BONUS Episode 53 PREVIEW: The GG1

it's your favorite locomotiveif you disagree you are wrongfull episode on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/gg1-150339598

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

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  Well, welcome to a bonus episode of Well, There's Your Problem.

• 0:05Justin Roczniak?

  It's bonus. You all know who we are. You presumably signed up.

• 0:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, you signed up for a slightly looser vibe in which we just do sort of five minutes of wildly GDPR noncompliant death threats at each other and sort of like logistical issues like no one, despite recording this podcast for like almost a decade at this point, having closed back headphones.

• 0:29Liam McAnderson?

  I'm wearing closed backs.

• 0:31Justin Roczniak?

  I'm gonna keep using these until I wear out.

• 0:34November Kelly?

  I am going to wear them out by strangling.

• 0:37Liam McAnderson?

  Drag like you. Yeah, yeah, I will help.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  I have another pair of closed backs. No, you just absolutely sniped me with the fact that it is, even with rail now, I'm into the second half of a decade with it. So yeah, you guys. Holy shitballs.

• 0:52November Kelly?

  It's like almost at the point like now, I mean, cause like you have a child, like multiple of my colleagues have children now. We're into the like podcast dynasty at this point. Like we're gonna start seeing the first second generation podcasters. That's a terrifying thought.

• 1:07Justin Roczniak?

  My father was a podcaster and his father was a podcaster.

• 1:14Speaker 04

  I would like it noted that I've been upwardly mobile since the beginning because I recorded my first appearance on this show from the backyard of a gutted house I was sleeping on the tile floor in on a MacBook that I had bought several years before without any headphones at all. And now look at me, I'm in an apartment with furniture and water.

• 1:32Liam McAnderson?

  Wow.

• 1:33November Kelly?

  Wow. This is the power of left wing podcasting. This is what your subscriptions do is we moved Victoria into an apartment with furniture.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  That's just living history right now. Just imagining tracing down, like tracing up a family tree and going, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. That's a deep cut for the real heads out there. A real deep cut.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  You should go to Do Not Eat's YouTube channel, everyone. There's, when's Frankly coming out? I remember that guy. Yeah.

• 2:05Liam McAnderson?

  Wow.

• 2:06Justin Roczniak?

  Some guy got really mad in the comments recently about, about that, actually. Like really flew off the handle. I thought.

• 2:18Justin Roczniak?

  Specifically, it was in the comments of the video where I'm going up and down the escalator at Bally's in Atlantic City. And the guy was like, how do you have time to do this when you should be working on Franklin?

• 2:31November Kelly?

  It's a good question.

• 2:34November Kelly?

  Some people just want to be your boss, even when there's not that sort of like, like material relationship, you know?

• 2:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So anyway, it's bonus episode. What you see on the screen in front of you are a bunch of Pennsylvania railroad trains lined up to deliver passengers to America's greatest sporting event, the RV Navy football game.

• 2:59November Kelly?

  I'm locking in for five to six hours of pinstriped nonsense. I'm, I cannot wait.

• 3:08Liam McAnderson?

  This is beautiful.

• 3:09Justin Roczniak?

  Today, we're bringing, we're bringing bonus episodes back to their roots. We're going to talk about something I like, which is the GG1.

• 3:17November Kelly?

  After six years, we let you do a bonus episode about something you like talking about.

• 3:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, yeah, this was, uh, one time a year, they would build a whole temporary train station just to deliver people to JFK Stadium over here. Oh, I don't think it was named JFK Stadium yet.

• 3:34November Kelly?

  Raising hand for the question. So like back in the day, people used to care about Army Navy, right? Which is crazy to me. Does that mean that Army, Army or Navy used to be good? Because my understanding now is that- Yes.

• 3:46Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 3:47November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 3:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Uh, Army is one of the winninger, winninger programs.

• 3:53November Kelly?

  Winninger, most winninger.

• 3:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they've produced a number of Heisman winners, but they kind of, kind of, their dominance ends sort of 1945.

• 4:01November Kelly?

  I was gonna say, like, my understanding was that both Army and Navy football is like, kind of mediocre now. Am I, am I correct in thinking that?

• 4:09Liam McAnderson?

  Now, yes, historically, no. Historically, they were two great powers.

• 4:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it ended in 1945, much like their winning streak in war.

• 4:20Liam McAnderson?

  Cupcake schedule since then.

• 4:22November Kelly?

  There's a real like sort of IR thesis about this, right? Where it's like, you know, state capacity ends in 1945 and it all becomes private enterprise again.

• 4:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about that.

• 4:35November Kelly?

  Interesting.

• 4:36Justin Roczniak?

  Before we do that, we have to ask a question. What is railway electrification?

• 4:42November Kelly?

  It's the thing we keep saying is good.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  It is. I was like, oh, you're shit. Yeah, you got me on. And there's, I suppose I do talk about electrification a bit. Yeah. It's where you put the wires above. Well, you know, it's where you take the atmospheric railway idea and you go, oh, no, you make it good by going, oh, no, that not air and rat viscera, but electricity fizz.

• 5:00November Kelly?

  Instead of bacon grease, it was electrons.

• 5:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:05Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, this goes on for 56 slides. So there's words on all of them.

• 5:08November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ.

• 5:11Justin Roczniak?

  Well, every time we punted, I wound up adding 10 more slides.

• 5:14November Kelly?

  I started drinking before this and I will continue to do so.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  No, we can, it's fine.

• 5:21Justin Roczniak?

  This is what happens when you sober me up.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is it.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  We can, we can, it's fine. I can, we can accelerate this thing, much like an electric train. The thing about a train is that it has to carry all of its power around if you don't have the wires. And that's a lot because a train, even when it's not moving, consumes like a power station's worth of power. Like megawatts are consumed by a train just keeping the lights on. For a decent passenger train. So as soon as it's moving, it is using literally a power station for just the one train to move it along. So if it's carrying all that power source itself, that's hugely inefficient. It means you're carrying less people, less things. So it makes sense to take the power station and put it in a, for example, a power station.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  And then, and then attach that power station by wires to the train, which now is much lighter and can carry more things and people.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Why don't we take the power station and move it somewhere else?

• 6:16November Kelly?

  Why don't we make it somewhere else's problem?

• 6:20Justin Roczniak?

  And excitingly, when the power station is somewhere else, it doesn't have to run on like diesel or coal. It can be hydroelectric. It could be nuclear. It could be, you know, solar or wind. It could be, I don't know. What's the word?

• 6:35November Kelly?

  Geothermal.

• 6:36Justin Roczniak?

  Geothermal, yeah. It could be all kinds of stuff, right? You can do fun stuff like the brakes on the train can power a different train because you have regenerative braking, which returns the electricity to the wires, right? You can stop pollution. You can protect the environment. Electric locomotives are very high performance, so they can go faster. They can haul more. They can, you know, they let you have higher traffic densities so you can run more trains. And they have fewer moving parts than diesel or steam locomotives, so they're more reliable, right?

• 7:13November Kelly?

  And most importantly, the transformers on them make a kind of singing noise sometimes as they accelerate, which I really like.

• 7:20Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  There's some Glaswegian, there's some trains made in Glasgow that run in Birmingham by a company called Hanslet Barclay that have a very distinctive little singing. The 323 is a very distinctive little singy songy noise.

• 7:32November Kelly?

  The singing songy noise par excellence to me is the noise of the, um, the network southeast and then southeastern networkers.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Hell, yeah, made in York.

• 7:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, that was my commute into school. And so I have that etched in my brain is the noise that they make.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  My, my favorite train powering other train thing is the Swedish one that carries like ore to the sea and empty trains come back up the hill. And those empty trains get a free ride up the hill. They use no, the whole thing uses zero electricity. In fact, it puts electricity back into the grid because of the regenerative braking of the train going down the hill to the sea easily powers every train going back up the hill and also basically all the towns within a hundred mile radius. It's great.

• 8:12Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. It was the apocryphal story from the opening of the Milwaukee Roads Electric District over the Rocky Mountains was when they, uh, when they sent the first train over the mountains, uh, the, the electric company owed the railroad $16.

• 8:34Justin Roczniak?

  So there's different-

• 8:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, you mean, you mean, I'm sorry, Roz, do you mean the Palooza? Oh, goddammit, it's another fucking Washington place name that I didn't look up before I recorded this episode.

• 8:45November Kelly?

  You're never gonna pass your Washington citizenship test.

• 8:47Speaker 04

  They're gonna kick me out, I'm gonna have to go back to Idaho, and I'm gonna get killed. Anyway, Nova, the Palooza to Cascades rail trail? Instead of the, the greatest achievement in American engineering of the first half of the 20th century?

• 8:59Justin Roczniak?

  You want a depressing episode to do at some point, the Milwaukee Road.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  That, oh my god, I, yeah, that, I almost put some in here about that, but I was like, no, because I saw how many slides there were, and I was like, I think Nova would be justified in killing me.

• 9:13Liam McAnderson?

  Hopefully it's 56 of them, yeah, isn't it? Yeah, they're fucking just, you know what, you could just add them on, Victoria, it doesn't matter, we're gonna be here next 6 hours. Make it an even 60, you know? Exactly.

• 9:22Justin Roczniak?

  We'll be here forever.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  I think we should just do a bonus episode that is the Milwaukee Road, because that is my special interest in railroads, because it's stupid, they didn't run it great. But they also ran it great.

• 9:34November Kelly?

  What I'm experiencing when I look at the difference between 56 slides and 60 slides is sort of like the, you wanna be specific and make it a runway, huh? Uh, kind of thing, you know?

• 9:48Justin Roczniak?

  So there's different types of railway electrification, right? You can electrify with direct current, that's when the electricity goes in one direction and then circles around the other way, right? That's direct current, or you can do it with alternating current, where the electricity goes back and forth along the same wire, right? And then there's more exotic stuff, like batteries, or three-phase AC electrification, which makes you do stupid stuff with pantographs.

• 10:21November Kelly?

  I don't like, I don't like when rail electrification involves a third rail, because that's too, that's a little bit too Call of the Void to me. Uh, when I'm at like a train platform, you know, like-

• 10:34Justin Roczniak?

  And you can only do that with direct current, because of something called the skin effect, where, for whatever reason- Alternating current tends to migrate to the outside of the third rail, which means it can't carry very much current. Also, alternating current systems tend to be much higher voltage. So, uh, you know, you would just have insane arcing constantly if you tried to use.

• 10:59November Kelly?

  Getting, getting smited on the platform by the third rail. I hope you're all taking notes, by the way, because this will be on the test when we get, uh, all of us on Kill James Bond for, uh, Take It Pelham 123. Oh, yes.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  I love that movie.

• 11:15Justin Roczniak?

  That's a great movie.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Third rail, you, you have to like at DC, you need loads of substations. So it gets quite expensive. Like you need smaller clearances because, uh, it doesn't jump as far. But you, you, as a result of DC, you need loads of substations, which kind of works in a suburban area. But if you have like a rural railway where you'd need to build like a DC substation every three miles, that kind of starts getting stupid quickly.

• 11:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, and a lot of times if you do have a long distance DC network, they still use overhead wire. Yeah. Um, and you're, you're, you know, the third rail is usually like, what? 600 volts or so?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Six, 750. Yeah.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  Ross, what is that? What is that cod rail locomotive?

• 11:53Justin Roczniak?

  That is a E44 and we'll talk about them later.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Okay. It's absolutely stunningly beautiful.

• 12:00November Kelly?

  It reminds me of, it reminds me of chalk ice specifically.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Blue wrapper. Oh, that is a deep cut to the nineties. Uh, that's Nova and I being basically exactly the same age and having exactly the same catering company supplying our primary school.

• 12:14November Kelly?

  Having, having yet to invent a locomotive that looks like a Viennetta. I'm forced to make do with the chalk ice.

• 12:22Justin Roczniak?

  And, and it is running long hood forward as God intended.

• 12:26Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 12:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So most of your modern systems are going to be alternating current overhead wire systems, right? And we'll, I guess, talk about how that started in a bit.

• 12:41Justin Roczniak?

  But first we're, we gotta put on our Pennsylvania railroad hat.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  I would like it noted that this 56, this 56 episode podcast has now had three butt firsts.

• 12:52November Kelly?

  Before reaching the topic of the episode.

• 12:55Liam McAnderson?

  Firstly, thirdly.

• 12:56November Kelly?

  Yeah. Also, I would not be surprised if we were all expected to have a Pennsylvania Railroad hat. And I feel bad that I don't.

• 13:03Liam McAnderson?

  I do have one. I don't know where mine is.

• 13:05Justin Roczniak?

  I have one somewhere, but I'm not sure where. So it is the early 1900s and the Pennsylvania Railroad has problems and believes electrification can solve them.

• 13:15November Kelly?

  Well, it's better than the Pennsylvania Railroad's other way of solving problems in the early 1900s of trying to shoot passengers. Shooting passengers or passengers, yeah.

• 13:24Liam McAnderson?

  I bet, I bet, yeah, I bet. Whatever. No, shoot the passengers too. Pay up, motherfuckers.

• 13:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. And taking a sort of like heel turn in the middle of the service, you know, where it's like, listen, you want to get to your destination, pay me.

• 13:35Liam McAnderson?

  Pay up.

• 13:37Justin Roczniak?

  Ivy Ledbetter Lee said, "The guns are for the protection of the passengers."

• 13:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Justin Roczniak?

  So. He was lying.

• 13:49Justin Roczniak?

  So, problem number A, right? Is horseshoe curve and the Pittsburgh division, right? So we'll have a diagram later. I should have shown that somewhere here. The Pennsylvania Railroad main line, it goes from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and it goes to Harrisburg and it goes to Altoona. Right? And then it goes around the horseshoe curve and then it goes to Pittsburgh, right? And so you have the Philadelphia division, the Pittsburgh division, and then the one in the middle is of course called the middle division, right?

• 14:27Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, the land of God forgot, central Pennsylvania.

• 14:30Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 14:31Liam McAnderson?

  That's where I'm from.

• 14:32Justin Roczniak?

  And the Philadelphia division, you know, it goes through sort of, you know, Amish country, which is relatively flat. The middle division follows the Juniata River. So it is again, even though it's going through the ridge and valley Appalachians, it is relatively flat. And then the Pittsburgh division is just one long, continuous horrible grade.

• 14:58Justin Roczniak?

  Which necessitated the building of, of course, the famous, the world famous horseshoe curve, among other things.

• 15:07November Kelly?

  Big switchback.

• 15:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this brings you up to the summit at Galitsin. And then after that, it's, I'm not sure if it's downhill all the way to Pittsburgh. I think it's just horrible grades everywhere. And so you needed to add helper engines to get over this grade for a very long time, up to and including today. This is one of the last places in the United States where helper engines are still regularly added to freight trains.

• 15:36Liam McAnderson?

  Can I talk about horseshoe curve just for a second? That it was so important the Nazis wanted to bomb it.

• 15:41November Kelly?

  I mean, best of luck with that, Adolf, Jesus.

• 15:44Liam McAnderson?

  Well, no, the, the Germans landed saboteurs on Long Island and one of their intended targets was the horseshoe curve.

• 15:50November Kelly?

  Fritz Duquesne, yeah.

• 15:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes, yes. And he, and then they, we, we did not, did we execute him? I'm sure we probably did, this being the United States.

• 16:00November Kelly?

  I don't know. I know we executed a bunch of German spies, but my, I'll check.

• 16:04Liam McAnderson?

  This is so important to US industrialization that was a target for German saboteurs. If you've never been to horseshoe curve, you should absolutely go. It is breathtaking.

• 16:13November Kelly?

  Died 1956, so if you executed him, you took your time about it.

• 16:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the Nuremberg executioner, yeah. Ross, continue, I'm sorry for interrupting you.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  There is a whole episode on German spies. My favorite thing is that pretty much all the German spies in the UK got flipped. There's definitely an episode.

• 16:30November Kelly?

  Cross committee, yes.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, the whole, and the characters involved in there are hilarious. There's, there's got to be an episode in there somewhere. That's a lot of fun.

• 16:36November Kelly?

  There will be, there will be.

• 16:37Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  So I, I just, I want to see the horseshoe curve so bad.

• 16:41Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, it's great. You can go up there and be completely surrounded by train.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  It's like Peterborough.

• 16:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:49November Kelly?

  It's erotic in its own way. I've never had Peterborough described as erotic in any way, let alone its own way. Well, I'm doing it now, Dova.

• 16:58Liam McAnderson?

  Or in his case, erozic.

• 17:04Justin Roczniak?

  So speeds up this grade were very, very low and they tried and this made a major bottleneck on the main line, right? They tried to solve this by adding more tracks. It was four tracks the whole way up, but you can see in this image, those four tracks were entirely occupied by train.

• 17:24November Kelly?

  I love the, I love the two guys standing on a boxcar.

• 17:27Justin Roczniak?

  I was thinking that too, yeah.

• 17:30November Kelly?

  Take your life in your hands, you know?

• 17:32Justin Roczniak?

  That's bold. A lot of times you were down to, especially on a heavy freight train, you were down to 10 miles an hour here. It was not a, it was not a, a very.

• 17:41November Kelly?

  Oh, it's a class 66 going over a shap today. Nice. Okay. Noted.

• 17:46Justin Roczniak?

  So there's gotta be a better way here. Another location that was a problem. Problem number B was Pennsylvania Station in New York City.

• 17:58November Kelly?

  God, it's beautiful. It was, it was beautiful. Not anymore.

• 18:03Justin Roczniak?

  No, not anymore. I was just there recently. Yeah, it's, well, the old concourse is still better than the new concourse because.

• 18:11November Kelly?

  If they added anyone to sit down yet?

• 18:13Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 18:16Justin Roczniak?

  The, the ticketed seating area has a bar in it now.

• 18:20November Kelly?

  Thank God.

• 18:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You picked a hell of a time to stop drinking, Ross. Yeah, well, I slowed down. I didn't stop. Attaboy.

• 18:31Justin Roczniak?

  But anyway.

• 18:34November Kelly?

  Oh, the can of sensitivity.

• 18:38Justin Roczniak?

  Lordy.

• 18:39November Kelly?

  I was.

• 18:41Justin Roczniak?

  The Pennsylvania Station, we've talked a lot about this one in the past. We have a whole episode on that that also has Gareth on it, right?

• 18:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 18:50Justin Roczniak?

  Brief here, you know, steam locomotives and underground stations generally don't mix. But there was no other feasible way for the Pennsylvania Railroad to reach Manhattan other than by way of a tunnel because Gustav Lindenthal's mega bridge didn't pan out.

• 19:07November Kelly?

  There's, there's, there's still time. If you, if you engage in a little bit of like megalopolising, then it could still happen.

• 19:13Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. They did lay the foundations. So they needed some kind of non-steam traction to get the trains into the station, right? Do you use cables? Do you use a huge team of horses?

• 19:25November Kelly?

  Do you use, as you used to sometimes do, have the passengers get out and push?

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Reading the notes, I thought you were gonna ask, do you use a huge horse? Just one.

• 19:36Liam McAnderson?

  The one big.

• 19:36November Kelly?

  That's really, really big. I have a name.

• 19:42Justin Roczniak?

  It's a, it's a Chinese baseball team, if I recall correctly.

• 19:45November Kelly?

  What, the huge horse?

• 19:46Justin Roczniak?

  Hell yeah. Huge horse. Um, I, I, I was trying to get merchandise, uh, from them a while back, but I can't get it outside of China. I gotta go to China and watch Chinese baseball, I guess.

• 19:56Liam McAnderson?

  Davy Crockett nuke mounted to the back of the train. Yes.

• 20:00Justin Roczniak?

  So another thing they were worried about was fires, right? That's a big problem when all the trains are made of wood. So the Pennsylvania railroad turns to their guy to fix both of these problems. George Gibbs, right?

• 20:14Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, GG.

• 20:15Justin Roczniak?

  GG, go George Gibbs.

• 20:17November Kelly?

  GG. That's, that's a good mural. That's a good like cameo they've got of him, you know?