Episode 177: The Balvano Rail Disaster

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

• 0:00November Kelly?

  There we go.

• 0:01Justin Roczniak?

  Excellent.

• 0:01Liam McAnderson?

  Is it going? Is it going?

• 0:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it looks like it's going to me.

• 0:05Liam McAnderson?

  Hi, this is Justin in the edit. You may not recognize my voice because I'm being piloted by Liam. Some sort of Kermit situation.

• 0:18Liam McAnderson?

  We regret to inform you that Roz has been murdered.

• 0:22November Kelly?

  He seized control of the radio station.

• 0:24Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, yes. Welcome to Radio Free Liam, baby.

• 0:28Justin Roczniak?

  We still have to do a sync point for Devon.

• 0:30November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. Okay, so the way it works, one of us counts down three, two, one, Mark. When you hear Mark, just clap or snap by a microphone, please.

• 0:41Justin Roczniak?

  Or say, "That's me."

• 0:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, or just scream, just really like primal, like, yeah.

• 0:47Speaker 03

  Make a big loud peak.

• 0:48November Kelly?

  Yes, exactly.

• 0:50Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Three, two, one, Mark.

• 0:54November Kelly?

  Perfect.

• 0:55Justin Roczniak?

  All right, we did it.

• 0:56Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, hang on.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  I mean, I was early, but that's okay.

• 0:59Liam McAnderson?

  No, that's fine. I just gotta shut down my torrents real quick. Sorry.

• 1:03November Kelly?

  It's just gonna be like ballpark, you know, and it's all good.

• 1:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Enough to, yeah.

• 1:09Liam McAnderson?

  We want to avoid our skin being peeled off with flinty knives.

• 1:13November Kelly?

  Anarchism is about seeding torrents, and the more torrents you seed, the more anarchist you are.

• 1:20Liam McAnderson?

  I know for a fact you're not assessing me right now.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  We do a bit of pyre-tin around these parts.

• 1:27Liam McAnderson?

  Information wants to be free, dickhead.

• 1:32Speaker 03

  Wait, when people know things, they're, wait, that's like beneficial to society? What do you mean?

• 1:37November Kelly?

  Something boots, bootmaker. I don't know anything about anarchism, right? Like, in the same way, I don't know anything about the Kansas City Chiefs. Why would I learn about losers?

• 1:47Justin Roczniak?

  What happens in anarchism is you get crushed by the Soviets.

• 1:52Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes. Then people get real mad at you for recording a podcast.

• 1:57Liam McAnderson?

  People get real mad at me in the comments because they're like, well, you see, I'm an anarchist recording with two communists. And it's just like, because they're my pals.

• 2:03November Kelly?

  My friends, like we're friends.

• 2:05Justin Roczniak?

  We're not in the Spanish Civil War.

• 2:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, but we will be.

• 2:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, in Marvel's A24 Civil War 2, it might get into kind of a factional situation, and I'm okay with that.

• 2:18Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, so my favorite hypothetical thing to do, or thing to do with hypotheticals is to say like, Roz, X, who you got? So it's just like, you know, Roz, Tom from 10,000 losses, who you got? The answer is obviously Tom, by the way.

• 2:32November Kelly?

  Well, of course, yeah.

• 2:33Justin Roczniak?

  Well, he's got the guns.

• 2:34Liam McAnderson?

  Kind of, all due respect, Roz v. anyone is kind of the other guy, but.

• 2:39November Kelly?

  I disagree. I think there's, I think there's people that Roz could take. Like, if you went like Roz, Timothy Chalamet, right? Like, that's. Dead French Canadian, right?

• 2:48Liam McAnderson?

  How tall is Timothy Chalamet?

• 2:51November Kelly?

  He's like wispy, you know?

• 2:53Liam McAnderson?

  He's 5'10". So Roz, you got like two inches.

• 2:56Justin Roczniak?

  I got two inches on him. Yeah, I could definitely beat up like Ben Shapiro.

• 2:59Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, you could [bleep] Ben Shapiro.

• 3:02November Kelly?

  Hell, yeah.

• 3:03Justin Roczniak?

  I'm not gonna do that.

• 3:05Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's an actual threat against a named person.

• 3:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. No, no, don't do that. Anyway. Welcome to a special Italian episode of Well, There's Your Problem.

• 3:15November Kelly?

  Buongiorno.

• 3:16Justin Roczniak?

  Podcast, buongiorno. A podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Roczniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 3:27November Kelly?

  I was gonna do a whole bit in Italian, then I realized I don't speak Italian. My name is November Kelly. I'm the person speaking now. My pronouns are she and her, Yeliam. Avanti Liam.

• 3:37Justin Roczniak?

  She speaks the third most Italian.

• 3:40Liam McAnderson?

  I don't speak Italian. Exactly.

• 3:44Liam McAnderson?

  Beyond the new, well, there's your problem. She'll compel Liam. My pronouns are he, him. Fuck me, we have a guest.

• 3:52Justin Roczniak?

  We have a guest.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  A river derchi, if in case we haven't gotten the Inglourious Basterds references out of the way. I'm Mark, Mark Heiss Huber. You probably know me as Heiss on the the interwebs and youtubes and the things and perhaps as Mark at Studio 346. Figure it out. I'm the same person. What is a brand? Who knows? And yeah, my pronouns are he/him. Hi, delighted to be on. Love your guys' pod.

• 4:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're glad to have you on. This is gonna be fun. Now, you see.

• 4:26November Kelly?

  Oh, do you want us to refer to you real quick as Mark or Heiss? Or is there no?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Don't give a shit. Fun little aside, I was giving a breakman training to new trainees and our president of the museum at the time of the board couldn't get my attention. He was saying Mark, Mark or whatever. And he finally yells Heiss and he's in his 40s. Like, he's not a young, you know, not like he watches my YouTube. And I was like, yeah, oh shit. So either is fine.

• 4:55November Kelly?

  The kind of the we have people everywhere moment is.

• 4:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 5:00November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's striking.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 5:02Justin Roczniak?

  So what we have on the screen in front of us is a tunnel.

• 5:06November Kelly?

  This is another four. Nothing wrong with it. Looks fine.

• 5:09Justin Roczniak?

  Nothing, nothing wrong with the tunnel. Nothing particularly wrong with it. You'll be happy to know in this episode, there's, it is about trains, but there's no derailment, no fire, no bombing, barely any property damage, no nothing. And it still kills 520 people.

• 5:23Liam McAnderson?

  That's a lot of people to kill.

• 5:25November Kelly?

  That's, that's, that's numbers on the board. And I'm looking at here like a functional tunnel. I'm looking at a hole like.

• 5:33Justin Roczniak?

  A perfectly good hole. Yeah.

• 5:34November Kelly?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:35Liam McAnderson?

  It was made for me.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Tunnels, tunnels with trains inside don't bode well sometimes.

• 5:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Today, we're going to talk about the worst disaster in Italian railroad history, which is the Balvano disaster.

• 5:50November Kelly?

  Everybody remember to be respectful of the great Italian people, nation, culture, etc., etc.

• 5:58Justin Roczniak?

  The, the gallant people of Italy.

• 6:03November Kelly?

  We're gonna, we're gonna fuck up so bad on that.

• 6:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Justin Roczniak?

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

• 6:17Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, I have a bit of more breaking news, which is that Garrett Cole, the Yankees ace, has to have Tommy Dodd's surgery and he's out for 2025. Terrible.

• 6:28November Kelly?

  I mean, is that, can this also be the fault of ending DEI initiatives?

• 6:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, it stands for don't elbow injure.

• 6:38November Kelly?

  They've got that on the, on the wall of the doctor's office. It's just like, PSA, don't fucking do that to yourself. It is.

• 6:45Justin Roczniak?

  Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this, then don't do that.

• 6:49Liam McAnderson?

  Doctor, doctor, why is your fist inside my ass?

• 6:52November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, listen, um, so DEI, I mean, the end of DEI has taken another victim here as, um, uh, two, two boats have hit each other. Classic of the genre.

• 7:06Justin Roczniak?

  A Portuguese flagged container carrier, a small one, crashed into a, uh, a tanker, an American flagged tanker. I believe it's one of our few Jones Act compliant ones.

• 7:19November Kelly?

  Yep.

• 7:19Justin Roczniak?

  Which was at anchor. Uh, just, you know, just slammed right into the side at full speed. Uh, the tanker exploded. Um, a lot of damage to the, uh, container ship as well. A lot of injuries. I don't think anyone died. Uh, I think both these ships are write offs.

• 7:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, I think, I think.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Well, the front fell off. Eighty thousand tons of oil fell under the sea, got fired. It's a bit of a giveaway.

• 7:42November Kelly?

  I, I think they're missing one, like, for remember from the, the smaller Portuguese ship, which, by the way, was carrying a shitload of sodium cyanide, uh, which is, uh, we, we don't know what that is at the moment, but we do know where all of the jet fuel that the American was carrying is because it's, it's busy, uh, oxidizing, as you see before.

• 8:04Justin Roczniak?

  It's going, it's going up in the air, which is where it was going to be anyway. So, you know.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  It's not in an environment. It's been towed outside the environment.

• 8:11November Kelly?

  It, it's making its way towards the jet, which is where it wants to be. You know, it's sympathetic resonances. It's like a, like a color based diet. You know, it's like, you know, the, it has the energy that it wants to have. Anyway, so, uh, I'm, I'm thinking that this is a really bad time to be a mariner. If you're, if you're kind of like boat sinking, boat on fire, uh, also cyanide. You know, that's, that's a, that's a bad combination of things to be happening at once.

• 8:38Liam McAnderson?

  Hey, you've got a caustic burden, uh, the likes of which no one's ever seen before. Congratulations. Here's eight dollars.

• 8:44Justin Roczniak?

  I bet it's one of those situations where it's like the added sodium actually makes it harmless.

• 8:49November Kelly?

  Oh, just, just like.

• 8:51Liam McAnderson?

  Thank God we're not on a chemistry podcast.

• 8:53November Kelly?

  This cyanide's only dangerous if you get the low sodium version.

• 8:57Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. That's just regular H N H C N. I think that's the formula for fuck.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Chemical burn. Diet chemical burn.

• 9:04November Kelly?

  I feel like.

• 9:05Liam McAnderson?

  Costish, costish.

• 9:07November Kelly?

  I feel like anything with a cyanide in it is gonna be probably pretty dangerous to like cellular respiration, but what do I know?

• 9:15Liam McAnderson?

  Almonds, Nova, almonds.

• 9:17Justin Roczniak?

  So, so I can quite confidently say I do not know.

• 9:21November Kelly?

  So this, maybe people on Reddit can get mad at me for like being confidently wrong again, but this happened in the North Sea, off the coast of Yorkshire and coastal Yorkshire is now under a like, maybe don't breathe the air kind of warning, which, you know, it's not, it's not great. It's not like, you know, sort of HF refinery spill type thing, but it's, it's not great for you to be breathing any of this stuff in.

• 9:48Justin Roczniak?

  I like how all the containers have puffed up like a lithium ion battery.

• 9:52November Kelly?

  Yeah. Oh no, my shipment of lithium ion batteries.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  It's fine. It's fine.

• 9:58November Kelly?

  So, I mean, but we don't know what the like oil spill resulting from this is gonna be like, but you know, obviously none of it's good, right?

• 10:05Justin Roczniak?

  Still on fire at time of recording, I believe.

• 10:08November Kelly?

  Yeah, this happened pretty much like right before we started recording. Also, the American tanker like was transporting jet fuel for the US military, which means this was an act of Portuguese anti-imperialist praxis.

• 10:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 10:27November Kelly?

  But also.

• 10:28Justin Roczniak?

  Special F 35 fuel. They're gonna have to spend two and a half billion dollars to make more of it.

• 10:34Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not allowed to touch the F-35 anymore because Laserpic will get mad at me.

• 10:40November Kelly?

  I think it's also crucial that like this happened a couple of days after Hexeth removed all of the like woke stuff from the DOD's website, including a photo of the Enola Gay because it had the word gay in the name.

• 10:52Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that is funny.

• 10:53November Kelly?

  This is, this is what happens. Like you, you, you take away the wokeness and all of a sudden, uh, things like this start happening, you know? So the, the next, the next US, uh, like US flag tanker you're on, you have to make sure and check that the bridge crew comprises a diverse mix of racial, ethnic, gender and religious identities.

• 11:14Justin Roczniak?

  We need, uh, we need, we need the, uh, the, the, the, the one-legged, uh, trans woman.

• 11:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And indigenous, yeah.

• 11:32November Kelly?

  Yeah. So we, we don't know basically, but, um, it, it feels like this is just part of a general, uh, iloamand moment in, in any kind of transportation. Right? Like, I know that's a statistical anomaly, but I think it's more fun to say that it's because of, because of Trump. So.

• 11:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I, I was gonna say, I mean, you know, the only thing we haven't seen, I mean, we have seen a big train wreck. We've seen a couple of them recently, but that's like the normal amount of train wrecks. We haven't seen one like involving an M track train yet. So that's probably next up.

• 12:04November Kelly?

  Hmm. Well, I mean, I hope you're not touching the lathe.

• 12:07Justin Roczniak?

  I hope not either. I tried, I tried to get all the lathe touching in last episode.

• 12:12November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  You know that the United States is going to be sunk shortly. So that kind of fits in.

• 12:20November Kelly?

  The whole United States out into the ocean and sink it.

• 12:24Liam McAnderson?

  Like a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  That's what they're doing. Yeah. She's, she's on her way, unfortunately.

• 12:29Justin Roczniak?

  SS United States, uh, recently left the, uh, dock in Philly. They towed it all the way around to Mobile, Alabama for asbestos abatement. They're going to sink it off the coast of Florida as an artificial reef. I didn't think.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  Sink it with the asbestos. The fish will get mesothelioma.

• 12:45Liam McAnderson?

  What a dig that way to go, man.

• 12:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  I suppose it's better than it getting scrapped, but that's sad either way.

• 12:52Justin Roczniak?

  Surprised it made it.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. That thing was rickety. It's being probably a little generous.

• 12:59Justin Roczniak?

  I have a, I have a friend who used to be in the conservancy and quit in disgust, I think. And, uh, yeah, they, they, they were like, yeah, it's gonna sink. It didn't sink. I mean, it will sink eventually, but that's the deliberate sinker.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  She's made of iron, sir.

• 13:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, aluminum.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 13:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Is it really?

• 13:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, whole thing's aluminum.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  I did not know that. I guess that would explain the speediness, but.

• 13:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Not the boat person, train person over here.

• 13:25November Kelly?

  At least with the name, it doesn't feel like, you know, like a metaphor for kind of great things.

• 13:30Justin Roczniak?

  SS United States to be sunk off the coast of Florida.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  No way.

• 13:33Liam McAnderson?

  No, no.

• 13:35November Kelly?

  It's, it's like after Trump got elected the first time, people started finding all those dead bald eagles.

• 13:42November Kelly?

  Real thing, by the way.

• 13:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 13:44November Kelly?

  I remember seeing the news story the day after it got inaugurated the first time. Somebody just found like a, like a bald eagle, like face down in a swamp. And I'm like, what do you want from me?

• 13:53Liam McAnderson?

  God, God has a peculiar sense of humor.

• 13:56November Kelly?

  It's, it's difficult not to believe in omens at times like this, you know?

• 14:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In other news.

• 14:05November Kelly?

  Why is this man wearing a corset?

• 14:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. Trump and JD Vance got really mad at Zelensky for not wearing a suit.

• 14:13November Kelly?

  The thing, the thing is.

• 14:14Liam McAnderson?

  Shut the fuck up.

• 14:16November Kelly?

  Okay, wow, Jesus.

• 14:17Liam McAnderson?

  Not you, not you.

• 14:20November Kelly?

  I, I guess, I guess the thing is, right, irrespective of all of the JD Vance edits, um, the.

• 14:27Liam McAnderson?

  Him leading into it makes me want to [BLEEP] myself, by the way.

• 14:29November Kelly?

  I, I, I kind of, I kind of feel like the Russia gate libs have vindicated here in the sense that whether or not the piss tape is real. And like Donald Trump is being remote controlled from Moscow with the promise of the piss tape being released. He wouldn't act any differently if he were, right? Like this is, this is like a hundred percent the same in outcomes, if not in process. Because, uh, the whole, the like, uh, sort of core assumptions of American foreign policy are just being demolished here. Uh, and all in Russia's favor, which is fun.

• 15:04Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I figured this would end in some kind of brokered solution immediately, but now that it's happening, I find myself very mad about it.

• 15:12November Kelly?

  They're actually too stupid. I mean, if it makes you feel any better, right? I had the similar kind of feeling from the opposite side with Syria, right? Where I was like, well, you know, I know it might be bad, but you know, Assad's gone. I'm gonna let myself hope for like a week and then, you know, now obviously there are very good reasons to stop doing that. So, yeah, it just.

• 15:37Liam McAnderson?

  People getting kidnapped in broad daylight.

• 15:39November Kelly?

  Yeah, it turns out even if you win, you kind of still lose, which.

• 15:44Liam McAnderson?

  I did not support Assad. I want to make that very fucking clear. If I have to do that.

• 15:53Justin Roczniak?

  I never, ever commented on any of that shit because I knew I didn't understand it.

• 15:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I, I, listen, at the risk of sounding like the guy in my neighborhood. Yeah, man, I mean, I, listen, imperialism is bad, no matter what flag it happens to be wearing.

• 16:10Justin Roczniak?

  You have Assad in your neighborhood?

• 16:12Liam McAnderson?

  I don't have Assad.

• 16:13November Kelly?

  Well, we don't know where he, like supposedly he's in Moscow, but like, I don't know if you're like, hey, a new optometrist just opened up around from me. Guy looks weird as hell.

• 16:23Liam McAnderson?

  I do need a new optometrist, so we're gonna, we're gonna find out. It's like that guy they captured in like the mid 2000s who had been like the architect of a bunch of Rwandan war crimes.

• 16:33November Kelly?

  Oh, God, yeah. Well, I mean, when they, when they captured Rukh Kamladat, he would have been working as like a tantric sex coach. So like the second, the second career of the war criminal is like an interesting one, right? So, but yeah, no, so I, obviously this is like very, very bad and infuriating. And I, I think you can even at this point do worse than to sympathize with, you know, just, just live out, become like a NAFO kind of dog person.

• 17:04November Kelly?

  Like, because they were kind of right, like, you know.

• 17:08Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, those comments are not gonna be kind to you, Nova.

• 17:10November Kelly?

  I know, but listen, the thing is, right?

• 17:13Liam McAnderson?

  You're not wrong.

• 17:14November Kelly?

  Russia started the fucking war. It was, it's been a series of war crimes and crimes of aggression. Um, and the US was obviously supporting Ukraine for cynical reasons. Obviously, there were like bad elements in Ukraine they were supporting, but this is the, even like within that internal logic, this is one of the worst things you could do. This would be the thing you wanted to do if you wanted to cause Ukrainian 9/11. Like, fucking, a bunch of Azov guys blow up the capital or something in like 10 years' time.

• 17:44Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, yeah, yeah, the Azov Battalion's gonna, gonna 9/11 us. They're also gonna shoot Zelensky. I mean, you know, all this is, this is not a great outcome, guys. I...

• 17:55November Kelly?

  No, and the thing is, that, that was a kind of opportunity for a limited sellout here if Trump and Vance had been smarter, but they're not. They're, they're the guys that they are, and so even in selling out Ukraine, they had to do it in the stupidest possible way that alienated the most people and fucked with the US the most.

• 18:15Justin Roczniak?

  I will, will say that if anyone has access to, uh, long rumored Ukrainian loose nukes, it's probably Azov Battalion.

• 18:24November Kelly?

  I mean, I, I bet they wish they did.

• 18:26Liam McAnderson?

  Basement there, Ross?

• 18:28Justin Roczniak?

  That's not mine.

• 18:29November Kelly?

  Yes, these belong to some Ukrainian guy at Twitter.

• 18:32Liam McAnderson?

  I don't know, yeah, yeah. You guys don't even, right? Fuck you, no.

• 18:37November Kelly?

  I got these from my optometrist.

• 18:40Liam McAnderson?

  I had to explain that Libya armed the IRA the other day to my wife, and that was...

• 18:45November Kelly?

  Gaddafi, Gaddafi was just doing shit.

• 18:47Liam McAnderson?

  He was just like, "Hi", he was just like, "No, a man of many things."

• 18:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, so no, I don't know. I've been infuriated by this. It's been making me feel crazy. And just everything since the fucking Vance speech in Munich where he's like, you know, Europe is fucking woke and gay now so you can get fucked. I've just been like, I want, I always wanted the US empire to collapse, but not like this.

• 19:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, we would have prepared, we would have preferred another way too, but.

• 19:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:20Justin Roczniak?

  Speaking of war crimes.

• 19:23November Kelly?

  Don't yell at me in the comments.

• 19:25Justin Roczniak?

  And other news.

• 19:28November Kelly?

  It's Hitler time. It's now, it is now Hitler time.

• 19:31Justin Roczniak?

  We're doing Hitler stuff. The administration has pledged to start deporting students on foreign visas who support Palestine, which they call supporting Hamas.

• 19:43November Kelly?

  It's flagrantly unconstitutional, but it remains to be seen if the courts will bother to stand up to that at all. And even if they do, who knows if they're gonna enforce it.

• 19:53Liam McAnderson?

  There are specific green card protections. I mean, I know I'm going full resistance, but like, come on now, dickheads.

• 19:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is Mahmoud Khalil.

• 20:00Liam McAnderson?

  Also, fucking doing it like shalom. It's like, again, I've said it before, not in my fucking name.

• 20:05November Kelly?

  Hmm, it's gross.

• 20:06Liam McAnderson?

  I might be Catholic now, I don't know, but nah, still, still got the circumscisions, circumskision, circumskism.

• 20:12November Kelly?

  We can't all become Catholic before we do the Catholicism bonus episode. They can't give us like a total, like a cross the board win before we fucking put the episode out.

• 20:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is Mahmoud Khalil. He's a graduate student at Columbia University. They just sort of vanned him a couple of days ago because he was doing negotiations at one of the big Palestine encampments at Columbia. He had his student visa revoked, but he had a green card and they're also like, oh, well, we're revoking your green card.

• 20:47November Kelly?

  That was the thing. It was clown shoe shit because they showed up to be like, your student visa revoked and you're getting deported. But when he told them that he had a green card, they didn't really know what to do because they didn't know that, which they're the government that you're kind of supposed to. And they're like, okay, sure. Well, I guess we're gonna revoke that and deport you too. So like, this is, like I say, it is massively, massively illegal. It's, one thing I will say is that at the moment, it's still not normalized yet to the point that it's scaring even like fucking lib, like squishy libs like Jonathan Chait or whoever. So maybe that's gonna make a difference. I don't know. But I, I just, the thing, the thing about resist libs, right?

• 21:32November Kelly?

  And I've been saying this for a while is that, that they're not wrong about Trump. That was never the problem, right? And when we said to like, you know, not to vote for Harris or Biden or whatever, and I stand by those things. It's, it doesn't mean that they weren't right about Trump. It's just that they were the ones who are happy to lay the groundwork for him on this. This is something that like a democratic president might well have tried to do in a more legalized way.

• 22:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, I could see that. I could definitely see if they had kept the, uh, the, the war in Gaza at, you know, uh, more, uh, a more brisk pace as Biden wanted to seem to want to do. You know, they might be doing exactly the same thing. But, you know, it'd be like the kids in cages, right? They weren't a problem when Biden was doing it.

• 22:26Liam McAnderson?

  They were a problem if the cameras were running, right?

• 22:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 22:29Liam McAnderson?

  But that's also not the reality we live in. So we live in reality where Trump is president and they're not gonna fucking do it. Like Columbia's response has been, I don't know, shameful to say the least. Strike, strike.

• 22:42November Kelly?

  Yeah, you have to treat all of these institutions as your enemy, right? Whether that's the university, whether that's the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, right? The, the kind of distinctions don't really matter at this point.

• 22:55Justin Roczniak?

  Every institution is your enemy now. The FAA.

• 22:59Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, oh, oh.

• 23:01November Kelly?

  Except for the Vanguard Party, we're gonna start any day now, any day now, we're gonna do it.

• 23:07Liam McAnderson?

  Come on, be an anarchist.

• 23:10Justin Roczniak?

  You gotta, you gotta go, go protest everything. Go protest a Tesla dealership. Go protest Amtrak. I don't care.

• 23:17Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, go do whatever you want to a Tesla dealership. I don't know if we have that in the news, but it is pretty funny to watch their stock price just.

• 23:24November Kelly?

  Check, check this shit out liberal and not, not, not just theirs, but also everybody else's with this tariff shit.

• 23:31Liam McAnderson?

  Thousand points in a day, baby. Yeah.

• 23:34November Kelly?

  Fucking crock.

• 23:35Liam McAnderson?

  So what, so my dad used to be a bankruptcy attorney before he retired and he did a lot of like, you know, small business bankruptcies. He did personal bankruptcies and he, he was always just like, oh yeah, the economy is crashing. Oh, this is so fucking great. And that's like, I'm like, oh yeah. I mean, it's, it's bad for like my, my savings. So I'm trying to buy a house, but also like, yeah, yeah. You want it. Yeah. I have a social worker, baby. I'm recession proof.

• 24:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I, I'm sort of, I, I mentioned this a bit in the, the last bit, but it's like, I, I, I love the collapse of the United States. Apart from the fact that a bunch of my friends lived there and also my country is entirely dependent on it. So, you know.

• 24:16Justin Roczniak?

  And you're, and your state has already collapsed.

• 24:18November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically. So.

• 24:21Liam McAnderson?

  Secure. He's not gonna secure. I thought that he, oh.

• 24:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, I, I don't know.

• 24:29Justin Roczniak?

  Welcome to collapse, but I would encourage you to go further.

• 24:34Liam McAnderson?

  You, you can, you, okay. Well, you're seeing my dad on Saturdays. You two could just bro out over the accelerationism.

• 24:42Liam McAnderson?

  Wednesday, you're seeing him on Wednesday.

• 24:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 24:44November Kelly?

  But, but yeah, i- i- in the meantime, this is obviously terrifying and is intended to terrify you.

• 24:50Liam McAnderson?

  Exactly. That's the whole point.

• 24:51November Kelly?

  Thing you should do is, is not be terrorized, but to, you know, fucking it. Again, if you, if it, if your form of resistance is to do the like pink pussy hat. I think it's kind of pathetic, but like it's better than nothing. All right. So.

• 25:05November Kelly?

  Christ.

• 25:05Liam McAnderson?

  Also she won't because, uh, no, you know what? I'm not going to, because, uh, I want, I want Nova to be admitted to the United States pretty quick.

• 25:12November Kelly?

  Yes. Yeah. Thank you.

• 25:14Liam McAnderson?

  Hello DHS.

• 25:15November Kelly?

  Hello, hello, customs and border protection. Um, hello, state department. Um, thanks for listening. Please approve my visa.

• 25:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And that, uh, reminds me, I forgot to put in a slide about the tour. Uh, so pretend that's here. That was the goddamn news.

• 25:32Liam McAnderson?

  Why'd you say tour like that?

• 25:34Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so now the the picture for the tour should be up.

• 25:38Liam McAnderson?

  I would still the, no, stop.

• 25:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we're gonna, oh, yeah.

• 25:41Justin Roczniak?

  I forgot to put it in.

• 25:43Liam McAnderson?

  So we are, we have tickets left in Philly. We have tickets left for the first night of New York. Please come buy those. Please come see us.

• 25:53Justin Roczniak?

  That some of the tickets in New York have gotten cheaper.

• 25:56Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, yes, you're welcome.

• 25:59November Kelly?

  That are inscrutable to us.

• 26:01Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 26:02Liam McAnderson?

  I just approved those emails. I don't read them.

• 26:05November Kelly?

  Dictated but not read.

• 26:07Liam McAnderson?

  I, yeah. Yeah, I I have one more announcement, actually, which is, I guess we could also put it in the video description. We have a website now.

• 26:16November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. Only took us, what, like, four years?

• 26:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Liam McAnderson?

  I gotta, I gotta set up your email addresses. So when it goes to Roz, it, well, there's your problem. It just bounces to Roz's Gmail address. If anyone wants Roz's Gmail address or his cell phone number, you guys know where to find me.

• 26:31Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 26:33November Kelly?

  We, we need to get a layer back on in a hurry so she can dox you again.

• 26:37Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 26:38Liam McAnderson?

  All right, let's talk about the upside down train.

• 26:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so.

• 26:42November Kelly?

  What?

• 26:43Liam McAnderson?

  The upside down train.

• 26:44Justin Roczniak?

  Let's.

• 26:45November Kelly?

  It fully Mussolini'd itself. Okay.

• 26:48Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so.

• 26:53November Kelly?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. I am a hack. What do you want from me?

• 26:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 26:59Liam McAnderson?

  Low hanging fruit, much like Mussolini himself.

• 27:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Justin Roczniak?

  So I guess we'll start with some context.

• 27:07Liam McAnderson?

  I did not mean fruit in a sexually derogatory sense. I just mean that he was strung up from a lamppost.

• 27:12November Kelly?

  Calling Mussolini like the F slur is a great bit as well, because.

• 27:15Liam McAnderson?

  I'm not doing that. I can't do that. I will leave that to you. I am an ally.

• 27:23Liam McAnderson?

  So caught my clenched fist here.

• 27:27Liam McAnderson?

  All right. Talk to me about this dead bitch.

• 27:29Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, all right. This is Mussolini, Benito Mussolini. He was the fascist dictator of Italy. One thing people like to say about him is say what you want about him, but at least he made the trains run on time.

• 27:44Liam McAnderson?

  Not true.

• 27:45Justin Roczniak?

  Not true.

• 27:46November Kelly?

  Myth.

• 27:46Justin Roczniak?

  Famous myth.

• 27:47Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 27:47Justin Roczniak?

  Famous myth.

• 27:48Liam McAnderson?

  You can go to the Wikipedia list of common misconceptions.

• 27:52November Kelly?

  I mean, but one, one kind of thing is even though this is a myth pre-war, one thing that really stops the trains from running on time is getting bombed a lot. And we were doing that and he helped start the war. So.

• 28:07Justin Roczniak?

  There were certain politically important luxury trains that started running on time better and they put, you know, fascist guards with fancy uniforms on them and everyone loved them, you know, so that was like.

• 28:20November Kelly?

  Fancy uniforms was the main kind of contribution of Italy's fascism.

• 28:24Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much, yeah. That and like the futureism.

• 28:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, although even then, like it's kind of, I mean fascism is this like mixed, it's like this marriage between like the revolutionary and the like sentimental conservative, right? So like it kind of every time it gets like sort of pinned down on one, it retreats into the other. And so you get the like Arno Braker kind of like Nazi statues, but you also get the like chocolate box kitsch kind of like high mass shit. So, yeah, I don't know. Not even that maybe.

• 28:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Mark, are you still there? You haven't said anything in a while.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  I'm here. I had not much to contribute to previously, but.

• 29:03November Kelly?

  Yeah. Do you have any like actionable threats against any named persons?

• 29:08Speaker 03

  I do not have an actionable threat against any named persons. I do, I do, I do just wish that, you know, humans would look at other humans and other living things and be like, yeah, that's important. I treat myself this way. Maybe I should treat everyone else this way. And there seems to be a distinct lack of that.

• 29:27November Kelly?

  Apparently empathy is a sin now.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Apparently, I'm a very empathetic person and listening to the politics section was a little challenging on my end because it was very depressing, but such is life these days, I guess.

• 29:40November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm sorry that we make all of our guests sit through a kind of mandatory 20 minute segment of us making actionable threats against a name person.

• 29:49Justin Roczniak?

  Bad news, fire hose.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  Fine. That's what I say right before I do a shot of whiskey. It's fine. It's fine. Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is a wee bit hilarious that I didn't know this about Mussolini. People will come to learn about me. People looking like, oh, you work in vintage train things and you're on YouTube talking about old trains. And I'm like, yeah, I'm an engineer and I'm neurodivergent. I really like the train part. I didn't get the history part. So I did not know these statements about Mussolini, which is kind of fun and hilarious to learn. But yeah, no, no one in power has the charge of whether or not a train's on time. Like, yeah, they can, they can approve like, oh, yes, comrade, our train will be on time. They can do that. And that's great. But, you know, every other train, you know, like normal day to day operations?

• 30:42Speaker 03

  No, that's not going to happen. What do you think? Like, it's the same thing about, I don't know, prices of eggs. Anyway.

• 30:48Justin Roczniak?

  I would say the closest to anything directly that someone did to make the train run on time was that when Lenin was being covertly returned to St. Petersburg, he was disguised as the stoker on the locomotive. And apparently, he was very good at it.

• 31:07November Kelly?

  Just realizing you're kind of missing the career you're really inspired for as you go back to like seize power.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  Everyone would have preferred you being a fireman than what you did.

• 31:17November Kelly?

  Yeah. No, I would not. But, you know.

• 31:21Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know.

• 31:22Liam McAnderson?

  I do like the idea that, that I thought I would be writing poetry after the war, but it's just let it just like, when do I get to shovel more coal?

• 31:33Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah, they do fascism in Italy for a while. That leads to them getting into, of course, World War II.

• 31:40November Kelly?

  Is that Monte Cassino?

• 31:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 31:43November Kelly?

  Uh, yeah, that that's arguably an allied war crime and certainly a strategic kind of piece of futility.

• 31:49Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. But hey, we won the war, so.

• 31:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, Mark Clark, in particular, kind of forced the bombing of this like very ancient monastery.

• 32:01Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 32:01November Kelly?

  Destroyed a bunch of like very, very old manuscripts and art and stuff, because it was on top of a hill that the the Germans weren't in it, but they weren't really using it. And they ended up fighting out of the craters and it was a whole fucking thing. It's just disastrous all around. The the whole allied campaign in Italy is like ego and stupidity. It's it's wild stuff.

• 32:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we'll we'll we'll talk about some of that in a bit.

• 32:26Liam McAnderson?

  And I killed my great uncle, who again was maybe killed by Germans, although by that point, 300,000 Italians were fighting. It's not it's not relevant. Go on.

• 32:33Justin Roczniak?

  This war goes.

• 32:34Liam McAnderson?

  Charlie.

• 32:35Justin Roczniak?

  The war goes pretty poorly for Italy, enough so that they surrender. Yeah. And once they surrendered, Hitler was like, oh, no, you don't. And he invaded.

• 32:46Liam McAnderson?

  We must defend the Gothic line, which went so well.

• 32:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 32:50November Kelly?

  It's a great combat mission game, though.

• 32:52Justin Roczniak?

  They wind up being occupied in the north by the Axis, which included occupying themselves.

• 32:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, the the the Italian Social Republic, which is the setting of Salò, the Pasolini movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, you know, the war essentially ended in southern Italy relatively quickly. It was just like, OK, we're under allied control now, whatever.

• 33:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, we're all doing like Godfather Part Two shit. And I just think Godfather Part One, whatever Sicily is cool, right? It's it's a bunch of like, Michael Corleone's there. It's fine.

• 33:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, now during allied occupation, the economy was all kinds of fucked up, right? If you're in a port city, you know, something like Naples or Rome's, Rome singular, Rome's, yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  There's only the one, yeah.

• 33:41Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, they captured Rome, but there was a bunch of, they didn't destroy the German tent. There's a bunch of, I don't know, mismanagement of the war, we'll say. Yeah, go on.

• 33:50Justin Roczniak?

  So it's relatively easy to come by things like clothing and cigarettes, all kinds of stuff. The American military was bringing in on Liberty ships and stuff. There wasn't much food. Food was harder to come by. In the countryside, the situation was reversed, right? Now, the problem there was that travel was pretty restricted.

• 34:08November Kelly?

  So you gotta, you gotta steal a bicycle. There's a whole thing about that.

• 34:13Justin Roczniak?

  The main way of fixing-

• 34:14Liam McAnderson?

  Ride a bicycle, my bad.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Use the other appendage.

• 34:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I got you. I can't see me pedaling, but I sure am.

• 34:22Justin Roczniak?

  The main way of fixing this economic imbalance was to stow away on a freight train and go barter out in the countryside, right?

• 34:30November Kelly?

  I was a thing in like, um, early occupation Japan as well. Uh, like people like getting out of Tokyo to go back to the like, you know, family like hometowns and stuff and try and get, you know, like whatever they had harvested.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  It's, it's a thing generally with trains. It's one of the darnedest things, you know? People bum around the country and bum a ride, whatever country it is on trains when they can. I had somebody do so, uh, and they decided to hop off at 50 miles an hour at, at the shop I used to work at for the MSF. And, um, he insisted that I don't call an ambulance, uh, but his, you know, uh, whatever bone is attached to the shin, I'm a engineer, not a medical person, being sticking out through his knee made me say,

• 35:19Speaker 03

  no matter who you are, you need to go.

• 35:20Justin Roczniak?

  You may, you may need an ambulance.

• 35:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, we don't, we don't love to see an open fracture.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was, um, that was pretty gross. It was a fun time.

• 35:28Justin Roczniak?

  Folks, uh, train hopping is dangerous. You can and will get turned to pasta sauce if you fuck up.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Don't do it. We, we tell the train crew, we tell the goddamn train crew not to get on and off moving equipment. Don't fucking hitch a train, please. If I can say one thing in this episode.

• 35:47Justin Roczniak?

  So during this time in Italy, of course, the train service is actually pretty poor, but it's also Balkanized, right? There's some trains being dispatched by-

• 35:55November Kelly?

  Shoes on the other foot, Italy tries to Italianize the Balkans and ends up Balkanizing Italy.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  Old country run the train like this.

• 36:06Liam McAnderson?

  That's gone poorly. Yes.

• 36:08Justin Roczniak?

  Some of the trains are dispatched by the Italian State Railways and some are dispatched by the Allied Command. There's not very much coordination. There's some pretty poor communication. Passenger service is especially bad. You know, so a lot of times no one actually knows what's running on which line with whose equipment and how and where.

• 36:28Liam McAnderson?

  Also, the crane situation in Philly.

• 36:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  This just sounds like the railroad. Like literally the amount, the amount of times I sent gifs of Led Zeppelin playing communication breakdown to my coworkers on a day to day basis when I work for the railroad. Yeah, this is a day that ends in Y.

• 36:47Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. So now, most of these trains were these wonderful things called steam locomotives.

• 36:54November Kelly?

  Fantastic. Beautiful. Great technology.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  We, we love these and I have to say you've picked a very, very, very specific, really, really stupid one to use for your diagram. But I'm here for it.

• 37:06Justin Roczniak?

  You know what? I just realized a bunch of extra stuff on there. Yeah. This is Andre Champlon's one or whoever his name is, right?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  This is a French choo choo with four cylinders. Much power and small space. Apparently. I don't know. It was a, it was a shitpost of a locomotive, but yes, it does make a good diagram though.

• 37:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So what is a steam train?

• 37:31November Kelly?

  It's literally, we're doing, we're doing the Simpsons bit of like Le Grille. Locomotive à vapeur. What the hell is that?

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Dump, dump, dump flock. What is that? Yeah, it's, it's a bomb on wheels. It's a bomb on wheels, Billy. I mean, it is James Watt's invention taken to a horrifying, uh, final modern end, quote unquote, modern being like, you know, 1920 ish.

• 37:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  But yeah, steam train, you have a steam engine, which is the bottom bit and you've got the bomb, which is the top bit, the boiler. And you know, you put all those things together and you can make lots of stuff move and they're really good at making lots of stuff move. You make a fire, it boils some water, it makes the steam, use the steam and rather than reuse it like a sensible marine kind of situation, you violently vomit it out the stack, which causes the fire to get real, real hot. And you get rid of all the fiery gases and all that stuff, which may or may not be important to the rest of this episode, out the stack. And you know, hopefully it goes out into the stratosphere and meets the jets like the jet fuel we talked about.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  But you know, maybe it doesn't. So yeah, it's fine. Yeah.

• 38:43Justin Roczniak?

  There is an issue where you're making all this smoke and steam, but sometimes trains go in holes.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:49Justin Roczniak?

  So how do we compensate for that?

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Stupidly. Oh, wow.

• 38:56November Kelly?

  I was really hoping that the answer would be invent electric locomotives, which eventually.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  So not even eventually. This is the fun of this. Okay. So we understood this intrinsically as the US very early, much earlier than this story takes place. Look up the Great Northern Railway of the US. We've done stories on my YouTube channel about it previously where they had electrified in the teens, the 1900s, you know, 100 years ago, plus. And they ran through the longest tunnel in the US, which is seven miles. And they used the electric power just for that. And but even before that tunnel existed, all those things, all that fun. But all these steam examples that you're showing on the slide are hilarious to me. Except the cab forward. The cab forward's badass. I've seen.

• 39:45Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone likes the cab forward.

• 39:47Speaker 03

  Did a video about it. It's kick ass. You could have used a worse cab forward, which we need not discuss. North Pacific Coast number 21.

• 39:56November Kelly?

  So, so, so the, as I interpret this, three solutions to the same problem. Problem is, if you're in a tunnel, the everything is going to get filled with like choking steam and smoke. And, you know, like, that's not good, because people need to breathe air. Yeah. So, solution number one. We do like a, like a fume hood type deal. And we just make you wear this in the tunnel.

• 40:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so the hilarious thing about this, anyone who's ever worked on a locomotive, regardless of a steam locomotive. Um, will understand how terrible this is. This is, it's like a gas mask. Southern Railway did this and I've been meaning to do a video for a long time on this. They plugged the gas mask into the main reservoir of the air system on the locomotive. So, okay, it's air. It's air. Yes. But you're getting damp steam locomotive air compressor scuzzy disgusting milky air. I wouldn't, when I asked my friends, we literally all said, no, I would never put that on. I would rather just put a rag over my mouth and nose. That is disgusting.

• 41:05November Kelly?

  It's like, I, I, I want to breathe some ventilated air. So I'm going to hook up a big tube to the like fan on the back of my computer. And it's like, it take a big inhale of that.

• 41:15Liam McAnderson?

  Especially your computer.

• 41:18November Kelly?

  Oh, you're assuming it's not moist already. I've, I've, listen, there's some things going on in that case. I don't care to account for.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  The, that's valid and fair, but the drip.

• 41:27Liam McAnderson?

  Your hard drives properly.

• 41:28Speaker 03

  The, the drip that comes out of the main reservoir looks like chocolate milk.

• 41:34November Kelly?

  Mmm, tasty.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  So just breathe, just breathe the chocolate milk that is not chocolate, nor is it milk. It is steam cylinder oil and.

• 41:43November Kelly?

  The things that are worse for me, so delicious looking. Why does lead taste so good?

• 41:47Justin Roczniak?

  I, I never got to try the mummy water.

• 41:51Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, there's still time, Ron.

• 41:54November Kelly?

  So, so, so that's one. Solution two, uh, the second funniest to me. What if we put the, the steam in a tube and we run that tube all the way?

• 42:04Liam McAnderson?

  Baby.

• 42:05November Kelly?

  There will be blood style out the back of the thing. So it's not my problem anymore.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  So this sort of thing kills draft, right? Like we talked about ejecting the steam with great velocity out, out the top of the smoke box, which is the front bit, which is not pressurized. That's where the gases in the steam mix, it goes at a literal rocket nozzle called the blast nozzle, which induces a normal shock wave inside the smoke box to suck those gases out quite violently. And putting it through a long tube reduces the effectiveness of that. So you don't get the same draft, which means this locomotive would steam like shit.

• 42:46November Kelly?

  They also.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Do well.

• 42:48November Kelly?

  They did this for like war locomotives, like underneath sometimes, but I, we've talked about it before to like hide, like steam clouds.

• 42:59Justin Roczniak?

  The steam like.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  They would have steamed like crap. They would have sucked to fire. They wouldn't have made steam. But like, if you gotta be sneaky, you gotta be sneaky. But if you're trying to use a locomotive and like, I don't know, move some tonnage, which, well, I mean, you know, no offense to my, my British friends here, uh, you know, the Brits were not known for doing compared to what we did. Uh, over here.

• 43:20November Kelly?

  I mean.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  One thing we did do right.

• 43:22November Kelly?

  Country.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Freight trains. Yeah. Smaller country, more dense. I, I love British trains, but I do love give, giving the Brits shit too. Uh, you know, you would have been fine with that.

• 43:32November Kelly?

  Ah, who, who won the fucking war anyway?

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:35November Kelly?

  With, without us, you'd all be speaking German.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Uh, well, you know, it's the details.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  Goes back to the politics section and you scratch your head and go, but anyway.

• 43:46November Kelly?

  And then solution number three, what if, what if I'm in front of the big scary bomb? And then bomb is just doing its thing behind me and I don't have to worry about it.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. And solution number three is actually fucking kick ass. I've seen that exact locomotive. It is a tragedy that there are not more of these because the Southern Pacific built several hundred like this. It's cab forward, put the cab in front. They were extremely successful. They had 12 classes of, although the AC nine was not cab forward, whatever. They had what they called articulated consul consolidations, AC. And they were AC one through AC 12, uh, and they're fantastic. That engine is preserved in Sacramento, California, California State Road Museum. Amazing museum, if you can go.

• 44:33November Kelly?

  I have maybe a stupid question.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  It's just incredible. Yeah.

• 44:37November Kelly?

  My, my, my stupid question is I see the coal wagon behind it.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  It's not coal. That's how.

• 44:42Justin Roczniak?

  Coal.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 44:44November Kelly?

  What?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  You're so British it hurts.

• 44:49November Kelly?

  I hear this so often.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  How could it not burn coal? It's a steam train.

• 44:56November Kelly?

  If I was Swiss, I would say, where do you put the wood? Right? If I was a Marine, I would say, where do you put the bayonet? This is just an essential characteristic of the thing.

• 45:06Liam McAnderson?

  National stereotypes are hurtful facts.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  The better part of half of the engines in the US burned oil, fuel oil. And the Southern Pacific, being located, I don't know, damn Texas, friend. And all along the south and up into California had a large sources of oil to utilize. So they burned fuel oil. It is an oil burning locomotive and the firebox, I mean, the firebox is gargantuan. You can see it in there and they've got the oil burner and you get to see it. It's it's super neat. What a fantastic artifact. But, you know, they just plumbed everything to the cab, which is one of those hilarious little things about this kind of engine versus any other kind of engine where, yeah, you have

• 45:48Speaker 03

  to bring everything from the tender, which is still behind, up to where you can control it and then back to where it goes. So, yeah, the oil comes from the tender, from the bunker, up to the cab where the firing valve is for the fireman, then to the burner. The water comes from the tender, runs all the way, you know, I mean, this is a huge locomotive. This is bigger than anything they built in Britain by a factor of four.

• 46:12November Kelly?

  Well, size isn't everything.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Well, it's true. It's how you use it. We know this and you guys have the speedy boys and we'll, we'll, we'll let that be. But.

• 46:21November Kelly?

  No, no, no, T1 Trust is gonna fix that.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  You guys are on my side. I love that. I love that. Yeah. Duck for dinner, anyway.

• 46:30November Kelly?

  Not, well, it's not as pressing.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  And well, well, you know, again, beauty in the eye of the beholder.

• 46:37November Kelly?

  First, well, there's your problem episode, but I ended a fistfight.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  You said this locomotive wasn't pretty and I'm going to fly to Britain right now. Anyway, tell, tell me you're nerd or virgin without, anyway.

• 46:50November Kelly?

  What's the purpose of your visit? Combat.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Yes, somebody has to go down. All in all, British trains, lovely. American trains, lovely. Very different purposes, very different things, all the stuff. Who cares? Whatever, blah, blah, blah. Imagine plumbing 100 feet almost of water from the tender to the injector that's in the engine to then plummet almost 100 feet back to where it needs to go into the boiler. A little stupid, lots of extra work, lots of extra rework, which is why these things were not common. The Southern Pacific having the ridiculous amount of tunnels that they had, it made sense. They made a ton of these. They used them all the time. Amazing locomotives. And it's a shame we only have the one, but the one we have is one of the last and one

• 47:38Speaker 03

  of the best, and it is truly an engineering marvel, and we're very thankful to have it. For reasons that we will learn about very shortly from Justin.

• 47:47Justin Roczniak?

  What can we say other than restore it and run it on the main line?

• 47:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Well, SP, there's details there, but who cares?

• 47:56November Kelly?

  So, but like, if I'm doing all of this, this is exhausting. Can't we just electrify the thing?

• 48:01Liam McAnderson?

  No, shut up.

• 48:02November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, you know, most people do that. String the wire. And they say that. Roz. You know, you know, you know, you know how much wire you'd have to string? You know how much maintenance that would cause? You know how many meth heads we have in the US that would steal the wire?

• 48:17Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know.

• 48:19November Kelly?

  It's called Keynesianism. What you do is you string the wire, that requires a bunch of wire stringers, and then you station a railroad cop every 10 meters, like a presidential motorcade's coming through, and to just like shoot anybody who tries to steal the wire, that's jobs. And then pretty soon, everybody is either working as a wire stringer or a railroad cop, and nobody's left to steal the copper.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like this plan. It's a good plan.

• 48:44Liam McAnderson?

  Well, there's your problem. Make work.

• 48:46November Kelly?

  And they say Leninists don't know how to organize an economy.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 48:50November Kelly?

  It's central planning at its finest.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  When I was at the BNSF, we had three cops for the Northwest Division, three for the Northwest Division, which was a small division. And when I worked at Transit, we had overhead contact systems, stolen all of it, like several miles worth. It's fine. And, you know, several miles worth in Transit versus the, I don't know, 32,000 miles of just that one railroad. Details, you get.

• 49:15November Kelly?

  I mean, this is, this is kind of like, it reflects a fundamental inadequacy of the American criminal, right? Because it shows a lack of ambition, right? Still, still, still the wires, whatever, fine. Show me, like, if you're telling me that, you know, a steam locomotive is safe because it's harder to steal, you need a better class of thief, right? Start stealing steam locomotives.

• 49:35Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, and then running it on the main line, of course.

• 49:39November Kelly?

  It's fine. Like the general?

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Uh, the many options of that, including a, an episode three quarter show where we talked about the CB stealing South Korean locomotives, which was hilarious, but another story for another time.

• 49:52Justin Roczniak?

  So my understanding with running steam locomotives in tunnel, in the tunnel is that you're not, you're not supposed to open the firebox because the flames all shoot out at you. Is that a thing? Or is that like something I made up?

• 50:06Speaker 03

  That, that depends on the draft. Uh, for all my viewers, drink. That's the fun. Everything depends. Everything is situational. Nothing's black and white. Everything's kind of gray, right? So if you've got a good head of steam, you're working hard, you're working the engine hard and it's ejecting shit out the stack. It's going to draft everything in. I mean, point of context, when you put in the snow shovel sized shovel to put coal in the back corners when you're working hard, it is trying to rip that shovel out of your hands like somebody pulling you away from a car that's going to hit you. Like it is a crazy amount of force from the air. So no, it's not going to blow back if you've

• 50:48Speaker 03

  got that draft. If you don't, that air pressure back down the stack, oh man, it'll blow flames out the cab six feet. I mean, to touch the tender and beyond.

• 50:58Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my God.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  It's, that's not a fun time.

• 51:01Justin Roczniak?

  So I, I mean, what I'm hearing is make sure you got enough power. And the other one, of course, don't stall.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, don't, don't do that. That's, uh, that's not great.

• 51:12Justin Roczniak?

  Bad.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  And, and ideally, you know, like just in case, cause power is variable, train's running slow. The draft is variable. You fire before you go in and then you hope that the fire is gonna take you all the way through. Typically, but.

• 51:26Justin Roczniak?

  There you go.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  You never know.

• 51:27November Kelly?

  That's, that's, that's like root knowledge, right? Like I have to fire the thing this much in order to get through this tunnel, which I know is this long beforehand.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 51:37Liam McAnderson?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  And that's.

• 51:38November Kelly?

  Not always possible because it's not an ideal world. And I don't know, maybe the same guys who came and stole all of the copper wire have lengthened the tunnel by 10 feet or like.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:46November Kelly?

  Or conversely stolen part of the tunnel. Me and my gang of tunnels.

• 51:52November Kelly?

  Me and my gang of tunnel thieves have removed about 10 feet of the mountain.

• 51:55Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, Henry.

• 52:03November Kelly?

  So somebody stole my tunnel. Now it's just a fucking normal rail.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  They daylighted the tunnel. Does that happen all the time? It's fine.

• 52:13Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So yeah, um, that's steam locomotives and tunnels. Now sometimes you also do something fun, which is what if you operate two steam locomotives on the front of the train?

• 52:22Liam McAnderson?

  Run into each other.

• 52:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  So that, that is an intrinsically fun time of, uh, everyone always asks, is there, are there controls for that? Or like, how do you, how do you talk to the other engineer? And, uh, it's a lot of, I feel with my butt, what I must do.

• 52:39Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. Like rail, like rail directions. Yeah.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  Right. Like it's literally the, the, the road engine, which is the engine in the back, which the engine, uh, the train is typically designated with in the U S. So in this case it'd be extra 475, cause 475 is in the back.

• 52:57Justin Roczniak?

  Is this Yawei or Yuri?

• 52:59Speaker 03

  That's the real question.

• 53:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Gotta think about those things. Uh, that engine's gonna work, work its nuts off. It's gonna work as hard as it can, balls to the wall, everything. And then the helper is going to try and stay out of its way, basically like pull hard enough that you're pulling away and you're, and you're maintaining whatever speed you need to maintain. Cause anytime you're doing a gabang gabangy between the two of them, you, you shoot yourself in the foot and you'll feel it. If the engineers are not in sync, uh, the train will not orgasm. It's very true.

• 53:33November Kelly?

  Okay, so it's so it's so it's Yawik then. Okay.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:37November Kelly?

  Right.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:37November Kelly?

  Settled question.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  Got it figured out.

• 53:40Liam McAnderson?

  Phallic.

• 53:42November Kelly?

  Just doing some feminism and wondering why the lack of Yonex sort of steam.

• 53:47Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my God.

• 53:48November Kelly?

  It's like, no, nobody's designed a pressure vessel that way, but I think that's telling.

• 53:53Speaker 03

  Hoop stress.

• 53:53November Kelly?

  Really.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  It's easy to make it look like a dick.

• 53:55November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Justin Roczniak?

  You can you can tell the the male dominance in the railroad industry.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  It's fine.

• 54:05Justin Roczniak?

  Do you also use whistle codes for this? Or is it, you know?

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Every railroad is unfortunately different because of course they are, because that's just the way they want to be. We do out in the West very much so.

• 54:19Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, so we also have to talk about coal.

• 54:21November Kelly?

  Coal. Coal. I've heard of this.

• 54:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Liam McAnderson?

  You love it.

• 54:26November Kelly?

  Yeah. If you if you don't have a bunch of petroleum just coming out of the ground in in in Texas or wherever, you have to use this. Or wood.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Solidified dinosaur.

• 54:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 54:36Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, the OG spicy rock.

• 54:38November Kelly?

  So solidified dinosaur food, right? Like.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  It's not actually dinosaurs.

• 54:43November Kelly?

  Yeah, so it's all like sort of dead plant material and stuff that got mine.

• 54:47Justin Roczniak?

  It got crushed before bacteria developed that could break down. I forget which plant part.

• 54:55November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's it's it's it's one of the most effective carbon sinks.

• 54:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 55:00November Kelly?

  That's its natural.

• 55:01Justin Roczniak?

  Until you burn it.

• 55:02November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, then you're like destroying the thing and the carbon comes back out and that that's a whole problem for everybody, but like.

• 55:08Justin Roczniak?

  Well, what we clearly have to do is make more coal.

• 55:11November Kelly?

  You start crushing up more plants.

• 55:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, real quick.

• 55:16November Kelly?

  But yeah, no, this is.

• 55:18Liam McAnderson?

  Let's go.

• 55:18November Kelly?

  This this is one of the most effective carbon sequestration things ever devised, which we incidentally use to make train go fast sometimes.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Right. Coal coal burning is a huge part of railway stuff, particularly over in your land, Nova. They're actually freaking out that they've stopped mining the Welsh coal and and it'll be the end of the railway and and that actually one of my good friends is. Helping you guys convert things to burn the liquid diet, which you'll figure out hopefully.

• 55:47Liam McAnderson?

  Burn the liquid diet is such a hell of a phrase.

• 55:49November Kelly?

  So, so much better than, uh, you know, but in, in the windiest fucking country on earth being like, where, where are we going to get electricity? The turn of turbine of some kind? I don't know. It's a mystery to me.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. What are you gonna do?

• 56:05November Kelly?

  Well, I mean, it's not as if anybody has the technology to split the atom, you know?

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Or anything like that. Yeah. Nuclear? I think, I think we call it nuclear over here.

• 56:16Justin Roczniak?

  Nuclear.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  W told me.

• 56:17November Kelly?

  It's pronounced nuclear. Despite the impression that you get living here, six months out of the year, the sun does shine on the United Kingdom. So you can also use that maybe. And then you just.

• 56:26Liam McAnderson?

  God doesn't trust an Englishman in the dark.

• 56:31November Kelly?

  Shouldn't trust them under the kind of like shadow of all the solar panels either. But the point is you can build a lot of them. And then you can put all of that beautiful copper wire up, give everybody a job as a railroad cop. And then pretty soon you don't have to burn the, the Jurassic swamp.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Burning coal. Do you not burn coal over there? Isn't that the way it works? But.

• 56:51Justin Roczniak?

  You know, I, I, I, isn't the Welsh coal anthracite?

• 56:54November Kelly?

  I believe so.

• 56:55Speaker 03

  I don't know what it is, and I doubt it's anthracite because there, there's this whole debate in railroad things. You have the, the grades of coal for the uninitiated. You have lignite down near the bottom. You have semi bituminous. You have bituminous. And then you have, uh, anthracite at the top and easy wood to tell for the uninitiated again, how shiny is it? Anthracite is like, it's darn near a polished ridiculous substance.

• 57:21November Kelly?

  So, so I'm, I'm looking here on, on Google. I could buy a ton of very shiny looking Welsh anthracite for 648 quid. Jesus Christ.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Is it really anthracite? I'm, I'm surprised by that.

• 57:31November Kelly?

  So I'm told.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Our, uh, our locomotives over here are typically designed to burn bituminous coal and the anthracite burning engines had weird fire boxes that were very, very thick. That's why you have a camelback locomotive where the, the cabs in front is because the firebox had to be so dummy thick that it could probably.

• 57:49Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, me too.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Properly burn a smaller amount of anthracite.

• 57:54Justin Roczniak?

  That's because I, as far as I know, that's because the, they didn't burn the actual mined anthracite. They burned the spoil, the, the comb.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, I would not be surprised by that. I'm not an anthracite expert.

• 58:07Justin Roczniak?

  Cause the anthracite is too expensive to burn in a locomotive. You use that for like home heating or building heating, um, because it burns so clean.

• 58:15Speaker 03

  That does sound like the, uh, the railroad that I know. So, yeah. So anyway, our, uh, our engines are usually designed to burn bituminous. Bituminous is a lesser grade. It's got a lot of bunch of crap in it, but coal, uh, as we'll see in this episode, coal is so dependent on the grade, the quality, the, what it is, even i- in those ranges. I've had bituminous that we've burned in our locomotive that burns great, makes a bunch of ash, but burns great. It's fine. I've had the same grade of coal. It was bituminous coal that we burned in the locomotive and it had so much oil content in it that it plugged all the way, every single flue and tube in the locomotive.

• 58:56Speaker 03

  Two hundred and three fucking flues and tubes, including the big five and a half inch ones, were plugged solid with this weird, cakey, greasy, disgusting coal particulate. And we saw they're trying to fire it up the one day and it's like, it got to seven PSI. We've got the blower, which drafts the fire with a steam draft, open as far as it goes. And it wouldn't make more than seven PSI. We shut it off. We go and look later when it cooled down. It's like, the tube sheet looks like a blackboard. It looks like, like something in a classroom. It doesn't look like it has tubes. Cause it was just covered in this shit and it was just junk garbage, still bituminous, but just junk garbage.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  So sometimes you get good coal. Sometimes you get bad coal. It makes a huge difference.

• 59:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, and during the war, the, the Italians used German bituminous coal. Not the late night they're famous with mining, uh, you know, with the big bucket wheel excavators that tear through a whole village. You know, this is a, a higher grade, uh, bituminous coal. But during the allied app occupation, of course, they couldn't use German coal. So they use a lower grade, American bituminous coal, which was shipped over on, you know, Liberty ships, probably from like West Virginia or some. Where well, from from Norfolk, Virginia or Baltimore, Maryland. But the coal originated from West Virginia. And it was found just in general to have poorer steaming quality than the German coal. And it created a lot more smoke.

• 1:00:27Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, and this didn't really bother Allied Command. Like, it's not like they're about to go out and buy the better coal from Germany right now.

• 1:00:35Liam McAnderson?

  Shovel harder, you bitch.

• 1:00:36November Kelly?

  Yeah, and you're also you're you're occupying a formerly fascist country and all these guys were shooting at you five minutes ago.

• 1:00:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:44November Kelly?

  I don't care about your passenger service, right?

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  Figuring it out, yeah.

• 1:00:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about the Badapaglia to Metaponto Railway.

• 1:00:55Liam McAnderson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:00:56November Kelly?

  I'm looking at all of these these names on the thing and just soaking them all in. There's beautiful language.

• 1:01:02Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  I do not speak third best Italian, so I'm gonna struggle.

• 1:01:06Liam McAnderson?

  Italian. All right, Roz, you're up. You love Italy.

• 1:01:09Justin Roczniak?

  I I do love Italy. Italy is fantastic. This goes down here Badapaglia, right? And it goes and it goes and it starts getting into some mountains, reaches this place called Balvano. This is like a really tiny town that's off the beaten tourist path. You know, and it's also weird because it was entirely rebuilt in 1980 when the earthquake knocked it down. It looks like a like a tiny Italian traditional village, but it's all board formed concrete.

• 1:01:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, brutalist Italy.

• 1:01:44November Kelly?

  This is this is like southern Italy, right? Because I see Bari over there on the east. Okay.

• 1:01:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, Naples is like right up here.

• 1:01:50November Kelly?

  We're we're sort of like about at like ankle level of boot.

• 1:01:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, down there. Yeah, you mean to tell me that a train having to do a squiggly left and right also probably has to do a squiggly up and down? And the train don't like it?

• 1:02:06Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. So it goes through at this point at Balvano, the Galleria della Army. That's, um, I believe that's just the army tunnel, right? I don't know why it's called that. Uh, it wasn't built for the army, to my knowledge.

• 1:02:22November Kelly?

  No, because it's not army, because army in Italian is a has it all.

• 1:02:27Justin Roczniak?

  That makes sense.

• 1:02:29November Kelly?

  One of those.

• 1:02:31November Kelly?

  So it's like the arms gallery, I suspect.

• 1:02:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35November Kelly?

  Like, in the sense of like weapons, welcome to weapons tunnel.

• 1:02:40Justin Roczniak?

  Welcome to the weapons tunnel. Anyway, the weapons tunnel. It makes a few curves in its route. Then the route goes over here to Patenza, right? Patenza is home to the largest escalator complex in Europe.

• 1:02:54November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 1:02:54Justin Roczniak?

  Huh. Yeah, not at the time.

• 1:02:56Liam McAnderson?

  Escalator land.

• 1:02:58Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 1:02:59November Kelly?

  When we say, when we say escalator complex, what do we mean exactly?

• 1:03:02Justin Roczniak?

  So part of the old section of the town is on a hill. The new section of the town is on a hill. There's a valley in between.

• 1:03:10November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Justin Roczniak?

  And there's a covered escalator that goes down the entire hill and crosses the road and then goes up the other side.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  So rather than being a temple to the stair god like Dubravnik, they, you know, weaponized the stairs?

• 1:03:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, shit. That's, that's so cool.

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  It's fun.

• 1:03:28Justin Roczniak?

  And then from Patenza goes somewhere.

• 1:03:31November Kelly?

  Vision of myself falling down every single fucking escalator step.

• 1:03:35Justin Roczniak?

  Blup, blup, blup.

• 1:03:36November Kelly?

  Being carried up to the other side and then falling back down every other escalator step.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Gary's mod, right?

• 1:03:45November Kelly?

  I feel like I'm making those all the time, being in your thirties.

• 1:03:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, your thirties are great. It's all the injury.

• 1:03:51Justin Roczniak?

  Then it goes down here to Metaponto, right?

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  That's a squiggly ass alignment.

• 1:03:57Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. And this was, this is one of those lines. I don't know too much about it. What I, what's sort of, it looks like to me is this thing was old when it was new.

• 1:04:06Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, that tracks.

• 1:04:08Justin Roczniak?

  You know, definitely a kind of a very squiggly line. You know, not electrified, obviously. Maximum grade is 2.6%.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  That's, that is stout for a choo-choo.

• 1:04:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21November Kelly?

  I mean, also, as, as much as the fascists kind of like boasted about trying to remedy it, as have every other political tendency in Italy, there's, there's really stark like north-south divide, particularly in like poverty as well. So this is kind of a backwards and it's like in, like, you know, towards the kind of ankle end.

• 1:04:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of stuff here that has not been really well-modernized. I mean, I would say the, the Italian rail network is in better shape than, let's say, the US rail network, at least for passenger service, but.

• 1:04:54Speaker 03

  Passenger service in the US is depressing.

• 1:04:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:05:01Justin Roczniak?

  But this is still a very curvy route. They have electrified. They electrified it in 1994.

• 1:05:06November Kelly?

  Italian route.

• 1:05:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09November Kelly?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  New girl like that ones.

• 1:05:13November Kelly?

  Still have a number?

• 1:05:16Speaker 03

  I'll look it up.

• 1:05:18Justin Roczniak?

  This was still a very popular route. It served a bunch of major population centers, but it only had one real passenger train each week. You could catch the train on Wednesdays.

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  Hey, one a week is, is worse than Amtrak. You're talking a lot of shit, but like, Amtrak at least does that.

• 1:05:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Justin Roczniak?

  So, anyway, uh, let's meet the players today.

• 1:05:42November Kelly?

  The players.

• 1:05:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43November Kelly?

  In the red corner.

• 1:05:44Speaker 03

  Are you, do the locomotives from this exist?

• 1:05:48Justin Roczniak?

  This is one number ahead of the locomotive involved.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Okay, sister engines.

• 1:05:55November Kelly?

  Next one off the production. I, I love the cunty. Sorry, I probably shouldn't call them cunty. I love the stylishly Italian cut-out silhouette standies there. That's very cool.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  Very non-American. They're very skinny. Uh, it is, it is funny that, um, it's, it's a decapod. Uh, we, we want it, we want, you know, we, uh, I can't even do an Italian accent if I tried. We wanted to parody, uh, you know, Daddy Germany with a two-ten-oh, uh, and so we made this and it's not quite a class 52, but you know, it's fun.

• 1:06:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but it's, uh, it's, it's got cleaner lines because you know, it's Italian.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that looks like it'll go as fast as a Ferrari.

• 1:06:34Liam McAnderson?

  We've, we've built our trains just like we've.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:06:36Liam McAnderson?

  We build our trains and we build our cars functional and basically not running. Or beautiful and not running.

• 1:06:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  It's fine. So Jesus.

• 1:06:44Justin Roczniak?

  This is an FS four eighty. It is a two ten oh, a decapod. This was designed for the Branner Pass line, which had just become part of Italy instead of Austria owing to World War One.

• 1:06:57November Kelly?

  Italian irredentism's first and only victory.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  Waits on drivers. You have something to help you through the curves. I mean, it looks spindly to me, but I mean, it's not an American train.

• 1:07:08Justin Roczniak?

  This, this is probably, this is really big for Italy, not big for here, big for Italy.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would, I would wager a bet that my cute little narrow gauge choo choo that I deal with all the time over here in the States weighs more than this thing.

• 1:07:24Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, we might be able to look that up even.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I bet we can. We could, we can wager my bet and I can owe somebody money within the context of this episode.

• 1:07:32Justin Roczniak?

  The FS four eighty weighs.

• 1:07:35November Kelly?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, is.

• 1:07:38Justin Roczniak?

  Do we use long tons or short tons? I forget.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  We use short tons because long tons are metric tons.

• 1:07:44Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I see. Ninety two point nine short tons.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  Ninety two point nine short tons. Is it just for the engine or the engine and tender?

• 1:07:52Justin Roczniak?

  Just for the, the engine. The tender is fifty seven point four.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  They're like the same. That's hilarious. I, I want to say ninety one is like ninety four short tons. She's right there. Four ninety one, a, a narrow gauge, three foot gauge locomotive in the US. Biggest of the narrow gauge, biggest of the three foot gauge, uh, but you know, it's still very small and presumably much smaller driver and all that stuff. You know, less power, who, whatever, whoever cares. Um, not the same size as this thing.

• 1:08:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So these guys, four times the power. It's fine.

• 1:08:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. These guys were built in nineteen twenty three, but they were rendered redundant on the Branner Pass fairly shortly after they were built because they electrified that whole line in nineteen thirty. So they moved them to Sicily and then they moved them back to the mainland to work the, uh, Badapaglia to Mediponto Railway. Uh, the one you can see here, this is at Pia Trarza, which is the Italian State Railway Museum. It's incredible. You should go visit. I, I have been there. I have seen this locomotive. Great location right there on the, on the ocean. You know, you can see Vesuvius and everything. Also, the museum's huge and really well done.

• 1:09:10Liam McAnderson?

  Noise.

• 1:09:11Justin Roczniak?

  All the railway works, uh, buildings are really well preserved. Um.

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  Gotta, gotta put that on my list. Uh, the railways that region are so neat. And then they're preserved so well. Uh, I spent a lot of time at a railway museum, just, uh, you know, a couple of doors down in Slovenia recently and, uh, it was so freaking cool and so lovely how, how tied in the history is to the present day there.

• 1:09:35Justin Roczniak?

  What, what I liked was that the railway museum had a train station attached to it. So I could, that, that was, I was with my, my parents in Italy last year. My brother had never been before. This is when I went rogue. Yeah. Cause they were like, we're going to the Vatican today. And I was like, I ain't been to the Vatican. I don't care. So I woke up early and took the high speed train down in Naples, specifically to go to this railroad museum.

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  To hell with Jesus trains.

• 1:10:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  Vibes.

• 1:10:03Justin Roczniak?

  The problem with St. Peter's is it's so big. It's not impressive.

• 1:10:07Liam McAnderson?

  Catholicism is coming. I promise.

• 1:10:11November Kelly?

  This is, this is the problem with, uh, getting conservation estimates.

• 1:10:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:15November Kelly?

  You end up, you end up with a new build and it's kind of too much, you know, and it's, uh.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  It's fine. It's fine.

• 1:10:22Justin Roczniak?

  All right. It's great. You go into like, oh, this looks like some kind of early Christian basilica. No, some Renaissance asshole redid it in 1620.

• 1:10:32Justin Roczniak?

  Piece of shit.

• 1:10:36November Kelly?

  Listen, if you didn't want that to happen, blame the Protestants. They shouldn't have started the reformation. They wouldn't have been a counter reformation.

• 1:10:43Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. Yeah. Um.

• 1:10:47November Kelly?

  It's all Martin Luther's fault.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  Look at history, kids, it's fun.

• 1:10:51Justin Roczniak?

  And this other guy, this is an FS 476. It is an O10O.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, is that an O10O? It looks like it.

• 1:11:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:11:02November Kelly?

  It raising my hand here to ask, why would you do that? Why, why would you, why is this the way that it is?

• 1:11:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Ride quality is not important.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  No, so this is so stupid. I mean, all the weights on drivers, that is very important in some contexts. I did a, I did a video, maybe a year ago now about wheel arrangements. And I talked about all of the popular ones. Wheel arrangements are a big deal for steam engines. You have lead wheels, you have driving wheels, you have trailing wheels. Maybe you have multiple sets of lead wheels. Why do you do these things? And, and it's generally because you need the engine to perform a certain task, which is why steam engines kind of went out of favor. A diesel engine, which is a box that just does a do, is so much better than, oh, I need that exact tool. I don't need a 10 millimeter wrench. I need a hammer.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  The diesel's a hammer versus a specific sized wrench for an application. And an O10O means, hey, you're probably shunting. You're probably in the yard. You probably, you're not going fast. You need all your weight being adhesive. And if you go more than 20 mile an hour through a curve, your crew is going to hate everything about existence. So, you know, fun time.

• 1:12:17Justin Roczniak?

  I'm a little bit confused as to what these were originally designed for, because I think this might be one of those situations. You know, like the British like to do like, uh, O6Os and like O8Os for mainline service.

• 1:12:30November Kelly?

  It's normal when we do it.

• 1:12:32Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that's because your track is so much better.

• 1:12:36November Kelly?

  That's right. I can, I can hear, I can hear Gareth like pumping his fist in celebration. That's right.

• 1:12:43Justin Roczniak?

  So, uh, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, the, the British equivalent of a 440 was an O6O. You know, so.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  And they had no slop between the, uh, the laterals on the driver. So they couldn't move back and forth and they could go faster without being incredibly stupid. And they didn't have to be incredibly stupid because they were pulling, uh, checks notes, almost nothing.

• 1:13:09Justin Roczniak?

  So this was actually an Austrian locomotive and quite a few of them were seized as war reparations after World War I.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Oh, that means it's a wiener.

• 1:13:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:13:19November Kelly?

  I'm reading here about the FS476, their poor riding qualities and huge mass led some Milanese crews to nickname them after an icebreaker.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Not shocked. The lead truck has a point, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not exaggerating it. You watch an oh blank oh do anything, it fucks the track.

• 1:13:45November Kelly?

  It's this needs to hold like three wagons full of like beautiful vegetables, like the nicest San Marzano tomatoes you've ever seen in your life. Not a, not a single blemish on any of them.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  If I could get my San Marzano tomatoes delivered via this O10O.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  I thought that would be all I had bought.

• 1:14:06November Kelly?

  And then, then you eat the tomatoes, they give you the energy to go out and fix the rails, which it has absolutely devastated.

• 1:14:17Justin 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.

• 1:15:00Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:15:20Justin Roczniak?

  So the other thing this train is gonna have today is an unusual amount of freight cars.

• 1:15:26November Kelly?

  Oh shitload of San Marzano's.

• 1:15:28Justin Roczniak?

  Forty-seven cars of, well, they'd be empties because they're heading into the countryside to pick up the San Marzano's.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  They're gonna make a lot of pizzas.

• 1:15:36Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:37November Kelly?

  Delicious.

• 1:15:37Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. Well, the interesting thing is, there is actually, because of things we'll discuss later, there were going to be quite a lot of black olives on the train coming back.

• 1:15:48Speaker 03

  That is, that Italy dot web.

• 1:15:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Justin Roczniak?

  So yeah, this is an unusual amount of freight cars for this route owing to the sharp curves and the steep grades. And of course, they have north of 500 stowaways on board.

• 1:16:05November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, of course.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  You know, we always talk about the, the, the people tonnage. You have tonnage and then you add people and like a person's like not super heavy, one of them.

• 1:16:16Justin Roczniak?

  One of them.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  A lot of them, they do add up, especially if they're American.

• 1:16:22November Kelly?

  It's Justin's measurement of like an extremely fat man on a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that guy and, and his 15 brothers have all sort of like rolled their bicycles directly into the.

• 1:16:38Speaker 03

  I'd like to think that in 1944 Italy, they're probably not that level, but still.

• 1:16:44November Kelly?

  Just indulge me a little whimsy, you know?

• 1:16:48Justin Roczniak?

  These are all, these are all the people who would later come to America and become Italian Americans.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  Sorry, Jersey.

• 1:17:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, just a bunch of fat guys drinking Peronis.

• 1:17:04November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:04Justin Roczniak?

  No shirt on.

• 1:17:06November Kelly?

  Again, have we failed at respecting the noble culture and people of Italy?

• 1:17:10Justin Roczniak?

  I.

• 1:17:11Speaker 03

  I think we've failed at respecting the people of America, but I think that's fine.

• 1:17:16November Kelly?

  It's like task failed successfully.

• 1:17:18Justin Roczniak?

  You can't appreciate Italy without appreciating the contrast, which are what makes it great.

• 1:17:24November Kelly?

  That's true.

• 1:17:25Justin Roczniak?

  You know, you go, you go to Rome or you go to Florence and you see the most beautiful architecture, the most beautiful, you know, streets, you know, the cities, everything. You know, and you see up there on this gorgeous building on this beautiful street on a balcony is a fat shirtless guy in his boxers drinking a Peroni.

• 1:17:46November Kelly?

  Hell yeah.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:47Justin Roczniak?

  And it's like, this is the life.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  You've heard of five o'clock somewhere. I remember, I've been to Croatia a couple of times. My family's from Croatia.

• 1:17:57Justin Roczniak?

  Eleven o'clock.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, five o'clock somewhere doesn't apply in Europe. I'm pretty sure at least Central Europe. It is probably eight AM in Croatia or Italy or wherever, and they're having beers. It's what happens.

• 1:18:11Justin Roczniak?

  So, train eighty seventeen was made up in the yard at Naples on the night of March first, nineteen forty-four, and it started the next day for Patenza. Initially, it was hauled by an electric locomotive, but at Badapaglia, the wires ran out and the power was swapped for the two steam locomotives on the previous slide.

• 1:18:34November Kelly?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  Meth heads stole the wires, so we gotta use our steam engine the rest of the way.

• 1:18:39November Kelly?

  You mean Nazis? Yeah, I feel like the only meth heads in like nineteen forty-five Italy are like in the Vafanesa.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  Legally, they would be Nazis, yes, because they did distribute meth. That is that, that is that whole thing. It is amazing to me that, you know, in American railway culture, we electrify, I don't know, the place where you can breathe or can't breathe, rather, the tunnel. That's what's electrified. And, you know, they electrified what was close and convenient, but maybe that's, you know, the easy thing and.

• 1:19:11November Kelly?

  It's a classic, classic decision-making management strategy, right? You do the easy part first and then you never have to do the hard part because you just don't bother.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  And nothing bad will happen from it, right?

• 1:19:21November Kelly?

  Bad can ever happen.

• 1:19:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:23Justin Roczniak?

  So, on the lead locomotive, which was the four eighty, were Espetito Senatore and Luigi Ronghe, right?

• 1:19:34November Kelly?

  Did you just put this in so you would get to say some Italian names?

• 1:19:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 1:19:37November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40November Kelly?

  Espetito Senatore is a fantastic name.

• 1:19:43Justin Roczniak?

  That's a really good name, apparently.

• 1:19:44November Kelly?

  The Fast Senator.

• 1:19:46Justin Roczniak?

  Apparently, he was, he was a very good engineer, had a good reputation. He was like, you know.

• 1:19:54Justin Roczniak?

  Consummate professional. And then on the second locomotive were Matteo Gigliano and Rosario Barbaro.

• 1:20:05November Kelly?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:20:07Justin Roczniak?

  Uh huh. Yeah.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  I don't think you've got, as Hans on to said, you need to let me hear the music in it. I don't think you've got enough music in these names.

• 1:20:15Justin Roczniak?

  Gigliano, Gigliano.

• 1:20:17November Kelly?

  Rosario Barbaro.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  Gigliano.

• 1:20:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Speaker 03

  I can hear the music in it.

• 1:20:23Justin Roczniak?

  So they were engineer and fireman respectively. Anyway, it's slow going, right? This is a 520, 520 ton train with several additional tons worth of stowaways on board.

• 1:20:37November Kelly?

  Yeah, not to mention the bicycles.

• 1:20:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So they're

• 1:20:40November Kelly?

  The freakishly heavy bicycle thing.

• 1:20:46Justin Roczniak?

  As, as they're traveling away from Naples, there are a few times the railroad cops show up and they start trying to throw people off. There's so many damn people on the train that they can't manage it and people keep, you know, picking the train up at various stations they stop at. Cause this is Europe, the freight trains stop at stations. I don't know what they do there.

• 1:21:05November Kelly?

  Why not?

• 1:21:08Speaker 03

  They need a coffee. It's Italy.

• 1:21:10November Kelly?

  Matteo Gigliani goes and puts the fucking, um, um, what do you call it? The, the moka pot on and Rosario Barbaro goes back and like eats a couple of olives off of the wagons.

• 1:21:22Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, there, there's your next K 28 cooking show. See if you can put a moka pot in on the, on the, on the, uh,

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  Roger, we will, we will do that.

• 1:21:32November Kelly?

  That feels like an interesting way to bomb your own

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  Next time I cook on a K 28, we will do that.

• 1:21:39November Kelly?

  Small, small pressure vessel, big pressure vessel.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Yes, porcano los dos. Yes. See. How, this is a 520 ton train.

• 1:21:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  Ah, yes. Italy.

• 1:21:54Justin Roczniak?

  Italy, yeah.

• 1:21:56Speaker 03

  That is, that is five cars in the U S.

• 1:21:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Five. Christ.

• 1:22:04Justin Roczniak?

  So this thing is slow as all hell, even on the flat portion of the route. It takes the whole day to reach this crucial piece of infrastructure on the line.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Have we found the hole?

• 1:22:16November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's weapons tunnel.

• 1:22:19Justin Roczniak?

  Weapons tunnel near the town of Balvano.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  Is it actually weapons tunnel? It's not a weaponized and it's weapons tunnel?

• 1:22:25November Kelly?

  Yeah, for me is the LISA arms weapons like.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  Christ.

• 1:22:30Justin Roczniak?

  So the army tunnel is a monster, right? It curves through its entire length. It has a 1.3% grade, has absolutely no ventilation.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  Oh, well, you know, you don't want that in the tunnel.

• 1:22:44November Kelly?

  This, this gives me anxiety.

• 1:22:46Liam McAnderson?

  Me too.

• 1:22:47Justin Roczniak?

  Even in its later years, when it was run by diesel locomotives, uh, the crews complained about dense smoke in there.

• 1:22:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, but the.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  For context, the two tunnels I'm aware of that I have experience with in the U.S. Moffett Tunnel, Stevens Pass Tunnel, the two longest in the U.S. Like five and something or six and something change miles in a seven mile tunnel. They have gigantic fans. They're ridiculous. The biggest fans you've ever seen that clear the tunnel, the instant train goes in and it still smells like exhaust. If you go in a couple hours later, uh, yeah, it's, it's a whole thing.

• 1:23:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this one's about a mile and a third long, um, which isn't like especially long.

• 1:23:32Speaker 03

  It's a lot for a steam engine with zero ventilation.

• 1:23:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you know, so this is a nightmare with not one, but two steam locomotives in it, right?

• 1:23:42November Kelly?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Double, double the belching.

• 1:23:45Justin Roczniak?

  Just after midnight, they arrive at the Balvano station. This is just an isolated building and platform that's about three kilometers away from the town. Cause the town is way up on the hill and the railroad's way down in the valley.

• 1:23:58November Kelly?

  And a station master, you can hear him falling down all the escalator steps.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, little, little spot near the tunnel because important for railroad. Fuck the people, duh.

• 1:24:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, the station master is actually pretty suspicious of setting a train this long through the tunnel, especially with this many stowaways, but he can't do anything because this train was ordered by allied command. He's, it's out of his jurisdiction. This train has to go.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, bosses said yes, therefore train go. That sounds a lot like modern day railroading and has resulted in uh, modern day railroading. Check the news.

• 1:24:37November Kelly?

  Being out of a station master's jurisdiction is fun conceptually because it just plays into like old cop movie tropes, you know, like give me a badge and your gun.

• 1:24:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46November Kelly?

  Your badge, your weirdly accurate pocket watch and your gun.

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:24:50Justin Roczniak?

  So the train makes a brief stop right after midnight.

• 1:24:53November Kelly?

  They put on some coffee.

• 1:24:55Justin Roczniak?

  You put on some coffee. Yeah, they put on like, I don't know, a record or something.

• 1:25:01Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know what Italians do.

• 1:25:02November Kelly?

  Smoke.

• 1:25:02Justin Roczniak?

  I'm doing the smoke. They're smoking. Yeah, that's true.

• 1:25:06November Kelly?

  Paint.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  Having a glass of olive oil.

• 1:25:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11November Kelly?

  Having a glass of like Chanzano or like Limoncello or something.

• 1:25:15Justin Roczniak?

  Have some crap.

• 1:25:17November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:25:17Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah, I love crap.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  Rule G is, no, no, no. Rule G is, uh, don't drink on the job. And it's a very American thing.

• 1:25:25Justin Roczniak?

  They, they don't have rule G in Italy.

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  No, I would not imagine they do.

• 1:25:30Justin Roczniak?

  They're the opposite of that.

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Rule G, drink on the job.

• 1:25:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And at 12:50 AM, they set off towards the tunnel. It's just about a mile away. They go through two more short tunnels and over a bridge to get there. So they don't pick up very much speed. They're going 15 to 20 kilometers an hour.

• 1:25:52November Kelly?

  I mean, I, I feel like for this to be safe, the like route leading into the tunnel needs to look like the euthanasia coast, you know?

• 1:26:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I, well, the problem is then, you know, going the opposite direction. You'd have to go up the euthanasia coaster. No one's ever figured that one out.

• 1:26:10Speaker 03

  You'd have to have a switch for that, you know, euthanasia coaster or not, you know, uphill, downhill.

• 1:26:15Justin Roczniak?

  So they go in the tunnel and as they enter the tunnel, the wheels turn slower and slower. The chuffs get farther and farther apart. There are wet rails that's reduced the traction. The sanders on board can't compensate. That's the thing that puts the sand between the wheel and the rail gives you more traction. Finally, with only a few cars sticking at the end of the tunnel, the train stalls.

• 1:26:41Liam McAnderson?

  Uh oh.

• 1:26:42Justin Roczniak?

  The air becomes thick with smoke and the oil lamps illuminating the locomotive cabs went out.

• 1:26:50Liam McAnderson?

  That's bad, right?

• 1:26:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the jo- the joy of this, the joy of this is that a coal burning locomotive is a, it's a promise based on the principle that the locomotive is going to keep doing whatever the fuck it's been doing recently. So stomping up the hill, big grade, double headed, big train. Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. Like working its ass off. That means the fire is being drafted really, really, really fucking hard. And it stomps bum bum bum bum bum bum bum into the tunnel, slowly slows down and stops. That means that fire, which had been combusting probably perfectly, if not a little heavily, maybe a little bit more carbon,

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  no longer has the suction of oxygen, cuz the blast nozzle, the rocket nozzle that we talked about, is no longer supplying any of the air through the smoke box, means the fire is no longer getting anything. Which means you would go from a perfectly clean stack, or maybe a slightly hazy stack into, hey, I'm stomping up the grade, I need a big fire, big violent crappy coal, crappy coal fire. All of the smoke is now going everywhere and not just out the stack.

• 1:28:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, so it gets really dark.

• 1:28:06Liam McAnderson?

  That makes sense. Is that why, is that why this slide is just black?

• 1:28:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:28:10Liam McAnderson?

  Except for our friend, the activate windows logo.

• 1:28:12Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I, I, I decided, you know, rather than look for a photo, it'd be funny to just leave this one black. Also, I couldn't find another photo.

• 1:28:21Liam McAnderson?

  That's good. I like that bit.

• 1:28:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, there we go. Sometimes laziness, you know, leads you to creative decisions you wouldn't otherwise make. So, as we said, drafted a fire is not good. The locomotives are no longer producing power.

• 1:28:36Justin Roczniak?

  The whole thing is a big mess right now. So, in the first locomotive, the fireman, Luigi Ranga, he's searching for air and he doesn't find any. He tried leaning out of the locomotive and was completely overcome by smoke and fell out.

• 1:28:52Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus.

• 1:28:52Justin Roczniak?

  And miraculously, he fell out into the only area where there was breathable air, which was the horrible drainage ditch next to the tracks.

• 1:28:59Liam McAnderson?

  Ah, yes, the chocolate belt factory.

• 1:29:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  Christ.

• 1:29:04November Kelly?

  Again, God's sense of humor is.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  It's immeasurable, isn't it? Because Christ, I, I get on our new fireman all the time at the museum. Coal burning engines, you shut the throttle, you stop, not even working up this kind of grade for this long, just, you know, working up a steeper grade, but shorter time, shut off, black smoke rolls in the cab. And I always joke to them like, open the blower, or I will make it an oil burner. Figure it out. And to be in a double header and to go up this hill in a tunnel, stall out, have the rip and rage roaring, crazy fire, and you jump out the window for air. So believable.

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  Anyone who's fired a coal burner will know they're, they're awful in many ways.

• 1:29:58Justin Roczniak?

  So he lays there in the ditch unconscious and injured, but alive for several hours.

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  Christ.

• 1:30:06Liam McAnderson?

  Better than the alternative, I suppose.

• 1:30:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Engineer, engineer Esposito Senatore was not so lucky. He was found slumped in his chair with the throttle and reverser both at full forward.

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. The, the amount of, oh yeah, the crew died or the crew passed, or, you know, one unconscious in a tunnel, significant in murdering history.

• 1:30:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In the second locomotive, a different scene played out, right? Matteo Gigliano threw the reverser backwards and passed out before he could reopen the throttle. I think this was, you know, in the United States, you have a big lever. That's the reverser, right? Easy to throw it back real quick. This is Europe. I think they had a screw reverser.

• 1:30:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:30:54Justin Roczniak?

  And you gotta turn that a whole lot.

• 1:30:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:30:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. Screw verse is great for running one direction. You have infinite positions it could be in because it's a screw, not individual notches, but changing directions is very hard, very, very hard. And you have to really crank the thing. And it's not a simple, easy thing to crank either, depending on the size of the engine. And so what you've told us is the front engine was pointed one way and had its reverse pointed that way and the rear engine had it the other way like they were trying to bunch up the cars and trying to restart on the hill and they were both fighting each other.

• 1:31:35Justin Roczniak?

  At this point, yeah.

• 1:31:38Justin Roczniak?

  So at least one of the sources I looked at said, okay, if, if, if Gilianno had managed to reopen the throttle, the train probably would have started moving backwards. I mean, the front locomotive would have gone into an insane wheel slip scenario, which it probably did anyway. But.

• 1:31:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, guy who is most concerned about the, the track at this point.

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, depending that, you know, we're worried about the locomotives, not the 520 people. Yeah.

• 1:32:08November Kelly?

  I mean, Allied Command might have been.

• 1:32:12Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Speaker 03

  Details. It would probably be true. I doubt it would go to a wheel slip. It just depends on, it probably stopped stuck centered, which is when one of the valves or one of the pistons is at dead center, which means you're only getting force out of one side. Steam engine's usually only a two cylinder thing. And so when one of the cylinders is at one end, a clocked 90 degrees opposite, such that one can be in the middle of its stroke while the other one is at either end. So typically you have both strokes of power. When one is at the end, you only have one. And that's almost always where they stop because guess what? That's where the power output gets the least, which is why it

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  was hilarious that you used the SNCF four cylinder engine as your.

• 1:33:01Justin Roczniak?

  Oh crap.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  Piece of reference.

• 1:33:04Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't even think about that. God damn it.

• 1:33:06Speaker 03

  But anyway.

• 1:33:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. So she probably stopped dead center and said, wide open throttle. It's putting all of the force on one piston. The other piston's getting bubkis.

• 1:33:17Justin Roczniak?

  Ah damn.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  Godspeed, you know, like it probably sat there and went. Okay, I'm not gonna move. Fuck you. The fuck are you, uh?

• 1:33:27Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Italian engine.

• 1:33:28Liam McAnderson?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:29Justin Roczniak?

  Well, both Mateo Gilianno and Rosaria Barbaro also passed out in the cab. Um, back on the freight train, no one knew anything was going on because nearly everyone was asleep.

• 1:33:42Liam McAnderson?

  I forgot it was at night.

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, or we in the morning. Yeah.

• 1:33:47Justin Roczniak?

  And a vast majority of them quickly became much more asleep.

• 1:33:51Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, God.

• 1:33:51November Kelly?

  I mean, small mercies, right?

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, of the ways to go. Yeah, but also, oh, my God.

• 1:34:00November Kelly?

  My grandfather died quietly in his sleep, along with his passengers, who also died quietly in their sleep.

• 1:34:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:34:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Roberto Masulo was the rear brake man. Um, this train had two braking systems on it. The cars at the front had air brakes and the cars in the back had manual, you know, hand brakes, right? So they needed a brake man and, you know, a van at the back, right? Um, now he saw the train stall. He waited a few minutes for it to restart or reverse back. Then after that didn't happen after a while, he decided to go up to the train, figure out what's going on. He got a few meters in the tunnel, realized how bad it was in there and he got the fuck out.

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  Smart man.

• 1:34:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. He ran all the way back to the Balvano station, through the two smaller, but still smoke-filled tunnels in pitch darkness.

• 1:34:55November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:34:56Justin Roczniak?

  It took him nearly an hour.

• 1:34:58Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:58November Kelly?

  Good sense.

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  Good, good for him. Here's the hero of the story.

• 1:35:02November Kelly?

  Marathon, yeah.

• 1:35:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that, that, that, that, that guy had, didn't have to deal with smoke in the original marathon, you know? When.

• 1:35:12November Kelly?

  And, and he was running with good news.

• 1:35:14Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Speaker 03

  True.

• 1:35:15Justin Roczniak?

  When he, when he got there, he exclaimed to the station master, they're all dead in there, all dead. And then immediately collapsed.

• 1:35:23Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, so there's a marathon.

• 1:35:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  Tell.

• 1:35:27November Kelly?

  You're, you're doing this in like 1940s, like railroad worker boots as well?

• 1:35:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And this is, you know, it's a single track line. The closest place they can dispatch a rescue train from was Salerno, right? Which is all the way back at basically the start of the run. You know, they telegraph back, get a rescue train up here. They, that train arrived very early in the morning, like five o'clock. And they pulled the train out of the tunnel, shut the throttles and took stock of the damages. They also managed to get Luigi Ranga out of the tunnel as well. He lived.

• 1:36:04November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:36:07Speaker 03

  His instinct to jump out the cab was a good one.

• 1:36:10Justin Roczniak?

  Turned out that was a good one. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. If you're on YouTube, you don't want to look at a whole bunch of dead bodies. Look away from the screen now. Um, the, well, they're pretty low resolution.

• 1:36:23Speaker 03

  They're low res dead bodies, but it is a large pile.

• 1:36:27Justin Roczniak?

  That's great. Yeah. The official figures are 517 dead and 90 injured from partial asphyxiation. We're never going to actually know the actual number of survivors since quite a few of the stowaways fled the scene when the authorities showed up.

• 1:36:45November Kelly?

  I'm amazed as many people survived as they did, you know?

• 1:36:49Justin Roczniak?

  The last four cars of the train were stopped outside of the tunnel.

• 1:36:52November Kelly?

  Ah.

• 1:36:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Uh, the bodies were piled up beside the tracks for identification. Most were never identified and were buried in a mass grave in Balvano Cemetery.

• 1:37:04November Kelly?

  I mean, it's wartime, you know, like nobody gives a fuck.

• 1:37:07Speaker 03

  This is, uh, this is one I've, I've never heard of this one before. Heard of a lot of railroad disasters, but they're typically more like, oh, the railroad did this and then the train died or the train got hit by an avalanche or natural weather or whatever. But, you know, outside of wartime, this one being in wartime and, and being the way it is, this is one of the worst railway disasters in history.

• 1:37:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  Obviously Italy's worst, but the, this is one of the worst. Like it's, it's in the top, you know, X amount.

• 1:37:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I mean, certainly probably the worst freight train disaster in history because usually you don't have that many passengers on a freight train. Yeah, the two engineers and the firemen were given funerals. Luigi Ranga actually lived to tell the tale and returned to railroad work.

• 1:37:59Speaker 03

  Massacrist.

• 1:38:00November Kelly?

  Yeah, back in those days, it was all it was all professions, you know, like, what are you gonna do? Get another job?

• 1:38:06Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:38:07Justin Roczniak?

  One of the engineers was going out with a large sum of money from the, uh, um, the, the railway drivers collective in Naples, uh, to purchase a huge consignment of black olives for the return trip.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 1:38:24Justin Roczniak?

  And that was discovered by one of his colleagues, um, during the identification of the ba- uh, the bodies, and I believe he went out to go purchase all the black ba- the black olives with that.

• 1:38:39November Kelly?

  I mean, that's, that's

• 1:38:39Justin Roczniak?

  That's

• 1:38:40November Kelly?

  Union solidarity is complete, basic errand at all costs, but also crucially, do not like rob somebody, uh, who you find like a giant stack of banknotes on.

• 1:38:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Then we get to the blame game. Some people blame the station master who didn't have the authority to stop the train for not stopping the train. Some people blame the brakeman because he applied the brakes when it seemed appropriate to do so.

• 1:39:08November Kelly?

  Too flawless pieces of logic.

• 1:39:10Justin Roczniak?

  I think, uh, I, I, I, I think even if, you know, the brakes were applied in the van at the end of the train, that would have not stopped it from moving backwards if they really needed to.

• 1:39:21Speaker 03

  One car with a handbrake, you do real quick algebra, even including the multiplication of leverage.

• 1:39:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  One, one car with the brakes does not get you a whole stalled train. The train was overloaded.

• 1:39:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Lots of people blamed Allied Command for putting together this huge ass train and running it through the tunnel with bad coal.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  Well, the, the huge ass train is Allied Command. The bad coal is also Allied Command, but in separate instances, right? Like, it's not the same sort of thing. And you get bad coal, you get bad coal, and who knows what the pressure gauge readings were?

• 1:39:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. The investigation here was very brief and inconclusive. Allied Command actually ran some test trains through the tunnel with the crews that had respirators on them and found out that, um, huh, this coal that works fine in the big American locomotives isn't working in these smaller European locomotives.

• 1:40:20Speaker 03

  Engines are designed for the kind of coal that they're designed for. Hence, my earlier story of 491 and coal that was perfectly good, perfectly good BTU, plugging the entire fucking thing up.

• 1:40:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. But rather than get better coal, they slapped the weight limit on the line and banned double heading.

• 1:40:44Speaker 03

  Well, bam, there, there she be.

• 1:40:47Justin Roczniak?

  Then they added a mandatory waiting period of one hour between trains to allow the smoke to clear out of the tunnel, sort of.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  Did they at least employ a local to wave a fan at the tunnel during that hour?

• 1:41:00Justin Roczniak?

  No. Wow. I think they did station guards at each end for this purpose.

• 1:41:05Liam McAnderson?

  Good enough.

• 1:41:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  Well, they could wave their service rifles.

• 1:41:08November Kelly?

  To the primarily railroad cart-based economy.

• 1:41:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. There were no, oh, go ahead.

• 1:41:16Speaker 03

  The other fun, you know, solution to this, why do mechanical engineers exist in this day and age? Mechanical engineering is so easy. Tunnels, they, they compute the amount of cubic feet per minute that must be evacuated from a tunnel. Like, when, when I went to work in transit, everybody who is a mechanical engineer except me, because I was stupid and did signals instead, everybody was just figuring out, how do you get all of the air out of the tunnel as fast as you can? So.

• 1:41:46November Kelly?

  I saw this movie, Tenet, about that.

• 1:41:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, one, one little Italian boy with a, with a, you know, paper, whatever.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  Not so much.

• 1:41:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  There's a reason that there's jobs for that.

• 1:41:58Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God, I knew some, I knew someone who was working in, I forget if it was on this podcast or not, they mentioned this anecdote, working in the ventilation tunnel for, I think, the Holland Tunnel. And they asked, while they were doing some inspection in there, what happens if there's a fire and the ventilation system kicks on? And the other guy was like, well, we die.

• 1:42:19Liam McAnderson?

  Just say it now.

• 1:42:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a, there's a reason there is this whole like thing. It's a national thing that, you know, hopefully continues to exist. Screams in agony vaguely in Washington DC. So, yeah. National Fire Prevention Act? What if it became the, uh, nothing? What if it was nothing?

• 1:42:42Justin Roczniak?

  The Nothing Protection.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Nothing Act, that one. There's nothing good that they do there. They don't try to prevent fires or, you know, prevent people from dying this way with flames.

• 1:42:53November Kelly?

  Fire, have you considered that fire protection is woke?

• 1:42:57Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, yeah.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  Sounds, uh, it sounds pretty gay to me, so we should probably ban it.

• 1:43:01Justin Roczniak?

  I mean, when you don't have it, you go to sleep, so, uh, yeah.

• 1:43:05Liam McAnderson?

  So is it sad?

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  Damn, didn't think of that.

• 1:43:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:10November Kelly?

  Hard to argue.

• 1:43:11Justin Roczniak?

  At any rate, there were no further accidents in the Army Tunnel. Problem solved, everyone.

• 1:43:17Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:43:19Justin Roczniak?

  This, this situation remained until, you know, diesel trains hit the line in the 1950s. They're able to up the tonnage then. Uh, finally, real modernization arrived in 1994 and they put some fancy tilting electric trains on the line.

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  Are you saying that diesel trains are not modern? How dare you?

• 1:43:40November Kelly?

  It was, it was, it was a 50 year interlude and now thankfully it's over and they have a real train on there.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  Are all are real trains, only trains with electric overhead wires?

• 1:43:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm thinking about becoming like a like a

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  I'm being triggered by this.

• 1:43:54Justin Roczniak?

  Here, here is, here, here, here is my argument.

• 1:43:57November Kelly?

  Diesel trains. Real trains, mental disorders.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  That's even worse. All right. I follow the mental disorders camp.

• 1:44:07Justin Roczniak?

  I'll call diesel trains modern when they build another one in the United States.

• 1:44:12November Kelly?

  No, shots fired.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, they built most of them in the US, but

• 1:44:17Justin Roczniak?

  What was the, what was the last big order, like 2019 or something?

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, the GE Evolution Series has not been a while and Caterpillar has been on the struggle bus trying to figure out tier four emissions. So, yeah.

• 1:44:34Justin Roczniak?

  We have no modern trains anymore. It's over. It's done.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, US was really good at making locomotives and then all of a sudden they weren't.

• 1:44:43Justin Roczniak?

  Private equity happened. Yep. So what did we learn?

• 1:44:48November Kelly?

  Fans. War is hell.

• 1:44:50Justin Roczniak?

  War is hell.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  You say anything anti steam engine, I'm blocking your podcast.

• 1:44:55November Kelly?

  Don't, don't ride on a freight train.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't ride on the freight train. Um, yes, the exhaust gases from choo choos, whatever variety or bad.

• 1:45:06November Kelly?

  Just in a more human sense, you can be killed at any time by something of which you have no comprehension, like a bug in the gears of a complicated machine.

• 1:45:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  And, and perhaps maybe have some more empathy for everyone that you know and everyone that you don't know. It's important. We're all humans. We're all living things. Whether or not we're humans, we're all living things. We all care about each other and maybe we should all respect that a little bit more.

• 1:45:33November Kelly?

  And steam locomotives are bullshit.

• 1:45:36Speaker 03

  Fuck you. Eat shit and die, you whiny bitch.

• 1:45:43Speaker 03

  We respect living things.

• 1:45:45November Kelly?

  I love to defeat empathy.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  We love living things, except for those whiny bitches that do not like steam locomotives. Who can eat shit and die.

• 1:45:59Justin Roczniak?

  The clear answer here is that, you know, these, these Italians should have bought, you know, nice big steam locomotives for this as opposed to whatever, whatever this is.

• 1:46:10Justin Roczniak?

  Should have put a, should have put a K28 in there.

• 1:46:15Speaker 03

  K turn out a wee bit smaller, but we've wider wouldn't fit through the tunnel.

• 1:46:20Justin Roczniak?

  Ah damn.

• 1:46:21November Kelly?

  Well, there's your, that's fine. Easy solution. Like it doesn't fit in the tunnel. Nobody dies in the tunnel.

• 1:46:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  K twenty eights instead. I mean, K twenty eights of the grand locomotives. One of the best designs. Alco had it figured out. They've got really nice suspension designs that I could talk about for way too long for this podcast. But anyway, they're fantastic. There's a reason they're called the sports models. And it is easy to suss out. So.

• 1:46:53Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:47:01Justin Roczniak?

  Dear November, Roz, Liam and Gareth.

• 1:47:05November Kelly?

  No.

• 1:47:06Justin Roczniak?

  No, no. If there, if there is a guest, no, there isn't. Fuck you.

• 1:47:12November Kelly?

  Hey, I don't, I don't even need to say anything. I don't even need to say anything because the person who wrote the safety third is on my side.

• 1:47:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Justin Roczniak?

  May I say, first of all, rest in paradise, Milkshake. What a guy.

• 1:47:25November Kelly?

  Oh.

• 1:47:25Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 1:47:26November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Justin Roczniak?

  This is a story about the one true enemy of solar workers. No, it's not roofers. I'm talking about the wind. A few months into my solar installing life, I was working on an office building in the Northeast. It was the tallest building around with no protection from wind gusts coming across a big body of water a few miles away. It was a flat membrane roof in February, covered in ice with no lip on the roof edge between you and a three story drop into the parking lot below. There was one portable penetrator style tie off point and about 10 workers.

• 1:48:06Justin Roczniak?

  I assume that's when there's like something you stick in a roof and then that's where everyone ties the, the fall protection system.

• 1:48:12November Kelly?

  I see. Okay. Sure. I was thinking of something else.

• 1:48:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And about 10 workers. I'll let you guess how useful that was. When we started the job, the first task was to set up a guardrail system made out of two by fours set in plastic bases and weighed down with sandbags.

• 1:48:30November Kelly?

  Oh, that sounds safe as hell.

• 1:48:32Justin Roczniak?

  In order to build this, you had to walk practically practically to the edge of the slippery roof, carrying lumber or 60 pound sandbags, then assemble all the pieces.

• 1:48:43November Kelly?

  Getting getting killed assembling the guardrails is a great bet.

• 1:48:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Whenever we left the job for the day, the wind would blow the guardrails over, sometimes actually ripping out the screws and disassembling the pieces. To solve this problem, our foreman had us assemble and disassemble the guardrail every day when we arrived and left the job.

• 1:49:06November Kelly?

  There's gotta be an easier way to do that.

• 1:49:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's called

• 1:49:11November Kelly?

  Fuck, I know what it is.

• 1:49:12Justin Roczniak?

  Have a fucking parapet on your building. Architects, put a parapet on your fucking building. People gotta work on that roof.

• 1:49:23Justin Roczniak?

  Again, think slippery roof and then add more solar racking underfoot every day as time goes on. One day we got up on a roof and quickly realized we were standing in the middle of 40 mile an hour gusts of wind and still had to build the fucking safety system.

• 1:49:40November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:49:40Justin Roczniak?

  A couple hours of back and forth with the foreman and a few absolutely fucking nuts and we were out of there. We left all our guardrail equipment strapped or weighed down in the middle of the roof as per usual before we left. Less than an hour later, I got a call from the foreman asking if I could come back and help him out. Me and another guy that were still nearby went back. It turned out that the guardrail posts and bases were blowing off the roof into the parking lots below and it only barely missed a lot of parked cars.

• 1:50:10November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 1:50:11Justin Roczniak?

  So we went up with more ratchet straps. That solves every problem, right?

• 1:50:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:16November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah. If it if it moves and it shouldn't, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:50:20Speaker 03

  So long as you say that shouldn't go anywhere.

• 1:50:25November Kelly?

  Slap on it twice for extra power.

• 1:50:28Justin Roczniak?

  The wind had gotten worse. We literally had to crouch down to move around so the wind wouldn't blow us off the building. As we were praying and strapping everything behind an HVAC unit, our foreman told us we had to go help another job as soon as we were done. Now, when I say this next one was a doozy, my god. We went to a job that this company had finished almost a year prior. It was a new library with a nice, modern architectural twist. The solar array on the roof extended over the edge of the roof and had then kicked upward into the direction of the wind.

• 1:51:03November Kelly?

  Oh, I see that. Very stylish.

• 1:51:05Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. The solar panels were bolted through their aluminum frames onto rails running parallel to the face of the building. The uplift from the 50 to 60 mile an hour gusts was tearing the aluminum frames away from the bolts and had blown two or three of the solar panels over the top of the building and into the parking lot behind it while the library was full of old folks for senior day.

• 1:51:30November Kelly?

  Oh, no. Less stylish.

• 1:51:33Justin Roczniak?

  You may see in the photo, there's a slightly lower section of the roof at the front of the building where the two planes of the solar array meet. That's down here.

• 1:51:42November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:42Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, hold on. We got up on a roof through a hatch, crouch down onto that lower lip of the roof, moved down to the front left corner of the building where the panels were blowing away. And every time there was a big gust of wind, we ducked under the panels as if it would protect us from a 50 pound, three and a half, three and a half foot by six foot flying sheet of tempered glass and metal.

• 1:52:05November Kelly?

  Yeah, horrible way to get killed to just get fucking crash bandicued by a giant solar panel.

• 1:52:10Justin Roczniak?

  Then my foreman proceeded with his plan, throwing the hook of our biggest ratchet strap into the wind to try and get it over the panels, then fishing it underneath the array with a makeshift crook made out of taped together plastic reflective stakes and some six gauge wire.

• 1:52:28November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ. Okay, sure.

• 1:52:32Justin Roczniak?

  I watched him do this for about 15 minutes, all while the lips of the solar panels were bouncing in the wind. He was using the ratchet strap we use to tie down pallets on our flatbed, and the wind was blowing it right back at him. In a moment of frustration, I watched my coworker, who's not a small guy, try to climb out on top of the solar panels, hanging over the left of the building, to try and help him out. That wasn't the loudest I'd ever yelled at someone in a workplace, but it was close. Eventually, I went to go get some longer, heavier ropes, and we got a couple of panels secure-ish, and got the fuck out.

• 1:53:08November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:53:10Justin Roczniak?

  It was bad enough that the cis-hat 50-something building manager, "Thank you for your service to me." Am I allowed to say that word?

• 1:53:18November Kelly?

  I'll read it. "A commie dyke, hell yeah."

• 1:53:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, on my way out.

• 1:53:27Justin Roczniak?

  We found out later that the engineer who signed off on the design hadn't looked at the prints that closely. Go figure.

• 1:53:34November Kelly?

  Tracks.

• 1:53:35Justin Roczniak?

  You'll be shocked to know I don't do solar anymore, though I still miss it in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way. Thanks for listening and putting together such a great show. And hey, if any of your listeners are lefty electricians, do yourself a favor and Google the Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers.

• 1:53:55November Kelly?

  You can't read this one either. And cheers, queers.

• 1:54:01November Kelly?

  And cheers to you.

• 1:54:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. This is why I stopped working on roofs too. I mean, you know.

• 1:54:08November Kelly?

  Don't get up on the roof. Never let them make you get up on the roof.

• 1:54:11Justin Roczniak?

  Don't get up on a roof. It's a bad idea. And again, design your buildings with... Give me some parapets. I like some parapets on a roof, you know. Maybe, you know, three or four feet. One time I was in a building where it was like 12 feet. That was great.

• 1:54:28November Kelly?

  Maybe, maybe design buildings to think about people who work on them as well as people who are gonna like live or work in them, you know?

• 1:54:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:54:36Speaker 03

  Maintenance?

• 1:54:36November Kelly?

  Just a, just a thought. Yeah.

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  What, what, what? Maintenance?

• 1:54:40November Kelly?

  Maintenance.

• 1:54:40Speaker 03

  What's that?

• 1:54:41November Kelly?

  It's, it's, it's, you know, the thing that you have to do to make sure that the solar panel doesn't just randomly kill a, like, senior in the parking lot.

• 1:54:49Justin Roczniak?

  That's when you hire an engineer to look at something and they write a report and then you throw it in a filing cabinet.

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:58November Kelly?

  And then it shows up like, photocopy a burn to hell in an episode of Well, There's Your Problem like 20 years later.

• 1:55:04Liam McAnderson?

  You're welcome.

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  I've got, I've got my own filing cabinet full of things where engineers were told to not, that should be an episode of this podcast, but I'm just gonna appreciate being a guest and letting you know that engineers are important. Listen to them, comma, dumbasses.

• 1:55:24Justin Roczniak?

  Good idea. Yes. I would also recommend that if they, they, they give you a report and say do something, you should probably do that.

• 1:55:30Liam McAnderson?

  Do that thing. Yeah.

• 1:55:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Do that.

• 1:55:33Liam McAnderson?

  What did we learn?

• 1:55:35November Kelly?

  War is hell.

• 1:55:37Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, solar panels are hell.

• 1:55:39November Kelly?

  Malad is still the greatest steam locomotive ever devised.

• 1:55:43Speaker 03

  Fake and gay. How dare you, Nova.

• 1:55:47November Kelly?

  Gay and all surreal.

• 1:55:51Justin Roczniak?

  All right. That was Safety Third.

• 1:55:57Justin Roczniak?

  Um, our next episode will be on Chernobyl. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  Christ on a bike. Sorry.

• 1:56:05November Kelly?

  Yeah. The concept of Christ on a bike, the worst of all possible worlds.

• 1:56:10Justin Roczniak?

  Freakish, freakish, freakishly heavy Christ are...

• 1:56:23November Kelly?

  Trying to, trying to describe the Christor Adentor above Real Disheron Engineering.

• 1:56:31November Kelly?

  Oh, God.

• 1:56:34Justin Roczniak?

  Excuse me, very fat Christ on a freakishly heavy bicycle.

• 1:56:42November Kelly?

  The, um, the, the, the notes say, don't forget to mention the worst of all possible worlds, which is a great podcast. Not sure.

• 1:56:48Justin Roczniak?

  I, I know I was on it recently, but I copied this from the last podcast where I also mentioned I was on it.

• 1:56:54November Kelly?

  Well, I guess they just get a free endorsement. So listen to the worst of a possible world. It really is a good podcast. Uh, listen to No Gods, No Mayors, also Trashy, Kill James Bond.

• 1:57:04Justin Roczniak?

  Bark, I believe you should have several commercials.

• 1:57:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, what's up, guys? This is Hyce. Uh, please check me out on YouTube. Uh, Hyce, H Y C E. And that is, uh, my YouTube. And yes, we do talk about trains. So if you want to learn more about train things, check me out on YouTube. H Y C E. Hyce. Find the blue bird with the engineer's hat. That is me misspelling something for my entire existence as well. Century of Steam, Studio 346. I'm the president of Studio 346. We're making a train video game, uh, bit by bit. It's gonna take a little bit more time. It's not coming out this year, but hopefully maybe shrugs next year. Hopefully screams.

• 1:57:51Justin Roczniak?

  I heard, I heard every time someone asks you when you come out, when it's gonna come out, you, uh, delay it by a week.

• 1:57:58Speaker 03

  You know, I'm trying to pull a page out of Gabe Newell's book, and that seems reasonable. The, the, the point of it is, we love this. Uh, I, I know that my fellow friend, Tom Coletti, AKA Wings and Strings, the they, the them, the amazing. I have yet to made a, meet a human who is as smart in every single possible, facile way than the way Tom is. Tom is a part of the team and they've been on the podcast before here.

• 1:58:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  They were the reason why I am now here, which very much appreciate you guys, including me. It's been fun to talk about trains. I like to talk too much, so you're gonna have to edit a ton of me out, but you'll figure it out. You guys are professionals.

• 1:58:47Justin Roczniak?

  I am really excited for Century of Steam. I am also putting my full-throated endorsement on this project. You should, if you're listening to the podcast and you like trains, go, go, go get excited about this.

• 1:59:00Justin Roczniak?

  I'm excited. I'm excited to finally see a dev log with polling. Give me that polling. Come on.

• 1:59:06Speaker 03

  Okay. All right. You know, we're actually talking about, we were literally talking about polling the other day. And so now we can go to bed. We have not, we have not talked about polling since, uh, the, since the trailer. And we're like, do we show it? We save it for later. Like, we know it works. Uh, I will, I will say that Justin said that and maybe we'll get some traction. Either way, this 2346 Century of Steam, we're talking about train things. We love it. We care about it so much. We're, we're trying to give you all of the experiences sans the dying in a tunnel from the inhalation, but we're going to give you everything up to that point where you can feel every little piece of locomotive along the way.

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  And, and, and we really truly believe and love in it with all of our hearts. And, uh, that's the hill we will die on. So, please check it out.

• 2:00:00November Kelly?

  It looks, it looks beautiful, which is my problem. It should be set somewhere horrible in Britain instead. Have you considered that? Maybe like some kind of like industrial sort of like hellscape. That'd be cool.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  No, sorry. We're trying to have an escape from this fuck shit that is this universe that we live in right now.

• 2:00:19November Kelly?

  But what if, what if I like the misery?

• 2:00:21Speaker 03

  Well, then you're fucked in the head, but thanks for having me.