Speaker 1 He's bad.

Speaker 1 Salty snail. We also have to talk about the live shows.
Live shows. Yes.

Speaker 1 The spaghetti warehouse. Come to the spaghetti warehouse.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the spaghetti warehouse.
You will be accommodated. You will have a good time.

Speaker 1 But I have to emphasize, we are no longer asking. Come to the podcast live show or the podcast live show will come to you.

Speaker 1 Do you want a bottle of wolf urine for hunting purposes purchased from Amazon.com, poured into the air vents of your parked car? No, come to the live show.

Speaker 1 That's my ad read.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yes.
So

Speaker 1 there we go. We are doing

Speaker 1 a pair of live shows relatively soon at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 I understand it's now called Union Transfer. There we go.
Okay, right. Yeah.
Dead naming Union Transfer. Well, otherwise,

Speaker 1 I was there more when it was Spaghetti Warehouse than it was when it's called Zimbabwe now. Implying that Spaghetti Warehouse was more of a Rhodesia situation.

Speaker 1 Just like, there's nothing justified about the existence of Spaghetti Warehouse.

Speaker 1 What are the dates? It's like December 15th.

Speaker 1 The links will be in the description.

Speaker 1 Yeah. December 14th and 15th.

Speaker 1 Sorry. December 14th.
14th and 15th. Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 I cannot stress enough, we are not asking. Do not fucking embarrass us.
No, do not fucking embarrass us. Yeah.

Speaker 1 We're there with the Quorators.

Speaker 1 They are a podcast about asking questions on Quora, the question website.

Speaker 1 It's a very good podcast. Listen to that podcast.

Speaker 1 It's a good podcast, but under no circumstances, allow their their fans to outnumber our fans. No, you will

Speaker 1 be doing a wall of death in the parking lot after, but we will also have exclusive for you. You will be asking some quora questions of your own, such as, why is this happening to me?

Speaker 1 How could a loving God watch such agony and do nothing? And please have mercy. That last one isn't even a question, but you'll be asking it unless you come to the live shows.
Yes.

Speaker 1 There will be the most requested piece of merch we've ever had available exclusively at the live show.

Speaker 1 We have made the piece of merch that I have to tell you what it is because I think Current went rogue on it.

Speaker 1 Hang on. Hell yeah.
What kind of merch is that?

Speaker 1 It's in the chat of the Zencaster. I guess the fans will have to find out.
What have we done?

Speaker 1 Oh, let's fucking go. Okay.
Yeah. Shit, be a hack with us.

Speaker 1 Don't flash it up, Frost. God damn it, dude.

Speaker 1 No, no, they

Speaker 1 have to actually know. You can't like tease it.
No, we were supposed to tease it. They have to actually know what it is.
You motherfucker. Yeah.
No, what

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 what the hell? No, they have to actually know what it is. They can't say, because what if they didn't request that, but they realized, no, I would like some high-viz.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's going to be, well, there's your problem branded high-viz.

Speaker 1 Get the high-viz, otherwise, you are going to be highly visible to me through a gunsight.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay. So, yeah, unfortunately, we will December 14th to 15th.
November, how do you sell out all your shows? Threats, violent threats,

Speaker 1 violent threats.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you can, yeah, fans are going to learn what duty to warn me, real fucking quick. Um, unfortunately, yeah, unfortunately, extending castle doctrine to someone else's house.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to repeat this from our previous announcement. Um, uh, November's gonna have to appear on the video again.
Yeah, I know. It's fucking so

Speaker 1 the 0-1 visa process is very difficult for us to accomplish because we have no press whatsoever.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 if you work for a newspaper or some other

Speaker 1 journalism outlet, please write some articles about us. There are exceptions.
If your name is Olivia Nootsi,

Speaker 1 maybe

Speaker 1 a picture of my butthole elicited a mere nice,

Speaker 1 which we've all been there.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the other thing I want to announce is the toy drive is back.

Speaker 1 I'm going to parrot what November said and point out that if you do not donate toys, you will be executed. There will be no quarter given to people who do not donate toys.

Speaker 1 You will be bent over a shallow ditch, which you have dug with your own two hands. I'm not even giving you a shovel.

Speaker 1 You will be donating gifts to the children. Wait, so

Speaker 1 this might be a little excessive, you know? I mean, we can threaten to kill them for not going to the show. Unless you're unlimited genocide on the listener.

Speaker 1 You're going to

Speaker 1 wind up, you know, killing.

Speaker 1 How many subscribers do we got?

Speaker 1 Not enough. 25,000 on YouTube.

Speaker 1 Yeah, if we got a live show. 25,000 subscribers.
Come to the live show and donate to us. There are 650 seats at the live show.
550 times 10, 1,100.

Speaker 1 A bunch of you are going to to have to sit in each other's laps or get killed. It's going to get real sexual.

Speaker 1 That is successful. Why do you think they call you the spaghetti warehouse?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Friends to lovers.

Speaker 1 Enemies to lovers.

Speaker 1 Lovers to enemies. Exes to lovers.
MPreg tag.

Speaker 1 All of these things are experiences you will have at a well, There's your problem live show. You'll get pregnant.
We're going to have to do a lot of people. Surely, surely.

Speaker 1 Surely, Dev, Dev, just do your best to bleep enough of this that it doesn't get like, you know, fucking adult only.

Speaker 2 I think it's good that every single time I'm on an episode, there's a YouTube disclaimer for warnings about self-harm.

Speaker 1 I think that fits with you. This isn't self-harm.
No, this is

Speaker 1 a sort of

Speaker 1 others' harm.

Speaker 1 All right, all right. We'll figure out the logistics behind this later.

Speaker 1 Just cut enough to make it visible and then, you know, fine. We may have to start a gulag anyway.

Speaker 1 So yeah, come to the show so you don't get sent to the gulag.

Speaker 1 Genocide on the list. Out of self-preservation, if for no other reason, come to the live shows.

Speaker 1 All right, all right. Wait a second.
Wait a second. Wait a second.
Because of the fucking Visa shit and Trump, right? Technically. Physically, I can't come to the live show.

Speaker 1 So am I obliged to, once I'm done wading through the blood of our listeners, like just put me on the list as well. Like

Speaker 1 you're exempt. We'll put you under comp tickets.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
I don't have to go to the shows because I work here, you know? Yeah. Oh, I have a fun story about that.
I think I've told this on

Speaker 1 the show, on the podcast before, but we were playing the Somerville show and I was standing in the because Rin and Megan work merch.

Speaker 1 And so Rin, Megan, and Jay were standing around working merch, not doing their goddamn jobs for which I don't pay them. And

Speaker 1 a woman came up to me and said, excuse me, is this the merch line? And I said, I just work here. And then she was like, oh, okay.
And I gotta, and so I was just like, the merch line's over here.

Speaker 1 And she was like, okay, thanks. And then the show concluded and we were doing signings.
And she said, I've never been more mortified in my entire life.

Speaker 1 One third of this podcast, which is fine. It did not hurt my feelings or make me sad in any way, shape, or form, I promise.
But now we've aired your dirty laundry

Speaker 1 while also announcing our intentions to kill upwards of six figures of people

Speaker 1 yeah man that's with that's part of the course on the show said that was announcements i don't have a i don't have a sting for that what do you want me to do i got like announcements announcements

Speaker 1 with gareth always one to two seconds behind ros and i uh i don't know anything about the pacific northwest so we're handing this off to victoria yeah i don't know anything about the pacific Northwest.

Speaker 1 Hands it to trans women. Typically.

Speaker 1 It's true.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we've actually claimed Capitol Hill in Seattle as our own. We have achieved figures of upwards of like 10% of the city.
And we also have a woke mayor now. So that's my news.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 We have woke mayor. We have woke city council.
We have about as woke as a city attorney as you can possibly get, which is to say an ex-prosecutor for one that doesn't like Trump. So we'll take it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so to figure out what happened with the Amtrak Cascades derailment, first we have to ask, what is the city city of Tacoma?

Speaker 1 Seattle's uglier sister.

Speaker 1 This train station fucking rules. Yeah, it's still there.
They don't have anything

Speaker 1 to rustic responses. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And a big, big, like, bell epoch, like, uh, dome here. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, this is, you know, I was kind of going to go with the Tacoma sort of Pacific Northwest Trenton. It makes the world takes.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes.

Speaker 2 It was kind of like the more industrial city.

Speaker 2 Basically, in 1865, there was a Civil War vet who came out west to try to, you know, make his fortune or whatever, and he paddled around Puget Sound looking for a spot of land that he was going to claim as his.

Speaker 2 And he put a cabin down in what is modern-day Tacoma on the shores of Commencement Bay, specifically on the least slopes, like flattest edge of the bay, because he was like, Northern Pacific is building a railroad up here, and they're going going to need some land, and I'm going to make a fortune when they pick this spot.

Speaker 2 And this is 1865.

Speaker 2 Nobody

Speaker 2 lived in Tacoma. Yeah, nobody lived in Tacoma except for like native people because, like, there were, you know, at this point, the territorial capital was Olympia, which is, I don't know,

Speaker 2 30 or 40 miles like southwest of Tacoma. Or they lived in Seattle, which is, you know, 25 or 30 miles north, you know, on the shores of Elliott Bay.

Speaker 2 And, you know, Seattle at this point is like up and coming. It's kind of like a logging town.

Speaker 2 They still hadn't figured out how to not dump raw sewage into the Puget Sound and then flood the streets with shit piss every high tide.

Speaker 1 But they were, you know, getting there. Oh, oh, I sense judgment.
I sense a lot of judgment in that.

Speaker 1 What do you want? Paris?

Speaker 2 I mean, it's like, no, I mean, that's a very, it's not a problem.

Speaker 1 It's like shit everyone thinks of Paris.

Speaker 1 That's true. Especially in 1865.

Speaker 2 Yeah, one of my favorite things about Seattle is that it used to be like just an entire environmental apocalypse and we managed to clean it up to the point where sometimes there are whales.

Speaker 2 So no, I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 but it was still kind of like Seattle was not a city, you know, like SF is way bigger at this point.

Speaker 2 It's not really like a place people, there are a ton of people, but it's definitely bigger than Tacoma.

Speaker 2 So, you know, for the next decade, this basically goes unchanged. Tacoma is like a village of like 50 people,

Speaker 2 50 settlers, I should say. There's, you know, natives still up here in this era.
And then, you know, Seattle is an an actual city with like money and industry and jobs.

Speaker 2 And by, you know, by the middle of the year, Great Northern had their rail link in Tenino, Washington, which is south of Olympia.

Speaker 2 And they had until December 19th, 1873, to finish their Transcontinental Railroad or they would lose all of the federal land grants that they had been given to build it.

Speaker 2 They would revert back to the government. They'd lose.
They were basically borrowing money off of the value of these grants. So they would be completely and utterly destroyed.

Speaker 1 I love a whimsical federal government that's, you know, sort of like around the world in 80 days type shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, and they've been working on this for a while, and you know, completion of a transcontinent railroad is you have to hit saltwater, you know, somewhere, and you know, uh, the Puget Sound is saltwater because it connects to the Pacific Ocean.

Speaker 2 So they're like, all right, we just have to get here as fast as possible.

Speaker 1 It hits saltwater, thousands of miles of rail rust instantly. It just travels up it, you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, capillary effect.

Speaker 1 It's like when you,

Speaker 1 uh you know what i mean it's like when you pour a bunch of water into a cup that you know surface touch no that's not capillary effect whatever we'll figure out what the fucking capillary i'm not a scientist i just drive cars um

Speaker 2 so you know seattle at this point is offering like a bunch of money and you know they're they've got like big they've got prime real estate they're going to give to the railroad and they're like okay we got this on lock and uh lo and behold the job car the man who put his uh cabin down into coma next slide please was correct.

Speaker 2 This is not Job Carr. This is the next guy.
One second.

Speaker 1 They picked.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Northern Pacific is looking around, and they're like, okay, we just have to finish this thing as fast as possible. We have like less than six months to complete our Transcontinental Railroad.

Speaker 2 And it just so happens that, you know, there's a bunch of prairie land south of Tacoma and they can build it in as fast. Basically, they can lay down rails as fast as humanly possible.

Speaker 1 So I have to do it. Total vindication for one insane kayaker/slash homesteader.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Man successfully prospected a railroad terminus.

Speaker 2 Eight years before it even got there. Like it was like for a guy.

Speaker 1 These guys are going to finish it in the stupidest way possible.

Speaker 1 I'm pretty stupid too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Only a stupid guy can predict another stupid guy's actions.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it paid off perfectly.

Speaker 2 So, of course,

Speaker 2 they start laying rails heading towards Tacoma.

Speaker 2 This is July.

Speaker 2 By September of 1873, Jay Cook and Company, which was the first wire service bank in America,

Speaker 2 was collapsing. It was Northern Pacific's primary lender and the source of all of their gold to pay the workers to build the railroad.

Speaker 1 The banks are out of money. Stop.

Speaker 1 This is before

Speaker 1 you have

Speaker 1 a business currency. So you needed actual gold to back up the bank notes and so on and so forth.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Bank is out of gold. Stop.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because this is like the beginning of

Speaker 2 an early understanding of what monetary policy would become. Because part of the reason, you know, part of the reason they went.

Speaker 2 They collapsed was because they were just over-leveraged to shit building this incredible money sink of a railroad.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, Northern Pacific was kind of operating off of the, yes, if we lay more rails, we'll just make more money sort of operating strategy.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. They were open AI for railroads.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 At the very least, they got land grants. Like, the land grants made a lot of sense.
Well, they did.

Speaker 2 But also, at the same time, like, most of this land was totally worthless, you know, in like a monetary sense, unless the railroad actually ran through and went places, which, if your railroad is, like, disjoint and incomplete, it's not doing, which is kind of, you know, a lot of the West Coast operations in 1873.

Speaker 1 So they had a lot of land. There was only demand for one transcontinental railroad at this point, let alone the three that were being built.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, you know, one half is that the railroad itself was kind of a bad idea.

Speaker 2 The second was because, you know, there had been so much mining out west that there was actually a glut of silver on the market. And it was pushing, like, it was creating massive inflation.

Speaker 2 And so what ended up happening was, you know, you had, you had inflation at home.

Speaker 2 And what companies would do is they would basically ship off a bunch of silver immediately overseas where there wasn't the same inflationary pressure to hire, you know, usually like Chinese workers to come over and then work on the railroads, basically taking advantage of like early like,

Speaker 2 you know, currency exchange rates.

Speaker 2 And so basically it meant that there was, you know, there was not much cash and also like inflation had driven the value of what there was was lower.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you get a bank run and all of a sudden, you know, basically you start with a bank panic and the American economy gets wiped out.

Speaker 2 So this, this is September when this begins. And by November,

Speaker 2 you know, the workers had not, had now not been paid for three months. And they were hearing that they weren't going to get paid again.
And so they struck in late November of 1873.

Speaker 2 They are like, I couldn't find an exact source for how far they were, but I think it was within like 10 miles of saltwater.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 1 10 feet away from this guy's log cabin. He's just like tearing his hair out.
And

Speaker 1 all the guys who talk about going back to the gold standard, this is the economy they want to go back to.

Speaker 1 Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 2 I mean, like, this, it's, it was, it's wild because so much of this is just like, it does kind of feel like the U.S.

Speaker 2 sort of operated off of like an an-prim philosophy for like the first couple hundred years it was going.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, where it was just like, yeah, if somebody's on land you want, you can just kill them. And then also like you can

Speaker 2 do all that stuff, you win.

Speaker 1 Think of them as a fan of the show. Yeah, from like, I don't know, from the end of the Civil War to the 30s.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we just have a horrible depression every 10 years. Yeah, Panic of 1871, a lot of that.
I wrote my undergrad thesis on that. Yeah.
71, 93. There was one in the 1880s, too.

Speaker 1 We used to have a panic. We used to have panics.
We don't have that anymore. We have recessions.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was going to say we had the Great Recession like 15 years ago, man. Yeah, but that wasn't a panic.

Speaker 2 You're right. I was pretty anxious.

Speaker 1 We barely have like incidents anymore as well.

Speaker 1 No, we don't have to go back to having panics. Excuse me.
We did have sound monetary return guy, but only for monetary panics.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wanting to go back back to the gold standard but just because you think it's good to get a little uh adrenaline going because the panics keep the keep capital limber i want to see some guys jump off of the stock exchange building come on

Speaker 1 um no sound monetary policy let's go

Speaker 2 so this this is uh general john sprague he was a union civil war vet um who was quite accomplished. He joined in like Sherman's March to the Sea.

Speaker 1 And he looks like the kind of guy who would do that. That is not a moustache that hides a secret smile.
It's a moustache that hides a second, angrier moustache.

Speaker 2 Jamie Heinemann-type facial hair. Plagiarized.

Speaker 1 Jesus, I just realized I plagiarized that joke from a cracked.com article. I am going, I will add myself to the list of people who will be killed for not attending the live show, maybe.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, that was fun because he is a walrus. We are looking at a walrus.

Speaker 1 Angry-looking man. Yeah.
So, how do you want, how do you you want your lithograph taken? Furious.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so he's superintendent to the Northern Pacific and overseeing building this section of the rail.

Speaker 2 And, you know, of course, the local cops are like, let's start a war. Let's kill all of the strikers.
Let's murder literally everybody here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then they found out about the strike, which, you know, sort of redoubled their conditions.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 like they literally, the cop literally rolled up to the strikers when, you know, they had barricaded themselves in and was like, began reading the Riot Act and was like literally ready to go to war.

Speaker 2 And this guy was like,

Speaker 1 that's not.

Speaker 2 You know, he was.

Speaker 1 That was probably a bad idea.

Speaker 2 He was, you know, I think it was a, it's hard to like

Speaker 2 ascribe sort of reasoning to him, you know, centuries later. But, you know, part of it is kind of like, these are all civil war vets.

Speaker 2 You know, some people, you know, may evoke memories of who he served with. Part of it is also like, wow, these guys are probably insane.
We haven't paid them for three months.

Speaker 2 They're debt, you know, they have the sympathy.

Speaker 2 Literally, everybody around us, we're going to get absolutely fucking wiped out.

Speaker 2 So he negotiated a settlement where, you know, he and a bunch of the other execs started withdrawing money from their personal bank accounts

Speaker 2 and working with like literally every shop and saloon in the area to like give them, you know, basically script that they could spend there because he was like, look,

Speaker 2 we have got to finish this railroad by any means possible. Because, you know, if we don't finish it in the next three weeks, we lose all of the land.
And this was all for naught.

Speaker 2 And, you know, we're all basically bankrupt forever.

Speaker 1 And for reference here, the land grants for these Transcontinental Railroads, they were generally like, okay, you have every other square mile in a checkerboard pattern for like some number of miles away from the actual railroad right of way.

Speaker 1 So for the for the northern Pacific, I mean, in the mountains, that was not so valuable except for timber. But if you're going from like,

Speaker 1 oh, God, where did the northern Pacific start? I mean, it started from Chicago to some extent, but, you know, we're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 2 They had roots up north, too, I think, in like the Dakotas and Montana and stuff.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. I mean, they went through the southern part of Montana.
That's still perfectly like viable, like agricultural land. Like this, this was big, big, big bucks they were talking about.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, and actually, it's fun.

Speaker 2 If you look at a, um, if you look at like a PLM survey map today, you can actually still kind of see the checkerboard pattern in a lot of places because you'll see where the government owns lands and sort of like, you know, that checkerboard around railroad tracks and stuff.

Speaker 2 And then some, you know, a lot of it's been transferred away from the railroads, but like you can actually see the original like grant patterns overlaid over top of like, you know, Nevada where the Union Pacific line cuts through, which I think.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And also like the logging in the Pacific Northwest follows that same pattern.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which is pretty crazy to look at. We striate the terrain, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sorry. Next slide, please.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I quit smoking this week, so I'm like extra funny.

Speaker 1 Good job.

Speaker 2 Thanks. I picked it back up for month of hell, and I was like, all right, month of hell's over.
Time to stop. poisoning myself.

Speaker 2 Anyway, this is an artist's rendition of what Tacoma looked like in, I believe, like the mid-1880s. You can tell it was, there's not a lot there.
That's Mount Rainier.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 1 so it looks like Japan. I was going to say, I was about to say that looks like Fuji to me.
Yeah. Yeah.
Some lovely tall ships in the foreground. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Rainier and Mount Fuji are part of the same chain of volcanoes.

Speaker 1 People didn't know this, but actually

Speaker 1 Seattle and Tacoma were part of a closed country system until the railroad arrived and forced them to be open.

Speaker 1 This is sort of a this is the the anime version of the appalachians um

Speaker 2 yeah we we're trying to reclose it so that the all the racists and like transphobes on the other side of the cascade stop coming over to you know beat up people

Speaker 1 we're working on that um you got you got to force them into like based on my study of history you got to force them to interact with you at specific named ports and then that that way you have a kind of designated chud zone and you can acquire kind of chud knowledge you have to use the Dutch as a go-between.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Well, the Dutch would be the Chuds in this. Ah, those motherfuckers.
Lost $500.

Speaker 1 All right. Here's the thing about the Dutch, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, get it. From going to Amsterdam,

Speaker 1 please. All right, here's the thing.
I was so excited to go ride a bicycle in Amsterdam and the infrastructure is great. Everything's fantastic.
Then you get the fucking bicycle.

Speaker 1 The bicycles suck shit. Holy fuck.

Speaker 1 They all have coaster brakes.

Speaker 1 I was like, I got on the bicycle and I was like, something's off here. I can't stop.
Oh, shit. There's no brakes.
Fuck.

Speaker 1 Just

Speaker 1 put your legs down, I'm sure a Dutch person will say extremely securely. Yes, that did happen.

Speaker 2 What do you mean by? I'm sorry, I'm stupid. What are coaster brakes in a bicycle?

Speaker 1 So, you know how you were a kid and you pedal backwards to stop the bike?

Speaker 2 Oh, my God. They have that for adults?

Speaker 1 Yeah. That's weird.

Speaker 1 That's like the main

Speaker 1 am I supposed to revere these fucking people that can't even build a bicycle pressure

Speaker 1 if you build enough of the infrastructure around it. Nobody will question why the actual bike is bad.

Speaker 1 I understand why they need such great bicycle infrastructure because the bicycles themselves suck so bad

Speaker 1 anyway. This is going to be a whole, this is a whole other subject.
I shouldn't bring this up.

Speaker 2 But I was like, I need an entire episode on the bicycles he rode.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, no.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, we're going to have to, we're going to have to do a new a new episode.

Speaker 1 Bicycles suck shit in the Netherlands.

Speaker 1 You know, and I don't know.

Speaker 1 We'll get not just bikes back on and berate them the whole time. But, you know, this is a different situation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we got to talk about trains today.

Speaker 2 I would be remiss during this conversation to not mention my favorite thing that makes fun of the Dutch that my wife introduced me to, which is the Steven Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures, which has an entire song about how goofy goofy the Dutch are.

Speaker 2 It's an all-time moment in making fun of Europeans.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 2 December 16th, 1873, with three days before they lose all of their federal land grants, the Northern Pacific hits saltwater on the shore of Commencement Bay into

Speaker 1 the like Indiana Jones reaching in under the thing to grab the hat, except it's like a railway engineer's hat.

Speaker 1 Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Some high-viz from Network Rail.

Speaker 2 Sprague drove the final stake, or Spike, rather, into the rails, and they've got their rail link.

Speaker 2 Now, of course, this was about the most rushed train line that had ever been constructed because not only they have no time, but then they get delayed by striking.

Speaker 2 And Tacoma has nothing in it, really.

Speaker 2 They've started clear-cutting everything to make timber for trestles or whatever, but they basically are importing a lot of stuff. They're importing a lot of labor.

Speaker 2 So it was, they basically were like, Yeah, that looks possible. Let's go for it.
Um,

Speaker 2 and you know, this showed because, like, as they were pushing, you know, bringing supply trains up, they were they laid down a train because the grade was just

Speaker 2 laid so poorly. Um, it was just this is the final essay at 11:58 p.m., the night before the due date of railroad lines.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, really, really funny to derail a train on the way into

Speaker 1 the place selected to be the flattest place where it would be hardest to derail a train.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I wasn't the thing is about the Pacific Northwest is that like flat here is a very relative term.

Speaker 2 Um, you know, Seattle is like insanely hilly and like our flat streets are, I think, you know, for a lot of like, if you're used to the Dakotas in Montana, you come out here and you're like, oh, holy shit, everything is sideways.

Speaker 2 What's happening?

Speaker 2 But yeah, but anyway, I found like newspaper reports from the era where they had to like dig the cook out of the roof of the

Speaker 2 mess car and, you know, because they just overturned the train trying to, you know, race this thing to the finish.

Speaker 2 So next slide, please.

Speaker 1 This was also relatively common for like transcontinental railroads in general, just because you were racing for the,

Speaker 1 you know, for the land grants. You would, you know, a lot of these railroads were built with the idea that, okay, we build the railroad and then once we're finished, then we build the good railroad.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 We'll fix it in post, but for railroad construction.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 Having Devin go back and like straighten your ties.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, you know, this dotted line here from Tenino to Tacoma is this line that was built

Speaker 2 that they was the initial construction of the

Speaker 2 of the Transcontinental Link. In 1891, the Tacoma, Olympia, and Grays Harbor Railroad added the leftward bend from Lakeview to to Lacey.

Speaker 2 Lakeview is now currently like southern Tacoma.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 so that in 1891 completes the rail line that we now know more or less as the Point Defiance Bypass.

Speaker 2 So it's just sitting there and it's going to wait about 120 years for us to get to the rest of the episode.

Speaker 1 It's sitting there and then we can sort of see the whole timeline of it leading inexorably to, well, there's your problem. Yeah.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 So the thing about this route is, you know, it's, it's 2.2% grade for like 12 miles. And this is kind of a pain for trains of the era to traverse because it's steep and consistently steep.

Speaker 2 So they start looking into alternative routes and they end up building a the Northern Pacific builds a waterfront line that goes is around the edge of the Puget Sound through Point Defiance to Tacoma.

Speaker 2 And that one's much flatter.

Speaker 2 And they end up up cutting two rail tunnels through it. And so by the 40s, most passenger traffic was using the long flat line that went around the Puget Sound itself.

Speaker 2 And traffic on this original sort of,

Speaker 2 as they call it, the prairie line,

Speaker 2 diminished as Northern Pacific stopped shipping as many freight trains out. After Burlington Northern was created in 1970 from Great Northern and Northern Pacific merging,

Speaker 2 they widened the clearances on the Point Defiance line to allow oversized Boeing freight trains to get through it. And so by 73,

Speaker 2 this original line, you know, 100 years after it was laid down, was basically no longer used. It just kind of sat here.
There was a couple of locals on it, but there was not like any through traffic.

Speaker 2 So yeah, if you want to go to the next slide, please.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 This is the Boeing oversized freight. This is my.
This is actually my

Speaker 2 staff photo.

Speaker 1 I would like credit for this photo.

Speaker 1 Sick. Yeah.
And they held that it was taken by you because it's a good photo. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's at the rail yard here, one of the rail yards here in Seattle. They actually just run these sometimes.
You can catch them and it's wild.

Speaker 2 It's just an entire 737 fuselage.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 For those of you who are on audio here, what you see is an entire 737 fuselage that came up from Kansas,

Speaker 1 which is on a railroad, two railroad flat cars. They just run these trains fairly frequently up to Ren, I think.
Yep. Yeah, there's like a horrible siding.
It's like 5% grade.

Speaker 1 They got to haul all these things up. Good thing it's pretty light cargo because it's an airplane.

Speaker 1 Doing a kind of ground-based 9-11?

Speaker 1 Hit the Boeing fuselage.

Speaker 2 I was waiting for the sounder, which is the... sound transit name for a regional rail, which I'm sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 2 I know they did they did and the the font they use for it is also terrible So it's just I'm not a big fan, but in any case, I was waiting on the platform and one of oh that fucking thing off fuck

Speaker 1 That took me I then I remember what it wow shit

Speaker 1 damn it

Speaker 1 Yeah yeah

Speaker 2 yeah otherwise known as one of the one of the uh the the many people's hard limits for those who have thought about it in any case

Speaker 2 um I was standing in the King Street station and an entire BNSF train just made up of like 15 fuselages came through and I have never foamed so hard in my life.

Speaker 2 I was like fumbling for my phone, like visibly, like tears running down my face. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life.
I think the engineer was like, is she okay?

Speaker 2 Like they've got to be used to like seeing like abnormally tall, overly excited women next to the tracks in Seattle of all places. But I feel like I really kind of elevated it that day.

Speaker 2 It is really cool. It combines train and plane, which I, you know, both good.
Anyway, that's all I got about that. We can go to the next slide.

Speaker 1 So, um, hold on, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take over here for a second, but please, please, I do want to do one thing, which is check on the chili. I'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Listen, that kind of sort of uh helicopter parenting is very important, you know. What if I got a beer? That's all that

Speaker 1 I'm experiencing some agonies. Um, I'm sorry, I'm gonna to grab a tree, though.
I'll be right back.

Speaker 1 No, it's okay.

Speaker 1 My agonies are quite funny in this case.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 in a sort of like desperate attempt to maintain general hygiene while being sick, like really sick, I've been washing my hands a lot,

Speaker 1 which means I have like badly dried out and cracked all of the skin on the back of my hands. Oh, no.

Speaker 1 And I went looking forward to sort of an awful lot awful.

Speaker 1 I was like in sort of moderate agony looking for some like hand cream for this. And what I alighted on was some cocoa butter.
And

Speaker 1 while I'm sure it is moisturizing the absolute fuck out of this skin, that shit hurts.

Speaker 1 That burns.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I will see whether or not this is

Speaker 1 the good kind of burning or the bad kind of burning.

Speaker 1 But just another day and sort of like dip shit ville, you know?

Speaker 1 Hi, it's Justin.

Speaker 1 So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Speaker 1 Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month.

Speaker 1 Join at patreon.com forward/slash WTYP pod.

Speaker 1 Do it if you want. Or don't.
It's your decision, and we respect that.

Speaker 1 Back to the show.

Speaker 1 Wait for Liam to come back. God damn it.
Temperature was too low on the chili, but I've now rectified that. I was too conservative.
This is, I will have to be punished for my reactionary tendencies.

Speaker 1 Chili, chili, a dish that rewards audacity in a chef, I believe. Yes.
Well, no, I use audition because I'm bourgeois.

Speaker 1 That one already got you, huh?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it took me a second. So by the time it, you know, it's kind of like chilly.
Like the joke steeped for a little bit, and then it really hit me.

Speaker 1 And I'm back. All right.

Speaker 1 Excellent. We're going to do a second sync point.

Speaker 1 So I'm going to say one, two, three, Matthew.

Speaker 1 In order to keep these separate, we're going to use a different book of the Bible each time. Right.

Speaker 1 Or excuse me, 3-2-1, Matthew. So, 3, 2, 1, Matthew.

Speaker 1 Really good visual of you almost clapping Bert in the title.

Speaker 2 He's fine. All right.

Speaker 1 This better not happen three more times because I only got Luke and John left.

Speaker 1 After that, you're into the like deuterocanonical stuff. Yeah.
Yeah. Paper fucked up the

Speaker 1 first letter to the Philadelphians or something.

Speaker 1 You guys got to to stop being so fucking weird.

Speaker 1 Okay, so, you know, this sort of thing that eventually becomes to be known as the Cascades service, you know, between

Speaker 1 like Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and Vancouver and Eugene, and I don't know what else is up there, Yakima or some bullshit, right?

Speaker 1 This sort of by the late 60s is like a daily train between Seattle and Portland and a few horrible long-distance trains.

Speaker 1 You have the Pacific International.

Speaker 1 You have some kind of train that goes down the Oregon short line to Salt Lake City.

Speaker 1 The Oregon shoreline sort of followed the Oregon Trail where you may have, you know, shot several animals down the wilderness.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Cock the wagons and float, so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 You know, so only like the international and the train called the Mount Rainier served local markets. The Mount Rainier went from Seattle to Portland and Portland to Seattle one time a day.

Speaker 1 The international went from Seattle to Vancouver and Vancouver to Seattle once a day. Right.
There was the Coast Starlight that went from Seattle to San Diego. That's not for local markets.

Speaker 1 And you had, what was the other one? The Pioneer was the one that went to Salt Lake City.

Speaker 1 So this was not great for local service, which was a market that seemed to generally work because Seattle and Portland are not too far away from each other.

Speaker 1 They're both pretty walkable, even back in the 70s when Amtrak was created.

Speaker 1 It made a lot of sense to say, well, gee, maybe we should improve this service.

Speaker 1 But it took several decades before Amtrak really seriously started considering, maybe we should put a few more trains on this court.

Speaker 2 I really love the mess of cars in this, what appears to be like an in-era slide, too.

Speaker 1 Yes, this is early Mount Rainier train. This is shortly after Amtrak took over.
You got Northern Pacific cars. You've got

Speaker 1 Burlington Northern cars. You've got some stainless steel ones.
You got, it is sort of, they put together whatever the hell worked. The train of many colors, yes.
Yes.

Speaker 1 But, you know, it took a few decades again before Amtrak really responded. And, you know, they picked an interesting sort of train.

Speaker 1 And in order to talk about that, we have to go back in time a little bit and talk about Talgo.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. What the fuck?

Speaker 1 Haunted clown train.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's all. I like the clown catcher, the cow catcher.
That's also on the train.

Speaker 1 I want to wear you like

Speaker 1 changing my vocabulary with that.

Speaker 1 This is the Talgo one.

Speaker 1 This is where don't tell me there's more of them.

Speaker 1 So, in the late 1930s, Alejandro

Speaker 1 someone else do this. Goigoya.
Goig

Speaker 1 that.

Speaker 1 And Jose Louis Oriol

Speaker 1 like the baseball team. Yeah,

Speaker 1 yeah, sure, whatever. They're two

Speaker 1 Spaniards. They have a vision.
Yeah, they're made up.

Speaker 1 Their vision is: what if we put a kind of Thomas de Tenk engine character in the Hannibal Leximask? Yeah.

Speaker 1 What if we made a really fucked-up looking train with the weird suspension? I mean,

Speaker 1 I guess it would be bad. Don't do that.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, that's the problem. It was good.

Speaker 1 So, the idea here is very simple. It was very new for Spain at the time, right? Train, it's all made of aluminum, none of that steel, it's all aluminum.
It's lighter, and the cars are smaller, right?

Speaker 1 So, it can use fewer wheels. The center of gravity is really low, so it's harder to tip over, and it tends to cant less in curves, right? It doesn't like swing out as much.

Speaker 1 That means you can go faster. Um, how does this work? Little clown bug.
Yeah, it's a weird little horrible train.

Speaker 1 Now, to explain this, we have to look at a normal train. There is a big Pennsylvania Railroad P70 coach, which is actually here.
It's Pennsylvania Redding Seashore Lines.

Speaker 1 Your normal coach, you got eight wheels on two trucks, right? You got a fairly high center of gravity up here. If it's on a curve, right?

Speaker 1 Here's the car. Here's the car.
It's a box here. Well, actually, no, hold on, let me.
And we got the clear story, and yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 So, here's the car, and it's here, here's the wheels, right? Right, um, and then there's an axle, and then there's you know, so on and so forth. So, it's and then there's the rails here, right?

Speaker 1 Okay, so when this goes around a curve that's going this way, right, it has a tendency to uh lean over to the outside rail, right?

Speaker 1 And this sort of tends to have the perception of increasing the g-forces inside the car on the passengers, right? Who are also forced out there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. So you can't go that fast, right? Getting a real East Coast mainline experience.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 So, you know, this is because, again, the center of gravity is relatively high, even though this is an old-fashioned heavyweight car where

Speaker 1 the floor is actually like six inches of concrete, but

Speaker 1 that's just how heavy everything was at the time, right? The Talgo cars, and they evolved pretty quickly from the horrible clown train in the first slide. Talgo cars are much more low-slung, right?

Speaker 1 You can see here

Speaker 1 they're very short,

Speaker 1 and so they have a lower center of gravity, right, for each car.

Speaker 1 What this means is you can go a lot faster around curves without the cars sort of leaning outwards, right?

Speaker 1 So this increases passenger comfort because ultimately the thing that limits train speed is not, you know, derailing on the curve. It's, you know, spilling drinks in the cafe car, right? Yeah,

Speaker 1 the weakest link in that chain is the passenger wanting to arrive comfortable, you know? Exactly. You could achieve greatness if you just sacrificed your need to not spill your drink over yourself.

Speaker 2 So I'm not going to lie, having ridden cross-country Amtrak recently, I feel like passenger discomfort is not the limiting factor.

Speaker 1 So this, this example, this is a Talgo train. This is the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad's John Quincy Adams.
They were an early adopter.

Speaker 1 I was desperate to figure out how the hell this thing made it into either Penn Station or Grand Central because as far as I know, they can only board at low platforms.

Speaker 1 I have no idea. So

Speaker 1 right in the roof. I can't stop the roof and climb in through the length.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, like a NASCAR. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I believe the

Speaker 1 New York Central or the Boston and Albany or someone else had a similar train called the Explorer, right? The the early talgos, they were moderately successful in the United States.

Speaker 1 You know, there was some precedent there. They were much more successful in, you know, Spain, where they were from, right?

Speaker 1 You know, the other thing about the Talgos is, of course, you have a much shorter passenger car, right?

Speaker 1 And rather than having four or two sets of four-wheel trucks, each car has two wheels in total, and they're shared between two cars each. Legally, a motorbike.
Yes.

Speaker 1 So Talgo is actually an incredible success in Europe, less so in the United States in the early years. That's because we have taste and don't want to get the haunted clown train.

Speaker 1 Well, that's also because

Speaker 1 we decided passenger trains weren't real around the time that it made sense to buy talgos, right?

Speaker 1 I'd start to decide that around the time of that if I'd seen Talgo one.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I haunts my fucking nightmares now. So, the early Talgos, they're very successful at providing a lot more passenger comfort using, you know, these weird,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 these very weird train cars. I mean, they work great.
They're very good.

Speaker 1 I'm not the guy here to denigrate Talgo technology. You should be.
Look at this properly. It works really good.

Speaker 1 But then it got better. Right.
So we have to understand how these cars work.

Speaker 1 So in order to do this, we had a friend cut one open for us.

Speaker 1 So a couple of things you can notice here is that you have,

Speaker 1 so here's the wheels, right? The wheels are actually not linked by a solid axle. They're two separate units, right? That go through this like aluminum frame here.

Speaker 1 That means that, you know, among other things, the wheels spin independently. You're never going to get things like flange squeal as a result.

Speaker 1 You know, again,

Speaker 1 the center of gravity is very, very low. And you can see here the suspension goes all the way up to the top where the car is actually mounted to the wheels, right? This is very good for going fast.

Speaker 1 In the 1970s, the Talgo Corporation realizes, oh, wait, we can go further here with the Talgo Pendular, right? Sick name already. Yes.
So the idea here is we have the suspension system.

Speaker 1 What if we we let the train tilt a bit, right?

Speaker 1 Because of how the suspension is mounted, you have a very low center of gravity, but you have a very high pivot point, which is actually above the physical limits of the car, right?

Speaker 1 So when this car goes around a corner, the bottom swings outwards. As a result, it is a tilting train with no hydraulics.
No active systems, entirely passive.

Speaker 1 The APT, fuck that shit. Don't need any of that shit.
Costs too much money.

Speaker 1 Do it on the cheap. Just basic physics causes this train to tilt in such a way as to increase passenger comfort and allow the train to go much faster than it otherwise could have.

Speaker 1 This is a brilliant system. It's really good.

Speaker 1 Talgo is cool.

Speaker 1 So when you're looking at old-fashioned, you know, very curvy lines, such as you might find in the Pacific Northwest. This is a natural system to say, ah, let's give this a shot.

Speaker 1 Other advantages that Talco had is that they

Speaker 1 manufactured their own

Speaker 1 power systems and they had an integrated bag. They had a whole bunch of stuff that meant that, you know, you could deploy these pretty much anywhere very quickly and cheaply.

Speaker 1 You know, it was a whole like self-contained system, which is one of the reasons why it had so much success internationally and continues to to this day building the train ak yeah

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 amtrack gets a test set of some kind they run in the pacific northwest for a while they call it the uh the like the pacific talgo or something they are so pleased with it that they eventually order their own sets the uh talgo six right you can see a train set here i love the little cat ears in the baggage cars oh yeah the cat ears are really cool uh i love those

Speaker 1 I had the fortune to ride these once, but I was very small, so I don't remember much of the trip other than we got stuck behind the American Orient Express, which broke down. Yep.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 it was at, what, Pacific Station in Vancouver or whatever they call it. Yeah, that's

Speaker 1 it. At that moment, that the fires of communism were lit within your heart.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 Well, I remember distinctly, there was, there was someone, there was someone in front of us in the next booth because I was with my family.

Speaker 1 Someone in front of us in the next booth was calling someone. It was like, yeah, the train in front of us, it's overhanging the platform, so we can't.
Yeah, it's a $3,000 train.

Speaker 1 Just anger sort of building. It's like season one of Andor.
Yeah, it's a $3,000 train in like 2002 or something as well. Jesus.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 these Talgo trains are used to expand what becomes the Cascade service, right? The The Cascade service becomes a corridor between Vancouver and, I don't know, Eugene.

Speaker 2 They run a train from Portland to Seattle and they run one from Vancouver to Seattle. No train completes the whole route, but

Speaker 2 they run like six of between six and eight of them a day. I can't remember.
They changed service a bunch with COVID. Yeah,

Speaker 1 I don't know either. I don't know anything about that coast.

Speaker 2 We have the one train.

Speaker 2 I've taken it once, and it was, I didn't get to ride the Talgo for reasons you'll discover.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so they get this talgo pendular. It works really good.

Speaker 1 They do some basic modifications to the lines to allow these, such as putting in new speed limit signs. Look, you can see here, this says P 70.
That's for passenger trains, 70 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 But T, that's 79. That's where the talgos.
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 Why is it 79? Because after Naperville. It's ahead of real speeds.
Yeah, after Naperville, you could only do 80 if you had cab signaling. They didn't go that far.

Speaker 1 You also had to add a bunch of other safety systems, you know, to protect from like overspeed and you know, that's so on and so forth, right?

Speaker 1 Um, you know, which will be relevant later, um, you know, but anyway, yeah, these are very cool train cars. They had a very fancy bistro car with a bunch of like bespoke, like nice glassware.

Speaker 1 And we'll talk about that later. Wow.
To use them with these locomotives as well. It's like beautiful sort of of

Speaker 2 so they still use those uh locomotives as well, but they've gutted all the engines out of them and they use them as baggage cars.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so this is this is uh this is an F40, um,

Speaker 1 which has been converted to baggage, right? Um, well, the door is actually back here.

Speaker 2 Um, that one isn't that's actually from before it was converted to baggage, I think, because now they have just a big sliding like garage door on the side of them.

Speaker 1 They call them, they call them cabbages. Um, on the other end, there's a F-59 PHI, which is actually more streamlined and designed for the thing.
But these guys,

Speaker 1 whatever.

Speaker 1 I think they're cute. Yeah, I like them.

Speaker 2 You know, it's trying its best. It's like an old trusty Toyota pickup or something.
It's like

Speaker 1 you can't have the cat is. Plus, it gives you the nice little swoop sort of line down the side.

Speaker 2 Yeah, cat-eared locomotive. That's very much a Pacific Northwest kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And the F-40s are good for 110, so you know, it goes as fast as you need it to, which is 79.

Speaker 1 This is what, if you're a car guy, you might call this a slow, fast train, you know?

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Because it goes 80 miles an hour, but it's a fast 80 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like an old 80s turbo car where it's like it takes you seven seconds to get to 60, but you're like, damn, it sounds so cool.

Speaker 2 Rowing through the gears, it's like screaming. And you look down at you, like 35, you're like, oh, hell yeah.

Speaker 1 So that's Telgo technology right here which allows you to go go faster on slow track anyway back to victoria uh so do you remember that thing i was talking about earlier where they built this rail line uh in the 1890s

Speaker 2 well so 2006 rolls around and um

Speaker 2 amtrak is like hey so we have this huge checkpoint up here at the nelson bennett tunnel at the edge of point defiance

Speaker 2 because this has been converted to single track and it also serves freight.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, this is it's constraining our ability to run as many trains as we want.

Speaker 2 And if we want to do high-speed service someday, because they've been talking about doing like an actual high-speed rail line in the Pacific Northwest since about 2000, we do not have one, but they dream big.

Speaker 2 Um, so they're like, What if we bypass this?

Speaker 2 Sound Transit, which is Seattle's, you know, regional rail operator that runs the aforementioned sounder, um, already owns most of this right-of-way highlighted in red here from Tacoma to uh DuPont.

Speaker 2 And they use the Lakewood stop as like one of their stations for the sounder.

Speaker 2 You know, what if we just modernize this whole section of rails, we can actually run, you know, the telgo trains on it. We can skip this whole section.

Speaker 2 It should save us like, it won't save a ton of time. I think they were projecting like 10, 15 minutes, but it allows us to run with a lot more reliability.

Speaker 2 And also, you know, when we do further high-speed upgrades in the future, we already have this track here that's like a lot more suitable.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 there's a lot of problems with like if you're sharing with freight railroads, they don't like the idea that they got to upgrade their trains with stuff like cab signaling or like you know, um, modern signaling systems in general.

Speaker 1 They're kind of like, I don't know, I think I'm fine running trains at 45 miles an hour.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, and also trains that are notably too long to fit in sidings, so you can't let Amtrak's pass.

Speaker 2 As I discovered on my recent cross-country trip on the Empire Builder,

Speaker 2 which was certainly an experience.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're still using Superliner ones on those. I had a car that was from the Carter admin on that trip, actually.

Speaker 1 That's sick.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was hell yeah, until the toilet stopped working. Oh, that's good.
Which happened like three separate times on the two and a half-day trip.

Speaker 1 You're now a living history reenactor.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It felt, you know, we were just grabbing the Oregon Trail segment earlier, and it's like, yeah, I almost died of dysentery on Amtrak. That'd be a good shirt.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'd be like Amtrak. It felt like I was dysentery.
I was like, I've been on Amtrak just like the last few days, so I'm with you.

Speaker 1 One of those things about Amtrak is the Amtrak long distance trains is like, okay, you know, you wake up in the morning on day two.

Speaker 1 That's when the big, horrible cardboard trash cans have come out and the toilets.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know, and it's like, oh, God.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah.
No, it was, it was certainly an experience. The coach seats get more, they get less comfortable every night you sleep on them, too.

Speaker 1 Or you get the roomettes, the old, the roomettes and the old view liners that have the toilet in the room, but like not like in a separate room, but like it's in the room.

Speaker 1 That's like, I'm going to go to another car and use it. Yeah, I'm going to poop in somebody else's bathroom.
Fuck this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't shit where I eat. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But yeah, so the Tacoma to Lakewood section here roughly corresponds to the original route that was

Speaker 2 laid down by the great

Speaker 2 by Northern Pacific in 1873. The Lakewood to DuPont section is that prairie line, that extension line that was built by the Tacoma and Grays Harbor in the 1890s.

Speaker 2 But, you know, it's been more or less sitting here waiting for them to be like, hey, we have these tracks. Let's use them.
So the initial budget is like half a billion dollars.

Speaker 2 But then, you know, 2008 hits

Speaker 2 and they're like, okay, we have limited federal funding and limited appetite to spend all this money.

Speaker 2 So they take, They get 800 million from the feds for the stimulus project that they spread it all across the state. They spend $181 million on this section of line.

Speaker 2 And the feds attach a deadline of 2017 to finish all this work, or otherwise, they run out of money and they don't get any money anymore.

Speaker 2 So they're like, okay, we got to hurry up and finish this section. So, you know, they modernize all of this so they can run the

Speaker 2 talgos on it. And it's kind of coming down to the wire.

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 wait, I'll just start with the next side's text and then we can switch.

Speaker 2 On December 18th, 2017, at 7:33 a.m.,

Speaker 2 144 years and two days after the first trackage was laid on what is the right of way for this route, on its maiden passenger voyage on the newly completed Point Defiance bypass, next slide, please.

Speaker 2 The Amtrak Cascades speeds through a 30-mile-an-hour curve at 78 miles an hour, derails, falls off a bridge, and lands on Interstate 5 beneath it, completely blocking southbound I-5 and crushing a bunch of cars.

Speaker 1 Incredible.

Speaker 1 Just like we set this bomb for our great-great-grandchildren to find.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so this is a picture of the accident aftermath. You can see all of those pretty Talio cars completely destroyed.

Speaker 2 Next slide, please.

Speaker 2 It's worth noting that this really does just completely block off

Speaker 2 Interstate 5 South. You know, the train, every single car on the train, except for the trailing locomotive, derailed.

Speaker 2 There were 83 people aboard.

Speaker 2 Three of the passengers died. 65 people were injured, including people in the cars below, you know, on the tracks.

Speaker 2 I don't know how anybody below didn't die because the train was just literally dropping on top of SUVs and stuff. It's insane.
Looking through the NTSB report, it is like,

Speaker 2 three people feels like a miracle.

Speaker 2 The three killed passengers were all foamers who were riding to celebrate the new bypass opening,

Speaker 2 which does feel like, you know, it's rail fans dying in the line of duty. And for that, I salute them.

Speaker 1 This is, you know, three orders of Lennon.

Speaker 2 Yeah, three, but I mean, it, it's just, it, yeah, it, it's, uh,

Speaker 1 that's really sad and pointless. And, and, yeah, no, that sucks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, extremely. Um, but I do, I do salute them for, you know, being there to write.

Speaker 2 I've, I've ridden so many first day transit things that it's actually very like a damn, I totally get that kind of moment.

Speaker 1 This is one of the reasons why I wait till day two or three yeah whatever what else

Speaker 2 nah i always get so excited i'm like i want to be i want to say that i rode it um

Speaker 2 so and i mean you know you you ride an amtrak and like yeah they have accidents and stuff but you you know generally speaking it's assumed the train is safe yeah

Speaker 2 train safe car dangerous yeah yeah and i mean this was this was really bad for like the entire pacific northwest because they closed down all of i-5 south

Speaker 2 And, you know, it's, it's an hour and a half because of the geography of the Puget Sound, um, it takes an hour and a half to get the detour around this.

Speaker 2 I mean, this just destroys like all local transit. Um

Speaker 2 so obviously, as you can tell from this, the train was going too fast. Uh, the why is really frustrating.
Yeah, uh, next slide, please.

Speaker 2 So, I've done my best to highlight it here in blue with on on this Google Maps screenshot, but uh, this is where the crash happened, um, uh the

Speaker 2 part of I-5 south here, uh, where the first bend is. And you'll notice that that seems kind of sharp for a passenger train that's supposed to do 80 miles.

Speaker 1 I'm noticing this.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So back in 2006, when Amtrak was going to, you know, build the Port Defiance bypass, they were like, hey, this curve is kind of sharp.

Speaker 2 We should probably build a new bridge that's a lot gentler, that allows us to maintain speed. And then they did the math on it and realized it's going to cost $400 million.

Speaker 1 So they were like, well, fuck that.

Speaker 2 We can still hit six trains a day, which was their, you know, service tire, or eight trains a day or whatever. I can't remember which of the two they were actually projecting at this time.

Speaker 2 It was 2006. They were like, we'll have high-speed rail by 2015.

Speaker 2 None of this came true.

Speaker 2 But they're like, we'll just slow the trains down to 30 for this corner. And we'll skip this and we'll just spend the money elsewhere.

Speaker 2 Because there's so many other improvements we got to make, you know, along the entire Cascades route. And we only have $800 million.

Speaker 2 So like, let's just leave the bridge for now.

Speaker 1 Fine. Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is not like a crazy idea, you know,

Speaker 1 because we've had like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 systems that can detect overspeed for 125 years at this point. Yeah.
Some,

Speaker 1 it's not like, you know, you're going to, you're, you're, you're not likely to have an overspeed as long as people recognize.

Speaker 1 this is a place where it should it would be catastrophic so we should install those systems here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. So next slide, please.

Speaker 2 So one of the systems that you would use to stop this from happening is called positive train control, which is, you know, the train, the train knows where it is because it knows where it isn't.

Speaker 2 And, you know, let's say you have a 30 mile an hour curve in the middle of your 80 mile an hour, you know, trackage.

Speaker 2 If it rips past the 30 mile an hour zone and the engineer does not start applying the brakes, it will say, hey, I shouldn't be doing this. And then it will slam on the brakes.

Speaker 2 And of course, you'll remember this derailment happened in 2017. Congress mandated implementation of this in 2015 for all like major passenger routes and big freight lines.

Speaker 2 So it should have been in place. Like this, this is, you know, this exact situation was anticipated and legislated theoretically out of existence.

Speaker 2 But the freight railroads were like, hey, this costs money.

Speaker 1 Well, also, they did it in like the most completely useless way possible, where they rely on GPS, you know, which

Speaker 1 GPS isn't accurate enough to even know what track a train is on when there's two parallel tracks. So like, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 I, you could use a lot older systems to do this properly, but they didn't do that either, which is the case on a lot of railroads in the United States where there's just like the systems that should have been there for 80 or 90 years.

Speaker 1 just aren't

Speaker 2 yeah yeah so so so notably like none of this was there there is no positive train control. The train is just, you know, the engineer drives the train.

Speaker 2 And if the engineer fucks up, the train goes off the bridge. You know, that's yes.

Speaker 2 Which, you know, is again one of those situations where you're like, okay, but I mean, like, you know, the sounder runs on a lot of these similar, you know, it doesn't run all the way down south to where this exact derailment happened, but it runs in a lot of the same trackage.

Speaker 2 And I mean, they run fine and they don't have positive train control. So, you know, it theoretically should be fine.
You know, that's why you do training runs. Next slide, please.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, you you gotta have the knowledge you gotta know the route yeah so here is a map of the uh the trackage leading up to where the train derailed um and uh you'll see that there's you know the t30 p30 and that's your speed limit signs um for the that's the two mile warning um and that's uh all right the diagonal ones yeah yes diagonal ones mean the speed limits coming up yes and then in the middle here it's not marked on this this is directly from the uh NTSB, but it's not marked here.

Speaker 2 But somewhere between 18 and 19, closer to the 19, there's your like one mile warning sign.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, at the curve, there is the, hey, you're going to go off the bridge if you're not doing 30 miles an hour sign.

Speaker 1 Increasingly urgent warning signs. Please do.

Speaker 1 Please don't make an ass of yourself.

Speaker 1 Re my previous three signs.

Speaker 2 As per my previous sign.

Speaker 1 These are, again, these are like, okay, the speed limit is for comfort and not so much for like safety. But, you know, okay, if you went around this at 40, you know, people would be unhappy.

Speaker 1 If you go around this at 80, you were going straight. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So, so, you know, there's a new section of rail with this with this corner that's been discussed in multiple meetings. And like, you know, the Amtrak knew about it.

Speaker 2 And so that's like kind of a known quantity that like, oh, this could be a problem.

Speaker 2 And so what they do is they take all the engineers they're gonna run on this section, and they just they cram all of them into the cab of one of these uh Siemens chargers.

Speaker 2 And like, here, take a look at it. Or actually, in most cases, it was an F40.
They're like, here, look. Um, and so the engineer who was driving on this maiden voyage had only ever actually gone

Speaker 2 through this section of track in this direction once

Speaker 2 at night in the rain. Uh, all the other times he was either riding a shotgun or he was shoved in the back of the cab cabin facing backwards.

Speaker 1 So this guy has pissed all idea what he's doing.

Speaker 2 I mean, yeah, but it also, like, again, I can't stress this enough. It keeps getting worse.

Speaker 2 So the sign at mile 19.8, which is supposed to be your, hey, you have a mile to slow down, and that's when you're supposed to start hitting the brakes, right? Like the two-mile sign is too far ahead.

Speaker 2 If you start hitting the brakes, then you'll just be doing 30 for a bunch of time. You know, so you're supposed to hit it a mile.

Speaker 2 That sign is extremely poorly placed and like blends with the signal box that is placed right behind it. And so like it's very, very easy to miss.

Speaker 2 And so the

Speaker 2 engineer misses the

Speaker 2 warnings, the first warning sign of like, hey, slow down, which is like, you know, he's kind of monitoring a new section of track. You know, that's not completely unforgivable.

Speaker 2 He misses the second one because the sign is completely invisible. And then, you know, you get to the third one.
And of course, there's a conductor in the cabin, too,

Speaker 2 on this maiden voyage, but like he's never even run this before this is his first time to get familiarized with the trackage himself so he's not there to help he's there to like learn for himself so he's not giving the engineer any assistance whatsoever bad bad enough but this is a paying passenger run they have brought foamers along because they do not believe that they are ensold yeah no i mean the who can blame them Yeah, I mean, I like, again, of all of the people who have ever died in one of these episodes, these are the, I spiritually relate to these guys the most possible where it's like, yeah, I got super

Speaker 1 where it's like, we hope that our deaths will not delay the program because the exploration of space is worth the risk, but it's like getting the train on the first day.

Speaker 1 Yes, yes.

Speaker 2 So, okay, so there's, there's the two signs, you know, the human error causes him to miss the first one.

Speaker 2 Signage being poorly laid caused him to miss the second one. But like, you know, usually engineers aren't like paying super close attention to the signs.
They're looking for like landmarks.

Speaker 2 So, you know, maybe he would notice, like, hey, this corner's coming up. I should probably jam on the brakes.
Next slide, please.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 2 this is a Siemens charger. This is the locomotive that was involved in the crash.
These were pertinently very new when this happened. They had just entered these into the fleet.

Speaker 2 So, 27 seconds before he reaches the corner, the engineer knows that the track is downhill-sloped coming into it, and the train hits 82 miles an hour, and it starts beeping like crazy because it's over the speed limit.

Speaker 2 This is a, it's a, it's an overspeed alarm, but it is not tied to the position of where the train is on the tracks. It's just saying, hey, you're breaking the federally mandated speed limit.

Speaker 2 Now, the engineer who, again, has driven this section of track once in a different locomotive, has never actually driven a Siemens charger. He's attended classroom training

Speaker 2 and he's like, you know, he's hung out in one, but he's never actually like driven one. So this thing is.

Speaker 1 He's hungry on the train too, goddamn.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 so he's like, Uh, what does this mean? And of course, it's a different alarm than the overspeed alarms he's used to.

Speaker 2 So, he spends like 20 seconds looking down at the gauges of the train, trying to figure out what the fuck is beeping at him.

Speaker 2 Um, you know, and just the meanwhile, the train is like headed directly towards this corner.

Speaker 2 And so, he looks up with uh, with six seconds to the corner, and you can hear it on the you know cockpit voice recorder, basically, where he's like, oh, fuck, um, and you know, tries to apply brakes.

Speaker 2 And of course, at this point, you're doing 80 80 miles an hour and you are coming up on a corner that, you know, mandates 30. So

Speaker 2 it's too late at this point. So brand new locomotive, only run this section of track once.

Speaker 2 No positive train control, no fail-safes whatsoever.

Speaker 2 So the train, you know, next slide, please.

Speaker 1 I mean...

Speaker 2 The train goes off. Here's another shot where you can kind of see, like, I can't believe the people in the cars below just didn't die.

Speaker 1 Jesus, what? Left and right.

Speaker 2 That's actually, if you look, you can see the uprights for the suspension here. Yeah.
That's that funky suspension that Roz was talking about earlier, lying flat on the ground.

Speaker 2 Because, yeah, the talgo designs were heavily implicated in the final report about why there were fatalities

Speaker 2 because the cars were not built to modern FRA standards regarding crash worthiness. So the engineers lived.

Speaker 2 Like the train, obviously, you know, the locomotive went off first and hardest, but the Siemens charger did its job and kept them alive.

Speaker 2 But, you know, some of the passengers died because the train crushed, and basically the wheels fell in and, you know, destroyed entire rows of seating for them in the car.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, the wheels bouncing around everywhere were just kind of like it's amazing that nobody else died because you've basically got thousands of pounds of chunks of steel bouncing around in interstate where cars are going 70 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 Well, now, in fairness, I think if it were conventional rolling stock, it probably would have done the same thing. Just because, you know,

Speaker 1 the wheels,

Speaker 1 the bogeys are basically held on by gravity.

Speaker 1 That's fair. Yeah.
It's not really a kind of expected sort of deviation to drop a train onto somebody's car. No.
Yeah. Also, FRA crash worthiness standards are fundamentally broken.

Speaker 1 That's a different subject.

Speaker 2 That's fair.

Speaker 2 But the wheels coming in and crushing parts of the car definitely did seem

Speaker 2 like it was sub-optimal. Yes.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So, so yeah, this this one was just kind of a, you know, and I

Speaker 2 had written this down one second.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's worth noting that in 2000, so earlier in 2017, the NTSB in an unrelated report had noted that Amtrak had, quote, a labor-management relationship so adversarial that safety programs became contentious at the bargaining table, with the unions ultimately refusing to participate.

Speaker 2 The crash was a month after that report.

Speaker 1 I am literally never going to blame a union for anything, so this this is management's fault.

Speaker 2 It is. I mean, it's very much one of those cases where it's, it is like looking through it, the NTSB cannot blame management, but also

Speaker 2 a lot of the engineers were Amtrak immediately fired the engineer, and he was like, What the fuck? And the court was like, You have to compensate this guy for the rest of his life.

Speaker 2 What were you doing throwing him into this train and saying, like, go do revenue service? He'd never even driven one before.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this, this, this is, I mean, the railroad as an institution is fundamentally broken.

Speaker 1 You know, this is definitely like an example of, okay, even, you know, you can talk about the class one freight railroads and all the horrible things they do. Amtrak does horrible things too.

Speaker 1 It's all rotten to the core.

Speaker 2 I mean, yeah, well, and again, this was, you know, it's, it's kind of funny that like this was driven by a race to the deadline to secure federal funding.

Speaker 1 Again, again,

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 then, you know, I mean, this is, and it's not even like one of those things where it's like, oh, you could say, you know, this could have, this could have happened whenever.

Speaker 2 It's like, no, this is probably going to happen like one of the first couple of trips. Because so much of it also depends on the engineer not knowing where he is.
Like, you know,

Speaker 2 all the engineers that the NTSB reviewed talked about how, you know, usually they have like fixed positional landmarks to orient themselves with.

Speaker 2 And, you know, for tricky sections like this, they have like a house they pass or something, you know, they look for

Speaker 2 in addition to the sign in case they miss something.

Speaker 2 And so like, you know, this was, this was just kind of like a first day disaster waiting to happen and really a reason not to rush this because you're, it's likeliest to be a problem when your engineers are the least proficient in the segment.

Speaker 2 And of course, like the track being owned by Sound Transit and, you know, partially, it was built by, it was like managed by BNSF for this section.

Speaker 2 And Sound Transit didn't actually run any trains on this part of it. And so they were like, no, it's Amtrak's responsibility to make this.

Speaker 2 Basically, basically you know there should be a whole there should be a lot of training around like specific hazardous corners like these and everybody just sort of blame gamed it and nobody had the training for like a corner that was this obviously going to cause a problem um because again nobody like everybody manages it and runs on it but nobody really wants to own it yeah i mean there was no like basic safety systems in place to prevent you know we all make boneheaded mistakes especially on the first day of work and uh you know, there was no, there was nothing in place.

Speaker 1 There were systems that you could have implemented to stop this from happening, yeah.

Speaker 2 Nah, yeah, I mean, if they had if they had positive train control, this just wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 1 If they had not even positive train control, I mean, you could put an automatic train stop system from like 1910 in there, it would have, it would have done its job.

Speaker 2 I mean, yeah, yeah, so um, you know, it was uh

Speaker 2 it took them until 2021 to end up resuming service on this segment.

Speaker 2 They waited to get PTC implemented, but, you know, it ended up taking another four years anyway to fix the bridge and, you know, like actually properly do training. And then COVID hit.

Speaker 2 And so it didn't, it's just one of those things where it's like, you know, one of the things that's eternally frustrating is reading about trying to, you know, hit these

Speaker 2 man-chosen deadlines for engineered projects that sometimes maybe just need more time.

Speaker 2 But anyway,

Speaker 1 amazing, yeah. Then, uh,

Speaker 1 you know, one of the one of the consequences of this was um, these uh, these Talgo 6 trains were scrapped, Jesus, like putting down a dog, yeah, well, cats because of the ears,

Speaker 1 yeah, exactly. That makes me even sadder.
They were, uh, they were sent to a company called the uh uh railroad excursion management company.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, um, and then a colleague of ours put them through a shredder and then got a a phone call from the ambassador to Mexico for commerce. And then episode 143 of this podcast happened.

Speaker 1 And a great time was had by all. Yes.

Speaker 1 Nobody had to hide in electrical closets dodging the Mexican Navy. Yeah.
As a consequence of the kind of murder of these innocent Talgos. Yeah.

Speaker 1 A lot of people are, you know, mad about the Talgo 6s being scrapped.

Speaker 1 I am told by Scooter that these things were, in fact, shot to hell by the time he got to them.

Speaker 1 And I have now seen the videos of him smashing all the priceless glass fixtures in the Biscro car.

Speaker 1 It was going to go through the shredder anyway. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Still, man, you know?

Speaker 1 One of them's preserved. Don't worry.

Speaker 2 Well, they preserved 90% of it.

Speaker 1 I preserved 100% of it, and then there's 10% of another car on the end.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's true. This is my frankentrain.
This is my real trade. This is my frankent.
Oh, God. I've seen a picture of it.
It's hilarious. It's like

Speaker 1 they just ripped. They ripped it off another car.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 They have that up

Speaker 2 at the Snoqualmie Railroad Museum.

Speaker 2 which is where my wife and I went on our first date.

Speaker 2 northern we rode northern pacific's 894 the steam locomotive it's a baldwin 260 i think like 1895.

Speaker 2 hey i made the same trip we did yeah yeah it's a it's a really it's a really cool little museum um but it's also yeah we moved in together and then immediately the next day went to ride a steam train together because we're lesbians

Speaker 1 so and good idea they do have the They do have the tail go up there.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 other notable side effects of this is that it takes three hours and 25 minutes to get from Portland to Seattle today.

Speaker 2 In 1966, it took three hours and 30 minutes.

Speaker 1 Progress. That's an improvement.

Speaker 2 Notably, it takes two hours and 45 minutes using a car at posted speed limits.

Speaker 1 I think the fastest Metroliner schedule on the Northeast Corridor is still faster than the new Acela. So, you know.

Speaker 1 It's slower across the board. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Nowadays, we don't even have we've got the I was talking with you about this before the episode started recording where

Speaker 2 we had to scrap,

Speaker 2 I don't know if we scrapped them, but there was substantial rust damage in the cars they were using instead of the Talgos. So we are now using like am fleets from the 70s.

Speaker 2 They had to ferry out here from the East Coast for the Cascade service. So instead of the fancy bistro cars and like the nice seats, it's just kind of like an old dingy,

Speaker 2 you know, kind of like worn to hell.

Speaker 1 You can go in a cafe car and see a picture of Trenton, New Jersey. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Or as I like to call it the East Coast Tacoma.

Speaker 1 There's one cafe car that has a picture of Nashville, which is a place MTRAC doesn't go to.

Speaker 1 It's aspirational, Roz.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you know, it'd be nice if they did.

Speaker 1 I'd love to go back to Nashville. I, too.

Speaker 2 Well, that makes you one of us.

Speaker 1 I'm going to be, throw what you know, Victoria.

Speaker 2 I am going to be an AO Pie on the town with my boyfriend, bottom tier trent i don't know some jokes about prats i'm running out of material here let's wrap this up i've been to nashville i've been to nashville three or four times for work and it's the only city i've ever traveled to repeatedly that has a 100 slur rate and that i get called a name every single time i'm there sucks i'm sorry yeah genuine and i'm only ever there for like two days because it's press trips so it's like you fly in you go to some fancy hotel and they sequester you for everybody i go outside for like a cigarette and somebody's like hey you you know redacted i don't know can i what?

Speaker 1 Yeah, can I you can

Speaker 1 stop? You can say tranny. I've been, I've said it so many times over the course.
Yeah, two-thirds of us can't say it, but you can say it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, no, I uh, yeah, so I'm, I'm, and every time I go to Nashville, too, it's like, I feel like you know, even the people who are nice to me are kind of like, I feel like I'm in a zoo, but like, it's like

Speaker 1 it's impressive to be able to like clock that hard, you know, like that's and just to have the full like Tesla on deck as well, you know.

Speaker 2 It's been like it's it was like it's like Tranny and like Faggot, and like I, the couple I don't remember specifically because I've tried to block all memories of Nashville out of my mind.

Speaker 2 Who could blame you? But like, it's like different, it's a rotating cast. The only city that's ever been like consistently meaner to me is Reno, Nevada, and I lived there, which shocks me.

Speaker 1 You'd think a Reno

Speaker 1 gives a shit. Bad news for the show.
Oh, no, Reno is bad.

Speaker 1 This is bad news for the show I just booked at the grand old Opry.

Speaker 1 I can't believe no one said that place.

Speaker 1 Come to the show or we're going to go. You're going to invent new slurs for like straight men to call it while you're there.

Speaker 1 Anyway, yeah. What did we learn? What do we learn?

Speaker 2 Train your engineers.

Speaker 1 Yeah, don't do fancy European cars too fancy for America.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of safety systems you can install on the railroad, not even positive train control, because the freight railroads fuck that one up, which can prevent boneheaded mistakes like this one.

Speaker 1 One of the things which I have personally found fascinating from watching, you know, well, airline accident videos, such as on Mentor Pilot, is, you know, sort of compare how the airlines handle huge accidents like this to how the railroads handle them, which is the railroads are just just like, eh, fuck you,

Speaker 1 including Mtrack. You know, it's like

Speaker 1 idiot mistake occurs, and then someone notes that the idiot mistake preventer was developed by a guy in his spare time in 1909.

Speaker 1 Yeah, 1909 sounds pretty late, but yeah.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 these are solved problems. They just don't exist on huge swaths of the American railroad network.

Speaker 1 You could have easily prevented this problem with a little bit of modern infrastructure. And no, we just don't, we don't do that.

Speaker 1 And it's confusing as to why, you know, and this is, you know, the whole industry, the safety culture needs to change.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 there is a future where people at least aspire to zero derailments. We're far from that.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 people need to realize things can be better. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 Having written Amtrak recently, it's pretty easy to look at that and be like, this could be better.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You know,

Speaker 1 this was, it's confusing just because you would think if you're rehabilitating a railroad in the year of our Lord 2006, you would install some systems that would have been considered advanced in 1898.

Speaker 1 But here we are. I don't know.
Well, and notably, maybe it's just that guy's fault.

Speaker 2 And notably, if they had just spent a little more money on the bridge, they'd had like a little bit more money instead of having, you know, limited bucket of money, they could just rebuilt the bridge.

Speaker 2 The train could have gone 80 and no one would have died. Yes.
And it also would be faster and work better.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 Negatively. That's what we learned.
Yeah. Spend more fucking money.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 If there's a

Speaker 1 system that will prevent a problem that was developed before your grandfather was born, you should install that.

Speaker 1 Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Speaker 1 Shake hands with danger. Greetings, Justin, Liam, and November.

Speaker 1 Fucked up. Yep, yep, nope, nope.
Miss Victoria, transphobic. Yeah.
I've been meaning to share this for a while, but my ADHD just wouldn't let me.

Speaker 1 I am a train dispatcher for a regional railroad here in Michigan, and this is the story of how Pete Buttigedge gave me COVID and ruined my vacation.

Speaker 1 So this all starts on what I thought would be a completely normal day. I showed up for my afternoon shift at our dispatch office, which is inside an old Yard Masters tower.

Speaker 1 The Yardmasters are long gone, so us dispatchers have inherited the best view in the house. Nice.

Speaker 1 Back Back in the summer of 2022, Pete Buttigieg, who was Biden's Secretary of Transportation, pictured here,

Speaker 1 was on this big national tour taking up and talking up investments in infrastructure. One of his stops just happened to be our rail yard, and I had no idea.

Speaker 1 We're usually kept in the dark about these kinds of visits. Mixed my days up, ended up on cast him in a room with Pete Buttigieg.
Who amongst us, you know?

Speaker 1 I like usually here implying that this has happened several times before,

Speaker 1 or once or twice they were informed.

Speaker 1 Plus, since a bigger company had recently bought the railroad, assume that's Genesee in Wyoming.

Speaker 1 We had already had random executives in

Speaker 1 the orange menace. Yeah, we had already had random executives in fancy suits showing up all the time.
They didn't write that it was GNW, by the way. I just inferred that.

Speaker 1 So when I walked up to the tower and there was this big guy in a black suit and sunglasses standing at the door, I just assumed he was one of them. I said hello, asked if he needed to get in.

Speaker 1 He mumbled no. And I went upstairs like nothing was out of the ordinary.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 that's my interactions with Secret Service, too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 What interactions have you had with Secret Service? I went to, oh, this is going to doxx my location. Shit.
No. You live in Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 I tell you, after.

Speaker 1 Got it. Joe Biden likes a Vietnamese restaurant near my house.
Yeah, you're not.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I like it too, Roz. You're not special.

Speaker 1 No, it's a very good Vietnamese restaurant. Yeah, they have

Speaker 1 the fucking

Speaker 1 fishbowl shit that you're supposed to have two people to drink it but now you just get it by myself

Speaker 1 it's owned by my landlord's cousin i believe oh is it um

Speaker 1 see giving out this kind of information is exactly how our guests end up supplying you with satellite images of your own deck

Speaker 1 anyway No, this is a problem with living in Philly is you just have run-ins with Joe Biden. Even now.

Speaker 1 So anyway, where was I? Weekdays are insanely busy, and most dispatchers absolutely do not enjoy surprise visitors staring at us while we work.

Speaker 1 When I walked in, my co-worker on the first ship took one look at me and said, oh, you're underdressed. For the Secretary of Transportation?

Speaker 1 At your job.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Turned out the visit was supposed to be over before my shift even started, which is why no one even bothered to warn me.

Speaker 1 What kind of habsburg shit is it to expect your dispatchers to be wearing like white ties

Speaker 1 kind of maybe

Speaker 1 yeah yeah

Speaker 1 not even a minute later a motorcade of black suvs and police cruisers rolled into the parking lot you'd think mayop would take the train to see the train dispatcher but

Speaker 1 apparently not important like why does okay sure america's fucking crazy yeah we know i thought he was the transit guy um apparently not Well, no, a different guy's the transit guy.

Speaker 1 Secret Service haven't worked out how to up armor a bicycle yet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, actually, I understand.

Speaker 1 Presidential bicycle. It just like, you know, it's landmine proof in the sense that the president is a kind of fine mist, but the bike is completely impervious and it's fine.
Also, for some reason,

Speaker 1 he did try and strap to it. He did try and bike around DC, but there were like three SUVs around him protecting the bicycle.

Speaker 1 insanely paranoid like there's no reason for this nova we have 350 million guns yeah but like how often do people take a shot

Speaker 1 usa well never but that's because we have 350 million well never because they got

Speaker 1 i don't under i don't understand furious

Speaker 1 i don't understand how the suvs prevent you from taking a shot at Pete Buttigieg.

Speaker 2 Their aura is too strong.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I guess deflects the bullets like the fortune and and Medicare solid too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the kind of psychic violence of like Fed security theater dissuades any potential assassin. A thing feds actually believe

Speaker 1 works.

Speaker 1 As a high-ranking

Speaker 1 government official, you should just be able to get drunk and wander out and hang out with hippies on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Oh, going for

Speaker 1 there's a Netflix miniseries about the Garfield assassination,

Speaker 1 I think also, yeah, should should take you to that position, which is, eh, it was probably better than just let him walk around. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 These people are so coddled up that they never experience. Anyway,

Speaker 1 never experience shit that like President Garfield experienced. They don't.
Being made a slutty little kermit by your doctor, yeah. At some point, you forget how to shop for groceries.

Speaker 1 And at that point, you should be disqualified from public office.

Speaker 1 So anyway, not even a minute later, a motorcade of black SUVs and police cruisers rolled into the parking lot.

Speaker 1 And of course, the railroad doesn't stop for anyone, so there was little time to spectate at the crowd of people outside.

Speaker 1 A minute later, a parade of people ascended the stairs, including railroad executives, reporters, security staff, and then Pete Budigej himself.

Speaker 1 He walked right up to me, shook my hand, and introduced himself. And honestly, he seemed like a genuinely nice person.
That's his job is to seem seem like a genuinely nice person.

Speaker 1 After a lightning fast introduction the president of the railroad turned to me and said okay go ahead and give everyone a quick explanation of what train dispatching is

Speaker 1 I was completely unprepared and frankly horrified. Fifteen minutes earlier I'd been expecting a normal day not a spontaneous TED talk in front of the Secretary of Transportation.

Speaker 1 I did my best to explain what we do probably stumbling over most of my words and sounding like a fool. Meanwhile, I'm making desperate eye contact with my coworker, silently begging her to save me.

Speaker 1 She just kept working away on the phone, like it was the most important phone call of her career.

Speaker 1 Eventually, she finished and thankfully stepped in, explaining what was happening on the CTC, that centralized train control,

Speaker 1 dispatch screen as if she was turning over to him to take over the dispatching duties. This whole visit lasted maybe 20 minutes.
Before they all left, Pete shook my hand one more time.

Speaker 1 This is important for later. Oh, no.
Thank you, Freddy Foreshadow. Now, we're going to jump ahead a few days.
My wife and I are at Walt Disney World.

Speaker 1 Ah, or as I've started calling it, Bay Lake Country Fair because it's really gone downhill. It fucking has, dude.
Listen,

Speaker 1 as somebody who's forced to go to Disney World a lot of the time because I'm married to the most terrifying woman in the universe, I can confirm it has really gone downhill.

Speaker 1 She's 5'7 ⁇ , and she's very scary.

Speaker 1 But yes, go ahead.

Speaker 1 And then other people are puking up their Grand Monier slushies, but not Liam, because I can hold my liquor, you motherfuckers.

Speaker 1 Now, when I'm in... the Disney bubble, I try and leave all real-world stress behind.
Hey,

Speaker 1 whatever gets you to enlightenment, you know, you can Disney mode. That's fine, probably.
We were in the Space Mountain queue. Oh, no.

Speaker 1 Family in front of us started talking about the news of Pete Buttigieg just tested positive for COVID-19.

Speaker 1 But is Pete Buttigieg that much more important than I imagine him to be? The just random Disney enthusiast, like, hey, do you hear the fucking high elves of like

Speaker 1 necromancy is banned in Cyrodiil or whatever? Like,

Speaker 1 the nice centrist lives think he's going to be the next president

Speaker 1 because he has a straight gay boyfriend. And I'm Marin Marty.
I keep going. Yeah, exactly.
And without thinking, I jumped in with, oh, I met him a few days ago. You idiot.

Speaker 1 As you can imagine, they put the pieces together a lot faster than I did.

Speaker 1 By day three of the trip, I woke up with a dry cough.

Speaker 1 This is pleasing to me because, like, this is one of the, I've only had this, one out of the three times I've had COVID where you get the kill cam where you know where and when you got it and from whom and you should you should get that every time if you ask me like doubly so if it kills you then you should

Speaker 1 definitely better get you better you better have like a cutscene yeah yeah by day five i was coughing so much that strangers were giving me the side eye i wrote it off as allergies because apparently denial is a powerful thing.

Speaker 1 Masks were optional at Disney at the time, but my wife, who was significantly smarter than me, suggested that I wear one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that might be a good idea. Feel it in my face.
It helped the cough at least. By day six, our last day, I was completely wiped out.
I didn't even leave the hotel room.

Speaker 1 I shut the curtains, laid in bed all day, and my phone would buzz every now and then with pictures of my wife living her best life in the magic kingdom.

Speaker 1 Yep, been there.

Speaker 1 When we got home, I finally took a COVID test. Surprise, it was positive.
I spent the next several days miserable, but I did get an extra paid week off.

Speaker 1 So I guess that sort of balances out the ruined vacation.

Speaker 1 I feel like you should get like a challenge coin or an achievement or something if you, if you got co if you got infected with COVID by a cabinet secretary. Like

Speaker 2 little Xbox notification in your peripheral visual.

Speaker 1 It's like how

Speaker 1 some video games have an achievement for like played with one of the developers, you know?

Speaker 1 So in true safety third fashion, here's the moral: the odds of Pete Buttigieg giving you COVID at work are low, but never zero.

Speaker 1 And honestly, the safest way to avoid getting COVID is simple: just don't go to work ever.

Speaker 1 Yep, feel free to cite me in your HR meetings. Thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed my story. I did try to keep it short, but well, you know how that goes

Speaker 1 from Andy. Thank you, Andy.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, this could happen to you.

Speaker 1 Remain vigilant.

Speaker 1 Always, always be vigilant. You never know when Pete Buttigieg is coming to your location to give you COVID.

Speaker 1 Secretary of giving you COVID.

Speaker 1 I thought that was RFK

Speaker 1 or the worm, actually. The worm.
I can't believe that was

Speaker 1 a worm or picture butthole He's not a real doctor, but he is a real worm.

Speaker 1 He likes to play the drums. Don't send people pictures of people.
Or do send pictures. He's getting good.

Speaker 1 A lot of people who like you. And he can handle criticism.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was safety third.

Speaker 1 Shake hands with danger. Next episode will be about Chernobyl.
Does anyone have any commercials before we go? Come to the live shows, Victoria, the finals that she does.

Speaker 1 Come to the live shows or else come to the show.

Speaker 1 You have one warning remaining, and to show you we're serious, you have no warnings remaining. Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1 Come to the live shows, or we'll shove you into the reactor at Three Mile Island, which is apparently being reactivated.

Speaker 1 They're not calling it Three Mile Island anymore, they're calling it the Crane Clean Energy Center. Fuck off.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 yeah, we'll shove you into the old reactor that's melted down, actually.

Speaker 1 You know, because we can't go to Chernobyl.

Speaker 2 George orwell trying to come up with examples for new speak kind of

Speaker 2 it's like that's like in seattle we are our our stadium is owned by jeff bezos and it's called climate climate arena

Speaker 1 yeah subscribe to the patreon and and and if you do don't subscribe to the patreon on ios uh do it like not through the through any of your like iphone apps because tim apple takes a cut and the cut is substantial actually Yeah, if you subscribe to the Patreon from your iPhone-type device, all you have to do is to subscribe on your web browser as opposed to through the Patreon app.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's it. Yeah, we will make literally dozens of dollars more if you do this.
Yes, man, I love technology anyway.

Speaker 1 It's good, isn't it? Yeah, good night, everyone. Bye, everybody.
Bye, everyone. Bye.