Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 166: The Privatization of British Rail

Episode Date: October 10, 2024

folks what if we introduced competition to a natural monopoly? that's a good idea right? see gareth on RAILNATTER: https://www.youtube.com/@GarethDennisTV Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Alright, we're going. Yeah, we're five minutes in actually. Yeah. Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak, I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go.

I'm November Kelly, I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam, hi, my name's Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I'm November Kelly. I'm the person who's talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay Liam. Yay Liam. Hi, my name's Liam McAnderson. My pronouns are he and him. I'm the person who's both talking and trying to dial in this goddamn power boy file. And we have a guest. Jesus. Hi, my name is guest. Yeah, it's me, Gareth. My pronouns are he, him. And I don't have a job. Hi Gareth. I have a family, but no job.

That's one of the worst combinations. We'll talk about that, I assume. Cause like, job and family, all good. Job and no family, potentially pretty good, depending on your feelings about it. No family and no job, eh, kinda sad. Family no job, that's, mm, crisis time. It becomes a headache. Yeah, it's fine.

Thankfully we have a really good safety net in the UK for these conditions. That safety net being ADHD and having six paying jobs all at once in the background. Thank you for that. In fact, no, it's just the Patreon people are giving me... they're currently paying for a week's worth of rent a month, so that's... Thank you. Thank you Patreon people. Not your Patreon people, they're not paying me anything.

ALICE Yeah, go and do that. We'll put the plug up front for once. Railnatter. Go and subscribe to the Patreon. LIAM Go subscribe to Railnatter, yes. ALICE Absolutely. JUSTIN Yeah, no, we'll get to that anyway. Sorry.

There's something on screen though, which is quite nice. I see it and it handles messiah plays whenever I see it, which is quite nice. Pleasing, pleasing, roundel, or whatever. It's not roundel because it's not round. The CIS, the corporate identity symbol, isn't it beautiful. We finally found a good sis. It's the British Rail double arrows symbol. Guess what?

This doesn't exist anymore. ALICE Well, I mean, it's still at some stations. It's still the symbol four station, because it was too good to quit. RILEY Yeah, it's still owned by the DFT. It's still the symbol, and it's been reinvented. There's a new version of it. Symbol two is gonna be rolled out, but more on that in the future as well. ALICE Symbol two?

Is that what we're calling it? RILEY Literally, symbol two. Yeah, they're calling it symbol two. symbol 2 that is gonna be rolled out, but more on that in the future as well. Symbol 2? Are we calling it that? Literally symbol 2, yeah, they're calling it symbol 2. Symbol 2.0. Grim. That's offensive. Today we have Garethon to talk about the privatization of British Rail. Woohoo!

This one's been a long time coming, folks. I'm super excited. Oh yeah, this is gonna be fun. One of the greatest world historical disasters beyond like the collapse of the Soviet Union. RILEY Yes, exactly. Exactly, this is another moment when our future was foreclosed upon. ALICE Opening up a bunch of time capsules from old British rail engineers, greetings

comrade descendants. RILEY Yeah, they're all buried in Derby as well. Um, but before we talk about that we of course have to do the goddamn news. Oh yikes. I think maybe there's some problems with transit policing. I was about to say, there was a shooting at the Sutter Avenue station on the L train. Police shot a suspect who had gone around the fare gates using the emergency exit door, and in addition to shooting the suspect, they also shot another police officer, and two bystanders, one of

whom was shot in the head. ALICE New York's finest, baby. Jesus fucking Christ. ALICE They had an officer involved, officer shooting. Amongst other things. I believe the narrative here is, the guy jumped the fairgate, they tried to stop him, he pulled a knife, which they don't have. JUSTIN They don't have the knife, no.

Because there's no actual proof that a knife was involved as of now. Allegedly someone else stole it. Oh, okay. And then on seeing that knife, they then lit up an entire subway car, like, brain injuring a guy shooting another cop, etc. Yes, they fired something like nine rounds. I don't know if there was a reason for this to escalate to a gunfight? Um, at any point?

Don't let the cops in the tunnels, I think, is what we've learned from this. Keep the cops out of the tunnels. Yeah, I've seen the Dark Knight, guys. The Stutter Avenue is an elevated station. Oh, you said the L, I was gonna say, you said guys. JUSTIN The Stutter Avenue is an elevated station. ALICE Oh, you said the L, I was gonna say, you said the L, just don't let them step onto the steps. Don't let them view transit.

Just keep them out of there. JUSTIN No stairs for cops. ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN There's not really a reason to have, like, armed law enforcement, enforcement of fares, right, of ticketing. Yeah. And all the other... Catch me if I'm wrong on this one, but all...

And this isn't the case for every single municipality that has fares. So for example in TFL, fare evasion, the cost versus the enforcement isn't quite as simple as it is in New York. But I'm pretty sure the numbers are in New York that if they just got rid of fares, like, they got rid of all the fare protection stuff, particularly the cops, it would be an enormous saving. Like, they would save money. Yeah. Yes and no.

I mean, I suppose if you... I don't know if... I know that they've spent lots and lots of money on police to combat fare evasion, and they haven't really done very much. Certainly far more than they could ever recover in revenue from having the police there. I don't know if you would, I don't think the New York City subway could transition to like, you know, a fully proof of payment system, like Berlin or Munich or somewhere like that.

I, I'm not sure if Berlin has that. I know Munich does. It is a system that's big enough that fairs are a significant part of the revenue. So it is at least covering the cost of fair enforcement, but it's not like, I guess the big issue is we hire police officers we hire police officers to do this, and what do they do?

They just shoot people. Yeah. We know that this is what US cops do, they just shoot everyone. Like, surely having them in highly dense environments, i.e. mass transit systems, isn't a good idea, as evidenced by this. They were put there in the first place for like, counter-terrorism, this is a post-911 phenomenon as much as anything else. And I mean, as you say, they have two speeds, right, which is either play Candy Crush on your phone for your entire shift, or shoot someone in the head.

And in both cases, you are providing, apart from everything else, a very poor return on investment there, right? One of the reasons why this is so much more expensive than it would be in the UK or anywhere else is because American cops are sort of like... MILITIA. Well, grotesquely overpaid, is what I was gonna say. Yeah. That's not bad. That'll do.

Yeah. And sort of like overarmed and over-tacticaled, if that's a word that makes sense. And I mean, also, just apart from everything else, the fact that it has to be the NYPD, and the NYPD Transit Bureau, which this would be, is a hive of scum and villainy, even by NYPD standards. You may care to remember that Eric Adams came up through the Transit Bureau. ALICE I'm sure there's no other news that's pertinent to Eric Adams. Of course not.

No, and if you, if you, if you were interested in hearing about mayors of some kind, maybe mayors of New York City, there is a newly launched podcast called No Gods No Mayors that has me on it that you could, you could go and listen to. Do that. It's fun. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, you got to figure out a different way, you know, um, that if someone, you know, doesn't pay the subway fare, you don't murder that person. That is not a crime deserving

of murder. Um, it's also not a very good business decision. Cause, uh, I mean, you're not getting the three dollars back, but you're also not getting any other fares from that person ever again. That's a good point. It doesn't feel like a long term revenue solution. Yeah, and on a broader basis, it doesn't really jive with the idea of this is a public service that feels friendly and accessible, and by the way, we'll kill you. Yeah, we'll just kill you for no reason, for three dollars.

People complain about British Rail's customer service, but sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad, but I don't think they... The only person shooting you is November, with the rocket launcher for the Crispy, that's the only time. That's right, that's right. I don't remember British Rail ever just saying, like, we will shoot you, you know? Yeah, I mean, shooting four people over three dollars is an extremely trailer park type thing to happen, you know?

This is just, this is a bad look for everyone involved. ALICE I mean, I don't wanna be too condescending about British policing here, given that the Met did literally shoot and kill an innocent man on a tube train. But they managed not to hit anyone else, so the bar that's buried like 50 meters below the floor in the sub-basement level, y'know, they're just kind of gently hopping over that. JUSTIN It's 140 stairs to the surface. ALICE Oh dear.

Horrifying. JUSTIN Or whatever the sign says. I know they use the same number at every station, even though it's different. Do they really? Yeah. Well, just another kind of example of a tremendously inhospitable and murderous urban environment, which is not great.

Uh, well, folks, if you don't wanna get shot, I guess you gotta pay the fare. Don't worry, they'll still find a way. But they might shoot you anyway, in the course of trying to shoot someone else. Yeah, just make sure that everyone around you has paid the fare to the NYPD's satisfaction, I guess. You're gonna have to wear a Kevlar vest, and like, one of those fancy Kevlar helmets, y'know? Yeah. Mm.

This is my Call of Duty riot shield as I get onto the subway. Exactly. I hate riot shields. It's interesting to see that this came in the context of, like, y'know, your favorite fear mongers, like the New York Post being like, subway crime has surged, and you look at, like, homicides on the subway, and the homicide rate went from five to eight last year. Like eight total.

Like eight people. RILEY That's one of those situations where they say, it doubled. It's like, yeah, it doubled from basically zero to continuing to be basically zero. Like, given how many people use the system, I mean, come on. Just... Yeah. RILEY I love weaponizing statistical noise. Yeah, I'm not gonna believe statistics are gonna make up for yourself, Roz.

It's a good point, it's a good point. I mean, criminologically it's always difficult with statistics, because criminology is one of the fields that's most, like, sort of, affected by... Sometimes people just are doing shit, y'know? Sometimes stuff just happens. And often in tremendously unpredictable and statistically dubious ways, y'know? JUSTIN People do be doing things. ALICE Mmm.

That's my kind of reasoned judgement on it as a social science, is, uh, yeah, the social part can really fuck with the science part. Oh golly. Speaking of people doing things... Oh boy. Oh god. That's a grim one. Israel exploded every pager in Lebanon.

This is just a fuckin' war crime, dude! Yeah, yeah, I mean, they followed this up the next day by blowing up a bunch of, like, handheld radios, like Walkie Talkies. SEAN Yeah, so this is almost certainly in breach of the convention, uh, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, or whatever it's called. And it's like, you know, a number of people have been killed, including children, who are, like, collateral damage. Obviously the Israelis don't give a shit. Um.

The most moral army in the world strikes again. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I said this on Twitter, not to just recapitulate stuff I've been saying on Twitter, right, but like, I think a lot of people have been talking about, particularly in Western press, about how technically impressive this was, as like an act of people have been talking about, particularly in Western press, about how technically impressive this was, as an act of espionage, which is true, right? At the same time, it doesn't detract from the humanitarian criminality of it, or the kind of political stupidity, you know? It's fucking frightening.

For me it's the cat out of the bag element of this. You're not putting this back in the box. Now that Israel, well you know any state, but particularly Israel realizes, oh we can do this and get away with this too. They're just going to start hacking, it's everything. It's fair game. Everything is fair game. It's really frightening. We all carry an explosive device around.

I have it next to... I tweet so much. I spend so much time with that thing near my dick and balls. Like, I... it's... It's not good. ALICE Getting free gender surgery from Massad by, like, tweeting on my phone, uh, if you consider this to be militarily impressive, you have to say that October 7th was tactically impressive too, putting my phone near my balls and waiting for my free surgery. As I understand it, right, what has happened here is that this has been a supply chain

attack where Hezbollah, I'm so old that I remember when Hezbollah was a byword for competence, right? Which is, getting to this point, it's embarrassing. Hezbollah has gone, okay, well we need to secure our communications, so we will order in from some combination of fronts and cutouts, like, say, 5,000 pages and 2,000 walkie talkies, right? Just off the shelf. And Masad has found out that they're doing this, and at some point in either the manufacture or the shipping of those things they have

placed explosives in all of those devices and then activated them. And, I think... JUSTIN They made sure to turn on the beeper first so people would take it out of their pocket and then squint at it, and then it explodes in their eyeballs. ALICE Yeah, I mean, it's sort of the same thinking as a landmine in a lot of ways. It is also terrorism, but like, to be clear, like, it's table stakes. SEAN Well, yeah, but it's intended to disable, right, it's intended to maim. And the benefit of that, besides the drain on the Lebanese healthcare system and the kind of psychological terror that you inspire, is that you kind of hope to disable a large number

of Hezbollah operatives before you then start the invasion, which it turns out they had to do this thing early before they started the invasion anyway. So... I guess they also got a bunch of healthcare workers using the same pagers. I don't believe that, to be honest. I think when you're talking about Hezbollah, you're talking about a movement that is deeply enmeshed in Lebanese society for good reasons, right? And it's not at all unthinkable, I think part of the point of doing this is that you blow up a bunch of people who are deniably affiliated with Hezbollah and then go, well, how did you get that page?

I don't think this is a case. I don't think we're going to see that this is something where it's affecting unrelated pages or unrelated radios. I think it's going to be people who are engaged in some capacity with Hezbollah and have now been blown up in a war crime about, in a vaguely targeted way. It's not to say that there hasn't been collateral damage, but I think a lot of people are gonna make hay of this, sort of like, this doctor was blown up by his pager, and it's like, well yeah, but he was blown up probably by his Hezbollah pager because he was in Hezbollah,

right? We don't have to be, you know, we don't have to be, y'know, we don't have to sort of like, um, y'know, cover for that. I think the other implication of this, is that, this means that a whole bunch of communications infrastructure is now gonna become, like, much more secure-onomics, like, this has to be made in country. I think, some of this already is, for exactly this reason. And I think it's- You definitely want to at least crack a couple open and make sure there's nothing suspicious

in there. Yeah, well ideally you want physical control of the factory and the whole supply chain, right? Which is something that a lot of places already have, has beloved by virtue of its position as being a prescribed, internationally designated terrorist organization, doesn't have and has to rely on these more vulnerable commercial supply chains. But still, it's really striking on a couple of levels, one, that they are able to develop this communications network, and two, that it was so vulnerable and they didn't notice.

And it's just like, I think you underestimate Hezbollah, your peril, always, right? And I think that, especially given that this seems to have been something that Israel were forced to detonate early, it's gonna affect the sort of situation if Israel do invade Lebanon less than it otherwise would have done. But still, it's like, an embarrassment. Oh yeah, and I mean, who's to say they won't blow something else up tomorrow? Well, absolutely, I mean, this is the thing, is that you just kind of keep trying to do this kind of rolling barrage, and increase paranoia, and presumably if you're in Hezbollah

you are ripping open every piece of electronic infrastructure you have, which is part of the idea. But yeah, no, it's... I have the same feeling, and I said this on Twitter too, as with the Skripal poisonings, where Russia used nerve gas against some guy they were mad at, where I'm like, you've really reached quite deeply into Pandora's box of tricks here for not a very good reason, necessarily. And you're not putting the lid back on it? No, I mean, I think this is harder to replicate against a state, but yeah, I think there are lots of other non-state actors, groups, at a lower level

than Hezbollah, where this is going to really provide some opportunities to fuck with them. Mason- Individuals in places, individuals in countries across the world, who, you know, does it come to the US and how, you know, US politicians who are particularly, or activists who are particularly successful in pointing out some of the awful things Israel is doing? Are they going to start getting to, where does, it's- Well, it's sort of backwards there because this is something that like on a more targeted basis Israel has been doing for decades. They killed the head of Hamas's technical wing with explosives

in his mobile phone. I don't remember which year this was, but yeah, well before this. JUSTIN They're gonna start implanting bombs in left-wing podcasts. ALICE Well, you have a basement nuke. JUSTIN Yeah. ALICE That's not yours. LIAM We're not allowed to talk about that. Yeah, no, I just, I think this is unprecedented in terms of the targeting and the scale, and

yeah, it's remarkable, really, as my main takeaway from it is that I'm still stunned, you know? I think in terms of being able to target members of Hezbollah who are sort of enmeshed within Lebanese political and civil society, obviously, criminally and obviously at the cost of this collateral damage, it's like, I don't know that anyone's been able to do something like this before. Mason- It's a grim time for Lebanon right now, given just the succession of massive economic booms and actual booms that they've been dealing with over the last succession of years. Al- Yeah, I mean, the thing that really struck me was I saw a Twitter account from a Lebanese

ER doctor who had been treating this kind of wave of, and literally thousands of injuries, people walking in with serious facial and eye injuries or missing fingers, missing hands. And you go back in her tweets, and a couple of days earlier she's posting about Game of Thrones or whatever, it's totally normal. And you're just like... The kind of... Oh, right.

Yeah. it's like, totally normal. And you're just like... the kind of... yeah, seeing the contrast with all of this stuff, like, with any of these human rights abuses anyway, you're like... these are like... the kind of sheer strangeness and brutality that you're imposing onto ordinary people's lives. Well this is why the terrorism is absolutely the right word for it, because that cascading through society, just a lot of people who've now had their lives completely impacted and the haunting they're going to experience of dealing with this, yeah, it's grim. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, you know, it feels like there's always sort of a tendency in the mainstream media to sort of really otherize, you know, a place like Beirut, let's say, which, you

know, is, I don't know, it's a weird... Is it a city where people live? Yeah. No, this is just a weird Middle Eastern terrorist compound as opposed to, you know, this is a normal city. Just a regular city with... yeah. There's a lot going on. Or even Hezbollah itself, right, I think this is the other thing, Hezbollah is a prescribed

organization, it's a terrorist organization, it comes by those labels pretty honestly, but it is also a political party, it's like this organization of charitable movements that do social services, obviously with the aim of consolidating its own movement. It's a bunch of different things that are very deeply enmeshed with all aspects of civil society in certain areas, and that's like, like I say, it's really kind of remarkable, you know, to, to like, even have this ability to kind of target it in that way. And obviously the results are horrifying.

Yep. Well said, Ross. In other news. You heard about this. Oh, this. You heard about this. Oh, this is a lot of about this. Now to the funny news. Yeah, that that that that. Hey, hey. Yeah, here we go. A work winning engineer fired for truth.

That's it. Oh, God. Yeah, yeah. So in what was probably the most like soft interview I've done in a long while, like I've said, much punchier stuff. I pointed out that, um, that there are challenges, historic challenges at Houston station because government has canceled crush rail too. And then it's canceled HS2 and so on and so forth. All the stuff that you guys, you know, everyone, hi hogs. Hi, hi old patient folk. Hi, everyone listening. You all know this stuff. It was pretty softball and, and it extremely pissed off one Lord Peter Gerard Handy of Richmond slash Imber in the Wiltshire of the brackets he him. And, and he didn't like this. So he

very personally got me sacked in the sense that my job that was mine isn't anymore. Yeah, he went straight to my employer, threatened the CEO with not getting any more contracts, threatened him again as saying he would go and pester his shareholders and the head office, whatever, whatever that meant. And then my former employer, Sister, promptly sacked me. Thanks, Sister. And did all of this in text as well, which is the thing that's really astounding, is that like, this guy, the chairman of Network Rail, which, if you've listened to this before,

you know, is the like, arms-length sort of like governmental body that owns the tracks and like, infrastructure for rail. Just like, emailing your boss or your CEO as like, a kind of stereotypical mobster, being like, you know, nice contracts you've got with Network Rail would be a shame if anything would have happened to them, kind of thing. Mason- And it's what's subsequently happened. So then I've then bounced around through an horrible disciplinary process for several months, being spat at the end of it without a job. And so then, you know, I kind of said in the 11th hour, Hi Chucklefucks, do you have any idea how much of a shitstorm I'm about to create for you if you do this? And they did not. So I created the shitstorm. And about to create for you if you do this. And they did not. So I created the shitstorm. And someone who has quite extensive media contacts and a large

social media following proceeded to tell everyone what happened with all the receipts. And that's not gone hugely well for the Hendy, who's not made any public appearances since this went public. It's not gone well for Network Rail who have been somewhat hounded by an enormous number of freedom of information app requests from journalists and the RailNAS Discord server. Oh man, the odds are at them. It's great. And yeah, so Network Rail put out a statement that could not have been written more to look like there's a cover up at Houston. Even if there isn't a cover up at Houston, the statements that have been written about Houston station by Network Rail make it look like there's

an enormous cover up. Everyone's digging around in Hendy's private and professional life. A lot of the supply chain are really pissed off and getting very angry about it. And there's some more fun news to come out in the next. It's annoyingly taken. I always forget that I can go quicker than lots of big companies and indeed so long form journalism moves a bit slower, but there is more to come. The story is not done yet, even if it is very boring and annoying. But it does mean that I'm not the professional head of track in the UK for Sister anymore. But we'll see what happens next. I will still be and continue to do engineering, and that's not going to change. But yeah, the chance for me to think, ah, what else can I get up to? So, you know.

ALICE It's just, it's so striking that what you actually said was so... RILEY Not just mild, and not just like something that was like, you know, known to, known to like your employers as like, your employers as part of the commentary you were doing and they were happy that you were doing, but so blindingly fucking obvious. To say, like, hey, when it gets really crowded, when one train is delayed and another one arrives and they're all dumping passengers onto the same platform where people are sprinting through it, that's dangerous? Anyone who's been to Euston in, like, the past, I venture to say, decade, has personal experience, because someone else's suitcase has taken out a chunk of the back of their

ankle. JUSTIN So, let me get this straight, like, the boarding procedure at Euston is like Penn Station but worse? Let me get this straight, like, the boarding procedure at Euston is like Penn Station, but worse? Okay, let me explain Euston Station to you, right? There is, so there's like a boxy station hall, right? Which is very ugly. It's got like one LED wall, which you could use for announcing stuff.

They don't use it for that, they use it for advertisements. And then you have a couple of displays oriented 90 degrees away from that, showing you where people are going. You have a little fucking Leon, shitty fast food restaurant, and a whole deck with a pub above it, and all the seating crammed into the back. And then, you have a very narrow corridor, transversely with the platforms extending out from it. And what they do is, if you're getting a train from Euston, it will be announced on all of the displays that are over the public address system about 25 seconds before that train's doors close and it leaves.

And also, I have to mention, every train operating company is cance like, I don't know, every like third or fourth train at no notice. So you get a bunch of trains which are oversubscribed, too small, on a bunch of platforms connected by very narrow corridors and ramps, and please don't run here signs, nothing to stop you running, no barriers. And so you either get like a little text on your phone, or the tannoy goes off or whatever saying, you know, go to platform six, the entire contents of not just that train, but the train before it that's been cancelled, and maybe the train before that, are now in a dead sprint across a narrow corridor, down onto a platform, through this station hall. It is an absolute fucking

disaster waiting to happen. Yeah. Also Penn Station, but worse. Yeah, it's Penn Station but worse. Yeah. Imagine if, now firstly, imagine if you're doing that blind or in a wheelchair. And yeah, imagine if that had been mentioned by someone in an engineering disaster themed podcast. Merely, purely coincidentally, the episode before I ended up going public with all this, it was very good timing, Nova, for you to

talk about, to briefly allude to Euston Station in the episode about crushes on London transport infrastructure. It seems like it was coordinated, but honestly, it was, I come by it honestly through the form of having just been in Euston and thinking to myself, unprompted, but honestly, I combed it honestly through the form of having just been in Euston and thinking to myself unprompted, fucking hell, that was dangerous. This sucks. Yeah. I've just had to take my rolling suitcase and do a sort of 100m sprint with it down

an incline. Oh boy. See, this is why every time I've been in the UK, I take the East Coast mainline. Absolutely. It's a much more civilized way to get up and down the country. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, no, that's weird to be in the news.

But yeah, what's funny is that the PM was getting asked about it. So yeah, it really went up to the top level and it's fun to annoy Keir Starmer. The fact that I've personally annoyed Keir Starmer brings me great joy. ALICE That's all we can hope for. ALICE Absolutely. ALICE Warhammer, you know, the Emperor knows your name. RILEY Yeah. For better or worse. But yeah, so the good thing about me going really public with it is if I get assassinated, you all know,

firstly, that it won't be Amlo, and that uh... SEAN No, I know it was Maasad. ALICE Three states all gunning for you at the same time. Oh, it's like a Cold War thriller, I love it. The first British-Mexican-Israeli joint coverse operation, and let me tell you, two legs of that stool, the food is fucking terrible. Mexico is carrying the cuisine on that one. That's what he's about to say, that's about to say.

And then they all come to assassinate you at the same time, and they bump into each other like three outfielders going for the same fly ball. Oh boy. Yep. Anyway, so that guy doesn't have a job anymore, the guy on the television screens right now. It's a great shame, and, you know, we hope that you get a better offer soon. JUSTIN Yeah, let's see what happens.

So if you're out there, engineering consultant, he's, uh, hi. ALICE Do you want someone who is like, able and talented and takes their safety responsibilities as an engineer and their professional ethics very seriously? Because you should. They don't want that. Yes. Exactly.

You can't fire him because he'll get you to get yelled at. Yeah. Oh, poor sister. You have to briefly feel, I mean only very briefly feel for them, because they just don't have a clue of what shitstorm they were gonna create, clearly, and oh boy what a shitstorm they've had to deal with, so, what a shame. Yeah, I mean, getting bullied by someone who could credibly threaten them, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah.

And Lord Handy. Ho ho ho ho ho. Yeah, fuck you guys. But uh, okay. It's not, I had a great team and I missed my team that I was working with. It was, we're gonna do fun stuff. But anyway, enough of that. Let's talk about something that isn't a miserable disaster.

Oh. ALICE & LIAM That was the goddamn news. ALICE Average, average, west coast mainline. LIAM Yeah, this is the west coast mainline. ALICE Oh boy. RILEY So, Roz foolishly let me drive a little bit on this one. And so, this is WTYP and therefore we have to start at the beginning, which is, what is railway? Well it comes from the Roman cart pads actually.

Well actually it's funny because this picture- Welsh light mines? Well actually, I've gone earlier than that because to my mind, the first railway, so that's a thing that is a guidance system that guides the wheels of a kind of wheeled vehicle, and it's not the vehicle doesn't steer itself, is Diolkos in ancient Greece. So we're back in 700 BC. ALICE Oh, I've improved foolish. RILEY Yeah, and yeah, so this thing. Southern Central Greece, it connected the Ionian and Aegean seas. The gauge, interestingly

enough, between these two ruts, because we can call this a rut way, which kind of sounds rude, doesn't it? The gauge here is 1600 millimetres, which is not far off. It's Irish gauge. So yeah, this thing moved ships, basically, would go onto the wheels and would get kind of hauled between these two seas. A canal was built later, but this thing was actually developed a bit of a reputation of being a pretty fast way of moving things around, which is, which is kind of cool. So this is, it was also open for fee paying customers, which kind of makes it the first public railway as well. But I admit maybe calling it a railway is a bit of a stretch,

but it is the first sort of permanent way if you like. But if we jump to the next slide, I said, we're going to hammer through these. That's the old cross in Greece. That was 700 BC. Let's jump to 1515 and the first kind of permanent way that we would maybe recognize as being kind of a railway. And that is the Hohensalzburg fortress funicular. It was a funicular railway was the first kind of permanent way. And it kind of went, you can kind of, you can kind of see where it went in this picture. I think it's to the left hand side. If you're in the 16th century, you could just kind of do whatever, you know, the, the plosive

pentament is happening in the background. And you're like, I don't, I don't give a shit about any of this calligraphy bullshit. I'm, what I'm doing is I'm, I'm making my special interest inventing trains. Yeah, exactly. And so the Austrians got there first with what we'd recognize as the shape of today's railway, really. It wasn't the British. Sorry, all the adenoidal boomer weirdos who shout at me every time I diss their HSTs. But no, it's not British. It's the railway, as we recognize it, is Austrian. And it went up a hill into a kind of cool castle. But we do have to talk about Britain, unfortunately, in this episode, because that's the literal episode thing.

Oh no, I'm so sorry. Sorry, Liam. So let's jump forward again to, not that much later, but to 1594 and the first overground railway in Britain. So even as early as the 18, sorry, the 1560s, we'd started having, Nova, exactly as you'd said, we'd started having these kind of mine tracks being built. Actually, the first ones kind of were popping up in Cumbria. But the first kind of outdoors thing was the Prescott Wagonway in 1594. And here is not a picture of it, but it kind

of vaguely gives you an idea of what it looks like, right? ALICE Yeah, just like, man's quest to not have to pull or push heavy shit. At a certain point it gets beyond even a horse, really, and you're just like, there's gotta be an easier way. LIAM I'm dying. ALICE I'm dying, my horse is dying. RILEY The child that I got to push the thing is definitely dead. Like, you know, yeah.

So if you, the, the, the fun of the logic of all of this is to move a load. And if you reduce the friction between the load and the ground, you can move, you require less effort to move it. That's, that's kind of the logic of all this stuff. So you know, D'Alcos used a very nice, sort of a hard sort of limestone, which really nicely created these ruts and ended up being really smooth and really nice, low friction. We ended up using split timbers for Hohensalzburg and for all the kind of Cumbrian mines. This thing's similar. But if we jump forwards again, you have this glorious scene here of Wakefield. This is this is this is glorious Wakefield.

Look at this suburban shithole that is out of Wakefield. Sorry everyone who lives in Stanley. Actually, you know what? It's not so bad. It's fine. 90% of Britain looks like this and I feel a kind of swell of patriotism and romance looking at it. They gotta work on the brush clearance here on this right away. So unfortunately the Wakefield council has Wakefield city council has tarmacked over the thing that I've took this street view screenshot of. And because the thing that the screenshot of is of the, um, is of the Lake lock railroad. And yes, that's right. That is a railroad, not a railway, the Lake lock railroad,

which was the first public railway that used iron edge rails. Ooh, what is an iron edge rail? So we'd had all these wagonways going all over the place. And then some Bright Spark in Colbrookdale decided that they could create iron to pretty decent quality because they're a coke and coal they had access to. And so another Bright Spark decided, you know what we can do with this iron? It's kind of roll it out nice and thin and stick it on these wooden rails that we've got on all these wagon ways. And this started happening kind of in the middle of the 1700s to the point whereby by kind of the 1780s, 1790s, we'd actually developed a rail as you or I would

recognize it, what we called edge rails that were kind of a rail that you see now. And this, the Lake Lock Railroad was the first public railway using them in the world, in fact. And at this point, we did start, Britain can start saying that we started accelerating beyond everyone else. And it was really because of our ability to create cheap, reasonably consistent quality iron

that we would then either put on top of the wooden wagonways or we'd start rolling these edge rails. And Other railways around the rest of the world, places like Russia for example, where some of these early examples of wagonways started finding their way elsewhere, started using rails, but they were British rails. They were rails that were manufactured in Britain because no one else could quite get the quality. That's kind of cool. Anyway, Wakefield City Council, go back, take the tarmac off this bloody important piece of history, you oiks. Just because people are getting upset because they're potholes, like screw those guys, they're

probably all driving SUVs anyway, but also everyone can go to Line Pit Lane and have a look at this thing. ALICE It is an honour for the suspension of your Kia Sorento to die on this. Exactly. Are these edge rails the kind that have the flange on the rail? No. So they are...

So there were two types of... There were plateways that basically relied on, yes, having a kind of an L shaped rail, and the wheels sort of sat in that, and then edge rails are kind of relied on a conic wheel, which is very much the kind of what ended up being the technology we use still to this day. So yeah, no, you've got the two, you've got the L shaped rails and the edge rails. And these kind of, even when this railroad was built, they were very much competing with each other. Like no one had quite decided on which to use. So if we jump forwards once more, we're not looking at track anymore, you'll be glad to see, we're looking at this thing.

Oh, beautiful. Goofy ass. Look at this nonsense. Look at all the gears. Look at this. Yeah. This is... I mean, this is such a waste. Those gears could have been put to so much better use decorating a top hat. Mason- This is one of Trivithix, well basically just put a giant kettle and attached it with

a bunch of pistons and cogs to some wheels and went and said go. And the difference between this and some of the other steam engines at the time, well firstly this one moved, but secondly it used high pressure steam rather than low pressure steam, which was quite revolutionary. So James Watt, kind of famous steam engine guy, he was a low pressure Cornish engine. He was using low pressure. Travithic decided to use high pressure and also wheels. And in 1804, he made this thing haul a train. For the first time ever, there was a locomotive hauled train on the Pennadaran tramway in what is today Merthyr Tydfil in the Welsh Valleys, north of Cardiff.

And so that 1804, a pretty epic moment, shatter to Trevithick, who, as with many engineers, he ended up ruining himself financially multiple times over, kind of bumped into George Stevenson in South America, as you do, and then continued to live penniless for the rest of his life. So, excellent chance. ALICE It's doing like a FOMA version of Butch and Sundance. MIGUEL Exactly. So by this point we're still having a battle about what railways should look like, but jump forward to 1830.

And the next slide. And here's Chatmos with the first modern railway as we know it. So all the previous wagonways and railways and shit, including the Stockton-Darlington, were all kind of pre-modern railways, early railways or pre-modern railways. This is the first modern railway, Liverpool-Manchester railway, the first intercity railway as well. Why do I call it the first modern railway? Because it took a lot of stuff that we'd decided on, like, oh, timetable maybe is a good idea, but we're not going to use that with everything else. Having signals is a good, oh, double It's, oh, locomotive. This is the first railway that pulled all that

shit together and actually went, oh, this is a system. And all this stuff together ends up being quite good. And it was, and from 1830 onwards, partly as a result of an enormous, basically the demise of the slave industry in the UK kind of timed rather well with a bunch of people no longer having a frontier of capitalism they could horribly exploit. ALICE There's kind of this thing, you know that meme about like, you know, America's deficient in a key resource, some random farmer in Nebraska finds the world's largest deposit of it?

The kind of, like, there's a special providence that protects like, fools, drunks, children in the US, and the United States of America. That used to be true of Britain. Which means that that mandate of heaven is transferable, and that the US will one day lose it, and there will be a situation where like, whatever the resource of the future is, some random farmer in China is gonna dig up the world's largest deposit of it instead of the US, you know? MN Yeah, yeah, for sure. So there's, at the point of, you know, abolition had happened a couple of decades before, but actually it was only kind of 1830 at this point, where firstly, and not the majority funding of the railways, but a large amount of capital started getting freed up because

the British government compensated the slave owners, not the slaves, the slave owners for all the slaves that they had had to free. So there's a huge amount of capital. ALICE We did slavery Keynesianism by accident. Genuinely, like, giving the worst criminal in the fucking world millions of pounds, millions of 1807 pounds, which is like... RILEY Exactly, millions of 1807 pounds, which is like, well- Exactly, millions of 1807 pounds, which is like, might as well be trillions. Just insane amounts of money.

Al- And being like, hey, your plantation career is over, there is no reason for you to stay in Jamaica or whatever, why don't you instead take these trillions of pounds, and after buying yourself everything you could possibly want, why not splash that around on some more investments? Will Barron Exactly. This railway was built very much to, among other things, to move slave one cotton from the US into mills in the interior of Northern England. And at this whole time you had this explosion railways that then happened, and it was no coincidence that it was at the time of, you know, the slave industry was

very much that, it was an industry, you had huge numbers of managers, clerks, merchants, this huge network of people that all of a sudden didn't have much to do. And so they were basically diverted, you had to see a transfer, a wholesale of this industrial might, evil industrial might, into railways. So people I'm afraid have often thought of railways as being this benign, peaceful, technological wonder that just appeared without any negative consequences. ALICE Oh no, no, no, no, no. RILEY Wrong oh. So yeah, so anyway, 1830... ALICE. All transport is political, I understand.

JUSTIN. Yes. Quite. There's an enormous explosion in railways. And it was hopelessly disorganized, chaotic, and not great, because the British rail network, from this point onwards, we went into the Stupid Zone, and built- And we have never left! That's right. Correct, yes. Our rail network-

Welcome to the Stupid Zone. Welcome to the Stupid Zone, where the service will terminate, remind passengers to take their baggage with them. And shove it up their asses. So the problem in Britain was that we had, like, a hundred companies all competing and building railways with each other. Some of them, lots of the railways were half built, or they were proposed prospectively, there was zero strategic oversight.

And so you just had lots of very weavy, very useless railways, all sort of, none of them making any real sense. ALICE You just had to get some act through the most corrupt houses of parliament imaginable. RILEY Yeah, the MPs were all directors on the boards of these railway companies, so they'd just pick their pet railway project they were gonna front to parliament that day. And there's a reason why all the drawing offices for railways were next to parliament. There's a reason the Institute of Civil Engineers, their fancy offices on Great George Street are right next to Parliament. It's so that they can, they don't have to jog very far with all their plans to lay out on the table

for the House of Commons to accept and then everyone get their slush fund money. Yeah, just not a great way to build a railway network. And no one else got it particularly right in the rest of the world either, but there was much more strategy in mainland Europe about the rail network. Russia, for example, had more strategic views. ALICE This is what happens if you have a Napoleon, or a Tsar. RILEY Well, quite. A little bit less laissez-faire, a little bit more organization.

ALICE Just like, 19th century podcasts are being like, Railways Napoleon. ALICE The old joke about the inner-urbans that were being built in the 1890s and early 1900s in the United States, y'know, we're here to build the nowhere-in-east armpit railroad. SEAN Ah, yes, the nowhere-in-east armpit, famously, yes, of course. ALICE I guess here it'd be the nowhere-sure and armpit-upon-drainit upon drainage ditch railway. Oh, you mean that's south of Little armpit? Yes.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's two clicks. So it's east of like Great armpit. Let's jump forwards almost a century from this point. So we have a huge explosion of railways, hugely wasteful. Let's jump forward to 1923. And the railways act, hugely wasteful, let's jump forward to 1923, and the Railways Act, well actually let's jump forward to 1921 and then what happened in 1923, which was the Railways Act 1921 which gave us what's called grouping, where

all of these railways, let's go next slide, all these railways were smooshed into four large railways of the LMS, the LNER, the GWR, and the Southern. And these are the four, what they call the big four, these are the big four railway companies, and this actually wasn't a great idea, it wasn't a bad idea, but it also wasn't done that well. ALICE Why does the LNER logo look like a bumper sticker you'd see on the back of somebody's car? LIAM Looks like a Christian fish, yeah.

ALICE Why is Southern used to kind of like old West font? Yeah, I know. Mysteries abound. I know, right? I guess, like, it's a good thing that none of these were like revived as kind of zombie brands to put a gloss of patriotism and old time feeling on some quite shit trains. Yeah, Southern literally reused this logo. So the current Southern Railways, which obviously has absolutely no connection to the original,

reused this logo. LNER is back, obviously. GWR is also back. No one's bothered recreating the LMS though, which is the West Coast Mainline one. So, you know, sad times. Yeah, no, the big four were created. And the thing about just doing a big thing like this, and I would say this was a bit of a half-arsing of it, in that this didn't solve

a lot of the... The logic of this was to remove a lot of clerical duplication, if nothing else, to try and, you know, in the middle, between the two wars, the railways were starting to lose money in a big way. They were struggling. You know. They were competing with road logistics more and more. They were also just huge, complicated companies that no one really had a handle on. And so the good idea was to merge them and attempt to make some of that go away, which maybe it didn't. But we'll never know because then the second world war happened. And then immediately after the second world war happened, this is where Nova needs to line up the USSR... I got you. I got you. Clem and Atlee elected. Sorry, Devon.

So yeah, we have Atlee, we have a socialist government and they nationalized the railways. So we have the Transport Act 1947, which creates, um, this little guy. The old anemic lion that's in the next slide. Balancing on his unicycle. Yeah. There is British Railways. And you know what, okay, so the lion looks like Britain did at the time, but, you know what, I don't mind this logo, it's alright. It's, compared to like, the kind of Soviet and Eastern Bloc railway logo which is a winged

conic wheel which looks quite Nazi. It does a bit, yeah, it does a bit. This one's also, like, no wings involved, it's on the ground, why do you need the wings? Exactly, wings, not necessary. The lion with the chronic wasting disease. You have to shoot this lion but not eat it. What's funny is that one of the later logos did include a, it was more of a silhouette, but it did include a dick outline for the lion, so...

Interesting. Yeah, so whereas this one is, there is a bit of a funny outline, but I'm not sure it, not sure it is. It's like church or hiccup, you know, it's like the border between Syria and Saudi Arabia. Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, British railways. So, um, so the BR it's a funny one.

So BR was an absolutely necessary move because the railways had just been absolutely hammered by the second world war. Well, they'd have been hammered by both world wars and they'd never really caught up in the interwar years. And so our railways were kind of just a bit of a shambles. Much as the US had successfully done in the First World War, it had made sense to run them under one unified organization, which had been a bit of a board of combining the four grouping companies. But they knew, right, okay, we're going to be nationalized.

Annoyingly, as often happens with the big chains like this, this did cut, or this did stop a lot of modernization efforts in their tracks. For example, quite a lot of electric creation projects were going on, the nationalization, all the stuff to do with nationalization kind of stopped in its tracks. I mean, Clement Attlee in many ways, like climate Stalin in the bad way, in the sense that if you're nationalizing stuff like the National Coal Board, for instance, then you're like, we gotta do something with all this coal, apart from anything else. Yes. You know, like, we're sort of like, gonna make sure that everybody has good jobs...

Short-term, isn't it? And this is genuinely a factor in it. Exactly. Genuinely a factor in us keeping hold of steam for so long as we did, because we had a lot of good coal, and a lot of good coal jobs. And why would you not run the railway with steam locomotives? But so, you know, there was still a realization, fairly quickly, there was a realization that, ah no, everything's still fucked and we're going to really need to look into the future.

And so if we jump forward to the next slide, we have an oft maligned bit of documentation, which is the modernization plan, 1955, modernization re-equipped the British railways. This context is all important, by the way, for where we get to in the future. This is all very important stuff. So modernization can often stay as a failure by rail nerds who've bought the treasury line on this. Treasury are a long time enemy in this story, I'm afraid. So so often said it's a failure, but it's kind of... I find it difficult to agree that modernization was a failure because it really moved BR forwards in a pretty dramatic way.

If you go to the next slide, I'll show you one example of this, which is, like, fancy schnancy signaling. Look at this. Look at this fancy stuff. Look at this! Look at this person who's supposed to be on a moog board. It's like Deadmau5, but from 1955.

ALICE Controlling steam trains with this? RILEY Well, yeah, actually, weirdly. I mean, increasing number of diesels, but yeah, plenty of steam's still running at this point. A decent whack of steam's still running at this point, we're still building steam locomotives at this point. So yeah. JUSTIN This is also like when it was like, okay, we gotta buy all these diesel locomotives really quick

so you couldn't have any standardized designs because you gotta buy them from 50 manufacturers. Correct. Weird like warship class stuff, yeah. And don't get me wrong, that was wasteful, but actually it kind of worked out in the end, and actually it was a bit of a move past and break thing situation. Yes, it would have been better to standardize and go for a kind of a standard locomotive. And we kind of learned that the hard way. And there are various reasons for this. But I would say that the mess of the locomotives, partly because railway history is often written by the train nerds, right? And so they're all like,

well, the diesels were a mess, so modernization was a failure. But actually, if you look at the infrastructure, modernization represented huge amounts of track renewal, massive re-signaling projects. We saw the beginning of what kind of was a bit of a rolling program of electrification right the way through to kind of the East Coast mainline getting electrified in the 80s actually, was initiated by the modernization plan. So actually- It was like until about 1950, like a third of signals in Britain were just like children waving a red jumper, you know?

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Flannel petticoats and such. So, this was kind of pretty... And, you know, Britain, once again, our rail network sort of started catching up in terms of its signaling. We started having signaling systems that were world leading again, whereas we kind of hadn't for a long while. Mason- Imagine Britain being world leading in anything. Mason- Wow. Mason- I know, right. Not a thing we can do. The challenge, the trouble the railways had though, this is all happening at the same time as we started seeing the emergence of the motorway

construction boom in the UK. Unlike the railway, which was very much centralized and therefore Treasury could just get his grubby hands all over it, the motorway construction was pretty decentralized and regionally led and so Treasury didn't really have much involvement. You just have Glasgow City Council decide to run the M8 through a big portion of their city, you know. F's in the chat. Oh, how's that? Oh dear.

So, the Treasury, like BR, British Railways, had to directly please Treasury, who are a bunch of short memory psychopaths. So that was a problem. Even the Attlee Treasury as well. So that was a problem. Even the Atlee Treasury as well. It's just endemic, that you can't get people out of these modes of thinking. Atlee's failure was that he didn't round them all up and drive them off the end of Brighton Pier.

That was his failure. Fuckers. Anyway, so Treasury continues to exist. I can't stop staring at this guy here. All I can think is, I am the Keymaster, are you the Gatekeeper? Yes. He has some very nice, I mean he's got a lovely Cardi there. Actually, yeah.

Very, very nice knitwear. Yeah, it's good. And his glasses are good. He's just, you know what? That guy is, that guy is serving. I like what he's got going on there actually. We gotta bring back 1950s engineer... Oh hell yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. Oh beautiful. Also not the 1950s Nazis. Yeah. Yeah, no not those. Leave those guys. They're enjoying the treasury at the end of Broughton Pier.

So let's just have a look at some numbers shall we? Let's jump to the next slide. Because I want to look at some numbers. So okay. I'm immediately going and getting myself another drink. Modernization is a failure. Yes, do it. Numbers are important. We don't have to look at all these numbers. The important number here is, so this is basically the income and expenses of the railway in 1961 versus 2021. And I've normalized it into pre-Liz Trust pounds for

everyone's convenience. So the important number here is the bottom one. So if you've got the top, you've got all the income. The bottom, you've got all the expenses. So treasurer were very angry that in 1961, the government, the deficit of the railways was 1.9 billion pounds in pretrusts, funny money. Whereas in 2021, the deficit was 18 billion pounds. So those are not because of inflation. Those are the same equivalent numbers in 2022 prices. So when people, I get angry at the railway going, oh yeah, no, we'll do more efficiency. It's like, no, Treasury have always just wanted more and more. So we had a much more efficient railway running without much of it being cut back in 1961 versus 2021. So yeah, I just

thought I'd throw that up there for people, for the real number crunches to get angry. So, um... ALICE That's a big drop in freight traffic, my god. RILEY Yes, it is, isn't it? Because we got rid of it all onto the roads, because that felt like a good idea. ALICE Yeah, what's interesting is that... ALICE We got rid of a bunch of the industry generating it as well, if you look at the British Rail sectorization, and we'll talk about sectorization,

like one big sector of it was for instance, coal. Don't do that anymore. Don't- RILEY Yeah, go on. ALICE There's still coal trains, but we don't mine it. RILEY Well, it's just gone. And steel as well.

RILEY There's no- because the last coal train ran a couple weeks ago, right? RILEY Yeah, we just don't, yeah, we don't need coal in this country anymore. And likewise, like steel traffic, similarly, like later on, steel traffic massively, massively diminished. We did a lot of steel in this country, we don't anymore. Yeah, what's interesting is how similar the passenger traffic receipts are. Like there's barely a bit, there's like a billion in it, which is actually quite close. Okay, fewer people traveling for sure, but it's kind of interesting how close those are, as you say, versus freight, which has been obliterated. Kind of interesting.

And we're earning 0.3 billion more from retail, apparently, or some other shit. All of the like, Cornish pasty companies, you know? Selling more sandwiches. Yeah, exactly. Selling something in like, Leon, that is approximately food. Nets. We'll get to sandwiches. I am looking forward to talking about sandwiches. Oh yeah, it's our food.

Finally something I have like, expertise on. Yeah, here, yeah. That's it. So let's go to the next slide and prepare the booze. Here it is. Oh boy. Dr. Beeching is indeed here. There he is.

There he is. Fucker. He looks so nice and friendly, how could anyone find him offensive? He does look like a smug cunt, doesn't he, there. Probably not a bad suit. But I like the, there's like typical extra worker guy who's kind of found behind the shoulder in the middle. They don't make cops like this anymore, and thank God, that dude on the left looks like fucking Josef Goebbels. He really does. Like, you've got Wes Treating's half brother on the right hand side, but the guy on the

left is absolutely straight from the bunker. You don't really see like a broad cop anymore either, like... No, it's sad loss. It's a real like- ... everlasting gobstopper recipe. I genuinely have a theory that stuff like steroids, and even just more gym accessibility, has taken away one of the great British stanchions of public life, which was the Big Lad. Yes. Yes.

If you were gonna look like this, if you had this, I dunno, what is it, fucking phenotype or whatever, now, you're in the gym all the time, you don't look like this. JUSTIN I just can't take him seriously, I need a large lad to be saying what's all this then. ALICE You don't have the combination of, like, the genes that code for this build, and also a diet of mostly meat pies and races anymore. Yeah. Exactly.

I don't respect it if it's coming from a guy who looks like Andrew Tate or something. Yeah, this guy is on the protein, you know, he's drinking fucking bone broth, and it shouldn't be like that, he should be drinking stout and eating meat pies. Exactly, exactly. 14 pints down the pump. And dying at 35 of like a coronary, you know? Yep. So, we had this guy, Dr. Beeching, Dr. Richard Beeching, much maligned, was brought in as

the chair of the, as the last chair of the British Transport Commission and the first chair of the newly formed British Railways Board. As the- I'm just, these- sorry. No, no, go for it. I'm just keep coming back to this picture. These signs, they're ostensibly protesting him, but what they're doing is they're acting as his hype men.

LIAM Yeah, that's about to say. SEAN Wait, is he Flava Flay back here somewhere? ALICE Yeah. They've got this in a really nice, like, kind of painted, like... RILEY They're really nicely done, yeah. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Doctor Beeching is here. It's like, whoa!

Fuck! Check this guy out, he's got like a police escort and everything. Dr. Beeching and his medicine band. Yeah, just hyping him up. Well funnily enough, Beeching, we'll get to, in fact, next slide we'll get to what he's doing, but anyway, Beeching arrived and was told, basically set about his role was to attempt to make the railway's revenue neutral. Just as the modernization plan had done and kind of failed to do, that was what he was

supposed to do. So if we go to next slide please, we get to the thing that's... ALICE He killed the kind of age of innocence of like, you know, village green cricket and, you know, like... RILEY He did. ALICE Old maid cycling to church. And your local branch line that had three passengers a decade... RILEY Yeah, that's it. And so this is exactly that.

And it's as much the fact that he accelerated the... he said, get steam the fuck off my railway. He did indeed get rid of a lot of fringe branch lines. And that's the thing that everyone remembers, right? Is the fact that we closed a bunch of rural railway lines. And, you know, in some cases that might have been a bad idea and whatever. These are the two, the reshaping of British railways, by the way, the beaching report, as it's often called, I mean, we're going to call it the beaching axe. The axe is then referred to, came in two parts. I have them behind me on my shoulder. I have literal original copies behind me on my shoulder, because it's an interesting thing to have a hold of. Very interesting

thing to read through actually. I did a rail now on it and I've written stuff on it. So if you want a detailed deep dive into this, this isn't the episode. You can find it elsewhere. But one of the things, so it's much maligned, it kind of was in a way, it was just a rebranding of the kind of the ongoing modernization efforts. Yes, it chopped a lot of lines, but actually it chopped a lot of pointless rubbish, to be honest. ALICE I'm crying into my, like, real ale that the kind of, like, Uppington upon Blossomham, like, sort of, like, model railway was cut. RILEY Branch joint line was cut, yeah, exactly.

ALICE Yeah, this, like, kind of beautiful, pointless like, artefact, because I don't want a railway that's strategic. JUSTIN As a nice cute little tank engine, with a happy face. ALICE Yeah, yeah. This guy put like, had all of the cast of Thomas the Tank Engine cut apart with oxyacetylene torches. RILEY Oh, shit. I should've got that picture, that high res scan of the Audrey picture, where they've

got, they're like, they've got a guy with a cutting torch just taking the faces off the tank engine steam locomotive. I love that. It's so good. It's so punk. So actually what, sorry, that was a weird laugh. I let my psychiatrist evaluate that one. I've been under a lot of stress over the last few months. Anyway, right. So let's jump to the next picture and I'm going to talk about what reshaping actually represented, which was a real acceleration, some very important and successful things. One of those being the first successful deployment of intermodal rail using these shipping containers as a system. So these had existed all over the place up to this point, but the first proper deployment of them was in the UK, and thanks, very much thanks to Beeching himself. So this was highly successful, and we still have a railway company called Freightliner,

it kind of sustains, spoiler alert. So very very successful, but also Intercity. You know, Beeching introduced the Intercity concept. ALICE Just sitting down and being like, I have personally barbecued Thomas the Tank Engine. Designed me the best font to have ever existed, or you're next. RILEY Yes. And it, god damn it worked. And good grief,

we will, I mean, yeah, we're gonna get there. So, um... ALICE Maybe he was Railways Napoleon. RILEY He was. So, you know what, with Beijing, people say, okay, he might well have been a bit of a prass, but actually I think he is annoyingly maligned, much as he was a, you know, he's a Tory and blah, blah, whatever. But like, actually he did some very large, very positive things for our railways. And I think it's, I think there are a lot of boomer types who like to, because he got rid of steam and got rid of their, as exactly as you're saying

over that, that innocence, he kind of, it was around a moment where that innocence was lost and everyone's hung it around his neck. But actually a lot of what he did was really good, but it wasn't all good. And the biggest mistake he made was not closing a bunch of rural railway lines, but it was the removal of network duplication in the cities in the UK. And this is going to come and haunt us momentarily. The removal of the network duplication in the city. So getting rid of having the opportunity to have one station that was the suburban station and one station that was in city station. No, it was no, have just wherever you can opportunity to have one station that was the suburban station and one station that was in city station... No, it was no...

Have just... Wherever you can, just have one station and get rid of all the duplicate lines. That was a really big error. So basically saying... I was generally just deprioritizing suburban rail in the UK was one of the things the Beecham report did, and it was reshaping... That was its biggest failure, by a long way. This is awesome.

You're still in this weird situation where, like, you'll be in a British city that has one train station, and that train station still has a name that implies the existence of others in that city, like, I'm pulling examples out of my arse here, a bunch of these have other stations now, like Bristol Temple Meads, right, or like Liverpool Lion Street, or like Glasgow Queen Street, right, where it's like, this implies that there are others, and often there are not, because they usually, and there aren't. ALICE Also, the only reason we're able to have a northeast corridor in the United States is because several parallel lines were combined

into a separate line for freight that was only able to be done strategically, because we had Conrail at the time. ALICE You want some waste, you want some redundancy. RILEY Yes. And this is the challenge, exactly. And so whilst actually the rail network had not as much redundancy as we might like today, but actually had some redundancy in terms of north-south mainlines, for example, although not enough on the east-west axis, it was in the city centres that we didn't. Because that was seen, partly, it was seen as a good way to make some cash, was to sell off that land, prime real estate

in city centres, rather than retaining it. And often that ended up getting used for nasty urban motorways and shit like that. So, yeah. But, now, the Handel Messiah drop is about to land, because next slide please. Oh god, I don't even have that, can I do the Saudi Union one? No, I haven't, I can play them through here. Why? Do the Saudi Union one again, actually. Yes please. Ah, there it is. Because 63 was reshaping, 65 was the time that we moved from British Railways and the limping lion to the double arrow.

The corporate identity symbol. I, behind me, have a copy of the corporate identity manual. The Ruin of Power. Yes. a copy of the corporate identity manual. The ruin of power. BR got shit hot. And all of a sudden it started looking really modern. It wasn't just the branding. Branding is very important, but it wasn't just the branding. The overall system really started modernizing at this point.

It was kind of the end of the beginning for... Yeah. So it was the end of the beginning, if you like, for the way that British Rail and British Rail Operations as a unified thing would be. It was kind of the point at which, from this point onwards, we knew kind of what we needed to do, and we started getting on with doing it. ALICE It's like, deadly serious. This is the age of the train.

Right? RILEY Yeah, now then. No, let's not talk about him. But, uh... ALICE Yeah, but still, we're going to lean into this, right? Yeah, and we did in a big way. You did the APT episode 150 years ago when you did it. And actually, part of that was the optimism of the future. There was a really positive, optimistic view of what the future's going to look like. And we did spend quite a bit

of money on research. You know, BR research was a beacon of light that genuinely, you know, the reason we have high speed rail across the world is because of the work that was done at the BR research department. You know, Alan Wickens, thankfully still alive actually, one of the great railway engineers in history, still alive. I'd love to go meet him up in the Northeast. He gave the world, you know, advanced yaw dampers and the science behind how to make your train go faster than 125 miles an hour. And it was thanks to him that everywhere else could do... the TGV wouldn't exist without him. You could not do high speed conventional rail without the work that he

did. So that was all happening thanks to BR, so thank you BR. SEAN No one else has the wherewithal to do basic research anymore. ALICE That's right. And just, as a piece of design, as well, I'm gonna talk about this so much, but every single thing about the branding, whether it's the Rune of Power, as we see here, or even just stuff like... I mentioned sectorization before, because it's something that really struck me, like, hey, we're gonna have, we're gonna divide up the main freight structure into a series of things that make sense, like

coal, steel, aggregates, and parcels and shit. But we're also gonna make sure each of them has a distinct, visible identity that's gonna be beautiful as well, even if it's gonna be on a diesel locomotive that's covered in dust half the time. Yeah. It's also funny that there was a few narrow gauge steam locomotives that survived for a long time under British rail control that eventually got the double arrow and the blue bay steam. Yeah.

Well, it's just specifically the one in Aberystwyth, the Raidlethe Valley line that, that had the, that had, yeah, BR blue steam locos. Um, very weird. Um, so yeah, lots of other successes at this point. So, um, it wasn't, so from this point onwards, we still had, don't get me wrong, we still had pretty messy industrial relations going on. Like was that very, APT episode, for example, the union fight over whether the fact that they only had one seat in the front cab ended up costing more than the whole research budget of APT. So clearly there's still messes, but it was also a period of kind of substantial modernization improvement.

We kind of had a loosely rolling program for electrification across various lines as, you know, with the demise of beaching, not literally, they didn't kill him, but they told him to go back and do more explosive inventions over at ICI again. And so Barbara Castle came up and gave us passenger transport executives. So that was kind of doing some level of devolution to city regions to allow them to take control of their passenger services. So there's lots of good stuff, lots of station openings.

And by the mid 80s, we actually had a turnaround in passenger numbers. So rather than passenger numbers dropping, that kind of leveled off through the 80s, and started climbing, by kind of 82-83, the line go up. Which is very good. But... ALICE There is a situation where British Rail is doing more and more stuff, and you're just like...

You know how Streetsing said the other week the other week that Britain was in danger of being an NHS with a country attached? And how this was some terrible, unspeakable fate, right? I think we should have lent into that, right, and just like, we do full communism under the auspices of British Rail, like it's a train company. RILEY Yes! We can be a railman with a country attached! ALICE Yeah, it's a train company with a country attached. Exactly. You could do the backwards in Mexico and put the Navy under control of the railways. Why the hell not man?

I would love that. I mean, in a way, BR did have a little Navy for what I'm talking about in a minute. So, right. So next slide please. So briefly, so I alluded to the transport in 1968. This kind of was the first time when the British government acknowledged that railways aren't just going to make a profit in and of themselves and they serve a public good, a social good, and they started quantifying it and therefore understanding how much money social good justified the railways getting, which is quite positive. Also passenger transport areas, what became the PTEs and devolving power, a brief bit of light, a brief moment where we had the right network structure before the bad things happened. So let's hop forwards again. That was 1968. We hop forward. We have to jump a couple of years forwards to this

though, because one of the things that BR started doing was kind of hiving off bits of itself into subsidiaries that were wholly owned, but were also their own corporate structure. So in 1970 we had an organization called British Rail Engineering Limited created. BREL, as it's often referred to. And this is the start of a slippery slope, folks. So pay close attention to this. So that was in 1970.

ALICE And making British Rail into a kind of, like, start-up incubator, you know, where it has spin-outs. N- Yeah. So the Abrel was the train manufacturer, so this covered all of the places that made, almost all the places that made the train. Um, and so actually building the damn thing. So next slide please, because there were other things that started getting hived off. Um, so here, so yeah, in fact, on the left hand side, in fact this one's for you, Nova, there's the old, the Glasgow Works there. M- Oh, fantastic fact this one's for you, Nova, there's the old Glasgow Works there. Still doing some railway stuff, but a lot less.

Isn't that a beautiful van? Is that a Comma? From the left? I think it is. Incredible. I think it is a Comma. I think it is a Comma, yeah. We used to build things in this country, namely weirdly shaped vehicles that would be used

in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Yeah. Jesus. Yes! That's a reach and a wonderful one. vehicles that would be used in the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Yeah. Jesus. Yes! That's a reach and a wonderful one. I like the shed on the flat car. Yeah.

So on the left hand side you have... It's a caravan! It's a static caravan! On the right hand side you have a static caravan. I'm going home to my rail house! Someone doing the IRL... Oh, flashbacks to holidays in one of these outside Portsmouth. God, shoot me in the back of the

head. So, yeah. Braille on one thing. But in 1979, Seelink, so we talk about BR having a navy, they did have a navy, quite a large one. They didn't have any guns particularly, but yeah, they had a big navy of ferries, a pretty massive navy. And some of those ferries were pretty modern as they continued to modernize. I did an episode on Sea Link a while back. It's kind of an interesting history. And in 1979, Sea Link was formed as its own sort of subsidiary, which also had like the Belgian and French railways kind of part bought into it. Which this is a photo from... I suspect... Is it Belgium?

ALICE What deranged Belgian freak attempted to ship a static caravan on a ferry? Exactly. I love it. My dad's static caravan enthusiast would never in his wildest dreams have, like, considered this, you know? Yeah. So, this is Dieppe, actually, maybe, so this might well be France. Anyway, some nice, a very nice, kind of nice mainland European locomotive there with some stuff behind it.

Very nice. Nice pictures, lovely. So those two. Now the first actual privatization of British Rail happened in 1982 when we... So next slide please. I just noticed these passenger cars just look so fucking old. Yeah. Yeah.

Those are... It's still kind of a car cement on the roofs and everything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, those have gotta be like interwar... They're old. They're really old. They're really, really old. Really old.

Lovely. Beautiful stuff. So next slide please. Because in 1982, British transport hotels are sold off. This is the first actual privatization of British Rail, is when the British transport hotels, which was part of BR, were sold off. So, RIP to the station hotel in Aberdeen and the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool here. ALICE It fucking sucks, it's a great idea, and it's

one that's still being capitalized on now, is that you have a train station that has a hotel attached to it so you don't have to worry about getting to your train. These still exist in a lot of places, they're just privatized, and you get an entrance from the station to the hotel that's called something else that has like, three corporate fucking identities. RILEY And even if, cause railways have got faster, there's not as much of a need for overnight stays, you know what's not a bad idea for

a railway that has lots of, I don't know, people who work for it? People who work for it. Well yeah, that as well. But also, like, these things double up as conference centers and training centers and might have been a good idea to just have hotels and make income from them, question mark? I don't know. Maybe you're on a particularly long run and the crew has to stay overnight. Well if you own a hotel, that's a lot cheaper. Well, yeah, exactly. And also having these tactical... Okay. So again, Britain's small

enough that the need for these had certainly diminished as train speeds had increased. But we do lots of overnight shifts that are near railways and maybe having hotels that people with their oranges could go and sleep in overnight might also not have been a bad idea rather than paying travel lodge over and above the odds. So, 1982. Mason- Nationalised travelodge. Mason- Nationalised travelodge, exactly. So let's jump forwards to the next slide. And a picture I took yesterday in fact of the footstep of a York built train. Brell York, train makers to the world. There we go. This is on the footstep of a

class 150 Sprinter. So a lot of you listening to this right now and watching this will have a visual image of that, which should entertain you greatly. The idea of that being exported to the world. But anyway, no. So in 1984, Seelink were sold off proper. In 1988, Brel was sold off proper. So it was sold off and then there were management buyouts and all the boring corporate shit that happens in weird neoliberal world where stuff gets privatized. But yeah, so Brell was privatized. And crucially, I said we were going to talk about sandwiches. Travelers Fair was sold off in 1988 as well. Travelers Fair was the BR catering organization, and one of the brands that they had launched

was Uppercrust, among others. ALICE HARDY, M.D. Cute name. The puns, you know? I knew it was too cute to be a real private invention. MARK BLYTH, M.D. Quite. Of course, all the good stuff ends up being a state invention.

So yeah, Uppercrust, which is still in lots of stations in the UK, and will serve you an immensely overpriced and disappointing crusty baguette. Still exists. So hooray to Upper Crust, I did say we're gonna talk about sandwiches. But also, travel is fair, weirdly, also... ALICE It's what holds this podcast together. RILEY Yeah, this is it, yeah. I mean, I, yeah, I mean, god, I would love a cheesesteak right now. ALICE The thing is, Warren's advice to enjoy every sandwich, very difficult if you live in Britain, even more so if you regularly

travel by train. Yeah, I mean, it's also this thing, because one of the biggest targets on British Rail's back was the catering, for a long time. RILEY Yes, it was, yeah. ALICE You get a famously terrible sandwich, right? And then you look at how much this famously terrible sandwich, or burger, or whatever, cost you, and it's like, oh, it was like 70 pence or whatever. As opposed to now where you get still the worst food ever, but it costs you like a fiver.

What exactly was in the sandwiches that made it so terrible? I need a description of the British Rail sandwich. ALICE I can answer this for you by the fact that I was on a Trans Pennine Express train, and a large segment of the audience will get a sense of where I'm going with this. And I had a vegan sausage bap that you could only describe as satanic. Every... JUSTIN So...

Fascinating. ALICE Every different component of this was, I suspect, made of a slightly different wetness level of cardboard. I don't know how I survived the experience, but like, just like, meant to be hot, nominally heated, and like, cold and hard as bone. Um, yeah, no, I think British Rail, right, because people got used to the very striking design and because it became invisibilized, became dismal and banal to people, and so, you get a lot of Clarksonian takes

about it. Where it's like, you know, you get like, grey beef or whatever, and sort of like, grey in navy blue and grey in grey. And it's like... The worst sandwich in the world. Exactly, yeah. And it's exactly what you allude to, we inherited... Because it was a state entity, we ended up imparting our... Exactly. Yeah. And we can, it's exactly what you're looking to. We inherited, because it

was a state entity, we ended up kind of imparting our, and this is a kind of a general, a class thing. And there's all sorts of annoying British shit that gets wound into this, but like, BR kind of like, whilst it's an incredibly good thing and incredibly successful on, on lots of different metrics, it kind of, we're going to, we're about to jump forward to 1990, and we'll jump to the next slide in a second, but it very much started to... Well, not started to it, throughout its entire lifetime, the upper classes hated it because it was the proles being in charge of a big thing, and in some cases being in charge of their beloved railway that they'd argued so much against, or their great-grandfathers had argued so much against a hundred years

before. ALICE I do also note, by the way, in passing, that British Rail sandwich does have a fairly extensive Wikipedia article. RILEY Of course it does! JUSTIN What I don't get is, you know, we don't... I mean, M-Track serves some pretty mediocre food, but it's not like legendarily bad. RILEY Oh god damn. RILEY The thing is, it built up a life of its own, like, I don't think the sandwiches were ever that bad, they thing is it built up a life of its own. I don't think the sandwiches were ever that

bad. They just kind of build up a bit of an allegory for being probably popularized by a too-rawny sketch or whatever. They built up this banality of like, oh, it's the state running things and we have to just shrug our shoulders at the banality of the state running things and the idea that it wasn't. And it devices a little bit of that chip on the shoulder thing about all oh, those chippy Americans with their entrepreneurialism and all this shit. ALICE I feel like a post-Soviet Russian, right, in that, like, I'm not saying it wasn't bad, but I've seen the alternative.

LIAM Yeah, we've had somewhere to sit down. ALICE Yeah, exactly. LIAM Yeah, exactly. And everything they told us about communism was a lie, but everything they told us about capitalism was the truth. So let's jump towards the next slide. So, Devon, I'm so sorry, we've slowed ourselves down a bit talking about sandwiches. Yeah I knew I would do this.

So secularization! Look at this shit. Oh boy. Look at every single one of these, so. I apologize. Sectorization! Look at this shit. Look at every single one of these, a beautiful corporate identity. Look at these services. Really? So we've kind of-

I know, I know. Sorry, sorry. I'm trying to restrain myself. I'm trying to restrain myself. It's like the- It's nice that it's the New Jersey transes of Britain. It is. I, my first commute to school was a network southeast, still just about networker.

Was it class 365, I wanna say? Yeah, very likely. The noise that those things make is like embedded in my skull at this point. I have fond memories. Actually, were you at the southern end? It might have been at 465. Quite possibly. This would have been shortlands out to West Dulwich, if that tells you anything.

Yeah, it would have been a 465. You're very close. It would have been a 465. Also made in New York, actually. Are those the ones with the slamming doors? No, no. They're plug doors. I still catch them today to go to Denmark Hill regularly.

They're fine trains. No, the slam doors are like, in my head, is what my dad takes to work at like, Cannon Street, you know? And actually, I'm glad you bring those trains up, Nova, because BR hadn't just been like, oh, we've made our old Naka trains look nice. By this point, so this is 1990, right? By this point, BR had absolutely turned things around. You know, we had a railway that was the, it was incredibly, ridership had been climbing slowly since the mid 1980s. Average subsidy was as low as like 20% of running

costs, which was amongst the most efficient railway in Europe. Like pretty impressive stuff. You know, we had, we had pretty impressive stuff. Even in London, which funnily enough had ended up with a lot of the oldest stock being left over, we started seeing a rolling program of fleet renewals. So we'd seen regional railways getting new fleets, obviously Intercity had had. By this point, we were starting to see the appearance of the 225s as well. So we were starting to see fleet modernization right across the board, which is cascading stuff down and getting rid of the really old crap shit. So this was happening ongoing.

ALICE You don't have a compartment, you don't have a door, you can't do the th- I forget which British eccentric this was, whose train went past his garden on the way home, and he used to pull down the window and throw his briefcase into his own garden to save carrying at home. quite possibly, yeah. JUSTIN Oh, Mad Jack Churchill. Mad Jack Churchill, yeah. That carrying home. Quite possibly, yeah. Mason- That's the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, yeah, good stuff. So, at the time also, so let's hop forward a slide actually, because often people cite privatisation as

being this wonderful explosion in ridership, and it's all because of privatisation, but that's because what they do is chop the x-axis off at the start of privatization. But if, Roz, if you John Madness the line that's at like... Kind of look at... John Madness at 1990 and see where the line is around then, and then look at where, if you go back to 1980, you can see that things have been climbing since the mid-80s. So you can see... Exactly.

That line's very... Thanks, Roz. Yeah, that's perfect. Can I add one more diversion? Yes, of course. It's about the last slide. Didn't have my favourite British Rail sort of hived off thing there, which is Red Star Parcels. Yes, you're right, that was a mistake.

Lest you forget that all of these people were, like, crypto-communists, and like, art and trade unionists. Fun, fun, fun story. Red Star Parcels, the massive logo is still attached to the north facing side of Euston Station if you want to go and see it. Al- Could have had that instead of Amazon Prime, I'm just saying. Mason- Literally, Red Star Parcels was the express rapid parcel delivery scheme that used like kind of basically passenger express trains to move stuff around.

It's a very good idea and we're, as with so many things in the railway, in the process of very expensively reinventing it right now. So yeah, so on the one side, you've got the ridership showing you how it kind of, it dropped through, through from the kind of the post-war years, dropped through to the kind of the mid eighties and then started climbing. And for their reasons why it dropped off again in the early nineties that we'll get to in a moment, they evolved cocaine. But the, the next graph shows you the government subsidies and showing that subsidies were extremely low through the late 80s. They climbed a bit for cocaine reasons in the early 90s and then dropped again in the final years

of BR. So next slide please. And very briefly. I have a question. Oh yes, ask the question. I have heard that a good amount of this ridership uptick is like all TFL. Not entirely. A good chunk of it is, but no actually, we had a lot of climbing usage in the cities outside of London as well. So it's not entirely London. Actually, I do have a version of this that

splits between the different, but no, it's not quite that. Whoever told you that might have slightly oversold it. Certainly a major component, because funnily enough, the only place that we really built a good suburban and urban rail network was London. Funnily enough, when you build that railway, people will use it. Talking of which, talking of London rail investments. So next slide. It's 1990 and we have this funny thing called Thameslink providing the first high capacity suburban rail link through London. Next slide again. We have planning for this funny old thing, Crossrail here running. So all these optimistic things. if we go to the next slide, we were

even talking about planning for new high speed rail links between the Channel Tunnel, London, and the North of England. What an idea! You could get a train from Rome all the way to Glasgow and have it be like 200 miles an hour the whole way through. Yeah, even on a slightly more mundane level we had this funny project called the Trans-Pennine Route upgrade being mooted in 1990s. Very interesting. So the next slide, sorry, Roz.

I did say this, we'd get through them at a whack. So yeah, the Trans-Pennine Route upgrade here, which I'm sure that is long delivered, that electrification presumably finished in the mid-90s. You could go to Hull. You could go to Hull. You could go to Hull. You could have some kind of a Transpennine Express. Yeah. You could, yes. Actually, the Transpennine Express was a brand name that BR came up with

and did stick on some of their funny curvy window glass fronted DMUs for a while. So, and actually if you want to read about some of the stuff that BR was in the process of doing in 1990, then you can go to the next slide, please. You can have a look at this nice report called Futureail, The Next Decade. With this nice optimistic thing. The trouble is, as soon as this document was published, the fact that we, well, we have to of course jump forward to, next slide please, 1991. And there's this guy appearing freshly. Shout

out to my dad's leather jacket there. Weird. Hey, we're the same age. We are the same age, yeah. There's me, this tiny little weirdo. I'm not supplying a baby picture for the podcast. No, I don't. Is this TMI for the hogs? No, no, it's fine. No, what we have to talk about is cocaine. Because what happens when you build your entire economy?

Jesus, what were you up to? Yeah, I was about to say. Next slide please. Because what happens when your entire economy is run by people who are just insanely coked up? Oh, well they obviously make stupid decisions. And obviously it went to absolute... The UK economy, the financialized economy, in fact the world economy went to complete rat shit in the early 90s.

Indeed. So what happened there was we'd had, in the UK at least, we'd had a decade of Thatcher and us all having no money. And so the line that, the reason that the rise that started in the 80s dropped back again in the early 90s was because a decade of, um, a decade of, kind of, austerity. You know, John Maynard Keynes fucking told you so. I mean, Marx more prominently, but like, even Keynesianism tells you this is gonna happen. You should've dropped money from helicopters. You should've dropped money from helicopters. You should have dropped money from helicopters. And if you go to next slide please, because some more, more fuckhead economists are going

to get involved in this situation. Those fuckhead economists are the horror show Tufton Street, Adam Smith Institute folks, and the Treasury. Now what do these fun, fun loving guys get up to? Well, what they do is they get together, presumably get up to nothing nefarious and they... Next slide, please. Publish a document called New Opportunities for the Railways, or should I say heavily input into the white paper, New Opportunities for the Railways. So up to 1990, not even Thatcher was cantonising national... privatising what was left of British Rail, which, let's be fair, most of British

Rail was still just one thing British Rail. ALICE It's like, it's too deeply embedded, and also people are kind of fond of it in the kind of love to hate sort of way, like as much as you get the sandwich thing, it's also like, this is a kind of shared national thing that we all hate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was se- exactly, exactly. We love complaining about shit that we do well. In this country.

We love it. We cannot get enough of it. We cannot fucking get enough of it. We cannot get enough of destroying the good things. You accidentally start believing the stuff you're complaining about. We are doing it now to the NHS. The cycle fucking repeats itself, and there's not much left to do it to after that. RILEY So this document, New Opportunities for the Railways, was absolutely penned by

a combination of the Treasury and the Adam Smith Institute. The reason why no one had been really cantonising privatisation of the railways despite asset stripping everything else was because the railways were just too complicated. There were too many interrelated moving parts. It was also a safety critical industry in a way that made the way that risk would flow through the industry quite complicated as well. ALICE It's also quite strategic. In the same way as Stalin never fucking with his nuclear physicists, it's like, you want this kind of state capacity until you don't.

You know? RILEY Exactly. So July of 1992 this thing was published, and it was a mess. It proposed what could only be described as an atomization of the rail network. And there was this one guy, this conservative MP Robert Adley, who was like the chair of the Transport Select Committee at the time. In his words, successive appearances of ministers and officials in the committee had shown a deep lack of understanding of how their proposed system would fit together. But then he died of heart failure in May 1993, so F.

ALICE HENRY Fucking John Major shot him with a cancer gun, you know? LIAM LARSON Yeah. ALICE HEN? Well, quite. The counter gun set to heart attack. Sorry, sorry, we're trying to fix it. So next slide please. They did that. They did the crazy thing.

So okay, deep breath. This is the Railways Act 1993, which is, An act to provide for the appointment of functions of a rail regulator and director of passenger rail franchising and of users, consulative committees for the railway industry and for certain ferry services to make new provision with respect to provision of railway services and the presence by whom they are provided in order to secure their provision to make provision for and in connection with the grant and acquisition of rights over and the disposal of other transfer investing of any pro...

I can't even finish this. I love statutory construction. Can you see why I didn't want a career in this? This is a good act. Whatever is he detecting America? The bullshit nonsense. I'd say that's for something. Oh yes. The uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism. Parentheses USA Patriot close parentheses act of 2001. ALICE I would say, you should at most use one semi-colon in a sentence. SEAN I really liked when, my dad used to watch Glenn Beck, hi dad, hi mom if you're listening. ALICE Isn't your dad a Maoist? SEAN Yeah, we're gonna get there.

It was to see how long he could last before he turned the TV off in rage. ALICE Oh, I see, okay, sure. SEAN He would time himself, and see how long he could last before he turned the TV off and rage. Oh, I see. Okay, sure. He would time himself, and see how long he could last. But Glenn Beck's great complaint about, and one of the right-wing talking points about the Affordable Care Act when it came out was like, well, it's too long. Blah blah blah blah blah. It's like 5000 pages or whatever, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Not that it fucking matters. But my dad was like, alright, cool, I'll do it in one sentence. The United States of America hereby adopts universal healthcare and authorizes the Department of Health and Human Services to oversee SAAM. Done. RILEY Boom. Oh man, I shout to Liam's dad, you know. That would have been beautiful. LIAM Yeah, he had some real good takes about Cuba the other day, that I'm sorry I didn't

get to post. They were... RILEY Oh wow. Okay. LIAM They were- Oh wow. They were nutty. I mean they're- Yeah. Are we in trouble with your dad for the Cuba episode? No, he liked the Cuba episode.

I've been consulting with a friend of the show, Noah, to try to get him to Havana. Just once before my dad dies he should see the fruits of his labor? Pushback. Yeah, I guess. Oh yeah, so next part please. He intervened to prevent several Castro assassination attempts from succeeding. Yeah, my dad actually beat Batista with a baseball bat. I would actually love to see that.

Thank you Liam McCanderson. Beautiful. Thank you. So, this act, what did it do? Well I used the word atomization earlier, and so I decided to do a diagram to show you what that looks like. So here's British Rail on one side, on the other side if we go next slide please. I hate this.

Take it back. It's like a military PowerPoint episode, what the shit is this? Building state capacity in Afghanistan. I have simplified this slightly. So from one organisation, British Rail, you end up with, the first entity being created was Rail Track, which took over the rail infrastructure, like track signal stations. Hey, they've got Trans Rail on there, which I still think it's funny to have a sweatshirt with Transrail's

logo on it. ALICE Yeah. So that was Railtrap which took over the infrastructure, but it wasn't in charge of infrastructure maintenance, no no no. Seven infrastructure maintenance units, and six track-reel units were set up to split off maintenance from operation, that feels like a good idea. ALICE This will not cause any problems. LIAM I am being driven to madness.

Yeah. And we're only getting started. Six freight operating companies were created, and 25 train operating units there. There's a nice little blue sort of battalion there of train operating units. Six freight operating companies, Rail Express Services, one of the sectorization ones which I don't remember, Mainline Load Hall, Transrail Freightliner, and Weird Triangle. MW Oh, the Weird Triangle I think is actually the weird bit of the Freightliner logo they

did for a while. Yeah, it's just my bad logo size shaping for my little diagram, I mean. ALICE Why did they do the Freightliner? I didn't need that. MW I know, it is a bit... I much preferred the one with the BR arrow next to it, you pricks. So then that's not the worst bit of it though, because we end up, okay, holds a bunch of regulating and franchising authorities and safety regulators and economic, but the evilest part of this, the most evil part of this, I talked about the fact that BR had scrimped and saved to have this rolling program of rolling stock renewal. We ended up by this point, quite a decent fleet in terms of age. Okay, lots of Mark

One stuff still floating around, but actually, BR had got into a rolling program of fleet renewal. Enter the Roscoes, the rolling stock operating companies. Three of them. Here they are. Angel, Eversholt and Porterbrook, all still extant. There are others who have entered the fray since then, but these three are still the big players. And they were at the start all consortia of banks and private equity. And interesting things. What did they do? They got all these trains for unbelievable cheap prices, like criminally cheap prices. Basically, they then leased these banks, the the train operators at eye-watching cost with no oversight whatsoever.

This continues to be the main flow of cash out of the industry. And it's absolutely zero coincidence that these groups funneled all their cash via low or zero tax regimes. And it's actually... I was going to say, I'm sure that that money re-enters the economy and trickles down to you and I. It does, yeah. Yeah, money re-enters the economy and trickles down to you and I. It does, yeah. It does, yeah.

Yeah, the only trickling going on was the shit and the piss out of the loose storage tanks in the old stock that they had. Because the trouble with the Roscoe's, they landed this massive cheap asset that they could rent out at a high price. Yeah, why spend money on it then? Yeah, why spend money on it. Exactly. So it basically killed the UK train manufacturing industry.

So we lost, in the aftermath of privatization, the only orders that remained were BRs, orders that were rolling over. New passenger trains then wouldn't be built until the early 2000s. And we lost pretty much every single train manufacturer in the UK, except for the one in Derby. They all went. We've since then opened new plants at extreme cost in Newport, but they're like, we, we, we kill their train manufacturing industry as a result of the Roscoe's.

Thank you. Pranization. They're all like, they're all like foreign owned. I mean, well, I guess really the thing, the thing that gets me here, this is all being done in the name of efficiency through competition, right? Exactly, yeah. And if you look, if you know any railroad history, like, globally, competition between railroads has always been kinda fake.

Yes. Yeah, it's always a facade. If you don't like your Roscoe, you can go and rent your train carriages from another Roscoe. Which is the same three hedge funds in a trench coat, but the trench coat is a different color. Whenever there's actual competition going on, it's always destructive and it leads to a rate war that eventually drives both companies to bankruptcy. Yeah, if they were serious about this, Roscoe's would be going out and sabotaging rolling

stock of other companies, you know, like putting the windows in with ice axes and stuff. I need a guy with a really evil mustache. Did you just say the phrase, funny, you should say that? I did, yeah. Don't like that! Sorry November. Yeah, no, um, yeah, interesting, both freight companies refuse to fit stuff on their trains that would even make their journey more efficient, such as like better, better sanding equipment if it risked improving the

traction for the, their competing freight train running behind them. And likewise with, so one of the, one of the fun things about the, the, the rolling stock operating companies is say one of the train operators wanted to fit a load of nice like new kit on the train like, and they're like, no, no, we'll pay for it. The rolling stock operator... So say it's like Sensor to improve to Aircon or... ALICE And Sensor is a tank that doesn't hose down tracks like lineside crews with like shit and piss. WILL Yes, having been lineside and had those trains

go past and had to duck, it's not a very pleasant experience. No, the rolling stock operating companies told those train operating companies to... Oh God. To strip all that stuff back out of the train when they came off lease. So yeah, really, really efficient system. So yeah, you allude to precisely this point, which is the psychopaths in Treasury and the Adam Smith Institute, the whole British economy, and it's only more true today, is built around the idea that value comes from the interfaces between the things that do stuff, not from the things that do stuff. And that was very much the logic of privatization. S.K. Rentseeking. Which, as we know, Adam Smith was famously a big fan of.

A. Oh yeah. That's why they invented the train landlord. M. Yep. And so we have literal train landlords. We had Railtrack at this point, very much not what Network Rail is. At this point, Railtrack, very much a contract management organization that didn't see itself in the business of being an engineering company, despite having, you know, what, 16,000 miles of railway to its name. And also a whole bunch, you know, like the same number again of engineers, skilled engineers that it promptly attempted to sack or just generally make their life horrible. So these RASCOs also cause problems with like the availability of rolling stocks. promptly attempted to sack or just generally make their life horrible. So-

But these Rascos also cause problems with the availability of rolling stock, so you wind up with the wrong train on the wrong service. Why is my train to Glasgow Central one carriage, filled, every inch of it filled with people? The thing about having a lease, the thing about leasing a train is that the more coaches you lease, the more expensive it is to lease the train. And so you end up in a situation where, okay, your train might be full. You don't want it super full. Basically, you end up with a situation of trains are way too short. And also it's not just, okay, there are lots of other reasons

why trains are short, but you also, by consequence of that, you remove some of the incentives to fix the infrastructure reasons why trains have to be short as well. So this, just all of this incentivizes a situation where the railways either get shitter or the rate at which they were improving slows down massively. Now, let's just, let's maybe, you know, everyone watching and listening to this, you thought this was just going to be one of those sort of systemic big picture disaster episodes. No. Let's go to the next slide and ask, how did this go? ALICE and JUSTIN poorly.

ALICE episode in itself, you know. RILEY Yeah, so we've, interestingly, we've not done any of these four because, oh boy, there's another one. So, this is the Southall crash, the Southall rail disaster. The root cause of this was a lack of effective communication between the fragmented parts of the new industry. Whoops. All sorts of horrible things going on here of protection systems being isolated and trains

crossing and signalers doing this and drivers being stupid and not trained enough. Lots of... Actually, the driver wasn't... Okay, this driver was a bit stupid, but actually it was, it was a very much a failure of the new, of the new frag fragmented structure. And it resulted in death. The system should be able to withstand a stupid driver. Yeah, exactly.

That's true. Exactly. Yeah. Like this, this, this was not good. So, so yeah, um, seven people were killed, 140 others were severely injured. Um, very much not good. So I'm sure this is not the, not the, not the, you know, we're not going to see another one of these. Next slide please.

Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. So only just up the line, two years, that was 1997. In 1999, 31 people were killed at Labbroke Grove, which was as a result of poor safety regulation and poor safety oversight of the new railway structure. Oh dear. Yeah. And this is a pretty horrific, I mean, we talk about those nice, nice turbo network of turbos that go around the nice aluminium bodied thing. The first car and second car were basically burst open by being hit head-on by an HST going at full tilt. Not good. Is this the one that there's like a pretty graphic video of? There's like a fake CCT fee video of this. I'm not

sure if there's a real video of this one actually. There is a YouTube video and I'm not sure it's the, but maybe, maybe it is the real one and I've just told myself that it's fake to deal with the fact that it's a horror show. But I was like, uh, like maybe upscaled a bit. I'm not sure. Yeah, possibly. Yeah, maybe it might be that it was from like a, like a dispatches episode or something

like some documentary and they kind of upscaled it. But yeah, really 31 people dying. That's, that's a really, that's a really nasty rail crash in the UK. It's worth saying as we get to the midpoint of these horror shows that overall safety did continue to improve through the... Okay, these are some big prominent, very public failures and crashes, but overall safety did continue to improve on the rail network. I do just want to put a flag in the sand on that. That's not because of privatization. It's because you still had all the same people working in the industry and going, actually, I want safety to get better.

There are some other secondary, inadvertent side effects of safety that maybe were improved by privatization as a result of everyone becoming super risk averse. But I still think that as we go to the next slide please, we will... This is Hatfield in October 2000. And this is an accent that I want to spend just a minute longer talking about. I mean, this is a disaster podcast, so maybe we should spend longer talking about these all over. And we can just do all of these as episodes in due time, you know? Well, exactly. And it would be very interesting to do so, because they are all pretty frightening in different ways.

So this failure was specifically an infrastructure failure. And it's pretty instructive on me as a track engineer and how we do track engineering, both in the design of railways and also the maintenance and inspection of the rails themselves. But I just want to read from some twats book actually, page 123 of some twats book. So basically I just want to quote from what the report started talking about when, about Railtrack. So we always talk about the fact that Railtrack had been formed. The fact that it saw itself primarily as a contract management organization. It retained as little of its specialist engineering knowledge as possible by its very design. And the structure

of the industry around it involved various separate contractors, subcontractors, those infrastructure maintenance units and track renewal units. They're just all run by companies like Jarvis and First Engineering and all these sort of things that question mark, question mark, red flag raised. So like skills and knowledge were like deliberately split apart in such a way that no single responsible person was both competent and empowered enough to like match engineering knowledge to decision making. So it's worth saying. So what is like, it was deliberately split up. So if you knew stuff, you had absolutely no power. And if you were, like, yeah, so no single person had both the knowledge and the competence,

and the knowledge and competence and decision making. And those high up and off the tree... RILEY We gotta put the MBAs in charge, they know how widgets work. ALICE Literally, literally, right. Because all the guys who were supposed to be in these safety oversight roles were consciously just NBA guys. Yeah, and I, we're doing business success here, we're doing super business success. Business.

Business, yeah. I'm finding efficiencies, you know, I'm engaged in contracts, awarding... I'm efficiency maxing, I'm finding... Yeah. I'm doing widgets. Unrealized gains, yes. Yeah, I'm selling train tickets. I'm doing it, mom, I'm doing... Unrealized gains, yes. Yeah, I'm selling train tickets.

Yeah. I'm doing it, mom, I'm doing it! NBA should be rounded up and executed. Yes. I mean, 100% sure. That's one of Robert E. Lee's other horrible contributions to the world. Business school. Business school.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, shove them all to the end of Brighton Pier. So a lot of people were pushing off a pier, man. I know, right? That's a big pier. So just for clarity, what happened at this accident was that a length of rail about 35 meters long shattered into about 200 pieces underneath the train going 150 miles an hour. This beautiful and city 225, 35 meters of rail shattered like a dropped vase into over 200 pieces. There are a few pieces at the National Rail Museum now you can go and see and just kind of say the word fuck under your breath a few times out when you look at them. And the train going around the curve swang to the outside of the curve and the restaurant car, the kind of the diner, the kind of the shop car bit, um, hit an OLE mast

and was ripped apart and all the fatalities were in that, you know, in that vehicle. You're just buying this kind of like early privatization sandwich thinking, can my life get any worse? Oh, it sure can. Don't worry. Just immediately taken out by a catenary poll. Yeah. Or worse, you're the staff member serving the thing.

And then unfortunately it was mostly staff who got killed in that car. Four of them wiped out in there. Absolutely horrific out along with a lot of injuries. It's pretty unpleasant. Thankfully it was reasonably isolated because these Mark IV coaches were really decent in a crash. And yeah, and kind of that, the design of that particular car, it just managed to sort of snatch a lot of the energy out. So this could have been a lot worse. Thankfully it wasn't, but still, you know, really horrible. So I'm just going to read out. So the thing that led to this was the fact that there was an absolutely shagged rail that they knew they needed to take out and replace. And they basically couldn't get maintenance. They didn't really understand

quite how bad it was, or the people who did didn't have the power to tell the others that it was that bad. And they couldn't get access to actually replace the rail in the first place. So I'm just going to quickly read a thing because this is going to make you all miserable and really angry. So the Adisource maintenance contractor did not comply with engineering standards in relation to defect management or carry out inspections to the level of detail required. They did not employ staff competent to inspect or assess track defects or the maintenance techniques employed to minimize the risk resulting from them. Grinding trains that could have prolonged real life were operated by a separate contractor and infrequently. And guidelines as to the

use of grinding trains were held by Railtrack central engineering team that no one had access to. Ultrasonic testing was screaming on each pass that the rail was shagged, but this received little attention from the maintenance contractor. Yes, I use the word shagged in my book. I wrote it. I get to do that. Records were... It gets worse, I'm afraid. I'm going to just briefly because it's so ... The precision of how miserable this is quite important. Records were sent to Rail Track's zonal management, but few staff at this level were capable of reviewing those records. The view of its highly paid executive staff was that Rail Track was a contracts manager, not an engineering organization. This led to contempt for engineering skills and the recruitment of totally unqualified staff, among whom there

was also high turnover. Hooray! The zone compliance and engineering manager responsible for the section track around Hatfield failed to comprehend what track work was being undertaken and what was required. And I'm quoting here, because of its technical nature. Yes. There's railway stuff in my railway job. Can you believe this? I'm confused. What the fuck? Is this a kind of widget?

The Zone Quality Standards Manager, in his own words, did not have the knowledge of railway engineering nor railway safety. Why not? God damn. Yeah. So in the words of the independent investigation published about six years later, Railtrack was not putting safety as the number one objective in its maintenance strategy. You should probably do that. That's kind of your job. I just felt like I needed... Sorry for slowing things down and reading that, but I just wanted to lay out the level of... The short word to use is evil within this organisation that resulted in people

dying. This intransigence had horrific outcomes and the intransigence was as a direct result of the privatisation of the GB, sorry, rail network. Northern Ireland's railways by the way at this point, still nationalised. God love them. The north of Ireland. Indeed, the north of Ireland. Yeah, and to be fair, the Irish railways were also...

I look forward to the unification of those rail networks for good reasons all around. I'm afraid folks, we're not done, because next slide please. Oh Jesus. It keeps happening. Two years later... Fuck me, this is goddamn. We decided to tumble a Class 365, like some kind of, almost like a Hornby train getting kicked down a sofa, tumble a class 365 full of commuters into Potters Bar railway station. And in the

meantime, knocking a parapet down and flattening a, like a hot fuzz style, flattening some poor lady on the, on the bridge below with a bunch of brick parapet. Wow. So this was as a result of, oh yes, that's right, the outsourced infrastructure maintenance teams, not looking after a switch properly which opened under the train, and sent it tumbling into the canopy of Potters Bar station. And yet again, we found ourselves killing passengers. Seven of them.

Six of them and a lady under the bridge. Uh, really horrific. Um, and now so what's thing is not so good in real life. It isn't a not a, not when you go into a hundred miles an hour. So yeah, not good. So, um, as a result of these, this spread of accidents, there were a lot of changes in the industry. And if we go to the next slide, uh, the big one was, uh spread of accidents, there were a lot of changes in the industry. And if we go to the next slide, the big one was, fuck you, rail track, you're off the case. Network Rail arrived. Network Rail was essentially a government body, although at this point it was kind of one of those sort of weird half and half, like arms length things, but

it was essentially a government company. And after Potter's Bar, all infrastructure maintenance was brought back in-house as well, which was not only a good idea from a safety perspective, but also much cheaper. Just funnily enough, when you don't have a bunch of individual companies you've got to run contracts for and you just do it all in-house, it's a lot cheaper to do this stuff. So now, as I've said, overall passenger and worker safety had continued to improve, but these massively As I've said, overall passenger and worker safety had continued to improve, but these massively visible public tragedies really... They properly exposed how much of a mess this was as Treasury had drawn it up. So bad news, very bad. Network Rail ended up becoming officially

a public body in 2013. So what else is going on then? New labor came in in 1997 after all of this privatization had been finished and we'd ended up with all of our rolling stock, our train operating companies and such. What did New Labour do to reverse this and make the system better? Next slide please. Oh, the Socialist Rifle Association. Oh my God. More, more, more, oh my God. Liam, I'm so sorry. I feel like I'm giving you brain damage. I'm so sorry.

All of Britain gives me brain damage, man. No, Nova and I have to live here. We have to drink the water for God's sake. Do you have any idea how much poo is in the water that we drink every day? The prions too. Yeah, you guys don't talk to Nova about the prions. Please. Don't bring up the prions.

Please. Yeah. I don't want to hear about it. I just, I don't, like, I understand this just based on like the finance broification of everything, but it just still makes me so goddamn upset that like we had a perfectly good system and then we just shit and piss all over it to make a few NBA dickheads from Duke or wherever the fuck you went to business school. Fuck you and fuck tobacco road.

At the expense of like normal people who are NBA. Our MBAs don't really have like a sports angle you can make them feel bad with. You can't really be like, you know, fuck the LSE. No, it's cool. It's cool. What you're going to do is walk to Brighton here, right? You're going to It's cool, it's cool, what you're gonna do is walk to Brighton Pier, right? You're gonna put on the biggest lead shoes you can find, and do us a favor and jump in and fucking stay there. I think it'd be funny if in Britain they were all inexplicably Duke alumni, though. Yeah, I just assume.

What asshole... I mean, you go to... Well, what's the shitty business school I hate? You have any idea how little that narrows it down? Drexel University. Yeah, we'll say Drexel. Oh man, we're off topic, it's fine. No, I'm just gonna take a bunch of people to Brighton Pier for the sightseeing is why.

Yeah, right, so the strategic railways authority gets created by New Labour. And in theory, it's a good thing, but it's very much a sticking plaster on a messy system that clearly is starting to... Well, it's not starting to. It's clearly caused a lot of problems and death. So it does start awarding these longer term franchises. There's some kind of actual strategic thinking going on, if not them actually having the funding powers to back it up. But there are problems of the structure of this industry that cause real headaches that the SRA could not really resolve. Next slide, please. We have to talk about again, the West Coast mainline. So here's the West Coast mainline. And this is halfway through them for tracking the Trent Valley and doing a little electrification to kind of provide... Well, basically we ended

up spending what in today's money is about 25 billion quid on upgrading the West Coast Mainline between London and Manchester and Glasgow and Liverpool. And don't get me wrong, fantastic project, you know, ish. We achieved a tremendous increase in capacity that was used up, every seat used up before we'd even finished the project. So before we'd even signed the contract on completing the West Coast Route modernization, every new seat of capacity we created had been sat in by new passengers. So yeah, not enough folks.

The trouble is this project was an absolute shit show. So the West Coast mainline had been considered the jewel of the crown for a long time. It was electrified and modernized through the modernization plan in the 50s and 60s and into the 70s, in fact, with electrification reaching Glasgow in 74. But BR, before it had been privatized, had actually developed plans to significantly upgrade the route. This train that we're looking at now is what's known as a bendy dildo. I think I've made everyone laugh about that on the show before. Uh, please laugh again. Um, it was, it was a tilting

train. It is a tilting train, uh, kind of with recycled APT technology in it, uh, ish and a roundabout way. And, uh, uh, yeah, this thing was running up and down, but BR had already kind of had plans for this. Not least obviously we knew about the tilting trains, but also in introducing, you know, um also in introducing more upgrades in terms of speed and for tracking and such and such, and actually a new fleet of trains as well. But that got delayed because of privatisation. Hooray. By 1998, passenger growth was really putting stress on the route. Everyone's favourite beardy dickhead Richard Branson was wanting to introduce these trains.

It's always good when someone owns an island in the British Virgin Islands, right? That's always good. ALICE Yeah. Totally normal guy. ALICE Can we say he's a p***y? No. No? RILEY Well, actually, technically, Liam, you can

say that. I have a US citizen coming in, motherfucker! ALICE I don't think that he is... We don't think that. Devon, have fun with this bit. So, uh... You'll have to answer to the United States of America. Yeah.

So here's the thing, right? Yeah, no billionaire could ever interfere with that. No, I come and get me in the titanium bathtub. I rescued from an A-10 motherfucker. I've got a GAU-7 and you know, whatever. That's fine. The A-10's a good plane. Suck me off. So the SRA came along, the Strategic Rail Authority came along kind of halfway through this project, hemorrhaging money and achieving very little. So by 2002, costs had risen for this project from 2.5 billion to 14.5 billion in then money, which is about 35 billion now in post-trust cash. And the scope of the project had been significantly curtailed. So this

thing was supposed to provide in-cab signaling, 140 miles an hour everywhere. And it was like, no, 125 miles an hour, regular ass signaling, less capacity improvements. But they still delivered it. But basically, any benefits that it actually afforded in terms of increased capacity were pretty much immediately absorbed. And indeed, before the Wainworks had even completed in 2008, it became quite clear that, oh, we still need to do that new high speed line that BR had started talking about in 1990. So West Coast Route Modernization had made Treasury angry again. So next slide please.

I just want to issue a correction. It's a GAU-8 for you all, before I get another laser pig video made about me. You're really taking that to heart, you know? I will never surrender my stolen GAU8 and titanium bathtub. I keep it right next to Ross' basement nuke. That's not mine. So, right, the Strategic Rail Authority had provided the rail industry with some level of long term vision, and a decent amount of organisational autonomy.

Railtrak's demise had slowed it down,, they started awarding these 20 year franchises, which did help fix some of the stupid issues of the early privatization years. And this, however, was an absolute, this kind of long-termism was basically made everyone in treasury get a tummy hurty. And so what they did was, next slide please. They killed it. Yeah. They just killed the strategic rail authority. Ike, you're gone. You're off the case. So yeah, that was like,

how many years was that? Not many years, like a few years the strategic rail authority existed for, and then it was killed off. And that was kind of like, yeah, Treasury, their last gasp, well, if only it was their last gasp, that was Treasury going, no, no, we're in charge. And so a lot of stuff ended up being brought back into the DFT. And we found ourselves in a situation where the DFT and central government had more control over the railways than at any time in the railways history, including under BR. Like central government had not had this level of control under BR that it ended up getting after the collapse of, or the pistol in the back of the head of the SRA. So it's a bit of a whistle

stop tour, this isn't it? But this is the mess that was privatization. This is the whole point, right? The episode is to tell you how much of a fucking shit show it was. And all of these kind of sticking plasters did not solve the big problem, which was this was bad. So let's jump forward to 2007. What a wonderful job the new Labour government had done of railways not. And so by 2007, they decided to actually talk about them a little bit. And so we had this paper released called Delivering a Sustainable Railway. Now what this paper did was it said, we're not going to electrify anything else. We're going to use biodiesel everywhere.

And that's going to give us- That's definitely sustainable. Yeah. Why the hell not, baby? Yep. So that's how we're going to run the... The thing is sometimes, and this is weird given how much of a... well you'll see what I mean when we go to the next slide, sometimes a nerd comes along. And sometimes that nerd

is called Andrew Adonis. Next slide please. ALICE Name not matching the Tiers. RILEY Oh, that's a good one. ALICE Lord Adonis to you as well. No no no! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! 1776! Can you flash up the painting of surrender at Yorktown please? Yeah, exactly. We need to, you know, I think we need to ratify the titles and nobility amendment that we should go further. Yeahbility amendment. Which should be illegal to address

someone by their title in the United States. Mason- I agree. After recent events, I could not stand by that more vigorously. Fuck the Lords. But this guy might well be like whatever the word for a weeb is, but for Tony Blair, he is that. However, he's also a massive rail nerd. And as a result of this, that 2007 report came out and he basically said, okay, Gordon Brown, that report is shit. Cause the same year Gordon Brown came into power, there's something about war criminal and stuff with Tony Blair making him becoming like electoral poison.

Anyway, Brown ascends and he puts Andrew Donis in as Secretary of State for Transport. Donis not only says, no, no, actually strategic electrification is a good idea. Let's crack on with that. But also initiated development of this thing called High Speed 2, which flipped the previous kind of, flipped kind of Blair's agnosticism towards doing anything to railways. And suddenly we're like in a situation where, oh, we might finally after this long period of a supposedly social democratic government, absolutely not, we're like in a situation where, oh, we might finally, after this long period of a supposedly social democratic government, absolutely not, we're going to maybe do something about railways. And indeed, next slide please.

We ended up with Network Rail publishing this document saying the case for new lines, which is kind of laid out why we needed high speed two, happy days, lovely days. Oh, but we have to talk about the fact that things actually aren't still going so well. So let's, let's just go to the next slide again. I just want to, I just looking at the cover of this report and the way the OLE is set up is appalling. I mean, I presume that they, that it's to tram line, given how many, I don't know, I just realized what you meant. It's centrally located.

And there's one every like 15 meters. And the hangers alternate position. Yeah. So whichever graphic designer, whichever like late 2000s CGI guy in like Bryce 3D was like setting this up, presumably didn't know anything about railways. Which sadly when it comes to render right stuff, see also our Hyperloop episode folks, is not something that is ever gonna be fixed. I don't think so. I mean they're gonna have AI doing it soon.

So you know. Oh my god. They already do. They already do and I hate it. That thing doesn't know anything about railways. So next slide please. Let's talk about National Express East Coast and Virgin Trains West Coast because in 2009, National Express East Coast, having been awarded the franchise of the East Coast Mainline, collapsed horribly, RIP to them. In 2012, Virgin Trains West Coast, or rather the west coast franchise, the bidding process was scrapped by government because it was found to be flawed and they were being threatened with judicial reviews in left, right, and center. We have to briefly talk about franchise agreements. Franchises were these sort of... Basically you have an area of trains that a company

or that would run under a train operating unit that a company would come in and run as a franchise operator. These things were, things were at the start, they were changing hands left, right and center all the time. So the logos were changing as quickly as, as people were getting on off the trains. It was, it was kind of chaos. And this, at the start of them- Spending a lot of money on paint. A lot of money on paint and even more money on lawyers. And that number only went up. You know, we talk about line go up. The lawyer line really went up because at the start these-

And an organization that spends a lot of its time on contracts to an organization that spends a lot of its time on lawsuits. Literally yes. Because at the start these were really, the franchise agreements were like one binder, right? One A4 binder. And by the time of, you know, By the late 2000s, these things filled up the back of a transit van. These agreements were thousands and thousands of pages. The money that you had to spend for the lawyer to just read through the whole thing was eye-watering. At this point, as a result of this complexity, it became difficult to actually run it. The number of companies interested in running trains massively diminished. So, you're talking

about the fakery of railway competition. Well, here it is in action, right? So the number of bidders reduced, the ambition of their bids increased so that they would win a chance of actually getting a bid. And this is why we started seeing these collapses. So, like National Express was stripped of the franchise after they failed to meet their payment targets. This is, this isn't because passenger growth wasn't good by the way. It's just that they were saying that they were going to get this like crazy made up wizard levels of money that just never materialized. So yeah. We're going to pack them in like cordwood. Exactly. Right. So, so we have both the failure of one franchise and the failure of a bidding process in another.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the franchise system was creaking at this point. And it was only going to get worse. Let's jump forward to the next slide to talk about something else that's going wrong. Because one of the things that British Rail had done was strip out all the fat of the system and made it really efficient. I said it was running one of the most efficient railway systems in Europe. The trouble when you then privatize that and tell the private companies to find more efficiencies is that there aren't any, other than the big lever that says,

fuck over your workers. By 2016, that's in a very big way what was happening. And so we were seeing changes to the responsibilities and the roles of staff, because the only lever left to these private train operators was fuck around with staff T's and C's or staffing levels. And so in 2016, we started seeing enormous levels of strike action, just a huge escalation in the level of strikes that were happening, kind of spearheaded by the RMT, but absolutely ass left were there with them. There were no levers left to minimize costs. And so this is where, in a way, this is really the only thing that the private train operating companies existed to do, right? It was to act as a shield against public outcry. And also as a way for government to say, well it's not us fucking over you workers,

it's the private train operating company that we've told to trade more for citizens. You're not mad at me, you're mad at Trans-Pennine Express or Avanti West Coast, you know? Oh, right, right, sure. Exactly. They look at American railroads and the obsession with operating ratio and they saw that and they're like, that's a good idea, we should have that here. Sounds like something we should do, right? So everyone will be glad to know that we're heading towards the climax of this story and it's not a good climax. So next slide please. Thanks, Liam. I'm glad someone lied. So yeah,

so next up we get, so let's talk again about Roscoe's, right? So we've already talked about the annoying things that Roscoe's relating, but one of the other things that Roscoe's had incentivized was, because why would you buy new trains? It was a freeze in train procurement. So we've already talked about the annoying things that Roscoe's relating, but one of the other things that Roscoe's had incentivized was because why would you buy new trains? It was a freeze in train procurement. So we had a very, we kind of a trickle of new trains popping up. But in 2015, well 2016, we had a record breaking trade order for new trains, like an enormous order for new trains and nowhere to actually build them, question mark. So we have this decade wide gap in building trains and so a lot of new trains are being built. At the same time as this, it's worth saying, these two pictures here are... This is some foreshadowing. These

two pictures here are of mothballed trains. On the left-hand side, you can see here are a bunch of still within their usable life Class 319 electric multiple units, all stored at Longmarsden for everyone to look at and put their heads in their hands over. These were supposed to end up in the North of England. We'll explain why they didn't in a minute. On the right-hand side is what were some of the brand new trains that started running on the Transpand and Express network, of which they ordered a set of three different trains because the train manufacturers didn't have the capacity to deliver all of one type of train. And they ended up being a disaster to operate.

So these are also now being stored at Longmarsh and for everyone to look at this kind of alien versus predator ass looking motherfucker on the right hand side here. They just replicated like the stupidest inefficiencies of British rail, but in the private market. Correct. Yes. We've got to buy four or three different kinds of trains because the manufacturers don't have capacity. Yeah, literally, we're rediscovering what B.R. had learned was a bad idea in the 50s. Isn't isn't private enterprise wonderful?

No, innovative, very innovative. So next slide, please. VR had learned was a bad idea in the 50s. Isn't private enterprise wonderful? Isn't it wonderful? No. Very innovative. So next slide please. One of the challenges, so that we've talked about trains, but one of the challenges with the, there was a similar story from an infrastructure perspective, the fact that we, other than the West Coast Route Modernization Project, there wasn't much going on in infrastructure world. So we ended up, we had this decade wide gap in skills on the infrastructure side, particularly when it comes to electrification. And the consequence of that was that suddenly we did, we ended up kind of in the start of the 2000, well kind of from like 2008,

2009 onwards, we started seeing a surge in infrastructure projects. And we had a massive skills bottleneck combined with an industry structure that exacerbated costs by kind of maximizing these organizational interfaces meant that we were delivering this infrastructure work and electrification in particular way too slowly and way too expensively. And so government canceled a lot of electrification in 2017. Whoops. Now the problem is as we were approaching May 2018, we had what was going to be the biggest change to railway timetables in like a generation. This required a load of new trains. It required a load of electrified railway and a load of tracks to boot. And it also required a lot of trained staff. Next slide, please.

The trouble is we didn't have any of those things. And so when we tried to run a timetable without those trains or tracks or train staff, we ended up in a situation where everything went to complete rat shit. So we have the May 2018 timetable meltdown, which people might remember because none of the trains ran. We ended up with a huge number of trains just not running, being canceled. You know, hundreds of trains delayed or canceled after biggest timetable change in decades caused, causes chaos across the country. Thank you. The eyepaper. Well, that was what they called it meltdown on the railways. And you know, the timetable meltdown is kind of what it ended up being called. And it was, it was genuinely catastrophic, an enormous drop in performance. and at this point, let's just jump forwards to, uh, to 20, just a little bit later, like a couple of months later, just to really piss on everyone's parade.

Next slide please. You could get a two for one at Sandals resort. To for the Sandals resort. Yeah. On that day though, only on that day. Rush home to get to, uh to take advantage of that deal. Yeah. Sal, not to be extended. Yeah. Next slide please.

Cause I was talking about paint jobs being changed on trains. Well, here is, here's a, actually I think this is a DVT. Here's the other end of an intercity 225 having the Virgin logos applied to it. Sadly though, Virgin Trains East Coast was not to be because once again, they'd over-promised and Virgin Trains East Coast collapsed in July 2018, just after the timetable collapse. It was a bad year for the privatized rail network at this point. With the franchise system already struggling, with this lack of bidders, no one really wants to get involved because it was more trouble than it was worth. This whole thing with Virgin Trains East Coast going over, the whole thing just fell over.

That was kind of, it was quite clear that the franchise system was done. It was doomed. And everyone's favorite. And you're going to be shambling for another few years, you know. Yeah. I was going to, yeah. Well, unfortunately it continues to shuffle shuffle onto this day in a roundabout way, but we'll get there in only a couple of slides. So Chris Grayling, who some people might remember as being a very annoying transport secretary, but by far not the worst given that we had Mark Harper until the last general election,

initiated a thing called the Williams Review. Next slide please. Which was supposed to- One thing I'm reminded of here is just, you know, it looked like Virgin Trains was doing so well for so long that I think they were actively in talks with the Bush administration to start running Virgin Trains on the northeast corridor. Really? And weren't they like branded on Brightline for a bit and then decided not to because the name was shit or something Yes, I believe the Brightline West was going to be Virgin Trains USA and then um and

All this kind of happened and then I think they decided not to yeah And they're like I don't want to touch a train ever again This is interesting because the Virgin a lot of people got really upset when Virgin because when this went that was the end of Virgin Running on the rail network. Oh, no, what shame. A lot of people were genuinely upset for it. Virgin is such a 90s brand. Everything about it, from Richard Branson wearing a dress, cross-dressing offensively, to all the happy clappy stuff and the tongue-in-cheek stuff. All of it's so 90s coded in a way that just has not aged that well. I don't know, Nova, you might have a different view on this, but Virgin, it just feels... Even then, even in the mid 2010s, it felt really outdated.

I remember Virgin feeling kinda cool when I was getting on the first Pendolino I did, when I was, you know, like, 13 or something. ALICE I think this is most acute with the airline, but like, Richard Branson, like, picking up on, like, princess carrying flight attendants, or like, painting a kind of pinup on the nose of the planes, it was all stuff that makes you go like... That kind of icky shit. Yeah, in hindsight, you're like, this wasn't cool at all, and in fact was like, deeply sus. SEAN You need a more sex positive railroad, you

need like the sex worker train. RILEY Well yeah, thankfully, well we didn't, Virgin, they did start doing Pride stuff there, but yeah, we did start getting gay trains at this point, which was nice. I don't know if we can credit that with privatization, but I'm all here for gay trains. ALICE I like to believe British Rail would have I don't know if we can credit that with privatisation, but I'm all here for gay trains. I like to believe British Rail would have done a gay train had they survived into the 21st century.

Come at me with the fucking counterfactual that says otherwise is all I have to say, because I agree. Gay British Rail sandwich. There's too many gay people working in railways for it not to be an inevitability, I feel. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So next slide please. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So, next slide please.

Williams Rail Review. This went rapidly to shit. Oh dear. Well, it was privatization, it was going to be messy, wasn't it? Exactly. Yeah, this is the thing that was going to look at, oh, how are we going to make the railway system still work? And that was set about in 2018, in the aftermath of all of this shit hitting the fan. And this was kind of ongoing, and people were like, well this

is taking a bit of time, this is taking a bit of time, but okay, I'm sure this guy's gonna get it right. And then next slide please, happened. Oh. Oh. Oh. Yeah. So this little thing... I remember this. I was doing a lot of podcasting at the time. Yes. Yeah, and you know, every... So this came along and decided to like, kill hundreds of thousands of people across the

globe. Millions. Millions, yeah. Millions of millions. Yeah, millions of people across the globe. I mean, we still have 5% greater excess deaths than before the pandemic, right? And the WHO might have announced that it's over, but if you look at wastewater traces in the US and the UK right now, we are very much still not through this.

This is just part of our life now. Well, we failed the pandemic stage, so it's just endemic now. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We failed the pandemic stage, so it's just endemic now. Yeah. Exactly, yeah. We failed that one. It is over in the sense that we got the bad ending. Truly this is America's Vietnam. And Vietnam's Vietnam as well.

That's a good point, yeah. And Italy's, yeah, just listen around. So next slide please, because this had effects on our railway system. Namely, no one was on it. This is a trace of the railway usage as a percentage of pre-COVID levels. So the top line is cars and taxis in red. The middle line is bus services outside of London and the bottom line is national rail services. And you can see that everything dropped to 5% of pre-COVID levels. And it took a bit of time for us to get back to where we actually, with the benefit of hindsight, the curve is quite a nice fit actually

from when it dropped to the bottom to kind of coming up to the 100% again. We are back at, by the way, and I know I like to shout this every time I'm anywhere near a microphone, we are back and indeed above 100% ridership on the GB Rail network. So don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. Patterns might have changed a bit, but we are right back up there again. But it took us a bit of time. This is immediately obvious to you if you're trying to squeeze into the one car leaving from Houston, you know. Yeah. You and 3200 of your best friends.

Yeah. So in March 2020, the current, you know, we had 5% of pre-COVID ridership and the industry was put on life support. All franchises by the end of March were transferred onto emergency concessions, and that was it. That's the end of the franchise system. It was gone. Hilled, stone dead. ALICE One of the only welcome casualties of COVID-19. RILEY Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah. And this thing's in hospital on ECMO and I'm busy trying to like kick the shit out of it, you know? They're still like, they're still like branding everything in like these, you know, different ways. They're like, okay, now we have LNER back, right? Mm hmm. Yeah.

And then this would kind of start happening. We talked about this, actually, November, you and I have talked about this on other media platforms about this branding of these trains kind of popping up. And that was actually a bit of a fad of the Department for Transport even before this started happening. They started going, what if return with a V? But anyway, so we have the Williams review. Finally, we get the response to that with all this chaos kicking off. Next slide, please. We finally get the Williams Shaps finally we get the response to that, with all this chaos kicking off. Next slide please. We finally get the Williams Shaps plan for rail, which sounds like a kind of a pro rock band, right? As the outcome of the Williams rail review, and

they say we're going to have great British railways, that's going to be the future. ALICE The age of innocence is back. Crickets on the village green. LIAM We're gonna re-gate the GWR to seven feet. back, crickets on the village green. I hate it. ALICE So we'd had three years to get to the point of this thing being published, and then we continued to do nothing for another three years. Other than erode all the stuff that had been going properly. For example, next slide please. High speed two. The only strategic view, we've done this to death on the pod before, so we're not going to do it again. But yeah, so Sunak, as one of the last things he did was

kill HS2. And so we really had wrecked up the... So the franchising system was dead, but nothing had come to replace it. So the industry was in a horrifying, arguably worse than things had been limbo. And we just lost our main strategic plan for the future. Great success. Long-term decisions for a brighter future. Thank you. Hi guys.

Thanks Rishi Saman. We forgot how to run trains. We forgot how to run trains. We lost. Yes. So is there hope though? So next slide please. Is there some hope?

So it's worth saying at this point that the privatized rail system as it existed before is pretty much entirely dead. The only part of it that's survived because successive secretaries of state and ministers have thrown their bodies in front of the bullets to protect it are the Roscos. The Roscos continue to exist. Indeed, here is the pre-election Labour Party publishing their Get Britain Moving plan, which is basically their thing saying, we're going to just do what the Williams plan said, but with more flag shagging stuff on it. Along come know, that, along come labor and say, look,

we're going to, we're going to get Britain moving again. We're going to do everything they said, but obviously we're going to leave the rolling stone operating companies exactly as they are. We cannot get in the way of the money that is made from that hugely extractive part of the industry. So this is pre-election. We need the train landlords. We need the train providers. I just don't understand. If there's no train providers, who will provide the trains? Mason- Who provides? Exactly. Where do the trains come from if you don't have the train landlords? Exactly, right? It's just, it's not possible. So, next slide please, because

we have, all of a sudden, an election. Of which there are only two interesting and useful things to notice. The first is that the party of adult human females and whatever, party of women did real shit. We should really just pay attention to that and enjoy it. They did really bad. Really really bad. That's worth paying very close attention to and being entertained by. The other thing to pay close attention to and be entertained by is that Labour got fewer votes in 2024 than they got under Corbyn in 2019. Just a nice little thing

to remind ourselves there. ALICE The Loveless Landslide. I almost said Loveless Landline. MARK Yeah, this is it. So anyway, let's move on from that stupid general election. The third Starmor Reich rises. Kir is here. And we have appointed, fun enough, on the day of, yeah, good old, good old, good old, yeah, oh man, I welcome Lord Hendy. Next slide please. And fun enough, on the day that I receive a letter from my employer telling me that I'm sacked, um, the, uh, the transport team is, is appointed, including a Lord handy of Richmond Hill being appointed as a life period, becomes a labor life period.

One of the old time cronies. No, handy of Richmond Hill. I'm not saying Lord, fuck you. We want, I can't believe the soon next government would do this. Well, this is, this is, well, this is, this is Labour now, of course. This is Keir Starmer doing it. He's a man for all seasons, you know, like, Boris kept him on in TFL. Boris loved him. Having, you know, him having been there under Ken, so like, you know, very flexible man,

I understand. Flexible man, or was good at getting dirt on people. Although by the way that he conducted himself in sending a lot of emails, maybe he's lost his touch. ALICE Outward seems Boris Johnson's not... ALICE That's not it. That's not something to put on your CV. I will put in a word for the youngest member of the cabinet, which is Louise Haig, who

I do still stand by actually being a good Secretary of State for Transport. I think she's actually good. She cares a lot about buses, which is genuinely important. And I think she's good. I think she's surrounded by a load of tawdry men, boring, useless men who think they're better than she is. And you know what brings me joy? Is that after all of the handy shit went public, Louise Haig will have had him in a room in a meeting without biscuits or coffee and she will have got to dress that prick down and good grief, by which I mean, sorry that's a Britishism, I mean shouted at him.

And the idea of Louise Haig who is young, has funny coloured hair, shouting at this nasty old establishmentarian git brings me immense, immense joy. Immense joy. Anyway, so they bring forward their bill. Right on the week that I go live with telling them that their rail ministers are corrupt piece of shit, they come forward with the passenger railway services, brackets public ownership bill. Yay, it's another bill, another change. But this time it's to basically bring all of the already collapsed franchise, what

are now concessions into public ownership as their contracts expire, which is pretty revolutionary stuff there folks. Wowza. So meanwhile, nothing has been fixed still. HS2, Labour have shown no signs of doing anything on it. There is no rolling program of electrification. Rail accessibility is a little better now than it was in 1993. Capacity is deliberately being constrained once again by increasing ticket prices. Everything's a mess. And next slide please. Oh, actually, so there's two next slide please's. Yeah, there's the bill there that I should have said next slide please about. It's not that interesting. That's

the bill and it's half finished because it's as brought from the commons. So this is the version that the Lords are looking at. Talking of which, next slide please about it, it's not that interesting, it's the bill and it's half finished because it's as brought from the Commons, so this is the version that the Lords are looking at. Talking of which, next slide please. Because yeah, this guy's in charge of deciding what the structure of the rail industry's going to be. And given aforementioned news, is this a good thing? I don't know if this is a good thing. Probably not. Yeah, I'm going to go with possibly not. Yeah. The picture's too small. Is this still Lord Hendy? I refuse to learn anything about the Brits. This is this is this is Pete Hendy. Yes, I'm going to call him Pete Hendy. He's got a name tag.

Yeah, he does. That's back when he was only a sir. I'm going to. Oh, man. No, I can't say that. That's an actionable threat against a debuted person. I invite you to step into my home, Pete. And I can say stuff, which is, I'm gonna get you sacked, motherfucker. I'm not done yet, you prick. So yeah, so that is the story of... I'm afraid there is not a happy ending to this one. It's just that, is there some hope with the renational... the very, very vigorously rabbit

eared renationalization? Not yet. Can you sum it up in a word? No. A noise? Yeah. Who said it? It's gonna change a lot.

Two and a half hour podcast. Sorry everyone, sorry that escalated. No, no. Don't get me wrong. It's a step in the right direction that we're doing the renown, that we're bringing the franchises back in house, but it's so much, and they're going to, you just know that this government are going to do it in the worst possible way. You just know that. And it makes me very angry. And you should buy my book about it. Next slide please. Yeah. That's right. I was going to do that after safety third. Oh shit. There's a safety. Yeah that's right. I was gonna do that after Safety

Third. Oh shit there's a Safety Third? Yes please, I've missed Safety Third, let's do a Safety Third. Yes we need cheering up by hearing someone get horribly maimed by... Add good actions to safety. Yeah was the goddamn news not a Safety Third I suppose? Anyway sorry, go on, Safety Third. Safety Third. We've said what's on this podcast called Safety Third. What the hell's a sprinkling pipe? Shake hands with danger. Meet a guy you want to know. Hello, nerds. Anchors.

Oh shit, I just realized what this is. I don't like, I immediately don't like this, cause heavy thing, moving thing, feet, hands, I don't like it. I've seen anchor chain fires on YouTube, and that's, uh... RILEY Oh, no. ALICE You drop the anchor, it's sort of out of control, the friction on the thing ignites the grease on the thing, uh, whole thing catches fire. RILEY And it looks like a jet engine going, doesn't it? It's crazy.

RILEY Yeah. Yeah, not good. Don't like that. SEAN Hello nerds, I've been a fan of the pod for around seven months now. ALICE Address me by my rank. SEAN Yeah. Hello nerds, I've been a fan of the pod for around seven months now, would like to share an experience from my time in the merchant navy of this godforsaken island in the North Atlantic.

I hope this meets your strenuous standards for safety third. This story takes place around two years ago. For context, I had just dropped out of a university astrophysics and astronomy course and applied for the merchant navy. I've since learned what a terrible decision this was." ALICE There's a phrase that sticks with me, because somebody was asking about joining the military at age 38, and one of the replies was, uh, you're never too old to make the worst mistake of your life.

And I think about that, that changed my entire worldview. For those unfamiliar, the Merchant Navy officer training course in the UK requires 18 months of study on land, and 12 months of operation on ships, followed by a final spoken exam. ALICE Yeah, you can do it at City of Glasgow College, and believe me I thought about it when I was considering making the worst mistake of my life. JUSTIN From the start, this ship had me questioning

my life decisions. I was given a lift to the port by a safety inspector who took no time at all in describing the numerous accidents that had taken place aboard over the past three months. These included a cook that had been accidentally stabbed, an engineer that lost a hand to a fan, a second cook that fell down the stairs and was buried alive by frozen fish. Is this an Edward Gorey sort of deal? She's a cursed chap. A fire on the fuel tank manifold. Bro, what the fuck?

A large oil spill on the cargo deck, which was unrelated, and approximately 50 tons of diesel oil that mysteriously vanished because of a misaligned loading valve. Trust me, the actual oil spill figures are always way under-reported. I would like to repeat that this all happened over a period of three months. Oh my god. I joined the ship against my better judgment and encountered the approximately 18 people managing the 77,000 ton tanker. One such person was an older man we shall call Josh. He was the Boatswain. Is that because that's what his name was?

I- Yes. Apparently. Maybe. That's what his name was. I... Yes. Apparently. Maybe. He was the boasting and was uncomfortably friendly for me, as a fairly young trans girl that

was trapped in a medium sized apartment with him for several months. Oh no. Yep. This is hitting close to home. I had been on this ship for about two months and we'd just arrived in Greece. As there was no space in board just yet yet the captain decided to drop anchor and wait for a berth to open. Josh was put in charge of the deck side and I was supposed to watch and learn. Now the normal procedure for anchoring is to conduct several break

and winch tests to open the guillotine which is a big metal bar that holds the anchor chain when you're in open sea which is labeled here as a writing chalk this this guy here yeah mm-hmm gently lower the anchor to the waterline conduct several more break and winch tests to confirm everything was okay and then finally let go of the anchor, controlling it carefully with the brakes. Now as you can probably guess- I think you did foreshadowing on this one, oh my god. As you can probably guess this was not followed in the slightest for reasons of it's slow, so what actually happened was, open the guillotine,

disconnect both the winch and brake in quick succession, let the anchor free fall, and lean over the bow and guesstimate when to reapply the brake. Or at least I think that's how it went in Josh's head, because nothing happened. The anchor and chain were trapped by some tangle in the system somewhere and they didn't move an inch. You'd think this would be a sign to backtrack and do things properly, but not for Josh. ALICE Oh, it never is. JUSTIN Josh walked right up to this person-sized

chain, stuck his leg deep in the hot- the hot-spipe? Ho-spipe? ALICE Nooooo, no, Josh. Joshua. JUSTIN And started kicking. LIAM Don't do that. ALICE Oh, no! JUSTIN How attached are you to your leg?

How attached to your leg would you like to be in the future? LIAM How attached is your leg to you? JUSTIN I think it's pretty obvious, but some of the ways this could kill you include, but are not limited to, ripping off your leg, getting yourself crushed by a shift in the chain, or being sucked through the hospipe while it contorts you into whatever shape it so desires and then drags you screaming to the salty depths." ALICE Getting the kind of black hole, like, Schwarzschild

radius experience on Earth. JUSTIN I would at least use a stick for this. ALICE Getting Bifid Dol dolphin'd in one atmosphere of pressure. Exactly, exactly. That requires a special kind of circumstance. Voluntary your foot for flensing. I believe this is a prime opportunity to use a stick. I stood there in shock until there was a loud clunk and a deafening roar, and the anchor

chain started flying out in a cloud of rust flakes and muddust. This was enough to shock me into sprinting over and applying the brakes as fast as I could in an adrenaline-fueled haze. I was convinced I was going to be radioing the bridge with something along the lines of, oh god, it's everywhere. Oh god. radioing the bridge with something along the lines of, oh god, it's everywhere. ALICE Mmm. Oh god. It's everywhere.

JUSTIN As it is, Josh escaped with only a broken leg, losing his boot, part of his jumpsuit, and a few toes. He got airlifted to a hospital, and I didn't have to deal with them staring at me the entire trip home. I'd already decided in that moment that I was not getting on another ship, and I was going to go back to my pretty stars in telescopes. ALICE Too fucking right. Good enough.

ALICE God bless you. JUSTIN Was the lesson learned here? I don't really think so, but it's not my problem anymore. ALICE Jesus, dude. Jesus, dude. Don't lie, what's going on, they hit the bricks. ALICE I have never respected a merchant navy officer more than this. Yeah. Just get the fuck out.

As quickly as possible. MW Oh, nice. Okay, a happy ending. Possibly not for the rest of the crew. JUSTIN I am hopefully only one year from getting my M's, Masters in Science in Astrophysics, and I genuinely have no idea what possessed me to leave. Love your podcast, I would absolutely go to a live show if I could. November and Devon, I came to see you in London for your Charlie's Angels show, and had a

great time. I even got a signed poster, but I was super shy. I wanted to see the more recent one, but I just don't have the time or money right now. Keep up the awesome work. Best from Rebecca." ALICE Oh, thank you so much. Make yourself known at the live shows, because we were, like, I was signing stuff and I was like, I could personalize these quite easily, you know?

Like, yeah. Wow. Yeah, um, wow. Remember when you saw Weird Guy maim himself? Love November. Yeah, like, exactly. That's what I'm writing, I will write that, I will sign that. There's very little I won't sign, and there's very little I won't sign it with. There's no little we won't sponsor, yeah, we're... Absolutely.

We're exiles. As far as live shows go, all I can say is that I am talking to lawyers right now about US visas, and we will see what transpires there. RILEY Oh, that is very very exciting. Yeah, let's kill James Bond, that's a good idea. Everyone should do that. ALICE This is a real matter. And then subscribe to the Patreon for that, is what you should

do. Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was Safety Third. Oh yeah, that's... sorry, man. Our next episode will be on Chernobyl, but of course we do have commercials before we go. Gareth, talk about your book. Yeah, I actually have a commercial, which is that I wrote this book, and what I did was leave it in a Greggs in Derby railway station today, my nice advance copy that I was getting all tatty and that's got stickers

and my scribbles in it, so to Harold from the Rail and Our Discord server, I hope you enjoy the copy that you picked up when I told everyone on the server that if anyone was in Derby to go get their size of advance copy, nice work. ALICE Sprinting towards the Derby station, Greg's. RILEY Yeah, I enjoyed my sausage, bean and cheese melt, so it's all good. But I know I have a book, it's called How the Railways Will Fix the Future, and it's, there's plenty, I mean, it's just so much in everyone here as Wheelhouse, partly to the ability, but also partly because it's things I love writing about. But the

point of it is saying, the left and people who want to actually survive the future have kind of fallen apart from us lot, us nerds, far too much to the left of just like forgotten about railways or don't think about railways or somehow feel like the railways are evil or whatever. You know, we've seen all this with the HS2 shit and the green party. Hooray for them changing their stance on it by the way. And this book this book is trying to remind us that the railways aren't just like, they have a bad history. They have been used for ill. They are useless who run in lots of ways, but actually there's no, they are their fundamental stick and they are the way that we build a better future. It's not just that they are one of a series

of tools. My view is that they are the tool that will give us the future that we need, that will give us the better future. So that's what the book's about. And there's lots of fun, optimistic stuff. I slag off plenty of people in there. There's lots of fun stuff about Hyperloop and about Gadget Bands. And thanks, Roz, by the way, because your early loop video is definitely some inspiration. In fact, WTYP has mentioned in the book, you know?

Roz, you get a little quote in there, don't you? And I mention the podcast, so, yeah. It's getting a lot. ALICE So, citing that on my visa application, international press. JUSTIN Yes, exactly. ALICE Exactly. And, yeah, so, these are available for pre-order now from all reputable locations, and also some disreputable ones, they're evil. ALICE You can get this from your local thieves guild. It is, it is available at your local Greggs.

Very likely. Well, I've realized that it's quite a good viral marketing campaign. So my box of my sadly rapidly diminishing box of advances clearly I need to just distribute them around the British rail network, right? Watch this space. No, I had a lot of fun reading it. I didn't have a lot of fun writing it because having a very badly sleeping little baby and trying to write a book in about three weeks is really hard work. But no, I'm actually quite pleased with how

it's come out. I'm very proud of it. And it's going to be really weird to have people reading my book. That's going to be a very strange experience. I'm just a steel and concrete guy. So this whole experience is very weird to me. But thanks everyone. And you, lovely lot, who are talking to me right now, as in Liam, Roz, November, thanks so much for being pals and being so supportive of me as somebody who comes on. Hogs, those watching, I love you as well. You're all great. And it's like coming and having a chat.

In fact, it's not like, it is, you are my friend. It's like having a chat with friends. You stayed in my house with friends. I am having a chat with friends on here. I did stay in your house. Yeah. Why did you say that like? You said it very- You said it very- You said it very- Remember when we were waiting for that great old bus in Harrisburg that never showed up? Yeah, that was, that was enraging. Yeah, that was very enraging. But no, it's a delight, I love this podcast, and yeah, I'm gonna stop being sobby, but no, this has been fun.

Hopefully this is an aura episode and it's two hours forty-nine, oh my god, Devon, I am so sorry. JUSTIN We gotta make up some time because we had some episodes we had to scrap recently and we've been a bit behind. ALICE Don't even remind me about that experience. LIAM Can you cut that out? The hogs need some slop. ALICE Yeah. But yeah, no, thank you so much for coming on, it is always a delight, it's always a

pleasure. And, yeah, I always learn a lot, and I always enjoy it. JUSTIN That's it, we did privatization, but this is the definitive history of privatization. We've done it. We've solved it. We've solved the problem. Alright, bye everybody. Bye.

On that note, that was the podcast. That was the podcast, we did it. We did it. We did it. We was in under three hours as well, so, yeah, it's all good. That's the efficiency of the podcast market.