NEWSBRIEF: Corredor Interoceanico Derailment

the thing we said would happen, happenedsee our original analysis: https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-143-corredor-interoceanico/ follow gareth: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV | https://bsky.app/profile/garethdennis.ukfollow scooter: https://bsky.app/profile/angryscooter77.bsky.socialfollow eme: https://bsky.app/profile/emeflores.bsky.social 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.

• 0:00November Kelly?

  Okay, so you want to talk about sterile? I have been, for gammet storage purposes, in the NHS jerking off room, which is like, it's like a kind of tiny, like, goon bunker in the like, in the bowels of your local hospital, some subterranean, like, basement, sub-level 5.

• 0:19Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I'd had a window, which I didn't like.

• 0:22November Kelly?

  Luxury, luxury, you had a window. I was in an entirely, like, vinyl and formica room with no windows, with a drop ceiling, with a lazy boy that felt like it was bolted to the floor. And the collection of, like, the, like, worst pornography I've ever, like, magazines directly out of the 1970s.

• 0:45Liam McAnderson?

  They were just like, use your phone, and I was like, I don't want a dome.

• 0:47November Kelly?

  I ended up using my phone, but I was in, I was in, like, the sub-basement goon bunker, so I couldn't even get fucking signal. So I was just, like, looking at this, like, this is a very, first of all, this is a very kind of normative, sexually, sort of like, sort of like, sexual orientation selection of pornography here. It's very heterosexual, first of all. Do you have anything a bit less awful? And, and also, it's, you know, aesthetically quite dated.

• 1:16Liam McAnderson?

  I love that you walk into the lobby being like, do you have anything more modern?

• 1:21November Kelly?

  Right now, so like, the NHS, our beloved socialist medical system, pays for you to store gammetes for, like, two years, right? And then you have to make your mind up, and then they start charging you. And I kind of want to, because they've given me the letter, being like, what do you want to do about this? We have your cum in a freezer. Start paying us for it. And I almost want to write it and be like, I paid already. I paid in the most, like, emotionally alienating wank of my life. Like, I, I, it felt like I came out of that room, kind of, like, stripped down to my soul. It was like a confessional. It was, it was, I just, yeah. We should do a sync point so that the audio works. Hi, Devon.

• 2:05Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, all of that was recorded.

• 2:07November Kelly?

  Good, okay, fine, I don't care, that's fine.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  No, but you've killed me. Someone else has also been in the goon, the NHS goon dungeon. Twice. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20November Kelly?

  Well, at least they didn't make me go back. At least they were happy with whatever kind of, they refused.

• 2:24Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no, I had to go back, I had to go back.

• 2:29Speaker 03

  I had to, I chose to go twice because I was like, I'm doing a backup advance freeze just in case I don't perform on the day.

• 2:36Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a bad thing to do. And it meant that I just was in the, the very odd. It had an emergency button, which, which I just was.

• 2:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Hit that.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  What could a wank be that you need to get an emergency button?

• 2:54November Kelly?

  It's also, there was something, there's something about this.

• 2:56Liam McAnderson?

  That's disgusting.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  Could you bring me like a Diet Pepsi, please? Just like.

• 3:03November Kelly?

  There's also, there's something about the procedure of the NHS wank where it's like, they have so clearly had to design a procedure that is like proof against you flashing the nurse. Right? Because, because you are jerking off and so they, they anticipate a certain level of perversion. And so it's very much like, no, you have to like come out of the room fully clothed. And we will mention this to you in detail. It's like, okay, don't treat me like some kind of gooner just because you want my come. We should, we should do the sync point.

• 3:35Justin Roczniak?

  The emergency button must be like, if you need to end the wank really quickly. So it shows you a picture.

• 3:41November Kelly?

  When I slap my hand on the balls, I'd like you to bring the wank to a controlled stop.

• 3:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  In, in, I, I might have dropped a picture of the, of the panic alarm.

• 3:52November Kelly?

  Oh, it says panic alarm. Okay.

• 3:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It immediately flashes a picture of the most unsexy thing you can think of. I don't know, probably Henry Kissinger or something.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Clarkson just appears. Yeah.

• 4:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh boy.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  I'm just imagining the nurse like coming on the aircom. Are you okay? No, I'm having a stroke. Yeah, that's the point. No, I'm having a stroke.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Oh dear, this isn't going to be the short one. I thought it was, is it? Oh, crikey. And that's not what people say in the goon cave either.

• 4:25November Kelly?

  We have Emma in the Discord, so perhaps this will be wasted.

• 4:29Justin Roczniak?

  No, I think Emma can just join.

• 4:32November Kelly?

  Emma could just join. That would, that would, that would be ideal. And then we do the sync point. So all of my, all of my advocacy, advocacy for the sync point is, is it's a sunk cost fallacy.

• 4:42Justin Roczniak?

  Did you?

• 4:43Liam McAnderson?

  Join.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Join.

• 4:45November Kelly?

  Join, join or die.

• 4:47Justin Roczniak?

  Join or die.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Or die. Uh, my mic is in my way.

• 4:51Justin Roczniak?

  Oh wait, I think, okay, we're all here.

• 4:54November Kelly?

  Hi, Emma.

• 4:54Speaker 05

  I joined, I joined. Oh God. Sorry, I was finishing a thumbnail of a Maduro and

• 5:01Liam McAnderson?

  Oh god, yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  I got mixed up, sorry.

• 5:04Liam McAnderson?

  It's all good.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Finding the most ominous possible picture of Trump.

• 5:07Liam McAnderson?

  Oh lord.

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Please no.

• 5:09Justin Roczniak?

  That's a, that's, that's, that's a cornucopia of images that.

• 5:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 5:15November Kelly?

  I think, I think the classic there is the, the one that he chose is his second term portrait.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, that is, it's, his shoulders are cut off, so I had to like mess with them, just.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  Also, I fit the, the, the World Cup thing in there, because my, my pitch is that Mexico should leave the World Cup in protest, because this is some Berlin Olympics shit.

• 5:35November Kelly?

  Absolutely.

• 5:37Speaker 05

  It's truly some Berlin Olympics shit.

• 5:39Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 5:40Justin Roczniak?

  Oh yeah, big time.

• 5:41Speaker 05

  Anyways, that, I'm here, I'm so sorry.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  You're fine.

• 5:45Liam McAnderson?

  It's a good problem.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  We were just all talking about jerking it, so it's.

• 5:49November Kelly?

  Yeah, that is literally true, yeah.

• 5:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but in a, in a clinical setting.

• 5:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, hey, I, you know, Emo, what's your worst jerk story, bud?

• 6:05Speaker 05

  I, we don't have HIPAA here, so I, I don't think I can tell it.

• 6:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, this was born of the discovery that no fewer than three of us have had to like jerk off for medical reasons in a hospital. And, and so like this, this led to anecdotes. Anyway, if we can get local recordings going and then do a sync point, perhaps we can start the podcast about the thing where a lot of people died, you know, that'll be a nice shift in tone.

• 6:31Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, fuck, I forgot, that's why we were gathered here today.

• 6:34November Kelly?

  We gathered here today because, because like more than a dozen people were, were killed, yeah.

• 6:39Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, we're gonna get yelled at, we're gonna get yelled at. Entirely predictable, entirely predictable fashion, but we were here talking about creating life.

• 6:49Liam McAnderson?

  That is, that is, that is, that is Nixonian level spin, I like that.

• 6:56November Kelly?

  All right, Justin, do you want to lead us in?

• 6:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. Uh, I'm going to say three, two, one, Mark. You're gonna clap. Three, two, one, Mark.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, fuck that one.

• 7:07November Kelly?

  That's fine. It just needs to be close enough.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:10Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and I guess we can do the podcast.

• 7:13November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 7:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

• 7:23November Kelly?

  A huge cast.

• 7:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, a huge cast. And usually, usually we do disasters after they happen. In this case, we predicted one before it happened and it happened. Anyway, I'm Justin Roczniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 7:39November Kelly?

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

• 7:44Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, uh, my name is Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he, him. I'm the person talking right now. And we have just a, like a litany of guests, frankly.

• 7:53Justin Roczniak?

  Three whole guests. Three whole guests.

• 7:55November Kelly?

  Decide amongst yourselves who is guest one.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Okay, as the person who inadvertently talked first, I'll say my name. Uh, no, in fact, I won't. Uh, Emma is here. Uh, Emma.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  Hi.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Introduce yourself.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Oh, I guess, uh, hi, I'm, I'm Emma Flores. Uh, they them, A A views, fixed Spanish. With an X if you're nasty.

• 8:12November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah. Oh, hell, yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  I'm, I got it. I got it. Uh, hi, I'm Angry Scooter. Uh, pronouns are he, they.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  And I'm Gareth Dennis. The what, the, the guy who's kind of, uh, is definitely a guest who was once a host. It gets very confusing. Um, but, uh, it's a delight to be here. My pronouns are he and him.

• 8:31November Kelly?

  Yeah, sort of host emeritus.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  The only qualified person here, so very, very needed host.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And doesn't Mexico let me know about it in my mentions? Cry.

• 8:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  See, you get it in the mentions. I get it in the DMs. I don't know why they all come to me that way, but it's always the DMs and they're like trying to got you, man.

• 8:55Liam McAnderson?

  My DMs are turned off. What the fuck is that, Roz?

• 8:58Justin Roczniak?

  Big sneeze.

• 8:59November Kelly?

  Blessing.

• 9:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 9:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, so it's kind of a, it's like a kind of a news brief episode where it's just, we talk about this thing that happened. If you want some context, some essential context, then you gotta go back and listen to the episode we did about the interoceanic corridor.

• 9:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Um, so, uh, yeah, uh, I guess the whole episode is the goddamn news.

• 9:23November Kelly?

  Do you want, yeah, okay.

• 9:26Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, fuck, that's loud. Jesus Christ. Jesus.

• 9:31November Kelly?

  Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  It shouldn't be.

• 9:35November Kelly?

  I have changed no settings. That's baffling to me. Okay.

• 9:40Justin Roczniak?

  Still optimized for the live show. I don't know.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  Big sound for big news.

• 9:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 9:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 9:47Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we're, we're.

• 9:49Justin Roczniak?

  It's so, um, yeah, but the corridor interoceanico train in Mexico along the Isthmus there, uh, derailed and killed, uh, 14 people now.

• 10:00November Kelly?

  Jesus, up to 14?

• 10:02Justin Roczniak?

  It's up to 14 now. Yeah.

• 10:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, as of, uh, 1726 at 5:08 PM Eastern.

• 10:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 10:10Speaker 04

  Cause boy, howdy, is this an updating situation.

• 10:13Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, there's still very much, a lot of things are in flux. Um, I figured it would be good for us to talk about it cause we did sort of predict something like this would happen on this particular railroad. But don't take anything here as like, you know, the gospel, right? We're, we're gonna try not to make like any crazy predictions or crazy speculation or anything. But we will shoot down other people's crazy speculation.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is the thing that's, that I want to upfront this is lots of people were shouting at me, um, and us of, of saying, wait, but you're walking back from what you said back in the podcast. Like, no, we weren't. In the original recording, we were talking about all of the crazy shit that could happen because of how this whole. Caboodle has been set up. What we were doing when there's actually been an incident is then debunking all the bullshit that people were then saying was the cause. It's very different. Like, the point is that we were projecting, we were projecting forward into the future, something that could happen based on the information that we knew and had understood, you know, two years ago, three years ago. Now, we're debunking stuff because at the time, you know, three, four days ago, when

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Twitter was very hot on this before, you know, the US invaded Venezuela. More on that later in this episode. Not according to Polly Market. Well, yeah, thanks, Polly Market, for denying all those horrible men some money. That's good. Yeah, no, lots of people like getting very excited, picking everything they can, but we had no information. There was no information. Therefore, you could not say most of what was being said. And unfortunately, what we said in the podcast was being misconstrued as a result. So just want to upfront, that's partly why we're doing this episode.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, most of what we said in the podcast was stuff that was happening in real time. And a lot of it has changed since three years ago. A lot can change in three years.

• 12:05November Kelly?

  We were kind of focused on what we thought was the kind of most likely way it could go wrong, which is not inevitably the way it actually did.

• 12:13Speaker 05

  And like, noticeably, Amlo is alive.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, Amlo is alive, yeah.

• 12:19November Kelly?

  Once, once Amlo finished his term and was not assassinated, I was like, okay, cool. Like, I can go, I can actually go to Mexico now. This will be, this will be lovely. I get to do my whole, like, tourist thing. And now, I don't know, it's up in the air again.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  I don't even know who the enemy is for a second.

• 12:36Liam McAnderson?

  I've been to Mexico in the intervening years between that one and this one, and I have yet to be assassinated, as far as I know.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  So, good news.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's, um, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll get, we'll get, we'll, there's, there's lots to cover.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Can I, can I do a quick disclaimer?

• 12:53November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yes. I, Angry Scooter, I am here as myself, not representing anyone or anything, and I only am here as an expert opinion on this opinion piece journalism.

• 13:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, none of us represent anything to the best of our knowledge.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  Speak for yourselves. I represent Network Rail and the British government.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  This is the official line of Network Rail, of Jeremy Westlake, the CEO of Network Rail, and all of the board of Network Rail. No, of course, I'm bullshitting. Don't sack me again. This is absolutely my opinion, but it happens to be there several quite informed. I mean, it's a whole bunch of informed people on here, but like, this gets into my wheelhouse a lot, this incident. Yeah.

• 13:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So first, we have to ask, what is the corridor into Oceanico?

• 13:48November Kelly?

  Go back and listen to the episode the first time. And the editorial act, yeah. Yeah. What if we did some more developments with a capital D by building this railway?

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think I don't think I said enough last episode. This is a good idea. Like, it is a good idea to have this railway connection. And none of us really thought that it was a bad idea. We were unhappy about the way that it was being done, but it is a good idea to have this railway, right? It makes sense.

• 14:17Speaker 05

  I, I'm not in love with the idea, but there's worse, like, this is like, just a straight up improvement from Ten Maya, in my opinion. Like, that one does, that serves no purpose. This one serves some purposes. Purposes I am not sure I'm aligned with, but it serves them. It hypothetically could. And that's, well, there are a lot has happened in the, in the years since, since that, the podcast that was really good. Honestly, surprised that, like, November, your pronunciations were on spot. I just went through the drum betting.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 14:54November Kelly?

  Beaming. I'm beaming. I got a good grade in podcasts.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Lots of the things we did predict, yeah, lots of the things we did predict, like, the HSTs getting their nose smashed, we'll talk about that later, did and have happened several times in quite large ways. So like, yeah, we did predict successfully lots of other things, which unfortunately have happened, but haven't led to fatalities.

• 15:16November Kelly?

  But the really short version of this is like, they were going to connect the now Gulf of America. In in Veracruz with with with the Pacific and and compete with the Panama Canal by shipping stuff by train.

• 15:36Justin Roczniak?

  This is the idea is that, you know, you're going to have some kind of competition with the Panama Canal here because you're going to build some kind of magical railroad that can haul the same amount as a huge container ship and you're going to massively upgrade the ports, you know, and that's going to somehow somehow you're going to be able to include the cost of an extra ship and two transloads and it'll be competitive with the Panama Canal. Somehow you're gonna, I don't understand at all how this was supposed to work. It sort of made sense in terms of, well, we're going to do a lot of industrial development along the

• 16:12Justin Roczniak?

  line, which will have easy access to both the Gulf of America and the Pacific Ocean.

• 16:23November Kelly?

  And it does have in common with Trent Maya, the Morena and more specifically AMLO's thing of, uh, hold still, you are being developed, right? You are being sort of economically uplifted.

• 16:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Stop resisting.

• 16:38November Kelly?

  That did not look good on the ground in lots of different ways. But in specifically, they also put the Navy in charge of this. And so

• 16:51Justin Roczniak?

  Trains famous for going on water.

• 16:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, again, if you kind of think about, we talked about all this, but the like internal politics of like, you have to give the military something to do that isn't like getting in gunfights with drug dealers. And then also it makes it like sort of harder to criticize from the right and and you get some sort of buy in from the military as an institution. And then all of that spirals directly to them trying to kill Scusa.

• 17:20Speaker 05

  Because there's, speaking about the conservatives, like the one thing that you need to know from when the podcast came out and today.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Is that AMLO won a total cultural victory. Every single conservative in Mexico, they're, they have like AMLO derangement syndrome predictably. It's the only thing they talk about. Well, maybe they have like a week to talk about foaming at the mouth about shame on getting kidnapped like Maduro. But they are, they basically have no answer for him. They only say vote against, both for us, we're not that guy, while that guy had 70% approval. It's pathetic. But what that means is that their, their campaign promises were to keep everything AMLO did. No one's pushing an, an alternative like view to how to develop the South or if we should be developing the South.

• 18:13Speaker 05

  The only question is, should we do it AMLO's way with the army? Or the conservative way also with the army, but I don't know. Make right, make it like a right shirt, like there's no, just make it more neoliberal somehow, like privatizing, privatize it from the ground up. There's really no.

• 18:34Justin Roczniak?

  You could sell this line to Canadian Pacific, Kansas City.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  Exactly. And, uh, well, the, the, the, the big problem with AMLO's like, it, it never made sense to me. Cause he was, with this cultural victory, he was assured that, uh, Morena was gonna win for like at least one or two elections. He could have done this like as a 12 year thing. Like they did not need to rush this.

• 19:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  That's, it's even when the things could be implemented correctly, where they could have talked to the locals, make them have some, make them be invested in this. They could have done that, but the central, the core of this thing was, well, the, the, the, the premise of the last podcast. The AMLO was gonna say, was gonna wave like Queen Elizabeth on, on, on his very special train that might, might or might not blow up.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  But.

• 19:32November Kelly?

  It's it's relatable. Everyone wants to, everyone wants to get to like, play with their own special train set. And he just, he, he wanted to get it done. And, you know, I, I also, you sympathize in the sense of like, um, maybe you want to sort of inject some urgency and, and not let the thing get sort of like bogged down. Sure. But in the event.

• 19:53Justin Roczniak?

  In the process of delivering this very quickly.

• 19:57November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Well, they, they also had to deliver this very quickly because it was all a cover to get freight trains. This whole project was, here, I will give you a passenger train if you shut up about the freight trains. And that they, they succeeded. They got their passenger train. And the freight trains have quietly been running in the background.

• 20:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah. And I mean, that, that, what, what was ultimately delivered here was an okay rehab of an existing railway that was built in 1907.

• 20:27November Kelly?

  It's, it's like describing something as three dimensional chess, but instead it's three dimensional transport fever too. No, you don't want to hear that sentence.

• 20:37Justin Roczniak?

  This is not like a super gold plated project like Trend Mile was. This was done very, very cheaply. Um, and you can see, you know, they didn't even stop running trains on it when they were rehabbing the track, which was a problem because it just destroyed all the track they just rehabbed.

• 20:56November Kelly?

  Or, or de-habs the track if you.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. But this was three years ago as they were finishing the project.

• 21:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, their time has passed in the, in the intervening, there, there have been intervening years. And we'll, we'll get to some of that when we, we look at some of the pictures from this.

• 21:11Justin Roczniak?

  Three years. Three years. Yeah. But most, most of the railroad is just relaying the existing sent single track railroad in place. The only substantial new construction that I, at least I could find, admittedly, I'm not on the ground. I was just looking on Google Maps, was bypassing the, uh, the market in, uh, Tejo on Tepec. Um, I'm sure I pronounced that wrong.

• 21:34November Kelly?

  No, you nailed it. I'm, I'm, I'm sitting on my good grade from earlier. I'm not even going to try and venture. Nope, me either.

• 21:40Justin Roczniak?

  Um, but yeah, this is, this is sort of a brand new, like, 1907 railroad they built.

• 21:46November Kelly?

  Um, it goes. This Navy still builds railroads the old fashioned way.

• 21:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  I mean, very Trump in that sense because Trump is obsessed with building things from the early 1900s like battleships.

• 21:59November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  Really, the core army of engineers, like. Type ship.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:06Justin Roczniak?

  I think some some emphasis should be placed on this, though. So here are two features that railroads have. Signals and crossing gates, right?

• 22:18November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 22:20Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, signals are there to provide visual reminders to the engineer not to crash his train into another train.

• 22:30November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, it's very easy to get distracted and do that. I mean, that is unironically true.

• 22:35Justin Roczniak?

  That is true. Yeah. Well, that's why you have backups like train orders and so on and so forth, right? That's why everyone has very, very strong knowledge of the route and everything like that.

• 22:45November Kelly?

  Yeah, but it sort of guards against your your sort of like it's your last line of defense. Plus, if you have a sort of like very ADHD and you're a divergent engineer, like, for instance, I would be. It's very helpful to have a big sign that says, hey, don't crash the train, just like sign that says lock in, you know?

• 23:01Speaker 03

  And if and if your railway is, you know, built to standards from the 1950s onwards, looking at you all of North America. Then you also have secondary protection systems that go, okay, you've not seen the signal. Well, you idiot, now I'm going to break the train for you.

• 23:15November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  So. We have or you've got an overspeed, for example, and the system will go, oh, your train's going too fast. You're we're applying the brakes, you idiot. Like, these these technologies have existed.

• 23:28November Kelly?

  Sorry, do you mean the stuff that I have to turn off every time I play train some because it like.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. Switch off.

• 23:37November Kelly?

  Fucking beeping at me. I don't want to press Q every 15 seconds.

• 23:42Speaker 05

  Driving this train. I'm so sorry, November. So if November had been driving this train, she would have just bought those one of those Amazon's click thingies to.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:55November Kelly?

  Like disabler. Yes.

• 23:58Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, with the Punisher logo. Yeah.

• 24:05November Kelly?

  Just there's a bumper sticker on the rear cab that says, no seat belts, we die like men.

• 24:12November Kelly?

  I had a buddy with a Volvo 240 who uh.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Don't even get me started on arguing about seat belts on trains. That's been a top. Pornobusting cab.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Fake train?

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Now, let's not get ahead of ourselves. This is interesting discussion wise. Yeah, okay.

• 24:33Justin Roczniak?

  Having signals is sort of a prerequisite for most of the more advanced safety systems that again, most railroads, especially if you're building them new with infinite social democracy money, you probably should have.

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. And to add, signals not only tell you there's another train ahead of you and the speed you should be going. They also tell you if the rail is broken ahead of you because of the track communication goes through the track. An important part.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  I mean, you might, you might, for a long system railway like that, you might have something that's treadles rather than track circuits, which doesn't necessarily detect it. But yeah, one of the upshots of tracks of electric track circuits, is that, yeah, if you get a rail break, there's a likelihood that you, that that will be noticed by the signaling system and all the signals will go red. Yeah, for sure.

• 25:22Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 25:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 25:23November Kelly?

  Yeah. Plus you save a lot of time and energy in like railway children type situations where somebody has to sort of like run down embankment.

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Etticoats. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 25:34Justin Roczniak?

  So this was the, the, the, the interoceanico was, um, you know, a substantial railway rehab, which occurred in the year of our Lord, 2022, 23, I forget.

• 25:47November Kelly?

  Back, back when I was in my early 30s, you know.

• 25:53Justin Roczniak?

  Which had no signaling system and still does not to this day, I believe. Oh, good.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 26:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So it's all, it's all dark territory. It, yeah, it's run on train orders and I would assume they have radio. I don't know. This is to the best of my knowledge.

• 26:10November Kelly?

  It's, it's like you, everybody can spring for like a box of Baofengs in a charger at this point, like. Fine.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, they do have radio across the system.

• 26:20Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, well, that is a good start.

• 26:23Speaker 04

  It is a start.

• 26:23November Kelly?

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  That immediately begs the question, why don't they just put cheap ass like trade identifier tech in the trains? You could just get a box that hooks over the lamp hook that can do signaling like in about 24 hours, you can have a signaling system. Why do that? Good Mexican government, hold me back again. Oh, okay.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  We don't fucking do that here. Welcome to America.

• 26:43November Kelly?

  Trying to find the lamp hook on an HST.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  They have one. You just open the little flap at the front. You take its pants off. It has a little square thing you take off of its fiberglass nose and you can see it's a dongle dongle behind it. And yeah, briefly, this is a little fun thing. Briefly, I was advising the Mexican government after the podcast. I think possibly off the book rather than the podcast, but I was doing that briefly, which was fun. So I have a family again, just to remind you.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  I'm the only one without a family.

• 27:15November Kelly?

  In between recording that episode, recording this episode, I did get divorced. So arguably, I am more assassinateable now. But I don't know.

• 27:25Justin Roczniak?

  Ross is a single malt. Kill Ross first.

• 27:32November Kelly?

  So. I mean, arguably like Rosie, Rosie is like the officer, right? So like you want to assassinate him first and that way the whole kind of like organization falls into disarray.

• 27:43Speaker 05

  Just until the trans woman.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  I stealth added a slide to show what crossing protection they still have down there.

• 27:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Oh, crap. I hope that's in here because I.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Man with gun.

• 27:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, because I'm doing this from a downloaded PowerPoint. But anyway, they have, they have, they have, what you would call it, or railroads have crossing protection, right? You have the gate that comes down, the bell rings.

• 28:09November Kelly?

  And you drive around it like an asshole, right? Automate any of this. You barely even need electricity. You can have a gate that a guy raises and lowers by hand and he lives next to the thing. And his job is to raise and lower the thing.

• 28:22Speaker 05

  Which seems to be starter procedure here, like guys standing around.

• 28:26Justin Roczniak?

  Sort of a, sort of a different philosophy here, right? Because I assume Scooter, you must have added this on the next slide, right?

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 28:33Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, hold on. Let me go back over here. They just have guys stand around with machine guns.

• 28:39November Kelly?

  Oh, boy. Yeah, I mean, I like doing it. I'm American.

• 28:44November Kelly?

  Yeah, if ever you doubted that Mexico was part of North America.

• 28:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, they have Train Ice, who sits there and guards the crossing.

• 28:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  Appropriately named.

• 28:56November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Speaker 05

  That's honestly kind of like, the reason we are not getting invaded right now is that, and it was redirected, is that we were very forthcoming with aid towards stopping the caravans and shit. And part of it was, we just built a bunch of trains in the middle of, put guys with guns. And, well, if they happen to see a caravan coming, well, that's, that's kind of the thing that made people angry about these projects to begin with. They seem to be, to have a dual purpose and they seem to be working with, in that dual purpose to, well, there's a reason you can see a Maduro mock shot

• 29:40Speaker 05

  with him smiling in your interior for some reason and not a Claudia Schimmel one. But yeah, again, this means as they did, they do have a, I don't know, a guy standing around based infrastructure.

• 29:52November Kelly?

  Hmm. It's also like, if you, if you look at the map again, it traverses Southern Mexico. It's a border. It's also an internal border, like.

• 30:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:03Justin Roczniak?

  I, I, I do, this has a dual purpose of like, you know, okay, it's infrastructure, but it's also an excuse.

• 30:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, Mexico build the wall. We are the wall.

• 30:12Justin Roczniak?

  I got, have guys standing around with machine guns everywhere.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Jobs program.

• 30:17November Kelly?

  Yeah, Job, Jobs program, also a backhander to like whoever supplies the, the like assault rifles, wherever they're buying the kind of like, sort of like.

• 30:27Justin Roczniak?

  Lamar Goddard's corpse, come on down.

• 30:30November Kelly?

  Exactly.

• 30:32Justin Roczniak?

  I think another, another aspect that's interesting here, this railroad, of course, well, it has no signal, so it has no centralized traffic control, which also means, of course, the whole thing is hand throw switches, you know?

• 30:43November Kelly?

  Oh boy.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 30:46Justin Roczniak?

  There's no automatic switches.

• 30:50Justin Roczniak?

  Some people were theorizing this derailment could be because of terrorism. It's like, no, you have all hand throw switches. You could just run any train anywhere just by walking up to a switch and, you know, pulling the handle.

• 31:01November Kelly?

  Also, it also suggests some kind of like Central American solid snake sort of getting past every single cop that's standing around every like railroad crossing.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  And like, that would have been the most boring Metal Gear Solid game ever. Like, what's the purpose here for a terrorist? What are they getting out of it? That's something I cannot understand. Both sides of the Mexican political divide are just failing at trying to blame this on either misreading y'all's work, to be quite honest. They're not very, uh, they're not very good at independent research. Or I've seen some more aligned conspiracy theories that are wild. I've seen people think this is like a Spanish operation.

• 31:53Speaker 05

  I've seen people, yeah, I've seen people accuse this was Spain's doing for some reason. I think they got mad at us for, uh, because AMLO told them that the conquista was a bad thing. Because, which was kind of like the only woke thing in his presidency.

• 32:13Speaker 05

  The colonial, I'm looking, uh, but I saw people blame, uh, the, the wife of murder politician, Carlos Manso, which would be kind of like saying that, like blaming Erica cared for this.

• 32:25November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 32:28November Kelly?

  I, I mean, I was trying to like, I was trying to explain this sort of briefly the other day. And I was like, no, you don't understand that like, uh, if you're, uh, if you're on the right wing, what you want to have happened here is that either AMLO or Shinebaum like caused the train to derail by making it have pronouns.

• 32:49Speaker 05

  Yes. Exactly, like, and that's my biggest issue with the conspiracies that the right wing causes. So this was like, first of all, it's inviting, honestly, it's playing with fire. Because if you start saying, throwing the word terrorist around, well, doesn't that give credence to Trump's narco terrorist framework?

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Oh, all of the news.

• 33:11Speaker 05

  Scary to me.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  All the news outlets on Twitter are using the word narco terrorist like it's the letter A.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  It's scary, like, again, I'm not a fan, I'm not the biggest Chamberlain fan, she's not the biggest fan of me. But I, but I would don't want to get, see her kidnapped, like, we don't need, we, we, we don't need like seven Salvadori enders a year, like this, it's not tenable. And so, yeah, I don't think throwing the word narco terrorist around is a thing that we should be doing at all. And again, for this to be something that the right wing would even consider doing, well, they would need to see what hack and lives at something worth anything, which they don't, they really don't care about, you know, brown people.

• 33:59Speaker 04

  Well, do you, do you know, because I, all the news I was looking is just blaming everybody and everything. Apparently, Faramix is having quite a bit of torch cutting incidents and people pulling rails. Is that, is that political or is that just people?

• 34:19Speaker 05

  I don't think it's political, I think it's people trying to rob trains. And, and that's also if the freight train was the one that derailed, okay, maybe there's something there. But who the hell is robbing a passenger train? Is this the old west or they?

• 34:35November Kelly?

  It's also sort of like deriving from this that Scotland has a serious problem with narco terrorism. And John Swinney should get like black bagged because someone's stealing the overhead electric, like the overhead wire.

• 34:48Speaker 05

  And again, if I was a robber, I would not go to the, the, the train tracks are, consist mainly of guys with guns. I'd go to, you know, the private one that's cost cutting.

• 34:58November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  And especially where it is too, but we'll get to that. Like, good fucking luck getting out there to do something. Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  If you wanted to do a terrorism on a train, and I have to point this out when it comes to like Eurostar bullshit security, you can just stand on a hill and shoot the train from a distance. You don't need to do all this elaborate bullshit.

• 35:16Justin Roczniak?

  You have a family.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Long beat. Yeah, there's, there's, there's, there might be some redacted. You can just do that. You know, you don't need to go do all the elaborate shit. You can just do that.

• 35:26Justin Roczniak?

  Again, hand throw switches. This is how some dumb teenagers, uh, flung a New Jersey Transit commuter train into a pasta factory in the eighties.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  Well, there's also the

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Soft landing.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  Those idiots in the Midwest that threw the switch and ran the train into the grain silo. Like, it's just

• 35:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  You can just do that.

• 35:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. This whole railroad

• 35:49Speaker 03

  You cannot do that in the UK. There are not many places where you can successfully do that. We have basically controlled all of it centrally.

• 35:57Speaker 05

  Also, like the last podcast, uh, November said something about, you should not run this train to Chiapas because even with the most bombed tracks, I would like to say, Capitan Marcos had possible deniability because like they were on camera at the time of the derailment.

• 36:14November Kelly?

  I was on Facebook Live.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is where having like a, a, a full on, uh, conference with talks and stuff. They do that thing every, every new years because it's the, the anniversary of their, uh, rising. So, yeah, this was not, I don't see anything that could be, uh, sabotaged from really anything political. I'm not even, I don't even think this was a false flag from Morena. Like there's just, this seems to be just a purely, uh, well, thing that could be explained.

• 36:42November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, there won't be.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:43November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 05

  It doesn't seem to be political at all.

• 36:46November Kelly?

  Yeah. Which, which is great because it confounds everyone. Like, it's really inconvenient for all sides.

• 36:54Speaker 05

  Oh, but by the way, it, speaking of, of, uh, dead names and stuff, it is Capitan Marcos now. Just so he got demoted.

• 37:02November Kelly?

  They demoted my fucking hell.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, because he's not indigenous. The, the leadership is all indigenous now. He's now the committee manager.

• 37:12Justin Roczniak?

  Rears its ugly head again.

• 37:14Speaker 05

  He got VI.

• 37:16November Kelly?

  His appetit just went woke.

• 37:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  The biggest surprise of the century.

• 37:23Justin Roczniak?

  All right. I'm not going to dwell on this too much. The purpose of the railroad, it seemed like most logically was, okay, we're going to develop a bunch of industrial parks through the center of the isthmus again, so they could reach both oceans. That seemed most logical. What we found out over the past couple of years is, oh, my God, they bought their own bullshit.

• 37:45Justin Roczniak?

  They're actually trying it. They bought a bunch of brand, well, not brand new, recently refurbished auto racks for moving cars from one end of the railroad to the other. They bought a bunch of well cars. They're all marked not for interchange. I have no idea how I think this is going to work. It's They're just chucking, they're just doing stuff. They've got a railway, they're just doing stuff, and I can respect that.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  The whole reason this could work is because you have an access to the north. You could take trains and go north, then they're not doing it.

• 38:17Justin Roczniak?

  It's like, no, no, no, we're actually going to try this, compete with the Panama Canal bullshit. Oh, wow. You're back.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  And back to, and back to

• 38:29November Kelly?

  I gotta say, though, this is a beautiful image of the guy standing around economy. I, I, I think we should aspire to like my, my country is not a guy standing around economy, and I think we'd be better off economically if we were, you know, we've got an unemployment crisis. If we could find niches to pay guys to stand around, we would be so much better off. And you know what that is? That's Keynesianism.

• 38:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, we were, we, we thought we were going to have a nearshoring economy, but then the tariffs came, so guys standing around.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  Stretch those hamstrings.

• 39:04Justin Roczniak?

  Fun fact about these, does anyone remember the FEMA white box cars with shackles?

• 39:10November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:10Justin Roczniak?

  Conspiracy from

• 39:11November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but like they were, they were going to put all of the like unvaxxed patriots in these and then ship them around to jade helm them.

• 39:19Justin Roczniak?

  This, this was way back in like Hurricane Katrina or so. And someone pointed out the white box cars with shackles and there were these big white Gunderson Auto Max, uh, auto rack cars. These are those same cars. They just painted them brown. And it's a nice color. You know what? Actually, it is a nice color. Yeah, actually, the brown is very nice.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  Reluctantly, I do like more in a coloring scheme.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  And yeah, in 2017, I was working at Amtrak Beach Grove, which is the facility where the incinerators for the FEMA camps were. How do I know this? A guy jumped the fence and ran straight for the powerhouse to try and get pictures of the incinerators that were used in 2006.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Hey, you gotta respect the guy who's with with a commitment to the bit, right?

• 40:07November Kelly?

  I mean, that's not a guy you can question his sincerity about that. That guy 100% believes that they were putting like the the unvaccinated patriots in the boxcars. Like.

• 40:18Speaker 05

  Instead, he just found some, uh, weirdly enough, uh, missing soldiers from Vietnam.

• 40:27November Kelly?

  Sort of, sort of running Rambo two and four at the same time. Yeah. Wait, no, two and two and five. Yeah.

• 40:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  Oh, dear.

• 40:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Okay, so this is an important slide just because, uh, we gotta talk about the trains.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  It's not the same fucking train.

• 40:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Gareth, Gareth, Gareth. The problem is, is you're using the word train when you mean the word train.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. What I've discovered is that, um, is that train means route line. Um, when it's when people using lazy chat GPT or like X AI translators are going, no, it's the same train. Look, it says inter oceanico on the side. It's like, no.

• 41:09November Kelly?

  Train to mean railway.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's understandable, but the if they just look at the information rather than just quickly Google translating, they'd they'd be an understanding of that. Um, because people jump straight. Anyway, sorry, this slide is that it's not the same fucking train slide.

• 41:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, exactly. So on on this, uh, on this line, on the train, I was inter oceanico and some of the, I think there's two more lines now which are attached to it. I believe.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's, there's three different divisions and only on line Z is the, um, is the, I don't know, the American train.

• 41:48Justin Roczniak?

  The American stuff, right? Yeah. You got this big, ugly F 59 locomotive.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  And now, and now F 59 P H I's that they, uh, they, uh, took from California and put a new engine block in and said, ah, screw the environment.

• 42:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You got the C dot coaches, Connecticut Department of Transportation, depowered SPVs. I don't know. That's too complex to go into here and the Am fleets, right? These are all designed for the North American Railroad Network, right? Where you have things like hitting cars, hitting freight trains.

• 42:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, the design for a continent in which stuff happens.

• 42:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Generally, you have some pretty rough track by European standards. This is the one we thought would be mostly okay, even if it was operated wrongly.

• 42:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, something we were, we were wrong about, you know, like Meerkat.

• 42:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Oh, kind of.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Kind of. We'll, we'll get there. We'll get there. Cause at the, we'll get on the next slide, but like, things improved as soon as we were done with our podcast.

• 43:00November Kelly?

  This is works sort of, we, we, we are.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  I did have somebody say that a direct result of the podcast was a couple of the, the improvements on the cars. Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  First, I'm calling it a podcast improving the world.

• 43:17November Kelly?

  I'm gonna have a fucking panic attack thinking about a bunch of admirals sitting around and listening to like me talking about jerking off.

• 43:25November Kelly?

  Being like, okay, okay, skip forward a bit, skip forward a bit.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  You better believe they're all going to be listening to this episode and we started off it. And I, you know what? That's fine. That's okay.

• 43:37Speaker 04

  Well, this, that's what you take to the news and go, this was not serious. Look at how it started.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  We might want to be informed, but we're also doing bits on a podcast.

• 43:47November Kelly?

  Right now there is a decent chance that there is somebody wearing like sort of highly polished white shoes, thinking about what made them choose a career in the Navy.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  We have that power. So there's another train that's underneath the big American one.

• 44:05November Kelly?

  Designed for a continent where stuff does not happen, Europe.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  Yes, it is an HST. Roz, go on.

• 44:12Justin Roczniak?

  British Rail Class 43, that's the locomotive and the Mark III coaches behind it, right? It's not big and ugly. It's small and pretty and it's designed for the UK rail network where you don't really have great crossing accidents. You don't crash trains into each other on a regular basis. You have high quality, high speed track. This is the one we were mostly panicking about and frankly still are.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  Yes, we are. Like that's that that fear still exists.

• 44:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  We know what happens when these things, before they go anywhere else, before they, we saw the things that this, this has collided, by the way, in, in operation on the intro, Shanico. It has collided with things at great crossings.

• 44:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, we've seen the front get ripped off one of these by somebody's.

• 44:56Justin Roczniak?

  Entirely.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Pick up truck. It's down in the slides. It's.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  No, but we saw it. We saw it happen in the UK before. That's why we were saying, because I put the picture up from off the nerve it. Where the front was ripped off and the whole train made a horrible mess when it hit a little bloody Mazda on a level crossing. So we know that these things are not good with grade crossings, right?

• 45:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Of which there are many and none of them have protections.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  And even worse with the freight network because they're about a two thirds the size of a freight car.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, these two pictures are misleading. If you line these two up on the same track next to each other, as you can do quite easily on, there are pictures with it happening. It looks like someone's fucked up the perspective because the HST is just tiny compared to the HST doesn't even come up to the hood of the front of the F59. Like it's lower than that. It's like basically up to like the handrail level. Like this thing is tiny. Note both those though, the track looks pretty good. This will be important later.

• 45:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  Flashback to slide 29 of the previous podcast where there's the SD60s say next to

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  HST and it looks like somebody parked their Ford Ranger next to a semi.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  They looks like someone's parked in a double O like, like the wrong scale of double O and and OO trains next to each other in model form. It just looks odd.

• 46:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And the, uh, the, the, the, the other thing here to note, uh, both of these train sets here, uh, or everything in both these trains here is pretty damn old.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  So, so with that, and it's a fair complaint is that both these trains come from the seventies at minimum.

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  And you have the right to be mad that you were told they were brand new and they were not.

• 46:48Justin Roczniak?

  They were 55 years old.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. You do not have the right to be mad that they were rebuilt and they were told new. You can rebuild a train. It can be made new.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  They can.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  The fact that 50 years old means bad is not correct.

• 47:07November Kelly?

  It's also, it was, it was possible to have bought a brand new train that would have been as bad an idea as this.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 47:16Justin Roczniak?

  Cash. It would, uh,

• 47:18Speaker 04

  Siemens.

• 47:19Justin Roczniak?

  The big thing here, the big thing here is why are they buying these very old trains? Um, it's because the Navy thought they could go to the train dealer and buy a train. Uh, it doesn't, it doesn't work like that.

• 47:31November Kelly?

  Yeah. It turns out it's like there are three companies and you have to put in like an order sort of several years in advance, which doesn't really work when your president is like, do it in three months.

• 47:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  And they scoured the surface of the planet looking for any trains and these were the ones that they could find. It's worth saying the HST, it's, it's true. I mean, you know, Skewer, you know, the, the US kit, but it's true for the HST. Like, yes, there are lots of features of the train that are inescapably seventies or indeed sixties in some cases. But like a lot of the mechanicals are, you know, of, of 2000s era vintage, actually. Are re-engined by MTU. There's lots, you know, they've got LED cluster light. There's lots of stuff about these that is not from the seventies. There are lots of features in them that's decent. The interiors are not bad, although they did rip out a lot of the interiors for the, um, when they brought them over. So, you know, yeah, lots of things that are.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  If you look at the interiors, it looks like something that came out of the Siemens factory. They did new paint. They did new seats.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  They did. They did a complete refresh. And then honestly, with the way that the modern manufacturing and international best practices is, is the seats are better, the, the cushions are better, the interior experience of, of both train sets. You hear that? I'm defending the HSTs.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  The interior is better than what you could buy on the modern system nowadays. Like, I was, I was privy to an article where the Amtrak, believe, I believe it was Roger Harris said live that you cannot buy a seat that reclines anymore. No one will build it.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  You have to buy those ones with the sliding.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  About society.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  So like, yes, they're old, but like, they were made nice. So.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. However.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  How, uh.

• 49:25Justin Roczniak?

  So, you know, essentially what wound up happening is, uh, the, the Navy bought every used passenger car in the United States and then filled up the rest of their roster with the HSTs, right? This was enough to run some pretty minimal passenger service.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  One a day.

• 49:42Justin Roczniak?

  Is about all this railroad can handle because they built it so cheap.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  Well, I see there's like a demand for more than that. How many people are chomping at the bit to go from Sarina Cruz to like the one to pick? It can't be that many people.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  Apparently, apparently.

• 49:58Speaker 05

  Apparently it was a lot.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Apparently it was 241 a train. Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true.

• 50:05November Kelly?

  Much as it's one of those build it and they will come situations turns out people are keen on getting a train.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, you know, this is again, this is the one we were panicking about down here. Uh, this is the one we really thought was going to cause a nasty accident.

• 50:20November Kelly?

  And, and instead our problem child has to date, only had the front ripped off a couple of times. And then our nice, reliable, American, uh, like, uh, fucking John Wayne locomotive.

• 50:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 50:34November Kelly?

  Did this.

• 50:35Speaker 04

  Well, it, hold on, hold on, the equipment did not do this.

• 50:40November Kelly?

  Yeah. Don't kill people. This happened to it.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  This happened to it.

• 50:46Justin Roczniak?

  Correct. What's happened? The eight AM train out of Selena Cruz gets to the loops outside of, uh, the Zonda, right? Something happens, train flies off the cliff, plunges down into the ravine.

• 51:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's struck by like flying pronouns or like, uh, Guatemalan solid snake blows up the track or we know not what. Spanish solid snake. Excuse me, yeah, Spanish solid snake, uh, avowed socialist weirdly, but like very kind of like, uh, chauvinist about, uh, about Latin America blows up the track and, and then it just, uh, dumps down the side of a hill.

• 51:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And so, you know, anyway, the train, the train leaves the track somehow at a very bad spot, somewhere back here, there's a locomotive that's still on the track mostly and one that was entirely on the track down here and it keeps going. There's another passenger car down here. Um, and we didn't quite know what was going on, but we were able to say, ah, we predicted it. Oh, wait, now those people dead. We can't say ha.

• 51:53November Kelly?

  Um, yeah, we don't, it doesn't, it doesn't feel good to say, I told you so in this specific line of work, you know, because in particular, because something like this, it's not like we were going sort of retrospectively. It's, we were telling you so that you, so that you could not do it, you know, so this could have been avoided.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  And when we keep saying this, this, as far as we're about to get into.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  What has happened was not particularly of concern.

• 52:22Justin Roczniak?

  This was that.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Equipment maintenance was, uh, equipment capability was, the rush to build the railroad was.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I suppose it's an oversight because we didn't actually, I like to, on rail now, I like to talk about skills. And I suppose we kind of, there was enough for us to talk about that we didn't dwell on. How are you training up your staff? How are you training up your pool of drivers and operators?

• 52:42Speaker 04

  Are you?

• 52:42Speaker 03

  We didn't touch it because there was so much else to talk about.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Are you?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  But you know, yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 04

  Are you building the infrastructure to prevent a general accident from happening?

• 52:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 04

  Is the track up to standard? Have they actually done what they said they would do? We didn't really get into that because it wasn't of concern.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Other things going on. When you were happening, you know?

• 53:03Speaker 05

  And that's the problem with like building something that's clearly meant for freight, but like slapping a passenger train to like, try and honestly fail at calming the social turmoil that it was going to cause. That well, if there was training, I guess it went for the freight part because, ugh.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  Well, we'll get there.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:24Justin Roczniak?

  So a lot of people were trying to figure out, okay, what, what, what happened here? I think a lot of people who listened to our earlier podcasts immediately gravitated towards this, right?

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 53:34Justin Roczniak?

  Which is the AM Fleet car, um, where the airbag was completely compressed. So the suspension wasn't really working, um, as well as, you know, all this equipment was painted when it really shouldn't have been. Um, and you know, there's a whole bunch of problems here.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  It's like we, we said, I think that it, it looked really good, but it was going to sort of like fling AMLO out of the door down a mountainside.

• 53:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:58Speaker 03

  Not exactly what happened.

• 53:59Justin Roczniak?

  Which, well, you may notice that the AM Fleet car is back here and it's the one that's still on the track.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. So they jumped all over the, the general mechanical that we pointed out, which.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Was almost immediately fixed by the time the train was running regularly. They hacked off the generator, they did heavy mechanical on the truck frames, all the stuff that was, get the train out for AMLO was taken care of and they, they were pulling in new wheel sets. The SPVs arrived, um, which are the, the general coaches. And they completely rebuilt the interiors, put new wheels on them, did, uh, did quite a bit of air brake work. I only know this from the fact that you can watch all the videos and see new wheels. The generator's been cut off, uh,

• 54:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  No flat spots, the airbags are inflated, all this stuff that like you could, you can visually see. Whether insider information or not, you can watch it happen in real time.

• 55:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. Yeah. You can go and watch, uh, the Simply Railway video or something.

• 55:15Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:16November Kelly?

  You're, you're trying to fix all this stuff.

• 55:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 55:19November Kelly?

  You're trying to fix all this stuff when you, when you actually have time to do it and you're like this fuck ass podcast is making fun of me.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. So this, this problem was fixed.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. One thing people have jumped on, on this is that, well, they didn't replace the airbags or the airbags weren't working properly. The airbags aren't the main suspension system. Now, if you, if you screw up the center of gravity on the car, all of a sudden they're the only suspension system, but that was fixed. They removed the generator and the AM Fleet wasn't involved. The SPVs have the same system where they rely on the spring system first. And then the secondary air leveller, which is the airbags. So in theory, unless there was a horrific mechanical failure, that is not a factor to look at.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  And we'll get into analysis here in a little bit of why we can almost prove that.

• 56:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Here's some pictures of the derailment.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  So, so this is the curve where it turned and Gareth, this is definitely where you can add to it.

• 56:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's not supposed to look like this.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, I've got a section later where I'll get into the details of the, of the specifics of what I think the mechanism of derailment was, but things that you spot, when I was seeing these pictures, Scooter did a really good thread pretty early on. I was looking through the pictures and the first thing that struck me, thinking about what we talked about in the podcast was this track looks pretty good, actually.

• 56:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 03

  It's fresh ballast, it's decent ballast, the track materials are fine, lots of people are moaning about timber sleepers, shut the fuck up, like timber sleepers are fine.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Those are all brand new.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  They're all good condition. We'll get to later, there's a specific complaints and conspiracy theories, but look at the, the pictures up show, right now show decent track that has been super elevated, which means that someone has put some thought into the alignment, which been, so it has been aligned, there has been some engineering gone into this. Like, it looks decent, like, the only thing that I'd say is, is not great is there's not a huge amount of lateral ballast to, to keep the track in line, but there are no obvious, you know, despite there being several very heavy trains walloping around on it, there are no obvious geometric defects in the track here. So, you know, we'll get later to my predictions, but my instinct here was, well, this, this does not look like a track issue, the track looks pretty solid through here.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  And what, what needs to be mentioned is that is not the lead locomotive on the right-hand side, there was an F-59 PHI ahead of that, that was pulling through, and then this was the second locomotive that rolled, and then we'll get into it, but there was a car in the ravine and then cars over the side.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  This image is misleading because if you look on both images, there's a

• 58:12Speaker 04

  A like a covering that almost looks like a rock fence covering. And so that early, early, early guesses, including my own, was a boulder came down and hit this, especially with how bad that locomotive is.

• 58:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was also thinking big boulder at first, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  A rock fence would be kind of smart to have in this kind of territory. But once you look at other pictures zoomed out, that's more of like a grassy hill.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's probably smaller material. It's probably a geotechnical rather than big boulder fall. It's more of a we're protecting this slope to keep it stable for the civil engineering. Again, worth commenting, some engineering has happened here. They've gone, this slope requires some remediation, some work has done. So it's indicative that since we were talking about, since we did the podcast, there has clearly been ongoing civil engineering to bring elements of this line, bits of it, what total percentage, I don't know, but sections of this line have clearly had attention to bring it up to a standard, which, you know, this is as good as a lot of GB rail. Looking at this, looking at these, these pictures, like there's plenty of railway that looks worse than this in the UK right now, right?

• 59:21Speaker 04

  Yep. So, so that's, that's the, the front and the rear of the derailment. Can we go to the next slide? So that this is the rear half of the train.

• 59:31Justin Roczniak?

  Jesus, wept.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  That when, that was pulled up and over from the track.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  What a fucking coupler.

• 59:38Speaker 04

  H couplers, tight lock couplers. Saved so many lives in this accident.

• 59:45Speaker 03

  I, I, we talked about it in many previous episodes, but keeping couplers connected and therefore keeping the train in line is a major factor in how many lives are saved in a crash like this.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  They took these cars, put them back on the rail and brought them home today. They're in that kind of condition. That coupler kept these things from becoming battering rams into each other.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Unbelievable how much engineering saved this train.

• 1:00:12November Kelly?

  And, and we were, we were saying there were what, like 240 something people on, on like?

• 1:00:17Justin Roczniak?

  241, I believe.

• 1:00:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  And again, I wanted to bring this picture into it because we were talking about the equipment. You look at the car on the left, those are brand new wheels. That is full thickness, brand new wheels sitting there. Why the MT bag is up under the truck frame? I will never know. That's not a great place for that. No. Um, I mean, these cars are, were in immaculate condition from what we can tell from all the pictures we've got in the video that we've seen before. Um, new springs, new, new, new brake shoes on everything like they, they were doing their job to maintain this as far as we know. Yeah. So I, I wanted to show that and you can see the rock pilot went through.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  It's like really, really like thin limestone, almost maybe not limestone, but like it's where it shatters really easily. It's like scree or whatever. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So like it, there was just no resistance when this thing hit that, which might've been for the best in this accident. Uh, I, I just want to point stuff like that out because it's, it, it changed things for the better. Yep. And, and also discredits the, the engineering theory or the, not the engineering theory, but the boulder theory. You know, or, or the. Landslide theory.

• 1:01:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The cars were so substandard and that's the reason why it happened.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:01:43Justin Roczniak?

  I mean.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  And it's not, there's nothing showing that.

• 1:01:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The, the, this is the standard, the standard hasn't changed in North America in, you know, 40 years, but this is what it is.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, anybody have anything else? Can we go the next slide? Yeah, let's pop to the next one, which is slightly less pretty in a variety of ways.

• 1:02:03Justin Roczniak?

  So this is.

• 1:02:04Speaker 03

  I have to use the restroom.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  You picked a good one to leave on, buddy. Hmm.

• 1:02:10Speaker 04

  Um. Fuck me. Yes, correct. This is the one that went down the ravine, broke the coupler on the car behind it and slid down all the way. Um, and you can see, we'll get to it, but that front coupler's twisted as if. Yeah. It rolled, it was forced to roll. Um, this car. Stayed in one piece, but a lot of the internal equipment seating, mainly seating, but some of the luggage racks are detached themselves and threw themselves from the

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  It's one of the things I can say while Roz isn't here is that I hate, no, is that We do call him Stinky Roz.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  One thing I can say while Roz isn't here is that is when like there's a balance of how you manage energy in a derailment. And in some instances, you don't want the car to be designed to be completely rock solid. You actually want it to disintegrate and crumple in certain ways. In others, you benefit from it absolutely staying intact and not folding over. The Mark III that we looked at earlier is pretty good in collision energy management and also in rollover strength, relatively speaking. It's not built like a tank, but you know, under its own mass, it can, it can sustain from 125 miles an hour. It's been in crashes where it's done remarkably well. This is an example of kind of like a mixture of the two in that the fact that this stayed physically intact in

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  the way that it has, like a tank, meant that that will have protected a lot of lives. It will have also meant that the energy within that vehicle will have been very high and not well dissipated. So there will have been a lot of bodies being flung around and chairs and other loose fittings being flung around that you might not have had in a situation where energy was managed. However, it fell off a fucking cliff.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Speaker 03

  So actually, it's staying in a physical, it not deforming is probably erring on the side that you want in this situation from an energy management perspective.

• 1:04:13Speaker 04

  If this was a modern venture coach, it would have either done the exact same thing or disintegrated, depending on how it hit.

• 1:04:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was going to say it would have pancaked, quite possibly just pancake flat.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. With that, you'd have just as many chairs flung, just as many luggage racks ripped off.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  But zero survival space.

• 1:04:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it would be, I don't want to say it would be worse, but it would be worse. And that, that's the one takeaway from this is like, I've seen people in it, not luckily not in the news, but in comments being like, oh, it fell apart on the inside. And it's like, it probably experienced 50 plus Gs in there. The interiors of these cars were built to airline standard. They were using the same track that airlines use bolted into the frame. The seats were built by an airline manufacturer. Like if a plane and planes don't crash sideways normally, neither do trains.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  So like, it's really hard to compare it to another crash, other than ones we'll talk about towards the end.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, like you do design for rollover strength, but it is not, you don't design for rollover strength.

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  Going down a cliff.

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  The level of G-forces that you're.

• 1:05:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, you generally don't expect the train to be flung off a cliff, sort of Looney Tunes style.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  So.

• 1:05:32Justin Roczniak?

  Not much you can do to design for that.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  There's a lot of pictures of this thing. I just wanted to bring this one up to show how it it slid on one side. It never rolled. So like, it wasn't a blender in there, thank God. But it went down the hill in in one piece. And it looks like it broke the trucks off at the very bottom.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  So which again, it's good because as soon as those break free, they become missed, they become projectiles. So.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  Well, they've only broken free at the end of its journey is also.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  The center pin on these did its job, just like the couplers. And it saved a lot.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  I'm almost, I feel like I'm defending these and I have a reason to, but like.

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  Well, no, you know, you're just undermining some of the bullshit that was getting thrown around suggesting that a problem is not.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  If this, if this was an aluminum car, if this was the, some of the shit they could have gotten that went on the market afterwards. This was an aluminum car. This would be an aluminum can, it'd be just crushed.

• 1:06:36Justin Roczniak?

  Just completely shredded, just like.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  The HST, which is steel bodied, would would have not performed, would absolutely not have performed this well in this instance. But there are other issues with it, we'll get to if there was an HST involved in this, what the other consequences could have been.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll, we'll get our five minutes, but just.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:52Speaker 04

  Trying to show what the derailment was without showing the graphics of it. Because.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 04

  Good God, nobody has any chill with their pictures down there. It may be in 480p, but they were posting pictures of bodies in high rails, bodies coming out of the cars.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  So I instantly blocked anyone who did that. But the number of people sending me pictures of, yeah. You know, victims, I'm going to put it that way. I'm trying to think of a sensitive way because you have to.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Fair.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  These are victims. Welcome to Mexican media. Yeah.

• 1:07:25Speaker 05

  We are just obsessed with gore. It's just, this was tame for our senders that are used to like narco violence. It's, uh, it hasn't trained us, uh, in a, in a good way to, uh, have respect for victims.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, not good.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, the next picture is a really good overview. There's, I think the picture that we've opened with is the best overview, but this is a useful overview to just kind of show you what ended up where.

• 1:07:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  I think.

• 1:07:53Speaker 04

  Probably should have started with this, but I will.

• 1:07:57Justin Roczniak?

  This is from an official government presentation, uh, by, uh, Claudia herself. Yeah. The first locomotive made it through the curve. Second locomotive turned over, uh, first car down the ravine. Second car mostly down the ravine. Third car, a little bit down the ravine. Uh, and then back here, we have the AM fleet stayed on the track.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  It's, it's worth saying, so the fact that the couplers held intact is absolutely key here because if they hadn't, you'd have had the potential for overriding, you'd have had the potential for, um, the car behind actually barreling into the, the, the middle perhaps of one of the other coaches and crushing it. As we, you know, you can go to car, the, the Stonehaven, you know, the derailment at Carmen, you can see what happens when mark three coaches, by the way, do a similar thing to this, which is where the couplers, which are pathetic on an HST, uh, relatively speaking, all just break with the slightest tickle. And so you get the car scattering and they roll over, they catch on trees

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  and they ride over each other and make an awful mess. Carmen is kind of a very, I haven't put any pictures of it here, but you can all Google it. Um, uh, very similar, um, yeah, a very similar sort of arrangement with, with the, with altitude, you know, with, with an embankment and with the energies involved. And you can see what that, what that looks like, admittedly at much higher speeds actually. But you can see what that looks like where those couplings break. So the coupling's holding together is a really key element of, of, of the lives being saved here. Like that, those couplers will have literally saved dozens, if not hundreds of lives.

• 1:09:38Speaker 04

  Yep. And this picture is really good at showing the track where it derailed as well.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  How clean it is. I mean.

• 1:09:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's it's it's in pretty decent shape. I I There's nothing here that I I would. It doesn't look like it was damaged in any way. Correct. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:09:59Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. 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. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks. You get what you pay for. 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.

• 1:10:41Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  So on the subject of couplers and

• 1:11:06Justin Roczniak?

  Because I didn't want to dwell too much on counterfactuals, but we do have to do the counterfactual. What if an HST was involved in this accident as opposed to the the Bud cars?

• 1:11:17Speaker 03

  So a couple of things here. Lower center of gravity means that it might well have got around the curve more successfully. So it's not necessarily a clean counterfactual. But let's assume that if it did go around the curve and come off in much the same way. The main thing that I think would be a difference is the, okay, the cab, the the The locomotive would have been completely destroyed because the HSTs are just a reminder, the front is just fiberglass upturned with a seat inside. It's just a bath, it's an upturned bath. But the couplers would likely have all have broken under the forces. And so you'd have had the cars being scattered and therefore safety of those inside, the safety space inside, yeah, much less of that.

• 1:12:02November Kelly?

  And potentially you're then chasing what like two or three cars down a ravine rather than one.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that more of them would have ended up down the ravine. They'd have scattered, they'd have potentially over ridden and bumped into each other and bashed each other. And HST bogies have a habit of just immediately becoming five ton projectiles. It would not have been pretty. That's accepting that there's a higher likelihood this train would have got around the curve, given that.

• 1:12:28Justin Roczniak?

  In the event of an overspeed is the answer.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  But if, but if, but say there'd been, yeah, but assuming that the same thing had happened to it, that it comes off in much the same way, it would have been uglier, much uglier. There we go. We've done our counterfactual. There we are.

• 1:12:41Justin Roczniak?

  Actual, this is.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  And I was the one who said it.

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  For all the fricking people over the pond yelling at me, I didn't say any of that.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  To all the HST fans who are suggesting that things would have been better than HST or getting upset by HSTs, you can absolutely.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  Yep. Okay. So we did counterfactuals. Now let's do zero factuals.

• 1:13:14Justin Roczniak?

  Some of the actual conspiracies, right?

• 1:13:17November Kelly?

  Fictionals, if you will.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, there is a word for that. Thank you, Noah. Yeah.

• 1:13:21November Kelly?

  Counterfictionals.

• 1:13:24Justin Roczniak?

  So I, I, these are two particular ones.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Neoliberal lover. Fuck.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  What a fucking handle. Okay.

• 1:13:33Justin Roczniak?

  I believe this is, this is a video of the train kicking up some dust from some of the ballast, which is normal.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  Kicking up some dust.

• 1:13:41November Kelly?

  Why everything on a railway is kind of brown and gray is because there's a lot of dirt and grime.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's also dusty. It's a dusty bit. The environment is dusty. Like it's dry. It's dusty.

• 1:13:50November Kelly?

  To keep the dust.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've played Doom three. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:54Justin Roczniak?

  This is, you know, someone planning, you know, okay, you know, already evidence the track had little ballast. This is, this is translated by unfortunately Grok from Spanish.

• 1:14:08Speaker 03

  You know, bras.

• 1:14:10Justin Roczniak?

  The tracks did not have stability, quote, right? It was the state. It was shinebound. It was the, I don't know what the four T is.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  I don't know, but I've had, I've had those, that number and letter sent to me a lot in the last.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  Four T means Cuarta Transformación, fourth transformation. It's supposed to be like the, the current stage of development that we are thanks to Unlo. The first one is the, you know, it's kind of like divide subdividing Mexican history in, in stages like the, the independence, the revolution, the.

• 1:14:40Speaker 03

  Oh, it's like French. Yeah.

• 1:14:42November Kelly?

  French publics. Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  Right. And so, and now every, the, uh, Morena's brand is the word transformation, right? Like they, they painted outside buildings. They call everything transformation. It's, yeah, it's supposed to be a break with neoliberalism, hence the angry eye with globe emojis.

• 1:15:02Justin Roczniak?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 05

  I, I for one would like more breaks with neoliberalism.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  Those are usually good.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can recommend those.

• 1:15:12Justin Roczniak?

  So the video on the left as well, that's the one where everybody has their gotcha. Because there's some old ties from the rebuild kicked over onto the embankment. Oh, right. Oh, wait, over here.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I was getting sent pictures of these old bearers that were chucked over long, like old bears. And I'm like, those are, there's no, I don't like, I don't know what those are. There is nothing tying those to the incident. Excuse the pun. Like this, like, I don't know what they are. They're probably from 1907.

• 1:15:43Speaker 04

  It's standard US practice. We do it all the time. There's a pile out front of my house from the railway. Like.

• 1:15:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes, you know, if it's railroad land, you just, hey, you just chuck it to the side. Don't worry about it, you know?

• 1:15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, there is so much rail dumped like that on GB, on the GB network. Like, it's a problem. We like, and it's sleepers. Generally, we're better with sleepers, actually, because they're kind of easier to handle. But, but yeah, like, that's just a thing you do, particularly with timbers, because they're really light. You just flick them over the side and that's fine. Like, it's not a problem. Like, that's not the fact they're dumped over the side and look crap. It's probably because they were crap. So they were dumped over the side.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, they probably put good ones in, which was the whole fucking point.

• 1:16:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, and, and you know, these, these are, you know, these are also, of course, biodegradable after about 1,000 years because of the grease.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  Oh, dear. Yeah. So then the other thing was, was there were two fact, or two or three factors in this other video that was getting sent around a lot. It's on the other side. There was like a moving video showing the track, again, by the way, in pretty good nick. Like, yeah, there's some nice concretes. There, there are lots of people. So there are things that people are pointing to. They were pointing to ballast. They're saying, oh, ballast, ballast. I was like, okay, yes, I don't think there's enough ballast on the ends of the sleepers to keep it in position laterally. And also, for those tight curves, there should really be a third guard rail to sort of, or a continuous check rail, rather, to kind of support this. But anyway, fine. Those are nice to have, but it's jointed track, I will assume. And therefore, you don't need to have ballast shoulders. It's fine, as long as it's maintained well. So there's one thing was the ballast. The next

• 1:17:22Speaker 03

  was like, well, they're changing from concrete to timber. It's like, yeah, so there's probably like, 5,000 of those changes in more even than those in GB. That's Yes, that there will always be a change from concrete to timber. As that's just unless you have only one type everywhere, which is never going to be the case. So no, that's not a problem. And the other was saying, look at the cracks and you can see it in the picture there. Look at those cracks in the timber sleepers. They're dreadful. It's like, no, that's what hardwood sleepers look like. It doesn't look like that.

• 1:17:52Speaker 04

  Let me show you the Texas TransCon, like BNSF's eight mile per hour freight corridor. It's worse than this. And they're running.

• 1:18:02Justin Roczniak?

  I was also thinking like the Meridian Speedway or something.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:18:08November Kelly?

  So I mean, to summarize, this is all born of people not knowing what they're looking at. And therefore concluding that because it looks bad to them, that like.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  They love speculation.

• 1:18:21November Kelly?

  You, the guys who actually know about this stuff professionally are lying to them because you have pronouns.

• 1:18:27Speaker 04

  Well, in the second we correct them, they're like, no, you're doing it. And it's like, you asked for.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  I was getting paid narco dollars. They're like, that would be nice. I would love some narco dollars.

• 1:18:38November Kelly?

  Consider this, you might've like gone to school for this and like worked on this and stuff, but I asked Grok, right? And it told me that it was perfectly acceptable to like, uh, like render a version of me with no shirt on. So.

• 1:18:55Speaker 05

  I have heard some complaints by people who live in Oaxaca about like lack of maintenance and like substandard practices. But I mean, we all saw the, the, uh, the past couple of slides. That doesn't seem to be the main, the main cause. Like there, we're, we're all grasping at straws on what the hell happened here. And.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like, and anything like that, it's like those, that stuff might be true, but it's circumstantial. There's nothing with the information we had. There is, this is where we're getting constantly accused of being walking back. It's like, no, we're not walking anything back. It's just that without something that specifically ties those behaviors or those shortcomings to the accident, there is no way. Sorry, to the derailment, I shouldn't call it an accident because it isn't one. Um, there, there is no way of saying, of saying, no, that's it. No, that's it. It's all just, okay, sure, but I, I'm. Not going to say that's what the cause was unless I've got evidence. We'll get to what I my gut feeling was, which ends ended up looking like it was right on what the cause was. We'll get to that in a minute. But like lots of things, what's on the screen here and a bunch of other similar things that were that people were claiming were smoking guns.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  And from both sides, by the way. Yeah. And they weren't, as you say, it was just clutching at things that look out of place according to their gut, you know, their uninformed gut instinct. And it's not that I don't think people who don't know, I don't think that nobody who unless other than experts should speculate on stuff, right? I don't think that. What I do think is when people say that that is it, that they know that's it. It's like saying, well, what about this or what about that? But so few people were asking me, a few did. I had lots. I did have a genuinely plenty of people going, what about this? What do you think about this? Those people, kudos to them. And I gave them as good an answer as I could, but there were so many more people going, no, this is the, this is the smoking gun. It's like, you don't know fucking shit, mate.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  And, and then.

• 1:20:43Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yes. The WTIP airing of grievances episode.

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Need to do it every so often, you know?

• 1:20:52Justin Roczniak?

  There was a small grain of truth that I think got blown into this, which is someone, oh God, I forgot. I forgot where the article was, um, cause it was in Spanish. So obviously I forgot immediately. Someone did a big in-depth, like real old fashioned shoe leather reporting into discrepancies in the ballast accounts. For the inter oceanico, like they paid too much for ballast, so on and so forth. Is there some, is there some fraud here, right?

• 1:21:22Speaker 05

  Specifically tied to, uh, possibly Amlo's sons.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we love, we love, we love a sons based kickback.

• 1:21:31Speaker 05

  Right. And that's, listen, I will die on the hill that I think people who accuse both Claudia and Amlo of corruption are just way of course they are like for all accounts and purposes, upstanding individuals.

• 1:21:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 05

  I, I will not, uh, I will not, uh, risk my reputation for Amlo's sons.

• 1:21:53Speaker 04

  If you're if you're like looking into like, okay, why is this railroad substandard? I would say, where's the second track? Where are the signals?

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Speaker 04

  Where are?

• 1:22:04Speaker 03

  And no one was raising that. It's like, there was, yeah, no one.

• 1:22:07Speaker 04

  Where are the crossing gates?

• 1:22:09Speaker 03

  And it's, it's the training, what's the training for the drivers like? Like, how much training the drivers have? How many drivers are there? What's their fatigue management like? These are questions I'm just not seeing anyone ask me.

• 1:22:18Speaker 05

  Yeah. The, the thing that I saw most, like, people on the ground that I trust, they were not speculating on causes and posting random Facebook videos. Instead, they were saying, where was the response? Like, the, we, we, we were supposed to get developments. There's not enough hospitals. Like, people had to be rushed to, to Inzvenistara and they, and some of the victims were not, were had to, had to be rushed to another hospital further away. Cause like, we, what we were promised, that we were gonna, we were gonna trade the environment in our ancestral lands for development. And, well, so far, we got some couple decentish trains. We don't have the goddamn development.

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's all legitimate complaints. It's legitimate problems to have is, was what, where is the money gone? What happened? Where is the development been? And that's fine, but using the derailment as a jumping off point for that is not okay. If that wasn't the cause. Those, those articles should have been written months, years ago.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  It shouldn't be being brought up now.

• 1:23:29Speaker 05

  The, the complaints by Wakan, like, indigenous communities have been constant throughout this, this past six years. The complaints by conservatives have not. They, and they, it, the lack of hospitals didn't cause this derailment.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  Some of that probably should have been on this side, slide.

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  It's, it's fine. We can sort of skip through the actual slide, having done the content early.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  I did, one thing I did get out of the viral videos is like multiple Instagram, I guess, or maybe TikTok videos were using what appeared to be AI-generated versions of

• 1:24:09Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:24:10Speaker 03

  at lower resolution of me, which was kind of interesting.

• 1:24:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, I saw Mexican Gareth.

• 1:24:17November Kelly?

  He is what you would look like if you were Mexican.

• 1:24:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, which was kind of nice.

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  We might get merged Gareth.

• 1:24:26Speaker 05

  So if you see a purple herd you walking around in Mexico in AIBs, I am extremely sorry.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  That does not sound like something to apologize for. That sounds absolutely ideal. What was also funny is like someone did do the Grok thing on me, but rather than putting me in a bikini, which could have been fun, they were, it's funny, like someone came into one of my pictures and said, get this guy holding some obscene banner. It was like deport the illegals, which is funny because I'm British and I would never say that, even if I was a fascist. But it like got me holding a sign saying deport the illegals. And then it like from one account and then immediately like 30 seconds later came on into one of the Mexican railway crash chats posting that saying this you. It's like, no, obviously it isn't because firstly, it isn't me if you zoom in. And secondly, why would I use that phrase? And why would I say that?

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  Especially in this context.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  It was, but yeah, so it got kind of ugly. So that's some of my screaming and frustration is how ugly it got on social media. Like I did quite a lot of blocking and muting and escaping, but it was still pretty, my mentions were on fire for about a week of like, and I was trying to pick through it because I did want to engage with some of those good faith convers- people who are genuinely like, so what do you think about this? I was wanting to try and find those and engage with those. So yeah, it was scrappy.

• 1:25:40Speaker 04

  There was one account, you got, it was awful for you and I'm sorry you got hit so hard, but you also are the expert. So they all gravitated to you. There, there was this one account that just kept hitting me and hitting me and hitting me with, well, they spent so much money on this and spent so much money on that. I'm like, that has nothing to do with what happened. We won't know. You won't know. Wait until the accident report comes out.

• 1:26:05Speaker 05

  The under the Ranger syndrome has everyone trying to re-litigate every single thing, every single time there's something wrong. Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was being, I had to be the dickhead a couple of times. Be like, look, my friend, I have done nearly 15 years of career and before that I had five. Actually, it wasn't, it wasn't because it was someone who was like, why are you like, you're engaged, like, what do you know? None of that. I was like, I've had, I did a five year degree and I've had a 15 year career after it nearly. Like, I've learned something from that. Some of it has gone in my head. And I'm not, I'm not here to just engage with the random trolls. Anyway, it was a strange experience. Being Mexicanified was one of the lighter elements of it.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  Bit force maxed.

• 1:26:48Speaker 05

  So hopefully.

• 1:26:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. One of the complaints that Ucisoni did that we mentioned was, we need better crossing times. And they were the only ones.

• 1:27:00Speaker 04

  You need crossing signs in general.

• 1:27:04Speaker 05

  Here is how the actual people who live there know what they need. And not like the equivalent of Miami Venezuelans, but for Mexico.

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  Bright line. Yeah, that's it. Bright line, Mexico. Yeah.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  So on the slide, I do want to bring up, I really, really, really hope the accident investigators took plenty of pictures before they did this. Because I.

• 1:27:31November Kelly?

  This is, this is another thing you are allowed to get mad at is to the best of my knowledge, Mexico does not have an independent, like rail accident investigation authority.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  No, it's the first thing I thought was, this is a problem. There is no independent investigator like the R A I B, like the N T S B, like the P A. Like, it's an incredibly important thing to have an independent investigator, because they don't come in looking for blame. They come in looking to understand what happened first and foremost.

• 1:27:57Speaker 05

  Like, I think an independent investigator would not hurt more understanding that much. But. Uh, Amblo hated independent stuff, uh, and independent investigators and pretty much tried to get rid of any independent organism in almost every area. I'm not sure he, I, I, I don't think he got rid of a train one, but he certainly was not gonna implement it because he was systematically removing every single one of those things uh, in most other dependencies that he could get access to. Mind you, it was because a lot of them were even extremely corrupt, but uh, so he had a point, but like, yeah,

• 1:28:39Speaker 05

  it's uh, it's something that like most uh, libs here get really mad about. Uh, and point here for libs, cause like, yeah, we could really use some actual independent information here.

• 1:28:52November Kelly?

  It's like you start by abolishing the senate parliamentarian or the office for me getting bribed and then, then you finish up and you're like, well, wait a second, why does nobody investigate the train crash, you know?

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and it's unlike, I have to say, this is one of the things which is like, um, shine bound specifically, in fact, is, is, is implicated is, is what happened with the line 12 disaster in Mexico City. When actually, in, instead of an independent investigator, what they did was, well, an internal independent investigator, what they did was reach out to, I think, the Norwegian, um, transport crash investigators. And that's been an almighty shit show. Not, I don't, I'm not gonna go into details necessarily of why and where blame lies for that, but that ended up being messy because that is one thing you can do is go to a trusted third party, not the, actually, I have a lot of time for the NTSB, but let's just say, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to go to the US in this situation, but you could go to, I don't know, you could probably go to the RAIB because Britain's, nah, who the fuck is Britain? Get them in.

• 1:29:49Speaker 05

  And like, I think that

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  That could have been a way to do it. You bring in an independent investigator and have a look, but that, that ship has sailed at this point.

• 1:29:57Speaker 05

  Not after, I don't think, the Mexican government is not really happy with, uh, external investigators to the shattering of the 43 disappeared students, uh, and their families. Uh, that was never resolved. And part of that was that Amblo kinda kicked out the independent investigators.

• 1:30:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and I mean, one of the things that really prevented like the development of an independent, you know, regulator here is that every Mexican railroad was a private railroad, which also went into the United States, which meant they were regulated effectively by the United States Federal Railroad Administration. They didn't need a separate regulator in Mexico because, you know, hey, we did all the work. You know, you could see, you could see Feromex locomotives. Like I've seen them like up here in Philly, you know, so.

• 1:30:50Speaker 05

  And that kind of explains why we have such a broken brain. Like we are, we, the, the, the Mexican media consumer immediately jumps to like conspiracies and Facebook videos because we're, we're trained that we're just, we're just never going to get answers for anything.

• 1:31:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, I, I do want to bring up before we move on to the engineering. Somebody has been riding my ass that this car split in half and that's why everyone died. Those are saw cuts. Somebody, they, when they got the big hooks out, which they brought in two Derrick's from, it looks like Feromax, and drug this up the hill. With the hill they were dragging it up on, they almost guaranteed could not have been the whole car in one piece, although I, you could have tried. But they cut, they cut the car up into pieces to make it happen and fit it on flat cars. Those are gas saw cuts. If that was intentionally torn, or not intentionally, oh my

• 1:31:50Speaker 04

  God. If that was torn apart by fall, in the crash, that would just be shreds.

• 1:31:56Speaker 03

  It would not be a nice, clean little scissor cut like that.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  I, so many people are like, look, look, look, look, it's all been up. And it's like, my guy, they had to pull it on up a ravine. They had no choice. Now, I again, hope they got pictures before they did it, but it's all been, it's all been cleaned up. They have pulled everything back into coats of coalcoats. So we'll see.

• 1:32:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, it sucks that we don't get pictures like if there's pictures, we're not gonna see them. And the only pictures that like reach the public are gory messes. There's no appetite for like the actual technical details because I guess Facebook video suffice.

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  There is one guy on Facebook that has been documenting every train that's come down the line. And that's been the wreck train with the locomotive, which they cut the locomotive all apart to get. But they ran it on its frame to get back. And then the wreck train with this right behind it with a couple of semis pulling it. And that was it. That is all the documentation I have seen since.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, like for this, as we'll get into for this incident, the most important photographs you can take are in the cab of the leading locomotive. And my fear and what all the equipment positions were levers, speedometers. Um, I do believe there is a data recorder in this locomotive. What that information says.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  They have said that there was one in one of the locomotives. They have said that they have gotten the equipment to download it. They didn't have it beforehand. Uh, and the problem is, is the lead locomotive immediately after the accident was pulled away for uh, accident recovery. So there's, it wasn't at the site when the investigation started.

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So that's so, so much as, so the most important, critical, bare minimum is to have an understanding of what the equip, what the controls were set to in that vehicle. And I don't think we're gonna get that, you know, I, I, that, and that is a frustration because that's kind of the key thing in this. Um, to understand what happens because, because the reality is most of the investigating that you need to do, as we'll get into, is actually not going to be at the crash site here. We kind of can see what happened. Train, we'll get into it in a minute. Train fell over, fell down an embankment and killed some people. The more important stuff is the investigation that's going to be organizational investigation.

• 1:34:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Understanding the drivers, training, uh, you know, procedures for fatigue management, these sorts of things. And, and again, that's, those are more difficult things to get under the hood of if you're not the investigator or indeed not the person who's finding out what information they need to make sure doesn't get out. Who knows? Um, I suppose at this point, we, we do have to ask a question though, Ross.

• 1:34:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Which is.

• 1:34:50Speaker 04

  Well, what happened?

• 1:34:51Justin Roczniak?

  What happened?

• 1:34:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, what happened?

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  What happened? So I'm very, very.

• 1:34:59November Kelly?

  Go get him, Gareth.

• 1:35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm spooling up. So I'm very, this is, this is.

• 1:35:04Justin Roczniak?

  Spooling up like he's a turbo.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I'm very briefly going to tell all of you how trains fall over. And so even if there, there are lots of other ways that they can happen, but generally they will create one of these six situations I'm going to go through to happen. Also, I want to just briefly say, this is not like a bells and whistles. This is exactly how it all happened, how it went down. I'm going to be describing what a mechanism, a likely mechanism for the derailment based on the information. And this is exactly what I would have said before the official announcement that it was an overspeed, which has now happened, by the way. To what extent that's in the public domain? Screw it. Is that a news article or was it a Shinebaum statement?

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  Lots of, lots of news articles are leaning into it. It has not been officially announced yet.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Really? Okay. Well, I put my flag in the sand. In fact, I put a tweet later of my first flag in the sand. But as soon as I saw Scooter's thread, I was like, that looks like an overspeed. And I'll explain why. So how do trains fall over? Next slide, please.

• 1:36:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Number one way, flange climb derailment. Don't laugh. That is where you have a train that is for various reasons, being forced to ride up the rails and find its way off. And that can happen from like a poorly ground wheel, or it can happen from a very worn rail head, or it can happen from a F C D.

• 1:36:19November Kelly?

  Your tree is a fickle bitch.

• 1:36:20Speaker 03

  Yes, quite. So generally it's to do with varying forms of light, of reduced vertical loading or increased lateral loading. So that's flange climb. Next one.

• 1:36:30November Kelly?

  It's like one day you're in maths class and you're like, when am I going to need to know this angle shit? And it turns out this angle shit being slightly wrong flings you down a mountain.

• 1:36:41Justin Roczniak?

  That's why you should have studied the free body diagram.

• 1:36:47Speaker 03

  So number two is a critical thing that track has to do. I don't know why I'm gesticulating because none of you can see me doing it. Well, none of you lovely listeners at home. I'm looking at you right now. I know. I'm so sorry, Link. So I'm not at my best. So. Very handsome. I love you so much. So track has to do two things. It has to keep the rails up and it has to keep them the right distance apart. And if either of those things are no longer happening, then you have a problem. And with the two rails falling apart, that's called gauge spread. That is a way that trains can derail. That's number two. Number three, I should have like the like 1980s Radio One music going on in the background. Number three, track twist. This is where you are not maintaining your tracks line and level

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  properly and you, a train or a bogey is a very, a truck, should I say, is a very rigid thing and it cannot twist. And so there is a rate at which the wheels can twist. And if your track exceeds that, then you will unload the wheels and enable a derailment. That is track. That's why it's important to not have twisty track. And at number four, number four is the track buckle. This one is obvious. If this happens. Oh dear. That's good for it, right? Yeah, no.

• 1:37:58November Kelly?

  That's like the sort of railway track equivalent of like my front teeth. That's no good.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  This is me too. Yeah. So, um, so we're British and we're matching the stereotype. I bet you're even better than mine though, frankly. Anyway, right. So track buckle, tracks can buckle for all sorts of reasons. We're not going to get into them now because they'll be, we'll do it. We'll do another episode on buckly track. But if it happens, it's bad. Number five.

• 1:38:22November Kelly?

  If you want to see, if you want to see three, four and five in succession, watch the earthquake sequence in The Wind Rises.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. And I'm now Googling. No, I'm not because I've got to describe this slide. So dynamic bollocks is stuff that happens that isn't just a stationary track thing, but actually the track is responding to trains moving over it. So perhaps you have a defect in the rail head that results in the wheel set of the train being excited, as we call it. We all know what that feels like. And the result of that is that you get a response in the track and the train that amplifies and results in the train falling off. And there are lots of different ways this manifests, but this picture kind of a bit shows what that sort of looks like.

• 1:39:03November Kelly?

  Tacoma Narrows Bridging My Train?

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  Kinda, yeah, that kind of vibe. And then in at number six, last but by no means least, is overspeed. Oh, Croydon Tramlink.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  Used to be my commute. And yeah, did this. This is what happens. What this is, this, I mean, funnily enough, the curvature of the track you're looking at now is only marginally tighter than the curve of the crash that we're talking about. And this, this is what happens when a train goes too fast around a curve. It falls right over. So this isn't Flannan's climb derailment. This is the center of gravity goes over and the train just falls over from going too fast. Next slide, please. I predicted this. This is when I, as soon as I saw Scooter's picture here, it was obvious to me that this was, or let's say not obvious, it was, it seemed pretty unlikely that another cause

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  would explain this behavior of the vehicle. The way that the train has spread as it's gone around the curve, the way that the locomotive, in this case, the second locomotive you can see is tipped over, it all matches the behavior of an overspeed. Now, to explain what this, what happens here, very, very briefly, we're going to go into the science again, like we did for the Morpeth episode. So next slide, please. And I'm going to be on it for seconds, mere seconds. When a train goes around a curve, it has an inwards acceleration and an outwards acceleration. The outwards acceleration is related to the speed of the train. The inwards acceleration is related to the amount that you've tipped the train over with cant, with superelevation, or have indeed chose not to. Next slide, please. That gives, I'm barely giving time for Ross to John Madden this shit. Anyway, that gives us the equation

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  of cant, which is E plus D equals 11.82 V squared over R for standard gauge track. And that gives us two things, which is how much cant superelevation we have applied, and then up to equilibrium cant, where you cancel out the inwards and outwards accelerations. The difference between those two is cant deficiency. This is important. Cant deficiency is how much lateral force you choose not to balance. And we, there are lots of reasons to do that, because actually, you don't want to have perfect, perfectly balanced forces, because not all your trains go at full speed. You have trains going at different speeds. And actually, you want a little bit of cant deficiency for improving curving forces. There are reasons we do that. But if you fuck this up.

• 1:41:20November Kelly?

  If you are experiencing the symptoms of Kant's deficiency, apply to your university philosophy department for a refund for your degree.

• 1:41:27Justin Roczniak?

  There's a couple, there's a couple of stations on the northeast corridor where there's a noticeable bank, but also it's a station. So, you know.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, which, which isn't a good idea. You should have separate tracks for the, for the trains that it's not a good idea to have lots of banking for your, through your platforms. It's not the end of the world, but also it's stupid and, and we should build better railways.

• 1:41:48Justin Roczniak?

  I'll tell him, sure.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  Mostly, mostly you well inside safety.

• 1:41:53November Kelly?

  There's only one station on the underground that had a notable bank.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Oh, which is funny actually, because those platforms are also notably banked. So it's meta. That's, that's meta shit you're talking about, right?

• 1:42:04Justin Roczniak?

  And those corridors are too fucking long.

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know you had a run in with bank station fairly recently, Ross. It's, um, yeah. Um, by the way, I should say, I, Ross now knows all of this because I sent him with a copy, with this copy, a fourth edition copy. I'm holding up for no one's benefit other than my friends who are. It's, he, I sent Ross with my only other copy of British Railway Track Fourth Edition, which I think is the sexiest edition of.

• 1:42:31Justin Roczniak?

  It looks very nice. I read it on, I read it on the plane on the way back.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  Oh, that's, I mean, riveting experience. I mean, for me, yes, sure. And probably for you. Actually, Ross, I bet you're a pig in shit. Anyway.

• 1:42:46Speaker 03

  Wrong. Get this wrong. And mostly it's fine, except where you get it really wrong. Next slide, please.

• 1:42:52November Kelly?

  Oh, yes. Yeah. Mm hmm. You can tell when I skip to the slide on my own slide deck slightly faster.

• 1:42:59Speaker 03

  You're getting, but yes, that "ooh" is absolutely appropriate. This is in Spain, and you can see, and there's a reason why I want to draw a brief on these pictures.

• 1:43:07November Kelly?

  This is the thing. That's the conspiracy.

• 1:43:11November Kelly?

  This is where they learned to do it.

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  This is a horrible and frightening series of images, but you can see the vehicle rolling over as it comes to the curve. You can see its behavior as it comes through the curve, but also as it hits that concrete wall on the outside, you can see how the body is being damaged as it's way around, as it's striking things. So these are things that are pertinent.

• 1:43:30November Kelly?

  Your train becomes possessed with the spirit of, I fucking love walls.

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  If you look at picture five and compare it to the locomotive in the, in the upper pictures, it looks suspiciously the same.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's what happens when you have the higher, so you have a higher center of gravity in the locomotives because they've got lots of equipment in them that goes up to the top of the inside of the vehicle. Whereas you have a, but, but also you're balancing that with the fact that they are heavier and they are therefore have less propensity to just fly outward. So there's, there's all these dynamic behaviors going on. I mean, the, the, the different vehicles in a train formation do different things. So if you've got a series of a multiple unit where everything weighs the same, the whole train will kind of do a similar thing. Whereas if you have, in this case, a power car with coaches, or in the case of the, um, the crash we're actually talking about, you have two heavy locomotives and a series of fairly substantially lighter passenger cars, then

• 1:44:28Speaker 03

  they will behave differently. But also the whole thing, as soon as it digs into, hits things or digs into ballast, the whole thing decelerates as well. So the cars further back, the train behaved differently to the ones at the front. Next slide, please. Here is, I believe where the crash happened.

• 1:44:44November Kelly?

  Yeah. You had to do some like OSINT for this, didn't you?

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. And I got it all wrong and then had to do it all again a minute before we recorded.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  This is, this could be wrong. We're, we're really, really guessing here.

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  We don't know exactly where this happened. This seems to be the good fit, but actually this one's useful for us because it's. Possibly of this whole stretch of track, which is extremely curvy, by the way, and we'll get to why this is relevant in a sec. This whole stretch of track is extremely curvy. This feels like this is the tightest radius curve that I could find, and it is so tight. Next slide, please. A reminder, when I talk about the radius of a curve, a curve is a section of a circle, and it has a radius. Don't laugh at my sketchy sketch. Radius. And in this case, the radius of this curve is 81 metres. That is insanely tight. Like, that's so tight.

• 1:45:36November Kelly?

  That's like sending it down a right angle.

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

  It's like Hornby desktop layout tight, genuinely. Like, this is such a tight curve. That is tram level tight. Like, the Sambulance curve was 15 metres, or 25 metres even. Like, that's not that much less than this. It's just, it's very, very tight. So, next slide, please. Oh, yeah, wait a minute. This slide has been inserted randomly.

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  So, curves, go on. Skur, say something about curvy. No, no, no, move on.

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  That's a later problem.

• 1:46:07Speaker 03

  Okay, that's a later problem, everyone. Next slide again. I did some calculations with that curve. So, look, it's my tool that I made in Excel when I was a graduate, and it's still.

• 1:46:15November Kelly?

  This what you were doing, like, pre-recording, while I was talking about jerking off?

• 1:46:20Speaker 03

  Everyone was talking about jerking off while I was simultaneously.

• 1:46:23Speaker 05

  I was making a thumbnail about Noor. I was not talking about jerking off.

• 1:46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, fair call out. So, I was doing some sums to just check, like, what are the behavioural parameters for a train going around here? And it's worth saying that if a train derails around.

• 1:46:39November Kelly?

  I also learned here in the second to last word on the heading, a new slur for a trans woman who wears a lot of, like, different fashion.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  As a track engineer, that's got Roz.

• 1:46:53November Kelly?

  That is, to be clear, the heading, it says clothoid transitions.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  Clothoid, clothoid transitions. So, clothoid transitions. I have to say, as a track engineer, I do, I spend a lot of time doing transitions.

• 1:47:08Speaker 03

  I have to be clear, like, I, yeah.

• 1:47:13Speaker 04

  Transition leg ratio?

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Every curve has two transitions.

• 1:47:17November Kelly?

  Do you have anything to get this foric about?

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  Straight or curve? This is, well, yeah, having lots of trans friends means that I, I, I've become increasingly confused about what my job is, whether it ultimately resulted in me thinking different things. I, I take the damn, right, so, anyway, so this is, this tool allows me to go, how fast could that train go through the curve? And, and the can deficiency is what lets me know the point at which the risk that the train falls over becomes more like one than zero. And so very briefly, the rules for design of trains in the UK means that all trains are designed to cope with about 450 millimeters of can deficiency, which is about 18 degrees of tilting the wrong way ish, essentially.

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  And that doesn't mean that they will derail at that point, but it means that they are designed to basically go around a corner way too fast. And, and that's about two, above two times the speed they should be going around a curve. Again, that's a rule of thumb, not a, a scientific fact, but about two times. And you'll find this because curve derail is generally it's between two and three times the safe speeds that the train has gone before it derails. And so that allows me to give an idea of the minimum speed the trains were going at around this curve to derail. Then, and next slide, please. As you can see, I've represented this in an equally scientific looking way of the scribbly notes that I made and then took a photo of on my phone and then I put into the slide five minutes before we started recording. So assume this curve is, I've just said, I've just rounded it to 80 meters.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  For a range of camps represented here by E, the letter E for elevation. And that's not how you pronounce that. And it gives you a series of design speeds. So yeah, why not? Fuck it. And, and that's so for no can 50 miles an hour, I, we can see there is some banking through the curve. So it's more like the lot, the safe speed through here is 20 miles an hour. Possibly it's less, but you could get.

• 1:49:12November Kelly?

  Oh geez. Okay. So just, just like creep around there, you know?

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  That's the speed. It's so tight. That's the speed you're doing. But you could get a train around there. Probably you could get a train safely around that curve at 40 miles an hour.

• 1:49:24Speaker 05

  Can you put that in numbers just for the army generals listening?

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  So in kilometers an hour, that is, where's my design tool? That is 60 ish kilometers. So 60, you could probably get around that curve at 65 kilometers an hour.

• 1:49:37November Kelly?

  Oh, you hate to be looking at the like, um, sort of track speed signal that says 60, probably.

• 1:49:44Speaker 05

  What if this happened because of this, like of miles per hour? What if this is a classic miles and kilometers discrepancy?

• 1:49:55Speaker 03

  Well, you're totally wrong because if you're going at 60 miles an hour, you're definitely fucking going over the edge. But the point here is that this train could be going anything up to 60 miles an hour and potentially have got round this safely. So what I'm saying is above 40 miles an hour, above 38 miles an hour, the likelihood of derailment goes from probably it'll be okay to this is getting pretty close to a derailment. So the train could have been going 60, 65 miles an hour around that curve. Now, what fascinates me is this is not the first curve that the train went past. Even if you go back a couple of slides to look at the aerial view, you can see that there are several curves it goes through. But actually, if anyone gets the Google Maps up and zooms right out, it went through probably, I mean, 20 or 30 curves by this point, including by this point, a

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  massive hilarious horseshoe curve. So for the driver to get up to this speed, I don't, this is where the question comes in. But we know it's an overspeed, but how this happened? Like how it got to this point? That's the open question. Next slide, please. And so how this will have worked is that the train will have come around the curve. The first locomotive will have managed to pretty much get through because of its higher mass and therefore the behavior of the vehicle such that it didn't go over. The second locomotive did not manage to get through. For whatever reason, that has rolled over. But the lighter vehicles behind have essentially not been as planted on the track and have gone over much further. Actually, what's likely to have happened is that the car that went over

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  the back pulled the second locomotive over and that's why it struck. So if the two locomotives had gone through on their own at this speed, both of them might have got through fine. But what's happened is that the, as the lighter and therefore more sprightly passenger cars have rolled over as it's gone around the curve, the first car has pulled the second locomotive over. That second locomotive has struck the embankment here and smashed up, splitting the coupling with the first locomotive, which has rolled forwards with the brakes being applied. The passenger cars further behind have slowed down as all this stuff has happened. Therefore, they've not tipped over as far. They've also been slowed down longitudinally as they've dug into ballast and dug into things. So that means that that's why they haven't continued to spin off in the way that the first car has.

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  So really, it's the kind of the lighter first car that's rolled over has pulled the locomotive over and pulled the others over. And that's kind of why you get this pretty classical looking overspeed vehicle spread. And this looks pretty similar to, for example, next slide, please.

• 1:52:25Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on.

• 1:52:26Speaker 03

  There is. You're right there, Ross.

• 1:52:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. I just had to change a bunch of stuff around on my end.

• 1:52:32Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. Sorry, sorry. So it looks very similar to Morpeth here, which we did that time. Remember, everyone? Because you can see here, here is the locomotive planted on the track fine. And behind Ross is going to circle up. There's a black thing up there, which is actually not the locomotive. It's the kind of the little wagon that it dragged around with it, if you remember that episode. But yeah, but in front of that is the locomotive in white and it made its way around fine. And then behind it, you can see all the passenger cars that have just spread out and scattered, much like what we've just seen in the, in the crash in Mexico. It sort of drags everything around and like throws it out. Down the cliff. Lighter cars spread and scatter. Also, much like, next slide, please.

• 1:53:14Speaker 03

  Morpeth again, but going in the other direction where you can see the locomotive come through and the wagon. So you can see the locomotive, it actually fell on its side, but didn't get very far. Whereas all the wagons, all the passenger cars fly all over the place and demolish that guy's bungalow, if you remember. That was a fun episode. Go watch it again if you haven't before. And I'm talking to you, Mexican Navy.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  So, and then also painfully like, and there are some similarities to, and this comes into the fact that I don't think that this train would have been going at that full speed the whole time. I, I can't imagine that the engineer, you know, the driver, the engineer would have gone through that many curves and not gone, fuck me, this isn't right. I'm going to slow down. Which is where it comes into a, did they, for whatever reason, accelerate the train at short notice or inadvertently or misjudging which curve they were at, potentially thinking they were reaching a straighter section track?

• 1:54:10Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, I believe this entire section is uphill.

• 1:54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. So did they? And there is a

• 1:54:16Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty strong uphill too. That's why they need all those loops.

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And there is after like a curve after this, like a curve or two after where we reckon the crash happened. And I have to say in similar geography is a straighter section of track. It's not straight, but it's straighter. The curves aren't quite as aggressive.

• 1:54:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  So is this a root knowledge problem? This is where the question, open questions come because okay, knowing that the train was going too fast around the curve answers almost no questions.

• 1:54:42November Kelly?

  Well, this is the thing. Those, those are questions that you need to ask the engineer, the driver, along with other such questions like, how long have you had Spanish citizenship? Do you have pronouns?

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Carlos Manso.

• 1:54:57November Kelly?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:54:59Justin Roczniak?

  So Catalonian, are you Basque, are you?

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

  There's a couple of things to add from the, the news reports as passengers that were interviewed have said that they felt like they were getting thrown around in the curves beforehand.

• 1:55:14Speaker 03

  Which then does indicate that it'd been going faster for longer, but to what extent was that case? You know, was, was the driver just kind of balancing, well, I need to go fast to get up this hill versus? Yeah. So

• 1:55:25Speaker 04

  Well, with those two locomotives too, is you have incredible acceleration. Both are high geared passenger locomotives that can take off. I mean, they're the same type that's used, literally the same that was on Go Transit in Canada for quick start, stop, station operation, transit operation.

• 1:55:46Justin Roczniak?

  Their design have like 12, like double decker cars.

• 1:55:49Speaker 03

  I was gonna say 12 very heavy cars and this had four?

• 1:55:53November Kelly?

  Sort of, sort of the equivalent of like driving a car that's more powerful than you expect. And it just sort of creeps up at you and like sort of under stairs and like throws the ass out. Except the ass is like a passenger car full of people.

• 1:56:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Justin Roczniak?

  Four cars with two locomotives. So. You know.

• 1:56:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's a hell of a power to weight ratio. And again, it's like.

• 1:56:13November Kelly?

  My question, why run it that way?

• 1:56:15Speaker 04

  I.

• 1:56:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:16Speaker 04

  I can only assume that they were trans that they are running one locomotive dead and one locomotive pulling as a backup because of how remote they get. So you've got.

• 1:56:28Speaker 03

  Is it possibly a braking force thing? Maybe? No, okay.

• 1:56:32Speaker 04

  Doubt it.

• 1:56:32Justin Roczniak?

  Head and power?

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  Head and power. Well, head and power is on a separate generator on these locomotives. So it's not like.

• 1:56:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:56:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a very good question, Nova. And, and, and, yeah, I, I, I, I was thinking it's a long distance and they just need the redundancy.

• 1:56:46Speaker 04

  So that's what I think it is because they almost always have two locomotives on here. We've seen an SD 60 and an F 59, uh, two F 59s, the PHI in this locomotive as we've seen. So the only question is, do they run with both online? And if that's, if they run with both online, that easily could explain why this thing went to, okay, kind of trundly to, oh my God, we're off the side of a hill.

• 1:57:13Speaker 03

  So you see through this, like, Scoot, you might have more to add. And I know the next slide, please, we'll also give, um, there's more for you to discuss as well. But like, over speed, yes, that was a thing that it looked obvious. And I was like, that's my gut feeling is what's happened here. But that only opens up lots of questions, which is why all of the conspiratorial bullshit was frustrating because it was muddying the waters of the discussions that should have been happening.

• 1:57:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, you could be having way more informed conspiracy theories.

• 1:57:38Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:57:39November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:39Speaker 05

  The media here has gone crazy and they're not asking those questions. They're accusing shame on of like taking selfies with victims like, and, uh, and saying that that's like parasitic and, uh, they're like being really, like really blood thirsty about this. It's, no one's asking the right questions. Uh, the, the, the victims seem to be suing the government for lack of maintenance, which is interesting. I don't know what, what are your.

• 1:58:08Speaker 03

  It's interesting, but it's not the right path. It's not the right avenue.

• 1:58:11Speaker 05

  I, I.

• 1:58:11Speaker 03

  It's not relevant. I just don't think maintenance is relevant here.

• 1:58:15Speaker 05

  No, looking at the, looking at the images and the slides, like the, it seemed even better than I expected. Like, like, like you all said, the, the, the wood seemed new, the, the metal seemed like in good condition. Like, and like, I don't know, I, I, I don't know what to say. I.

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  There might be maintenance problems elsewhere. In fact, I'm sure there are.

• 1:58:35Justin Roczniak?

  There absolutely are.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  There might be some rolling stock where there are challenges, although I've not seen any, but certainly infrastructure wise, I'm sure there are problems, but I don't think there is a yeah, the HST, exactly. I don't think there is a problem. I don't think those are in any way contributing factors here.

• 1:58:51Speaker 04

  No track damage that is noticeable in any picture. And there's one included that is the rear of the train from the looking about 300 feet back, looking at the rear of the train derailed. None of that tracks injured at all. And in every slide we posted, none of the tracks injured. So for it to be track maintenance, the only thing is, is the, that I could even think of is, is the super elevation, even that's looks okay in the pictures.

• 1:59:20Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, it had to be, I mean, that this is designed for oversized, huge American top heavy rolling stocks. Yeah. Of course, um, you know, they couldn't do much super elevation.

• 1:59:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. There are freight trains that went across this and that those would absolutely roll.

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  And, and, and I've done the calcs for minimum and maximum super elevation and it doesn't make much difference to the speeds involved, to be honest. So they, they could, you know, and this, it doesn't look like a twist fault issue here. Again, there's no obvious geometry defect.

• 1:59:52Speaker 05

  It's really disappointing to read the news that they're suing for maintenance. Like, that's really fresh news.

• 1:59:57Speaker 04

  Well, and the, it's from an attorney that seems predatory.

• 2:00:02Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:00:03Speaker 04

  And that's, that's just unfortunate because they, they, they will have something to sue about, I'm sure. You know what the worst part about all of this was for me? Like personally, not like the 14 people died. That's part of it. But like, I was in the middle of enjoying myself when the news came this on another episode.

• 2:00:23Speaker 04

  I was writing about how we almost nuked the United States. We've almost nuked ourselves multiple times as and literally the news came out, just closed the PowerPoint. It was like, nope, that's, that's not happening for a while.

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 05

  I was like, listening to like a talk by the, by the separatistas and they were going like, yeah, all these projects fucking suck. And then this happened. It's like, damn.

• 2:00:51Speaker 04

  Oh shit.

• 2:00:53Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm scared that there's gonna be a couple more of this. Cause we're again, for no fucking reason rushing to do a bunch more projects. They're trying to do a, a, a cable car before the Olympics in Mexico City.

• 2:01:09Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 2:01:11Speaker 03

  God.

• 2:01:11Speaker 05

  Be like, it's not even a bad idea. Like this is, this place is a valley surrounded by mountains. Like cable cars could work. I don't know, but I mean, we have one that's pretty relatively good.

• 2:01:23Liam McAnderson?

  Okay. We lost, we did lose Nova, so we're just gonna keep going per Nova.

• 2:01:27Speaker 05

  So, yeah.

• 2:01:28Speaker 03

  Oh, really? Okay. Oh, that's, ah, that's a shame.

• 2:01:31Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Well, the, the, the Mexican Navy gained another angel.

• 2:01:35Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, I mean, the, the, the thing here is, you know, we gotta remember there's gonna be an investigation. People are gonna try and assign blame. And I think a cautionary tale here is M-Track 188 at Frankfurt.

• 2:01:48Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yes. Thanks for nothing, Josh Shapiro.

• 2:01:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Um, so the long story short here is Frankfurt Junction is a very tight curve in Philadelphia. I think the speed limit is something like 60. Uh, coming southbound, you're coming off of, uh, I think 125 mile an hour segment. Coming northbound, I think it's only 80. Um, so there were systems in place to stop you from going over speed around this curve from the north, from the, or excuse me, if you were coming southbound, but not if you were coming northbound.

• 2:02:23Speaker 04

  50 mile an hour.

• 2:02:24Justin Roczniak?

  50 mile an hour. Damn. Okay. Yeah.

• 2:02:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:27Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh, so there was one engineer who worked for M-Track. He somehow managed to get through the, uh, rail fan filter. Um, cause he was.

• 2:02:37Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 2:02:38Justin Roczniak?

  He was a, uh, uh, you know, very safety conscious, very much a, uh, you know, someone who was like. I mean, he posted on, I want to say it was trainorders.com saying, Oh, boy. Hey, I go through this, this curve every day. If they don't put automatic train stop on the northbound side, someone's going to cause an accident here. Right? Right?

• 2:03:01Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:03:01Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, there was one night where he was distracted because of reports of, I think, kids throwing rocks. Rocks.

• 2:03:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:03:11Justin Roczniak?

  Which is something we do in Philly, of course, if you've listened, if you've watched It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. And so he got distracted and he lost track of where he was. And he started accelerating for the straightaway after Frankfurt Junction and over speed, you know, straight off the curve into the yard. Thank God this wasn't full of molten phenol as it usually is. The molten phenol was all back here. And yeah, so the train wrapped around a catenary pole. Most of the cars were intact. A lot of people died. I mean, we'll do an episode on this at some point, but you know, the most safety conscious guy out there

• 2:03:54Justin Roczniak?

  still made a brain fart and still derailed the train because there wasn't, the safety system wasn't in place.

• 2:03:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:04:00Justin Roczniak?

  And

• 2:04:01Speaker 04

  They crucified him.

• 2:04:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. It, the, the, I mean, M-Track did eventually install the safety system, but yeah, Governor Josh Shapiro, he wasn't governor at the time, he was like Attorney General. Yep. Brought charges against the guy because More than once, right?

• 2:04:18Speaker 04

  Multiple times.

• 2:04:18Justin Roczniak?

  People were not satisfied with the answer that the railroad had deficiencies. It was just like, let's try and bring criminal, criminal charges against this guy. And that's

• 2:04:31Speaker 03

  And that's what, well, that's, that's massively my worry is, is going to be here is that justice will seem to be done if they crucify the, the poor driver of this train.

• 2:04:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  And that'll be the end of it. There'll be no in, in, inwards looking, there'll be no consideration of maybe we should have one or more signals. There'll be nothing like that.

• 2:04:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:50Speaker 04

  The first thing I read other than it happened was they have the crew and they are interrogating, not investigating, interrogate.

• 2:05:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:01Speaker 04

  And I have heard a peep about it, like there's no news about them. I really hope that that was a translation error. Well.

• 2:05:11Speaker 04

  Well.

• 2:05:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:13Speaker 05

  Like this was your example had was about like Joe Shapiro and Philadelphia and stuff like that. This train is run by the Navy and like.

• 2:05:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:05:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is a much, much worse scenario. I think for anyone who was involved, who was the crew, I don't think there's, there's gonna be like, I, I, I, I don't even know where to start there, you know?

• 2:05:36Speaker 04

  It's going, it's going to be another update. I'm just, I can feel in my bones, we're going to be doing a third episode about this.

• 2:05:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, if they just say, well, we got the guy, we put him in prison, it's gonna, it's, this is complete farce.

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:05:50Justin Roczniak?

  There, that achieves nothing. It, it, it doesn't do anything.

• 2:05:54Speaker 04

  Well, and if they do the opposite too, we interviewed the crew, they said they were doing the right thing. Okay, it's over.

• 2:06:01Speaker 05

  Or we, there's gonna be like legal battles, legal battles about maintenance and then they're gonna check the maintenance and they're gonna say, well, this track seems okay. So case closed. There's like several avenues and to get to nowhere here.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:06:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of ways, you know, you, at some point you have to acknowledge the fact that you, you built a brand new 1907 railroad. Maybe you should install some safety systems.

• 2:06:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was trying to think of something piffy to, to, but no, like, and it might be a good idea to have an independent investigating team to at least highlight some of that. But like, all the ergonomics, all the fatigue, all of that stuff, it's very difficult to see a world in which that gets highlighted and addressed and considered, you know, but, but just to reemphasize, it's not just the engineering stuff. There's a lot of human behavior stuff that's really important in these sorts of situations.

• 2:06:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  And that is, is just not, I just, I have no confidence that that stuff's gonna get looked into in any detail whatsoever.

• 2:06:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 2:07:00Speaker 03

  And not for like racist color grade reasons, but for, there are specific political reasons right now that we in this podcast have highlighted why that's not going, that just, there is not an obvious pathway for that information to be made public in any form whatsoever.

• 2:07:14Justin Roczniak?

  Sure.

• 2:07:15Speaker 05

  We, we barely do. Some racist things, like a lot of conservatives don't care about, instead of saying, oh, maybe we should consider like making trains that go through indigenous lands in a more consensual way. They say Indians don't know how to ride trains. So.

• 2:07:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Speaker 05

  And that's, like, internally Mexican, like.

• 2:07:36Speaker 05

  Colorism, racism, reasons that this might go nowhere.

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:40Justin Roczniak?

  I think it is. There's also broader North American problem about railroads is that, you know, the, the idea is, well, accidents just happened. It was probably human error. Just leave it like that. You know, it's, it's, uh,

• 2:07:52Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:52Justin Roczniak?

  It's amazing when you sort of consider it compared to like how airlines operate, you know, where, where

• 2:07:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, with a mass publicly funded system of safety infrastructure.

• 2:08:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:02Speaker 03

  Um, uh, which, yeah, which everyone seems to think is some magic magically privately funded. No, no, the state just spends billions and billions on that shit.

• 2:08:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:11Speaker 03

  Um, yeah.

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  I would like to, I would like to say, like, clearly the train good. Like 200 plus people were on this train. It's like apparently always sold out. Like it would be a shame for them to not learn anything from this and also clip it.

• 2:08:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:08:29Speaker 05

  And like it's already built, like

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:08:33Speaker 05

  The environmental and like cultural damage, it's done what people, in fact, the, the complaint about the people who got displaced or like have some cultural position to this is that, well, where's the promised development? Where's the, where's the hospitals? Where's the infrastructure? Where's the safety regulations and, uh, path and the cross signals and piping? I don't know.

• 2:08:58Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I'll tell you what, if it was a 1907 railroad, the railroad would have built the hospital because they would have had to.

• 2:09:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:09:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:06Speaker 04

  For the railroad, yeah.

• 2:09:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Just for the railroad workers and everyone else. Um,

• 2:09:10Speaker 04

  But like

• 2:09:10Justin Roczniak?

  My, uh, my grandfather was treated at the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad Hospital in Clifton Fort.

• 2:09:16Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:09:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, one of several hospitals he was treated at. Anyway.

• 2:09:21Speaker 04

  But like, yeah, it, it like order new trains. If that makes you happy, order new trains. I, it, it's just, would be such a loss to start to back away from doing more trains. And it's from what I've seen, it doesn't look like they plan to, but like, yeah.

• 2:09:38Speaker 05

  No, and I honestly like don't tell Shimon, but I think her projects are better designed than this. I think there's a, a, an upgrade in like, uh, Shimon styles herself as like a more scientifically minded.

• 2:09:53Speaker 05

  And to a certain extent, it's propaganda, but it also kind of is true. And the the the train lanes she's proposed were what we were complaining that they were not doing while they were doing the train.

• 2:10:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:10:05Speaker 05

  Right. So and there's there's still some problems about, you know, land rights and rushing and imposition. But then, but I I have to say, they seem to be at least more in demand than this. And this seems to have, like you said, organic demand already. So I I'm not a train hater. I the worst thing that anybody to me was make me a train hater.

• 2:10:31Speaker 05

  And I hate to be right about this. I think we all hate it to be right.

• 2:10:35Justin Roczniak?

  We all hate.

• 2:10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:10:38Justin Roczniak?

  I will say that the other thing about most of the most of Shinebound's proposed routes is that they are along existing, you know, private railroads, which actually have a lot better safety systems than this thing.

• 2:10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they ordered new equipment for it like.

• 2:10:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, like I said, like Dr. Shane Bond strikes again.

• 2:11:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 04

  Can we go to slide thirty one to close this out?

• 2:11:06Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:06Speaker 05

  By the way, I've read Shane Bond's thesis. It's pretty good. People say that she didn't hear for her doctoral thesis. It's it's kind of nice, actually. Anyways.

• 2:11:17Speaker 04

  So.

• 2:11:17Speaker 05

  She's like an actual scientist.

• 2:11:19Speaker 04

  So I I threw this in here at last minute because one of the like last things that we haven't talked about that has bothered the shit out of me in all of this is you can't run trains on railroads like. And, you know, Gareth has said, like, this is tram track. These are tram curbs. You can. This is Amtrak's Southwest Chief on Bretton Pass. Very similar railroad. In incredibly similar, incredibly remote railroading. But it signaled with ABS signals. It has automatic train stop.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:52Speaker 04

  It. It. They run with dynamic brakes, something we haven't talked about because that's just baseless speculation, but they have the systems in place to more prevent these types of accidents. And but it's incredibly tight railroading. It's slow. It's remote and it's doable.

• 2:12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Belgrade Bar and Mostar Sarajevo jumped to mind as railroads in Europe that in the former Yugoslavia that are that have extremely tight curves because they have to go up and down a mountain. Stanagage railroads that are signaled, you know, they're fully signaled.

• 2:12:31Justin Roczniak?

  There are like brand new railroads being built in China, like conventional railroads, which have, you know, horrible hairpins and all the loops and everything. And, uh, well, yeah, they also have signals though. Yeah. Right. You know.

• 2:12:47Speaker 04

  But there's like no point to blowing a tunnel through the mountain just because you want to make the railroad seem more.

• 2:12:56Speaker 03

  I mean, you can, you can do that.

• 2:12:58Speaker 04

  You can.

• 2:12:58Speaker 03

  And there might be justification for doing that. And it's happened. Again, I go to former Yugoslavia Croatia is doing quite a bit of that at the moment, which is bypassing some of its old weavy stuff with with some bypassed straight lines. You can do that, but you have to, you know, there is a cost to doing that and.

• 2:13:11Speaker 04

  You have to justify it. And one train a day might not be worth it, but you can still do it.

• 2:13:18Justin Roczniak?

  I think if they want to compete with the Panama Canal, do the thing they think they're going to do. They do have to build that tunnel.

• 2:13:27Speaker 05

  If you're running a social democracy, you got to run a social democracy. You can't halfway.

• 2:13:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:32Speaker 05

  You can't do half and half.

• 2:13:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:13:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I'm kind of like, okay, this has got to be like at least an 80 mile an hour railroad the whole way through. We got to have like two, maybe three tracks. We got to build the biggest, most efficient port on each end in order to compete with Panama Canal. That thing needs to be either fully automated or run with slave labor.

• 2:13:55Speaker 04

  It's difficult. It's difficult to compete with the Panama Canal.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  Well, I'll tell you what you can do is you list off all the tight curve. I mean, what I'd be doing if I was managing this, if I was engineering manager. Railway line, I'd be, I'd have, I'd have a list of the curves and I'd work my way from tightest upwards and create small smoother, you know, easing projects for those where it's possible to do so. Of course, the challenge on mountainous grades with diesel traction, rather than electric traction, is that those curves are there because you need that much length to get up the gradient. And every time you slacken a curve, you have a steeper gradient.

• 2:14:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:14:28Speaker 03

  So, so that, you know, there, there are chat, this is why you end up having to do the whole job lot in, in, in sort of mountainous terrain is either you weave the, the contours or you cut straight through the hill.

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  But yeah, like there, there, there are ways to do that. But again, I would say there are other priorities and, you know, Shimbam has a few of those listed off. And I, I'd say attempting to do a huge amount to make amends for the mess that was Trend Maya is, should be high on the agenda.

• 2:14:55Speaker 05

  Oh, they're not gonna touch that. They're not gonna even, gonna mention it. They're too busy making a giant AI supercomputer.

• 2:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. If Inter Oceanico was incompetent and inept, uh, Maya was, you know, Trend Maya was absolutely malicious, um, you know. But that's, I see also a former, a previous episode on that. I wonder who was on top of that.

• 2:15:19Speaker 03

  Anyway, yeah, uh, Scooter, uh, uh, yeah, thanks for that. A neat way to, to round off, I think. Train, train is good.

• 2:15:27Speaker 04

  Train good.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  But dot, dot, dot.

• 2:15:30Speaker 05

  Train should be good.

• 2:15:31Speaker 04

  Train should be good. That's a good, good way to put it.

• 2:15:33Justin Roczniak?

  We would want to have a good, good train.

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:39Speaker 04

  I just want my last statement to be stay informed, don't let this die and, and hope and pray that the right answers come through for those that were affected.

• 2:15:53Justin Roczniak?

  Cause the, uh, the attorney general's office is investigating, right?

• 2:15:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:15:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15:57Speaker 05

  Well, at least we, our attorney, uh, we, we just switched from the most corrupt attorney general we've ever seen to like, uh, a one that's less corrupt, but way more, uh, friendly to, to Shimbam. So I, I think it was an upgrade, but it might mean that we don't get that much info out of this.

• 2:16:17Justin Roczniak?

  The bar is so low.

• 2:16:19Speaker 05

  It's no, honestly, that Attorney General was single worse, in my opinion, the worst appointment I'm alone made ever.

• 2:16:27Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 2:16:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, because his name was Hertz Manero, he was in charge of Operation Condor in Mexico. Like, he was like a straight up CIA asset. I, I'm, Jesus Christ, one of the worst appointments.

• 2:16:42Speaker 03

  That is the official opinion of the podcast.

• 2:16:44Speaker 05

  I mean, he ran Operation Condor, that's, that's peanut shit.

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:49Speaker 05

  It was the AG, but now, now we have less respected AG by the conservatives, but I, it's an upgrade. So, hell, maybe, maybe we get some info out of this. Hopefully.

• 2:17:03Speaker 04

  Hopefully.

• 2:17:04Justin Roczniak?

  I'm sure. Get some reforms out of this.

• 2:17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sure we will hear about it.

• 2:17:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:10Speaker 05

  Well, I'm sure you're gonna, you guys are gonna get added about it. That, that's what I know.

• 2:17:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:17Speaker 03

  Ah, what, what's the next episode on, Ross?

• 2:17:19Justin Roczniak?

  What is the next episode on?

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  You could backfill the slide deck later.

• 2:17:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's right, it's a, it's a news brief, so I didn't even add the concluding slide. The next, the next episode is gonna be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  Um, listen to Kill James Bond, listen to No Gods, No Mayors, um, listen to Trash Future, listen to, um, uh, Railnatter, if you, if you fancy that sort of thing, we talk about, I just did an episode on a train crash, actually, tonight, as of the day of recording.

• 2:17:50Speaker 05

  And, uh, I, I, I just released, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm back to streaming and making podcasts in Spanish, if you want to learn about Mexican politics, uh, from a leftist and queer perspective, I'm Fresapatistas con crema, it's a pun about, uh, desserts and being called, uh, and Zapatismo. We're, we're, we're gonna hopefully come back this year with new episodes, so, and check out the video I just made on why, uh, Mexico should leave, should leave the World Cup, because it's gonna be Trump's Berlin Olympics, and we should not support imperialism, that's bad.

• 2:18:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:31Speaker 05

  Anyways, that was my commercial.

• 2:18:32Justin Roczniak?

  All right.

• 2:18:33Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a guest heavy episode. Thanks. Thanks for being my fellow guests.

• 2:18:38Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us on. Thanks for, yeah, thanks for having us on doing this so that you can at least, uh, attempt, you know?

• 2:18:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Justin Roczniak?

  They're gonna, they're gonna pin all of this on Scooter.

• 2:18:52Speaker 05

  We, we wanted to ask the Spanish ninja that kidnapped November to, please let her go.

• 2:18:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, let her go. Yeah. Yeah. She's, she's really, she makes good podcasts. And, um, so yeah, please let her go. We need that entertainment in Britain. It's a miserable place. Otherwise.

• 2:19:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 2:19:08Speaker 04

  I just want to say I have a family. It's a cat, but it's a family.

• 2:19:13Liam McAnderson?

  Karen has a family. I have a family. All right. End this.

• 2:19:16Justin Roczniak?

  All right. That was a podcast.

• 2:19:19Liam McAnderson?

  Bye, everybody.

• 2:19:20Speaker 04

  Bye, everybody.

• 2:19:20Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 2:19:21Speaker 03

  Bye, everybody.