Episode 198: The Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern Merger

how is this even legalalso sorry we recorded this the day right before the updated proposal was released. whoops! donate to help buy liam's coworker's grandson a mobility van: https://helphopelive.org/campaign/24216/check out Public Rail Now: https://publicrailnow.org/ Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  And I will start the podcast. Wow.

• 0:06Liam McAnderson?

  Wow. Two great nations, two, two, two great peoples, two great houses.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  A long ago, the class ones lived in harmony.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  And everything changed when you did Pacific Attack.

• 0:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Oh, you a lion. Oh, oh, Roz, we gotta go see Big Boy do the horseshoe curve.

• 0:26Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, that is a very expensive ticketed event.

• 0:32Liam McAnderson?

  Is it?

• 0:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 0:34Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, now I know. How expensive is it?

• 0:36Justin Roczniak?

  I don't remember. It's too much.

• 0:39Justin Roczniak?

  You know what? I think this is the official, this is the official image for the merger. And I just realized, I think it's done with AI.

• 0:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that, that tracks.

• 0:51Justin Roczniak?

  It's cause it's a train.

• 0:52Liam McAnderson?

  Roz, it's 20 goddamn dollars, dude.

• 0:54Justin Roczniak?

  Is it?

• 0:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, it's sold out. Oh, it's sold out.

• 0:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's sold out, though. Yeah, you're gonna have to get that from a scalper.

• 0:59Liam McAnderson?

  All right.

• 1:02Liam McAnderson?

  Seat geek.

• 1:06Justin Roczniak?

  I'm just gonna go down to the Market Street Bridge and watch when it comes out from under the art museum.

• 1:10Liam McAnderson?

  Okay.

• 1:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that's gonna be impressive to look at.

• 1:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, uh, 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.

• 1:33Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, November's dead. I'm Liam. Pronouns he/him.

• 1:37Justin Roczniak?

  Nova, Nova has Novid, unfortunately.

• 1:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Liam McAnderson?

  We have not [BLEEP] and/or [BLEEP] her. That may happen to her incidentally, but it's not gonna be our fault.

• 1:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, we're not allowed to do that.

• 1:48Liam McAnderson?

  No, not the way they, this company is structured, baby.

• 1:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Hello, my name is Victoria Scott. I'm first to talk to you right now. My products are she and her.

• 1:57Justin Roczniak?

  Um, all right. So.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  I'm also here to maintain the transgender woman quorum required. Exactly.

• 2:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, if we, if we, if we do an episode without a trans person, the episodes suck and we don't release them.

• 2:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 2:10Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not making that up. I'm not making that up. That's, that's true. That's factual. I'm not making that up.

• 2:17Liam McAnderson?

  So I don't, I don't love, I'm on the field, I'm on the, the thing for the horseshoe curb and it's the, the, the header is feel the thunder.

• 2:25Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 2:26Liam McAnderson?

  Which is what I, which is also incidentally what I say to my wife right before she kicks me.

• 2:31Liam McAnderson?

  I put my hand on her thigh and I go feel this. I'm not done. I'm kidding. Now I'm done.

• 2:35Justin Roczniak?

  I thought I'd gather us all today as a family to talk about something very difficult.

• 2:43Liam McAnderson?

  Are we getting divorced?

• 2:44Justin Roczniak?

  No, I, this is, this is, uh, for everyone out there, um, your uncle Pete.

• 2:52Justin Roczniak?

  Um, you know, he's always had some interesting proclivities. Um, your uncle Pete is marrying a horse.

• 2:59Liam McAnderson?

  What?

• 3:00Justin Roczniak?

  That's right. Union Pacific is merging with Norfolk Southern.

• 3:03Liam McAnderson?

  Uncle Pete, no.

• 3:07Liam McAnderson?

  Don't, don't do that.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Union Pacific headquarters is being moved to Endham Claw.

• 3:14Liam McAnderson?

  I'm here. No, I don't even want to say I'm here to fuck the horse. That's, I don't. Here to fuck Uncle Pete. That's what I'm here to do. I'm here to fuck Uncle Pete, baby.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Here to talk about the merger, we invite, uh, Washington legend, Mr. Hamps.

• 3:31Liam McAnderson?

  Trying to fuck a horse, baby. Let's do this.

• 3:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. All right. But yeah, that's right. The, uh, the great big rolling railroad is about to get bigger.

• 3:41Liam McAnderson?

  Uh huh.

• 3:42Justin Roczniak?

  And we're going to talk about what that means for the rest of us. Spoiler, mostly bad. Um.

• 3:47Liam McAnderson?

  Is this going to be more PSR bullshit I hate?

• 3:50Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, a little bit, yeah.

• 3:52Liam McAnderson?

  Is this going to be any more locomotives because I can't buy a new one anymore?

• 3:57Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yeah, that's part of it.

• 3:59Liam McAnderson?

  Are they going to bring back big boy? And then I'll just watch it go round and round and probably watch them put it on the ground at horseshoe curb somehow?

• 4:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's a propaganda tool.

• 4:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 4:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But before we do that, we have to do the goddamn news.

• 4:20Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, comedy, comedy is legal again, man.

• 4:22Justin Roczniak?

  The Onion has not purchased for the moment, but leased the intellectual property of Infowars. Meaning, they are going to be able to start publishing content on the Infowars website. This is, I understand, a stopgap measure until all the injunctions can get cleared. So they can actually buy the thing outright. It's very exciting. Alex Jones has been, has been Onion-mugged, I think is the word the kids would say.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  He's losing his fucking mind also.

• 4:57Liam McAnderson?

  I, so I haven't seen, because I make a habit of not doing anything related to Alex Jones. I assume he's basically just like fisting his own ass in panic. Is that, am I on the, on the track?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:08Justin Roczniak?

  He's gotten so red, he's gotten outside the electromagnetic spectrum. He's in infrared now.

• 5:14Liam McAnderson?

  Infrared.

• 5:15Justin Roczniak?

  You, you can't see him.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  The, the funniest part of this is they brought in, uh, Tim Heidecker to do a bunch of the like new shows and podcasts, like be kind of the face of Infowars, which he, he's also publicly claimed he's gonna make like a home for transgender comedy. Which specifically is comedy told by trans people not doing Chappelle bits.

• 5:38Liam McAnderson?

  Punching wire out, right.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Crucial distinction.

• 5:42Liam McAnderson?

  Right, so although I don't like them stepping on our turf as America's number one and the UK's number one trans-friendly podcast, because once again, when we don't have trans people on the show, it collapses like the Blues Brothers car.

• 5:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I can't, I can't believe that one guy, one guy did crowd work at the expense of one of our listeners.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  That guy does suck, but I, the thing is, is like there are a bunch of people like, oh, you can't, this is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate about trans people and holding it such a high standard. And while this is somewhat true, I did also date that woman, basically. So I can't really, I, it's kind of like, yeah, it's fair, actually. Stop working for defense contractors.

• 6:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, everyone, everyone, don't, don't build bombs. Uh, listen to my episode on Bloodwork Podcast.

• 6:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Uh, no, but the funniest thing about this, this Infowars merger lease, whatever the hell thing is that, uh, it appears that Alex Jones is in some state of inebriation where he is unaware that Tim Heidecker does parodies of real things. And so kind of seemingly believes that he is actually a Satanist. It's hard to tell where the kayfabe begins and ends with that guy.

• 6:52Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  But he is, no matter what, uh, he claims to like actually believe at the end of the day, he is incredibly owned and he is turning into a corn cob. It's great.

• 7:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes. I guess like he just filed some kind of emergency appeal, uh, like two hours ago.

• 7:12Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck off dude. Just take, just take the L.

• 7:15Justin Roczniak?

  You're gonna have to take the L on this one. Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  They're selling rainbow, uh, onion Infowars tote bags. And my wife obviously was like, I have to get this incredible object to have. Uh, and we're trying to figure out like when the event horizon for can actually use this outside of the home will hit. Cause right now, not enough people are aware of this to, to be able to like publicly make that joke and expect people to get it. But I'm hopeful.

• 7:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm, uh, this is one of the, one of the first pieces of good news in a while.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm stoked also that there might be like a second transgender jobs program besides the rotating, uh, hosting spot on this podcast.

• 7:55Liam McAnderson?

  There's your problem make work program.

• 7:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  This boy, do we, do we need it?

• 8:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, but that, that fucking rules. I just, I, I do like, you know, obviously we, we don't, we don't have it in the news today, but the Voting Rights Act was gutted today, uh, April 29th. Shoot John Roberts with a gun. Um, and, uh, I, I, I am, I am, I am very happy at least that Alex Jones is melting. I assume like some sort of witch.

• 8:21Justin Roczniak?

  Gradually decomposing into chili.

• 8:24Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Ben's chili ball. We're gonna have smoke. Well, yo, we can get a half smoke out of his shattered chest cavity.

• 8:31Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good idea.

• 8:33Liam McAnderson?

  Mmm, thank you. The one good thing about DC is Ben's Chili Bowl because they closed all the fucking Armand's pizzas.

• 8:39Justin Roczniak?

  I never went to Armand's Pizza.

• 8:41Liam McAnderson?

  How?

• 8:42Justin Roczniak?

  Because I lived in the suburbs.

• 8:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you're you're yeah, well.

• 8:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the deep suburbs.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I'm gonna need some food recommendations when I'm down there in mid-August for the

• 8:51Liam McAnderson?

  Why the fuck would you?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Grand Prix of America.

• 8:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I was gonna say, why the fuck would you go to DC in August? Bring extra shirts, like six of them?

• 8:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Liam McAnderson?

  You will sweat through them.

• 9:01Justin Roczniak?

  Large, uh, large five gallon tote of water that should last you about two hours.

• 9:06Liam McAnderson?

  Two, two to three, yeah.

• 9:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Liam McAnderson?

  Be conservative, good luck.

• 9:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Justin Roczniak?

  Well, in other news.

• 9:20Justin Roczniak?

  All right, we have an update on the.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Stop getting COVID.

• 9:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 9:24Liam McAnderson?

  Novin, in her case.

• 9:25Justin Roczniak?

  We have a, we have a update on Jacksonville's ultimate urban circulator.

• 9:31Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, fuck yeah, dude. I'm sorry, does this say 973 riders a month?

• 9:36Justin Roczniak?

  973 riders per month with a $1 million monthly operating subsidy.

• 9:42Liam McAnderson?

  That's $1,000 per person.

• 9:43Justin Roczniak?

  That is over $1,000 per person subsidy.

• 9:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that fucking rules.

• 9:49Justin Roczniak?

  Efficient autonomous vehicles, which the vehicles have never completed.

• 9:53Liam McAnderson?

  There's a guy in that.

• 9:54Justin Roczniak?

  Without requiring manual assistance.

• 9:56Liam McAnderson?

  There's a guy in that, I can see it.

• 9:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, because they need to intervene once every quarter of a mile.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I have, I've got a question.

• 10:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, hit us with it.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Why not just pick 973 people who need to use public transit and give them a voucher to a Craigslist Jeep Cherokee? That would be roughly, that would be roughly the same cost, would it not?

• 10:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, but that's more, oh, coming soon, phase one. Uh, the future's coming soon. Does it say June 2025?

• 10:30Justin Roczniak?

  Where?

• 10:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, on the van, on the van, yeah.

• 10:34Justin Roczniak?

  Um, the, the, the vans cannot change lanes. They cannot pull into traffic. They require human intervention every quarter mile. They require more people to operate than a normal transit vehicle. For those of you who did not listen to our ultimate urban circulator episode, you can go back and listen to that. But the gist is that Jacksonville was going to go in hard on be having the first autonomous shuttle system in downtown that they were eventually going to replace their old inefficient, boring, dowdy old automated, uh, you know, elevated rail system with, you know, this is going to be autonomous, not automated,

• 11:15Justin Roczniak?

  which is going to be better. Um, and it turns out, uh, well, unlike the old technology, this one actually requires quite a bit of manual labor to run.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  This is, okay. I was just curious because I'm looking at that chart there. Um, or the table at the top of the image. Uh, that 18,435 revenue miles, that works out to $54 per mile.

• 11:40Justin Roczniak?

  Wow.

• 11:40Liam McAnderson?

  That fucks. That is so immense.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  It would be cheaper to build a train line and pull it up every single time somebody wants to take a ride somewhere, I think.

• 11:53Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah. You just have like a continuous loop of track in front of you.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Wallace and Gromit, uh, the, uh, the Penguin Thief episode, just laying down rails directly in front of the train and pulling them back up from behind.

• 12:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 12:08Liam McAnderson?

  It would make more sense than this.

• 12:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So this is, this is the future right here. Um, imagine a driver intervening in the operation of an autonomous vehicle forever.

• 12:28Liam McAnderson?

  How wonderfully absurd.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  At least, you know, the thing is, is like, I almost admire the Tesla strategy compared to this, because at least Tesla just lets the cars fucking run into stuff, you know?

• 12:38Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Sure, it crashes a lot, but like, you know, at least they don't have somebody sitting there with their hands hovering over the wheel constantly.

• 12:47Liam McAnderson?

  But, but, and I know there are, there's, there's collateral damage, but think of all the Tesla drivers it kills, and that's a net good.

• 12:58Liam McAnderson?

  I saw a camo wrapped Cybertruck today, and I, I fucking just lost my.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  What camouflage pattern was it, though?

• 13:06Liam McAnderson?

  I, like, just, I, I don't know, it's just like, like, like, not a specific one, right? Just like, bad, green, blue, army camo.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:15Justin Roczniak?

  I should have had real tree.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  You could, you could tell, like, I feel like.

• 13:19Liam McAnderson?

  Mossy Oak, Mossy Oak Cybertruck with just me spitting in the back.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Real tree Cybertruck does feel like an invention meant to kill me instantly.

• 13:32Liam McAnderson?

  It's my, it's my, it's my Cybertruck that's painted to look like my mud jug. I don't do the licensed mud jugs to us, but I'm trying.

• 13:40Justin Roczniak?

  What is that?

• 13:41Liam McAnderson?

  It's a washable spitter, dude. It's like a.

• 13:43Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see, I see. Okay.

• 13:46Liam McAnderson?

  Because that way I don't have to go out back, you know, and.

• 13:49Justin Roczniak?

  You don't have to, you don't have to ask for a little plastic cup.

• 13:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, thank you. I was telling that story and my coworker got so nauseous, she threatened to kill me. Because I, because remember I had to get the little plastic, like, remember they gave me that sippy cup at that restaurant in Boston?

• 14:03Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that was pretty funny.

• 14:05Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, fuck you. It's pretty funny.

• 14:08Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, innovation is coming to Jacksonville. I'm sure they will have.

• 14:14Liam McAnderson?

  Go Jags.

• 14:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, integrated spitters in the man soon enough. They'll be autonomous, too.

• 14:23Liam McAnderson?

  Autonomous spitters, that, that is the whole point of Elon's humanoid robot fiasco disaster shit.

• 14:30Justin Roczniak?

  $1,000 to ride the slow van.

• 14:34Liam McAnderson?

  Just give me a van. Give me a van back. I want a van again. Give me a van. I can do I what do you know the damage I could do with a million with an M a million dollars? You know how many vans I could buy with a million dollars? Fuck dude. And it would be nice. It would be nice fans. It would be like the one that with the engine seized up and killed us almost.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  $54 a mile.

• 14:57Liam McAnderson?

  That's incredible. That's worse than like a Veyron.

• 15:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, what that's that's like a container ship.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Finally, we've gotten a program that achieved the.

• 15:12Liam McAnderson?

  You have a thousand commuters of A-ron.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  You ever you ever you ever been to an airport and you see like the little Porsches racing around from gate to gate with all the Delta VIPs?

• 15:23Liam McAnderson?

  No, I fly American, so.

• 15:25Justin Roczniak?

  I fly I fly United. I just see people's arms getting broke.

• 15:28Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I fly American and and the and the the the flight attendants are very nice to me. And then they give me extra liquor, which is shout out American air. Yeah. Because I asked nice and they're like, oh, you want four mini bottles? Here you go, champ. And I'm like, I think Dallas is a nice airport, actually. And the rental car return makes sense, actually. They're like, sir, you got to calm down.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  I I used to connect through Salt Lake City when I lived in rural Idaho. Yeah, it's the worst airport in America in, I think, probably the worst state in America. Um, just got nothing going for it. Anyway.

• 16:05Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, natural beauty, but like ruined by Mormons and dirty soda kind of fucks. I don't know.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't. Fuck that. You can't get an actual beer anywhere in the goddamn state from a tap. I do like, no, absolutely not. It ridiculous backwards.

• 16:22Liam McAnderson?

  And high west whiskey. Roz, a dirty soda to answer your question that I I I heard.

• 16:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 16:28Liam McAnderson?

  I heard the hesitation. Dirty soda is basically like a diet Coke or some sort of soda with like creamer in it.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  It's disgusting.

• 16:37Liam McAnderson?

  It kind of fucks.

• 16:38Justin Roczniak?

  I don't I don't know if I would enjoy that.

• 16:40Liam McAnderson?

  Soda. You don't drink soda.

• 16:42Justin Roczniak?

  No, I had I had two sodas when I went to visit EFA last weekend.

• 16:48Liam McAnderson?

  Good for you.

• 16:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 16:50Liam McAnderson?

  What'd you drink? Coke?

• 16:51Justin Roczniak?

  I was it was Sprite.

• 16:53Liam McAnderson?

  Baffling. You are.

• 16:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, I needed something and there was no alcohol in that household.

• 16:59Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, okay. So WD forty and Coke float. Yeah, I've seen Archer.

• 17:07Liam McAnderson?

  All right, nothing. Moving on swiftly.

• 17:11Justin Roczniak?

  All right. All right. That was the goddamn news.

• 17:13Liam McAnderson?

  And before

• 17:16Liam McAnderson?

  before we continue, I have a real quick announcement to make, which is that, once again, I am asking for your donations. My coworker, Mary, who is a saint, her grandson has a rare genetic illness and needs a mobility van. So we're raising money. There's a donation match going on right now. We'll drop, I will send the link to Roz and we'll drop it in the video description or the Spotify or whatever description.

• 17:43Justin Roczniak?

  Did you, did you announce that on the previous episode too?

• 17:46Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 17:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, okay. So yeah, we'll, we'll drop the link in this one. Someone's gonna have to remind me.

• 17:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'll send, I'll send you the link. But yeah, I, I wanted to just take a minute to tell you that Mary rules. She has a rosary in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And I adore her very much. She is my work mom and I would die for her. And yeah, let, tell me about the railroad, man. This is, this is so dear.

• 18:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So first we must ask, what is the railroad?

• 18:15Liam McAnderson?

  Individual railroads collectively quote the railroad charters, land grants.

• 18:20Justin Roczniak?

  Don't breathe off. I have

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Virginia and Truckee is like right outside of Reno, right? That's like right where they, that's where they laid the original connection ish.

• 18:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, sort of. Yeah, this, this, I don't know too much about this locomotive, other than it was in multiple Disney films.

• 18:37Liam McAnderson?

  It's, it's very, it's, it's cute. I like it. I think, I think it's happy to see me. I don't think that cow catcher is doing much work.

• 18:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, no, that's, well, it'll take out a cow. The cows are smaller back then.

• 18:49Liam McAnderson?

  Now we have just HGH enhanced cows.

• 18:55Liam McAnderson?

  I call this one the Super Bowl.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure that's the Virginia of Virginia City, which was like the original like big northern Nevada city before they ran the silver mine dry and then everybody moved down to the valley in Reno. So there anyway, I used to live in Reno for a very brief period of time and I didn't like it very much. It's a lot of interesting like if you're into how the railroads like developed the West to what it is, it's a very place to live.

• 19:24Liam McAnderson?

  I imagine.

• 19:25Justin Roczniak?

  And you can shoot a man there just to watch him die.

• 19:28Liam McAnderson?

  Hell yeah, brother.

• 19:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Not much else to do, so.

• 19:31Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point.

• 19:31Liam McAnderson?

  You could gamble.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  I, the thing is, is like, I, I am not a gambling type because I have like clinical anxiety.

• 19:38Liam McAnderson?

  Me too, baby. And I go to the casino. So much people are worried about me.

• 19:44Liam McAnderson?

  Actually, I don't. I go to the casino when I'm forced to like for a work event.

• 19:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Um, but also like Reno casinos are pretty sad.

• 19:54Liam McAnderson?

  Cause Reno's.

• 19:55Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you, Liam.

• 19:56Liam McAnderson?

  You're welcome.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  We need Nova here. She would tell you after that.

• 20:04Liam McAnderson?

  But she's not.

• 20:07Justin Roczniak?

  So when I, when I'm talking about the railroad, right? There are, you know, there's railroads, right? Those are the different companies that own trains and tracks and so on. But the railroad as a collective thing, that's just all of it, right? Um, now your, your, your, your railroad, typically started off as a company that was chartered by a state government, right? And this charter essentially said, these were issued generally sort of back in like the 1820s,

• 20:45Justin Roczniak?

  1830s, 1840s, when we were a little bit more liberal with what powers of the state we delegated to corporations.

• 20:54Liam McAnderson?

  Incredibly somehow.

• 20:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Liam McAnderson?

  So I have a question, which may be a story for another time. Can you explain to me why Norfolk Southern and Uncle Pete survived and like the Pennsylvania Railroad, which you taught me at one point had a larger budget than the government of the United States died? Besides like the Penns Central, like what is it about those two? Or is this just like a topic that we're just not gonna get into today? Because it's fine. I just

• 21:21Justin Roczniak?

  We're very much gonna get in. So Union Pacific is the shambling corpse of the Southern Pacific.

• 21:30Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, cool. All right. Let me put on my fact hat. Let's do this.

• 21:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. And the Norfolk Southern is, you know, just still the Norfolk and Western. They just, you know, they just had very high profit, you know, long haul coal drags their entire existence. Yeah. So luck of the draw, geography to some extent. Yeah. Anyway, so these charters gave the railroad, you know, a right to build from point A to point B, sometimes via point C, and they delegated powers of the state to the railroad, things like eminent domain, right? They could, they could do compulsive, you might call it compulsory purchase in Britain. You know, you, you, you could force people to sell you land, right? You had the authority to

• 22:17Justin Roczniak?

  have your own police force, which they still have, which is accountable to the railroad. The railroad can shoot you.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  And frequently they do.

• 22:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. That's just one of the many ways the railroad can kill you, though, to be clear.

• 22:34Justin Roczniak?

  They have immunity to certain local laws and taxes, right? Sometimes they have other special considerations. My favorite was always the Georgia Railroad and Bank, which so long as it operated passenger trains, could operate a bank that was not subject to any banking laws in the state of Georgia.

• 22:54Liam McAnderson?

  Hell, yeah, brother.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm just imagining like we get like, you know, railroad letters of marque in which you could do legalized train robbery by ramming your train, eating railroad train. I really want to see what, how Looney Tunes can we get with this?

• 23:12Liam McAnderson?

  I do want to draw a comparison real quick between, and we've covered this in the university episode, land grant universities and the railroad here, institutions with a lot of, how do I say this? Managerial inertia.

• 23:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 23:27Liam McAnderson?

  And I also want to plug, I have to talk to Diane Moskowitz about it, that University Two is coming because we've run out of ideas that are simply recycling old episodes.

• 23:40Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  The other thing on the land grant front, I was just gonna say, I don't know if this is true for universities or not. Railroads, it was very much a, we have to, we should build a railroad through here and own as much land as we can around it. Because by building the railroad through here, we theoretically will make the land valuable.

• 23:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 24:00Liam McAnderson?

  And we do tracks that look like this.

• 24:03Justin Roczniak?

  That was how you sort of funded the construction of the railroad was through government land grants. You were given one square mile plots of land in a checkerboard pattern surrounding the railroad as you built it.

• 24:19Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and that was, that was the incentive to keep building, right? And then the state also did other nice things for you, like send out the army to go take out those pesky Native Americans and things like that. And this is all.

• 24:35Liam McAnderson?

  Strikers.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  You can't forget that they would also send out the military to kill striking workers.

• 24:40Justin Roczniak?

  This is true, yeah.

• 24:43Justin Roczniak?

  And so this was all in exchange for eventually getting a railroad, which is going to provide some kind of public service, right? It's going to move people and goods and well, those are the two things it moves. And it's, it's going to provide service to the communities along the line, you know, and, and, and to a certain extent, that's their end of the deal, right? You have on the railroad generally pretty strict and regimented roles for management and employees in a very hierarchical structure. You know, management employees are officers and enlisted men, you know, it is, it's very, very military in that sense.

• 25:27Liam McAnderson?

  A big class of mine too, I assume.

• 25:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Justin Roczniak?

  So I, the one thing I've always liked to, a way to think about it is the, the American Railroad is an organization, which is much closer to like the East India Company than it is to a modern corporation.

• 25:45Liam McAnderson?

  That makes a lot of sense.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  They were also considered broadly to be like as powerful as state, especially in like this era is like the railroad basically like especially the further you got, the further you got from like the seat of power in DC that end like deeper into the West. It was basically, yeah, the railroad kind of runs things.

• 26:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and that that's still true in some places.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  What are you telling me the corporations have onto one so for American law?

• 26:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:13Liam McAnderson?

  No, shut up.

• 26:14Justin Roczniak?

  I wouldn't want a bad mouth CSX in Clifton Ford, Virginia.

• 26:20Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God, they cut Roz into eight Rozbits.

• 26:25Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 26:26Liam McAnderson?

  Rozbits coming soon to a snack store near you.

• 26:30Justin Roczniak?

  So, so anyway, I guess we'll talk about some of the earliest, earliest incarnations here you have. Or a brief history of railroad mergers. So for a long time, we have what I always call the alphabet soup era. Cause there's so many railroad acronym names that you can't remember any of them. Right? You have like a billion tiny railroads from about 1865 ish onward. You know, there, there, there, there are, you know, you have, you have a nowhere in east armpit Pacific railroad for every town in the Midwest. You know, there, there, they, there are so many railroads. It's hard to keep track of them or impossible to.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  From my understanding, this era of railroads is kind of like AI today where it was like, oh yeah, we could spend money on this. It might be worth a trillion dollars tomorrow. Basically just like putting a building stuff for capital going to it just so happens that like on like AI, you actually get a railroad at the end of building a railroad.

• 27:28Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. Yes.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Buying a new locomotive and suddenly graphics cards become unaffordable.

• 27:37Justin Roczniak?

  So even these small railroads are like built made of separate individual charters, right? You know? I, I maybe I need six separate railroad charters to build my railroad to the county seat, the next county over. Right? They're built very rapidly and with no thought as to how they might interact with other railroads as like a railroad system. If you were lucky, when you finished your railroad, you could then lease it to a bigger railroad who could operate it profitably. Right?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Oh, this does sound like a lot of modern American businesses.

• 28:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Justin Roczniak?

  If you were unlucky, you just built 17 miles of track to a cow shed. You dunce.

• 28:25Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, the brother, could you spare a dime as they said?

• 28:31Justin Roczniak?

  And this is an era of destructive competition, right? The railroads are competing directly with each other, which is unusual. In in the broad scheme of history here. Sometimes they're on parallel tracks that are in sight of each other. Right? So they're both getting in that case, like half of the traffic they might otherwise get. So you had to get creative to try and get all of that traffic onto your railroad as opposed to the other guys. So you reduce your freight. Yeah, it's a race to the bottom. You reduce your freight rates. You offer rebates. You make friends with shippers, give them sweet deals, right? Whatever you have to do.

• 29:12Justin Roczniak?

  Any real competition between railroads resulted in rates or fares being lowered to a completely unsustainable level. And then informal cartels had to be formed to bring those rates back up to the point where they could run the trains again.

• 29:29Liam McAnderson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  The most efficient system of allocating resources ever devised by humanity.

• 29:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 29:36Liam McAnderson?

  That's just pee pee poo poo. Yeah.

• 29:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Justin Roczniak?

  And these kinds of rate wars resulted in a lot of stupid railroads being built. And a lot of smart railroads to fail. It was not a good system.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Well, luckily we learned our lesson from that.

• 29:53Justin Roczniak?

  Mm hmm.

• 29:53Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they got.

• 29:55Justin Roczniak?

  So eventually we we over time into like the early 1900s. We see these railroads start to consolidate into names we're more familiar with, right?

• 30:07Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and the the mergers and acquisitions of all these tiny railroads into the bigger railroads of the early 20th century. These are largely unregulated. They're at the whims of whoever controlled whichever railroad. A lot of times they were like heavily leveraged and completely unsustainable. But they did at least make remembering all the names easier.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  This is, this is peak. I just got my first Bachman, like, ready to run train set when I was ten railroad era. Where it's like, oh, cool. You have a Union Pacific locomotive. You might recognize that one. And then a bunch of cars behind it with some of these logos. And then you're like, huh, this seems interesting. It's like the perfect era to be completely fixated by.

• 30:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Uh, like a really specific kind of like six to ten.

• 31:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I like all the pretty colors on the boxcars.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  It was like, they were still doing like competitive advertising too, because it was still. While it was, it was not as bad as like the era predating it, there were still a lot of like competing service. Uh, imagine kind of like, uh, like airlines, I guess, where it's like. You, you probably take whatever, you know, flight is going to be the most convenient, but they're still kind of vying for. Like, you know, I want to go with like this carrier and like go a little bit longer because their points program is better or have better lounges or whatever. Um, so they're still, they're trying to differentiate themselves from like a service perspective and like an ad perspective. Uh, this is when you get all the really cool art.

• 31:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. And, and mostly with the passenger trains, you were competing on amenities. Um, cause.

• 31:52Liam McAnderson?

  That makes sense.

• 31:53Justin Roczniak?

  Shaving time off was expensive. Um.

• 31:56Liam McAnderson?

  I mean, that's kind of, yeah, that's exactly where we are now. But, but yeah, exactly what Victoria said. I don't have a bad to that, actually. Thought I did.

• 32:03Justin Roczniak?

  So another thing is it became much easier to operate a large centralized railroad. Since there were improvements in telegraph technology. So you didn't need to have like a situation on the Pennsylvania railroad. Where each division of the railroad basically operated autonomously, right? Or the New York Central system, which was just six railroads in a trench coat.

• 32:30Justin Roczniak?

  You know, but once you, once you could had better communication, you could coordinate everything better across, you know, several thousand miles. And this leads to better service, more ability to maintain and improve infrastructure, lower freight rates and passenger fares, but there were still some serious inefficiencies with the system, which wouldn't really come to light until, that's right, I'm using this exact slide again.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Give it up for World War One.

• 33:01Liam McAnderson?

  It's passion delin here and I'm losing, which I guess makes me the Germans, which I don't want to be, so I withdraw that.

• 33:13Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, the Great War.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  You know what they, you know what they say? Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, right? That's it, right? Yeah, they meant it totally unironically. It's awesome. Kicks ass.

• 33:27Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Oh, it's, it's, it's Latin for, it is sweet and proper to die for one's country.

• 33:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see. Okay.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  It is quoted in a poem that was relatively famous by Wilfred Owen about how that's the oldest lie in history.

• 33:46Liam McAnderson?

  However.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Because World War One sucked so bad. I only know this because my wife makes this joke basically anytime war comes up.

• 33:54Justin Roczniak?

  You, you could, you could die bleeding out.

• 33:57Liam McAnderson?

  Fascinating new ways.

• 33:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, bleeding out, covered in mud, looking at your own intestines in the middle of no man's land. Doesn't that sound fun and glorious?

• 34:09Liam McAnderson?

  You could go in a tank made by like Bruno for some reason or Citroen, which I don't even want to think about what reliability of French tanks looks like.

• 34:20Justin Roczniak?

  Really comfortable suspension.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  You could me blast through the French countryside with the orbs?

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Be like, damn, I can aim this gun so easily because it's self leveled. Look at this.

• 34:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Going around a corner on just three treads.

• 34:39Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, the great war was a war between America and Germany and was thus fought in Belgium. I'm going to say that every time. Anyway.

• 34:49Justin Roczniak?

  A guy shoots another guy. The second international shits the bed. All of Europe goes to war over nothing. America gets dragged in. Then this is a problem because now we have to send a lot of stuff to Europe. And all that stuff has to go on trains to the various port facilities in New York City.

• 35:07Liam McAnderson?

  Hey, I'm funding the war effort here.

• 35:11Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my God, it's, oh Jesus, wept.

• 35:15Justin Roczniak?

  The biggest bottleneck in the country was the port of New York. So the trains came in to Jersey City to the various terminals. These are mostly passenger terminals. There were freight terminals over here as well. You know, the cars were stored in railroad yards, right? And as available, they put the cars onto car floats. That's a little barge you can put railroad cars on. And floated them across the Hudson River. Where they were then sent across the street into a warehouse to be unloaded. And then after they were unloaded, the goods were brought back across the street on a little horse and cart. That's called a dray.

• 35:59Justin Roczniak?

  And then they were put on the boats. Then of course you had to float the empty car back over and then the process repeats. Very, very, very inefficient.

• 36:08Liam McAnderson?

  That sounds.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  This sounds terrible, but I will say railroad barges are cool.

• 36:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 36:13Liam McAnderson?

  Oh yeah, of course.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  We should bring those back because actually there's a model railroad guy who had does absolutely obscene HO scale work. But it's just like more realistic than I thought was attainable by like a human being. He has like a little barge, like a scratch built train car barge set up. Awesome.

• 36:29Liam McAnderson?

  That sounds awesome.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I think it's boomer diorama.

• 36:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, they still got a car float in New York City.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Really, they they they had, used to have a, but yeah, it is, it's Boomer Dyer, it's the S R Y River Railway, Railway, or Sorry, uh, but uh,

• 36:45Liam McAnderson?

  Sorry, of course.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  It's it's really cool. I think he's, his work is genuinely like the the unattainable dream of what I wish could be with my railroad, but uh, they used to have a bunch of the stuff in like, um, San Francisco and Oakland too, and that's all like ripped out now.

• 37:00Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, well, uh, uh, New York City, they still have the one car float that goes down to the South Brooklyn Army Terminal, or wherever it is right there. That's how they they they move all the retired subway equipment out by barge.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Isn't that the plot of a Metal Gear Solid?

• 37:17Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, maybe.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  I'm doing a bit, it's not.

• 37:22Liam McAnderson?

  It probably is. You know, you're you're trying to be funny, but I believe that it is now.

• 37:30Justin Roczniak?

  So this process is time consuming and inefficient, but exacerbated by the fact that the railroads refuse to use other railroads facilities, nor did they allow other railroads to use theirs, even if they had spare capacity. So while America is doing what it used to do best, which is spin up insane productive capacity for the war effort, all that stuff just went to New York City and sat outside of New York City in the yard and collected dust.

• 38:00Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, good.

• 38:04Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually Uncle Sam gets fed up with this, and on December 26, 1917, in accordance with the Army Appropriations Act, President Wood Woodrow Wilson points at the railroads and says, "Nationalized."

• 38:18Liam McAnderson?

  Good. Yes. Keep doing that, actually.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  The only, one of the only halfway decent things he ever did, which he then immediately made sure to undo before leaving office, because he sucked.

• 38:31Liam McAnderson?

  Well, yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:33Liam McAnderson?

  He was, he was president.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, but of course he sucked.

• 38:36Justin Roczniak?

  Well, he was also in the Klan.

• 38:38Liam McAnderson?

  I thought it was Calvin Coolidge was in the Klan.

• 38:40Justin Roczniak?

  No, Wilson was in the Klan.

• 38:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right.

• 38:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, anyway, this proved to be a very good idea, nationalizing the railroads, not being in the Klan. Um.

• 38:54Justin Roczniak?

  I would say joining the Klan is a bad idea. Don't do that.

• 38:58Liam McAnderson?

  Um, do swallow shotgun if you do decide to do it, though, please.

• 39:02Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you can also leave the Klan.

• 39:04Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 39:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Liam McAnderson?

  All right.

• 39:06Justin Roczniak?

  We got, we have to open a path for deradicalization.

• 39:09Liam McAnderson?

  God damn it.

• 39:12Liam McAnderson?

  I hate when you're right. Fodder's when you're right.

• 39:17Justin Roczniak?

  So, the centralized authority that managed these railroads was the USRA, the United States Railroad Administration. Right? And they, they come in, they're very quickly able to correct most of the worst inefficiencies in the United States Railroad Network. They bring online these new, big, standardized steam locomotives for every railroad. Um, they're able to make use of excess capacity on underused railroad lines. You know, they're able to balance everything properly.

• 39:53Justin Roczniak?

  It turns out if you put everything under one roof, it works a lot better.

• 39:58Liam McAnderson?

  Imagine that.

• 39:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the only big downside was that the war traffic, uh, the, the amount of traffic required to support the war effort was so high that they, they were really deferring maintenance the whole time, just to make sure all the trains could run. But anyway, after the war, I mean, okay, the railroads were in pretty bad shape by that point because they got beat to shit. But there was a push by organized labor to keep the railroads nationalized. And there was actually some legal precedent to do so. They did not have to re-privatize the railroads. But, uh, instead, Wilson and Congress determined that, eh, we could probably, probably just have some better oversight by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

• 40:44Justin Roczniak?

  That'll be good enough, right? And the government handed the keys back to the private and, uh, back to private interests in 1920. And the previous disorganization in the railroad network returned.

• 40:59Justin Roczniak?

  But the bill that returned the railroads to private hands also gave the Interstate Commerce Commission authority to approve or reject railroad mergers, right? And the commission decides to get a leg up on this with what was called the Ripley Plan.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Like from Alien?

• 41:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Justin Roczniak?

  No, like from Ripley's.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Waylon Utoni Railroad Corporation?

• 41:26Liam McAnderson?

  Ripley's Believe It or Not Railroad would be insane.

• 41:29Justin Roczniak?

  No, it was named for William Zabina Ripley, who I think was a college professor at Columbia? And he did phrenology as a hobby.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Damn it.

• 41:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Liam McAnderson?

  Fucking great.

• 41:48Justin Roczniak?

  So the Ripley Plan, the idea was we're going to consolidate these several hundred small railroads into 21 large regional railroads, thus avoiding duplication of service, destructive competition. We're going to increase the overall efficiency of the railroad network. We're going to talk about efficiency as a term in a bit, you know? And this made a lot of sense, right? Because, okay, look at the railroad network in 1920. Why does Maine have three separate Class I railroads?

• 42:22Liam McAnderson?

  Great question.

• 42:23Justin Roczniak?

  Why are there eight unique mainline railroads going across Iowa? You know, stuff like this. There's, there's probably some efficiency to be eked out here with some central planning. Probably everyone would make more money, too.

• 42:37Liam McAnderson?

  Well, yeah, that makes sense.

• 42:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And so this plan was presented to the railroads like, hey, we're going to try this managed consolidation. It worked really good in Britain where they had something very similar. What do you think? And they were like, no, fuck you.

• 42:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 42:56Justin Roczniak?

  Because, because these railroads are as much as they are corporations, they are personal fiefdoms.

• 43:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, okay, that, that was kind of what I was thinking. All right, yeah, that makes sense.

• 43:06Justin Roczniak?

  And also arms of the state.

• 43:09Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 43:11Justin Roczniak?

  So the previous disorganized operational regime continued.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  This never came back to haunt anyone.

• 43:19Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  The end of the episode, actually.

• 43:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, all right, call it. Hey, thanks for listening. Yeah, we'll see you. Don't forget to donate to, uh, Mary's Guys, okay? Catch you the next one.

• 43:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. All right. So let's talk about the theory of railroad mergers here. Very simple.

• 43:34Liam McAnderson?

  More railroad, more gooder.

• 43:37Justin Roczniak?

  Bigger railroad is more efficient. Um, now you gotta ask, what is efficiency, right? This is always a, a dangerous word. You gotta always look into what people mean by that, right? Um, efficiency is always about one thing in terms of another thing. The another thing is usually money. This is how we get to like the ideal railroad is one which owns no track and runs no trains, right? That's very efficient. Um, but essentially the bigger railroad is more efficient. It's able to do more with less, you know, cause there's more destinations to ship railroad cars. There's more routes to do so. It's easier to coordinate trains when they're all the same railroad.

• 44:19Justin Roczniak?

  They're not like in a separate command structure in a different railroad. There's fewer transfers and interchanges between railroads. There's fewer big terminals and they're more centralized. You have redundant routes are either repurposed, like you might have, okay, there might've been two railroads that were competing with each other between city A and city B. Well, if you consolidate them, then railroad A becomes the passenger route. Railroad B becomes the freight route. Um, you know, or sometimes you just abandon unnecessary routes. Um, you know, and hopefully this all results in more income, which you can use for infrastructure improvements, right? Hopefully, yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Good bit.

• 45:04Liam McAnderson?

  Thing railroads are famous for, yeah.

• 45:07Justin Roczniak?

  The practice of railroad mergers.

• 45:12Liam McAnderson?

  Money.

• 45:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I don't know. Do some like, just mash the railroads together and do some cost cutting or something. I don't give a shit.

• 45:21Liam McAnderson?

  You guys want anything from the liquor store?

• 45:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Justin Roczniak?

  So here's a, here's a big chart that's often cited of railroad mergers in the latter half of the 20th century. This is by no means exhaustive, um, cause if you were gonna do an exhaustive chart, it would be about eight times larger, be too small for people to see it on the screen. So we're gonna start with, uh, sort of by talking about the set of mergers from about here to here, right? Or actually no, not that one. Never mind. Here. Um, and this is sort of the first round of what we're called mega mergers, right? These happened in the 60s and early 70s while most railroads were under a lot of financial

• 46:11Justin Roczniak?

  duress due to competition with trucking and airlines and also a whole bunch of self-inflicted wounds, to be frank.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that whole bit about like, no, we're not going to accept your plan to become more competitive and make more money because we like running these personal peepdoms does seem like it could possibly have played a role in this collapse.

• 46:33Justin Roczniak?

  Don't.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  I, I do, I do love hating on Eisenhower for, uh, everything but the interstate highway system, but this is not entirely his fault.

• 46:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, no, there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff that the railroads really fucked up, sort of in like the 50s and 60s. A, a great book, very hard to find, very out of print, is called To Hell in a Day, Coach. Um, by, uh, hold on, I got my copy right here.

• 47:00Liam McAnderson?

  I haven't, you don't.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  This is, this is like what I recorded with Be Gay, Solve Crimes with Nova. Uh, we're talking about, we're talking about trying to make the hat work and without getting up, she managed to put on a hat as we were recording.

• 47:19Justin Roczniak?

  But that's, that's, that's, that's a good contemporaneous account of how the railroads were fucking themselves over intentionally. And, uh, you know, uh, crying about it afterwards.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Too big to fail, etc.

• 47:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. So, uh, hold on, we're gonna talk about this in a second, but I have to use the restroom.

• 47:38Liam McAnderson?

  Didn't he just pee?

• 47:40Speaker 02

  I think he did.

• 47:41Justin Roczniak?

  I did, yes, but I have to again.

• 47:45Justin Roczniak?

  I had a lot of coffee today.

• 47:46Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, well, I'll go get an energy drink. I'm nodding off, frankly. Alright, Victoria, you got the reins, you got this.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  I'm doing the whole thing.

• 47:55Liam McAnderson?

  You're the whole thing.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  I'm taking over.

• 47:57Liam McAnderson?

  Congratulations, see ya.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  I can't, oh, we're on the next slide, I guess.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Uh, god, I grew up in the, uh, coal mining regions of, uh, West Virginia as a kid, and I remember the last time I ever saw a chassis system locomotive. And it's like, one of the peak experiences of my childhood, which is a lot sadder when I say it like that, but, god. What a livery. It is very interesting, like, I, uh, this era of railroads, where you kind of get this fucked up mergers, sort of living in the wreckage of what was once a great civilization, is kind of like, peak railroading in my mind, which is very funny, because like, uh, when you're growing up as a kid, all of the, you're millennial, which I am, all of the, uh, railroad, like, model railroad stuff is targeted at boomers,

• 48:45Speaker 02

  who grew up during the actual peak, but it was like 50s, 60s, and they were still making money hand over fist before they started solidating. Um, and so finding anything that was actually like chassis system, or like, that BN, you know, Burlington Northern Green, uh, or like, Seaboard lines, very unusual, CSX was the main carrier, uh, owned a lot of the lines by me. Um, it was very rare to find. Conrail was basically nonexistent, um, despite the fact they were my favorite, because when I was four years old, my across the street neighbor, who was a Conrail engineer, let me drive a, uh, I think it was the GM U-boat, I wanna say, uh, on like some short haul local freight train.

• 49:25Liam McAnderson?

  Ow.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Uh, with a transformer on the, like a U-car, on the back, the, the press.

• 49:31Justin Roczniak?

  I'm back.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm just relating the story of how I got to drive a Conrail. I think it was a U-boat when I was like four years old.

• 49:38Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  And how, how this whole like this, this, what most people regard as the nadir of like American railroading is what I have most nostalgia for because I grew up and I saw chassis locomotive. They were really pretty.

• 49:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, they gotta, they gotta bring back chassis system. The CSX heritage unit is terrible.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  It is. Well, you could do an entire, well, there's your problem episode on heritage.

• 50:04Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God, it's a heritage unit. Here's all the ones I've seen and taken photographs of.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  They are, are, uh, but yeah, I just, I, uh, it was cool when trains used to be colored. This is, I think, kind of the boldest take I have.

• 50:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, I, I strongly agree. It's miserable looking in a freight train now. It's all brown.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the only thing that actually breaks it up is nowadays they've finally given up on graffiti. Cause that was like, I seem to remember it being less common when I was a kid, like cars used to get painted and patched more often, I think.

• 50:36Justin Roczniak?

  You know what it was is the graffiti artists got smarter. They don't paint over the reporting marks.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, I, the graffiti is like the main point of watching a freight pounces go by at this point. Cause everything else is just gray and filthy.

• 50:49Justin Roczniak?

  Honestly, yeah, I love to see like a really, some really great graffiti on a railroad car.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  I am, I am a big graffiti on rolling stock.

• 50:59Justin Roczniak?

  And it's just a free coat of paint for the railroad, you know?

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. What are you mad about? The fact, the thing is, is like, I understand the fact that it is illegal is probably part of what makes graffiti artists wanna go do it. Because it is like explicitly forbidden, but it does feel like one of those things we should, we're just well past the point we just legalize it.

• 51:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and I mean, there's a lot of graffiti artists who are foamers.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  I mean, it makes sense, like.

• 51:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  I just, I think we should legalize it because then I would to- totally go do it, but I'm too scared of getting arrested to ever try as a current sense.

• 51:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Justin Roczniak?

  Alright, so. The first mega mergers of the 1970s, we sort of consolidate a couple of these railroads, a whole bunch of these railroads into a few really big ones, right? We got up here, we got the Norfolk and Western, uh, which took over the Wabash, um, and a few others. You had the Family Line system, which was the Seaboard Coastline and the Louisville and Nashville. Um, they, they had a nasty habit of blowing up a town every couple of months.

• 52:07Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, well, the, nothing's changed.

• 52:10Justin Roczniak?

  No, every couple of months, not every couple of years.

• 52:12Liam McAnderson?

  Alright, yeah, fair enough.

• 52:14Justin Roczniak?

  Um, you had the chassis system, that was the Chesapeake and Ohio and the Baltimore and Ohio and the Western Maryland. Um, Burlington Northern, which was, well, the, the.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  It was up here.

• 52:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, the Burlington Route, the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific, I believe.

• 52:33Justin Roczniak?

  Um.

• 52:34Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, that Louisville and Nashville is, uh, that's what the all in it is, right? That thing, top, top center is looking pretty gray.

• 52:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, they look pretty great coming out of the shops. You had the, uh, Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, which is just, you know, sort of big naturally. Um, and of course, yeah, you had the Union Pacific, which was just the Union Pacific, right?

• 53:00Speaker 02

  He chose the, uh, the, what is it, the DD forty or whatever?

• 53:03Justin Roczniak?

  The DDA forty X, yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the longest freight, uh, locomotive engine ever, locomotive ever developed because it's got two engines.

• 53:12Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  I rode a bus like that once.

• 53:17Justin Roczniak?

  A bus with two engines?

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a, there was a, it was the wind coach, I think it was a bagel, bagel, I'm not sure how to pronounce that one. Uh, but it was a, they've got one in the SF Muni Historic Heritage Fleet.

• 53:31Justin Roczniak?

  Ooh.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Cause they couldn't get, they couldn't get gas powered vehicles up the hills until they threw a second engine in it.

• 53:40Liam McAnderson?

  I love this.

• 53:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And of course you had Conrail, the Consolidated Railroad Corporation that was the government had to make to save rail service in the Northeast. You know, so through these mergers that were largely of necessity, the rationalized railroad network Ripley had dreamed of was forming, right? Norfolk and Western and Family Lines in the South, Chessey System and Conrail in the Northeast, Union Pacific and the ATSF in the Southwest, Burlington Northern in the Northeast. It's a couple of other large railroads that had resisted major mergers like the Southern Railway and the Southern Pacific. Those would go soon enough. All this took was

• 54:24Justin Roczniak?

  extreme financial duress, lots of subsidized competition from the trucking industry, and finally the railroads had to stop squabbling and get together. And this was maybe good. It improved operational efficiencies, but woe to you if you worked at, you know, a maintenance shop that closed down, or lived along a railroad that was, you know, deemed redundant. Like, yeah, like say, all 2,300 miles of the Milwaukee Road Pacific Extension, which

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Excuse me while I pour one out.

• 55:01Justin Roczniak?

  You know, your new, more efficient competition from the Burlington Northern essentially killed that route outright.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Well, that's also the Milwaukee Road. Couldn't figure out how to run a railroad.

• 55:13Justin Roczniak?

  That is also true, yeah.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  That was, that was, I would argue that is a classic, one of the, one of the classic cases of a good railroad dying for stupid reasons.

• 55:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Well, they should have finished the electrification, you know, had they done that, I think they'd still be all, that's a different episode. Yeah, but generally speaking, this is an era of retrenchment, right? You know, you have these mainline railroads, they have extra tracks, you know, which they are not considered useful anymore. They're just a maintenance burden. So they'll take a four-track mainline and reduce to three, or three to two, or two to one, right? Because you have sophisticated new systems like centralized traffic control, which, you know, allows a lot more trains to use a smaller number of tracks, right? It becomes

• 56:02Speaker 02

  God forbid we like allow more throughput.

• 56:05Justin Roczniak?

  God forbid, yeah. You're you're don't worry, we're never gonna need that capacity again. You have you don't have too many new locomotive or rolling stock purchases, right? You like to re-manufacture old ones. You have something called de-marketing, right?

• 56:25Justin Roczniak?

  Railroads start to aggressively shed traffic they thought wasn't profitable enough, or which was difficult and complex to handle, right? So, one of the first to go was livestock, right? Livestock trains all needed to be fast, they needed to stop every 33 hours so you could feed and water the cattle, right? And that was like, that was annoying, you know, that was the kind of freight that complained at you.

• 56:57Justin Roczniak?

  Gone is the less than carload freight to like terminals in major cities that was like, you know, if you imagine like a a truck full of Amazon packages today, you know, that would be handled in a box car back in the day. You know, you just have like 50 or 60 different consignments in one box car you brought to a freight house in a major city, and then people would go in and sort it and take it out, put it on trucks for delivery. They got rid of that. You also got rid of like what I would call community oriented freight services, like, you know, stuff that goes to the freight house in a small town, you know, like if I'm, if Farmer Brown in Nowhere, Iowa orders a new tractor,

• 57:39Justin Roczniak?

  the Union Pacific delivers it on a flat car to the Nowhere Freight House, and he drives over there in the pick them up truck with his son Farmer Brown Jr. to go get the tractor, right? He drives the truck back and his son drives the tractor back because he's 11 and basically an adult, right?

• 58:00Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and this is a great community service delivering the tractor straight to the town, right? Doesn't make much money, so the railroad starts de-marketing it, you know, and eventually they shut down the Nowhere Freight House and Farmer Brown now has to haul a trailer all the way to the county seat at East Armpit.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Luckily, at this point Farmer Brown probably killed himself because of the, you know, general economic pressures on family owned farms, so really.

• 58:26Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, that's true, that's true.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  The market kind of was going away, it was getting, he was getting de-marketed either way, honestly. No matter how you look at it.

• 58:33Justin Roczniak?

  I've been de-marketed.

• 58:36Justin Roczniak?

  Well, it might be worse than that. He has to go to a John Deere dealer halfway across the state in like Dubuque or Davenport or another scary big city.

• 58:44Liam McAnderson?

  With his lockdown John Deere DRM, which is bullshit nonsense. It's a tractor. Right to repair is important assholes.

• 58:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 58:55Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 58:55Liam McAnderson?

  And I put away my soapbox.

• 58:58Justin Roczniak?

  The mergers themselves did not save the railroad industry, nor was it just the retrenchment and the demarketing. A really huge factor in what ultimately revitalized the railroad industry in this era was the one railroad expansion built in the seventies and eighties.

• 59:18Liam McAnderson?

  Powder River, right?

• 59:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the Burlington Northern built a new line into the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to get to all the horrible brown coal that the EPA said was good.

• 59:32Justin Roczniak?

  Which it does have a very low sulfur content. I will give them that. Otherwise terrible for the environment.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we need this. We found this out when we cleaned up the bunker oil to use it for global shipping. We need the sulfur. It's keeping out the sun.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  We're going to heat the earth too fast if we don't put up our protective barrier.

• 59:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Liam McAnderson?

  You've heard of the ozone. Now get ready for the sozone.

• 1:00:01Justin Roczniak?

  Anyway, what that led to was about a billion huge, long distance coal trains every day that, you know, went over everyone's railroad.

• 1:00:10Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and jacked up everyone's revenue by a huge amount because they're real cheap to operate. They make a lot of money.

• 1:00:16Liam McAnderson?

  They don't complain at you.

• 1:00:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. When, uh, when, when the Burlington Northern decided to build this thing, several members of the board resigned because of austerity brain.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  I was, I was saying while you were gone, I grew up in like, uh, when I, when I really got in train, I was living in like whole country, West Virginia, in like the, like the Ohio River area.

• 1:00:41Liam McAnderson?

  We're talking about Nitro or where we're talking?

• 1:00:44Justin Roczniak?

  Nitro is on the Kana.

• 1:00:46Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you're right. You're right.

• 1:00:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  Um, but, uh, yeah, and I remember like whenever there was something that came through that wasn't a coal train, it was exciting.

• 1:00:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  It was like, ooh, different rolling stock instead of the same dusty brown ungraffitied hop, like, uh, uncovered hoppers.

• 1:01:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, sometimes just.

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  They are. I don't, I don't remember what they were using. It's those ones that they got the weird like, um, rounded section on the bottom.

• 1:01:09Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, it's a, it's a Bethcon.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  I saw like every single one of them. They, I think they have the CSX fleet at the time.

• 1:01:17Justin Roczniak?

  So these, these early mergers, I would say not necessarily the reason why the railroads, uh, survived, but that was probably just something that, you know, was gonna happen. Uh, but, you know, immediately folks were like, well, we can go further. Um, which brings us to the mega, mega merger, the first one that failed miserably. The Southern Pacific Santa Fe. Uh, this was a disaster.

• 1:01:44Justin Roczniak?

  And it left both railroads worse off, right? So in the mid 1980s, after we've really started the deregulation process with the Staggers Railroad Act, it looked like an even bigger combination of railroads was possible between the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific, right? These are two very different operations, right? The, uh, the Santa Fe, the ATS F got by with the sort of lean operation that ran very fast freight trains of high value goods, uh, on their very direct main line from Chicago to Los Angeles. Whereas the Southern Pacific had access to every port and every population center between New Orleans and Portland, Oregon.

• 1:02:28Justin Roczniak?

  They had vast tracts of productive farmland, other real estate like that, big interest in industries along the line. And, you know, they took all this accumulated wealth and they just sat on it. They did fuck all with it, right?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  God, railroads love doing that.

• 1:02:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Liam McAnderson?

  It's their favorite thing to do.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  The, the, uh, the, the ideal railroad is one where you sit smog like on your massive board of railroad rail lines and simply never use it for anything.

• 1:02:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 1:02:57Justin Roczniak?

  They were content to just run these really long, really slow trains through the desert. And you know, they would show up when they show up and the railroad barely broke even each year. So this is clearly a match made in heaven, right? So they were so confident in the approval of this merger that the respective boards of directors on the railroads. You know, they created a new company, the Santa Fe Pacific Corporation to acquire all of each railroad's assets. Right? The railroads would be operated independently until the Interstate Commerce Commission approved the merger. But the non railroad assets, you know, expensive downtown real estate, fast tracks of Central Valley farmland,

• 1:03:42Justin Roczniak?

  gold and silver mines, oil and gas production facilities, parking lots at Disneyland, all kinds of crap. The vast wealth that the railroads had built up.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Are you serious about the parking lots at Disneyland?

• 1:03:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Or is that a joke? Are you serious?

• 1:03:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 1:04:02Justin Roczniak?

  Well, yeah, it's like how the Pennsylvania Railroad started Six Flags.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  Are you really?

• 1:04:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that was a.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Am I the lucky, am I one of the lucky 10,000 today to learn that that's actually true?

• 1:04:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I, I think they started, I, they might've bought it early on, but the Pennsylvania Railroad was intimately involved with the development of Six Flags over Texas.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Wow, okay.

• 1:04:28Justin Roczniak?

  Dad and, yeah, there's a whole bunch of like the Buckeye Pipeline, like there's a bunch, there's a bunch of weird stuff in that portfolio. conglomerates were wild.

• 1:04:37Liam McAnderson?

  It's like the Redding owning all those, uh, was it Australian movie?

• 1:04:41Justin Roczniak?

  Australian movie theaters, yes. Now that's the only part of the company left.

• 1:04:48Justin Roczniak?

  So the vast wealth the railroads had built up over 130 years, that would be administered directly by the Santa Fe Pacific Corporation. And as they awaited ICC approval for the merger, they even started painting their locomotives in this very fetching Kodachrome paint scream, they called it.

• 1:05:07Liam McAnderson?

  Paint scream.

• 1:05:08Justin Roczniak?

  Paint scream, excuse me.

• 1:05:10Liam McAnderson?

  No, I like paint scream.

• 1:05:14Justin Roczniak?

  It was called the Kodachrome scheme because it's

• 1:05:17Liam McAnderson?

  Beautiful dude.

• 1:05:18Justin Roczniak?

  It's the same colors that the Kodachrome film came in of the box it came in.

• 1:05:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Gorgeous.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  We gotta, we gotta believe them. Now that we have no EPA, we could, we should bring it back. We should do that as a favor for me. We can have whatever chemicals we want now. Bring back Kodachrome. Kodak is free of the yoke of private equity and the British pension fund of management now. They can do whatever they want. Bring back Kodachrome.

• 1:05:44Justin Roczniak?

  You have to reemerge it with Eastman.

• 1:05:46Speaker 02

  They are. They're Eastman. Eastman now has control of their own distribution again. Sorry, this is the, this is, this is now a film podcast.

• 1:05:53Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I thought Eastman had been fully separated. Okay.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  No, so there's Eastman Kodak and there's Alaris Kodak and Alaris Kodak handled all the distribution, sales to consumers and Alaris got bought by a private equity firm, which decided they didn't want to actually make any products or sell anything. They just wanted to sit on IP. And so Eastman now is distributing their own film again, which means we might actually get new stuff for the first time in like, I don't know, a decade. It's actually, it's one of the very few things that America is not fully destroying at the current moment. And so since we have stripped the copper out of the walls of the EPA, I think that we should bring back the dangerous chemicals that kill you.

• 1:06:33Justin Roczniak?

  Who, who runs the big chemical plant in Kingsport then?

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:06:38Justin Roczniak?

  Huh?

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Eastman Kodak still exists.

• 1:06:41Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, this is Eastman Chemical.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:06:44Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know if they're separate or not.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  That might be just an unrelated guy named Eastman.

• 1:06:48Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, it was the same company at one point.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. I just follow this kind of stuff because for a while there it looked like we were going to get screwed out of film forever. Uh, and now it looks like we won't. Private equity somehow managed to, uh, not destroy my favorite thing for a little bit longer. So that's kind of nice.

• 1:07:07Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, hold on. No, Eastman Chemical is now independent, independent of Kodak. Okay.

• 1:07:13Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but presumably, okay, but presumably that there's someone who's got the, I, I don't know.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Well, Eastman Kodak still makes film, though.

• 1:07:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  There is still a company called Eastman Kodak and there's a company called Kodak Alaris. It's, it's a, it's like every single thing that went through, uh, you know, bankruptcy in 2012. It is a convoluted mess of like shell corporation bullshit. Uh, all that matters is that they can still keep making film.

• 1:07:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  I would bet you this picture was actually taken on Kodak Chrome, too.

• 1:07:45Justin Roczniak?

  Probably, yeah. That would be appropriate. Um, I should have looked up who's, who, who did this photo. I got it off, got it off Wikipedia. I bet it's a Roger Poota.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Certainly.

• 1:07:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So the Interstate Commerce Commission staff recommended approving the merger since the railroads were both not doing especially well financially. Um, the railroad press didn't like it, but they expected to go through. Ronald Reagan is the president. Business is everything, right? There's a lot of grumbling about the whole situation. It looks, looks kind of stupid and bad. Well, except the paint scheme that looks great. Uh, which is why it stunned everyone. On July 24th, 1986, the ICC issued a ruling of fuck you, go home and.

• 1:08:29Liam McAnderson?

  Verbatim, actually. It's wild.

• 1:08:32Justin Roczniak?

  Refused even to hear an appeal.

• 1:08:34Liam McAnderson?

  Damn, dude.

• 1:08:35Justin Roczniak?

  And.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:08:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Justin Roczniak?

  What followed was a rather messy divorce where the Southern Pacific was stripped of all its assets and sold to the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad. Where it gradually ate that railroad from the inside out.

• 1:08:55Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Justin Roczniak?

  You know, exploded their fast freight business model and the Santa Fe wound up with all of the Southern Pacific's non railroad assets. You know, all of the land in the Central Valley, half of downtown San Francisco.

• 1:09:13Justin Roczniak?

  You know, oil and gas, gold and silver reserves.

• 1:09:19Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus, wow.

• 1:09:21Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. And they quickly sold all those off for a quick buck, right? This is also where Sprint Wireless comes from.

• 1:09:33Justin Roczniak?

  Because Sprint was an acronym for Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications. But they, they got a, they got spun off at this point and had to become a real phone company.

• 1:09:50Justin Roczniak?

  And this is how a tremendous amount of land in California and the Southwest was liberated from the oppressive control of the railroad. And all that land is now owned by other types of assholes instead.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Um, it's crazy to me that Scrooge McDuck was a real business model for like the first half of America's history. Just like somewhere there's a swimming pool full of gold coins and this one company owns everything because there's some eccentric multi-billionaire whose assets can't even be listed, who just happens to, you know, own a city because of a weird work of zoning.

• 1:10:30Liam McAnderson?

  Weird technicality, right?

• 1:10:34Justin Roczniak?

  So this one doesn't go through, but, uh, steps are taken to neuter and finally destroy the Interstate Commerce Commission, right? You know, there's still appetite for more consolidation. You know, why do you need a chassis system and the family lines? Why do you need a Southern Railway and a Norfolk and Western? Why does Conrail exist at all?

• 1:10:58Liam McAnderson?

  Because they went with the union by it, those motherfuckers.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  If Conrail was cool as hell and we never should have broken it up and sold it.

• 1:11:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  That should, that should be like when you're, that, that, like, that's up there with the post, like the post office, right? Like, that is one of the great American institutions and it's expanding, it's severing of the line of prophecy. We now exist in a doomed world.

• 1:11:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, the Northeast Rail Network would probably make a lot more sense if Conrail was still around. So after the Staggers Rail Act of 1980 deregulated the railroad industry and when I see deregulate here, that's that's sort of a very specific thing. Before then, the Interstate Commerce Commission would set, you know, per mile freight rates for various different commodities the railroad transported. Like, okay, coal is this much per mile. You know, televisions is this much per mile. You know, washing machines is another amount per mile, you

• 1:12:00Justin Roczniak?

  know, per unit or per unit of weight. Right. Once it, once, once they deregulated that, the railroads could set their own freight rates, which were generally lower than what the ICC wanted. Because the ICC was trying to do it in terms of, we need a balanced transportation system. And they also tended to set rates as like, percentage of the value of goods, as opposed to the modern way, which is the cost of transportation. You know, so deregulation is sort of, it's not, it's not as scary as it sounds. There was a lot

• 1:12:42Justin Roczniak?

  of, probably had to happen. The other thing, though, is it made it much easier to start abandoning unprofitable branch lines. You know, it did give you some amount of leverage over the unions that you didn't have before, because it was, you know, easier to just say, well, it's not profitable to do the service anymore. So we can just cut it. Bye. But yeah, deregulation in 1980. I mean, it was, it happened.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  I mean, it's kind of like, it, it feels sort of akin to like, again, the airlines, where it's like, some good initially came out of it, but it immediately went shit. Because the minute you stop, like, threatening corporations with a gun, with anything that resembles a public utility, they will destroy everything in sight. And so they should just be nationalized to begin with. Like, there's no, it doesn't make any sense to have a utility owned by private companies, which is what a railroad is, what an airline is, all of these, like, basic building blocks of how our world is.

• 1:13:44Liam McAnderson?

  Pico, I'm looking your way.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 1:13:47Liam McAnderson?

  Said Pico, I'm looking your way. That's Philadelphia's energy company.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, well, that's like, if you want to, if you ever want to get me like, you know, rah rah, like absolutely jingoistic about Seattle, get me going about Seattle City Light. Uh, cause we were the, like the first city in America to be like, hey, we shouldn't have competing electric companies for the same walk. That's why would we build a bunch, why would we each like allow all of these companies to carve out their own little thiefdoms with building dams to, you know, and granted, there are ecological problems with that. That is very much like a, a, uh, white people came in and, you know, destroyed a bunch of land that people were using, uh, kind of situation.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  But at the very least, they were like, hey, what if we just built enough of these to serve the whole city and made it a public good instead of making it a private, you know, uh, doing this bullshit. Um, anyway.

• 1:14:44Justin Roczniak?

  I always thought it'd be, uh, I, I, I always enjoyed that era of, um, electrification in cities where it was like, yeah, we got six different competing electrical companies. They all use different voltages. Some of them are AC, some of them are DC. You have to buy proprietary appliances for your house.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Genuinely incredibly stupid. Uh, Seattle just out that out of it a little bit earlier and we happen to have, uh, a lot of water. And, uh, we were able to build a bunch of dams. So we actually have pretty clean power. Just don't ask about what happens to fish or anybody who lived on that land.

• 1:15:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:23Liam McAnderson?

  Or about that.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a later problem. Anyway, I just.

• 1:15:26Justin Roczniak?

  Every telephone pole looks like a H R Geiger painting.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Anyway, yeah, I just, I just wanted to throw that in about the, also at this point, it's worth noting that like, um, the, the, all the passenger service, I feel like probably everybody listening knows this, but all the passenger service got pushed on the Amtrak like at this point, like a decade, two decades ago, uh, cause they were like, that doesn't make the most money per minute of running an engine. So we're not going to do it.

• 1:15:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Because again, they, when it came to being a public service that people could actually use, they were like, fuck that. That's, that goes up there with like delivering, uh, the farmer and his, you know, son, the, the, the last mile tractor delivery, right? Like that's, that, that isn't profitable.

• 1:16:15Justin Roczniak?

  It's not profitable. Yeah. And you know, I mean, just because we gave them half the country.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Justin Roczniak?

  Um.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  Show me where public good shows up on a balance sheet.

• 1:16:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, what have you done for us lately? Okay. Make M track, whatever.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And now of course, like the, the, they're stranglehold on all of the like actual trackage that we gave, let them have that they own because of land grants that we gave them is why we can't fucking make passenger rail service worth a damn in the U S, uh, anywhere at all.

• 1:16:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  I know you've got more about this. It's just, it, yeah, anyway. I still haven't recovered from my single interstate train trip six months ago.

• 1:16:57Justin Roczniak?

  I, I took the lake shore on, uh, Saturday and Sunday. Uh, actually that was quite nice. And we got in seven minutes early.

• 1:17:06Liam McAnderson?

  Whoa.

• 1:17:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Um.

• 1:17:10Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:17:11Justin Roczniak?

  So, de-marketing and retrenchment had done their job at this point. These, these redundant lines had been removed. All these unprofitable branch lines, they'd been cut or spun off into tiny short lines, which had different work rules. So it was easier to run trains on there. It by, by paying people less. Um. Government had given the green light to all of it. It was time to double down. Aiding in this was the complete destruction of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1995 and its replacement by the much more business friendly Surface Transportation Board.

• 1:17:50Liam McAnderson?

  Boo.

• 1:17:52Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 1:17:53Liam McAnderson?

  I assume.

• 1:17:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The chassis system and family line systems become CSX, which doesn't stand for anything.

• 1:18:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  It was a temporary. Cheesy system extreme.

• 1:18:06Liam McAnderson?

  Chicken shit express.

• 1:18:09Justin Roczniak?

  Chicken shit express. Yeah.

• 1:18:12Justin Roczniak?

  The Norfolk and Western and the Southern become the Norfolk Southern, right? The Union Pacific eats the Southern Pacific and the Denver and Rio Grande Western, and that becomes the Union Pacific. But, once again, Southern Pacific management manages to eke their way up into the upper echelons of the new railroad and, um, the Union Pacific is the Southern Pacific, um, which is the, it's, it, it mostly, the Southern Pacific survives in spirit this whole way as a horrible ghost.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  A specter is haunting American railroading. But it's just, it's just Southern Pacific.

• 1:18:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Justin Roczniak?

  The Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe become the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. That's easy enough. But the, the, the Union Pacific, Southern Pacific merger was a disaster that resulted in this years-long service meltdown that was nearly as bad as like the early Penn Central.

• 1:19:15Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, hell yeah.

• 1:19:16Justin Roczniak?

  They lost cars and entire trains. The yards were clogged with cars for unknown destinations. Everything slowed down, uh, again, in accordance with Southern Pacific practices. You know, the, the, the whole place is being rotted from the inside out. That's another story.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  This is, this is probably related, actually. Uh, so there's, there's a, there's a couple of short lines that, there's a couple of conglomerates that own basically every, every short line left in the US. And I've noticed a lot of them tend to use-

• 1:19:46Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, um, Jersey, Wyoming, yeah.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of them tend to use like a Rio Grande paint scheme.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  Well, there was, there was the Wheeling and Lake Erie out by me that they owned-

• 1:19:56Justin Roczniak?

  Right, Wheeling and Lake Erie is, um, uh, I don't know who owns them, but they do use the Rio Grande, uh, paint scheme.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  By any chance, did, did, did, uh, UP and Southern Pacific just sell off all the Rio Grande locomotives? Uh, and so a bunch of short lines got them, like, eh, paint's expensive.

• 1:20:13Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I changed this now.

• 1:20:15Justin Roczniak?

  The Wheeling and Lake Erie in particular, the reason they picked that paint scheme is because a bunch of, uh, Rio Grande guys, uh, went to work there.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:20:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:20:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they just like it.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  The first time I saw that as a kid, I was like, what the hell is going on? And then I read it and I was like, that, that still doesn't explain things, but okay.

• 1:20:41Justin Roczniak?

  Conrail is split in half. Half of it goes to CSX, half of it goes to Norfolk Southern. And this gets us roughly to where we are today, right? The pair of duopolies. You got CSX in Norfolk Southern in the east. You got BNSF and Union Pacific in the west. And I'm not gonna talk about Kansas City, Canadian Pacific, because that's too complicated.

• 1:21:04Liam McAnderson?

  And you can't make us.

• 1:21:06Justin Roczniak?

  So, anyway. So it's 2026 now. It's 10 years since all this stuff. Well, excuse me, 20 years, 30 years. For I old, I'm old.

• 1:21:17Liam McAnderson?

  You're old.

• 1:21:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Liam McAnderson?

  It is 2026 though, Roz. I can confirm that.

• 1:21:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, let's talk about some existential problems facing the modern railroad industry, right?

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Hang on, I'm gonna go just get my entire bottle of whiskey.

• 1:21:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:35Liam McAnderson?

  Well, don't forget to share.

• 1:21:38Justin Roczniak?

  Problem one, I'm listening these in no particular order. There's no locomotive builders anymore because of private equity.

• 1:21:46Liam McAnderson?

  So what do they do?

• 1:21:47Justin Roczniak?

  Purchase a new locomotive anymore.

• 1:21:49Liam McAnderson?

  Will they just like refurbish them? Or like, how does that work?

• 1:21:52Justin Roczniak?

  It's mostly refurbished stuff, yeah.

• 1:21:55Liam McAnderson?

  So it's like a B-52. Just we'll just get a retrofit the airframes forever.

• 1:22:00Justin Roczniak?

  Forever, yeah.

• 1:22:01Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, that's fucking terrific. Good work, boys.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  No one wants to work anymore.

• 1:22:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, I will say, this is partially because of the EPA.

• 1:22:14Justin Roczniak?

  Recurring, recurring villain. And, and this is, okay, I I spent, I spent a lot of time in the truck yelling about this with Scooter on Friday. Or Saturday. So, as part of new clean diesel regulations, you know, there were several, there was a ramp up over the 21st century, making diesel engines, non-road diesel engines cleaner. You know, it was like, okay, that's in terms of like particulate pollution, and nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxides, stuff like that. That right? Um, and you ramped up every couple of years to a new tier of cleanliness.

• 1:22:56Justin Roczniak?

  You know, tier one, tier two, tier three, all of those were achieved through sheer fuel efficiency, which everyone liked. Then we hit tier four. That was like 10 years ago now. Which is when they had to bring out the big guns, right? To reduce particulate emissions and so on and so forth. Um, and there were two ways of doing that, uh, which I refer to as, you know, you either drink the piss or huff the farts, right?

• 1:23:25Liam McAnderson?

  Give me huffing the farts.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  You have such a way with words.

• 1:23:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Justin Roczniak?

  One option was you have something called diesel exhaust fluid, which is essentially urea. Yeah. And you, you inject that into the engine in such a way that it reduces nitrogen oxides.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  They do this with trucking.

• 1:23:47Liam McAnderson?

  And blue tech Mercedes, right? Like that's the fluid, the blue tech.

• 1:23:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, the blue juice. The railroads really didn't like this idea because they didn't want to set up a second, uh, distribution network for fuel.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, God, that sounds like infrastructure.

• 1:24:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no.

• 1:24:02Liam McAnderson?

  Can't fucking do that.

• 1:24:05Justin Roczniak?

  So drinking the piss was off the table. They moved to huffing the farts, right?

• 1:24:10Liam McAnderson?

  It's gonna be methane recapture. Please give me, give me gas.

• 1:24:13Justin Roczniak?

  Exhaust gas recirculation.

• 1:24:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:18Justin Roczniak?

  So you, you take the, the diesel engine, right? The idea is we're going to reduce the heat of combustion in the diesel engine. And that reduces the amount of these criteria pollutants that form, right? So you, but you, you can't like add like cold air or something in there because that's just gonna add more air that's going to heat everything up when the combustion occurs. So you take some of the exhaust from the engine and you recirculate it back into the cylinders. Right? And that reduces the heat of combustion.

• 1:25:01Justin Roczniak?

  At the expense of horrible fuel efficiency and also destroying the engine block much quicker than it otherwise would. You know, I bet these did. It's very bad for the engine. That's a that's huffing the farts. Yeah.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  They again, also a thing that they do in cars and um. It's it's not as such of a problem as it used to be, obviously, but like when I had my uh my 80s Supra, a common early mod people would do is like, get rid of the EGR. It kills the motor.

• 1:25:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  Um, which obviously marginally worsens the environment. Uh, but you know, you I have an okay, Roz, I I just, I think Union Pacific needs to hire me. Well, Union Pacific, I have an idea.

• 1:25:48Liam McAnderson?

  Let's hear it.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  So, um, what if instead of diesel locomotives, you put up a wire above the track?

• 1:25:56Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  And you pull like you electrified it and then you put a train underneath it that was electric and you just put up like a thing that connected to the wire?

• 1:26:05Liam McAnderson?

  No, we forgot how to do that. We can't be done.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  I I feel like I saw like a science video about this. It was something like I fucking love science or something back on Reddit. Uh, this is a doable thing, right? Like we could do that.

• 1:26:19Justin Roczniak?

  I this is this is I I.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Wait, no, never mind. That's stupid. Let's do batteries instead.

• 1:26:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, the the I mean, the thing about the the EGR is that it it also increases CO2 emissions.

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, luckily, that's not a problem.

• 1:26:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's not a problem. Yeah. So, you know, okay, we we we've introduced this requirement for clean diesels.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  Check my snowball index real quick. Uh, oh, yeah, yeah, we're fine. Don't worry about it. Just at this point, we're past the tipping point. Just keep admitting it. It's it's no big deal.

• 1:26:56Justin Roczniak?

  And the net result of this was basically railroads stopped ordering more locomotives because they're like, ah, we got enough anyway. We don't need to deal with this fancy liberal bullshit. You know, and I feel like the, the, you know, this is, there should have been a bigger, more holistic strategy here for environmental friendliness, which would have, yeah, involved electrification. Like every other goddamn country in the world, but.

• 1:27:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, fuck you idiot.

• 1:27:23Justin Roczniak?

  No, that's. We have sort of the general backwardness and decrepitude of the United States Railroad Network. You know, basic improvements like electrification are not considered even for like the highest traffic parts of the railroad. Like, you know, the horrible grade out of Los Angeles heading towards like, uh, what is it? Barstow or whatever. That would be an ideal spot for it because you could conserve so much energy from, you know, the loaded trains coming down the grade, helping to power the empty trains up it. Uh, no, no, obviously we're not going to do that. That would make too much sense.

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  I live right next to the Cascades. It's one of the most difficult passes in like the entire country. Uh.

• 1:28:10Justin Roczniak?

  Um, another.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:28:12Justin Roczniak?

  Another issue facing railroads.

• 1:28:15Liam McAnderson?

  I likes that a lot.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  Thank you. I, I just, we used to have a solution to this. Anyway, go on.

• 1:28:22Liam McAnderson?

  Put up some goddamn wires.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  No, it's a bike trail now.

• 1:28:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Labor and safety. The railroads want none of either.

• 1:28:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, wasted. Yeah, saves weight, dude.

• 1:28:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, you know, uh, we did have that. You may have remember there was a large nationwide railroad strike that was imminent a couple of years ago.

• 1:28:43Liam McAnderson?

  Thanks for not being Joe Biden, you son of a bitch.

• 1:28:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, luckily Joe Biden, the most pro labor president in history stepped in and gave the railroads basically everything, right?

• 1:28:55Justin Roczniak?

  You know, safety is going wrong in like exotic ways, right?

• 1:29:01Justin Roczniak?

  Derailments overall are down, but so are the number of trains the railroad is running. So the number of derailments per train is actually going up, which is not good if you run the trains.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  That rub a little dirt on it, it'll be fine.

• 1:29:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  This reminds me of like, uh, the, the US loves doing shit like this, but they're like, actually, we're making really good progress. Cause pedestrian fatalities were down last year on the, on the way that America measures them, which is like.

• 1:29:34Liam McAnderson?

  By road mile or whatever.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Fatalities per million vehicle miles traveled.

• 1:29:38Liam McAnderson?

  There we go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Uh, which it, it only looks good because we drive such an insane fucking distance in this country. That, uh, if you look at it like a per capita basis, we're like worse than like Syria road safety.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  Anyway, just funny to me.

• 1:29:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  God, I want to live in a real society.

• 1:29:58Justin Roczniak?

  The other couple of problems, you know, you've got decentralization of industry. That's not great for railroads because a lot of times, you know, railroads are good at, you know, concentrating goods in one area. You know, as opposed to serving a bunch of distant, uh, you know, areas, right? So I, I, it's much easier as a, a railroad to, you know, go to an area that has, uh, 35 factories as opposed to two. Um, but you know, since we've decided to move industry either offshore or to the south, you know, where it's all going to be in a field somewhere a hundred miles from everything. That is an issue. Um, that's a, that's an industrial geography issue.

• 1:30:41Justin Roczniak?

  We also have heavy public subsidies to trucking, airports, inland waterways, so on and so forth. Um, and the railroads themselves are not interested in asking for public subsidies themselves for like infrastructure improvements, because then they would have to do that.

• 1:30:59Justin Roczniak?

  You have aging rolling stock like the freight cars and so on and so forth. Especially if you're looking at stuff that's not like intermodal or containers. A lot of that stuff is getting up there in age. Now, the current regulation that the FRA has, the Federal Railroad Administration, is that you cannot operate a railroad car older than 50 years old in what's called interchange service. That is, you you transfer it between railroads, right? A lot of stuff is about to hit that number. And it looks like they're actually, you know, rather than trying to step in and make it, build new railroad cars, they're just gonna say, okay, you can apply for a 10-year waiver.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  I thought it was supposed to, I thought we were trying to build stuff again. What's more masculine than using a hammer to put together a train car? Come on!

• 1:31:53Justin Roczniak?

  Building a railroad car, that sounds like some gay liberal shit.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Finally, finally, a factory job that is composed entirely of trans women in the workforce.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  There's so many dolls who would be first in line to go work at the the Great American Railcar Factory.

• 1:32:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, fucking, there's some guys in a pickup truck trying to roll coal at you like, you know,

• 1:32:23Justin Roczniak?

  this is the new, wow, some, some, some blue-haired railroad car worker.

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  It's called Pull Man. What are you doing? You can't make the train cars woke?

• 1:32:37Justin Roczniak?

  They're making the freaking train cars gay, folks.

• 1:32:44Justin Roczniak?

  You also have a situation with the previous retrenchment and de-marketing and so on and so forth. The chickens are coming home to roost, right? There's too few tracks for too many trains now. A lot of, you know, there's a lot of places you look at. You know, I think a good example is like the Pennsylvania Main Line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, where all of a sudden, you know, with the amount of traffic on the railroad these days, especially with intermodal and stuff, it's like, hmm, you know, it might be good to have had all those four tracks.

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Nope, fuck you.

• 1:33:21Justin Roczniak?

  Um, you do have this large backlog of infrastructure investments that could be made. And you have, you know, you could solve that problem by using all the money the railroad is making. Cause we are in an era of record profits.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  Ooh, well, I'm sure though we're getting past that.

• 1:33:39Justin Roczniak?

  Those go to stock buybacks.

• 1:33:41Liam McAnderson?

  Duh. Fuck you for thinking anything can ever be made better.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  We just gotta fucking, oh god.

• 1:33:48Liam McAnderson?

  All these people, yeah, sorry, David.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  I was try, I was trying to.

• 1:33:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Oh, man, fuck.

• 1:33:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, I, I, I forget the exact number. I want to say over the past 10, 12 years, um, railroads have invested $100 million into, $100 billion, excuse me. That's the type of money you're looking at for like nationwide high speed rail network. Or if not that, nationwide average speed rail network.

• 1:34:18Justin Roczniak?

  You know, they invested that much money into stock buybacks, which.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  It's insane. It's insane how much money we are just blowing directly into rich people's pockets.

• 1:34:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's pretty much the equivalent of setting that money on fire.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, it does, it all, it doesn't even do anything there. It just sits in there like, essentially it takes out of circulation. It's just like, hey, all this potential wealth we could do anything else with? Yeah, this is just so these people's like feel better about themselves. And I guess like, you know, the yacht industry is doing well. It's just, it's insane.

• 1:34:53Justin Roczniak?

  I wouldn't be surprised that the yacht industry is somehow doing really badly right now. I'm gonna be honest.

• 1:34:58Liam McAnderson?

  Billionaires love yachts.

• 1:34:59Justin Roczniak?

  I was thinking, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a productive part of the economy. It's gotta be screwed somehow.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  You can, you can buy a yacht. Meanwhile, Washington can't fucking build ferries anymore because all of our shipyards are closing. Uh, and nobody's got dry docks that they could build a car haul like, like a row row ferry at anymore for any kind of reasonable price.

• 1:35:20Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  It's, it's been a huge problem. We're sending the ferry, uh, to Florida, which feels like, I don't know. It feels like asking like Mercedes Benz to build like, you know, United States fleet vehicles circa 1939, but you know, what do I know?

• 1:35:35Liam McAnderson?

  We'll take the Third Reich.

• 1:35:37Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, Philadelphia shipyards expanding.

• 1:35:39Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we're getting a cruise terminal. Might already have it.

• 1:35:42Speaker 02

  Is that when, is that where they're gonna build the, uh, the Trump class battleship?

• 1:35:48Liam McAnderson?

  Stop it.

• 1:35:48Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. No, they would build that probably in Newport News.

• 1:35:51Speaker 02

  That would have been, that would have been a good, uh, goddamn news one is that, uh, Trump fired the secretary of the navy because he wanted a ship that was physically impossible to build in two years' time.

• 1:36:05Justin Roczniak?

  Look, if you can build a Liberty ship in three days.

• 1:36:08Liam McAnderson?

  USS, we built this yesterday. Hell, yeah.

• 1:36:11Justin Roczniak?

  Um, I wrote down private equity here. Private equity is like less of a problem than you might think, at least with the class one railroads, the big ones, right? Uh, some of the smaller railroads though, you know, they are going, going crazy on those guys.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Um, look, looking into like, uh, the, any, any of the regional rail stuff, it's just like a great way to want to kill yourself.

• 1:36:36Speaker 02

  Sorry, too dark?

• 1:36:38Liam McAnderson?

  No, dark enough, but no, not too dark.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm in a bad mood today.

• 1:36:43Justin Roczniak?

  Dark like Norfolk Southern.

• 1:36:45Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, look at that. Thoroughbreds, baby.

• 1:36:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, you have, I, this is always one that like fucks with my brain. There are chunks of the national railroad network that only exist because of M-Track. Like the Santa Fe Transcontinental Railroad, um, the only train that uses a good chunk of that is the Southwest Chief.

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:37:11Justin Roczniak?

  It would not exist otherwise. They would have abandoned it. Like a whole transcontinental railroad. You know, I, I think it was, um, oh, God, uh, uh,

• 1:37:24Justin Roczniak?

  Richard Young said something along the lines of, you know, once you lose the passenger trains, you lose the railroad. Um, you know, this, this attrition would be much more quick if M-Track did not exist.

• 1:37:38Liam McAnderson?

  Got it.

• 1:37:39Justin Roczniak?

  You also have precision scheduled railroading, you know, which is sort of, you know, it was supposed to be this model where we had lots of fast freight trains moving cars very quickly from one yard to another, you know, increasing what they call car velocity, which is the average speed of each railroad car, right? And what you wound up with instead was every single train runs on the Southern Pacific model, really long, slow, miserable freight trains everywhere, right?

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is why they have trains that don't fit in the yards.

• 1:38:16Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. And they get robbed. And that's part of the cost of doing business.

• 1:38:22Speaker 02

  And then the, that's when the Union Pacific cops show up at your house to shoot you.

• 1:38:26Justin Roczniak?

  Mm hmm. And overall, this has all been in service of focus on these insane unsustainable operating ratios, right? The operating ratio is essentially how many cents per dollar are spent on running the railroad? And it used to be like a good operating ratio was 80%, right? For every dollar I take in, I spend 80% of it on running the railroad, 80 cents.

• 1:38:57Justin Roczniak?

  Now executives are aiming for, under pressure from stockholders and so on and so forth, they're aiming for operating ratios of like 60 or 55%, which

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  That's insane.

• 1:39:10Justin Roczniak?

  You should, you should probably invest some of this money into the railroad, you know?

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:39:17Justin Roczniak?

  But no, they are invested in stock buybacks, which is again, setting the money on fire.

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  Literally ripping the copper out of the walls. Like it's so, this is, I think this is what makes like transportation drive me so insane. It's like the present day is because it is so easy to be like, yeah, this money is being ripped out of this project, this public good, specifically to go to these guys. And you could literally see the effect year over year on the infrastructure that everybody depends on for life to continue.

• 1:39:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:50Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 1:39:51Justin Roczniak?

  And a lot of this could be solved with, you know, serious reform and a lot of spending like right now, you know, major infrastructure investments, industrial policy that rebuilds the locomotive industry, you know, refocus these, these sort of absurd non-road diesel regulations into like railroad electrification, right? You know, policies that put safety first, reforms the railway, railway labor act so that these labor agreements that the most pro labor president in history, Joe Biden, put into place could actually be enforced, right? Probably some public subsidy for rail infrastructure, especially if passenger trains are using

• 1:40:35Justin Roczniak?

  it as like a national program, not like internet, like little stupid projects everywhere, right? You know, reinvestment into what do you call the carload freight system that's box cars, tank cars, flat cars, so on, everything that's not containers, right? So we don't have so many last mile truck deliveries and you can afford to build a new box car again, which is currently a huge, huge issue. A new box car right now will likely not pay for itself over the 50 year life of the car.

• 1:41:09Liam McAnderson?

  That's wild.

• 1:41:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Have they tried using a substance other than gold to construct them?

• 1:41:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that's the problem. They sold off the gold mines.

• 1:41:23Liam McAnderson?

  We're all vertically integrated and now we can't have anything.

• 1:41:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. We got to re-ban stock buybacks, you know, you need policies that deferred more kinds of freight to the railroad. There's a, a lot of work to be done that can bring the railroads back up the stuff, right? You know, we're constantly told that the American freight railroad is the best in the world as, you know, they deliver every single car like a week late, then they blow up a town due to negligence. You know, these are, these are fixable problems, right? That could be. Solved with a concerted effort by the government, you know, good, smart policies, so on and so forth, um, that would probably, it would leave everyone better off.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Well, except us. We need them to blow up pounds occasionally for episodes.

• 1:42:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we got, we got to go back to content lines. That's right.

• 1:42:14Justin Roczniak?

  That would be a big issue, yeah.

• 1:42:17Liam McAnderson?

  Get better, but not too much better, guys.

• 1:42:24Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. Uh, so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. Uh, people are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Uh, sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks, you get what you pay for. Um, it also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you

• 1:43:09Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:43:27Justin Roczniak?

  What if there was a workaround though? What if we could improve the railroad instead by just making it really, really big?

• 1:43:34Liam McAnderson?

  Uh huh, uh boy.

• 1:43:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so we'll talk about the mega, mega, mega merger, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. The, the horse and Uncle Pete are getting together to form America's first transcontinental railroad.

• 1:43:50Speaker 02

  I am one of like Union Pacific's 15 Blue Sky followers and I keep getting posts from them about like, we, we, we assure you, this is a, a very popular thing that is going to benefit everybody in America.

• 1:44:05Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck off.

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  Don't you worry, we're not gonna-

• 1:44:07Liam McAnderson?

  Stop fucking horses.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  We're not gonna degrade the service. It's gonna be fantastic for everybody. It is very funny, uh, that their, their Blue Sky account has perfect PR speak. It feels kind of out of place.

• 1:44:23Justin Roczniak?

  So

• 1:44:23Liam McAnderson?

  Union Pacific, what do you feel about the Philadelphia Eagles draft picks?

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  It's like a stray threads account made its way over to Blue Sky.

• 1:44:32Justin Roczniak?

  So this is, this is interesting because it is one of the first, what you would call an end to end merger uh in several decades, end to end, meaning Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern do not share very many overlapping routes.

• 1:44:49Justin Roczniak?

  So you know, there's not going to be too much in terms of like economies of scale here. There's not going to be like line abandonment abandonments to a large extent, or like consolidating maintenance facilities or so on and so forth. This is going to be, we're just taking two railroads and making them into one bigger railroad. Although there probably will be cutbacks in certain areas, especially, well, probably especially for management. We don't care about them.

• 1:45:17Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 1:45:18Justin Roczniak?

  This was announced July 29th, 2025. It was approved by 99% of shareholders. Something 85 billion dollars to acquire Norfolk Southern, yada, yada. Who cares about money? How does this affect the physical railroad, its customers, its employees, us ultimately? All right. Let's, let's go look at what, what might happen. I thought I'd be generous. See if there's any good things that might happen. So this is the good. So now we have one railroad that runs coast to coast. Interesting.

• 1:45:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. It only took, it only took like what? 250 years on the dot? Uh, time to disband the country. Never mind.

• 1:46:03Justin Roczniak?

  Finished it.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  God, it'd be very funny if by the time this episode comes out, some interesting things have happened geopolitically.

• 1:46:10Justin Roczniak?

  This means theoretically.

• 1:46:13Justin Roczniak?

  If you're running a transcontinental freight train, you don't have to switch cars or switch locomotives or anything when you hit the Mississippi River, which is usually when that changeover happens today. Right? This is the big top line benefit that's being heavily marketed by Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. Yeah.

• 1:46:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:35Justin Roczniak?

  Blue Sky account.

• 1:46:36Liam McAnderson?

  To 15 people, including Victoria for some reason.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  I wanted to get updates on what they were bringing up, the heritage fleet stuff. Because you need to zip it still runs the big boy and I want to see it.

• 1:46:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I got the schedule.

• 1:46:48Liam McAnderson?

  Can you send that to me, please?

• 1:46:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'll do that.

• 1:46:50Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  I don't think they're coming to Seattle.

• 1:46:53Liam McAnderson?

  They're not yet.

• 1:46:54Justin Roczniak?

  Not yet. Yeah. Well, I gotta, well, that'll be when the, when the other mega merger happens. Well, we'll talk about that later.

• 1:47:02Liam McAnderson?

  Hyper merger, hyper merger.

• 1:47:04Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 1:47:05Speaker 02

  They're gonna start running on all letters soon.

• 1:47:07Liam McAnderson?

  BN, yeah, BNSFUPNSD7.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  CSX was hogging it by taking three letters.

• 1:47:16Justin Roczniak?

  They have already established that the name of the merged railroad will be Union Pacific.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  They should just change it back to Southern Pacific, just for the bit.

• 1:47:26Justin Roczniak?

  Honestly, though, yeah. Well, the funny part is that.

• 1:47:28Liam McAnderson?

  What about Union Atlantic Pacific if they're gonna make you charge continental, eh?

• 1:47:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, they're never gonna give up that branding.

• 1:47:34Liam McAnderson?

  No, I know. Gee, I hate your propaganda.

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  They're, they're making all that money from those Bachmann starter sets that you get.

• 1:47:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  A 10 year old kid to get hooked on trains.

• 1:47:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's like, that's, that's like the equivalent of the loyalty program for airlines, you know?

• 1:47:50Justin Roczniak?

  That's where the real money is made. So, yeah, it's gonna be a real transcontinental railroad. It's gonna be cool and stuff, right? Well, this is maybe less of a benefit than you might think. I mean, so like what, what freight is going transcontinental? Anyone?

• 1:48:06Liam McAnderson?

  Not.

• 1:48:07Justin Roczniak?

  Anyone?

• 1:48:07Liam McAnderson?

  Not much.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  Uh, chemicals, maybe?

• 1:48:11Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, yeah, just like not very much of anything. I mean, that's, that's the dirty secret here.

• 1:48:17Liam McAnderson?

  Cause what would you have?

• 1:48:18Justin Roczniak?

  You do have, you do have like, um, you know, certain like domestic intermodal trains that go like.

• 1:48:27Justin Roczniak?

  Already are scheduled to go very, very fast, all the way across the country. But those already have arrangements where when they're interchanged between railroads, they try and do that as quickly as possible, right? So that doesn't change too much with one big railroad, right?

• 1:48:46Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, if you're shipping like-

• 1:48:48Liam McAnderson?

  What if we had one big union join the IWW?

• 1:48:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Justin Roczniak?

  And certainly, uh, i- if you're shipping stuff in from China on a ship, right? You're not gonna have any real benefit from, you know, unloading in Los Angeles to get to, I don't know, the big, the big, uh, container terminal out in, uh, Harrisburg, right?

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was what I was thinking. So I was like, I guess you could like deliver cars to Los Angeles and then ship them by train to New York, but why not just put the cars in New York?

• 1:49:24Justin Roczniak?

  Just use the Panama Canal, yeah.

• 1:49:26Liam McAnderson?

  At that point.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  So what you're saying is this would make sense if we closed down the Panama Canal?

• 1:49:32Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we don't give them ideas.

• 1:49:34Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God. Well, that might happen incidentally.

• 1:49:37Speaker 02

  How would you feel about another war?

• 1:49:42Liam McAnderson?

  You love it, don't you?

• 1:49:44Justin Roczniak?

  No, so your, your biggest winners actually are sort of in, uh, here, right? If you're a shipper in like the Midwest or like Louisiana or somewhere, you know, East Texas, something like that. You know, because we no longer have to switch railroads in a complicated way. If you're shipping like a boxcar from, I don't know, Dayton to Topeka or like Nashville to Wichita or something like that.

• 1:50:18Speaker 02

  Make it Dayton anymore.

• 1:50:19Justin Roczniak?

  What do they make?

• 1:50:21Speaker 02

  I've been to Dayton and like it is, it is very much a Rust Belt city.

• 1:50:25Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I bet they do make something there, but I can't think of what it is offhand.

• 1:50:29Speaker 02

  They've got the, they've got the really cool Air Force Museum. They could put the nuclear train back in service.

• 1:50:35Liam McAnderson?

  Isn't Wright Patterson there? I mean, there's gotta be something fucking around. Malt product, well, I searched Dayton, Ohio factories and I came up with malt products corp Dayton.

• 1:50:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so I have a covered hopper full of malt products.

• 1:50:50Liam McAnderson?

  All right.

• 1:50:51Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:50:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I like.

• 1:50:52Justin Roczniak?

  And I'm shipping it. Yeah, I'm shipping it to Topeka, Kansas. Uh, before it wouldn't make a lot of sense because it would have to go up to Chicago and get sorted in the yard and then get shipped over to the other railroads yard and then get sorted again and then go down to Wichita. Now it can go directly, which means it's competitive with trucking, right?

• 1:51:17Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I, the, the, the, the, the fact that the, the railroad requires, you know, classifying and reclassifying cars over and over again. It costs time and money, right? And that's why even for large shipments that aren't that time sensitive, uh, sometimes it is still more economical to use, you know, 10 trucks as opposed to two train cars.

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:51:42Justin Roczniak?

  So this is, this is why, you know, uh, this area of the country, you would likely see more freight mode shift towards rail, uh, if I'm being generous, right?

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  Do they have the capacity to actually add more trains?

• 1:51:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, most likely.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:52:00Justin Roczniak?

  Um, a lot of these lines are not.

• 1:52:01Speaker 02

  So the, the Blue Sky account did not fully lie to me. Something good could happen.

• 1:52:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:52:06Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe.

• 1:52:07Justin Roczniak?

  Um, another potentially good thing is, you know, I, I would say Union Pacific is a little bit better at maintenance than Norfolk Southern is. But that's also a result of having newer infrastructure in general.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  Say, that's an incredible statement after I've seen a bunch of their locomotives.

• 1:52:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  But I have, I have never seen so many graffiti bombed locomotives that I have on Union Pacific, uh, like freight yards. It's crazy. I don't even bother repainting them anymore.

• 1:52:34Justin Roczniak?

  That's just extra paint. It's good for it. Stops corrosion.

• 1:52:40Justin Roczniak?

  Another benefit is that finance journalists will stop referring to Norfolk Southern as just Norfolk.

• 1:52:48Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, those are different fucking things.

• 1:52:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, Norfolk is a town, not a railroad.

• 1:52:56Justin Roczniak?

  Another potential benefit, but I'm skeptical of this one.

• 1:53:01Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, welcome to Chicago.

• 1:53:03Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 1:53:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's beautiful. I love Chicago. So this is something that happens in Chicago every day. This is the 47th Street Yard that Norfolk Southern owns, right? You can notice up here, happened just recently, they demolished a whole neighborhood to expand this yard. Yeah, I know. You didn't think they could still pull that shit off? Nope, they have eminent domain powers.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  Which is insane, but oh my god. Meanwhile, if you try to like, put a rail line through a cornfield somewhere, 10,000 people would use it per day. It has to get caught up, logged up in environmental review and lawsuits for the rest of your life. And Norfolk Southern can just drop a bomb out of Chicago neighborhood and be like, yeah, we might use this.

• 1:53:52Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck off.

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 1:53:56Justin Roczniak?

  Theoretically, with a Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger, the need for facilities like this, where you have to nuke a neighborhood, that will be lessened. But we have to ask ourselves, okay, what actually happens in an intermodal yard like this one, right? Let's say I am shipping a container from Los Angeles to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is where the big container terminal for Philadelphia is. It goes on a BNSF train to Chicago, along with 19 other containers, to the same destination in stacks of two on 10 well cars, right? These will need to get from BNSF's intermodal yard to Norfolk Southern's intermodal yard

• 1:54:38Justin Roczniak?

  to be put on the train to Harrisburg. How do you do this?

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  Presumably you just shuttle them between the two yards with another train?

• 1:54:46Justin Roczniak?

  Now, that makes a lot of sense, right? That would be a good way to do it, and you are wrong.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  Oh man, I'm batting zero.

• 1:54:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Instead, they do something called drayage, right?

• 1:55:03Liam McAnderson?

  Oh god, no.

• 1:55:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So drayage comes from the term dray. A dray is a shitty horse drawn cart that brought goods from a ship to a warehouse, right? Modern drayage is also shitty.

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Strong ass horse to pull an entire intermodal container.

• 1:55:17Liam McAnderson?

  I had to explain this to my boss the other day. I was like, she was like, why is, why do truckers go bankrupt so much? I was like, alright, here we go.

• 1:55:25Justin Roczniak?

  So, modern day drayage is also very shitty.

• 1:55:28Speaker 02

  They don't use horses?

• 1:55:29Justin Roczniak?

  No, no. I mean, they treat the people worse than the horses.

• 1:55:33Speaker 02

  Damn it.

• 1:55:34Liam McAnderson?

  They'll get free oats or anything.

• 1:55:36Justin Roczniak?

  Here's, here's how you do drayage. Step one, you find an undocumented immigrant, right? Step two, you tell them about this great rent to own scheme, right? If you pay us monthly, we'll pay you to drive this big rig for us. And when you pay it off, it's yours. Obviously, there's no equity involved, right?

• 1:55:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it's vicious.

• 1:55:58Justin Roczniak?

  Step three, said undocumented immigrant drives the containers from one railroad yard to another railroad yard through residential neighborhoods full of kids and old ladies and stuff. They do that for a few months. You know, we're transferring all of these containers on trucks from one yard to another, all using, you know, these undocumented drayage drivers, right? These drivers are also responsible for the fuel and the maintenance on the big rig, right?

• 1:56:29Speaker 02

  Are you fucking kidding me?

• 1:56:30Liam McAnderson?

  No, this is like, half my dad's bankruptcy clients were drayage truckers. Literally half.

• 1:56:36Justin Roczniak?

  Step four, wait for the undocumented immigrant to fall behind on payments and you repossess the truck. And step five, if that guy complains about it, you call ICE. And that's how you move containers around through Chicago neighborhoods while paying the driver a negative wage.

• 1:56:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  Oh. Jesus, I, you know, I really like.

• 1:57:04Justin Roczniak?

  Burn it.

• 1:57:05Speaker 02

  I really like to think that I am pretty negatively polarized against America already. And no.

• 1:57:11Justin Roczniak?

  Not enough.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  Information I can learn.

• 1:57:13Justin Roczniak?

  Not enough, sweet girl.

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  And I, it's not true. I could get, I get more upset. Cool.

• 1:57:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:57:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, this is, this is, this, this is a nasty business right here.

• 1:57:26Speaker 02

  So you're telling me that it, this is, I mean, I guess, yeah, if you're paying the guy negative money, it's probably cheaper than if you actually had to like.

• 1:57:32Justin Roczniak?

  Then just to roll the cars half a mile. Yeah.

• 1:57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, instead we gotta, you know, and again, you're, you're driving through like neighborhoods full of kids and stuff, you know, you're, you're ruining everyone's day doing this. So theoretically, in a situation where Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific merge, this whole rigamarole could be avoided since trains could bypass Chicago. And this is one of the big selling points of the merger. We're going to stop rubber tire container transfers, right? And in practice, a lot of trains already bypass Chicago. Um, you know, in terms of like a situation where you're sorting, you know, containers

• 1:58:18Justin Roczniak?

  onto different trains bound for different destinations. I, I mean, unless you, you know, you have to actually, you know, change practices. I feel like, oh, you need to make a conscious effort to get rid of this stuff. I don't know that it's necessarily going to be like, oh, well, we can run the train around Chicago. That doesn't necessarily mean they will, right? Right. You know, there's plenty of services where, you know, trains are quickly handed off between railroads right now. Um, you know, and I, I would imagine if you're opening up, you know, new container shipping lanes, like again, to like, I don't know, uh, Columbus to.

• 1:59:00Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know, Dubuque.

• 1:59:02Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:59:04Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I, you're still doing a lot of rubber tire transfers in Chicago. I feel like if they really wanted to, they could end this practice now. You could be normal and just have a local train shift stuff around. You know, with that's driven by a guy who's paid well and he's in a union, right? His wage is positive.

• 1:59:27Justin Roczniak?

  But, uh, I feel like this negative wage thing is gonna, is a tough nut to crack. If, you know, you're, you're, uh, you're, um, a rational investor. You know, you're like, do the most evil thing possible at all times to make money.

• 1:59:43Speaker 02

  I, I can't think of a way to, to crack this nut. But, uh, I am gonna sound like a little bit like kind of transgender solid. So, you know.

• 1:59:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, actually, I, there, there are, there are certain things that need to be done to whoever came up with this business model.

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

  Genuinely, yeah, that would be a just a net benefit for humanity.

• 2:00:02Justin Roczniak?

  They are, they are not pleasant things.

• 2:00:04Liam McAnderson?

  Nope. We're the business of unpleasant things. That's our whole brand, man.

• 2:00:09Justin Roczniak?

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, ultimately, I guess the, the positive benefit is I, I don't think that's going to get rid of this practice. I think it will, you know, you'll, you'll be able to, I don't know. You'll be able to ship an intermodal container, container from Shreveport to Roanoke or something more easily. But I, I think the, the horrible injustices will continue to happen.

• 2:00:29Speaker 02

  The one guarantee in America.

• 2:00:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:33Speaker 02

  Oh, I should have brought myself some alcohol for this episode. Jesus Christ, this is bleaker than I thought it would be.

• 2:00:38Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So let's go to the bad stuff.

• 2:00:52Justin Roczniak?

  All right, all right, all right. So folks, uh, it's time to take off your leftist hat, which I assume is like some kind of like Russian hat doohickey, right? Put on your hard hat and your PPE, the Ushanka, yeah. Put on your hard hat and your PPE. We're all chemical industry guys now.

• 2:01:07Liam McAnderson?

  All right. I'm just your dad.

• 2:01:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much. That is the disclaimer. My dad works for American Chemistry Council, which has come out very hard against this merger.

• 2:01:17Liam McAnderson?

  You guys, not you guys, your dad's guys have a thing on their, on their webpage that's just rail merger.

• 2:01:25Liam McAnderson?

  I will drop the, the, the link in the chat to, to wow, you guys are not, again, not you guys, but your dad's guys are serious. God damn.

• 2:01:35Justin Roczniak?

  They, they are not happy about this. Yeah. Um, anyway, uh, plastics make it possible.

• 2:01:42Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, all right, let's do it.

• 2:01:46Justin Roczniak?

  So there are lots of captive shippers on the railroad network. These are people who make products that can't really be shipped in a practical way other than by rail. Right? So if you make a chemical that melts your face off, right?

• 2:02:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:07Justin Roczniak?

  And it's like a crucial ingredient in like baby food or something, right?

• 2:02:14Justin Roczniak?

  You, you want to ship that product to the baby food factory by rail rather than by a truck? Where you're going to have a face melting chemical spill due to a fender bender like every other month. Right?

• 2:02:30Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:31Justin Roczniak?

  It is much better to ship very dangerous chemicals by rail as opposed to by truck. Because, you know, as much as we complain about, you know, the state of the railroad in terms of like derailments and accidents and stuff like that.

• 2:02:45Speaker 02

  Literally everything is safer than being a like a car or a truck.

• 2:02:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's orders of magnitude safer. Yeah.

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  We could, we could do the, the helicopter collision with airplanes every day for the next year. It's still like not quite get to a number of road fatalities. We could just do the crush it crash or crash it crush every day.

• 2:03:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:03:08Speaker 02

  Crash it crush. I always get it mixed up. But yeah, you could just do that every day. We'd still be safe with trucking.

• 2:03:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. So right now those shippers, you know, they have the illusion of choice. Right? You know, you, you theoretically, if, if one railroad doesn't want to take your product, you can ask the other railroad and they might do it. There's a lot of solidarity between these railroads though. But the consolidation here is going to give Union Pacific a lot of leverage against these captive shippers. They can increase freight rates. They can provide minimal service, right? They could de-market the service altogether, you know, because hazmat is expensive and complicated to ship. And railroads hate expensive and complicated, right?

• 2:03:59Justin Roczniak?

  It makes the profit number sad.

• 2:04:03Liam McAnderson?

  Number go down.

• 2:04:03Justin Roczniak?

  And when the Yeah, and the profit number is synonymous with the public interest.

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  So much money.

• 2:04:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but they have to make more is the thing.

• 2:04:12Liam McAnderson?

  More, more, more, more.

• 2:04:16Justin Roczniak?

  I'm still not satisfied.

• 2:04:22Liam McAnderson?

  I like your, your, your Emperor Palpatine impression. That was pretty.

• 2:04:25Justin Roczniak?

  No, I was doing Tom Lehrer.

• 2:04:28Liam McAnderson?

  Good enough.

• 2:04:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so we need to, you know, if, if, if the, the profit number ultimately, because we have publicly traded companies, that is synonymous with the public interest. So, you know, I, in the interest of the profits, maybe, I don't know. Maybe we will, we'll just have to accept, you know, the face melting chemical truck whacking into a school bus every once in a while. It's, it's for the greater good, right? I

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  I can't, I can't even riff anymore. I'm, you could literally cook an egg on me. I'm so mad at this point in the recording.

• 2:05:02Liam McAnderson?

  Got that Alex Jones face.

• 2:05:04Speaker 02

  I don't know why. Like every week it's like, there's something horrible happened explicitly for profit. And it always irritates me, but this one is just like, I, I am so mad.

• 2:05:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, you're taking a lot of psychic damage this week.

• 2:05:16Speaker 02

  I, I am, I just genuinely, I like, I could feel it come the radiating heat off my skin.

• 2:05:23Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, this is, this is one of that, but I don't speak for American Chemistry Council, but this has always been one of their, yeah, I guess, you know, I, okay, yeah, I speak, I, this is exactly what my dad would say. No.

• 2:05:34Liam McAnderson?

  I'm in my skin and I'm Dan Roczniak.

• 2:05:37Justin Roczniak?

  Oh shit.

• 2:05:38Liam McAnderson?

  Oh no.

• 2:05:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, it's they they they've had a lot of frustrations with the railroad sort of being like, why do we have to ship all this hazmat exactly? It's like, cause, cause.

• 2:05:52Liam McAnderson?

  Goddamned.

• 2:05:53Justin Roczniak?

  On the interstate.

• 2:05:55Speaker 02

  Killed millions of people and gave you two thirds of the land in the country.

• 2:06:00Liam McAnderson?

  You can.

• 2:06:00Speaker 02

  In exchange, you have to call dangerous things.

• 2:06:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, I mean.

• 2:06:08Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 2:06:09Liam McAnderson?

  Do your civic duty, fuck faces.

• 2:06:11Justin Roczniak?

  End of the deal.

• 2:06:15Justin Roczniak?

  So another, another bad thing. Um, you know, Union Pacific hates M track. I mean, so does Norfolk Southern.

• 2:06:22Liam McAnderson?

  So do I.

• 2:06:23Justin Roczniak?

  I think, uh, Union Pacific is the only railroad that has like aggressively sought private operators to take over M track service on the rails, um, which has not worked.

• 2:06:36Speaker 02

  That's the whole reason Amtrak exists.

• 2:06:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:39Speaker 02

  Cause that doesn't work.

• 2:06:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:40Speaker 02

  Because these assholes are too focused on making money.

• 2:06:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. But if you have this huge consolidated railroad, it has a lot more leverage against regional transit authorities. And, you know, things like that, they might want to come in and like run commuter trains on Union Pacific tracks. I don't think this is going to affect existing services, but they will have a lot more leeway to prevent like new commuter trains or regional trains or so on and so forth. Right? And they can also impose like onerous engineering requirements for transit lines or other construction paralleling the, uh, Union Pacific tracks. Because, you know, they develop all the standards and they keep all the knowledge.

• 2:07:24Justin Roczniak?

  Cause we don't like have really railroad engineering education in the United States. I mean, I think it's like that.

• 2:07:31Liam McAnderson?

  Penn State Altoona.

• 2:07:32Justin Roczniak?

  Penn State Altoona, and there's one out west. I don't, not Purdue. It's. I don't remember. I don't remember where it is. Um, so yeah, they keep all that knowledge under lock and key. So of course, you know, if you want to build a light rail next to the Union Pacific line, you need a two foot thick, 20 foot tall concrete crash barrier. Right? Um, and of course, bigger railroad, more leverage against workers in the unions, right? You guys pipe down or we'll make your facility redundant. That's what mergers are for, right?

• 2:08:08Liam McAnderson?

  Well, I'm bad.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  We didn't have like the most pro labor president in history, right?

• 2:08:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Speaker 02

  We could have like future proof for this.

• 2:08:18Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 2:08:19Speaker 02

  Too bad.

• 2:08:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, I, I, I mean, since this is like an end to end merger, you know, closure of redundant routes is probably be pretty minimal, but not absent. Closure of redundant facilities will also probably be minimal. We can still threaten people with it and you still will be losing jobs, um, one way or another. And, and we lose a paint scheme. Everything's going to be armor yellow. I

• 2:08:46Speaker 02

  They're never repainting all that stuff. Come on.

• 2:08:49Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. Yeah, that costs money.

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  There will be, there will still be the, the prancing horse running around the US until the death of the US, much like the B52.

• 2:08:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 2:09:01Liam McAnderson?

  I'm looking up about the death of the US, not, not anything else. I kind of like the B52. I kind of like the whole, we're just going to sit here forever.

• 2:09:09Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, the Union Pacific usually repaints everything pretty quickly.

• 2:09:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, fuck them. I don't care.

• 2:09:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's like no, there's no like.

• 2:09:15Speaker 02

  They're going to put more of that stupid flag on it though. I hate the US. I hate the American flag locomotive. It doesn't, one, it, it from a graphic design perspective, it sucks. And two, I fucking hate seeing the American flag everywhere because of a blue haired miserable communist. So, you know.

• 2:09:32Justin Roczniak?

  Blue haired miserable railroad car assembler.

• 2:09:35Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:09:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:39Speaker 02

  I worked at Pole Woman and I use a hammer, put together boxcars all day.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  And uh.

• 2:09:50Justin Roczniak?

  The ugly. Okay.

• 2:09:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:09:54Justin Roczniak?

  This is gonna result in a second round of mega, mega, mega mergers.

• 2:09:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:58Justin Roczniak?

  I'm pretty sure if this goes through, CSX and BNSF have to merge. I know Warren Buffett doesn't want to do it. He has said so publicly, but uh, he might have to. Um, and that leads the inevitable, right? One big railroad in private hands.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  God damn, we're so good at inventing hell.

• 2:10:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:21Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:23Justin Roczniak?

  You know, and this results in a huge part of the nation's infrastructure.

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  What is that British comedy sketch show where they, they do the bit about setting the pedophile in the space? And they're like, this is the one thing we didn't want to happen.

• 2:10:35Justin Roczniak?

  I think.

• 2:10:35Speaker 02

  That's how I feel about this.

• 2:10:39Justin Roczniak?

  I think that was Mitchell Webb.

• 2:10:40Speaker 02

  This is the exact opposite outcome of what we wanted.

• 2:10:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  This is the, this is the wario of having a working train system.

• 2:10:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, hit me with the rods. Hit me with the ugly.

• 2:10:55Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So the inevitable is one big railroad in private hands, right?

• 2:11:01Liam McAnderson?

  Well, it could be one big union in public hands.

• 2:11:04Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 2:11:05Liam McAnderson?

  Join the IWW.

• 2:11:06Justin Roczniak?

  There's, there's with these railroads, right? Even now, but I'm sure even worse in the future. There's no accountability to the public. There's no accountability to like, even like national interest. Like we don't have industrial policy in this country. So it's not like we can say it'd be good if the railroads did this. It would be bad if they did that, you know, as a government, even like a, like a cynical sort of, you know, as a nation building thing or as like, I don't know, I, you know, it's, it's all the whims of the shareholders.

• 2:11:37Liam McAnderson?

  Who are freaks.

• 2:11:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they're craving as a group, I'm sure individually.

• 2:11:43Liam McAnderson?

  Nope, nope.

• 2:11:43Justin Roczniak?

  They can.

• 2:11:44Liam McAnderson?

  Execute them.

• 2:11:45Justin Roczniak?

  Good things.

• 2:11:46Liam McAnderson?

  Nope.

• 2:11:46Justin Roczniak?

  As a group, shareholders are craven lunatics with a death wish.

• 2:11:52Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I it's who cares if these decisions result in a train blowing up my house? I want to see the returns.

• 2:12:00Speaker 02

  And this is the thing is like you that's the whole point of doing industrial regulation is that you make it so that the cost of blowing up a town is actually noticeable.

• 2:12:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Speaker 02

  You know, I mean, not to not to, you know, put on my tanky hat too hard, but I do think that, you know, the model of occasionally you take some of these guys out back and shoot them.

• 2:12:20Liam McAnderson?

  You do understand.

• 2:12:21Speaker 02

  For their industrial accidents. Huh?

• 2:12:24Liam McAnderson?

  You do understand why Stalin and Lenin just everybody.

• 2:12:27Speaker 02

  You do. You really, you really begin to understand when you look at this because it's like, yeah, there are no consequences. So like, nobody, every single person's individual interest is in blowing up the town except for the people that live there. They have no recourse. Fuck you. Your house blew up. What are you going to do about it?

• 2:12:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:43Speaker 02

  We're going to build a train yard over top of it. How you like that? You're that smoldering ruin of your house. That's ours now. Eminent domain, bitch.

• 2:12:50Liam McAnderson?

  Eminent domain, bitch.

• 2:12:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's right.

• 2:12:54Speaker 02

  God damn it.

• 2:12:56Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, she's mad, folks.

• 2:12:59Justin Roczniak?

  Thomas came to dinner with a tank car of sulfuric acid.

• 2:13:03Liam McAnderson?

  The fat controller laughed. We're going to take your house.

• 2:13:10Justin Roczniak?

  Fat controller laughed. Too bad.

• 2:13:13Liam McAnderson?

  They hate this place.

• 2:13:16Justin Roczniak?

  So essentially with this merger, it's a situation where there may be some minor benefits for some railroad shippers and customers in some parts of the country and some benefits to shareholders, which they won't notice because most of their money is in AI bullshit. Right? And everything else gets, yeah.

• 2:13:39Speaker 02

  Humanoid robots are the future.

• 2:13:41Justin Roczniak?

  You know, if you're looking for, if you're looking for returns right now, I, I, you know, the railroad is not, not the place that is going to give you gangbusters money. This is a drop in the bucket in everyone's portfolio compared to, I don't know, some AI bullshit.

• 2:13:59Liam McAnderson?

  AI bullshit.

• 2:14:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this will have some benefits to the shareholders and everything else gets worse and stupider.

• 2:14:07Speaker 02

  Great.

• 2:14:08Liam McAnderson?

  Hooray.

• 2:14:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Justin Roczniak?

  What else is new?

• 2:14:12Liam McAnderson?

  I love this show.

• 2:14:13Speaker 02

  This place is hell.

• 2:14:14Liam McAnderson?

  This show pumps me out so much, man.

• 2:14:16Speaker 02

  I just, I, I, you know.

• 2:14:19Liam McAnderson?

  We gotta kill these fucking people.

• 2:14:20Speaker 02

  I think I'm just gonna walk into the Puget Sound when we finish recording this.

• 2:14:24Liam McAnderson?

  I do like that we, uh, we are on the side of the American Chemistry Council. Our, of course, our fabled brothers.

• 2:14:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. ACC is woke now.

• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  Making classic, that's leftist, baby.

• 2:14:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:39Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck off, Dan.

• 2:14:43Speaker 02

  Oh, god damn it.

• 2:14:45Justin Roczniak?

  Those blue haired chemical industry guys.

• 2:14:53Justin Roczniak?

  And the railroad car constructors.

• 2:14:57Justin Roczniak?

  So here's the real question.

• 2:14:59Liam McAnderson?

  What happens to Big Boy?

• 2:14:59Justin Roczniak?

  Will it happen? That is the big boy.

• 2:15:03Liam McAnderson?

  I said, what'll happen to Big Boy? Hopefully they, I don't know, run it on the main line.

• 2:15:07Justin Roczniak?

  They're gonna keep that as a propaganda machine.

• 2:15:09Liam McAnderson?

  I know they are.

• 2:15:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Speaker 02

  It does work on me, unfortunately. When they, when they, they do the Garfield image, like you are not immune. This is what they're talking about for me specifically. I'm, I'm just sitting there like, I love this shit.

• 2:15:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm gonna go out to see it when it comes to Philly.

• 2:15:23Liam McAnderson?

  I have a two, seven that's good.

• 2:15:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I will do so.

• 2:15:26Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you.

• 2:15:26Justin Roczniak?

  So, a few months ago now, the Surface Transportation Board rejected the merger proposal, but only on technical grounds. They wanted a longer report.

• 2:15:38Liam McAnderson?

  You fuck faces.

• 2:15:39Speaker 02

  Run that shit through Claude, baby.

• 2:15:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So they're gonna give this another go in 2027, and I don't really see any reason why, in the current political climate, they would reject the merger.

• 2:15:52Liam McAnderson?

  There's no way this doesn't go through.

• 2:15:54Justin Roczniak?

  Especially since Donald John Trump kicked the token liberal, uh, Robert E. Primus, he kicked him off the board last year.

• 2:16:05Justin Roczniak?

  So there's two Republicans and one Democrat on there. This is supposed to be a nonpartisan or equally partisan, uh, board. But there's two vacant seats.

• 2:16:21Speaker 02

  It's just, oh my god, it's fucking, railroads are such a great way to realize that like, if, if you want to improve anything, the law is very clear that you cannot do that. If you want to make shit worse, it's fucking Calvin ball. Voting Rights Act, yeah, you gotta spend the rest of your life and probably die for it. Removing it? Uh, shit, yeah.

• 2:16:44Justin Roczniak?

  No problem.

• 2:16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, fuck you for even thinking things could ever be better. Uh, anyway.

• 2:16:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:52Speaker 02

  God damn.

• 2:16:53Liam McAnderson?

  How you doing over there, Victoria?

• 2:16:57Justin Roczniak?

  The, the deck here is very definitely stacked in favor of Union Pacific. They were like really big Trump donors. And I don't know, they'll probably, probably let him get in the cab of the big boy when it comes east this summer.

• 2:17:11Liam McAnderson?

  CEO of Union Pacific.

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  I would.

• 2:17:22Speaker 02

  I will say.

• 2:17:22Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that guy has got one [BLEEP], no.

• 2:17:28Speaker 02

  I will say, putting, putting me in the cab of the big boy would work on me.

• 2:17:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, me too.

• 2:17:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:33Speaker 02

  I mean, like, fuck it.

• 2:17:34Liam McAnderson?

  We're all a human.

• 2:17:36Speaker 02

  It, it's like the opposite of when Trump got in the Tesla, it was like everything's computer. It's like the anti every, this is what I want the interior of my new car to look like. I want a bunch of steamed knobs.

• 2:17:47Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, they had to put a positive train control box in it. So there is computer on it now.

• 2:17:52Speaker 02

  Damn it. We can't have anything.

• 2:17:58Speaker 02

  Fucking iPad, baby, in the train cab. Jeez, Christ.

• 2:18:04Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 2:18:05Justin Roczniak?

  Um, so, uh, what can be done?

• 2:18:08Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:18:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:11Liam McAnderson?

  These fucking people. You heard me with a [BLEEP] or a [BLEEP].

• 2:18:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:16Liam McAnderson?

  Or a cannon or an anti-aircraft gun or some sort of, I don't know, Halbert or Pike or Mace or?

• 2:18:25Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. Come on, man. We just gotta do nudge theory, you know?

• 2:18:28Liam McAnderson?

  No, I'm not doing that.

• 2:18:29Speaker 02

  If we just, if we just offer some small business loans to people to start their own railroad.

• 2:18:35Liam McAnderson?

  Pro labor.

• 2:18:36Speaker 02

  Free market.

• 2:18:37Liam McAnderson?

  President in history.

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  Assuredly mean that the, the better world we all want would magically come into existence.

• 2:18:46Liam McAnderson?

  Pricks.

• 2:18:49Speaker 02

  Sorry Devin.

• 2:18:53Justin Roczniak?

  What's the alternative? Is there a future where this doesn't happen? You know, maybe, I don't know, Congress could block it or something. Who cares?

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 2:19:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, they're not gonna do that.

• 2:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm really positive that like they're gonna burn full capital on like pissing off the railroads.

• 2:19:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:08Liam McAnderson?

  They should, fuckers.

• 2:19:10Justin Roczniak?

  We're like well past the point where, you know, fiddling around the edge is gonna have real, any real results in the public interest, right? The only real long-term solution is nationalizing the railroads, making them accountable to the public, to the government, to someone, right? And this is a hard sell in the United States of America when all these railroads are setting, or making record profits, and the only people really aware of the disorganization and the mismanagement are the folks in this increasingly sidelined part of the economy where people do things and make stuff.

• 2:19:49Liam McAnderson?

  The blue hairs, yes.

• 2:19:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. The blue hairs at Bull Woman and the chemical plants.

• 2:19:56Liam McAnderson?

  The chemical plants, yes. Woke DuPont was not a phrase I was ready to hear.

• 2:20:03Justin Roczniak?

  I work at Woken Haas.

• 2:20:08Justin Roczniak?

  So I figured I would shout out the Public Rail Now campaign, which is organizing to try and make this hard sell to point out what is surprisingly obvious. Our nation's railroad network is not in service to the public. It isn't serving, it's serving a mob of investors and shareholders who are incapable of rational or long-term decisions as a group, right? This is not hard to point out. All the other infrastructure out there is public. Why not the railroads?

• 2:20:38Speaker 02

  God, a five-year plan would hit so good right now.

• 2:20:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:41Speaker 02

  Jesus.

• 2:20:43Justin Roczniak?

  Plus, as noted before, there's an enormous amount of external problems to the industry that private ownership is not going to solve. So anyway, I'll leave a link to the campaign. In the description, get involved, you know, or use something just, I don't know. Let's not be completely hopeless, you know?

• 2:21:02Liam McAnderson?

  Attaboy, attaboy, Roz.

• 2:21:04Justin Roczniak?

  May- maybe, maybe generative AI will make an app to fix the railroads. I don't know.

• 2:21:12Speaker 02

  I think I learned too much this episode.

• 2:21:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm really bad now.

• 2:21:16Speaker 02

  I didn't, I didn't like this one.

• 2:21:20Speaker 02

  Roz, usually when you do a trains episode, I'm in for a good time. What the hell was this, man?

• 2:21:27Speaker 02

  You do this to me?

• 2:21:30Justin Roczniak?

  All right, you're, you're burdened with the knowledge that I have.

• 2:21:33Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 2:21:35Justin Roczniak?

  You must share this burden with me.

• 2:21:37Speaker 02

  I already, I consider myself like pretty aware of how bad everything is, especially with railroads.

• 2:21:45Justin Roczniak?

  It's always worse and stupider.

• 2:21:48Speaker 02

  I'm going to the shaped place. See y'all.

• 2:21:51Justin Roczniak?

  Going to the shape store.

• 2:21:55Liam McAnderson?

  Go to the shape store. You want anything?

• 2:21:57Justin Roczniak?

  Well, what did we learn?

• 2:21:58Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you, man.

• 2:22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, seconded, actually.

• 2:22:06Speaker 02

  We learned that, uh, America

• 2:22:09Liam McAnderson?

  is pricks.

• 2:22:10Speaker 02

  Has always sucked. And it turns out that just better things aren't possible ever.

• 2:22:16Liam McAnderson?

  Bring back, bring back the alphabet soup era.

• 2:22:20Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, I could, I could like take over the block of trolley track, uh, you know, and just that's my charter. The block of trolley track in my backyard.

• 2:22:33Justin Roczniak?

  Call it the, the Roz and the Roz Pacific.

• 2:22:37Liam McAnderson?

  The Roz and Roz Pacific?

• 2:22:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:22:39Liam McAnderson?

  I like that. I fuck with that.

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, meanwhile, the thing that's really just like driving me insane is like they already, they're, they're talking about taking dedicated trackage for the sounder out of the Washington State rail plan. Um, because they're like, well, it's kind of expensive, but you know, we don't really wanna, we don't really have the money. And it's like pittance compared to what these railroads make. And the whole reason we can't run more commuter rail. To make it into like an actual regional rail server.

• 2:23:06Speaker 02

  And you know, Pacific won't fucking give more time to the regional rail. Oh, God.

• 2:23:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 2:23:12Speaker 02

  There's like actual problems in the city I live in that are caught, is caused directly by these assholes. And so they're just getting more money forever. Raised your hand in the Zen caster. What do you have to say?

• 2:23:24Liam McAnderson?

  I have nothing good to say. Devon's already gonna be mad at me. I, I, it's, it's just like. The, the, the better things aren't possible shit where we're all holding hands and chanting better shit isn't possible because we're Matty Glazier's now. It's just fucking exhausting. That's kind of all I have to say about this. Public rail now. Join the IWW. Uh, like these people on fucking John Roberts with the gun. Um, yeah. What else did we fucking learn? I don't know. I hate this place, man.

• 2:23:53Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Give me safety third, I guess.

• 2:23:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, all right.

• 2:23:59Justin Roczniak?

  Shake hands with danger. Hello, Justin, Liam, Nova and Gareth, even if he's not there.

• 2:24:07Speaker 02

  Chop liver?

• 2:24:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, right?

• 2:24:10Speaker 02

  I've been on like twenty-five episodes at this point.

• 2:24:13Liam McAnderson?

  We are, we're going through the old ones. Someone DM'd me to be like, did you get my safety third? I sent it last year. I was like, I don't know, man. I'll look.

• 2:24:20Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think this one's even that old.

• 2:24:22Speaker 02

  Well, I, I.

• 2:24:23Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you, Victoria. You get nothing.

• 2:24:25Speaker 02

  If you ever message me and I don't respond, it's because I'm terrible at it. Put that out there for the public, in the public domain, it's the notes.

• 2:24:32Justin Roczniak?

  Same. A few years back, I was a machinist apprentice at a workshop of a prestigious university in Germany.

• 2:24:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:46Justin Roczniak?

  In these three years, I accumulated many stories that would fit this segment, including overloading a freight elevator and overwriting its software to use it despite a computer voice warning that the weight limit had been exceeded.

• 2:25:01Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, fuck them.

• 2:25:02Justin Roczniak?

  That same elevator getting stuck on a different occasion and catching fire and having to carry a two hundred and fifty kilogram electric forklift up a flight of stairs by hand with three other guys. Because you guessed it, the freight elevator happened to be out of order due to being on fire.

• 2:25:24Justin Roczniak?

  But that's not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is the disassembly of a lathe.

• 2:25:30Liam McAnderson?

  Nova.

• 2:25:33Justin Roczniak?

  The whole ordeal could fill several pages of its own, but I'll try and keep it short. Every now and then a work safety guy comes in to review the safety features of the machines in the shop. The guy in question is known to be pedantic. So my meister was in a bad mood. Whenever this happened, we got tasked with some Arbeitsbeschaffen ist schon Hold on. Arbeitsbeschaffen Maschine.

• 2:26:00Speaker 02

  That's not a real language. Sorry.

• 2:26:02Justin Roczniak?

  A job creation measure to keep us out of the shop until the inspection was over.

• 2:26:10Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, a bake work.

• 2:26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sorry. We didn't have a, we didn't, we didn't, we didn't fight, fight them in the, the fields of Belgium. To speak German.

• 2:26:17Liam McAnderson?

  We won, dickhead.

• 2:26:21Justin Roczniak?

  In this case, we were to go to the basement where a big and very ancient lathe was located in one of the shop's additional machinery rooms.

• 2:26:31Speaker 02

  Why is that phrase a scare quote? That's alarming.

• 2:26:36Justin Roczniak?

  Guys, this is the additional machinery room?

• 2:26:41Justin Roczniak?

  The joke was always that the building had to be constructed around the lathe, but it turns out that was actually the case. The machine was supposed to be scrapped because it failed a previous inspection.

• 2:26:55Justin Roczniak?

  The disassembly process included lifting off several components via a crane, such as the headstock, and they weighed several hundred kilograms each. Unfortunately, the only crane we had was not tall enough for the job.

• 2:27:14Justin Roczniak?

  The solution to that problem was to put the crane on two lifting tables, jacking them up and pulling it all backwards with the headstock dangling from it.

• 2:27:25Liam McAnderson?

  Oh my God.

• 2:27:30Speaker 02

  There was no better way to do this. Are you sure?

• 2:27:33Justin Roczniak?

  It's fine. I'm sure they, they thought about it. Really? They're German, you know?

• 2:27:38Liam McAnderson?

  It's over engineered and there's two ashtrays in it.

• 2:27:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:42Speaker 02

  This is actually the surface manual for a mid 97 series. It's just being read to us.

• 2:27:50Justin Roczniak?

  There was just one issue. The crane was on rollers, as were the lifting tables. Imagine standing on an office chair while wearing roller blades. That's about how stable the whole construction was. To keep everything in place, my coworker decided to jam a crowbar under the roll of the crane.

• 2:28:15Justin Roczniak?

  Which could have easily cost him a few fingers or his hand had something decided to go south. It's also worth mentioning that all this took place in a small basement room without ventilation. While everything was covered in oil from the half disassembled machine. While my coworkers were both heavily smoking the entire time to cope with the stress of maybe losing a limb or two in this attempt of evading the eyes of the work safety inspector.

• 2:28:45Justin Roczniak?

  Now luckily, nobody got injured and by some miracle, all of us still have all our limbs and we didn't even burn to death.

• 2:28:52Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 2:28:53Justin Roczniak?

  I took pictures of the scene as it was unfolding, but to protect the identity of my coworkers and myself, I traced over it to obscure it. It's also worth noting that we listened to metal while doing this and Iron Maiden's Dance of Death blasted on full volume as I took these pictures, which I find too funny not to include.

• 2:29:11Liam McAnderson?

  That rules.

• 2:29:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. If you enjoyed this story, maybe I'll do a follow up with how I found out that the safety housing of our circular saw doesn't actually stop any shrapnel in case the saw blade explodes, but that's a different story entirely.

• 2:29:27Justin Roczniak?

  Regards, a machinist.

• 2:29:29Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you, a machinist.

• 2:29:31Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you, a machinist.

• 2:29:34Justin Roczniak?

  Well.

• 2:29:34Speaker 02

  I love to build a rolling Jenga tower.

• 2:29:38Liam McAnderson?

  It's on wheels now.

• 2:29:41Justin Roczniak?

  That was Safety Third. Burnin' our stars, shake hands with danger. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have a commercials before we go?

• 2:29:51Liam McAnderson?

  Once again, donate to Mary's grandson for a new mobility van. Listen to Trans Girl Esmo. I'm gonna be on it.

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm uploading that episode like right after we do this.

• 2:30:04Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 2:30:05Speaker 02

  The Liam guest special.

• 2:30:06Justin Roczniak?

  Exciting.

• 2:30:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, we talked about how everything sucks. You may notice a theme in the shows I'm on lately.

• 2:30:13Justin Roczniak?

  Developing.

• 2:30:15Speaker 02

  Well, that's not fair. We also did talk about how Bob Lutz is a king and Todd Viper's greatest car built, but.

• 2:30:20Liam McAnderson?

  That's a damn truth.

• 2:30:23Justin Roczniak?

  Um.

• 2:30:24Liam McAnderson?

  Bye, everybody.

• 2:30:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, bye, everyone. Wow, what a great podcast, everyone.

• 2:30:28Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.