Episode 203: The Wreck of Amtrak 188

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

• 0:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I I just want to point out while we're on the subject of Zen cast going or not going. I I

• 0:06Justin Roczniak?

  We're not going.

• 0:07Liam McAnderson?

  We are going. No, no, no, no. I it's about Zen caster corporate because.

• 0:11Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God.

• 0:13Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. So so we have. So my brother in law is a is a man named Zach Hatt. We all know Zach Hatt. And he was entered. He joined with a Zen caster pilot program to do like AI. Stuff, training, machine learning. And he was like, brother, I can't do this anymore. No amount of money is worth it. Not for any moral reason, but because it sucked that bad.

• 0:39Liam McAnderson?

  He was like, I don't. He's like, you know, like, I'm not an AI doomer or whatever, but like, this is fucking unusable.

• 0:44November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  That sounds about right.

• 0:46November Kelly?

  It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work good. Even if you didn't care, even if you thought like, oh, you know, whatever. I love the future. I'm super on board with this. There's no reason to be suspicious about Sam Altman and Elon Musk trying to invent God, right? There's no reason to disbelieve Jensen Huang. I assume it doesn't work.

• 1:06Liam McAnderson?

  It doesn't work. I I

• 1:08Justin Roczniak?

  They're all

• 1:09Liam McAnderson?

  That's my problem too, right? Is it like, I and we've had requests for an AI episode and like, brother, I will write it as soon as I know where to fucking start. It's all bad.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18November Kelly?

  Yeah. The thing is, basically, do we want to hold Ed Zitron hostage for like four hours?

• 1:24Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:25Justin Roczniak?

  Four hours.

• 1:26November Kelly?

  Is the AI.

• 1:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm not opposed to holding people hostage, right?

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Also, like, it's not kind of like, it's not. I don't think you've got long to wait before the disaster will finish as well. So you you've not got long to wait until like, there's a reasonably good bookend on the story like. I I don't think it's going to be a single dramatic hit to end it in the way of the Taznick crash. But but I think there will be a moment not too far away when we'll be able to go, oh, that's kind of fizzled out, hasn't it?

• 1:50Liam McAnderson?

  Like, that's it, right? I I I was talking to someone, I was talking to a friend of mine, they were talking to my friend Maggie, who I know listens to the show. Hello, Margaret. And I and they were talking and they were like, oh, like, I don't know about the like ecological impacts and stuff like that. And I was trying to, like, in my role as a social worker, there's people who are who are really like, oh, we need to integrate AI, which is like, A, how, B, why? Right?

• 2:17Justin Roczniak?

  A Y.

• 2:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  That's another thing.

• 2:20Justin Roczniak?

  A.

• 2:23Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck you.

• 2:25Liam McAnderson?

  And I was just like, like, there's no, like, I'm not even what I would consider like an AI doomer. But I'm just like, there's no use case for like 99% of people, right? Like, no meaningful use case, because like, the internet made sense. It was always on constant communication. And we know that sucks. We just like, yeah, it revelizes, revolutionized the world. And I know that, like, machine learning and AI can do that to a point, right? But like, they're not like AI. I don't think it's ever going to be good enough to be like, okay, I want to like, book a flight, blah, blah. You know, the the classic use case, which is like booking a flight, like, you can't possibly fucking do that yourself.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  Shit. Yeah, that just it just it will send you eggs. Like, it will send you eggs.

• 3:03November Kelly?

  You know what AI would remember to do? AI would remember to do a sync point in the recording before two minutes in.

• 3:13Justin Roczniak?

  That's a good point. That's a good point. All right. I'm gonna say three, two, one, Mark.

• 3:17Liam McAnderson?

  Wait, one second. Are your bomb collars also getting tighter?

• 3:19November Kelly?

  Oh, yeah, of course. But I just attributed that to like external factors.

• 3:23Liam McAnderson?

  No, but you put on the bomb. What? No.

• 3:25November Kelly?

  You it's, yeah, it's called horizontal management. I want to be like in this with you guys, you know?

• 3:32Justin Roczniak?

  It's a it's a co-op. We all have bomb collars and any of us, any of us can trigger them at any time.

• 3:41Liam McAnderson?

  IWW is not ready for this one, boys.

• 3:48November Kelly?

  Some really intense.

• 3:50Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is radical accountability.

• 3:55Liam McAnderson?

  We're a union shop, and it's just like mutually assured destruction.

• 3:59Justin Roczniak?

  All right. Three, two, one, Mark. Close enough.

• 4:06November Kelly?

  Amazing.

• 4:07Justin Roczniak?

  Wow, that was a bit of a delay there.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Too bad, actually, from Nova's end. Yeah.

• 4:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 4:11November Kelly?

  If it gets really bad, just turn off the cameras besides besides you, Justin. Yeah.

• 4:16Liam McAnderson?

  I just want to know. I don't understand. No, shut up. I'm talking.

• 4:20Justin Roczniak?

  God damn it.

• 4:22Liam McAnderson?

  Go ahead. I'm fucking with you. Go ahead.

• 4:23Justin Roczniak?

  Here's the thing about the AI guys who are all really scared of their AIs. The data center has a breaker box.

• 4:31November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 4:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, go in there, turn it off.

• 4:35November Kelly?

  So I spread it with some water or something.

• 4:38Liam McAnderson?

  Right. The thing that I don't understand, genuinely don't understand, and maybe I'm just lacking in knowledge, right? It's just like, oh, like, the like, the hugging face incident, right? Where they were like,

• 4:48Liam McAnderson?

  oh, we like mutated into this and that. It's like, but you guys are the ones who designed the guardrails.

• 4:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yep.

• 4:53Liam McAnderson?

  Like,

• 4:54Speaker 03

  It's just software.

• 4:55Liam McAnderson?

  Do you not know? Right. Do you not know enough to like, put in guardrails and say, like, if there's, it's one thing if you explicitly lay out, do not do these things, right? And then it goes ahead and does those things. And I understand that, like, there are scary implications because AI like will out in some occasions just ignore its prompts, right? That is scary. I'm not disputing that. But this like, they seem like almost horny for the end of the world in a really weird way.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It's like 50% that and 50% like the scary stories make people not actually like not pay attention to the fact that it's just, as with the the rest of the tech industry, it's a way to bypass plagiarism law, right? And and and reduce and send staff to the global south. Because if you only have to have prompt prompt artists rather than actual people, they can all be in Manila, right? Yeah, it's it's, yeah. That's good.

• 5:45Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I just don't. I I'm really at a loss when they're just like, oh, you know, I it's the scariest thing and it's going to kill us all. Please, please, 10, 4 billion dollars. Like, what does that? Doesn't mean fucking sense.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've had bad software for forever, though. Like, we've had software that has killed people forever. We've had like a bad app, like, still makes my phone hot enough that it might burn, like, set fire to the battery. Like, we can do shit like that is is around already. Like, it's not, it's just other shit. It's just more shit software.

• 6:13Justin Roczniak?

  We don't need AI to make bad software.

• 6:17Liam McAnderson?

  No.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 6:18Justin Roczniak?

  Humans can do it.

• 6:19Liam McAnderson?

  Humans are good at it.

• 6:20November Kelly?

  We also don't need AI to like fry our own brains because we had perfectly good social media for this.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 6:28Justin Roczniak?

  I this is that that that we had Vine. Why don't we have Vine anymore?

• 6:33Liam McAnderson?

  Because of Twitter, I, you know who Mrs. Vine is? My wife. Jesus Christ.

• 6:37November Kelly?

  You know what, listener? You, the listener, you're old. And the reason why you're old is because all of the podcasts that you listen to, hi, it's, well, that's your problem, by the way, are now mostly about getting old. And people complaining about getting old. And I I like to appreciate, you know, that's the service I like to provide to you.

• 6:57Liam McAnderson?

  I I was talking

• 6:59Justin Roczniak?

  I don't understand it that much, but my wife, my wife is really into vines.

• 7:05Liam McAnderson?

  Brother, I look, I understand technology really well. And then she'll say shit to me that I'm just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Just like, she's like, oh, you've seen this?

• 7:13November Kelly?

  If you wanted this episode to start briskly or be on topic, right? A, we don't really do that here. And B, I I I needed some time off, not because I was taking time off work. I had to go to Brighton to get my like consult for Boston Surgery. Shout out to Boston Surgery. Incidentally, small plug up top. If you want to read about that, I'm writing about that on my Patreon. I bet you didn't know I have a Patreon, but I do. And you can subscribe to it. And I'll make these fuckers put a link in the description. But that kind of threw me off.

• 7:42Liam McAnderson?

  It's just hair.

• 7:43November Kelly?

  Thank you.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's well worth reading. It's good.

• 7:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 7:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, it's gonna look like beef beery down there. Thank you. But yeah, no, it's so.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  I'm a little cis boy and I'm always learning.

• 8:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 8:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 8:02November Kelly?

  I love you guys. I I just all it just it it threw me off the schedule for a couple of weeks. But I'm back. I missed everyone. And I really missed recording the podcast.

• 8:12Justin Roczniak?

  Speaking of podcasts.

• 8:15Liam McAnderson?

  I said, hold on.

• 8:19November Kelly?

  What did you do? It sounds like you just took a chunk out of like a keel of bread.

• 8:24Liam McAnderson?

  I did. I was drinking. I was drinking. I mean, I'm not allowed to have a succulent beverage on this, on this, on all podcasts. The podcast that had to drop 25 minutes from the beer episode because we were literally too incoherent to edit it. Anyway. No, I was also here. I should get four more now.

• 8:45Liam McAnderson?

  All right, keep big dog. I couldn't record last week. And would you like to know why?

• 8:49November Kelly?

  Why?

• 8:50Liam McAnderson?

  Do you want to know where I was?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Why?

• 8:51Liam McAnderson?

  Where I was. I was in Malmouth.

• 8:54Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that's right.

• 8:56Liam McAnderson?

  Episode is fucking coming. That Disney episode is fucking coming, folks.

• 8:59November Kelly?

  I I was talking earlier about Disney World and I was like, well, that's his wife's culture, right? And I respect that very deeply because it's not my thing. But, you know, I respect the level of earnestness. And then you come in and you're like, yeah, my wife's interests are ridiculous. And I'm not positioned to sort of judge that, you know?

• 9:21Liam McAnderson?

  Let's talk about Disney World. Okay. So I, no, shut up. So God invented South Florida for reasons beyond me or Central Florida. And what happened was I have to go there. And then what happens is I go on the Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind Roller Coaster. And there's an eight year old who won't stop fucking screaming about how excited he is to see the Guardians, his best friends, even though they're fucking fictional characters, unlike me who lives in your phone and your computer. And he just will not. He's like, I don't know why they picked this music. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. You're eight. You don't understand a goddamn thing about fuck. Shut up. Anyway, you may now continue the episode. I fucking hate Disney World, dude.

• 10:06November Kelly?

  But you married into it.

• 10:08Justin Roczniak?

  And welcome to

• 10:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I know. It's my worst flaws as a human being right up there with being a Francophile.

• 10:20Justin Roczniak?

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

• 10:33November Kelly?

  I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's speaking right now. I am once again battling the worst internet in the world and my pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

• 10:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yay, Liam. Hi, I'm Liam McAnderson. I have that sweet, sweet, redacted company two gig internet, but we don't need five gig internet. My pronouns are he and him, and we have a guest.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  You do have a guest. That guest is me. It's Gareth Dennis. My pronouns are he and him. And I've missed this so much. Like, it's the, it's the, it's that line. I don't know what this form of the podcast is, but it's that one again. And I've missed it so much.

• 11:08November Kelly?

  This one I would describe as the Gareth Liam intimacy hour. You know, the one where you two kind of flirt for a bit. I think the fans really enjoy it.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  I love that man so much.

• 11:16Liam McAnderson?

  We're fucking. We're fucking.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  I don't have any poetry with me today, but well, not any that's legally broadcastable. Liam, I will email you that.

• 11:27Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you. Thank you, brother. I, what? Oh, I was watching Jeopardy last night. I can actually feel the tendon in Roz's neck get tense.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  That's where you're going with that sentence. Okay.

• 11:43Liam McAnderson?

  I can, I can, I can psychically visit Roz in his apartment and I can see him clenching.

• 11:50Justin Roczniak?

  They made us watch Wheel of Fortune reruns in the jury duty waiting room on Monday.

• 11:58Liam McAnderson?

  Did you also get the, the redheaded man with the very thick Northeast Philly accent who's trying to be polite? I think it's asked the same question 35 times. You can sort of see the mask slip a little bit.

• 12:08Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yeah, actually. Yeah.

• 12:09Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like that guy. So I was watching Jeopardy and Charged the Light Brigade was one of the answers, as was the hunt for Red October, and I've never been more my goddamn element.

• 12:23November Kelly?

  You know, this podcast turned into a senior center rec room so slowly I almost didn't notice.

• 12:28Liam McAnderson?

  I work with old people. That's my job outside of this. I am a social worker for olds.

• 12:37Justin Roczniak?

  So what you see on the screen in front of you is a place that we've been before on this podcast, Frankfurt Junction in Philadelphia. And you see a train, but this train has done some alarming things.

• 12:51Liam McAnderson?

  Maneuvering.

• 12:51Justin Roczniak?

  There's a locomotive over here. There's a car turned on its side. There's another two cars turned on its side. There's one that's perpendicular to the tracks and there's one which is.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  A squished Coke can.

• 13:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, sort of turned into.

• 13:07November Kelly?

  This, this, this evokes to me one of my favorite pieces of sort of pilot to air traffic control communication, which is the, the sentence, oh, you want to be specific and make it a runway, huh?

• 13:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, this is MTRAC 188. This is the 2015 derailment at Frankfurt Junction. And speaking of airlines, I do think, you know, this is one I've wanted to do for a long time, but I felt like, you know, gotta be kind of sensitive about it just because a lot of the people involved, they're still alive. But also I think it's illustrative of, well, let's say you're, you're, you're watching a program like Mentor Pilot or Air Crash Investigations or something like that. You know, and you think about the sort of professionalism and grace that comes with some of these airline crash investigations, things like how the main goal is to eliminate sources of human error, to identify the procedures

• 14:02Justin Roczniak?

  and structural factors which led up to an accident, to avoid placing blame on like one individual unless it's like very, very, very extremely warranted to do so. And that's how that works in the airline industry. But today we're going to see how that works on the railroad. Oh.

• 14:22November Kelly?

  I'm getting the sense that they did a guy flight style.

• 14:26Liam McAnderson?

  Welcome to the Josh Shapiro, you motherfucker grievance hour.

• 14:31Justin Roczniak?

  Actually, yeah, yeah, that, that'll, and, and if you're like one of those guys who's like, yeah, the engineer, you know, he did all, he, it was his fault. This is not the podcast for you.

• 14:43Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 14:45November Kelly?

  It's worth saying.

• 14:46Liam McAnderson?

  Someone that has graphics.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  For everyone, for everyone in, who's joining this from the UK, this is pertinent for the fact that the R A B have just released the interim report for the crash at Bedford, which the media have just gone, it was the driver. What did it? Driver error, driver error. And the industry is kind of looking to go, well, what a tragedy. What a shame. I feel for that guy's widow. And yes, this is going to be relevant, folks.

• 15:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. But first we have to do the goddamn news.

• 15:16November Kelly?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I still haven't updated the.

• 15:31November Kelly?

  For my mistakes. That's what the bomb callers are for.

• 15:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. We, we could do a wide variety, variety of depressing news stories, but I figured, okay, let's, let's do a, like I said, this is also a depressing news story, but it's also got some, what should, what you call it, schadenfreude.

• 15:48November Kelly?

  It's also got like, we're sticking to sports here. We've got a, we've got an all transit.

• 15:52Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So if you remember our episode about the ultimate urban circulator in Jacksonville, Florida.

• 16:01November Kelly?

  Yeah, the van.

• 16:02Liam McAnderson?

  I do. I assume that went well.

• 16:04Justin Roczniak?

  The autonomous vans. So, oh, it's shutting down.

• 16:11Justin Roczniak?

  The JTA, Jacksonville Transit Authority CEO Nathaniel Ford sort of bet the farm on these autonomous shuttles to replace the Jacksonville Skyway, which is an actual automatic transit system, right? It turned out to be a pretty bad bet. There was no ridership, very slow trip times, very, very, very, very, very expensive software licensing. It was autonomous some of the time, but the route required, you know, the driver to take control to, you know, merge across six lanes to take a left turn, you know? So that's.

• 16:50November Kelly?

  The way of the future. The way of the future.

• 16:52Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah. When can we get an autonomous car that can do a proper Jersey slide?

• 17:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But Nat Ford has left Jacksonville Transportation Authority earlier this year so he can go fuck up Dallas Dart, right? So JTA is now completely broke, cutting Skyway service, cutting essential bus service, and turning off the autonomous capabilities of the ultimate urban circulator and possibly ending the service altogether.

• 17:26November Kelly?

  Well, it looks like my work here is done.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Oh, God. Yep. Incredible. This is what we always said would happen, folks. Why, why do they keep doing this? Why do they, why does it let? It's a minibus with a bunch of extra expensive shit on it.

• 17:46Justin Roczniak?

  It's a mini bus.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Then expires.

• 17:48Justin Roczniak?

  It's a minibus that has a server rack that takes up the place of four seats.

• 17:57Liam McAnderson?

  As you do.

• 17:59November Kelly?

  It's fine. It's fine. Just sitting, sitting on the bus and the guy next to me is Claude and is a server rack. That's fine.

• 18:09Liam McAnderson?

  This is my emotional support server rack, which is actually how it works in my house, but.

• 18:14Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 18:15Liam McAnderson?

  Hold lab, baby.

• 18:15Justin Roczniak?

  In other news.

• 18:18November Kelly?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 18:21Liam McAnderson?

  We gotta, I, I, when I get around to the, the university part, whatever, Drexel, it's just gonna be Drexel for like four hours, dude.

• 18:30November Kelly?

  So Drexel University was, yeah.

• 18:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Drexel University has shut down the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia.

• 18:39Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck.

• 18:40Justin Roczniak?

  One of our oldest museums.

• 18:43November Kelly?

  Turns out it's, it's woke. It was woke the whole time and gay.

• 18:47Justin Roczniak?

  I guess it was woke. Dinosaurs are woke, you know? That's why Noah didn't bring them on the ark.

• 18:54Liam McAnderson?

  I had a Hebrew school teacher who, I think I've told this story before. His name was Larry. And before anyone gets mad at me, he served in the IDF. I did not. Happy October 7th, by the way.

• 19:11November Kelly?

  We unreservedly condemn the remarks of et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, sure.

• 19:15Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, whatever, man. Nothing matters anymore. I'm playing with house money. And so, and so he was like, no, no, God put dinosaur fossils on the earth to confuse Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the ancestors. And he was, and then he moved back to Israel and I'm pretty sure did unit 8200 shit.

• 19:40November Kelly?

  Was fucking like, how many guys are in unit 8200? Is it named after the fucking roster? Like every fucking time I hear about a guy, it's like he was in a unit 8200.

• 19:51Justin Roczniak?

  What's a unit 8200?

• 19:53November Kelly?

  It's like the Israeli, like spoof shit hacking thing. It's, it's like, if you're gay and Palestinian, they hack into your phone to blackmail you, right?

• 20:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Israeli NSA, basically. Yeah. Okay. So he, when I was 18 and already going to college at my, at Drexel, God, I hate this school. He was like, hey, try to maybe kind of recruit me to join like Israeli intelligence, maybe? Question mark? And it was all very strange. And I talked to my mom about it. She was like, absolutely. Under no fucking circumstances are you going to Israel. And then I went on birthright, sorry, but.

• 20:29November Kelly?

  You got tapped on the shoulder by Israeli intelligence?

• 20:33Liam McAnderson?

  I'm a smart guy.

• 20:34November Kelly?

  I mean, yeah, I don't doubt it, but like, I feel like that would have led to.

• 20:39Justin Roczniak?

  Who knows? He might still be.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  Don't say that one like podcast discourse, fucking podcast.

• 20:46Liam McAnderson?

  I am not Israeli intelligence.

• 20:51November Kelly?

  I just thought it was weird that I never saw you at any of the seminars, you know?

• 20:56Liam McAnderson?

  The big cabal meetings. I always, I always sit next to, you know, I always sit next to the Blackstone guy, you know?

• 21:04Speaker 03

  You don't spend enough time grooming children to be in Israeli intelligence. Let's be honest.

• 21:08Liam McAnderson?

  No, I don't like talking to kids, man. They freak me out. They're like, they're buggers on everything.

• 21:13November Kelly?

  And you told this guy that and he was like, actually, never mind. You know what? It's fine. We don't need you.

• 21:18Liam McAnderson?

  Takes these backsies. Takes these backsies. Yeah.

• 21:23Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, uh, Drexel University is now two for two on uni- on museums they've affiliated with and then shut down.

• 21:33November Kelly?

  It's the machine that destroys museums. It's, uh, you know, the purpose of the system is what it does. The pre- the press, uh, fuck. The purpose of Drexel University is to shut down museums. Thank you.

• 21:46Justin Roczniak?

  Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, cause it was, uh, Academy of Natural Sciences is our, you know, natural history museum, the, the, they got the dinosaur skeletons there. They got the other, I never actually went. I feel bad about that now.

• 21:59Liam McAnderson?

  I did. It was beautiful.

• 22:00November Kelly?

  It's a, it's a museum age.

• 22:03Liam McAnderson?

  Huh. It's, it's a school, it's a school that's capable of, it's a school well known for running itself well.

• 22:09Justin Roczniak?

  The other one they, they took out was the Atwater Kent, which was the Philadelphia City History Museum. Yes. Yeah. They killed that water Kent.

• 22:16Liam McAnderson?

  I thought, I thought that was Penn. Jesus Christ.

• 22:19Justin Roczniak?

  Nope. No, that was Drexel.

• 22:21Liam McAnderson?

  Are you fucked, dude? I fucking hate this school. It's terrible.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  It's awful. If you name your university after something that sounds like it's a brand of like home hardware tools.

• 22:32Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 22:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. No, no, he was, uh, Drexel was a banker. Uh, Drexel Morgan and Company. That Morgan being JP Morgan.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Huh. Oh yeah. That guy.

• 22:43Liam McAnderson?

  That guy. Yeah. Well known for not being a piece of shit. Oh, wait a second.

• 22:46Justin Roczniak?

  Wait, wait a second. Yeah. But so I, I think there's now like some kind of movement to, uh, get the museum to reopen by having the academy disaffiliate with Drexel. Cause I think the idea was they were going to close the museum, but keep like all the research parts of it going. Now that's not going to happen. Also, they're trying to sell the building.

• 23:05Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 23:06Justin Roczniak?

  Um, you know, there, there's a whole.

• 23:07Liam McAnderson?

  Break up the collection, right? Do I have that right?

• 23:09Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, I would assume they would have to. Yeah. Um, city council almost tried to do something that didn't happen. Mary Sherrell Parker is nowhere to be found.

• 23:19Liam McAnderson?

  That's crazy dude. I can't believe that.

• 23:20Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Who would have thought?

• 23:21Speaker 03

  So much to do podcast about that. Yeah.

• 23:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's, it is, yeah, this is, this is another, another beloved cultural institution that, uh, Drexel University has just decided, nah, don't need that.

• 23:35Liam McAnderson?

  Business school. Business.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Business school.

• 23:38Justin Roczniak?

  Business, business, business, business.

• 23:40Liam McAnderson?

  Maybe they could do a museum of business.

• 23:42Justin Roczniak?

  Ever did.

• 23:43November Kelly?

  You know, they could put like the big whiteboard that says, you know, uh,

• 23:47Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no. We had, we had the, we had the Philadelphia Commercial Museum. It was demolished by University of Pennsylvania.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Oh, that was a, the Penn did get that one, did they? Okay.

• 24:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Liam McAnderson?

  Penn also has a nasty habit of keeping bones belonging to children in their basement. Um,

• 24:05Justin Roczniak?

  That's true.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 24:07Justin Roczniak?

  The commercial museum was, uh, that, that was a word that was, uh, that, that's a phrase that we would now call a convention center, but you know.

• 24:16Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, thirty four hundred, right?

• 24:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So anyway, that was the goddamn news, I think.

• 24:24November Kelly?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 24:27Justin Roczniak?

  All right. So first we must ask, what is Frankfurt Junction?

• 24:33Liam McAnderson?

  Sure. Yeah. What is Frankfurt Junction?

• 24:35Justin Roczniak?

  What is Frankfurt Junction? Okay. Okay.

• 24:38Liam McAnderson?

  The purpose of a junction is what it does, is what it does.

• 24:41Justin Roczniak?

  What it, what it does?

• 24:42Liam McAnderson?

  What it does.

• 24:46Liam McAnderson?

  Oh dude, I could go for a hot roast beef sandwich right now.

• 24:49Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, that would be pretty nice.

• 24:50November Kelly?

  So that sounds incredible.

• 24:52Justin Roczniak?

  Frankfurt Junction is this thing over here. It is the second tightest curve on the Northeast corridor. Um, the first one is the curves leading into the Stanford station. Frankfurt Junction is in North Philadelphia, right? Um, it, it is limited to 50 miles an hour on otherwise very straight, uh, and very high speed stretches of track.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Wait a second. That sounds familiar.

• 25:20Justin Roczniak?

  I know.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  What are you saying? A, a high speed line on the east of the country with a 50 mile an hour bend in it. Wait a minute. We did, this is the Morpeth episode again.

• 25:32Justin Roczniak?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  This is our Morpeth. This is your Morpeth. Yeah.

• 25:35Justin Roczniak?

  Much later in the future. Why is it there? So the Philadelphia and Trenton Railroad was incorporated to build a railroad from Philadelphia to Trenton. Unexpected. I know.

• 25:49Liam McAnderson?

  Huh.

• 25:49Justin Roczniak?

  It made it into Trenton pretty easily, but entering Philadelphia from the north was a challenge, right? Residents protested the plan to build a whole new railroad down city streets and into center city. Because that's a weird 1820s idea, and this is the modern age of 1839.

• 26:08November Kelly?

  Yeah. This is the future. We're supposed to have the trains run on the street and kill my horse.

• 26:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, you're not supposed to do that. That was the thing.

• 26:16Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, you are. Turn it into viscera. Turn them all into viscera.

• 26:20Justin Roczniak?

  Thus, the Philadelphia and Trenton went down this way, right? To what is now, uh, Kensington High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, which is right next to the Burke Station on the Frankfurt L, right? To this big, big wooden terminal here. Um, now the Frankfurt L wouldn't exist until 1922, which was, you know, 90 years in the future. So alternative methods were needed to get passengers the last three miles to center city and to other railroad connections, right?

• 26:51November Kelly?

  I've had longer waits with the Vanti West Coast.

• 26:56Justin Roczniak?

  Some corporate machinations, which aren't super important, happen over the next 30 years. Everything in the city winds up controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was time to unite the Pennsylvania Railroad main line that came into Broad Street Station with the Philadelphia and Trenton main line by means of something called the Connecting Railroad.

• 27:17November Kelly?

  I sure hope it do. The official muscle. I sure hope it do.

• 27:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Rather than brute force its way through the city, the Pennsylvania Railroad's Connecting Railroad would skirt around the edges like so, going that way. Uh, that's, that's more useful for people who would, who, who are not doing this audio only. Uh, skirts around the edges of the city, cross the Schuylkill River on this thing back here, the Connecting Railroad Bridge.

• 27:44November Kelly?

  You're back.

• 27:44Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and join the main line at a location we now call Zoo Interlocking. It's called Zoo Interlocking because that's where the Philadelphia Zoo is.

• 27:56Speaker 03

  It's true. I walked up there. It's nice.

• 27:58Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And so again, the Connecting Railroad splits off from the previous main line at Frankfurt, at appropriately Frankfurt Junction. This is not designed for high speed trains, right? It's designed for 1860s trains. And so the speed limit became a nuisance fairly early on, right? Plans to straighten the curve here with a viaduct over Erie Avenue, uh, were so well advanced in the 1930s. You can actually still see it in the property lines, right? You can see where the railroad bought property. Here's an angled warehouse that shouldn't be angled like that. Here's a driveway. Um, this I think is the Bachmann Model Train Factory. This is a later addition.

• 28:41November Kelly?

  When I sort of city builder or my scale model, right? I fuck up the rotation of something. I didn't fuck up the rotation of something. It's because of a sort of arcane like railroad right of way thing, you know?

• 28:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Exactly. That's how that works. Yeah.

• 28:57November Kelly?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:58Justin Roczniak?

  But yeah, there was a plan to straighten out this curve, uh, a long time ago, they got surprisingly well advanced and then it just did not happen, right? Um, so this sudden tight curve in a section of otherwise high speed track is with us to this day.

• 29:14November Kelly?

  Just to kind of turn train drivers. Yeah. Sure.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If, if you want to know, like, Open Railway Map's really good for people. If people want to go and see what the fuck is all going on there, go to Open Railway Map. It's got all the old lines there. It makes a lot of sense. Like it's basically, you know, you've got two railroads meeting and then annoyingly the, just the chord that was kind of, you know, the secondary chord between them ends up becoming the main line. This is, this is a fairly common occurrence, but now it's the, it's, it's the curve zone. We have to, very briefly, I'm not going to, we've, we've done this already, right? We've done this already. Um, we've, uh, gone into, um, we've gone into detail of curves and why trains go around them.

• 29:54November Kelly?

  Everybody open your copybooks back to any of the previous episodes. You'd like go back to Morpeth.

• 30:02Justin Roczniak?

  Look around you.

• 30:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Look, look, look around you.

• 30:07Justin Roczniak?

  What are curves?

• 30:08Speaker 03

  When a train goes around a curve, when a train goes around a curve, it is, um, there is an outwards acceleration that goes around the curve, which is, um, the square of its speed over the radius of the curve it's going around, right? That gives an outwards acceleration. There we go.

• 30:20November Kelly?

  Now we've done this like previously with Morpeth. Can we do this again in like a fun way with like a cool Ferrari or something where it's like, um, oh God, what's like outrun or something?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Ooh, that could be, yes, yes, is the answer to that. Uh, Nova, that's exactly what we can do. Um, we choose to or choose not to balance out that hours acceleration with an inwards acceleration by leaning the train over, by lifting up the one rail over the other through the curve. And that allows us to eke a bit more speed out of existing tight curves like the curve at Frankfurt Junction. It will be super elevated to get that 50 miles an hour because it is very tight. And we achieve that by, um, dangling the center of mass, uh, away from the center of the vehicle, which means we get some component of the acceleration due to gravity laterally from the super elevation or cant. Uh, what did you call me? Et cetera. Jokes of this nature.

• 31:10November Kelly?

  I'm sure I've made one, one of the times we've explained this previously.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Almost undoubtedly, almost undoubtedly. And so you can have these two and this allows you to then calculate, right? Okay. How fast can you go through the curve? But the thing that's important here is that there are, there is a safe speed to go around a curve. And that different, that, that the safe speed that we put in the design standards is usually like two to three times lower than the speed that a train can actually like blast its way through a curve without actually falling over. So to go, to actually tip a train over through a curve, you have to be going really damn fast. Um, for example, next slide please, like at Morpeth.

• 31:50Justin Roczniak?

  Like at Morpeth. Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  And you can see here, a scene that looks perhaps familiar to the one that we saw from an aerial show earlier. Uh, in this case though, it's a guy with a small high vis bib stood on the side of an upturned mark three coach that's tried to eat a bungalow.

• 32:04November Kelly?

  Yeah. You're sort of like high vis cropped up, looking, looking at this guy's new cool garden ornament.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I wore one of these in Washington DC for the live show.

• 32:15Justin Roczniak?

  You did. Yes.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  So that's what one of those is. To which I hand back capably to Ross.

• 32:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So, you know, it's important to remember, trains can't always go around a curve, but there's also things that are supposed to prevent you. From messing up there, let's talk about

• 32:34November Kelly?

  Fucking taking of Pelham 123. This is so meta-textual this time.

• 32:39Justin Roczniak?

  I'm about to explain, I'm about to explain all the ways that railway safety systems stop you from taking a Pelham 123, right? Okay, this is railway safety systems that prevent trains from doing things that they shouldn't do. Right now, you're driving your car 75 miles an hour in a 35, right?

• 33:02Liam McAnderson?

  Yes.

• 33:02Justin Roczniak?

  And you see a sign with flashing lights and chevrons that says curve 15 miles an hour. You still have plenty of time to slow down to 45 miles an hour to make that turn, right?

• 33:13November Kelly?

  I knew this, I knew this episode was written by someone who had been in a car with Liam.

• 33:24Liam McAnderson?

  I, I once was driving my wife somewhere and I wouldn't cross a double yellow line, which would have been an illegal turn. And she said, I'm sorry, you will drive 40, I've seen you drive 40 over the speed limit, but you won't make a turn on yellow. And I was like, yes, yes. There's no people on the highway. They're all cars. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're not humans.

• 33:45November Kelly?

  This is a fascinating insight into American psychology.

• 33:49Liam McAnderson?

  I, I'm the king of the highway, I believe is what you want.

• 33:55Justin Roczniak?

  And if you see a yellow light, you have plenty of time to speed up and tear through the intersection at 112 miles an hour.

• 34:02Liam McAnderson?

  Hell, yeah.

• 34:04November Kelly?

  I think one of the most fascinating things about this podcast, right? And I think this is a tribute to you, Liam, is that you can come onto this podcast and go, I love speeding and I was nearly in the like Israeli intelligence and people still love you.

• 34:22Liam McAnderson?

  Thank you. I, I have worked hard to maintain, I have worked hard to maintain my cult of personality and I will not apologize for saying.

• 34:29Justin Roczniak?

  So trains do not respond to throttle and brake inputs like cars do. They don't respond that quickly. As such, railway signals and speed limits have to be strictly obeyed. Uh, since locomotive engineers don't have freedom like drivers do, there are safety interlocks to prevent them from speeding or running red lights.

• 34:49Liam McAnderson?

  Okay. Well, that sounds like a restriction of my freedom, but yeah, go on, King.

• 34:53November Kelly?

  Does the we can't drive 55 bumper sticker on a train?

• 34:58Justin Roczniak?

  On a train, yeah. The oldest and simplest of these is automatic train stop, right? And automatic train stop was developed in the late 1800s in conjunction with air brakes and signaling systems.

• 35:13November Kelly?

  Timing that when they invented it, the guy who wrote automatic was thinking of an automaton.

• 35:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Yep. Yes. It's like, uh, it's, it's, it's like there was some cultural exchange.

• 35:25November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 35:26Justin Roczniak?

  Hmm. Weird. This is a very basic mechanical system, uh, at, in the 1800s at least. If a signal was set to danger, that is to say it was red, which means you can't pass, right? A mechanical arm would raise up.

• 35:41November Kelly?

  Trying, all right?

• 35:43Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, God. I'm sorry, Nova.

• 35:47November Kelly?

  Yeah, so am I.

• 35:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. A mechanical arm would raise up. When the train passed that arm, the arm would catch onto a lever onboard the train that would open the brake valve and stop the train, right? Or sometimes you'd have an arm that would lower from a gantry and that would smash a glass tube, which is attached to the air brake system that would vent all the air and stop the train, right? It's entirely mechanical and safe for wear and tear on the levers. And of course, replacing the glass tubes, this is entirely fail safe, right? Um, this was implemented very early on in the New York City subway. This is presumably why they're meddling with, this is presumably what they're meddling with in taking of Pelham 123 when they're down by the tracks.

• 36:34November Kelly?

  Under the train and replace the glass tube with a stronger tube.

• 36:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 36:39November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 36:40Justin Roczniak?

  But these systems are later supplemented with automatic train control. That's ATC or.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Not to be confused with the, the one that we had in GB in, uh, nine, that we introduced in the, in 1905, 1906 or something, which is the GWR had, which was also called ATC, automatic, automatic train control. And was basically the same design as, as British, as like AWS is, which is with the magnet underneath. So that was, that was 1906. Yeah. That that was introduced on GWR. So we, we had that real early and that was, that was for, um, signals and speed control. Um, yeah. So this tech has been around a while.

• 37:18Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In the United States, I don't think we get automatic train control until like the 1950s with like early electronics, you know, relays, stuff like that. Um, ATC systems were usually used in conjunction with like cab signals. So you have a little indicator in the cab of the train to, uh, show what the next signal is going to be. Uh, the associated speed limit, so on and so forth. And ATC can and will override throttle inputs and apply brakes if a train is in overspeed. Or, you know, for the layman, speeding, right? Um, and this is why in Taking of Pelham 123, the train stops before South Ferry.

• 37:59Justin Roczniak?

  ATS is overridden, but ATC steps in, stops the train when it enters the lower speed limit zones around South Ferry, right?

• 38:08Liam McAnderson?

  So like a super fail safe. Am I getting that right?

• 38:11Justin Roczniak?

  Well, this is, this is the more sophisticated system. ATS is supposed to be the dumb, stupid system, right? Uh, this is an overlay to that that enforces speed limits, but it's not always installed everywhere. It's a little bit more expensive and difficult to implement. So a lot of times it's only installed where it's really needed. We'll get to that in a minute. Uh, this system works well enough for telling trains what not to do, but we can go further into something called positive train control, right? And positive train control, PTC, that's when we take the systems above, turn them upside down, right? Rather than telling trains what they can't do, we explicitly tell trains what they can do

• 38:56Justin Roczniak?

  and limit the actions accordingly.

• 38:58November Kelly?

  Yeah, these trains have had it too good for too long. Now they better not assume they can do anything.

• 39:04Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:05Liam McAnderson?

  Or you have to go to train jail.

• 39:06Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this would, this would make the, uh, the railway series a lot more boring.

• 39:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, I'm a, I'm a prison, prison abolitionist, but for trains.

• 39:15Justin Roczniak?

  This is, this is the system that stops you from being able to take a Pelham 123 in the first place, right? This relies on a lot of modern electronics and horror horrors, computers to run, right?

• 39:29Liam McAnderson?

  Boo.

• 39:30Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  I find a computer extremely useful.

• 39:34November Kelly?

  I found the computer indispensable.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  That's the one. Thank you. Nova, of course, you know the exact quote.

• 39:39Justin Roczniak?

  So essentially there's a brain box onboard the train that can receive commands either from, you know, track side infrastructure, like signals, like little boxes with radios in them, like all that sort of stuff, or, or just on the rave, radio overall. And it says, you can run this train from this location to this location at this speed. And if you do anything else, you'll have hell to pay.

• 40:05November Kelly?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, but what if, what if you, what if there's like a diehard 4.0 type situation where the hackers who have kidnapped John McClane's daughter hack into that and tell the train, do a taking a Pelham 123?

• 40:20Liam McAnderson?

  Is that a good day to die hard?

• 40:22November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Liam McAnderson?

  Is that the one I'm thinking of? That's maybe the fifth one. Yeah.

• 40:25November Kelly?

  Oh, whatever.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  I lost track of the subtitles.

• 40:28Liam McAnderson?

  Live free or die hard. That's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:31Justin Roczniak?

  I, I believe you can just cut it out in the circuit breaker on the locomotive.

• 40:35Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, okay. Well, that's less, that's less, yeah, less compelling to me.

• 40:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's, that's a little bit, little bit, you, you don't need a laptop to do that and you know, you're typing.

• 40:44Liam McAnderson?

  It's a, it's a, it's a bunch of code coming down, you know?

• 40:51Justin Roczniak?

  It's like, nah, you gotta pull a circuit breaker. You're fine. Um, so these types of systems, like positive train control systems are common in Europe. Um, you know, I want to say European train control system is like that. I want to say basically everything is like.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:11Justin Roczniak?

  In the United States, we've had problems with it. And to understand that, we need to deviate for a second to talk about the Chatsworth derailment.

• 41:20Liam McAnderson?

  Can't imagine why we've we've derailed. And then also, we've had problems.

• 41:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 41:24Liam McAnderson?

  Those are my jokes.

• 41:25Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, no.

• 41:26Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, dear. Is that fire? Oh, that's a lot of fire.

• 41:29Justin Roczniak?

  That's no, this is, this is well after the accident occurs. That's, uh, those are fire trucks with lights.

• 41:35Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, my bad. I have a very small image. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In 2008, a MetroLink train, MetroLink is the Los Angeles commuter rail agency, a MetroLink train whacked into a freight train because the engineer was texting while driving.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Don't do that, folks.

• 41:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, don't do that.

• 41:52November Kelly?

  But what if the text is really interesting?

• 41:55Liam McAnderson?

  It's not. There you, what?

• 41:58Justin Roczniak?

  Well, we'll, we'll figure that out when we finally do an episode on Chatsworth. This is the mini episode on Chatsworth. Uh, that killed 25 people.

• 42:06Liam McAnderson?

  Damn.

• 42:06Justin Roczniak?

  Um, the reaction there was very swift. Uh, the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008 sailed through Congress and was signed by none other than President W himself, right?

• 42:19November Kelly?

  Is this gonna be like Priya, where it's like one of the weirdly good things that W did?

• 42:25Justin Roczniak?

  Well.

• 42:26Liam McAnderson?

  Nixon started the EPA. Things are weird.

• 42:28Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, uh.

• 42:30Liam McAnderson?

  And Legal Services.

• 42:32Justin Roczniak?

  This is complicated, right?

• 42:34November Kelly?

  Okay, okay.

• 42:35Justin Roczniak?

  So, among other things, it mandated-

• 42:38Speaker 03

  Justin neoliberal Roczniak.

• 42:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Justin Roczniak?

  It mandated that the vast majority of the American railroad network be covered by some kind of positive train control system by 2015. It did not provide any funding for the same.

• 42:54November Kelly?

  Ah, okay.

• 42:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 42:56Liam McAnderson?

  Is this the one you were talking to me about where they just kept kicking the can down the road, right?

• 43:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 43:00Liam McAnderson?

  Okay, thank you.

• 43:01Justin Roczniak?

  So, the result here was that the implementation of the positive train control by the freight railroads was extremely cheap and also sometimes kind of horrifying, right? It's all GPS based rather than having a bunch of infrastructure installed next to the rails, right? It's not, because it's GPS based, it's not accurate enough to even tell what track a train is on when there's two or more parallel tracks.

• 43:29Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's like-

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Like axle counters aren't that expensive. You don't, they're not that expensive. Oh, it's not, oh.

• 43:38Justin Roczniak?

  They wind up needing several extensions to the deadline, and even today, coverage is a bit spotty. Um, and a lot of time, positive train control on the freight railroads exists, and if you're the engineer, it can make angry beefs at you, but it doesn't really have any control authority because the freight trains are too damn long and too poorly made up. And if there's a sudden uncommanded brake application, that can cause the derailment you're trying to prevent.

• 44:05November Kelly?

  No, positive train suggestion.

• 44:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  That's, uh, yeah, go back to the precision schedule railroading episode on that. Yeah.

• 44:13Justin Roczniak?

  So, MTRAC and some northeastern commuter railroads develop a system called the Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System. That's ACES, right?

• 44:24November Kelly?

  I like the words back from the acronym. I appreciate that.

• 44:27Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 44:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. It uses conventional blindside equipment, you know, signals, you know, little radio transmitters, little, all, all the normal stuff, all the stuff they would use in Europe, right? All the stuff they would use in a more civilized railroading environment, right? It works really good. It, you know, it'll all but drive the train for you. It's not quite up to the scale of like what the Germans use on high speed lines where it's like you get on the high speed line, advance the throttle to full, the whole, the signal system drives the train for you. But it's close, right? Um, it's expensive. The equipment was expensive to install. It took a long time to install. There was no funding for it. They had to dip into their own funding for this whole

• 45:10Justin Roczniak?

  thing because, God forbid, not even the government will fund the government. Um, yeah.

• 45:16November Kelly?

  Hearing an eagle screech, you know?

• 45:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Liam McAnderson?

  Come find out why our healthcare isn't free, et cetera.

• 45:24November Kelly?

  Did the Houthis ever find out why you don't have free healthcare?

• 45:27Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, this was, I, this is one of the things about the PTC man. There's a couple things with the PTC mandate, you know, but-

• 45:35Liam McAnderson?

  It don't make sense. Yeah. The other thing that doesn't make sense is how we couldn't just wipe the Houthis off the face of the earth that we were so committed to it. Like, we have, we, we have Minutemen missiles. I, like, what are we doing? I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying-

• 45:47November Kelly?

  Do you wanna, do you wanna close the Babamandab with fucking Fallout, dude?

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Is this a plowshare situation again?

• 45:56Liam McAnderson?

  I don't even care anymore. Nuke, nuke everybody.

• 46:01November Kelly?

  Uh huh.

• 46:01Liam McAnderson?

  Nuke me.

• 46:02November Kelly?

  When you, when you say Israeli intelligence turned you down.

• 46:09Liam McAnderson?

  I, I, well, what I'm gonna do is reverse USS Liberty C. Okay, now, here's my diagram. Here's my diagram.

• 46:16Justin Roczniak?

  All right, yeah, yeah.

• 46:18Liam McAnderson?

  Is that anti-Semitic? Am I doing it?

• 46:21November Kelly?

  Yes, probably.

• 46:23Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, fuck.

• 46:25Justin Roczniak?

  Look, I, I, I have, uh, I have a good word from, uh, the entire news media that the worst anti-Semites are all Jewish. So, you know.

• 46:34Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 46:35November Kelly?

  And they're all in the Green Party as well.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're all in the Green Party. That's it.

• 46:39Justin Roczniak?

  That's true.

• 46:39Liam McAnderson?

  My team sucks so much, man.

• 46:43Justin Roczniak?

  You know, there were, there were a few, there were a few railroads that were trying to do good faith efforts to install this PTC system. Um, a big one was, uh, you know, SEPTA, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority that we have here in Philadelphia, who easily made the deadline, got absolutely no brownie points for it, almost went bankrupt.

• 47:07Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus.

• 47:08Justin Roczniak?

  That's SEPTA, baby. Let it ride.

• 47:13Justin Roczniak?

  But for, but, but for MTRAC, the biggest issue was with radio spectrums, right? That's for the next slide. Here we go. Okay. Thank God for today's XKCD because I wouldn't know how to describe this otherwise. Um, I'm, I'm not a radio guy. I'm gonna give it a go here. Positive train control requires radio communication between the computers on the trains and the computers in the wayside signal equipment so they can go beep and boop at each other, right?

• 47:44November Kelly?

  Computers love to do that.

• 47:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. In order so that a beep is not confused with a boop, this needs to be relatively high fidelity, right? Ideally, it ought to be able to be transmitted fairly long distances so you avoid more, you know, blindside wires and cables, stuff that's gonna clutter up the railroad right of way, right? Hmm. You also need multiple channels of radio so different trains' beeps and boops don't get crossed, right? And that requires space on the electromagnetic spectrum. Hmm. And that space is regulated and allocated by the Federal Communications Commission, right?

• 48:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 48:26Justin Roczniak?

  You, you have to buy space on the electromagnetic, electromagnetic spectrum to use it. You can't just, you can't just say, I'm gonna transmit on this frequency. It's like, no, if you're gonna use that, especially for any kind of industrial purpose like the railroad, you have to buy that piece of spectrum. No one else is allowed to use it, right?

• 48:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, this is, this is a fascinating way where you can do something-

• 48:49Justin Roczniak?

  Bring us the pirate radio, the pirate radio episode. Yes.

• 48:53November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, this is one of the coolest things that you can do in the privacy of your own home that will actually really annoy the federal government and cause you to get your door kicked down is just transmit stuff on, uh, like bands you're not supposed to.

• 49:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. So, this turns out not to be a huge problem for the freight railroads who simply bought random frequencies on the secondary market since they didn't have a huge amount of traffic density. Like, there was not, they don't run that many trains in any given location except, uh-

• 49:24November Kelly?

  You expect to be tuning into your local sort of news station that hasn't been bought up by Clear Channel yet, and instead they got gazumped by Norfolk Southern and all you're hearing is haunt beeps.

• 49:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. A bunch of, a bunch of nays and winnies.

• 49:42Justin Roczniak?

  So, they were also only installing PTC where they absolutely had to, and they were generally slow walking the process, right?

• 49:50Liam McAnderson?

  Ugh.

• 49:51Justin Roczniak?

  MTRAC had high traffic density, relied on wayside instruments rather than GPS. They were making a good faith effort to install positive train control quickly. Thus, they required multiple channels, generally a lot of space on the spectrum for ACES to work properly, right?

• 50:09November Kelly?

  I wasn't expecting access to the spectrum to be a problem for railroads, given the people who are interested in them.

• 50:15Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, my God.

• 50:20November Kelly?

  Why is my bomb collar beeping?

• 50:23Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's Gareth, actually. I don't know who that-

• 50:27Justin Roczniak?

  Relatively early on, it was determined the best location for positive train control was on the spectrum somewhere around 218 to 222 megahertz.

• 50:38Liam McAnderson?

  That's where I am. That's a lot of autism. God damn.

• 50:41Justin Roczniak?

  The, the spectrum is, uh, determined in megahertz, right? Or in, in hertz, that's the frequency, right? Uh, as we go down, it's higher frequency. Um-

• 50:51November Kelly?

  Yeah, there's also Avis, which isn't as good, but they do try harder.

• 50:55Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:57November Kelly?

  I like, I like, yeah, I like to hear the sound of me almost getting fired whip past my head, you know?

• 51:05Liam McAnderson?

  We can't do that.

• 51:06Justin Roczniak?

  So the problem.

• 51:07Liam McAnderson?

  We've lost the technology.

• 51:08Justin Roczniak?

  The problem with this area of the spectrum is that this is also a good area for a lot of other things, most notably terrestrial broadcast television, right?

• 51:19November Kelly?

  I don't remember that.

• 51:20Justin Roczniak?

  Two, 218 to 222 megahertz is right above channel 13, but there was a suspicious, underused gap in the spectrum there for interactive video and data services, right? What the hell is that?

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Porn. It's porn.

• 51:37Liam McAnderson?

  It's porn.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's porn.

• 51:39Liam McAnderson?

  It's porn.

• 51:40Justin Roczniak?

  Well, it was that and some other stuff.

• 51:42Liam McAnderson?

  No, it's porn. Shut up.

• 51:44Justin Roczniak?

  We're here in the podcast industry doing internet radio. Interactive video and data services was the opposite. It was radio internet.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Oh, CFAX.

• 51:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:55Justin Roczniak?

  The big, the big use case for this was supposed to be interactive radio and television. Like you're watching QVC, you see some horrible news salad spinner or something like that. You can use your TV remote to buy the thing on the spot before you think better of it.

• 52:12Speaker 03

  Oh, press the red button.

• 52:14November Kelly?

  Yeah. I mean, I've enjoyed Gareth and I both having the sort of British person when CFAX is mentioned reaction. Meanwhile, you're just stuck with consumerism.

• 52:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, man.

• 52:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Uh, this was sort of the main use case and no one was using this by 2011 when M-Track came to the FCC to ask about this frequency band as well as another band at 220 megahertz that was up for auction soon. And M-Track goes to the FCC and they say, hey, you're the government, we're the government, Obama's in charge. I know that you know that, hey, nobody is using this shit. So could you just give it to us, right?

• 52:54Liam McAnderson?

  Spot us one.

• 52:55Justin Roczniak?

  Buddy, pal, it's in the public interest. Come on. And, you know, they even pitched the idea that these frequencies could be permanently allocated to positive train control nationwide as a public good, you know, what with the unfunded mandate and all that, you know, you, you could, you, you could really make a case for just give it to us.

• 53:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:18Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah, understandably, yeah.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  And like save, you know, like make, make the whole railroad safer and crucially run better, more efficient, you know, which is good for the economy.

• 53:27Justin Roczniak?

  And so the FCC says, fuck you, buy it from Verizon or Clear Channel or someone.

• 53:38Justin Roczniak?

  And because M-Track doesn't have the money to do so, uh, we're talking about $500 million per megahertz.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  Why?

• 53:46Justin Roczniak?

  This, because that's like channel 14 right there. Um,

• 53:50Liam McAnderson?

  Oh.

• 53:50Justin Roczniak?

  Think of all the stuff on channel 14.

• 53:53Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, yeah. But can you imagine Amtrak TV?

• 53:56Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that'd be pretty good.

• 53:57Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Yeah. Fuck shit. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, we had to disband it because of the foamers were getting a little out of hand trying to fuck the TVs. What are you gonna do, right?

• 54:07November Kelly?

  It's not as bad trying to fuck a digital TV as a cathode ray tube. I'll say that. Less dangerous.

• 54:12Justin Roczniak?

  Oh.

• 54:13Liam McAnderson?

  The CRT, the C at CRT stands for cocked and ball torture.

• 54:16November Kelly?

  Feel, imagine the feeling you get of like touching a CRT screen, but for your dick.

• 54:22Liam McAnderson?

  But with my dog, no.

• 54:24Justin Roczniak?

  All your, all your hair stands up, but like down there.

• 54:27Liam McAnderson?

  Do you think it, yeah. My cubes are just straight as an arrow.

• 54:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So anyway, we're talking about $500.

• 54:35Liam McAnderson?

  Podcast.

• 54:36Justin Roczniak?

  $500 million per megahertz. This significantly delays the installation and most notably the activation of, uh, the advanced civil, Aces. Yeah, asses, whatever, however you want to say it, it's fine.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  I know when my ass is not activated.

• 54:54Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 54:54Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Throw that ass in a, Aces in a circle? Question mark.

• 54:57Justin Roczniak?

  They, they wind up cobbling together a full megahertz over the course of about four years, meaning they can finally start the final parts of ACES installation in 2014. Um, in the meantime, we're modernizing the Northeast corridor, specifically the regional trains with the Siemens ACS 64, the M-Track City Sprinter 64, also known as the last good locomotive delivered in America.

• 55:24November Kelly?

  Looks to me like a big chunky old Nokia mobile phone.

• 55:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Liam McAnderson?

  That's how you know it's good.

• 55:31Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. And these things are ordered during a brief period of optimism for M-Track around 2010, when the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was, uh, was passed and promised to bring high speed rail to all corners of the country.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  They lied to us. They lied to us.

• 55:49Justin Roczniak?

  Well, what happened was when these Republican governors were presented with funds for high speed rail, they said, can we use it for highways? And, uh, the, uh, the, the DOT said, no, you can't. That's not in the law. And they said, well, have your money back.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Hooray.

• 56:06Liam McAnderson?

  We got it. We, we, we got to kill so many fucking people, man. So many, like so many people have to die.

• 56:15Justin Roczniak?

  All of the high speed rail funding went into the Northeast corridor and California high speed rail. Um,

• 56:22Liam McAnderson?

  Is this all related to? I have a question. Is this related at all to the, the, the North Caroli- didn't North Carolina take a bunch of Amtrak money and set up some stuff? Or is that not related to this?

• 56:35Justin Roczniak?

  Good question. I don't know offhand. I know that like the, the big notable, uh, funding rejections were Ohio and Wisconsin.

• 56:45Liam McAnderson?

  John Kasich, you son of a whore.

• 56:47Justin Roczniak?

  And Florida.

• 56:49Liam McAnderson?

  Sink it. Sink it and take me with it.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  I do. You are throwing good money after bad at that point if you're spending money in Florida. Let's be honest.

• 56:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Well, no, they managed to get it built privately and now it's gone bankrupt.

• 57:00Liam McAnderson?

  It's a mall you have to fly to. Isn't that exciting?

• 57:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Liam McAnderson?

  Dickhead.

• 57:04Justin Roczniak?

  So the M-Track City Sprinter promised to bring M-Track into the 21st century, finally aligning it with international best practices with essentially off the shelf, European style equipment. Now they're still pulling 40 year old AM fleets and the previous AEM seven was also basically off the shelf European equipment. But you know, that's details, right?

• 57:29November Kelly?

  The Americans who want to live in a slightly more European style America are gonna get to do that.

• 57:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. But these are replacing the AEM sevens, you know, the toasters, the meatballs and the HHP eights, which were lemons.

• 57:46Justin Roczniak?

  Very bad locomotives, um, on all Northeast regional Keystone and long distance trains on the Northeast corridor. I don't know what else you can say about them. These are, these are good locomotives. They perform as advertised. They pretty much worked out of the box. All skills we've since lost. Um, but coupled with infrastructure improvements, including the installation of ACES on the entire Northeast corridor, the ACS 64 would provide Northeast regional service that was faster, more reliable, safer than ever. The locomotive started being delivered in 2014, but ACES installation would take a little longer for full installation, testing and certification. Again, largely because difficulties in acquiring the radio spectrum, right?

• 58:31Speaker 03

  God damn it.

• 58:31Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So they're still running on an old system, which brings us to.

• 58:37Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 58:38Justin Roczniak?

  May 12th, 2015.

• 58:40Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, good a date.

• 58:41Justin Roczniak?

  On train 188 from Washington DC to New York City, right? Um, this train leaves 30th Street Station at 9:10 PM, just over two thirds of the way to New York City, uh, on time, right? You have one year old locomotive 601 on the head end with engineer Brandon Boston right here. Uh, we should talk about him for a second.

• 59:04November Kelly?

  Interesting to talk about a, like a named individual, cause that's not typically something we tend to do.

• 59:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So he, he studied to become an accountant. He hated that. He signed on to M-Track as a conductor, eventually promoted to locomotive engineer.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  I love that for him.

• 59:21Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. But by all accounts, he's someone who's very, who was very meticulous about his job. He was an experienced railroader. He cared deeply about safety, uh, was an actual railroad enthusiast as well as it being his job. And what's more, he was a poster.

• 59:36Liam McAnderson?

  Yes. He was pathological about safety.

• 59:39Justin Roczniak?

  He was, he posted on an old stuffy forum, you had to pay money to join. We all know it. That's right.

• 59:47November Kelly?

  No.

• 59:48Justin Roczniak?

  Trainorder, trainorders.com.

• 59:53November Kelly?

  God damn it. You can't do this to me. You can't retweet after Benghazi?

• 1:00:03Justin Roczniak?

  So there were some alarmingly prescient posts from him over there. Um, I had to look these up in a, a, a New York Post article that really, really tried to dig into his posting history that was like, man who crashed train interested in safety?

• 1:00:20November Kelly?

  Mysterious, yeah.

• 1:00:22Justin Roczniak?

  I know, right? But he was not like, not like an old school guy. He's generally, he was generally pretty critical of railroad safety, the safety culture that had developed among railroad employees, especially the culture of silence around like minor operational irregularities and so forth. You know, it's the 21st century. Why is it still the Wild West out here on the railroad?

• 1:00:44November Kelly?

  Does that track have like a kind of a near miss thing? You know, like the normal, how you report something where something terrible could have happened and didn't?

• 1:00:52Justin Roczniak?

  You, there is now an FRA near miss hotline, but it's very new. Um, I don't know exactly when they put it in. Uh, but yeah, that's, that, that sort of thing is, is relatively new to the railroad.

• 1:01:06November Kelly?

  And not like culturally embraced, I would imagine then either.

• 1:01:10Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  No. Uh, kind of, I'm kind of getting a man off my own heart feeling about this guy. I gotta be honest with you. You know, his posting?

• 1:01:19Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  He is, uh, doesn't like the old school hierarchy of the railroads. This all seems familiar to me.

• 1:01:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Lots of posts pointing out how railroads have in many instances had like 80 or 90 years to implement basic safety infrastructure, just haven't done that, leading to accidents like Chatsworth, which could have been prevented, you know, not with PTC, but, but, but with like automatic train stop would have prevented that, right?

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And generally, you know, these posts are very critical of how much can go wrong on the railroad due to simple human error, where even a safety conscious and experienced engineer could cause, you know, could, could do a simple human error. How so few existing systems designed to prevent said human error from occurring were, you know, they, they, they were not installed over vast swaths of the United States Railroad Network, including of course, the Northeast Corridor. These sort of complaints, yeah, they should be familiar to anyone who listens to this podcast. The vast majority of safety problems on the railroad can be fixed with technology from before when my grandfather was born, right? And

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Everything old is old, guys. Hey.

• 1:02:28Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Railroads have simply sat on their hands that whole time. I'm not saying he's railroad serpico trying to change the culture from the inside, but as some of us should know, speaking out in public about these safety issues can come back to bite you.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:02:47November Kelly?

  He is one step close to being railroad serpico on account of having a cool hat.

• 1:02:51Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. That is true. Um, you also could have other factors working against you there on the job, like, uh, Brandon's one of the first openly gay engineers, I want to say.

• 1:03:04November Kelly?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:03:05Justin Roczniak?

  Certainly, certainly like a, a trailblazer and that sort. He, he, uh, I know he went out to, uh, whatchamacallit, uh, went out to San Francisco to support gay marriage. I'm not super familiar with that aspect.

• 1:03:19Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Folsom Street, just dressed as a locomotive, literally running a train on someone. Yeah, I got you.

• 1:03:23Justin Roczniak?

  This is, uh, this is a, a difficult position to be in, in an industry which is to this day, still run by sort of traditional toxic masculinity types of guys, right?

• 1:03:34November Kelly?

  Old school boys' club.

• 1:03:38November Kelly?

  Every interest in the world now, every specific one is like, um, 50% chud, 50% queer.

• 1:03:45Justin Roczniak?

  That's, that's true. Like that, that, that is what the, the railroad definitely feels like right now is, you know, okay, is, uh, is someone interested in trains? Well, you know, there's some kind of, some kind of, you know, they got some kind of gender going on or they're Hitler.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  So, so we're, we're sat here. We've, we just had a date read to us, which is a horrifying portent, but we're, we're at this point, we're kind of rooting for this guy, right?

• 1:04:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, we're definitely rooting for this guy. Yeah. So he's bringing the train north out of 30th Street Station. Excuse me. He's bringing the train. Yeah. He's bringing the train north out of 30th Street Station. He goes through Zoo Interlocking, which I, I, I asked someone today on, um, the secret discord, wait, is the Northeast Corridor north, south or east, west? Apparently it changes at Zoo Interlocking. So he's going north from 30th Street Station. Then he's going east from Zoo Interlocking, right?

• 1:04:46Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. You're Nova. I think you're in.

• 1:04:50November Kelly?

  I, I don't pay a lot of attention.

• 1:04:53Liam McAnderson?

  Bleep that.

• 1:04:55November Kelly?

  You, you all know how difficult it is to schedule things with me.

• 1:05:00Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So goes east over the Schuylkill River. He hears some radio chatter about kids throwing rocks at trains.

• 1:05:10Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. It, this is, this would be, it's always sunny. Right? Yeah.

• 1:05:16Justin Roczniak?

  And we gotta, we gotta talk about kids throwing rocks at trains. Um, this is a less common occurrence than it once was. Now that kids have social media, right? But it's very difficult to prevent kids from throwing rocks at trains because rocks are readily available and so are trains. Right?

• 1:05:35November Kelly?

  And it's fun. It's a safe and legal thrill.

• 1:05:38Justin Roczniak?

  It, it is. Yeah. I, I can't, I can't argue with that.

• 1:05:44Justin Roczniak?

  If a rock hits in a bad enough place, it can cause serious damage or even injury. This was a bad enough problem in like the 1960s and 70s. You know, the peak years of atmospheric lead that commuter railroads, especially in the Northeast installed, uh, these things generally referred to as ghetto bars.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Oh, that's not racially charged at all.

• 1:06:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. On the windshields of locomotives, right? They're just steel bars that prevent the rock from getting to the windshield.

• 1:06:16November Kelly?

  Make the, make the train look like a police riot van.

• 1:06:19Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, pretty much, pretty much. Yeah. I mean, there's some, uh, the M track E60s had some particularly aggressive ones. Um, uh, you might ask, was this only a problem in urban areas? No. Well, actually the rocks specifically were in urban areas because in rural areas, uh, the kids all had 22s.

• 1:06:40Liam McAnderson?

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:06:44Justin Roczniak?

  Eventually both these problems were solved by making every window on every train bulletproof.

• 1:06:51November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ, you're not a real country. You're a collection of 300 million sociopaths.

• 1:06:59Liam McAnderson?

  With GTIs and guns.

• 1:07:04Justin Roczniak?

  But, uh, a big enough rock can still cause some damage, especially on an older train, such as the type Septa runs.

• 1:07:12November Kelly?

  I know not with what weapons train war three will be fought, but train war four will be fought with rocks. Cause rocks are more effective than guns.

• 1:07:23Liam McAnderson?

  She said overconfidently.

• 1:07:33Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:08:17Justin Roczniak?

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

• 1:08:36Justin Roczniak?

  So in this case, hold on, I need to, I need to make a alteration to this, this news image because this, this comes, I forget where this comes from, but they have the Delaware River down here. I just want to point out the, uh, the

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  What they deleted the Scookle?

• 1:08:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:08:52Liam McAnderson?

  Say his weight.

• 1:08:53Justin Roczniak?

  Here, here's the Scookle.

• 1:08:54November Kelly?

  The Philadelphia Superleggera.

• 1:09:00Liam McAnderson?

  No great loss. I'll tell you that right now.

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  Ah, I enjoyed cycling on the Scookle. It was lovely.

• 1:09:07Liam McAnderson?

  Did you enjoy cycling in the river Gareth? Is that a thing that you did?

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Okay, okay, okay. Point, point duly acknowledged and taken.

• 1:09:16Justin Roczniak?

  So in this case, a septic train was passing underneath the Diamond Street Bridge, right? And someone threw a rock at it in such a way, the rock broke through the windshield, possibly injured the locomotive engineer.

• 1:09:31November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:09:33Liam McAnderson?

  Yep.

• 1:09:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Brandon Boston hears this chatter on the radio. Uh, he's knows he's coming up on the scene quick. So he's got to do a couple of things here. Um, when, when the engineer was hit by the rock, uh, he put the train into emergency, right? Uh, having put the train into emergency on track one, um, this triggers a few things. Number one is that someone has to go out and do a visual inspection of the train before they can start it moving again. Um, this is again, this all happens very quickly. Uh, but Brandon Boston's got to do a few things. He's got a radio back that he's hot on two. He is passing the train at about 80 miles, 70 miles an hour. Excuse me. This is a 70 mile an hour section, right?

• 1:10:15November Kelly?

  Blow remaining windows out.

• 1:10:17Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. He's got a, he's got a hit the horn really hard to warn personnel who may be on the track or near the track that there is another train coming through, right? He has to, you know, and, and obviously look out for personnel. I mean, there's not much you can do other than lay on the horn, but you will be worried about hitting personnel on the track in this sort of situation. Maybe personally getting hit by a second rock. I don't know. Right? The newspapers-

• 1:10:46November Kelly?

  Mr. President, a second rock.

• 1:10:48Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, you know, you're certainly in a spot where, um, you know, you, even if personnel are not on the tracks, uh, you want to make sure they're warned because a train coming by at 80 miles an hour right next to them is going to startle them. Right? You don't want, you don't want to cause an injury that way. So, you know, there, there's suddenly a lot more workload here than there would be otherwise. Right?

• 1:11:12Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  So this is dark. What time of year is this again? This was da, da, da, da, da. This is May. So it's nine PM. It's probably dark. It gets dark earlier. So it's dark, right?

• 1:11:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's dark. It is. Yeah. We don't, we don't, we only get like a few days of light after nine o'clock here in Philly. Like maybe like four.

• 1:11:31November Kelly?

  Oh, it is Glasgow.

• 1:11:33Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  So, so yeah, so I'm just thinking that, you know, if you're the driver, sorry, the engineer of this local, our, our guy, um, you know, Brandon is sat there. He's going to be peering through that window, trying to just, you know, even though there's nothing he can do, that doesn't stop you from just wanting to make sure that the line in front of you is, is clear of personnel. Right? So that's going to be occupying a lot of his, a lot of his, yeah, it's going to be occupying a lot of his sort of, um, kind of mental.

• 1:11:58November Kelly?

  I'm not experienced as to the sort of cognitive division of labor for a, for a train driver, right? I am experienced in identifying the cognitive division of labor for a poster, right? And as a poster, I know that when some shit like this happens, any type of shit that affects your workday, you, a portion of your brain is thinking, what is the post I'm going to make about this later when I'm off work? Right?

• 1:12:21Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:12:21Liam McAnderson?

  You don't believe the fucking day I had at work. Right?

• 1:12:24November Kelly?

  Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah. You can't help it. It's just in there, you know?

• 1:12:29Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, uh, the radio broadcast, uh, continues until he's well past North Philadelphia station, uh, up here. Right? Um, North Philadelphia is going to be important later.

• 1:12:42Liam McAnderson?

  It always is. Go else.

• 1:12:44Justin Roczniak?

  He never gets like a reply to, uh, to, to hot on two, but whatever. He makes it through fine, but he's still like distracted. Right?

• 1:12:52Liam McAnderson?

  He never gets a reply at all?

• 1:12:53Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, Jesus. Okay.

• 1:12:55Justin Roczniak?

  Well, there was, there were two trains passing that one train at the same time. So it was a whole, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff. There's a couple of other mitigating factors, like he was normally in a cellar engineer. Um, you know, he was qualified on the ACS 64, uh, but this was not his normal run. This was, uh, because his train coming in was delayed. He was put on a different train going back to New York. But yeah, it's important to have situational awareness when you're driving the train, right?

• 1:13:26November Kelly?

  Never heard of it.

• 1:13:28Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, I'm, I'm very rarely aware of the situation. I'm not.

• 1:13:32Liam McAnderson?

  That's a goddamn truth. Jesus Christ.

• 1:13:36Justin Roczniak?

  Now this can be assisted by landmarks or even a general vibe, right? Around Frankfurt Junction, it was like so, if you're traveling east before the curve, the railroad has frequent underpasses and overpasses, right? And was surrounded by various dilapidated brick industrial buildings. After the curve, the railroad had frequent overpasses and underpasses and was surrounded by various dilapidated brick industrial buildings.

• 1:14:02November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  I've done, I've done this in the railroad. I can confirm. It's both north and south of it. Very, very similar.

• 1:14:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Liam McAnderson?

  And the one guy, uh, who hates, uh, was it Dick Anderson that he had the graffiti?

• 1:14:14Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, Richard. Yeah. Richard Anderson. Uh, that's, uh, that's what's his name. What's his name's, uh, car storage.

• 1:14:20November Kelly?

  Yeah. I would say sort of jokingly that this is the, the one reason to be an architect to chud. But the problem is that you'd still have the same homogeneity. So it would be like, yeah, in this case, the railroad has frequent overpasses and underpasses and is surrounded by various chudded out buildings.

• 1:14:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, pretty much. Yep. Um, so if you're going, uh, eastward, right? Towards the curve, uh, the speed limit's 80 miles an hour and the speed limit on the curve is 50. And the speed limit past the curve is 110, right? A train traveling 80 miles an hour would likely make it through Frankfurt Junction, albeit very uncomfortably.

• 1:15:02November Kelly?

  Hmm. Everybody gets thrown to the side. Everybody spills their drink.

• 1:15:06Justin Roczniak?

  It'll be like the, that time, uh, there was one train that went through the Elizabeth S curve at a hundred miles an hour.

• 1:15:12Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Justin Roczniak?

  And, uh,

• 1:15:13Liam McAnderson?

  G-forces you don't, you don't want to experience, right?

• 1:15:15Justin Roczniak?

  That guy got super fired. Um, so you would make it through very uncomfortably. So M track and predecessor railroads had only elected to install automatic train control that would slow the train on the westward tracks, right? On the inside, Boston, however, had become distracted and he believed himself to be past the curve. He began advancing the throttle. The train speed crept up to 85, 90, 95, 100.

• 1:15:49November Kelly?

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:15:50Justin Roczniak?

  105. He sees the curve coming, snaps back into focus, hits the emergency brake and

• 1:15:57Liam McAnderson?

  It goes as a face up or apex, right?

• 1:15:59Justin Roczniak?

  At nine 24 PM, the locomotive leaves the curve at about 102 miles an hour.

• 1:16:04Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck.

• 1:16:05Justin Roczniak?

  The locomotive stays upright.

• 1:16:06Liam McAnderson?

  Well built. I'll give them that.

• 1:16:08Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The first coach, business class wraps itself around a big, heavy catenary pole. Right? Um, the catenary poles, uh, modern catenary poles are designed to break away. These catenary poles are over a hundred years old and are big girders embedded in concrete. They do not-

• 1:16:28November Kelly?

  They're ones that would be- More rigid school of engineering. Yeah.

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. These would be landmarks in Fallout, uh, in Fallout Philadelphia. Yeah.

• 1:16:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, absolutely. They, you know, they'll still be here a thousand years from now. So

• 1:16:42Liam McAnderson?

  At Ross's basement nuke, just sitting.

• 1:16:45Justin Roczniak?

  The business class car wraps itself around a catenary pole, takes it out partially and continues to travel down the tracks, having been folded into a sort of pancake sort of situation, right?

• 1:17:00Liam McAnderson?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:17:01Justin Roczniak?

  The second coach is the quiet car. It falls on its side, comes to rest in a siding over here. Car three and four both turn over a little bit less violently, right? Car five is completely jackknifed. Car six and seven derail, they remain on the track. This is a very nasty, violent derailment, very high speed, over very quickly at least. One of the small blessings here is that usually in this yard here, the interchange yard with Conrail, there's a lot more tank cars full of molten phenol.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  No, Jesus.

• 1:17:41Justin Roczniak?

  That's for the big scary advanced six chemical plant in Bridesburg. Apparently it was a slow week.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  In your city.

• 1:17:50Justin Roczniak?

  It was a slow week at the plant that that week, so, uh, so it was kind of, uh, it was emptier than it usually is.

• 1:17:57November Kelly?

  Small mercies, I guess.

• 1:17:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, lots of injuries here that take a long time to recover from, you know, blunt force trauma, organ displacement, blah, bleh. Yeah, real nasty.

• 1:18:09November Kelly?

  Ask a stupid question, maybe, well, what's the kind of crashworthiness on these am fleets like in general?

• 1:18:15Justin Roczniak?

  I don't think they ever expect to, well, I'll tell you what.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  The thing is, it's, it's, it's make it more rigid in action. Because these are actually extremely strong. They just turn the content, they're just designed such that in a crash like this, you go in and hose down the contents.

• 1:18:30November Kelly?

  Oh, the car's fine. Yeah, this is squishy, you know?

• 1:18:34Justin Roczniak?

  Except the business class car.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  The business class one had some absolutely spectacular, yeah, I was gonna say that that had some seriously spectacular force involved, but all the others you can see are in pretty good nick. There's two things I want to say from looking at it from a crashworthiness perspective is, one is like the overturning strength of these, the strength of these vehicles is very good, but what that means is there is no collision energy management. So the people inside these trains are being submitted to some very undamped extreme forces, which is not good. Another thing that helps though, in this situation, is the fact that other than those that suffered extreme forces, well, only one, car one, the couplers remained intact. So you, again, that really helps with managing the forces through the train.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  It helps with decelerating as much of the train as safely as possible. So actually, in this situation, the crash where there's those bud cars of those am fleets, should I say, is, is really, like, is helpful, but there is no energy absorption. So yeah, there's a lot of extreme accelerations and decelerations for the humans inside it.

• 1:19:41Liam McAnderson?

  Like a bifurc dolphin, but on land. How exciting.

• 1:19:44Justin Roczniak?

  You got, you, you, you got survivable space, but you don't have, uh, you don't necessarily have, uh, survivable G-forces.

• 1:19:54November Kelly?

  Steel framed cars where it's like, yeah, car looks fine, you know?

• 1:19:58Justin Roczniak?

  Concrete floors, baby.

• 1:20:00November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, but they're like the meatbag inside is not in as good shape. Yeah, it's, hmm. And like, yeah, like even, even in the case, so, so you're spinning this back to the Bedford crash, the recentish Bedford crash in the UK, which was at 50 mile an hour collision between two trains, a stationary one and a moving one. Even with all the, they were, both of those trains are pretty modern. Even with, you know, a 50 mile an hour end on collision, which is pretty favorable conditions with modern trains and a lot of collision energy management, those forces were still enough to cause a lot of very serious injuries, you know, a hundred people with pretty serious injuries. So yeah, if you think about the extremity of force going on here, yeah.

• 1:20:42Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, this is not something that was, I would say, they, they didn't design for crash energy management back in 1970, whatever, when these cars were built. Same cars we're still using now.

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:20:57Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 03

  Well, nobody's building any new ones, so.

• 1:21:01Liam McAnderson?

  Run it back, folks.

• 1:21:03Justin Roczniak?

  There's a lot of horrible stories out of this wreck. There's also one fun one that was published in the Inquirer about assistant conductor, Thomas O'Brien, who was in car seven, whose first reaction after the wreck, you know, he survived almost without a scratch. He got the wind knocked out of, out of them. He was like, okay, so like, I'm invincible, right?

• 1:21:25Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Liam McAnderson?

  That would also be my logic. There is nothing wrong with that.

• 1:21:30Justin Roczniak?

  And then he was like, oh shit, where's my hat?

• 1:21:34Justin Roczniak?

  Because if he doesn't have a hat, he cannot project authority and competence as a conductor.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Lion, that's just flatly correct.

• 1:21:41November Kelly?

  This man is a lion, yes, absolutely.

• 1:21:44Justin Roczniak?

  So he finds his hat, he evacuates the last four cars, and anyone who is unable to like walk out, um, for the first responders, he marks with a glow stick because it is dark out.

• 1:21:59November Kelly?

  Really good.

• 1:21:59Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 1:22:01November Kelly?

  This is, this is aligned to my interests, which is more positions should have snappy uniforms that project authority and competence, because it's a correct safety factor.

• 1:22:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it is a safety thing, yeah. Another big worry here was that, you know, you got the 25 kilovolt overhead wires. They could still be live. They weren't, um, because I, I think the way that everything got pulled down, de- de-energized them.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:26Justin Roczniak?

  This did hamper rescue efforts because you had to treat them like they were live. And so, uh, well, here's that business class car.

• 1:22:34November Kelly?

  Oh, God. Oh, dear.

• 1:22:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Yeah, um, you notice it's a little, it's done the twist.

• 1:22:43Justin Roczniak?

  Am fleets only do this when they're very distressed.

• 1:22:45November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, I've seen, I've seen plane crashes where the fuselage has been more together, you know?

• 1:22:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I was about to say, yeah, this thing got really ripped to shreds. It's, it's surprising as many people survived in there as, as, as they did.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  Another, I mean, yes, this one has completely disintegrated. And in some ways, the, the, the severity of the destruction of this vehicle is partly because of its rigidity and that its lack of energy absorbing means that when it does go, it goes spectacularly. But there is another feature on here that I want to give in its favor, which is the truck or in normal English, the bogey, at least one of them, and possibly the other one, still attached. That is otherwise a five ton plus projectile that causes a lot of damage when it flies around in a high energy collision like this. And as you can see, still attached. So that is, you know, even in death, this car was trying to save the others, you know?

• 1:23:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, because that could have easily flown off and impacted another railroad car, yeah.

• 1:23:40Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:23:41November Kelly?

  Yeah, God. The fucking molten phenol.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  Well, God, yeah. Anyone who's more familiar with British, anyone watching, hello to the British weirdos. Uh, I can only apologize, um, uh, who are watching this, like this, this looks like often nerve it aftermath, right? That's probably the thing that it looks very similar to. And unfortunately, our mark three coaches just sneeze their bogies off at the slightest hint of a derailment. And they, and there are pictures from that same crash.

• 1:24:06November Kelly?

  Controllers, you know?

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  Let's, photos from often nerve it, and indeed in any of the major HST mark three crashes, of which there are plenty in the late 90s, early 2000s, where the bogies come off and they just kablammo into coaches and cause severe damage and kill people. So yeah, uh, the fact that it's held on to that bogey, that truck is, is again, a, a point in its favor. I'm not saying make it more rigid is the right approach, Nova May, but, um, but there are pouncing.

• 1:24:34November Kelly?

  Yes.

• 1:24:36Justin Roczniak?

  I think the catenary poll was a big contributor here, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can, yeah.

• 1:24:45Justin Roczniak?

  When the dust settled, seven people were dead and eighth would die in hospital. Forty six people were critically injured. There were 245 passengers and eight crew on the train in total. Boston himself survived the incident, but with a hell of a concussion, which results in the most controversial issue of the wreck. He does not remember anything between North Philadelphia Station and the site of the wreck.

• 1:25:13November Kelly?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't blame him. You don't need to have had the concussion to have that. You can have an entirely kind of psychogenic amnesia, you know, like.

• 1:25:22Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. One, one of the things which causes difficulty in the investigation is that when he regains consciousness, his first instinct is of course to get his phone out of his bag, turn it on, turn off airplane mode and call 911.

• 1:25:40Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, sweetie. Uh, hang on.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Hi, Ren.

• 1:25:43Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, Ren.

• 1:25:44November Kelly?

  Hi.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  Listeners, he did not have the car key on him.

• 1:25:47Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, okay.

• 1:25:48November Kelly?

  We're keeping all of this in, I assume.

• 1:25:50Justin Roczniak?

  I, I'm gonna be executed.

• 1:25:52November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:25:53Justin Roczniak?

  Good run, lads. Good run, lads.

• 1:25:54November Kelly?

  Yep. It's been lovely.

• 1:25:56Justin Roczniak?

  I put it in my butt.

• 1:25:57November Kelly?

  Ah, okay. You have to stop doing those stuff. Well, not in general, you know, I'm not gonna sort of suggest that to you, but like, stuff you need.

• 1:26:06Justin Roczniak?

  Mm hmm. So, yeah, he gets his phone out of his bag and turns it on and turns off airplane mode because everyone in the railroad is really paranoid about cell phones now. Um, and he calls 911. By that point, the incident had been called in multiple times. He walked down the train. He eventually lets a passenger borrow his cellphone to call someone. Eventually, he winds up the triage station.

• 1:26:29November Kelly?

  I'm guessing this is gonna like fuck up whatever investigation they wanna do to find out, hey, when was your, when was your phone on last, right? Because, hey, taking a sort of like 100 mile an hour, you know, train derailment to the face is not great for your decision making.

• 1:26:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes. Um, first responders get to the scene pretty quickly. They're confused as to how to access the site. Eventually, they get in. Uh, set up a triage site, start cutting trapped people out of the railroad cars. Something like 200 people are taken to area hospitals. Um, you know, some people are pretty severely injured. Some people, well, we'll see one of the injury reports later.

• 1:27:06Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, no.

• 1:27:07Justin Roczniak?

  Well, no, that, that's one of the funny ones.

• 1:27:11Liam McAnderson?

  Sure.

• 1:27:11Justin Roczniak?

  The very next day, the GOP-controlled House Transportation Committee votes to gut M-Track funding. And they're also all absolutely indignant at the thought that chronic underfunding of America's chronically underfunded National Passenger Railroad may have caused this disaster. Or that increasing levels of underfunding might, did I say increasing levels of under?

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  That is correct. Increasing levels of underfunding, yeah.

• 1:27:34Justin Roczniak?

  That these increasing levels of underfunding might lead to more such disasters in the future. Luckily, this was a committee vote that didn't go anywhere, but the symbolism was noted there. Um, you know, so this is, this is, uh, uh, well, yeah, I, no, no one cared anyway, so. We'll talk about the investigation here a bit. Um, there's a lot of stuff that comes out quickly that was wrong. Um, one of the big ones was, uh, was this the second rock? No, it was not.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  It's just shit being flung everywhere by a train no longer on the tracks. Yeah.

• 1:28:11Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. The FBI quickly determines it's not terrorism. The NTSB comes in. After a few interviews, uh, you know, looking at the site, looking at everything, they determine. This was due to a loss of situational awareness precipitated by the radio call and subsequent actions that the radio call required. The black box on the train indicated smooth acceleration as you would normally command up to 110 miles an hour. As would be expected for the route, um, eastward of Frankfurt Junction with an emergency brake application just short of the curve.

• 1:28:47November Kelly?

  Question, why if, why is the, and I know the answer to this. And I know, you know, why it can't be like this, which is money, but why can't there be two guys in there? You know, so that maybe when one of them has to do a bunch of stuff, working the radio. The other one can be like focused on the track, like you do on a plane, maybe on a large aircraft.

• 1:29:13Justin Roczniak?

  I, I mean, so this is, there's a complicated like history of union rules about that. Although this is a point that the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen brings up later is. Why do freight trains have two people in the cab and passenger trains only have one?

• 1:29:30November Kelly?

  It's because passengers' lives are valued way less than freight.

• 1:29:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the, the, the story of second manning and the demise of second manning in, in GB under British Rail is in and of itself its own story. Yeah. Uh, it's a good question, Nova. And, and, and it was one that was sort of, the unions gave it up on the premise of, um, you know. Changes to, to their bargaining powers, but better salaries. And it's, it's, it, no one comes clean out of that story. It doubles the price of the, of the running costs inside that cab, but you know, as you, you know, as you say, that there are obvious benefits from doing it.

• 1:30:05November Kelly?

  I mean, I have, I have a, I have a horrible liberal opinion here, which is that I'm very glad that unionized train drivers make good money, right? And so, you know, they're accurately valued in that way. I would sooner that there maybe be twice as many people making decent money, you know? Um, and things be safer, but what can you do?

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  Well, certainly if you don't have a, a positive train control, you know, a fully active controlling system in the train. Like, I can accept that you have, you can bring the efficiency of a single person in that cab. If you have a fully protective, much higher level of risk reduction signaling system, right?

• 1:30:45Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, the, the, one of the things about one person per train operations is you, you expect that. Um, yeah, you, you have a lot of fail safes and redundancies. Although one of the things, you know, here in the United States is it's like, uh, okay. If I'm on the Northeast corridor, you know, I have the advanced civil speed enforcement system and that's fine. One person per cab? Sure, we got so many fail safes. But if I'm on the California Zephyr and I'm out in like dark territory, I still got one guy in the cab.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can write a rule for that, Ross. So it's not hard. I can do it right now, which is, is there active, uh, AC, SCS, uh, on the train? Boolean, yes. Single person in cab, no. Two people in cab. Did it. I did it, folks. It's a bit complicated standard and I wrote it right now.

• 1:31:36Justin Roczniak?

  Goddamn. Faster than Claude could do it even.

• 1:31:39November Kelly?

  So what I'm hearing is we should mandate this and then not thunder.

• 1:31:45Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, yes. Congress loves that shit, yeah. Um. So this is, in the end, a brain fart, right?

• 1:31:53November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Justin Roczniak?

  One which could have been entirely prevented if the AC system, which was already installed, was active. But if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, we'd all have a Merry Christmas, right?

• 1:32:06November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, right?

• 1:32:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Justin Roczniak?

  Which, sort of, if you go back to contemporary articles on, on this incident. Um, there's a common theme which I'd sum up as, hey, look at this dumbass. He heard something on the radio and forgot where he was. What a chucklehead, right? Or as equally as commonly.

• 1:32:25November Kelly?

  That's interesting. I'm gonna call you on the phone right now and I'm gonna need you to read me the numbers on top of this locomotive.

• 1:32:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Or equally as commonly disbelief that a loss of situational awareness could have even occurred, right?

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  How do you fucking lose situational awareness when I'm in the shower?

• 1:32:46November Kelly?

  Yeah, I'm gonna call you on the phone right now and have you describe to me what was on three slides back.

• 1:32:51Liam McAnderson?

  Right.

• 1:32:54Justin Roczniak?

  Early reporting indicated Brandon Boston was on his cellphone. And that's something that never quite left the public consciousness.

• 1:33:01Liam McAnderson?

  No, it didn't.

• 1:33:02Justin Roczniak?

  There's, there's a narrative of negligence that never quite gets stamped out. And this has ramifications in the criminal proceedings, right? You might ask, the criminal proceedings?

• 1:33:13November Kelly?

  That was gonna be my question, yeah.

• 1:33:16Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. Uh, yes, of course, because this must have been deliberate. But we'll get to that later.

• 1:33:22Liam McAnderson?

  Yes, because.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  Jesus.

• 1:33:24Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. The poster's folly.

• 1:33:26Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So, we'll talk about the big civil lawsuit, right? Um, now, the M-Track Reform and Accountability Act of 1997 limits M-Track's liability to $200 million per incident, right? The torts were reformed.

• 1:33:44Speaker 03

  Ah, damn. Yep.

• 1:33:46Justin Roczniak?

  Some threats to the constitutionality of this limit end up bending the rule. M-Track settles for $265 million. In October of 2016, to be split among 125 victims and the victims' families.

• 1:34:03November Kelly?

  I wish I had, I knew offhand how much an airline would get, you know, sort of get done for, for killing like seven, uh, killing eight people.

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, less. Uh, my gut feeling is less, actually. The thing I was gonna say was.

• 1:34:16Liam McAnderson?

  So I just, I just searched.

• 1:34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, go on.

• 1:34:18Liam McAnderson?

  Airline eight dead settlement, uh, and it was $15 million.

• 1:34:23November Kelly?

  Jesus, that's nothing.

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  About right.

• 1:34:25November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:34:26Liam McAnderson?

  And even, uh, Boeing, uh, in the, in one of the 737 MAX, uh, lawsuits was 28 million that killed a combined 346 people.

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's nothing. That's nothing. That's.

• 1:34:40November Kelly?

  How is Boeing losing money? Like, they're playing with house money. How are they tanking?

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, the other thing I'm thinking here is 265 million pays for, um, that paying for, uh, like 600 kilohertz. Of bandwidth for PTC.

• 1:35:00Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:02November Kelly?

  Well, I think what it's mostly gonna end up factually paying for here is a lot of lawyers, like.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:35:08November Kelly?

  You know, you can, you can do some sort of like client maths here and go 125 million victims, 260 million dollars. Everybody got $2 million? No, I doubt it.

• 1:35:19Justin Roczniak?

  All right, I'm back.

• 1:35:20Liam McAnderson?

  No, they did not.

• 1:35:22Speaker 03

  No, they did not receive that much money. They received many, many, many dollars less than that. Yeah, good grief.

• 1:35:29November Kelly?

  The federal government has sent you a sympathy card and your lawyer is buying a house.

• 1:35:34Liam McAnderson?

  Your lawyer is buying the Baltimore Orioles.

• 1:35:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:35:38Liam McAnderson?

  That's the guy, I'm not making that up, Peter Angelo's, uh, the lawyer who handled Maryland's part of the tobacco settlement. Bought the Baltimore fucking Orioles with the money.

• 1:35:49November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:35:49Speaker 03

  Jesus. Yep. No, there you go, Nova. That, that's, I would say that's closure on that particular point.

• 1:35:55November Kelly?

  Why did I, why did I drop out of law school to do this instead? I could have been buying the Baltimore Orioles. And I don't know what an Oriole is. I'm pretty certain it's the thing that goes around the nipple, but I could be buying it.

• 1:36:07Justin Roczniak?

  Well, that's, that's the Baltimore Areolas. Much less possible.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  Well, that, that's much more popular, but, uh.

• 1:36:16Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that, that, that, I don't know. Maybe that'll be the, the, the T-girl baseball team.

• 1:36:26Justin Roczniak?

  I'm sorry. Um, anyway.

• 1:36:29Liam McAnderson?

  We do, we do dignity well on this show. Yeah.

• 1:36:32Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So anyway, as I said, threats to the constitutionality of the limit end up bending the rule. M track settles for $265 million in October, 2016 to be split among 125 victims and the victims families with more money available to anyone else who files suit against M track. This was not enough for some folks, though. Somebody's gotta go to prison, right? Someone has to fucking pay for this. And I think we've gotten through how this is a deep systemic issue, which has roots in railroad safety, culture, lack of investment, uh, FCC being bastards. Um, long string of events.

• 1:37:10November Kelly?

  I'm not opposed to some of those people going to prison.

• 1:37:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. A long string of events which culminated in one man having a brain fart and crashing a train. But what if none of that mattered? What if the brain fart was the crime? Criminal charges against Brandon Bostian were prepared and Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams does one of the very few decent things he ever did and decides not to press charges.

• 1:37:40Liam McAnderson?

  Thanks Seth, you piece of shit.

• 1:37:44Liam McAnderson?

  In case you're wondering why I'm saying he's a piece of shit, he was indicted on 23 counts, count on 23 of bribery, extortion and fraud.

• 1:37:51November Kelly?

  Huh. Well, that guy was a piece of shit. At least, at least didn't feel the need for the viability of just torturing this poor guy even more.

• 1:37:59Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it goes up. This was a clear case of human error. This is clearly like, there's no criminal thing here, no malice, no deliberate actions that could be proven. Um, and the, the lawyers for the families involved in the incident, I'm not, they get really angry. I'm not sure exactly what happens here. It sounds like some strings were pulled. Three days after that announcement, no charges would be pressed. Um, hold on, I lost my place here. Uh, on May 12th, 2017, Municipal Court Judge Marcia Niefield orders prosecutors to file involuntary manslaughter, reckless endangerment charges against Boston.

• 1:38:42November Kelly?

  Needless.

• 1:38:44Justin Roczniak?

  Seth Williams wipes his hands of the matter and pawns off the case to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

• 1:38:51November Kelly?

  I've heard of this guy.

• 1:38:54Liam McAnderson?

  Keep going.

• 1:38:56November Kelly?

  Why, why, why, why, whenever this guy comes up, do I keep seeing a diagram of a, like a person with a bunch of stab wounds?

• 1:39:02Justin Roczniak?

  What bunch of 27 stab wounds in the back of the head? That's a great way to commit suicide, you know? Yeah, yeah, you know? So this guy, Brandon Bostian, he's like one of the few guys with the foresight to see how bad railroad safety cultures become. He was meticulous at his job. He loved his job. He had a perfect safety record. You know, he was, he was talking about how to make the railroad safer, pointing out the flaws and he had a pretty serious boo boo that was entirely preventable by the better safety culture that he was always talking about. You know, there's no motive here. Uh, the train wasn't even late. There was no reason to go faster. There's no evidence to be found. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro decides, yeah,

• 1:39:47Justin Roczniak?

  this is the guy who needs to be made an example of.

• 1:39:50November Kelly?

  This poor fucking guy.

• 1:39:52Liam McAnderson?

  Cause the only thing Josh Shapiro cares more about than Josh Shapiro's career is his quote, and I'm quoting here deliberately, faith, because it's real fucking weird for a Jewish guy, as a Jewish guy, to talk about your faith using the word faith. Oh, I believe in my, well, then you wouldn't fucking believe in this dickhead. Uh, he also, he also, uh, was, uh, kind of served with the IDF, but that's, that's a different story.

• 1:40:16Justin Roczniak?

  So anyway, dickhead, folks, it's time to go after the lowest guy on the totem pole.

• 1:40:22November Kelly?

  Yeah, that guy's had it too good for too long.

• 1:40:24Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly. Boston was looking at 200 counts of reckless endangerment, eight counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of causing a catastrophe.

• 1:40:35November Kelly?

  You know, when I, when I said that they were gonna do flight to a guy, I don't like, yep, Jesus Christ.

• 1:40:43Justin Roczniak?

  So he's basically looking at infinity years in prison.

• 1:40:47November Kelly?

  And in flight, Denzel Washington did something wrong.

• 1:40:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, he flew the plane upside down.

• 1:40:54November Kelly?

  Yeah, it's not supposed to go that way around. It's supposed to go the other way.

• 1:40:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58Justin Roczniak?

  Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge Thomas Garrett dismissed all counts against Boston after a four hour preliminary hearing.

• 1:41:06November Kelly?

  I know, I know. That's like, you know, a very quick as far as the sort of wheels of justice go, you know, but, but like, that's if even just accepting the sort of time leading up to it of some of the most severe kind of anxiety I can imagine. Four hours of this shit just to get like laughed out of court, basically is.

• 1:41:30Justin Roczniak?

  Now, if you're.

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  I'm sure it stops there though. I'm sure the humiliation ritual stops there.

• 1:41:34November Kelly?

  Fucking sure. Yeah.

• 1:41:36Justin Roczniak?

  This was a travesty, a breach of justice, so gratuitous, so vile, so completely against the interests of the public, of decent, God fearing folk everywhere.

• 1:41:46Liam McAnderson?

  Suck my dick, Josh Shapiro.

• 1:41:47Justin Roczniak?

  Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office appealed the ruling. Just a few months later, on February 6th, 2018, Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Kathleen Streeter Lewis reinstated all criminal charges against Boston.

• 1:42:01November Kelly?

  I thought to get like persecuted like this, you had to have like done something, you know? Maybe that's a naive sort of, you know, liberal thing. In fact, it is a naive liberal belief on my part, but like Jesus fucking Christ.

• 1:42:15Justin Roczniak?

  Nova, would an innocent man be acquitted of all charges?

• 1:42:21November Kelly?

  Fucking damn it.

• 1:42:25Justin Roczniak?

  There was a second trial. Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott dismissed all charges.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:42:31Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Oh, we just keep doing this shit again.

• 1:42:33Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 1:42:34November Kelly?

  Don't you have like some kind of double indemnity shit happening?

• 1:42:40Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no, no. You have to understand this low life, this scumbag who deliberately and with malice of forethought murdered eight people by his own hand must be brought to justice for God and America and apple pie and motherhood. So help us God, the Attorney General's Office appealed again.

• 1:42:58November Kelly?

  And they, they were doing disclosure, right? They weren't like holding back some fucking text message that he had sent being like drinking and driving right now. Fuck these passengers. It was purely just like, like miss, like loss of situational awareness and they went to the fucking mattresses against this guy for no reason.

• 1:43:24Justin Roczniak?

  For no reason whatsoever.

• 1:43:25Speaker 03

  We're surely, we're surely running out of judges. We've had municipal court judges. We've had common pleas court judges.

• 1:43:31November Kelly?

  This, am I blind, right? This guy is white, right? Like I'm looking at.

• 1:43:35Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:43:37November Kelly?

  Like I'm not being flippant about that. I'm just like, this is.

• 1:43:41Justin Roczniak?

  The middle here. Yeah.

• 1:43:42November Kelly?

  This is an unusual level of stacking the deck of.

• 1:43:45Justin Roczniak?

  Josh Shapiro wants to be president so goddamn bad.

• 1:43:49November Kelly?

  For something that's not racial, you know, that's not racist.

• 1:43:54Justin Roczniak?

  On May 14th, 2020, Superior Court Judge Victor Stabile reinstated the charges on Boston. For whatever reason, this case takes a long time to go to trial. I think, cause this is the first one where it was gonna be a jury trial, right?

• 1:44:10Justin Roczniak?

  And the state offers him a really scummy plum, uh, plea deal, right? To the extent that, look, if you just accepted you personally, you caused the accident, yourself, you, yes, you, you and you alone, you won't see any jail time if you admit it. As long as you admit you did it.

• 1:44:28Liam McAnderson?

  That they don't even fucking believe that he did it. What are we doing here, dickhead?

• 1:44:31November Kelly?

  That's so fucking evil.

• 1:44:33Justin Roczniak?

  Otherwise you get infinity years in prison.

• 1:44:36Liam McAnderson?

  Suck my dick, Josh Shapiro.

• 1:44:39Justin Roczniak?

  Uh, that's what Boston said. He was like, no.

• 1:44:42Speaker 03

  Hell yes, my fucking boy. Hell yes. Always say no to the NDA or the fucking plea deal. Absolutely.

• 1:44:49November Kelly?

  Some doing, like that's.

• 1:44:53Justin Roczniak?

  I don't know. Would an innocent man be acquitted twice?

• 1:44:59Justin Roczniak?

  Um, and yeah, so it's like a week long trial and a jury acquitted him after about an hour of deliberations.

• 1:45:06November Kelly?

  Yeah, it took about the time that like about half the time we did to go, this is bullshit.

• 1:45:13Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:13November Kelly?

  So the American jury system more efficient than, well, there's your problem.

• 1:45:18Liam McAnderson?

  Well, what are you gonna do?

• 1:45:19Justin Roczniak?

  I, after having done jury duty on Monday, I, this is the first time I was on a criminal. I was, I was not in panel, but I was selected for a criminal case and, and, uh, holy fuck that, that, that process. Oh my God. Anyway.

• 1:45:35Liam McAnderson?

  Our justice system, uh, uh, well, there's your problem, episode infinity forever, the American justice system.

• 1:45:42November Kelly?

  Oh, I will write, I will write you a trial by jury episode right now.

• 1:45:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my God. Well, you know, I, I was prepared to take all the instructions from the judge and put everything out of my head and so on and so forth. And not look things up. And then on the way out of the courthouse, I, I looked up, what's the sentence for, uh, felony unlawful possession of a firearm? And I was, it was like 10 years. I was like, we're gonna give that guy 10 years?

• 1:46:06Liam McAnderson?

  Did he kill someone?

• 1:46:07Justin Roczniak?

  No.

• 1:46:08Liam McAnderson?

  Then what's the fucking problem?

• 1:46:09Justin Roczniak?

  Well, I don't know what his previous charges were, cause this was a repeat offender, like

• 1:46:13Liam McAnderson?

  Well, okay, but again.

• 1:46:14Justin Roczniak?

  offender thing, but I'm like, you know, Albert Speer only got 20.

• 1:46:20November Kelly?

  Yeah, that guy didn't even have an unregistered firearm.

• 1:46:23Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly, exactly. So, you know, anyway, that's a different, that's a different story, but yeah, a judge acquitted Brandon Boston after about an hour deliberations on March 4th, 2022. Brandon Boston was finally a free man.

• 1:46:38November Kelly?

  Justin, can you go back and read me the original date again, right? Like of, of when this happened?

• 1:46:45Justin Roczniak?

  It was May 14th, 2015, I want to say.

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  May 12th.

• 1:46:51Justin Roczniak?

  May 12th.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  2015.

• 1:46:53November Kelly?

  So you lose, what, seven years of your life to this? Like, you're not, you're not like just traumatized, right? Physically and mentally.

• 1:47:04Liam McAnderson?

  Long time to lose.

• 1:47:05November Kelly?

  You are a professional defendant for

• 1:47:09Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:47:10November Kelly?

  almost a decade on tenterhooks, thinking, am I gonna go to prison for the rest of my life? And then you don't, and they just kick you loose and you're supposed to go and just, what, just live?

• 1:47:21Liam McAnderson?

  Thanks, Governor Josh Shapiro.

• 1:47:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, you piece of shit. Years of no relationships that can be viable, uh, you know, trashing relationships that he already had. Yeah.

• 1:47:31November Kelly?

  Why would anyone do this for a living?

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  Ah, don't worry, Precision Schedule Railroad is making sure that within the decade, no one will do this for a living.

• 1:47:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38November Kelly?

  Oh, good.

• 1:47:39Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. So anyway, what are the improvements following this wreck?

• 1:47:46Speaker 03

  They turned their asses on.

• 1:47:48Justin Roczniak?

  ACES was turned on in December of 2015.

• 1:47:51November Kelly?

  Okay.

• 1:47:52Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, that's all talk. All right. Yeah.

• 1:47:54Justin Roczniak?

  The NTSB said some bullshit about seat belts on trains.

• 1:47:57Liam McAnderson?

  What?

• 1:47:58Justin Roczniak?

  That went nowhere.

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  Nobody would, nobody would fucking wear them. This as well. Shut up about seat belts on trains. Just shut up about it. It's not a thing.

• 1:48:05Justin Roczniak?

  BLET said we need two men in the cab of passenger trains, which is fair. That also went nowhere.

• 1:48:11November Kelly?

  Of course.

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's no PT, yeah, without PTC, there should be second manning in trains.

• 1:48:16November Kelly?

  Just, just do it anyway. Stimulate the fucking economy, you know? It's, it's, it's the same as the uniforms thing. It's good for the kind of dignity of the office, you know?

• 1:48:24Justin Roczniak?

  The only thing.

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

  No, we gotta, we gotta just, we gotta buy non-existent GPUs to put in non-existent warehouses for three and a half trillion dollars.

• 1:48:31November Kelly?

  About like, why I should be dictated, right? Is if we're gonna have these sort of inefficiencies based on kind of like hypothetical benefits, they should at least be centered in a human person who's walking around and can have like a life, you know?

• 1:48:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:48:46Liam McAnderson?

  Agreed. They call her GPU Stalin.

• 1:48:48November Kelly?

  Yeah, well, this is the thing. I don't, I don't subscribe to this idea that everybody's job has to be a hundred percent necessary, right? I'm a podcaster. Thank fucking God I don't, right? But like, I, I, I just, I just feel like if, if, you know, or every kind of economic system has a huge amount of waste built into it. It's just that, you know, we live in the one that's kind of dedicated it to, uh, you know, living in the Hamptons or buying a super yacht or buying the Baltimore Areolas or whatever, when it could instead. And also a bunch of GPUs that might maybe create God someday, which it won't, right? I would prefer to live in the one where a bunch of that kind of inefficiency, that waste, if you like, went to providing people who, you know,

• 1:49:33November Kelly?

  deserve it by virtue of being alive, unlike the GPUs, had like, you know, dignity and safety and security and a good quality of life, right? Is it a hundred percent necessary to have a second guy in the train? No, not necessarily, but like it fucking, you know, it, it, it's, it's a good thing to do, I think. So why the fuck we can't do that?

• 1:49:55Liam McAnderson?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:49:56November Kelly?

  Yeah. And to do all of that would cost like a small fraction on what we are currently spending on Jensen Huang's leather jackets.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  Yes, precisely.

• 1:50:05Liam McAnderson?

  Got such a fucking crazy tail.

• 1:50:06November Kelly?

  Jesus.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, but stuff about geese that are gold Nova. So, you know.

• 1:50:11November Kelly?

  I, I, I missed doing this podcast, but you know who else missed doing this podcast is the forehead vein I have that will one day kill me.

• 1:50:19Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, Ross's neck tendon. I know what's going on.

• 1:50:24November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Justin Roczniak?

  Locomotive, locomotive 601 becomes a parched owner.

• 1:50:28November Kelly?

  Oh, it's Turkish.

• 1:50:29Justin Roczniak?

  The Am fleets are, yeah, the Am fleets are scrapped by friend of the podcast scooter.

• 1:50:34Speaker 03

  Hi Scooter.

• 1:50:35Justin Roczniak?

  Hi, yeah, hi Scooter. Um, he said that, you know, usually these cars come in clean, but cafe car didn't.

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Justin Roczniak?

  Um, Brandon Boston did not get his job back and I have no idea what he's doing now.

• 1:50:51November Kelly?

  I mean, as far as not, you were good. Yeah, exactly. Like, I, I, I don't know whether he's like fucking, uh, like on a shrimp boat in Alaska. I don't know whether he's at the live shows. I don't know whether he's wandering the fucking earth. Like I, it, it doesn't matter. We shouldn't know. I'm glad we don't.

• 1:51:10Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, it's, I, I, I, I hope.

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  Whatever he's doing is managed to find some, find his own geese.

• 1:51:15November Kelly?

  Jesus Christ. I hope he's, I hope he is as well as could possibly be expected after this shitty horrendous run of awful luck that he himself warned was possible.

• 1:51:29Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:51:30November Kelly?

  You know, like the fucking, the Am fleet is not the only machine here that is built so rigidly that it stays intact and just crushes somebody on the inside, you know?

• 1:51:38Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:51:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. And, uh, anecdotally, I just say this as a long time frequent regional rail rider. They moved business class to the rear of the train after this accident.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  Jesus, yeah.

• 1:51:53November Kelly?

  Okay, sure. Yeah.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  No, I've seen Cassandra crossing. You're supposed to make business class the sacrificial part of the train.

• 1:52:01November Kelly?

  It's, listen, when I get the train down to London, I always get the quiet car. And the reason why I do is because I want to be part of the crumple zone. You know, like I want to get killed instantly if it comes to that.

• 1:52:13Justin Roczniak?

  La Poldi, baby.

• 1:52:14November Kelly?

  Hmm. I want to get someone, someone's fucking folding bicycle has, but has got to go through my skull at like 500 miles an hour. Otherwise I'm not going.

• 1:52:24Liam McAnderson?

  If it, yeah, if I ain't flayed, I ain't going.

• 1:52:27November Kelly?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:28Justin Roczniak?

  So, uh, well, what did we learn?

• 1:52:30Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck Josh Shapiro forever and ever. And I'm gonna be voting for you, motherfucker.

• 1:52:34Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, this is, this is, this is something that Sam found in the NTSB docket among the injuries. I mean, some of them were horrific, but, but, but this is

• 1:52:43Liam McAnderson?

  Just a life mate.

• 1:52:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:45Liam McAnderson?

  Uh, ask me about my life.

• 1:52:47Justin Roczniak?

  So.

• 1:52:50November Kelly?

  Yeah. Injury description. I'm suing Amtrak for being attached to the fucking wheel of Samsara.

• 1:52:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58Liam McAnderson?

  Well.

• 1:52:58November Kelly?

  I mean, fair enough.

• 1:52:59Justin Roczniak?

  You know, it's, what, what did we learn? I, I think the first thing I would say is, you know, it's good to have automatic train control systems, right?

• 1:53:08November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:08Justin Roczniak?

  Most of us cannot spend 12 years meditating in a Tibetan monastery, so we never, ever have a brain fart ever again.

• 1:53:17November Kelly?

  No.

• 1:53:18Justin Roczniak?

  And if you do that, you risk escaping the cycle of Samsara, in which case you cannot become a locomotive engineer, right?

• 1:53:28November Kelly?

  Yeah, because you don't have any desires, including the desire to get the train to the station on time.

• 1:53:33Justin Roczniak?

  Oh my God, that would be so bad. Um, so having some automated systems to back you up is necessary.

• 1:53:41November Kelly?

  A rail replacement service because the existing service's driver has developed Buddha nature.

• 1:53:47Liam McAnderson?

  We're all very proud of him. We are also a little confused.

• 1:53:52November Kelly?

  We found him in the cab levitating an inch and a half above the seat.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, this is like, to kind of spin this back across to the other side of the Atlantic, you know, we're talking about the Atlantic and talking about trains. Someone should do a podcast about that. But the Bedford crash, that I keep coming back to this because there are lots of commonalities, right? The R A I B of just the rail accident investigation, you know, our N T S B just published this interim reports. There's loads of stuff that's not, that's not done. They haven't looked at fatigue records. They haven't looked at training. They haven't looked at all the second, the kind of, the kind of contributing factors. But they have said, and it's been quoted now that driver error is the cause. I will always fight the fact that driver error does not exist as a cause.

• 1:54:36Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:54:37Speaker 03

  And it's amazing the extent to which that there is within the press, including the railway press, but certainly the broader press, how little curiosity there is about, well, wait a minute. The signal that the guy, that the driver passed, that Sean passed, the signal was not protected with T P W S, right? Which is the, so there are two main signaling protection systems in the UK, in G B, should I say. There's A W S, which is the 50s one, which is the big magnet. And there's T P W S, which is the one that looks like a toast rack that has two parts that is more sophisticated. And it's the one that can actually actively apply the brakes in a much broader range of circumstances. Now, T P W S was rolled out at extreme high speed. It's a big engineering success, actually,

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  in the aftermath of crashes in the 90s, instead of the more expansive P T C equivalent, which is E T C S as now was automatic train protection. Very little of that got rolled out because it was seen as too expensive. So for T P W S. Now, we rolled out T P W S very quickly and we got rid of 95% of risk. The thing is about getting rid of 95% of risk is that once you've done that, you've got, you know, the 5% of risk becomes 100% of the risk. So what we call an auto signal, this is just like a repeater that says, there's a signal ahead and it says that. And then there's another signal behind that. So it's not saying there's a junction. It's not saying turn this way, that way. It's just saying there's a signal further ahead. It's splitting up the block, right? We didn't use T P W S to protect those because they were low risk.

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  But once you get rid of the 95%, they do become higher risk. And then if you increase the amount of traffic by three or four times, the risk increases further. And so rather than continuing to roll T P W S out, we stopped. So we're like, you know, it's not just the U S that is fucked up with the way that you do or do not roll out good signaling. T P W S, we stopped rolling it out. We said, oh, job's done. We should have kept going. We should have been protecting these auto signals. And what angers me isn't, you know, yes, that's kind of a given because Britain's a stupid dump run by Treasury. But what is frustrating is the lack of curiosity, including from the railway press, about why that didn't happen. And rather than going, well, it's tragedy, driver error. Yeah. And there are so many parallels, right?

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  You know, there are so many parallels to this, like the curiosity of it's just a guy rather than no, let's look at the systemic issues underneath. It shouldn't be down to just some, some folks doing a podcast to be the ones who are some of the loudest voices about this.

• 1:57:02Justin Roczniak?

  Have they, have they tried criminally prosecuting the driver though?

• 1:57:05November Kelly?

  God.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  Well, driver is highly dead on the Bedford crash is the thing. Yeah. He's, he's gone very deaded in the crash. He is extremely killed in the collision. So they, I mean, they might try, but no, they haven't. So, but the thing is, it'll still be, well, it's a tragedy. There's driver error. The R A I B are actually very good at going for underlying factors. So, you know, there will, the final report will be very good, I think, on that front. But in the meantime, it's, you know, as you talked about earlier with the mobile phone thing, the public consciousness gets settled on those first stories, right? And driver error is the message that's been kicked around. It's too, it'll be too long. It's still, it'll be a year before the final report comes out, by which point everyone else will have moved on.

• 1:57:47Justin Roczniak?

  Yes.

• 1:57:47November Kelly?

  God damn.

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. Sorry to be, it's, it's, it's, we're still doing, we're still in this situation.

• 1:57:52November Kelly?

  The thing is, we've, we've talked about plenty of cases of like actual like recklessness and misconduct and stuff, right? We've talked about like showing up to work drunk, right? And even that's, yeah.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Morpeth drunk guy. He drank so much. That's bad. He shouldn't have done that. That is his fault.

• 1:58:11November Kelly?

  Happen in a vacuum, right? And like, to have, you know, someone who is, as far as I'm concerned, completely blameless, right? Just, you know, be unlucky enough to fall victim to, yeah, just.

• 1:58:27Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Speaker 03

  He was as much of a passenger in this situation as everyone who was in the train behind him. This is, this is absolutely a failure of the system around him. 100%.

• 1:58:37Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. You know, that's, that's, that's where I wanted to put in the second thing we learned. You can love the trains, but the trains don't love you back.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  No, they do not.

• 1:58:45November Kelly?

  No, no, they do not.

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true.

• 1:58:48November Kelly?

  But, you know, that's, yeah, well, exactly, exactly. That's part of how you achieve train Buddha nature, you know?

• 1:58:55Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. That's true.

• 1:58:57Liam McAnderson?

  So what did the Buddha say to the hot dog bender?

• 1:59:00November Kelly?

  Give me, make me one with everything.

• 1:59:07Liam McAnderson?

  Well, no, I won't tell the joke.

• 1:59:09November Kelly?

  Sorry, Liam. Sorry, sorry.

• 1:59:13Justin Roczniak?

  My third, my third thing is, please only throw rocks at the sides of trains.

• 1:59:19November Kelly?

  Hmm. Throw it at a, like a cargo wagon that just has like nothing in it because they don't have hovos anymore. So like.

• 1:59:27Justin Roczniak?

  Well, this is the problem. We used to have open auto racks, you know, there are no walls on the side. You just see the cars. You could throw rocks through the windows of the cars.

• 1:59:34Liam McAnderson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:35Justin Roczniak?

  You know?

• 1:59:36Liam McAnderson?

  Target practice.

• 1:59:37Justin Roczniak?

  You know, we don't have that anymore. So this is, you know.

• 1:59:41Liam McAnderson?

  What happened to the America I love?

• 1:59:43Justin Roczniak?

  Exactly. I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw, I want to throw five rocks through the windows of like 1969 Mustangs, you know?

• 1:59:51November Kelly?

  Sweet land of liberty of the icing.

• 1:59:54Liam McAnderson?

  And fuck Josh Shapiro.

• 1:59:55November Kelly?

  And fuck Josh Shapiro for real.

• 1:59:58Justin Roczniak?

  That guy, that guy, that guy. I don't like that guy. I liked our previous governor.

• 2:00:04November Kelly?

  Never, never trust a prosecutor because they all build their careers on shit like this, you know? It might not be this exactly, but it's, you know, I, when I, when I was in law school, when I was in law school, I wanted to be a prosecutor because I'm, I don't know, I'm a bad person. And, you know, it's, it took me a long time to sort of reckon with the fact that actually, no, I don't. In large part because it's a, it's a terrible career, you know? That is, is built off of the, the bones of things like this, you know? And okay, sure, you might be able to get some good out of it, but in practice, I kind of think not really.

• 2:00:42Justin Roczniak?

  It does feel like there must have been some like prosecutor madness happening here, like I've never lost a case. I've never lost a single fucking case. We're gonna nail this guy's dick to the floor.

• 2:00:51November Kelly?

  Yeah. And it just, it does just happen. You can, you can just make an enemy out of somebody who wants to make his career on you being in prison forever for no reason. And also go now because, you know, feminism and, or, you know, even a non-binary person because trans rights. Um, and yeah, it just, it's, it's a miserable system.

• 2:01:14Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:01:20November Kelly?

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

• 2:01:25Liam McAnderson?

  Shake hands with danger.

• 2:01:26November Kelly?

  Shake hands with danger. The real, the real monster here was the American criminal justice system.

• 2:01:30Liam McAnderson?

  The real monster is Josh fucking Shapiro, dude.

• 2:01:33November Kelly?

  Yeah, as embodied here by Josh Shapiro. Yeah.

• 2:01:37Justin Roczniak?

  Hello, activate Windows and Devon.

• 2:01:40Speaker 03

  Fuck you. Die.

• 2:01:43Justin Roczniak?

  I live,

• 2:01:47Justin Roczniak?

  I live in the north where we still have winters sometimes. And as the Pennsylvania contingent of this podcast knows, living in the north means that your year.

• 2:01:57Liam McAnderson?

  Oh, we're, we're, oh, we exist now? Because you didn't say hi? Because you didn't say hi?

• 2:02:03Justin Roczniak?

  Living in the north means that your year consists of only two seasons, winter and roadwork season.

• 2:02:10November Kelly?

  Yeah, I think I remember Jon Snow saying this in Game of Thrones.

• 2:02:15Liam McAnderson?

  Almost winter, winter still winter construction.

• 2:02:18Justin Roczniak?

  Roadwork lasts like 10 years in that universe. Just 10 years of roadwork? That's gonna suck.

• 2:02:23Liam McAnderson?

  Fuck that. One goat half, god damn.

• 2:02:27November Kelly?

  You ever driven the M eight into Glasgow? That's what it feels like.

• 2:02:33Justin Roczniak?

  Roadwork season is that wonderful time of year when traffic cones bloom in the potholes. The air is filled with the sounds of reversing alarms and jackhammers and the skid loaders frolic in the reduced speed zones. Now, for reasons I don't fully understand, my town's public works department seemingly never quite figures out it's roadwork season until sometime in late July.

• 2:02:57November Kelly?

  ADHD procrastination is real. You see all those ads on Twitter about it, you know?

• 2:03:03Justin Roczniak?

  It's true. Yeah. Take some Adderall, see what happens.

• 2:03:08Justin Roczniak?

  This results in a lot of haphazard projects started too late that the road crews are rushing to finish before the frost sets in.

• 2:03:16November Kelly?

  Oh shit, I was joking, but maybe.

• 2:03:19Justin Roczniak?

  Our story today features one such project from years past, a bridge replacement on a creek near my house. It was the middle of October and roadwork season was drawing to a close.

• 2:03:35Justin Roczniak?

  The construction, the construction crew on the bridge had completed the abutment and the girders to span the river and were working on rebuilding the road at either end of the site. I was working as a line cook at the time and as I started chopping onions for soup, I could feel my phone begin to start to go ballistic in my pocket. When I finally checked my messages, I found I had received the following in a span of several minutes. Number A, an alert from the power company that there was a utility outage in my area. Number B, an alert from the internet company that there was a utility outage in my area.

• 2:04:13Justin Roczniak?

  Number C, my neighbor complaining about a gas smell in the local board game group chat. And number D, and a vague but urgent message from my town's emergency alert notice for residents to evacuate my neighborhood.

• 2:04:30November Kelly?

  That's good, right?

• 2:04:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh no. As I was staring at my phone, trying to figure out what the hell was happening, I received a message from my roommate. Hey, the construction workers fucked up and hit a gas main. I'm gonna go hang out downtown until everything blows over. See attached video. Let's see if I can get this to play.

• 2:04:50November Kelly?

  Oh no. We shall, we shall see. We have had bad luck with this before. Oh, portrait mode as well, huh? You ambassador, you spoil us.

• 2:04:57Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, come on, come on.

• 2:05:00Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh.

• 2:05:02November Kelly?

  You got it. You got it. You got it.

• 2:05:06Justin Roczniak?

  There we go.

• 2:05:07November Kelly?

  You got it.

• 2:05:09Justin Roczniak?

  That's the gas main going there.

• 2:05:11November Kelly?

  Oh dear.

• 2:05:12Speaker 03

  Is it better that it's visible?

• 2:05:14Justin Roczniak?

  I don't, I don't think that's, I don't, there's no audio, but uh, there is audio, but only I can hear it. It's a horrible whooshing sound.

• 2:05:23November Kelly?

  I know, it smelled crazy out there.

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  Don't light up.

• 2:05:25Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. In the rush to complete the reconstruction, the road crew had managed to put a digger blade from one of NYSCG's, NYSCG is New York State Electric and Gas, I'm gonna guess.

• 2:05:39November Kelly?

  Electric and gas, okay.

• 2:05:40Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, that sounds about right. I don't know if that's right. I just came up with that. They're, they put a digger blade into one of their medium pressure gas mains.

• 2:05:50November Kelly?

  Listen, I still haven't seen the movie yet. I, I think it's probably gonna be good. I like Inari too.

• 2:05:57Justin Roczniak?

  Firing a geyser of methane 300 feet into the sky.

• 2:06:01Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 2:06:02Justin Roczniak?

  Luckily, no, luckily no one was hurt and the evacuation was lifted several hours later. One of my neighbors complained that the police officers who had knocked on her door to tell her to run away from the explosive gas jet less than a block from her house had been horror of horrors rude to her.

• 2:06:22November Kelly?

  Okay, I kind of low key agree with this though. It's the same as the like Amtrak hat thing. It's like you're a public servant, man. You have to be a polite as robot. I don't care. If baristas can do emotional labor, you have to as well.

• 2:06:33Justin Roczniak?

  That's true. That's true.

• 2:06:35November Kelly?

  You're not, you're not different just because you're tactical, you know? Oh, you got trauma at work? You know who else gets trauma at work? Nurses. Fuck you. Be polite.

• 2:06:42Justin Roczniak?

  Ah, but they, they have qualified immunity though.

• 2:06:45Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:06:46Justin Roczniak?

  We should give baristas qualified immunity.

• 2:06:48November Kelly?

  I agree. I agree. Reaching for the barista's service weapon.

• 2:06:56Justin Roczniak?

  That's enough, that's enough flavor pumps. That's enough. Put it back.

• 2:06:59November Kelly?

  Give us, give us some barista safety thirds, actually. WTYPod at gmail.com.

• 2:07:03Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, honestly, honestly.

• 2:07:04Speaker 03

  Also, I'm over here.

• 2:07:06Justin Roczniak?

  You get to, you get to cut the order off after a certain number of syllables.

• 2:07:11November Kelly?

  I think so.

• 2:07:14Justin Roczniak?

  Yep. Sorry, you're not getting a triple pump of, I, I don't know how to do a complex Starbucks order.

• 2:07:20November Kelly?

  Socially anxious, you know, to the point of worrying that I'm inconveniencing the barista all the time. Jesus, man. I think that, no, too many.

• 2:07:30Speaker 03

  It's true. I can testify to that.

• 2:07:32Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, I'm a gentle lover. Fuck off.

• 2:07:35November Kelly?

  Listen, you two have, have this, you know, later. My point is not enough people have social anxiety. And I know we're working on it. I know we're working on it, but it needs to happen faster.

• 2:07:46Justin Roczniak?

  As I go to Starbucks, I order a drink off the menu. Excuse me, I don't go to Starbucks because currently the union is calling for boycott.

• 2:07:53November Kelly?

  What I, what I do is like, is I go to like Cafe Nero or whatever. I walk in, I look at the board, I comprehend what I want. I look at the board again. I comprehend what I want a second time. I refine that in my head into a very like distinct and clear order, right? Then I go and look at the sandwiches for a bit to try and like lower my heart rate, right? I pick up a sandwich I don't even want. I take that sandwich to the thing. I very shyly push the sandwich over the thing. I recite the thing that I said. I, I like get my coffee and I scurry away, right? That in itself is a level of imposition on a barista that they should be able to kill me if they want to. And it is incomprehensible

• 2:08:35November Kelly?

  to me that there are people who are just standing their ground, hands in their pockets going, uh, 27 pumps of hazelnut? Fuck you.

• 2:08:46Justin Roczniak?

  Fuck, no, absolutely not. I mean, this is, all right, this is the coffee shop we open is gonna be like, uh, how dare you enter my house of coffee?

• 2:08:57November Kelly?

  You enter one of those problems, house of coffee, they put the bomb collar on you, like minute one.

• 2:09:02Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. You gotta, you gotta, you gotta work with a barista looks like the head from Zardoz, you know?

• 2:09:15November Kelly?

  The steam wand gives only evil.

• 2:09:21Justin Roczniak?

  The bridge didn't quite finish in time for the end of the roadwork season and construction had to be resumed after the winter. The moral of the story here is save yourself some trouble and call 811 before you dig. And if your house is going to blow up, you can just leave.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  Just leave, just hit the bricks.

• 2:09:42November Kelly?

  You don't have to wait for the cops to be rude to you.

• 2:09:44Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah. Thanks for all the laughs and making me feel less crazy from an aspiring forester.

• 2:09:50November Kelly?

  You can just go out and just start chopping down trees. I mean, I don't recommend it, but you can do.

• 2:09:55Speaker 03

  Free on disease.

• 2:09:56Justin Roczniak?

  This might be, might be forestry conservation.

• 2:09:59November Kelly?

  Maybe, maybe they're aspiring to be a Subaru, you know? You ever consider that?

• 2:10:03Justin Roczniak?

  Good point, yeah.

• 2:10:08Justin Roczniak?

  That was safety third.

• 2:10:09November Kelly?

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

• 2:10:14Justin Roczniak?

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

• 2:10:19November Kelly?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:20Speaker 03

  Yes, for once I do. Yes. Uh, Justin Roczniak and me, the two of us, we have a new podcast. It's seven episodes, just landed as of time recording. Um, it's called, Listen to Train's Atlantic. Welcome indeed to Train's Atlantic.

• 2:10:34Justin Roczniak?

  You can learn about exciting things like, uh, um, the Bay Shore Canadian Railroad or, um, haunted train stations or, um,

• 2:10:43November Kelly?

  Nice.

• 2:10:44Justin Roczniak?

  Whatever train station that Gareth and I have been to recently.

• 2:10:48November Kelly?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:10:49Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:10:52Justin Roczniak?

  That start, many train stations start with a letter. Some start with numbers. We're only doing the letters. Uh, the numbers, the numbers might start getting difficult once you get high up in the numbers.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  Well, we, we, otherwise the podcast has to stop after 26, right? So, you know, we can just keep going. Yeah. No, it's, uh, listen, you can listen to it wherever you like. The usual places. It's the usual model, blah, blah, two a month. Uh, but also listen to all of Nova's five podcasts.

• 2:11:20November Kelly?

  You know, I mentioned it at the start, but like, uh, you know, three hours ago, but I'm doing a little Patreon thing where I'm just writing about the process of getting surgery. Um, so everything's gonna be free on there eventually. It's just if you want to, you can pay me five bucks a month for it and you can read it a week early or whatever. It's really just a tip jar. But it's patreon.com slash post octoberist. You can find me on there. Um, listen to all the other podcasts. Listen to, uh, yeah, 10,000 losses.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  10k losses. Listen, yes. Yeah. Listen to, uh, listen to Real Matter if you like as well. We do this sort of thing. Things of this nature. Oh yeah. Listen to Nova, Nova did a Real Matter episode on the history PFI part one. That was a lot of fun. Listen to that. Really. We call Joe Major a twink. If that sounds like your deal.

• 2:12:07November Kelly?

  Part two forthcoming.

• 2:12:09Justin Roczniak?

  I think by the time this, this has come out, uh, uh, Jay and I will have done a big stream about Transport Fever 3 and why we don't like it.

• 2:12:17November Kelly?

  Oh, you don't like that? Fuck, I was gonna pick it up. Okay.

• 2:12:21Justin Roczniak?

  No, no, no. I, I don't like it for esoteric reasons.

• 2:12:26November Kelly?

  We count those. We count those when it comes to me not buying stuff. Yeah. I still don't have City Skylines 2 because you didn't like it, right? Like you, you don't know your own influence with me.

• 2:12:38Justin Roczniak?

  Nah, that's true. That's true. I don't know if that one's still bad or not. I'd need to, I need to open it back up.

• 2:12:44Speaker 03

  Nah, skip that one. Go to the Lego one. It's fine.

• 2:12:46Justin Roczniak?

  Oh, that one sounds like it's gonna be fun. Yeah.

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  Sounds like a podcast.

• 2:12:51Justin Roczniak?

  Yeah, I think so. I think that was a podcast.

• 2:12:53November Kelly?

  You don't have to go home. You can't stay here.

• 2:12:56Justin Roczniak?

  Yes, I am home. Shit.