Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: Subways: HUH! What are they good for?

Episode Date: March 24, 2018

As ubiquitous as they've become, it's easy to overlook the marvels of engineering that are subways. Chuck and Josh go boring as they explore these systems of tubes that must circumnavigate rock, rivers, cables and more to get you where you're going. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Happy Friday afternoon, everybody. This is Chuck here with this week's stuff you should know, select, select, shun. It's called Subways, colon, huh, what are they good for? I can't remember if I came up with that silly,

fun name or if Josh did. I think it was me, but at any rate, this is from September 27th, 2012. And this is just a great episode. It's just a classic stuff you should know. I'm fascinated by Subways and we kinda hit on all cylinders on this one from the creation and invention and history of Subways to how they're built today.

They're just really a pretty remarkable form of transportation and you should know more about it. So, enjoy Subways, huh, what are they good for? Right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

Just sitting there normally, right? Not doing anything unusual. I think we should have started this with taking the A train. I think we should have changed up our music. Let's do that. Okay, how about this? All right.

Hurry, hurry, hurry. Take the A train to find the quickest way to get to Harlem. We did. Okay. Thanks to the magic of post-production. We did. So that was taking the A train. Who made that song?

Oh boy, I don't know who originally composed it, to be honest. Well, I think we should find out. Well, who just performed it? Well, there's many versions. Well, what's the one you selected like a week from now? I don't know. The Shurels?

Did they do A train? No, it's a jazz tune. Oh, John Coltrane. Did he do it? I don't know if he ever did. Let's go with Coltrane, man. Or maybe I should just do it. Okay.

Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Oh, is that that song? Yeah, taking the A train. That's a good song. Is it instrumental? Because you know a lot of those instrumentals actually have lyrics. What, the old jazz tunes?

Yeah, really? Yeah. Take in the A train. Oh, but that's it. I bet you're right. Okay, well. Let's go with Duke Ellington's version. Duke Ellington did the A train at the beginning

of this episode. I hope everyone liked it. The Duke. We haven't heard it yet. That's right. So, Chuck, I know that you know what a subway is because we've been on the subway together. Yeah.

Do you remember when we were in New York? I believe it was for ABC Go. Our first little opportunity there. And we were going to meet Yumi. Oh, yeah. And I remember I met Yumi in that bar afterward. Right, yeah. Well, I mean, I worked with her,

but then I was like. That was the first time you ever hung out? Yeah, exactly. So we were going, and that was my first time in the New York subway. And I remember we were looking at the subway map. Yeah. And the whole thing just turned into the series

of confusing lines to me. And suddenly I was blind and holding your arm. And I had the mind of a child, and not even like a really bright child either. It was just kind of like, what does it say? And I can report after being back in New York with Yumi several times that I do that to her still. Oh, really?

That's because we're enabling you is what's going on. I think it is. I think if you guys had thrown me in and be like, Yeah, figure it out. Figure it out. I could have. Yeah. But I don't have to.

Right. And it's kind of nice because it's really confusing. So when you go to New York, you just kind of like just go with Yumi's wind wherever she blows. Kind of, but the wind is coming from her heavy size that she's the one who has to like read the subway map all the time.

Yeah. Um, but now that I've read this article, how subways work, I don't understand the New York subway system any more than I did before I read this article, but I can tell you that the rails are made of 35 foot long pieces of carbon steel that are five and a half inches tall

and one and a half inches wide. That's right. And you could run any train, any train on the world, in the world on those rails. Not in the world, but at least in New York. Cause I guess there's different gauges, but the New York subway system was designed so that you could just kind of, hey,

if you wanted to like go to Cleveland on a subway train, you could. Yeah. That's how it's designed. Yeah. They could put it on just a regular railroad track. Right. And go to Cleveland.

And then you get to Cleveland and you go, geez, I want to go back to New York. Cleveland's where the first stoplight in the country was. Did you know that? Really? Yeah. I like Cleveland. I'm just kidding.

Yeah. Home away from home is now. Oh yeah. Well, Emily thought it was a, no, they're in Akron, but yeah, it's a suburb of Cleveland. I never realized that. And I'm from Ohio and I didn't realize that it was a suburb.

Yeah, it's like a half hour or so. I always thought Akron was more toward Dayton. All right. So Dayton, let's talk about it. All right. Let's talk about subways. The Metro in France. Yeah.

And Paris. Yeah. 547 yards. Every 547 yards you're going to find a subway station. Yeah. That's pretty good. No, no, no. Not even.

There, there's no building in Paris that's more than 547. All right. Well, I'll watch that one. No, but it really, you help build up the drama. Okay. Yeah. The tube in London.

Mind the gap, everyone. Yeah. 275 stations. And our dear beloved New York subway system. 468 as of now. Packed into like 260 square miles. 240, yeah, which is, that's pretty impressive. And that's why the New York subway system

looks like a plate of spaghetti. Man, it's really tough to read. It's not just me. It can't just be me. It's not. You just have to zero in on your area. And then you're like, oh, just, you got to blur your eyes and block out everything else.

Yeah. And then everyone behind you is looking at you like. Tourist. Yeah, exactly. He's got his eyes crossed. And why, why does that guy next to him look like Ronnie Millsap all of a sudden? Because I saw him walk down here just fine.

The London Underground is the oldest, opened in 1863. The Metro was next in 1900. And New York, not far behind in 1904. And Tracy, who wrote a very thorough article. This is a Tracy V. Wilson joint. Yeah, you know, it's going to be good. Yeah. She points out that they all kind of

happen within pretty dense space of time because the Industrial Revolution. People are out and farming and they're like, screw this. I need a decent egg roll. I'm going to move into the city where I can get a job in a factory. Well, yeah. And before that, there weren't jobs in factories

because there weren't factories. Part of the Industrial Revolution was the rise of factories. That's true. Everybody threw down their agrarian tools, like scythe. Forget this hoe. I'm out of here. Right, right. Clever wordplay.

Thank you. And they moved to the cities. And when they moved to the cities, all of a sudden, there was a lot of people who needed to move about. And they didn't have cars, partially because cars hadn't been invented yet. That was one reason. But also, even beyond that, not everybody

could afford a horse, but they still had to get some place. So city fathers in these areas, Paris, London, London first. And then because I think it was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. And then New York said, all right, we need to figure out how to move a bunch of these people at once.

And what they came up with was mass transit. But it was all above ground mass transit. And it involved horses. Remember the Wing Cries Typhoid Mary episode? One horse produces 20 pounds of poop per day. And New York had like 100,000 horses or something like that walking around. Yeah, you know how much poop a subway train produces?

Zero. There's probably a couple of guys pooping on the train. Yes, but you would attribute that to the guy on the train. It's not really the subway. That's true. It is not exhaust, as you would call horses poop. No one can call it that. So you're right.

They had horse-drawn carriages and these cool things called omnibuses, which were longer horse-drawn carriages. Now they're known by their slang term, bus. Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's what a bus is. I'm glad you brought that up. OK.

People in New York, tourists in New York, if you're in New York, you got it all figured out. But tourists in New York, I would recommend that you occasionally take a bus trip. Don't be afraid of the bus. Like a regular bus or a tourist bus? No. Like a double-tanker bus.

Don't take those. No, a regular bus. Your little metro card, you might even know this if you've just been to New York like once. It works on the buses, as well as the subways. And a lot of times, if you're like uptown at the park, you're like, man, I can't find a subway stop near me. I need to get downtown.

Just walk to the edge. And chances are, you're going to see a bus with its own little lane that's just going south. And you get a nice views of everything. You're out and about, up above ground. And that's just my advice to tourists. Don't be afraid of the buses in New York. It could be a great way to get around.

There's also cabs, you know? Yeah, but those are expensive, man. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not when Discovery Channel's famous. When I'm there on my own dime, I take a lot of buses and subways. Do you really?

Yeah, sure. And in the subway, yeah. But I didn't realize you took the bus. Yeah, buses are great. I had no idea. So you take the bus, and you know where your local elector lives. That's right.

That's pretty impressive, Chuck. So what happened with these buses, though, and with all the horse poop, as they said, this is getting out of hand. We need to go underground because there's no more room up here. Yeah. We'd love to build trains. But we can't because there's too many people and too many bagel shops.

So London did it first, right? Yes. 1863 is when it opened. Yeah. God knows when they started construction. I bet someone knows. God. Besides God.

And then within 40 years, I guess, Paris opened theirs because it was such a huge success. Yeah. And I mean, it was just brilliant. The problem is, it was also planning-wise. It was a brilliant move. But construction-wise, it makes almost no sense whatsoever. It's like, hey, where's the hardest place

we can put this mass transit system? I've got it through a river, like under bedrock. Right. And basically through every obstacle that we can create, that we've already created. Yeah, that's a good point. Let's talk about this. These days, they have this really cool machine called

a tunnel boring machine. Yeah. Did you see these? Yeah, it looks awesome. It's pretty amazing. It's basically like a trimmer worm. Yeah. But a mechanized one that won't turn on you.

Exactly. And I hope people caught that little reference. Which one? So this TV tunnel boring machine has discs and scrapers. They crushes rock into pebbles and sand. It has like a conveyor belt that comes out the back. So it is kind of like excreting. Yep.

And then dudes get rid of that stuff. And it actually supports the tunnel as it digs and does a really, really great job. We all love the TBM. They're fairly new, though. They didn't have these back in the day. So back in the day, they had to do it by hand. Yeah.

By hand. Picks, shovels, dynamite. Or TNT, depending on where your preferences lie. That's true. Yeah, so this was kind of a problem in that you didn't have a conveyor belt. You had to use a pick. You frequently ran into rock.

And sometimes you had to dig into the bedrock. Which, you know, bedrock, that's just like that's the actual Earth's surface. Everything else, like mud and dirt, that's just like runoff. Yeah. Did you realize that? Yeah. I just recently realized that.

I've known that for years. But that bedrock, it's kind of tough to get to. Yeah, New York City alone had 8,000 laborers to work on this project, about 60 of which died. And I don't even know if they have account on the injury sustained. Yeah. I'm sure it was like 60 a day injured.

You think? I don't know. Thousands of injuries. Let's just say that. Did you look up the new Austrian tunneling method? I did. I want to know about this. I didn't have a chance to.

I can't tell you. Please tell me. It had like eight different tenets. So it's not so much a method of digging as it is, as Tracy points out, a collection of techniques for digging. And finding out where to dig. Yeah, where to dig and how to dig.

So what are they? Like never dig on a Tuesday? Are they random like that? No, no. They're not random like that. But we should do an article on tunneling period, because it's pretty amazing. OK.

And the reason they called it the new Austrian method was to distinguish it from the old Austrian method. Was there really an old Austrian method? Yeah, I guess that they must be the king tunnelers, like Charles Brunson. Is he Austrian? No, but he was the tunneler in Great Escape. I didn't know that.

He was the tunnel expert. I got you. So that was from Reservoir Dogs. That was a line. At one point someone says, he's like Charles Brunson in Great Escape. He was digging tunnels. Great line.

How did they miss that line? I don't know. Well, so you just referenced the reference of a movie. I did. The method that they used for a long time was the cut and cover method, which this is crazy. They literally rip up a street, put a subway there, and then build the street back on top.

It makes uttering complete sense for a couple of reasons. Number one, subways are meant to serve areas, streets, right? It's basically like a street that happens to be underground that moves a bunch of people at once. So following a street makes a lot of sense, especially if you're a planner. The problem is you are completely ripping up a street temporarily, because what you're doing

is you're digging a trench and then rebuilding the earth above it. But the good thing is, is you can rebuild the earth above it even stronger. It's like Steve Austin or something like that. Like you dig a trench as far down as you want your subway to be. And you put in pilings.

You drive them down, preferably into bedrock if you can. And then you put like tresses and beams over those. Nice buttress every now and then. And then you can rebuild the ground in the road up above it. You can also reroute any sewer lines, any power lines, any anything through these tresses and beams. Frankly, I'm a cut and cover method guy. Well, it also makes sense because the streets

are probably not going to, you're probably not going to run into as many obstacles. Like a basement of a major building? Yeah, exactly, because there wouldn't be a major building in the middle of the street. There was a cool part in The Devil in the White City. Would you ever read that? No, man, that's on the list.

I need to get to that. You like it a lot. Or they're talking about how Chicago built the first skyscrapers. Oh, yeah. And basically, they figured out how to float the foundations of the building above the bedrock, because the bedrock was really far down,

and there was like this sandy shifting soil. Wow. And I can't remember it specifically, but it's like, wow, I'm riveted by this description of an architectural technique, a building technique, that they figured out. So you didn't even need the murders. I found them superfluous.

Really? Yeah. It was a good book. And I'm not one for popular fiction like that. It's a popular semi-fiction. Historical fiction? Yeah. It's good.

I like it. So we were talking about obstacles, and that is a big problem when you're digging tunnels, especially under a city that already has an infrastructure in place. You're going to run into things that you can move sometimes. You're going to run into things that you can't move sometimes that you have to move around.

So have you ever been in a subway, especially New York, that really slows down and takes one of those hard turns? It may be because that's the direction you need to start going now, but more than likely it's because they had to reroute it. Especially if it's an old section of the subway. Yeah, very true. Because now you can just put the TVM on that thing,

and it's like, whatever you need, guys, I'll go get it. Well, yeah, but I'm talking more along the lines of man-made obstructions like gas lines, pneumatic lines, water lines. No, but with those, water lines are probably very tough, but all of those can be rerouted. You can basically reroute the line rather than reroute the subway line.

This probably depends on which one's more cost-effective is what they go with. You can also, like I said, if you're doing a cut and cover method, you can basically hang those same lines from these. You can use the beams and tresses as support for those same lines. That's true.

That makes sense. Psycho furniture. Absolutely. On the podcast, Hadood90s called David Lash her and Christine Taylor, stars of the cool classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use hey dude as our jumping off point,

pack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like Poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Sometimes, as Tracy pointed out, you see lines that aren't on any blueprints. You're like, wait a minute, what's this big pipe doing here? Yeah. It doesn't show up on any registry

that we have for the city. We got to find out what this is to see if we can move it. Yeah. Maybe it's old and unused, and you can just throw it away. That'd be great. Maybe it's full of dangerous gases, which is not great. Or full of water. Or maybe you hit an aquifer.

Yeah, water is a big one. If you hit an aquifer, well, you know what that is. That's just a bunch of water pooled on top of the bedrock, which is really the surface of the earth. You can hit an aquifer. You might have to, say, cross a river, like the East River. And when you do that, you have to generally tunnel under it, which is extremely dangerous.

Because then not only you don't just have a street that can collapse on top of you, you have a river that can collapse on top of you. And rivers tend to weigh more than streets. Yeah, and you can drown in a river. You can't drown in a street unless it's full of water. I thought this was pretty clever how they was at Paris in the Seine before we're drowning.

So they basically put down pods. And then sent compressed air into the pod and blew all the water out. And then men went into these pods and worked. And they used the same thing, a similar technique, in building the Brooklyn Bridge pylons. But the problem was people would come up and get the bends from working beneath the water surface,

but in a dry area of compressed air. Because they were down so far, and they just come up without thinking about it and get the bends. Well, the good news is, if you're working under the water like that, you're probably going to get a little pay bump, like hazard pay, as they call it. And the other cool thing they did in Paris, too, was they found that some of this mud and wet dirt, which

is mud, was too hard to deal with. So they froze it with calcium chloride. And all of a sudden, they removed it. It was a big chunk of clay. Yeah, pretty neat. It was very clever. And that was old-timey construction, too. Oh, was that back in the day?

I believe so. Wow. I didn't realize that they were that clever back then. It's pretty smart. You can also basically use the cut and cover method. You pick on that. And I love that. I'm going to make you a t-shirt that says cut and cover.

I would wear that. It just makes sense to me. Yeah, it does. You can use the cut and cover method across a river. That's what they did in the San Francisco Bay. They basically just cut the tunnel. They wanted and prefabricated the sections of the subway tunnel and put it in the trench

and then just cover it back up. And I guess waited for the water to leak out over the course of several decades. Right. In the very old cities like Paris, they have also uncovered some pretty interesting things, like catacombs full of human bones. Yeah.

There's a whole documentary on that. Really? Catacombs, yeah. Cannonballs, quarries, very deep quarries. This is kind of cool. I thought this was very cool. Some of the quarries in Paris were so deep that they had to actually build bridges,

underground bridges for the subway to get across. It's an elevated train underground. Yeah. And that's? Across ancient Roman quarries. Man. I mean, that is crazy. Yeah.

There's a lot of cool stuff like that, like abandoned subway stations. Yeah. If you're into that kind of thing. I know a lot of people who listen to this are. There's a website called nycsubway.org. And they have little reports on stations when they were built, when they were decommissioned, why,

photos taken of them after they were abandoned. And there's actually a little trick, Chuck, where if you were on the sixth train. I know you're talking about. Do you? I think so. The city hall stop? Yeah.

Yeah. So if you're on the sixth train and you're headed toward the Brooklyn bridge stop and you stay on, right, the train will actually go around a loop to turn around and go the other way. That loop goes through an old abandoned metro stop or MTA stop. And it's this incredible stained glass architecture,

like preserved turn of the century subway station that's just like frozen in time. It was in operation from like 1904 to 1945. They used to make everybody get off at Brooklyn bridge, but now they'll let people stay on. Do they? Yeah. Because I couldn't find recent information.

I saw an article today that said they did that for a while, and now they're not. Oh, really? And then I saw another one that said, no, you can. I wonder if it's just arbitrary, depending on who's watching. I know that they cleaned it up in 2004 and made it kind of, I don't think they put tons of money toward restoration, but they cleaned it up really nice

and allowed light to come through the stained glass. And for a little while, they let people stop and get off and kind of tour it. Oh, really? But no, they shut that down. Yeah, because the whole reason, well, one of the big reasons they shut it down is because there's such a tight curve that the modern subway cars can't sit flush up

against the platform. So there's a pretty big gap that people would have to jump over to get off. So I can imagine you can't get off. But from what I saw, it was a 2010 article. It said you can stay on now. Well, I've been meaning to check that out. I'm going in November.

I'll check it out. Yeah, do, let me know, report back. I will report back. OK. So rolling stock or what these trains are actually called. And in some cities, the rolling stock is automated. Like Denmark, the one they're building now, doesn't have drivers, which is kind of neat.

They have laser beams and all these crazy surveillance systems to drive the train, the computerized what, no? Yeah, laser beams. Laser beams. Well, they do. They do. And they navigate it. They use brake heat to generate power.

They will even let you know if someone's stuck in the door. Yeah, well, open the door back up. And did not drive away. Not drive away while someone's stuck. Yeah. In New York, they're actually trying out some of these now, too, actually. Yeah, so I didn't see when this article was written,

but Tracy made mention of the addition that's being made to Long Island. Is this going on still? And just this revamping that's going on? I imagine it's constant. Well, the revamping, I think it was a $17 billion bid in 94. And they're adding new lines. They're trying to spruce up the trains and replace the old cars.

They're improving the air circulation, which she points out, just because it's open up top and a little bit of air can get in doesn't mean you don't have to have a massive air circulation system. If you've ever been deep within the bowels of the subway system, then you might be wondering if it's working properly. But it is, or you'd be dead. Yeah, you'd die.

It takes a tremendous amount of air to be recirculated to allow humans to live underground. I think she said something. Yeah, 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air per minute is what they're shooting for. I don't think it's there now, but that's their goal. Should we talk about some of the signals? Yeah, train signals?

Yeah, so before, a long, long time ago, when a driver reached a stoplight and had to come to a stop, they had to put a key in and turn it to reset the stoplight and be able to drive. And there's a term called keying by. So they do still use it. Now it's much more automated. But there's still a set of signals

where it's like stop, proceed with caution, green light. Just go as fast as you can. Yeah, they do have speed limits. Yeah, of course. Yeah, they're posted too, aren't they? Yeah, I mean, the driver can see them, at least. Imagine if you were looking and you were up front, you could probably see them.

You could. And tap the driver on the shoulder and be like, we are going way faster than that. Yeah, I mean, Marta here in Atlanta, which is sort of a subway, you can ride right up front by the person. And I've done this many times and just kind of spied in on how you drive the Marta train.

And every time I look, I'm like, I could totally drive this thing right now. Yeah, dude, it's just like it's got a little forward lever and a neutral and a reverse and a brake. And that's pretty much it. I could go do it right now. You could drive with your arms crossed, right? Have you seen, it's been going around Facebook, the Marta map

compared to the rest of the world? It's pretty funny. I haven't seen it on Facebook. It's like New York, London, Paris, and they all look like a plate of spaghetti and then it's Atlanta with its little plus sign. It's got two branches. But I will argue that, I mean, it does suck, in a way.

But I will argue that Atlanta didn't build its subway in 1863. They built it in 1970 something and stopped. Yeah, but yeah, it stopped. OK, I was going to say, this isn't a work in progress. No, they've added some stuff since then. Yeah, a little bit, but really, it does suck in every way. I mean, it's great if it goes from the one place you need to go

to the other place you need to go. Sure. And chances are, that's not the case. And sometimes it does, though, especially if you live near a rail line. But even still, you make one big L. Yeah, I mean, it's great for me on, like, Falcon's Game Day. You know, right down the street, hop on there with my brown bag,

hop off and right at the stadium. Yeah. It's nice. Your brown bag. You know, for hyperventilation. Right. In case something bad goes down. In case the 600,000 cubic liters of air isn't moved through.

No, most of Atlanta is above ground. Yes, it is. In the subway, really. That's what I'm saying, it sucks in every way. These things run on electricity these days, not like the old steam train days. Yeah, I don't even know that that was worth mentioning. Well, I think so, because you have the third rail

that everyone knows is very dangerous. Yeah, 625 volts in New York. And you have 120 coming into your house. Really? Yeah. Oh, wow. So it'll get you. It'll fry a rat.

Like, they're not kidding. Yeah. Sometimes the third rail is between the two tracks. Sometimes it's on the outside. And then you generally have a brush or a shoe, sliding shoe, or a wheel that connects to that. And that supplies power to the train. And they used to have its own power plant

to run the subway system in New York. In New York, yeah. I guess these days they just mooch it from everyone. Yes. If you follow a cord in a subway, it's actually going into somebody's living room. It's coming through the window. Yeah.

Bye. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by

step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. All right. I think the fact of the podcast, I'll give it to you, but to me, it's the geometry train. Yeah, I've seen these before, but you have? I've seen ones that were just, it looks like a little platform or something like that going by. Yeah. Well, or I dreamt one.

Yeah. Uh, yeah. This one in the diagrams, like full of computers and people, I haven't seen that, but basically a geometry train. Like if you have, you know, hundreds and thousands and millions of miles of subway track and some of it dates back a hundred years, thanks to seismic activity, fire, weather, people. Heavy trains. Yes.

All this stuff is going to basically pull your tracks out of alignment and tracks need to be fairly precise to keep trains from like hopping off. Yeah. Right. So to, to basically keep or find, I should say, the rails that are out of alignment, they have this thing called the geometry train, which have your lasers that you're so fond of. And it basically just goes down the track.

Every track and these things are running like 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah. The one in New York runs at all times. Right. Pretty cool. And, and you would think it would have to. Yeah. Sure.

I wonder how long it takes for a geometry train. To hit every inch of track. Yeah. Man, that's a good question. It's got to take years. Yeah. But anyway, it just rides along and takes precise measurements of the alignment of the tracks and anything that's over 1.25 inches out of alignment.

There's a report that's filed and says, go fix that track. And they also, just as an added bonus, the geometry train finds hotspots using heat sensors and shoots them with fire extinguishers. Right. Like if there's something flammable near the track that could combust. Yeah. Whether it's like a Doritos bag, a cool ranch Doritos bag, any kind of Doritos bag. Well, the dude's probably already toast anyway.

If he's on the third rail, he is. And that's a good reference for our spontaneous combustion podcast. That's right. In New York City and in many cities, the fare does not cover the cost of running this massive system. Yeah. Take about half. Yeah.

New York. So if you're complaining about the price of a subway in New York, just remember it could be double. Yeah. If they were to cover all the costs. So count your blessings, New Yorkers. Yeah. Don't complain to me.

New York for big government if you like the subway. Tracy points out that the subways and at least the tunnels over the years have been the site of refuge and terror. That was a great setup, Chuck. It's true though. Oh yeah, it is. During World War I and II, in London and Paris, I believe people sought cover against air raids in the subways.

But World War I, I was like, that's when they were dropping bricks on each other. Like really, that's how you would take down a plane. You'd fly over another airplane and drop a brick and just go right through a wing and that was that for the plane. Was that it? Yeah. I thought they at least had the little tube, like the boom, and it would shoot something like somewhere.

That's a mortar, but that's ground based. Oh, those are mortars? Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, I guess you would still need to take refuge against a mortar. It doesn't have to be a plane, and a mortar comes through an air, so yeah, air raid. If you want to get technical. But yes, World War II for sure, during the blitz of London.

There are a lot of people underground in the tube seeking help in shelter. That's right, as are the mole people. If you haven't seen the documentary Dark Days, highly recommended. Is that about the mole people or this is like, it's a group of homeless people. They don't identify themselves as mole people. I think mole people is one of those terms that, you know, the people above ground made up somewhat sensational, but there are people living underground, some haven't been up in a long, long time.

And this dude made the documentary. I think he actually went underground and lived there for a couple of years to do this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So he wasn't like, you know, I'll be down there for a few hours on Wednesday. But then I have my spa appointment after that, so I need to get back above ground. And then in 1995, everyone remembers the Tokyo Seren Gas episode. Yeah.

Killed 12 people. Sure. That was credibly frightening. London. 2007. The what? 2007. It was July 7.

Oh, was it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Was that significant or? No. That's just how they refer to it. Like we refer to 9-11 as 9-11. Oh, and they say 7-7.

7-7. Interesting. Yeah. So in 9-11, it destroyed subway station and damaged some of the track. I think we talked about that in the 9-11 Memorial episode. Yeah, I think you're right. Didn't they preserve it somehow? Like one of the trains is going to be in the museum?

I think so. Because that rang a bell to me. I'm going to hit that up in November as well. Oh, man, I can't wait to go to that. Yeah, me too. It's going to be something else. Originally you had tickets, then that became coins. These days you might have an RFID ticket.

I think I was in Switzerland. It was like an honor system thing. Really? Yeah, I remember being there and looking around like, I don't see where you put the ticket in or anything. I think it's just honor system. It was either Switzerland or Sweden. I think it was Switzerland.

And I just remember thinking these people are crazy. Right. This is the United States. Dummy, so you just didn't pay a cent? Just to teach them a lesson? Yeah. No, I paid my fare. So Chuck, train car, if you are a train car, how many axles are you going to go through

if you're in New York, if you're part of their system in your lifetime? Well, you're going to live about 40 to 50 years. You will go through 24 axles and 24 motors over that span, so that'll be two years. Right. You're going to get gussied up a little. You're going to get 48 wheels over that time. Not bad. Not at once.

But at the end of your lifespan, they will dump you in the ocean off the coast of South Carolina. Have you seen pictures of that? Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty remarkable. I found a whole little gallery. It's only like 10 pictures.

Yeah. But on FastCodeDesign.com, they have, it's called surreal photos of subway cars being thrown into the ocean. It is surreal. It's really new. Because you look at that and you're like, no, whoa, how could you? Yeah. And then, oh, it's good for the environment somehow.

Right. As long as they take the gas out first and the oil. All right. So I got some more little fun things over here. The overhaul and repair shop on Coney Island is where it all goes down. They have over 1, 2, 3, over 500,000 square feet of shop space. Can you just count it that fast? Yeah.

I just, you know. 1, 2, 3, 500,000. I wasn't counting each square foot. I guess. And this is where everything goes to get worked on in New York. Everything. They can even work on regular trains. They can store 1,800 subway cars there and they have a car wash that has.

Subway car wash? Yeah. Okay. They didn't make it extra money on it. They also have bake sales. 2.75. It cleans the exteriors of over 1,000 cars once a week. That's 50,000 washes in a year.

That's a lot of washes. Then they just came out with the new survey on the New York subway system and the queue line was ranked the number one line. Which where is that? I'm not sure. Though, queue runs between Coney Island, Stowell Avenue in Brooklyn and Astoria, Dittmas, Boulevard and Queens. So in other words, that's the one that one takes.

So it's very clean? It's very clean. And for the fourth year in a row, the C train was ranked as the worst. It failed in all four measures, amount of scheduled service, delays caused by mechanical breakdowns, cleanliness and announcements. Whether or not the announcements are even something you can hear that makes sense or whether it's just garbled mess. See, this is why I can't do it by myself.

Yeah. Well, you certainly don't get any help most of the time from the conductor? Yeah. Driver? Yeah. Yeah. We should know this. I would think conductor.

Ticket taker. Ticket taker. And then New York ranks number seven in ridership in the world. Tokyo is first, Moscow, Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, Guangzhou, where is that? China. Is it? I would imagine. Well, I mean.

That's a Chinese word. I just haven't heard of that. Paris, Mexico City and Hong Kong, London's not even in the top 10 in ridership. And that's the number one. But you know why? Because World War II happened and everybody got cars afterward. Yeah, that's true. And a lot of subway lines just kind of fell into disrepair and like a whole generation

was raised without really using subways. Yeah. And black cabs are so roomy and private. But not just in London and in the United States especially. Yeah. That's true. I think about the LA and wider cars become the predominant form of transportation. Number of miles traveled by an average subway car in between repairs in New York, 1982, that

was 7,000, 2011, 172,000. But I think that means they're taking better care of them, not that they're just shirking their responsibilities. New York in 2011, all the subways combined traveled 342 million miles. And in total New York's 468 stations are only 60 fewer than the rest of the subway systems in the United States combined. Wow. Pretty cool.

That's my favorite for sure. And end to end. Now I have these. If you laid the tracks end to end, New York cities would go from New York to Chicago. That's it. You're going to get cars or something. No, just New York to Chicago. Really?

Yeah. I'm a little disappointed. And the lowest station, if you've ever felt a little weird at 191st Street in Manhattan, that's because you are 180 feet below ground. Huh. Crazy. Probably his schist. He ran into a schist problem.

So they had to go down. You should tell people what that is. Oh, it's very hard rock. It's a metamorphic rock and it tends to flake rather than break. So it's very hard to get through. That's my motto. Flake, don't break. We came up with like three mottos and catchphrases in this one.

Cut and cover. Flake, don't break. And I guess, don't take the C train. Is that? That was the other one. Maybe. And the C train is like, it's insult to injury because I think the A, C and E are like the blue line and the A and the E are doing pretty well and the C is like the ugly stepchild.

Where is it? Where does it go? Oh, it goes all over. You can get it down in the West Village and then I believe it goes north and then cuts over somewhere around midtown and then goes up the East side, I think. It doesn't go into Brooklyn? I don't think so. Is it the L train?

I don't remember. You knew more than I do, man. I miss the old, and I guess they still have some, but the old red, like the seven train I remember had those old red trains that look like trains. They didn't look like subways. They look like regular locomotives to me. I like my subways to look like subways. Trains should look like trains.

It smells like poop. Gum. Apparently in New York, the gum is so bad and some that you can lose your shoe. I can see that. You can actually get mired in the gum. You got anything else? No. Give up your seat for the ladies.

That's what I got to say. That's a big one. For sure. Yeah. Good going, Chuck. That's a fine ending. If you want to learn more about subway etiquette and the tunnel boring machine and the cut and cover method, you can type in subways, S-U-B-W-A-Y-S, into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com.

It'll bring out this fine article by Tracy V. Wilson. Since I said search bar, it's time for Lissy and your man. This one was an anniversary of two young people in love, and we had something to do with that. A few years back, Nathan was trying and failing to win over my heart, and then he began striking up conversations about the weirdest things like abandoned cities, blood pressure, and robots. I found this odd at first, but then began to love this quirk of his. It's like, she's in love with us.

Let's get real. Yeah, not Nathan. He's in love with the blood pressure episode? Yeah. Well, that's what she says. That's what she said. Long story short, he ended up winning me over. Not long ago, I was poking around his ithens library.

Uh-oh. Yeah, that's dangerous, and discovered the source of his information, you two. We both love the show now and sometimes sneak out of our houses to make spontaneous midnight trips to McDonald's and listen to your show while eating Big Macs in the car. Young loves so sweet like that. Yeah, sweet and terrible for your arteries. From time to time, I'll make him pancakes for dinner, and we'll listen. I love that.

And we'll listen as we really I do all the cooking. He does, however, get a little agitated whenever I mention that Chuck has a sexy voice. Can you just see him like throwing his pancakes and stomping around the apartment? Josh is sexy. And that is from Monique in California, and congratulations, Monique and Nathan, pancakes for dinner. That's right. A couple that listens to SYSK together stays together.

Exactly. Let's see if we brought you together. I want to hear about that, right? Sure. If we brought you and a loved one together, or estranged you from your family, either way, we want to know about it. You can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.