Episode 189: 2017 Point Defiance Derailment

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

• 0:00November Kelly?

  Coercively assigned, ready at birth.

• 0:03Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God, it's not on. I can't just push the button anymore.

• 0:07Liam McAnderson?

  And give it a second.

• 0:07Justin Roczniak?

  Because I haven't done this in two weeks.

• 0:09Liam McAnderson?

  There we go.

• 0:10Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God, hold on.

• 0:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my.

• 0:12November Kelly?

  Anytime.

• 0:12Justin Roczniak?

  Adobe.

• 0:14November Kelly?

  This is.

• 0:15Liam McAnderson?

  Adobe doesn't know how to open Adobe?

• 0:17November Kelly?

  This is the most shut the fuck up and don't touch nothing podcasts in history where it's like anytime anything changes, all of us become, uh,

• 0:27Justin Roczniak?

  Helpless.

• 0:27November Kelly?

  Mentally.

• 0:28Liam McAnderson?

  Delirious with rage. Uh, you know that XKCD about every update breaks somebody's workflow?

• 0:34November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 0:34Liam McAnderson?

  That, that, that got both of those things on rods.

• 0:37November Kelly?

  One hit point workflow.

• 0:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, hold on. Uh, and.

• 0:43Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna.

• 0:45Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I should start the virtual camera too. And we should do a sync point.

• 0:50November Kelly?

  A sync point?

• 0:52Justin Roczniak?

  A sync point, a point where you sync. Um.

• 0:55Liam McAnderson?

  Ask me about the Titanic.

• 0:56Justin Roczniak?

  One mark, three, two, one, mark.

• 1:01Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, crispy.

• 1:02Justin Roczniak?

  Close enough.

• 1:03November Kelly?

  That was a, that was a violent clap. I was fond of that. That was, that was good. Stimulating. All right, we're locked in. The podcast with a one hit point workflow is back.

• 1:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:13Liam McAnderson?

  The hot, the podcast barely clinging to life both days. Yeah. We don't worry.

• 1:19November Kelly?

  This is the thing. We're never, we're never gonna stop doing it. We're never gonna stop doing it, but it's a battle.

• 1:25Liam McAnderson?

  Hi, haters.

• 1:28Justin Roczniak?

  All right, yeah, 60 gigabytes. That's fine.

• 1:30Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna, oh, I'm gonna beat you to death with your own shoes.

• 1:34Justin Roczniak?

  I hope there was nothing incriminating on, uh, recent files. I don't know.

• 1:38November Kelly?

  Something incre- okay.

• 1:40Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:43Liam McAnderson?

  I guess we don't.

• 1:45November Kelly?

  Nuclear bomb plans?

• 1:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Liam McAnderson?

  Not my .exe.

• 1:52Justin Roczniak?

  Why is it in executable?

• 1:55Liam McAnderson?

  Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, shut up.

• 1:59Justin Roczniak?

  Hello. Hi, Rod. And hello and welcome to... Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Roczniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 2:16November Kelly?

  I am November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 2:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he/him. And we have a guest slash employee slash... What are you, Victoria?

• 2:28Speaker 03

  That's a great question.

• 2:29Justin Roczniak?

  That's not rhetorical, by the way.

• 2:31Speaker 03

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

• 2:40November Kelly?

  Survived the month of October reward?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it tried really hard to kill me.

• 2:44Liam McAnderson?

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

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, like a, like a, like a valiant, like a medal of Lenin, like for valiant service in the face of October.

• 2:53November Kelly?

  Get you an order of Lenin. You just have to come to Scotland to pick it up.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Okay, that's fine. We can arrange that.

• 2:58Justin Roczniak?

  Who would do that?

• 2:59November Kelly?

  Go to Scotland?

• 3:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Liam McAnderson?

  What kind of asshole?

• 3:03Justin Roczniak?

  In this economy?

• 3:05Liam McAnderson?

  I know exactly what kind of asshole it would be.

• 3:08Justin Roczniak?

  Entirely to purchase Buckfast.

• 3:11November Kelly?

  Coming back with two suitcases laden down with the caffeinated fortified wine made by monks.

• 3:20Liam McAnderson?

  The thing is right, that I need caffeinated alcohol because it is, it is, it is my lifeblood. Because the two favorite things in the world are being stimulated and depressed, baby. And I'm gonna have both at once.

• 3:32November Kelly?

  God made caffeinated alcohol for the same reason he made trans people. So that we could share in the joy of creation.

• 3:40Liam McAnderson?

  That's right, baby.

• 3:41Justin Roczniak?

  Here's the thing, I couldn't, I couldn't find Buckfast in Scotland. I had to go with respected railway engineer Gareth Dennis to buy it in York. And father.

• 3:57November Kelly?

  When did you find it in York? That must have been a, like a little bit of an odyssey.

• 4:02Justin Roczniak?

  It was, uh, it, it, there, there was a bar, but it had a beer store underneath.

• 4:08November Kelly?

  Bizarre.

• 4:09Justin Roczniak?

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

• 4:15November Kelly?

  I, I'm so glad you enjoyed my stupid, stupid country.

• 4:22Justin Roczniak?

  It was a nice time. I liked it more than other parts of the trip, to be honest. So, um, what you see on the screen in front of you is a pretty beat up, uh, M-Track, whatever the new Siemens diesel locomotives are called.

• 4:41November Kelly?

  It looks like the kind of-

• 4:43Justin Roczniak?

  The Charger, yes.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  They sell to the Marines.

• 4:46November Kelly?

  It looks like the train equivalent of Darth Vader with the helmet off. It's, uh, it's bad.

• 4:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's not very good.

• 4:53Liam McAnderson?

  You might as well have just spray painted "that's bad." The T right here is shorthand for "that's bad, folks."

• 4:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the, the WTIP inspectors arrive at the side of this train. Uh, and like, and like spray paint a W and a Y P on, on the side of this instead of an A.

• 5:09Liam McAnderson?

  I, um, it's better than a fanfic.

• 5:12Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's not supposed to look like this. Um, today, we're going to talk about the 2017 Port Defiance, uh, M-Track Cascades derailment.

• 5:24November Kelly?

  You can tell that this is the Pacific Northwest because someone has clipped a leash to the front of this train, the carabiner.

• 5:31Liam McAnderson?

  Ugh, lesbians.

• 5:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's already like vegetation growing on it because there's so much rain. You know, um, yeah. Um, I think we have not friends, but friends of friends who were on this train when it derailed.

• 5:46November Kelly?

  I hope they're excited for us to like make light of their tragedy.

• 5:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 5:51Liam McAnderson?

  You survived a train crash, Tom, and people can say that.

• 5:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, so, but before we talk about that, we have to do the goddamn news.

• 6:06Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 6:09Justin Roczniak?

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

• 6:19November Kelly?

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

• 6:28Liam McAnderson?

  Hey, shit we can't talk about on air, part 455.

• 6:32November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's fine. The, listen, the good thing is we established what they, what they call in the business a legend by also not releasing a bunch of times when the federal government was funded.

• 6:43Liam McAnderson?

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

• 6:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, it makes me, it makes me want to kind of ritually disembowel myself for, because of the dishonor.

• 6:54Justin Roczniak?

  People love A-Lab series. I can only hope to become that inconsistent.

• 7:02November Kelly?

  It's aspirational.

• 7:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, so we had the longest government shutdown in history and like 10 Democrats or whatever, including our own Senator John Fetterman. Yeah.

• 7:15November Kelly?

  Oh my god.

• 7:16Liam McAnderson?

  Boo.

• 7:19Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, we should, we should just, uh, we should, we should just, uh, you know, capitulate and reopen everything.

• 7:26November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, Fetterman had like another stroke maybe, or like a fall and a heart attack or some, some kind of like unhealthy shit, but it didn't turn him woke.

• 7:36Justin Roczniak?

  That happened after he voted though.

• 7:37Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, didn't turn, didn't turn him woke.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  God's just consistently trying to strike him down.

• 7:44Liam McAnderson?

  And who can blame God?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Through his thick ass.

• 7:47November Kelly?

  Satan being like, Pennsylvanian Satan being like, we've created a smite proof oath.

• 7:56Liam McAnderson?

  You thought it was gonna be me, didn't you, motherfuckers?

• 8:00November Kelly?

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

• 8:03Liam McAnderson?

  Immortals will prove it otherwise.

• 8:05November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 8:05Justin Roczniak?

  So this was, this was, uh, an extremely, you know, frustrating thing for it to end in this way because, uh, you know, you do this very long government shutdown. When the government shuts down, obviously, for those of you who have been living under a rock, um, you know, which seems like an ideal place to live, to be honest. Um, you know, people like-

• 8:23November Kelly?

  Unless it's the federal government's rock.

• 8:24Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, that's true. Then, then they kick you. You're the federal government's like, uh, ornamental hermit. Um, you know.

• 8:32November Kelly?

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

• 8:35Justin Roczniak?

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

• 8:46Liam McAnderson?

  The Trump administration is trying to not pay a lot of these people too, which is vile.

• 8:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, this is, this is like a whole like crisis that was sort of, you know, around like, okay, we have to fund the government somehow. And, you know, the Democrats, of course, wanted to continue such things as Affordable Health Care Act subsidies, right? So that people's insurance doesn't, you know, double next year. And the, you know, Republicans did not want to do that because they, I don't know, want to kill everyone. So.

• 9:23Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they're fuck asses, dude.

• 9:24November Kelly?

  And you know what they say, in a standoff like that, you can always rely on the famously iron spine of the Democratic Party.

• 9:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:35Liam McAnderson?

  Devin, 10 minutes, 30 seconds in, take those motherfuckers out back and [bleep] them. Kneel them over, ditch, [bleep] them, [bleep] them all, [bleep] them if you gotta, shoot and [bleep] them, 10 minutes and 30 seconds in, to reiterate.

• 9:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I don't know what to say about this, other than, you know.

• 9:51Liam McAnderson?

  I already said it, man.

• 9:52Justin Roczniak?

  With the ultimate, with the ultimate capitulation here, it's like, why did we do any of that? What was that for?

• 9:58Liam McAnderson?

  That is exactly right.

• 10:00November Kelly?

  It was, it was to disrespect a bunch of troops, which is the most noble reason for doing anything, to go to the US military.

• 10:07Justin Roczniak?

  Including air traffic controllers, who were a type of troop.

• 10:09November Kelly?

  Yeah, and be, and being like, hey, fuck us. And then you slap them in the back of the head so their glasses fly off and they can't see the planes. And you go, we're not paying you for three months.

• 10:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Well, the Dems were winning this too. Like, it was, they were, they, polling showed that, you know, even for like the wonk-minded out there, that the Democrats were perceived as not the problem. And the Republicans were actually getting, you know, kind of shellacked for this. So it made perfect sense to immediately be like, no, actually, it's our fault. We were just gonna. But we're so [inaudible].

• 10:41November Kelly?

  And then, of course, the second after they did capitulate, Donald Trump came on stage with a big briefcase, which, like, snapped open to reveal a bunch of documents incriminating him as a pedophile. So.

• 10:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yes.

• 10:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, tactical masterstroke once again from Senator Chuck Schumer.

• 11:00Liam McAnderson?

  I did like the article I read.

• 11:01Justin Roczniak?

  I just got a phone call today from Blue Cross Blue Shield saying that my premiums were going up next year. So.

• 11:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I I I'm trying to have a family and I have to do some stuff around that. And if you if you try to prohibit me from having a family, I'm going to take a a battle axe, Senator Schumer and Senator Fetterman, and I'm going to come to your offices with my battle axe. And I'm going to

• 11:28Liam McAnderson?

  dev 12 minutes 25 second.

• 11:33Justin Roczniak?

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

• 11:37Liam McAnderson?

  Die, oh, die.

• 11:39Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no, no, he comes back with a different ideology each time.

• 11:44November Kelly?

  Chairman Gonzalo thought for a minute there.

• 11:48Liam McAnderson?

  No, no, wait, fuck, go back.

• 11:50November Kelly?

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

• 11:55Liam McAnderson?

  I would pay good money to see Black Israelite liberation, John Fetterman.

• 12:01November Kelly?

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

• 12:09Justin Roczniak?

  No, he

• 12:11Liam McAnderson?

  doubtless.

• 12:11Justin Roczniak?

  He gets enough lumps on his head that he looks like the evil scientist.

• 12:18Liam McAnderson?

  I do like the idea of just spinning the wheel of ideologies, whoever this dirtbag fucking believes. Dirtbag used not affectionately, by the way.

• 12:25November Kelly?

  George Fetterman.

• 12:27Justin Roczniak?

  George Fetterman.

• 12:28Liam McAnderson?

  Fetterman.

• 12:30Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone works but the vacant lot.

• 12:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, so Chuck Schumer knows that Americans love their health insurance companies and they want to spend more time on the phone with them. And so courteously, he, you know, decided to really enable that, you know?

• 12:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I I a few people have tried to. You know, say, well, Schumer didn't do this. And it's like, okay, maybe he didn't, but he did lose control of the party. It's kind of like, well, what exactly are we doing here?

• 13:02Liam McAnderson?

  What is the point? Right. Exactly. What exactly would you say it is you do?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Well, and from what it seems like even the House is mad at him.

• 13:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Like it's it's like everybody like even the Democratic establishment is pissed at him. It's it's kind of insane to see like unanimously, every single person is absolutely fucking furious.

• 13:21Liam McAnderson?

  Resigned fuckface.

• 13:23Justin Roczniak?

  It might be time to hang up the hat, quit while you're ahead.

• 13:27November Kelly?

  Retire to spend more time with your imaginary family.

• 13:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  Hanging with the Baileys.

• 13:36Justin Roczniak?

  Don't know Chuck Schumer does frequently consult with imaginary friends for what policies he should vote for.

• 13:45November Kelly?

  Yeah, he's like a secular Mormon in that way, you know?

• 13:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 13:49November Kelly?

  He has like a kind of prophet, seer and revelator role.

• 13:53Justin Roczniak?

  Well, at least if you're Mormon, other people believe in your imaginary friends too.

• 13:58Liam McAnderson?

  And God, the Mormons haven't figured out, the Mormons haven't figured out because God can change his mind.

• 14:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Liam McAnderson?

  That's that. See, God, God is a consensus builder. And also you get your own planet when you die. We got to write the Mormon as a bonus episode. We got to have Jordan from bringing your money on here. Or Greg or one of the other ones. I don't know. And yeah, it's coming. Just when I get around to it. Shut up.

• 14:19Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, we did this whole rigmarole for nothing.

• 14:22Liam McAnderson?

  God damn nothing.

• 14:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 14:23November Kelly?

  Amazing.

• 14:24Justin Roczniak?

  Didn't even last long enough for me to get stuck in Europe, which would have been funny at least.

• 14:29Liam McAnderson?

  Could have been an expat.

• 14:30November Kelly?

  No, instead we we we sort of forced the air traffic control people back to work.

• 14:35Justin Roczniak?

  Um, yeah.

• 14:36November Kelly?

  And, you know, Ronald Reagan's criminal legacy continues.

• 14:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. In other news.

• 14:44Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, we gotta talk about the Hess truck this year.

• 14:46Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it looks like shit, dude. It's not a truck!

• 14:49Justin Roczniak?

  It's not a truck!

• 14:51November Kelly?

  That's a, that's a, what is that? NASCAR?

• 14:54Liam McAnderson?

  I, maybe, I do like-

• 14:55Justin Roczniak?

  The Hess truck this year-

• 14:57Liam McAnderson?

  It's back and it's worse than ever.

• 14:59Justin Roczniak?

  It's two stock cars, right? It's two stock cars, a big one and a small one.

• 15:07November Kelly?

  Now notably, two cars do not add up to one truck.

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Don't talk to me or my son ever again.

• 15:12Justin Roczniak?

  The big stock car, you can open up the hood of the big stock car and put the small stock car inside the big stock car?

• 15:22November Kelly?

  Russian stock cars?

• 15:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's a Matrojka stock, stock car.

• 15:26Liam McAnderson?

  Regular car's gonna have a field day with this. This is my big car, this is my little car. This is my big car, this is my little car.

• 15:31November Kelly?

  This is a, this is a fucked up thing to do in the cars universe. This is like some Ed Gein shit to them.

• 15:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, we never really established how the new cars are made. I guess this is, you know-

• 15:42Liam McAnderson?

  They're made by fucking cars.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Car vor.

• 15:45Justin Roczniak?

  So what have we got? We got, I think, sixty-seven lights, five roaring, that's covered up by the Chiron. The small car fits inside the big car, there's a pullback motor, you know?

• 15:58Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, I like the pullback motor, I guess, but-

• 16:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Liam McAnderson?

  Free shipping and batteries, yeah, it's fifty fucking dollars, pound sand!

• 16:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:05November Kelly?

  Jesus. The economy is fucked. This is downstream of tariffs to me.

• 16:09Justin Roczniak?

  This is not a good Hess truck, because number one, it's not a truck, right?

• 16:13November Kelly?

  The children crave like large industrial or commercial vehicle, you know? That's what a, what a truck is, gotta be on a truck body, you know? This is a real like light truck exception shit.

• 16:23Justin Roczniak?

  May- maybe if the big one was like one of those, like the NASCAR truck series, you know, trucks?

• 16:30Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I love the Hes- series, yeah, slam trucks, they look nasty.

• 16:35November Kelly?

  About like the Paridaca, uh, like truck rally?

• 16:39Liam McAnderson?

  They must. Someone in that office must know about that.

• 16:43November Kelly?

  You know?

• 16:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Justin Roczniak?

  The Hess truck is a DAF turbo twin and it like kills you instantly.

• 16:48November Kelly?

  Oh, god, please, yeah.

• 16:51Justin Roczniak?

  That's an episode I want to do at some point in the future.

• 16:54November Kelly?

  Absolutely.

• 16:57November Kelly?

  No, this thing sucks. I hate it.

• 16:58Justin Roczniak?

  You have to, you have to teach your kids about the Dakar Rally.

• 17:04November Kelly?

  Teach your children to. Talk to your kids about the Paris Dakar Rally.

• 17:08Justin Roczniak?

  Kids about the Dakar Rally. Um, here's how one man created a truck so powerful it kills you instantly.

• 17:18November Kelly?

  I just, if you, if you, if you're not familiar, you should look up, like just Google images, just look up some of these trucks because they look like a big bouncy excitable dog that's really happy to be doing what it's doing. And what it's doing is driving like 60 miles an hour up a sort of near vertical sand. It's great.

• 17:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah. Or like 150 miles an hour over like smooth.

• 17:40Liam McAnderson?

  I remember that I wanted to enter the Dakar. They only let professionals do it. And I was real mad. And then Joy yelled at me and she was like, why did you think you would be allowed to do the Dakar? I was like, I don't know. It just seems like fun.

• 17:50November Kelly?

  Having, having a sort of amateur bracket where you just use whatever car, like, you know, whatever.

• 17:55Liam McAnderson?

  Let us do it. What do you care?

• 17:57November Kelly?

  100% fatality rate.

• 18:00Liam McAnderson?

  Love in Dakar is the thing I want.

• 18:06Speaker 03

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

• 18:13November Kelly?

  All right. We got to step up from sponsoring teams to being teams.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  This is why you hired me.

• 18:19November Kelly?

  Yes, that's right.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm, I'm the driver.

• 18:23November Kelly?

  What, what's the most kind of ridiculously dangerous thing we can sign up for? And it, there's just like a clause buried in there somewhere from like 1924 that says that like wireless enthusiasts are allotted a team spot at Le Mans or something. And we just get to go out there and die.

• 18:41Justin Roczniak?

  We go from New York to Paris.

• 18:46Justin Roczniak?

  And, um, do you want the Leslie special or do you want, um, the Hannibal Twin Eight? I'm always going for Hannibal Twin Eight on that one, actually.

• 18:57November Kelly?

  Just we should, there's not enough like silly bullshit in the world, just in general, still less that we're involved in.

• 19:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 19:04November Kelly?

  And any kind of motorsport shenanigans like that, they should re, they should bring back the Meli Melia so that we can, we can enter it. Yeah, but it's not like as.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Can't die.

• 19:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, they don't let you die. What I want is for us to go, let's meet up and race and die.

• 19:18Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, shit. That sounds like fun. I, well, uh, well, we're not going to Saudi Arabia, so we can't do it right now, but when it goes back, we'll, we'll do the Dakar.

• 19:24Speaker 03

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

• 19:28November Kelly?

  Yeah. Well, that's fun. I'll do it. Kind of an interesting quandary for their legal system, you know?

• 19:33Liam McAnderson?

  All right, motherfuckers.

• 19:36Liam McAnderson?

  Trans women are women, but only if it says that they're not allowed to drive. Love Saudi Arabia.

• 19:41November Kelly?

  Ah, I see, I see you've observed some of my driving lessons.

• 19:45Liam McAnderson?

  I, well, I, I don't know, by that definition, Roz is a trans woman. Uh, he can't drive.

• 19:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, I was wondering how long that would take.

• 19:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we cracked the egg.

• 19:56Justin Roczniak?

  All right. All right. Listen, that was the goddamn news.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Oh, it's bad.

• 20:03Liam McAnderson?

  Salty snail.

• 20:04Justin Roczniak?

  We also have to talk about the live shows.

• 20:07Liam McAnderson?

  Live shows.

• 20:09Justin Roczniak?

  The spaghetti warehouse.

• 20:11November Kelly?

  Come to the spaghetti warehouse.

• 20:12Justin Roczniak?

  In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

• 20:14November Kelly?

  In the spaghetti warehouse, you will be accommodated, you will have a good time, but I have to emphasize, we are no longer asking, come to the podcast live show, or the podcast live show will come to you. Do you want a bottle of wolf urine for hunting purposes purchased from amazon.com poured into the air vents of your parked car? No? Come to the live show.

• 20:40November Kelly?

  Yeah. That's my ad read.

• 20:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, so.

• 20:44November Kelly?

  There we, there we go.

• 20:45Justin Roczniak?

  We are doing a, a pair of live shows relatively soon at the spaghetti warehouse in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

• 20:55Liam McAnderson?

  Roz, it's called Union Transfer now.

• 20:56Justin Roczniak?

  Union Transfer.

• 20:57Liam McAnderson?

  There we go.

• 20:58Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, right, yeah.

• 20:59November Kelly?

  Dead naming Union Transfer?

• 21:01Justin Roczniak?

  Well, otherwise, I, I was there more when it was spaghetti warehouse than it was when.

• 21:06Liam McAnderson?

  It's called Zimbabwe now.

• 21:08November Kelly?

  Implying the spaghetti warehouse was more of a Rhodesia situation.

• 21:15November Kelly?

  Just like, there's nothing justified about the existence of spaghetti warehouse.

• 21:21Justin Roczniak?

  What are the dates? It's like December fifteenth and sixteenth. The links will be in the description. Um, yeah. December fourteenth and fifteenth.

• 21:31Liam McAnderson?

  Sorry, December fourteenth.

• 21:32Justin Roczniak?

  Fourteenth and fifteenth. Okay, yeah.

• 21:34November Kelly?

  I, I, I cannot stress enough, we are not asking. Do not fucking embarrass us.

• 21:40Liam McAnderson?

  No, do not fucking embarrass us.

• 21:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, we're there with the Quorators. Um, uh, they are a, a podcast, uh, about asking questions on Quora, the question website. Uh, it's a very good podcast. Listen to that podcast. Um.

• 21:56November Kelly?

  It's a good podcast, but under no circumstances allow their fans to outnumber our fans.

• 22:02Liam McAnderson?

  No, you, you will be, you will be, we'll be doing a wall of death in the parking lot after, but, uh, we will also have exclusive merch.

• 22:08November Kelly?

  You will be asking some Quora questions of your own, such as, why is this happening to me? How could a loving God watch such agony with, and do nothing? And please have mercy. That last one isn't even a question, but you'll be asking it unless you come to the live shows.

• 22:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 22:25Liam McAnderson?

  Um, there will be the most requested piece of merch we've ever had, uh, available exclusively at the live show. We have made, we have made the piece of merch that I have to tell you what it is because I think Corin went rogue on it. Uh, hang on.

• 22:38November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 22:39Justin Roczniak?

  What, what kind of merch is that?

• 22:41Liam McAnderson?

  It's in the, it's in the, it's in the chat of the, of the ZenCaster. I guess the, the fans will have to find out.

• 22:46November Kelly?

  What have we done? Oh, let's fucking go. Okay.

• 22:49Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 22:49Justin Roczniak?

  What is it?

• 22:51Liam McAnderson?

  Don't flash it up, Ross. God damn it, dude.

• 22:56Justin Roczniak?

  No, they, they, they have to actually know. You can't like tease it.

• 23:01Liam McAnderson?

  No, we were supposed to tease it.

• 23:02Justin Roczniak?

  They have to actually know what it is.

• 23:03Liam McAnderson?

  You motherfucker. Yeah.

• 23:05Justin Roczniak?

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

• 23:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, there's gonna be, well, there's your problem branded high vis.

• 23:20November Kelly?

  Get, get, get the high vis. Otherwise you are gonna be highly visible to me through a gun sight.

• 23:28Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, okay. So yeah, uh, unfortunately we will.

• 23:31Liam McAnderson?

  December fourteenth to fifteenth.

• 23:33November Kelly?

  November. How do you sell out all your shows? Threat. Violent threat. Credible, violent threat.

• 23:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you can do.

• 23:41Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah.

• 23:41Liam McAnderson?

  Fans are gonna love what Dudi told me real fucking quick.

• 23:44Justin Roczniak?

  Unfortunately.

• 23:46Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Justin Roczniak?

  Unfortunately.

• 23:48November Kelly?

  Extending castle doctrine to someone else's house.

• 23:52Justin Roczniak?

  I'm just going to repeat this from our previous announcement. November's gonna have to appear on the video again.

• 24:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, I know. It's fucking sucks.

• 24:02Justin Roczniak?

  The O one visa process is very difficult for us to accomplish because we have no press whatsoever. So if you work for a newspaper or some other journalism outlet, please write some articles about us.

• 24:20November Kelly?

  There are exceptions. If your name is Olivia Nutzi. Maybe not.

• 24:26Liam McAnderson?

  A picture of my butthole elicited a mere nice, which we've all been there. But the other thing, the other thing I want to announce is the toy drive is back. I'm gonna, I'm gonna parrot what November said and point out that if you do not donate toys, you will be executed. There will be no quarter given to people who do not donate toys. You will be spent over a shallow ditch, which you have dug with your own two hands. I'm not even giving you a shovel. You will be donating gifts to the children.

• 24:55Justin Roczniak?

  Wait, so.

• 24:57Justin Roczniak?

  I, this might be a little excessive, you know, I, I mean, we can threaten to kill them for not going to the show.

• 25:03November Kelly?

  Unlimited genocide on the listener.

• 25:08Justin Roczniak?

  You're, you're gonna like wind up, you know, killing.

• 25:11Liam McAnderson?

  Auto less.

• 25:12Justin Roczniak?

  How many subscribers do we got?

• 25:14November Kelly?

  Um, not enough.

• 25:15Liam McAnderson?

  Twenty five thousand on YouTube.

• 25:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, if we got a hundred and twenty five thousand subscribers.

• 25:20Liam McAnderson?

  Come to the live shows and donate toys.

• 25:22Justin Roczniak?

  There are six hundred and fifty seats at the live show.

• 25:26Liam McAnderson?

  Times tail, eleven hundred.

• 25:27Justin Roczniak?

  You're, you're, yeah, yeah.

• 25:29November Kelly?

  A bunch of you are gonna have to sit in each other's laps or get killed.

• 25:32Liam McAnderson?

  It's gonna get real.

• 25:33November Kelly?

  That's just the way it is.

• 25:35Justin Roczniak?

  That is six figures of killing. Yeah.

• 25:40Liam McAnderson?

  Friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, lovers to enemies, exes to lovers, M preg tag.

• 25:48November Kelly?

  All of these things are experiences you will have at Well, There's Your Problem live show.

• 25:52Liam McAnderson?

  You'll get pregnant.

• 25:53Justin Roczniak?

  We're gonna have to shoot a lot of people.

• 25:54Liam McAnderson?

  Surely, surely, surely.

• 25:58November Kelly?

  Just do your best to bleep enough of this that it doesn't get like, you know, fucking adult only signing required.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Every single time I'm on an episode, there's a YouTube disclaimer for warnings about self harm. I think that fits my feelings.

• 26:12November Kelly?

  This isn't self harm.

• 26:13Justin Roczniak?

  No, this is external harm. Sort of a.

• 26:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's harm of others.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Others harm.

• 26:18Justin Roczniak?

  All right, all right, we'll figure out the logistics behind this later. I, you know.

• 26:23November Kelly?

  Just cut it, cut enough to make it visible and then, you know, fine.

• 26:27Justin Roczniak?

  We may have to start a Gulag anyway.

• 26:32Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, come, come to the show so you don't get sent to the Gulag.

• 26:37Liam McAnderson?

  I'm looking at genocide on the listeners.

• 26:39November Kelly?

  Out of self preservation, if for no other reason, come to the live shows.

• 26:43Justin Roczniak?

  All right, all right.

• 26:44November Kelly?

  Wait a second, wait a second, wait a second. Because of the fucking visa shit and Trump, right? Technically, physically, I can't come to the live show. So am I obliged to, once I'm done wading through the blood of our listeners? Like, just put me on the list as well?

• 27:02Liam McAnderson?

  Nah, you're exempt. We'll put you under comp ticket.

• 27:05November Kelly?

  Okay, okay.

• 27:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 27:07November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I don't have to go to the shows because I work here, you know?

• 27:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I have a fun story about that. I think I've told this on, on, on, on the show, on the podcast before, but we were playing the Somerville show and I was standing in the, because Rin and Megan work merch. And so Rin, Megan and Jay were standing around working merch, not doing their goddamn jobs for which I don't pay them. And, and a woman came up to me and said, excuse me, is this the merch line? And I said, I just work here. And then she was like, oh, okay.

• 27:37November Kelly?

  That's pretty good.

• 27:38Liam McAnderson?

  And so I was just like, the merch line's over here. And she was like, okay, thanks. And then the show concluded and we were doing signings and she said, I've never been more mortified in my entire life.

• 27:50Liam McAnderson?

  One third of this podcast, which is fine. It did not hurt my feelings or make me sad in any way, shape or form. I promise.

• 27:57Justin Roczniak?

  But now we've aired your dirty laundry. While also announcing our intentions to kill upwards of six figures of people.

• 28:08Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, man. That's that's bar for the course on the show.

• 28:10Justin Roczniak?

  Said, that was announcements.

• 28:14November Kelly?

  I don't have I don't have a sting for that. What do you want me to do? I got like.

• 28:17Justin Roczniak?

  Announcements, announcements, and now.

• 28:21Liam McAnderson?

  With Gareth always one to two seconds behind Ross and I.

• 28:23Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, I don't know anything about the Pacific Northwest, so we're handing this off to Victoria.

• 28:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, I don't know anything about the Pacific Northwest. Hands it to trans woman. Tip it.

• 28:32Speaker 03

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

• 28:43Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  We have woke mayor. We have woke city council. We have about as woke as a city attorney as you could possibly get, which is to say an ex prosecutor or one that doesn't like Trump. So we'll take it. Um, yeah. So to figure out what happened with the Amtrak Cascades derailment, first we have to ask, what is the city of Tacoma?

• 29:01November Kelly?

  Uh, Seattle's ugliest sister.

• 29:03Justin Roczniak?

  This train station fucking rules.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's still there. They don't have an.

• 29:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:14Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yeah, the big, big like bell epoch like dome here. Oh, my God.

• 29:18Speaker 03

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

• 29:28Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yes.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  It was kind of like the more industrial city. Basically, in 1865, there was a Civil War vet who came out west to try to, you know, make his fortune or whatever. And he paddled around Puget Sound, looking for a spot of land that he was gonna claim as his. Um, and he put a cabin down in what is modern day Tacoma on the shores of commencement bay, specifically on the least slopes, like flattest edge of the bay, because he was like, Northern Pacific is building a railroad up here, and they're gonna need some land, and I'm gonna make a fortune when they pick this spot. Um, and this is 1865. Um, nobody.

• 30:07Liam McAnderson?

  More American than.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Like, lived in Tacoma. Yeah, yeah. Nobody lived in Tacoma except for like native people, because like, there were, you know, at this point, the territorial capital was Olympia, which is. I don't know, thirty or forty miles like southwest of Tacoma, or they live in Seattle, which is, you know, twenty-five or thirty miles north, you know, on the shores of Elliott Bay. And, you know, Seattle at this point is like up and coming. It's kind of like a logging town. They still hadn't figured out how to not dump raw sewage into the Puget Sound and then flood the streets with shit piss every high tide, but they were, you know, getting there.

• 30:40Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I sense judgment. I sense a lot of judgment in that.

• 30:44November Kelly?

  What do you, what do you want? Paris?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  I mean, it's like, no, I mean, that's a very.

• 30:49November Kelly?

  Pissed shit everywhere, kind of is Paris. That's true, especially in eighteen sixty-five.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. One of my favorite things about Seattle is that like it used to be like just an entire environmental apocalypse and we managed to clean it up to the point where sometimes there are whales. So, no, I mean, you know, it was, you know, but it was still kind of like Seattle was not a city, you know, like SF is way bigger at this point. It's not really like place people, there are a ton of people, but it's definitely bigger than Tacoma. So, you know, for the next decade, this basically goes unchanged. Tacoma is like a village of like fifty people, fifty settlers, I should say. There's, you know, natives still up here in this era, in this era. And then, you know, Seattle's an actual city with like money and industry and jobs. And by, you know, by the middle of the year, Great Northern had their rail link in Tenino, Washington, which is south

• 31:39Speaker 03

  of Olympia. And they had until December nineteenth, eighteen seventy-three to finish their transcontinental railroad, or they would lose all of the federal land grants that they had been given to build it. They would revert back to the government. They'd lose like, they were basically borrowing money off of the value of these grants. So they would be completely and utterly destroyed.

• 31:58November Kelly?

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

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, they've been working on this for a while and, you know, completion of a transcontinental railroad is you have to hit saltwater, you know, somewhere and, you know, the Puget Sound is saltwater because it connects to the Pacific Ocean. So they're like, all right, we just have to get here as fast as possible.

• 32:19November Kelly?

  Hit saltwater, thousands of miles of rail rust instantly. It just travels up.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, capillary effect. It's like when you, you know what I mean? It's like when you pour a bunch of water into a cup, you know, surface touch. No, that's not a capillary effect. Whatever.

• 32:37November Kelly?

  We'll figure out what the fucking capillary.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  I'm not a scientist. I just drive cars.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  So, you know, Seattle at this point is offering like a bunch of money and, you know, they're, they've got like big, they've got a prime real estate they're going to give to the railroad and they're like, okay, we got this on lock and lo and behold, the job car, the man who put his cabin down to Tacoma, next slide, please, was correct. This is not job car. This is the next guy. One second. They picked, so Northern, Northern Pacific is looking around and they're like, okay, we just have to finish this thing as fast as possible. We have like less than six months to complete our transcontinental railroad. And it just so happens that, you know, there's a bunch of prairie land south of Tacoma and they can build it in as, basically they can lay down rails as fast as humanly possible.

• 33:23November Kelly?

  Total vindication for one insane kayaker slash homesteader.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah.

• 33:32November Kelly?

  Man successfully prospected a railroad terminus.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Eight years before it even got there. Like, it was, like, for a guy-

• 33:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he's like, these guys are going to finish it in the stupidest way possible. Sign my ass up. Pretty stupid too. Yeah. Only a stupid guy can predict another stupid guy's actions.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it, you know, paid off perfectly. So, of course, they start laying rails heading towards Tacoma. This is, this is July. By September of 1873, J. Cookin Company, which was the first wire service bank in America, was collapsing. It was Northern Pacific's primary lender and like the source of all of their gold to pay the workers to build the railroad.

• 34:23November Kelly?

  The banks are out of money. Stop.

• 34:26Justin Roczniak?

  Well, this is, this is before, you know, you had like a centralized currency. So you needed like actual gold to back up the banknotes and so on and so forth.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:37November Kelly?

  The bank's bank is out of gold. Stop.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and, and it's interesting because this is like the beginning of, you know, sort of like an early understanding of what monetary policy would become because part of the reason, you know, part of the reason they went, they collapsed is because they were just over leveraged to shit, building this incredible money sink of a railroad. Because, you know, Northern Pacific was kind of operating off of the, yes, if we lay more rails, we'll just make more money, sort of operating strategy.

• 35:04November Kelly?

  Oh my God, they were open AI for railroads.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 35:08Justin Roczniak?

  Well, at the very least, they got land grants, like the land grants made a lot of sense.

• 35:14Speaker 03

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

• 35:36Justin Roczniak?

  Barely demand for one transcontinental railroad at this point, let alone the three that were being built.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, so, you know, one half is that the railroad itself is kind of a bad idea.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  The second was because, you know, there had been so much mining out west that there was actually a glut of silver on the market and it was pushing, like it was creating massive inflation. And so what ended up happening was, you know, you had, you had inflation at home and what companies would do is they would basically ship off a bunch of silver immediately overseas, uh, where there wasn't the same inflationary pressure to, to hire, you know, usually like Chinese workers to come over and then work on the railroads, basically taking advantage of like early, like,

• 36:20Speaker 03

  you know, currency exchange rates. Um, and so basically it meant that there was, you know, there was not much cash and also like inflation had driven the value of what there was lower. And, you know, you get a bank run and all of a sudden, you know, basically you start with a bank panic and the American economy gets wiped out.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  So this, this is September when this begins and by November, um, you know, the workers had not, had now not been paid for three months and they were hearing that they weren't going to get paid again. And so they struck um, in late November of 1873. They are like, I couldn't find an exact source for how far they were, but I'm, I think it was within like 10 miles of saltwater. Um, and you know,

• 37:04November Kelly?

  Just like sort of 10, 10 feet away from this guy's log cabin.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:09November Kelly?

  Like tearing his hair out.

• 37:10Justin Roczniak?

  And all the, all the guys who uh, talk about going back to the gold standard. This is the economy they want to go back to.

• 37:17November Kelly?

  Yep.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, pretty much. I mean, like this, it's, it was, it's wild because so much of this is just like, it does kind of feel like the US sort of operated off of like an an prim philosophy for like the first couple hundred years it was going.

• 37:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 03

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

• 37:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, think of him as a fan of the show.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Stuff, you win.

• 37:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But also like, Yeah, from like, I don't know, uh, from the end of the civil war to the 30s. Um, yeah, we just have a horrible depression every 10 years.

• 37:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Panic of 1871, a lot of that. I wrote my undergrad thesis on that.

• 37:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. 71, 93. There was one in the 1880s too. We used to have a panic. We used to have panics. We don't have that anymore. We have recessions now.

• 38:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I was gonna say we had the great recession like 15 years ago, man.

• 38:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but that wasn't a panic.

• 38:12Liam McAnderson?

  You're right.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  I was pretty anxious.

• 38:13November Kelly?

  We, we barely have like incidents anymore as well.

• 38:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 38:16November Kelly?

  Like,

• 38:18Justin Roczniak?

  No, we don't have to go back to having panics. Excuse me. We need to have sound monetary policy.

• 38:23Liam McAnderson?

  Return guy, but only for monetary panics?

• 38:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Wanting to go back to the gold standard, but just because you think it's good to get a little adrenaline going because of the panics, keep the, keep capital limber.

• 38:37Justin Roczniak?

  I want to see some guys jump off of the stock exchange building.

• 38:40November Kelly?

  Come on now.

• 38:43Justin Roczniak?

  No, sound monetary policy. Let's go.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  So this, this is General John Sprague. He was a Union Civil War vet. Who was quite accomplished. He joined in like Sherman's March to the Sea. And he was-

• 38:59November Kelly?

  He looks like the kind of guy who would do that. That is not a mustache that hides a secret smile. It's a mustache that hides a second angry and mustache.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Jamie Heineman type facial hair.

• 39:11November Kelly?

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

• 39:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, that's- This man is, he is a walrus. We are looking at a walrus.

• 39:27November Kelly?

  Angry looking man.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:29November Kelly?

  So how do you want, how do you want your lithograph taken furious?

• 39:37Speaker 03

  But yeah, so he's, he's superintendent to the Northern Pacific and overseeing building this section of the rail. And, you know, of course, the, the local cops are like, let's start a war. Let's kill all of the strikers. Let's murder literally everybody here.

• 39:52November Kelly?

  Yeah. And then they found out about the strike, which, you know, sort of redoubled their, their conviction to do that.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  And, you know, the, the, like, they literally, the cop literally rolled up to the strikers when, you know, they had barricaded themselves in and was like, began reading the riot act and was like, literally ready to go to war. And this guy was like, oh, let's not. You know, he was-

• 40:12Justin Roczniak?

  It's probably a bad idea.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  He was, you know, I think it was a, it's hard to like ascribe sort of reasoning to him, you know, centuries later, but you know, part of it is kind of like, these are all Civil War vets. You know, some people, you know, may evoke memories of who we served with. Part of it is also like, wow, these guys are probably insane. We haven't paid them for three months. They're definitely, you know, they, they have the sympathies-

• 40:34November Kelly?

  We're about to get our shit kicked in.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Literally everybody around us, we're gonna get absolutely fucking wiped out. So he negotiated a settlement where, you know, he and a bunch of the other execs started withdrawing money from their personal bank accounts. And working with like literally every shop and saloon in the area to like, give them, you know, basically script that they could spend there. Because he was like, look, we, we have got to finish this railroad at, by any means possible. Because, you know, if we don't finish it in the next three weeks, we lose all of the land. And this was all for naught. And, you know, we're all basically bankrupt forever. Um.

• 41:11Justin Roczniak?

  And and for reference here, the land grants for these trans transcontinental railroads, they were generally like, okay, you have every other square mile in a checkerboard pattern for like some number of miles away from the actual railroad light right of way.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:29Justin Roczniak?

  So for the for the Northern Pacific, I mean, in the mountains, that was not so valuable, except for timber. But if you're going from like, um, oh, God, where did the Northern Pacific start? I mean, it started from Chicago to some extent, but you know, you're.

• 41:43Speaker 03

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

• 41:48Justin Roczniak?

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

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and actually, it's fun. If you look at a, um, if you look at like a BLM survey map today, you can actually still kind of see the checkerboard pattern in a lot of places because you'll see where the government owns lands and sort of like, you know, that checkerboard around railroad tracks and stuff. And then some, you know, a lot of it's been transferred away from the railroads. But like, you can actually see the original, like, grant patterns overlaid over top of like, you know, Nevada, where the Union Pacific line cuts through, which I think.

• 42:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And also like the logging in the Pacific Northwest follows that same pattern.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:30Justin Roczniak?

  Which is pretty crazy to look at.

• 42:32November Kelly?

  We we striate the terrain, you know?

• 42:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  Nick, sorry. Next slide, please. Yeah, I quit smoking this week, so I'm like extra funny.

• 42:44Liam McAnderson?

  Good job.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  I, thanks. I picked it back up for for month of hell. And I was like, all right, month of hell's over. Time to stop poisoning myself. Um, anyway, this is this is an artist's rendition of what Tacoma looked like in, I believe, like, the mid 1880s. Um, you can tell it was there was not a lot there. Um, that's Mount Rainier. Um, but, uh, so.

• 43:04Justin Roczniak?

  It looks like Japan.

• 43:05November Kelly?

  I was gonna say, I was about to say, that looks like Fuji to me. Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:09Liam McAnderson?

  Some lollipop ships in the foreground.

• 43:11November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Rainier and, um, Mount Fuji are part of the same, you know, chain of volcanoes.

• 43:16November Kelly?

  People didn't know this, but, um, actually, um, Seattle and Tacoma were part of a closed country system until the railroad arrived and forced them to to be open.

• 43:27Justin Roczniak?

  This is sort of a, this is the, um, the anime version of the Appalachians.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're trying to reclose it so the all the racists and like transphobes on the other side of the cascade stop coming over to, you know, beat up people.

• 43:43November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  We're working on that.

• 43:46November Kelly?

  You got you got to force them into like, based on my study of history, you got to force them to interact with you at specific named ports. And then that that way you have a kind of designated chud zone and you can acquire a kind of chud knowledge.

• 43:59Justin Roczniak?

  You have to use the Dutch as a go between?

• 44:02November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:03November Kelly?

  Well, the Dutch would be the chuds in this.

• 44:05Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, those motherfuckers lost their $500.

• 44:09Justin Roczniak?

  All right, here's the thing about the Dutch, right?

• 44:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, get it.

• 44:13Justin Roczniak?

  From going to Amsterdam once.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Please.

• 44:15Justin Roczniak?

  All right, here's the thing. I was so excited to go ride a bicycle in Amsterdam and the infrastructure is great. Everything's fantastic. Then you get the fucking bicycle. The bicycle sucks shit. Holy fuck.

• 44:29Justin Roczniak?

  It they all have coaster brakes. I was like, I was like, I got on the bicycle and I was like, something's off here. I can't stop. Oh, shit, there's no brakes. Fuck.

• 44:40November Kelly?

  Just put, put, put your legs down. I'm sure a Dutch person will say extremely securely.

• 44:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, that did happen.

• 44:47Speaker 03

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

• 44:51Justin Roczniak?

  Coaster, coaster. So you know how you were a kid and you pedal backwards to stop the bike?

• 44:55Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, they have that for adults?

• 44:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  That's weird.

• 44:59Justin Roczniak?

  That's like the main.

• 45:00Liam McAnderson?

  I'm supposed to revere these fucking people that can't even build a bicycle properly?

• 45:04November Kelly?

  No, no. If you build enough of the infrastructure around it, nobody will question why the actual bike is bad.

• 45:09Justin Roczniak?

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

• 45:20Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, this is gonna be a whole, this is a whole other subject. I shouldn't bring this up, but I was like, I need to bring this up.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  An entire episode on the bicycles you rode in.

• 45:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  In Amsterdam?

• 45:30Justin Roczniak?

  No, we're gonna have to, we're gonna have to do a new, a new episode. Bicycle sucks shit in the Netherlands. You know, and I don't know, we'll, we'll get, we'll get not just bikes back on and berate them the whole time. But, you know, this is a different situation. Yeah, we got to talk about trains today.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  I would be remiss during this conversation to not mention my favorite thing that makes fun of the Dutch that my wife introduced me to, which is the Stephen Sondheim musical Pacific Overtures, which has an entire song about how how goofy the Dutch are. It's an all time moment in making fun of Europeans.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Anyway, so December 16th, 1873, with three days before they lose all of their federal land grants, the Northern Pacific hit saltwater on the shore of Mcent Bay in Tacoma.

• 46:21November Kelly?

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

• 46:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:30Justin Roczniak?

  Some high viz from Network Rail.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Sprague drove the final stake, or spike, rather, into the into the rails and, you know, they've got their rail link.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Now, of course, this was about the the most rushed train line that had ever been constructed because, you know, not only they have no time, but then they got delayed by striking and, you know, Tacoma has nothing in it, really. They've started clear cutting everything to make, you know, timber for trussels or whatever, but they basically, they're importing a lot of stuff, they're importing a lot of labor. So it was, they basically were like, yeah, that looks possible. Let's go for it. And, you know, this showed because like as they were pushed, you know, bringing supply trains up, they were, they laid down a train because the grade was just like laid so poorly. It was just, this is the final essay at 11:58 PM, the night before the due date of railroad lines.

• 47:23November Kelly?

  Yeah, really, really funny to derail a train on the way into the place selected to be the flattest place where it would be hardest to derail a train.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I wasn't, the thing is about the Pacific Northwest is that like, flat here is a very relative term. You know, Seattle is like insanely hilly and like our flat streets are, I think, you know, for a lot of like, if you're used to the Dakotas in Montana, you come out here like, oh, holy shit, everything is sideways. What's happening? But, yeah, but anyway, I found like newspaper reports from the era where they had to like, dig the cook out of the roof of the the mess car and, you know, because they just overturned the train trying to, you know, race this thing to the finish. So next slide, please.

• 48:09Justin Roczniak?

  This was also relatively common for like transcontinental railroads in general, just because you were, you were racing for the, you know, for the land grants, you would, you know, a lot of these railroads were built with the idea that, okay, we build the railroad and then, once we're finished, then we build the good railroad.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll fix it in post, but for railroad construction.

• 48:32November Kelly?

  Exactly.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Having Devon go back and like, straighten your ties.

• 48:38November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  So, you know, this dotted line here from Tenino to Tacoma is this line that was built. That they, was the initial construction of the, of the Transcontinental Link. In 1891, the Tacoma, Olympia, and Grays Harbor Railroad added the leftward bend from Lakeview to Lacey. Lakeview is now currently like, southern Tacoma. But that, so that in 1891 completes the rail line that we now know, more or less, as the Point Defiance bypass. So it's just sitting there and it's gonna wait about 120 years for us to get to the rest of the episode.

• 49:22November Kelly?

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

• 49:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:29November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yes. So, the, the thing about this route is, you know, it's, it's 2.2% grade for like, 12 miles. And this is kind of a pain for trains of the era to traverse, because it's steep and consistently steep. So they start looking into alternative routes and they end up building, the Northern Pacific builds a waterfront line that goes, is around the edge of the Puget Sound, through Point Defiance, to Tacoma. And that one's much flatter. And they, they end up cutting two rail tunnels through it. And so by the 40s, most passenger traffic was using the long, flat line that went around the, the Puget Sound itself.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  And traffic on this, you know, original sort of, as they call it, the prairie line, diminished as Northern Pacific stopped shipping as many freight trains out. After Burlington Northern, you know, was created in 1970 from Great Northern and Northern Pacific merging, they widened the clearances on the Point Defiance line to allow oversized Boeing freight trains to get through it. And so by 73, this origi, this original line, you know, 100 years after it was laid down, was basically no longer used. It just kind of sat here. There was a couple of locals on it, but there was not like, any through traffic. So yeah, if you want to go to the next slide, please.

• 50:48November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  This is, this is the Boeing oversized freight. This is my, this is actually my staff photo. I would like

• 50:57Liam McAnderson?

  Sick.

• 50:58November Kelly?

  Yeah. You can tell that it was taken by you because it's a good photo.

• 51:01Speaker 03

  Thank you. Yeah. Um, that's at the rail yard here, one of the rail yards here in Seattle. They actually just run these sometimes you can catch them and it's wild. It's just an entire 737 fuselage.

• 51:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. For those, for those of you who are on audio here, what you see is an entire 737 fuselage that came up from Kansas. Which is on a railroad, two railroad flat cars. Um, they just run these trains fairly frequently up to, uh, Bren, I think.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. There's like a horrible siding. It's like 5% grade. They got a hole, all these things up. Um, good thing it's pretty light cargo because it's an airplane.

• 51:40November Kelly?

  Doing a kind of ground based nine 11.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  I

• 51:45Liam McAnderson?

  A second flat car has hit the Boeing fuselage.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  I was waiting for the sounder, which is the sound transit name for a regional rail, which I'm sure. Yeah. I don't know.

• 51:58November Kelly?

  Call it that.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  I know. They did. They did. And the, the font they use for it is also terrible. So it's just, I'm not a big fan, but in any case, I was waiting on the platform and one of, uh,

• 52:09Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that fucking thing. Oh, fuck.

• 52:13Justin Roczniak?

  I, that took me, I, then I remember what a wow shit. Damn it.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Otherwise known as one of the, one of the, uh, the, the many people's hard limits for those who have thought about it. In any case.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I was standing in the, the King Street station and an entire BNSF train just made up of like 15 fuselages came through and I have never foamed so hard in my life. I was like fumbling for my phone, like visibly like tears running down my face. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen in my life. I think the engineer was like, is she okay? Like they're, they've got to be used to like seeing like abnormally tall, overly excited women next to the tracks in Seattle of all places. But I feel like I really kind of elevated it that day. It's, it is really cool. It combines train and plane, which I, you know, both good. Anyway, that, that's all I got about that. We can go to the next slide.

• 53:06Justin Roczniak?

  So, um, hold on, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take over here for a second, but

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Please, please.

• 53:11Justin Roczniak?

  I do want to do one thing, which is check on the chili. I'll be right back.

• 53:18November Kelly?

  Listen, that kind of sort of helicopter parenting is very important, you know?

• 53:23Speaker 03

  What if I got a beer?

• 53:24November Kelly?

  That's allowed? I, I, I'm, I'm experiencing some agonies.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, I'm gonna grab a beer though, I'll be right back.

• 53:33November Kelly?

  No, it's okay. My, my agonies, my agonies are, my agonies are quite funny in this case. Um, so, in a, in a sort of like desperate attempt to maintain general hygiene while being sick, like really sick, I've been washing my hands a lot. Um, which means I have like badly dried out and cracked all of the skin on the back of my hands.

• 53:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no.

• 53:54November Kelly?

  And I, I went looking, so I was like sort of in-

• 53:56Liam McAnderson?

  I feel awful.

• 53:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, I was, I was like in, in sort of moderate agony, looking for some like hand cream for this. And what I alighted on was, uh, some cocoa butter. And, um, while I'm sure it is moisturizing the absolute fuck out of this skin, that shit hurts. Um, it, it, that, that, that burns. Um, so, I, I don't know. Um, I, I, I will see whether or not this is, uh, the good kind of burning or the bad kind of burning. Um, but, uh, just, just another day in, in sort of like dipshitville, you know?

• 54:36Justin 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.

• 55:19Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, that's something to consider 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.

• 55:39Justin Roczniak?

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

• 55:52November Kelly?

  Chili, chili a dish that rewards audacity in a chef, I believe.

• 55:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Well, no, I use audition because I'm bourgeois.

• 56:06November Kelly?

  That already got you, huh?

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it took me a second. So by the time, you know, it's kind of like chili, like the joke steeped for a little bit and then it really got me.

• 56:16Liam McAnderson?

  And I'm back.

• 56:17Justin Roczniak?

  All right, excellent. We're gonna do a second sync point. So I'm gonna say one, two, three, Matthew. In order to keep these separate, we're gonna use a different book of the Bible each time. Right? Excuse me. Three, two, one, Matthew. So three, two, one, Matthew.

• 56:37November Kelly?

  Really good visual of you almost clapping, but in the tail there.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  He's, he's fine.

• 56:43Justin Roczniak?

  All right, this, this better, this better not happen three more times because I only got Luke and John left.

• 56:50November Kelly?

  After that, you're into the like deuterocanonical stuff.

• 56:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. First letter to the Philadelphians or something.

• 56:59Liam McAnderson?

  You guys gotta stop being so fucking weird.

• 57:04Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so, you know, this sort of thing that eventually becomes to be known as the Cascades Service, you know, between like Seattle and Tacoma and Portland and Vancouver and Eugene, and I don't know what else is up there, Yakima or some bullshit, right? This sort of by the late 60s is like a daily train between Seattle and Portland, and a few horrible long distance trains.

• 57:41Justin Roczniak?

  You have the Pacific International, you have some kind of train that goes down the Oregon short line to Salt Lake City. The Oregon short line sort of followed the Oregon Trail where you may have, you know, shot several animals in elementary school.

• 57:58November Kelly?

  Into a river, yeah.

• 57:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, cock the wagons and float, so on and so forth. Um, you know, so only like the international and the train called the Mount Rainier, um, served local markets. The Mount Rainier went from Seattle to Portland and Portland to Seattle one time a day. The international went from Seattle to Vancouver and Vancouver to Seattle once a day. Right? There was the coast starlight that went from Seattle to San Diego. That's not for local markets. And you had, what was the other one? The pioneer was the one that went to Salt Lake City. Um, so this was not great for local service,

• 58:41Justin Roczniak?

  um, which was a market that seemed to generally work because Seattle and Portland are not too far away from each other. They're both pretty walkable, even back in the seventies when M-Track was created. So it made a lot of sense to say, well, gee, maybe we should improve this service, but it took several decades before M-Track really seriously started considering, eh, maybe we should put a few more trains on this court.

• 59:09Speaker 03

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

• 59:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, this is, uh, early Mount Rainier train. This is shortly after M-Track took over. You got Northern Pacific cars. You've got, um, Burlington Northern cars. You've got some stainless steel ones. You got, it, it's sort of, they put together whatever the hell worked.

• 59:30Liam McAnderson?

  The train of many colors, yes.

• 59:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. But, you know, it took a few decades again before M-Track really responded. And, you know, they picked an interesting sort of train. And in order to talk about that, we have to go back in time a little bit and talk about Talgo.

• 59:46Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God.

• 59:47November Kelly?

  What the fuck is that haunted clown train?

• 59:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's all. I like the clown catcher, the, uh, the cow catcher.

• 59:55November Kelly?

  It looks like it wants to eat my skin.

• 1:00:00Liam McAnderson?

  I want to wear you like a suit.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Changing my vocabulary with that.

• 1:00:06Justin Roczniak?

  This is the Talgo one. This is where it all began.

• 1:00:09Liam McAnderson?

  Don't tell me there's more of them.

• 1:00:13Justin Roczniak?

  So, in the late 1930s, Alejandro Guev, Guev, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:00:20November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:20Justin Roczniak?

  Guev, Guev, someone else do this.

• 1:00:24November Kelly?

  Guecochea.

• 1:00:25Justin Roczniak?

  Gueg, that, and Jose Luis Oriol.

• 1:00:31November Kelly?

  Like the, like the baseball team, yeah.

• 1:00:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, sure, whatever. They're two, two Spaniards. They have a vision.

• 1:00:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Justin Roczniak?

  What if they made a really?

• 1:00:41November Kelly?

  That vision is, what if we put a kind of Thomas the Tank Engine character in the Hannibal Lecter mask?

• 1:00:47Justin Roczniak?

  What if we made a really fucked up looking train with the weird suspension?

• 1:00:53November Kelly?

  I mean, I guess it would be bad. Don't do that.

• 1:00:57Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, no, that's the problem. It was good. So the idea here is very simple. It was very new for Spain at the time, right? Train, it's all made of aluminum. None of that's steel. It's all aluminum. It's lighter and the cars are smaller, right? So it can use fewer wheels. The center of gravity is really low. So it's harder to tip over and it tends to cant less in curves, right? It doesn't like swing out as much. That means you can go faster. Um, how does this work?

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Clown bug.

• 1:01:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's a weird little horrible train. Um, now to explain this, we have to look at a normal train. There is a big Pennsylvania Railroad P70 coach, which is actually here. It's Pennsylvania Reading Seashore, Seashore Alliance.

• 1:01:48Justin Roczniak?

  Your normal coach, uh, you got eight wheels on two trucks, right? You got a fairly high center of gravity up here. If it's on a curve, right? Uh, here, here's, here's the car. Here, here's the car. It's a box here. Well, actually no, hold on, let me, and we got the clear story. And yeah, okay. So here's the car and it's here. Here's the wheels, right? Right. Um, and then there's an axle and then there's, you know, so on and so forth. So it's, and then there's the rails here, right? Okay, so when this goes around a curve that's going this way, right? It has a tendency to, uh, lean over to the outside rail, right?

• 1:02:29Justin Roczniak?

  And this sort of tends to have the perception of increasing the G-forces inside the car on the passengers, right? Who are also forced out that way. Yeah, exactly. So you can't go that fast, right?

• 1:02:48November Kelly?

  Can you remember East Coast mainline experience?

• 1:02:51Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. So, you know, how, this is because, again, the center of gravity is relatively high. Uh, even though this is an old fashioned heavyweight car where, you know, the, the, the floor is actually like, um, six inches of concrete. But, you know, that's just how heavy everything was at the time, right? The Talgo cars, and they evolved pretty quickly from the horrible clown train in the first slide. Talgo cars are much more low slung, right? Um, you can see here, they, they're, they're, they're very short. Um, and so they have a lower center of gravity, right? For each car.

• 1:03:31Justin Roczniak?

  Um, what this means is you can go a lot faster around curves without the cars sort of leaning outwards, right? Um, so this increases passenger comfort because ultimately the thing that limits train speed is not, you know, derailing on the curve. It's, you know, spilling drinks in the cafe car, right?

• 1:03:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, the, the weakest, the weakest link in that chain is the passenger wanting to arrive comfortable, you know?

• 1:03:59Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 1:04:00November Kelly?

  You could achieve greatness if you just sacrificed your need to not spill your drink over yourself.

• 1:04:05Justin Roczniak?

  Mm-hmm, so.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna lie, having ridden cross-country Amtrak recently, I feel like passenger discomfort is not the limiting factor.

• 1:04:16Justin Roczniak?

  So this, this example, this is a Talgo train. This is the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads. John Quincy Adams, they were an early adopter. I was desperate to figure out how the hell this thing made it into either Penn Station or Grand Central. Cause as far as I know, they can only board at low platforms. I have no idea. So.

• 1:04:39November Kelly?

  Step onto the roof and climb in through the like.

• 1:04:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh yeah. Like a NASCAR. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:04:47Justin Roczniak?

  Believe the, uh, the New York Central or the Boston and Albany or someone else had a similar train called the, uh, Explorer, right? The, the early Talgos, they were moderately successful in the United States. You know, there, there was some precedent there. They were much more successful in, you know, Spain where they were from, right? You know, the, the other thing about the Talgos is of course you have a much shorter passenger car, right? And rather than having four or two sets of four wheel trucks, each car has two wheels in total. And they're shared between two cars each.

• 1:05:25November Kelly?

  Legally a motorbike.

• 1:05:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:05:30Justin Roczniak?

  So Talgo is actually an incredible success in Europe, less so in the United States in the early years.

• 1:05:37Liam McAnderson?

  That's because we have taste and don't want to get the haunted clown train.

• 1:05:41Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that's also because, um, we decided passenger trains weren't real around the time that it made sense to buy Talgo's, right?

• 1:05:50November Kelly?

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

• 1:05:55Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, I.

• 1:05:57November Kelly?

  Haunts my fucking nightmares now.

• 1:05:59Justin Roczniak?

  So the early Talgo's, they're very successful at providing a lot more passenger comfort, um, using, you know, these weird, um, you know, the, uh, these very weird train cars. I mean, they work great. They're very good. I'm, I'm not the guy here to denigrate Talgo technology.

• 1:06:17Liam McAnderson?

  You should be. Look at the fucking bag.

• 1:06:19Justin Roczniak?

  It works really good. But then it got better, right? So we have to understand how these cars work. So in order to do this, we had a friend cut one open for us.

• 1:06:34Justin Roczniak?

  So a couple of things you can notice here is that you have. So here's the wheels, right? The wheels are actually not linked by a solid axle. They're two separate units, right? That go through this like aluminum frame here. That means that, you know, among other things, the wheels spin independently. You're never going to get things like flange squeal as a result.

• 1:06:59Justin Roczniak?

  You know, again, the, the, the, the center of gravity is very, very low. And you can see here, the suspension goes all the way up to the top where the car is actually mounted to the wheels, right? This is very good for going fast. In the 1970s, the Talgo Corporation realizes, oh, wait, we can go further here with the Talgo pendular, right?

• 1:07:24November Kelly?

  Sick name already.

• 1:07:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So the idea here is we have the suspension system. What if we let the train tilt a bit, right? Because of how the suspension is mounted, you have a very low center of gravity, but you have a very high pivot point, which is actually above the physical limits of the car, right? So when this car goes around a corner, the bottom swings outwards. As a result, it is a tilting train with no hydraulics, no active systems, entirely passive.

• 1:07:59Justin Roczniak?

  The APT, fuck that shit. Don't need any of that shit.

• 1:08:02November Kelly?

  Costs too much money. Do it on the cheap, yeah.

• 1:08:05Justin Roczniak?

  Just basic physics causes this train to tilt in such a way as to increase passenger comfort and allow the train to go much faster than it otherwise could have. This is a brilliant system. It's really good. Talgo is cool. So when you're looking at old fashioned, you know, very curvy lines, such as you might find in the Pacific North. This is a natural system to say, ah, let's, let's give this a shot. Other advantages that Talco had is that they, um, they manufactured their own like, uh, power systems and they had an integrated bag.

• 1:08:44Justin Roczniak?

  They had a whole bunch of stuff that meant that, you know, you could deploy these pretty much anywhere, very quickly and cheaply. You know, it was a whole like self-contained system, um, which is one of the reasons why it had so much success internationally. And continues to this day.

• 1:09:02November Kelly?

  Building the train, AK?

• 1:09:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Justin Roczniak?

  So M-Track gets a test set of some kind. They run in the Pacific Northwest for a while. They call it the, uh, like the Pacific Talgo or something. They are so pleased with it that they eventually order their own sets. The Talgo six, right? You can see a train set here.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  I love the little cat ears in the baggage cars.

• 1:09:27Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah. The cat ears are really cool. Uh, I love those. Um, I, I had the, I had the fortune to ride these once, but I was very small, so I don't remember much of the trip other than, um, we got stuck behind the American Orient Express, which broke down.

• 1:09:41November Kelly?

  Yep.

• 1:09:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It, it was at, uh, what Pacific Station in Vancouver or whatever they call it.

• 1:09:49November Kelly?

  No, this tracks. Moment that the fires of communism were lit within your heart.

• 1:09:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, I remember distinctly there was, there was someone, there was someone in front of us in the next booth. Cause I was with my family. Someone in front of us in the next booth was calling someone was like, yeah, the train in front of us, it's overhanging the platform. So we can't, yeah, it's a $3,000 train.

• 1:10:12November Kelly?

  Just anger sort of building. It's like season one of Andor.

• 1:10:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's a $3,000 train in like 2002 or something as well.

• 1:10:20November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:10:22Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  They run a, they run a car, they run a train from, uh, Portland to Seattle and they run one from Vancouver to Seattle. That no train completes the whole route, but.

• 1:10:43Justin Roczniak?

  Okay.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:10:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know either. I don't know anything about that coast.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  We have the one train. It's, I've taken it once and it was, I didn't get to ride the Talgo for reasons you'll discover and it.

• 1:11:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 1:11:02Justin Roczniak?

  But, but yeah, so they get this Talgo pendular. It works really good. They do some basic modifications to the lines to allow these, such as putting in new speed limit signs. Look, you can see here, this says P 70. That's for passenger train, 70 miles an hour. But T, that's 79. That's where the Talgo's.

• 1:11:23November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:11:24Justin Roczniak?

  Why is it 79? Cause after Naperville.

• 1:11:27November Kelly?

  A scat of railspades?

• 1:11:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, after Naperville, you could only do 80 if you had cab signaling. They didn't go that far. You also had to add a bunch of other safety systems, you know, to protect from like over speed and you know, that's so on and so forth, right? Um, you know, which, which will be relevant later. Um, you know, but anyway, yeah, these are very cool train cars. They had a very fancy Bistro car, um, with a bunch of like bespoke, like nice glasswork and we'll talk about that later.

• 1:11:55November Kelly?

  Why would you use them with these locomotives as well? It's like beautiful sort of European sports car.

• 1:12:01Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So this is, this is a, this is an F40, um, which has been converted to baggage. Right. Um, well, the door is actually back here. Um.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:24Justin Roczniak?

  They call them, they call them cabbages. Um, on the other end, there's a, um, F59 PHI, which is actually more streamlined and designed for the thing, but these guys, uh, whatever.

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  I think they're cute.

• 1:12:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I like them.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:43November Kelly?

  I mean, it's like, it's a job done. Have the cat ears. Plus it gives you the nice little swoop sort of line down the side.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Cat eared locomotive. That's very much a Pacific Northwest kind of thing.

• 1:12:53Justin Roczniak?

  And the F40s were good for 110. So, you know, it goes as fast as you need it to, which is 79. This is what, i- if you're a car guy, you might call this a slow fast train, you know? Oh, yeah. Because it goes 80 miles an hour, but it's a fast 80 miles an hour.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like an old 80s turbo car where it's like, it takes you seven seconds to get to 60, but you're like, damn, it sounds so cool. Rowing through the gears, it's like screaming and you look down and you're like 35, like, oh, hell yeah.

• 1:13:27Justin Roczniak?

  So that's Talgo technology right here, which allows you to go, go faster on slow track. Anyway, back to Victoria.

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  So do you remember that thing I was talking about earlier where they built this rail line in the 1890s? Well, so 2006 rolls around and Amtrak is like, hey, so we have this huge checkpoint up here at the Nelson Bennett Tunnel at the edge of Point Defiance, because this has been converted to single track and it also serves freight. And, you know, this is, it's constraining our ability to run as many trains as we want. And if we want to do high speed service someday, because they've been talking about doing like an actual high speed rail line in the Pacific Northwest since about 2000. We do not have one, but they dream big. So they're like, what if we bypass this? Sound Transit, which is Seattle's, you know, regional rail operator that runs the

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  aforementioned sounder, already owns most of this right of way, highlighted in red here from Tacoma to Dupont. And they use the Lakewood stop as like one of their stations for the sounder. You know, what if we just modernize this whole section of rails? We can actually run, you know, the Talgo trains on it. We can skip this whole section. It should save us like, it won't save a ton of time. I think they were projecting like 10, 15 minutes, but it allows us to run with a lot more reliability. And also, you know, when we do further high speed upgrades in the future, we already have this track here that's like a lot more suitable.

• 1:14:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of problems with like, if you're sharing with freight railroads, they don't like the idea that they gotta, you know, upgrade their trains with stuff like cab signaling or like, you know, modern signaling systems in general. They're kind of like, I don't know, I think I'm fine running trains at 45 miles an hour.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

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

• 1:15:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  As I discovered on my recent cross-country trip on the Empire Builder. Um, which was certainly an experience. Um, yeah, they're still using Superliner Ones on those. I had a car that was from the Carter admin. Um, on that trip, actually.

• 1:15:37Liam McAnderson?

  That's sick.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, hell yeah, until the toilets stopped working.

• 1:15:41Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's good.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  And which happened like three separate times on the two and a half day trip.

• 1:15:45November Kelly?

  You are now a living history reenactor.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:15:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, I almost died of dysentery not on Amtrak, just, just like the last few days, so I'm with you, but.

• 1:16:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Justin Roczniak?

  One of those things about like Amtrak is the Amtrak long-distance trains is like, okay. You know, you wake up in the morning on day two, that's when the big horrible cardboard trashcans have come out in the toilets.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:17Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and it's like, ah, God.

• 1:16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that was, it was certainly an experience. The coach seats get more, they get less comfortable every night you sleep on them, too.

• 1:16:27Justin Roczniak?

  Or you get the roomettes, the old, the roomettes and the old viewliners that have the toilet in the room. But like, not like in a separate room, but like it's in, in the room. It's like, I'm going to go to another car.

• 1:16:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm gonna poop in somebody else's bathroom. Fuck this.

• 1:16:42Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:16:46Speaker 03

  Um, but yeah, so the Tacoma to Lakewood section here roughly corresponds to the original route that was, uh, that was, you know, laid down by a great, um, by Northern Pacific in, uh, 1873. The Lakewood to Dupont section is that prairie line, that, that extension line that was built by, um, the Tacoma and Gray's Harbor in the 1890s. But, you know, it's been more or less sitting here waiting for them to be like, hey, we have these tracks, let's use them. Um, so the initial budget is like half a billion dollars. Um, but then, you know, 2008 hits, uh, and they're like, okay, we have limited federal funding and limited appetite to spend all this money. So they take, they get 800 million from the feds for the stimulus project that they spread.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  All across the state, they spend $181 million on this section of line. And the feds attach a deadline of 2017 to finish all this work. Or otherwise, they they run out of money and they don't get any money anymore.

• 1:17:41November Kelly?

  Ah, history rhyming, perfect.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  So they're like, OK, we got to hurry up and finish this section. So, you know, they they modernize all of this so they can run the the tailgates on it. And it's it's kind of coming down to the wire. But, you know, wait, I'll just I'll start with the next side's text and then we can switch. On December 18, 2017, at 7:33 a.m., 144 years and two days after the first track address late on what is the right of way for this route on its maiden passenger voyage on the newly completed Point Defiance bypass. Next slide, please. The Amtrak cascades, speeds through a 30 mile an hour curve at 78 miles an hour, derails, falls off a bridge and lands on Interstate 5 beneath it, completely blocking

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  southbound I-5 and crushing a bunch of cars.

• 1:18:29November Kelly?

  Incredible. Just just like we set this bomb for our great, great grandchildren to find. Yes.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is a picture of the accident aftermath. You can see all of those pretty tailgated cars completely destroyed. And next slide, please.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  It's worth noting that this like really does just completely block off like Interstate 5 South. You know, the train, every single like car on the train, except for the trailing locomotive derailed. There were 83 people aboard. Three of them, three of the passengers died, 65 people were injured, including people in the cars below, you know, on the tracks. I don't know how anybody below didn't die because the train was just literally dropping on top of like SUVs and stuff. It's insane. Looking through the NTSB report, it is like I, three people feels like a miracle. The three killed passengers were all FOMERS who were riding to celebrate the new bypass opening, which does feel like, you know, they it's rail fans dying in the line of duty. And for that, I salute them. This is, you know.

• 1:19:33November Kelly?

  Three orders of Lenin.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, three, but I mean, it it's just, yeah, it it's.

• 1:19:40November Kelly?

  That's really sad and pointless and and, yeah, no, that sucks.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, extremely. But I do I do salute them for, you know, being there to write. I've I've written so many first day transit things that it's actually very like a damn, I totally get that kind of moment.

• 1:19:57Justin Roczniak?

  This is one of the reasons why I wait till day two or three.

• 1:20:01Liam McAnderson?

  What everyone else.

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  Nah, I always get so excited. I'm like, I want to be, I want to say that I wrote it. So, and I mean, you know, you you ride an Amtrak and like, yeah, they have accidents and stuff, but you, you know, generally speaking, it's assuming the train is safe. Yeah.

• 1:20:16Justin Roczniak?

  Train's safe, train's safe, car dangerous.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, this was, this is really bad for like the entire Pacific Northwest because they closed down all of I five South. And, you know, it's it's an hour and a half because of the geography of the the Puget Sound. It takes an hour and a half to get the detour around this. I mean, this just destroys like all local transit.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  So obviously, as you can tell from this, the train was going too fast. The why is really frustrating.

• 1:20:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  Next slide, please. So I've done my best to highlight it here in blue with on this Google Maps screenshot. But this is where the crash happened, the the part of I five South here where the first bend is. And you'll notice that that seems kind of sharp for a passenger train that's supposed to do anything else.

• 1:21:04Liam McAnderson?

  I am noticing this.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So back in 2006, when Amtrak was going to, you know, build the Port Defiance bypass, they were like, hey, this curve is kind of sharp. We should probably build a new bridge that's a lot gentler that allows us to like maintain speed. And then they did the math on it and realized it's going to cost $400 million. So they were like, well,

• 1:21:29Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck that.

• 1:21:30Speaker 03

  We can still hit six trains a day, which was their, you know, service territory, trains a day or whatever. I can't remember which two they were actually projecting at this time. It was 2006. They were like, we'll have high speed rail by 2015. We see, you know, none of this came true.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

  But they're like, we'll just slow the trains down to 30 for this corner and we'll skip this and we'll just spend the money elsewhere because there need, there's so many other improvements we got to make, you know, along the entire Cascades route. And we only have eight hundred million dollars. So like, let's just leave the bridge for now. Fine.

• 1:22:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is not like a crazy idea, you know.

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:22:05Justin Roczniak?

  We've had like, um, you know, uh, systems that can detect overspeed for a hundred and twenty five years at this point.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Justin Roczniak?

  Um, it's, it's, it's not like, you know, you're gonna, you're, you're, you're not likely to have an overspeed. As long as people recognize this is a place where it should, it would be catastrophic.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:28Justin Roczniak?

  We should install those systems here.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So next slide, please. So one of the systems that you would use to stop this from happening is called positive train control. Um, which is, you know, the train, the train knows where it is because it knows where it isn't. Um, and, you know, let's say you have a thirty mile an hour curve in the middle of your eighty mile an hour, you know, trackage. If it rips past the thirty mile an hour zone and the engineer does not start applying the brakes, it will say, hey, I shouldn't be doing this. And then it will slam on the brakes. And of course, you'll remember this derailment happened in two thousand seventeen. Um, Congress mandated implementation of this in twenty fifteen for all like major passenger routes and big freight lines. Um, so it should have been in place like this, this, you know, this exact situation was anticipated

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  and legislated theoretically out of existence, but the freight railroads were like, hey, this costs money.

• 1:23:22Justin Roczniak?

  Well, also they did it in like the most completely useless way possible, where they rely on GPS, you know, which uh, GPS isn't accurate enough to even know what track a train is on when there's two parallel tracks. So like, you know, it's, it's, I mean, it's crazy. I, you could use a lot older systems to do this properly. Uh, but they didn't do that either, which is the case on a lot of railroads in the United States. Where there's just like the systems that should have been there for eighty or ninety years just aren't.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  Um, yeah. Yeah. So, so notably like none of this was there. There is no positive train control. The train is just, you know, the engineer drives the train and if the engineer fucks up, the train goes off the bridge, you know, that's.

• 1:24:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  Which, you know, is again, one of those situations where you're like, okay, but I mean, like, you know, the sounder runs on a lot of these similar, you know, it doesn't run all the way down south to where this exact derailment happened, but it runs a lot of the same trackage. And I mean, they run fine and they don't have positive train control. So, you know, theoretically should be fine. You know, that's why you do training runs. Next slide, please.

• 1:24:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta have the knowledge. You gotta know the route.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So here is a map of the, uh, the trackage leading up to where the train derailed.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  And you'll see that there's, you know, the T30, P30, and that's your speed limit signs. For the, that's the two mile warning. Um, and that's

• 1:24:49Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, right. The diagonal ones. Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:24:52Justin Roczniak?

  Diagonal ones mean the speed limit's coming up.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Yes. And then in the middle here, it's not marked on this. This is directly from the, the NTSB, but it's not marked here, but somewhere between 18 and 19, closer to the 19, there's a, there's your like one mile warning sign. And then, you know, at the curve, there is the, hey, you're going to go off the bridge if you're not doing 30 miles an hour sign.

• 1:25:15November Kelly?

  Increasingly urgent warning signs.

• 1:25:18Liam McAnderson?

  Please do not die. Please don't make an ass of yourself.

• 1:25:21November Kelly?

  Read, read my previous three signs.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  As per my previous sign.

• 1:25:28Justin Roczniak?

  These are, these are, again, these are like, okay, the, the speed limit is for comfort and not so much for like safety, but you know, okay, if you went around this at 40, you know, people would be unhappy. If you go around this at 80, you're going straight.

• 1:25:44Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so, you know, there's a new section of rail with this, with this corner that's been discussed in multiple meetings and like, you know, the Amtrak knew about it. And so it's like kind of a known quantity, but like, oh, this could be a problem. Um, and so what they do is they take all the engineers that are going to run on this section and they just, they cram all of them into the cab of one of these, uh, Siemens chargers and like, here, take a look at it. Or actually, in most cases, it was an F40. Like, here, look. And so the engineer who was driving on this maiden voyage had only ever actually gone through this section of track in this direction once, at night in the rain. All the other times, he was either

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  riding shotgun, or he was shoved in the back of the cabin facing backwards.

• 1:26:32Liam McAnderson?

  So this guy has piss-all idea what he's doing.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, but it also, like, again, I can't stress this enough. It keeps getting worse. So the sign at mile 19.8, which is supposed to be your, hey, you have a mile to slow down. And that's when you're supposed to start hitting the brakes, right? Like, the two-mile sign is too far ahead. You, if you start hitting the brakes, then you'll just be doing 30 for a bunch of time. You know, so you're supposed to hit it a mile. That sign is extremely poorly placed and, like, blends with the signal box that is placed right behind it. And so, like, it's very, very easy to miss. And so the, the, the engineer misses the, the, the warnings, the first warning sign of, like, hey, slow down, which is like, you know, he's kind of monitoring a new section of track, you know, that's

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  not completely unforgivable. He misses the second one because the sign is completely invisible. And then, you know, we get to the, the third one. And of course, there's a conductor in the cabin, too, on this maiden voyage, but like, he's never even run this before. This is his first time to get familiarized with the trackage itself. So he's not there to help. He's there to, like, learn for himself. So he's not giving the engineer any assistance whatsoever.

• 1:27:41November Kelly?

  Bad, bad enough, but this is a paying passenger run. They have brought foamers along because they do not believe that they are insulted.

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I mean, the

• 1:27:50Liam McAnderson?

  And who can blame them?

• 1:27:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I, like, again, of all of the people who have ever died in one of these episodes, these are the, I, I spiritually relate to these guys the most possible, where it's like, yeah, I got super excited about other transit.

• 1:28:04November Kelly?

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

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes, yes.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  So, okay, so there's the two signs, you know, the human error causes him to miss the first one, signage being poorly laid causes him to miss the second one, but like, you know, usually engineers aren't like paying super close attention to the signs, they're looking for like landmarks. So, you know, maybe he would notice like, hey, this corner's coming up, I should probably jam on the brakes. Next slide, please. So, this is a Siemens Charger, this is the locomotive that was involved in the crash. These were pertinently very new when this happened, they had just entered these into the fleet. So, 27 seconds before he reaches the corner, the engineer note that the track is downhill sloped coming into

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  it, and the train hits 82 miles an hour, and it starts beeping like crazy because it's over the speed limit. This is, it's a, it's an overspeed alarm, but it is not tied to the position of where the train is on the tracks. It's just saying, hey, you're breaking the federally mandated speed limit. Now, the engineer, who again, has driven this section of track once in a different locomotive, has never actually driven a Siemens Charger. He's attended classroom training, and he's like, you know, he's hung out in one, but he's never actually like driven one. So, this thing is beeping, and he's like... I've hung out in the train too, goddamn. Yeah. So, he's like, uh, what does this mean? And of course, it's a different alarm than the overspeed alarms he's used to, so he spends like 20 seconds looking down at

• 1:29:39Speaker 03

  the gauges of the train, trying to figure out what the fuck is beeping at him. Um, you know, and just, meanwhile, the train is like headed directly towards this corner. And so he looks up with, with six seconds to the corner, and you can hear it on the, you know, cockpit voice recorder, basically, where he's like, oh, fuck. Um, and, you know, tries to apply brakes. And of course, at this point, you're doing 80 miles an hour, and you are coming up on a corner that, you know, mandates 30. So, uh, it's, uh, it's too late at this point. So, brand new locomotive, only run this section of track once, um, no positive train control, no failsafes whatsoever. Uh, so the train, you know, next slide, please.

• 1:30:19Justin Roczniak?

  I, I mean.

• 1:30:20Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:26Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  Left and right. Um, that's actually, if you're looking and see the uprights for the suspension here.

• 1:30:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  That's, that's that funky suspension that brows was talking about earlier, um, lying flat on the ground because yeah, the, the Talgo designs were heavily implicated in the final report about why there were fatalities. Because the cars were not built to, uh, modern FRA standards regarding crash worthiness. So the engineers live, like the train, obviously, you know, the, the, and locomotive went off first and hardest. But the Siemens charger did its job and kept them alive. Um, but you know, some of the passengers died because the train crushed and basically the wheels fell in and, you know, destroyed entire rows of seating.

• 1:31:08Liam McAnderson?

  God.

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

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

• 1:31:20Justin Roczniak?

  Well, now in fairness, I think if it were conventional rolling stock, it probably would have done the same thing. Um, just cause you know, uh, the wheels, the, the, the bogies are basically held on by gravity.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  That's fair.

• 1:31:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34November Kelly?

  It's not really a kind of expected sort of, uh, deviation to drop a train onto somebody's car.

• 1:31:40Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 1:31:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Also, FRA crash worthiness standards are fundamentally broken.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  That's.

• 1:31:46Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's a, that's a different subject.

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  That's fair. Um, but the, the wheels coming in and crushing parts of the car definitely did seem, uh,

• 1:31:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Like it was a suboptimal.

• 1:31:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:31:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so yeah, this one was just kind of a, you know, and I, I had written this down set one second. Yeah. It's worth noting that in, in 2000, so earlier in 2017, the NTSB in an unrelated report had noted that Amtrak had, quote, "A labor management relationship so adversarial that safety programs became contentious at the bargaining table, with the unions ultimately refusing to participate." Um, the crash was a month after that report.

• 1:32:26November Kelly?

  I am literally never going to blame a union for anything. So this is management's fault.

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  It is. I mean, it's it's very much one of those cases where it's it is like looking through it, the NTSB cannot blame management, but also the a lot of the engineers are Amtrak immediately fired the engineer and he was like, what the fuck? And the court was like, you have to compensate this guy for the rest of his life. What were you doing throwing him into this train and saying like, go do revenue service? He'd never even driven one before.

• 1:32:55Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:33:03Justin Roczniak?

  This is definitely like an example of, okay, even, you know, you can talk about the class one freight railroads and all the horrible things they do. Amtrak does horrible things, too. Everything, it's all, it's all rotten to the core. I mean,

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, again, this was, you know, it's, it's kind of funny that like this was driven by a race to the deadline to secure federal funding.

• 1:33:27Justin Roczniak?

  Again.

• 1:33:28Speaker 03

  Again, that then, you know, I mean, this is, and it's not even like one of those things where it's like, oh, you could say, you know, this could have, this could have happened whenever. It's like, no, this is probably going to happen like one of the first couple of trips, because so much of it also depends on the engineer not knowing where he is. Like, you know, they, all the engineers that the NTSB reviewed talked about how, you know, usually they have like fixed positional landmarks to orient themselves with. And, you know, for tricky sections like this, they have like a house they pass or something, you know, they look for in addition to the sign in case they miss something. And so like, you know, this was, this was just kind of like a first day disaster waiting to happen and really a reason not to rush this because you're, it's likeliest to be a problem when

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  your engineers are the least proficient in the segment. And of course, like, the track being owned by Sound Transit and, you know, partially, it was built by, it was like managed by the NSF for this section and Sound Transit didn't actually run any trains on this part of it. And so they were like, no, it's Amtrak's responsibility to make this. Basically, you know, there should be a whole, there should be a lot of training around like specific hazardous corners like these. And everybody just sort of blame gamed it and nobody had the training for like a corner that was this obviously going to cause a problem. Because again, nobody like, everybody manages it and runs on it, but nobody really wants to own it.

• 1:34:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, there was no like basic safety systems in place to prevent, you know, we all make boneheaded mistakes, especially on the first day of work. And, uh, you know, there was no, there was nothing in place. There were systems that you could have implemented to stop this from happening.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:07Justin Roczniak?

  Nah.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, if they had, if they had positive train control, this just wouldn't have happened.

• 1:35:11Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, um, you know, it was, uh, it took them until 2021 to end up resuming service on this segment. Um, they waited to get PTC implemented, but, uh, you know, it ended up taking another four years anyway, uh, to, to fix the bridge and, you know, like actually properly do training and then COVID hit. And so it didn't, it's just one of those things where it's like, you know, you, one of the things that's eternally frustrating is reading about trying to, you know, hit these, these man chosen deadlines for engineered projects that sometimes maybe just need more time. Um, but, uh, anyway.

• 1:35:59Justin Roczniak?

  Amazing. Yeah. Then, uh, you know, one of the, one of the consequences of this was, um, these, uh, these Talgo six trains were scrapped.

• 1:36:09November Kelly?

  Jesus, like putting down a dog?

• 1:36:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  Well, cats, cause the ears.

• 1:36:13Justin Roczniak?

  No. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:36:15November Kelly?

  That makes me even sadder.

• 1:36:16Justin Roczniak?

  They were, uh, they were sent to a company called the, uh, Railroad Excursion Management Company.

• 1:36:23November Kelly?

  Oh, no.

• 1:36:24Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, then a colleague of ours put them through a shredder and then got a phone call from the ambassador to Mexico for commerce. And then episode 143 of this podcast happened.

• 1:36:40November Kelly?

  And it was, and a great time was had by all.

• 1:36:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:36:44November Kelly?

  Nobody, nobody had to hide in electrical closets, dodging the Mexican Navy.

• 1:36:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:51November Kelly?

  As a consequence of the kind of murder of these innocent Talgos.

• 1:36:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:57Justin Roczniak?

  A lot of people, a lot of people are, you know, mad about the Talgo sixes being scrapped. I, I am told by Scooter that these things were in fact shot to hell by the time he got to them. And I have now seen the videos of him smashing all the priceless glass fixtures in the Biscrop car.

• 1:37:19Justin Roczniak?

  It was gonna go through the shredder anyway, doesn't matter.

• 1:37:23Liam McAnderson?

  Still mad, you know?

• 1:37:27Justin Roczniak?

  One of them's preserved, don't worry.

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  Well, they preserved 90% of it.

• 1:37:31Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:37:37Liam McAnderson?

  This is my Frankentrain, this is my real train, this is my Frankentrain.

• 1:37:41Justin Roczniak?

  Oh god, I've seen a picture of it, it's hilarious. It's like, they just ripped, they ripped it off another car.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have that up at the, at the Snoqualny Rubber Museum, which is where my wife and I went on our first date. We rode, we rode Northern, we rode Northern Pacific's 894, the steam locomotive. It's a Baldwin 260, I think, like 1895.

• 1:38:07Liam McAnderson?

  I made the same trip we did.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a really, it's a really cool little museum. There's also, yeah, we moved in together and then immediately the next day went to ride a steam train together because we're lesbians. So, and

• 1:38:21Justin Roczniak?

  Good idea.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  They do have, they do have the Talgo up there. Yeah, I mean, other notable side effects of this is that it takes three hours and 25 minutes to get from Portland to Seattle today. In 1966, it took three hours and 30 minutes.

• 1:38:36Justin Roczniak?

  That's an improvement.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

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

• 1:38:44Justin Roczniak?

  I think the fastest Metro Liner schedule on the Northeast Corridor is still faster than the new Acela. So, you know, it's, it's slower across the board.

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Speaker 03

  Nowadays, we don't even have, we've got the, I was talking with you about this before the, we've started recording where we, we, we had to scrap. I don't know if we scrapped them, but there was substantial rust damage in the cars they were using instead of the Talgo's. So we are now using like M fleets from the seventies. They had to ferry out here from the east coast for the cascade service. So instead of the fancy bistro cars and like the nice seats, it's just kind of like an old dingy, um, you know, kind of like worn to hell.

• 1:39:25Justin Roczniak?

  You can go on the cafe car and see a picture of Trenton, New Jersey.

• 1:39:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:31Speaker 03

  Or is that like the east coast Tacoma?

• 1:39:34Justin Roczniak?

  There's, there's one cafe car that has a picture of Nashville, which is a place M track doesn't go to.

• 1:39:42Liam McAnderson?

  It's aspirational, Roz.

• 1:39:44Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:39:47Liam McAnderson?

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

• 1:39:50Speaker 03

  Well, that makes one of us.

• 1:39:51Liam McAnderson?

  I'm gonna be, I throw what you know, Victoria, I am gonna be a, uh, an A O pie on the town with my boyfriend. Bottom tier Trent. I don't know. Some jokes about prats. Running out of material here. Let's wrap this up.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  I've been to Nashville. I've been to Nashville three or four times for work and it's the only city I've ever traveled to repeatedly that has a 100% slur rate. And that I get called a name every single fucking time I'm there.

• 1:40:17Liam McAnderson?

  Sucks. I'm sorry.

• 1:40:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, genuine. And I'm only ever there for like two days because it's a press trip. So it's like you fly in, you go to some fancy hotel and I see question for everybody. I go outside for like a cigarette and somebody's like, hey, you know, redacted. I don't know. Can I, what? Yeah. Can I?

• 1:40:31Liam McAnderson?

  You can. We're not gonna stop.

• 1:40:32November Kelly?

  You can say tranny. I've been, I've said it so many times over the course of the show.

• 1:40:36Justin Roczniak?

  Two, two thirds of us can't say it, but you can say it.

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

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

• 1:40:51November Kelly?

  Almost impressive to be able to like clock that hard, you know, like that's, and just to have the full like TSLA on deck as well, you know?

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  It's kind of different like every, it's been like, it's, it was like, it's like tranny and like faggot and like a couple, I don't remember specifically because I've tried to block all memories of Nashville out of my mind. But like, it's like, it's rotating cast and the only city it's ever been like consistently meaner to me is Reno, Nevada, and I lived there.

• 1:41:20Liam McAnderson?

  Which shocks me. You'd figure Reno would be like, who gives a shit?

• 1:41:24Justin Roczniak?

  Bad news for the.

• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  Oh no, Reno is bad.

• 1:41:28Justin Roczniak?

  This is bad news for the show I just booked at the Grand Old Opry.

• 1:41:31Liam McAnderson?

  I can't believe no one's in that place.

• 1:41:33November Kelly?

  Come to, come to the show.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  They're gonna invent new slurs for like, straight men to call you while you're there?

• 1:41:44Speaker 03

  Anyway, yeah.

• 1:41:45November Kelly?

  What did we learn?

• 1:41:46Justin Roczniak?

  What did we learn?

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  There's. Train your engineers?

• 1:41:50November Kelly?

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

• 1:41:55Justin Roczniak?

  There's a lot of safety systems you can install on the railroad, not even positive train control, because the freight railroads fucked that one up, which can prevent boneheaded mistakes like this one. One of the things which I have personally found fascinating from watching, you know, well, airline accident videos such as on Mentor Pilot is, you know, sort of compare how the airlines handle huge accidents like this to how the railroads handled them, which is the railroads are just like, eh, fuck you, including M-Track, you know?

• 1:42:34November Kelly?

  It's like, really like, idiot mistake occurs and then someone notes that the idiot mistake preventer was developed by a guy in his spare time in 1909?

• 1:42:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, 1909 sounds pretty late, but yeah.

• 1:42:50Justin Roczniak?

  You know, the, the, these are, these are solved problems, they just don't exist on huge swaths of the American railroad network. You, you could, you could have easily prevented this problem with a little bit of modern infrastructure. And no, we just don't, we don't do that. And it's confusing as to why, you know, and this is, you know, the whole industry, that the, the safety culture needs to change. You know, there, there is a, there is a future where people at least aspire to zero derailments. We're far from that. You know, I, I, people need to realize things can be better.

• 1:43:35Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, I, I, this was, this, this was, it, it's confusing just because you would think if you're rehabilitating a railroad in the year of our Lord 2006, you would install some systems that would have been considered advanced in 1898. Um, but here we are. I don't know.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  Well, and notably if they-

• 1:44:05Justin Roczniak?

  Maybe it's just that guy's fault.

• 1:44:07Speaker 03

  And notably, if they had just spent a little more money on the bridge, they'd had like a little bit more money instead of having, you know, limited bucket of money, they could just rebuild the bridge. The train could have gone 80 and no one would have died.

• 1:44:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:44:20Speaker 03

  And it also would be faster and work better.

• 1:44:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:44:24November Kelly?

  I guess that's what we learned.

• 1:44:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Spend more fucking money.

• 1:44:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, if there's a, uh, system that will prevent a problem that was developed before your grandfather was born, like you should install that.

• 1:44:42Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:44:49Justin Roczniak?

  Greetings, Justin, Liam, and November.

• 1:44:53November Kelly?

  Fucked up.

• 1:44:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yep, yep. Nope, no.

• 1:44:55November Kelly?

  Miss Victoria, transphobic.

• 1:44:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I've been meaning to share this for a while, but my ADHD just wouldn't let me. I am a train dispatcher for a regional railroad here in Michigan, and this is the story of how Pete Buttigieg gave me COVID. It ruined my vacation. So this all starts in what I thought would be a completely normal day. I showed up for my afternoon shift at our dispatch office, which is inside an old yard master's tower. The yard masters are long gone, so us dispatchers have inherited the best view in the house.

• 1:45:29November Kelly?

  Nice.

• 1:45:29Justin Roczniak?

  Back in the summer of 2022, Pete Buttigieg, who was Biden's Secretary of Transportation, pictured here, um, was on this big national tour, taking up and talking up investments in infrastructure. One of his stops just happened to be our rail yard, and I had no idea. We're usually kept in the dark about these kinds of visits.

• 1:45:52November Kelly?

  Mixed my days up, ended up on Casamian in a room with Pete Buttigieg, who amongst us, you know?

• 1:45:58Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:46:05Justin Roczniak?

  Or once or twice they were informed. Plus, since a bigger company had recently bought the railroad, assume that's Genesee in Wyoming. Um, we had already had random executives and the orange menace. Yeah, we had already had random executives in fancy suits showing up all the time. They didn't write that it was GNW, by the way, I just inferred that. So when I walked up to the tower and there was this big guy in a black suit and sunglasses, standing at the door, I just assumed he was one of them. I said hello, asked if he needed to get in. He mumbled, no, and I went upstairs like nothing was out of the ordinary.

• 1:46:50Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:46:55November Kelly?

  What interactions have you had with Secret Service?

• 1:46:58Justin Roczniak?

  I went to, oh, this is gonna dox my location. Shit. No.

• 1:47:03November Kelly?

  You live in Philadelphia?

• 1:47:06Justin Roczniak?

  I'll tell you after.

• 1:47:11Liam McAnderson?

  Got it.

• 1:47:12Justin Roczniak?

  Joe Biden likes a Vietnamese restaurant near my house.

• 1:47:15Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:19Liam McAnderson?

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

• 1:47:22Justin Roczniak?

  No, it's a very good Vietnamese restaurant.

• 1:47:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they have the, uh, the, the, the, the fucking, uh, the, uh, fish bullshit that you're supposed to have two people to drink it, but I just get it by myself.

• 1:47:34Justin Roczniak?

  It's owned by my landlord's cousin, I believe.

• 1:47:37Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, is it?

• 1:47:39November Kelly?

  See, giving out this kind of information is exactly how our guests end up supplying you with satellite images of your own deck.

• 1:47:49Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, no, this is a problem with living in Philly is you just have run ins with Joe Biden, even now. So anyway, where was I? Weekdays are insanely busy and most dispatchers absolutely do not enjoy surprise visitors staring at us while we work. When I walked in, my coworker on the first ship took one look at me and said, oh, you're underdressed.

• 1:48:13November Kelly?

  For, for the Secretary of Transportation?

• 1:48:19Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:48:29November Kelly?

  Kind of Habsburg shit is it to expect your dispatchers to be wearing like white ties to, you know, greet the kind of dignitary, yeah.

• 1:48:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Not even a minute later, a motorcade of black SUVs and police cruisers rolled into the parking lot. You'd think Mayo Pete would take the train to see the train dispatcher, but apparently not.

• 1:48:50November Kelly?

  Also, he's not that important. Like, why does, okay, sure, America's fucking crazy.

• 1:48:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we know.

• 1:48:56Justin Roczniak?

  I thought he was the transit guy. Um, apparently not. Well, no, different guys, the transit guy.

• 1:49:01November Kelly?

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

• 1:49:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, actually, I understand that was a problem.

• 1:49:07November Kelly?

  The presidential bicycle. It's just like, you know, it's, it's, it's landmine proof in the sense that the president is a kind of fine mist, but the bike is completely impervious and it's fine.

• 1:49:17Liam McAnderson?

  Also, for some reason, as a fifty cal strap to it.

• 1:49:22Justin Roczniak?

  He did try and bike around DC, but there were like three SUVs around him protecting the bicycle.

• 1:49:28November Kelly?

  This is insanely paranoid. Like, there's no reason for this.

• 1:49:33Speaker 03

  No, but we have three hundred and fifty million guns.

• 1:49:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, but like, how often do people take a shot at Pete Buttigieg?

• 1:49:40Liam McAnderson?

  USA. Well, never, but that's because we have three hundred and fifty million guns.

• 1:49:42Speaker 03

  Well, never, because they got.

• 1:49:45Justin Roczniak?

  I don't under, I don't understand how the SUVs, I don't understand how the SUVs prevent you from taking a shot at Pete Buttigieg.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  Their aura is too strong.

• 1:49:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I guess so. I.

• 1:49:57Speaker 03

  Deflects the bullets, like, like Fortune and Metal Gear Solid 2.

• 1:50:01November Kelly?

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

• 1:50:11Justin Roczniak?

  As a high ranking government, government official, you should just be able to get drunk and wander out and hang out with hippies on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

• 1:50:21Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, going for a horse, he'll send.

• 1:50:23November Kelly?

  There's a Netflix mini series about the Garfield assassination, uh, which I think also, yeah, should take you to that position, which is, it was probably better than just let him walk around.

• 1:50:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. These people are so coddled up that they never experience. Anyway.

• 1:50:42Liam McAnderson?

  Never experienced shit that like President Garfield experienced.

• 1:50:47Justin Roczniak?

  They don't.

• 1:50:47Liam McAnderson?

  Being made a slutty little current by your doctor. Yeah.

• 1:50:50Justin Roczniak?

  At some point, you forget how to shop for groceries.

• 1:50:54Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:54Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and at that point, you should be disqualified from public office. So anyway, not even a minute later, a motorcade of black SUVs and police cruisers rolled into the parking lot. And of course, the railroad doesn't stop for anyone. So there was little time to spectate at the crowd of people outside. A minute later, a parade of people ascended the stairs, including railroad executives, reporters, security staff, and then Pete Buttigieg himself.

• 1:51:21Liam McAnderson?

  Uh.

• 1:51:22Justin Roczniak?

  He walked right up to me, shook my hand and introduced himself. And honestly, he seemed like a genuinely nice person.

• 1:51:28November Kelly?

  That's his job is to seem like a genuinely nice person.

• 1:51:31Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:51:42Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my god.

• 1:51:44Justin Roczniak?

  I was completely unprepared and frankly horrified. Fifteen minutes earlier, I'd been expecting a normal day, not a spontaneous TED Talk in front of the Secretary of Transportation. I did my best to explain what we do, probably stumbling over most of my words and sounding like a fool. Meanwhile, I'm making desperate eye contact with my coworker, silently begging her to save me. She just kept working away on the phone like it was the most important phone call of her career.

• 1:52:17Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually she finished and thankfully stepped in explaining what was happening on the CTC, that centralized train control. Uh, deep dispatch screen as if she was turning over to him to take over the dispatching duties. This whole visit lasted maybe 20 minutes. Before they all left, Pete shook my hand one more time. This is important for later.

• 1:52:39Liam McAnderson?

  Oh no. Thank you, Freddie Foreshadow.

• 1:52:41Justin Roczniak?

  Now, we're gonna jump ahead a few days. My wife and I are at Walt Disney World.

• 1:52:46Liam McAnderson?

  Ah.

• 1:52:47Justin Roczniak?

  Or as I've started calling it, Bay Lake Country Fair, because it's really gone downhill.

• 1:52:53Liam McAnderson?

  It fucking has, dude. It, listen, again, you know, I, as somebody who's forced to go to Disney World a lot of the time, because I'm married to the most terrifying woman in the universe, I can confirm it has really gone downhill. She's five seven and she's very scary. But yes, go ahead. And then, and then other people are puking up their Grand Marnier slushies, but not Liam, because I can hold my liquor, you motherfuckers.

• 1:53:21Justin Roczniak?

  Now, when I'm in the Disney bubble, I try and leave all real world stress behind.

• 1:53:28November Kelly?

  Hey, whatever, whatever gets you to enlightenment, you know, you can Disney mode. That's fine, probably.

• 1:53:33Justin Roczniak?

  We were in the Space Mountain queue.

• 1:53:36Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no.

• 1:53:36Justin Roczniak?

  Family in front of us started talking about the news. Pete Buttigieg just tested positive for COVID-19.

• 1:53:44November Kelly?

  Is Pete Buttigieg that much more important than I imagine him to be, that just random Disney enthusiast? Like, hey, do you hear the fucking High Elves of like, necromancy is banned in Saradale or whatever? Like.

• 1:53:58Justin Roczniak?

  The nice centrist lives think he's gonna be the next president. Because he has a straight gay boyfriend.

• 1:54:04Liam McAnderson?

  And I bear a narnia. Keep going.

• 1:54:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. And without thinking, I jumped in with, oh, I met him a few days ago.

• 1:54:11Liam McAnderson?

  You idiot.

• 1:54:13Justin Roczniak?

  As you can imagine, they put the pieces together a lot faster than I did.

• 1:54:19Justin Roczniak?

  By day three of the trip, I woke up with a dry cough.

• 1:54:22November Kelly?

  This is pleasing to me because like, this is one of the, I've only had this one of, one out of the three times I've had COVID, where you get the kill cam, where you know where and when you got it and from whom. And you should, you should get that every time, if you ask me. Like doubly so if it kills you.

• 1:54:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, no, you definitely better get, you better, you better have like a cutscene. Yeah.

• 1:54:44November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Justin Roczniak?

  By day five, I was coughing so much that strangers were giving me the side eye. I wrote it off as allergies because apparently denial is a powerful thing. Masks were optional at Disney at the time, but my wife, who was significantly smarter than me, suggested that I wear one.

• 1:55:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, that might be a good idea.

• 1:55:04Liam McAnderson?

  Feel it in my fucking bones.

• 1:55:05Justin Roczniak?

  It helped the cough at least. By day six, our last day, I was completely wiped out. I didn't even leave the hotel room. I shut the curtains, laid in bed all day, and my phone would buzz every now and then with pictures of my wife living her best life in the Magic Kingdom.

• 1:55:20Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yep, been there.

• 1:55:23Justin Roczniak?

  When we, when we got home, I finally took a COVID test. Surprise, it was positive. I spent the next several days miserable, but I did get an extra paid week off. So I guess that sort of balances out the ruined vacation.

• 1:55:38November Kelly?

  I, I feel like you should get like a challenge coin or an achievement or something. If you, if you've got code, if you got infected with COVID by a cabinet secretary, like.

• 1:55:48Speaker 03

  Little Xbox notification in your peripheral vision.

• 1:55:51November Kelly?

  It's, it's like how, uh, some, some video games have an achievement for like played with one of the developers, you know?

• 1:55:58Justin Roczniak?

  So in true safety third fashion, here's the moral. The odds of Pete Buttigieg giving you COVID at work are low, but never zero.

• 1:56:09Justin Roczniak?

  And honestly, the safest way to avoid getting COVID is simple. Just don't go to work ever.

• 1:56:15November Kelly?

  Buzz.

• 1:56:15Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 1:56:16Justin Roczniak?

  Feel free to cite me in your HR meetings. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed my story. I did try to keep it short, but well, you know how that goes.

• 1:56:26November Kelly?

  That was about.

• 1:56:26Justin Roczniak?

  Andy.

• 1:56:27November Kelly?

  Thank you, Andy.

• 1:56:29Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, this could happen to you.

• 1:56:34November Kelly?

  Remain vigilant.

• 1:56:36Justin Roczniak?

  Always, always be vigilant. You never know when Pete Buttigieg is coming to your location to give you COVID.

• 1:56:46November Kelly?

  Secretary of giving you COVID.

• 1:56:50Justin Roczniak?

  I thought that was RFK. Or the worm, actually.

• 1:56:55Liam McAnderson?

  The worm. I can't believe that one.

• 1:56:57November Kelly?

  They call him Doctor Worm.

• 1:56:59Liam McAnderson?

  Picture of her butthole.

• 1:57:00Justin Roczniak?

  He's not a real doctor, but he is a real worm.

• 1:57:04Liam McAnderson?

  Got it.

• 1:57:04Justin Roczniak?

  He likes to play the drums.

• 1:57:05Liam McAnderson?

  Don't send people pictures or do send pictures.

• 1:57:07November Kelly?

  He thinks he's getting good.

• 1:57:08Liam McAnderson?

  But all the people who like you.

• 1:57:10November Kelly?

  And he can handle criticism.

• 1:57:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Justin Roczniak?

  That was safety third.

• 1:57:19Justin Roczniak?

  Take hands for danger. Next episode will be about Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 1:57:26Liam McAnderson?

  Come to the live shows, you dirty motherfuckers.

• 1:57:28November Kelly?

  In all that she does, come to the live shows or else.

• 1:57:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:31November Kelly?

  This is your final, this is, you have one warning remaining and to show you we're serious, you have no warnings remaining.

• 1:57:36Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. Come to the live shows and we'll shove you into the reactor at Three Mile Island, which is apparently being reactivated. They're not calling it Three Mile Island anymore. They're calling it the Crane Clean Energy Center.

• 1:57:50Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck off.

• 1:57:51Justin Roczniak?

  You know, hi, yeah, we'll shove you into the old reactor that's melted down, actually. You know, because we can't go to Chernobyl.

• 1:57:59Speaker 03

  George Orwell trying to come up with examples for Newspeak kind of shit.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  It's like, let's think in Seattle, we, our, our stadium is owned by Jeff Bezos and it's called Climate Pledge Arena.

• 1:58:14November Kelly?

  Subscribe to the Patreon and, and, and if you do, don't subscribe to the Patreon on iOS. Uh, do it like not through the, through any of your like iPhone apps because Tim Apple takes a cut and the cut is substantial, actually.

• 1:58:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, if you subscribe to the Patreon from your iPhone type device, all you have to do is to subscribe on your web browser as opposed to through the Patreon app.

• 1:58:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 1:58:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44November Kelly?

  We will make literally dozens of dollars more if you do this.

• 1:58:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, and a lot of technology. Anyway.

• 1:58:51November Kelly?

  It's good, isn't it?

• 1:58:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Good night, everyone.

• 1:58:53November Kelly?

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:58:54Liam McAnderson?

  Bye, everyone.

• 1:58:54Justin Roczniak?

  Bye.