Episode 184: The United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle

"we can build a plane, how hard can it be to build a train?" - a plane company miles's youtube: https://www.youtube.com/interurbaneramiles's patreon: https://www.patreon.com/interurbanera Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  Three, two, one, mark.

• 0:05November Kelly?

  It's the angriest clap I've ever done.

• 0:08Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, alright, so for a little behind baseball here, folks, it's 6:42 PM. What time are we supposed to start recording? Six. Nova is gonna put on-

• 0:17November Kelly?

  Is it, is it 6:42 PM? Because I make it, I make it 23:42.

• 0:22Liam McAnderson?

  I know, I know, but I'm also a social worker and I had a bad day today, so we'll be somewhere in the middle over at-

• 0:29November Kelly?

  Okay, okay, well, I'm sick.

• 0:32Liam McAnderson?

  I know, I was going to say, to your credit, you're sick. I will come over there.

• 0:37November Kelly?

  The thing is, right, I, the combination of never ever taking a day off in my life, I would rather hack one of my limbs off than, than like, take a day off. Plus, us having taken four weeks longer to record this than I wanted us to.

• 0:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 0:52November Kelly?

  Plus, working with Americans across a different time zone have really conspired to fuck me over. So, this is gonna be a good episode, this is gonna be another flu game, I feel pretty confident in saying that.

• 1:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:04Liam McAnderson?

  Well, can, can somebody, assuming-

• 1:06Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna pitch, we're gonna pitch a no hitter on LSD tonight, folks.

• 1:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they call her Nova Alice.

• 1:15Liam McAnderson?

  I think that, um, so we should do a Photoshop of Nova as Jordan collapsing into either mine or Roz's Scottie Pippen arms.

• 1:26Liam McAnderson?

  Alright, let's go, fucking hurry up.

• 1:28November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:28Liam McAnderson?

  No jokes, no bullshit.

• 1:30November Kelly?

  No jokes, no news, only just straight down the line, uh, welcome to Facts About Engineering.

• 1:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, we're just gonna read the Wikipedia article today, folks, no. Welcome to, Well, There's Your Problem, it's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. Uh, I'm Justin Roczniak, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, okay, go.

• 1:54November Kelly?

  I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's speaking right now, my pronouns are she and her, yay Liam.

• 1:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yay Liam, uh, hi, my name's Liam McAnderson, my pronouns are he, him, and we have a guest.

• 2:04Justin Roczniak?

  We have a guest. My name is Maya.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Pronouns are he slash they.

• 2:08Justin Roczniak?

  Why are you here?

• 2:09Liam McAnderson?

  Why are you here? Yeah, fuck sake.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Here to teach and introduce you to the wonderful world of what happens when aerospace engineers try to make trains. The Boeing's light rail vehicle.

• 2:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:22November Kelly?

  Oh, no.

• 2:22Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, oh, boy. Okay. All right. All right. I feel like I'm gonna regret. I'm seeing, you know, I'm cheating a little bit. I'm looking through the notes. The thing I don't normally do. I like to be surprised normally. So I often, I often don't look at the notes and now I'm looking through it. I'm horrified.

• 2:39November Kelly?

  What you see. You are Boeing to get a rail replacement service.

• 2:43Liam McAnderson?

  People, you know who fucks with that shirt is dads. Like, middle-aged dads fuck with the "You're Boeing to die" shirt. I get compliments on mine every time I wear it. It's just like dads, their three kids be like, "Oh, that's so funny. I really like the shirt, man." And I'm just like, "You're responsible for other human lives. I'm fucking not."

• 3:01November Kelly?

  Well, you know what? So is Boeing.

• 3:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, what you see on the screen in front of you are two vehicles. Both are made by the same company. Both are built in the same decade. Both are called LRV. One of them worked pretty good, but yeah, we're gonna talk about this one. The United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle.

• 3:20November Kelly?

  Should have sent this one to the moon.

• 3:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:22Liam McAnderson?

  I would have been happier there.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Probably would have fared better.

• 3:25Justin Roczniak?

  Before we start, I just wanted to add a note here since we'll be talking tangentially about defense procurement. Which is something a certain YouTube, a certain YouTuber, Mr. Laser Pig, lampooned us for briefly a long time ago in a video entitled "Shut Up About the F-35", published June 23rd, 2022, with a clip of our Osprey podcast from August 21st, 2020, and then also a clip from our live show at Caveat New York City. And... You know, for one thing, I'll have you know, we've only had one Russia Today propaganda presenter on our podcast.

• 4:05Justin Roczniak?

  But for another thing, I'll have you know that while I don't know anything about anything with guns on it, what I do know about is ladders. Now, in LaserPig's latest video, "The USS Defiant Sucks", published July 25th, 2025, which I otherwise enjoyed, he mentioned about 43 minutes and 20 seconds in, "The single ladder from engineering to other decks was unsafe", and he recommended a caged ladder in its place, because, as he said, "They prevent falls." Then, again, mentions about 49 minutes, 50 seconds in, "That this is a flagrant breach of OSHA regulations."

• 4:47Justin Roczniak?

  And I'm just here to say, caged ladders are no longer recommended as of November 2018 as a fall protection system, because they don't actually protect from falls.

• 5:07Justin Roczniak?

  They only provide a false sense of security. And the main thing they do is you can get entangled in them, and if you fall off the ladder, you fall directly onto people below you, right? Caged ladders are not safe. They merely give a false sense of security, right?

• 5:25Liam McAnderson?

  What a bizarrely specific beef we have now. Well done.

• 5:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, no, he started it. He started it.

• 5:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah. I still like the A-10. Fuck you!

• 5:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. OSHA 1910.28, "Duty to have fall protection and falling object protection, in fact, recommends phasing out caged ladders in favor of more sophisticated ladder safety systems or personal fall arrest systems by 2036", well before the events depicted in Star Trek.

• 6:02Justin Roczniak?

  Um, anyway.

• 6:03November Kelly?

  You know what? And I've never been wrong about anything in my life. Even perhaps especially when I have not known what I'm talking about.

• 6:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I also don't know what I'm talking about, but I like, I like the A10. Sorry, I was getting, I was getting a visit from my wife.

• 6:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Otherwise, I enjoyed the video, um, and I expect your response, uh, based on the, you know, previous, uh, the, uh, what you would call it, uh, you know, timing.

• 6:30November Kelly?

  Beef.

• 6:30Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, you, you have three to five years. Um.

• 6:35November Kelly?

  Okay, yeah, sure. The, the slowest moving beef since like the Hundred Years' War.

• 6:41Liam McAnderson?

  We'll get them in, in 10 to 12 years, yeah.

• 6:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. All right. With that having been said, let's do the goddamn news.

• 7:01November Kelly?

  I don't, I don't, I don't know how you expect me to just go into the news having just witnessed my coworker perpetrate a murder live on air.

• 7:10Liam McAnderson?

  That was beautiful.

• 7:11Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so all websites are now illegal in Britain.

• 7:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, turns out, sorry about this. I, I don't love it either.

• 7:19Liam McAnderson?

  It's Nova, uh, gently caressing her computer.

• 7:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 7:24November Kelly?

  Yeah, listen, it's the only way it'll learn. Um, no, I'm, I'm coming to you from like three proxies and five different VPNs. And a tin can with a USB cable coming back in the end of it. At about an hour into the recording, they're gonna kick my door in for like illegal podcasting.

• 7:44Liam McAnderson?

  You still have that FBI open up drop.

• 7:46Justin Roczniak?

  For that podcast?

• 7:49November Kelly?

  I, I don't, I don't have a license for that podcast. Uh, so it's, it's only a matter of time before the Department for Culture, Media and Sport like, uh, kick my front door in. Uh, excuse me, the Department for Digital Culture, Media and Sport, kick my front door in. Um, but yeah, so because of the, the Online Safety Act to stop kids from getting like traumatized by the internet, the internet is now illegal.

• 8:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, well, you had a good run, I guess.

• 8:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, and so now every website from like Reddit to Wikipedia, not just like, because it's intended to be like, oh, you can't just like go on Pornhub by clicking a yes, I super swear I'm over 18 box, right? But now, it means that a bunch of websites that are not Pornhub have to institute some kind of like age verification system.

• 8:33Liam McAnderson?

  Which can be defeated with very rudimentary means from what I've seen.

• 8:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, basically, the thing that most people have gone with is a like a kind of take a photo of yourself thing that you can easily beat with just about anything, including um, uh, like a David Lynch Funko Pop, I saw.

• 8:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, I, I mean, this does make all those like, uh, you know, phishing emails you get about, you know, I hacked into your webs- uh, webcam while you were browsing porn, you know, that, this is a lot more plausible now.

• 9:06November Kelly?

  No, it's like, no, the fuck you didn't, because no one can browse porn anymore.

• 9:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's, that's a good point.

• 9:11November Kelly?

  I'm going back to like dirty novels. I'm going back to like Lady Chatterley's lover.

• 9:15Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna have to, that's how we get the kids going outside, they're gonna have to find Woods porn again.

• 9:23November Kelly?

  Horrible. Yeah, so I mean, basically, um, everything is illegal in Britain increasingly, like, uh, you can't even have a good time, like, uh, sort of jerking it to Pornhub with the one hand and like other hand resting on your ninja sword, because that's illegal too.

• 9:39Liam McAnderson?

  I saw that, that's very stupid.

• 9:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, they banned Katana's, so, um.

• 9:44Liam McAnderson?

  Come on, why don't, what, no fun island, Jesus Christ.

• 9:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's kind of ridiculous.

• 9:51Justin Roczniak?

  Someone get arrested today for having gardening implements while gardening?

• 9:56November Kelly?

  Arrested, arrested by armed police for carrying like a, like a trowel and a, and like a garden sickle, um, so.

• 10:05November Kelly?

  Britain, Britain is not a real place.

• 10:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 10:08November Kelly?

  And on the one hand, this is very easy to defeat. On the other hand, it's like crippling for a lot of websites like. Um, there's a lot of people who just like can't see tweets now, which is kind of a mercy given Twitter, but like.

• 10:21Justin Roczniak?

  This is true, yeah.

• 10:22November Kelly?

  Because Twitter has decided that it doesn't know how to verify people. It's just like, okay, well, any tweet that has like any kind of adult content of whatever form.

• 10:31Liam McAnderson?

  Boobs dot JPG, yeah.

• 10:33November Kelly?

  Not even boobs dot JPG, but like anything, including like a decent amount of my tweets for some reason.

• 10:38Justin Roczniak?

  Pig poop balls dot JPG.

• 10:40November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like you just can't see it whatsoever. Um, and so Wikipedia is suing to be like, this is bullshit. We shouldn't have to, it would like bankrupt us and also we shouldn't have to have like an age verification system, which is good.

• 10:53Justin Roczniak?

  Keeping all that data, like, I, I'm surprised the stuff hasn't leaked yet, you know.

• 10:58Liam McAnderson?

  There's an app called T, which did have a leak that was using just like.

• 11:03Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 11:04Liam McAnderson?

  Vibed coding, basically.

• 11:07November Kelly?

  And that happened like a week before this came in as well.

• 11:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  The thing that really gets me about any of this is that, you know, you're adding steps. You're wasting data and bandwidth just to continuously prove yourself who you are, who you might be. The whole picture thing is so insidious, like, okay, yeah, sure. Uh, what if I just want to be, you know, in my case, the, uh, profile pic of, you know, a Pacific Electric blimp on the internet, then.

• 11:33November Kelly?

  I mean, to be fair, that blimp is over the age of 18.

• 11:35Justin Roczniak?

  That's true, yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  It was built 1927, so yeah.

• 11:39November Kelly?

  It's, um, but yeah, I mean, so the really funny thing about this is the discourse around it. Because this is something that the Labour Party have really decided to dig in on, right?

• 11:48Liam McAnderson?

  No, you stupid assholes.

• 11:50November Kelly?

  I know, I know, but like the only real like opposition to this is from Reform, the like far right, like further right than the Conservatives.

• 11:58Liam McAnderson?

  Party, yeah, I don't know how to say his name.

• 12:00November Kelly?

  Um, but yeah, Nigel Farage's party. And so Labour's response has been to call them all paedophiles. And to suggest that the only reason why you would be against having to upload like a photo of your own face in order. To look at Wikipedia is because you two are a kind of like predatory sex offender.

• 12:19Liam McAnderson?

  Suck my dick and die, I'm entitled to my privacy, I'll never move to pervert island.

• 12:23November Kelly?

  Yeah. But shit's getting really, shit's getting really weird with reform. Like, this is, this is one area where they're like, uh, better on civil liberties than Labour. And then, just the other day, their prison spokesman was like, or spokeswoman, I should say, was like, "Why, why is Labour putting trans women in, in men's prisons? That's, that's fucked up that they, that they do that." And I'm like, "Sorry, what, like, I'm not gonna vote for you because you guys are Nazis, but it, it's, it's very, very strange to be affirmed by the Nazis, you know? Like, just, just a, a guy wearing like a full Waffen SS uniform being like, "Well, of course, the transgenders are part of our Western culture," or whatever.

• 13:07November Kelly?

  It's like, "Fuck off, I don't want your help." But, but I wasn't expecting to guess it in the first place, you know? I thought, I thought you guys were gonna be the ones to kill me. Turns out it's the like, moderate centrists doing that, and you guys are just like,

• 13:22November Kelly?

  "Fuck, I don't know." It's baffling, baffling things are happening in this country.

• 13:26Liam McAnderson?

  Baffling is the word that comes to, comes to mind, yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, a lot of things in culture and history are vibes hitting each other, basically, coming up against each other. And at this point, I feel like we've eviscerated the expert, we've eviscerated educated people making educated decisions, and now it's just scraping the fond on the bottom of the pot.

• 13:47November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  It's so frustrating.

• 13:49November Kelly?

  It's, it's, it's like perverse outcomes, I guess. But, yeah, that, that's just another little dispatch from, from, uh, my nation of the United Kingdom.

• 13:58Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck off, useless island, yeah.

• 14:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm sorry we're like this. And also sorry because like, uh, just by virtue of how the internet is, uh, and I know the, the US version, the Kids Online Safety Act is gonna kick in any minute now.

• 14:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that, that stuff is spreading, yeah.

• 14:15November Kelly?

  But it's already spreading in the sense that a bunch of sites that are just hosted in the US and, you know, displaying stuff to US users are just like, "Well, we still need to do the age verification, I guess, just in case you're secretly British."

• 14:26Liam McAnderson?

  No, you don't.

• 14:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, so, uh, this is just a thing. We've appreciably made the world a bit worse, uh, just in the last couple of weeks.

• 14:33Liam McAnderson?

  That's crazy how you guys are so good at that, though.

• 14:37November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, listen, it's a core competency we've honed over like hundreds of years.

• 14:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  I mean, am I incorrect in imagining that British politics is in some way like a three to five year preview of the crap we'll see in the United States?

• 14:51November Kelly?

  It's weird because it's traditionally, it's been the other way around, but stuff does seem to be switching, yeah.

• 14:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, we, we still haven't, you know, banned guns in the United States, let alone, uh, gardening implements.

• 15:06November Kelly?

  That's true.

• 15:07Liam McAnderson?

  We have banned letting your kids play outside, though.

• 15:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 15:10Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, because the cars are too, the cars are too big. The cars are too big. You don't need anything larger than a VW Golf. Fuck off. Everyone gets a mandated government GTI. The Germans won. I don't care.

• 15:22November Kelly?

  There is, there is a, there is a weird kind of wrinkle in this, which is that, I mean, obviously like Nigel Farage is, is like lying about the kind of more pro-trans stuff. And the reason why I can prove that he is, is because, uh, some of you may remember, uh, the, the weird pro-LGBT Trump arc that he occasionally had in fits and starts where someone would ask him and he'd give his like real answer instead of his base answer, which is, "I don't care." Um, and so, like, obviously that, that dropped in a second when it became like, you know, useful for, for like Project 2025 to be like, uh, transgender is now illegal, right?

• 16:00November Kelly?

  But like, there were a few times where he was just kind of caught like, uh, sort of not policing himself where he was like, "I, I don't care. I was in clubs in Manhattan in the eighties. I know what a trans woman is."

• 16:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:13November Kelly?

  But like, so, yeah, if you, if you translate that across, Farage will also continue the like transgender murder machine. But it, it's fun with, when these sort of strange little symptoms happen.

• 16:26Justin Roczniak?

  If only we had Trump of the 1980s.

• 16:30November Kelly?

  Still just as racist.

• 16:32Justin Roczniak?

  No, it's still pretty bad, but yeah.

• 16:35Liam McAnderson?

  But maybe better on trans, who's to say, the monkey's paw curls real bad.

• 16:41November Kelly?

  I said it earlier, it's not a trade off I'm willing to make, you know, no deal.

• 16:44Justin Roczniak?

  And he D ages forty years, but is the same guy.

• 16:51November Kelly?

  I mean, maybe, maybe the like, maybe the like pro trans part of Trump's brain will get reactivated as the dementia hits because, you know, now he's, he's like, he's in all the Epstein files. We'll talk about that another time, I'm sure. Uh, he's like wandering around the roof of the White House confused.

• 17:07Justin Roczniak?

  So funny, that was so funny.

• 17:08Liam McAnderson?

  That was so fucking great. Just like, come on, man, do a flip.

• 17:13Justin Roczniak?

  He's gonna, he's gonna.

• 17:14November Kelly?

  Bringing back a classic from Occupy Wall Street, the, the pasteboard sign that says, "Jump, you fuckers."

• 17:20Justin Roczniak?

  He's gonna demolish the East Wing of the right White House and put a ballroom there. And you know what? No, I agree with him on that one. I'm sorry.

• 17:29November Kelly?

  The White House is an ugly building. It just is.

• 17:32Justin Roczniak?

  The East Wing in particular is a shitty building.

• 17:35November Kelly?

  We were, we were right to burn it down, not least because if you look at Trump on the roof, he's on the roof of the West Wing, which is just this like, like one floor. It looks like a strip mall with some like decoration on it. It looks like absolute ass.

• 17:48Justin Roczniak?

  That's the corridor to the West Wing, not the West Wing itself.

• 17:51November Kelly?

  Excuse me.

• 17:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the, the memorized White House blueprints give me a little bit of concern, but that's okay, Ross, go ahead.

• 17:58November Kelly?

  Just played a lot of Hitman Blood Money.

• 18:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, look, I, it picks things up when you live in or near Washington DC. Anyway.

• 18:09Liam McAnderson?

  This is, this is my project. I just call it the first street tunnels.

• 18:15Justin Roczniak?

  Well, in other news.

• 18:18November Kelly?

  Oh shit, I gotta boost the volume. There we go. Uh, yeah, we, we didn't talk about Air India Flight 171 at all, which mostly because there wasn't much that we knew about it, but we probably should.

• 18:31Justin Roczniak?

  Now we know like a little bit about it. This was Boeing 787 that took off from what airport?

• 18:39November Kelly?

  Uh, I'm, I don't recall off the top of my head. Um.

• 18:42Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, you see, we still don't know anything about it.

• 18:45November Kelly?

  Well, I know, I know like two things about it, which I will get into.

• 18:48Liam McAnderson?

  I met about two.

• 18:49November Kelly?

  I met about, okay.

• 18:50Liam McAnderson?

  Two Gatwick, which obviously.

• 18:52November Kelly?

  It's, it's like you, you, you get out of going to the United Kingdom by crash.

• 18:57Liam McAnderson?

  The monkeys' paw curls, yes.

• 18:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like, man, I hope this plane lands in a country where I'm still allowed to like access Wikipedia and the plane immediately crashes.

• 19:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 19:09November Kelly?

  It, it also had a real kind of like, um, sort of far side crash location in that it landed on a medical school dormitory. So it's also just like, uh, you know, Boeing at the last second taking over from Cessna, a number of doctors killed per flight.

• 19:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is.

• 19:28November Kelly?

  Oh, well, yeah, excuse me, Beechcraft. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:31Justin Roczniak?

  But, uh, you know, this, this flight took off from the airport, um, it gained altitude and then it started losing altitude and it didn't really seem obvious what was going on. Um, then it crashed. Um, now we know from the initial report that, uh, the fuel cutoff switches had been flipped. And you can also see down here, the, uh, ram air turbine, that's the emergency little propeller that comes, drops out of the airplane. Uh, you know, if you lose all hydraulic power because let's say the engine shut down, uh, that had been extended very early in the flight. Um, we still don't know very much about anything else.

• 20:15November Kelly?

  No, very strange. Um, this is the first 787 like whole loss, isn't it?

• 20:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 20:21November Kelly?

  So I, I mean, the, the Boeing shirt remains topical at least, but like, uh, the, the other crazy thing about this is that one guy survived.

• 20:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 20:32November Kelly?

  And he, like, not even badly injured. He doesn't know how. He just like, uh, you know, found himself in the wreck of the plane. Inside this building. He just like got up and walked out and it's like everyone else is soup and this guy is just fine.

• 20:47Justin Roczniak?

  And then I found Mohammed Atta's passport on the street.

• 20:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, genuinely. There was, there was like one guy, which is, I mean, horrible, but.

• 20:56Justin Roczniak?

  I thought he like bailed out like early or something like he got the, the emergency exit open early.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  I mean, this is extremely, extremely tragic, but I would also love to see a serious Bollywood movie about the guy.

• 21:09November Kelly?

  This is true. Um, so he was, he was in the like, um, window seat of the emergency exit aisle, which I guess tracks, um.

• 21:18Liam McAnderson?

  That makes sense.

• 21:18November Kelly?

  But yeah, just, just straight up walked out of it like, um, which absolutely insane. Um.

• 21:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 21:27November Kelly?

  I don't know that you can hand much credit to Boeing for that either.

• 21:29Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, I frequently replay fantasies in my head of how I could walk out of various dangerous situations.

• 21:37November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:38Justin Roczniak?

  This is the first guy who did it.

• 21:39November Kelly?

  You, you know, you just, just hit the bricks. I mean, you know my bit about like calling myself a plane crash survivor because my like jet two flight was delayed by 15 minutes. This guy gets to call himself a plane crash.

• 21:49Justin Roczniak?

  This guy, this guy, yeah. He, he just walked out of the plane crash. I don't know why anyone else didn't try that.

• 21:56Liam McAnderson?

  Roz.

• 21:58November Kelly?

  If you're already like liquefied, you know, it's harder.

• 22:01Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's just spilling out, literally spilling out.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Cause there have been other wrecks where, uh, there's loss of airframe and during, you know, in combat aircraft and also passenger aircraft where like, somebody falls out of the plane at altitude and survived on the ground somehow.

• 22:14November Kelly?

  Um, normally it's the landing that kills you, but like.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:19November Kelly?

  In this case, guy just shrugged it off, which that's, that's pretty impressive. A- as to like. Why it crashed in the first place after like, what, like 30 seconds of flying? I don't know. Someone moved them accidentally, someone moved them on purpose, some, something happened mechanically, but like, we, we, it remains to be seen. I was just, I, I was kind of feeling bad that we hadn't talked about it at this point because it had been like on for a while, you know?

• 22:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Did all of you have the chance to, did you ever do an episode about that Tupolev airliner where they bet the guy he could land it blindfolded?

• 22:53November Kelly?

  Never asked me about what we've recorded because I have no idea. I honestly said that we had recorded a, a bonus episode that I had been planning us to do on, uh, like pyramids archaeologically. Uh, I had been planning that one for about three years. Never recorded it. So, I, yeah, the, the workflow of doing the show is having serious-

• 23:15Speaker 03

  It just washes over you.

• 23:17Justin Roczniak?

  Um, what, what happened was I had projected false memories into you of a presentation I did in Contracts and Specs 2 class about the Bent Pyramid. Uh huh. Yeah. So that might've been what you were thinking of.

• 23:34November Kelly?

  That's, that's possible, yeah.

• 23:35Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think, I don't think I've ever told you about that.

• 23:38November Kelly?

  Well, you wouldn't need to. We all share like a gestalt consciousness.

• 23:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we all have this, this, this, a single mind.

• 23:46Liam McAnderson?

  It's, it's not my turn to use the brain.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Everybody has their one brain cell on a timeshare and they have to split up.

• 23:54November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's like when you're writing a bonus episode, you get to use all of them, which is why the other two don't have any memory of it happening.

• 24:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Liam McAnderson?

  Oh yeah. That's fair. No, that's fair. I've been, also I'm stupid. So, yeah.

• 24:07November Kelly?

  Oh, me too. It's all good.

• 24:09Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was the goddamn news.

• 24:15Justin Roczniak?

  Okay. So I think a good place to start here is, uh, street cars, the 1920s, 1930s, right? Um, you've got lots of different types from lots of manufacturers, right? Uh, some are even home-built by the various street car companies. There's not really very many standard parts. Uh, there's a huge market for them, right? So we got a, here's, here's a Peter Witt, uh, from Toronto.

• 24:41November Kelly?

  Street, a street car named Bathurst.

• 24:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:44November Kelly?

  Less catchy.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  So for the viewers who are listening via podcast, a Peter Wit is a type of 1920s street car that has a center, uh, it's pay as you enter. So you go into the front of the car, pay your little dime, and then go in the car, and then you exit via the center exit. It was invented by, I think, a guy in Cleveland, whose name was Peter Wit.

• 25:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  And then it, the idea spread around the, the world. You can ride Peter Wits in numerous cities, the most famous of which are the Melanie's Street Cars, which you can ride in Cisco and Milan.

• 25:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, and then there's, uh, here's, uh, here's a Pearlie Thomas from New Orleans. Uh, here, I don't know.

• 25:24November Kelly?

  Hey, there actually is this street car named Desire.

• 25:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Well, no, that's on the St. Clair Avenue line. Desire shut down in the 50s.

• 25:32November Kelly?

  Uh, god damn it.

• 25:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 25:34Liam McAnderson?

  Get a shit in this house.

• 25:36Justin Roczniak?

  Here's a Third Avenue Railroad Company street car made by, I have no fucking clue. This, that's from New York.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  It's an old, uh, JG Brill design from the late 1890s.

• 25:46Justin Roczniak?

  That makes sense.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  So, so this is an interesting one, uh, to some viewers of old comic books. Um, this was the inspiration for the Tunerville Trolley. It's a little two axle, uh, JG Brill design that was used in hundreds of places all around the world. It was exported, uh, often as, as often as it was used in the United States.

• 26:07Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe have something fancy that's entirely made of wood. This is, uh, open street car for the Connecticut Company. They use these for the, uh, Yale Bowl games. Um, you know, or maybe have something even more exotic, like, uh, hey, it's the Golden Chariot from Montreal. I love these things. Uh, that's for sightseeing. Set up like a theater.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  So the original open side street cars are basically the urr street car. Um, these were, these allowed so much flexibility because you could hop on and off. Uh, in this picture, the little steps are folded up, but they would be down at all times. You could, uh, you know, hop on and off whenever you reach stop. Some of them had automatic little levers you could pull down and the, the steps slop down, kind of fun.

• 26:52November Kelly?

  That's really cool. It looks like very Final Fantasy, you know?

• 26:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Uh, you know, they're very, uh, they're very pleasant to ride. I will say that. Other than that, these old, these old cars, they have straight cut gears, so the traction motors sound fucking awful.

• 27:08November Kelly?

  You're just, you're just in this beautiful kind of carriage and it's just screaming at you the whole time.

• 27:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's like.

• 27:15Justin Roczniak?

  Constantly, yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  So the, the sightseeing car is really fun because if I'm not mistaken, these were cut down from other cars. And it basically has theater seating.

• 27:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Where each, each, uh, there's a bunch of rows of seats and each row is a little bit above the next and it gets taller and taller as it goes to the rear of the car. It has no roof and it just has a trolley pole mounted on a little tiny metal pole. Uh, that goes straight down to the, uh, the control surfaces. Now, one thing all four, five of these cars have in common is their little control stands, which were universally made by General Electric or Westinghouse. Uh, they were kind of an interesting and beautiful cast brass affair with a gigantic throttle lever. Um, and basically all these pre-war trolleys, uh, if it was home-built or built by Brill or St. Louis Car or whatever.

• 28:07Speaker 03

  It was taking an overhead electric wire, uh, you know, throttling it through a large cast brass throttle, which went directly to the traction motors. And you also had air brakes to stop the train and the air brakes were electrically powered by, uh, an air. Um, and so this is basically how every systems, uh, at least in the United, in the United States and North America, this is how it works.

• 28:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and you know, the thing about these, uh, golden chariot cars, I've seen, uh, four of them. I've been on two of them. If you're in the back in the top row here, uh, you do feel alarmingly close to the wire.

• 28:42November Kelly?

  Just, uh, seeing something really exciting and jumping out of your seat and just ending your own life.

• 28:46Justin Roczniak?

  600 volts DC, yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  You completed the circuit, congratulations.

• 28:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, um, but yeah, so a lot of these cars, you know, they, there's lots of different manufacturers by the twenties, even by twenties standards, a lot of these are looking pretty old. Um, so the presidents of various streetcar companies got together in a big conference to fix this mess and then created a committee to design a new universal streetcar in 1929, which led to, of course, the President's Conference Committee Car, the PCC.

• 29:23November Kelly?

  I like these things. I've seen these things before. Yeah, I recognize this guy from L.A. Noir.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. They were widely copied all around the world. A bunch of cities came to the United States to gaze upon the marvel of the PCC and then they would take the idea, or in some cases directly license it, and build their own versions. There's tons of European and even Soviet copies of the PCC car spread around the world.

• 29:49November Kelly?

  Ooh, okay.

• 29:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I-

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Tatra made a bunch of them in the Eastern Bloc.

• 29:55November Kelly?

  Strongly pro a Soviet copy of anything, pretty much. Like, you know, the intellectual property law is a bourgeois delusion, right? We- it's not stealing, we're just gonna take your thing and make it better.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  The PCC car was the most successful streetcar design in history, basically. The other manufacturers, such as J.G. Brill and a couple of others, tried to make PCC-influenced ideas. On the right-hand side is a Brill Master Unit, which is from the late 1920s and sold through the 30s. These were probably the second most popular design for a, you know, post-1920s, all-steel construction streetcar. The Brill also made the Brill Liner, which I kid you not is as close to a carbon copy of the PCC you can get, except for it has all of the Brill parts in it. It didn't sell very well because people looked at the Brill Liner and like, "I could just buy the PCC." And they bought the PCC instead.

• 30:52November Kelly?

  The PCC, which is precious, mind you.

• 30:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the PCC has the nice, you know, the nice styling. It's got automatic doors, sometimes they're air, sometimes they're electric. You know, you've got, you've got helical gears, so the motors are very quiet, as opposed to the straight-cut ones. You've got, yeah, you've got magnetic brakes, those are essentially, you just divert all the current into a big electromagnet underneath the trucks that just grips to the rails so you can stop really quickly in an emergency.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  And it works extremely well.

• 31:29Justin Roczniak?

  It works too well sometimes, it's why, you know, you don't want to use it unless you have a real emergency.

• 31:37Justin Roczniak?

  It is, what else does it have? There's one more thing.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  It does not use a traditional control stand.

• 31:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, it has pedals.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Yes. While on a podcast, you should never say that something was the first ever to have done this. Because obviously, the PCC was not. But this was the most popular version of using pedals, like you would on a bus. And it works extremely well. You just tap it to go and tap it to stop.

• 32:02Justin Roczniak?

  And then you just sit there confused as to what to do with your hands, you know?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:08November Kelly?

  Get really good at air guitar.

• 32:09Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 32:10Liam McAnderson?

  Or a yo-yo.

• 32:12Justin Roczniak?

  Another thing about the PCC is it's not entirely standardized. Because there's a lot of different streetcar systems that need to buy these things, right? So lots of lines order these with like little changes to the bodywork, or how the windows are arranged, or like, okay, does it make more sense for us to use an all-electric system or an air-electric system?

• 32:35Justin Roczniak?

  You could customize these a lot for what you needed, up to and including like, the Chicago Transit Authority just bought subway cars, which were basically PCCs with a different body on them and a third rail shoe, as opposed to a trolley pole, right?

• 32:56Speaker 03

  And there's single and double-ender versions, both of which you can ride in San Francisco as restored and equipped.

• 33:03Justin Roczniak?

  And this is one of these things that sort of staves off the death of the private streetcar for a long time, you know? But there's still problems with the entire corporate model of the private streetcar system.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Yes. And keep in mind, we're saying this, this is a private enterprise. Very few cities had a municipal railway.

• 33:24Liam McAnderson?

  Do you have any examples of those?

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, San Francisco's muni is a perfect example of a city-owned transit district. However, yes, a lot of these were for-profit institutions across the bay. In Oakland, the key system was a private institution that provided tran and interurban service even across the Bay Bridge.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  So think about that when we think about modern discourse about transit stuff, we're usually talking about publicly owned transit authorities versus a privately owned for-profit institution. So when we think about the demise of streetcars and we think about the economization, or at least what they thought would be economization by going to bus, this is why in many cases, obviously, you know, without going into forever, you know, the National City Lines debacle slash conspiracy slash what have you, this was the simple cut and dry, is that if you had the infrastructure and you maintained it fairly well, it was expensive.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  So slowly, one by one, the tram networks were cut back and back to just core lines with buses, slowly leaking in until many cities, at least by the late 50s and early 1960s, had sunsetted network. However, there were a few that held on for dear life.

• 34:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, the fact that the American streetcar by the 1940s, 1950s, you're in mixed traffic. You can see here, this is Washington DC. You know, lots of cars that are getting in the way of the streetcars, right? A lot of times, they're, you know, these center routing systems on huge boulevards. This is Detroit over here, right? You know, or, you know, and that's where, you know, okay, you can definitely drive faster than the streetcar. Or you might have a situation like Pittsburgh here, where you have these ancient right of ways with really tight curves, really steep grades. And, you know, just trying to navigate these streetcars through them was, you know, miserable.

• 35:31November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, that gives me anxiety. That's diabolical, though.

• 35:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  I put this out to all of my listeners, please, somebody, seriously prototype model Pittsburgh's tram system and build a beautiful model railroad. I would love to come visit it. Do it right and do it beautifully. I would love to see it.

• 35:51Justin Roczniak?

  Pittsburgh had so much stuff that you looked at it and you're like, how did this not derail every single time? Anyway.

• 35:56Liam McAnderson?

  Don't worry about that.

• 35:58Justin Roczniak?

  Um, you also had, you know, these streetcar companies were run on, you know, franchises granted by the city government. So their fares were regulated, right? Uh, they often had to be responsible for repaving streets and snow removal on streets. Right? Um, the, the city was the only one who could increase the fare and a lot of times they were like, nah, nah, we don't have to do that. Uh, you're going to be fine. And, you know, a nickel in 1920 is great. A nickel in 1958, not so great for a fare. Right?

• 36:33Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was huge, huge issues with fare increases. And in fact, it was like the biggest like op-ed thing of that period when it came to transit. Whenever the company was like hurting and cutting as much as they possibly could to just make ends meet. And people are losing their shit about like, oh my God, we need to raise this from five cents to 7.5 cents. You know, and it's just like, it was insane.

• 37:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, it was, um, you know, a nickel wasn't worth a dime anymore. As the great Yogi Berra said, um. So yeah, there's a lot of deferred maintenance of these systems. They were not doing good. Um, and again, cities were using these sort of as, you know, cash registers, right? Um, it was like, well, as long as we have the streetcar company, we get free paving and we get free snow removal and other street maintenance stuff.

• 37:28November Kelly?

  This is the correct relationship of municipalities to capital, I think.

• 37:32Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, I mean, honestly, it kind of, you know, it, it, it is like, but the problem was, we didn't quite, you know, you know, at some point, they, I hate to say it, they ran out of other people's money.

• 37:46November Kelly?

  God damn it. You know, there's no such thing as a shortage of other people's money. All there is is a shortage of regulations.

• 37:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 37:55November Kelly?

  I'm gonna go out of business. I have a gun. No, you're not.

• 37:57Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Well, honestly, that's the way to go. Yeah.

• 38:01Liam McAnderson?

  I might not be able to win, but we can both lose.

• 38:04Justin Roczniak?

  Streetcar Stalin. Just hire a commissar in like to, to get every driver, every, every trolley operator to, uh.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  So one of the most important parts about this is that, uh, with the private company is that they were expanding from downtown all the way out into greenfield, upon which they would buy the land, the greenfield, to develop into what became known as the bungalow belt, which were these hub rings around cities of beautiful 1920s and 19, uh, you know, teen zero houses. And they would sell the land to people to build, or they'd even build the houses in some case. Uh, the Realty Syndicate in Oakland is a perfect example.

• 38:41Justin Roczniak?

  Or a theme park.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Yes, or a theme park and/or actually in most cases both. So, um, you would have this income at the very beginning of the system in, you know, the, you know, the turn of the century through the 1920s of they're selling land, money's coming in from the other thing, but the problem is they're selling it off. Uh, for instance, in Japan, a lot of the privately owned railway networks, uh, before JR, they would buy the land and then develop it and manage the land themselves and get rent every month from the commercial and residential, uh, you know, uh, patrons to, you know, uh, what do you call them? Um, renters. Um.

• 39:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  You know, so they would have consistent income decade after decade, and the American systems in most cases did not do this. They just got the money from the sale and then that was it. And so you can see how this decline worked very quickly and effectively over time because you ran out of places to sell new land for, obviously. And you were not getting any new income.

• 39:39Justin Roczniak?

  That's right, folks. Uh, here we are. Um, we're now, um, anti-regulation and pro landlord. I'm sorry.

• 39:48Justin Roczniak?

  I.

• 39:49Liam McAnderson?

  I didn't see us doing this.

• 39:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 39:53November Kelly?

  Just being like, I always knew this day would come.

• 39:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we're gonna have to deal rocks over a ditch. Here we go, baby.

• 40:00Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, folks, yeah, no, let me, I got a new line of new tropics to sell you.

• 40:09Justin Roczniak?

  Um, now, this was not the only path we could have taken, though, right? Um, let's talk about which way Western man here.

• 40:20Justin Roczniak?

  So, in Europe, in the post-war era, obviously, all the cities got bombed to shit, which, you know, did mean that there was a lot of investment coming in to rebuild the cities.

• 40:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the United States Army Air Force's urban renewal plan.

• 40:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So, particularly in Northern Europe, right? They take control, they modernize their streetcar systems, right? Um, you know, you have, you know, these like dedicated lanes on the streets, you got dedicated right of way where, you know, the streetcar is far away from the cars. You got these fancy new, really big streetcars, or, well, they say trams over there. Um, they have tunnels, bridges, they increase the speeds, they reduce the number of stops, right? They generally improve the passenger experience for riding on a tram, right? Um, they build on the PCC model, right?

• 41:18Justin Roczniak?

  So, because there were a lot of PCCs that were exported to Europe, right? Those streetcars we were talking about earlier. Uh, using the same electrical and mechanical equipment, you know, they just like, you know, take that and build something gigantic and faster, right?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Netherlands was particularly good at this, the Germans as well, of course. Um, you had a bunch of PCC clone manufacturers, uh, just improving on the original one. You can see that in these cases, the, the noses are narrower, so they can handle tighter curves on some legacy systems, but otherwise, they're pretty much the PCC.

• 41:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they're pretty much the PCC.

• 41:56November Kelly?

  All the technicians from the end of Gravity's Rainbow, just like, really, really excited about rockets, couldn't cut it at NASA, just like, well, guess I'm gonna be the trams guy, I guess.

• 42:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Liam McAnderson?

  That's, this does explain how we get to Boeing, I suppose.

• 42:10November Kelly?

  Verna von Tram.

• 42:13Justin Roczniak?

  And simultaneous that.

• 42:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, that was, that was all the reaction that deserved.

• 42:19Justin Roczniak?

  In the United States, we either scrap or burn our streetcars.

• 42:25Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 42:27November Kelly?

  And you're still inhaling a bit of them now.

• 42:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's what you do with a wooden car. You burn it.

• 42:32Liam McAnderson?

  It's like, it's like microplastics. I piss out a credit card a week.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. The top image is the infamous picture in Minneapolis. I might get this wrong, so put in the comments. But if I'm not mistaken, one of the guys is from National City Lines and the other is the current mayor of Minneapolis, or Minneapolis or St. Paul.

• 42:49November Kelly?

  Mayor, mayor detected. Okay. Writing this down for future use.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  And then the bottom image is the classic iconic used in every book about trams ever covering American stuff. This is the Terminal Island Scrapyard in Long Beach, California in the early 1960s. And these are all Hollywood cars. They were called Hollywood cars. They served Hollywood. They're a Peter Witte variant. Were scrapped out there and only a handful survive today, some of which you can enjoy riding at the Southern California Railway Museum in Paris, California.

• 43:24November Kelly?

  Look, look at how they massacred my boy.

• 43:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Liam McAnderson?

  Seriously.

• 43:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, our, our streetcar systems, they don't have the money to modernize. The streetcars couldn't take advantage of the, you know, wildly generous funds that the government was dispersing for road improvements and the shiny new highways and so on and so forth. And, you know, these streetcars required expensive to maintain tracks and, you know, wires and, you know, depots and all this stuff. And, you know, ultimately, I, it was sort of a rational economic decision to say, okay, to hell with this. I'd ride a fucking bus, you know?

• 44:03Justin Roczniak?

  There was no sort of support for any of these operations.

• 44:07November Kelly?

  Very funny to do the Marshall Plan on Europe and not on America.

• 44:10Justin Roczniak?

  Not, not on yourself. Yeah. Well, I keep that in mind for later.

• 44:15Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, God.

• 44:16Justin Roczniak?

  So many years pass. By the 1970s, folks are starting to notice that in Europe, these trams, right, they seem to work a lot better than they do in the United States. One man is set to the task of figuring out why. That's Dr. Vukin Vuchik of University of Pennsylvania.

• 44:36Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, yes.

• 44:37Justin Roczniak?

  So, Dr. Vuchik puts together this huge report for the new Urban Mass Transit Administration about tram systems in Europe, how they compare to those remaining streetcar systems in the United States, and he calls it "light rail transit systems, a definition and evaluation", and in the process coins a term that will later come to haunt us all: "light rail".

• 45:02Liam McAnderson?

  Boo.

• 45:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Justin Roczniak?

  What is light rail?

• 45:09Liam McAnderson?

  It's whatever you want it to be.

• 45:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 45:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Justin Roczniak?

  At this day and age, yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  For, for the purposes of this podcast, let's define light rail as the following: Light rail is typically an electrified, uh, sort of, uh, it's an electrified, steel-wheel-on-steel-rail streetcar system that can also have elements of earlier inter-urban designs, that can have legacy stuff, but in general, it is not a, uh, in the old days, they used to call them the steam railroads, um, the heavy rail, which is, you know, in modern day, a diesel or electric locomotive hauling separate coaches that are unpowered on normal railroad mainline. So, light rail will go typically in the street, sometimes on segregated rights

• 45:57Speaker 03

  of way, but will be part of the urban fabric, versus heavy rail, which is its own thing, separated typically from the urban fabric, and your main points of contact are actual stations.

• 46:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, light rail is gonna, I mean, you know, it's gonna, it's, it's, you know, heavy rail is like a subway or an elevated train or something. Um, you know, Vuchik goes around Europe and, you know, sort of looks at all these different operating practices, right? You know, you're separating the trams from the cars, you have, um, elevated lines, you have tunnelled lines, you have, uh, all kinds of stuff that makes the tram work a lot better than a bus, right?

• 46:41Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 46:42Justin Roczniak?

  It says, "Hey". You know, we should consider applying these to the few remaining American streetcar networks. As opposed to some of the plans at the time, which well, the plan for the Urban Mass Transit Administration to that point was, we're just gonna give every city the size of Dayton or larger a subway system.

• 47:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes. Why should, why shouldn't Harrisburg have four subway lines?

• 47:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Liam McAnderson?

  Tell me motherfuckers.

• 47:14November Kelly?

  Control C, Control A, Control V. It's the point in the city builder game where you're getting kind of bored with it.

• 47:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but this is a situation where, okay, we can build an upgraded tram system, a light rail line, for a fraction of the cost of a heavy rail line with most of the capacity and most of the usefulness.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  And in many cases, recycling old legacy rights of way and in fact, in many cases, retracing the original routes of old streetcar lines that may have already been ripped up or may have the rails still in the street, but obviously would have to be rebuilt to accept light rail.

• 47:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Modern equipment. And a very positive example of light rail that's more transit oriented, and this will probably get a lot of comments, is the Docklands Light Railway reusing heavy rail rights of way and putting in new stations to take advantage of that, right? It's not a traditional light rail system by any means, but it's a good example of reusing an old right of way.

• 48:17Justin Roczniak?

  It's always one of those situations where it's like, okay, what exactly makes it light? It's the capacity. And the Docklands Light Railway is, well, I wouldn't consider it light by American standards.

• 48:32November Kelly?

  But it's light rail as a branding exercise.

• 48:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, I think that's ultimately what light rail becomes, you know? I mean, I remember a couple of years ago on the Inquirer, they called the Market Frankfurt Line "light rail." It's like, no, no, the definitionally is not.

• 48:52Justin Roczniak?

  Light rail as a term today doesn't mean anything.

• 48:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but anyway, yeah, so you know, here's a bunch of nice little vignettes of European tram systems as like, you know, this is what we should be striving for as opposed to, um, you know, what we have in the United States. And what do you have in the United States at this point? It's, um.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  Moldy.

• 49:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's moldy.

• 49:16November Kelly?

  Hmm, it smells a little bit in here.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Like Boston, for instance, has, uh, I believe elevated and subway systems that date back to the late 1890s and the very dawn of electrification.

• 49:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Um, and the SF Muni has elements like the, uh, the West Portal Twin Peaks Tunnel, uh, which date back to, well, as it said on the thing, 1917, right there on the art.

• 49:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 49:41November Kelly?

  If it ain't broke, don't fix it or upgrade it.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Um, and you know, I have to give some credit to the system that did stick around. Um, you know, they did it tooth and nail. They thought of brilliant ways to keep things operating far longer than they should have. Um, and in some cases resulting in various patents for various fixes they did. Um, but by the 60s and 70s, it was all really long in the tooth and the youngest new equipment were the PCCs, the last of which was built in 1954.

• 50:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  And now we're approaching 1970. So think about that.

• 50:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, in the, the systems that were left, uh, usually had a lot of dedicated right of way where you couldn't really use a bus. So as we mentioned, you had Boston, San Francisco down here. Um, you had sections in Pittsburgh where because the streets were so narrow and the grades were so stupid, um, that buses couldn't fit. Um, in Philly, we had the, uh, subway surface trolley tunnel, of course. Um, you know, in New Orleans, of course, they ran the, the street cars on the neutral ground, right? Um, Newark, uh, New Jersey also ran mostly in tunnels and dedicated right away. And then you had the weird one.

• 50:56November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 50:57Justin Roczniak?

  Which was El Paso.

• 50:59November Kelly?

  What?

• 50:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Because their system ran into Ciudad Juarez where no one had a car.

• 51:05Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, okay, I, alright, yeah. Sure, why the hell not?

• 51:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you could take a PCC across the border.

• 51:12Liam McAnderson?

  That fucking rips.

• 51:14November Kelly?

  Take me back.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Which, you don't even need to be taken back, they're still running them, they just restored a bunch of them.

• 51:21Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, the border crossing is not back yet, but they do wanna do it.

• 51:25Speaker 03

  No. Um, yeah, you can ride them in El Paso proper, but yeah, the, the way these cars survived was really funny. Some random, uh, guy bought the remaining cars and stored them at the airport for thirty years. Until the early two thousands.

• 51:39November Kelly?

  God bless hoarding, the cause of and solution to, uh, all of our nation's problems.

• 51:44Speaker 03

  Right?

• 51:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so, yeah, all these systems are still using their old and busted PCCs, except in New Orleans, where they are of course using their Pearly Thomas cars from the Cretaceous period.

• 51:55November Kelly?

  I'm very, very, very into the guy being like, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll need him someday, I'll need him someday.

• 52:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 52:03November Kelly?

  You should, you should really give up these like, you should really give up these like thirty street cars, you're never gonna use them, it's like, one day. And then, of course, he is the most vindicated a man has ever been.

• 52:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  My time has come.

• 52:19Justin Roczniak?

  So, clearly, what we need is a new, universal streetcar, we're great the first time.

• 52:25Liam McAnderson?

  Again, again, it's like this X K C C D cartoon.

• 52:28November Kelly?

  Solution, there are now fifteen competing standards, yeah.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  So, let's talk a little bit about the formation.

• 52:36Liam McAnderson?

  Eric's greatest president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, yes.

• 52:40Justin Roczniak?

  Jumbo.

• 52:41Speaker 03

  Jumbo.

• 52:42Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you wanna do that?

• 52:42November Kelly?

  Killed a lot of kids, I, mixed legacy, let's say.

• 52:46Justin Roczniak?

  Mixed legacy, yeah.

• 52:47Liam McAnderson?

  Mixed legacy, yeah, well, they, they all do.

• 52:49Justin Roczniak?

  But he did have an amphibious car.

• 52:51November Kelly?

  That is true, and he did use it to prank people. On the other hand, he also used a lot of napalm to prank people, which is a lot less funny.

• 52:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's less funny.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  I'm just imagining like the Fallout New Vegas reputation management system, but for LBJ.

• 53:04November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the, the prank is, you don't think that the plot of Kill Everything That Moves is gonna happen to you, and then it does. It's not the best prank.

• 53:13Justin Roczniak?

  You're dropping napalm on a Vietnamese, a Vietnamese village, and, um, you're on TikTok saying, "Just a prank, social experiment."

• 53:22Liam McAnderson?

  Just a prank social experiment.

• 53:24November Kelly?

  I think we're a couple of steps away from TikTok is actually doing this.

• 53:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 53:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's true.

• 53:29Liam McAnderson?

  Don't, don't, don't give them any ideas. And also, if you're gonna get ideas, uh, we want those royalties, motherfuckers.

• 53:36Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 53:37November Kelly?

  Doing the Mr. Beast, uh, like, video thumbnail format, but it's like, I launched a a limited intervention in Southeast Asia to protect democracy.

• 53:47Liam McAnderson?

  Did you see the guy who keeps emailing us but only addressing me, asking to make new thumbnails for our videos?

• 53:54November Kelly?

  I didn't see that, no.

• 53:56Liam McAnderson?

  Five times. Five. One, two, three, four. Five times. And it's just addressed to me.

• 54:01November Kelly?

  I'm not opposed to a more YouTube-style thumbnail, just so long as it doesn't have Mr. Beast in it.

• 54:06Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, it would have to have all of us soy-facing.

• 54:09November Kelly?

  We take it in turns to do the Mr. Beast face.

• 54:12Liam McAnderson?

  I would like to [bleep] that guy. I hope he has a good time.

• 54:16November Kelly?

  I don't, I don't know that that guy's insulted.

• 54:18Liam McAnderson?

  No, he doesn't have a soul. He doesn't have a fuck soul, which is fine. Whatever. Yeah, go on, Miles.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the, the formation of the UMTA happens, uh, in the early 1960s, and basically what they wanted to do is throw out the book of old-school railroading. They could see that both heavy rail and light rail were faltering in the 60s for obvious reasons, competition with trucking, competition with buses, all this sort of thing, and lack of infrastructure, uh, investment because most of them were privately owned at the time, blah, blah, blah, right? So, uh, the Great Society goes forth and thinks, maybe we can completely rethink this from the ground up. So they do a bunch of crazy spaghetti, you know, throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks things. Um, one of which we won't cover here, but perhaps could be another episode, is about the air cushion

• 55:07Speaker 03

  uh, maglev train that they're thinking about for intercity stuff that doesn't go anywhere. We have the absolutely delightful Pueblo Rail Testing Facility in Colorado, which comes out of the UMTA, which is where all, including the Boeing LRV, will be tested eventually for certification for operation. It does a bunch of other things, including an absolutely buck wild 1968 report on what they think transportation should be like in X number of years. And a lot of it is a bunch of really beautiful 1960s, like jaunty madman era gouache illustrations of the most harebrained

• 55:51Speaker 03

  PRT, Personal Rapid Transit, rubber tired, concrete guideway bullshit you've ever seen in your life, but sold to you in this gorgeous jaunty illustration that almost, almost makes you think it's a good idea, but it's not. I looked, yeah, I searched light rail or, you know, steel rail in this 1968 report. It came up white and it was only in passing. It's like, this is the past. We need the future. And so it's very interesting that out of the blind optimism of the great society UMTA, we start getting a new idea for maybe we should throw out the entire book on street cars. Sign it for the ground.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  So, yeah, he signs this into law in 64. A bunch of stuff happens. Let's go to the next slide real quick.

• 56:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Because we have to frame this a little bit. And there's a little Easter egg for those who are following along in slides of the little tiny 821 helicopter. This is an era of absolute unbridled optimism for what technology can bring to us in the future. We harness the atom.

• 57:00Justin Roczniak?

  Fucking morons.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, we harness the atom, you know, 15 years, 20 years earlier. You know, we're re-engineering, the Army Corps of Re-Engineers was engineering waterways and building dams, you know, for the last 45 years.

• 57:12Justin Roczniak?

  We built a, we built a plane that goes Mach 1 million and flies using its own shockwave.

• 57:19Justin Roczniak?

  It has 10,000 engines.

• 57:22Liam McAnderson?

  Chuck, yeah, you ain't got shit on me, Isaiah, as I just kick a brick out the back, yeah.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  Like, the XB70, to me personally, is my, the perfect evocation of unbridled 60s optimistic future thinking. Like, it was flawed, it had a lot of issues, it was fantastic, and batshit in the most inciting way from an aeronautical engineering perspective. And of course, it ended tragically, or at least one of the two ended tragically. Um, so you can see the foundation upon which we're thinking, maybe we should redesign the tram, right?

• 57:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Ridership is down, the shit's falling apart, maybe with, I love they say, yeah, I love to say vigorous leadership of the federal government. When was the last time you saw that in a document?

• 58:03Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my god, no, no, they don't like vigorous leadership anymore.

• 58:07Liam McAnderson?

  Putting people on alligators or Alcatraz.

• 58:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, I guess that is vigorous leadership.

• 58:10Liam McAnderson?

  The bad kind, yes, oh my god.

• 58:18Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. Uh, 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. Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. Um, it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes, so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider

• 59:02Justin Roczniak?

  if you have two bucks to spare each month. Uh, join at patreon.com/typpod. Do it if you want, or don't, it's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show.

• 59:21Speaker 03

  So, who will rescue transit? Who knows how to address the future? Guys like this, and it's the picture of an old retirement age, uh, motorman in his full regalia blue suit, or, or guys like this.

• 59:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  And it's, uh, two absolute, uh, you know, IBM style NASA engineers, uh, pretending not to look at the camera.

• 59:45Justin Roczniak?

  Well, this is, um, this is the secret. Both these guys, but all three guys pictured here are drunk.

• 59:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, why, dude, it was the same, yeah, it was 71, man. Nixon was president, you could do fucking anything.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  So, I mean, obviously the spoiler is that the guy on the left, the retirement age motorman, did end up knowing a little bit more.

• 1:00:04Justin Roczniak?

  He knew a little bit about running a streetcar, yeah.

• 1:00:09November Kelly?

  Train good, NASA bad?

• 1:00:11Justin Roczniak?

  Uh... Well, NASA had trains, but those guys weren't allowed to consult on the trains.

• 1:00:18November Kelly?

  What?

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Not allowed, flatly.

• 1:00:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, alright, I'll just go fuck myself.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're just, they're just locked outside the door, like with their hands on the window looking in.

• 1:00:28Justin Roczniak?

  Like, no, don't do that, don't, no, no!

• 1:00:32Liam McAnderson?

  You're gonna mess it up, you're gonna mess it up!

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, uh, let's get a little vertical.

• 1:00:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  Let's pick out some things that go up and down instead of side to side.

• 1:00:44Justin Roczniak?

  Piasacki Helicopter Corporation.

• 1:00:47Liam McAnderson?

  Wow, the liveries on these motherfuckers!

• 1:00:50Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  They delivered almost more bananas than United Fruit.

• 1:00:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is the company that wasn't Sikorsky, but was still, you know, still proved the only people stupid enough to build a helicopter are Polish.

• 1:01:04Liam McAnderson?

  Broads!

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  Piasacki, um, I'll have you primarily talk about this, Justin, but, uh, for our viewers who are not looking at the slideshow, uh, produced an array of twin rotor helicopters, uh, most famously later on, of course, the Chinook and the C-9, but the earlier ones, uh, were incredible banana-shaped affairs, the point where they actually literally called them the Flying Banana, uh, twin rotor, uh, all metal-framed helicopters, and in some earlier cases, uh, steel tube with a doped fabric like an airship, yeah, try and wrap your mind around that one.

• 1:01:41Justin Roczniak?

  I just realized I forgot the guy's first name, okay, right. Shit Frank Piazzecki, right, okay.

• 1:01:48Liam McAnderson?

  There we go.

• 1:01:48Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know.

• 1:01:49November Kelly?

  From season two of The Wire?

• 1:01:51Liam McAnderson?

  Ugh.

• 1:01:52Justin Roczniak?

  Uh. Good question.

• 1:01:56Liam McAnderson?

  Sure, man.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  That's his, that's his son.

• 1:01:58Justin Roczniak?

  So, he starts this helicopter corporation, he's, he's one of the helicopter pioneers, he, he is, um, you know, he's a true believer in helicopter, he believes, you know, this is going to be.

• 1:02:09Liam McAnderson?

  I don't like the phrase, "true believer in helicopters."

• 1:02:13Justin Roczniak?

  He's a true believer in the helicopter, in that he believes it will be the flying car. He will be able to market a helicopter to every household. Um, I believe he builds one of the first working helicopters in the United States. Uh, not the first, but one of the first. Um, yeah, he's the first guy, Piazzecki's the second guy. Um, you know, and, and, and he's a pioneer of the dual rotor design. As opposed to having, you know, you have a main rotor and a vertical tail rotor. You just have two big rotors, right? Um, which turns out, yeah, that works pretty good.

• 1:02:54Justin Roczniak?

  Um, you know, he builds a big factory in Morton, Pennsylvania, which is now this BJ's. Um. But you can see the control tower is still there.

• 1:03:07November Kelly?

  In the BJ's control tower?

• 1:03:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the BJ's control tower, yeah.

• 1:03:12Liam McAnderson?

  The hell are they using that for?

• 1:03:12Liam McAnderson?

  That's why I call my strip club.

• 1:03:13Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 1:03:15Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's right there in the name, Nova, come on.

• 1:03:17Justin Roczniak?

  It's right next to, uh, it's right next to, uh, the coffee station. Where you can get the famous award-winning Morton Monster breakfast sandwich. Um, I saw it, I have not had it, I saw it once in a Beard Meets Food YouTube video. I was kinda like, damn, I should, next time in Morton, I should go get one. Um, it's a pretty big sandwich, as I understand it. But yeah, so, you know, Piazzecki is, uh, you know, he sells all these helicopters, mostly to the army and the Navy.

• 1:03:47November Kelly?

  They said cheese twice.

• 1:03:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48November Kelly?

  Scrambled eggs, cheese, bacon, scrambled eggs, cheese and sausage on grilled Texas toast.

• 1:03:52Liam McAnderson?

  That's how you know that ChatGPT didn't write that.

• 1:03:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's got scrambled eggs twice, too.

• 1:03:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's double the eggs.

• 1:03:59November Kelly?

  Oh yeah, so it does.

• 1:04:02November Kelly?

  Finally clawing my way to literacy at the age of thirty-four.

• 1:04:07Liam McAnderson?

  At a girl, at a girl.

• 1:04:09Justin Roczniak?

  It's layered in that order, yeah.

• 1:04:11November Kelly?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:04:12Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, well, the literacy, literacy continues to escape bait, so. Oh, well, oh, well.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  But yeah, Piasecki built a pretty successful chain of helicopter designs throughout the 50s, 60s. And of course, you know, we decided foolishly to help out the French in that weird overseas proxy war. Um, and we started the war with these little flying bananas. Um, and they worked fairly well.

• 1:04:35Justin Roczniak?

  I do love the word mark here where Piasecki, the two I's are hubs for rotors.

• 1:04:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:04:43Justin Roczniak?

  No, that's great. That's really good.

• 1:04:45November Kelly?

  We had an idea and it's like integrated all the way up into the branding. Sick.

• 1:04:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's the future. We're using helicopters for everything.

• 1:04:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, one thing we did use them for.

• 1:04:56Justin Roczniak?

  Is, um, yeah, I mean, is the Vietnam War, but the problem with the Vietnam War is sometimes you run out of war.

• 1:05:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, sometimes you run out of helicopters.

• 1:05:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, the driving engine behind the United States economy since World War II has been, we're gonna, you know, the government gives companies to build things that we then ship overseas to blow up. Right? Um, you know, this is the, this is the basis of the American economy. And the problem is you need a war in order to do that. And unfortunately, in 1975, peace broke out.

• 1:05:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I remember playing all of those Metal Gear Solid games about that.

• 1:05:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, here we have cursed competitor Belle, that's 206 Huey, in the famous iconic, uh, what is this, the US Embassy shot, I think?

• 1:05:49November Kelly?

  Uh, no, it's actually CIA housing. That's an Air America helicopter.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Oh, is it really? Interesting.

• 1:05:55November Kelly?

  That is, it, it, it's as far as I know, the like last helicopter out, but it's not off the embassy. It's, um, uh, like, I, I'm willing to be corrected on that, but I'm pretty certain this is like, um, sort of like near embassy or in embassy compound housing for the CIA specifically.

• 1:06:12Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:06:12Justin Roczniak?

  Now you're like, nah, nah, nah, this is, uh, this is a civilian helicopter. Don't shoot at us. It's a civilian helicopter.

• 1:06:21November Kelly?

  I, I'm pretty certain they were shooting at Air America and they were right to do it. Although, I, I, I'm vaguely remembering that Air America had the, uh, most recent, and I think to date, well, to, to date, most recent, like, shoot down of a plane from a helicopter with a handgun. Um, so, yeah, they, they got up to some weird shit back then.

• 1:06:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  So, eventually, the flying bananas gave way to helicopters, uh, one of which is still in service today, the other retired. The CH46C Knight, which was used by the Marines, um, and I think also, to a limited extent, by the Army and the Navy, I'd have to double check. And then the Chinook, uh, which is still flying today. Um, and you've got your, your usual Piasseki twin rotor layout, and, uh, they were very effective at carrying troops, light artillery, all sorts. And, you know, stateside being used for stuff like the aerial logging I described earlier and a bunch of other, uh, executive transport.

• 1:07:19Justin Roczniak?

  Piasseki got kicked out of the company because his ideas were too out there. And then I believe he's, he started a second company just called Piasseki Aircraft, which I believe still exists, but, uh, that was when...

• 1:07:32November Kelly?

  Just, um, just a Boeing guy being like, "This is clearly you trying to kill yourself in a helicopter."

• 1:07:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38November Kelly?

  Uh, and he's like, "Well, fu- fuck you, I quit."

• 1:07:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  The most elaborate hitman environmental kill ever.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  So, they built thousands of, uh, both of these types of helicopters, but of course, war end, and then you have surplus, so then what?

• 1:07:53Justin Roczniak?

  It's how P- Piasseki gets, uh, you know, absorbed into, they become Boeing virtual, they get, uh, absorbed into Boeing during the war.

• 1:08:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, you're, you are Boeing to be part of the collective.

• 1:08:05Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:08:07Justin Roczniak?

  But now, yeah, there's no helicopters to build anymore, because you can't send the Vietnam to get blown up, so, uh, but we do have this obvious pressing need.

• 1:08:16Liam McAnderson?

  We have VIPs that need to be ferried around. Oh, boy.

• 1:08:20November Kelly?

  And Frank Piasseki wept for there were no more helicopters to conquer.

• 1:08:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Liam McAnderson?

  Slash blow himself up in right.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  So what happens when you hire an aerospace company sign a streetcar? You might think you might get something like this, which is a drawing I did a couple of weeks ago of a CH46 C9 fuselage on some PCC trucks with Tom.

• 1:08:41Liam McAnderson?

  I like this.

• 1:08:42November Kelly?

  I hope I would have have fucking hell, I would have hoped we would have got something like this.

• 1:08:47Speaker 03

  Would have been better engineered. Um, but yeah, I couldn't resist it when we were, Justin and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. It's like, you know, I gotta draw this.

• 1:08:54Justin Roczniak?

  It looks like it has a happy face.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  It's very happy.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  And you can see the pedestrians in front of you on the ground level as well as straight ahead. It's actually pretty, pretty smart.

• 1:09:05Justin Roczniak?

  There you go. Yeah. So it's like, okay, yeah, uh, we're doing defense conversion. Let's do this. We're, we're having a helicopter company make the streetcar.

• 1:09:14November Kelly?

  You know, the colonial violence returns to the metropole in the form of you having to get the Chinook to work.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  And it is, you know, reconversion has happened after most 20th century wars happened in World War I to some extent. It certainly happened in World War II, um, and a little bit in Korea. So it's not surprising that this would happen after Vietnam as well, especially after the largest outlay of expenditure since World War II. If I'm not mistaken, for, you know, Men in Material. So it makes sense that if you've got all this stuff spun up, you need to do something else at those factories. Uh, you should presumably, you know, do, I think there's literally a swords to plow shares quote, uh, made by Carter in this respect. In exactly talking about the Boeing, let's, uh, let's go to the next slide and see why that might not be the best.

• 1:10:01Liam McAnderson?

  It is easier to talk about beating swords into plowshares than it is to convert a production line from jet fighters to subway cars.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  And indeed he was right because it was extremely difficult. Um, and especially because, so it wasn't just.

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  A president's conference committee of the 1930s where he had a smoke filled room cigars and whiskey all around coming up with, you know, relatively logical ideas because at the time, most of the people who are running the transit companies probably came from some transit oriented background instead of, you know, installed McNamara style into a corporation.

• 1:10:38Justin Roczniak?

  That sounds like a great meeting to be in, I'm gonna be honest.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  It would be really fun, honestly, yeah, back in the 30s, talking about like, we need to make it better.

• 1:10:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  You know, it's fantastic. But, so, when they were first developing what would eventually become the Boeing LRV, they had a bunch of cities on board to kind of guide the process and one by one, they kind of disappeared.

• 1:10:58Justin Roczniak?

  They dropped out, yeah.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  New Orleans, yeah, New Orleans was fully on board to modernize their system. Thank God they didn't do that.

• 1:11:05November Kelly?

  Just, just finally, like, we're finally gonna bring the New Orleans streetcar system into the 19th century.

• 1:11:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:11:13Liam McAnderson?

  Kicking and screaming.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  And so, I think a couple of other cities, their names escape me, were also involved.

• 1:11:18Justin Roczniak?

  Philadelphia, at least. Buffalo, I believe, yeah. I think El Paso also did some constant consultation. It was basically everywhere we mentioned before, there was some kind of consultation into creating this standard light rail vehicle.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, and a lot of ideas were passed around, some obviously better than others. The problem, though, why it got necked down to just the two in the end, is the two most demanding clients were San Francisco and Boston. You know, Boston was dealing with the legacy subway system from the engineered in the 1890s and SF Muni was on this crazy project to build the new Muni metro subway, which is directly above BART, going up and down Market Street and then goes through the aforementioned tunnel that pops out in West Portal. And they just built the subway with the hopes that they would have like this high floor, you know, semi automated system that would work really well. And they're, you know, you can see that these are wildly different.

• 1:12:17Justin Roczniak?

  These are total polar opposites, you know? They're they're just like, yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, they wanted to build a car that could do both. And it did neither. So you have this huge issue of these wildly different systems demanding all these constraints. The reason why the nose on this car is narrower than the PCCs is because of Boston. The reason why it has low floor, high floor steps, wells that I think pneumatically or electrically raised and lower. And of course, you can imagine how many ways that could go wrong with 1970s early solid state bullshit.

• 1:12:52Speaker 03

  Because both have legacy systems where you're getting on and off at street level and on and off at high platform. All sorts of other crap as well that we'll get into later. But let's take a look at the blueprint and see what we're working here.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  So we have, to the people who are just listening to this on a podcast format. Imagine in yourself the ideal platonic tram.

• 1:13:15Liam McAnderson?

  I'm a perfect perfectly spherical.

• 1:13:17Justin Roczniak?

  Perfectly spherical tram just rolls down the rails. Yeah.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  So it looks like a very long eclair. It is an articulated car, which is articulated in the center. It has three sets of trucks, which have two axles each underneath. It has two cabs, one on either end. It has three sets of doors. I believe some also had other door arrangements, if I'm not mistaken, or were modified in other ways later on. And two pantographs or does it just have one? Oh, it just has one in this room. Interesting. Okay, and some came with trolley pulls for a panoply of other reasons that we won't get into. But this is basically the as-delivered Boeing LRV.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  This was not on on paper, not a bad design necessarily. Just looking literally at the plans, not a bad design. What they would choose to do later and how they would construct them, that's where it went.

• 1:14:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, this is not, not anything that looks, you know, especially controversial. It's a nice, big, good-sized articulated tram, you know, but it's not like too big. There's nothing here that's like incredibly controversial, right? Other than the fact that you didn't really have too many articulated streetcars in the United States at this point, other than like on the key system, I want to say. Um, I don't know if anyone else had them, yeah.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, Jacob's truck, like articulated cars were not uncommon in the United States, but they were also not common. Um, it's a weird middle ground, like the systems that bought into it, like the key system really went for it, and other systems never used them. Um, Europe loved the, and in fact, uh, Sarajevo bought a bunch of used, um, DC Transit PCCs.

• 1:15:01Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, those guys, yeah, those are so weird.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're so cool. I want to kit bash one in H O so bad out of the Bowser streetcars. Uh, but they took two PCCs and sawed the front off one of them and the rear off another, and built an articulated, uh, twin-unit car just like this using PCC equipment, and they ran until the war, uh, the Kosovo War. Um, so they're pretty reliable.

• 1:15:25November Kelly?

  So much of this just seems like you can just like kind of carve a streetcar out of another, out of a bigger streetcar, like a block of marble.

• 1:15:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely, the Michelangelo approach.

• 1:15:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  I can see the streetcar inside.

• 1:15:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we already, we already produced the ultimate streetcar. We just have to, uh, change the bodywork.

• 1:15:47Justin Roczniak?

  That's another system that was using PCCs at this time. The Tandy Center Subway in Fort Worth, Texas.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  And thankfully, one of those still survives. I think it was restored, um, and it's on display, I think at the shopping mall or whatever it is.

• 1:16:03Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  I was really shocked to know that somebody had saved one.

• 1:16:07Liam McAnderson?

  Probably our hero from earlier who just hoarded 30 cars that would not surrender, though God bless him.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  So apologies for the eBay green cap one, but there were basically no pictures of the the Essington, Pennsylvania virtual plant building LRVs out there. So you can see both the San Francisco and the Boston cars are being built concurrently right here. The orange ones obviously are the Muni and the green Boston. Buffalo would also get some single unit versions of these non-articulated, really long boys,

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  which we might talk about later.

• 1:16:39Justin Roczniak?

  I put a slide in about them, yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  Oh, good, good. At any rate, so you take a helicopter factory and you ask them to make trams. What's the worst thing that could possibly happen? First of all, you would think logically, right? This is a helicopter factory, they're used to building airframes. What do they do? They decide not to build the airframes at all. They decide not to build the tram bodies at all. They hire Tokyo Car Corporation in Japan, which is honestly a pretty good choice.

• 1:17:05Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good builder, yeah.

• 1:17:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's not a bad, they were a good idea for a contractor, but you know what the problem was?

• 1:17:12Justin Roczniak?

  Being in Japan?

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  They built them, they, yes, they built them in Japan and they put them on the deck of a break bulk carrier freighter on the deck of a break bulk carrier freighter in red primer paint, no other protection. And they tied them down to the deck and they took them all the way across the Pacific through storm season and they went through the Panama Canal, all the way to Pennsylvania, on the deck with the sea water splashing up all over the, each and every one of those windowless, primed metal steel, you know, tram bodies. So you had, you know, seawater everywhere and I'm sure some guy at the, you know, the former Pasecki plant was like given a garden hose or something to, you know,

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  laxidasically wash them off when they arrived.

• 1:18:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, you unstrap the first one from the deck of the ship and it just collapses into a pile of iron filings.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like average British 60s car, right?

• 1:18:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Or average Alfa Romeo of the 1967.

• 1:18:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's like, okay, you know, how are we gonna put these street cars together? Step one, add 60 years of aging.

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, bake in that sea salt.

• 1:18:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's nice and seasoned.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  So Boeing Vortal proceeds to subcontract out a bunch of components to a wide variety of subcontractors with mixed success, just like Roar did with the Bard cars. You know, they subcontracted a bunch of electrical systems to various other companies. You know, not all of them talked to each other well. There was a bunch of wiring issues, there's a bunch of labor issues. Everything that you could imagine basically went wrong as they were converting over to building helicopters at the Vortal plant.

• 1:18:59Justin Roczniak?

  It does seem like more like they're not really bringing any engineering expertise to this, they're just becoming a project manager and not a very good one at that point.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  And the funny thing is, so this is their first foray into it. They would, and we'll talk about later, Boeing assembled some Chicago L cars that were engineered by a different company and pre-done as knockdown kits by a Portuguese manufacturer and just assembled in. And those worked fine, but these were built in-house from too many different subcontractors and it didn't work. So let's go to the next. So even before they hit the street, it was already, the writing was on the wall. The testing in the facility was not going well. They were doing them out on the streets, I believe in Boston initially, and Boston

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  took delivery of them first and basically had hell to pay from day one. Doors wouldn't work, there were electrical fires, there were all sorts of traction issues. You know, everything that you could think of going wrong did go.

• 1:20:03Justin Roczniak?

  The air conditioners were like a real big problem, right?

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. They're mounted under the car and not above the roof. So all of the brake dust and all the street smells were basically sucked into the air conditioner intake units and basically barely filtered before it entered the cabin. So you were getting, you know, ethyl- ethylated gasoline fumes from trucks and cars coming right into the AC unit and then being pumped into the sealed window tram.

• 1:20:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and you know, this was never a problem on aircraft, I don't know why. I guess they don't, they're not on the street that much.

• 1:20:46Liam McAnderson?

  No, they are. Something's got terribly wrong. Right?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  So it became a huge contra tom and later on, like I think in the 90s or some things, they rebuilt some of them with roof mounted air conditioners and solved that problem. But this will be a long and torture process. Right? The, when the Boston cars hit the streets, I think in the next, yes, in the next slide, we can see some of the amazing, like genuinely good reporting of the 1970s of like the Boston Globe and other things. I just love this headline.

• 1:21:19Justin Roczniak?

  Cannibalized, stripped and parked in the yard.

• 1:21:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Ask me about my fucking Tuesday, bro.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  So this was an insane story. So what ended up happening was, so the Boeing LRVs were having, were being tested out before they were accepted by Boston MBTA, right? So they would, Boeing would deliver them online and then they would run them for X number of days and determine whether or not they would accept delivery of them. And so some of them were running just fine, long enough to accept delivery. And then after they accepted delivery, they break down. In some cases, uh, they would last as little as 600 miles, track miles before we're breaking. And an average day, you would, uh, sometimes, or in an average week, you would run more than 600 miles.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  So it break, you know, you'd break down more than once a week running these cars. Eventually, a Boeing Veridel is not producing enough replacement parts for these cars. So at night, um, Boston MBTA shop crews would take parts off of some of the cars that were out of service in order to keep the cars that were in better condition. And keep in mind, these are less than a year old and they're already cannibalizing cars. Yeah. They take windows or door or controls or electrical stuff out of the brand new cars and put them in the other cars to keep them in service. And eventually this fleet, every night was moved into a portion of the subway tunnels that was away from public view during the night.

• 1:22:47November Kelly?

  Like in The Dark Knight Rises?

• 1:22:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. They have, uh, they had the advantage of having one abandoned tunnel that they could just shove these things into. So no one could look at them. You know, they could hide their shame.

• 1:23:01Liam McAnderson?

  Hide their shame. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:04November Kelly?

  It's just, I just kind of like, as apart from anything else, like culture mismatch where Boeing Versos looking at these and they're like, where'd he put the agent orange?

• 1:23:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  So it gets crazier. So they've been doing this and in the early days, they were taking them out and putting them in each night, which was insane. Okay, so they were, they were doing some sort of move with some sort of freight motor and shoving this increasingly longer consist adding cars to it each time. And shoving it in this tunnel.

• 1:23:32November Kelly?

  But it just getting bigger and bigger rugs to like shove it under.

• 1:23:36Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:23:36Liam McAnderson?

  Just playing snake, but in real life.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  And so, um, a, a Boston Globe reporter was going down in, into the tunnels for a different thing to cover a completely different story, not even related, right? And he casually looks over and sees all these Boeing LRVs and they're missing windows, they're missing headlights, they're missing, you know, other pieces of equipment, pretty obvious, right? And he casually says to some Boston guy, and if anybody of you have a better Boston accent than I do, the guy says, oh yeah, we've just been stripping these for parts to keep the other ones running.

• 1:24:05November Kelly?

  So what, what he found essentially were the, the like, the chuds of, uh, in the original sense of, uh, street cars.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. So, you know, the reporter literally has his eyeballs go out of his head like an old Tex Avery, you know, Looney Tunes cartoon. Yeah. And he runs as fast as he possibly can to his probably IBM Schlecker typewriter and bangs out a story. And it becomes this fury of MBTA falling on its ass yet again. Um, and it turned into a giant lawsuit, which was an interesting lawsuit. So they didn't want money in the most, you know, in the 21st century, I'm going to sue you. I just want money out of you sort of thing. No, they wanted blood. The MBTA sued Boeing virtual for, to repair the cars on their dime.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  They're like, fuck you. We don't want money. We want you to make these things actually work. And so they forced, yeah, they forced Boeing to pay on their own dime to repair each and every one of the cannibalized ones with brand new parts to get them back to operable condition. And take back the ones as they broke to be fixed and then recertified for operation. So this is costing Boeing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. Um, and you can see where this is. Going, right? Like only two cities agreed to buy this flop of a street car. And now they're having these insane teething problems, the likes of which at this point, we really hadn't seen before. Like the PCCs probably had negligible teething problems, but they were also electrically and mechanically extremely simple.

• 1:25:39Speaker 03

  You know, these were, these had solid state electronics. They had all sorts of bespoke aerospace engineered BS on them. And whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. Um, and so this continued for many years throughout the, the late 70s. Uh, let's go to the next slide.

• 1:25:55Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on. I just wanted to read this off the, uh, the, the article here. So far, the trepid reporter has preconceptions of incompetence and fiscal irresponsibility lurking in his head. The one other thing which you ought to suspect when looking at the MBTA and Boeing Vertol is terminal arrogance. The Vertol division made helicopters. Helicopters, as almost everyone knows, are things that go around and around and up and down. They are probably very difficult to build. Trolley cars, on the other hand, never go around and around and never should go up and down. Such events are called derailments.

• 1:26:36Liam McAnderson?

  God's ass. God's ass.

• 1:26:40Justin Roczniak?

  Now, if you knew how to make helicopters and someone gave you tens of millions of dollars to build trolley cars, the average person would, faster than the speeding bullet, hire some people who knew how to make trolley, trolleys and pick their brains, buy their patents and keep them bent over the drawing board. The Boeing Vertol people did none of this. It was a strictly in-house project and an out-house project.

• 1:27:07Liam McAnderson?

  Got their ass. God damn. That's two murders on one show. No.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  I, I, it just continues, like the poison pen on this article. Yes, Jeff, yeah.

• 1:27:20November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  So, let's take a look at the next slide. So, in Boston, this is a, a great clipping from 1978. Uh, go ahead and read the.

• 1:27:30November Kelly?

  MBTA returning 35 LRV cars because they don't work. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is returning 35 of its new LRV transit cars to the build of Boeing Vertol of Philadelphia because they don't work. The LRVs have been plagued with breakdowns of doors, air conditioning, electronics, propulsion systems, and many other components. David L. Gunn, the MBTA's Director of Operations, said yesterday that he has had a team of 95 men working on the cars since they began arriving in 1976, but that even with many modifications paid for by the contractor, they have provided unacceptable service.

• 1:28:05Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus. How bad it's gotta be in like the eight, what is this, 78? Yeah. For it to be unacceptable service in 78?

• 1:28:13November Kelly?

  Gunn said that it takes more MBTA personnel to keep 50-odd LRVs going on the green line than it does to maintain 220 cars on the red, blue, and orange line.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's breathtaking, isn't it? $300,000 per car, it says. And this continues, I, I love the, this other quote, he says, "The LRVs are not like Fords", he says. "The parts are hard to come by and a lot of it is oddball stuff." The MBTA board has authorized the purchase of $2.2 million in additional parts since May. Everybody was taken by surprise by the LRV's rate of failure, Gunn said. "They were supposed to be reliable, but it just wasn't true."

• 1:28:54November Kelly?

  A new LRV would cost more than $800,000 today, according to Gunn. San Francisco's Bay Area Transit Authority has put in the only other author for the Boeing Vertol LRVs, which were designed to U.S. Department of Transportation specifications.

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  The, the other one, which we, we don't need to read this one, but I just love that, uh, the headline and deck for the, uh, one on the lower left.

• 1:29:15November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. A half-million-dollar ride when it works. Really good.

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And all of this journalism is coming out in, in the late 70s, and they're basically. Just getting their asses handed to them and it becomes a complete fiasco.

• 1:29:28November Kelly?

  Well, I mean Boeing hadn't worked out that they could just like kill anyone who reported negatively about them yet, you know?

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  My god, could you imagine if they did that back in the days like, oh yeah, they found thirty-two people with their Lincoln Mark IVs on in the garage with their engines running? How could this happen?

• 1:29:44November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, either that, either that or they did. It's just that it was so easy to become a journalist and make a living wage off of it in the in the seventies that like, they were just outpaced and it was like Stalingrad, you know, they go, they lost a battle of attrition, you know, the Boeing wetwork team was killing guys in their garages all the time and it just wasn't quick enough because there's a new guy ready with like, you know, the press card in the hat, ready to go, you know, when when the jour- when the whistleblower in front of you is killed, you pick up the typewriter and you keep typing.

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  Okay, IO Interactive, after you're done with the James Bond game that's coming out soon, I need a seventies era version of Hitman in which we're doing this.

• 1:30:25November Kelly?

  I've been telling them this psychically through beams for for many months at this point.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  It would be so great, like-

• 1:30:33November Kelly?

  It's just, I mean, it's much, it's much easier to to play sixties Hitman because the cops do even less.

• 1:30:40Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point, yeah. You get caught, you get two years in prison.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  A wrist slap. So this happened throughout the seventies and throughout the early eighties. And when we go to the next slide.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  So we're talking about the car barns in both Boston and San Francisco and probably also, let's be honest, Buffalo, fighting with these trams. And one by one, they think of unique and interesting and genuinely smart solutions to get these things running. A lot of them is jury rigging on the fly, others are sending out parts to new manufacturers who can manufacture them to better tolerances or replacing electrical like components like micro switches and hydraulic components as well. And just slowly, one by one, ship a Theseus-ing these trams into actual operable LRVs.

• 1:31:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so sorry, it's not, I can't, I can't, I need railroad tolerances. I can't deal with aerospace tolerances. I need railroad tolerances.

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, totally. Um, you know, this was also the case with Roar's Bart and Wamata and I think Marta cars were the same deal. It's like slowly, one by one, the systems would fail and slowly, one by one, the shops would put their their genuinely best machinists and electricians on the job and they slowly, car by car, made them reliable to the point where they were useful. And throughout the eighties, reliability and track mileage in repairs increased and people stopped hating them much.

• 1:32:11Justin Roczniak?

  This thing can't be a delicate little flower like your fighter jets. I'm sorry, this thing actually has to do work.

• 1:32:21Speaker 03

  But there was one ticking time bomb with these cars and it was something we touched on earlier. With the Tokyo Car Corporation, Japanese-built car body in two, you know, remarkably great seaside tourist destination city with the salt air continuing to rot these mild steel car body. You can see where this is going. You know, they could have done something smart, perhaps an aerospace company could have made the frames and bodies out of aluminum and this would not have been an issue.

• 1:32:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Or they could have used some sort of stainless steel alloy from a competitor across town.

• 1:32:59Speaker 03

  Right? They could have hired frickin Bud across the street.

• 1:33:02November Kelly?

  The podcast that argues that you fucked up a lot by not hiring Bud, just whatever it is, whatever the engineering problem is, should have hired those guys.

• 1:33:11Justin Roczniak?

  No, you know what it was is Tokyo had the patents for Bud's processes, but they could only sell mild steel in America because you would have had to go to Bud properly.

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I didn't know. Is that true?

• 1:33:26Justin Roczniak?

  I think so.

• 1:33:26Speaker 03

  That, that, it would make sense. Um, so yeah, I mean, look at this. So instead of literally going across town and hiring Bud and giving them a little bit more life by hiring, you know, making stainless steel bodies for these, they went halfway across the world and shipped mild steel across a saltwater ocean. So you can see what kind of brain they're thinking. Um, let's go on to the next slide, which is a flow chart and I will describe it in a logical way for listeners.

• 1:33:51November Kelly?

  Oh, God.

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  Um, let's start. There are two, only two paths in this flow chart. And it starts in the upper left-hand corner with, which is the PCCs are getting old.

• 1:34:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:34:02Speaker 03

  All the cities, the PCCs were at least 20, if not 30 or 40 years old. The government suggests hiring a helicopter factory. Yeah, because that's logical. The LRV has massive teething problems.

• 1:34:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:34:14Speaker 03

  Which then flows into, the cars can only run 600 miles between breakdown. Which flows into, agencies sue to fix the defective train. Which flows into, almost a decade of delays to get to working trains. Which flows into, they rebuild them at their home shops one at a time. And then it flows into reliability now acceptable. And this is like the early 80s. But then, the next flow, it flows into, the rebuilt LRVs get old. And then that flows into two paths. Which is, in San Francisco's case, Breda wins the new LRV Pid. And then this whole thing goes in a circle again. The other one is that the equipment gets scrapped.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  Um, however, there is a second path that you could take as a transit agency. And it starts with the PCCs getting old in the first slide. And then flows into, they rebuild them at their home shops throughout the 60s and 70s.

• 1:35:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  They run reliably more, longer than their discerning service life. But then, the ADA passes, the Americans with Disabilities Act passes. And the PCCs are a high-floor design and they are not compatible. And so the final, uh, cell in the flow chart is for the PCCs. And, uh, it flows into, still used on Heritage Line today. And that's true in both Boston and, uh, San Francisco. Are there any still left in Philly?

• 1:35:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, the PC, they're PCC 3s now, but we still have them.

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  Okay. So you can see, the, a car designed on the eve or just after the Great Depression. Almost a century, you know, 90 years ago. Is still rolling around, doing the job it was designed to do. And if that is not a testament to great quality, I don't know what is.

• 1:35:55Justin Roczniak?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:55Speaker 03

  But it's also a testament to the desperation and ineptitude of what happens when you hire an aerospace engineering firm to design a frickin' streetcar.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  So let's go to the next slide. So these soldiered on in service through the 90s and eventually they became reliable enough that most of the complaints had evaporated. They fixed the air conditioning systems. They replaced all the electronics and stuff and they were fairly good. But in the early 90s, San Francisco sent out RFQs to replace them and Bretta, a Melanes Italian manufacturer, won that bit. And as mentioned in the flow chart, this whole rigmarole, despite them not being an aerospace company and being a train car manufacturer, the cycle happened again in the late 90s and early 2000s where they

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  were accepted for, they were manufactured as knockdown kits and Pier 70 in San Francisco for their Buy America certification. And then they had a bunch of teething problems for a bunch of years until eventually they were also rebuilt reliable cars and they were just recently retired. So you can see how this is kind of our de facto cycle.

• 1:37:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the only guys who can, you know, the only guys who can keep these things running are the guys in the shed, unfortunately.

• 1:37:18November Kelly?

  Hmm. Doing some Apollo 13 shit every day in order to keep one street car running.

• 1:37:24Liam McAnderson?

  I clock in, I save the world. I clock out, the world moves this wheel.

• 1:37:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Now, this is not the end of the LRV, the United States Standard Light Rail Vehicle, goes to Britain. So, the 2002-

• 1:37:42November Kelly?

  Oh no, don't, don't come here. Don't do that.

• 1:37:44Justin Roczniak?

  The 2002 Commonwealth Games were held in Manchester and Manchester needed more capacity on its existing MetroLink tram system, right? So, unable to quickly procure a low quality British tram and unsatisfied with how low the quality a British tram would be, Manchester figured the Yanks could give them an even lower quality product. So they bought two, count them, two Boeing LRVs from San Francisco for 170 pounds each.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:38:26Justin Roczniak?

  To evaluate on their system, these are fully functional, you know, to the extent that they were fully functional, LRVs, and potentially they would buy some more, you know, just to bump up the capacity for the games, right? Now, on MetroLink, which they knew was basically compatible with the LRVs, and also it's a brand new system, brand new, high-quality track, high-quality rights-of-way, everything's in working order, so on and so forth, right? They start testing the Boeing LRVs. The first test was, we are going to pull the LRVs using a little utility vehicle through the system to see how they do. And they derailed on every, everything,

• 1:39:11Justin Roczniak?

  just anything, they just derailed for no reason, everywhere.

• 1:39:14November Kelly?

  It fell over. It fell over.

• 1:39:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17November Kelly?

  Okay, sure.

• 1:39:19Justin Roczniak?

  And so they're like, no, this is a bad idea. They put them into storage, um, and I think both of them were relatively recently scrapped.

• 1:39:28November Kelly?

  And, and Boeing Verso owes Metro Rail 340 quid.

• 1:39:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:39:36Justin Roczniak?

  Well, plus, I think it was about 30,000 pounds shipping. That's how they get you.

• 1:39:40November Kelly?

  That's how it is with eBay sellers sometimes, or board games.

• 1:39:44Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, and then MetroLink was just, you know, crowded during the Commonwealth Games, um, you know.

• 1:39:50November Kelly?

  Yeah, everybody, everybody survived. Nobody died.

• 1:39:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, everyone lived, probably.

• 1:39:55November Kelly?

  As opposed to, you know, derailing on every...

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  The end would come for both Boston and San Francisco's cars in the 2006, 2008 slot. Uh, most of them were sidelined, uh, before then, but the very bitter end was, uh, right before the Great Recession, the credit crunch, or whatever you want to call that thing. Um, and most of them, of course, were, uh, turned into razor blades. Um, a few were scattered to the four winds. One ended up famously in a scrapyard in Richmond, California, uh, which was recently saved, um, and by a private individual, and they started an Instagram saying they would make it into some fun little, like, uh, tiny home situation, um, that you could rent as like a, uh...

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  An Airbnb type thing, but they went dark a couple of years ago and I haven't heard anything else about it. I'm just glad that it's saved and no longer in the scrapyard. It was used as an office at the scrapyard, which was kind of fun. There's a bunch in, there's, well, I can't say a bunch, but there's a few in museums and let's go to the next slide so we can take a look at that. If you want to go visit one in person, you can go to a couple of museums. You can go to the Western Railway Museum in Rio Vista, California, which is north of San Francisco, northeast of San Francisco. You can also go to the, what used to be called the Orange Empire Museum, which is now the Southern California Railroad Museum in Paris. P E R R I S, not P A R I S, California.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  And of course, you can go to the Seashore and go look at the trolleys at the Seashore Museum.

• 1:41:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  There's also some stuff at the Oregon Electric Railway Historical Society, which is in Brooks, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, south of Portland, some distance, and north of Redding, basically somewhere in that swath. The only one that actually runs is at the one in Brooks, Oregon, Brooks, Oregon. Yeah, so the Western Rail Museum, go to the next slide. At any rate, yeah, so you can go visit any museums, you can donate to help make them come to life again. Because older trams at museums are getting top billing, these are usually sidelined and not top priority for restoration. However, the W R M is actively trying to restore theirs to operable condition. So let's talk about how, how can we break the cycle?

• 1:42:13Justin Roczniak?

  Miles, this photo is alarmingly close to my house.

• 1:42:16Liam McAnderson?

  I was gonna say, I think I know this, this guy.

• 1:42:20Speaker 03

  It's a photograph I took like about 10 minutes before I met you in person. So there you go.

• 1:42:26Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that explains that, yeah.

• 1:42:28November Kelly?

  Second, second guest to Doc's Justin.

• 1:42:32Liam McAnderson?

  Second doxing, a second doxing has hit the World Trade Center.

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  Well, you didn't have to admit that it was near your house. It's just a tram picture anyways.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  So, let's enter, let's enter the final spreadsheet here, and this was vetted by somebody who's deep in the transit agency world. So this is the typical cycle that we have entered into in the post 1970 era of acquiring railway equipment. So the flow chart begins with the first cell, which is transit vehicle aging badly, which flows into hires overpaid quote unquote consultant to write specifications, which flows into manufacturer consultants, which flows into manufacturer has to build quote unquote a new assembly line, which flows into vehicle has to be tested at Pueblo, Colorado, which takes months, if not years, delays and cost, which flows

• 1:43:28Speaker 03

  into eventually reliability now acceptable. Well, gee, you wrote all of those crappy specs that are so custom tailored to that one city, the manufacturer cannot sell the custom vehicle to other transit agencies. Then, all of that flows into manufacturer has to manufacture new parts or hunt around for other similar parts. And then it flows into the first cell, which was transit vehicle aging badly. And this is a cycle that is continued unabated with multiple major manufacturers and only a couple of national manufacturers have been able to overcome this.

• 1:44:09November Kelly?

  I'm glad we were able to simplify it down to a nice concise 13 step process.

• 1:44:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And the one thing is, you know, the pictured here is the Philadelphia K car, the Kawasaki car, you know, because we dropped out of the United States standard light rail vehicle order, even though, you know, for a while, we were going to be one of the main systems to get it. But, you know, thank God, the trolley tunnel put unacceptable constraints on that. These things, you know, we went to Kawasaki and we're like, we want a trolley. And they were like, we'll give you a trolley. And, uh, yeah, no, it's there, all of them. are like 45 years old now and they're all tanks, you know, they're indestructible.

• 1:44:53Justin Roczniak?

  The other thing which is interesting about the LRV like the shell is yeah Buffalo, New York. Essentially got a very similar car to the LRV, but it was a single unit instead of a multi-unit. Rather than going through virtual, they just had the whole car put together by Tokyo Car Corporation. And yeah, they work fine. They still run to this day.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're just fine. And it's so funny because like all the stories of the of the Boston and San Francisco cars are riddled with issues and the The Buffalo one is like barely a footnote. It's like, yeah, these run.

• 1:45:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, they were fine. Yeah, basically the same design. Nah, they were fine.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  So, uh, Justin, fill us in on the bus slide.

• 1:45:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was just thinking, you know, when we talk about defense reconversion. Oh, I forgot to put this on a white background so you can see the Grumman logo. You know.

• 1:45:50Speaker 03

  Just say it like a Swedish death metal band.

• 1:45:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Grumman. Yeah. You know, defense reconversion actually worked in a few cases. I think a great example was that, okay. Grumman came out. I think they bought the flexible company, which is a bus company. But they sort of integrated that expertise into their production lines and they were able to come out With an actually extremely successful line of buses, which I used to ride to school every day back when I Was in high school, not every day, but some days. And they worked fine and they lasted a very, very long time. So like this was This was never a project that was doomed to failure. It was just, um.

• 1:46:38Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it was, it was just horribly incompetently managed from start to end. It turns out that, you know, I don't know, one of the things that you have to do as an engineer, it's good to be a little bit humble. You can't come in to like saying, I'm an aerospace engineer. I know everything. I can build a street car, no problem. No, you can't. You don't know shit about that. You know, it's like, I don't know, the, the software engineers, you want to say, you know, they could, they could write a novel, no problem. You know, no, you can't. You're a moron. You're a dumbass, right? Yeah, people gotta understand their limitations is ultimately, you know,

• 1:47:19Justin Roczniak?

  the first, the first way to overcome your limitations is to understand you have them. Um, so I, I mean, I think the real, the, the, the, the lesson to be learned from the Boeing LRV at the end of the day is don't be an asshole.

• 1:47:35Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:47:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't go in with hubris, thinking you have the solution. Actually listen to the people who are going to use your product.

• 1:47:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46Speaker 03

  Like it's user centered design. Like there's a whole area of industrial design centered around exactly that, that kind of thing.

• 1:47:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You know, you, you, you come out and you're like, I designed the greatest helicopter of all time. You fall flat on your face. Try and design a trolley.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  It's as we've seen in this pod, like it's a great story arc. It would make a fantastic like season of Mad Men or something like if Mad Men was set in Boeing in the sixties.

• 1:48:15Justin Roczniak?

  Like Pentagon wars.

• 1:48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. So let's go to the next slide. So I mentioned in passing that the Breda cars are now being retired. And in fact, the Western Rail Museum is in the middle of fundraising to rescue one of them from San Francisco before they're all scrapped. So I just put a little blurb on there. If you want to donate to ensure that both this Boeing LRV gets properly restored to operable condition and that they can successfully secure at least one, if not more than one Breda LRV so that future people can visit the museum and ride behind trams. Please do donate. Um, you can do that at W R M dot org slash port slash donate. Cause you know, who doesn't want to ride?

• 1:48:56Justin Roczniak?

  The, the world's worst street car.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  And if you like this kind of thing, you can find my modeling at interurbanera.com. I also build model railroads. So if you live in the Bay Area, or if you're willing to pay money to fly me out to build you a model railroad, I am happy to. That is my bread and butter and my day job. And I regularly post update videos at youtube.com/interurban with layout updates and kit bashing projects like this.

• 1:49:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, and the other thing is, you know what else worked?

• 1:49:30Liam McAnderson?

  The PCC?

• 1:49:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's right. This whole damn time, the PCCs were still running. And they're still running to this day. In Boston on the Mattapan line.

• 1:49:40November Kelly?

  Unnecessary.

• 1:49:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In Philadelphia on the 15. This one's at Kenosha. The El Paso cars are back. And of course, Chicago made the weird L cars that were based on them. It's like, you know, when it comes right down to it, the only replacement for a PCC is another PCC.

• 1:50:03November Kelly?

  It's like, it's like a Kalashnikov. Got it right the first time, except no substitutes.

• 1:50:07Liam McAnderson?

  Why you need, yes, exactly. Why do you need to pervert?

• 1:50:11November Kelly?

  Rifle is fine. Yes.

• 1:50:14Speaker 03

  Whoever can do the best Soviet accent, just say like, is tram?

• 1:50:20Justin Roczniak?

  He's tram. Well, yeah, because the Soviet, like, the Tatars are pretty close. Yeah.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  The Tatars are beautiful, and many of them still run today. And yeah, they're directly based off the.

• 1:50:31Justin Roczniak?

  Windows are bigger. You know, they changed exactly one thing, and that was a good thing. Um, well, what did we learn?

• 1:50:38November Kelly?

  Stick with the PCC. Never change.

• 1:50:40Justin Roczniak?

  No, never change anything, never upgrade anything. It's a man's hubris to think that you as, that you as an aerospace engineer can improve society.

• 1:50:54Justin Roczniak?

  Sorry.

• 1:50:54Speaker 03

  Never, never hire a defense contractor to build a transit vehicle that they've never done before.

• 1:51:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to like, look at these defense contractors in the space and say, like, listen, your job is to bomb defenseless people. Uh, let, let, leave, leave transit vehicles to people with compassion.

• 1:51:19Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:51:28Justin Roczniak?

  Dearest, well, well, there's your problem, pods, swine herds and any parasocial pals.

• 1:51:34Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:51:35November Kelly?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:51:36Justin Roczniak?

  I hope the happy mental health meters are high after the depressing goat rope of a disaster you probably just covered. In the assumption that they are not, I hope the following bumps them up a few notches for you.

• 1:51:48November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:51:49Justin Roczniak?

  Well, a fighter fi- a firefighter man am I, and I'm telling you no lie.

• 1:51:53November Kelly?

  I'm locked in, I'm back in the room, okay.

• 1:51:55Justin Roczniak?

  Firefighters are frequently thrust into situations involving a whole lot of stupid, it's a capital S stupid. Sometimes, capital S stupid wins, sometimes sense wins, sense is lowercase. Rarely does the public win, although if their day was going so great, they probably wouldn't have had to call us in the first place. The trick is to stay-

• 1:52:18November Kelly?

  What do you want for your lousy 911 calls, live forever?

• 1:52:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, I just called 911 so I got to talk to a firefighter.

• 1:52:27November Kelly?

  They get mad at you if you do that.

• 1:52:29Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, yeah, that's true. The trick is to stay out of the splash zone of the stupid.

• 1:52:35November Kelly?

  And the thing is, it's not a bad tactic if your goal is to talk to an angry firefighter.

• 1:52:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. On Thanksgiving Day 2021, my company was toned out to help a neighbor- neighboring department fight a garage fire. The first thing that is supposed to happen on any scene is called a 360-degree scene size up. This is a quick recon around the perimeter of the scene that serves multiple purposes. The pertinent one here being the identification of any hazards on the scene.

• 1:53:07November Kelly?

  Yeah, is the guy like trying to build a twin rota helicopter in his garage? Does he have a bunch of like JP2?

• 1:53:16November Kelly?

  Stacked up against the back wall, like?

• 1:53:19Justin Roczniak?

  Fire engine pulled up, we found a long driveway packed with cars, two of which were on fire, and a burning detached garage with fire that had extended into the nearby house via an electrical line and into a stand of trees next to the structure.

• 1:53:34November Kelly?

  I guess the problem with being a firefighter is that you can't be like, this one sounds too annoying, I don't want to do it. Skip it, skip this one.

• 1:53:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, nah, it's like, damn, these guys, these guys are loaded, they should get their own guys to fight this fire, you know?

• 1:53:47Justin Roczniak?

  When we were rotated into the garage, we found two ATVs, a go-kart, a golf cart, a mess of wires, chargers, oil, and gas cans, and all the eclectic fun has met detritus of dads everywhere. All of this, along with the two walls and the roof, were fully involved. After some time of doing it, we had extinguished everything and saved Thanksgiving. I went around the exterior of the garage and suddenly took psychic damage. There was a 250-gallon propane tank, such as the one pictured here, from a company called Big Iron. I got this off of DuckDuckGo Images.

• 1:54:27Justin Roczniak?

  There was a 250-gallon propane tank about six inches from the burnt, smoldering back wall of the garage. It was scorched. The paint was bubbled, peeling, and burnt off. There was a one-foot section of warped deformation, and I could see heat waves in the air above it.

• 1:54:44November Kelly?

  Scat, scat, scat, scat, scat, scat.

• 1:54:48Justin Roczniak?

  I coolly and professionally relayed this development to my lieutenant by shouting, "Holy fucking shit, Lou! There's an LPG tank back here that looks like it wanted to bleve!" That's a boiling liquid evaporation vapor explosion, I believe. I don't remember that acronym offhand. He calmly-

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  Isn't it bleve?

• 1:55:09Justin Roczniak?

  Bleve, yes. Ah, yes, a fine bleve.

• 1:55:14Liam McAnderson?

  Of course. Only the finest.

• 1:55:17Justin Roczniak?

  He calmly-

• 1:55:18Speaker 03

  In other countries, it's called sparkling propane.

• 1:55:21Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you don't want that. You don't want to drink that.

• 1:55:23Justin Roczniak?

  It's only a bleve if it's from the bleve region of Texas.

• 1:55:29Liam McAnderson?

  Keep it moving, Raj. He's gotta go to bed.

• 1:55:31Justin Roczniak?

  Right. He calmly cooled it with the hose, and we checked the tank's gauge, which showed that it was nearly empty. This indicated that the pressure-relief valve had done its job. Justin can explain what this little guy does. Okay, so there's a pressure-relief valve. I don't know where it is. It's somewhere on here. If the pressure gets too high, it vents the gas, yeah. Anyway.

• 1:55:50Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:51Justin Roczniak?

  The pressure-relief valve in much of the tank, however, were extremely corroded, making me- Extremely thankful to Thanksgiving Day that it had operated at all. Why this tank's location had not been reported on as part of the 360 size up is a mystery. It was obviously not to code and its location dictated that someone should have had an open nozzle on it throughout our entire attack. It turns out someone knew about that tank, though. I was rolling hose a few minutes later when a teenager came out of the house and asked me if the family could turn their oven back on. So they could finish cooking Thanksgiving dinner. She and I turned in comic unison to stare at the blackened and deformified tank.

• 1:56:35Justin Roczniak?

  I rolled a morale check and decided then that while it. It may have not had the spoons to blow up that day. At that point, I did not. To spare the blameless minor from my wrath, I directed her to my chief. And when he heard her request, I wordlessly motioned to the propane tank, which he had obviously not yet heard about. Again, we all comically turned and silently stared at it for a long moment. With the defeated, Picard-like facepalm, he sighed, "Nope." It can be rough when you realize you've been splashed by someone else's stupid. I suspect the 360 size up was more like a 90, close enough for government work, I guess.

• 1:57:20Justin Roczniak?

  Hopefully this incident.

• 1:57:21November Kelly?

  I, I, I just, I, okay, sure.

• 1:57:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, we didn't die. Time to leave. Hopefully this incident illustrates again the importance of trusting only yourself to give a squirty shit about your own safety. Thanks for the old episode covering five over ones. It was eye opening for me as my training hasn't covered them much. Keep up the good work.

• 1:57:44November Kelly?

  That's reassuring.

• 1:57:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, keep up the good work and keep the mental health meters full, bros and briots. Yours in parasociality, firefighter Jake.

• 1:57:54November Kelly?

  Thanks firefighter Jake. Tempting to be like, uh, take a libertarian angle on this and be like these, these, you know, jackbooted fire thugs. Uh, not only assaulted my perfectly innocent fire, but also ruined Thanksgiving dinner for an entire family.

• 1:58:11Justin Roczniak?

  Good, good. You get nothing.

• 1:58:16Justin Roczniak?

  Sorry, you're going to Arby's tonight.

• 1:58:21Liam McAnderson?

  More Applebee's, you can get Riplets.

• 1:58:25Liam McAnderson?

  Alright, end this.

• 1:58:26Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, that was safety third.

• 1:58:31Justin Roczniak?

  Our next episode is on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 1:58:37Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I was already did his.

• 1:58:39November Kelly?

  Listen to all of the podcasts. Listen to No Gods, No Mayors. I haven't plugged that in a minute. NoGodsNoMayors.com, it's a podcast about Mayors. It's got Riley, it's got Matty Luchansky on it. It's a good time.

• 1:58:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:58:50Liam McAnderson?

  Listen to, uh, buy our merch, buy our shit.

• 1:58:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh shit, yeah, buy the merch. Yeah, buy the merch.

• 1:58:55Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:56November Kelly?

  Is, is, is, is the dad shirt selling well?

• 1:59:01Liam McAnderson?

  Please buy it, it'll make him so happy.

• 1:59:03Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna have to buy the dad shirt, yeah.

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if you love model trains, uh, go check out the YouTube channel, youtube.com/innerurbanera, or go to the website, innerurbanera.com to see train pictures and all sorts of things.

• 1:59:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Do you want to look at pictures of trains? Obviously, yes, because you listen to this podcast. Yeah. Alright, well, uh, thanks for coming on. I think that was a podcast.

• 1:59:26Liam McAnderson?

  Alright.

• 1:59:26November Kelly?

  That's a podcast.

• 1:59:28Liam McAnderson?

  Good night, Nova.

• 1:59:31Justin Roczniak?

  Good night, everyone.