Episode 186: The Quintinshill Wreck(s)

War is bad folks Support Groove for Good at Lutheran Settlement House: https://givebutter.com/grooveforgood2025/team-wtyp/liammcandersonHelp James get necessary surgery: https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/james-needs-surgery-urgently Follow Gareth: https://bsky.app/profile/garethdennis.ukCheck out Railnatter: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address:Well There's Your Podcasting CompanyPO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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

• 0:00Justin Roczniak?

  This is a totally anonymous podcast by people who you don't know who they are. You don't know what the subject are is.

• 0:09November Kelly?

  You don't know what the subjects are.

• 0:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you actually don't. It do be like that.

• 0:15November Kelly?

  So here's the thing. Is no longer released on traditional channels. It's just like we put a cassette tape in an envelope and we mail it anonymously to several reporters. Who will then leak kind of.

• 0:26Justin Roczniak?

  They say the revolution will not be televised.

• 0:30November Kelly?

  What time is it? We're only an hour late starting recording. It's fine.

• 0:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say.

• 0:35November Kelly?

  That was, that wasn't what I was getting at. What I was getting at was I was referencing a nice little film called One Battle After Another, which I highly recommend people see. Noted.

• 0:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're gonna have to do a sync point here. All right, I'm gonna do three, two, one, mark. Three, two, one, mark. Okay, and I guess we're podcasting, yeah.

• 0:57November Kelly?

  Fantastic. For the first time in a minute.

• 0:59Justin Roczniak?

  So, well, you know, it's, it's been a while since we recorded because we've all been preparing for our debut at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

• 1:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, doing some crowd work at the Riyadh, at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

• 1:19Justin Roczniak?

  Would like to thank His Royal Highness Mohammed bin Salman for inviting us. And actually, we have a special bonus episode soon about how the line is good, actually.

• 1:34November Kelly?

  It's tough doing crowd work in Riyadh because you're going from the front rows back and you're like, so what do you do? A prince? Okay, what about prince? Right, sure. What, anything funny about your family? Oh, you're, you're cousin like bone sorter journalist? Uh, I, I mean, I guess.

• 1:51Justin Roczniak?

  I've heard that one before.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Oh, crikey. So here's the thing. Everyone listening, it's me, but also it's Victoria. And we're on a podcast together, and that's extremely dangerous because we are, of course, sworn mortal enemies. So, yeah. My pronouns are she and her, just to be clear. It hasn't changed. We're not updating.

• 2:15Justin Roczniak?

  No, there's a way we introduce the podcast.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  I know there is. I know. But I was peeking behind the curtain.

• 2:21Justin Roczniak?

  You've gone out of line.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  I know. Well, it's getting me back into shape.

• 2:25November Kelly?

  You're out of order. This whole system is out of order.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Score one for me.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  It's disastrous. We've lost, one variable has gone, has changed, and everything is upside down.

• 2:36November Kelly?

  The only solution is- We're going like, sort of, primary school, where we're doing like, good guest host points. And, you know, whichever one of you has the most at the end of the episode has a sticker. And now Victoria has one, and Gareth doesn't have any.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Oh. The only solution is to trans Roz. That's the only possible solution we have to fix the start of the podcast.

• 2:57November Kelly?

  Surely your solution, just, make sure your own gender is securely fitted before adjusting anyone else's.

• 3:04Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Hey, whoa. Yeah, well.

• 3:08Justin Roczniak?

  If the gender comes down from the ceiling, picture your own. Yours is securely fitted.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Oh, dear. Yep. Yep, yep.

• 3:20Justin Roczniak?

  To make an emergency gender descent to 10,000 genders.

• 3:26November Kelly?

  It's what Joe Biden was trying to do before the fucking anti-work deep state stopped him.

• 3:30Justin Roczniak?

  Just about to say. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosneck. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

• 3:47November Kelly?

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

• 3:53Justin Roczniak?

  Nay Liam. Liam is unfortunately not with us today because he has been dragged kicking and screaming.

• 4:00November Kelly?

  Confined, yeah.

• 4:01Justin Roczniak?

  Confined to Disney World.

• 4:03November Kelly?

  My gods. This is, this is inhumane.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Particularly for the mass transit they have down there, you know. Yeah. Also the mosquitoes.

• 4:11November Kelly?

  Free the Disney World one, and by one, I mean Liam.

• 4:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Justin Roczniak?

  But we do have our new temporary co-host, Victoria.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Hello, my name is Victoria Scott. My pronouns are she and her. Thank you for having me, as always. Yeah, I'll be annoying all of your guests.

• 4:29November Kelly?

  You don't have to say thank you for having me. You work here now.

• 4:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, you work here now. Yeah, we're paying you.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  No, I, I, whenever I, whenever I have like full-time employment, I email my boss every day and I say, thank you so much for the job again today, sir.

• 4:45November Kelly?

  We're also not your boss. It's a, it's a collective.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  I honestly thought Ross, Ross is my boss now. I thought I was gonna be emailing him every day.

• 4:56November Kelly?

  I don't think he wants that responsibility. I don't, I don't think any of us want that responsibility.

• 4:59Justin Roczniak?

  I don't understand how this podcast is set up in a legal sense.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  How many years in?

• 5:06November Kelly?

  It's, it's sort of like by ancient custom, you know, like it's like Gormenghast. It's built on top of itself. And if it hasn't fallen down yet, then it's part of the podcast since time immemorial.

• 5:20Justin Roczniak?

  Very great man who I worked with in my previous engineering job said something to me, which is, uh, the less I know, the happier I am.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Uh, also I'm here. Um, yes.

• 5:34Justin Roczniak?

  We also have Gareth today.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah. Hello, my name's Gareth.

• 5:38November Kelly?

  Who's a guest. You are not being paid to be here.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  I'm not being paid to be here. My pronouns are he and him. Um, and yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a delight to be here. As I said in a, a pre-recording segment that might be chopped, uh, yeah, mortal enemy Victoria Scott is on the podcast. What's actually fun is that Victoria and Nova and I all had a very important business lunch in Glasgow not too long ago, which is absolutely unbelievable delight. I had such fun, such a nice time. But obviously, you know, Victoria and I are mortal, mortal enemies. Yeah, now the gloves are off. Cause we're competing because now Victoria, you're going to rack up some numbers that don't count like I did. Which means that our, our score against each other remains, I think possibly you're still winning in terms of guest appearances on, uh, the Well, There's Your Problem podcast.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  I think we're officially entering the era in which these don't count as guest appearances because I'm just here.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. So.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  I just have to come and rep cars, which is too bad because I just got found out that S-Stop's ripping out a bus lane that I really liked using. So I'm pretty pissed at them. Uh, just the general concept of personal automobiles today. So I think we're gonna have to, I may have to yield and say, train good.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:45Justin Roczniak?

  They'll they'll get you.

• 6:46November Kelly?

  We see we see here before us.

• 6:48Justin Roczniak?

  We see here.

• 6:49November Kelly?

  Of train being good.

• 6:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. What we see on the screen in front of us is a wooden passenger coach, which is completely burnt out. It's not going well. Some other people spraying water on various other pieces of railway equipment, which are also extremely on fire. Today, we're going to talk about the Quintons Hill rail disaster. Although before we do that, actually, before even the goddamn news, I do have to mention two things. Which is Liam's Liam's thing. This is at the Lutheran Settlement House. Their Dance Away Domestic Violence Event, that's October 16th. The link is in the description.

• 7:36November Kelly?

  Give them some money.

• 7:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, give them some money, give give money to them or, you know, I don't know, you'd even attend the thing, I suppose. Oh, yeah. The other thing is from one of our, you know, colleague podcasts. Podcasting is Praxis. James from there has an extremely simple surgery that the NHS is just not able to do because they're so backed up. There's a fundraiser for that, so he can he can get that done and over with. It's like pretty, pretty debilitating, the skin condition he's got right now. So, you know, if you want to donate to that, that's probably that's that's a probably good thing to do.

• 8:20Justin Roczniak?

  I'll put a link to that in the description as well. You know, so much for socialized healthcare, huh?

• 8:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, they they the the.

• 8:29Justin Roczniak?

  If you defund it, then yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:33November Kelly?

  Shout out to Jamie, yeah.

• 8:35Justin Roczniak?

  That's it. Yeah, so with that, let's do the goddamn news.

• 8:47November Kelly?

  It's always gratifying when I put in the chyron and then I get to see the reaction. Yeah. So the somehow still Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has has gone. What I can only describe as warfighter mode. He has gathered together.

• 9:08November Kelly?

  He made everyone go to Quantico.

• 9:12November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's kind of like he's at the stage of like drunk at work where you start pulling people in for like really like maudlin. Or like self aggrandizing conversations, which is exactly what this was because when he started calling in like every general from like every kind of far flung fucking command. There was some sort of like consternation about this. I admit to also thinking, is this going to be a kind of like bath party purge? And it wasn't what it was going to be was just kind of lecturing the troops about how DEI is bad. How they're all fat, how too many of them have beards and that wokeness is no longer allowed.

• 9:56November Kelly?

  I I was surprised at how stupid it was. I'm gonna be honest. I was also like, I didn't think Pete would bring everyone down to Quantico. There's only one bar in that town. It's a shit hole. I've been to Quantico, man. That's where the coup is being planned immediately following that speech because like not to not to kind of like, you know, lionize the US Armed Forces, but it was interesting seeing the absolute silence in that room that prevailed whenever he tried to land one of his big lines about, you know, fucking around and finding out or whatever. Brass was not amused by this. No, he ended on a big flourish about, you know, sort of like being like, we are the war department.

• 10:41November Kelly?

  And he got like a woo from two of his staffers and dead cold silence.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  They could just coup the government. Why aren't they doing that?

• 10:52Justin Roczniak?

  Like they could just.

• 10:53November Kelly?

  I.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  You can't say that.

• 10:54November Kelly?

  The thing, in my admittedly limited experience of American military officers, they really do take the whole constitutional actor part seriously. Like, as much as Trump wants him to be, Mark Milley, not a liberal, right? Not a lib, at least not in that sense, right? He's not a woke guy exactly. And what this is doing is we're cascading down. We're going to less and less woke officers and calling them woke, which is funny. And I don't know, I, I, I don't know what would happen in a situation where, I mean, for my money, Trump is already so flagrantly unconstitutional in his actions that you

• 11:36November Kelly?

  would be perfectly justified in cooing him and, you know, doing some kind of like, fuck knows, like, I almost said rally to restore sanity. But I think it's probably good if you're a military officer that the bar is a little bit higher than that. But yeah, no, I, I don't know. I don't, I don't want to predict anything. It's just, this is, this is a really comically dangerous thing to do if you are the regime is to get all of your officers in one place, really try and make them feel bad.

• 12:10Justin Roczniak?

  And then immediately shut down the government so that they don't get paid for several months.

• 12:14November Kelly?

  Yeah. It's just be like, point one, you are fat, woke and gay. Point two, no paycheck this month or indefinitely. Point three, we've brought out the president, this aged, like senile rapist pedophile to be like, to tell a bunch of like extremely technocratic Navy officers that they should bring back battleships because he saw victims.

• 12:37Justin Roczniak?

  That was a good one.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I enjoyed that very much. Oh, yes, that was glorious. I, the thing, it's like they're confusing the army with the cops. The cops are better armed than the army, sure. But the cops are all slovenly gits without any, like, whereas the army are, like, you know, they're, Nate might disagree with this, but like, the army are basically quite well organized and could easily just make these people disappear. Well, not make them disappear.

• 13:06Justin Roczniak?

  You can't say that.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Like, you know, am I organizing insurrection? I'm in the UK, it's fine.

• 13:12Justin Roczniak?

  The very least officers have a head on their shoulders, generally speaking.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm calling my lawyer to figure out what bits I can make about this currently.

• 13:23November Kelly?

  If you, if you, if you want to think about like the deep state or about the blob, right? Like what these, what these guys want is to maintain American power, to maintain American empire such as it is, right? And much like the money, the, the Hegseth thing is a real indication that Donald Trump is going to try and touch that. You know, and it's, it's been interesting. It's been watching, uh, Trump sort of like tack more sort of like NatSec on Ukraine and be like, oh, well, you know, they, they can, they can sort of like get back all of Ukraine or, um, you know, NATO should shoot down Russian jets that overfly their airspace or whatever. And it's like, you always wonder whether it's Trump sort of believing the thing the last person to speak to him said.

• 14:09November Kelly?

  Or you always wonder at what point they take him into the big room from Network and then for some reason he just seems to keep forgetting that if they do.

• 14:18Justin Roczniak?

  It's not, it's not good enough.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  If he's loving battleships, like what are they showing him? Like battleships were last an effective tool of war in like before the first world war.

• 14:27Justin Roczniak?

  Battleships, like 1920. The last time they were an effective tool of war was before they were built.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Like, I think the last, the last time there's a, of battle on this, uh, like naval nerd, the last time there's a decisive battle on the sea won by a battleship was like 1910 or something. Like, like, it was like, like, like that, then it was aircraft carrier, you know, then it was cruisers, then it was aircraft carriers. Then it was like, oh, no, then subs like this. What is he on about? I mean, it's very funny. But the funny is, as you say, he's fun, he's fucking with the thing that you're not allowed to fuck with, which is like the military industrial complex. It'll get angry at him.

• 15:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 15:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, if you if you think about what Trump said besides the, you know, we should have battleships. This stealth ship doesn't look aesthetic to me. One of the things was just openly being like, yeah, we're going to deploy more like American troops domestically because we're fighting a war from within. And it's like, if you kind of take your head out of your hands when you're sort of like not being called fat and woke and actually listen to that, I think that might be the kind of thing that's more likely to make you go. Maybe I should have a quiet word at the one bar in Quantico with some kind of like minded officers. The other thing about this is if you want to talk about kind of like military liberalism, combat liberalism in the Maoist sense, but you know, reading combat as a as an adjective rather than a verb.

• 15:51November Kelly?

  If those guys don't do it, then sometimes a lot of mid ranking officers do. And you've been seeing the posting about like American Napoleon, right? You need like a an artillery major or Colonel from like Puerto Rico.

• 16:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was gonna say Puerto Rico, yeah. I mean, you know, the other the other option here is, you know, I I guess Trump's mad at the littoral combat ships because they don't look good. Maybe he is going to develop a river navy because he wants to fight our internal enemies. Right? We need a we need a battleship.

• 16:22November Kelly?

  You saw you saw Border Patrol driving up and down the Chicago River, right?

• 16:26Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, we need something that fits up the Chicago, goes up the Chicago Sanitarian Ship Canal to go off the Mississippi River. It's got to fit in the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, you know?

• 16:38November Kelly?

  Ah, Dan, you shit like. Civil War two is gonna be so fucking stupid.

• 16:43Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God, yeah. Monitor two versus Merrimack two. That's gonna be amazing.

• 16:48November Kelly?

  Oh, my God. USS Forums Monitor.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  The thing that's really wild to me is like.

• 16:56Justin Roczniak?

  10 bucks.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  He's gotten what he wanted and like he's managed to find the people in the military who are willing to drone strike, like fishing vessels off the coast of Venezuela for no reason. They they they're like, they're 90% of the way to consolidating all of their power and they just need to make it the final like 10 feet to the to the goal line. And at the at the at the five yard line, they're like, actually, you're still too woke and we we're gonna like, we're gonna purge you if you think as much about like hiring any

• 17:30Justin Roczniak?

  It's it's it's

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Women, I don't know. He went around about raising canes. There's no point in like trying to dissect it.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it's just chaos and anarchy.

• 17:39Justin Roczniak?

  Trump would like say like Douglas MacArthur was woke. If Douglas MacArthur was a guy who was in the military right now.

• 17:45November Kelly?

  It's like he would. It's it it it's one of his funniest qualities is his like reflexive contempt for the military. I still think about the I'm not gonna go to the like war cemetery because those guys are suckers.

• 18:01November Kelly?

  I I don't know.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  I don't cross posts, but like I was just finished listening to last week's or the the most recent TF bonus episode. And Hussein made a really good point, which is that these guys like they're addicted. It's politics by posting. And the trouble with that is that at some you've got to do the next post. And so you are going to you will shoot into flames, whatever power you've won. The trouble is that you then get swept aside and the like, like, you know, Musk is we've seen it happen to Musk. He has been swept aside and, you know, something else takes his place. So, yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Hey, but today he's worth $500 billion.

• 18:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 18:36November Kelly?

  I mean, I think the thing is, if you if you look at like, sort of the precedence from Trump's first term, right? You can see kind of like Milley and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff being extremely unprepared for Trump, which I think I potentially still are, but also very, very hesitant, right? That's why I mentioned the kind of constitutionality thing. And I think having this idea that it was fatal that anything kind of come out in public, right? Because you have to maintain sort of like trust in the institutions. And I think correctly judging that if you sort of have a kind of open fracture in civil military relations from the military side. You don't come back from that, right?

• 19:19November Kelly?

  And I genuinely think the question is, can Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth post themselves into a situation where that becomes the lesser of two evils? And Trump just gets, you know, goes out, you know, Nod and Gem style. I don't know. I genuinely do not know.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Love living here.

• 19:36November Kelly?

  Mr. President, please inspect the back of our, please inspect the, the rear compartment of our very cool M113. I'm a personnel carrier.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Don't worry, Victoria, it's absolutely god awful over here as well. We might not be quite as far in the fascism, but Labour are desperate to take us there. So, oh boy.

• 19:54November Kelly?

  I've been trying, I've been trying to persuade Victoria, among others, not that there's really any feasible way to do this, but to like lifeboat into this country as it gets significantly worse. And I'm just like, if anyone's got any suggestions for places where it's, it's, it's not bad. I guess Mexico, we could go to Mexico, see if the Mexican Navy squash the beef.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, sorry, I'm, oh, I'm was gone now, so, uh, yeah, we're good, we're good.

• 20:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I think we're, I think we're actually good. Yeah, I've, uh, you know, apparently, uh, Scooter's back in good graces down there somehow.

• 20:29November Kelly?

  Shit, okay, yeah. Well, it's, maybe it's, maybe it's time for us to go to Mexico.

• 20:33Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no one else can sell them railroad cars.

• 20:37November Kelly?

  Mexico City live show.

• 20:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  I mean, that would actually be sick, though.

• 20:42Justin Roczniak?

  In other news.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Oh shit, kind of laugh at this, this is actually bad. No, no one's dead, it's okay, we can laugh again.

• 20:50November Kelly?

  Eric Adams finally got the 9/11 he always wanted. He was mayor of New York City during a kind of transcendent disaster as a block of public housing's gas riser exploded, hurting no one, which, amazing work.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 21:08Justin Roczniak?

  It doesn't even look like there was like a significant amount of damage to the building. Like, I think this was like, you know, there was a garbage chute here and then probably, you know, the gas and the plumbing riser. Um, I don't actually have any idea what, what happened here, cause I was, um, doing slides when it happened and I was like, I don't want to think about this.

• 21:28November Kelly?

  As far as they know, there was just, there was some kind of explosion, uh, in either the like garbage chute or, or the gas riser and it just blew off the side of the building. But it's fine. No, no one hurt, let alone, let alone died, you know? So if they really built these buildings, you know?

• 21:47Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know, there's a lot of bricks on the ground. I mean, it's fortunate no one was walking down there.

• 21:53November Kelly?

  I'm not saying I'm not falling for that one.

• 21:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no one in the building would have gotten got by this. This is actually an impressive success from a, you know, building standpoint. I can't comment too much on it because I don't know exactly what happened, other than damn, New York City Public Housing is pretty, pretty well built.

• 22:14November Kelly?

  I think that's a kind of like our takeaway here is you can build the buildings pretty good, especially out of brick.

• 22:20Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. Well, this is, this is a mostly steel framed building. This has got like, you know, it's, it's got like, I don't know, one or two, maybe three wides of brick as a facade, probably on the lower end of that. So, you know, it's all, it's all like steel frame in there. And then I guess whatever this entire like chute area here, you know, where the riser was, where the trash chute was, so on and so forth.

• 22:50November Kelly?

  You know, I'm sure they'll rebuild.

• 22:53Justin Roczniak?

  It all blew out at once, but path of least resistance was outwards. Yes, that's what I was thinking. It's, it's, yeah, it's been a well-directed explosion. Yeah, crikey. Yeah, you wouldn't want to, if this happened like somewhere like in the middle with the elevator shafts, well, probably it would have been stronger construction to start out with, but you know, you might've had a different outcome. Uh, yeah. So, uh, uh, Public Housing Building exploded in New York, but no one was hurt. So it's good? Question mark. I mean, that's like a bad thing to happen. Um, that shouldn't happen.

• 23:30November Kelly?

  Yeah, I guess. But we finally had the like, the good nine 11, not in the sense of it being a good thing, but in the sense of it being kind of

• 23:36Justin Roczniak?

  In the words of Eric Adams, it truly was New York's nine 11. Yeah, the good nine 11. Oh, you just mean nine 11?

• 23:43November Kelly?

  Well, this is the thing about New York. You could see

• 23:46Justin Roczniak?

  I can't put that.

• 23:49November Kelly?

  Every, every day you, you could see, uh, anything from like, um, uh, one of our public housing towers exploding to a person celebrating a new business that's opened. I don't, I don't want to get too Eric Adams here, otherwise I'll switch into mayor mode, you know?

• 24:06Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that was the goddamn news.

• 24:11Justin Roczniak?

  Let's ask a question. What is the Caledonian Main Line?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  That's a good question to ask, Ross.

• 24:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Oh, wait, I mean, it's so we've done a lot. We've done quite a few episodes on the East Coast Main Line.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  When I was around in the past. And this is, this is the other one. This is, this is the top end of what is now known as the West Coast Main Line. But it was built by a separate railway company called the Caledonian Railway, who wanted to connect the already emerging railway network in the middle of Scotland and the Scottish Central Belt, kind of Edinburgh, Glasgow, that area, Nova's home, among other places. With, with that there, England that they have and connect up to the railways being built by the L N W R, by the Midland Railway and others.

• 24:58November Kelly?

  Very, very bad idea. You don't want to connect Scotland to England because then you get things like, people like me moving to Scotland. And ruining it for everyone else. I think Glasgow's quite nice.

• 25:10Justin Roczniak?

  Scottish people move out of Scotland.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is it. I mean.

• 25:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, you simultaneously do a brain drain on Scotland and also you fit a solid like quarter of Glasgow with the most annoying accents you've ever heard in your life. And I include myself in that. I remember distinctly when I was at uni, because I went to uni in Glasgow, hearing many instances of the Glasgow uni accent. And I remember hearing legit a girl behind me going, oh yeah, I was in Bali.

• 25:43November Kelly?

  To mean, and it took me a second to process that she meant like Indonesia rather than.

• 25:49November Kelly?

  And I was like, we, someone should like detonate something in this vicinity right now. We would deserve it.

• 25:56Justin Roczniak?

  The official opinion.

• 25:58November Kelly?

  This is, this is a consequence of the Caledonian Railway.

• 26:01Justin Roczniak?

  Opinion of well, there's your problem podcast is entirely closed borders and ethno states. No one should be allowed to move anywhere.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes. Yes. Complete ethno state.

• 26:16Justin Roczniak?

  You can clip that and post it on, post it on Twitter, post it on Blue Sky.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  First day of my new job that I've already fucking cancelled. Jesus Christ.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Well, this is a good grief. Yeah. So, so if listeners cast their mind back to the, to the Morpeth episode where we talked about the various battles of George Hudson and his mates to get a railway across the Scottish border, but on the east. Well, the Calgary Railway was competing with that on the west and did so over, the East Coast Main Line was fairly flat near the coast. Tricky, but not too tricky. The Calgary Railway was built over several extremely large hills, including the very high summit of Betec, which you can see just about in the middle of the slide. In fact, Roz is highlighting underneath it marvelously. And meaningless railway is quite wibbly.

• 27:07November Kelly?

  Also, also worth noting that the, the East Coast Main Line is very, very pretty. You go by the sea. It's a nice journey. You can look out of the window and have a nice time. Whereas the, the West Coast Main Line, no disrespect to the scenery, but it does, it's bad. But it's not, you're not seeing a lot of it.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  There's once you're, once you're north of Lockerbie, there ain't much good on. Apart from the forest tenants tea, the wooded tenants tea that you can see from the trains, about the only highlight on the way north. Yeah, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty bleak. Those, anyone who's, right, everyone in the comments, YouTube comments, go absolutely buck wild for that, please. Cause you should, the people should know about it. Anyway, weavy, wibbly. But it goes from Glasgow, it went from Glasgow and Edinburgh southwards with a funny old triangle junction at Currsters, which has been recently remodelled ish. Worked on that actually for a bit and then didn't. And then down to Carlisle Citadel Station. Citadel Station is the name of the big station at Carlisle. Roz, does that cover the question?

• 28:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, very, very wibbly. And 80 years later, some, some genius would put tilting trains on it and cause a podcaster to get more motion sick than she had ever been in her life.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Well, you did the APT episode, so everyone knows all about that.

• 28:20November Kelly?

  It's a

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Have to do Virgin trains as an episode, actually.

• 28:23November Kelly?

  As an episode, yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's an episode right there. Anyway, right. So that is the main line, the first main line of the Caledonian Railway. That's what that is.

• 28:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And this is, uh, starts, they start building it in the 1830s. They finish it in stages in like the 1840s. And this is during like a pretty early era of railroad technology, railway technology, excuse me, Britain. So, you know, but it's, it becomes very busy very quickly, which means we need, we need methods.

• 28:54November Kelly?

  Yeah. Stand up comedians going south, uni students going north.

• 28:58Justin Roczniak?

  Methods to prevent the trains from running into each other.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Yep. Glasgow at the time, and absolutely, oh, sorry. I was gonna say Glasgow, uh, at the time, an extremely important imperial port and only gets more so actually.

• 29:11November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 29:12November Kelly?

  Second city of the empire, Birmingham found dead in Miami Beach, if you ask me.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 29:18November Kelly?

  Like Birmingham's just northern London.

• 29:20Justin Roczniak?

  Where the engineers come from too. So, you know.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  And quite a lot of the generals with blood on their hands during the, during the height of empire.

• 29:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  So, sorry, Scottish nationalists, but tis true. Yeah. So, um, yeah, a major undertaking, extremely complex, challenging bit of engineering. And instantly under capacity for the amount of traffic. Yeah.

• 29:41Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And so, you know.

• 29:42November Kelly?

  I hope they solve that problem at some point in the ensuing century.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  And may, may that two centuries of not resolving that problem.

• 29:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Justin Roczniak?

  One of the bigger problems on these busy railroads, especially early on was like, how do you keep trains from crashing into each other? Cause trains don't stop very quickly, especially before you have, you know, air brakes or vacuum brakes or something.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  Or any brakes.

• 30:12Justin Roczniak?

  Any brakes at all. Yeah.

• 30:13November Kelly?

  Gen, general aviation rules, see in the void, you know, like, uh, just look out the front.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Ever, ever remember it took until the 1890s before, the 1890s, that is everyone, before all trains had to have brakes. So, yeah.

• 30:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 30:29November Kelly?

  Just like, it just does, we were doing speed on fucking steam trains.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  And we will get there because that's an important one.

• 30:37Justin Roczniak?

  That's an important one, yes. So, um.

• 30:40November Kelly?

  Good lord.

• 30:41Justin Roczniak?

  One of the first ways to stop trains from running into each other is timetables. I was going to add a picture of a timetable there, um, and I couldn't find one, um, or an employee timetable, excuse me.

• 30:54November Kelly?

  That's, that's a, that's a beautiful piece of, piece of text. Um, I, I, I love it.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  I'm holding a New Jersey Transit Newark Division employee schedule in my hands right now that I was given by a friend of the podcast. I'm waving it in front of the camera, which is switched off for the sake of Nova's bandwidth. There you go, listeners, enjoy that.

• 31:12Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone can imagine that in your head.

• 31:15November Kelly?

  Just imagine, just imagine. You're getting, you're getting a homeopathic picture of an employee timetable. I am, I swear to God, I am writing the alternative medicine bonus.

• 31:26Justin Roczniak?

  There's a vague notion of a timetable. The idea of a timetable is that trains will pass through this location at this time. That means especially if you have a single track railroad, um, you know, uh, people driving the trains. They know when they have to take a siding and wait for another train to pass. Or they know, you know, when they, they are able to proceed, right? And this is all time-based and it's all also based on the idea that, um, you know, if another train is late, ah, too bad. You still gotta wait for it to go by. Um, it's, uh, it's very primitive, but it works if you don't have things like, you know, the telegraph. Or, you know.

• 32:09November Kelly?

  They still do a kind of radio-enabled version of this.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  A few lines in Scotland. Yeah, yeah.

• 32:15November Kelly?

  Cause it's all, the Alaska railroad is like almost all single track.

• 32:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, and then you have a slightly more advanced version of that, which is train orders, right? Where because there are telegraph stations or something like that, you wind up picking up train orders that are physically written down by someone to tell you what to do with the train. So we see here a man leaning out of a caboose to pick up the train order if from a big loop next to the track because you could pick it up without stopping. Then you have a fun thing.

• 32:51November Kelly?

  That seems like an excellent way to get your entire like hand and arm ripped off.

• 32:56Justin Roczniak?

  It's just a little loop. It's fine. You're supposed to do it at 15 miles an hour, but lots of people didn't do it at 15 miles an hour.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yoink.

• 33:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. He got some bruises, but it was fine.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, tokens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:10Justin Roczniak?

  Tokens are a fun one where, you know, if you have a section of track that you know is limited to only one train at a time, there is one physical token you have to carry from one end to the other to to give you permission to use that section of the line. And these weren't necessarily physical. There's, I know that like, as far as I know, part of one of Septus Trolley Lines, the 101, which is now called something else, still uses a token system, but it's a button you press. You reach out of the cab and press a button on the track.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  We have Scotland has multiple lines that still use tokens. They're called RETBs, Radio Electric Token Block Signaled Sections. The West Highland Line is one, Far North Line's another. They work very well on a single lines that are mostly single track. It's a very sensible way to keep it operating. The test track.

• 34:09November Kelly?

  I like this, but only if the token is extremely like physically elaborate, you know? Like it has to, it has to be kind of like very aesthetic.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  On one of the test tracks that I've worked, that I now work on, we still have a token to access it and it is literally a cast. It's like a proper iron staff that's been, it's like that way of that way rust gets when it's like rusty, but so hand worn that the rust is like a completely impervious kind of layer of like material. And this thing is probably 140 years old. It's great. I'm imagining like a big challenge coin. Yeah, some of them are like that. Some of them are like a staff. Others are like, literally like a disk thing. Yeah, it depends. Some of them have a machine to dispense them. Some of them are just like slipped. But oh, it's the wonderful world of tokens.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Having to play a dot trick game before you're allowed to proceed down the track.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Connect four. That's it.

• 35:06Justin Roczniak?

  The main problem with these is if someone loses the token, the line's out of service forever.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah, you have to literally have to dig it up and build a new one.

• 35:16Justin Roczniak?

  But eventually we discovered technology which allows us to build signals, right?

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Woo.

• 35:24Justin Roczniak?

  And that lets you just relay commands down the line. Go, stop, slow down, so on and so forth. And that's what you really need to run a lot of trains on one line.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  It's worth saying, it's worth saying that the railways employed light speed technology fairly early on, like from the, from the 1830s. The first use of, in fact, the first use of commercial electronics was at Euston Station down the Camden Incline to get to basically start, this is back in the day when you still had like powered steam inclines rather than locomotives in various bits of the railway and into Euston Station was one of those examples. And to set, basically to set trains off up and down that, the initial railway operated using a, it's in the book, actually, I talk about this, and they used, the first commercial use of electronics was to, was a signal system, which got ripped out like two years later for various stupid reasons.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  But so we did have signals in various ways. The signaling was, we started out pretty well. And basically so that the modern tech industry can blame the railways for creating it because we were the ones who started off with commercial electronics. Sorry.

• 36:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, that's, that's unfortunate, but there it is difficult to, it is difficult to do signals without having a zero or a one.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  It's true. It's true. Of course, the majority of signals were not worked with commercial electronics. They were worked with, like the one here you'll see, cables and immensely, well, I'll tell you what, we'll get there. We'll get there.

• 36:55Justin Roczniak?

  I was about to say, we'll get there immediately.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Hooray.

• 36:59Justin Roczniak?

  The signal box. What is a signal box?

• 37:03November Kelly?

  If only there was some way to like signal this in advance.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Oh, nice. I'm easily entertained. What can I say? Hey, listeners, you know this about me. Come on now.

• 37:12Justin Roczniak?

  So, so you have, you have a place where a bunch of trains are coming through, right?

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm listening.

• 37:19Justin Roczniak?

  Go a lot of different directions.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Okay, different directions.

• 37:23Justin Roczniak?

  Obviously, yeah, obviously you can't change directions from inside the train. So you need a man to sit in a room where he can see what's happening and pull a bunch of levers to change the tracks so the train can go where it needs to go. Person in box cannot steer a train in cab.

• 37:46November Kelly?

  Like these frames.

• 37:48Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, I love a big lever frame.

• 37:50November Kelly?

  Because like some of the, the beautiful, beautiful pieces of like mechanical engineering and a lot of them have like physical interlocks on them to make sure that you can't, you know, perfectly nine eleven one train into another. Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  And, and.

• 38:04November Kelly?

  Most of the time.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  And. Exactly. No, I was gonna say going underneath.

• 38:07November Kelly?

  Kind of like mechanical complexity. It's very.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I should have put a picture up. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll throw Devon a picture of what underneath one of these looks like. Cause yeah, even a signal box of the size of the one at Quintess Hill here, but particularly, okay, let's take, I don't know, Shrewsbury, which has the largest mechanically interlocked signaling layout in the world. And you go to the, so the top bit with the window is where you have the levers. It's where the signaler stands so they can look out and see whoever they might be. And underneath in the brick bit is where all the interlocking is. Now, when we talk about interlocking, so often people talk about interlocking, the US interlocking is often an interchangeable word for like railway junctions and track layout. But interlocking specifically refers to the way that bits of metal interlock to prevent

• 38:54Speaker 02

  or enable certain types of behavior of your signaling, of your railway track layout. And the way that things will, your switches, your turnouts, whatever you want to call them, will move to allow trains to be protected from hitting each other because ultimately the purpose of a signaling system, it's purpose number one. Make trains not hit each other.

• 39:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  And so that interlocking is became fairly quickly had became more and more developed to the point where we now have solid state interlocking, which it's doing the same job as the enormous thing of mechanical hooplies, which the picture will appear on screen. And it's doing that job, but in a solid state hard drive. And in fact, the interlocking again influenced the design of early computers because of the way that interlocking worked is a series of logic gates. It is a series of physically represented logic gates, which is fun.

• 39:47Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. And like the, the way these guys work is, well, I guess hopefully there'll be a picture on screen, but if I recall correctly, there's just a bunch of cables that go into trenches that go out into the tracks to like, you know, physically move the switches, you know? It's, it's not like this, this, this, uh, this lever is not an abstraction. No, you are physically creating mechanical.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and for example, in hot weather, you'd have challenges from the fact that the, you'd have the cables expanding by potentially quite substantial distances. Metal expands. And so those cables, you ended up having to have quite complex pulley systems to enable the, to, to kind of deal with the increasing and decreasing lengths of those cables in varying weather conditions. And what the interlocking is doing underneath those levers. So there are different ways to manage this. And in early days, you didn't have the complex interlocking. You relied on the training of the signaller to, you know, with, as, as Ross is about to tell us, with some potential additional physical aids. But in the early days, it was just the signaller had to know what levers they could and could not pull in what sequences. And sometimes they were, as you've seen the picture here, sometimes they're painted

• 40:54Speaker 02

  different colors to help them to know which, which ones related to which other ones. And as that became obviously not huge, you know, as you had more and more complex systems, you, that moved from being entirely manual to being mechanically interlocked, where you had these metal kind of teeth and ga- gears that would engage with each other. Then that moved into a situ- but again, still with physically manual, you know, those were basically stopping the levers from being pulled. And then you move into later years, you move into your mechan- electromechanical, where the lever is just a little, it still looks a bit like this, but it's a little one and then it, it powers. Relays and then the relays do the interlocking and then again you've moved to the modern era with all, all, all on the computer.

• 41:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes, I have. Everything eventually becomes going on the computer.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:40Justin Roczniak?

  But one thing to pay attention to here is this wooden block.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:45Justin Roczniak?

  Right? Or a collar. And this is there to indicate to the signaler that there is a train in this location. This lever cannot physically be moved as a result of the block.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in place of a model of, it's in place of that interlocking that I've, that I've, a picture has appeared on. It's in place of that. It's, so it's a more primitive version of that to, as a, both an aide memoir to the signaler saying, hey, fuckhead, but also, as you say, in theory, to physically stop that lever from being pulled.

• 42:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  Or returned to one or the other.

• 42:18November Kelly?

  That's so perfectly physical as well. Like, you're not, I, I say this in total confidence, not looking at the number of slides we have left. You're not defeating that as a system, right? Like.

• 42:30Justin Roczniak?

  Well, as long as you're using it.

• 42:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. As long as it's say mandated by the company or.

• 42:39Justin Roczniak?

  And you follow that.

• 42:40November Kelly?

  Has anyone seen the, the one collar for the thing? And meanwhile, it is like the doorstop in the waiting room downstairs.

• 42:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. An ash, it's an ashtray. It's a makeshift ashtray. Yeah.

• 42:50Justin Roczniak?

  I had to give it to one guy in place of a token. I didn't have.

• 42:58Justin Roczniak?

  So another thing to mention here, maybe this is less relevant. I wanted to mention it anyway. We talked about timetabled operations. Well, what is a extra or a special train, right? And so.

• 43:10November Kelly?

  Oh, I mean.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  You have.

• 43:13November Kelly?

  Basically whatever I feel like.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:15Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It's, you know, any train which is not part of the regular timetable, which is not part of routine operations is going to be an extra or a special. Right? I, I think in the UK they call it special. In the United States, we call it an extra.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something that appears as a V A R, as V A R on real time trains. Yeah. It, it's, it's a change, an additional service running on top of the working timetable. Yeah. In the UK.

• 43:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So like, and, and, and you're.

• 43:46November Kelly?

  Why is that? Why is the Thomas the Tank Engine 125? Why does it look like that? Why?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Well firstly, because the Reverend Audrey's illustrator could not do a very good rail alphabet for Stars. That's the main problem there.

• 44:03Justin Roczniak?

  My real question with this guy is, like, they replaced the cabs-

• 44:08Speaker 02

  It's a she, actually. I think the InterCity 125 is a she character. So we're misgendering the Class 43 off the bat.

• 44:15Justin Roczniak?

  They had to replace the cabs on these relatively frequently, right? Because they were made of fiberglass.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Those faces got smashed up to fuck. So yeah, wait a minute. Facial FFS.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Well, not-

• 44:31November Kelly?

  It's more of a kind of horrifying, like, warhound type situation where it's like, I, you know, I sexually identify as an attack train. And my face just gets stoved in routinely in the course of my work.

• 44:43Justin Roczniak?

  They just replace your face? Is it, is it the face or is it like-

• 44:48November Kelly?

  Hold on a second, sorry, sorry.

• 44:49Justin Roczniak?

  Personality change each time?

• 44:51November Kelly?

  The InterCity 125 is arguably non-binary in the sense that it comprises, that it is a set comprised of, like, Pip and Emma. So I mixed, mixed gender train sets.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, is it Pip? Yeah, that's a good point. Is it Pippas Philip or-

• 45:12November Kelly?

  So, yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:14November Kelly?

  Isn't my train headmates? So it's just-

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:18November Kelly?

  I guess so, yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Or do they function in the way of those, of those extremely Siamese twins of, of like, when they're like, have two heads and two organ sets? Is it that situation? Ah, yeah.

• 45:33November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is, I don't know. I don't, you're sort of being welded to, um, to another woman.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  Also, they should be conjoined twins. I definitely said they not, I don't, I don't know. It's definitely not Siamese twins anymore, is it? I'm cancelled. It's conjoined twins, isn't it?

• 45:46November Kelly?

  We're sending, we're sending, we're sending Pip and Emma to, to Mexico.

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:52November Kelly?

  Some kind of cat dog situation.

• 45:55Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I'm thinking of like, you have like permanently coupled train sets. But like, all like, we've seen the, like, Annie and Clarabelle have faces. So I'm imagining a situation where you have six or seven permanently coupled coaches and the, the middle five have never seen the sun.

• 46:13November Kelly?

  Jesus, that's terrifying.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  It's appalling, isn't it?

• 46:16November Kelly?

  I'm on the Thomas the Tank Engine Wiki, right?

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Let's go Queen.

• 46:24November Kelly?

  The detail, the detail here that I want to note is that it identifies both of these, these trains as being active, I guess, in both England and the Island of Sodor. And the Island of Sodor, the flag that they've used for that is just the trans flag. So I don't know if that's intentional or not.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  Island of Sodor flag. Hmm, that's holy shit. It's like, it's like potentially a better than the trans. I know that, I know your hatred of the trans flag at Nova. It's potentially better.

• 46:57November Kelly?

  Old sky and bacon, the bandaid floating in the swimming pool.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:01Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, sure enough.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  I just want it on record that I have no problem with the trans flag. I think the trans flag is absolutely fine.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  You're really trying to get those points back, aren't you?

• 47:11November Kelly?

  It's more, it's more visually, the Isle of Sodor's flag is more visually interesting because it breaks up the, it's not like monoblock colors. It's like the, the sort of like different.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's quite nice.

• 47:24November Kelly?

  But it is the trans flag in a lot of places.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  It absolutely is.

• 47:27November Kelly?

  Yeah, I.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  It's also somehow inadvertently kind of the rail network of orange and white. So interesting. That's very interesting. Maybe I planned that all along.

• 47:37November Kelly?

  Loving so much.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Although there's like a yellow and white version as well. I mean, they could just turn that to pink and then it absolutely is the like.

• 47:45Justin Roczniak?

  That's the, that's the South Sodorese.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Succede like a Cyprus situation, like, like.

• 47:54Justin Roczniak?

  No, I was thinking of Vietnam.

• 47:56November Kelly?

  Sodor has a native language that's dying out. What the fuck? There's so much to, okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna sidetrack.

• 48:02Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, Reverend Audrey wrote that book, The Isle of Sodor. It's Isle of Sodor, its history and people.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, I, yeah, I, in my head, there's, there's, there's been a civil, what, there's a secession and a civil war. I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna get on that wiki and add a few extra pages, I reckon.

• 48:22Justin Roczniak?

  It's not, it's not a real, um, English novel, a English fantasy series unless you've built the whole backstory, right?

• 48:31Speaker 02

  It doesn't have extensive.

• 48:33November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, guy, guy who has never been diagnosed with any form of neurodivergence, just painstakingly doing a bunch of world building.

• 48:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, no, that's, uh, that's, that's the Silmarion, but for Thomas, the tank.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  The, uh, the, the Archipelago series is a series using Transport Fever 2 to represent, oh, wait, sorry, that's, uh, yeah, sorry.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Anyway, um, so, right, sorry, Roz, we've got sidetracked talking about, uh, FFS for HSTs.

• 49:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  HRTs for HSTs.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  You can't use that word.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  That's supposed to, that's supposed to stay on fucking 4chan.

• 49:13Justin Roczniak?

  So, so these, these.

• 49:15November Kelly?

  It's like looking at a bunch of old railroad acronyms. It's just like, why is there a T, T, T?

• 49:21Justin Roczniak?

  So this is, this is, uh, we're talking about specials and extras. They're trains that don't appear on the timetable. They run as necessary. They may not be like special, you know? An empty coal train could be a special, or it could be like an excursion, or a private charter train full of VIPs, or a troop train, for instance, right?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Well, I, I, I think all trains are special, Roz, actually, so, you know, I think, you know.

• 49:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, and the thanks to precision scheduled railroading here in the United States, we agree, um, because we've completely done away with schedules, nearly every single train on the rails today is an extra or a special.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  You can never really tell what an X3 is thinking.

• 50:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, exactly.

• 50:11Justin Roczniak?

  You know, these, these are in the United States, they were indicated by these white flags up here on the locomotive. In the UK, the signals are more complicated or the, the, the lamp codes you can see here. Edward has four lamps indicating that he is hauling the royal train, um, which had its own special code.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, crikey.

• 50:36November Kelly?

  Oh, fuck off. I hate this stupid country.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  I don't know much about lamp codes because it's a steam train thing and I don't know anything about steam trains, but, um, that, that is okay. Fine. Yeah. Nowadays we do it in head coat. Well, not nowadays in the BR years, it was, it was head codes.

• 50:51November Kelly?

  Good news is.

• 50:53November Kelly?

  Good news is we can't afford a royal train anymore. I mean, of, of all the reasons why we don't have one, that's my least favorite, but we, we just don't now because we can't afford it.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh dear. But anyway, we just can't afford railways at the moment. That's basically Britain. We've decided we can't afford railways anymore. So we're doing away with them.

• 51:09Justin Roczniak?

  Can't afford anything anymore. It's gonna have to do without.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  It's because of woke.

• 51:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Everyone's gonna have to live in like a hut pretty soon. They're gonna have to go back to, uh, you know, traditional like long houses.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  And we deserve it as well.

• 51:23Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But yeah, so, uh, you have some amount of a predictable schedule if you're in the signal box, but if one of these extra trains or these special train shows up, you just gotta deal with it, right? Send it along as best you can.

• 51:39Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, now we have to talk about coach construction in the 19th and 20th century.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Oh, it's the crashworthiness slide deck again for me. Oh, no way. It's not. Why, why are you always talking about crashworthiness on my answers? Yeah, they are very pretty. You're right.

• 51:56November Kelly?

  I'm not, I'm not interested in crashworthiness. Look at this, look at this mock Tudor situation we're dealing with.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  And the cleristery as well. It's lovely.

• 52:04Justin Roczniak?

  Very nice looking car.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  They're, they're, they are. Yeah, that, I mean, so that first one is a, um, oh, actually, you have to correct me. That one, first one looks like an L and E arteique, um, coach, actually.

• 52:16November Kelly?

  Made out of teak?

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:18November Kelly?

  What the fuck? We're deep into the, the like Vicky three extractive economy thing where we're pulling teak out of like Borneo and sending it to Britain in order to make it into the.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, Nova, seriously, the equivalent of the, the Azumas that you get if you go, I mean, you always, you pretty much always hit the West Coast Main Line, but if you happen to go via Edinburgh, go down the east and got in one of the Azumas, the equivalent to those, the crack north, south expresses on the East Coast Main Line were a beautiful Garter blue Streamline A4 Pacific with a bunch, with a, like, with like 15 or not quite, like 14 of these things behind these teak L and R coaches. I don't know whether this specifically is why I can't quite see the picture.

• 52:58November Kelly?

  You know the thing about railways and people getting like really romantic and wistful about them, right? It's like you get that train, you're, you're supposed to be like, and you know, someone is kind of like seeing you off of the platform and it's like very tragic and you're, you know, you're crying and stuff. I'm still doing that, but the trains have gotten worse. So the railways need to return to my level of aesthetics.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, when I, when I visited Glasgow and we got on a Scot Rail train and Nova was like, this thing's a piece of shit. I fucking hate it. I was like, they come every 25 minutes?

• 53:37Justin Roczniak?

  You can, you can just, you can just get on the train and go. What a concept.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, we were, we were running for a train and I was like, oh my God, if we miss this, when's the next one? Cause I was like, I don't know if we're gonna make this. And she's like, oh God, it's like 25 minutes. I was like, are you fucking kidding me?

• 53:54Speaker 03

  This should be the last one for the month.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. 15 minutes trains to Mall Guy. Hell yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  It was only, it was only between the two largest city, the two largest cities in like, you know, the region. And so I was like, yeah, this should be the last one for the day.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, Edinburgh Glasgow, yeah, they get the nice express over there. They're not bad. But there's also four railways for Edinburgh Glasgow. So if you really want to, you could just get one of the slower ones and enjoy looking at sheep for an additional 20 minutes and go via like Bathgate. It's all good. Anyway, we digress. We're looking at trains, crashworthiness, wood or steel, Roz, materials and train car construction. Let's go.

• 54:30Justin Roczniak?

  It's been, it's, it's, in the, in the late 1930, 20th century, it was for a long time considered impossible to build a steel railroad car because there's no give to steel. So it will shake itself apart, right?

• 54:45Speaker 02

  And to a certain extent, that's kind of like a. Yeah, you might as well be putting people into a blender. Are you insane? That's partly a track thing because early days of, of, of the modern railway, we built our track form to be

• 54:57Speaker 02

  rigid. We, we took the Nova School of Engineering and it was rigid as hell.

• 55:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 55:01Speaker 02

  And so it was more rigid and then only kind of later did we learn that actually you can build a track system that's, that's resilient, which means kind of it has some give to it. And the design of vehicles kind of followed that a little bit like it was, it wasn't entirely the train people who had the epiphany. It was a little bit of a, we made our track to be less, you know, we, we, we, we spread it on more, you know, more sleepers, more ties and it became a bit more resilient. And so then, then an epiphany could come along. Thanks to, in this case, the Interboro Rapid Transit Company.

• 55:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So the Interboro Rapid Transit, the Interboro Rapid Transit Company built one steel car. And it worked fine. It was a little bit heavy, so they couldn't really use it in service, but it didn't shake itself apart. The Pennsylvania Railroad followed this. Everyone realized, wait, you can build a steel passenger car, right?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 55:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's fine. Nothing bad's gonna happen. This, this big revolution didn't come until around 1903 and, you know.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Also when battleships were useful. Okay, noted. Yeah.

• 56:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, yes.

• 56:06November Kelly?

  Back when you could also build those out of tin. But you did still have to use a lot of steel, so.

• 56:12Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh, you know, passenger cars last a long time. So throughout the First World War, which is about the era that we're talking about, there's still a lot of wooden coaches rolling around, right?

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, but a coach has a 40-year shelf life, which is not uncommon.

• 56:27November Kelly?

  I mean, you're not gonna complain. They look beautiful. They seem to be fine. Like, yeah.

• 56:33Justin Roczniak?

  Another question is, okay, are you using vacuum or Westinghouse air brakes? In Britain specifically, there, there was, uh, for a long time, a question of whether you use vacuum brakes or air brakes, and those are essentially, they, they work in reverse to each other. An air brake keeps pressure on to keep the brakes off, and a vacuum brake keeps a vacuum to keep the brakes off.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Which I always liked the idea of, because it fails safe, right? It fails safe, which is good. But I always liked vacuum, even though technically it's a more primitive system. Don't put the diagram of the valve cock up again.

• 57:12Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. And a vacuum is also interesting because of, uh, it's very easy to have a vacuum brake system when you have a huge pressurized steam vessel at the front of the train. Because you can use a Venturi device to create that vacuum very easily, very cheaply.

• 57:33November Kelly?

  I would love to use something called a Venturi device. I'm using so few named devices.

• 57:38Justin Roczniak?

  I know. Not enough, not enough devices. Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  They put all the devices into the, into the computer. It's such a disappointment.

• 57:47Justin Roczniak?

  This is not really a factor in this accident, but at the time you, you are going through a, a period where it was not clear which brake system they were going to adopt in Britain. So a lot of cars were equipped with either one system or the other, or some had both, or some had a pass-through where it was like, okay, we can use this car with an air brake train, but it doesn't have air brakes, but it does have an air brake pipe, but it can work with vacuum brakes.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:20Justin Roczniak?

  You know.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 58:21November Kelly?

  Yeah. What if we just never standardized anything?

• 58:24Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually, eventually vacuum brakes became standard. And then in the seventies, everything was converted over to air brakes.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Thank you to the Mark II coach.

• 58:36Justin Roczniak?

  And.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  What else, Ross? What other things? Tell us about other variations in design at this time. More. I need more.

• 58:42Justin Roczniak?

  Hold on. I, this is embarrassing. I have to use the restroom again. This is something, my digestion is not happy with something I ate earlier.

• 58:52November Kelly?

  I think it's genuinely the latest thing of COVID going around. I, I, I will explain and we can cut this or leave it in. Depending. Part of the reason why it's been so difficult to record podcasts is I have been sick as a dog lately. I had like, I had like three days back to back where I just was like useless. I was still working. I was doing my best to like work through it, but like, uh, I was genuinely sort of like concerned about my health at that point. And, um, yeah, I, I don't know whether it was like COVID or like something else viral or what, but like, it was, it was very much like the kind of ideal girlfriend in the sense that it kept like,

• 59:32November Kelly?

  absolutely knocking me down on the floor. And then anytime I tried to get up, just it hit me again. And so I'm still kind of not really, not really rid of it. I'm still, I like, I feel, I still don't feel great. And it's just like, yeah, real, real bad. And I know that's been going around.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Really good is that the NHS have been allowed indeed funded to continue to keep the information on their COVID page up to date with the latest symptoms for the latest variant. Oh, wait a minute. I'm just getting a message through my ear. They, oh no, they haven't. No, it's still from about four years ago.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  Still thinks COVID's real?

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  No, they don't actually, unfortunately.

• 1:00:09November Kelly?

  Sort of just about, but it doesn't, they don't think you should do anything, you know?

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13November Kelly?

  Uh, just don't worry about it, which I, I guess fair enough, but it's very difficult to not worry about it when you're sort of like, uh, spending day three of lying exclusively on your side and sort of like fairly bad.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25November Kelly?

  It's being like, uh, at what point do I sort of like go to the hospital? Hospital about this.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  I still have like nasty and just regular fatigue that I just never felt before I got COVID. That I definitely feel now, just like utter fatigue. It's not just from the toddler. Like this happened before, well before the toddler arrived, that I just had fatigue and I felt I just couldn't do and still can't do half the stuff. And it manifests for me as my brain is much more chaotic from the ADHD because when I'm tired, I'm more manic by quite a dramatic level. So yeah, it's um, yeah, thanks. Thanks for keeping us all up to date.

• 1:00:59November Kelly?

  I've had that.

• 1:01:01November Kelly?

  Yeah. So, so I've, I've had, um, basically I, I always get like, whenever I get any, any like sick at all, I always get like this huge like post viral fatigue thing. Walking feels like walking underwater. It's like, it's like painful, but it's, it's also like, uh, kind of, kind of frightening and also really kind of like debilitating. And I, but I, I, I don't know that that sort of like is something that originated with COVID in the sense that, and this is also partly why I kind of get mad at like long COVID as a thing. Is because I got really sick in like 2019, early 2019. And it was, it was just kind of like downstream of that. And I genuinely think what happened was I just got like a, a bad flu and I got, I got unlucky and got long flu or something.

• 1:01:44November Kelly?

  Cause you can get long anything, you know, and it's just like, it was, it was this kind of thing.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  Nasties up your insides and.

• 1:01:50November Kelly?

  You can have this like mess of like really, really like difficult to pin down post viral symptoms. They just get thrown into the same basket as like chronic fatigue syndrome, right? Where it's just like, or anything like that, where it's like, this is, this is mental woman problems, right? And for a while, people kind of were like, uh, you know, long COVID, maybe this is a thing. Maybe it's the first one of those things that we're going to recognize. And then of course they didn't, which they were never going to. And now long COVID is also.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  No, because the government cast cannot, yeah, the government is not allowed to acknowledge that chronic conditions exist because then they'd have to think about actually doing some research into understanding what they are. And chronic conditions often are primarily a woman, like they're often women's health questions as, you know, as, as we, yeah. And therefore they often get pushed into the, well, women thing. Woman. So, yeah.

• 1:02:42November Kelly?

  Also, the kind of the the economic considerations of being like, well, we have to cut benefits. And a key part of that is refusing to acknowledge that people can be sick in a way that prevents them from working for long periods or even indefinitely.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55November Kelly?

  Right. We have to kind of

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:02:56November Kelly?

  Trim all of the fat off of that, you know, which is, of course.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  I'm just checking in on the on the scale of workforce, long term sickness, those numbers, just just double check. Oh, oh, okay. Yeah, that that seems like a good idea economically to just ignore that problem. Yeah, just what to do is to just ignore it, not engage with it. Cool.

• 1:03:17November Kelly?

  It's crazy that you can you can genuinely make that worse by defunding a bunch of stuff.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:03:22November Kelly?

  Like you sort of stop spending money, you stop investing on anything that might make people's lives better. And that might make them, you know, healthier. And for some reason, you're surprised when they they get and stay sick.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Do you know what's a really good icing on that cake? Is to also make everything so obviously shit that everyone has like a really like is like forty percent despair on any given day. It's really good extra icing on top of that cake.

• 1:03:44November Kelly?

  And the one thing about specifically like post viral stuff, I will say is that like, people don't understand the like kind of psychological, like even psychiatric aspects of it. But like you can get so like depressed in a way that even if you are a kind of like habitual depression habit, feels so alien and so out of proportion and and feels much more like kind of idiopathic physically, you know? It's like, yeah, real bad, real bad. We can cut all of that, but that's some context as to why I've been struggling a bit at work.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Well, we love you, Nova, and I'm sorry you've been struggling.

• 1:04:19November Kelly?

  Well, thank you.

• 1:04:20Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't hear any of that.

• 1:04:21November Kelly?

  I don't mean to complain. I feel bad when I do.

• 1:04:23Justin Roczniak?

  Definitely say the last round of COVID definitely left me with some problems. My God.

• 1:04:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. It's fine. We'll just cut all of that because I feel bad for complaining.

• 1:04:35Justin Roczniak?

  Good time to complain.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  Devin, you get editors veto on that.

• 1:04:38November Kelly?

  Yeah. So trains, apart from the else, you're in this, you're in this beautiful train, you're experiencing yearning, right?

• 1:04:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46November Kelly?

  You're you're sort of like, but you also need to be able to see.

• 1:04:51Justin Roczniak?

  See stuff, yes.

• 1:04:51November Kelly?

  Maybe it's dark.

• 1:04:53Justin Roczniak?

  And there's basically two choices for you. Do you have electric lighting or do you have pinch gas, right?

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Ouch. Sorry, couldn't resist.

• 1:05:03November Kelly?

  Well, yeah, I think I've had some of that the last few days, part of why I've been feeling bad.

• 1:05:07Justin Roczniak?

  Pinch me and I pass wind. That's gross. I don't like that.

• 1:05:14November Kelly?

  Yeah, just like the entire train being like.

• 1:05:18Justin Roczniak?

  So Carl Friedrich Julius pinch developed this proprietary gas, right? It's distilled from Napa.

• 1:05:27November Kelly?

  Back when you could just do that.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  People would just be having a name like that.

• 1:05:29Justin Roczniak?

  Developed a gas.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Proprietary gas. Oh, yeah, me too.

• 1:05:37November Kelly?

  It's a degree in inorganic chemistry. I could develop a proprietary gas from Stuttgart.

• 1:05:45Justin Roczniak?

  Distilled from Napa, which is, you know, like white gas or camp fuel or something like that, which can be compressed very easily, which meant that you could have a relatively small container slung underneath the railroad car full of this compressed gas and you could run gas lamps off of that for like days at a time. It did not need to be refueled off.

• 1:06:10November Kelly?

  I have a question. I have a question. We've talked about fractional distillation and stuff before. And from this, I remember, and correct me if I'm wrong, that Napa, Napa's a pretty like a high octane hydrocarbon, right? Like it's got a.

• 1:06:24Justin Roczniak?

  It's higher up on the on the distillation column. Yeah.

• 1:06:27November Kelly?

  Yeah. So it's got a lot of kind of like volatile. It's got a lot of energy kicking around, which make a good.

• 1:06:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's great for lighting. It made a very light, a very, very bright, very smokeless flame. You know, it, it, it worked really good for what it was. But the thing is, what it was, was gaslighting and it was being used in wooden cars.

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't. Oh, that's fine, though. That's definitely fine. No, in fact, it isn't. And everyone knows it isn't.

• 1:06:56Justin Roczniak?

  If you don't derail, nothing bad happens. In fact, interestingly, what one of the, one of the properties of these particular lamps and their associated gas was they were much better at, you know, the flame kept going when there were bumps or there was, you know, some kind of jolt or something like that, as opposed to like earlier oil lamps. So these flames liked to keep going regardless of shocks.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  That's also probably fine.

• 1:07:29November Kelly?

  Being gasoline. You have like a constant even supply of fuel, which you can then sort of like slowly adjust to make people feel like they're going insane.

• 1:07:40Justin Roczniak?

  So again, this is an obvious safety hazard, but there wasn't really another way to do it until electricity came along, right? I'm not very familiar with like early British practices here. I know that in the United States, early electrically lit cars, they attached the dynamo to one of the axles. And then they had a big lead acid battery underneath and, you know, the dynamo would charge the battery.

• 1:08:06November Kelly?

  Everything was dangerous back then.

• 1:08:08Justin Roczniak?

  The dynamo would charge the battery, which would run the electric lights. And if you, if the train stopped for too long, well, it got dark.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, not, not, not dissimilar. We had dynamos, but also we would have an electric feed from the, from the calves. Certainly once we moved to diesel, diesel and diesel electric, we'd have a electric feed through the, through the train from the locomotive. Even, even, even early on, but with steam, it was a dynamo and, and lead acid battery similar just as the UK, partly because we were inheriting a lot of those designs from the Pullman Railcar Company.

• 1:08:40Justin Roczniak?

  That would make sense. Yeah. I don't know if you could fit a large enough, alternator on the steam locomotive to power a whole train. You might need a second steam locomotive for that, which weirdly is how a lot of Amtrak trains work, just with their second diesel locomotive devoted to head and power. But yeah, so a lot of these advances, you know, they, they made, train cars got a lot safer, very rapidly in like the early 1900s, 1910s. They were steel, they had better brakes, they had, electric lighting, a derailment wasn't quite the death sentence that it used to be, right?

• 1:09:22Justin Roczniak?

  And because these cars were, I mean, they're expensive upfront, but, they're more durable, they have lower lifetime maintenance costs. It did behoove the railways to move to them relatively quick.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:36Justin Roczniak?

  But then,

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:09:37Justin Roczniak?

  Then an event happened.

• 1:09:39November Kelly?

  Ah, in order to understand the Quentin Sewell disaster, we must first explain the causes.

• 1:09:46Justin Roczniak?

  The causes of the first world war.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:51November Kelly?

  Beginning with sort of like wounded nationalisms all over Europe in all sorts of different ways, which then play out in in the form of like a guy.

• 1:10:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, a guy shoots another guy. The second international shits the bed. I use this exact identical slide.

• 1:10:10November Kelly?

  That's crucial. Yeah.

• 1:10:11Justin Roczniak?

  The last time we discussed this. All of Europe goes to war over essentially nothing. Britain gets dragged in. And what does that mean for the railways? Lots and lots of traffic, right?

• 1:10:23November Kelly?

  Yeah, you got to move all of these troops around. You got to move all of this newfangled sort of like various devices.

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Devices and whizgigs.

• 1:10:31Justin Roczniak?

  Things. You have whatchamacallits.

• 1:10:33November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Justin Roczniak?

  You have, you know, man and material, right? It's paramount to send as many boys over there as quickly as possible so they could all immediately die in a muddy ditch fighting for control of 10 feet of a French pig farm.

• 1:10:51Justin Roczniak?

  And this required a lot of railway equipment to be pressed into service, including stuff that was obsolete or no longer suitable for civilian service, right? You know?

• 1:11:05November Kelly?

  You also have to remember that you're running the railways with, I mean, like railway work is like a reserved occupation. So you're not conscripting people, but you can't necessarily stop them from volunteering. And it also means that you're not getting new intake anymore because all of the, you know, 17 or 18 year olds who might have been going to work on the railways are now going to die fighting for control of 10 feet of French.

• 1:11:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yeah, it's it's very difficult to recruit people. Surprising amount of women wind up working on the railways. I know that like World War II is supposed to be, oh, that's when the women were in the workforce. No, World War I as well. It also happened.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, very much. Yeah. There's a reason why the interwar years were big for suffrage, right? Because a lot of women had got a taste of doing stuff. And we're like, wait, what? This is fine. Like, why can't, I want to do this stuff again. Why can't, why can't I do this stuff?

• 1:12:00Justin Roczniak?

  I like working on the train.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  I like getting various forms of chemical warfare weapons, like stuff smushing up my face and, and skin and hands and hair. It's all good. Mmm, phosphine, delicious.

• 1:12:13Justin Roczniak?

  Wonderful. So your railways are, are dealing with like normal traffic, but also troop traffic. Like there's a lot of troop trains, special troop trains that are being, you know, to move as many of, you know, Britain's best and brightest to go get murdered. Um, and of course, all the material needed for the war effort, you know, so all these lines uh suddenly get very, very, very crowded. Um, and you're having to do, you know, like a lot of exotic signaling to get trains around each other.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, that's, wait a minute. So you're an extremely saturated rail network, having to do increasingly bizarre things to its operating regime and timetable to satisfy the, the, the demand. That, that couldn't possibly happen today.

• 1:13:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that is, that is not something we can, you know, consider these days. Um, well.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Actually, the joke, the joke there is that that's precisely what we're doing on our rail network currently because uh we're doing extremely bizarre things operationally and to our timetable to squeeze as many trains in as possible and without actually doing any infrastructure work. Uh, so yeah, no, I don't know. Uh, I guess we never learn lessons.

• 1:13:26Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, we learn nothing. Well, you know, I, I'd rather have that problem than a car shortage, which is what's happening over here, but that's a different episode.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  Although incidentally, also what we're about to talk about now.

• 1:13:39Justin Roczniak?

  Actually though, yeah, no, we do have to talk about car.

• 1:13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:44Justin Roczniak?

  So they don't have enough cars to run everything with modern rolling stock. So I think it's uh useful here to look at our contestants today, which you're about to meet at Quentin's. In the red corner.

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Oh dear. I tell you what, actually, so you've got, it'd be, and I'd say, everyone, Google some of these, some of this rolling stock, because it's so key to see, we'll, we'll get there, but Ross will get there, but I really want you to understand how knackered the coaches of player one are in this situation.

• 1:14:20Justin Roczniak?

  I was trying to find some pictures and I couldn't, I couldn't find any good ones, unfortunately. So this is on the morning of the 22nd of May, 1915. This is outside of Quinton's Hill, which is just barely, you know, it's a little bit north of Carlisle, right? And there's several trains which want to get through this set of sidings. We'll show that in the next slide. But, so, all right, we have a local train which has, these are Caledonian Railway relatively modern coaches. There's, there's two coaches, a brake van and a milk van, right? You have a troop train special which has, oh boy,

• 1:15:02Justin Roczniak?

  a bunch of great Central Railway, really old, really terrible cars. This is what?

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Third-class passenger cars.

• 1:15:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, mostly third. So, no, you got some, you got some, you got some composites too. So I don't know, maybe they put the officers in those. Composite means something different in Britain than it does in the United States. Composite car here means it's just, it got a steel frame, but a wood body. Composite in Britain is, it has first and third classes in it.

• 1:15:36Speaker 02

  Correctamundo.

• 1:15:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, all of these guys are all wood. So yeah, we got composite brake, third class, third class, third class, third class, composite, composite, third, third, third, third, third composite, composites, caravan truck. I don't know what that is.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  So I've, so I've put in the group chat what the coach looks like. And I want everyone to just go in and look at the, the DM, our group DM, and have a look at the picture. And that's what the troop train is made of. That is a three axle.

• 1:16:08November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Piece of.

• 1:16:09November Kelly?

  That's a barn. That's a barn with some, some wheels under it.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is not like, the pictures that Roz put up earlier give people a false impression of how modern this, this kit is. That's what it looks like.

• 1:16:19November Kelly?

  That's, that's a, that's a conservatory that's been erected without planning permission.

• 1:16:25Justin Roczniak?

  I thought, I thought I was. Okay. I don't, I don't like this at all. Those are those, those three, there was those, those six wheel coaches I always assumed were like children's drawings. Okay. As opposed to a, a real thing that existed.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, that is what the troop train was made of. It was made of, what, what was that like, like, uh, just like 20 of these fuckers all salitate together.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I, uh, in.

• 1:16:55November Kelly?

  Long train, many troops.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Yes. And squeezed in like the chickens that ultimately occupied most of these things when they ended up in fields. Um, yes.

• 1:17:05November Kelly?

  And presumably feeling pretty good about the prospects of going from Scotland to France to Dian.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're, you're in Leith, you've just congregated in Leith and you're getting onto this thing, which is a GCR coach, which has no business being up in, in Edinburgh in the first place. Like, what the hell is it doing up there?

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Secondly.

• 1:17:24November Kelly?

  No nationalism strikes again.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Get that, get that, get that Edward Watkins shit back to south of the border. Anyway.

• 1:17:30Justin Roczniak?

  How did they go around curves?

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Uh, I wouldn't worry too much about it. They had a lot of play in the axles.

• 1:17:37November Kelly?

  Just hold on.

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  Uh, they had a lot of play. I know you look at it and you're like, why, why has it got the extra wheel? What does it need it for? The thing's 15 feet long. Yeah. Uh, yeah. Uh, I don't know. I, what the fuck are they doing? Like, this is bad. It's, but because it's GCR, like this is a GCR coach, which means it is, this thing was built like in the, you know, the, the turn of the century. This was late, very late 1800s, if not early 1900s, because the GCR had only existed, these were built new for the GCR and the GCR only existed from the, the late 1890s. So, um, yeah, this is, I mean, as you say, these things are, they're old, they're definitely old, but they're more importantly, they are, it's a situation. Where they've been made obsolete by new technologies and new design approaches to rolling stock.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  A bit like the pictures we showed earlier. Anyway, sorry, Ross, I've derailed this, but only because I think it's really important that people see what this fucking thing looks like.

• 1:18:29Justin Roczniak?

  I didn't actually know it was a six-wheel coach. I, again, I had, I always suspected those things weren't real.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Victoria, I mean, what, what, you, you know about coach, coach builders in the sense of the traditional description of that? How, how would you describe what you could see as that, that, what do you get on that vehicle?

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  I mean, it's third class, so I assume it's kind of the equivalent of like a Spirit Airlines flight. In which case I just don't ask questions. I just kind of get on and I'm like, sure, whatever.

• 1:19:03November Kelly?

  It's probably fine. Especially, especially 1915, you, you're like, you've been, you've been simmered in a broth of like a class anxiety your whole life. You're like, of course you don't.

• 1:19:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I presumably at some point I would have thought about the fact that there was an enormous compressed gas cylinder directly under my ass. That likes to explode and ignite and burn for hours, kind of like I do every time I get in a Tesla from an Uber call where I'm like, huh? I hope this doesn't go wrong. I just, I just don't think about it. It's a skill that you learn as an American.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's remarkably similar experience to getting a Cybertruck, I suppose. Yeah.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just don't think about it.

• 1:19:48Justin Roczniak?

  I think one of the interesting things about this train is that the, you know, it's a troop special, but the Caledonian Railway is still like, okay, we've got, we've got the caravan, the two caravan trucks, which I assume are some kind of like express freight cars. The open scenery truck, I don't know what that is. I assume, I don't know, the troops could have like, go get a breath of fresh air and then two cars of fish.

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  Remember that these didn't have corridors between them. So when you were in one coach, you were stuck in one coach.

• 1:20:20Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  So the only people in the open scenery truck are the people unlucky enough to have been, because this train was going from Leith to Liverpool, right? So they're the only people that are unlucky enough, I believe, I mean, catch me if I'm wrong, that they're the people lucky enough to be put in an open coach from Leith to Liverpool.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  But notably, they don't have lights, so they don't have a compressed gas tank sitting directly under their asses.

• 1:20:43Speaker 02

  That's a very good point.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  So really.

• 1:20:45Justin Roczniak?

  Perhaps that was the true first class. I mean, those would have been the lucky ones, right?

• 1:20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Justin Roczniak?

  You could actually at least have a dart on the way there.

• 1:20:52November Kelly?

  Feeling the words thrown clear of the rack, you know?

• 1:20:57Justin Roczniak?

  Then there's a express passenger train, which is also going to be involved. Um, this is a normal, you know, civilian train, you know, break bank composite, sleeping saloon, not a coach, it's a saloon, uh, composite cars, third class, third class, uh, break third, break composite, so on and so forth. Um, so yeah, this is, uh, you know, we have a wide variety of equipment coming through. Some of these got 12 wheels. That's a lot of wheels.

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a lot of wheels. So yeah, this, oh, that's because they are, they have uh, three axle bogies. Um, so they got two sets of three axle bogies. So, uh, so yeah, I said Midland Railway earlier. Actually, the expresses were not Midland Railway. They were of course the equivalent of what are now the west coast, uh, kind of um, Virgin Trains, West Coast or whatever it is now. What is it? Avanti, which are the L and, uh, L and W are so London and Northwestern Railway, which is basically they were the crack north, south, like, they're basically the London up to Glasgow kind of crack expresses.

• 1:21:59Justin Roczniak?

  The fancy train for fancy people and this.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Fancy train for fancy people with, um, three axle bogies.

• 1:22:06Justin Roczniak?

  Lots of sleeping cars.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, look at them. Aren't they happy? Yeah.

• 1:22:09Justin Roczniak?

  Everyone's, everyone's gonna wake up fresh in Glasgow, fully rested, you know, have a nice day.

• 1:22:16November Kelly?

  Hmm. The podcasters of their day were on this.

• 1:22:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 1:22:22November Kelly?

  I do a radio show. I do a wireless. I do a wireless broadcast.

• 1:22:27Justin Roczniak?

  I do a show on the wireless.

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Get it on the train in the morning, hey?

• 1:22:33November Kelly?

  Gosh, well, that seems to be a problem.

• 1:22:44Justin 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. Anyway, that's something to consider if you

• 1:23:29Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:23:47Justin Roczniak?

  So let's look at the tracks around Quinton's Hill.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, shit. It's my slides.

• 1:23:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, okay. So this is Quinton's Hill. It's really important. So Quinton's Hill is just kind of a little bit north of the Scottish border. So if anyone who doesn't know the geography of the UK, the Scottish border runs in a kind of a weird diagonal direction from like Carlisle, kind of northeasterly towards Berwick. The Carlisle end is further south. The UK is a very weird shape, or Britain as an island is a very weird shape. The border is north of Carlisle by like 10 miles or so. And then after Carlisle, the railway gets increasingly weevy and windy as it heads towards Beetuk Summit. But it's fairly flat and straight at the, just across the border, which is where Quinton's Hill is, in the sense that Quinton's Hill is nothing. It was a local farm that was called Quinton's

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Hill, and that, I think even at the point of this accident, had mostly gone, the buildings had been swept away. Certainly today, there's absolutely no remnants of that farm. The only way that Quinton's Hill is remembered is from This bit of is the fact the railways kept the name alive. So in any case, this was the location of a signal box. We talked about those a minute ago in 1880. It was built in 1880 as capacity was increased along with Calgary Railway. Basically additional signal blocks allowing you to have more trains running between those signals. So you have more signal boxes means you can run more trains at the time. There was also a trailing crossover. So that's just a crossover in the trailing direction. So you had to, if you wanted to go by, it makes

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  sense in the diagram, I'm just going to show you a second. And yeah, so traffic increased massively.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  So on this railway, so loops were put in either side of the main line. So you had the main lines, the up and the down main. And in 1903, these two loop lines were put in, the up loop and the down loop. They were installed in 1903 and the signal box was flattened and a new one was put in basically the same spot, but just with an extra track width away. And just one more track, bro. Just one more track.

• 1:25:52Justin Roczniak?

  Just one more track will do it.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, in this case, it was classic. You know, people talk about, you know, if only we had the profligate days of the early railways. Well, no, the railways have always been cheap because the Calgary Railway absolutely cheaped out here and built the loops between two bridges so they didn't have to rebuild those bridges. So the loops are pretty short, like they're only 500 meters long, which is long enough, like even for the UK is kind of uselessly short today. And even back then is not actually that long, but you know, I suppose long enough. Anyway, this is kind of all besides the point, other than the fact that, yeah, the railways have always been, we've always been cheapskates when it comes to building railroads in the UK. Next slide, please, because what I'm going to do from that map, which is a little after the time period

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  we're talking about, is explode out and show you it in true GD diagram scribbly form. So I've kind of blown this up. This is what I'm, this is what I'm here for. Yeah, so.

• 1:26:48Justin Roczniak?

  And I just, I want to point this out before we go. If you look on various sources, this,

• 1:26:58Justin Roczniak?

  Switch here.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  Crossover.

• 1:26:59Justin Roczniak?

  The crossover is in like five different places, depending on the source.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I don't know why that is because the crossover in back in Yonday. Well, firstly, the crossover was there before the loops were there. So why would the signal box be anywhere other than where the crossover is? It doesn't make any sense. You're not going to put the signal box where the guy has to keep warm. More than just a very short walk from the crossover where the signaller and the fitter will be going out and the plate layer will be going out to hit the crossover to make it work. So it doesn't make any sense. You're not going to, and you're not going to run the cables longer than they need to. So the signal box is going to be next to the crossover and this, and so flip that on its head. That we know where the signal box is from maps. So the crossover is right next to it. So why did all the diagrams put it in weird places? So I've, so this is the best diagram now on the internet for what we're about to describe.

• 1:27:47Justin Roczniak?

  We are right and everyone else is wrong.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  And dumb and stupid. Let's put that on the record as well.

• 1:27:53November Kelly?

  That has always been true.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  So on the left hand side here, you've got the lines going up to Glasgow. On the right hand side, I'm sure that the lines go down to, well, sorry, I'm used, I should say that on the line. They'd go down to Glasgow and no way.

• 1:28:09Justin Roczniak?

  Scottish supremacy here.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:28:13November Kelly?

  It's the like weird kind of thing I kind of liked about British rail parlance that like you go up to London and down from London.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. Up, up to London, down from London, down towards the, down towards the frozen south, north, sorry. Which is technically correct, given that the, the, the planet is an orange shape. So technically going south is going uphill on average. But anyway, so Carlisle in one direction, Glasgow in the other. And kind of here you have Quinton's Hill and it's funny little cornered, kind of like, well, like 12 miles or something. 10 miles ish, not very far north of Carlisle, like, like a few minutes north of Carlisle. And at the bottom, you have the down loop. At the top, you have the up loop. So in schematic form, track layout look like this. And the, the up loop serves southbound trains and the down loop serve northbound trains. Worth saying for everyone's benefit, the track on the left hand side goes north.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  The track on the right hand side goes south in GB work, mostly unless it's bidirectional. Yeah, exactly. Drive on the left. So this, let's, next slide, please. So this is our sequence of events. Roz, I don't know whether you want to, I can run through this, but just chip in or do you want to run through this? How do you want to, how do you want to roll with this?

• 1:29:25Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, I think you run, you can, you can run through it and I'll chip in every once in a while.

• 1:29:30Speaker 02

  Perfect. Yeah. So this is the, oh, that means that all the people have to listen to my weird voice again. Sorry, everyone. You've, you've, you've survived without me for so long and I'm back.

• 1:29:38November Kelly?

  Cheering, you know?

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  They're whooping, they're cheering.

• 1:29:42November Kelly?

  I hope so.

• 1:29:42Justin Roczniak?

  There's, there's, there's signs in the background. There's some.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Right. So here we go. Well, actually what will happen is, and it's the thing that always makes me feel happy is that Devon will say, Devon will be saying, here he goes. We're all getting excited. We're whooping, we're cheering. Thanks Devon for your con words. So, right.

• 1:30:01Justin Roczniak?

  What if they don't appear here?

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Oh, actually Roz, you need to read a date because we've not read a date yet.

• 1:30:05Justin Roczniak?

  No, we did. It's the, it's the morning of the 22nd of May, 1915.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 1:30:13November Kelly?

  At least you're outdoors in May on your way from Leith to Liverpool.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Can you imagine if it was like, oh, crikey. Yeah. Thing is, if it was like January, then the, the, the gas lamps that we're about to talk about in some more detail would have immediately snuffed out, you'd hope. Anyway, but also everyone would have instantly frozen to death for, for, for reasons that will become clear momentarily. So, right, I'll shut up. No, I won't. I'll be clear about what I'm saying. 5am. It's early in the morning and a Carlisle goods train has arrived and it's arrived and the signaler in the signal box has gone, ah, yeah, right. Okay. We're going to pop that train into the down loop. Fine. Okay. I've done that. Next slide, please. So there's, there's the train parked in the down loop, minding its own business. Nay bother. Next slide, please. 6:20am. A local train arrives going from Carlisle

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  to Beethock. It arrives at 6:20 in the morning and the signaler goes, signaler says, okay, next slide, please. Signaler goes, okay, park up. Thing is, you've. Actually, I'll tell you what Roz, you, you explain what's happening. So why is the train, why is that local train stopped here? Why is it being held at signal? And what happens?

• 1:31:22Justin Roczniak?

  What? One of the things, if you. Work on the railroad, um, excuse me, railway. This is Britain.

• 1:31:29November Kelly?

  Oh, no, we were still, we called things railroad still. It's fine.

• 1:31:32Justin Roczniak?

  If you, if you work in these places, it's actually very convenient to get to your job via train sometimes, right? But sometimes the schedule of the railroad doesn't match up with the schedule of the railroad being your employment, right? So the signalman on duty in the box was supposed to get off work at six o'clock in the morning, right? That was George Meakin. Um, but he had to deal with the next guy, right? Who was James Tinley. He would stay on duty in extra 30 minutes. So that Tinley could take the local train in and just walk over the single signal box.

• 1:32:17Justin Roczniak?

  They change shifts and then I believe Meakin would then take the local train out. Cause um, one of them lived further up towards Glasgow and the other one lived in Carlisle or further down towards Carlisle. So this was a very convenient arrangement um, for both.

• 1:32:35November Kelly?

  What could go wrong? And I'm, I'm seeing the whole for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost sort of layout before me here.

• 1:32:43Justin Roczniak?

  And so, um, it was, the company was fairly strict about like, okay, you can't stay on duty later. You can't have this arrangement. Um, but what would, what would happen is Meakin would just, you know, do the trains for the extra 30 minutes. And would fudge the records so that it looked like he left 30 minutes earlier. And Tinley showed up 30 minutes earlier, right? And the thing is shift changes are usually pretty safety critical, right?

• 1:33:17November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Justin Roczniak?

  You know, especially for, well, yeah, stuff like trains, you know, where, where you, you don't want to be in a position where you've lost track of what's happening and.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  That's adding.

• 1:33:31November Kelly?

  Oh, don't, don't remind me. I would, if anyone's read my rice up on the, the lap I went to, a lot of the kind of disaster of that, I'll put a link in the description, maybe a lot of the disaster of that was downstream of information not being, being lost on a shift change. It happens like.

• 1:33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. The way that they were coordinating this too, from what I read was that Meakin would basically take a second log on a sheet of scrap paper and just kind of write down like whatever the hell else he was doing for the next half hour. And then Tinley would come in and be like, okay, I'm going to copy all this down to the official guidebook in my handwriting.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Really cool.

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  No potential for loss of data whatsoever.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  So on top of all this, let's add in some corporate shenanigans as well, because you might ask yourself, what's this? Well, I'll tell you what, let's go to the, let's go to the next slide, please, Roz. Because this train gets shunted back, well, not shunted, it reverses itself back onto the up main. It's pulled back onto the up main. Next slide, please. Where it is held, that is right, facing into the direction of oncoming traffic. Now, you might ask yourself, why the fuck have they done this?

• 1:34:46November Kelly?

  That's fine.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  Just pop that there.

• 1:34:48Justin Roczniak?

  It's probably fine. Don't worry about it.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  So let's, this requires a little bit of explanation. So this, at this time of day, there were three passenger trains that would come through from Carlisle northwards. Two overnight sleeping car expresses that we've talked about, one of them from London to Glasgow and Edinburgh, they would depart Carlisle at 5:50 AM and 6:05 AM when on, when they're on time. Now, they were followed by this local train that we see on our screen now in bright yellow. It would depart from Carlisle, it was advertised in the timetable, it departing at 6:10, but it normally left at 6:17. If the sleepers ran late, so those expresses, if they were, yeah, if they were, if they were running late, then the local

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  service would not be held back to depart from Carlisle after them because corporate shenanigans approaching, precedence would. Then need to be given to the departure of the expresses which were run by a rival company. In this case, the L and WR. So that's the Caledonian Railway getting upset that its local service would be deprioritised versus the L and WR services. Also, if that local train was then late, it would cause knock on delays to a Moffat to Glasgow Edinburgh commuter service, which it connected to a BTIC, which is kind of BTIC, maybe in fact we scribbled under it earlier, BTIC's halfway up the line. So basically, if one or other of the sleeper trains were running late, the stopping train would depart, it's advertised of 6.10,

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  and then it would be shunted at one of the various stations or signal boxes to allow the sleepers to overtake it later on. Now, the problem is, that train would normally go and park in the down loop, but there's a big fucking train in the down loop at the moment, isn't there? There's a big old goods train.

• 1:36:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Oh, so what would happen is that actually, if that was occupied, then it would be shunted via the trailing crossover on to the up main line. Now, this might seem mental, see also Nova's reaction a minute ago when I explained this happening. But actually, this was allowed by the rules. Like, it's fine. It's like, it's not dangerous because there is various safety processes in place and a professional signaler to make sure that it is all fine and good and safe, right? Right? Right?

• 1:37:00Justin Roczniak?

  Right. And this just goes to show, a lot of people think they don't have room for a model railroad. And no, the answer is, you can have an incredibly small model railroad with a very simple track layout and just make the operations insanely complex for no reason.

• 1:37:24November Kelly?

  Just do it with that in like T-gauge, you know?

• 1:37:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Speaker 02

  So, next slide, please. And the train sits there.

• 1:37:35Justin Roczniak?

  Just sits there for a long, long time.

• 1:37:38Speaker 02

  Quite a while. Now, actually, so the train sat there with it. Actually, it sits there for a long time. But first, first, another train is coming along in the direction of our local train, but that's fine because it's expected. It's a flow of, this is the Navy getting it. It's those fucking battleships getting involved again. It's the flow of empties from the major fueling flow of coal from Scapa Flow and where a lot of the Navy sits down to South Wales or from South Wales where all the coal is. So there'd be a regular train. Normally, this would be done by boat at this time. But unfortunately, those coal boats kept getting hit by mines and sunk by ships and shit.

• 1:38:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, the fucking U-boats and shit like that. So they were like, well, the railway will have to pick up the slack. And so just chuck more traffic onto the railway. That's fine. So along comes the empties.

• 1:38:29Justin Roczniak?

  The first special.

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  This is the first of our specials. So here's the, here's the, here's the empty coal train arrives. And so it arrives at just a couple of minutes after the, the train had halted waiting for instructions. Next slide, please. And it rolls in and sits and occupies the up loop. So there it sits, happy as Larry. Our local train still sitting, doing not very much.

• 1:38:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:53November Kelly?

  Meanwhile, in the signal box.

• 1:38:55Justin Roczniak?

  Great idea.

• 1:38:56November Kelly?

  In the signal box, presumably, your, your second guy is getting in and, you know, getting the tea on and like copying out all of the like scrap paper movements.

• 1:39:10Justin Roczniak?

  Somehow, he's like, he's doing that. And he's also reading the newspaper to hear what's happening in the war.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's locked himself into the toilet. He's, he's flipped to the back pages. He's seen if he, you know, he's, he's, he's just getting busy before he starts his shift.

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Checking to see if the Secretary of War has called the troops gay yet.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:39:30November Kelly?

  1915, quite possibly. Kitchen and lining up like Hague and French and being like, you're all woke homosexuals.

• 1:39:37Justin Roczniak?

  1915, page three, girl. Oh, my God. Look at that ankle.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  So, so we have, now we have three trains just sat at Quinton Hill in this, in the, in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere in the Scottish Borders, Reva territory. Yeah. So, okay. So far, things are fine. Signaller paying some attention because the first of our expresses arrives, 6:38. So we're still, there's, there's a bit of time passed. This express passes through, completely fine on the down main, whizzing northwards, happy as Larry, right?

• 1:40:10Justin Roczniak?

  This would be fantastic if you were a Fomer, just seeing this insane meat on this stupid siding.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Just the amount of stuff. This is all the train. Yeah. And I was like, why is that local train just there in the face in the, what's, what's going, okay, fine.

• 1:40:26Justin Roczniak?

  Why is this happening? Okay.

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  What's going on? So, and about the same time, next slide, please. The fireman of the local train, as are theoretically the rules, if a train's been sat for more than, you know, five minutes, then the, the fireman, oh, this is, there's a rule for this, by the way.

• 1:40:43Justin Roczniak?

  There's rule 55.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  That's it. This is important. This will be important. The fireman goes, oh, I better go and speak to the signalers. Why the fuck I'm still sat here facing into traffic? This doesn't feel good. So, yeah, the fireman has to go to the signal box to ensure that the train's presence was noted by the signaller. He went to the signal box.

• 1:41:02Justin Roczniak?

  Hey, still here. You, you. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I know. You just got off this train, but I have to come here and say that I'm here.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I have to, that's, it's like not reassuring. It's like, you got off this train and you've, what, what, what's, what's happening with it? What's, what's going on? And so, yeah, he went to the signal, if that's Roz, yeah, you, you, you take these words.

• 1:41:23Justin Roczniak?

  He's supposed to go in there and say, hey, the train is here. I'm just here to make sure in compliance with the rules that you are aware of the train is here and that also that you put that wooden block we talked about earlier, the safety collar in place, you know, to.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  Get the hell out of here. We're trying to figure out which troops are woke.

• 1:41:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, you're reading the newspaper to figure out how woke our troops are. You know, and everyone's kind of like, ah, this is routine. This doesn't matter. So, you know, and a fireman is just, you know, goes in there. The, the crew of the other two trains are also in there, if I recall correctly. They're all talking about war news.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Everyone's just having a nice chat.

• 1:42:08November Kelly?

  Isn't that be like, I hear the Royal Flying Corps awoke?

• 1:42:13Justin Roczniak?

  Do you want to be on the footplate of horrible 1915 British steam locomotive? Or do you want to be in the nice warm signal box where there's tea?

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Hey, I'll have you know.

• 1:42:25November Kelly?

  Pretending I'm not autistic.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'll have you know, I mean, yes, but also I'll have you know that those, the locomotives involved here are all absolutely gorgeous. They are so stunning. It's like the peak of like steam locomotive design. They are, uh, good. You can, everyone can Google that, that, the, the Caledonian Railway locomotives involved here are all stunners by something.

• 1:42:46Justin Roczniak?

  This is still well before you had like enclosed cabs or anything like that.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's cold. It's May, but it's, it's 5am in May, 1915 Britain. It's fucking, it's like one degree, uh, your, your fingers, your dick, your nose have all fallen off. Like it's cold.

• 1:43:00Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, the front of you is incredibly hot from the locomotive and the back.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, that's true. So your ass has fallen off. Yeah. Okay. Right.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  Right. So.

• 1:43:10November Kelly?

  So everyone's in, everyone's in the signal box.

• 1:43:11November Kelly?

  Rotating like a 711 hot dog.

• 1:43:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  Well, if you're the fireman, I suppose you were, weren't you? You're shoveling. Yeah. But if you're stood still and not shoveling, you're, you're going to rapidly cool down. So, uh, a few minutes later, our fireman waddles back to the, um, to the locomotive, the local train. And so that's, that's four, that's 646. One minute passes. Uh, next slide, please. And a troop train is offered forwards towards Carlisle. So that's one minute after the fireman gets back into the cab of the locomotive, the local train. And the signaler offers forwards, uh, the, uh, the troop train, basically provides the right signal, say it's to the previous signaler goes, uh, that's sorry. To the previous signal box, one further north says, yep.

• 1:44:01Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  On it comes. That's fine.

• 1:44:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:44:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we got, we got space. It's fine.

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  Yep. Next slide, please. And we wait. And next slide, please. Two minutes later, at 6:49, the leaf to Liverpool troop train heading southwards at speed on the upmain. Hundreds of woke troops heading at high velocity towards your location. And the the result of this is, uh, yeah, not the next slide, please.

• 1:44:30Justin Roczniak?

  This is not good. That no, that's gone poorly.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  That's, yeah, it's not. All three trains. So that's not three. That's one, two, three, four trains in a piled up heap across four tracks of the main north, south railway in and out of Scotland.

• 1:44:48Justin Roczniak?

  That's about probably the most trains you can pile up here, right? I don't I don't think there could be like a situation where.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've maxed out, right?

• 1:44:57Justin Roczniak?

  You wreck more trains. That can't happen.

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  No, yeah, exactly. So next slide, please.

• 1:45:02Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  One minute later, the 650, at 650, the second North Ben Express train heading northwards at speed also arrives at Quinton's Hill. And well, Roz.

• 1:45:13Justin Roczniak?

  Well, in the words of Denzel, they were a wreck on a wreck.

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  Oh, God. And, uh, yeah, next slide, please. And is he mewing?

• 1:45:25Speaker 03

  I am so glad that I'm not the only person who saw that stupid movie enough times that it changed my what my brain's wired.

• 1:45:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, it's a great movie. It's so good.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  Also, Chris Pine has exceptional cheap bones, doesn't he? I think he is legit mewing here.

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:43Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, he's mewing in the sense of M U-ing. That's right. There's two locomotives on this train.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Sorry. Next slide, please.

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  So that's one, two, three, four, five trains. Yeah, it's spillkins, folks. This is, it's not good. And did I mention that this is all on fire?

• 1:46:08November Kelly?

  Oh, because of the gaslighting?

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, so.

• 1:46:13November Kelly?

  And because of the being made of wood.

• 1:46:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if we, and just to round it off, so that, all that happens at, three minutes later, next slide, please, the signal is sent from the signal box to stop all trains. So that was, that was three minutes, I would imagine, of not great vibes in that signal box.

• 1:46:35November Kelly?

  And being like, no, I'm reading about Gallipoli, you know?

• 1:46:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  So this is, this is, this is so much on fire. Like, this is real, this is really, really on fire. Yeah, Roz, I hope that was a reasonable explanation of what the fuck happened here, because to get five trains in a pile is, well, this is it, you know?

• 1:47:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you have to go through that sequence to really understand how the fuck you put five trains through each other.

• 1:47:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, this is a difficult feat, but it was accomplished in Victorian Britain, or, excuse me, not Victorian, it was after Victorian.

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  Edwardian.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Edwardian, yeah, very much Edwardian, yeah.

• 1:47:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

  We did it, we did it, folks.

• 1:47:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I wonder if this is the record for most trains involved in one collision.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know.

• 1:47:30November Kelly?

  It is the deadliest train accident in British history.

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  Oh, it absolutely is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, yeah, yeah, okay, everyone in the YouTube comments, get cracking. Tell us, is this the rail crash of the most trains involved? Because, good God, if there's one with more trains involved, we will do it within the next five episodes.

• 1:47:50Speaker 03

  Did any of you ever play Burnout?

• 1:47:52November Kelly?

  Yeah, Crash Mode.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, that's what this is, but with trains.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  There's just like a rolling multimillion dollar ticker on the bottom of the screen, inside the signal box, the entire time, until they send the stop signal.

• 1:48:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God, I love that game. Old timey, it's like old timey, like the, the, the flip, not flip boards, like just the old counters, you know?

• 1:48:17November Kelly?

  It like rings a bell every time. Guy chalking it out and like pound shilling and pence, yeah.

• 1:48:25November Kelly?

  And because of currency valuation, the high score is like six pounds. Yeah. You translate that out, that's 11 billion pounds today.

• 1:48:35Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  Victoria, you've absolutely just laser pointed me with like, you've just now immediately sent my brain back to burnout two, which I spent more hours than I care to remember.

• 1:48:43November Kelly?

  The Googling, Googling backwards compatibility.

• 1:48:46Speaker 03

  No, the way you do it is you get PCSX2 and you just get the ISOs. You need to know, you need to know a really cool girl who's got the ISOs for a bunch of, I don't have those Sony. It's not me. It's some other cool girl.

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  Some other cool, cool person who's, uh, yeah.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  I respect copyright law.

• 1:49:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:05November Kelly?

  So I appreciated that another. We did get you to admit that you're cool finally.

• 1:49:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. The long-term project that is this podcast to restore my self-esteem to something resembling a healthy baseline is succeeding.

• 1:49:18Speaker 02

  Listen, gentlemen, we got her.

• 1:49:22Justin Roczniak?

  So, yeah.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  What's happening? So we turn to Scotland. What's going on? What's going on? What's going on in the Scottish borders on this fine morning?

• 1:49:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yarring shift in tone. Oh no, this has gone quite poorly, actually. You can see this train is very much on fire. Here's some empty coal wagons. They're also on fire because they're made of wood. Um, bad things are also happening over here.

• 1:49:46November Kelly?

  You're getting like functionally shell splinters from wood, right? Like your, and glass as well.

• 1:49:52Justin Roczniak?

  So by far, the train that came off the worst was the troop train, right? Um, every single car on it instantly caught fire, um, except for the six cars on the rear end, which detached and through the magic of vacuum brakes, rolled away. Problem is those cars, those cars were the ones that were full of like baggage and fish. Um.

• 1:50:18Speaker 02

  So well, I mean, fuck, yeah.

• 1:50:21November Kelly?

  Jesus. Okay. So we saved two cars of fish from being smoked effectively.

• 1:50:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, pretty much.

• 1:50:26November Kelly?

  Yeah. We may, we may have killed a couple of hundred people, but we did prevent the creation of a bunch of like arbroth smokies.

• 1:50:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, um, yeah, all these cars were lit with the pinch gas and those cans had been recently filled, right? So there was no hope of extinguishing the fire at all. It burned until the following day.

• 1:50:49November Kelly?

  Um, Jesus. And I mean, this is in the middle of nowhere, right?

• 1:50:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:50:53Speaker 02

  Fucking miles from anywhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. There's like a fire company in the nearest town, which is Gretna, but they don't have like, you know, there's no fire hydrants. There's no anything like that. There's no way to get like water. Yeah. So, you know, uh, they try to rescue people from the burning cars and it's nasty. Um, you know, if you could get out really quickly, maybe we're fine. If you got like injured, you got trapped in the car really quickly. There was a lot of like field amputations and things like that. There was a lot of, you know, I mean, everyone was armed. So some people chose to just, just end it. Um, just like, no, I'm not burning to death.

• 1:51:34November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:51:34Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and there were also reports of

• 1:51:36November Kelly?

  Fair enough.

• 1:51:37Justin Roczniak?

  Officers who survived the crash, just walking down the train and doing mercy killings.

• 1:51:43November Kelly?

  Um, in fairness, if you're a, if you're a sort of like British infantry officer of 1915, shooting your own man is a real core competency, you know, you're not

• 1:51:52Justin Roczniak?

  This is true. This is true.

• 1:51:54November Kelly?

  Feeling prepared to do that. That's why they give you the revolver, you know?

• 1:51:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:51:58November Kelly?

  They don't give you it. The revolver is private purchase, but that's why you purchase the revolver is, uh, normally you're expecting to shoot some of your own men who are, you know, recalcitrant rather than, you know, burning to death, but uh, makes no odds, you know?

• 1:52:11Speaker 02

  Uh, it's a skill transfer, you know?

• 1:52:13Justin Roczniak?

  But it's a mercy killing. It's, it's good. Um.

• 1:52:17November Kelly?

  Hmm. I think, I think we can be a pro mercy killing podcast. I don't think that'll cause any controversy for us.

• 1:52:22Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, nah. Well, you know, we haven't caused any controversy in this episode so far. May as well clip that one, put it on blue sky. Let's see how it goes.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  So I, yeah, so packed troop train, all on the fire. Everyone is shooting everyone else. It's like the song, but worse.

• 1:52:44November Kelly?

  Barely needed the encouragement at that point. You're just like, if you're, you're sort of like, you know, second lieutenant and the, and the sort of like the subaltern and the territorial force in 1915, you're like, you're one sort of moustache twitch away from doing that anyway.

• 1:52:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I mean, one of the things you gotta remember is that all these, all these kids on the train, they were gonna, you know, go to France and get impaled on a bayonet covered in shit and then die of sepsis, you know, four weeks later. So I don't know, this might've been a better way to go out.

• 1:53:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it really is the case that, I mean, I know you're about to talk about the numbers here, which are spoiler large.

• 1:53:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:53:22Speaker 02

  But in terms of like the grand scheme of things, the First World War, nothing. Just like.

• 1:53:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's like a sort of like quiet mornings work in like one sector of the Western Front, you know?

• 1:53:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, just staggering. So go on, Ross, what were we talking about? Let's put some numbers on this, on the scoreboard.

• 1:53:40Justin Roczniak?

  In this one railway accident, 226 people were killed, about 226 people. We don't actually know the full number. 215 of them were members of the 7th Battalion Royal Scots who were on the troop train.

• 1:53:58November Kelly?

  No, so you effectively you knock a company off that battalion. Royal Scots, by the way, kept existing until options for change. So exist until 2006 and now it doesn't.

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  R I P.

• 1:54:10Justin Roczniak?

  I.

• 1:54:10Speaker 02

  I'm sure great, great legacy of that particular element of the, the British Army, I'm sure. No skeletons in that closet.

• 1:54:18Justin Roczniak?

  There were 246 people who were injured. The vast majority of the dead and wounded were on the troop train. The newer steel coaches of the express, even the local train, I think the local train might've had one wooden coach. I'm not sure. They were largely up to the task of surviving an impact and they didn't just instantly catch fire.

• 1:54:43Justin Roczniak?

  Because most of them had electric lighting. So.

• 1:54:46November Kelly?

  You're sort of like you're on your commuter train up to Glasgow where you're going to record your wireless program. Gosh, well, there's your problem. And you're you're opening a newspaper, reading about reading about the woke troops. And you see, hear and feel 200 of said woke troops slam into the back of your train instantly obliterating a good like, you know, quarter of them. And then the rest of them burning to death while their own officers shoot them. And you're just sort of like ruffling your paper like, bloody country's coming to.

• 1:55:24Speaker 02

  I'm just still thinking about the vibe shift in that signal box. You know, you've got all the lads in there.

• 1:55:31November Kelly?

  Just having a great time with the boys. And all of a sudden, it just really goes wrong.

• 1:55:40November Kelly?

  Just just the feeling, the feeling of anxiety that I have all the time of like, you're in so much trouble, made very real for like, a half dozen guys at once. And the fact that it's sequential trains, like, it just keeps getting worse. Like, the first one gets your attention, and then the second one fucking hits. That was those guys 9/11.

• 1:56:03Justin Roczniak?

  At that point, I would be like, okay, I'm gonna throw myself on the machinery and tell the other guy to throw the lever so the machine kills me. You know?

• 1:56:12November Kelly?

  I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of going down and asking one of the officers if he can like, you know, spare an extra bullet at that point, you know?

• 1:56:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  It's not. Yeah, it is. It is not great. Yeah, I mean, you just look up and see just burning carnage. And then another train slams through it all. Yeah. Good work, lads. Good work.

• 1:56:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  But this is stuff we do, I P, so we can't necessarily blame our signalers. We'll get there.

• 1:56:39Justin Roczniak?

  We can't, we can't really fully blame the signalers. No, um, there was a pretty big investiga- There were two separate investigations immediately. There was coroner's inquest, which said, you know, there's gross negligence on the part of the two signalmen and also the firemen of the local train. There was a board of trade inquest that said there's, you know, negligence in the procedure, but also a lack of modern safety equipment. I, if you had track circuits rather than manual signaling, this would not, this could not have happened. You know, and there were, you know, just sort of general deficiencies in the process of, you know, uh, moving trains safely through this area there.

• 1:57:21Justin Roczniak?

  You know, there was all, see, it was found, I believe that, uh, they simply didn't use the wooden blocks to interlock the signals.

• 1:57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, the absolutely rudimentary sort of protection, uh, equipment was not used. But yeah, I, I mean, the thing is like the instant response, you might, you know, earlier we were talking about the fact that local train was put facing traffic. Like that was a kind of a standard move, like in, in the last sort of, you know, in the six months before the accident, that happened 20, 21 times. Uh, sorry, the, the, the local train had been shunted at Quinton's Hill, Quinton's Hill 20, 21 times. And four of those had been shunted onto the upline without incident. So it, it wasn't a completely unusual kind of, uh, move to use. It was unusual. Yeah. It was, it was, it was definitely not, um, ideal, but it wasn't, uh, it wasn't totally unheard of.

• 1:58:13Speaker 02

  Um, and it was, you know, seen as safe within the working practice if they'd put the little wooden cock ring on the top of the, uh, the kind of the signal lever.

• 1:58:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. There was, there was, um, nothing particularly wrong about what they were doing, although it was weird. Um, it could have, it could have been done more safely, obviously, you know. It's also, you know, I, I, I don't know exactly if there were any improvements to procedures that happened after this, um, you know, because they did try and sort of pin it on, you know, the two signalmen and the firemen, it did not stick. Um, you know, this was, th- th- this was a disaster that could have been prevented by new, more automated technology that simply would not be able to make this mistake.

• 1:58:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also on a, on a, a line with extreme traffic through there and a problem that we are still played with today, had we instead four tracked north from Carlisle and up until further up the line, maybe even as far as Lockerbie, you'd have resolved an enormous number of problems we have today with capacity on that line, but you would absolutely have solved this problem because you'd have just overtaken the, you know, the expresses would have just overtaken the local train. So.

• 1:59:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, but that would cost money.

• 1:59:27Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Um, or say if the competition between private enterprises, you know, on the railway, two different private railway companies hadn't resulted in an obviously stupid method of working. If they just held the train, the local train and allowed the expresses through, then that would have also completely prevented this incident. Like that, that, that, that's one of the key root causes for me. You know, the capacity issue is one thing, but the fact that it was the competition between the railway companies, meaning that they, they held, they, they didn't hold the, the local train and they raced local forwards 10 miles for it to just end up having to stop and get overtaken anyway, just so that

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  they could give preference to their own versus, um, you know, competing companies, rail services, over line that, you know, by the way, remember, over the railway that was theirs. And so, you know, that was used extensively by just obvious conflict between the way that these train operating, uh, the, the, the, sorry, the railway companies were competing with each other. It's just daft. So for me, that's the, that's the really nasty, nasty bit of this is that this wouldn't have happened.

• 2:00:35November Kelly?

  Interesting.

• 2:00:35Speaker 02

  They're not being competing. Sorry.

• 2:00:37November Kelly?

  Interesting as well that the, um, uh, so the two, the two signalers got convicted of, I think it's like. Culpable homicide, which is like Scots law manslaughter, right? Got out after a year in prison and both went back to work on the railway? Which suggests a couple of things in terms of this not being a kind of career ending piece of misconduct. One, I guess, is that, you know, there were a lot fewer sort of of those, but also that like someone in that railway has got to believe that it is not exclusively on sort of like not primarily your fault to give you your job back.

• 2:01:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. And also, everyone got killed in the war. So, you know.

• 2:01:19November Kelly?

  Well, also, yeah, like, I guess you're you're sort of like short of short of sort of like railwayman.

• 2:01:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's, you know, it's like, ah, they only killed 225 people or so. That's not that many, all things considered. Um, just give him his job back. It's fine.

• 2:01:34November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, you you you killed 200 people in sort of slightly different geographic circumstances and they give you a DSO, you know?

• 2:01:41Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly.

• 2:01:43November Kelly?

  Being in jail, a career move. Yeah, in in in 1915, sort of like, um, and sort of like country and continents awash in killing. I can see how this kind of like, you know, briefly horrifies people and then the sum happens a year later. So, you know, whatever.

• 2:02:00Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just blows the scale of this out of the war. I I mean, there there are two other, um, two two other elements involved in this incident that I want to talk about. And that is number 140 and number 48, um, of the Caledonian Railway, which were the two trains at the front of the, um, the two Caledonian Railway trains at the front of the express. Um, because of course the Caledonian Railway asked for its locomotives to be connected to the L W R train. Anyway, stupid railway system. Anyway, those two look, by the way, that locomotive, it's in the in the DMs. Go and have a look at that locomotive, how beautiful they are. Those two locomotives that careered into the wreckage a minute after the first crash, both repaired and returned to traffic pretty rapidly as well. So,

• 2:02:47Speaker 02

  in true railway crash style, if that look was fine, you're running it again. But the picture, you have to.

• 2:02:52November Kelly?

  Hose all the blood off of it.

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:02:54Justin Roczniak?

  They gotta, they gotta replace the, they gotta replace the face on the front, but you know.

• 2:02:59November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, we've got a process for that. It's fine. The face on the front is looking very traumatized. Yeah, if people want a sense of this sort of scale when I talk about the Somme, which was like almost a year later, the first battle for Somme stuff. The like British casualties like killed first day, like one day, nineteen thousand two hundred and forty. So this is sort of a footnote, you know? Yeah, it's it's. I like I like observing this in the sense that like this is this is a society in sort of like about to be up to its knees in sort of like mechanized slaughter. And I don't know, I always like doing this podcast because we can get kind of holistic with it.

• 2:03:43November Kelly?

  Not just in the sense of like, you know, oh, why was the railway built there? But also, why was the kind of investigation? Why was the aftermath as it was? Well, because this was this was something that happened in a profoundly sick society, you know?

• 2:03:57Justin Roczniak?

  Very, yeah, very much, very little value on human life at that that that time of, you know, our existence as humanity. You know, we are sending tens of thousands of young men to their deaths for we don't know.

• 2:04:15November Kelly?

  Yeah, yeah, it feels it reminds me of Palestine in the sense of there is something so obviously monstrous being done here that it kind of like overshadows everything else. And also in so doing that, it kind of like throws into really sharp relief why it's sort of like, you know, it's sort of like it overrules any claims to sort of like valuing human life, but it also shows how stuff like this can happen, you know? Just by virtue of this is a society in the grips of industrialization that is is sort of like in the process of losing much of its humanity to it, you know?

• 2:04:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 2:04:54November Kelly?

  Which is a good thing to talk about, a timely thing to talk about in this sort of like 200th anniversary of the railways as well is, you know, that's, that's part of what the, the story of the railways in this country is.

• 2:05:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. True. True. 195 years of modern railways this year. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, pertinent to think of the, the ways in which the movement of people on the railways dehumanized us as, as much as it was part of the machinery of a, of a broader war that absolutely dehumanized us. Particularly the First War, a reminder to everyone, purposeless, completely purposeless. There were no particular bad guys or good guys. There was just everyone shooting everyone else. Um, yeah.

• 2:05:35Justin Roczniak?

  Well.

• 2:05:35Speaker 02

  But it did give us some real bad guys a couple of decades later. So.

• 2:05:39Justin Roczniak?

  It's okay.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  Maybe that's.

• 2:05:41November Kelly?

  What's.

• 2:05:42Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think that's a good thing.

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:05:45November Kelly?

  Is, is, is it a dourner who has the line about like, you know, all this kind of like, um, civilizational kind of rationalism leads inevitably to madness. Right? Like, um, anyway, I, I just, I, I wanted to kind of like tie that together because I, you know, this podcast is a good opportunity to do that. I liked it.

• 2:06:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, uh, luckily, you know, super intelligent AI, you know, Brock is going to save us and, um, return us our humanity, um, very soon. I'm pretty sure. Um, so yeah. Ultimately, you know, the dead whose remains survive the blaze because a lot of people were completely incinerated, uh, buried with military honors in a mass grave in Rosebank Cemetery in Edinburgh. Got this nice big.

• 2:06:35November Kelly?

  It's really, really kind of a nonsense to say that you, you, you gave your life, uh, you, you gave your life for your country when your country has sort of like killed you negligently, you know? Yes.

• 2:06:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:48November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 02

  I mean, this gets me on to another thing. I mean, yeah. The one thing, the one thing, I spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia and the one thing that always strikes me particularly bad is the war memorials, of which there are plenty in the former Yugoslavia. And those ones, I mean, admittedly, the first war, as we said, there were no particular bad guys. The second war, there were. And the thing that always strikes me with war memorials is how much in the UK, we never talk about who we were fighting. We always just say, our brave boys who arbitrarily just died and gave their lives to this country for...

• 2:07:18November Kelly?

  Et cetera, et cetera.

• 2:07:19Speaker 02

  Question mark. Yeah. Whereas the Yugoslav war memorials absolutely point out, fuck the fascists. We were murdering the fuck out of those guys and it's great that we did that. And actually, it's really good that you remembered that we did that, that we should keep doing that. And these guys who died doing that are absolutely heroes. I kind of feel like there's a sickness in our country that we still don't, that we have not healed from in relation to the fact that, are there any war memorials in Britain that mention who we were fighting?

• 2:07:53November Kelly?

  It's sort of like our culture of like institutional remembrance is one of the First World War, much more than it is one of the Second. It's when we decided what a kind of, what a war memorial should look like and the kind of form of words to use and things like the Senatap. And I, on the one hand, I appreciate a lot of that because a lot of it was born of very authentic, very experienced kind of horror of this stuff. Actually, my favorite war memorial in London is the Royal Artillery Memorial, because it was grotesquely unpopular at the time, because people wanted something like the Senatap. In particular, the royal family and sort of like patrons and stuff wanted a very, very clean, very neoclassical thing that allowed that kind of like vacancy.

• 2:08:38November Kelly?

  And the officers of the Royal Artillery, who had been, you know, had been a technical arm and who had been, you know, slightly more working class, they didn't go to cavalry regiment, said, no, we want you to put a howitzer on the top of it, which is what they did. And it's a, it's an ugly thing. It's an ugly object and I like it for that. But yeah, I think that a lot of it has been kind of turned into this really kind of vacant thing. It's a whited sepulchre. It's what a Senatap is, right? Like it's...

• 2:09:13November Kelly?

  And the thing that really broke me. Yeah, well, the thing that really fucking broke me was when I saw those, those, uh, the Royal British Legion, uh, putting those kids in like future soldier T-shirts and giving them big plastic poppies to wave around.

• 2:09:28Speaker 02

  Yep. Sick country. We are a sick country with real problems.

• 2:09:32Justin Roczniak?

  It started earlier than, uh, with, uh, uh, what's his face, Boris Johnson.

• 2:09:38November Kelly?

  Um, yeah, no, for real.

• 2:09:42Justin Roczniak?

  Well.

• 2:09:42November Kelly?

  Nasty, nasty war, nasty, nasty sort of like addendum to it, you know?

• 2:09:48Speaker 02

  I suppose, I think that if, if I'm going to say one last thing on this point, um, it's incredible that it was the worst rail accident in British history. And it is just utterly disappears into the horror. Uh, it's really reinforcing your point of, but it's just, just the fact that, you know, we've dedicated an episode to the worst rail disaster. You know, one of the worst rail disasters that we will ever cover on, on, you know, on this podcast and, or that you'll ever cover on this podcast. And it's, it was just at the time and even now barely remembered, you know?

• 2:10:17Justin Roczniak?

  Probably had a lot less impact on the, the way, uh, railways were run than anything else of a comparable magnitude. Just because there's a war on, you know, shit happens.

• 2:10:29Speaker 02

  Yep. A hundred percent, a hundred percent.

• 2:10:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. I, what did we learn?

• 2:10:34November Kelly?

  I would say almost deliberately nothing.

• 2:10:36Justin Roczniak?

  Now, now don't start World War One.

• 2:10:39Speaker 02

  That's what we learned. Yeah. Don't start World War One.

• 2:10:42Justin Roczniak?

  If you're in, what international are we on now?

• 2:10:45November Kelly?

  Oh Christ, don't ask me that. I don't even know what party I'm in now.

• 2:10:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:10:51November Kelly?

  At least, at least one.

• 2:10:54Justin Roczniak?

  Don't let the workers of the world, um, engage in World War Three.

• 2:11:00November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:02Speaker 02

  Uh, always use a cock ring.

• 2:11:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, please, please do.

• 2:11:08Justin Roczniak?

  Definitely.

• 2:11:09Speaker 03

  Don't get in the three axle carriage.

• 2:11:13Justin Roczniak?

  I.

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  Don't get in one of those.

• 2:11:15Justin Roczniak?

  Didn't know those were real.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  If your train car looks suspiciously like a coffin with a large propane canister taped to the underside of your seat, perhaps rebook.

• 2:11:28Justin Roczniak?

  If it looks like a child's drawing of a railroad coach. Don't get in it.

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  Roz, in a way, you're right in that they don't exist anymore because all of them were turned into charred splinters.

• 2:11:40Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, yeah, well, that's, that's how, that's how you dispose of a wooden railroad car. You burn it.

• 2:11:46November Kelly?

  Hack it apart with axes and set fire to it, yeah.

• 2:11:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:50Justin Roczniak?

  All right, you don't even have to do the first part. You just put some gasoline on them.

• 2:11:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, like the US with most of its streetcars.

• 2:11:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  Same in the UK, to be fair. Just burn them. They're made of wood. You can just burn them. That's fine. Um, ah, crikey. Yeah.

• 2:12:06Speaker 03

  Just, just for like a really brief point of levity, just cause like, wow. Um, I, I, I did go to, uh, San Francisco relatively recently for the historic, um, running of the SF Railway and I am eternally jealous of like previous eras foamers because I got to ride in like a actual wooden streetcar. It was one of the Milan, um, cars and it was just, it's just, I'm so jealous. That looks like it was so much fun. Your, your car is like made out of a tree. It was great. I don't know. There was something very, very innocent about it that I really enjoyed. I'm sorry. I'm desperately trying to make the episode more fun again.

• 2:12:43Justin Roczniak?

  They got a nice historic streetcar program out there. Yeah. Uh, I gotta make it out there one of these days.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  It was genuinely great. Um, but yeah, I just was like, wow, I can't imagine what it would have been like to like go train spot, uh, like 50 years ago. Sure. It'd be a lot harder to like get the estrogen, but then once you're over that hump, like I'm well, probably break even at that point.

• 2:13:03Justin Roczniak?

  Well, you know.

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  Just based on strength of trains.

• 2:13:07Justin Roczniak?

  The problem is back then people were like, you know, it was a lot better in like 1870.

• 2:13:16Justin Roczniak?

  Grass is always greener.

• 2:13:18Speaker 02

  It turns out Quinton's Hill in 1915 is also a great place to train spot because there's there's a lot of trains going through there.

• 2:13:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, all at once.

• 2:13:26Speaker 02

  All at once.

• 2:13:27Justin Roczniak?

  How do you fit five trains on four tracks? Don't, don't do that.

• 2:13:33Justin Roczniak?

  We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

• 2:13:40Justin Roczniak?

  Greetings, beloved pod hosts. Even though.

• 2:13:44Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:13:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:45Speaker 02

  What the hell is happening here?

• 2:13:47Justin Roczniak?

  Even though one of you has my dead name and I get slapped by it every time I listen. Sorry, your dead name is November, but you have to admit it's improbable. Yeah, that's that was not likely. I'm writing to you as I listen to the caving disasters pod and it reminded me of repressed memory from my first job with the late lamented National Park Service.

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  R I P.

• 2:14:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:13Speaker 02

  That's off.

• 2:14:13Justin Roczniak?

  For the sake of pseudo anonymity, I will not name the park.

• 2:14:18Speaker 02

  What was that? Sorry, Roz, say that again.

• 2:14:19Justin Roczniak?

  Anonymity, anonymity, anonymity, I don't remember. It has, there's too many whys in that word.

• 2:14:28Justin Roczniak?

  I will not name the park, but is one of the U S national parks that features a show cave, which I gave tours of, as well as a number of smaller wild caves, which are closed to the public, but are cave scientists used for research.

• 2:14:45Speaker 02

  Cave scientists. Interesting emphasis you put on the words cave scientists.

• 2:14:48Justin Roczniak?

  Why is so many? They're like cavemen who are scientists, right? That's how that works.

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Justin Roczniak?

  Me collects data.

• 2:14:56Speaker 02

  Cave.

• 2:14:57Justin Roczniak?

  Me test hypothesis.

• 2:14:58Speaker 02

  Cavemen?

• 2:14:59Justin Roczniak?

  Okay, yeah. Okay, yeah, I mean, I'm gonna offend a bunch of those guys who showed up in the Geico commercials. Anyway, so my role was an astronomy interpretive intern, which is basically I teach people about the night sky at the park.

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  Seems like a weird job to do inside a cave, to be honest, but.

• 2:15:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, well, you know. Well, occasionally I'd be drafted to give tours of the show cave, which was fully lit and an easy walking path. I had some trepidations upon first going into the cave, but soon came to love the cave and its unique environment.

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  Love the cave, learn to love the cave.

• 2:15:39Justin Roczniak?

  Love the cave.

• 2:15:40Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:15:40Justin Roczniak?

  One day.

• 2:15:41Speaker 02

  My dad used to tell me until I left home.

• 2:15:43Justin Roczniak?

  One day when I walked into the office, our cave biologist was there and threw a helmet at me and said, "You're coming with me today."

• 2:15:52Speaker 02

  I'm not getting in the cave. I'm not getting in the, I'm especially not getting in the non-show cave.

• 2:15:56Justin Roczniak?

  That's part of their culture.

• 2:16:00Speaker 02

  I understand that a cave scientist inviting you to their cave is a huge honor in their culture. However, I will not be partaking.

• 2:16:09Justin Roczniak?

  While we got kidded out, I was briefed on our mission for the day. Replace a data logger in one of the wild research caves in the park. We then drove to the trailhead and began the two-mile hike to the cave location. Upon arriving to where the biologist said the cave was, I was incredibly confused as I did not see a cave. She directed my attention to a spot on the ground, and I noticed a rusty grate covering a small hole in the ground.

• 2:16:41Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:16:43Justin Roczniak?

  The entirety-

• 2:16:43Speaker 02

  This is, this is great. So there's a cave, um, north of Ingleton that, uh, which is deep in the heart of Yorkshire caving territory, which is covered by a classic British steel bin lid. Um, I've been in that cave and it is pretty much as described here. Um, yeah, uh, love that ship.

• 2:17:05Justin Roczniak?

  The entirety of the cave entrance was no more than about one meter in diameter and appeared to disappear straight down into the cold, dark earth. The metal grate, as seen in the provided diagram, covered about half the opening, leaving a small hole for us to enter.

• 2:17:25Justin Roczniak?

  At this point, the biologist pulled out a diagram of the earth's cavity we were about to enter, as the second cave technician began tying ropes to the metal grate and tossing them down the hole. Upon reviewing the diagram, my first thoughts were, "What the fuck?" And, "Are you fucking serious?" Though my mouth said, "Uh, cool."

• 2:17:50Justin Roczniak?

  The data locker, the data locker we were to switch out was at the end of a 900 meter long passage that varied from roughly one to one and a half meters tall, which would require crawling on our hands and knees for almost a kilometer with the narrow squeeze at the end, about half a meter to finally reach the logger.

• 2:18:10November Kelly?

  I hate all of this.

• 2:18:12Justin Roczniak?

  This alone was to give a reasonable person cause for alarm, but that passage was about 20 meters beneath our feet.

• 2:18:21Speaker 03

  I really want to know what data is on there. Yep, it's cold and dark.

• 2:18:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's cave. My questions about the ropes tied to the grate were soon answered as I was informed that the way to get to that passage was down a 60 degree downward slope with the grate, which the grate was half covering. My brain said, what the actual fuck? And my mouth said, oh, that's okay. And it got worse.

• 2:18:50November Kelly?

  You got a real brain mouth problem going on.

• 2:18:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, no, this is sometimes, sometimes like I, you know, sometimes it's okay to say, no, I don't want to do this thing. This downward shaft was even narrower than the passage we were going to crawl through, averaging about point four to point six meters in diameter. For context, I am six foot, four inches, and at the time weighed about 240 pounds with broad shoulders. I was assured that I would be fine. It was not in fact, fine. The biologist went down the hole first. I was to follow second with the cave technician bringing up the rear. I sat on the ground. I thrust my legs into the abyss. To get down the dirty

• 2:19:34Justin Roczniak?

  rocky shaft, I had to put my arms at my side, legs straight and wiggle my body like a worm.

• 2:19:41Speaker 03

  Christ.

• 2:19:42Justin Roczniak?

  Slowly inching down the jagged rocks. About 10 meters down the shaft, I suddenly couldn't go any further.

• 2:19:48November Kelly?

  Kill me, kill me, shoot me in the fucking head right now. Let me, let me, let me get one of those fucking Royal Scots officers in right now with a webly. Yeah.

• 2:19:58Speaker 02

  So when I used to do caving, I used to do it with a, with a massive chunky like lead acid battery and an old caving lamp. And the standard thing that would happen is that the, the Nakadol belt that that was on around my like caving suit would roll to, would usually roll to the side and get snarled on a rock with my arms above my head and with me having absolutely no way to adjust it. And you'd kind of just have, in a similar pretty sounding situation to this, and you'd basically just have to bum shuffle to kind of get this thing, this battery to wiggle around, unless you could just about squeeze your arm down to your side. So this kind of sounds, I like the sound of this. This is good. This is my dirty secret that everyone now knows on W2P is that I was, was once a caver. I've done it for a while now. Yeah. I also, what's more terrifying is probably the state of that battery.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  Did somebody make you do it at gunpoint? Or like, was, was it, was it coerced?

• 2:20:49Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I mean, I mean, yes, in the sense that my father forced me to do it, I suppose. But, uh, no other sense, but no other sense that, no, I, I love doing it. It's good fun. It was freezing cold and filthy and absolutely horrible. But then so is living in Britain. So, you know.

• 2:21:06Justin Roczniak?

  Britain is just a large, open air cave.

• 2:21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much. Exactly. Yeah, quite. So I, um, that was good fun. I, I used to find a picture of me with a bit next to the bin lid about to go in the big hole. Cause, uh, yeah, anyway.

• 2:21:21Justin Roczniak?

  My broad shoulders had fully found themselves wedged into the rock and I was unable to continue further down, nor really turn myself to try and unwedge. I yelled to the experienced cave, caver above and below me for advice. And they told me to just try and get unstuck.

• 2:21:41Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 2:21:43November Kelly?

  Shoot me, shoot me. No, sorry.

• 2:21:45Justin Roczniak?

  What a great idea. I didn't think about that. Anyway, after about 10 minutes of struggling with micro movements, I was able to free my arms enough to grab the rope and begin slowly inching myself up the rope and finally reach the point where I could use my legs to really kick myself out of the cave, thus ending my career as a professional caver. I let the tech go down and waited under a tree near the entrance for an hour or so. As these two expertly made their way through the cave to do their job. When we all returned to the office, another ranger noticed the helmet and muddy clothes.

• 2:22:22Justin Roczniak?

  And an ashen thousand yard stare on my face and asked, did the cave biologist take you to fat man's misery? She does that to everyone.

• 2:22:35November Kelly?

  Oh my God, this woman is an evil fucking sadist. Can I say something?

• 2:22:45November Kelly?

  I don't even need to, you know, you know what it's gonna be.

• 2:22:49Justin Roczniak?

  It was at that point, I really questioned if that was a training opportunity. Or just a sadistic hazing ritual for all the new rangers. Either way.

• 2:23:00November Kelly?

  It's like, yeah, I got a, got a job at this national park and one of the cave biologists is like measuring my like, uh, hip size with a tape measure and licking her lips.

• 2:23:15Justin Roczniak?

  Either way, I have never and never will set foot in a wild cave again. Fuck that shit.

• 2:23:21November Kelly?

  Yeah, for real.

• 2:23:22Justin Roczniak?

  Stay the fuck out of the caves. They weren't meant for us. Thanks, bye. Have a great day from Kaz.

• 2:23:28November Kelly?

  Thank you, Kaz.

• 2:23:30Justin Roczniak?

  Thank you, Kaz.

• 2:23:30Speaker 02

  Thank you, Kaz. Enjoyed that very much. Uh, although, uh, I'll put an asterisk on the fuck that shit. Cause uh, yeah, I don't know. I'm a psychopath and I do quite enjoy that sort of fun. As she was describing, this is the bit where I realized that I'm, I thought I'm more of a sadist than, than I realized. And I'm like, I was like licking my lips and rubbing my hands together. And she was describing getting stuck in the cave. I was like, yes. Make me have claustrophobia. Force it into me. Make it. Yeah.

• 2:23:58Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, when I, when I'm in, when I'm in Britain in a couple of weeks, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna force me in the cave. Oh God.

• 2:24:07November Kelly?

  Live show from the caves. You're gonna chiselhurst.

• 2:24:12Speaker 02

  Maybe we could, we could drive you up to a show cave and I could, I could take you down into, uh, into one of the various strange.

• 2:24:18November Kelly?

  I'm grabbing the wheel and veering the car into traffic if you try, like.

• 2:24:25Justin Roczniak?

  Go to Luray Caverns and have a show at the stalagmite organ.

• 2:24:33Speaker 02

  White Scar Caves is very lovely. I can, I can, I can heartily recommend.

• 2:24:37Justin Roczniak?

  It's the only, it's the only cave I've been in is Luray Caverns. That's pretty, definitely a show cave. I will say that much.

• 2:24:44Speaker 02

  Well, this is a cave agnostic lineup of W2IP hosts and guests.

• 2:24:53Justin Roczniak?

  Just, just don't take me to fat man's misery. I have enough of that all.

• 2:25:01Justin Roczniak?

  No, I was safety third.

• 2:25:06Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:25:10November Kelly?

  Rail Natter.

• 2:25:12Speaker 02

  Ah, thanks, Scott.

• 2:25:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, you should, you should, you should watch it. It's good.

• 2:25:16Speaker 02

  You should buy, you should buy, I'll tell you what you could do is you should go on to Victoria Scott's website.

• 2:25:23Justin Roczniak?

  Buy Victoria's book.

• 2:25:24Speaker 02

  Forget my book. You should go to Victoria Scott's website and you should get hold of, we deserve this. You should get hold of Victoria's books. Victoria, well, Victoria's book, Victoria's projects. You should fund anything that Victoria, you should subscribe to Victoria's projects.

• 2:25:38November Kelly?

  This podcast now, so like subscribe to the Patreon.

• 2:25:42Speaker 02

  I'd like to plug the show I'm currently on. Subscribe to the Patreon, but also listen to Trashy Chalk James Bond.

• 2:25:49November Kelly?

  Someone who like listened to like three hours of this and is like, nah, I'm probably not going to subscribe to the Patreon.

• 2:25:55Justin Roczniak?

  It's, it's a fact. It's a fact. You should give your money to trans women because I get one third of that.

• 2:26:04November Kelly?

  You're doing a kind of comprador economy thing on us. Yeah, no.

• 2:26:11November Kelly?

  It's, what could be more trans than to be like, yeah, fund me. It subsidizes two cis men as well.

• 2:26:26Speaker 02

  Thanks, nobody. But yeah, no, Rail Network on Wednesdays, apart from for the last, or as at time of recording, the last two weeks, because I have been burned out and having a mental health crisis. So, yeah, but Rail Network will return, and it's gonna be fun, because the next one at time of recording is gonna be on the ridiculous history of tilting trains, and how America's now running the advanced passenger train up the northeast corridor, which is kind of funny.

• 2:26:48Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, that'll be good. And theoretically, Gareth and I have an episode that-

• 2:26:54Speaker 02

  We do, god, let's record that.

• 2:26:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we gotta actually record that one, yeah. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try and get Gareth to take coach bill. You know, no, EMUs, garbage, it's over. No, in America, you need coaches. Anyway.

• 2:27:10Speaker 02

  Oh, not bombshell. No, thanks so much for having me. And it's been fun to do- Yeah, well, you probably did, didn't you, Victoria? Let's be honest.

• 2:27:17Speaker 03

  I want the, I want the, um, the whose line is it anyway, Drew Carey count at the end. The tally of all my points.

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  It's being pinged up on screen right now by Devon, is how many points you got versus how many points I got.

• 2:27:29Justin Roczniak?

  I'm calling this one a draw, I'm sorry. It's where-

• 2:27:31Speaker 02

  Oh, that's true.

• 2:27:33Justin Roczniak?

  Well, there's your problem, where the points are made up, and we describe the horrors of war.

• 2:27:42Speaker 02

  It's been so, this is, this is an important moment, because Victoria and I are both on W2IP together, which is extremely fun. Let's, let's do this again, actually. Whether, who knows what episode we'll end up pulling together?

• 2:27:55Speaker 03

  I have to find some event with cars that killed 240 people, that like, kind of keep parody, and I'm not sure how to do that.

• 2:28:01Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, they, they kill or seriously maim 30,000 a year in the UK, and I think that's how many is a day in the US, so.

• 2:28:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  Wow, this is it.

• 2:28:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that actually would be great. Shit, alright, I'm on it.

• 2:28:13Justin Roczniak?

  Alright. Well, I think that was a podcast, folks. Beautiful. Alright. Well, bye, everyone.

• 2:28:21Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 2:28:22Justin Roczniak?

  Bye-bye.

• 2:28:23Speaker 03

  Bye.